It&#0146s hard not to notice the author&#0146s credentials. David Laidler is the Bank of Montreal Professor at the University of Western Ontario, as well as being the Canadian Bankers Association Scholar at the C.D. Howe Institute.

Some people might conclude from this that the guy&#0146s simply in the pocket of the big banks. It&#0146s hard to know where people get these wild ideas.

Laidler&#0146s study, published last week by the C.D. Howe Institute, is about the funding crisis in our universities, and Laidler&#0146s credentials highlight the crisis nicely: Government under-funding has left universities increasingly dependent on the business sector.

Hence we now have professorships that are paid for by corporate donors, and professors, like Laidler, who walk around bearing the name of their corporate donor, not unlike buses with ads for Pepsi all over them.

It seems intuitively obvious where this will lead. If we oblige our universities to rely on business for its funding, business will end up with increased clout over the form and content of our universities.

This isn&#0146t to say that there&#0146s a simple, direct relationship between how much money corporations spend on universities and how much influence they exercise.

I&#0146d be willing to bet the entire sum I&#0146m getting paid to write this column, for instance, that the Bank of Montreal Professor at the University of Western Ontario does not have to submit everything he writes to the Bank of Montreal&#0146s corporate headquarters for approval.

But I&#0146d also be prepared to bet about the same amount that, should the chair of the Bank of Montreal happen upon a copy of Laidler&#0146s study &#0151 or anything else Laidler has written for that matter &#0151 he&#0146d find little to quarrel with.

Indeed, Laidler has long used his perch as an economics professor to advocate for causes dear to the banking community: wiping out inflation and ensuring the autonomy of the Bank of Canada from control by Parliament.

The well-endowed Bank of Montreal professorship seems like an appropriate reward, and one that would be unlikely to fall into the hands of, say, an academic concerned about ownership concentration in Canada&#0146s financial sector.

Those of us not in the banking sector might feel better if our universities &#0151 which lie close to the centre of our cultural and political life &#0151 were funded collectively by us as a community, not by private interests with their own agendas to advance.

We&#0146re told we as a society can no longer afford such public financing. Laidler argues that the best bet now &#0151 in addition to encouraging ever more corporate donations &#0151 is to pass a much bigger part of the burden of financing universities over to students.

Like others on the right, Laidler wants to deregulate tuition fees, and he doesn&#0146t seem concerned about how high fees might rise. After all, students would be able to borrow the money. They could accumulate debt. No big deal.

This keenness to use debt as the method of financing is odd. Laidler and other right-wingers tend to get apoplectic at the suggestion that governments should go into debt, when necessary, to finance things that society needs &#0151 like hospitals, schools, universities, roads, parks, libraries, etc.

But this aversion to debt quickly disappears in the case of students. When it comes to piling debt on young people, the attitude seems to be: Load &#0146em up. How &#0146bout some more?

In fact, there would be no need for governments to go into debt at all to properly finance our universities. We have the resources; we are richer as a society than we&#0146ve ever been. The problem is that the financial elite insists on lower taxes, particularly for itself, rather than public investment.

Laidler points to Canada&#0146s slowdown in productivity growth as the cause of the decline in public investment. But if slower economic growth forces us to cut back, why not cut personal consumption rather than scrimp on education?

How does a sensible family handle its household budget when money is tight? Does it insist on upgrading the family car to a Lexus and buying a bigger gas barbecue for the cottage, and only then, if there&#0146s something left over, pay to educate the kids?

Transferring the financial burden to students is based on the notion that education is really just a benefit to the person receiving it. Gone is the concept that the university performs a vital public role as a centre of critical thought, a place where the prevailing wisdom of the day is constantly being challenged, a forum where the accepted dogmas and orthodoxies of our times are subjected to rigorous analytical scrutiny.

Laidler tries to put a positive spin on loading up students with mounds of debt, making it seem like a form of empowerment. Since they&#0146ll be the principal source of funding, he suggests, students will get to make some key decisions. (Presumably they&#0146ll get to choose who will be the Bank of Montreal Professor, how much she&#0146ll get paid, and what courses she&#0146ll teach. Right?)

The suggestion is that if students want a university free of corporate control, they&#0146re going to have to pay for it themselves.

But why should we put the burden on students &#0151 whose financial situations are often precarious &#0151 to ensure that our central, cultural and intellectual institutions are something more than centers, where one is free to argue fearlessly for lower corporate taxes, to defend the right of the banks to merge and to insist that global capitalism is making the world a better place?

Linda McQuaig

Journalist and best-selling author Linda McQuaig has developed a reputation for challenging the establishment. As a reporter for The Globe and Mail, she won a National Newspaper Award in 1989...