If the Black Students Association really wants to stop Dean Daniels from hiking law tuition to $22,000 per year, I have a suggestion that will probably achieve a quicker result than taking the matter to the Ontario Human Rights Commission.
Simply chip in and buy the dean a new Hummer. Seeing as this debate is more about penis-cum-law school size than real excellence, the chance to ride/tower above mortal men in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s favourite vehicle should satisfy the dean’s aspirations to be king of the road.Too harsh? Not really. If the plan were less about ego and more about excellence, ungodly levels of tuition would have been tossed out as a legitimate option long ago. The entire plan crumbles under the weight of its own illogic.
First is the ridiculous justification that “Canada’s best students are increasingly choosing to pursue their education in an international frame,” as Daniels says in a Globe and Mail commentary piece. Won’t higher tuition simply drive more students to the US?
If our costs are only a few thousand less than major private US universities, many prospective students will simply say, “Screw it, if I’m going $100,000 into debt, I may as well go to Harvard.”
Beyond that point—which, really, should be enough to stop this plan in its tracks—there is the dean’s narrow, even childish notion of the evolution of excellence. Perhaps a brief sabbatical in which to talk to a few other faculties and departments and understand how excellence actually happens would help him see the folly of his ways.
What he’d see is that new developments and new excellence almost always come from diversity. As a philosophy professor could tell him, having people from various walks of life bounce competing ideas off one another will lead to a flowering of new ideas.
Or, perhaps more stunningly, as someone who has studied evolution knows, the endless branching of life—of chance, fluke and interaction—is what creates new adaptations, new ideas, new excellence.
If this seems like a rather philosophical point, it is only because excellence is such a grand concept, and can be used to justify wrongs if not properly understood. In the face of $22,000 tuition, excellence at U of T will decrease because diversity will decrease. More students will be lost to American schools, seeing as the tuition is getting nearly equal. Students with an interest in pursuing fields of law (say public interest, environmental or human rights) that are not very lucrative will not attend U of T. And poor students, disproportionately those of colour, as pointed out by the Black Students Association, will be scared to attend. How could they not be, with tuition at $22,000 and average yearly income of black families in Toronto just slightly more than that?
Finally, there is the notion that we need the tuition hikes to attract talented law professors. Point a) is that if they really cared that much about money, they would be in corporate law on Bay St. earning scads more and point b) is why is it excellence to attract the most money-grubbing professors? Since when is a $100,000-plus per year salary not enough for a diverse range of decent, well-rounded people?
These points just spell out the simple fact that the tuition hike will rapidly destroy what little diversity is left at U of T’s law school, be that diversity of upbringing, career aspiration, colour, or field of study. And that destroys excellence, because no matter how well-funded, homogeneity is simply incapable of creating excellence.
I say “what little diversity is left” because law at U of T is already pretty white, pretty affluent and pretty male, and the focus is narrowing to just a small area of law. A friend of mine tells how when he first went to law school in BC, he had a near-impossible time getting into courses on human rights and environmental law because they were packed. When he transferred to U of T to complete his degree, those courses were the easiest to get into–it was corporate law that swelled shut first. Which isn’t a surprise, seeing as when you are paying $10,000, let alone $22,000 per year, you’ve got to be incredibly rich, gutsy or stupid to pursue a course of study that will not have significant financial returns.
So what’s my solution, smart-ass? Dean Daniels seems so intent on comparing size (of tuition, of faculty, and, most hilariously, of endowments) with American schools, he should maybe take a few other lessons stateside. For instance, you may have caught on New York TV affiliates a recent commercial blitz during prime time. In the ads, state colleges and universities quite effectively set out the economic and social benefits of a university education, and ended with the comment, “When you hurt New York State universities, you hurt New York State.” In other words, instead of just jacking up the tuition and making platitudes about seeking more government funds, they got some real balls and publicly took the government to task.
That works a lot better to ensure accessibility, diversity and, with those two, excellence than grovelling at the feet of government like Dickensian paupers with timid, private lobbying.
Perhaps most insulting, though, is the pithy way in which Daniels ends his defence of tuition, saying, “Canada has revelled in the excellence of our Olympic athletes. To settle for a bronze in higher education is simply unacceptable for the country we are, and for the country we need to be.”
In fact, Canadians were quite happy with a bronze, actually less, given that we finished fourth overall in medal standings against some pretty mean competitors. We were happy and proud with that, for as much as it’s natural to want to be top dog, we also know that at best we could hold that for only a fleeting moment. Powerhouses like Germany and the US who finished in top spots simply have so much money, and so many people to draw upon, that they would quickly regain the number one spot if we ever posed a serious threat. We’re not a country of 300 million, and we’re not a global powerhouse. Still, by not just ensuring accessibility and diversity, but actually making them our top goals, we can still achieve a wonderful amount of excellence. Of course, first we need to accept what we’ve been given, instead of pursuing the monster truck law school to compensate for our insecurity about our better-endowed counterparts in the US.
