At McGill, the main conduit for student input in decision-making is committees, working groups, advisory councils, and other bodies that meet and deliberate. When decisions that impact students are made, students must have a role, as provided by both Quebec’s Act respecting the accreditation and financing of student associations and McGill’s own Charter of Student Rights.
The theory is nice, but all infrastructure with students incorporated is decaying. Governing bodies are quietly retired or transformed to exclude students. Remaining committees meet increasingly rarely. Agendas are written behind-the-scenes and dictate every moment of a meeting. McGill handpicks its own student membership. These shifts in power rely on the Students’ Society of McGill University’s (SSMU) lack of institutional memory and the fact that student leaders are unaware that things were once different.
Some portions of governance are always being recycled. Governance upkeep is time-consuming and often underappreciated, in any setting. You might ask, is it notable that some committees are changing, or losing relevance? Not necessarily, if we consider one committee at a time. But my one year here has generated an extensive list of eroded governance processes involving students. It is actually rarer to find a well-working committee than one in the process of being transformed to circumvent student input. Even reading good faith into the university, the result is the same: students, where they still exist on these bodies, are powerless. Claims of student apathy are used to justify this lapse in accountability.
The Student Achievement and Accessibility (SAA) Advisory Committee was discontinued this year, based on low student engagement. I found out only after emailing the SAA, having selected four student members. I spoke to a previous member who had good attendance, but found that the meetings were ineffective, and feedback was met with defensiveness. I asked to meet with the SAA in a town-hall setting, but they were unwilling to extend a meeting invitation to students beyond those who initially expressed interest in the advisory committee.
The International Student Services Advisory Committee didn’t meet for the first half of the year because they were waiting for one representative to confirm their presence. The students that I assigned to the committee were never told. Their first meeting was in February.
The Committee on Student Services scheduled only four meetings; one was cancelled, and one was a training session.
The University Health and Safety Committee cancelled three of their four monthly meetings during Fall 2024 due to a lack of agenda items. Their one meeting that semester was 10 minutes.
Student members on the Committee on Student Grievances and the Appeal Committee for Student Discipline and Grievances were meant to get in-person training. This training was postponed multiple times and finally cancelled. Instead, they were given asynchronous training.
The Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee (EDIC) has rejected every addition to the agenda requested by Subcommittee chairs, only allowing strictly defined governance items to be discussed. Only the Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) Angela Campbell was able to bring an item to the attention of EDIC that was unrelated to large-picture governance.
The Universal Access Capital Projects Working Group (mentioned in this earlier blog post about the degradation of committees with student members) was also discontinued—I only learned of this when I asked at a meeting with McGill’s Director of Equity Tynan Jarrett. During that time, funding for at least one project, gender neutral bathrooms, was significantly cut. No students were alerted.
When I went to attend meetings at the James Administration Building, I wasn’t on their list of visitors the first few times. I had to wait 5 to 10 minutes each time for the receptionist to call someone at the meeting room.
I have submitted two requests for review to the Advisory Council on the Charter of Student Rights. As per the Charter, I should have heard back within 30 days. This didn’t happen either time, and I had to escalate the issue to McGill’s secretariat department to get a response. The second time, I was told the committee works on only one request at a time, the first of which has taken over six months.
I’m running applications for the 2025/2026 committee representatives, and the exercise seems insulting. I hate the idea that I’ll look through and filter hopeful students, and I’ll send their names off into the void, for them never to be contacted again.
These lapses are especially relevant in a time when McGill is defining acceptable and unacceptable avenues for student voices. We are pointed to the institutional mechanisms, but how? Committees are being scrubbed from McGill websites. Student representatives are left in the dark. And when there are sufficient barriers to participation, and no students left, these committee leaders can say, “there’s no interest!” and return to their work without the inconvenience of consultation.
