That said, if someone can do a better job, I wholeheartedly invite them to. I’m glad there’s Indian food on campus, as a general fan of the cuisine, but realistically, Tandoori is the fast food version of Indian food even though it prices itself in the range of some of the restaurants I’ve been to. Similarly, the International Kitchen, which serves a different dish every day and rotates something like every month, sometimes has dishes among my favourite at UTM, but sometimes it’s mac and cheese. At such times, I resort to Timmies, Subway, or pizza, all of which quickly get monotonous. And why do we have one Starbucks on campus but two Second Cups? Is there ever a lineup for the one in the Meeting Place? Worst of all, when we Medium folks are here publishing on Sunday, the only place still open at suppertime is OPH, where you can miraculously pay upwards of $14 for a dish, a drink, and a chocolate bar. Yeah, things could be better.
The question is, who is this superhero who should come in and fix it?
For a long time, the flak has been directed at Chartwells, the food provider whose contract with the university names it as the sole provider of all food on campus, except for the Blind Duck, vending machines, and food you bring from home. The various restaurants have been routed through Chartwells since 2004.
That said, Chartwells’ winning the contract over the departing provider, Aramark—the same one that was in the news for having been given millions in subsidy while providing food services at Ryerson—was heralded as a major improvement. Chartwells had purportedly friendlier staff, they cared about the environment, and they had plans for the future. The president of the student union at the time said Chartwells was “an excellent choice for the campus [...] They have proven themselves in other schools and seem to be ahead of the game already.” (This was between remarks disparaging Aramark. He also said the student union was “one of the leading forces on campus in opposition to Aramark”—but then, they’re in opposition to most of what the administration does. Just last week a UTMSU exec described the administration to me as “the enemy” before regretting the word choice. No wonder Chartwells, now established at UTM, has come under fire.)
Anyway, my point is that replacing Chartwells with a different provider won’t change much. In fact, in 2000, the Medium printed a rather prophetic quote by a student who predicted that if we ever got rid of Aramark, some other monopoly would come along to make us miserable.
But one thing did actually change substantially between Aramark and Chartwells. In the latter contract, the Blind Duck is placed in the hands of students. The idea was that the profits from the pub could be forwarded to student service improvements.
It was a good idea, but something went wrong in the implementation. For years the Blind Duck has been so unprofitable that it requires a student levy of tens of thousands of dollars to break even. On top of that, it requires an advance from UTMSU of tens of thousands more that, until last year, has regularly been written off. The advance was recovered in 2012, but the pub is far from profitable.
But that doesn’t mean we should lose faith. The model is the right one. Right now, Chartwells’ contract is up for expiry in April, as you can read more about in this week’s cover story. And a lot of fuss is being made about whether it will be renewed or opened up to other bidders. But it doesn’t really matter either way. Whoever gets it will take advantage of the fact that our only other choices are to bus to Square One or (heaven help us) pack sandwiches in Tupperware, and will expect us to be grateful for a third, a fourth, even a fifth station selling the exact same soups and sandwiches, not to mention those adorable plastic cups filled with 10¢ worth of red jujubes being sold for $1.99.
No, what we need is a better infrastructure to gradually erode the need for outside providers. And that’s the tricky part. We need to know more about our situation and how to do better. Why is the pub unprofitable? How can we make it profitable? What do we want to see more of and can we offer it? Are the pub’s prices really any better than elsewhere on campus for the same item? We should be investigating questions like these.
It’s easy to take shots at Chartwells. It’s harder to work out a real solution. But that’s what needs to happen.
YOURS,
LUKE SAWCZAK
It’s a question of numbers. There aren’t many people dedicated to the CCR; there’s a tri-campus coordinator downtown. Without them, the basic problem is this: We have a lot of clubs. Not many of them are in close contact with staff or faculty. But we need a reliable, objective party to validate a student’s application to have their activities listed on the CCR with their transcript. If we don’t have that check, the CCR gets inundated with undeserving students and loses its credibility. So who should be the validator?
The Medium’s case is easy. Everyone who writes gets their name in print. We’d just submit the list of people who’ve written six articles over the year (whom we call “staff writers”).
But most of UTM’s clubs don’t have such tangible evidence of involvement. Say you organize a typical club event—discussion and fuchkas, perhaps—and students come. Should you take attendance? Even if so, how do we prove to a third party that you were responsible for that work? We could have the club president sign your application. But how do we avoid people signing for their friends? Could you turn down a friend who asked you to let them get credit so they could have a shot at getting into grad school?
