By Ganesh Tailor
A rot is spreading through Canadian universities. What should be our bastions of education and critical inquiry are rapidly transforming into corporate entities fixated on real estate development, financialization and ruthless exploitation of students, faculty and workers. Decades of government underfunding, skyrocketing tuition, and capital’s insatiable drive to open new markets deeply betrays the university’s mission and is a direct assault on the future of young people.
Campaigns of austerity by successive federal and provincial governments have left universities starving for the public funds they were meant to operate on. Instead of receiving those funds, year by year they march into the arms of corporations and private developers. Increasingly bloated administrations, interested not in academic excellence but instead on revenue generation, have led to privatization of on-campus food and custodial services. The academic freedom afforded to tenured and tenure-track faculty is being eroded through the hiring of low-wage and precarious contract faculty.
Together, these shifts dismantle the role of the university as a progressive institution and morph it into just another playground for capital to stretch its arms.
The University of Manitoba’s “UniverCity”
On the site of a former golf course – part of the University of Manitoba’s vast tracts of valuable urban land, paid for by the public and meant for new libraries, research facilities or affordable student dormitories – the private development entity UM Properties has partnered with private developers on a multi-billion-dollar plan to construct a so-called “UniverCity.”
Southwood Circle, the official name of this construction, is slated to include 11,000 residential units and 300,000 square feet of retail space, where they envision condos and rental housing, grocery stores, pharmacies, offices, and banks. Sold to the public as a “vibrant, urban mixed-use community,” this will not be a community for students struggling with debt or for the precariously employed university staff. Rather, Southwood Circle is designed to attract private investment and generate revenue by land leasing to developers for 99-year terms.
The explicit mission of this massive development is to create an endowment fund from lease revenue, implied to support academic goals. Essentially, the university admits that instead of demanding the public funding it needs to operate as a university, it will shift priorities and operate as a major private landlord, profiting from the land earmarked to serve the public good.
The project wraps itself in progressive language and key terms – sustainability, walkability, community wellness – and even includes land to move the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.
While these offer the veneer of progressivity, scratching the surface reveals the fundamental nature of the project: the privatization of public land for profit. We are witnessing the development of a city within a city, but one where the primary logic is not of public service, but that of the market.
A generation in chains
With universities chasing after new revenue streams, the burden falls increasingly on students and the public. Instead of tuition reductions, average undergraduate tuition fees in Canada have steadily climbed. We need not comment on the vicious cycle of private student loans that justify higher tuition that justify loans – this, I hope, is obvious.
The Canada Student Grant, however, is presented as an altruistic helping hand for low- and middle-income families. Though, given the increasing corporatization of the university, it can instead be identified as a wealth transfer mechanism from public hands into the university corporate endowments. The program manufactures the illusion of affordability while, like private loans, enabling a relentless escalation of tuition costs.
It may be argued that this student grant is effectively the public funding we have been asking for. The university is raising funds through the public, after all! However, to accept this premise is to concede that the university is a marketplace and the student is a consumer purchasing a commodity, rather than education as a universal public good with tuition abolished.
The university treated as a marketplace justifies a massive administration of managers, not educators. It justifies cutting “unprofitable” arts programs. It justifies the university behaving as a corporation and a landlord. The university ceases to be a public service; it turns into a business competing for tuition money, now conveniently supplied, at least in part, by the state.
While the universities reap this steady flow of guaranteed revenue, they leave the student to be a precarious renter and worker, unable to sufficiently focus on their education. The university builds upscale housing for the open market while students live in substandard, overpriced and overcrowded rental housing in surrounding neighborhoods.
Those students who choose to stay in academia quickly find that the stable, well-compensated and unionized teaching positions of the past have been systematically replaced by a “gig academy” – contract lecturers and sessional instructors precariously employed and usually too overburdened by courses to conduct their own research.
The corporate university sees tenured faculty, especially those outside of the STEM fields, as an unnecessary threat to profits. So, while tuition fees are hiked, the quantity and quality of teaching collapses.
Fighting the pan-Canadian trend
The University of Manitoba is not an isolated case. It is simply following the path carved out by other major universities in Canada like the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. Each of these “UniverCities” are the physical manifestation of a capitalist rot infecting our post-secondary education system.
Students, young people, workers and community members must not take this assault on education as an inevitability. We need to recognize this assault and challenge it. We must contest the corporate control of our universities and demand its land and resources be used to build affordable housing and academic facilities, not luxury condos and banks. We must fight for massive reinvestment of public funds into post-secondary institutions and a full elimination of tuition fees.
We need to build a united front, link our struggles, and expose the interconnectedness of rising tuition, precarious work and real estate speculation of university administrations. Only then can we first reverse the degradation of post-secondary education by moribund capitalism and then pave the path towards a liberated, excellent and universally accessible education system.
Rebel Youth
[Photo: rendering of Southwood Circle development]
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