Some Clarification
Posted by Skrud at Wednesday, March 9th 2005 at 9:58pm
Wow, I received some comments on the last two posts… Interesting. I certainly welcome discussion, but I think Kevin misunderstood my position. I am in complete agreement with the motives behind the strike, but I completely disagree with the method. Bursaries are extremely important, everyone should have the opportunity to further their education regardless of income. Programs like bursaries and scholarships do enable those students that deserve it to pursue an academic career.
But a strike? How is complaining loudly in the street and skipping classes going to prove anything? I think the only difference between protesting and whining that your mommy didn’t buy you that teddy bear in the window is that we usually call it “protesting” when the person is over the age of 12. You do have to make your voice heard, but chanting in our escalators and banging on walls does little more than disrupt those that are actually trying to use their school for the purpose it was originally intended for, and that’s study and learn.
I think it’s high time students started looking into more creative means of communicating. Have a few brainstorming sessions and come up with ideas. Find ways of appealing to the public and get plenty of media attention, without causing a ruckus. It’s unfortunate that Concordia has the reputation it has because it seems most students will drop everything and picket for virtually any cause, but I’m sure that if students found innovative new ways to band together and show support for certain causes then it would go much further than the “standard” protest.
Either way, I will be in class on Wednesday attempting to understand some Vector Calculus, something which I’m sure won’t come from sitting at home or standing around in the street.
There is NO OTHER WAY then protesting though. Dont’ get me wrong. I’m not exactly for a strike, but if they wannt strike for a day or a week, I dont’ care as long as I can still go to class!
If you can think of an effective method of getting your word across without protesting let me know. I can think of one: Terrorism.
I went to to the assembly on Wednesday and somebody brought up a very interesting way of protesting the cuts; next semester we all register but nobody pays the tuition fees. This isn’t a bad idea but the problem is that the budget will be passed in april and it’ll be much harder for the government to dish out 103 million then rather than now. It seems to me that supporting the already growing strike is the best way to get heard right now. If we put enough pressure for 3 days or a week on the government, cause one day just doesn’t say enough, and if we don’t get the money then we could go ahead and not pay or tuition fees. But we have to try as hard as we can now because we can get our money back and alot of other schools are doing as much as they can while we aren’t. Nobody has any brighter solutions right now and even if you find strikes radical they work.
Also you can’t say that Concordia students are just looking for any reason to skip and protest because 70 000 are already protesting others are joining and we have just began to mobilize with or 1 day strike. It took a long time before we began talking about striking and CSU pulled that assembly together at the last second and I was very disapointed by how unorganized the assembly was. Holding cardboards up and taking a rough appoximating is a pathetic way to hold a vote. Why don’t they use the concordia portal and hold the voting on the portal for a day. That way many more students would vote and the student would be better represented rather than by a 700 person quorum.