As for UTMSU being the signer, the credibility problem still applies, albeit to a lesser degree, and so does the difficulty of having a fairly small staff supervise a lot of clubs.
The solutions proposed to us in the consultation were not bad, but not perfect. They proposed breaking the requirements into three more clearly defined steps. That’s good. But you still need to figure out who makes the assessments. The solution proposed was that each club be a part of a “community of practice”, linking them to relevant departments or offices of the university who could liaise with the clubs. In other words, break up the supervising into a lot of smaller pieces. But pairing them up might not be easy. Sure, the UTM Archery Club could be matched with the RAWC. But what about the many ethnic clubs we have? Do they all get dumped on the lap of, I don’t know, the sociology department? Or do they default back to UTM’s Department of Student Life, who offloaded them in the first place, and who currently has one person running the CCR in addition to her job description?
So how about we hire more staff? A student fee to pay for a CCR coordinator at UTM was proposed at a QSS meeting in February 2013, but was voted down by students who felt the university should fund it. Without it, the people best placed to sign are club execs, who’d still require verifying.
So far, the response is more consultation. Maybe we’re not ready for the CCR. Or maybe the university should make room in its budget for staff to manage the service.
YOURS,
LUKE SAWCZAK
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Quitting the summit isn’t necessarily stupid; after all, it’s a moderated discussion of an issue between downtown student groups that has little to do with UTMSU, except insofar as we might get the same idea someday and try to separate from UTSU, too. But the way we quit wasn’t one many students will feel they can stand behind.
First of all, it came out of nowhere. The seven-page goodbye note—signed by Melissa Theodore, UTMSU’s VP external, on behalf of the executive team—says they spent “many hours” reporting on the meetings to UTM students. I haven’t heard a peep. Might’ve been nice to talk through this.
At least as frustrating are the nonsensical reasons given for quitting. The letter extols student groups’ autonomy, for example, without a word as to why the summit is a breach of autonomy. Then it proceeds to lament the fact that the societies whose members voted to divert their money from UTSU don’t know what’s good for them and should stay in line. Actually, bringing that up at all is disingenuous: We know that this is the incumbents’ view. And that the smaller groups hold another view. That’s why the summit was called.
But that’s not the only convoluted logic in the letter. On the one hand, it insists that UTMSU “doesn’t know what the purpose of the summit is”. But despite being in the dark, the union also manages to “have serious concerns that the unknown purpose of this summit is in conflict with our mission, and as such an inappropriate use of our valuable time”. Well, which is it?
Elsewhere, the letter says attendees attacked UTSU to gain favour with the university, and so defends UTSU’s policy on proxies (voting on behalf of others) by saying that a major critic, the Engineering Society, also allows them. EngSoc’s bylaws are attached. Nice; now I can easily verify that UTSU lets one person vote for 11 people while EngSoc lets one person vote for three. The absentees also count towards minimum attendance for UTSU but not EngSoc. This isn’t to take sides; it’s just to say that misleading finger-pointing doesn’t befit a student representative.
Since none of these reasons makes sense, I suspect it’s because other attendees—rightfully or not—have been asking to see the contract that has UTM students pay UTSU, only for most of it to be remitted to UTMSU. The letter says UTMSU is only too eager to “summarize” the terms, as long as they don’t have to “divulge” them. Meanwhile, the university requires anyone who receives student money to be financially transparent.
I guess being caught on that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. And made it hit the eject button.
YOURS,
LUKE SAWCZAK
.
The full letter was shared with various campus media and can be read at the end of this news article.
]]>So the question that naturally arises when a proposal is voted down and the voter turnout is, if not approaching democratic levels, better than usual (it was 25% or 3,100 of us, give or take), is what to make of it. Outside of this editorial, the question of what interperetation to take of the facts is dealt with in four ways this week: a news article with an interview of the union’s president, a letter from a senior student, a letter from a UTMSU board member, and video interviewing random students around campus.
The conclusion I take from it is that nobody has set the Thames on fire. We’re not looking at a startling new grassroots movement wherein a group of radically disenfranchised students has decided to throw down UTMSU’s decisions. Nor do the figures readily support that. The margin of majority is so small (about 70 votes) that chance could have accounted for it. Thus, when the president, Raymond Noronha, said that “students don’t want an expanded Student Centre”, I’m not so sure he’s right. A better summary would be “Slightly more students don’t want it than want it.”
