Recently, I heard something from Quebec students which I think was a bit of a breakthrough.

Outside Quebec, the discourse of student tuition protests tends to be of the “gimme, gimme, gimme” variety: students should pay less, and government (or “the rich,” or “corporations,” or whatever) should pay more. They’re arguing for a straight resource transfer, regardless of how regressive it is. But last week in Quebec, students started singing a slightly different tune. Pointing to expensive new capital investments at l’Universite de Montreal, they suggested that tuition hikes wouldn’t be needed if only universities weren’t spending so much in the first place.

Ignore for the moment student leaders’ fallacious arguments about the detrimental effects of this particular tuition hike on access. Focus instead on the fact students – or some of them, anyway – are apparently prepared to settle for a less well-funded system if it means keeping prices low. They aren’t necessarily asking for more money from elsewhere; rather, they’re asking for a lower-cost delivery model for higher education.

What’s wrong with that?

I like this line of discussion because it implies that at least some Quebec students understand that there are real trade-offs involved in tuition fee discussions. And they certainly have a point that no one asked them whether they wanted Quebec –like the rest of Canada – to adopt a fairly high-cost model of higher education.

This is a debate worth having. For instance, why not cut professors’ research load by half and save the 20% of their salaries this represents? That would keep teaching loads intact (which is what students want) while delivering about $350 million in savings. Cancel the Science Pavillion at U de M – that’s another $350 million in savings. That’s enough to cancel the tuition hike and have something left over to reduce fees even further.

One would, of course, be left with a university system which is substantially less cutting-edge and substantially less attractive to research-oriented academics. But would that substantially affect undergraduates? Of all the many good things our country’s decade-long higher education spending spree has brought, it’s hard to say that improved undergraduate education would be anywhere near the top of the list. So maybe cutting it wouldn’t make it any worse.

I don’t necessarily agree with all of this line of argument, but it is several orders of magnitude more valid than the vacuously self-righteous tripe students are peddling about accessibility. The dialogue could certainly have value: students might learn something about how universities are run, and universities might learn more about what really matters to students.

This is a rare moment of clarity in the tuition debate. It would be a shame to waste it.