Madam Minister Pascale Déry,
I learned with interest that, for you, the draconian bloodletting to which you have just subjected the CEGEPs—several are forced to cut their investment budgets by about half—is a matter of “sound management of public funds.” (That’s a mind-blowing formula that I can use the next time I teach euphemism in a class, thank you.)
I am not surprised by the rhetorical device, since I expect nothing more from your government than Orwellian phraseology, where the worsening decrepitude is transformed into an exercise in financial “health.” But it reminded me of a haunting short story by Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, which I have taught a few times. It begins with a rider approaching an isolated house in “a singularly dismal stretch of country,” and what is striking is that even before a slightly more detailed description of the mansion is given, Poe emphasizes the “sinking of soul” that overwhelms this character in front of the building: “There was an ice in the heart, a dejection, a malaise—an irremediable sadness of thought that no spur of the imagination could revive or push to the great.”
I know this feeling. I felt it when, returning after the summer break, I saw the CEGEP where I teach rise up before me, once one of the most beautiful in the network, now a half-disaster zone where the omnipresent fences have created a confusing labyrinth and where the canvases of the scaffolding seem to cover old ruins in places. One building was evacuated in a hurry last fall before being sealed. In the winter, when a second one is closed to gut its walls, many professors and students will be deported to a concrete box bordering the highway, two kilometres away, to finish atomizing the campus and ensure that people frequent it without almost ever crossing paths.
Oh, don’t shed tears. I’m not going through a mandatory passage through pathos to beg for the pity of others. But don’t take out your Excel files or a bland “dashboard” to try to stun us with an avalanche of figures. For several years now, in the thinking about education that is ours – and especially yours, let’s be frank – what is being lost is precisely what Poe understood perfectly and what many of us teachers in our society feel, namely that a place of education, a home, a space of belonging, is experienced as an affective reality before being perceived in its “objective” reality.
In Poe’s story, the House of Usher is bordered by the “still mirror” of a pond in which it is reflected, a discreet sign revealing that the building is double, half stone, half dream. And what wears you down, in the long run, when you are caught in a decaying environment, is the certainty that there is no one up there, where you are, to defend the part of the dream and to believe that a spur of the imagination can “push to the great.”
What wears you down is the certainty that the goal is not to raise all wills toward a common greatness, but to save the furniture, little more, so that the scale of correctness triumphs on all conceivable levels. Toilets that are no longer repaired? That’s still correct. Help centers with budgets slashed to the point that they can hardly hire tutors anymore? That’s still correct. Dilapidated labs? Unusable swimming pools? Atrophied library budgets? Correct, correct, correct. Tell me, in this game of austerity Jenga, is the goal to try to remove as many blocks as possible without the tower collapsing?
Don’t wait for the “barely visible cracks” to widen until the CEGEPs collapse “in a tumultuous crash like the voice of a thousand cataracts,” as happens in the fatal denouement of Poe’s short story. In the name of the most basic common decency, reconsider this decision and find, somewhere in your being (and in the public treasury), “the spur of imagination” that will once again make our institutions the expression of a desire for global altitude.