The story goes that for every graduating university class, there will be a commencement speaker who waxes poetically about the graduates’ potential and promise. U of T requires no such person. It seems as if students at this school already presume themselves to be the future’s leaders and activists. For example, AlwaysQuestion certainly takes pride in its role as fighters for social justice. But it, like many other activist groups on this campus, suffers from a serious character flaw: the desire for the reward “change” brings, without the agreement to shoulder the costs.
Indeed, such is the mindset that pervades this school—a culture of privilege and entitlement. While not all students feel this way, many do— often those in positions of student leadership. It is exhibited in the countless campaigns year after year “demanding” that the university freeze its tuition fees, with bold assertions that education is a right. This was carried to a new extreme with Always- Question’s protest on March 20 inside Simcoe Hall.Reasonable people can agree or disagree on whether tuition and residence fees are exorbitant for lower income students—but this debate needs to be framed in a way that makes such rhetoric justified. For one, the assertion that education is a right, and that there is a need to make it accessible to everyone, is not followed by any reasoning for why that is so. It seems self-serving for students to paint the services they receive as some kind of intrinsic and inalienable human good. It is unclear why education—a publicly funded good that comes out of taxpayer pockets— ought to be subsidized and discounted for all students, regardless of their socioeconomic background.
Under the tenets of social justice, society ought to help the least well-off in achieving the same economic opportunities as the wealthiest. But a tuition freeze is universal, which would mean the public subsidization of the wealthiest students at Canada’s elite universities to perpetuate their legacy of economic privilege. A universal tuition freeze might seem convenient when one takes into consideration that most students who attend university are already by definition privileged, and U of T’s majority are at least middle-class. Whether out of willful ignorance of economics or a blind faith that money grows on trees, student campaigns “demanding” tuition freezes fail to understand the burden placed on the public. They send the message to the rest of society that the aid going to those struggling for a better life should also come with earmarks for the bourgeois.
But entitlement isn’t just limited to one dimension of university costs. After all, there are solutions, such as means-tested education subsidies and interest-free loans to lower-income students, that aren’t as ineffectual as universal tuition freezes. These programs exist, but we can make the case for their expansion. AlwaysQuestion, UTSU, and ASSU say that we must “fight the power.” We are told that we must fight for our “rights,” demand “justice” and “equity,” and resist authority. Such rhetoric paints university students as marginalized, alienated, and oppressed, when most of us are actually quite privileged. It equates the inconvenience of paying student fees with the plight of the landless Native Americans or the police-brutalized African Americans, when in reality such moral equivalence is an insult to the truly marginalized. Even international students, who indeed pay substantially more for than Canadian students, are often members of the elite in their home countries. Far from the proletariat who require solidarity, they are privileged enough to attend high-quality schools and belong to educated families. University students acquiesce to this kind of rhetoric because it is self-congratulating. It whispers sweet nothings to our ego, giving us the meaning that our bourgeois education lacks. It not only panders to our interests of paying cheaper fees, but to our fantasies of being more exceptional than we really are. To be oppressed means we can take part in the exciting adventure of revolutionary activism against oppression.
This entitled mindset delivers a singular message: we owe it to ourselves to fight for what is owed. We are owed by a greedy university president (who lives in a university-funded mansion in Rosedale, no less), our culturally insensitive professors, and soul-crushing school administrators. Most of all, we are owed by society, for it is the working families and struggling small business owners who must foot the bill for the reduced fees we are “entitled” to.
