The Tribune commends McGill’s commitment to increasing its number of tenure-track staff as part of its academic renewal program. It is a welcome shift from a North American trend of reducing tenure-track professors in favour of course lecturers hired on short-term contracts. Confusion in the campus press, stemming in part from the ambiguous and non-committal language of the McGill budget, had led many to believe that McGill was also reducing its tenure-track hires for the foreseeable future. However, so far as we can tell from the budget, and through clarification by campus administrators, this is not the case.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of tenure, a status that grants the professors who earn it guaranteed employment for life barring just cause for dismissal. For one thing, this is an important means of attracting the best teachers and researchers to McGill. Tenure offers job security and, usually, higher pay. This is significant for professors raising families, especially when hiring the best often means asking people to relocate across municipal, provincial, and sometimes national borders. This administration has argued for high administrative salaries in order to compete for the best in that field; surely the financial concerns of the teaching staff, who actually interact with students, are crucial too.

Tenure is also important for more qualitative reasons. It ensures continuity, allowing students to build relationships with professors over the course of their academic career. It is also a crucial guarantor of academic freedom, keeping professors who pursue controversial or unfashionable research safe from dismissal on such grounds. Of course, tenure can be abused, as when professors use it to protect themselves from suffering the consequences of laziness. Yet academia is, at least in theory, supposed to be a higher calling. PhD students and non tenure-track scholars often face pressure to produce marketable material. A mechanism ensuring a more pure pursuit of knowledge is something we feel is worth defending. That the university has chosen to do so is something we applaud.

Yet concerns remain. Despite a promise to increase salaries for some staff, McGill’s budget promises to cut expenses as bought-out tenure-track professors will be swapped with “replacements … hired at a lower salary and benefit costs (pension contributions) will likely be lower.” As living costs rise, McGill is pushing academic salaries down. This hardly seems like the way to attract the best professors, who after 10 years or more of post-secondary education are, love of the trade notwithstanding, probably looking for an income on which to build a comfortable life.

While the Tribune is encouraged by clarifications from McGill administrators, it is concerned that vague and evasive wording in the budget has created such confusion. The McGill Daily’s claim that academic renewal is “essentially institutionalizing professor turnover,” is dramatic, but not entirely inaccurate. The budget aims to increase the absolute number of tenure-track professors to 1,636 by 2016. After that, it calls for a “stabilisation” of this number, even as it asks faculties to “stabilise or increase (where capacity exists) undergraduate enrolment, and significantly grow research graduate enrolment in the short to medium term.” The only ways of reconciling the goals of stabilised tenure-track staff and increased enrolment are by increasing class sizes—asking staff to work more for their reduced wage—or by decreasing the proportional number of tenure-track professors as contract lecturers or graduate students are hired to handle the boom of students. Both of these options threaten the quality of education at McGill. The administration must be clearer regarding how long it intends to maintain its target level of tenure-track positions, and needs to adapt to changing demographic situations.

There are many elements of the McGill budget worth applauding, but the Tribune has reservations about certain ambiguities as well as about the pay reductions that the budget outlines all too clearly. McGill’s budget deficit is a real concern. But as an academic institution it is at least supposed to have ideals above corporate efficiency. So long as McGill administration’s chief goal is fostering the best possible academic environment, and so long as its actions are consistent with that aim, it will be pursuing a goal the Tribune can endorse.

On his blog for the New Republic, the neo-liberal magazine he owns and edits, Marty Peretz recently wrote of American Muslims: “I wonder whether I need honour these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.” This shocking and seemingly racist line, which he later apologized for, is an example of how the always-difficult debate on the role of Islam in American culture has recently become even more difficult, and more uncomfortable.

One of his critics, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, argued that Peretz’s statement is reflective of “how venomous and debased the discourse about Islam has become.” That one sentence indeed did not help Peretz make his argument, which was otherwise well thought out.

In the blog post, Peretz argued that there has never been any serious condemnation by Muslims of the heinous actions of some of their co-religionists. He pointed out that when Muslims kill other Muslims in the Middle East and Africa, few Muslims publicly speak up in criticism.

