Saturday 29 September 2012

Sophia, my love: renaming philosophy?

In an article published in March of this year, Colin McGinn argues that we should change the name of (academic) philosophy. Names are important things, and they provide a wealth of material for first impressions. A rose by any other name would indeed smell as sweet, but you may very well never get near enough to smell it if I said it was called a "splurk." It seems indeed that critically reflecting upon the name of our practice is a wise thing to do, although I never really feel that critical reflection needs further motivation; it's good in itself.

Anyway, let's have a brief run-down of what McGinn has to say on the matter. He opens the piece by drumming up a scenario that is sickeningly familiar to anyone who works in/around philosophy, or (heaven forbid) calls themselves a philosopher. Any association with the word seems to bring up, to those unaffiliated with the field, images of old sages, replete with wisdom to share on a wealth of topics spanning the known and unknown universes. This association with self-help peddlers McGinn sees as a problem, because it not only demeans the discipline, but also leads to a lot of unnecessary confusion.

He then goes on to explore the etymological heritage of the word "philosophy," which, as I've told a thousand undergrads if I've told one, comes from the Greek words "philos" and "sophia", meaning "love" and "wisdom," respectively. So philosophers, by definition, are supposed to be lovers of knowledge. However, there are plenty of lovers of knowledge that don't identify as philosophers. As a matter of fact, we need only look at our brethren in other academic fields to find some. (Though of course we must not look at their degrees, which suggest that they are indeed doctors of philosophy even if they would be ashamed to be so called. This situation makes me think of a child reticent to be associated with her parents, but whose surname just sticks to her like her shadow and refuses to cooperate and leave already.)

"Philosophy" does indeed pick out more than just the people we find working in philosophy departments, or seeking desperately and vainly to do so. However, an additional problem is that it also doesn't describe all of the people one finds in those very departments. There are some people who work in philosophy that are in fact quite fatuous and unbearable for the very reason that they just don't really care about philosophy. They can play the game, they've worked their way in through the system, but they're not very committed to their work or their ideas, and they really see philosophy as a job rather than a vocation.

Coming back to an idea I touched on briefly in my allusion to the child who just can't bear her parents, McGinn mentions that in fact much of what was once considered philosophy has since matured, left home, and become a respectable discipline of its own. Look no further than "natural philosophy," better known to contemporary audiences as good, old-fashioned, home-cooked science. All those disciplines have taken on new names, and ones that seem to pertain to their subject matter; philosophy ought to stop being such a square, take off those no-longer-fasionable togs (or togas) and keep up with the young upstart crowd.

So calling ourselves "lovers of knowledge" gets us confused for motivational speakers spouting pseudo-profound vagaries, it describes some people outside of philosophy very well in addition to describing some people in philosophy very badly, and it really doesn't say anything substantive about the subject matter of the discipline. But if we don't call ourselves philosophers, what should we call ourselves? McGinn suggests adopting the term "ontics" to describe our practice, which gives us nice words like "onticist" to describe ourselves and "ontical" as the adjectival form.

The word "ontic" by the way also comes from the Greek word meaning "being." That link to being also prompts McGinn to consider options such as "beology," which sounds positively revolting. One need not even mention the fact that such a ludicrous name only kindles the spark into flame—if people suspected we were shamans and wizards before, a name like "beology" would remove all doubt. What self-respecting discipline draws on English words to name itself anyway?

McGinn also says that ontics has a faint echo of physics about it, which he takes to be a virtue. McGinn, you see, believes that philosophy is a scientific, not a humanistic, endeavour. What is it to be a science? The author uses the following definition: "a systematically organized body of knowledge on any subject." (This definition, by the way, is drawn from The Dictionary, which I find somewhat quaint. I only have Webster's dictionary, but not THE dictionary. Clearly my library is lacking. But I digress, parenthetically.) An organized body of knowledge seems a compelling definition of science, and in fact rings nicely with the German word for an analogous idea: "Wissenschaft." "Wissen" is the verb "to know" and "–schaft" is a suffix that qualifies the root as a collection or totality.

However, is science the only systematically organized body of knowledge? The Germans don't think so, which is why they use the term "Naturwissenschaft" to refer to natural science and "Geisteswissenschaft" to refer to humanistic science. (Note that the word "Geist" does not mean human, but lest the humanities be incriminated on the basis of too short a discussion, I won't mention that it often gets translated as "spirit.")

So given that we shorten "natural science" to "science" and "human(istic) science" to "humanities," where should philosophy go? Is it a science of the natural world, as McGinn suggests? It seems to me that it is indeed a science of the world, but of the natural world just as much as of the human world. Philosophy, so far as I conceive of it, doesn't investigate the world in the way that either physics or history does: it doesn't seem to discover what things are in the world, it seeks to discover what it is for a thing to be in the world. Metaphysics investigates what it is to be; epistemology investigates what it is to know; phenomenology does both of those things; ethics and aesthetics investigate what it is to be valuable (in different ways). Aesthetics doesn't seek to discover what the beautiful things are, but what beauty is.

