“At a time of diminished state funding for higher education and uncertain federal dollars, Mr. Gee says that public colleges and universities need to devise a new business model to pay for the costs of education, beyond sticking students with higher tuition and greater debt. ”
Click here to read full article from the NY Times. (Nice suspenders Mr. Gee! lol 
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Well it is about bloody time that they come to their senses! Maybe these articles will finally start to garner some support for the Quebec Student Movement. Montreal is so avant-garde.
ADA, Ohio — Kelsey Griffith graduates on Sunday from Ohio Northern University. To start paying off her $120,000 in student debt, she is already working two restaurant jobs and will soon give up her apartment here to live with her parents. Her mother, who co-signed on the loans, is taking out a life insurance policy on her daughter.
“If anything ever happened, God forbid, that is my debt also,” said Ms. Griffith’s mother, Marlene Griffith.
Click here to read full-article at the NY Times
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The United-States is a nation of serfs and slaves. And if Canadians are not careful, we will end up like them. Montreal students are not fighting for entitlements, they are fighting off forces that are trying to enslave them into a life of destitute and economic slavery.
“President Barack Obama planned to announced the U.S.’ filing of a complaint from the White House on Tuesday. The fresh action is part of Obama’s broader effort to crack down on what his administration sees as unfair trading practices by China.”
Click here to read the full article from CBC.
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The world is in one of the greatest economic crisis since the depression and most of it can be attributed to the US’s lack of moral rigor and lust for greed–who is Obama to go out and lecture China on fair trade? In fact, who is Obama to lecture any country on human rights, equality and ethical business practices? The Canadian Government should really tell him to muzzle it.
“Former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney has cancelled a Canadian speaking appearance due to security concerns sparked by demonstrations during a visit he made to Vancouver last fall, the event promoter said Monday.”
Click here to read full-story from The Globe & Mail
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Finally, something I can be proud of during the growing austerity and fraying Canadian federalism. I wish we would stop fighting amongst ourselves and remember that we are in this whole mess because of criminals like Cheney south of the border.
I have been in relenting anguish since the beginning of the semester over the fraying and fragmenting pieces being published across the media over anticipated tuition hikes, student protests and some of the deteriorating conditions across various Canadian Universities. I am not for, or against tuition increases, mass educational reform or acts of civil disobedience. My qualms are over the suffocating and mounting loads of student debt; the deteriorating quality of Canadian education; and the psychological and spiritual well-being of future generations of students and the young. The current debauch of our universities and growing student strife has little to do about means; it’s about values, morals, and political power. And a society that is no longer willing to invest time, energy and resources into the general well-being of their young on a material, intellectual and psycho-spiritual level (by whatever means) is doomed for self-destruction.
Students’ cries and their youthful lamenting in the streets against student debt, rising tuition and growing income inequalities is the beginning of a symptom of a much larger malaise that many acute thinkers (Charles Taylor, John Ralston Saul, Chris Hedges et al.) have linked with the rise of modernity, mass industrialization, pathological individualism, and corporatism which has led—in various and complex ways—to our current economic, political and psychological debauch. And in no simple terms, our universities and students seem to be suffering and hemorrhaging from many of the consequences of this developmental gridlock. There is no easy solution to the predicaments and plight of our universities or the young. Yet one thing is for certain, the current political strategy by the current generation in power to continually bow down in fear to corporate greed and irrational market forces will undoubtedly backfire and create an even larger crisis, even civil unrest, if the occupy movement and the current rise of student protests are any measure of future possibilities.
As Matthew Brett, a graduate student from Concordia University elegantly pointed-out in an article entitled “The emerging Student movement: it’s about more than tuition”, which appeared in the Gazette before the Quebec November 10th day of action:
“The emerging student movement is not a group of self-interested revelers, as they are so often portrayed. The movement is expressing discontent with the current state of affairs, not only here in Quebec, but globally. And this is in keeping with the history of the student movement. Students played a major role in the civil-rights and antiwar movements of the past, as they continue to do in matters of environmental and economic justice today.”
And somehow, the general media continually fails to report on these dimensions and our government is idly prepared to sit back and watch students and citizens get psychologically slaughtered and spiritually enslaved by economic and technological forces driven by greed.
Canada is on a path of destruction if the current government, academics and public intellectuals are not willing to stand-up to corporations, their markets niches, and the elite few that control them through powerful technological means—whom all (in various degrees) are responsible for howling-out the fabric of not only our democracy and universities, but the whole of western civilization. The current government practice of slaughtering the “sacred cows” of education and healthcare is a catastrophe and shameful display in protecting the well-being and welfare of Canadian citizens. But more importantly, it is a dishonorable and gory miscarriage by the baby-boomer generation to live up to Canada’s foundational values and constitutional roots of “peace, order, welfare and good government”. And if left unchecked, these structural, psychological and economic factors might create a black-hole of hopelessness and start to activate humanity’s debase and primitive nature of ethnic, language, tribal and inter-generational power struggles and begin to tear Canada apart.
