To the Editor:

In the Bible (Sirach 13.2), it's stated, "Do not keep company with people who are richer ... they will use you as long as they can profit from it."

Many years of cuts to post-secondary education have created a lot of changes for the worse. We all know about the decreased quality of education, reduced research potential and increased student debt. However, one important feature was overlooked: the abuse of universities by industry.

It is found in the exploitation of underpaid researchers, staff and graduate students, who are mostly well educated and also have families to support. By paying a third or a quarter of the market salary, a smart investor can hire a devoted graduate student who will work 10-14 hours a day, seven days a week.

In such a situation, even a huge donation of expensive equipment by the industry to enable university researchers to conduct experiments makes good business sense -- it's certainly not charity. There is no need for investors to build and staff their own labs with technicians, no need to pay the full price for a scientist who will work only 40 hours a week.

In one case that I know of, there were two former McGill graduates working for a high-tech company, which hired McGill students and staff for laborious tests and paid them two times less (before even four times less), than the going rate in professional industrial labs.

These company reps have used many tricks to get the job done as cheaply as possible -- such as the unauthorized use of labs and equipment, as well as loosely treated oral deals. They knew exactly how university people are paid and knew how to obtain anything they wanted. After all, these graduates were once taken advantage of themselves in similar situations when they studied here. We should not be angry with them, because they are relatively young and starting a new career. However, the sad fact is that, once created, this abusive vicious circle is difficult to stop.

In another case, a freshly hired graduate student from a big company tried to impress his bosses by cheaply solving their technological problem. He made a short visit to his former university department. After deceiving the lab to get the most important results for his company in advance, he then downplayed the whole idea and offered 10 times less payment than professional labs would charge. Fortunately, his bosses were more civilized and after being fully informed, arranged the proper payment.

Many professors could provide more examples of such abuse on an even grander scale. We would hear about many extremely well-paid industrial and governmental "bozos" from research divisions, who use cheaply subcontracted university "slave work" to credit their own activity.

Ironically, the university promotes these situations as success stories.

It appears that much discussion in the press about universities' problems has been one sided. There has been too much focus on financial problems and no words about the suffering people behind them.

The cuts to education were implemented by top bureaucrats from the Ministry of Education. Along with the top administrators at universities, they have been careful to avoid harming their own privileged positions. Layoffs and attrition have focused on staff at the lower levels.

We must also be aware that these university and provincial bureaucrats are a priori, not the best advocates to win the hearts of public opinion. With their hard-won position and fat salaries they have more in common with the businesspeople who run short-term, profits-oriented, competitive industries than with real teaching and research pioneers, who are only interested in advancing knowledge.

That is why, after the efforts of these bureacrats in government and universities, we mostly hear a mumbling noise of worn-out catchwords in the mass media about our sector's problems -- fruits of their neatly packed reports given to the hands of lazy journalists. The educational apparatchiks are only in pain, because with shrinking funds they are losing manipulative power.

Now, it is time for the mentioned pioneers in teaching and research to speak out. They possess an emanating magic power of persuasiveness and a sharp perception of the situation after mastering perfectionism in even the most narrow fields of science -- reaching the level of gods. Only they can present convincing examples showing the decline of our previously leading technologies in telecommunication, metallurgy, pharmacology or mining and genuinely express their own feelings -- the general public needs an intuitive understanding of the whole involved complexity. It should be combined with a sound economical analysis of hitherto and future losses caused by such a decline.

We should be released from the arms of the morally and ethically ambiguous "art of lobbying" as glorified by some people such as Mr. R. Rabinovitch in the last issue of the Reporter. The trips to Ottawa, the gala dinners there ( see the last issue of the McGill News) and flirting with politicians like Bouchard at any occasion are too expensive, express a social particularism and represents comfortable status quo policy.

Our goal should be to at least double the percentage of the global budget for education -- not only to maintain the previous level.

Slawomir Poplawski
Technician, Department of Mining and Metallurgical Engineering