But in fact, I doubt most students really even voted on the expansion. Judging by the opinions we’ve gathered, they voted against paying more fees. (Maybe the unequivocal zeal for paying less that the Canadian Federation of Students fosters in its members worked too well.) They often said that they want to be around to experience what they pay for—a complaint that, surprisingly enough, I find less reasonable than UTMSU’s serene response: that we enjoy what we didn’t pay for.
It’s because of this, I think, that Noronha’s answers more or less put the loss down to misconception and “rumours”. Not that there was no misinformation; not many people we spoke to got the numbers exactly right. But I think that’s the other extreme from the “radically disenfranchised” explanation. Perhaps students are neither outright opposed to UTMSU nor simply misinformed, but have—at least those who aren’t swamped in their schoolwork—some discrimination as to which fees they’ll accept and which they won’t. After all, besides the closeness of the vote, the recent outcry about UTMSU having voted down an increase in the Health and Counselling Centre’s budget shows that students are willing to pay for some causes they deem important. And the reason they don’t deem the Student Centre expansion important probably comes down to a lack of use of it—and that brings us back to the bit about the few interested students. So no, the fact that the referendum failed isn’t so much a sign of students’ sudden engagement in campus politics as it is a reminder of the opposite fact. (Not that this is another tired call to get involved.)
And perhaps the union was aware of that. After all, it would seem a bit unusual that they went all out campaigning for the “yes” votes this year even though the same terms were passed last time around (but invalidated due to human error)—unless they suspected, apparently correctly, that our tolerance for in-your-face campaigning was about maxed out.
The main pragmatic question is what happens now, and nobody has talked much about it. I believe that’s because it won’t be clear what they’ll do until an official interpretation of this year’s results is decided on and solidified, which will probably happen over the next couple of months and be passed on to the incoming execs. They might ask themselves: Was UTM just misinformed? Then make it clearer. Was UTM scared about fees? Then negotiate a better agreement with the university, and if that fails, make the costs less explicit and get angry at the Medium for printing it clearly (hey, it worked last year). Were the various anonymous Facebook pages too effective a platform of dissent? Be more hip next time. Or… Do students just not want a Student Centre? Hard to say what they’d do then. That one might stump them.
YOURS,
LUKE SAWCZAK
Now, for me, there was no offence whatsoever. To clarify two things: One, I’m not of the same religious persuasion; I’m an Anabaptist Christian, and nothing I believe coincides exactly with this kind of restriction. But I do understand the shared and widespread concept of limited intimacy between genders except in appropriate relationships. Two, I grant that mainline Islam may not include a justification for a restriction of this degree, as some columnists have argued is relevant. Despite these two facts, I don’t question the sincerity or the legitimacy of these women’s religious convictions.
But let’s compare this case to what happened at York recently. To summarize: a male student was taking an online course there, and the students had to work in in-person groups for an assignment. He asked to be excused from working with a group of females, citing his religion, which a column in the Star last week implied was either Islam or Judaism. The student’s professor denied his request at first, but then the York administration overturned his decision and allowed the accommodation. Now the media is up in arms over it, as are Facebook comments and even an article in the Varsity last week.
The main complaint raised against this case is that equality has been breached by allowing the accommodation. The critics argue that the male student’s refusal to work with female students constitutes discrimination, a treatment of women as unequal with men.
But this assessment reflects only a jumpiness that balks at anything that seems like gender-based treatment. In fact, I think it’s a red herring. Avoiding intimacy—even to a considered extreme in our Western culture—is not the same as discriminating; it’s likely just an extension of the principle of restricted intimacy. That is, to give the student the benefit of the doubt, his request wasn’t necessarily because they’re women; if it was in line with the handshake refusals, it would be because they were of opposite genders. According to the tenet in question, they should have had the same qualms about working closely with him. Neither gender would receive special treatment. To take it so is willful naivety. In my mind, sexism is no more in question here than it was when these women declined to shake my hand because I was a man. (Some readers will conclude that I’m just anti-feminist; they would be wrong.)
The other factor in question is the limits to accommodation. As a columnist for the Star wrote, there are good reasons for religious accommodation, within reasonable limits. Agreed. So what’s beyond the pale here? Where’s the necessity of forcing this particular student to mix genders? (Was it somehow essential to the assignment?) Is it a fear of the slippery slope that motivates the suggestion that the male student should be forced to act against his conscience? What was at stake? Only the discomfort of those who misread the situation.
