The recent case of Arthur Porter comes as little surprise to those who have some sense of how McGill, and other big universities in general, recruit well-known and top-ranking professors. Benefits such as large, publicly undisclosed salaries and low-interest loans are a perk if you are a valued academic signing a contract with McGill. For Porter, this meant nearly $100,000 on top of his public $256,000 salary—for teaching he may not have done—and access to a $500,000 loan at one per cent interest, given explicitly for real estate deals.
These benefits are not at all indicative of a poorly-working administration, or of one individual’s corrupt attempt to steal from taxpayers and students. One of McGill’s major causes for overspending, according to a Financial Fact Sheet put out by the Office of the Provost, is its “expenses associated with [the] recruitment and retention of top academics.” Porter is an example of how this monetized and rankings-oriented university efficiently bureaucratizes the movement of wealth from taxpayers and students to those who can give the university what it needs: namely, another rankings boost.
Porter is an anomaly in that he has not fully paid McGill back; but he is not an anomaly in the sense that, if one has a certain degree of prestige, it is far from unusual to have back-room deals where extra money can be secured from university coffers. This back-room stinks of an ‘old boys’ club,’ and it tells of a university structure built with the intention of making it easy for staff members—or more precisely, staff who have some value to rankings and are therefore considered worth retaining—to rely on taxpayers and tuition to get as much as they think they need for their own private use. The obsession with rankings institutionalizes friendliness towards corruption in the form of self-serving and non-transparent transfers of revenue from taxpayers and students to prestigious individuals. This strays far from the ideal of a public university.
49 per cent of McGill’s budget comes from Ministère de l’Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport (MELS), and another 28 per cent from student tuition payments. 33 per cent of students at McGill receive some type of government aid, mainly in the form of loans with interest. Without doubt, even the loneliest student reading this has at least one friend using student loans, which have rates that vary between five and eight per cent—if not more. Student loans will prove a burden for years, and perhaps decades after graduation, depending on one’s job prospects. This means that those using student loans will be paying proportionally far more for borrowing than Porter would have had to pay on his one per cent McGill-approved property loan. While Porter’s high income would disqualify his children for student loans, Porter himself qualified for borrowing from McGill’s taxpayer and tuition revenue for his housing acquisitions—borrowing for which he was already approved from banks. Such is the price of “top academics.”
The best professors are by no means always the most visible. Yet renowned figures certainly bring the most public attention; and that, for McGill and other large universities, is the most important factor. Porter, after all, may not even have taught the courses he was paid for at McGill; it seems fair to say that he was being paid his extra salaries, not for his teaching, but for his public prestige. The ideals of liberal education—free and critical thought —serve not as guides, but as rhetorical devices in McGill’s obsessive pursuit of the preservation of its prestige.
The institutionalization of easy money is disgusting, but not unexpected in a highly capital- and rankings-oriented university that must bend the rules and hide some professors’ salaries in order to stay ahead. While students are incurring debts that will likely chain them for decades, well-paid Arthur Porters get whatever they need, because they have ‘real value’ to the university.
McGill wants more money every year—in part to keep up with the demand for continually growing back-room contract benefits. This may very well be what you want university to be: a place focused on recruitment for rankings, and not for teaching; on the prestigious McGill brand, rather than on free thinking; on back-room deals, rather than openness and solidarity with each other. You are the students; you can shrug your shoulders, and do as you like. But don’t be surprised at this instance of corruption; for if getting ahead is the only important thing, what else would you expect?
