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Student Life

Viewpoint: Popping my way into the McGill bubble as a Montrealer

by Selin Altuntur on

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Starting university at McGill required very little adjustment for me. I had lived my entire life in Montreal, in my parents’ home in Côte-des-Neiges. By the time I was enrolled in classes, I was already familiar with the campus, given that my mother, an employee of the university, had taken me to work every couple of weeks from a very young age. I already had a post-secondary degree from Dawson College and a tight-knit group of friends whom I met in high school and CEGEP. I had a long-term partner, a part-time job, and a solid, well-established life in the city. However, I quickly noticed that many of my first-year peers at McGill were living very different lives from my own.

For starters, many of them lived in residence, away from their families and friends for the first time. And given that Quebec’s legal drinking age is lower than in surrounding provinces and states, it felt like the majority of students around me were just discovering what it felt like to be able to drink legally. Even though I was only about a year older than those other first years, I felt we couldn’t relate. Admittedly, this was partly due to a false sense of superiority that I had developed to shield myself from the fact that my university experience was leaving me feeling very alone. While I wanted to meet new people and become more involved, my anxiety about being unable to relate to other students kept me from taking that first step.

During my first three semesters at McGill, I was very aware of the vibrant community of students bustling around me. Meanwhile, largely due to my lack of involvement in events on campus, I had made no lasting university friendships. While other students attended multi-day drinking events, mingled in rez, and joined clubs, I would come to campus to attend class and leave right afterward. I never went out with other McGill students who weren’t already friends of mine from high school, and I still didn’t know what Carnival was, or where all those onesies had come from. The concept of the “McGill bubble” was familiar to me—but only because I felt like an outsider with little idea of what was occurring inside that bubble.

Even though I was happy and fulfilled in my life outside of McGill, I felt a very strong fear that I was missing out on the university experience. I had already made peace with the idea that I would never explore McGill the way that first-years coming from outside of Montreal would, but I still wanted more of a quintessential student experience than I was getting.

However, I knew that in order to be happy during my time at university, I needed to get over the mental block that was keeping me from meeting other students. Following the advice of a close friend from CEGEP, I got involved with The McGill Tribune where I got to meet other students with similar interests to mine. I quickly found that befriending students from varying hometowns and backgrounds was surprisingly easy. This shattered my assumptions about not being able to relate to people from outside the province, and allowed me to develop relationships that have made me a more well-rounded human. Now, on the cusp of graduating, I am deeply proud of the community I forged at McGill, and the fact that I have done far more with my time here than simply complete my credits.

Being a native Montrealer can remove the incentive that most students have to build a community at university. However, the university experience only amounts to what one makes of it. Although finding the motivation to make that extra effort was something that didn’t come naturally to me, becoming more involved on campus was without a doubt the only way I was able to become fulfilled here, and graduate knowing I had the made the most of my time at McGill.

Ask a Scientist, Science & Technology

Ask a Geologist: How do islands form?

by Emma Gillies on

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Earth’s surface is constantly changing due to a number of natural processes: Rivers transport sediment, glaciers carve valleys, and colliding tectonic plates build mountains. One of the planet’s most impressive talents, however, is the formation of islands.

In recent decades, various new islands have popped up. The island of Nishinoshima off the coast of Japan formed from an eruption in 1973, and Yaya Island formed in 2013 near Russia. In Newfoundland and Labrador, sea level rise and coastal erosion turned a former peninsula into an island called Sandy Point in the 1960s.


Nishinoshima island (hakaimagazine.com)

Although islands can be formed by a variety of processes—such as clashing continents, sediment deposition, and glacial retreat—one of the most prominent ways in which they appear is through the convection currents of the mantle, the layer of earth directly below the crust. These currents cause Earth’s tectonic plates to move and interact with one another, which leads to phenomena like earthquakes and continental drift. When tectonic plates are pushed and pulled apart, they form volcanoes, causing eruptions when the plates are pulled apart. As hot magma rises from the crevasses created, it eventually builds up to form islands.

According to Christie Rowe, a geologist and associate professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, there are two types of submarine volcanoes that create islands: Island arc volcanoes and hotspots.

“[Island arc volcanoes] are formed when there’s a subduction zone, so the oceanic plate is actually going down into the mantle, where it triggers melting,” Rowe said in an interview with The McGill Tribune.

In this way, a convergence of two plates can result in a long belt of simultaneously active volcanoes, like those of Guam, Tonga, Fiji, and Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.

