Apology

In our last issue we published an editorial about student union governance and referenda.  The piece described the process leading to an annual donation to Students Building Schools (SBS), which the editorial writer assumed was a worthy cause, albeit largely unknown to the 89% of students who did not vote. Unfortunately, the headline was not an accurate index of the content of the editorial. At a glance, to someone not reading the editorial, the headline might leave the inaccurate impression that we were critical of SBS or our editorial writer was critical of SBS.  That would not be correct. We are critical of the process and not the particular  instance or the particular charitable beneficiary of the student union’s largesse by referendum. For clarity, we are pleased to advise that the PEAK acknowledges that SBS did not “dupe” anyone, and we apologize for any embarrassment or inconvenience that our headline may have caused to SBS. Additionally, we wish to clarify that SBS’s own projections are for $47,478 per year in levy funds from students, not $100,000 as erroneously estimated in the editorial. Furthermore, SBS presently does not have a salaried staff. The Peak regrets the error.

By Clinton Hallahan

You really can’t do anything against the awesome power of African children.

And why would you want to? There’s nobody saying that Schools Building Schools isn’t a worthy charity — nine out of 10 studies will tell you that schools are good. Ten out of 10 studies will tell you that building schools in places that need them is good. I’m not even saying that an SFU student giving their money to SBS is a bad thing. But what is a bad thing is institutionalized panhandling, which SFU students resoundingly supported last week.

As with anything in our little banana republic, ‘resoundingly’ is misleading. For those of you who don’t know, a cadre of students numbering around 2,200 on a campus of 30,000 have decided to tack on a few more bucks to your SFSS fees. It’s only $1 per semester for a full-time student, which I’m betting is part of the reason why it passed so easily. Any more than the price of a terrible coffee and people might have had something to say. But that represents around $100,000 of your dollars per year, which amounts to a pretty nice salary for whoever is hired to run this charity, and a few schools in Uganda, I’m sure.

I have no problem with the mission itself, but the way Schools Building Schools cropped up at SFU and made their levy dreams a reality is less Fame and more Election (the Matthew Broderick one, not the one that is brutal and Japanese. That said, the levy will likely live forever).

First and most distressing is the precedent set that SFU students are amenable to third parties coming in, pitching them a monetary stake in a feel-good cause, and coming away with guaranteed money forever. It’s a pilot fish for other organizations, and blood in the water for whomever else would like a free cheque.

The problem with a levy over voluntary participation in the charity is that to eliminate the fee we would have to go to another referendum. Whatever ‘yes’ side to abolishment that registered would likely be labelled racists for wanting to take food and shelter from needy Ugandans.  You can see the corner we’ve painted ourselves into.

SFU has a history of these levies causing problems. There is at least one totally defunct organization still collecting a levy that the SFSS can’t touch. They’d ask permission to do something with the $300,000 or so just sitting in a comical McDuck-style money bank, but they have nobody to ask. To strike the fee would mean a referendum, and SFU political physics says that the more referenda you have on the ballot, the worse they all do. When something important needs to be passed, SFU students just can’t be trusted to care enough.

Not to mention that the Schools Building Schools referendum question was shrouded in controversy from the word go. The question included a separate measure asking that if it were to pass, should there be an opt-out clause. In theory, the measure could have passed with no recourse for students to opt-out. Ask the more alert on forum and they will tell you that they voted to have the opt out clause baked into the question itself, so the opt-out would be in there regardless of the performance of a separate measure. That’s not how it was on the ballot. Of course nobody is taking independent minutes, and the IEC depends on the official minutes taken by the forum secretary, an SFSS staff member, so what we voted on is the official story. But that doesn’t explain away the sheer confusion in the air when the questions were published. Add that to a allegations of IEC intimidation and improper campaigning and you have some questions that need answering.

This is all in addition to the fact that an election that garnered 11 per cent  turnout to the polls has set moral policy for the SFSS. It is morally presumptuous to say that all SFU students, current and incoming, will hold the charitable support of Schools Building Schools as a priority. Charities by design must prove their needfulness (and integrity) on a regular basis so the charitable can choose to support them. With this referendum, SFU students have built a cash pipeline to SBS, no questions asked. Four years from now, the first-years who supported the initiative will convocate and nobody will talk about SBS again. It will be lost in the line items of the SFSS annual report, a charitable little parasite, passed by few and affecting many. The metaphor is so on the nose it hurts.

By Joseph Leivdal

A few weeks back, I went to a panel called “The Neoliberal University and Globalization”. All four speakers presented compelling arguments about the state of the university today, and how a multiplicity of forces are transforming it into more of a degree factory than a centre for higher learning. Our university is being run much like a corporation, with money and marketable patents being more of a focus than learning for the sake of learning. Take the constant budget cuts to the social sciences in favour of the applied sciences here at SFU for example.

But I’m not writing this to convince you that higher education is being destroyed in favour of market demands. In fact I’m already convinced that most of us know that something is wrong, not only with the university but with society at large. Underneath the surface of daily life many of us are beginning to bubble over with this knowledge, but most of us don’t know what to do about it.

The panel was a perfect example of this. I don’t mean to devalue the learning that goes on in these settings; in fact I learned a lot. One of the speakers actually caused me to have a bit of a paradigm shift, and I also learned about basic income units, or BIUs. This is common lingo used by the administration of universities to refer to students. We are being referred to as quantitative units of currency, not as human beings.

