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What Can Quebec Teach Us? A Preliminary Analysis of the University as a Site of Struggle

What Can Quebec Teach Us? A Preliminary Analysis of the University as a Site of Struggle

Though the basic course of events in Quebec over the past several months has been widely reported, I want to address two questions that might be of greater interest to those struggling in and around universities elsewhere. First, I want to look at how the Quebec student strike articulates, on the one hand, the conflict and interplay between the socialist aspirations and corporatist realities of a public university system, and on the other, the pressures put on that system by the dreams of dollar bills floating through the heads of administrators and the “austerian” belt-tightening of governments. Second, I want to ask, very briefly, whether this analysis has any traction outside of Quebec.