Arguments based around questions like ‘how do you assign a dollar value to an education’ or ‘what is the nature of education’ were spouted by either side to justify a whole host of positions. At Mount Allison, we have a problematic lack of arbitrary rules and guidelines to coordinate our affairs.

Wait, a lack of arbitrary rules?

Answering questions such as ‘what is the value an education’ are practically impossible for anyone at Mt. A, or anywhere to answer. Truly unanswerable questions are great for the classroom but when applied to policy at Mt. A the result is the ridiculous claim by the administration that we essentially did not lose anything of irreplaceable value during the strike.

The shroud surrounding the strike allowed the administration to cry and scream that students are losing their education during the strike, and then comfortably turn around and claim that students were essentially able to educate themselves with “enhanced services.”

So, what exactly is the ‘value of an education?’

My suggestion is an easy one. Simply take what each student pays in tuition (adjusting for full-time, part-time, and international fees) and divide that into the amount of classroom days the semester should have had and simply multiply that number by twelve (the amount of days lost).

This suggestion is arbitrary to the extreme but unlike the vague nonsense it would create a workable system. The administration would be forced to offer at least some sort of reimbursement because it could no longer use vague language to  justify polar opposite policies. More arbitrariness would allow all of us, professor, student, and administrator to discuss the labour problem at Mt. A on the same terms with each other. In the current rhetoric landscape Allisonians can hardly even discuss the strike with each other because the terms of the discussion remain vague and very much open to interpretation.

And besides, just because a a guideline or rule of conduct is an arbitrary one does not mean that it is valueless. A degree at Mt. A consists of 120 credits. Really, who decided that? Honestly, it does not matter who decided it or what kind of logic they used to reach their conclusion.

The traditional practice at Mt. A of granting a degree after 120 credits have been earned may be an arbitrary rule but it allows all to participate in the education process at Mt. A on an equal footing and understand the terms of a discussion around the granting of degrees.

We can argue ourselves into circles over assigning a value to education all day long. Or we can apply subjective arbitrary conditions that may not be perfect but at least allow us to all discuss the issue on the same terms. I prefer this to faculty shouting passionately about oranges while the administration makes the case for apples.

 It is plain old consumerism.

The same thing that drives St. Patrick’s Day, and Valentine’s Day, and characters like the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. These are scourges of modern society, say many critics of consumer holidays. Critics often label these holidays as examples of the decay of modern society and the Western over-reliance on imported, cheaply made products.

But alas, the decay of modern Western society cannot be found in a Vietnamese made costume purchased at Wal-Mart. In fact, consumer holidays are not necessarily bad for our collective souls.

I say embrace consumerism come Oct. 31. The problem is not with consumerism itself but with how much stock we choose to place in material possessions. A few times a year it is fine to throw some money to the wind and purchase frivolous items that have little lasting value and are used only to celebrate an artificial holiday. What is not good, however, is allowing those attitudes toward consumerism that have a place on days like Halloween take over your life 365 days a year. Just about everything will do no harm as long as it is kept to moderation. Consumerist attitudes are no different.

Do not allow them to take over your life or govern your actions on a daily basis. No, you really don’t need the complete first season of True Blood, just because you saw it for ten bucks at Jean Coutu this past week. If you make an impulse buy like that every now and again, you’ll do little harm, but if you act like that on a regular basis, you will soon be extremely short on ten dollar bills. A few times a year though, like at Halloween, spending that extra ten dollars is not a horrible idea.

And besides, every time you buy inexpensive consumer goods somebody else draws some kind of benefit. The cashier at the Dollar Store picks up an extra shift during the Halloween rush, or a mom and pop store gets a boost with greeting cards and chocolates during the first two weeks of February.

Feel free to buy that extra bag of candy or that accessory for your costume this Halloween. When the holiday is done gone though, don’t let consumerism continue to be a large part of your life. Consumerism has a place, and Halloween is one of those places.

