Montreal City Weblog

Kate 17:53 on 2024-03-23 Permalink Reply  

• Joey 16:03 on 2024-03-24 Permalink

  Nothing against the TAs in principle and without being aware of the issues and the degree to which their pay is below their market value or relevant benchmarks, but it’s hard to imagine the union making any kind of progress given how the province has taken an axe to the university’s funding envelope.

• Kate 17:58 on 2024-03-24 Permalink

  McGill has deep pockets, though. They’re just stuck in a sort of neoliberal 1990s attitude that education should be for profit.

• Joey 07:24 on 2024-03-25 Permalink

  It does have a huge endowment but that money can’t really be accessed for ordinary operating costs, for the most part.

• Kate 10:15 on 2024-03-25 Permalink

  Interesting. Then what’s it for?

  (McGill’s TAs are paid considerably less than people doing the same job in other universities in eastern Canada, and the amount hasn’t risen recently, not even close to inflation. I don’t work for the university but I do some work for one of its other unions, not the TAs’ union AGSEM, but close enough to be somewhat aware of the issues.)

• jeather 10:31 on 2024-03-25 Permalink

  I was looking at the Canadian medical residency stuff prior to match day (someone I know was matching) and the salary difference between Quebec (first year: 49k) and the other provinces (59-73k depending on the province) was really shocking. I’m not surprised this kind of difference is also visible in other parts of the university.

• dwgs 11:05 on 2024-03-25 Permalink

  Speaking as an employee of McGill I can assure you that we are not swimming in money. It’s a constant struggle to keep up.

• Joey 11:28 on 2024-03-25 Permalink

  @Kate imagine you’re a donor. They make a big pitch to you to fund a research chair or a scholarship. You acquiesce and open the tap. Now imagine they call you up and say, actually we wanna use that money to give our TAs a raise… Maybe you don’t open the tap quite so enthusiastically. That’s how you can have a huge endowment (which generates, for themes part, what universities call ‘restricted income’) and an operating deficit (or program cuts, hiring freezes, layoffs, etc.).

  Again, not to dismiss the union’s complaint, but you need to read the room a bit – and as we saw with the FAE, even a publicly supported teacher’s strike doesn’t produce results that union members are excited about in the current context. The Legault cuts to the English university sector will make it ludicrously easy for McGill to dismiss the TA’s complaints, IMO.

• Kate 20:28 on 2024-03-25 Permalink

  I suppose big time donors want a big deal thing named after them, and wouldn’t just say “hey, here’s ten million simoleons to best improve the quality of teaching”….

• Tim S. 21:18 on 2024-03-25 Permalink

  They could probably get money to improve ‘quality of teaching’, but it would be to hire someone with a snazzy TED talk to consult on the latest jargon, not something boring like reducing class sizes.

• Joey 11:07 on 2024-03-26 Permalink

  I don’t think the point is that it’s bad or unjust that donors want vanity projects – a lot of them just want to make specific contributions to the program or department they studies in. Scholarships, research chairs, etc. Yes, many are motivated by their own personal experience, but that’s valid, no? Like if you were loaded and some heart surgeon saved your life, you might be motivated to endow a research chair related to whatever your disease was. A donor who wants to ‘best improve the quality of teaching’ would probably be more interested in investing in applied pedagogical research than paying TA salaries, no? I know a couple of young professionals who endowed an anonymous scholarship at their law school to support students of colour. These are all good things!

  The point, however, is that what makes universities like McGill ‘rich’ isn’t the funding they get from governments or via tuition (with some exceptions given international tuition fees that are all in flux anyway), it’s the research and philanthropic income that makes them stand out. I don’t think it’s appropriate or reasonable or even legal to rely on research funders or donors to cover things like TA salaries. Why would we want to rely on philanthropy to pay for the nuts and bolts of running any school – from elementary to university? What happens when your prominent donors don’t like the students’ attitudes about, say, Gaza? Shouldn’t a wealthy society adequately fund its schools without relying on donations?

  As McGill’s president pointed out in the Gazette this week, the province’s English universities are actually penalized by the provincial funding formula, because (unlike the province’s French institutions) they don’t get special envelopes for things like doing maritime research or being a prominent urban university. To the extent that McGIll might get a slightly larger share of operating income, it’s a function of a funding policy that is based on student enrolment, which provides more or less money depending on the observed cost of teaching in that discipline. So McGill gets more funding per student because it has expensive programs, like medicine, where as the UQ in, I dunno, Abitibi might get slightly less.