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Commentary, Opinion

McGill must prioritize affordable student housing

by Mallory Yeates on

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Seeking out safe, affordable housing is often a significant source of anxiety for students, one that has only intensified due to the disastrous financial consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Montreal, in the thralls of a housing crisis, currently has an extremely low vacancy rate of about 1.5 per cent. Low vacancy rates are caused in part by a lack of social housing and increased properties dedicated to short-term rental services, such as Airbnb, thus creating a housing shortage and giving landlords the ability to refuse long-term rentals. By leaving apartments of the market for long time periods, landlords are able to increase rent significantly for future permanent tenants. As 50 per cent of McGill students come from outside of Quebec, McGill has a responsibility to ensure that students living off-campus have the resources necessary to find affordable housing. 

Increased rent prices combined with soaring unemployment rates due to the pandemic have created a storm of terrible renting circumstances for students. The issue is only becoming more pressing as support funds from the government such as the Canada Emergency Student Benefit (CESB) and Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) are no longer available. On top of this, McGill does not provide institutionalized funding for student housing. Instead, Student Housing and Hospitality Services (SHHS), a completely self-financed entity, manages all student housing and does not fund student accommodations. This leaves behind first year students living on campus in March when they must search for their own apartments for the next year. To add to this, COVID-19 has made it exceptionally challenging for students to rent as it is now more difficult to tour apartments in person before signing leases. This will leave students with no other choice but to sign a lease before seeing their apartments and arrive in Montreal without knowing what to expect of their living conditions.

The housing information that McGill does provide comes in the form of a dismal webpage with little to no advice on renting for the first time in Montreal. Student Housing and Hospitality Services provides the website “places4students.com” as the only suggested resource for students to find apartment listings. According to an SHHS representative who answered the information hotline, the university neither screens posted listings on the site nor guarantees safe and scam-free rentals. This allows landlords to attract international and out-of-province students and present them with inflated rent prices because they have not been presented with an accurate representation of the cost of rent in Montréal.

The Student’s Society of McGill University (SSMU) is a valuable service for students looking to rent, aiding them where the university fails to deliver. Last year, SSMU developed an Affordable Housing Plan designed to educate and inform students of their rights as tenants. The mission of the Affordable Housing Plan is to protect students, who cannot be guaranteed fair rent in an open market, from exploitation by landlords. In addition to this, the plan collaborates with Montreal-based organizations to move forward affordable student housing development. SSMU has partnered with The Unité de travail pour l’implantation de logement étudiant (UTILE), a non-profit organization dedicated to the development of student housing in Quebec and strives to create locally-governed real estate projects that offer affordable rent. UTILE has funded much of the SSMU Affordable Housing Plan. A partnership with UTILE would be a crucial first step for McGill to ensure that its students have access to safe and affordable housing. By partnering with SSMU and UTILE, McGill has an opportunity to directly support the already-existing initiatives promoting the accessibility of sustainable student housing. 

SSMU, having limited resources and funding compared to the McGill administration, does not have the same leverage as the university. As COVID-19 leaves students in desperate need for McGill to take action towards securing affordable housing, McGill needs to extend resources to better educate students on their rights as tenants, and commit to advancing affordable student housing. 

McGill, News

10 out of 1726: Confronting McGill’s colonial past and racist present

by Amir Hotter Yishay on

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McGill lost 10 per cent of its Black faculty when Art History professor Charmaine Nelson left to take up a new post at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in July 2020. Of the 1726 tenured or tenure-track faculty at McGill, only 10 are Black—a figure unearthed in a report produced by Dr. Nelson and her students in her final undergraduate seminar at McGill titled “James McGill was a Slave Owner.” The report was released in June of 2020, during the wave of protests that swept across the world following the police murder of George Floyd. 

“I [was] 10 per cent of the black faculty,” Nelson said in an interview with The McGill Tribune. “If people aren’t horrified by that stat, I don’t know what will motivate them. Enough is enough. What does it say if the university that thinks itself the best in Canada has reprehensible under-representation of Black and Indigenous people in 2020? What does that say? This is a university with a diversity hiring policy. Can we not agree that the policy is not working?”

