The Thunderbird Gazette

Com­merce stu­dents are before the bal­lot now. There are some good back­ground­ers out there. We scrapped ours because frankly, it was too dry. The import­ant les­sons com­ing from the his­tory are:

1. The rhet­oric behind accred­it­a­tion grew stronger with time. At first it was not being men­tioned, then there were short ref­er­ences, now there’s dir­ect cita­tions from doc­u­ments no one’s seen.

2. Fun account­ing tricks took place. The devel­op­ment was “phased” and then a lot of the pro­ject was shif­ted into Phase 1 slowly in what is most likely an attempt to max­im­ize funds from the first CUS ref­er­en­dum. This includes things that didn’t need to be there, like A/V.

3. Phase 2, in a sense, has to hap­pen. If only Phase 1 occurs, its costs go up because build­ing code and seis­mic improve­ments are in Phase 2. When you’re tear­ing down walls to upgrade to code, you may as well save money and make those walls pretty. It would be really stu­pid to not do Phase 2.

The fact that ‘phas­ing’ is irrel­ev­ant if you have to do both is beside the point. What’s import­ant to note from the his­tory is that there is this fin­an­cial model that was cre­ated by the admin­is­tra­tion, and they’re rely­ing on the inflex­ib­il­ity they built in to get a desired out­come. It’s like arguing “we shouldn’t stop the train, because I delib­er­ately broke the breaks.”

This piece goes into the nature of tuition and stu­dent fee account­ing, what’s wrong with this ques­tion, and the bad pre­ced­ents it is setting.

Stu­dent Fees Are Not Tuition; This Is

Tuition is a highly politi­cized issue in Canada. The reason for this is that optic­ally, it’s a big lever on determ­in­ing who can and can­not attend uni­ver­sity. Cana­dians widely believe that the basis of admis­sions should be based on merit, and polit­ical parties dif­fer on how to make it as such. To achieve a more mer­ito­cratic uni­ver­sity, and simply because there’s so much pub­lic invest­ment, gov­ern­ment keeps a firm grasp on the lever.

The upcom­ing CUS fee is best accoun­ted for as a tuition increase. His­tor­ic­ally, the only fin­an­cial onus on the stu­dent body is tuition, which goes towards recur­ring costs like salar­ies. Build­ings are typ­ic­ally con­struc­ted from some com­bin­a­tion of gov­ern­ment grants (pro­vin­cial and fed­eral), UBC invest­ment (endow­ment fund­ing and donation-matching), and private invest­ment (indi­vidu­als and cor­por­a­tions). Stu­dents have never con­trib­uted. This is delib­er­ate, as stu­dents con­trib­ute their share through tuition, and it’s the job of gov­ern­ment and the Uni­ver­sity to come up with the fin­ances for build­ings. The gov­ern­ment is clear with this.

Stu­dent soci­et­ies, such as the AMS, exist to rep­res­ent and ser­vice the stu­dent body in ways the Uni­ver­sity can­not. Need­ing some way to fin­ance their oper­a­tions, the law states they can levy fees off the stu­dent body via ref­er­en­dum. AMS fees fund ser­vices like the Advocacy Office, pay for renov­a­tions to the Stu­dent Union Build­ing, and fund the salary of the AMS executive.

Stu­dent fees have also fun­ded build­ings in the past. The AMS has a leg­acy of build­ing stu­dent facil­it­ies on cam­pus, such as the Aquatic Centre and SUBs past and present. Recently, under­grad soci­et­ies have taken up the idea of build­ing their own quar­ters as well. The Meek­ison Arts Stu­dent Space, Abdul Ladha Sci­ence Stu­dent Centre, and pro­spect­ive EUS Build­ing are all examples of con­stitu­en­cies tak­ing after the AMS and con­struct­ing their own stu­dent facil­it­ies. Each of these facil­it­ies share a com­mon prin­cipled link, and it’s because of those prin­ciples that stu­dents con­trib­ute to them. It boils down to a mat­ter of pur­pose and control.

Stu­dents build build­ings to ameli­or­ate the stu­dent exper­i­ence in a way the Uni­ver­sity can­not. For instance, stu­dents wanted a place to swim on cam­pus, so they paid for a pool. Stu­dents wanted a sanc­tu­ary from aca­demia, so they built a SUB. Engin­eer­ing stu­dents wanted some­where close for social activ­it­ies that isn’t a dilap­id­ated shack, so they’re build­ing the EUS Build­ing. In each case, stu­dents iden­ti­fied some­thing lack­ing, and draf­ted a plan to get it done.

And because stu­dents cre­ated the idea, they con­trol it. For instance, the AMS ran the Aquatic Centre up until about 3 or so years ago. The highest mana­gerial body had over 50% stu­dent rep­res­ent­a­tion on it, and as a res­ult, when the Centre’s man­age­ment tried to close the weight room, stu­dents objec­ted, and the weight room remains open today. The SUB is run by the AMS through a lease agree­ment with UBC. Stu­dents decide what goes out and what goes in. MASS and Ladha are run by the AUS and SUS respect­ively, and the EUS Build­ing will be run by the EUS—or the EUS won’t build it.

