For the past year, Carleton University’s senior administration has been in talks to outsource international recruitment and education to an Australian-based corporation called Navitas. Navitas is a private educational company whose role is to increase international student recruitment by offering a transitional year to international students who don’t meet the entrance requirements for first year studies at a Canadian university.
Navitas rents space and often course work, lectures and other resources from the university and uses those resources to teach international students English and whatever other skills they lack to get into the university where they are being hosted.
These international students, while studying at Carleton, are not Carleton students like you and I. They are not members of student associations, nor are the teachers necessarily Carleton professors who are protected by their faculty union.
One of the main arguments used by administration representatives has been that Navitas would allow us to globalize our campus. Navitas would function out of its own building, segregating students from each other. Students of Navitas would not engage with other Carleton students, or participate in Carleton community events, clubs or societies.
How can one possibly assume that this corporation would globalize our campus if it is going to segregate international students? Having international students present in classrooms with domestic students is what allows students from various backgrounds to learn about their fellow classmates.
Year after year, we have seen the further privatization of our campus by higher tuition fees, corporate sponsors, and businesses like Aramark. Now, the possibility of Navitas looms near; this is nothing to be proud of at a public university.
It is no surprise that a university would opt for the possibility of bringing in international students who pay more than double the amount in tuition fees than domestic students. The short term promises of a cut of Navitas’ tuition fees without having to worry about recruiting or educating those students seem tempting.
However, the lure of easy money has not worked out so well at other Canadian universities. The “success” of Navitas at Simon Fraser University is often touted as the reason that we should bring this corporation on to our campus.
We need to ask ourselves: What other schools’ student experience has this company benefited in Canada? I know the answer to this: none.
The University of Manitoba is the second university to bring in Navitas and it has proven to be anything but beneficial to students or faculty. The president of Uof M’s student union, Heather Laube, responded to an article written in the Ottawa Citizen concerning Carleton’s Navitas recruitment on Oct. 16, and said “Several academic departments and programs have refused to participate with Navitas, citing concerns about the academic freedom of teachers hired by Navitas and the privatization of education.
Office and teaching space on our campus has been allocated to Navitas, displacing university staff, students and faculty. Navitas has consistently tried to offload their student services costs onto others, whether that be the undergraduate students’ union or the [U of M] itself.”
The University of Windor’s senate recently shut down a proposal to bring Navitas onto their campus, and the Dalhousie Faculty Union in Nova Scotia has been extremely critical of any attempts to bring Navitas onto their campus.
Each and every Carleton student should take these concerns seriously before our campus catches the “Navitasism.”
Email the president of the university and make your concerns heard.
This is your campus, and we need to keep it that way. Domestic and international students should be able to learn under one roof, in the same classroom, learning from each other’s experiences and knowledge. Let’s not create a two-tier education system at Carleton.