All Posts Tagged With: "project hero"

Scholarship for children of fallen Canadian soldiers is granted despite professors’ objections last March

(Editor’s note: This post has been updated below)

Hang on to your knickers, University of Regina professors. The first Hero Fund scholarship has been awarded.

Maritimer Matthew Mellish is the first recipient of the Hero Fund scholarship for children of fallen Canadian soldiers. Matthew’s father, Warrant Officer Frank Mellish, was killed in 2006 by Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan. Matthew has received $10,000 from the Canadian Hero Fund to cover tuition and books.

A nice break for a young student who has obviously had a rough ride, right?

Wrong, you imperial jingoist!

When a similar initiative, dubbed “Project Hero,” was being launched earlier in the spring and universities across Canada were signing on, a group of professors from the University of Regina released an “open letter” to the president of the university objecting to its participation in the scholarship program.

They wrote that the Hero Fund (Update: We have been informed by Hero Fund administration that they are unaffiliated with Project Hero. The Hero Fund relies strictly on private donations, whereas individual universities foot the bill for Project Hero recipients.) Project Hero was “a glorification of Canadian imperialism in Afghanistan and elsewhere.”

“We do not want our university associated with the political impulse to unquestioning glorification of military action,” they argued.

Though despite the professors’ valiant (dare I say, heroic?) efforts to get the university to ditch the program, the University of Regina is still participating in the Project Hero scholarship. And now the Hero Fund has awarded its first scholarship. Bloody compatriots! Surely an extended appeal to Matthew Mellish directly is the next step in these professors’ pursuits of military modesty. Right? Or will bashfulness suddenly seize their pens when ideology is confronted with a real-life story?

Anti-war movements on campus are not new. Poppies have become the target of late, quickly becoming an unfashionable statement on many Canadian campuses. Some students and professors choose to abstain from wearing the Remembrance Day symbol because they believe it glorifies war. Others opt to wear white poppies, which is seen as a symbol for peace and nonviolence.

Then there are more direct approaches; in 2007, for example, the University of Victoria’s student union banned military recruiting at the campus job fair, a move which was later overturned by a general vote. At Laurier that same year, students chose to protest across the street from a veterans’ memorial, only after conceding to pressure and abandoning their original plan to protest on the memorial during ceremonies.

This sort of in-your-face pacifism is what leaves as bad taste in some people’s mouths. Choosing not to wear a poppy on Rememberance Day is a personal choice–lighting a torch to the stash is not. The University of Regina professors can exclude the word “hero” from their own military vernacular if they so desire, but no one asked them to serve as university administration conscience. They have the option to keep their change in the pockets, and the decorum–hopefully now–to cease the politicization of a student’s personal tragedy.

Answer: no.

Faculty members  at the University of Regina have come out against the University’s adoption of “Project Hero,” a program by which scholarships are provided to children of those who have died while serving in the Canadian military.

Related: Should soldiers’ children get special scholarships? Answer: yes.

One can almost hear the outrage before it is even spoken: Canadian soliders are heroes, people will say. They put their lives at risk for us everyday, and we must do everything we can to support our brave men and women in uniform.

This kind of thinking is so widespread, I’m sure many people accept it as an unquestionable article of faith. To them, the U of R faculty must seem perverse, if not diabolical, in their thinking. But I’m with the profs on this one.

To be sure, military life, especially life in a combat zone, cannot be easy. One does not have to be a soldier to know that it’s hard, dirty, dangerous work, often done a world away from home, and often done in the defense of our highest principles. For the record, I don’t oppose Canada’s operations in Afghanistan, and I’m proud of my fellow Canadians who are trying to bring hope to a region where hope is in short supply.

But let’s not let all that blind us to the reality of military conflict. Our soldiers are not just there putting their lives on the line. They are there killing people. That’s why they have guns. That’s what armies do. That’s why they call it war. Don’t get me wrong: it may be necessary, but if it is, it is a necessary evil.

And that’s why I can’t support things like Project Hero. It implies that military officers have a special status simply by virtue of being in the military. It suggests that the whole class of people is to be venerated, and that military service is a special calling to which only a select group of heroes can aspire. And if the military is always to be honoured, then the things that they are called upon to do are inherently honorable, and that, in the end, is to glorify war and its attendant violence. The fact that Project Hero provides funds for the children of dead soldiers has to imply what Wilfred Owen famously termed the old lie: that it is sweet and noble to die for one’s country.

Yes, members of the military do hard jobs that are dangerous and important. But so do police, and firefighters, and lots of other people. Even professors have died in the line of duty. Let’s be grateful to those who serve in uniform, but let’s do them the honour of treating them honestly in the process.

School is the sixth to offer free tuition to the children of fallen soldiers

Concordia University has announced that it will be the first Quebec school to offer free tuition to the children of Canadian Forces personnel killed while serving in an active military mission dating back to February 2002.

The university is the sixth to join Project Hero, a project started at Newfoundland’s Memorial University by Canada’s former top general Rick Hillier.

For more on this story, see here and here.

Children of fallen soldiers will get four years free tuition at participating schools

According to The Belleville Intelligencer, an Ontario-based military reserve officer is trying to persuade all Canadian universities to offer free tuition to the children of soldiers who have died in the line of duty in Afghanistan.

Kevin Reed, a 42-year-old honorary lieutenant-colonel of an army reserve unit in southwestern Ontario, says he was inspired by the work of Rick Hillier, Canada’s retired general. Hillier is now the chancellor at Memorial University of Newfoundland, which was the first to institute the policy.

So far, Reed says the University of Ottawa, his alma mater, and the Universities of Windsor and Calgary are all on board. He says OttawaU’s president, Allan Rock, was quick to support the idea.

The details vary, but Reed says the schools have all agreed to offer four years of paid tuition, plus two years of room and board (provided the student lives on campus) to all children of Canadian Forces staff who are killed in an operational mission since the start of Canada’s war in Afghanistan. As of now, Reed says there are about 30 Canadian children who have lost a parent in the conflict.

And how does he intend to spread the word to other schools?

“I’ve just been going to one university at a time, and we’ll continue to do so until we get ‘em all.”