On the other hand, hotspots are point sources of magma that are not associated with a plate boundary. They typically form island chains like Hawaii, Réunion, and the Azores.

“[Hotspots] can also come up under continents,” Rowe said. “Yellowstone [National Park] is a mantle melt source that’s not associated with a plate boundary.”

The mechanisms that create hotspots are not fully understood. Nevertheless, all volcanoes essentially work in the same way. An island is formed when magma builds up and breaks the ocean’s surface. In some cases, like the island of Hawaii, land masses merge together.

Each volcano is a bit different, and so are the rates at which they form. For many volcanoes, formation can take thousands of years, though some volcanic islands can sometimes appear quite suddenly.

“In terms of becoming an island, it depends on how deep [the] water they’re in [is] and how productive their magma source is,” Rowe said.

The formation of mud volcanoes—which are not true igneous volcanoes, since they don’t contain lava—can be observed in a day. In 2013, a 7.7-magnitude earthquake hit Pakistan and caused a mud volcano to form the island Zalzala Koh, which sank into the ocean three years later.


Surtsey Island (arctic-images.com)

In the 1960s, a three-year-long volcanic eruption off the southern coast of Iceland gave birth to a new island that has since been colonized by plant and animal life. Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Surtsey is a valuable location for scientists to study ecological succession.

“There are whole ecosystems basically based off the colonization of volcanic islands,” Rowe said.

Still, the transformation of a barren magma island to one able to support life is not unique to Surtsey. Earth is often called  the ‘Dynamic Planet’ because it is always changing—volcanic islands like Hawaii and Réunion remind us of nature’s ability to do so.

Out on the Town, Student Life

Going for the green: A look into the fight to save Milton-Parc’s Notman Garden from development

by Audrey Carleton on

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It’s easy to miss Notman Garden when walking past the intersection between Milton and Clark streets on a brisk April day. Under the strain of cold weather each year, the grass in the 1,000-square-meter area goes brown and the centuries-old trees become dry and bare. But this humble spot has a rich history to it, as the focus of activist efforts within the Milton-Parc community for decades.

Renowned architect John Wells built the garden in 1844 behind the heritage Notman House on Sherbrooke and Clark streets.

The house and garden were both passed down through famed Canadian families over several decades: The Molsons purchased it in 1866, then photographer William Notman followed suit in 1876, as did the Drummond family in 1893. In 1894, the house was renovated into a hospital for women with incurable ailments, and the garden was transformed into a leafy oasis of care and comfort for patients in their last years.

Fast forward 100 years, and the garden property has been separated from the house and sold to a development company. Despite the government granting Notman House protection as a historic site in 1979, the same security was not afforded to the garden. While its sale sparked outrage in the community at the time, this and every new threat to the space over the past twenty years has led Milton-Parc residents to come together to protect the land.

“In the Milton-Parc area, people have been mobilizing for quality issues and heritage issues and green space issues, transforming back [alleys] into common gardens, since the 1970s,” Dinu Bumbaru, Policy Director at Heritage Montreal, said. “So there’s really a special culture.”

This decades-long fight came to a head in May 2017, when a local condominium development company began vying to purchase the land, now valued at an estimated $1.8 million. But this threat did not fly with residents in the surrounding Milton-Parc community, who quickly mobilized to save the garden from being demolished and turned into condos.

“It’s not a mere green space or a set of trees for us, it is a bit of a historic garden associated with a very appreciative historic building,” Bumbaru said. “And this has been our statement since the first battle to save it around 2000.”

After months of protest and heated dispute, residents’ activism finally paid off. The Plateau Mont-Royal borough council voted for the City of Montreal to appropriate and preserve the land at its meeting on Feb. 5. The council’s resolution will hand ownership of the land to the city government, who plan to turn it into public space for the surrounding community.

While the garden will be open to use by long-time residents and McGill students alike, the student community has been relatively disengaged from the fight to save it. This is, in part, due to the transience of the student population, which turns over every four years. During the campaign, Students’ Society of McGill University Community Affairs Commissioner Julien Tremblay-Gravel experienced firsthand the challenge of involving the student community in the fight for the garden.

“It’s a nice space and I think it’d be made nicer by student involvement,” Tremblay-Gravel said. “We have different schedules [from the permanent residents] and can fit a lot of stuff in. So we can be very helpful, we can be a positive force in the neighbourhood.”

Being the most densely populated neighbourhood in Montreal, the Milton-Parc community has very little green space, making it all the more important to preserve. To Bumbaru, green space is essential to a healthy urban community.

