Students come to university to learn, but only so much can be learned from a textbook. Active, engaged learning happens in the classroom when professors get to know students – their interests and their goals. In this new video from OCUFA, Ontario students talk about how their professors have helped them succeed. Their stories illustrate the importance of public funding, small class sizes, and good jobs for ensuring faculty have the time to support their students outside of class.
This video addresses some important issues. Mentorship is the ostensible focus, but the real issue is the reluctance of university administrations to hire new tenure-track faculty. Administrations act like for-profit businesses whose sole desire is to minimize cost and maximize profit. They do this even though Ontario universities are NFP organizations which have particular requirements, one of which is the education of our students. The Ford government’s penny-pinching with respect to support of the education sector is the cause of the failure of our universities to staff properly, which has negative ripple effects on proper funding of university programming.