Concordia student activist Yves Engler was removed from the university’s downtown Montreal campus yesterday by police and charged with trespassing. Police were ready for trouble as riot squads waited nearby in the nineteen police vehicles sent to escort Engler from campus.

An elected student representative, Engler was informed that he could not set foot on Concordia property for the next twenty-four hours at minimum. Whether he will be expelled remains to be seen.

What did Engler do? As vice-president of communications for Concordia’s Student Union, he was, well, doing his job. During the day yesterday, Engler distributed literature on campus about an Americas-wide anti-FTAA protest that will be taking place this Halloween as the hemisphere’s leaders meet for the latest round of free-trade negotiations.

Engler’s actions violate a ban on free speech imposed by universityrector Frederick Lowy in the wake of confrontations between police andprotesters that forced the cancellation of former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s public address in September.

Although the aspect of the ban that has attracted the most attention has been the complete moratorium on all Middle-East-related speech, it has also meant the complete prohibition of the distribution of any kind of information in the busiest corridors on campus.

Engler’s goal was to inform and persuade students of the dangers posed by corporateglobalization to public education. Ironically, the show of force by the university administration was a concrete example of how corporate power can silence debate.

* * *

What at first appeared to be an example of tension between Concordiastudent groups on either side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has nowtaken on the character of a debate over the privatization of education. Onone side stand university rector Frederick Lowy, Concordia’s corporatepartners and the school’s Board of Governors. On the other, the ConcordiaStudent Union, the University Senate and faculty.

In a recent landmark decision, the University Senate called on the Boardof Governors to lift the indefinite ban in effect on campus. TheOctober 4 Senate decision is in direct opposition to the September 18resolution made by the university’s Board of Governors. You see, the majority of Board of Governors seats are reserved for the “community at large,” but almost all these community members come from Montreal’s business community. Most Senate seats are filled by elected Concordia faculty and students.

Although the Senate is the highest academic decision-making body in theuniversity, it cannot repeal the decision of the governing board becausethe latter has the ultimate authority on university management.

On October 16, the morning before Engler’s arrest, the Board ofGovernors decided to ignore the advice of students and faculty.Extra-curricular discussions of the Middle-East and informationdistribution in the central Hall Building lobby would still be prohibited, whilethe rector would retain his power to summarily expel students who violatethe extraordinary rules.

* * *

The battle of wills now pitting Concordia’s corporate partners againstteachers and students is a sign of the times. According to the most recentStatistics Canada data, almost twenty per cent of funding to Canadianuniversities now comes from private donations and the sale of services. Ifthose corporate partners’ faith is shaken, a university has a lot toloose.

Money talks, and so it seems, at Concordia, students can’t.

It breaks down like this: When Rector Lowy declared the campus-wide ban, heexplained the decision was motivated by concern for campus safety in the wake of the September confrontation between police and protesters. Under public scrutiny, however, another rationale for the ban has emerged. There may be a more basic, more vulgar andmore believable motive for the university’s drastic actions: cold, hard cash.

Concordia administrators have denied that any external forces have influenced the university’s decision-making process. But Marcel Dupuis, the university’s director of corporate and foundation giving, conceded in the Montreal Gazette that “[d]onors and alumni are saying, ‘If you don’t get things in order, we’re pulling the funding.’”

Two years of sustained activism for Palestinian human rightshave taken their toll on corporate confidence in Concordia’sprofitability. Last year, students voted in a university-wide referendumto support U.N. condemnations of the state of Israel’s occupation ofPalestinian lands; the student union produced a controversial agenda thatcriticized Israel, Colombia and other U.S. allies; students have criticizedConcordia’s corporate partner Pratt & Whitney for supplying F16 engines tothe Israeli military; and there have been more large-scale demonstrationsagainst Israeli aggression than most other universities have had on anyissue.

The Netanyahu demonstration was only the last straw. Time to “get things in order.”

While corporations have been putting pressure on Concordia’s pocket book,other off-campus forces have been tugging at the university’sheartstrings. Rector Lowy has received hundreds of e-mails from around theworld urging him not to abandon a core value of public education — thetradition of free expression — including an official complaintfrom the Secretary General of Amnesty International Canada.

Ironically enough, though perhaps not surprisingly, the decision to ban public discussion on the Middle East has made it the only thing that people at Concordia now talk about. Or, at least, it was the only thing people were talking about until Engler was charged.

The student union has been planning for several months to take part in the anti-FTAA action on October 31, but campus activists have been occupied by the internal dispute over freedom of speech on campus. Engler’s civil disobedience represents an attempt to bridge the gap between the two issues.

“Arresting me for exercising my right to free speech would look really bad on the university administration,” Engler told me just hours before his arrest.That afternoon, police had visited the activist as he sat at his information kiosk with dozens of students and a CBC camera operator looking on. No action was taken at the time.

Although Engler was happy to be a free man, he noted that, had the forces of order pushed their hand, “it would create great publicity for our fight against the FTAA and for public education.”

After Engler packed up his kiosk, and after the 6 o’clock news, the forces of order pushed their hand. Police entered the student union offices to remove the vice-president from his place of work.

Although silencing debate may be good for attracting private funding, student union president Sabine Friesinger observes that it has had a “negative impact onall student life.” Many students are worried about being disciplined under strict new rules. Friesinger hopes that the scramble to placate private donors willultimately backfire on the administration, pushing students to mobilizeagainst the FTAA and in favour of publicly funded education. “If we had more public funds,” she says, “we could have all the debates we wanted.”

Debates, on any issue, at a university? What a revolutionary idea.