But despite all the great ideas being tossed around I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all for nothing. At the end of the panel we would disseminate, with no real strategy to combat neoliberalization having been discussed. I decided I would speak my thoughts on this. I said that I felt that we need to ground such excellent theory in the practice of our day-to-day lives, and that we need to begin to take risks, to take action if we are to avoid the destruction of the higher qualities of advanced education. But my comments were met largely with blank stares. There were a few encouraging smiles, but the overwhelming feeling I had was that most people in the room thought that I was nothing more than an aware yet overly keen undergrad student. Well-intentioned, but naive nonetheless.

But fuck it! Here’s where I get mad. I understand that we all have busy lives. One of the genius properties of neoliberalism is that it keeps us damn busy just surviving so that we don’t have time to stop and think about how wrong things are, let alone do anything about it. But there comes a point where we must say enough is enough. There comes a point where we must decide to live the way we want to live and to stand up to the forces that are standing in the way of that realization. We will not be perfectly organized, we will make mistakes along the way, and we will be met with a lot of disappointment as well. But we need to make a decision to act.

We used to know how to act. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the political science, sociology and anthropology department here at SFU stood up to an administration that did not like the fact that within the school there existed a truly democratic and critical department. Students and faculty organized together to create the department that they wanted, and to live in an environment that fostered human development and emancipatory praxis. I know that legacy lives on; there are even some of you that lived through it working at the university.

Students and faculty at the University of Toronto have also found their breaking point. Out of frustration with their administration and with government policy they have built a parallel governing body for their school that is saying no to decisions made by administration that they do not support. They didn’t take power, they made their own. Like the PSA department did in the ‘60s, they have decided that they want to live on their own terms, terms that nurture human development, and they took the risks necessary to do that.

To the professors of Simon Fraser University, I challenge you to publicly verbalize your support for students and for democratic, emancipatory education in the face of the administration. I challenge you to live up to the legacy of PSA department, to inform, to support, and to organize. We’re all in this together, and it’s about time we begin to normalize a critical discourse of resistance, not only in panels, but also in our shared spaces and especially in our classrooms. We have spent enough time discussing neoliberalism in classrooms. Lets take back the podium, lets take back Freedom Square. It’s time that we start taking the risks needed to start living the way we know is right.

By Edward Dodd

REGINA (CUP) — Careful! By reading this editorial, you might topple the fragile economy!

Okay, perhaps that’s a little over-the-top, but the way the Conservative government falls over itself legislating people back to work, you’ll forgive me for thinking that if Nycole Turmel sneezes violently enough, the entire country will collapse into a financial hell-storm from which no one will escape unscathed. Every time a union even makes a peep about striking, Labour Minister Lisa Raitt is there with a pen and paper to scribble down a law criminalizing collective action — action that would improve workers’ benefits or salaries. In every case, be it Canada Post or Air Canada, unions are apparently endangering the feeble economic recovery the Conservative government has cobbled together.

And what a feeble recovery it’s been, based heavily on reinvigorating the sign-making industry by putting up “Canada’s Action Plan” billboards everywhere. Meanwhile, the government plays coy about buying expensive airplanes from foreign companies. The most recent Conservative strategy to put people back to work by cutting 30,000 jobs in the civil service is, to hear them tell it, a move that will inexplicably create more jobs. This “right-sizing” of the federal civil service coincides with what is speculated to be a shockingly austere upcoming federal budget. The budget will probably introduce spending cuts to everything from health care to the arts. Such a bare-bones budget would be a testament to our economic recovery and the competency of the government.

An austere budget makes sense when you consider that, in conjunction with spending cuts, the government has lowered taxes to a ludicrously low level for corporations, ensuring that once money flows into corporate coffers, there is no way to pry it back out. The reckless slashing of the GST from seven per cent to five per cent has eliminated an estimated $12 billion in government revenue. That’s a huge chunk of change that would go a long way towards eliminating the deficit without laying off thousands of government jobs or maiming services that Canadians rely on.

The first problem with severe austerity and continually blaring on about the fragile state of the economy is that it creates a climate of fear. This makes strong economic growth nearly impossible. How is scaring people into thinking the economy is fragile going to encourage them to spend their money? Fear will make people hoard their savings rather than invest them, creating a slow downward spiral that will eventually end in another severe recession, if not a depression.

This leads into the second problem. I don’t claim to be an economist, but I do know one of the first things that they teach you in economics is that an increase in government spending provides far more economic stimulus than any lowering of taxes. While many try to discredit this idea as returning the government to constant deficits, a concurrent increase in taxes, combined with the increase in tax revenue from the economic growth stimulated by higher spending, would likely deliver a balanced budget with much less pain, suffering, and austerity than slashing funding and slashing taxes. This isn’t Greece, where there is no money left to spend — the government shouldn’t act like austerity is the only option.

If Harper’s government is really serious about stabilizing the economy, it should increase spending, not impose austerity. It should continue to provide excellent services to Canadians such as health care and old-age security rather than forcing them to wait longer in emergency rooms or work later in their lives. While unpopular, raising taxes is necessary in order to pay for an economic renewal. Rather than fear-mongering and ending collective bargaining rights, the government should clearly show it will not hamstring the economy with lower taxes and lower spending.

Smaller government is the goal of the Conservative government, but frankly, smaller government is not the direction this country should go if we want stable economic growth. The government didn’t become so large unnecessarily — it entered into the economy in response to the failure of the free-market economy during the Great Depression. Unless we want a return to the economic conditions of that depression, it’s time the government stepped up and took a leadership role in stimulating the economy.