What Can Quebec Teach Us? A Preliminary Analysis of the University as a Site of Struggle

William Clare Roberts:

Though the basic course of events in Que­bec over the past sev­eral months has been widely reported, I want to address two ques­tions that might be of greater inter­est to those strug­gling in and around uni­ver­si­ties elsewhere.

First, I want to look at how the Que­bec stu­dent strike artic­u­lates, on the one hand, the con­flict and inter­play between the social­ist aspi­ra­tions and cor­po­ratist real­i­ties of a pub­lic uni­ver­sity sys­tem, and on the other, the pres­sures put on that sys­tem by the dreams of dol­lar bills float­ing through the heads of admin­is­tra­tors and the “aus­ter­ian” belt-tightening of gov­ern­ments. These are not sim­ple real­i­ties; uni­ver­sity admin­is­tra­tors hop­ing to open the flood­gates of tuition and donor dol­lars are con­tin­gently allied with gov­ern­ment min­is­ters con­vinced by fear that fis­cal aus­ter­ity is the only way for­ward. I believe that a Marx­ist analy­sis of the university’s place in the cap­i­tal­ist econ­omy will clar­ify the stakes of the stu­dents’ strug­gle against this con­tin­gent alliance of hope and fear within the admin­is­tra­tive apparatus.

Sec­ond, I want to ask, very briefly, whether this analy­sis has any trac­tion out­side of Que­bec. What con­di­tions have pro­duced these 100 days of increas­ingly wide­spread and increas­ingly ambi­tious clamor? Can these con­di­tions be repli­cated by oth­ers elsewhere?