McGill Tribune

According to a recent survery released by McGill’s MBA Student Association, 70 per cent of MBA students believe the cost of their program is at or below a reasonable level. When even students are standing up for tuition hikes, that’s when the province needs to stand down.

It’s unclear what the QuebecMinistry of Education intended to accomplish when it slapped McGill with a $2 million penalty for switching to the self-funded model for its MBA program, but the gesture comes across as little more than a symbolic slap on the wrist. The Tribune has voiced its support in previous editorials for the change in the MBA program, but the reasons are worth revisiting. Prior to last year’s drastic increase, a $10,000 deficit between operating costs of the MBA program and funding from tuition and government subsidies for it was offset by pilfering funds from the tuition paid by McGill’s undergraduates. Even after the recent tuition increase, MBA students—who often have worked for several years before entering the program and can expect salaries around $80,000 when they graduate—will still be paying far less in tuition than the national average of $40,000. It makes sense for MBA students, who consider the high cost of their education as a worthy investment in their future, to pay for their own education. Since switching to the self-funded model and raising tuition to $27,500, the program has gone from 95th to 57th in the Financial Times’ rankings of international business schools. Also, with increased revenue, McGill has been able to offer better financial aid, claiming to offer students an average of $12,000 to offset the increased costs related to the switch to a self-funded model.

Despite the increase—or, rather, by increasing tuition—McGill has been able to cater to the interests and needs of students far better than the pandering provincial government has cared to. While McGill has increased the amount of finanical aid given to MBA students, Quebec now considers McGill MBA students ineligible to receive aid. If the province really considers the recent increase a burden to students, it should help them shoulder the burden, not make it  even worse. Quebec’s displeasure at the tuition increase seems more of a punishment for McGill’s daring to defy provincial orders than an act in defence of accessible education.

The fine follows through on former education minister Michelle Courchesne’s promise last spring that Quebec would reduce McGill’s subsidies to keep it at the same level of total funding as other MBA programs in the province. While this is the overall goal of the self-funded model—to offer higher quality of education without relying on subsidies from governments and non-MBA students—the $2 million shortage for this year will directly affect the students, necessarily subtracting from the quality of the program or the quantity of student aid offered by the university. Holding back the quality of McGill’s MBA program for the sake of arbitrarily maintaining the lowest MBA tuition in Canada (when the MBA students themselves support the increase), and at the expense of other students, isn’t a strategy for making post-secondary education accessible. Especially in light of the recently announced tuition increases across the board, the $2 million shows the Quebec government to be more interested in empty gestures than in fulfilling the responsibilities of effective government.

McGill should stay the course; students should continue to make their voices heard; the Quebec government should reconsider its intentions and priorities, and should ultimately back down.

McGill Tribune

Queen’s University students are set to vote on a referendum question which would recommend to the university council that it move to impeach Nick Day, the university’s elected rector. Day—whose position is the third highest in the university and is mandated to represent students—drew national attention last week when he posted a note on Rabble.ca criticizing Michael Ignatieff for condemning Israel Apartheid Week. Day wrote: “I was elected to represent the approximately 20,000 students of Queen’s University. If I ever used the influence of my office and the power of my public voice, as you have, to insulate from criticism the perpetrator of a mass-slaughter, I would have a very difficult time sleeping at night.” Controversially, he signed the letter as “Nick Day, Rector, Queen’s University.”

While it seems true that, as Day later contested, he never claimed to be speaking for his 20,000 Queen’s constituents, it is obvious that by signing the letter with his position he sought to add more authority to his views than merely writing his name would have gotten him. It is common practice to assume that a letter invoking someone’s position means they are writing in that specific capacity, and not as a mere layperson. Queen’s students are appropriately upset about Day’s mistake.

It is important, in light of the controversial nature of the topic, to be clear about what is at issue. Everyone is free to agree or disagree with the stance Day took in supporting Israel Apartheid Week; the more important discussion is about a student leader who used his position in a way he was not elected to do. We have seen this at McGill recently, too, when Students’ Society President Zach Newburgh sent emails from his president account to make contacts with other student leaders regarding Jobbook.com. Both Newburgh and Day made errors in judgment. The Tribune believes it is inappropriate for student leaders to use their positions of authority for advocating on issues not directly related to student life and on which it is far from clear they have a mandate from students to speak on their behalf. If Day wanted to invoke his position in the online letter, he should have made it clear that he was speaking for himself only. Student leaders are elected to speak for students in a certain context; the Day controversy shows that when leaders exit that context, they need to be especially clear who they are representing and how.

