The themes, discussions and assignments in a majority of my classes at Ohio University all have some components pertaining to social inequality and stratification. In Cultural Anthropology, my notes read: there is a 70 percent chance of staying in lower economic class if you were born there; an essay prompt in American Literature asks me to “make sense of ethical systems” that pertain to colonization; and this week I gave a presentation on Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. My question then becomes, if the curriculum (albeit in humanities) at OU is asking me to question the status quo — to ask questions pertaining to social inequality, inaccessibility and stratification — then why does the cost of attending the university literally prevent people from engaging in the process of critical inquiry? There is discord between what is being taught at the university and what is being expected from the student to attend the university.
The university expects $22,068 per year from freshmen. Included in tuition is the mandate to purchase a meal-plan (the lowest, Traditional 10, costing $3,581 per year) and pay into a general fee (estimated $1,256 for Academic Year 14). The biggest chunk of the general fee money, 34 percent in fiscal year 2013, was used to pay for “Intercollegiate Athletics and Operations.” That would be approximately $427 and would take around 53 hours to pay off washing dishes in the Nelson dish-room.
Equally frustrating is the increase in tuition yearly and simultaneous increase of compensation for administrators. This year, a proposal was signed to raise tuition by 1.5 percent, raise fees for campus housing by 3.5 percent and raise meal plan cost by 1 percent. According to The Post, 17 percent of the increase in tuition went to pay raises for OU’s top 10 highest-paid employees. McDavis received $118,730 combined pay raise and bonus this year (last year, tuition increased by 1.6 percent and he received a $97,050 bonus). An increase in tuition means an increase in administrators’ compensation.
Last April during campaign season, I remember spewing out facts similar to these to students on campus and us uniting in our bafflement, frustration, anger, and fear. This fueled the election of RESTART into Student Senate. Senate passed a resolution on Oct. 8 demanding a living wage for student workers, no more tuition hikes and an end to “gross excess in compensation” for top administrators. If the student body is still as frustrated, confused and frightened by the undemocratic nature of the university, then we need to pick the discussion back up and rally behind these issues. We must be active. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire writes that “an act of violence occurs when one party does not allow the other to think critically.” We deserve to have the opportunity to think critically without being subjected to poverty wages and lifelong debt.
Madeleine Toerne is a student at Ohio University.