Nelson is an art historian, the first and to this day only Black professor in the discipline at any Canadian university. She began teaching at McGill in 2003, has published seven books, won a slew of awards and distinctions, and amassed a body of work that has consistently expanded the horizons of the burgeoning but perpetually neglected field of Canadian slavery studies. After 17 years at McGill, Nelson will take up her new post as Canada Research Chair at NSCAD, where she will develop and launch the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery—the first such institute in the country. 

“Working as [Nelson’s] doctoral student, I’ve always been so impressed with how she manages to spin straw into gold,” Chris Gismondi, a Ph.D candidate at McGill currently researching the history of slavery in Upper Canada, said. “She is such a valuable resource because there are so few people in [the country] with a specialized knowledge of slavery in Canada.”

During her final year at McGill, Nelson was struck by the university’s silence on its historical connection to slavery in the lead up to its bicentennial—a state of affairs she finds all the more galling for the glaring nature of these ties. James McGill, the wealthy Scottish merchant whose posthumous 10,000-pound bequeathment allowed for the founding of McGill University in his name, both enslaved people and invested in the slave trade. 

To date, only three Canadian universities have joined Universities Studying Slavery, a consortium advocating for universities to confront their ties to slavery and racism. Some members, including Brown, Dalhousie, and the University of Glasgow, have commissioned extensive task forces to investigate their own connections to slavery. As of now, all McGill has done in addressing its history is hire two post-doctoral fellows to conduct research into the university’s links to slavery, with no decision yet on what the school intends to do with their findings. 

“Brown, Harvard, Glasgow, Dalhousie have done mega-studies that take usually three to five years to do well [….] It takes money to do this properly,” Nelson said. “McGill’s commitment so far has been two post-docs.”

Nelson believes that a reckoning with Canada’s history of slavery and anti-Black racism is long overdue. 

“Canadians are so good at saying, ‘It never happened here, it happened in the USA,’” Nelson said. “You can go from kindergarden to university in Canada and never have anybody say to you that slavery happened here.”

Canadians have patted themselves on the back for a purported moral superiority to their neighbours down south. During Black History month, schoolchildren are taught to see Canada as a sanctuary for enslaved African Americans arriving through the Underground Railroad. This historical description leaves out the fact that Black and Indigenous people were enslaved in what is now Canada for centuries, only ending in 1833—something that few Canadians know and fewer still have had the chance to study. 

Nelson’s research has shown that although people of African descent have been in Canada since the 1600s, their presence, as well as their enslavement, has been written out of Canadian history. Nelson believes that this erasure has stunted not only the study of Canadian slavery but also the development of a broader conversation about anti-Black racism in Canada. 

“The thing people need to understand [is that] James McGill [was] not just a fur trader, he was a slave owner,” Nelson said. “We know he enslaved at least […] two Indigenous children and three Black people, and he was a West Indian trader. He’s not just exploiting enslaved people here in Montreal. He was also knowingly exploiting enslaved people in slave-majority contexts, [like] the anglophone Caribbean, and he understood, of course, who was harvesting the sugar and making the rum. So that’s part of where his wealth came from.”

McGill’s reluctance to acknowledge its ties to slavery prompted Nelson to investigate the matter herself.

“What redress, what reparations should be made for that? But this seems to be a conversation [the administration doesn’t] want to have,” Nelson said. “So I [said] ‘you know what?’ I’m going to have that conversation with my students and we’re going to generate recommendations, not to replace what McGill should do, but to urge them to take it on in an official capacity.” 

That conversation took the form of a seminar which aimed to present a report that included original, archival scholarship on McGill’s ties to slavery and racism, and a list of Bicentennary recommendations for the school to address systemic racism within the university. 

“We did a lot of work with slavery in Canada and Montreal specifically, uncovering a history that no one really talks about,” Nicholas Raffoul, U3 Arts, a student who was at the seminar said. “One of our assignments was transcribing a bill of sale of an enslaved person. A lot of them were actually James McGill buying or selling an enslaved African or Indigenous person.”