One might pitch this distinction as investigations of the world as opposed to investigations of worldhood. Of course, that kind of language (i.e.: "worldhood") instantly suggests bringing Heidegger into the debate. He distinguishes between ontic investigations, like the sciences and humanities, and ontological investigations, like philosophy. This seems to speak pretty strongly against McGinn's suggestion. Philosophy investigates the world, yes, and aims at a systematically organized body of knowledge. But it is an investigation into the fundamental structures underlying what it is to be a world, rather than an investigation into the fundamental structures that unify/govern particular objects or classes of objects in that world. (I argued last week that the natural sciences couldn't overtake all questions; this post on naming philosophy hopefully adds more detail to what I said there.)

"Ontics" was a good suggestion, and I think put us on the right track. However, I find it misleading. A better name would be "ontology," but that's already a term for a subset of philosophy, and resistance to adopting it to characterize the whole discipline would be pretty strong. (Not to say, of course, that resistance means we wouldn't be on the right track in doing so.) "Ontology" is very loaded, even if I believe that ultimately it would be a more appropriate term.

Let's go back and look over the reasons for changing philosophy's name. McGinn wants to align us more closely with the sciences, which I've tried to argue is not an accurate portrayal of what we do. He points out that we end up getting confused for sooth sayers, and thereby "demean the discipline." I actually don't think that this is such a problem, or at least not in the way that McGinn does. Academic philosophy is far too often steeped in jargon, to a fault as I've tried to argue elsewhere. Perhaps the problem with being compared to the age's sages is not that philosophy cannot offer pearls of wisdom about how to live a better life (and what that even is), but that philosophers these days have moved so far away from doing that that they've forgotten philosophy could have that power. (Check out Philopolis, an event that aims to right that wrong and bring that aspect of philosophy back to the fore.) Leaving that void in society open, philosophers have allowed a bunch of yahoos to make a tidy profit publishing books and reading palms to satisfy the needs of the masses. Philosophers often bemoan the funding situation, so why aren't we publishing those books? Why aren't we reading those palms?

The problem seems to me not that philosophers are thought to have insightful views to share on life, but that they've abandoned that line of work and are now being unfavourably lumped in with the (often, but not always) terrible substitute that has come in to fill the void.

Where does that leave us in the name game? I'd say we should stick with the name we've got, proudly calling ourselves philosophers. The fear of being mistaken for public intellectuals started off this whole discussion, and I don't think it's a problem, or rather I believe it's a problem with our research rather than our name. The appeal of being drawn closer to the sciences is losing its case in the court of appeals. The problem of philosophers who don't love knowledge is one to fix through tenure and promotion decisions, not The Dictionary. And what of the problem of people outside of philosophy loving knowledge as well? What a wonderful problem to have. If only we had more of it.

Saturday 22 September 2012

The Cult of the Scientific

First off, I'd like to shamelessly plug some of my ongoing efforts. The schedule for Philopolis Guelph (October 12–13) has just been released online; there are full descriptions for all the activities to be found there as well. Also, I'll be giving a talk on the Carrés Rouges movement this Tuesday (September 25), 7:00 PM at the Guelph Public Library. For all those of you who commented on that post, thanks very much. Your responses have been very helpful in honing what I'll say at the talk, even if I haven't had a chance to respond to you in writing yet.

Anyway, let's turn the page now and get on task for this week's post. A few weeks ago, a friend of mine sent me an article chronicling a debate between a scientist and a philosopher about which discipline answers "the big questions of life." This article irritated me sufficiently to warrant a blog post, for a few reasons. The first is a cultural prevalence to believe prima facie ("on the face of it," or, at first glance) that the answer to that question is trivial, and that of course science answers all such questions. This belief often goes along with a willingness to misinterpret scientific data, and when I say "misinterpret," what I specifically mean is the willingness to conclude from an experiment far more than what the data warrants. The second irritating point (and philosophers everywhere should appreciate what's coming) is that even the question is badly posed. Why is it assumed that one of the two must answer all the big questions? The formulation itself presupposes that the big questions are all of one type (or maybe that all questions are of one type) and on that basis looks to see which methodology will address such a type of question. In good philosophical style, my first move in answering the question is to undermine the question itself. I don't believe there is only one type of question; I disagree that all the big questions fall into one type; and therefore I disagree that we need to settle the issue of which discipline answers all of the big ones.

However, let's now have a closer look at what's going on in the discussion itself. Julian Baggini's opening comment about science envy from philosophers is spot on: anyone who's written a SSHRC application trying to get funding for a PhD in philosophy knows the pressure is on not only to justify one's project within the discipline, but that the value of philosophy as a whole often has to be justified right along with it. If only I could say my project were science, then people would know it's legit and I could just get the money to go off and do it. Science has indeed worked miracles. (And humanities scholars often feel that a lot more money goes to our scientific brethren than it does to us, and with more ease. This situation probably is true, and is beautifully caricatured in Futurama when Prof. Farnsworth talks about running an upcoming research project on a machine powered by "dump trucks full of flaming grant money.") But philosophers are quick to draw on history to demonstrate that individual sciences have grown out of philosophical inquiries. And so, as the young upstarts that they are, we sharply bring them back to order. After all, even scientists get awarded PhDs: philosophical doctorates. Respect your elders. Remember where you came from. Never forget who you are. All such things, if for no other reason than to make philosophers feel better and take the pressure off us for a wee while as we try to get a little research done.