You’ll also find a features article a few pages further along in this issue on the subject of religion on campus (a coincidence, actually—it was pitched months ago). We seem to be pretty inclusive at UTM. We have several faith-based clubs, we have facilities for religious observances, and now and then we have faith awareness events in public spaces. None of means opposing viewpoints can’t also exist on the same campus. And thank goodness. That’s one reason why I disagree with the columnist quoted in the features article; the fundamental role of a university is not to squash ideas that a few deem useless, but to furnish us with tools for discussion. As long as we propose to limit the freedoms—the reasonable freedoms, anyway—of a person, we act against that mandate.
I want to reiterate that I’m not defending the York accommodation because I agree with the student’s religious convictions. My personal opinion is there’s no risk of overstepping the borders of intimacy in a classroom collaboration, or even in a handshake. But I can respect the other view, especially when the only infringement is on my convenience and comfort zone. To refuse to do that is simply xenophobic.
The columnist for the Star accused York of failing the test of “common sense” in accommodating the student; this could only refer to the sense considered common in Western culture.
YOURS,
LUKE SAWCZAK
Last year, a friend of one of our staff was stopped by a campaigner in the Meeting Place during the UTMSU elections. (A quick glance at Facebook pages like Spotted at UTM tells you people are increasingly annoyed by this.) The campaigner told her she needed to vote and would she liked to have it all explained to her? She replied that she didn’t have time. He insisted. She joked, “Okay, I’ll vote. But I’m going to vote no.” At this point, the campaigner said, “Oh—uh, that’s okay, never mind.”
Don’t get me wrong; I don’t have a problem with anyone voting yes. Heck, I might do it myself, no guarantees. But the likelihood of a majority voting yes points to one of the difficulties in any democracy: the few who are involved and have money are very interested in you voting yes. They buy shirts, they put up elaborate websites, they design and print large colour posters, all of it telling you the many reasons why you must support a project that essentially belongs to them. They can even buy an ad on the back page of the Medium (anyone can buy the space, but it’s not very affordable for most students). Where would you hear any other side of it?
The ironic thing is, if it’s mostly business as usual for UTMSU, the whole thing is mostly for show. When was the last time something or someone wasn’t overwhelmingly passed (by a tiny voter turnout)?
Well, one thing’s new. Apparently because they’ve been reading along with the vitriolic Facebook comment wars about it, the Debating Club has announced an open discussion of the expansion (3 p.m. Monday, Council Chambers in Davis) and has invited UTMSU. I’ll go because I’m curious about who’ll be there and what they’ll say—will it be more of the same, or will there actually be a “no”?
YOURS,
LUKE SAWCZAK
Something I noticed when I attended the UTM Students’ Union’s annual general meeting towards the end of last semester was that I didn’t find myself totally committed to all their projects (although it’s safe to say the majority was). The probable reply is that not everyone will agree with every project, and besides, there’s always room for critique and improvement. So I’ll aim for just that.
One of main things that set the tone in my mind was the promise by president Raymond Noronha to keep pushing for a drop-credit policy. Two issues come to mind. The first is the question of whether such a push can succeed. It doesn’t seem likely, given that vice-dean Kelly Hannah-Moffat said last year that there would be no movement. So perhaps the energies could be directed elsewhere for now. But that’s not a crucial opposition; after all, the function of a student union is to be a watchdog, to always push the university to an ideal—if not always for an immediate result, at least to check situations from worsening.
My main objection is to the project itself. Yes, it’s tempting, the idea that I can blot out those damn CTEP marks from first year that bring down my CGPA. Both UTMSU and the downtown student union have latched on to this feeling for two or three years, calling the policy “progressive” because, as it stands, a low CGPA “could limit the prospects of those affected” after graduating. For example (this is all from the policy’s lobby document at utmsu.ca), you need a 70% average in your core accounting courses to qualify for the Certified Accountant designation and we’re limiting these students’ futures if we don’t let them retake a bad course. But do we want to have CAs who failed a core course?
