One Hundred Days of Student Protests in QuĂ©bec: Printemps Ărable or Much Ado About Nothing?
âWhat would Spinoza say?â one of the student strikers asked. He had taken a course on Spinoza with Carlos earlier in the year and was now blocking our way into a class that we were teaching together this term. The students of the philosophy department at McGill University had just voted to join the longest and largest student strike in QuĂ©becâs history to protest the governmentâs plan to raise university tuitions. His task was to enforce this decision.
The great seventeenth-century philosopher would surely have supported free public education of the highest quality. A good political order, Spinoza argues, is not only concerned with the safety and prosperity of the citizens, but above all with their scientific training. For knowledge, according to Spinoza, is the key to the good life. Indeed, since Plato many philosophers have claimed that rulers ought to promote the contemplative life.
But it isnât the question of the value of contemplation that has led thousands of students to take to the streets since mid-February. At the height of the strike, during the second half of March, about half of QuĂ©becâs 460,000 university and college students refused to attend classes. One climax of the movement so far was on March 22, when some 200,000 protesters filled the streets of MontrĂ©alâone of the largest demonstrations QuĂ©bec has ever seen. Some have dubbed the movement the âprintemps Ă©rableâ (maple spring), an allusion to the recent âprintemps arabeâ of the Muslim world. That comparison may seem far-fetched. After all, students here, unlike citizens in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria, are not risking their lives to get rid of an oppressive dictatorship; they are opposing âla hausseââthe increase in university tuition fees announced by the government of Jean Charest, the leader of the QuĂ©bec Liberal Party.
QuĂ©bec students currently pay $2,168 per year to attend university, the lowest tuition fees in North America (the Canadian average in 2010-11 was $5,138). The plan is to raise the tuition by 75 percent over five years, to nearly $3,800 by 2017. Although this is a significant increase, it still leaves QuĂ©bec at the lowest end of the North American spectrum. The Charest government has argued that QuĂ©becâs universities are severely underfunded and that in austere times like these students ought to pay their âfair share.â One can surely disagree with Charestâs argument, but this does not seem to explain the extraordinary passion driving the strike. Besides demonstrations, students have resorted to acts of civil disobedienceâblockading bridges, businesses, and government buildingsâand acts of not-so-civil disobedience by militant splinter groupsâstone throwing, graffiti spraying, window smashingâto which QuĂ©becâs notorious riot police have responded with brutal crackdowns. While some students are recovering in hospitals from critical injuries, others are being charged with inciting fear of terrorism for shutting down the MontrĂ©al subway system with smoke bombs. A resolution of the conflict is nowhere in sight