Zareen Ali / McGill Tribune

  On a visit to India in 2004, three sisters were struck by the inequality of the country’s education system and were inspired to do something about it. In a joint venture, Zareen Ali, U3 management, and her sisters Maria and Amena, a McGill alum and a current student at the University of Ottawa, respectively, started the Abhilasha Project, an organization to help underprivileged Indian children. This year, they were awarded the Forces Avenir award for Mutual Aid, Peace, and Justice for their work.

The Abhilasha Project aims to provide quality education to underprivileged children with a special focus on girls and children with disabilities. By striving for equal education, the project aims to foster more confidence and determination in the children so they can positively affect their communities.

The project has roots at McGill, Marianopolis College, and the University of Ottawa, where different chapters fundraise and mobilize support for the initiative. Since 2006, the project has donated over $40,000 to the Abhilasha School in India. In the summer of 2011, the money went towards building an annex for the school. The annex now accommodates 41 blind and 100 physically handicapped children, enabling them to receive both education and appropriate healthcare in safe surroundings at no cost to their families.

Zareen, project co-ordinator and artistic designer for the Abhilasha Project, said that the excitement of the award serves as motivation to further the project.

“This is a huge stepping-stone for us because we’ve finally gotten to that place that will allow us to expand our project,” she said. “It has motivated us to work twice as hard to achieve our goal.”

While the award serves as an encouraging force, the sisters continue to be motivated by the project itself.

“The most important thing that we’ve taken away from this experience is that we have a community that believes in us and is there to support us in our endeavours,” Zareen said. “Hopefully, two to three years from now we will be breaking ground on the construction for the new school.”

Professor Emine Sarigollu, BComm Program Director, spoke highly of the sisters’ social entrepreneurship.

“I’m delighted that one of our BComm students has won the Forces Avenir award,” Sarigollu said. “We take pride in [the] academic excellence of our students. But we are equally proud of their contribution to Quebec, Canada and the global community outside the classroom. A case in point is Zareen Ali’s project, which demonstrates her social consciousness, benevolent leadership, and entrepreneurial skills.”

The project was competing against various other student initiatives in the Forces Avenir university program. Since 1999, the Forces Avenir program has recognized the achievements of students who not only pursue their education, but dedicate time to external projects for good causes.

Simon Poitrimolt / McGill Tribune

Over the last year, Bar des Arts (BdA), run by the Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS), has seen a series of changes in policy that have frustrated many students. 

Founded in 2007, BdA is a staple service of the AUS, open Thursdays from 4:00 to 9:00 p.m. The fall semester has seen a standardization of the bar’s atmosphere, notably with the introduction of cup regulations. These changes have come with a crackdown by the administration on alcohol-serving institutions at McGill. 

In September, BdA, in conjunction with Gerts, implemented a new plan that grants free entry to the campus bar’s Thursday events after students get their hands stamped at BdA. BdA’s staff now dress all in black, and they serve beer behind a row of bottle openers attached by a few planks of wood, all in front of a redesigned BdA poster emblazoned with the bar’s new logo.

Other changes, including the bar’s new cup regulations, have inconvenienced some students. Under the new rules, students are encouraged to bring reusable plastic cups, or can buy disposable Boreal cups for $1.50, up from one dollar last year. The bar has always banned glass cups, but has only just begun enforcing the rule. Rachel Lanphear, BdA’s Publicity Manager, explained that the changes were made to ensure that the bar will be around for future students to enjoy.

“Everything that we have been doing, in terms of changes, had to happen because the administration is really cracking down on all alcoholic institutions on campus,” Lanphear said. 

“Last year, [the bar’s staff] did not crack down as hard, which is probably why people are reacting more this year,” she added. 

“Being a server, there are a lot of issues with the kind of cups that people bring in,” Jason Karmody, AUS’s VP Events, said.  

Some students come with disposable cups and are forced to throw these out only to purchase new cups from the bar. One student, Ben Kurzius, U3 arts, had his red beer cup taken at the door and had to buy one from BdA.