Anyway, Baggini (the philosopher) asks Krauss (his physicist interlocutor) if the imperialist ambitions of science know no bounds. In other words, should we expect science to take over all of the questions that philosophy has treated, or only some? Baggini cites the issue of morality, to which Krauss replies that science provides the basis for moral decisions. Such decisions are based on reason, and reason is gleaned from empirical evidence. "Without some knowledge of the consequences of actions, which must be based on empirical evidence, then I think "reason" alone is impotent. If I don't know what my actions will produce, then I cannot make a sensible decision about whether they are moral or not. Ultimately, I think our understanding of neurobiology and evolutionary biology and psychology will reduce our understanding of morality to some well-defined biological constructs." The response from Krauss here suggests to me that he hasn't spent an awful lot of time thinking about this situation. (Note here that I'm adopting a utilitarian/consequentialist perspective on ethics, which is not my position at all, but which is rather the position that Krauss himself suggests by immediately looking at consequences, and I'll therefore follow him into his own territory.) One might easily divide moral questions into two parts: first, what would the desirable outcome be; second, how might I achieve that outcome? Clearly, science will play a central role, maybe even the only role, in addressing the second part of that question. Science can guide us well in trying to accomplish a great many things. However, what about the first part of the question: can science ever tell us what ought to be the case? This picks up an old problem from the history of philosophy, that of trying to derive an "ought" from an "is," or otherwise put, trying to derive a normative claim from one or more factual claims. To my knowledge, no solution has yet been advanced for this problem, at least not one that will make you feel anything but tricked by a dirty philosopher and in need of a shower.

Krauss's response might suggest that we could solve it, though. His position is that science will reduce our understanding of morality to well-defined biological constructs. However, this doesn't seem promising to me. Suppose that we accomplish what Krauss suggests will ultimately happen; suppose that we can give an evolutionary story about how our feelings about morality developed. Would such a story de facto tell us right from wrong? No, it would tell us how our feelings about morality have evolved. However, we recognise all the time that sometimes our moral intuitions are wrong. There is an appreciable gap between what people sometimes believe to be right, and what actually is right. An account of the type that Krauss foresees tells us about people's beliefs, and nothing about the moral truths that such beliefs might track more or less well.

Of course, all that we need here is a further stipulation. We need a scientific theory not about how we form all of our moral beliefs, but rather only about the ones that are actually correct. Notice here that the distinction between correct and incorrect moral beliefs will rely on a standard of judgment already presupposed in answering the question: we need to know what the moral truths are before we can know which beliefs are correct, and therefore before we can put together a science explaining how such beliefs come about. And what kind of scientific experiment could we run to test whether killing is wrong? What would that experiment look like? Science only seems to tell us what is (or was, or would be) the case, but never what ought to be the case. There is no empirical experiment that can tell us what ought to be the case, and therefore the sciences just won't have an answer for us there.

Going back to Krauss's quote more closely, he says: "Without some knowledge of the consequences of actions, which must be based on empirical evidence, then I think "reason" alone is impotent. If I don't know what my actions will produce, then I cannot make a sensible decision about whether they are moral or not." Notice that he's actually weaseling his way out of the question here. Krauss was asked whether science would overtake questions of morality. What he has answered here, however, is whether science plays any role in moral decisions. As he says, "'reason' alone is impotent." However, the claim being made by consequentialist philosophers is not that reason alone will solve moral quandaries. They agree that science has a role to play here. What they dispute is that science has the only role to play, and Krauss dodges that question here. It is only with auxiliary philosophical hypotheses that science has anything to say about morality.

In fact, Krauss's own claim that science will reduce morality to a biological construct is not even an empirical claim. What he's saying can be recast as the following conditional: "If science can give an evolutionary story for our sense of right and wrong, then there isn't really something meaningfully 'right' or 'wrong.'" How could that possibly be an empirical statement (you know, the kind formulated, tested, and supported or rejected by empirical science)? If we succeed in giving that evolutionary story about our sense of right and wrong, how could we ever verify whether the consequent of that claim checks out? What object could we measure that would tell us that nothing is meaningfully right or wrong? There is no such thing. Trivially so.

