June issue about to hit the racks...

We're all working quite hard to finish the June edition of the Ryerson Free Press. This one is a whopping 28 pages with cutting-edge articles from across Canada and within Toronto. This edition's focus is "The Media." Many stories attempt to deconstruct how media portrays issues such as women's rights, Aboriginal rights and the Palestinian movement, to name a few.

Post a comment if you'd like a copy but aren't in Toronto... we'll see what we can do. Or, email us at ryersonfreepress@gmail.com.

Finally, some good news.

An interesting article appeared in today’s issue of the Montreal Gazette. In, “Students teach province a valuable lesson”, it is reported that as many as 80,000 Quebec students could be eligible for a refund for being charged too much interest on their student loans.

The government of Quebec changed the Quebec Student Loans Programme’s grace period of repayment from seven months to zero months. So, rather than a period of time before students had to start paying back their student loans, they had to start paying once the semester finished. The class-action lawsuit was launched in the names of those students who, unaware of the changes to this policy, were charged interest for the seven months after their last semester.

Harry Dikranian launched the lawsuit after he finished his degree in law at McGill. The suit was for $30 million.

This was the ruling from the Supreme Court of Canada:

“Supreme Court Justice Michel Bastarache, who wrote the ruling in Dikranian's favour, said the loan agreement is a contract between the student and the financial institution. As such, he wrote, the government violated the rights of the students by changing the interest obligation in the contract through a legislative amendment.”

While the details vary somewhat, it is unfortunate that the class-action lawsuit launched almost exactly a year ago by Andrea Hassum and Dan Roffey wasn’t as successful. After almost a year of going through the system, it was ruled that the issue of illegal ancillary fee collection is a political matter and students are technically third parties in the transaction between the colleges and the government. Because the ancillary fee protocol is a policy rather than a regulation (which would have carried the rule of law with it), the case was thrown out essentially on a technicality.

That being said, this ruling will likely bode well for any possible future class-action lawsuit that may be launched by students in Ontario, or anywhere in Canada. Justice Bastarache’s ruling sends a strong message to provincial governments that they could be financially liable for changing rules of student financial aid programmes without including students in their decision.

40 years of student activism at U of T and beyond

In yesterday's Star,there was an article about Kenneth Stone, a man whose activism at the University of Toronto culminated in him ripping up his degree at his convocation in 1968. The feature was published around the fortieth anniversary of that event.

You can read it here: The Man Who Ripped Up His Degree

The man who resists this today:

"'George Bush's war of terror against Arabs and Muslims, into which our own prime minister bought lock, stock and barrel. We're paying for a losing counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, where our troops control the groundthey are standing on for a moment." He berates Bush, (Defence Minister) Peter MacKay and (Liberal Leader) Stéphane Dion, saying they clamour for humanitarian interventions in Sudan's Darfur region while creating humanitarian crises in Afghanistan and elsewhere.”

…was resisting similar issues at the University of Toronto forty years ago. He fought the same issues that the UofT 14, their supporters and students at many institutions today continue to fight:

"For students like Stone, the civil rights activists who came to Canada from sit-ins in Mississippi and hung around the common room, were galvanizing.

"It was a time of intellectual ferment," he says. "We were not accepting what we were being told ... You could put out a leaflet at 9 a.m. and have an anti-war rally of 600 people at noon."

Stone, who became president of the Innis College Student Society, pushed hard to win the first student representation on the college council, which at that time was made up entirely of faculty and staff. By 1969, Innis was offering courses on cinema, urban studies, the environment and Canadian culture and society, all of which evolved into U of T's first interdisciplinary programs.

"I learned more about politics from the fight for student power than I ever could learn from books and in the classroom," he says.”

Students who fight for greater representation on university committees today are standing on the shoulders of people like Stone. It's easy to forget that the little representation that students have wasn’t handed to students; it was only made possible by others who fought the same battle years before. And greater representation will only be made possible through organised students using a variety of tactics to bring a broad range of students along.

Tomorrow at 12:00, at UofT’s Simcoe Hall, there will be a march against the criminalization of dissent on campus and in support of the UofT 14. Students, like they were forty years ago, will again be fighting for greater representation and their right to dissent against the university’s administration.

As the summer presses on, and as students continue to wake up, who knows that the fall will have in store for activism on our campuses? The Canadian Federation of Students-declared Provincial Day of Action on November 5 will hopefully be a flash point for activists across the province to unite on these issues and force the gatekeepers at the Council of Ontario Universities to comply with these demands that have been made by students year after year.

Nursing school sold, Ryerson continues to commodify

This week, Ryerson University announced that it has sold the naming rights of its School of Nursing. The School is Canada’s largest in the field of nursing and is now, officially, the Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing.

Three years ago, Ryerson’s Senate (then Academic Council) and Board of Governors wrestled over how to re-write the University’s Academic Naming Policy. In the end, the policy stipulated that there had to be a vote within the academic unit to approve or deny the proposed name change. Ryerson’s article makes no reference to the percentage of faculty who voted in favour of the name change.

The school will be named after the mother of long-time Board of Governors representative Jack Cockwell, at a cost of $5 million.

Cockwell is a director of the right-wing C.D. Howe Institute, a think-tank and policy research group. It has produced research that promotes marketizing the public school system to allow families “greater choice” for elementary and secondary education through providing tax credits for private schools. It has also used personnel from the American Educational Policy Institute, an organisation that argues for higher tuition fees, to research strategies to properly fund graduate education, that include (unsurprisingly) higher tuition fees.

