On August 20, 2009 the Province of British Columbia announced that the provincial dollars to support public libraries would be $13,700,000, which is about 78% of previous years. While this represents a reduction, the libraries of BC are pleased to see that the provincial government recognizes the integral role public libraries play in community development and literacy.¹

While I disagree with the ‘pleased sentiment’ (being happy with a cut in funding to important services isn’t the best approach, in my humble opinion), I think that what’s happening to the public libraries in the province should be making us in advanced education start to brace for impacts.

CBC reported today that the Finance Minister of the province is telling BC voters to get ready for a “very, very difficult budget.”  According to CBC,

“We are desperately trying to maintain the critical services in health care and education and the social services. So it’s definitely been a challenging summer,” the finance minister said Wednesday.

I would not be surprised to hear that provincial funding transfers to universities were to be impacted in much the same way that the libraries have been.  This will be an incredibly difficult budget for universities to cope with, especially since they’re already five months into a fiscal year.

In short, I think we should be bracing for the impact – and getting ready to say no.

What is this event?
“envision education” is a community-led visioning workshop that brings together members of the university community to develop a plan for our university. Community resistance to cutbacks, budget reductions, layoffs, and program elimination is met with two general responses: “what would you rather us do?” and “there is no alternative.” A workshop that brings together the university community will enable us to develop an alternative, and propose ideas that we can work for at our university.
Think of your ideas that would answer these questions: what should our university be? What should education be? How do we get there?
The workshop will be led by organizers with the SFU Community Coalition, and is open to all members of the university community.

When and where?
The workshop will be held on Friday, May 15th from 11:30am to 1:30pm in room MBC 2290 at the SFU Burnaby campus.

Who can participate?
All members of the university community are welcome to participate – a broad range of participation allows us to develop a wide and encompassing idea of what we think our university should be.

How do I sign up?
If you would like to attend and participate in the visioning workshop, please confirm your attendance by contacting Kevin Harding by email at kharding@sfu.ca. Please include your name, email address, and which campus constituency you belong to (APSA, CUPE, SFUFA, TSSU, GSS, SFSS, Poly Party, or other) to help the organizers plan for numbers. Please register by May 14th.

What do I need to bring?
Mostly yourself – we hope to have representation from all the community constituencies so that we can bring together a wide vision of what the university should be. Bring your thoughts on what you think the university and education should be, and how we can get there.

The take-home message?
· “envision education”
· a community-led visioning workshop – creating a new vision for our university
· Friday, May 15th, 11:30am-1:30pm.
· Register by emailing your details to kharding@sfu.ca
· Think about these questions: what should our university be? What should education be? How do we get there?

If you’re interested in seeing how the budget gets approved, stop by the Halpern Centre (between the AQ and the Library), room 126, on Thursdsay morning at 8am.  (yes, there is an 8am in the morning).

So, without much further ado, here’s the budget analysis:

• Undergraduate tuition is increasing by 2% this year.¹ This brings the standard per-credit hour cost of tuition to $157.30/credit for domestic undergrads, and up to $490.70 for international students.  Costs for upper-division computing science, engineering, and business courses are higher.  To break this down, it means that a 30-credit year now costs $4,719 excluding student fees, textbooks, transportation, parking, rent, etc.  For international students, the 30-credit year of tuition only now costs $14,721.
• Grad tuition is also mostly increasing.² Most of the non-premium tuition costs are increasing, while most of the premium programs are seeing a 0% change.  Oddly, the MBA in Global Asset and Wealth Management is decreasing by 7.7%³ — this may be the first decrease in any kind of tuition in years.
• Student services and rec and athletics fees are increasing.⁴ Same as the tuition costs — up by 2.0%.  Which is kind of frustrating because layoffs and the like mean that student services will actually decrease despite the increase of fees.  Alarmingly, scholarship, awards, and bursary funds will also precipitously decrease — by hundreds of thousands of dollars, despite an old promise that as tuition increases, so too would financial aid.  Instead, SFU has made it more difficult to access financial aid and has cut the aid budget as tuition gets more expensive.⁵
• A new fee — a “regalia fee” of $25.00 is being instated.⁶ When you actually graduate from SFU, you have the chance to walk across the stage and graduate from the university.  You get to wear a blue robe, blue hat, and a coloured ‘hood’.  We will now charge you $25 for this, and no, you can’t opt out of the program.
• The university argues that impacts are “inevitable.”⁷ While the budget document states that impacts of budget cuts and underfunding are inevitable, they have tried to “preserve areas of academic and research strength.”⁸
• Investment income has declined steeply.⁹ The budgeted decrease in investment income is $1.1 million, which also means endowment spending will decrease by $2.2 million.  This directly and immediately impacts student scholarships, awards, and bursaries.  Strongly.  And not in good ways.
• Significant changes in the university are coming.¹⁰ The university notes that the budget planning for next year will proceed with an intensive review of the academic and strategic plan, which will identify “areas for resource reduction or elimination.”  This is huge — we’ve killed off Canadian Studies…what’s next? What impacts will this have on education?

