On April 27, a sparsely-attended meeting of U of T’s Business Board approved a highly controversial measure to make all future Arts and Science undergrads pay for five courses even if they take as few as three. The measure must now pass a vote at Governing Council, and survive a lawsuit by students trying to block its implementation.
Anna Okorokov is the sole undergraduate representative among the Business Board’s 23 voting members. She ran for student governor on a promise to represent students in fee-hike votes. Okorokov told The Varsity she regretted not being at the April 27 vote, but that it conflicted with a final exam, which she believed she could not defer because she would be out of the country over the summer.
Okorokov voiced moderate support of the university’s stance on flat fees, repeating administrative arguments about the proposal’s upsides to students. “Program fees have the potential to be beneficial,” she said. “Those that are able to take on five or more credits will find it in their favour.”
Approximately six per cent of undergraduates take more than five courses, according to data compiled by U of T.
David Ford, the graduate student representative on the Business Board, was also absent from the April 27 vote and did not respond to multiple inquiries from The Varsity sent to his Governing Council and U of T email addresses.
The Faculty of Arts and Science Council approved flat fees in a questionable vote that has students and FASC members suing to have it declared illegitimate.
The university’s VP and Provost Cheryl Misak has defended the right of Business Board to overrule any objections that may emerge from the Arts & Science council.
“Faculty councils do not, in fact, engage in the business of setting tuition hikes,” Misak said.
The university’s official position is that flat fees are not a fee hike, but an adjustment in the way fees are calculated. According to data from the university, were the proposal be applied to current U of T students, this change would force half of all full-time students to either change their course load or pay up to 66 per cent more tuition than they currently do.
Opponents of flat fees have also said approving the proposal would be detrimental to the school’s grim financial status.
“I fail to see how the proposal will help,” said George Luste, president of the University of Toronto Faculty Association.
“What the proposal clearly does promise is a rather naked, unseemly, and undignified cash grab from a population who should hardly be expected to shoulder the responsibility of bailing us out of our financial troubles,” he added.
U of T’s endowment fund has lost $1.3 billion in the current recession.
Calling the proposal “unethical,” Luste also objected to what he sees as the proposal’s inadequacy in addressing the increased class sizes and teaching workload that would result from the proposal’s projected “intensification” of undergraduate course loads. U of T has forecast a moderate drop in full-time student enrolment and a large increase in the number of course-spots the Faculty of Arts and Science teaches. Luste had argued that this intensification would swell class sizes and faculty workloads.
“The additional enrolment is projected to be in the range of 854 to 1,683 full-time equivalent students,” Luste said. “Student-faculty and student-librarian ratios will continue to rise.”
Misak criticized Luste’s objection, telling the meeting she did not see how it “hangs together.”
She replied that the flat fee proposal aims to hire slightly more faculty to teach fewer students. She did not address the university’s own estimates indicating that the remaining students will fill up to 5,000 more actual classroom spots.
Neither Luste nor White-Grove were permitted to respond.
If the university expects enrolment to drop so steeply that higher course loads and lower enrolment will balance out class sizes, that would require roughly 2,300 to 4,200 students to drop out of full-time studies, leaving the university no added revenue from flat fees. Instead, U of T is projecting $8 million to $14 million more revenue per year.
UTSU VP university affairs Adam Awad remarked on the “astounding lack of detail as to where resources will be allocated.” He was among a group of students who made the case that flat fees will drain university finances through course intensification, rather than improving them.
Awad pointed to Brock University, which implemented flat fees two years ago but is now being forced to slash its budget.
Course intensification will strain not only finances, but quality of education, student representatives warned. “Seventeen faculty members is not going to mitigate a 10 per cent increase in course sizes,” said last year’s ASSU president Colum Grove-White. The university has stated that it will hire up to 34 new faculty to cope with course intensification.
“There’s no research looking at the academic implications intensification will have on students’ lives,” Grove-White added. He cited the widespread practice in Computer Science and Commerce—the two U of T programs that currently charge flat fees—of “course-shopping”: enrolling in six courses and dropping the weakest one before marks are noted on a student’s transcript. Such a “six-to-five special,” governors agreed, would make it even more difficult for students to get a spot in overcrowded courses.
Okorokov noted that the matter is still due to come before Governing Council, where she also has a vote and is scheduled to attend. That meeting, set for May 20, will take place at at UTM.
Meanwhile, roughly a hundred students protested outside the meeting chamber at Simcoe Hall. “We lobbied to get the proposal voted down in FASC. The end result was a meeting which is currently being challenged in the courts due to its undemocratic and potentially illegal nature,” said ASSU president Gavin Nowlan. “We did everything right in terms of convincing staff and the administration that this plan needed to be examined more carefully, yet the administration still conspired to get this plan voted through.
“I don’t hold any reservations that the Governing Council will add its rubber stamp to this flawed proposal. The fact that such a detrimental proposal can be passed speaks to the flawed nature of the Governing Council itself.”
Grant Gonzalez, member of GC and FASC, says he intends to vote against the proposal as he did on Faculty Council. But with only eight students among 50 GC members, flat fees is expected to pass.
WITH FILES FROM DYLAN ROBERTSON