Actually, says the document, after dropping a credit, the CGPA would “become more reflective of a student’s true abilities and competence”. I don’t buy it. But it goes on: “Taking an additional course provides a more accurate representation of a student’s true GPA, as demonstrated by the Law of Large Numbers, which dictates that the margin of error associated with test statistics decreases as trials increase.” Maybe this writer is looking to retake a stats course now. If the trial itself alters the test value…
And the credibility question is one that comes up a few times. The document argues that our credibility will actually go up if we fix the “extremely low grades” we get at U of T because then more of our alumni will make it into graduate school. The circularity is dizzying. Admittedly, a few other universities with similar policies are listed, and some of them are credible.
The reason the vice-dean gave for the lack of interest on the university’s part addresses the best argument for the policy, namely the existence of extenuating circumstances that prevent a student from demonstrating their real knowledge. The answer was that at UTM we have a recently won credit/no credit policy, late withdrawal, and even the grade forgiveness in the worst cases. Why apply an extreme solution universally?
Again, this is not to take sides, just to present a critique. It’s a relatively recent project, not a long struggle, and maybe we should rethink it. But I suspect that won’t happen yet. It was applauded by volunteers, staff, and others at the meeting. Give it a few more years of flat refusal from the administration and it might lose steam, or worse, finally go through.
It’s not the only case in which the union has stuck to ideology rather than pragmatics. One question I asked of Mr. Noronha was why UTMSU would set a $2-million cap on the student investment in the Student Centre expansion that we’re about to vote on. After all, considering how long it’s taken to expand, we might as well do the job right; for example, the club office space is expected to more than double if the referendum passes, but it’ll still be three or four clubs to one office, and more, if UTMSU’s 2011 estimate of growth in club numbers is accurate. Mr. Noronha’s answer? Because the university’s contribution is capped at $2 million and if students paid more, then the ratio of university to student contributions would be smaller. But why does that matter if the absolute value doesn’t change? If the university had promised a 2:1 match instead of 1:1 but still had a limit of $2 million, would we limit the student contribution to $1 million in order to maximize the ratio, and have even less for an expansion? The prioritization is bizarre. The ideal would be a better expansion, not the hollow victory of paying just enough to maximize the university’s contribution.
Don’t get me wrong. This is not at all to say we shouldn’t have a higher university investment. Absolutely we should. It frustrates me that the University of Toronto, always near the top of the rankings except in student satisfaction, should hesitate to take this asset in hand for even a fraction of the amount spent on the university-operated, enrolment-growing buildings going up as we speak. And I get that the message sent by limiting student enrolment on this expansion is that they need to fix this. But still, wouldn’t it be nice if we pursued the more tangible benefits now and then?
YOURS,
LUKE SAWCZAK
That’s not a complaint. Last year, a referendum by UTMSU on fee increases to expand the Student Centre was passed by majority vote (with a turnout that blows executive election turnouts out of the water—a whopping 18%!), only to founder in the proverbial shoals of bureaucracy. The experience was, as current UTMSU president Raymond Noronha put it, “frustrating for students”.
The choice of statement is somewhat surprising, given that it seems to have been a bizarre error on the union’s part that gave rise to the said frustration. As reviewed in our cover story this week, UTMSU used a voter list that allowed downtown students to vote (on fees they don’t pay) and the results were contaminated. The university office responsible for the list claims the right list was made available to UTMSU but never used; the list actually used was the one for UTSU’s annual general meeting. The question of how on earth that list got into UTMSU’s hands remains open. The UTMSU officer in question resigned, but still, a lament for frustration caused by one’s own union rings a little hollow. Never fear: Mr. Noronha has promised the team will be more careful this time.
But what was especially annoying was that this referendum was so long overdue in the first place. The union cites the need for an expansion in terms like “The Student Centre was built in 1999 for 6,000 students, and must now accommodate 13,000.” Those numbers are correct (not that a huge proportion of us use the building often, considering most of the food and study space is elsewhere). But the discrepancy has mostly just been allowed to grow worse—enrolment was already at about 9,600 five years ago in 2009, for example, which is plenty of justification for expansion—while not much has been done to rectify it.
In 2007 the expansion discussions between UTMSU and UTM began with a proposal but failed two years later when both parties refused to back down over who would control food services in the expanded building. In 2011, after meeting with focus groups, UTMSU put forth a ridiculous proposal (still available at utmsu.ca at the time of writing) that included a garage door for the pub, lots of soundproof office space, a convenience store, and more, along with an embarrassing number of made-up words. The extravagant budget led to the proposal’s rejection and raised suspicions that the union wasn’t taking its own expansion campaign—certainly a useful one for its public image—seriously.