Nelson faced institutional racism at every step of her career. Her time with the department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill was no exception. Nelson noted how the department created a hierarchy of the most important administrative roles, and decided to allocate positions based on seniority. 

“When it came to my turn, they jumped over me and went to get a white female colleague that was on maternity leave,” Nelson said. “They literally had to go find her in her house. They didn’t want me to be chair of the department.” 

Instead, Nelson was consistently pushed towards the role of Undergraduate Program Director (UPD), a role deemed less important within the department.

  “When I came up for full professor, the chair at the time said to me, ‘You don’t have enough senior [administration experience],’” Nelson said. “I was like, ‘well none of you have let me be GPD [Graduate Program Director] or the chair.’ Which is what they—my white colleagues—use in general, in order to be promoted to full professor. But they never let me sit in that chair.” 

She also asserts that her other administrative roles, which included running the Senate Equity Committee on Race and Ethnic Relations, were strategically ignored and undervalued within the department because they were primarily concerned with racial inclusivity and anti-racist practices at the university.

“It’s not written anywhere that the role of GPD is more important than UPD,” Nelson said. “It’s the people in my department that made that up and then constantly pushed me towards UPD and then, when I came up for promotion, used it as a way to say I didn’t have enough [administration experience]. So what, are you saying that I can never be a full professor because you guys decided I can’t be chair?”

Nelson thinks that her being outspoken on matters of race and gender equality played a part in the treatment she received within the department, as well as in how her work is perceived more broadly. 

“I have never been silent on any of these issues of racism and sexism that I experienced [in the department], and they don’t want to hear it,” Nelson said. “If I dare to speak honestly about my experience, they are implicated.” 

She alleges that this treatment is symptomatic of a pervasive attitude toward scholars-of-colour whose work is sidelined as subjective and unduly biased for focussing on issues of race.

“Are you objective?” Nelson said. “You are an embodied white person having a white experience in the world which you are claiming is universal. You are not objective either. You bring your own ideas to the job of chair as well.” 

Despite the surge of public interest in anti-Black racism over the summer, Nelson is doubtful about the prospect of change at McGill.

“There’s a pattern to the way that white Canadians typically respond to these moments, which is to speak in platitudes and misdirect our attention and to lay claim to progress or action that is not really progress or action,” Nelson said. “The barometer of anti-racist work being done has nothing to do with the good intentions of white people.”

For now, students will have to wait for Sept. 30, when McGill will release its “Plan for Addressing Anti-Black Racism” to find out if their concerns will be addressed.

“Is the moment different? I don’t think so,” Nelson said. “There was no plan, there was no goal, there was no timeline. McGill is beautiful at platitudes without a timeline. No goal, no timeline, nothing happens. If you don’t say at McGill we’re going to hire 100 black professors by 2025, you think they’re going to hire any?”

Creative, Video

Test-taking strategies for McGill students

by Monica T. on

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Contributor Monica T. shares some strategies from her experiences with taking exams at McGill.

Monica is the creator of the Youtube channel “I wish I knew”, where she explores the skills and knowledge she wishes she had during her time at McGill University. She shares resources with the goal of encouraging others to pursue education. Find more of her content here.

Features

Commemorating the past through the present

by Caroline Shelton on

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Photography has always been an interest of mine, especially the old, black-and-white photos capturing the past. While historical sources are often charged with biases, photography can depict the past through a clearer picture. There is no better example than the evolving city of Montreal. The endless summertime construction prompts us to believe that the city must be completely different from its foundation. But the beauty of the past is still present, and it can be commemorated through the photography of today. By comparing old and new images of Montreal, one can see the persistence and evolution of the city over the years.

Research Briefs, Science & Technology

How the brain and body synchronize to keep a beat

by Shafaq Nami on

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People often say that practice makes perfect, and music is no exception. From virtuosos to amateurs, rehearsal is a key part of mastering the craft.  