“The case of the Notman Garden is quite special, but it’s a reminder that there are little gardens all over the place,” Bumbaru said. “Frankly, the quality of life and the heritage of the city doesn’t rest in large, expansive land, like parks [….] These little green dots in the city make the difference between a good and a bearable space.”

Commentary, Opinion

Lonely campus

by Keating Reid on

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I’m a first-year McGill student, and I’m lonely.

I did all the right things. I lived in residence. I participated in Arts Frosh. I joined a few clubs. But nothing seemed to work. None of my relationships could bridge the canyon-sized gap between acquaintance and friend.

Everyone else, it appeared, had found their social groups: Engineers were drinking at Blues Pub, Management students were drinking at 4 à 7, and science students were bonding over shared complaints about required classes. The Thursday-through-Saturday night-clubbing expeditions had begun. And, in the middle of it all, I felt entirely out of place. Specifically, I felt out of place for being out of place—as if I was the only new student who couldn’t find his people.

But, in reality, I was not. Searching the word “lonely” on the McGill subreddit returns some bleak results: “Why the McGill experience is so lonely?” “Lonely at mcgill, have no friends, failing most classes.” “Lonely, and alone in mtl this summer. Is there any way I can pay people to hang out with me?”

As the year went on, and I started to make deeper connections, I found that many other McGill students shared my experience of feeling alone in their loneliness. This shouldn’t come as a surprise: We all accept occasional loneliness as a potential fact of life. Despite this, university marketing campaigns that advertise idyllic, predictable social lives have convinced students to think of campuses as an exception.   

The freshman blues phenomenon isn’t exclusive to McGill. A 2016 study by the American College Health Association found that around 66 per cent of Canadian post-secondary students reported feeling “very lonely” within the past 12 months. Still, I can’t shake the sense that McGill is an especially lonely place—and I think I know why.

In her recent book The Perils of “Privilege”: Why Injustice Can’t Be Solved …, author Phoebe Maltz Bovy observes how so-called “elite” universities have begun advertising themselves as not just schools, but as comprehensive, once-in-a-lifetime experiences.

Marketing a university as an unrelentingly blissful “experience” creates unrealistically high expectations of what life at university will be.

“What these schools are promising is sort of … everything,” Maltz Bovy wrote. “Everything in the sense of, every minute of the day will be spent with people who were, like yourself, handpicked for all-around perfection, as well as for serving some kind of preordained role in the impeccably balanced community.”

McGill is certainly guilty of idealistic advertising. Its slick admissions website promises: “From your first day on campus, you’ll quickly realize that you’re among kindred spirits.” Even better: “This is a place where creativity is contagious, and where there is always someone who shares your interests, no matter what they are.” McGill’s targeting of heart over head promises an all-inclusive experience. Unfortunately for would-be McGillians, it’s impossible to guarantee someone the intangible feeling of belonging.

Marketing a university as an unrelentingly blissful “experience” creates unrealistically high expectations of what life at university will be. In truth, university life is just that—life. It’s filled with the same quotidian boredoms and inconveniences as every other existence, and the same loneliness, too. But when students’ experiences fall short of the admissions-website hype, what are they to make of that? How could they not assume they’re the odd-ones-out?

This is far from the only consequence of the pernicious “best years of your life” myth. There’s no chapter in the experience narrative in which the protagonist realizes they chose the wrong school and transfers, nor one in which they drop their course load to part-time for a year (or, God forbid, withdraw) to take a needed mental health break. What many students forget is that neither of these choices are bad. Sometimes, they’re the best decisions a student can make. However, their exclusion from the advertised “experience” advertising narrative gives students the impression that such choices are not viable.

The loneliness epidemic comes as much from students’ high expectations as their bleak realities. McGill can’t offer students an effortless glide into a tailor-made social life, nor can any other university. For a lot of people, socializing is hard. Even for those lucky enough not to find chit-chat anxiety-provoking, it still demands a degree of energy. When energy is in short supply, as it’s gobbled up by exams, papers, extracurriculars, and internship applications, it’s no wonder that it’s so hard to make meaningful connections.

To those reading this who find themselves without a brochure-cover-ready group of friends—you may be lonely, but you are not alone in being so. As Billy Joel once sang, “Yes, they’re sharing a drink they call loneliness / But it’s better than drinking alone.”