As a matter of fact, that's a problem not only for morality. It's a problem for empirical science as well, because science itself rests on a set of philosophical assumptions. A well-known issue there is the problem of induction, which is the process of examining a finite amount of evidence in order to put together universal laws that apply more widely than one's evidence. It's a process that draws on knowledge of observed facts to pass judgment about unobserved facts. For instance, on the basis of the fact that the sun has risen every day of my life, I conclude that the sun will rise for all the days of my life still to come. However, how could science justify it? What test could we do that would conclusively tell us that using this kind of reasoning is okay? A very reasonable response is to say that the proof is in the pudding: after all, we've used it so many times already and it has worked, so using it in the future should be fine, too. Think about what just happened there: on the basis of the fact that past (observed) instances of induction have worked, the scientist claims that future applications of it are justified. But that was exactly the rule that we had set out for science to prove! (In fact, all past scientific theories have been false, so it's reasonable to believe that present ones are false, and that future ones will all be so as well.)

Do I want to decimate science here? Absolutely not. What I do want is to offer a harsh critique of the kind of rampant scientism that one finds in our society, the belief that science will answer any and all questions. Clearly, science is not up to that task, as I think I've just demonstrated (or at least I've pushed the burden of the argument into their camp: without a response, things look bleak at this point for science). What I want to demonstrate is the truth of the following claim: if science has all the answers, then science has no good answers because it can't justify itself scientifically. I don't see this as a problem for science. I see it as a problem for scientism. Philosophy and science work in tandem, not just on moral issues where philosophical theorisation about right and wrong are supplemented by scientific theorisation about how to achieve those ends, but also on the issues that seem to be clearly in the wheelhouse of science because science itself rests on a set of philosophical presuppositions. It would be foolish to say that science answers no questions; and that's exactly where we're headed if we say that science answers all of them.

Sunday 16 September 2012

Carrés Rouges

I've written about the sad contemporary state of academia, both about who's got it good in academia these days and about the inaccessibility of research to the general public, but I haven't said much (at length, in this blog) about the situation in Quebec that's been going on for the last few months. I volunteered some time ago to give a talk on the situation at the Philosophy Goes Public lecture series at the Guelph Public Library, and so finally my arm has been twisted and I've been forced to sit down and sort out my ideas, as well as my reasons for holding those ideas. The talk will be in about ten days, and hopefully this entry will serve not only as a way to fill people in who won't be there but would like to be, but also as a way for me to get some feedback on the structure (and content) of the talk beforehand. I'm therefore looking forward, probably more than was the case with any previous blog post, to the commentary this receives. Without any further ado:

Carrés Rouges: Quebec's tuition hikes and student protests

1. History

I'll start with a quick timeline of events I consider to be salient, for which I'm heavily indebted to Cayley Sorochan. From 1963–2012, Quebec has more often than not had a tuition freeze in place for university education. These were not gifts from the government, of course, but goals achieved through the hard work of past students who demonstrated and protested when previous hikes were proposed/declared. In 2010, the Quebec Liberal Government, led by Jean Charest, proposed an increase of 75%, to take place between 2012 and 2017. This proposal, calling for students to pay their "fair share," was met with student resistance from the very beginning, and was seen to undo the hard work of many previous generations of students. In effect, it would bring Quebec tuition up to the levels of other provinces, where there is not the same history of students keeping tuition down. Requests by student groups to meet with the Charest government on this issue were denied.

After two years of getting nowhere, CLASSE, an umbrella organisation with representative democratic structure for 342 000 students, voted for a general student strike. Their counter-proposal to the Quebec government was a 0.7% tax on banks, which would effectively raise enough money not only to cover the government's perceived shortfall, but also to cover tuition fees entirely throughout the entire province. On March 22, 200 000 students demonstrated in an attempt to get the attention of the government, who still refused to meet regarding this issue.

Institutions and students against the strike filed an injunction against the protestors, prompting the institutions to hire additional security to profile students and identify them for disciplinary action. Where picket lines (composed of students as well as professors) stood strong in the face of these tactics, riot police were called in to disperse them and prevent them from entering campus buildings.

In a vote on April 22, CLASSE changed tactics, voting unanimously in favour of civil disobedience, but unanimously denouncing violence. Roads and bridges were blocked by protestors, bags of bricks were on a few occasions thrown on metro tracks to disrupt commuting, the office windows of education minister Line Beauchamp were painted red (for the red square, which was already at this point quickly becoming the symbol of this protest movement), and windows of some businesses were broken. Police often responded to this civil disobedience with violence, and violence was cited as the reason for Beauchamp refusing to meet with student groups.

On April 25, Beauchamp finally agreed to meet with students, but only to discuss loans and bursaries, not the hike. At this meeting, the Liberals proposed to raise tuition at a slower rate over seven years instead of five, but ultimately this worked out to more than the 75% increase that was initially proposed. After some subsequent meetings, Beauchamp believed that she has nothing left to contribute to the resolution of this issue, and resigned as minister of education.

The government still claimed that it was willing to negotiate in good faith, but on May 16 proposed Bill 78: the content of this bill illegalises any demonstration that does not submit its route to police at least eight hours ahead of time, or any demonstration within 50 metres of an education institution. Fines are stipulated for offending students, student leaders and student groups. In the case of an infraction of the bill, institutions are free to stop collecting and passing along fees to the student groups in question, and these penalties apply not only to offending groups, but also groups that are judged not to have done enough to prevent their members from acting. On the same day, the city of Montreal passed a bill outlawing the wearing of masks during public demonstrations.