A recent study led by Caroline Palmer, a professor in McGill’s Department of Psychology, questioned if practice truly does make perfect, or if underlying genetic mechanisms contribute to an artist’s musical ability. The McGill-led research team identified neural markers that correspond to a musician’s ability to synchronize with beats. The researchers found a connection between one’s quality of synchronization and these neural markers, with some experienced musicians struggling to synchronize with complex beats. 

Neural markers can be either proteins or nucleic acids, such as DNA or RNA, that are expressed in undifferentiated cells during neurogenesis––the process in which neurons are formed. These markers allow researchers to attribute different perceptive functions to specific parts of the brain and are valuable to the study of how neural networks develop. 

“My collaborators Brian Mathias and Anna Zamm, [both] accomplished musicians, and I were inspired by the fact that musicians are very skilled at synchronizing their movements with a wide range of musical rhythms,” Palmer wrote in an email to The McGill Tribune.

Musicians must coordinate their sounds and movements on the scale of milliseconds. The inspiration for this study stemmed from a lack of research into how neural networks support auditory perception and movement control, and how musicians can precisely synchronize their movements to create and match beats.

“Our ultimate goal, and my contribution to the research, is to better understand the mapping between brain states and behavioural states as musicians synchronize with musical rhythms,” Palmer wrote. 

Using electroencephalography (EEG), which measures neural activity and the types of brain waves it produces, researchers tested the ability of the brain to synchronize with beats. They also measured synchronization behaviour—the brain’s ability to dictate motor-control—using a metric known as temporal accuracy. Temporal accuracy is the ability of a musician to resist deviating from timed judgements that allow them to synchronize their beat with a musical rhythm.

Musical rhythms arise from the relationship between time, also known as tempo or the frequency of a beat, and sound (i.e. notes). Rhythms can be either simple or complex, depending on how long notes are played for and the emphasis given to each note. The study involved gathering data from performing musicians with at least six years of formal instruction.

“We wanted to examine changes in [the] neural networks [of] people who could synchronize with both ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ rhythms,” Palmer wrote. 

Musicians were asked to synchronize with beats by tapping their hands to a given rhythm. At the same time, electrodes attached to their scalps measured their brains’ EEG signals. The researchers hypothesized that musicians synchronize better when their neural rhythms align with the rhythm of the music they are playing.

The results of the study showed that even experienced musicians had difficulty synchronizing with complex rhythms. Researchers identified a correlation between the quality of synchronization and the strength of “EEG power” in neural markers; musicians who synchronized better showed greater EEG power, which suggests that the frequency of their brain waves better matched the frequency of the beat. Those who did not synchronize as well showed weaker power. Researchers still do not know if these results can be generalized to individuals without professional musical training.

In the future, performers may be able to use EEG measures to become better synchronizers through the use of neurofeedback methods. While practice improves the alignment of brain rhythms with musical rhythms, it is unclear whether anyone could become what Palmer calls a “super-synchronizer”: Someone with the ability to synchronize with very complex beats.   

The study can also have implications in a variety of fields such as medicine and physical and speech therapies. 

“Musical rhythms are also used to aid recovery of speech functions following a stroke, and to aid individuals with gait disorders to walk,” Palmer wrote. “It would be exciting to examine the neural markers for synchrony […] in health applications such as these.”

Editorial, Opinion

The Royal Victoria Hospital must remain in public hands

by The McGill Tribune Editorial Board on

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On Sept. 4, students joined forces with Milton-Parc residents to protest the privatization of the old Royal Victoria Hospital. The building’s fate has remained unclear since it was decommissioned in 2015. In July, it was converted into a shelter for the unhoused during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the City of Montreal has announced that it will remain as a shelter until at least 2021, the Societe Quebecoise des Infrastructures (SQI) is currently developing plans to repurpose the site, and McGill has already appropriated several of its buildings for teaching and research. 

