Cuts and fees reveal a failing institution

The University of Alberta is facing a nightmare scenario, stuck between keeping up appearances and dealing with an increasingly horrible funding situation. There’s less money to go around, but the administration tries to play it down like there’s nothing the matter. And to make matters worse, the board is considering opening up regulations on mandatory non-instructional fees and removing the need for student referendums to approve increases beyond the consumer price index.

Mandatory non-instructional fees are not regulated by the province. This means that unlike tuition, which is capped at CPI, the board of governors can decide to implement whatever new MNIFs of whatever value they desire. The $290 CoSSS fee students are already paying is an MNIF, and all it required to be implemented was the approval of the BoG. However, for the BoG to increase MNIFs beyond CPI, they currently need to go to student referendum for approval — a rule they’re trying to eliminate. The SU is rightly standing up and making this an issue, saying that if the provincial government won’t regulate MNIFs, at least the BoG can concede that any such fees should be put to student referendum before being implemented. But the BoG isn’t accepting this without a fight. They want the power to introduce or increase any fees without student referendum ­— confirming that things have gone from bad to worse here.

Meanwhile, President Indira Samarasekera told the Edmonton Journal the cuts being implemented across the institution weren’t that bad — calling them “modest” — and won’t have a negative impact on the student experience. She said the six per cent increases to grant funding a few years ago, along with the major increases to tuition at the time, set the university up and allowed them to install new infrastructure, like campus Wi-Fi and adding new buildings.

To a point, she’s right. Buildings such as NREF, ETLC, CCIS and the ECHA are great new additions to campus. And UWS wi-fi is a major improvement over the horrible system that came before it. At the same time, those six per cent increases were also meant to offset spiraling wage costs and other issues as the overheated Alberta economy bit into the university budget. And now the budget stagnates as everyone is expected to do more with less.

The problem is the disconnect between what the president is saying and what’s happening on the ground level. As the president calls the cuts “modest,” they ravage various departments and faculties. Arts cut 10 faculty positions this year so far, and could continue cutting if the budget situation gets worse. The Faculty of Science eliminated 55 positions over the last year and a half. Computing Sciences had to cut five staff positions that supported teaching labs and have not been able to upgrade some labs in almost 10 years.

Most worrying when it comes metrics is the student-to-professor ratio, which heading in the wrong direction. After years of hiring professors and bringing down the ratio, it’s slowly creeping up again, hitting the other side of 20 students per professor.

All the while, the university continues to pretend like the problems aren’t that bad, looking for band-aid fixes to the problem. Tuition continues to go up each year, and though it’s a relatively small amount each time, add to that the CoSSS fee, and students are paying significantly more now than they were in years previous, and getting less for it. It’s the incremental changes to fees, whether new additions or increases, that really give the charade away.

Samarasekera claims that cuts won’t affect the student experience, but that the BoG is continually looking for ways to increase fees proves otherwise. Here at the U of A, we already pay one of the highest rates of non-tuition fees in the country. The SU deserves credit for making fees an issue, because the administration clearly isn’t looking out for students’ interests — not with the cuts they’re making and the fees they’ve implemented.

Everyone wants to see the University of Alberta grow and become an even better place of learning. But high-level administration, including President Samarasekera, have their heads too far in the sky to deal with the situation. They’re more concerned about international rankings or government relations to worry about little things like the student experience or staff happiness. So they’ll increase fees, hoping no one takes notice as they nickel and dime us to death one fee at a time.

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