Despite a series of significant financial setbacks so far, the Arts Undergraduate Society President Dave Marshall is still optimistic about the coming year.

Navigating the issues, Marshall said, requires the AUS to renew its vision and reinforce its principal duties.  

“Yes, it’s an unusual year, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad year,” he said. “It’s a re-imagining,”

For example,  AUS has launched an initiative to coordinate with companies which are in the interest of students and students’ futures.  

“Companies find the Faculty of Arts a great place for recruiting students, and students benefit a lot from information about where they can get job opportunities,” Marshall said.

Elements of this strategy are already in place. Last week’s Bar des Arts was co-sponsored by Rogers, which ran a contest that included a Blackberry as a prize.

At the practical level, AUS is automating and digitizing some tasks, such as bookkeeping, to reduce overhead.

“We’re getting smart with a lot of the things we do, to reduce redundancy and streamline our processes,” Marshall said.

Marshall emphasized, however, that the AUS prioritizes the student body over innovations.

“We’re students first, not necessarily politicians,” he said. “The AUS is big in and of itself, but we’re nothing without our departments.  Our success comes from their success. We need to find a way which ensures that we are financially stable while not detracting from the ability of our department associations to make progress.”  

AUS has invested in an online collaborative tool comparable to the WebCT system, called ARTSNET, for the departmental associations to use.

Marshall emphasized that regardless of budgeting concerns, student amenities will not be hurt.  

“There are a lot of expenses that we have to face that are significant,” he said. “Things like our contributions to the Arts Student Employment Fund. We’re not going to reneg on that because it’s something that’s good for the students.”

Problems with AUS Frosh and a federal back-tax collection have caused AUS’ financial difficulties.

“It’s come to the point where this year many issues have come to their maturity, with an expiration date, and now we have to deal with everything,” said Marshall.  

However, Marshall views the obstacles as opportunities to better understand which organizational and financial strategies work best for the AUS.

“This year allows us to wipe our slate clean,” Marshall said. “I think it’s a really powerful year for us.

McGill’s Board of Governors made public several documents last week regarding this summer’s closure of the Architecture Café, including some of the financial figures that protesting students have been asking for.

The documents revealed, among other things, that the café had lost more than $15,000 last year and was projected to lose more than $73,000 this academic year.

Students’ Society President Zach Newburgh had requested a report about the café’s closure at the Board of Governors meeting on September 28, which Stuart Cobbett, the board’s chairman, then asked Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) Morton Mendelson’s office to provide. The resulting memorandum, sent to the Board of Governors on October 22 and made public last week, details the McGill administration’s decision to shut down the popular student-managed café.  

According to the financial information in an appendix to the memo, the Architecture Café roughly broke even last year, aside from the money allocated to McGill Food and Dining Services, which managed the café jointly with the Architecture students. If the Food and Dining Services contributions are included, the café lost $15.

This year’s projected $73,211 loss would have resulted from the hiring of a full-time manager for $49,200 to replace its five part-time student managers.

While he agreed that the hire made sense, Newburgh said that the administration had failed to exhaust all its options before closing the café.

“Clearly, if we were facing financial deficits, we needed to ensure sustainability by raising prices,” he said. “According to calculations, if you raised prices by about 50 per cent, you would have seen the projected deficit disappear.”

Carly Roualt, a former manager of the café who has been a vocal opponent of its closure, declined to comment for this article.

Despite the release of the documents, Newburgh said that SSMU would continue its efforts to reverse the administration’s decision to shut down the café.

“We’re still going to be pushing for the reopening of the Architecture Café,” he said.

The documents also describe much of the history of student-run food services on campus.

According to the report and a subsequent interview with Mendelson, student-run food services first cropped up on campus in the early 1990s. Partly in response to massive financial cuts, the university struck memorandums of agreement (MoAs) with several student groups on campus which allowed them to set up food operations.

In the late 1990s, however, the university decided to retake control over food services on campus, citing problems with the student-run operations such as liability risks. As various student groups’ MoAs came up for renegotiation, the administration declined to renew their authorization to sell food on campus, with exceptions for operations like the Arts Undergraduate Society’s SNAX and the Engineering Undergraduate Society’s Frostbite.

However, the Architecture Students Association, which opened a food outlet in the Macdonald-Harrington Building in 1993, never negotiated an MoA with McGill. As other campus eateries shut down, the Architecture Café continued to operate beneath the radar. (It did not pay taxes, for example.)

After the administration attempted to close the café in 2007, the eatery reopened under the partial control of Ancillary Food Services, which operated food services on campus at that time. Over the next three years, the administration reorganized food services on campus, combining the administration of operations in residences with those on campus. The decision to close the Architecture Café, Mendelson said in an interview, was just one part of the process.

