Much has been written about the faculty of arts proposal to enhance the connection between research and undergraduate teaching by increasing the proportion of courses taught by professors who devote their careers to advancing their disciplines, as well as increasing the availability of teaching-assistant support to professors and students.

These objectives have long been part of the strategic plans of the university and the faculty, going back to the Provost’s 2006 White Paper (Strengths and Aspirations).

Some of the reaction to these realignments has tended toward the apocalyptic. But let us keep things in perspective. Arts students will experience many benefits by reallocating resources to teaching assistantships: more financial support for graduate students, smaller conference sections, better undergraduate student access to certain courses, and more time for professors to have substantive interactions with students.

All of which students have told us, repeatedly, that they want.

Discussions about these objectives go back to 2008. In 2010-2011, the faculty held important consultations with students, including a Town Hall—in which the issue of diminishing teaching-assistant support came up frequently—and a Dean’s Working Group on Academic Program Delivery that included students and consulted widely.

The student press reported on both at the time.

At the first meeting with the Chairs of arts departments on Sept. 2, 2012, I indicated that the faculty would make progress on these strategic priorities. I outlined the importance of the objectives and outlined some initial thoughts on how to achieve them at the first Faculty Council meeting of the year on Sept. 25, 2012. I reported on it again during the Nov. 20 Faculty Council meeting, and met the VP Academic of AUS on Dec. 6 to discuss the proposal in more detail.

I suggested it would be valuable to hold an AUS Town Hall on the topic. I again updated the Faculty Council on the proposal on Jan. 15, 2013—which seems to be when people began to pay attention. Rather than a sudden announcement of something new, my discussion on Jan. 15 was an update of a lengthy process of discussion and consultation.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the faculty of arts teaches a large number of low-enrolment, even under-enrolled courses. In 2011-12, the faculty offered 443 undergraduate courses (excluding such things as reading courses) with 20 or fewer students, representing 37 per cent of all its courses that year. More surprisingly, the Faculty offered 230 courses (about 20 per cent) with 10 or fewer students.

Here’s my question: could the faculty free up resources by teaching 100 fewer small or under-enrolled courses? I asked Associate Dean Gillian Lane-Mercier to consult with each teaching unit in search of an answer.

To be sure, there are consequences to offering fewer lower-enrolment courses. One scenario could be that the faculty offers 100 fewer courses with enrolments below 10, which would result in the displacement of about 550 students to the faculty’s remaining 1,100 courses (which would raise the average size of those courses by 0.5 students).

Many have asked about the message the faculty is sending to potential students. I think the message is this: that when the faculty of arts promises prospective students that they will be taught by some of the world’s leading experts in their fields, we are able to honour that promise by having those experts in undergraduate classrooms.

Universities are not easy to run. Administrators are constantly under pressure to make ends meet. To balance the budget sheet they must pay thousands of salaries, manage millions of dollars in infrastructure, fundraise, lobby and beg to pay for it all. In an age of austerity, this is unimaginably harder. All this considered, to make the budget work, should the administration be squeezing SSMU for every last penny? I say no.

Between cutting paycheques and writing letters to bureaucrats and donors, sometimes the administrators need to pay attention to students. Most universities leave it up to students to collectively organize in student-run spaces. They allow students to collectively levy a fee, and create a union which runs services and funds clubs. In the best of times, these unions are the centre of student life—a fond memory for alumni and a pull for potential students. They run essential services like childcare for young parents seeking an education and a stable future, and student clubs for marginalized students seeking a safe, familiar, and comfortable space. Although our dear SSMU isn’t omnipresent—and thankfully so—it provides great happiness and stability to many students, and by extension makes everyone’s lives better, including those of the admin. So what’s the problem?

The administration has been charging SSMU a ridiculous, almost debilitating amount of rent for the Shatner building. Read the past budgets on the SSMU website; hundreds of thousands of dollars [Ed. note: $210,000.00 in 2011-2012] have been sucked out of SSMU’s meagre budget for rent (one of the lowest budgets of any student union) into the dwindling coffers of McGill. While it is understandable that McGill needs money, it is wrong to take it from students. At this moment, our SSMU execs and the admin are in confidential negotiations to decide on the terms of the lease.

SSMU shouldn’t be praised by students in its handling of the lease. It hasn’t been doing the best job raising awareness about the most important issue facing its existence. Whereas it should be making public demands, staging rallies, and writing to alumni, the execs sit and quietly negotiate. Most students have no idea that SSMU’s ability to function is at stake. Almost none know about the negotiations and fewer, not even me, can name what our core demands are.

The lease is the sacred, long term document which decides how much SSMU will have to pony up to exist. Other universities charge basically nothing to their student unions. So should McGill.

—Jimmy Gutman, Arts Senator

At the beginning of last term, I wrote that this year would—hopefully—be free of the sort of acrimonious student politics that characterized 2011-2012 at McGill. Recent events have put the lie to that hope. While much of the attention on campus is currently centred around The Daily’s fee referendum, a more important set of controversies goes directly to what sort of education we will have as this university moves forward.

In December, the Parti Québécois (PQ) government suddenly announced a retroactive $124 million budget cut to provincial universities. The province-wide cut will take about $19 million out of McGill’s annual budget, and is reportedly just the first of several more cuts. The announcement of these cuts prompted vague, generalized outrage from the student body, with some of those more receptive to the proposed tuition increases—which the governing PQ rolled back—launching into full ‘told-you-so’ mode. What was most interesting to watch was the reaction of the one group that can be counted on to have a strong opinion about any issue inside the Roddick Gates, regardless of importance: the so-called “campus radicals.”

