Now the students say their protests are about more than tuition fees: they’re about “social justice” — two words that increasingly make me want to scream. The students’ agenda is to smash corporate power and dismantle capitalism. Their slogans are contemporary newspeak: the tar sands are bad, diversity is good; human rights are good, profit is bad; global warming is bad, equality is good. It is the usual litany of the progressive left.

While it would be pleasing to toss the students, or at least their leaders, into the nearest tailing pond, the CBC, the institution that brings us together and nightly explains to us who we are, takes the protesters very seriously indeed. As the CBC tells it, they are the hope for our future.

But former Parti Quebecois Premier Lucien Bouchard does not agree. In a letter to a Montreal newspaper, Bouchard said tuition hikes were required now to compensate for Quebec’s longstanding tuition freeze. “The scope of the disturbances currently being imposed on Quebec society bears no relationship to the impact of the government decision,” he wrote. When a former Pequiste premier aligns himself with the provincial Liberal government, I would conclude that, apart from the NDP and the CBC, public support for the students is practically non-existent.

And yet I would be sympathetic to the protesters if they directed their rage not against tuition fees but against the universities and colleges that levy them.  The truth is that these institutions are wasting the protesters’ time, formative years and even the meagre fees the universities exact. After half a lifetime spent teaching in Canadian universities, I have concluded that however low the fees are set, they are exorbitant for what is on offer.

Canadian universities are so lacking in academic standards and institutional integrity that their degrees are practically worthless. The faculty, who by day spout leftist ideology, should not be surprised when at night the protests turn violent. The average arts student pursuing a degree in sociology or queer studies can be excused for not knowing better, but the universities that indoctrinated them should not easily escape censure. The protesting students, for the most part, are simply pathetic; the state educational system that spawned them is culpable.

I wonder if some of the protesting students dimly sense this. Anyone who misled them into believing that our current educational shambles will equip them to thrive in the modern world is their real enemy, not Jean Charest. Graduates in gender studies will inevitably discover that society cares little for their theories. According to a recent Associated Press study more than half of recent American university graduates are either unemployed or working in jobs for which their university education was useless.

In Canada we spend lavishly on universities that have forgotten their raison d’etre. They teach useless subjects, often badly. They are run by careerists not scholars. They are hothouses of political correctness and conformist thinking. They lack financial accountability. If the students were protesting this, their cause would be worthy. If they resolved to change their university, they might be surprised to discover allies in unlikely places, including among faculty who are heartsick at what their university has become.

(Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at Western University.)