So when a new proposal was made in 2012, an agreement reached with the university over matching student funds, and a referendum held to approve the fee increases, it came as a welcome relief—not least because, as Mr. Noronha has argued more than once, the constantly rising costs of construction mean the same amount of money yields less and less each year. So it was understandably perplexing to learn earlier this year that Mr. Noronha declined to make any promises in his election and decided to seek feedback on whether to even hold a replacement referendum. For goodness’ sake, the first one was passed by a solid majority of voters, and recall that the value declines every year, by his own account. What would have justified declining to rerun a successful referendum? Whether you plan to vote for or against the terms, what would have been unsettling would be year seven of limbo. I’m glad that that won’t be the case.
On the subject of voting for or against the terms, that’s of course an interesting question affected by multiple factors. The timeframe, for one, might dissuade some students: those who are halfway through university now wouldn’t get to see an expanded building. The standard reply to this objection is that we inherited good things from past generations at no personal cost. That one comes down to social conscience, I guess. More interesting to me are the specific terms. Our current Student Centre levy is $12.50 a semester, and will almost double (with a proviso for 10% inflation per year) if the referendum is passed. An interesting investigation will be how these figures were determined: do students have an easy way of finding out whether the $10.50 per semester increase is appropriate for the projected costs? It’s hard to tell when, according to Mr. Noronha, the services UTMSU plans to add in the expansion are almost totally undetermined. Food options will expand (no guarantees on a pub open late on Fridays, though, says Mr. Noronha). Maintenance reserves are guaranteed. Beyond that it seems to be guesswork.
In the end, if an expansion yields practical benefits for students—and attracts more use—it will justify itself. But in order to determine whether and how there can be such a result, it would need to move on from being a nice idea, played with for a bit and then put down for a bit, and start receiving serious attention.
YOURS,
LUKE SAWCZAK
A few UTM students started a petition to the UTM Students’ Union that asked the union to hold a referendum to have UTM students stop paying fees to the Varsity, the newspaper based at St. George, and to have that money either go to the Medium or go back in students’ pockets. UTMSU invited the petitioners, Varsity editor-in-chief Joshua Oliver, and myself to a board meeting at which the petition would be discussed. That was the first we’d heard of it, and as far as we were concerned, it came entirely out of left field.
For one thing, it was a very unorthodox way to go about it. UTMSU doesn’t actually have any authority over those fees, so the petition’s goals would be accomplished through lobbying the administration (and there’s little chance they would take the campaign seriously, in my opinion). Redirecting those fees to the Medium wouldn’t be so cut-and-dry either. Not that we couldn’t stand to improve our financial position—we most certainly could, ad revenue having fallen from $70,000 in 2009 to $40,000 the next year and never recovering—but we weren’t consulted, and I don’t think that research had been done. And finally, there was no forewarning. The Varsity is holding their fall meeting this Wednesday, and as Mr. Oliver said at the board meeting, direct routes like that are welcomed for raising complaints.
But this particular instance aside, the question at the heart of it is, in the words of Ms. Hassounah, one of the petitioners, whether there’s “any value in paying for both the Medium and the Varsity”. Isn’t the Varsity supposed to be St. George’s paper and the Medium UTM’s? How much UTM coverage is there in the Varsity? More to the point, can’t the Medium cover everything we need to know about UTM?
One thought that comes to mind is the question of resources: the Varsity’s per-student levy is under $4, less than half of the Medium’s, but they also draw it from many times the number of students and so their budget is higher. The ratio of services rendered to what an individual student pays is very good. As UTM grows, so will the Medium, but we haven’t caught up yet.
I have a different point to make, though. The (no doubt well-meaning) petitioners do have something right: if you flip through the last few issues of the Varsity, you won’t find much on UTM. Searches for “UTM” and “Mississauga” don’t turn up much that deals with our campus specifically in the past months. Last week they ran a story on UTMSU barring us from filming their AGM, after having read about the incident in the Medium.
But the key word here is “specifically”. There are two questions in play here. One is the question of what an audience can identify with most closely. This was the topic of disputes with certain editors in the past whose idea of our scope differed from the editor’s at the time. Take sports, for example. You can read about U.S. tournaments in any number of papers, many of them offering more informed coverage than we have. But nobody else covers UTM teams and games. The players, their coaches, their friends, their families, and their competition all read those articles. The same goes for the local clubs, departments, union, and so on. For things like these, yes, the Medium is the most appropriate paper.
