The University of Toronto has gone down a dark path. Last December, at the behest of the University of Toronto Students’ Union (UTSU) and its allies, Ontario’s Liberal government arbitrarily imposed the phasing out of U of T’s flat fees policy. I have already outlined some of the problems with this policy change, but its true cost has only now become apparent. With the cost to U of T anticipated at $16 million the new policy will drain resources from the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, whose students had previously paid the fees.
U of T recruits far fewer tenured faculty members than the number of PhDs it produces. Many undergraduate classes are already too large, leading to limited available spaces, and a mad scramble at enrolment time on ROSI. Students even tell tales of professors altering course structure — usually by increasing the workload — so as to reduce the class size by persuading students to drop the course. Quite simply, the Faculty of Arts & Sciences doesn’t have enough staff to adequately teach its 23,000 students.
The recipe for disaster the UTSU and its faction have created will severely limit the ability of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to hire professors. Faculty will be hired at below replacement levels for years to come, even while the undergraduate population of the St. George campus continues to increase. Graduated students will find it even harder to find places in the workforce as more is asked of them to make up for teaching work which would otherwise be taken care of by full-time professors.
The lobbying of the UTSU and its supporters has resulted in severe damage to the university experience of ordinary undergraduates, the availability of employment for PhD students, the workload of professors, and the competitive position of the university and, by proxy, the city, province, and country on a global scale. We’ve suffered some serious damage.
So what can be done to remedy the situation? There is a role to be played by the student body, by campus leaders, and by the provincial government to save us from the current crisis.
The simplest course would be for the Minister of Training, Colleges, and Universities, Brad Duguid — or a potential replacement after the coming elections — to reinstate U of T’s original flat fees policy. However, it is unlikely that Minister Duguid will suddenly admit to his error. This leaves the province with a couple of options: it can either directly compensate U of T for its losses, or increase per student funding to universities — which has fallen by 30 per cent over the past decade. In fact Liberal and PC ministers have left Ontario last among the provinces in per-student university funding for 15 years. While remedying per-student funding is a necessary step for the province (my home state of Massachusetts just increased public university funding by 16.8 per cent), it seems highly unlikely with a minority government about to face a public skeptical of new taxes.
That leaves another idea which has been bandied about recently: provincial funding reallocated on the basis of specialization. The province could come to see U of T as an institution where it would get greater value per dollar due to U of T’s world class research facilities, central location, and ability to attract international minds to the region. While this would help to alleviate U of T’s precarious financial position, more steps will still need to be taken.
U of T students will need to make clear that a high quality education is of paramount importance. Given that the province has also capped domestic tuition increases — and international tuition can only be raised so far before U of T loses its cost advantage with US institutions — the best means of doing this would be for students to vote for a levy to fund operations of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences. A $650 Arts & Science student academic enhancement levy would probably make up the costs inflicted by the UTSU.
This leaves us with the issue of student leadership. The current political class at the St. George campus seems overwhelmingly opposed to the university administration. This opposition is not based on logical grounds, but rather out of resentment of authority, a sort of champagne socialism on the part of students attending an elite university in a wealthy country.
Our future education will ultimately require the emergence of a new breed of campus leader who will stand side by side with President Gertler and Provost Regehr to look after the university, staff, students, and community while sharing in the commitment to fund and maintain our institutions. The current political class has become so enthralled with their self image as revolutionaries that they celebrate destroying the very bedrock of public education upon which modern values are suspended. It is time for a new movement; it is time for change.
Jeffrey Schulman is a first-year student at Trinity College studying classics.
