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After almost an hour and a half of debate, University Council voted to include one undergraduate and one graduate student on both program prioritization task forces during the Jan. 24 council meeting. Program prioritization — or TransformUS, as it’s been dubbed by administrators — is one of the primary methods that the University of Saskatchewan is using to combat the $44.5-million deficit projected for 2016. The process will be led by two separate task forces responsible for analyzing and ranking academic programs and support programs. These task forces will give recommendations to the president’s office as to which programs should potentially receive more funding and which should be downsized, merged, or cut completely. The recommendations will then be voted on by University Council and the Board of Governors and, if passed, sent to the Provost’s Committee on Integrated Planning to be implemented. The academic task force will
examine academic programming while the non-academic task force will focus on the university’s administrative support services. Each task force will have 20 to 25 members, two of whom will be students. The university says task force members must be prepared to devote a minimum of four hours every two weeks to attending committee meetings as well as additional time to prepare for the meetings. Administration will be accepting nominations for both task forces online until Feb. 13. Students and faculty members who do not rank higher than a department head may be nominated to sit on the academic task force. University employees, who will only be included in the non-academic task force, may also be nominated so long as they don’t hold a senior leadership position. The task forces are expected to begin meeting in March and work through to November when they will submit their final reports, or recommendations, to the university. Galen Richardson sits on student
31 January, 2013 | The University of Saskatchewan student newspaper since 1912
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Students lock up place on task forces ANNA-LILJA DAWSON Associate News Editor
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University Council chair Jay Kalra counts the votes in favour of moving forward with program prioritization.
council for the College of Law. Although not in favour of program prioritization, he admits having students on these task forces is a
small victory for students across campus.
TransformUS
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OPINIONS
U of S students find their voice ISHMAEL N. DARO
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This counts as protest! You don’t have to bring a drum or have dreads to “protest.”
Last week, about 100 students packed the Neatby-Timlin Theatre to make themselves heard about program prioritization — what the university has obnoxiously branded “TransformUS” — and secured student representation on the groups tasked with ranking various university services for looming budget cuts. It was quite the spectacle. Students at the University of Saskatchewan, and Western Canadian schools in general, are not known for their activism. We generally prefer to keep our heads down, get our degrees and move on. The protest cultures of Quebec and some American campuses are alien to us, and when the Quebec student strikes took place last spring there was very little sympathy for those supposedly “entitled” Frenchies. And yet, there they were, lots of outraged students standing up to an administration starting down the road of austerity without significant input from
the people it will affect the most. After a sometimes-rancorous debate in which numerous people voiced their frustrations with the university brass, there are now guaranteed spots for graduate and undergraduate students on the two task forces that will decide the university’s future. This move was essentially a vote of non-confidence in the administration to get itself out of the budgetary mess that has left the school with a $44.5-million projected deficit by 2016. Even so, protesting seems to be a rather new impulse for some people on campus. After the council meeting, student Reagan Seidler tweeted, “Today, @usask students showed the power of reason and dialogue rather than protest.” That post was dutifully retweeted by several other students who failed to see that what had occurred was indeed a protest, that loudly opposing decisions you disagree with is OK, and that it’s not just radical agitators who do so. It’s nice to see the campus
community roused from its complacency. How long have humanities and fine arts students felt neglected? How long have people complained about underfunding and understaffing? Seemingly forever. To see that frustration finally solidify into something resembling a campuswide movement is exciting. One can’t help but notice more and more U of S students sporting the carré rouge, the red square that serves as the symbol of the Quebec student protests; and last week’s Sheaf, “The Money Issue,” was seemingly everywhere on campus. This newspaper’s online survey about the budget crisis got almost 300 responses, many of them angry with the administration. It turns out U of S students do care about their school, and they’re willing to do something about it. Let’s just hope we can all get over our reluctance to be shit-disturbers and keep pushing for positive engagement on campus. This is more than a degree mill, after all.