University Budget Woes Mean Less Protest over Ideas, More Strikes over Funding: The View from UC Berkeley and UdeMontréal

Part time faculty at the Université de Montréal are in heated bargaining for a new contract, and have struck twice for half days in the last week. My Portuguese prof Alice Taveres Mascarhenas explained to us what she thinks is at stake, and I must say I find it not unreasonable.

In part to save money, the UdM relies heavily on part-timers, paying them considerably less than regular staffers. According to the contract which expired last summer, they're paid $166 an hour, which works out to about $6,500 for a session-long, three credit course: if they teach two courses both fall and winter sessions, they'll get something in the neighborhood of $26,000. The scale for profs, however, begins at somewhere near $60,000 with many more benefits and, frequently, a lighter teaching load.

It was with this in the background that I stumbled upon a clip from a documentary on one of the formative events of my youth: the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley. One of the striking things about the video is the way that participants recall just how much the debate was about ideas. Problems continue at Berkeley, but now they seem to be even more money-related than the ones at the UdM. That freedom of expression and inquiry has taken a back seat to budget worries is a sad feature of societies who don't recognize that taxes are what we pay for civilized society.