Day published a statement in the Queen’s Journal this weekend arguing that one of the duties of the rector is to “foster academic dialogue” among Queen’s students, and that his publishing the letter falls under this category. This is a gross misinterpretation of why people are upset. Day needs to apologize for abusing his title. If he continues to insist, as he did in the Journal article, on his erroneous conception of the duties of a student leader, the referendum question urging university council to impeach might not be such a bad idea.

McGill Tribune

My name is Haaris Khan. I am not an anti-Semite. I am not a terrorist. I am not a threat to my fellow students on campus. I can be an idiot sometimes, though. I’ve learned that using my voice in a public forum comes with great responsibility. Politics can be nasty and human emotion can lead to colossal errors. In my case, I can only say that I erred in such a way. For that I am very sorry. My comments were totally inappropriate and I would never harm my fellow students. I have never been a violent person and I have never had any violent altercations in my life. I came to McGill University wanting to contribute, not destroy.

My comments on Twitter last week have caused quite a bit of concern for some students on campus, McGill security services, school administration, and the police. I recognize the gravity of the situation considering the nature of my tweets, which were meant in jest. After reflecting on my comments, I can only say that I truly regret saying them and that it was a very poor decision.

One question that seems to come up a lot is why I reacted the way I did to the documentary screening hosted by Conservative McGill and Libertarian McGill. Really, it had little to do with the movie itself and more to do with the negative attitude I had going into the event, my pre-existing ideological differences with those at the event, and the fact that I wasn’t in the right state of mind at the time.

I am anti-Zionist. The Israel-Palestine conflict is a very sensitive subject and it’s easy to become worked up about it if you care passionately about the issue. I also realize that anti-Zionism tends to go hand in hand with anti-Semitism because of the complex relationship between the Jewish identity and Israel. This creates a fine line when it comes to criticizing Israel and Zionism. I do not harbour any hatred towards Jewish people. My Jewish sister-in-law, whom I love very dearly, and my niece who is Jewish by tradition are both people that are close to my heart and their cultural or religious backgrounds have nothing to do with how I see them.

I think that Jewish culture is colourful and its history is inspirational. My objection to the policies of the state of Israel and the treatment of the Palestinians are purely political and in no way reflect how I view Jewish people.

I apologize to those who were at the screening of Indoctrinate U and any other people who were offended or felt threatened by my tweets. It was never my intention to be a divisive or antagonistic figure at McGill. I have strong opinions and a strong passion for justice. My goal now is to channel that into a more responsible discourse.

The morning before we published the story about Haaris Khan’s tweets last week, I think I startled one of my fellow editors. She was convinced that the story was a huge deal, that there would be a unanimous outcry, that this was one of those things that transcends politics and gets right to the roots of how people are supposed to treat each other. I was a bit more blasé. Sure, I said, this is some scary stuff. But we’re talking about words that mention Jews here. That’s not “real racism.” A lot of people will be upset about this, but many will find ways to dismiss it as nothing, thinking that so much as printing that article is little more than another conservative attack against innocent Muslims daring to question Israel’s hegemonic power. She disagreed, and I hoped my cynicism would be disproven. Unfortunately, in this case, I think I turned out to be right.

In fairness, Khan has issued an eloquent apology in this week’s Tribune. This article is not about him, but about reactions to his tweets. And there was no shortage of attention to the original article from those outside this campus. Major media outlets like Global and the Toronto Star covered the story, and conservative bloggers aplenty expressed their distress. The world outside McGill was hardly silent.

But in comments on the article, in threads on Facebook, and in the lack of posts on Facebook by some hyper-involved people who usually publicly discuss every article about topics remotely controversial on their profiles, one thing was evident: for many people, this was an issue of politics, not prejudice.

From the very first comment on it, last week’s story mirrored the fate of almost all articles about cases of anti-Semitism. There was questioning of whether tweeting about killing Zionists could really be considered to be threatening to Jews; whether a stated fantasy of shooting was tantamount to threat; whether this needed to be taken seriously.

At the risk of engaging in a counter-factual hypothesis, I would propose that the reactions to these tweets were far milder, especially from certain corners of the campus left, than they would have been were they directed towards a different group. If he had spoken of a feminist, rather than Zionist, conspiracy, would there have been any question of whether he was antagonistic towards women? If he had mentioned wanting to shoot a roomful of gay students, rather than conservative ones, would there be any debate on whether his tweets constituted more than an exercise in poor judgment?

As for those who pointed to a fairly moderate note he had written about Israel, that was an interesting piece of information but of little other value. If somebody tried to condemn a student based on his views on Israel, those same ones looking to exonerate him would surely be up in arms.

