We don’t need no education

Photo by Vinni123 via Flickr

The overwhelming majority of CEGEP students returned to class recently, and everyone’s been holding their collective breath over whether university students would follow suit.

Students at Université de Montréal and UQAM headed began classes today to finish their winter semester, only to have them disrupted by the protests of some of their classmates. La Presse has a photo of students wearing scarves on their faces and red pins on their clothes. The UdeM administration called the cops, and seven protesters were arrested as a result. The article says only two people attended a class in which 100 students are normally registered, while others were on hand to observe the scene (and tweet about it, of course).

The same La Presse article mentions that members of UQAM’s social studies department voted on Aug. 23 to uphold the faculty’s strike mandate, though only 703 of the department’s 4,600 members bothered to show up to vote — and only 60 per cent of those who showed voted to uphold the strike. Ain’t democracy grand!

Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois seized the opportunity to remind students that a vote for the PQ is a vote to abolish the much-hated Bill 78. But will low voter turnout at the university level translate into low voter turnout at the provincial polls on Sept. 4? ■