McGill TribuneSSMU should be commended for their efforts at giving McGill students a voice with the various consultation fairs and strategic summits that have been held so far this semester. For years, SSMU has been talking about better student representation via improved communication with students, and this year they have implemented those ideas. These changes have been positive across the board—BASiC, the Arts & Sciences faculty association, recently surveyed their members before taking a stance on the MUNACA strike, perhaps inspired by SSMU’s approach. Other faculty associations would do well to follow this example.
Student consultation gives students a sense of empowerment, whether or not any concrete changes actually result from the consultations. That’s not to say that consultation without results or follow-up is a positive thing, but a campus with an active voice is better than a campus that feels that it has no say. Committees, summits, and fairs are incentives for students to be informed and involved with campus events and politics. Otherwise, it’s difficult for students to care about issues like the name changes of SSMU clubs and the changes to Frosh when they feel like there are no venues in which they can voice their own opinions.
Compared to previous talks with McGill’s administration, student-mediated consultation is a less explosive and less reactionary way of garnering a sense of campus opinion, and the administration would do well to take advantage of this, in both its presence at the consultation events–-which has been positive to date–-and as they consider policy changes in future.
Topics at consultation forums will be most effective at changing McGill’s policies when they focus on the small things. While it is essential to discuss big issues like the MUNACA strike, it’s also important that those topics don’t prevent small issues, like those relating to academic advising, from being discussed. McGill’s administration will be more likely to effect change in those small ways, and in a sense, SSMU is doing their jobs for them—in order to make this a better university, student input is necessary on administrative matters.
It seems that no amount of consultation or discussion will bring back the Architecture Café, abolish tuition fees, or end the MUNACA strike, and thus efforts at consultation should be more focused on other issues than just the big, controversial issues. But, similar to the consultations that occurred after the café was closed, SSMU’s consultations go a long way towards reconciling the sense of alienation from administrative decisions amongst students, certainly more so than previous SSMU councils have managed to do.
