The denigration of the U of M
Quality can’t be left out of the debate again
Carson Jerema Staff
The provincial budget released a couple of weeks ago failed once again to adequately fund the university. While funding was only $3 million short of what the university requested, and the administration has indicated that the books will likely balance, that doesn’t change the reality that universities are woefully underfunded and that this current increase will do little more than maintain the status quo at the U of M.
The province currently contributes around 60 per cent of the university’s operating budget. In 1986-87, government funding for universities accounted for about 80 per cent.
Private revenue for Canadian universities, which includes tuition fees as well as corporate and other forms of donations, rose from 18 per cent of total operating revenue in 1986-87 to 39 per cent in 2001, according to a 2003 Education Quarterly Review article. After social spending was gutted in the mid-1990s, tuition rose on average by about 135 per cent.
Overall government funding has indeed been on a steady increase, but funding per student has been in sharp decline in recent years, suggesting that funding hasn’t been rising in line with the needs of the U of M. In the following weeks the public debate will focus on the needlessly polarized arguments between the need for funding and the need to prevent a further rise in ancillary fees, as it did last year.
What will be neglected in the debate is a meaningful discussion on the quality of education, an easy topic to ignore as it is difficult to quantify quality, whereas the potential for rising fees is something that is easy to understand — no one wants to pay more.
However, this is a vitally important discussion to have. In the same period that tuition rose by 135 per cent, “bequests, donations and non-governmental grants and contracts” rose by 235 per cent, while “miscellaneous revenues” rose by 250 per cent.
Private sector funding is not necessarily an inherent evil, as co-operation between universities and business can foster mutually beneficial and constructive relationships. But when universities desperate to balance the books and faced with a severe lack of government funding go pandering after corporate dollars, problems can arise.
This was clearly demonstrated last year when the faculty of environment received a $10 million donation in exchange for changing the name of the faculty to the Clayton H. Riddell faculty of the earth, environment, and resources, a change that has alienated several students in the faculty.
With inadequate public scrutiny, consistent questions about not only the quality of research but also the type of education are raised. One has to wonder what isn’t being researched or what is being censored, as well as what is being manipulated. Universities are supposed to be institutions where critical skills are developed, but increasing reliance on the private sector begs the question — critical of what?
Quality of education is threatened further with the U of M’s increasing reliance on non-tenured, sessional instructors. Sessionals receive very little pay for the work they do. If they teach between two and three courses — roughly what their tenure-tract counterparts teach — they earn around $21,000 to $24,000 during the regular term, among the lowest in the country.
Sessionals don’t get time off for research and they often seek employment outside of academia. In order to qualify for tenure-track, academics must demonstrate published work and, in many departments, a full-length study in the form of a book is required. Some sessionals have been at the U of M for 20 years, with little prospect of gaining tenure. Though, the university’s recent granting of the right-of-first-refusal to instructors who teach the same course five times in a row is a step in the right direction.
While many do publish actively in their respective fields, they simply don’t have the time or the resources to effectively follow their academic pursuits. As professors play an important role in the development of critical skills, instructors that are unable to involve themselves fully in the academic world can only mean that education will suffer.
University president Emöke Szathmáry has indicated that the university will not seek to lower its reliance on sessionals. With many tenured professors set to retire in the coming years, and in the absence of greater funding from the government, the further immiseration of non-tenured instructors and a consistent decline in quality is likely.
Concerns of quality are evident elsewhere. Little is visibly done with tenured professors that receive consistently abysmal evaluations from their students, and if something is done, these professors are often restricted to teaching first-and second-year courses. These are years where a bad professor can sour any student on not only a particular field but on the university experience in general.
All this is compounded by the reality that in some departments, students often have to delay their graduation because required courses are simply not offered. The lack of funding also restricts the number of sections offered for important and popular courses. With increasing enrollment, not only are students unable to take courses because they are oversubscribed, but those that do take them experience a reduced quality of instruction, as students have less opportunity to contribute to discussion and less access to professors.
Rising fees are an important part of the debate. But the discussion needs to be refocused to encompass the complicated question of quality. It is difficult to define, but budget cutbacks, reliance on the private sector as well as the unfortunate ghettoization of skilled and trained professionals surely contribute to the denigration of our university.
Carson Jerema is a fourth-year political studies student and the Manitoban’s Comment Editor.
