January 26, 2010 Opinions

Editorial

Show us the money

by Terrine Friday

If I go to Concordia University Health Services for a Pap test, I now know that a four-month wait for results is not unusual by their standards. Though McGill University and Université de Montréal get their results processed within reasonable time frames, it takes Concordia at least twice that amount of time to make sure I’m healthy.

I also know that the university needs to put down the knife; we’re addicted to revamping our image. Nothing shows this better than the unnecessary plan to fork over a cool $11.6 million in order to ensure the GM building’s façade looks just like its EV and MB twins.

If I become a teaching assistant at Concordia under the proposed collective agreement between the university and the Teaching and Research Assistants at Concordia, I now know that I would take a pay cut from what teaching and research assistants are paid elsewhere, and I could be paid less than a Starbucks supervisor.

Research-based institutions like the University of Toronto and Queen’s University offer salaries closer to $40 per hour for graduate work. Carleton University, a comprehensive university that’s comparable to Concordia, pays its teaching assistants at the undergraduate and master’s level an hourly rate of $20.38 and $36.36, respectively. Students at Carleton are also guaranteed to work 10 hours per week and sick leave is granted at the rate of one hour for every 10 hours worked.

In comparison, the proposed agreement that TRAC—in conjunction with the Public Service Alliance of Canada—considered signing with the university is shameful. Not only does it fail to define what happens in the event of a union strike, but it offers its PhD-level students a measly $12.30 to $22.94 per hour. Master’s-level and undergraduate students’ proposed wages are $1 to $5 less, and $2 to $9 less per hour, respectively (also, a teaching assistant’s contract can be terminated at any time with one week’s pay).

Health and education seem to continually fall into the tragic commons and our university will not pick up the slack. Concordia’s Health Services cannot really be blamed for the budget they were given to work with. Millions are instead allotted to scrape off and patch up the exteriors of our buildings and to beef up middle-to-upper university administration.

In a recent Maclean’s article, it’s revealed—through data compiled by Statistics Canada—that, as tuition rates across the country continue to rise, the most apparent causal result is the marked increase in administrative personnel. As the research points out, just over half of instruction budgets goes towards professor salaries, down from almost two-thirds in 1988.
“These ‘savings,’” the article states, “are used to fund increased cost levels for non-academic staff, travel, benefits and professional fees.”

Well, let’s break down Concordia’s bureaucracy a little bit for clarity’s sake. At our university, there are approximately 40,000 students, which includes full-time and part-time undergraduate and graduate students. There are at least 85 senior-level administrators (including the president, her two chief officers, and her six vice-presidents and their upper-level executives). Just to give an idea of the number of employees each office has, the office of Concordia’s advancement and alumni relations vice-president has approximately 45 employees—and that’s one vice-president out of six, excluding the chief communications officer and chief financial officer. And, as The Link reported Jan. 12, Concordia spends more than any Quebec university on perks for senior-level administrators.

Concordia’s top-heavy structure is doing nothing but inflating its ego and increasing its chance of winning a chest-thumping contest. We know it’s inevitable for tuition rates to rise reasonably. However, one begs to question for whom the increases benefit. It’s quite obvious they won’t go towards Concordia’s lecturers, nor its teachers, nor a lab with more cost-efficient testing for Health Services.

In case we’ve forgotten, this is a university. Let’s cut the fat and put students back where they belong: at the top of our priority list.

—Terrine Friday,
Editor-in-Chief