“It’s unfair that I have to buy a cup for a dollar fifty,” he said. “It’s another way to profit-monger.”

Though they caused some frustration, the bar’s managers are confident that the new policies have positive implications for the future.

“We are not making a profit, at all,” said Lanphear. “We are just trying to break even so that we can keep going.”

Sam Reynolds / McGill Tribune

Last week, the SSMU executive held a series of Town Halls to address General Assembly (GA) reform. Under a dozen students attended the Town Halls, which were intended to solicit feedback from and engage students in a discussion on various suggested changes to the GA. Most of the attendees were students already intimately involved in SSMU, who took the chance to discuss solutions to some of the key structural issues with the deliberative body of SSMU. The discussion included a debate on voting methods and on the possibility of suspending or simplifying Robert’s Rules of Order.

GA reform centres around the issue of facilitating and increasing student participation. The issue at the heart of attempts to simplify the GA is the voting method. There is no one time in which students can all attend a GA, nor is there a forum large enough to hold all of SSMU’s members, should they all be interested in attending the GA.

“While quorum is important, what’s really important [to me] is democracy: one person, one vote,” Zach Newburgh, former SSMU President, said. (Newburgh currently sits on the Tribune Publication Society’s Board of Directors.) 

Other members of the executive are nervous about a shift online, which could increase participation but would preclude any sort of debate.

 “I think the reality about a lot of proposals about moving things online is basically saying ‘I don’t think the GAs work and I don’t think we should have them,'” Arts Representative Jamie Burnett said.

Another discussion regarding the suspension of Robert’s Rules came down to a debate over sacrificing procedure in the interest of accessibility. Participants acknowledged that students find the rules of debate confusing and alienating, and suggestions ranged from handing out printed guides before the General Assembly to adopting a modified version of Roberts Rules to introducing differently coloured placards for “Yes” or “No” votes, as well as “Question” or even “I’m confused.” However, for Newburgh, having a structure like Robert’s Rules is important because it works as a mechanism to facilitate more respectful and orderly debate, which protects minorities in potentially heated debates.

“The minority, being people who are undecided and actually want to hear the debate, get lost in translation essentially … it happens every time,” Education Representative Kady Paterson said. “But Robert’s Rules is, to a certain extent, a good safeguard against that.”

At the same time, debate often finds itself bogged down in procedural issues that many members of the audience don’t understand. The onus of facilitating debate is placed on the Speakers of Council, Nida Nizam and Michael Tong. Many Town Hall participants made an effort to mention that this year’s Speakers are particularly good at striking a balance.

“I think, with all things procedural, we’re looking at that tension of how do we facilitate a process moving forward quickly, while making sure it doesn’t become a messy disaster,” Knight said.

VP External Joël Pedneault explained that the GA is a relatively new forum and flaws in its structure are in part due to the fact that the rules governing the body have been introduced piecemeal, and the current executive demonstrated a desire to move forward with   the reform process constructively.

“I think it’s time that we stopped to circulate [the] notion that the General Assembly is just this place where intimidation is rampant … it’ll become a self-fulfilling prophecy if people paint the GA as this place that people act disrespectfully to each other; I think it’s time to circulate the notion that this is the place for respectful direct democracy to happen on campus if you’re an undergraduate,” he said.

Reforms will be passed in council as part of broader changes in SSMU’s bylaws. Students can contribute to the discussion by filling out SSMU’s survey—accessible via Facebook—speaking to their faculty councilors, and attending further town halls (dates to be determined).

In the early hours of Friday morning, SSMU’s Legislative Council voted on two motions with huge implications for the future of the society. In a confidential session, the council voted in favour of signing a new Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) with the McGill administration, and voted against accepting the administration’s current lease proposal for the Shatner Building.

The MoA, which outlines the legal relationship between SSMU and the university, is up for renewal this year. The document contains a controversial section on the use of the McGill name by student groups. The result of last week’s vote to accept the document will effectively force up to 130 student associations who use ‘McGill’ in their name to rename and re-brand themselves.

