Last week, the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) held a series of consultation sessions to prepare for the Parti Québécois’s (PQ) summit on higher education planned for February 2013. Led by SSMU Vice-President External Robin Reid-Fraser, the three sessions covered many topics, including student representation at McGill, and out-of-province and international students’ concerns about their place in the student movement.
SSMU will be represented at the provincial summit through the Quebec Student Roundtable (Table de concertation étudiante du Québec, or TaCEQ).
According to Reid-Fraser, these consultations are to air students’ concerns, which SSMU will bring to TaCEQ, who will subsequently take these concerns to the summit.
Although much publicity around the summit centres on the topic of tuition, Reid-Fraser said SSMU’s events also aimed to engage students in other topics.
“With the student strike and everything that was happening last year … there is a lot of focus on the issue of tuition,” Reid-Fraser said. “There are so many other things about universities. There are students who weren’t super engaged with the issue of tuition, but might have other concerns.”
Students brought up the topic of student representation, and voiced frustrations with the current format of student representation in McGill’s administration and governance structures.
“[McGill] is supposed to be a public institution,” said Lily Hoffman, U3 arts, as a response to Reid-Fraser’s discussion of students sitting on committees to appoint new provosts and principals. “We’re all supposed to have access in attending, but that equals access to affecting how it’s run.”
Other students expressed frustration over what they saw as student apathy at McGill.
“In my experience at McGill, we appear to have a small portion of students invested in governance and politics—those [who] are serving as elected officials [and] officers of faculty associations and SSMU, and those who continuously show up and speak their minds at General Assemblies,” said SSMU Speaker Nida Nizam. “Other than that, it seems to be difficult to get the larger student body engaged in the process.”
Devin Dziadyk, science representative to SSMU Council, said he thinks student apathy at McGill come from students putting course grades first.
“There is such a priority on academics above all else,” he said. “[There is] a perception that … the only [thing] that’s going to mean anything in the future is what your marks are,” he said.
A number of students also expressed concern over the status of out-of-province and international students within Quebec.
“When [tuition increases] impact non-Quebec students, do we get that kind of solidarity from the Quebec associations that wanted it from us during the strike?” Reid-Fraser asked.
She also said that she perceives ambivalence towards international and out-of-province students within TaCEQ, noting the weak response she receives from the organization when she suggests that they adopt an official position to reject an out-of-province tuition increase.
Although the PQ repealed last year’s tuition increases for Quebec students, they have not yet announced a decision regarding out-of-province and international students. Some students voiced fears that the recent repeal of the tuition hike, which was proposed by the former Liberal government, may be offset by an increase in out-of-province and international fees. This was the outcome following a previous student movement in 1996 during the PQ government of Lucien Bouchard.
SSMU’s series of consultation sessions, the first of their kind at McGill, ended last Friday. The Post-Graduate Students’ Society will hold a separate series of discussions on education in early December.
