After a nearly 4 hour debate on a proposed joint venture with Study Group International, the University of Windsor Senate voted against the plan to create a private, for-profit pathways program for international students.
The vote is a blow to SGI’s ambition to establish a greater presence in Canada, but a victory for faculty and students who campaigned against what they called the “outsourcing” of education.
However, despite the rejection by Senate, the SGI proposal isn’t dead yet. The vote this week was on establishing a joint venture with the school of business. Voting on three other motions involving SGI deals with the faculties of computer science, science, and arts and social science were postponed until March.
Congratulations to faculty and students at Windsor for this victory and best of luck for the future votes at computer science, science and arts and social science.
There’s an important lesson here about Senates. In the UK, they have been downgraded and increasingly disempowered but they still remain of tremendous importance in defeating this kind of project as it’s hard for managements to proceed in the face of such manifest academic opposition.
Keep us posted!
I worked for Kaplan on their private online university, on one occasions a student submitted a cut and apste of a web page that wasn’t even formatted propery for an assessed assignemnt but when I gave them 0 I was told to remark it at 40%.
I quit, keep these shysters out of education.
Most international students for Windsor Business is from China. If the Chinese public, the schools and students know windsor “sell” them to a private company for the huge tuition they paid, I think windsor business will soon out of china market. Stupid to think only the money!