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Students and staff are joining forces on Thursday April 26th at 4:30pm at Simcoe Hall Council Chambers (27 King’s College Circle) to demonstrate and vote against the university administration’s proposal to implement tuition fee hikes at Governing Council.

Don’t go because you hate paying even more of your hard earned cash toward tuition. Don’t go because the university administration is further encroaching on the autonomy of student government by attempting to implement the proposal over their opposition. Go because the press release claims the demonstrators will use “creative methods” to voice their discontent.

Creative methods? That’s a teaser if I ever heard one. The full press release after the jump.

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO STAFF AND STUDENTS CONFRONT ADMINISTRATION

Staff and students unite to oppose tuition fee hikes proposed by the University of Toronto at its Governing Council meeting

Toronto – Staff and students will be uniting against tuition fee increases at Thursday’s meeting of the University of Toronto Governing Council. Together they will be voicing their opposition and voting against the university administration’s proposal to implement alarming fee hikes.

“The University of Toronto is attempting to offload its funding shortfall onto the backs of students and their families, many of whom are already saddled with unprecedented student debt,” said Jennifer Hassum, President of the University of Toronto Students’ Union, representing 41,000 full-time undergraduate students.

“In many programs, the University Administration is proposing to increase fees at the highest rates allowed under Ontario law,” said Allison Dubarry, President of United Steelworkers Local 1998, representing administrative and technical staff at U of T. “Instead of shifting the burden of funding to students, the University Administration should be joining us in lobbying the provincial
government for more funding.”

“Hiking tuition fees to make up for government underfunding is irresponsible and unsustainable,” said Robert Ramsay of CUPE 3902,
representing Education Workers at U of T. “These fee increases will allow the provincial government to make further cutbacks to
post-secondary education, and the quality of education at U of T will suffer.”

“Tuition fee hikes and government cutbacks are two sides of the same coin,” said Gina Trubiani, Vice President External of the Graduate Students’ Union. “By proceeding on this path, the Governing Council will be complicit in Dalton McGuinty’s Reaching Higher Plan for higher fees and higher debt.”

Students and staff will demonstrate their opposition to the fee hike proposal using creative methods. The meeting will take place at Simcoe Hall Council Chamber on April 26th at 4:30pm (27 King’s College Circle).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Events, On Campus, The Cynic, We've Got Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.