Yet as obvious as all these basic sociological and political factors are to any historically educated individual—fear, past conditioning and the herd mentality of Canadian technocrats and their inability to culturally individuate from the U.S. (mostly due to technological forces and their lust for profits over morals and principals of human dignity) is leading Canada to make some frightening policy decisions on the future role of education in our country. As another graduate student, Holly Nazar, from Concordia University recently wrote:
“It’s baffling that so many people compare Quebec tuition levels to those in the United States [or to the rest of Canada] as a way of arguing for the increases in tuition when the American economy is in a continuing consumer debt crisis.
In the U.S., student debt has surpassed credit card debt, and will soon be worth over $1 trillion. Many experts have expressed alarm that these debts [as in Canada] are likely to spark another economic meltdown.” (As Fees Rise, Graduate Happiness and Security Decline)
Nevertheless, our elected elite and their managerial assailants are relentlessly advocating and pursuing the avenue of commercializing our Canadian universities on the degenerate educational, economic and societal models of the U.S. and the U.K. Are we incapable of thinking and governing ourselves?
Maybe Margaret Wente is right in predicting in one of her recent pieces in The Globe and Mail, that “We’re ripe for a great disruption in higher education” due to the digital and information age which has yet to really revolutionize higher education in the manner that it as in the corporate sector. Sure higher learning still relies on a rather medieval model; it is economically expensive and is plagued with a professorship that is geared at researching rats, rather than inspiring and educating human beings. But how wise would it be to hastily upend our universities and hand over the young to corporations such as Apple, Google, and YouTube and see where that leads our Country. The cultivation of wisdom and nurturing of an engaged and strong citizenry is a little more complicate than setting-up a 4G wireless network and downloading an iPhone App.
Judging by the current state of these dealings, not only are we ripe for a great disruption in higher education, but we are also failing to evolve and create the type of education system that our country and our young so desperately need.
“Until now, online education has been regarded as the poor stepchild of the higher-education world – widely suspected of being a second-rate substitute for the real thing. But that’s about to change. The digital revolution is going to disrupt higher education in the same way it’s disrupted so many other industries. And it’s about time. Higher learning still relies on the medieval model, when scholars gathered in one place to listen to professors lecture at them. It’s increasingly expensive, and doesn’t do a very good job of delivering what a lot of students want and need in a way that society can afford.
The digital revolution will make higher education better, cheaper, more accessible, more engaging and far more customized than anything that exists today. It’ll also turn our current institutions upside down. For example, there’ll always be room for the old-fashioned lecture. But do we really need 10,000 professors in 10,000 classrooms lecturing on the same subject? Why not let students watch the best explainer in the world explain calculus or physics – online, on their own time – and use local professors to work in smaller groups with students? Makes sense – so long as you’re prepared to upend the entire professoriate, which is geared to research, not teaching, and is paid accordingly. ”
To read full-article click here.
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There is not a day that goes by where I don’t think about how technology has revolutionized our lives and how this might transform education. I totally agree with Margaret Wente, we haven’t even begun to harness technology in higher education.
Yet as much as there is to get excited about, there is just as much to be frightened and cautious about. Plucking people in from of computer screens and getting them to buy online degrees does not automatically equate into a more competent, knowledgeable and conscientious citizenry. There is a huge gap between being and having, as Erich Fromm knew and wrote about many years ago. Having a degree (or having the means to distribute them through technology) won’t solve all our miseries, nor will it redress massive economic & ability inequalities. In fact, it might only exasperate the situation….
Nevertheless, it is fairly hard not to get excited about where technology might lead us.
“Academic journals that decide which research discoveries count as important are practicing widespread “coercion” to gain influence, at the expense of their own credibility, a new survey says.”
Simply more evidence towards what I was hypothesizing and attempting to illuminate in my first blog post “Blogging vs. Academic Publishing“. The fine balance between freedom to learn, express, and inquire while adhering to rigorous and a high level of scholarship is already a difficult challenge. However, once we factor in socioeconomic influences this topic becomes extremely complex. This is a timely and necessary article—particularly in these fast pace times where technology is completely changing the conditions and the way we disseminate information.
Cohen will undo the chains & roll the stone away. Thank you for reminding me (again) to hold my head low.
He is entirely right, Canada has been slipping and we have fallen prey to corporatism. And nowhere is this more visible than in our Universities.
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“What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex. Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.”
“The decay of Canada illustrates two things. Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington. This, I suspect, is why the tactics to crush the Occupy movement around the globe have an eerie similarity—infiltrations, surveillance, the denial of public assembly, physical attempts to eradicate encampments, the use of propaganda and the press to demonize the movement, new draconian laws stripping citizens of basic rights, and increasingly harsh terms of incarceration.”
Click here to read the full-article.