Alberta's Budget and the Attack on Universities

[This blog was written for submission to the Lethbridge Herald. It is unlikely they will publish it. "The Perfect Storm" blog was written before this one.]

   It is time to be blunt. The provincial budget purports to be about “families and communities” and about supporting “health, education and infrastructure.” In truth, the lives of people, especially our most vulnerable, are not the object. Enhancement of infrastructure – buildings and roads, tangible testaments to the reigning government’s largesse – is the real object. Many weak cultures have lovely buildings.

   In regard to higher education, this government’s intentions are even worse. The budget declares that “we need to more closely align [sic] university research funding with the government’s economic diversification agenda.” Yet, Ms. Redford adamantly declared the opposite during the election campaign, rightly noting that “discovery is not a linear process” and the government has “a limited role to play” in directing the course of research (CAFA conference, 2011). The Minister of Higher Education charges our universities with duplication and restricted student mobility, yet the province has one of the best, well-thought-out, credit transfer programs anywhere. As for the enormous budget cuts, the Minister recently charged, in an interview with the Herald, that administrators’ salaries were too high, although, even if they may be (I do not have the figures to know), any correction to high salaries would be a mere drop in the bucket compared to the 7.3% cuts. In reality, these cuts are destructive of the whole integrity of universities. To paraphrase an old saying, the power to budget is the power to destroy, and that is the government’s purpose:  to cut university’s down to size, to put university’s in their place. And, what is this place – subservience to a controlling, micro-managing government.

  Finally, where are the public protests from this university and this community? Other universities and their members, as well as other mayors, long ago spoke out clearly and forcefully against this government’s absurd and destructive plans.

James Tagg, April 29, 2013