There are certain rights which ought to be granted to all human beings. This line of thinking became popular in the West after the Second World War, and has led to such social advancements as universal health care and subsidized housing for the poor.

How about education thought? Should we all have the right to read Plato, or to study particle physics until our eyes bleed? 

The answer to those questions is a resounding ‘yes.’ Education is one of the best ways for an individual to achieve self- improvement. The entire purpose of taxes is for creating and maintaining institutions that help individuals improve themselves and thereby improve society as a whole. Taxation is indeed a necessary evil and thus it is only right to use it to help those who gave up portions of their hard earned pay to improve their lives. 

Higher education helps to better an individual in ways beyond the classroom and textbook readings. For me personally, I came to Mount Allison as unconfident seventeen-year-old with little direction in life and no idea what I wanted my life to be. Education has given me the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes. If someone in the work place had made some of the mistakes I did in my first and second years the consequences would have be much worse. Sleeping through a psychology exam in first year will result in  a bad grade; in the workplace it could get you fired. University gives you the opportunity to learn life lessons at your own pace, rather than at the demanding pace of an employer. 

I think that it is clear that higher education is something that has the potential to better any who participate in it. Its implementation actually would not harm the quality of higher education in Canada.

Government-funded tuition may lead to increased enrolment in post-secondary educational institutions. A basic understanding of economics would suggest that the more individuals who hold a degree, the less valuable a degree would be. However, this does not translate into an understanding of the issues surrounding government-funded tuition. A bachelor’s degree will get someone’s name into the hiring pool at many workplaces, but it will by no means get that person hired in and of itself.

What also really matters is that resumés full of extracurriculars and positive references help an employer to separate the wheat from the chaff, and hire the right applicant. More people with undergrads does not equal more people that managed to score an impressive internship, or a glowing recommendation from a professor; extras like these are critical in securing a job in today’s economy.

On top of this, community college is becoming more and more popular. There are thousands of Canadians that enjoy learning in a practical environment and in a hands-on setting. If your dream is to work as a carpenter, free access to a history degree will not change your career choice. I fail to see how free tuition would greatly increase enrolment numbers at universities at the expense of colleges and technical schools.

When you boil it down, the benefits to government-funded tuition are many and the draw backs are few. If we are going to pay high taxes they might as well be going toward something can be useful like eliminating tuition fees.

This can clearly be seen in the controversy surrounding a chant that took place during Saint Mary’s University (SMU) orientation week.

The controversy surrounding SMU began with a chant that I doubt any student organizer or first year participant thought twice about. That is, until a video appeared on the Internet and the media picked up the story and ran with it. Soon, even the premier of Nova Scotia was throwing in his two cents about the controversy.

The chant in question was an acronym  of the word young: “Y is for your sister, O is for ‘oh so tight,’ U is for underage, N is for no consent, G is for grab that ass—Saint Mary’s boys we like them young.”  It is obvious that the student organizers at SMU made a stupid mistake by approving this chant for use in orientation week.

However, stupid mistakes are not something that students at SMU have a monopoly on. University is a time when many young adults find their way in life precisely by making profound errors in judgment, witnessing the consequences, and learning for the better because of it. As we evaluate what occurred at SMU we must keep these truths in mind, and remember to take  a critical look at ourselves.

When I was a starry-eyed, green-as-grass frosh in the fall of 2010, I participated in a chant, while differing in lyrics from the one at SMU, that expressed intolerance for others and a disregard for the welcoming environment that frosh week should be. Orientation week leaders (who shall remain nameless) walked students from Campbell Hall over to the south side residences. While we performed our relentless, Bud Light-fuelled march, we chanted, “hickory dickory dock, south side sucks the cock.”

I was a participant in a sexist and homophobic chant, and I didn’t think twice about it until years later.

