ghosts in the machine

Drop Pants, Not Fees (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Protest Sign, but Not Really)

Within just a couple of days, our Drop Pants, Not Fees event has exploded into a huge thing that’s apparently actually happening and really mobilizing a lot of students, so I feel that I should address my thoughts on the matter and clear up any confusion.

I’m going to state right off the bat that I’m not particularly privileged. I probably am a part of this ridiculous 1% idea purely because I’m passionate about, and good at what I do, and it happens to be in an industry where I’m shielded from boredom, poverty, recession, and irrelevancy. I’m not remotely afraid of the future, but for the time being, I still have to pay for school primarily with loans, so lowering tuition fees really would be in my interests. It’s taking me longer to finish school than it would if I didn’t have to worry about where my money was coming from, and there have been definite low points during my education that were purely a result of financial concerns.

So why would I do something so ridiculous as counter-protest the lowering of education costs?

First, I’ll give a brief overview of what’s going on here for anyone who doesn’t know, or needs a refresher. On February 1st, the SFUO, which is the uOttawa student association which provides services like our bus pass and which we’re all forced to be a member of, is organizing a protest in support of dropping tuition fees. As SFUO members, when we pay our tuition, one of the line-items on our bill is SFUO fees. This year, my SFUO fees for full-time enrolment during the fall and winter were $219.86, which is separate from health, dental, and U-Pass fees (listed as separate line items). Listed in the SFUO budget, viewable here if you think spreadsheets, clarity, transparency, or math are some sort of war crime or voodoo black magic (you probably shouldn’t look at it otherwise), in 2011 they spent $54,791 on campaigns (such as Drop Fees, but excluding philanthropic initiatives, which are a different line-item), and have budgeted $105,656 for 2012. Without figuring out exactly what percentage of our fees are going into that (because they have multiple revenue sources, and math isn’t something to just take all willy-nilly), if we divide that by 35,000 for a rough estimate, it really only comes to about $3 per student.

Which really doesn’t answer our original question of why I have my panties all in a bind over it.

There are a lot of different reasons why we don’t support the campaigns aspect of what the SFUO does. My personal number one reason is because I do not believe that the SFUO should have the right to represent us on a political basis. It doesn’t matter what my personal political beliefs are. I’ve already said that I don’t have a whole lot of money in the bank, so maybe I fully support their cause. Maybe I’m okay with being flat ass broke for a few years, and I’m a total conservative at heart. It doesn’t matter what I actually believe, because the organization that represents me has already made that decision. If they actually consulted the student body on what our political beliefs are, they didn’t make it down as far as the engineering buildings, because from what we can tell, they’re making wild assumptions about the orientation of the student body as a whole based on the personal beliefs of the elected executive. Let us imagine for a moment how the student body would react if they made these decisions for us in terms of religion. Imagine that our student federation spent slightly over $100,000 in a year promoting and fighting for arbitrarily chosen religious causes that don’t actually represent the beliefs of the student body whatsoever. I’m no lawyer, but that sounds like something that’s probably completely unconstitutional and not allowed, as well as just being totally rude and insensitive. We didn’t vote these people in based on their personal political views. None of them wrote on their campaign posters that they’re raging socialists or anything. Campaigning for SFUO executive positions is a pathetic farce of a democratic process lying somewhere in between popularity contest and rigged sham. This isn’t something we ever asked for. It doesn’t matter that it’s only $3 of my own money going towards this. I’m personally being represented as having taken a particular political stance on something when at no point in time have I ever done such a thing. I would pay $3 to have the opportunity to not have the executive organize campaigns and protests. I want the luxury of being represented apolitically. To be completely honest, I absolutely hate the fact that we have such a difficult time driving this point home that we have to go out and protest in the end anyways. I don’t want to protest. I have no desire to stand around in the cold with a sign. When I was drunkenly rambling to the good Nick Crawford in a Montreal hotel room last weekend that we should counter-protest with Drop Pants, Not Fees, I didn’t actually mean that I wanted to go to parliament hill with no pants on. That sounds like the type of thing that people who get arrested do, and I’m not at university to get arrested for stupid political causes, I’m at university to learn to be an engineer. I don’t even want to go to this event, because I don’t like protesting things, that’s the whole damn point.

I’m not even saying that students shouldn’t fight for political causes that they believe in. But let’s be honest, we’re basically living in the future. It didn’t cost us a single dollar, and took essentially zero effort to not matter to organize this Drop Pants thing. Mobilizing students who honestly want to be a part of something isn’t difficult, and doesn’t require plastering our campus with posters to accomplish. Our movement was done outside of any representative body, with no money. We aren’t trying to say that anyone holds our opinion who doesn’t. We aren’t wasting student money on things that they may or may not believe in. If the Drop Fees movement was being done in the same way, I wouldn’t give a damn about it, and I might even be in support. We used our contacts within the uOttawa community to get this thing going, and within the time span of like two days or something, people in other faculties with similar levels of influence were on board and helping to spread the word. That is successful motivation of the student body, and I think I’ve made my point now. So I guess I’ll see you all next Wednesday. Not that I want to.