To their credit, they were similarly outraged by the cuts, but oddly enough, they targeted this outrage not at the PQ government, but at the James Administrative building, staging a largely satirical protest asking Heather Munroe-Blum and the rest of the McGill administration to go on a general strike to protest the cuts. The protest, which as usual involved an attempt to enter the Board of Governors meeting underway at the time, can only be described as profoundly non-constructive. Participants quoted in media accounts admitted that the real purpose was to make some sort of high-concept ironic observation on structures of pedagogical authority—or something like that.

Even looking past the satirical conceit, the campus Left had no new ideas to offer in response to this highly unexpected cut. The usual slogans abounded; re-evaluating priorities, something about how caring about the university’s global reputation is bad, and some other oblique thing about cutting the salaries of a certain administrative bogeyman—or in this case, woman. Formal student and campus organizations thankfully responded with more coherent expressions of dismay.

Just as students returning from winter break were coming to terms with this budget ‘adjustment’—if they had spent even a moment during break thinking about anything related to the university aside from exams and marks—the administration announced another set of cuts: this time to 100 courses, all small selections in the Faculty of Arts. Here the outrage was similarly swift, sharp, and seemingly justified. The Dean of Arts claims that these cuts are completely unrelated to the reduction in the annual budget from the province, which is likely true only because the alternative involves the administration telling a lie that would make it look far worse, from a PR perspective, than the truth.

These cuts, which would reduce the number of upper-level courses available to students, are undeniably troubling. Again, they provoked a predictably nonconstructive response from the campus left. Arts Senator Jimmy Gutman, for example, alleged that these cuts were to “punish” course lecturers for forming a union. This accusation was not actually substantiated by anything, but was accompanied by the claim that the cuts were a step down the road to the elimination of any personalized education at the university.

As we move forward, we’ll see whether or not there is anything that can be done to avert the negative effects of either set of cuts. The arts cuts, if truly unrelated to the provincial budget reduction, are a stunning example of administrative incompetence from both a quality of education and public relations perspective. The provincial budget cut, however, speaks to many things; the shortsightedness of most of the tuition protesters, the duplicity of the PQ, and a broken clock moment for those in the student movement who shrank back from the support of Marois and decided to continue fantasizing about the total smashing of the state. Their rigid ideological consistency, for once, resulted in nothing more substantial than the very smug, very satisfying ability to say, “told you so.” Unfortunately, it seems that this is the most substantive thing anyone has contributed to this debate.

In an Academy Award season mostly bereft of controversy, Zero Dark Thirty has filled the void with its brutal and frank depiction of torture. The film, a dramatization of the American military operation that killed Osama Bin Laden, was written based on conversations with people who had first hand knowledge of the events in question. Condemnation of the movie has come from many different angles, the vast majority of which has coalesced into variations on the issue of torture.

The first point of criticism centres on the contention that the movie’s torture scenes are not grounded in actual events, and give viewers the misleading impression that torture was partially responsible for finding Bin Laden. While this is a vital point of historical debate, there simply isn’t enough proof to support any one position. A few U.S. Senators, led by John McCain, have claimed to have seen confirmation that torture played no role in catching Bin Laden. Others, like former CIA director Michael Hayden, have said that torture was involved. Much of the evidence that would illuminate the matter is classified information, and thus, the question remains unanswerable at this time.

A more interesting criticism, which is a permutation of the first, is that the use of these torture scenes endorses torture. Viewers see a key detainee tortured, leading to his supplying testimony that eventually led to the location of Bin Laden. It was thought that upon being shown a utilitarian value to torture, the public will begin to perceive it as an important and legitimate tool to be used by the defence community. While this is possible, I think that this criticism ultimately misses a far more important point.

Criticism of torture can reside on two different levels: moral and utilitarian. Although both play into this discussion, the moral issue is typically considered much more important. If torture is inherently wrong, which most would concede, any potential utility it may have is a moot point. Any other conclusion would go grossly against the basic principles of justice. Comparably, denying people the right to ‘habeus corpus,’ or being able to search a suspect’s property without a warrant may have utilitarian value if the principal desired result is to obtain a conviction. However, because these actions would be moral wrongs, law enforcement officials are not allowed to engage in this behaviour. Similarly, even if torture can garner useful information, itself a contentious proposition, the gross moral wrong it creates means that it should not be practiced.

Back to the movie: if the above is true, the movie cannot be said to endorse torture. The viewers see despicable acts being carried out against the detainee, and the moral wrong is clear in this unjustifiable violence. The fact that the detainee eventually gives the torturers information is then seen as an ends reached through decidedly improper means.

Besides this philosophical interpretation, the movie itself addresses much of the criticism lodged against it. Yes, the detainee does share information, but he does so outside a setting of torture, baited by the promise of good treatment and a decent meal. Also, after the successful raid against Bin Laden’s compound, the main character, a CIA officer, breaks down into tears—seemingly overwhelmed by the pointlessness in expending so much time and effort into achieving this goal.

I do not see the movie as endorsing torture, but rather, presenting an imperfect history of regrettable and despicable actions carried out in the name of finding justice for victims of 9/11. Surely, these dark moments of American history should not be glossed over. The movie provides an excellent forum for debate, and a way to re-examine preconceived notions of the ongoing war on terror.