Leah HennigTimes are a-changing, but the University of Alberta Students’ Union (UASU) executives may have misremembered this as grants come flying into the University of Alberta. In a recent news statement from the UASU, student executives seemed quite excited about the new budget for the U of A. But have they forgotten when the provincial government took away $224 million in funding in 2020? It appears it may be so.
The new funding the U of A has received, part of which was $21 million for defence research, is not helping students the way the UASU execs want it to. Not to mention, they also celebrated a $13 million operating grant — for the previous year and this year — that barely scratched the surface of what was cut in the past. It also failed to prevent a tuition increase. It should go almost without saying that no funding to this university should be taken without grace, but there’s a difference between grovelling and appreciating.
In June 2020, the Alberta government announced that the U of A would receive significantly less in grants. This totalled $224 million over three years. Balanced out with the seven per cent tuition increase each year for three years made the total loss $135 million. No student leader or exec at the U of A could have prevented this from happening, but the current UASU execs seem to have forgotten how much the U of A has already lost. So, being grateful for incoming grants should only come with so much courtesy for the provincial government that has let down universities continuously over the years.
Even more recently, last fall, the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) went on strike. Around the same time, the Association of Academic Staff of the University of Alberta (AASUA) nearly went on strike before reaching an agreement. For the past half-decade, and even more so now, Alberta has shown that the educational systems in this province are of little to no concern. The job losses for staff at the U of A and other Alberta universities had an uptick alongside financial strain. By giving a couple of grants here and there, it feels as though the government is throwing a bone towards education while hoping the education system doesn’t realize it’s a twig. And UASU execs seem to have fallen for this setup.
The biggest and most important part of the UASU is advocacy. Many student issues would go unnoticed if it weren’t for the execs. It’s surprising to see, then, that these same execs are unbelievably appreciative of these grants — as if they have forgotten how much the U of A has already lost. As mentioned earlier, the funding from the government has gone down, and our tuition has increased. The burden of keeping a facility and space as prosperous and important as the U of A should not fall upon the students already scraping by.
Pinning all the blame on UASU execs is just plain wrong. A majority of the blame should fall on the government for not prioritizing universities like they should be. At the same time, they have fumbled how to properly fund universities, including the U of A, which is incredibly frustrating. While the UASU execs should be acknowledging how vapid these new grants really are for the future of this university, they are not all-knowing, -seeing, and -hearing. There are limits to what can and can’t be addressed. So now, hopefully, UASU execs hold themselves accountable for the parts they can address.
