While we here in New Mexico ease into the new legislative season, students at Queen's University in Ontario are mired in a tuition fight that's been in progress for several months. With demands to freeze tuition and drop a proposal to deregulate tuition, several dozen of these students occupied an office suite in their administration building from Jan. 15 until Jan. 18.
As the occupiers put it, they entered "armed with flowers and notes for the secretaries," along with enough supplies to hold out in the office for a week.
In response to the peaceful invasion, the administration did not make any effort to meet with the students and discuss their demands. Instead, they nailed shut one of the doors to the occupied office and cut the power supply.
Though the occupation has ended, their struggle continues in Ontario and at campuses around the world. But, you know what? I still don't think it's good enough.
Tuition seems to be driven by this enormous momentum toward increase. So students' natural response is to simply try to prevent more hikes.
Back in my old lobbyist days in New York, the folks I worked with decided that, as much as a tuition freeze is better than a tuition hike, the rate of tuition still sucked pretty badly as it was.
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Public colleges in New York were initially free. That's the whole point, right? For public colleges to be accessible to everyone? As long as college costs something, it's going to be inaccessible to somebody.
Even with financial aid, most people trade off not being able to afford college at all for graduating college with thousands of dollars of debt. Or working two or three jobs to make ends meet. Or going part-time and taking eight or more years to graduate. Or all of the above.
So my co-workers and I decided we were going to look at the problem from a whole different angle. The issue wasn't just that the governor wants to raise tuition every year. It's that there is tuition at public colleges in the first place.
And that's what got the tuition rollback campaign started. Yes, we actually lobbied for a reduction in tuition. No, we weren't crazy.
Plenty of people thought we were. Activists from other organizations laughed when we told them what we were going to do.
Students, on the other hand, thought it was great. Wholly impractical, maybe. But so much more worthwhile than begging yet again for tuition not to be increased.
We started the campaign in the fall. By the time the Legislature was in session, most of the legislators wouldn't even think of raising tuition.
Though during the three years the campaign existed, we never won a tuition reduction, other good things happened. The threat of a tuition hike was dropped. More important, legislators began to question the assumption that tuition is a necessary part of public higher education.
And all those people who thought we were out of our minds were scrambling to get on board.
For those of you who are involved or plan to get involved in the budget battles ahead, don't limit your imagination. Whether you're dealing with tuition, financial aid, faculty salaries, departmental funding or whatever, the options are broader than they seem. But if you start forming demands on the basis of what you think you can get, you won't give yourself the chance to envision how much better things can be.
So don't worry about being practical.
Even if you can't win more than a tuition freeze or a pathetically small salary increase this year (and this year, even that's looking pretty pie in the sky), you might just plant some seeds that will change the whole way people look at public higher education.
by Sari Krosinsky
Daily Lobo Columnist
Send comments and delusional utopian visions to Sari Krosinsky at michal_kro@hotmail.com.