Student activists last year had little trouble arguing that Choose Life’s Echoes of the Holocaust event and general anti-abortion posturing constituted violence against women. Consistently, writers in the campus press justify violence at protests by arguing that oppressive state institutions constitute the real violence. Surely they should be able to perform the far less onerous mental gymnastics required to conceive of these tweets as violent against Jews. But they in general chose not to, and this is a scary portent for the future.

It is time to stop pretending that anti-Semitism doesn’t exist. That Jews have not faced thousands of years of oppression and people like John Galliano, Julian Assange, and Haaris Khan are the persecuted ones. That Jews are somehow just “white people” (a study of early 20th century writing about Jews belies this) and that white people are fair targets for discrimination to begin with. It is fashionable these days to complain that anti-Semitism is thrown around too often. It can be used irresponsibly, and it’s always wrong when it is, but I can recall reading far more complaints of unjust anti-Semitism lately than actual instances of it.

We need look no further than recent synagogue destruction in Montreal, or derogatory comments about Zach Newburgh upon his election and since, or even comments on a recent Tribune article accusing the whole paper of being under the sway of me and the Zionist conspiracy at Hillel McGill, to know that anti-Semitism is alive and well here at McGill. Moreover, something like the recent bombing of a Chabad house in Mumbai indicates where anti-Semitism—given a pass because it fits in with anti-imperialism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Israelism—can end up.

All prejudice is awful. And if we are to seriously consider ourselves to be against it, if we want to put into practice the anti-oppressive rhetoric that gets touted so much at McGill, then it is about time anti-Semitism stopped being considered a right-wing issue. It is real, it is here, and we should all be concerned about it.

Full disclosure: Mookie Kideckel is Zach Newburgh’s roommate.

You enter the gym. The ceiling lights are off. The only source of light comes from two or three rented lights that spin and/or change color. Of course, the light may just be coming from the lights in front of the speakers that the CD player is plugged into. Your friends gyrate to Ja Rule and LFO. And then, you hear it, the greatest sound in the world: the opening strings, gently pulsing, a top layer and a bottom layer perfectly intertwined to create a wonderfully serene environment suitable for spinning in place for five minutes. It is, of course, “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing” by Aerosmith (off the Armageddon soundtrack), and the context under which this would occur is the ritual of the school dance.

What is dancing if not purely a pickup tool? I don’t care how much you “like dancing,” you don’t go to clubs just for the music. Now, high school is one thing, but an 11-year-old kid should not be made (and in my middle school we were made) to go to dances. Forcing children to try to find a dance partner, to experience rejection and sit against a wall alone, is not the best way to inspire confidence and self-esteem at that age. In high school, we got to choose whether to go to the dances, as we get to choose if we want to go clubbing now. But forcing preteens to try to participate in these types of mating rituals is just weird. I can picture my 12-year-old self feeling like a G because I got to slow dance to K-Ci & JoJo and hold a girl real close when the teachers weren’t looking, but is that really a positive thing? Is forcing preteens into an overcrowded, poorly amplified gym the best way to get kids to spend an afternoon?

Last weekend, my 17-year-old brother came to visit me in Montreal, and we ended up going out to Vinyl. I rarely go to clubs, mostly sticking to Korova if necessary, and even then mostly on hip-hop night. Yet what I realized last Friday night was that there is a transition from middle school, through high school, into university, that puts an emphasis on going to “dances,” in their various forms, as a type of mating ritual. Little has changed in the years since the middle school dance, except that the supervision is more lax. We still go to these events so we can hold on to someone and hopefully get their name and number. Today, we drink and take drugs to make us feel sexy and uninhibited (let’s be honest, no one is ever sober at clubs) but I’m still missing the point. Perhaps I’ve always been more of a concert person. Or perhaps I don’t necessarily like dancing, or know how to dance all that well. The usual extent of my “dance” abilities is grooving to Prince as I walk to school. But I will still dance and go to clubs and buy giant PBRs and spend all this money on getting in and drinking because dancing is the world’s oldest pickup tool. You don’t even have to be particularly good at it to survive a night at Tokyo, Muzique, or wherever.

And maybe that lack of required is still my biggest problem with dancing. Maybe I just miss the spinning. There was no pretending, no hiding, no booze: just me and my partner not wanting to miss a thing. Grinding is not hard, it’s just that, to me, the spinning was more like dancing than anything we do now. Things were better then. You don’t need a fifth of whiskey and Ed Banger to realize that.

As the semester comes to a close, I usually find myself stressing—not about school but about finding a summer job. Last year, I started my search in November, and by the time April rolled around still wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do in the summer. Most of my friends don’t start searching for a summer job until reading week and when I tell them I’ve been attending CV workshops and mock interview events for months, they’re usually surprised.