Angus Doesn’t Fit the Model

What’s hap­pen­ing down Main Mall breaks this model. The first time this ques­tion was asked, it was deemed Dean-initiated. Why? Because the fee was, and con­tin­ues to be, Dean Dan’s idea. There is no stu­dent vis­ion, no stu­dent push, and no stu­dent reflec­tion in this fee at all. It’s the same fee that was launched last time, which came from the Dean. And it makes sense for the push to be com­ing from the faculty’s chief aca­demic officer, as this is chiefly an aca­demic fee.

Since it didn’t come from them, the CUS has no con­trol once this vote is passed. My read­ing of the ques­tion is even such that if the CUS tried to exer­cise con­trol, they would be at fault and liable to UBC. The only ‘get’ the CUS has here is a single seat on an advis­ory board, which they already have a seat on. Hil­ari­ously, the CUS has wanted some­thing in the new build­ing for some time, but the fac­ulty denied them. Why they’re not say­ing “we’ll give you mil­lions of dol­lars, if you at least give us this thing we wanted,” shows a mis­un­der­stand­ing of how to lever­age your capital.

Lastly, this is clearly some­thing the Uni­ver­sity would do without stu­dents. The Uni­ver­sity has an inher­ent interest in build­ing and main­tain­ing classrooms and offices—it needs them to per­form the most basic oper­a­tions of a uni­ver­sity. If they don’t, people get right­fully fired for not doing their job.

Three Bad Precedents

This fee, once it passes, sets three bad pre­ced­ents which span bey­ond the walls of the com­merce fac­ulty, and begin to cre­ate the case for inter­ven­tion by other fac­ulties and the AMS. There’s a mana­gerial pre­ced­ent, a polit­ical one and a found­a­tional one.

Management-wise, passing this fee amounts to a bail­out of ambi­tious, irre­spons­ible fin­an­cial plan­ning. The only reason the fin­an­cial plan got the go-ahead from the Board of Gov­ernors is because they were given the con­fid­ence that the Dean’s ori­ginal plebis­cite would get pro­vin­cial approval. Well the province said no, but walls were already being knocked over, so UBC bailed out the pro­ject by provid­ing a loan off the backs of every­one. (A note: the people most pissed about that? The other deans, who would never be able to do that if due pro­cess is fol­lowed.) After such a fail­ure, any reas­on­able pro­ject man­ager would scale back plans, until new sources of rev­en­ues come up. That didn’t hap­pen. In fact, plan­ning became more ambi­tious as time went on, and altern­at­ive rev­en­ues were not secured. The reason? Dan assumed he could ask again, this time with his ducks in line, while assum­ing the CUS would sup­port him and that it would pass. Well, when Dan went to the CUS and said “you need to do this, because I’ve been expect­ing you will,” they turned around and said, “but of course,” and star­ted down the road of a bailout—a ter­rible precedent.

From the Gov­ern­ment to UVic, with love. Feb 2010.

Polit­ic­ally, this serves as pre­ced­ent in favour of privat­iz­a­tion. If you’re against privat­iz­a­tion, you should oppose this, as gov­ern­ment and UBC will use it as evid­ence that stu­dents are will­ing to con­trib­ute more money in realms gov­ern­ment once did.

The last pre­ced­ent is eas­ily the most dan­ger­ous. This skirts the pro­vin­cial author­ity on tuition fees through a legal back door. Using the back door removes the pub­lic over­sight of the tuition debate. A coun­try that’s foun­ded on prin­ciples of equal access to edu­ca­tion, and that also firmly believes in a mer­ito­cratic edu­ca­tional sys­tem, needs to main­tain a grasp on the tuition lever irre­spect­ive of the dir­ec­tion it goes. To allow a private back door in which this very import­ant pub­lic policy issue can be decided avoids the pub­lic dis­course that’s needed to main­tain good gov­ern­ment in this coun­try. A Canada based solely on peace and order is not the Canada we know and love.

Con­clu­sion

This fee will pass. The stu­dent lead­er­ship in Com­merce is doe-eyed, and the dean and other fac­ulty mem­bers are act­ively cam­paign­ing for it. The Fac­ulty cares so much they even threw up their own “con­cerned stu­dents’ FAQ“, suc­cess­fully ali­en­at­ing the stu­dents within their fac­ulty who are crit­ical of the admin­is­tra­tion. It’s at the point that even Asso­ci­ate Pro­fess­ors have pub­licly expressed dis­ap­point­ment in students.

Read the thread for full interactions.

There is still hope though. Although the ref­er­en­dum will pass, the fee might not. There’s hope that gov­ern­ment could right­fully rule it as tuition. The only reason the gov­ern­ment said no at UVic though is because there was a group of stu­dents who rose up to let gov­ern­ment know their thoughts. Will this be the case at UBC?

Note: the images in this post are from the renov­a­tions already completed.