Peretz was roundly criticized for his line, “Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims,” for which he did not apologize. Peretz also wrote: “I want to believe that Muslims are traumatized by the unrelieved murders in Islamic lands … This intense epidemic of slaughter has been going on for nearly a decade and a half … without protest, without anything.” This is in contrast to when, for instance, the Israeli intelligence agency killed a Hamas operative in Dubai a few months ago, and the world was outraged and protested vehemently. There seems, to both Peretz and to me, to be a double standard at play here.

Kristof, who called Peretz’s statement racist, said the “suggestion that Muslims don’t value human life is … a slur.” But describing the sad state of affairs does not mean he is encouraging it. Peretz wasn’t making a racist comment, but simply noting the absence of free discourse and open dialogue in Muslim societies. If Muslims do disagree with the actions of their fellow Muslims, they seem to stay mostly quiet about it, whether out of fear or just ignorance.

My main problem with Peretz is that he tends to generalize. He writes that there has not been a “single demonstration aimed at Muslim or Arab interests or their commitments to foreign governments and, more likely, to foreign insurgencies and quite alien philosophies.” It is unacceptable for a prominent writer to generalize that all Muslims have the same views and loyalties. Throughout the article, he uses specific, cherry-picked examples to indicate that all Muslims act and think alike, which only reflects his ignorance about Muslims, and especially Muslim-American culture.

This generalization can have consequences beyond inaccurate reporting. Newsweek quoted a Taliban operative who argued that by virtue of the protests against the “mosque” near Ground Zero, “America is doing us a big favour. It’s providing us with more recruits, donations, and popular support.”

The kind of extremism exhibited by the mosque’s opponents—and by Peretz at his worst—only supports the cause of Islamic extremists, and undermines those American Muslims who might otherwise be more confident in speaking out against their violent brethren.

Unlike some students at McGill, I have been largely satisfied with Heather Munroe-Blum as our Principal. Her administration has brought common sense and innovation to a university defined by bureaucracy and hierarchy. The recent creation of the Service Point, for example, is a welcome change.

More than her peers, Munroe-Blum has advocated strongly for tuition reform in Quebec. She lobbied aggresively for this in McGill’s recent report to the Quebec National Assembly, and she has been taking flak for the decision, which however was made correctly, and has been a long time coming.

Quebec has simply never had a sustainable tuition model. To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, the state eventually runs out of other people’s money. A financial double-edged sword threatens McGill’s potential—a government whose contribution is consistently weak, and also students’ demands that tuition rates be frozen at artificially low levels.

The Quebec model is loved within this province, and despised in the rest of Canada. This is because it is paid for, in part, by the nearly $8 billion in equalization payments that flow to Quebec City from Ottawa every year.

There is no solid evidence that the Quebec model improves education. In fact, Quebec lags behind Canada for proportions of young people holding a university degree. Quebec’s graduation rate lies well below the OECD average. Meanwhile, Quebec has had the lowest rate of increase of those holding degrees in the entirety of Canada since 1992.

At the expense of quality, infrastructure, and competitiveness, Quebec’s universities have suffered from obscenely low tuition rates that don’t even serve their intended purpose of improving access to post-secondary education.

The problem is only compounded by the grant system; at least, what can barely be described as a grant system. While Quebec falls safely in the middle of Canadian provinces in terms of general operating grants per student, it does not compensate for artificially low tuition. The result is that Quebec falls chronically below the funding per student of nearly all other North American jurisdictions.

The Quebec model is dying, and will probably not survive the deficit cutting that will define government legislation for the foreseeable future.

I would never argue for the American tuition model. Munroe-Blum is certainly not making that argument. Her suggestion is reasonable: raise tuition to the Canadian average, where more students are going to school despite the increased cost of education. By increased cost, I do not mean to a level that will suddenly force low-income students out of university. That hasn’t happened in Ontario, Alberta, or British Columbia. It will not happen in Quebec. We must balance the affordability of our education with a simple reality: someone has to pay for it, and if we don’t, the government won’t either.

So I give this message to Munroe-Blum: soldier on. You are rattling sabres that other Quebec universities refuse to. In the end, it will give this university the resources it needs to achieve its potential. These are sabres that need to be rattled.