Rather than taking this opportunity to solely criticize SMU, we should take it as a reminder of the bigoted and intolerant actions we have all taken part in and the thoughts we have all had. The student organizers of the chant at SMU are you and they are me. The ignorance that drove their willingness to chant about sexual violence is something that exists within all of us. And it is something that we must constantly be on guard against, rather than only thinking about it when controversies like this rear their ugly head.

The controversy at SMU, while attention-grabbing  at the moment, is something that will eventually fade away as students, faculty, and administrators at the school return to normalcy. This is why bigotry is so insidious. It receives attention for a short time while a video trends on YouTube, but then attention drifts and we forget about our prejudices. We realize certain aspects of our prejudice for a short time but then soon forget while the new episode of Breaking Bad plays. The time must come when we realize the need to address bigotry at all times, and not just when student leaders make a mistake. Please join me in remembering the SMU chant in the spring, in ten years, in twenty years, and for the rest of your lives. And please remember that to rise above the bigotry and ignorance embodied in this chant is to not only become a better student, but a better human being.

This aphorism holds true for the decision by the University of Calgary (U of C) to cut nineteen programs from its roster. Arts students will have eleven fewer programs to choose from while their science counterparts will see a loss of seven areas of study. The faculty of kinesiology brings up the rear with the loss of one program.

It is easy to look at the rollback of university programs and see an institution that doesn’t care about its students and is looking only to save costs. But that is a flawed way to view the issue. U of C has made the difficult decision to do away with programs with chronic low enrolment, a decision that will allow university resources to be spent in other, more important areas.

As reported by the Calgary Herald, Raphael Jacob, president of the U of C students’ union, recognizes the need for these cuts, but also said that having fewer options limits the quality of education one can receive. His position misses the fact that fewer but better programs are always preferable to a plethora of programs with low enrolment.

The programs in question have only had up to five students enrolled over the past five years. This is an extremely low number of students even for a small university like Mount Allison. For a university with an enrolment close to 30,000, spending precious resources offering programs that less than one percent of students take is a waste of time and money.

Wasteful programs should go the way of the Dodo, rather than sponge university resources. The fact of the matter is that students have the right to have the quality of their education maximized, given the massive amount of money it costs to obtain an undergraduate degree.

This move will allow the university to focus more attention on programs that have hundreds of students rather than programs that have a number that can be counted on one hand. In the words of Mister Spock, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or of the one.

Keeping programs alive that draw little or no interest is blatantly wasteful. And in the current age of austerity, waste is the last thing that we need. All around the globe countries are having to make difficult choices on what is most important and what needs to be cut from the public budget. The government of Alberta announced in its spring budget that it would be cutting $147 million in funding for post-secondary education. This has left universities in Alberta scrambling to make up the shortfall. I am of the opinion that since the provincial government is forcing U of C to make cuts, the university should cut programs that will impact the least amount of students, which it has.

The university is trying to play innocent, saying that the cuts are unconnected to budget concerns. The government of Alberta has made a foolish mistake in cutting its funding to post-secondary education, but U of C has taken this curveball smartly and is cutting programs that will be missed by few. The university needs to save its money and is doing so in a fashion that will not significantly affect the vast majority of its students.

It is good to allow things to die a natural death. Rather than keeping these nineteen programs on life support as a token show of academic diversity, U of C has done the right thing, letting them slip into that good night. These moves also have the benefit of freeing up space for new programs to be created, programs that could be fresh, exciting, and appealing to larger numbers of students.

In reality, these cuts will not affect the quality of education at the school and could even improve it by releasing university resources to be used more effectively.

Students at the University  of Calgary need not fear that the quality of their education will be impacted by these cuts. In the age of austerity, U of C has made the best of very limited options.

Indeed, some Quebec students celebrated when the provincial Liberals lost their place in power and were replaced by the Parti Québécois in the province’s recent election. However, much has changed in Canada’s only francophone province since the conclusion of major student demonstrations.