On May 18, Bill 78 passed into law. A massive, peaceful demonstration that night was met with rubber bullets and tear gas from riot police. Those who were arrested were not charged under Bill 78, but rather fined for illegal assembly. The outcome of this is that the legal contestation of of these charges could not serve as a venue to examine the legality of Bill 78 in court. May 22 saw the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history, as an estimated 400 000 people demonstrated in defiance of Bill 78. Though no arrests were made that night, 500 people were arrested the following day in a kettling operation by police. Once again, a change of tactics came about. On May 26, rather than marching in a single large demonstration, thousands of protestors demonstrated in dozens of small groups through Montreal, walking through the streets at night and banging pots and pans. These demonstrations inspired solidarity marches across Canada and the world.

On May 28, the Quebec government made a new proposal to the students. However, the offer was retracted despite the fact that the student groups were willing to negotiate and compromise. One of the big problems throughout these negotiations was that while the government delegates representatives to negotiate with the students, the student groups have a representative democracy: their representatives are just the mouthpiece that passes along the will of the students as expressed through a vote. They have no power to make decisions on the students' behalf.

In June, Bill 78 was upheld in Quebec lower court. In July, the Quebec Human Rights Commission denounced Bill 78 as undermining the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Bill is set to be heard in Quebec Supreme Court in the fall of 2012. September 4 saw the Liberal government voted out of office in a provincial election, with Jean Charest losing the seat in his home riding of Sherbrooke. He subsequently stepped down as head of the Quebec Liberals. Pauline Marois, whose Parti Québecois promised to abolish the hike, became the new premier of Quebec. However, it is a minority government, and so it remains to be seen how this situation will play itself out. (Added in an edit on Sept. 24, 2012: The PQ has actually followed through on their promise and abolished the proposed hike.)

2. Value of education

Having laid out the historical groundwork, I now want to raise three sets of issues. The first is about the value of education. During times such as these, one I think has to reflect on whether education is a luxury good or an important social good. Clearly individuals benefit economically from being educated, but it seems that society as a whole benefits as well, and not only in economic terms.

Conceiving of education as a luxury good alone is a non-starter in virtue of those social benefits that come from having an educated populace. Certainly in Quebec, people have long been party to the idea that education is emancipatory, that it is the key to freedom. The philosopher John Dewey would certainly have agreed, as he claimed that education should not be conceived solely as creating human capital for the workforce. Rather, education should be teaching us to learn and to solve problems, not simply to hone a craft and send us out into the economic market. That doesn't even make good business sense considering the pace with which markets change and old skills become antiquated: we need to learn not only what will be successful today, but the skills we'll need to learn and innovate what will be successful tomorrow.

When education becomes financially inaccessible, we limit not only the quality of our workforce: more importantly, we limit access to intellectual freedom (from persuasion) and thus ultimately limit access to political equality. Pricing education out of the range of the masses therefore undermines its very value as emancipatory because the playing field can only be equalled among those who can afford it financially. (This take on education undermines the claim that students can boycott but not strike, likening the students to customers who withhold their patronage from a certain business.)

3. Accessibility

Taking up the conception of education as emancipatory, we then have to ask about the second of three issues: accessibility. Specifically, what is the "fair share" for a student to pay? Of course, whatever isn't covered through tuition must be covered by the government, which collects money from the people and industry through taxation; so perhaps a good way to reformulate this question is to ask what would constitute a fair distribution between student tuition and social contribution through taxation. According to the commodity view of education, many will claim that the students are gaining financially from their degrees, thereby justifying a larger portion of costs being covered by students.

However, society as a whole also benefits greatly from having an educated populace: middle-classers typically contribute huge amounts to the public coffers, not to mention the fact that the velocity of money in a society greatly increases as disparity falls. Furthermore, the private sector gains an awful lot from public research funded by the government, and the great number of university graduates in society makes the bargaining position of businesses that much better at the negotiating table because they know that their (prospective) employees don't have a plethora of other offers on the table, whereas the employers have many eager beavers knocking at their doors. The market is flooded with educated workers, not with jobs requiring that education. So yes, there certainly is an economic benefit for the students that might translate into a reasonable expectation that they cover some of the cost. However, there are also benefits for society at large as well as private corporations, and those benefits should translate the same way.

Everything gets more expensive over time when money is inflating, and so it seems reasonable to expect education contributions to go up as well, not just for students but across the board. From 1985–2005, the proportion of Canadian university costs covered by tuition went from 14% to 30%. In Quebec, to cover tuition costs alone required 4 weeks of full-time work in 1978, 2.8 weeks in 1989, 6 weeks in 2000, 6.7 in 2012, and is estimated at 8.8 weeks of work by 2015. Life is indeed getting more expensive, but why is the burden being shifted proportionately more and more onto tuition?