The other question is what an audience needs to know, what concerns them. Obviously, the Medium pursues every UTM story it finds out about in that category. But UTM stories are not the only ones that affect UTM students. There’s a whole world of central U of T governance that trickles down to our campus, and frankly, most of the coverage of those stories is done by the Varsity. We at UTM may not need to read about a residence into which students are slotted without their foreknowledge, but we can certainly benefit from articles on U of T research in an entire separate science section—a section the Medium simply isn’t equipped to run yet. Maybe one day soon.
And it goes the other way too. We report on U of T-wide happenings based downtown when we feel their impact is particularly relevant for UTM students. The installation of a new president, the creation of a new committee on mental health, the annual general meeting of the downtown union to whom we pay fees—in my view, these all require a UTM take in addition to whatever other coverage there may be, that is, a take with what UTM students feel is important. God forbid that someone should petition to take our fees away from us with the claim that the Varsity already covers these things.
The basic principle is to be careful about which information you want to have access to. UTM will always be the main interest of UTM students, but as long as we remain part of the bigger university, we should keep abreast of its news, too.
]]>First, a disclaimer: being excited by developments isn’t the same thing as agreeing with them. For one thing, as a UTM student and editor, I’m better able to make informed judgements of happenings at our campus than downtown. For another, there’s a certain degree to which the players are bound to certain parts that colour what they do. For example, when engineering student Pierre Harfouche was elected to UTSU’s board, he posted on Facebook that he would now advocate to “get rid of” the board. Whether he likes it or not, statements like this brand him as “opposition” and bear on how a disinterested observer should interpret the motions he submitted for UTSU’s AGM, which would partly decentralize their authority, whether or not his arguments for their legitimacy (they were rejected) were valid. That is, we should be excited by the criticism—and, in my opinion, glad to see any stirring of student interest in a politics that governs much of our university experience and moves massive amounts of money—but we should keep in mind that it comes from a self-proclaimed critic.
When Sana Ali resigned at the peak of her campaign last year, she was coming from the opposite direction. She was running for the responsibilities and sizable salary of an executive, after all, and I suspect that that had everything to do with why the response from the establishment was—rather than the cold, flatly delivered shut-out Harfouche receives with his much more direct jabs at the union—so emotional and personal (and finally shameful: “I drove you home once!” declared now-president Munib Sajjad, on video among his teary-eyed cohort). UTSU has policies for responding to self-proclaimed critics; it has no idea how to handle dissension.
When this really became clear to me was at last year’s general meeting. One thing to watch out for are the proxies that inevitably dominate these meetings. If you’re not acquainted with the fact, a member can cast his own vote plus those of up to 10 other members who don’t attend the meeting but do sign a form handing over their vote to him. This is frequently cited as a democratic policy, and in theory it is: it allows those who are prevented from attending to avoid losing their vote and their voice. But in practice it’s murkier. At last year’s special general meeting, the vote on a motion to implement online voting was barely approved, 575–567. Spread throughout the room were many smaller votes—yes, some with proxies attached—for the motion. And voting against it was a block of yellow signs bearing the number 11. That almost every member of that block held the maximum number of proxies is not accidental—it requires intentionally going out to stop students in the hallways to scoop up as much voting power as possible. And to see a single closely seated group, undoubtedly mainly made up of supporters and friends, trying to stop a motion that most of the rest of the room was in favour of was simply farcical.
It bears repeating (if only because the opening will be seized otherwise) that this observation is not to take a contrary position to UTSU or on student unions in general. I don’t have a set of policies to pick out and disagree with. See a past editorial on the idea that we at UTM might not even need to have as large a stake in UTSU as we do. But it is to suggest that the reason the recent developments have seen such a flurry of attention—even from those who don’t normally pay any—is that they tap into a long-standing frustration students have with the union for just such an inability to take criticism as we’ve seen above. It’s not specific policies that generate the most attention, it’s the (sometimes almost indiscriminate) suggestion that something might be honestly challenged.
If UTSU wants such episodes as the explosion of support for Sana Ali’s resignation to go away, they need to allow such disagreements to be commonplace, rather than to retaliate. Whereas what they have on their hands now—the serious threat of defederation from multiple important constituents—is the release of something pent up for a long time. It’s a rare occurrence, so you’ll forgive my watching with intense interest to see whether it comes to anything or, as per the norm, is summarily squashed.
YOURS,
LUKE SAWCZAK