Editorial
Students Could Use $35,000, too.
The process of raising children is one fraught with opportunities for disaster. Milk gets spilled, swear words get learned and occasionally, the wrong lessons get taught. When your kids catch you telling them to do one thing, while you yourself are doing another, you may have to pull out the trusty buffalo gun of hypocritical parenting: “Do as I say, not as I do.”
It’s a tired catchphrase and any school-aged child can see the inher- ent contradiction. So it’s hard to blame Concordia students—most of whom are no longer living with their parents—for questioning their dear old admin on perceived discrepancies between policy and action.
Especially when it comes to fiscal policy.
Imagine if your parents lectured you extensively about how “a penny saved is a penny earned” when explaining why you weren’t getting an allowance anymore, before telling you they’re heading out for a night on the town to blow a couple grand on frivolous and frankly absurd expenditures.
Not only is that a really hypocritical stance, it also should be clear that the two sides of the issue are connected not only in moral terms, but also in basic fiscal ones.
Unfortunately, this hypothetical situation isn’t hypothetical at all— it’s a pretty spot-on metaphor for what Concordia’s been saying to its students about moolah lately.
While silently supporting the Quebec government’s plans for staggered (and staggering) tuition hikes and telling students that they’ll have to pay, as Finance Minister Raymond Bachand put it, their “fair share,” Concordia hasn’t exactly had the best track record when it comes to its own finances.
On the heels of firing two separate presidents and sending them off with six-figure severance pack- ages, Concordia gift-wrapped a $1.4 million, interest-free loan to current Interim President Frederick Lowy last May so he can maintain a condo on Doctor Penfield Ave and purchase property out of town.
Concordia had to borrow the money for that loan from a bank—a bank not in the business of handing out interest-free loans, incidentally. The interest on that loan runs north of $35,000—which could buy us kids a whole bunch of bursaries—
and Concordia’s spokesperson isn’t even totally sure which budget line it came from.
What Lowy needs with a $1.4 million condo that’s going to cost student tuition-payers in excess of 30 grand is not for you or I to determine, evidently, as news of this friendly deal only came out only after someone leaked it to Le Journal de Montréal and the paper confronted Concordia about it.
(Undue hard- ship?! The man’s standards of living required $1.4 million!)
It’s hardly surprising that they wouldn’t release something like that in a press release—it might look bad for an institution whose last president was telling students that a province-wide tuition hike, though it would represent a major increase for students and only a negligible relief for indebted institutions, was necessary and would be “a good thing.”
That president, Judith Woodsworth, was let go in December without explanation and with $700,000 of—you guessed it—public money. It’s still not clear how students benefited from the presidential bait and switch, though, since Lowy evidently has no inten- tion of siding with the students against tuition hikes and his tastes seem to be twice as expensive as Woodsworth’s.
Concordia claims they gave the interest-free loan “in good faith,” as they didn’t want Lowy to “endure any undue hardship” after he agreed to regain his $350,000-a-year post at the head of this institution—because, God forbid Lowy endure the “undue hardship” of, you know, paying his own way to get the Lowy mansion on-track. (Undue hard- ship?! The man’s standards of living required $1.4 million!)
Some serious, internal fiscal mismanagement needs to be addressed, made transparent and remedied at this school before any administrator playing with public money has the audacity to turn around to tell us students we ought to reach even deeper into our meager bank accounts to pay more.
Or, at the very least, our administration should get serious about financial aid solutions for students as we await impending tuition hikes. I’m sure a bunch of us could use an interest-free loan, too.
This article originally appeared in Volume 32, Issue 01, published August 30, 2011.