“The Architecture Café,” he said, “as important as it was to many people, was, in terms of the whole scheme of operations, something that we dealt with against a backdrop of massive changes in the organization of food services on campus.”

When returning students found the café closed in September, Mendelson said he was nonplussed by the force of their response, which included two large student protests outside senate meetings.

“I was a bit surprised by the feeling outside the School of Architecture for the Architecture Cafe,” he said. “The space had always, at least notionally, been the Architecture students’ space.”

Though it has steadfastly refused to reconsider the Architecture Café’s closure, last month, the administration announced the creation of a new consultative body, called the Student Consultation and Communication Work Group. The body, composed of administrators and reprentatives from SSMU, the Post-Graduate Students’ Society, the Macdonald Campus Students’ Society, and the McGill Association of Continuing Education Students, is designed to increase student input in administrative decisions.

Newburgh has high hopes for the new group.

“We are institutionalizing a process of student consultation that this university has never seen before,” he said.

Alice Walker

Alice Walker

Lieutenant-General and Senator Roméo Dallaire has seen a lot. In fact, he has seen more than most people can possibly imagine.

This was made clear during a lecture delivered by Dallaire at Concordia University last Thursday. The talk and accompanying book signing were part of a tour promoting Dallaire’s new book, They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children.

Before Dallaire’s talk, Frank Chalk, a history professor at Concordia and the director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, introduced the senator to a crowd of mostly students.

“In General Dallaire’s case, compassion means more than empathy and sympathy, for he combines those virtues with action and with wisdom, and that is why he is with us tonight,” Chalk said.

Dallaire delivered a powerful lecture on the importance of the next generation’s ability to understand the past in order to make the right decisions for the future.

“We’re going to get a feel for the past,” said Dallaire as he addressed the audience at the beginning of the lecture. “And that’s going to be farther than CNN past, which is last week, and even farther than FOX past, which is yesterday.”

One of Dallaire’s main concerns about the future stemmed from his apprehension regarding how we, and in turn our politicians, spend too much energy “managing” the risks of the future so as to minimize any possible problems. Instead, Dallaire said, we should be anticipating and taking risks in order to build the best future.

“How can you look into that future and leap into it if you’re not going to take any risks?” asked Dallaire.

Dallaire argued that good leadership will often produce better results than what managerial statistics and theories say are possible.

“There is no limit to what human beings can do,” he said. “So, ladies and gentlemen, the future is in leading, not in managing and handling and avoiding the risks and perceptions of the future.”

Another theme discussed during the lecture was Canada’s position in the global framework. Although thousands of Canadian troops helped storm the beaches of Normandy, no Canadian general was consulted on the strategy of the mission. Canada, Dallaire said, used to be viewed simply as “the good cousins from across the pond.”

Today, he argued, Canada is one of the most powerful nation-states in the world. Dallaire believes Canada, and Canadians, should realize this and act accordingly.

“When I hear someone saying Canada is punching above their weight, I think that person is on another planet than us, because we have never yet punched above our weight,” he said. “For [Canada’s] potential has not yet been fully maximized. We have a lot more to give. You have a lot to give in this time frame, on this planet, to humanity.”

But Dallaire said that Canada must be responsible with this power. He talked about Canada’s membership in NATO and the dangerous power of nuclear weapons. Dallaire said that hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on upgrading nuclear weapons systems that are now useless because serious threats from superpowers no longer exist.

“Having nuclear weapons in existence is an affront to our human right to security,” he said.

Although the talk was billed as part of a tour promoting Dallaire’s new book on child soldiers, much of the talk covered a wide variety of unrelated topics. But he still made time to mention child soldiers and their lamentable prevalence in violence around the world, specifically in Africa.

According to Dallaire, there are currently close to 30 conflicts throughout the world where child soldiers are the primary weapons system. Dallaire recounted graphic details of child soldiers being drugged and used as killing machines and explained that there are serious moral issues for any third party who becomes involved in these conflicts.

“Do you kill children, who are under duress, who have been abducted, who have been drugged up, who have been indoctrinated, working out of fear, raped, who are engaged in using force and barbarism?” asked Dallaire. “Is the answer to shoot them?”

Dallaire’s answer was an adamant “no.” He maintained we must work to end the use of people as weapons and to secure all people’s rights.

“All humans are human,” Roméo Dallaire stressed. “All humans are human.”

The event was put on as a joint effort by several organizations, including the Concordia Student Union and the McGill Bookstore. Anna Stein, the events administrator at the McGill Bookstore, said that  bringing Dallaire to talk to students was an easy decision.

“Why General Dallaire? Because he is this exceptional figure. Exceptional beyond what people can articulate,” Stein said. “What he’s been through is astronomical and impossible to describe, and yet he keeps so busy, he has a hand in so many things.”