CLASSE proposed a 0.7% bank tax in Quebec, which would cover all tuition costs (including the proposed raise) for the entire province. The Big Five banks in Canada declared $21.8 billion in profits in 2011. By contrast, the federal government owns $14.5 billion in student debt; the average student debt in the Maritimes rose from $21 000 to $28 000 between 1999 and 2004 (a 33% increase in 5 years); Quebec has the lowest average in the country at $13 000; estimates vary between 7 000 and 30 000 when trying to anticipate how many Quebec students would lose access to higher education as a result of the proposed increase; in 1963, corporate taxation represented 55% of the federal tax collected, whereas in 2011 the corresponding figure had plummeted to 18%. Life gets more expensive because of inflation, but why so much more expensive for some and not for others?

Specifically, the increase in tuition hits people at a terrible time in life, financially speaking. Paying this increase through taxation later in life, when financial matters are more stable for most people, means that we end up paying drastically less in interest to the banks that offer these loans. Furthermore, it allows us to distribute the burden according to one's means (one of the main benefits of differential taxation). Though on average there is an advantage, not everyone who goes to university will be financially successful. Paying for education through taxation allows us to shelter those who would otherwise live under the yoke of their student debt. We do the same thing with health care in Canada. Increasing tuition is a simple way to inject money into the education system, but we should not therefore come to the conclusion that it is the best way to do so simply because it is the simplest.

Another reason that is often given for increased tuition being reasonable is that it would bring Quebec more into line with the tuition levels of the other provinces, which are of course far lower than the levels one finds in the United States. However, while we're on the topic of financial matters, it makes sense to ask whether these systems fit into a wider financial situation that we see as enviable. Does the debt situation in the US seem all that appealing? Is that really the road down which we want to go? The rest of Canada rightly points out that Quebec's financial matters are not in great shape, particularly Alberta, the source of much transfer payment money.

However, is that to say that the kind of social democracy towards which Quebec strives is untenable? The Scandinavian countries stand as an obvious counter-example to that claim. Denmark has no tuition fees, and they manage to run a pretty successful shop, economically speaking. Their social services are incredible: the difference is that their level of taxation is completely different from ours. For instance, there is a 100% tax rate on automobiles, much of which certainly fills the coffers of public transit systems, offered as the green alternative to private transit. Such nations have among the highest standards of living, with great records of social parity. By contrast, the United States has an attrocious record when it comes to wealth disparity and environmental matters. When choosing one's reference class for comparison, how do we (Quebecers, Canadians) really see ourselves proceeding in the future: towards the American or the Scandinavian model?

Other comparisons are historical: many Baby Boomers criticize current students for wanting everything handed to them on a silver platter, when the Boomers see themselves as having had to work for what they have. While undoubtedly that is true, the Baby Boomers lived in a period of great economic prosperity: the figures cited earlier about the number of weeks of full-time work required to cover tuition demonstrate that what students these days are asking for is actually a situation comparable to what previous generations actually enjoyed (and not "unfairly" enjoyed, those previous generations seem to say).

Students are fighting for the opportunity their forebears had, and the declining contribution of the wealthiest segment of society explains why they have to fight. In times of booming economy, Canadians lived well. Money flowed through the economy, with taxes taking a slice at every turn, providing the funds necessary to support the social programs of the era. Those same generations were not saying at the time that they ought to cut back for the future, nor are they rushing to give back their wonderful benefits now that we're in an economically trying present. Who was the last MP who refused their indexed pension claiming that the economy just couldn't afford it?

It is claimed that the education system in Quebec, as it is presently organized, cannot sustainably run on its current levels of funding. The simple solution to this is just to throw more money at the system, and the simplest way to do that is just to raise tuition for the people who use the service that that system provides. Just as one may ask whether other sources of funding are more appropriate, so too may someone ask whether the structuring of the system needs revision. After all, Quebec already spends more on higher education per student than any other province, though only marginally so. Why, then, is the money falling short there in particular? In the Quebec education system (in general, not specifically in higher education), 10 cents of every $1 spent goes to administration. Whereas Denmark has 50 administrators/1 000 000 students, Quebec has 5 000 administrators for that same number (figures from 1988). If the Scandinavian model is informing our ideal of social democracy, perhaps we should be following their streamlined administrative practices rather than moving further and further from their tuition-free funding structure.

In the two decades from 1988–2008, administration costs rose from 12% to 20% of total spending at Canada's 25 biggest universities. Teaching costs dropped from 65% to 58% of the total over that same period. In Quebec, university administration fees jumped 83% from 1997-2004. Additionally, we have seen a trend away from expensive tenured professorships towards relatively cheaper sessional positions, in addition to larger class sizes. We now expect academics to teach more students for less money, while the administration eats up the surplus generated thereby, all the while crying poor and requesting more money of the university's students. All this in the face of growing pressure to form partnerships with private industry, SSHRC and NSERC money going to the development of ideas for private profit.

