ANOTHER YEAR OF FAULTY BUDGET CONSULTATIONS
September and October means that SFU admins need to start “consulting” the SFU’s general populace about next year’s budget plan. But do you call a presentation and short Q&A session a “consultation”? Sound more like an information session to us.
Tuition Freeze Now fought for better student consultations last year. We wanted the students to have an active role in deciding how the budget would be rolled out, but we didn’t see a big improvement. The only real change was the fact that other consultations became open to students, but nothing changed about effectively working towards getting the student body involved (after all, we didn’t even get an email notification until four days before the first consultation). This is not how we want our university to operate.
Solution: A TUITION TOWNHALL
This is why TFN hosted a Tuition Townhall on October 29th to engage SFU students. The Townhall featured a presentation from the TFN organizers about what’s been going on with the TFN movement, the data we collected from our survey, and what has been happening on the administration front.
We ended the night with group discussions about what we would like to do to engage faculty and staff at SFU, what we would like the board of governors to do, and how we would like the government to fight alongside us.
The night featured lively conversations with a diverse group. If you would like you look at our minutes and presentation, please see the files attached.