If market theory were to truly be applied to the post-secondary education system, it would not be the donors who decide on naming of Academic units. Nor would it be a faculty vote, as per Ryerson’s policy. It would be a decision of the 1405.7 students in the School of Nursing who pay well-over $9,931,000 a year in tuition fees. In fact, assuming it takes four years to graduate, these students’ contribution is seven times that of Cockwell’s one-time payout. Nevertheless, students graduating Fall 2008 will have the name of a South African nurse on their degree, only because her son makes a lot of money, and donated a small (likely tax deductible) portion of it.

The absurdity of market forces dictating how our public institutions run is most apparent when colleges and universities sell pieces of their public image, such as their programs’ names. Thanks to people like Cockwell, high tuition fees and ancillary fees are privatizing higher education. If, however, people like Cockwell really wanted to apply free market principles, then they would allow students to decide on the program name that will appear on their degree. They would also consent to more student representation on the Board of Governors and Senate and less criminalizing of student dissent as they pay such a large portion of the university's operating costs. Strangely, the more students are forced to pay, the more rights they loose. This goes to show that those calling for a market-based approach to higher education, like Cockwell, really don’t know Jack about the system.

Student debt causing doctor shortage?

The National Post recently ran the article “Student debt dictates who enters medical field” which paints a shockingly honest picture of the societal dangers of high-cost post-secondary education programs like medicine.

There is a significant body of research that points to the fact that rising tuition fees are a barrier to participation in post-secondary education. Especially problematic are the once-deregulated fees paid by students in professional programmes, (though this is not to downplay the fact that other students, like international students, are also treated like cash cows via enormous tuition fees[1] [2] or provincial health fees).

Generally, the justification for high tuition fees is that students will make their money back in reams throughout their working careers (false). Applying this logic to the field of medicine however, pushes graduates who are keen to pay off their massive student debts, to choose jobs and work locations based on pay alone.

Medical graduates are not choosing to be family practitioners despite the growing need. They are leaving rural areas and even the country for work rather than providing their much-needed service in smaller towns. To some, this is an outrage—young professional medics who have milked society for its tax dollars to get them through school and then abandoning it for more money in other jurisdictions. But the sad reality is that it was their society, influenced by the baby-boomer generation and out-of-touch politicians who chose funding continuous tax cuts with unsustainable tuition fee increases. Not to mention that this will further the cycle where only the sons daughters of doctors go on to become doctors and lawyers themselves, thereby narrowing the accessibility of the field medicine.

Until Canadian society comes to grips with the fact that funding tuition fee reductions is an important tool in strengthening society, medical professionals will continue to disappear out of desperation to live a life unsaddled by debt.

Other Links
http://www.policyalternatives.ca/documents/National_Office_Pubs/2006/Mending_Mediare.pdf
http://www.albertadoctors.org/bcm/ama/ama-website.nsf/AllDoc/74866DED8CF4801E87257103005494EF/$File/add_janfeb06.pdf
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2007/10/22/brian-day-s-diagnosis-the-president-of-the-canadian-medical-association-explains-how-to-fix-our-health-care-system.aspx

The university-military industrial complex

Jim Prentice must have been a busy man on May 16. The Minister of Industry made two separate announcements for a total of $6 million from Lockheed Martin to fund research at Dalhousie University and the University of New Brunswick. For many of us in Ontario, these announcements flew under the radar.

The funding was part of a deal for 17 C-130J Super Hercules aircraft between the Canadian government and Lockheed Martin.

Lockheed Martin is one of the world’s largest weapons, including nuclear weapons, manufacturers. According to Corpwatch.com, Lockheed’s former vice-president Bruce Jackson chaired the Coalition for the Liberation of Iraq, a bipartisan group formed to promote George Bush’s plan for war in Iraq.

Universities are public institutions that educate students through public funds. The increasing amount of private money driving research is an issue that academics and students are fighting across Canada. The increasing presence of the military on Canadian campuses is also being resisted by many students, staff and faculty.

It’s interesting that such a deal was hatched when students are not in school. Despite this, students and community members protested this announcement.

The RFP’s next issue will be taking a hard look at Canada’s media and how events are portrayed, whose voice is being heard and which opinions are ignored. Public money funding research at a public institution to further Canada’s contribution to war is a contentious issue. In order for the general public to fully understand how they’re implicated in funding Canada’s war machine, it is critical that the media makes these links. Only then will Canadians have a clear enough vision to form their opinions on Canada’s role in foreign conflict, or occupation.

GATHERING OF MOTHER EARTH PROTECTORS

Please come to this important event

GATHERING OF MOTHER EARTH PROTECTORS

Sovereignty Sleepover: Toronto, Queen's Park May 26th – May 2

Rally: Queen's Park May 26th, 5 p.m. – dusk.

Respect the right of First Nations to say no to economic exploitation and environmental destruction.
No jail for saying no.
Free Bob Lovelace

On May 26th Indigenous communities and our supporters will gather at Queen's Park to uphold our duty to protect the land, forest, water, and air and to promote respect for our Indigenous rights to say no to economic exploitation and environmental destruction. It is time to end the jailing and harassment of our people for protecting mother earth and traditional ways. Please come to our large rally on May 26th at the legislature. We are also inviting supporters to join us in four days of ceremony, speakers, workshops, music, and a three night sovereignty sleep-over directly on the front lawn of the legislature.

Right now Indigenous communities across Ontario are taking a stand to assert our right to protect our traditional territories and the future of our peoples. First Nations communities are peacefully protesting destructive industrial projects that the government is permitting on traditional lands without community consent.