THUNDER BAY – The president of the Lakehead University Student Union says it is “unacceptable” the school’s board of governors evidently tried to shut students out of a vote to raise tuition fees.
Ian Kaufman said the board of governors held a meeting on Thursday where they were prepared to vote on increasing tuition fees by three per cent for the next school year.
While he admitted he wasn’t sure if the secretive nature of the vote was intentional or mere oversight, he insists it should have been handled differently.
“It’s hard to accept the university, through all the people involved in bringing this to the board, would not have once thought about whether they’d talked to students given they told us they would,” Kaufman said.
“Either way, I think it’s obviously unacceptable.”
The union became aware of the vote only because a student group was present at the meeting and preparing to deliver a presentation.
They contacted LUSU members and Kaufman addressed the board of governors, convincing them to postpone the vote until April 7.
“We had to scramble to intervene. We got as many students into the room as we could just to be there and object,” Kaufman said.
“It was promised to us there would be a new process this year with more consultation and we were promised we would be consulted in March. We still hadn’t had that consultation so we were waiting for that and that’s why this took us by surprise.”
University president Brian Stevenson admitted there had been an issue posting the agenda and there was no intent to keep the vote hidden.
“That’s why when we were told it wasn’t posted and they hadn’t seen it we had no problem postponing the discussion,” Stevenson said.
“There’s no point having that vote if the students don’t know about it. We want them to know about it and be part of the process.”
University administration had worked to involve the student body more this year to bring transparency to the budget.
That included a series of meetings leading up to the beginning of March, which is when the board of governors traditionally holds their vote on tuition fees.
That’s why LUSU being unaware of the vote surprised Stevenson and the rest of the board of governors.
“I think this year we’ve been much more open than in previous years. We’ve actually implemented a budget process we’ve been announcing since the fall that has consultation with many groups,” he said.
“Since January we’ve had two town hall meetings. In both town hall meetings we’ve mentioned the three per cent increase is part of the budget process. We’ve told everybody what’s going on.”
Kaufman said, if approved, this would be the 10th straight year the board of governors hiked tuition fees.
He added he believes Lakehead has increased fees by the maxiumum amount every year, which has resulted in a 50 per cent increase for Canadian students and a 100 per cent increase for international students.
The average tuition cost for a first year student for the 2014-2015 school year was nearly $6,000, compared to $4,300 in 2006-2007.