Marc-Antoine Dumas seems like an unassuming name. Dumas is the recent benefactor by an order from Quebec’s small-claims court. The court, in a July 26 ruling, decided that Université Laval history student association must repay $1,220 to Dumas for lost tuition and gas money. Dumas attempted to go to class throughout the protests and claims he was repeatedly blocked by protesters at the door to his class room, and as a result lost credits that he otherwise would most likely have earned.

So who holds the moral high ground in this case and what does this mean for the future of any mass student movement in Canada? And as the Université Laval history association argued, does a student union have the same rights granted to trade unions in Canada’s constitution?

I was pleased to see the protests in Quebec at the conclusion of my second year at Mount Allison. I had just finished putting a large part of a degree’s cost onto a line of credit and could empathize with my fellow students in Quebec. It is irrelevant that these students already had some of Canada’s lowest tuition costs and the claims that these students were somehow spoiled by the degree to which the provincial government funded the cost of their education are misguided and miss the point. These protests attempted to be proactive in address student concerns rather than silently waiting while their tuition slowly crept ever higher. Perhaps the rest of Canada would be paying Quebec rates for post-secondary education if these protests had of occurred nationwide years ago, prior to tuition rising to its close to unaffordable levels we now face.

Ultimately though, I do agree with the controversial ruling that will forever damage the ability of student unions to organize and stage mass protests. The thing about any mass social movement and what makes them tricky to effectively organize is that everyone that participates must buy into them. Dumas was unfairly denied access to his classes by those that blocked him from attending lectures. And unfortunately, since it is almost impossible to determine  the individual(s) that directly caused Dumas’ loss of credits, his student union, which had a hand in organizing the protests at Université Laval, should reimburse him.

The Quebec student protests were about the practicality of being able to afford an education in a time when the cost for everything else seems to be rising, and the wages for any job seem to be staying where they are or even falling. If Dumas judged for himself that he simply could not afford to participate in the protests and be delayed in receiving a degree that he needs then he should have had the option to attend lectures freely and with as much frequency as he desired.

A large part of these protests were a boycott on attending classes and Dumas was de facto forced into participating in this boycott. This only weakened the strength of a movement which had the potential to make real change in how post-secondary education is conducted in Canada. When students began trying to force other students on board with their protest movement, it only served to weaken the movement as a whole. Students need to be united behind anything they do if it is to be successful. Simply put, a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Months later the positive impact of the Quebec student protest has been dulled by actions like those that cost Dumas over $1200. Yes, we are talking about how the new provincial government halted the tuition increase, but we are all also discussing court cases and the loss of credits for students and other negative, rather than positive, aspects of this protest. The unfortunate part of all this is that what happened to Dumas takes away attention from the message of the Quebec student protests that a post-secondary education should be affordable for all.

I once remember my father telling me about his roughly 400 dollar tuition at Saint Mary’s University in the late 1970s. Adjusted for inflation he still paid less than half the money for a Bachelor of Arts degree than that same degree will cost me. The problem surrounding costs associated with a university education comes from how the provincial government looks at and addresses problems.

A university education is a long term investment.  However, we can see that the government of New Brunswick is not making choices that reflect the long term impact of having a well educated population.

Funding for post-secondary education from the provincial government has been progressively pulled back over the past decades and as a result, this 100 dollar plus tuition increase at STU is not the first one we’ve seen and it certainly won’t be the last. As time went on, tuition began to steadily rise while the provincial government began to save money in the short term. The problem, like any short term solution to long term problems, is that New Brunswick is simply putting the problem of tuition increases on the back burner. Ignoring the tuition problem may continue until it is ignored so long that the back burner burns the rest of the kitchen with it. The province saves money in the short term but in the long term it’s going to need an army of intelligent, well-educated university graduates to address a plethora of up and coming problems.

New Brunswick has an aging population. We have more people collecting retirement benefits than the province can ever hope to support in the future if current conditions persist. And we’re also the only province that shrunk in population according to recent figures.