No plans have been finalized yet, but activists are concerned that the property could end up in the hands of private developers, who may try to build expensive condo units on the property. Aside from an information session in 2017, local residents have not been consulted, and the project has proceeded without debate at Quebec’s National Assembly. As the hospital is built on public land, excluding the public from the decision-making process is tantamount to disenfranchisement. It is incumbent upon public officials to prioritize their constituents over private interests by organizing consultations with community members to determine the property’s future. It is equally imperative that the McGill community, from administrators to students across Montreal, collaborate with Milton-Parc residents to pressure authorities to respect public interests.

The idea that the hospital should be privatized is incredibly insensitive to the unhoused population. Gentrification is already contributing to a housing crisis in Montreal. In recent years, rising eviction rates have led to a precipitous surge in homelessness, as the housing crisis, together with related economic problems, have pushed financially struggling citizens into poverty. Establishing new condo units would add to this by raising the cost of living in the Milton-Parc neighbourhood, thus pushing lower-income residents out. For Montreal to allow a developer to privatize the hospital, which currently serves the unhoused community, would be unconscionably callous and unwise because it would deepen the crisis.

Montreal has historically disdained its homeless as a publicity problem. Even worse, in many cases, homeless people cannot be tested for COVID-19 because many testing facilities require people to present a permanent address. This is particularly striking considering that Montreal’s unhoused population is disproportionately composed of Indigenous people and other minorities, whose present economic tribulations ultimately stem from centuries of systemic racism and colonial oppression. By antagonizing these unhoused people rather than implementing appropriate solutions to underlying economic factors, the city not only fails to address its housing crisis, it also invokes the memory of colonial tyranny by perpetuating racial injustice. 

Montreal must avoid any measures that could exacerbate the situation, including privatizing the Royal Victoria Hospital. Instead, officials should address the problem by converting the space into long-term affordable or social housing units. Psychological research indicates that when unhoused people are provided housing first, before other services such as career training, their conditions are significantly improved. 

At the very least, such solutions would serve public interests rather than private developers’ financial interests. Whatever the solution, it must have the consent of community members. By failing to listen to their concerns, public officials fail in their basic duty to serve their constituents. As co-habitants of the Milton-Parc area, McGill students must recognize this injustice and stand with residents in demanding consultations. Likewise, because we contribute to gentrification, students must take an active role in supporting Montreal’s unhoused, by taking part in protests against privatizing the Royal Victoria Hospital, volunteering at homeless shelters such as The Open Door and Dans La Rue, and making donations to support them if financially capable of doing so.

Still, as stakeholders in the project, McGill administrators are better positioned to make a difference. Even if it is absolutely necessary to utilize some of the space for educational or research functions, McGill cannot tolerate the privatization of any part of the property. The hospital is a public resource, and McGill has already taken a share of it. At a bare minimum, McGill owes Milton-Parc residents the dignity of supporting their call for a voice in their neighbourhood’s future.

Science & Technology

The hazards of ill-designed science in the age of COVID-19

by Yiwei Bian on

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In recent months, several unpublished papers exploring the link between air pollution and outbreaks of COVID-19 have been swept into the media frenzy surrounding the pandemic. In April, the New York Times reported on an unpublished paper from researchers at Harvard University, which concluded that there exists a positive correlation between long-term exposure to air pollution and the mortality rate of COVID-19.

In a recent commentary, Mark Goldberg, professor in the McGill Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, questioned the validity of such research studies. He cited inadequate sampling and biased spatial resolution, amongst other methodological shortcomings. The commentary, co-authored by Paul Villeneuve, professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at Carleton University, examined nine different epidemiological studies on the link between air pollution and coronavirus outbreaks, including the Harvard paper.

Underlying each study is the hypothesis that living in areas with higher levels of air pollution increases the mortality rate of individuals who have contracted severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) or COVID-19. Of the nine studies, only one rejected this hypothesis. 

Goldberg first points out that incomplete data on COVID-19 cases renders the sampling methods used in these studies inadequate. Due to insufficient testing capacity in the early stages of the pandemic and the large number of asymptomatic carriers, these studies exclude a sizable proportion of COVID-19 patients.

