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Opinion: UCP gov't gets an F for interfering in post-secondary affairs

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Thanks to the UCP government, there has been a lot of bad news for Alberta post-secondary education over the last two weeks.

In a Journal op-ed on Jan. 28, University of Alberta president Bill Flanagan called for “enrolment growth” that will see undergraduate student numbers at the university increase to 50,000 by 2026. This may seem like a good thing, but it isn’t.

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The University of Alberta has been devastated by UCP government cuts which, compounded, total over a half-billion dollars over four years. Flanagan is hoping for increased income from student tuition to help offset the UCP cuts. At the same time, he is embracing the drastically limited idea of post-secondary education in the UCPs “Alberta 2030: Building Skills for Jobs” plan.

The “growth” is to be “targeted” to “the areas of greatest employer and student demand” in “tomorrow’s labour market.” Academic programs, especially those that prepare students more broadly to be effective participants in our increasingly complex civil society, will continue to be underfunded and to shrink, with the single-minded emphasis on programs tied to “market” needs. Current and incoming students will, in short, pay the price for Flanagan and the University of Alberta board’s failure to fight the UCP’s extreme cuts to the university’s budget and challenge their limited conception of higher education.

Just a few days after Flanagan’s op-ed appeared, the university president who did stand up to the UCP, Peter Scott, was fired from Alberta’s online university, Athabasca. Scott was very public in his opposition to the minister of Advanced Education’s directive that all Athabasca University executive and staff move to Athabasca even though it has no in-person courses and operates entirely online.

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It has been widely reported that UCP-appointed board chair, Byron Nelson, arranged for the firing of Scott and for his replacement by Alex Clark through a “confidential committee” whose recommendation he got the Athabasca board to approve in an email vote, a manoeuvre which pre-empts the discussion and debate essential to democratic governance. Worse still, as student union president Karen Fletcher has publicly confirmed, not all board members had the opportunity even to participate in the email vote.

The developments at the University of Alberta and Athabasca make a mockery of the UCP government’s most recent Alberta post-secondary education announcement. The minister of Advanced Education has declared the government will require post-secondary institutions to complete “report cards” on how well they are upholding “free speech” on Alberta’s campuses.

This news comes hard on the heels of protests at the University of Lethbridge over a student group inviting Frances Widdowson, formerly a professor at Mount Royal University, to give a talk there. Widdowson has been widely denounced for her view that the residential school system had some beneficial effects.

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In requiring its “report cards,” the UCP government wants to make it look as if it is a champion of free expression on Alberta’s campuses. I don’t remember any UCP champions of free speech siding with the University of Alberta and David Suzuki when there was a massive campaign to stop him being awarded an honorary degree several years ago.

Universities should never be agents of government, and governments must never be arbiters of what counts as acceptable expression in universities. Governments should not use funding cuts to limit and reshape academic programming, encourage their appointed board chairs to oust university presidents whom the government does not like, or be silent when their appointed board chairs interfere with student representatives’ statutory rights to participate in governance decision-making as happened at the University of Alberta last year in the case of Dave Konrad.

Konrad, a student representative on the board of governors, was chastised by Chair Kate Chisholm for asking the provost a question about tuition increases. Chisholm then refused to let the provost answer Konrad’s question. So much for free expression. Now, at Athabasca, student representatives have been excluded from participating, as a matter of governance, in decision-making of massive impact for the institution.

The grade the UCP government and their university board appointees deserve for the coercive climate they are creating on Alberta campuses is an “F.”

Carolyn Sale is an associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta.

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