When education in the province is expensive, it increases the likelihood that a resident of New Brunswick will seek their education outside of the province. And once that happens, it is quite easy to stay outside of New Brunswick once you’ve been educated in Ontario or Alberta. So we have a situation in this province where the cost of education is seriously affecting the chances that New Brunswick could ever become a have province. Education may not be significantly cheaper in other provinces but a discount at home would encourage New Brunswick’s prodigal students to come home rather than out west for opportunities.

The government of New Brunswick should never have allowed STU to get into this position. Yes, it’s going to hurt financially in the long term but the province is going to need as many university graduates it can get its hands on. Having more people retiring than entering the work force and a shrinking population are both long term problems that short term solutions are not going to fix. We need a progressive increase, rather than a decrease, in government funding for post-secondary education.

Some of this is our fault as well. The electorate often demands more funding for short term projects that provide immediate gratification at the expense of things like education funding which takes years to see results. I hope that soon the powers that be will increase education funding so that institutions like STU are affordable, not back breaking expensive, to attend.

 We have long term problems in New Brunswick and the people that will have the long term solutions will be university graduates. It must be affordable for students to be educated in this province or New Brunswick may never dig itself out of the hole it has dug.

The first problem with the York Federation of Students decision is that it steps so far beyond their mandated area of responsibility that I am puzzled as to why this vote was even considered. Student unions should advocate for students and issues directly affecting them. Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while indeed tragic, directly affects very few Canadian students unless they happen to be from the region, which is an uncommon occurrence. While student unions waste their time lobbying in areas that do not directly affect students, other important areas of student life go ignored. I’ll be frank: the government of Israel does not care at all what the students of York University think, and why would they? The government of Israel listens to other governments, not the concerns of university students. Areas where York University’s Federation of Students could actually make a difference is what the organization should be focusing itself on. Yes, activism is important but it must be directed toward issues in which one can make a real difference. Why could York’s student union not have taken a bold step on an issue that directly affects students? They absolutely could have done so. The only barrier they faced was a misunderstanding of their proper role as York’s student representatives.

Secondly, this move may be designed to encourage an end to hostilities in the decades long Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it does little to further that goal. In fact, it only hinders what little chance for peace there is in the region. Lasting peace, the kind that allows societies and people to grow and prosper over the long term, can only be brought about through communication and dialogue. There are three sides to every story: yours, mine and the truth. Only by speaking to those we disagree with can we reach any kind of agreement or peace. Endorsing a move that would stifle Israeli voices on York’s campus would only serve to create an environment dominated by ignorance and misinformation. If Israel is not allowed to voice its side of the argument, how can the truth ever be found? By not allowing Israeli academics on campus, York University would be denied an outlet to receive information from the region, and a means by which they could question the beliefs they hold on the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Every good academic (and student for that matter) knows that questioning one’s beliefs is essential to learning. It would seem that York’s Federation of Students has no desire to learn, but wants only to wallow in their ignorance.

Finally, I find the idea of banning academics from a university campus based only on their nationality as bigoted and borderline racist. The Israelis have a vast amount of varying views on the wars and conflicts their nation has fought. It seems that York’s student union thinks that every single Israeli academic holds the same view, based solely on where they are from, and disregards any individual differences that might exist. Millions of people live in Israel and they have millions of independent views and voices. For York’s Federation of Students to lump Israelis into a single category displays ignorance on their part and does not reflect well on the education they have received at the university. Yes, the government of Israel has committed atrocities against the Palestinians, but the people of Israel are largely peaceful and not all that different from Canadians.

Students at York should be ashamed of their student union, which has chosen to paint all Israeli academics with the same brush. Just because I’m a Canadian does not mean that I support Canadian government policies, and the same goes for Israeli academics. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict will never be resolved if we choose to do what the York’s student union has done, and refuse to communicate.