The contagious nature of COVID-19 leads to outbreaks in clusters, which skewed the results of the nine studies. Such a pattern has been exhibited in outbreaks in a South Korean church, the Smithfield meat packing facility in South Dakota, and over 800 reported clusters in France.

“There are more important factors than air pollution [that affect COVID-19 mortality],” Villeneuve said in an interview with The McGill Tribune. “You can’t control for [the modes of transmission] in studies that use a county-level measure of air pollution and a county-level count of death.”

The commentary also criticizes the ecological design adopted by seven out of the nine selected papers. In epidemiology, ecological studies come with what is termed the “ecological fallacy,” usually resulting from inferences drawn about individuals from aggregate data. The fallacy is evident in the Harvard paper, for example. There, researchers assigned a single value to the average concentration of air pollution in 3,080 U.S. counties over a 17-year period and compared it against mortality rates. Although these counties vary drastically in area and population, the data does not reflect their heterogeneity.

“[It’s like] comparing apples with oranges,” Goldberg said in an interview with the Tribune, noting that, for this reason, ecological studies are generally frowned upon within the field of epidemiology.

Epidemiologists are still grappling with the high degree of uncertainty associated with an ongoing pandemic. Goldberg used the example of Montreal, where a Hasidic community was one of the first heavily impacted by a surge in COVID-19 cases following travel-related community transmission. The outbreak then shifted to senior homes and other disadvantaged communities. 

Recently, younger populations who are generally less vulnerable to the more severe effects of COVID-19 have become substantial vectors for the virus as school and incautious social gatherings resume. Although new data has proved this to be true, Goldberg cautioned against conducting observational research in the midst of a pandemic.

“Who gets affected changes through time [.…] If you can’t take that into account, you can’t do a study,” Goldberg said.

Although Goldberg and Villeneuve’s commentary suggests adopting a longitudinal study design as a possible alternative for researching the effects of pollution on COVID-19 outbreaks, both authors remain pessimistic about publishing this research in real time. Instead, focussing on vaccine and therapeutic trials might be more helpful not only in the present, but for future prevention as well. 

“We already know that we need to reduce and regulate [pollution] levels,” Villeneuve said. “What doing a study on pollution and COVID-19 does is it raises issues about air pollution research, and detracts from decades’ worth of research in the area.”

Hockey, Sports

Hockey away from home

by Zoe Babad-Palmer on

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From Hall-of-Famers like Teemu Selanne and Peter Forsberg to young stars like Patrik Laine and Andre Burakovsky, Finland and Sweden have produced their fair share of successful NHL players. The frozen lakes that cover the two countries probably play some role in this success. Their Nordic neighbor Norway, however, has always been less enthusiastic about hockey. Although outdoor rinks are common enough throughout its cities, Norway’s mountains lend themselves better to skiing. While only 21 Norwegian players have ever been selected in the NHL draft and only one Norwegian, the Minnesota Wild’s Mats Zuccarello, is currently active in the league, hockey in Norway is far from dead.

At the beginning of this year, I left for a semester abroad in Oslo. As an avid hockey fan, I was eager to check out the local scene. I figured that the games would be nothing like the North American games I’ve been to at the professional and university levels.

 Norway’s top-tier hockey league is GET-ligaen (the GET-league in English), with the 1. divisjon (First Division) ranked just below. Of the 10 teams in the league, three—Grüner, Manglerud Star, and Vålerenga—play in Oslo. Tickets were affordable, and my rinkside seat cost only a fifth of the price of a ticket to a Habs game in the nosebleeds. However, information about the league itself was harder to find, probably due to a combination of my thoroughly mediocre Norwegian and the league’s lack of social media presence.

 When it came time to pick a team to cheer on, I went with Vålerenga: The most storied franchise in GET-ligaen. The club’s 2,050-seat Furuset Forum was a 45-minute ride away on the tram and subway—hardly the downtown locale of the Bell Centre or Madison Square Garden. Vålerenga won both games that I went to, trouncing Grüner 5–1 and beating Storhamar 3–2 in overtime.