The quality of education suffers from large classes, as well as overburdened teaching staff who are remunerated less and less. Furthermore, administrative costs are eating up more and more the budget, leading to an untenable funding situation where students are being asked to pay more to support a system that invests less and less in their education and ever more in private interests. Those interests, however, are being taxed less and less for the benefit that they receive from this research. This picture of universities as economic stimulators does not sit well with the emancipation model of education; it furthermore raises some very troubling questions about the degree to which public money ends up in private pockets.

4. Wider democratic issues

What do the actions of the Quebec government tell us about our democracy? First off, raising tuition suggests that money is lacking in the higher education system, which as discussed earlier is an important institution for emancipation and democratic practice. Money really is lacking, and one need only look at the state of repair of buildings on university campuses to see it. However, raising tuition suggests that they are exploring the simplest option to close the gap. Refusing to negotiate with students suggests that the structure of university funding is not open for discussion: the government knows what's best on this matter and will dictate it to their public rather than working with them (or for them, horror!). It suggests not only that the financing of higher education is off limits for conversation, but also that the same is true of the structuring of higher education. The government will not discuss the social values that underlie these decisions.

What about Bill 78? This is a much more troubling point, and really what turned an education issue into a full-blown social issue, touching everyone in the province (and many, many beyond), leaving no one indifferent. The fact that the government claimed to be negotiating in good faith with the students when they introduced Bill 78 suggests that they have no scruples about duplicity. Furthermore, they will not hesitate very long before applying pressure while refusing to sustain nearly any applied to themselves. (Remember that CLASSE voted in favour of peaceful civil disobedience, and that in most cases it is the police who are believed to have sparked the small number of violent outbursts. In fact, the very small amount of violence and low cost of damages for such a large movement, and one so prolonged, suggests that these protests were actually quite orderly and civilized.)

Our politicians are far too ready to dictate values to us, and far too reticent to have any discussion on the matter with the general public: to ban peaceful protest and general assembly is to silence the voice of the public. Ultimately, it should raise serious questions for us about the role of our politicians. Namely, are they not in place (ideally) in order to help us translate our values into the structuring of our society? And how should we respond to the paternalistic attitude that they have our best interests in mind and will protect us from ourselves?

Saturday 8 September 2012

Charisma, charm, and all that

With the recent elections in Quebec, in which many people were decidedly unimpressed by all of the parties, and with the recent announcement that Justin Trudeau will probably run for (and win) the leadership of the Federal Liberal Party, I've been doing a lot of thinking not only about politics, but also about our politicians. Those thoughts have also been fueled by a personal reflection on the use of police force in the state. More specifically, I was trying to figure out why it is that I feel so strongly that the introduction of Bill 78 was wrong, whereas the declaration of the War Measures Act during the October Crisis seems acceptable. (On that latter issue, I think it's that the FLQ had already resorted to and threatened further violence, whereas the student demonstrations were inherently peaceful, violent actions being condemned widely by the students in whose name some violent acts were ostensibly carried out.)

So what of these politicians, these people (mostly men) who offer to run our country, our provinces, and our cities on our behalf? One startling realisation while I was watching the leaders' debate leading up to the federal election in May of 2011 was that our politicians are doing two things: first, they talk about funds but never values; second, they do an awful lot of smearing of one another. The smear campaigns are old hat these days, as they've been going on for too long already, and we see them so widely adopted. Our democracy can't be very healthy if we're electing our leaders as the best among an overly sleazy and untrustworthy group of people that decided to run, and we can't be surprised to find that the people do not identify with or trust their political representatives when this is the case. Again, many friends of mine in Quebec declared how unhappy they were with Charest and the PLQ, but said that they didn't want any of the other parties running the show either. Surprisingly, in spite of those sentiments, a huge number of Quebecers turned out to vote this past week, which I was very glad to learn.

But my main complaint against the majority of political discourse these days is the near-total absence of the discussion of value. People drone on and on about cutting or raising taxes to the rich, expanding or contracting social programs, etc, but they never address the question head on: what responsibility do we have to our fellow community members? On this hangs answers to questions about what is fair taxation rate for upper income brackets, what is a fair amount of welfare, of tuition payment, etc, but politicians don't seem to ever talk about that. Are values simply off limits for rational discourse in our contemporary society, merely tolerant of multiculturalism but unengaged across cultural boundaries? Is this really the way that we want to run our society, refusing to engage in discourse about values simply because someone whose values differ might be offended? Of course, there is a spirit of respectful discourse that should be maintained, and discourse should be broken off when that respect is lost, but I certainly don't believe that this kind of respect is impossible across cultural lines.

And this kind of respect is exactly what we all too seldom find among our political class. Particularly in the States, we can see a polarization between the Republican and Democrat parties (the former run these days by a very strange and radically conservative group) that results not only in an impossibility of agreement, but furthermore of a hatred for one's opponents. (Bill Clinton's 2012 DNC speech both sums up that situation nicely, and shows us that not all hope for bold, charismatic and understanding leadership is lost.) Why are we lead by people who look so disdainfully on their constituents, who concern themselves so whole-heartedly with being re-elected rather than the successful governance that would earn their re-election? Why is it such a perfect joke when an "Introduction to Congress" class at Harvard is found to be rampant with cheating? Where are all the trustworthy people of our society? Where are the heroic?

