The defeat of the UTSU Annual General Meeting agenda in November focused the debate over campus politics even more than before on the particular and the personal. Student political discourse has had an increasingly narrow focus on UTSU incumbents, their contentious electoral history, and other U of T-specific concerns. Here, I want to take a “wider” view by focusing on rhetoric, not on policy, elections, or candidates.
This may seem like nitpicking, but words have power, and the rhetoric of the UTSU and its national umbrella organization, the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), has real consequences for our generation’s approach to post-secondary education. Rights rhetoric is ubiquitous in all kinds of activism, including student advocacy, but the CFS seems particularly zealous in promoting it as their big-banner tag line. Contrary to the proclamations, placards, and protest slogans of the CFS and its on-campus affiliates, post-secondary education is not a right. In fact, the whole purpose of higher education is that it is a great privilege, granted on a very specific basis.
My argument is premised on the idea that there are different kinds of rights. That is, if access to higher education is a right, it is not a universal or fundamental right, as the CFS clearly imagines it to be. The CFS and UTSU’s invocation of rights rhetoric isn’t restricted to accessing post-secondary education itself. A list of student rights on the UTSU’s website includes the “right” to refuse to submit work to turnitin.com and the “right” to submit handwritten essays, for example. It’s crucial to remember that these two kinds of “rights” — the right to be a post-secondary student in the first place and the rights of post-secondary students — are very different, both from one another and from the most fundamental rights such as those to vote, life, liberty, and security of person.
Clearly, there are different kinds of rights, and they vary in importance and scope. I don’t claim that the CFS and UTSU intentionally conflate these types of rights in their rhetoric; it is most likely that they simply would disagree with me about these distinctions. Nonetheless, the invocation of universal and fundamental rights rhetoric does serve their purposes by providing a compelling rhetorical backdrop for campaigns and advocacy, which are often worthwhile and productive. If they were to qualify their use of the word “right,” there would be no problem.
In a YouTube video available on its website, the CFS correctly argues that Canada is formally obliged to work towards equal access to education because it is a signatory to the 1976 U.N. International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. This document enshrines the “right of everyone to education” and stipulates that higher education “be made equally accessible to all.” However, the most this gives Canadian citizens is the “right” to hold the government to account on fulfilling an agreement it has signed, and I am skeptical as to whether this creates a “right” to post-secondary education. Further, there are undoubtedly many people deserving of higher education who live in countries that haven’t ratified the U.N. covenant. On what basis is their right to be claimed and exercised? The U.N. document is a faulty foundation for the “right” to higher education. The sole basis for a universal or fundamental entitlement to higher education is academic dedication and integrity, and everything else, including student loans, tuition rates, and accessibility, is secondary.
In these ways, invoking rights rhetoric about access to post-secondary education is a conceptual inaccuracy, or perhaps a blurring of categories. However, it has practical consequences too. When it is applied to post-secondary education, rights rhetoric creates a normative discourse. That is, it implies that pursuing post-secondary education is, or should be, the norm for young people. Rights ask to be exercised. This can be seen any time a young person explains their decision to work, travel, or do anything other than go to college or university directly out of high school; the apparent need to explain it in the first place shows how normative post-secondary education has become.
Rights rhetoric sanctifies, elevates, and — dare I say it? — privileges one option above all others facing young people. University education may be the sole path to success as many people conceive it, and financial hurdles should never be allowed to prevent those willing to work hard from accessing it. However, it is simply one of many choices, all of which contribute to a healthy, productive, and diverse economy and society. When young people are told that it is their right to get a university education, I worry at how many of them might pick up on the implied continuation — “…and you’d be stupid not to exercise it!” — then go on to choose university when they otherwise would not have.
So, if post-secondary education is not a right, what is it? I think it can be better understood in either of two ways: as a choice, or as a privilege. It’s a choice in that, ideally, young people should choose for themselves whether post-secondary education is right for them, based on an honest appraisal of their willingness to apply themselves and work with integrity. It is a privilege in that only those willing to do so are entitled to it. If something belongs to only certain members of society — as higher education belongs only to dedicated students — it is not a universal right. Of course, it’s not a question of learning ability, financial capacity, or other accessibility issues, and the CFS and UTSU are right to focus on removing all barriers to accessing post-secondary education in these areas. But those who are able but simply unwilling to work hard have no right to post-secondary education, and to say otherwise is to devalue the achievements and degrees of all students. Worse, it misleads a whole generation about their post-secondary choices.
Wes Dutcher-Walls is a fourth-year student in political theory.
Take a look at Abdullah Shihipar’s piece on education, also in this week’s issue: Access to education breaks up the status quo
