Fighting for our university

What's happening at York where senior administrators decided to suspend admissions into 19 undergraduate programs is galling: Taking the advice of a consultancy firm - Nous - which they paid millions of dollars to give advice on how to streamline university processes, senior administrators bypassed governance procedures and rammed through these suspensions.

Programs such as gender studies and indigenous studies, which the university has long touted as evidence of their commitments to diversity and to indigenization and to decolonization got cut, as well as highly ranked science programs. The justification for these cuts is low enrollment numbers. But even these numbers were selectively interpreted, given that they're only counting majors enrolled.

(What about people taking these courses as electives? As minors? Double majors?)

The counterfactual claim that these cuts are justified in light of deficits falls when we consider two things:

First, that in the same period of ballooning university deficits, senior administrators have given themselves pay raises beyond cost-of-living increases - these are something along the lines of 40% increases per year (though I'll have to double-check the numbers).

Second, hiring for senior administrators hasn't stopped and have in fact increased by 40% (!). And finally, part of the deficit is caused by York forcibly pushing through with the opening of our Markham campus, even when this branch of our university has proven to be a disastrous money pit.

Another claim is that, well, these majors need to be cut because its graduates don't get a lot jobs. Aside from the fact that I dispute the argument that the value of a university degree lies in employment prospects, data from the Ontario government shows that STEM and arts & humanities grads have the same employment rates measured two and six years after graduation - in fact, it's actually engineering grads with lower employment prospects.

Anyway, in our latest episode of Academic Aunties, I speak with Academic Aunties producer Nisha Nath, Ena Dua, and Sarah Rotz about what exactly is happening: the equity implications of this move, the need to form alliances with students, and the larger implications of these cuts - how none of us are safe until all of us are safe. Warning: I've never cursed so much as I have in this episode.

Also, Ontarians, if you believe in the value of education, vote tomorrow!!!!!!!!