My desire for a summer job isn’t simply due to the fact that I like having something to do with my four months of summer. As an Arts student, I’ve always been conscious of the fact that I don’t have a direct career path, like Engineering or Management students. Lining up summer jobs, becoming exposed to different industries, and networking are even more important for students who won’t have a clear career lined up at the end of their four years of study.

My sister claims that I spend more time writing about how hard it is to find a summer job than actually applying to summer jobs—but I promise I don’t.

Finding a summer job is not only difficult; it’s actually a full-time job in itself. Some days I find myself spending more time on my job applications than school work. One of the biggest challenges students face today is the increase in demands from employers. Not only do employers want straight-A students, they also want employees with relevant work experience, tons of extra-curriculars, and knowledge of foreign languages and cultures. Talk about high expectations! It’s starting to become a little unrealistic, and the problem is that there hasn’t been a way to directly engage with Canadian employers and express these feelings.

It turns out that some Canadian organizations are trying to get the voices of our generation heard. Last year I stumbled upon a Canadian job site and career resource for new grads called TalentEgg.ca, and I started writing for their online magazine. When they wanted to start a campaign engaging with Canadian employers, I immediately submitted my story to their project called Student Voice. So far, lots of stories have been shared and hopefully this will start informing employers that this job process is unfair to students.

One of things that I find particularly unfair is the lack of feedback given to students who spend an enormous amount of time applying for jobs. I once had to submit over 20 essay questions with an application. After putting in a lot of time and effort, I was hoping to receive at least a standard confirmation email that they received it. I didn’t. This is part of what makes the job process so frustrating.  

Finding a summer job for a good student with lots of extra-curricular experience shouldn’t be this hard—or should it? Is this just preparing us for reality, showing our generation that finding a job is not easy and it’s a lot of hard work? That may be true, but it is also true that we deserve to see a change in this job process—and it starts with letting employers know our concerns.

For now, it’s back to the drawing board, also known as my Google search engine.

I’ve never considered myself a psychonaut. The prospect of taking any drug usually frightens me more than it excites me. I’ve dabbled, though.  

In my first few years of high school, I smoked pot semi-regularly—partly because I wanted to and partly because I thought I should. I grew out my hair, or rather, my curly Jewish locks. (I’d hoped for some waviness, but what can you do?) I often wore a tie-dye shirt, along with a pair of Birkenstocks, and listened to jam bands. I was conjuring a cultural past—the hippie movement of the 60s—that didn’t really jibe with who I wanted to be. Smoking pot, I realized, made me self-hating and quiet. If that was liberation then I wanted nothing of it, but I still didn’t know what exactly I did want.

Near the end of high school, after I’d decided to stop smoking pot altogether, the joint inevitably came my way at parties. “It makes things too real,” I’d say, turning down a puff. “It exacerbates my analytical proclivities,” not even sure myself what that meant.

I’ve lately been thinking about drugs because, a little over a week ago, Owsley Stanley died. A wacky LSD cook—and revolutionary soundman for the Grateful Dead—Stanley concocted, popularized, and set the standard for the purest acid in the 60s. Before him, acid was not a cultural phenomenon. He made it one.

The first and only time I did acid, last summer, I didn’t really feel like it expanded my mind. I hallucinated and thought some deep things while staying up all night in a park. But in the morning, I felt more proud than enlightened for having lived through the experience.

I think acid has definitely lost its spiritual and ethical lustre since the 60s. That goes for most hippie values. Despite this, I still feel there is a sort of anxiety of influence that permeates my generation—an ambiguous indebtedness to the hippies (and unknowingly, to Stanley). It’s not immediately evident, but I think it’s there.

Perhaps that’s why I feel a sense of weakness whenever I turn a joint away at a party—I know what a joint is supposed to offer me, but I also know how I will really feel if I accept it—or why I felt accomplished for having done acid: I can check it off the list.

In the 60s, drugs (and I mean psychedelics) represented more than they could actually offer. Not that they don’t offer anything: you can learn from taking drugs. But the idea of drugs, in my mind, seemed to override their actual effects.

In 1963, when Stanley was researching how to make acid in the library of UC Berkeley, he came across The Kybalion, a book that outlines the ancient principles of alchemy. In a rare interview with Rolling Stone in 2007, Stanley described those principles as “mental transformation.” “Everything is connected, because it’s all being created by this one consciousness. And we are tiny reflections of the mind that is creating the universe. That’s what alchemy says,” he elaborated. To me, that means self-discovery: a noble pursuit. But I think the hippies watered down that notion. It became a platitude.

It took me about three years to realize that I probably shouldn’t smoke any more pot. I didn’t understand what paranoia meant until I smoked enough pot to know it personally. But that was surprisingly sobering in itself. I was making my own self-discoveries through drugs, just not in the way I—or, probably, the hippies—could have imagined.