Where are the people who make decisions and stand by their convictions not because it is the choice they would like to make, but because it is simply the best choice from a rather unpleasant set of options? Unfortunately, we know where people who make that kind of decision are: at the polling station.

Saturday 1 September 2012

Violation

Hey folks, it's been a wild few weeks, what with old roommates moving out, new ones arriving, and running an intensive workshop throughout the whole endeavour. So once again, I'll fall back on the archive this week. This piece was written in October of 2011.

Violation


            I had two students plagiarise the other day. There they sat, The First and The Second, before me. “I see you two here, having taken this course without a grain of seriousness for the whole semester, having sat together during the whole of our time together, neither contributing half the effort necessary for both of you to succeed, and then these arrive on my desk.” Two sharply graded papers are placed before them. In each appears the same argument structure, the same examples (granted, taken straight from my own words) and unfortunately also the same definition of a given term, nearly word for word. (An entire term defined by such similar words.) I had not yet convicted them, I was open to having my mind changed on the issue, though I certainly leaned heavily to one side on the issue.
            “So what really happened?” The First had missed a class, and had naturally spoken to his good friend, The Second, about what he had missed. The Second passed his notes to The First, and The First copied a sentence directly from those notes into an essay. Plagiarism. Naturally, this landed The First and The Second in my office. After all, good friends always sit together, move together and think together. They also hand in papers together, so The First’s paper ended up on top of The Second’s, and so when it comes time to grade, the paper of The First followed swiftly on the heels and the words of that of The Second. It was copied, of that there is not doubt (even the notes are produced to demonstrate the provenance of the words), but the question of violation is still unanswered. Ought they to have known that this was a violation? How reasonable is it to assume that this kind of behaviour is acceptable?
            Two pictures of plagiarism; 1: plagiarism is using the words found on pages (of the Internet, of course, never a book) without a citation. In order to combat this issue, all high school students learn to use quotation marks according to the rules, they learn the form of a parenthetical reference, and they learn to make bibliographies according to the standards of the Modern Languages Association. These are all useful tools, but for what are they to be used? Definition 2: plagiarism is using someone else’s ideas and passing them off as one’s own. Whose ideas are worthy of citation? Anyone’s but one’s own. Of course, there is the relevant issue of context here. Citation is context-dependent because there is always a reader, an audience. If I assign a chapter of Plato as the basis for an essay, I am the grader, I am the audience, and therefore it is reasonable to assume that just referring to “the ideas of Plato” is oftentimes sufficient to direct my attention to the assigned chapter without explicit citation. Referring to the notes of a friend does not pass the test; it is not evident merely from context.
            With these two definitions of plagiarism in hand, allow us to return to the question of The Violation: ought The First and The Second to have known that this was plagiarism? Yes, they ought. But the issue of responsibility is a far deeper matter. They sail through the doors of university with the first definition of plagiarism in hand, and (allegedly) all the technical tools they need to avoid these kinds of Violations. Such is the product of their high school education. The second definition, however, is far beyond anything they have ever encountered before. They have no concept of intellectual property, no concept of intellectualism.
            For these two, and sadly they are not alone, jobs are about money, and jobs require a degree, and a degree requires grades, and so there they sit in my classroom waiting for the grades to be doled out so they can get on with it. This is a completely infected notion of education, and a viral epidemic. Education is about wisdom, knowledge and skills, and grades are merely a way to evaluate a student’s progress in achieving these things.
            The student who focuses on taking in what is put before them rather than on their grades knows that they must make these ideas their own, knows that their own comprehension and subsequent ability to express these ideas to others is what’s really going on in education. These students also don’t plagiarise. It would never cross their minds to do so, and they have an acute ability to recognise when an idea is their own and when it is an idea taken from someone else. (Not always clear is when the idea falls within the implicit context of the assignment, and this obscurity sometimes leads to unfortunate consequences for those who truly don’t deserve them. Furthermore, those honest students are the ones who have the most trouble with accusations of plagiarism because at stake is not their grade but their integrity, their moral fibre, and often their passion.)
            So what is the story at the end of the day? How do we avoid plagiarism in future? Obviously students of the second kind, those who don’t have a merely instrumental view of education, are better able to avoid plagiarism. So clearly our education system has to start churning out serious intellectuals if we want the majority of these Violations to go away, but the virus begins far before the education system gets at these kids, and thus it falls beyond their sole responsibility to eradicate the problem. The ever-increasing prevalence of the instrumental attitude towards school (eruditio instrumentalis) is a subspecies of a greater virus (tutto instrumentalis), and we need to root out the bigger problem. Actually, if we started collectively shifting our focus away from personal fortunes towards more intrinsic goods (such as universal human rights, dignity and freedom) we might find that the disappearance of plagiarism went undetected, drowned out by the march towards something far greater.