McGill has sought to make changes to the names of student groups on campus since the 1990s. Their chief concerns with the explicit use of the McGill name by student groups, such as the McGill First Aid Service, are related to liability and reputation. The administration argues that it is often difficult for outsiders to tell whether a group is run by students or the university’s administration.

Morton Mendelson, Deputy Provost of Student Life and Learning, expressed the administration’s viewpoint in an email to the Tribune.

“The administration is … responsible for ensuring that the McGill name continues to enjoy the same prestige that it currently does,” he wrote. “The primary beneficiaries of this are McGill students and alumni, because it is the ‘brand’ of McGill’s credentials, including degrees and transcripts, that we are protecting.”

There was strong student opposition to the MoA vote at council. Groups held signs reading ‘We are all McGill’—a tongue-in-cheek reference to Principal Heather Munroe-Blum’s email to faculty and students on Oct. 18. Many attendees voiced their concerns.

“We are McGill’s brand, and they want to try to protect it. This rationale makes sense if we’re in a corporation, but we’re in a university,” Josh Redel, president of the Engineering Undergraduate Society, said. “As soon as we lose this, we lose many of the things we fight for.”

“I feel kind of hoodwinked by my university, trying to take away the name McGill from tons of students who, like me, have done tons of effort to make this campus a better place in the name of McGill,” echoed Allan Cyrill, a former executive of the EUS.

In spite of overwhelming student opposition, councillors knew that the name use agreement they had reached was probably the best that they would be able to negotiate.  While this year’s MoA means the loss of the McGill name for many clubs, the current agreement represents an improvement in many ways over both the 2006 MoA and the administration’s initial offers. In the 2006 agreement, new clubs could not use ‘McGill’ in their names at all, and instead had to use ‘SSMU.’ Though many existing groups will have to rename themselves this year, they will have a number of name change options which include using the phrase ‘McGill Students.’ SSMU also fought to have the right to grandfather some names of historical importance and names which clearly imply that a group is student-run, like the McGill Debating Union. The administration will  provide $25,000 to help groups with the cost of having to undergo a name change, as some groups may have to change their official gear.

Maggie Knight, President of SSMU, and Emily Yee Clare, VP University Affairs of SSMU discussed the vote with the Tribune. As SSMU’s principal negotiators with the administration since June, they felt they had a personal stake in the motion and abstained from the vote, but discussed the major points the council saw in favour of voting for the MoA.

“It was sad,” Clare said of the atmosphere in the room following the vote, “especially because I think we’re all human. The sad thing is I think we agreed with … everything the gallery members said … but we still had to look at the implications of not signing it and looking at what fundamentally would be in the best interest for students.”

“I think we had to face the fact that it wouldn’t have been possible to renegotiate the MoA, specifically to do with the McGill name, without a substantial change in tactics or ideology on the part of the university,” Knight said. “We spent many long hours in negotiations … expressing to them every argument we’ve heard from our constituents and every argument we could think of trying to communicate just how important many groups feel like their names are.”

Importantly, the administration did not want to renew SSMU’s lease of the Shatner Building or of the SSMU Daycare (which is a separate entity from SSMU) until SSMU signed the MoA. The previous lease expired May 31, 2011, and SSMU is currently operating in Shatner without a legal agreement. The desire to secure a lease for Shatner was an important motivator for councillors to accept the MoA. By law, universities are only required to provide student societies with a room and a phone.

Council voted not to accept the lease as currently proposed. McGill offered to sign a 15-year lease and also wants to implement a new fee structure. Ultimately, the council found that current estimates of the long-term financial consequences would strain the society, according to Knight and Clare. Based on their calculations, signing the lease as it currently stands would have forced SSMU to increase student fees in the long term. SSMU would have been responsible for paying an increasing portion of the building’s utilities each year, which representatives of the society say would be unsustainable.

The administration wanted to sign all three documents, but Knight and Clare hope McGill will renegotiate the terms of the lease now that they have the council’s mandate to sign the MoA.

—Additional reporting by Carolina Millán Ronchetti