McGill is radical too!

ENOR

A student group protesting tuition hikes and privatization at McGill is threatening unsavoury tactics—like taking over the principal’s office—unless their university becomes more affordable.

“We’re not going to shut them down today, but we could if we wanted to!” bellowed Lee Campbell into a megaphone at a rally at McGill on Monday. Campbell, cofounder of the GrassRoots Association for Student Power (GRASP), was referring to a Board of Governors meeting taking place inside the university. While roughly 150 students protested tuition hikes outside, around 70 students peacefully joined the meeting. Campbell accuses McGill of restricting education to wealthy students and gearing research departments toward “bagging contracts” with multinational corporations.

Because of a provincial cap on tuition, Quebec-resident McGill students pay only $1,700 a year. Students from other provinces pay an average of $2,300. But international students pay $8,268.30 to $19,200. That’s because McGill doubled international tuition two years ago, following the university’s successful request for deregulation of international student fees.

“It’s much more affordable than the States,” says McGill PR rep Anne-Marie Bourdouxhe. She says McGill is simply trying to recoup some of the 25 per cent of the provincial funding they lost to cuts in the ’90s. “We’re missing $50-million a year in revenue,” adds Bourdouxhe. “We have to do more with less.
“It’s true the students used to pay dirt and they’re paying more now. Now it is still a deal, but not as good as it was in the early ’90s.” :

—Craig Segal