 The differences from the Candian hockey that I was accustomed to were apparent as soon as I entered the small arena. The stands were nowhere near full, typical of Vålerenga home games, with an average attendance of 968 people that season. There was none of the spectacle that I was used to from an NHL game, but the second the puck dropped, I was right at home. The pace was quick, the players were determined, and the fans were excited. Chants rang through the rink, and while I could not decipher a word, I found myself just as eager to join in as I would have been for a “go Habs go!” or a “Let’s go Canadiennes!” I felt transported back to those Montréal Canadiennes games—like GET-ligaen, women’s hockey games are characterized by smaller arenas and fewer dramatic ceremonies, but fans can look past that to appreciate the spectacular quality of the hockey itself and love their teams even more for it.

 The hockey games that I attended were some of my favourite memories from my time in Oslo. They were a reminder that even if the goals are being announced in a different language, and even if you don’t know a single member of the team that you are cheering for, a breakaway can still bring you to the edge of your seat. A missed penalty call can always make you share an exasperated look with your neighbour. Hockey is still hockey. 

 Don’t count a league out just because it’s not the NHL. If you find yourself far away from the colossal arena of your favourite team, remember that you can have just as much fun going to a less commercial game, and you don’t have to break the bank to do it.

 

Commentary, Opinion

Frosh 2020 should serve as an inspiration

by Logan Pecht on

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For McGill’s first-year students, Frosh week marks the beginning of a vibrant social life on campus. In the face of a global pandemic, Frosh leaders and coordinators attempted to give new students a taste of the Frosh experience from the confines of the same bedroom in which their classes began merely a week afterwards.

Despite the absence of drinking events, which many students place at the center of their Frosh experience, many positives emerged from these rather unimagined circumstances. Because Frosh was online, hoards of intoxicated students that defined prior orientations no longer disrupted the residents of the Milton Parc neighbourhood. Virtual Frosh 2020 received a mixed reception from students but it hinted at a future where fun activities can take place without the numerous issues plaguing Froshes of years past. Due to the pandemic, the underlying theme this year inadvertently shifted from unhinged partying in past Faculty Froshes to emulating the McGill and Montreal community for every student no matter their location. While the virtual components of Frosh 2020 lacked excitement, future orientations should draw inspiration from these unintended consequences and model themselves on a greater emphasis on showcasing Montreal and avoiding contributing to McGill’s disruptive drinking culture. 

Unsurprisingly, the vision orientation leaders held for Frosh 2020 did not come to fruition. Satirically mocked for its attempt to be anywhere as enticing as a normal Frosh, the main “attractions” consisted of scavenger hunts, escape rooms, and a virtual dance party. Granted, many students acknowledged that, with the limited resources available to the leaders, many of the activities proved to be more enjoyable than expected. However, low participation and attendance at the events frequently nullified that. The blame should not fall on the leaders, as they were faced with froshies whose low expectations of the virtual events caused them to give up from the beginning. Still, the various attempts to showcase Montreal felt artificial to students unable to travel to campus this fall.

Frosh is notorious for being a huge disturbance to members of the Milton-Parc community. Before the pandemic, under the pressure from Milton-Parc community members, Frosh coordinators started to take steps to better respect the community surrounding McGill. Nonetheless, disturbances persisted, and it was only a pandemic that brought an unusual quietness to the surrounding area. Continuing to implement community awareness programs whenever it is safe for the in-person events to return must be a priority. Considering that thousands of students attend the event each year, future Frosh organizers should continue to address ramifications on the surrounding community. 

Perhaps future coordinators should incorporate the unique ways in which Frosh 2020 showcased the neighbourhood. This could be achieved through familiarizing students with the neighborhood beforehand and working with local community members to inform students on how to better respect their surrounding area. One major obstacle to these initiatives, however, remains the competitive nature of McGill’s drinking culture, which induces disruptive behavior.  