There’s a lot more throughout the budget, but more important are the discussions that we’ve had, in the Senate and Board of Governors, that directly address the cuts being made and the strategic impacts that are being felt.

Again, this is a very brief analysis of the budget that is being proposed tomorrow.  I would greatly appreciate any comments, questions, or suggestions.  Feel free to suggest things to yell, if you so feel.

I went to Victoria yesterday, along with other members of the SFU Community Coalition, to deliver the petition that we have been collecting to the Minister of Advanced Education, Murray Coell.  We didn’t have much luck, as he’s apparently a very busy minister and, as we were told, always in meetings.  We were able to deliver a copy of the petition to the minister’s constituency office in Sidney, and a copy to the Ministry office in the Legislature building in Victoria.  We didn’t actually get to meet with Coell, but we’re arranging a meeting for the near future.

However, the trek to Victoria ended up being very productive, in my opinion.  Those of us who managed to fit into the car and travel to the capital had quite an interesting conversation—and it all revolved around the goals of the SFU Community Coalition and what it is that we’re exactly trying to do.

Importantly, we talked about what a community coalition such as the one at SFU should be doing.  Should we be focusing our efforts, and thus the efforts of everyone in the community, on resisting cutbacks? Resisting budget reductions? Resisting financial crises?  Obviously, this is a huge part of what we’re doing.  We have to. We must resist.

But it isn’t all that we have to do, and it’s certainly not all that we should be doing.  Allow me to finish my sentence from just above: resisting cutbacks and budget reductions is something that we have to do beause high quality, public education depends on it. The SFU Community Coalition is not—and cannot—be simply solely about resisting budget cutbacks made to universities.  It’s a large part of what we do, but it’s not everything.

The coalition and its actions and activities and organising must also be about something else, something more postitive.  During our trek to and from Victoria, we talked a lot about various organising models and options that the coalition can consider, and the four of us that went seemed to reach some kind of a conclusion: the coalition cannot only organise “negative” actions, actions that resist other actions; but it should also organise “positive” actions, actions that promote certain actions, actions that propose an alternative vision, actions that show a path from where we are to where we would like to be.

Quite a bit of thinking, arguing, and discussing went into this.  A lot of academic and quasi-academic sources were quoted.  But it makes sense.  With a negative-based campaign, where we are saying “stop the cuts” or “stop underfunding,” we’re not answering a fundamental question: what would we rather?  When we rally, when we organise on campus, we’re using a lot of arguments and rhetoric that are positioned at only opposing things.

Quite fairly, this leaves people with a question: “what should we do?”  This came up at the forum on public education that the coalition held, and that I spoke at.  People in the audience wanted to get involved, to do something—but they wanted to know what they should do.  At the same time, people were wondering what alternative we were proposing. This is key: when an organisation such as the coalition is opposing actions, an instant (and entirely understandable) reaction is to wonder what might be done instead. Without being able to articulate an alternative vision, we may lose support, we may lose energy, we may appear to be one-sided and incomplex in our goals, arguments, and views.

But we’re not incomplex or one-sided.  We in the coalition are fighting for high quality, public education.  We’re opposing government policy, actions, and decisions that work to destroy that vision of education.  Mikhail Bakunin said that “the passion for destruction is a creative passion.”  David McNally writes that “another world is possible.”  What we are trying to do is both.  The SFU Community Coalition is trying to destroy the actions of government that leave post-secondary education underfunded and wanting for money to be able to continue to exist.  The coalition must also be creative as it aims to resist these actions; as we resist, we must be able to show, as McNally says, that another world is possible.

This is then the question.  What is our alternative vision? One of us who made the trek to Victoria brought up a quote from his partner’s thesis: when you don’t know of an alternative, you’re resigned to the current situation.  I’m likely considerably paraphrasing the quote, but it’s true.  Not having an alternative vision that we can clearly articulate leaves us with a mountain to climb—successfully opposing government policies—followed by a terrifying gulf—now that we’ve opposed the policies, what do we do?  It’s incredibly easy for us to offer up simply a resistance to things, but it’s counter-productive: once we’ve opposed something, what would we say should go in its place?  This argument is perhaps the easiest argument that those in power have to use against us: what alternative would we propose?  A lack of an alternative also leaves our supporters wanting, needing more.

So what is our alternative vision? Can we imagine a different approach to post-secondary education?  A different approach to funding education at Simon Fraser University?

I can.  And I will elucidate my opinions further in a day or two.  But I’m open to comments.  If you care about the education system in this province, tell me why you care, and what makes you care.  Tell me your alternate visions; your visions that contest the system that is becoming essentially market-oriented, the system that is becoming a sop to corporate interests instead of being the independent avenue of investigation that it ought to be.

And tell me how we can get to your alternative vision.  We could spend all day (and I have, in other places) talking about where our education system is, and where it appears to be going.  But as another famous philosopher said, the point isn’t to simply understand the world, “the point is to change it.”