The other working title was My Money My Choice, but I decided to be a tad witty.
This is hopefully my last post on MVP :P (hopeful but not optimistic). I will try to walk you through my decision making process I how I decided to vote no (when I get to vote) for this referendum.
1) $6!? That more than we spend on either newspaper, Legal aid clinical, counselling service, ANY of the student life services, zoom, accessibility fund, student advocate, or career services. So is it more important than these? Does MVP deserve more of my money that any of these services that I could easily walk into and benefit from? I pick up the fulcrum each week.
2) The whole question of does the program even work. I will be honest. I do not know much about MVP. I haven't researched it or read a ton of articles about the initiative. But I will tell you what I did do. I looked to our very own International Development students. I hate reading about development, so I am very grateful that we have students on our campus who will subject themselves to that stuff :). And I have heard a lot of criticisms towards MVP from DVM students. So if some DEVELOPMENT students dislike this DEVELOPMENT program, that's enough for me.
3) The irony. The 'YES' committee clearly supports positive liberty (Isaiah Berlin if you want the standard definitions). They feel as though the individuals living in Sub-Saharan Africa deserve to be able to become rational creatures and that it is up to outside sources (outside of themselves, either through the state or beyond) to force them to become developed (rationally). Negative liberty is the freedom from something, so freedom from having the police walk into your house and arrest you for no reason. Freedom from 100% taxes or freedom from oppression.
Yet, on our campus, the 'YES' committee is clearly infringing on my Positive Liberty. I have the freedom to develop my own rational choices. So perhaps this is more an infringement on my negative liberty (but no less ironic). Should I not be able to make my own rational choices?
4) It seems to be the 'YES' committee vs everyone in this debate. That tells me that there are only small pockets of support. Even if people don’t know about MVP, or aren’t informed students, that’s not their problem. If MVP is such an amazing program and will save thousands of lives and everyone should be doing it, wouldn’t we all be running up with more than $6? But that is not the case. Will forcing students to donate to the project immediately make them support international development projects in general? Nope. Will it make them care? Nope. Will it increase their passion for ending extreme poverty? Nope.
5) What would it take for me to support MVP? A well-known total opt-out possibility might (might) do it. But really, this should be an opt-in (like fund-raising!). What of the Grade 12 student right now. Do they have a choice in this?
6) The benefits for us? There have been claims of direct benefits for us as a student body. For one, the ‘Yes’ committee claims that it will open up internship opportunities. They say 1 or 2 per semester. WOW! 1 or 2, and over 30 000 people pay into it. Want to go on an internship? Voting ‘YES’ won’t make a difference in your chances, since there are many opportunities already, that we don’t get forced into support financially. Some guy I’ve never heard of is gonna come to campus and give a lecture that I wouldn’t go to. Yeah, I care about that. And I go to events on campus, but only those that appeal to me.
7) They claim that the initiative is sweeping across university campus’s all over the country, but the person who said that listed 4 (including uOttawa!).
Time to stand up and say NO!
And if it passes? Someone wrote in our of the discussions that there was all this passion around the NO CFS campaign, but now you hear none of it, and people seem okay with it. So why fight this? If it passes there is nothing we can do. Sit around and complain? Well that will get you nowhere. I will not be happy giving my $6 and will support the first efforts to mount a referendum to reverse the MVP levy.
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1) Who cares? It's $6 on top of the thousands we already pay. With an increase like that, it's not like we're going to go hungry or make much of a difference to our bottom lines. For us it's a fast food meal, a pint of beer or a notebook for class. For someone else, $6 might mean a whole hell of a lot more.
ReplyDelete2) Like any other proscriptive discipline, there is a lot of debate in the DVM community about which means are best to promote development. Just because there is debate or doubt from some people doesn't make the entire venture of the MVP worthless. No plan for development will ever be perfect or fail to spark controversy.
3) If this gives anyone a chance to escape extreme poverty, I doubt they'll care whether or not we're infringing on their "positive liberty" or not. Furthermore, it's not like we haven't been infringing on the ability of the people in the 3rd world to behave as autonomous actors for a long time anyway. And if all of a sudden this manifests itself in a possibly beneficial way through projects like this one (instead of, say, in the form agricultural subsidies or tied aid), why should we care?
5 & 6) If people are unwilling to actively engage in the attempted betterment of their world, I don't think there's anything wrong with coercing their participation through fee-levies like this.
7) Should philanthropy have direct "benefits for us"?
I seem to have forgotten about #4. But I have to run! See you in class in about 15 minutes.
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