While Frosh does not have to be completely dry, an effort needs to be made to curb the excess alcohol consumption. Not only is it damaging to the surrounding community, but it also feeds into a toxic social environment on campus. In essence, Frosh sets the tone for a social scene dominated by over-consumption. Many still argue, however, that drinking can be conducted in a responsible manner, especially under the supervision of leaders and coordinators. By continuing to expand upon the training protocols for both students and leaders, the negative impacts of Frosh may be in part alleviated. This approach is not without precedent and has been successful at ensuring a safe and fun environment for everyone involved. 

It would be foolish to assert that the virtual Frosh came close to replicating the same experience as in-person Frosh. But the unintended consequences of COVID-19 has spared much of the McGill and Montreal community from damage that occurs in a typical year, which should serve as a reflection on how to create events that better serve both students and residents alike. 

Off the Board, Opinion

Reimagining self-care

by Sequoia Kim on

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Capitalism has sunk its teeth deep into the ambiguous concept of ‘self-care.’ Many students have become accustomed to citing self-care to justify money wasted on frivolous purchases. What’s more, the western world’s ethos of perpetual, hyper-speed productivity has led to the ballooning of self-importance at the expense of others’ wellbeing. It’s time to reimagine self-care as a concept distanced from the ultimately unachievable consumerist distortion of the perfect fitter-happier-more-productive lifestyle.

It wasn’t always this way, though. Kindled by Audre Lorde’s writings and essays, Black feminist circles in the 1980s began to conceptualize self-care not as self-indulgence, but as an act of survival and “political warfare.” To Lorde, self-care was a necessary survival mechanism for Black women and other actively marginalized people to navigate a racist, sexist, hostile world. The concept of self-care that mainstream culture knows today is the result of white, corporate feminism jamming the term through the wellness-industrial complex grinder. Appropriated, commodified, and diluted, improving physical appearances has become a basic tenet of self-care.

Dangling low-hanging fruit like aloe facemasks, powder-dusted pastries, and overpriced jade rollers, the commercial self-care market tempts vulnerable, stressed people with quick-relief band aid solutions. It doesn’t help that social media giants climb into bed with capitalism at night either; I don’t go anywhere without being bombarded by hundreds of products that promise to satisfy everything that my fragile ego so badly craves. My attempts to buy myself out of the cesspool of my imaginary needs are in vain.

Audre Lorde’s essay, “Master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” serves as an important reminder. The self-care industry is two-faced: At one moment, companies injure and bruise insecurities, and a second later, turn around and offer a remedy. Of course, treating oneself in moderation is a healthy practice. But the true practice of self-care involves so much more than the single-use, impulsive reflex of self-indulgence it has become.

The self-care dilemma, however, goes beyond its rampant commercialization and borderline unethical self-doubt profiteering. The neoliberal emphasis on self-preservation and self-optimization has ingrained itself into the fabric of society and dug its heels into students’ collective consciousness, too. The constantly stressed yet overly competitive student archetype is a paradigm of this mindset. The cultural rewiring required of us will be difficult, and likely guilt-inducing. It’s no easy task to unlearn such a deep-seated mindset, especially as a student immersed in a competitive bureaucratic institution like McGill.

The pandemic moment calls for a reimagined practice of self-care—one that is more distanced from manufactured consumer holidays and machine-like efficiency, and instead focuses on communal care and comprehensive well-being.

I’m still working to untangle the capitalist, ultra-efficient attitude that is ingrained in me. Speeding in as a keen U0 student last year, my utmost concern was acing all my classes, marking up every single reading, policing every minute of my time, and constantly striving to be productive. I would turn down social events in favour of toiling away under McLennan’s awful fluorescent lights. I took arty, semi-pretentious pride in being sleep deprived many nights of the week. Thankfully, a lot has changed since then.

Last week, coming in and out of focus from a dense reading, I closed my laptop, reclined on a grassy hill, and napped in Jeanne-Mance. The sun rays pooled on my skin, and I shuffled my latest playlist. All the while, I fought with my internalized instinct to keep working, or at least finish the reading before I gave in. Working through thoughts ricocheting around my brain, I began the arduous process of decoupling shame and guilt from break and leisure time. Lying in the sun for a brief moment on a lonely Tuesday was the most valuable thing I did all week.

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