Off the Board, Opinion

“So what are you going to do with that degree? Any plans?”

by Jade Prévost-Manuel on

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Six years ago, I sat in a computer lab at my rural high school in southwestern Ontario for a mandatory course that the majority of my grade considered mind-numbingly dull: Civics and Careers. This one-credit program instructed 10th graders on ethics, resume-writing, and surviving the post-2008 labour market. Our assignment that day was to research a prospective field of study that would shape a larger project—a 10-year plan describing our dream job, lifestyle, and income in detail. Our respective plans, we were told, would be an important resource for us to refer to during course selections, as our eligibility for certain post-secondary programs depended on selecting the appropriate high school courses in our junior and senior years.

Six years later, I’m past the halfway mark of the 10-year plan I’ve long forgotten, and I fail to recall the dream job and lifestyle I once envisioned. I have, however, over the last year, crafted a number of satisfying responses to the two questions that I’m most frequently asked regarding my impending graduation: “So, what are you going to do with that degree? What’s your plan?”

These questions often come from a place of curiosity—and perhaps even a place of concern. Whatever the intention, both reflect the socially-acceptable and mechanical process undergraduates are expected to follow: Work hard, earn a degree, and secure a successful—synonymous with well-paying—job in a relevant field that, with a university education, should be easy to find.

While this may not sound like an unreasonable expectation, it fails to account for the fact that the post-secondary student experience has changed radically over the last 50 years. Undergraduates today are living in a different world than that of their parents or their grandparents. Long-gone are the days when an undergraduate degree was a ticket to a dream job, a glorious pay cheque, and a prestigious reputation among one’s colleagues. Nowadays, post-grad options for arts students seem to fall anywhere along the spectrum from attending law school to settling for barista work.

This may be due to the ever-growing gap that separates the expectations of soon-to-be grads from the realities of the labour market. A 2013 report from the CIBC World Market stressed the drawbacks of pursuing arts and humanities degrees, citing a much lower return on investment for soft degrees in comparison to specialized ones. These low-return fields—which in 2013 accounted for 45 per cent of all university graduates—make up the largest share of university students. Students in humanities and arts degrees are expected to earn around $30,000 per year—less than half of the median income.

Long-gone are the days when an undergraduate degree was a ticket to a dream job, a glorious pay cheque, and a prestigious reputation among one’s colleagues. Nowadays, post-grad options for arts students seem to fall anywhere along the spectrum from attending law school to settling for barista work.

But, it’s not just arts students who should be worried. Even the engineers aren’t guaranteed a full return on the value of their degree: A 2015 report from the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (OSPE) showed that 33 per cent of engineering graduates in Ontario are underemployed, meaning that they’re working jobs that don’t require an engineering degree. The OSPE suggested that universities may be at fault. Post-secondary institutions are under-preparing their graduates and neglecting the job-related skills so critical to securing employment in today’s labour market, such as the hands-on experience gained through internships or experiential learning initiatives.

Regardless of the type of degree, these are the realities facing most, if not all, undergraduates: Dismal job prospects, preceded by inadequate preparation by the institution. Unfortunately, there’s still a certain level of perfection expected among university students—not only throughout the course of their degrees, in the form of extracurricular commitments, internships, and a high GPA, but in their post-graduate plans as well. If a student’s success isn’t defined by their acceptance to graduate school, it’s defined by their ability to secure employment opportunities, the primary value of which often lies in the associated dollar sign. Any deviation from the idealized undergraduate path—whether it means taking a year off, working a lower-end job, or enrolling in a college program—is viewed as a failure.  

Ultimately, the job opportunities associated with the degrees we’ve worked tirelessly to earn are no longer guaranteed. The changing labour market doesn’t value bachelor’s degrees to the extent that it used to. This change has been accompanied by a spike in competition between students, and the failure of universities to prepare us for the new jobs landscape after graduation. University students need to think creatively about new ways to use their degrees, and shouldn’t be bound by a model that was built for the student experience of the 1960s.

Science & Technology

March for Science to unite Montreal community

by Catherine Morrison on

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On both sides of the Canadian-American border, governments are enacting environmentally harmful policies. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is, controversially, expanding the Kinder Morgan Pipeline, and American President Donald Trump plans on weakening fuel economy regulations, which would counter former president Barack Obama’s strides in reducing greenhouse gas emissions through creating efficient fuel standards for transportation vehicles. To respond to these policies, Montreal will hold the March for Science on April 14, co-hosted by the March for Science and Evidence for Democracy organizations. This annual event has been held in cities from coast to coast with the goal of bringing together communities by celebrating science and advocating for evidence-based policy.

Bishop’s University student Vince Scully is the main organizer of the event. When describing the origins of the march, Scully described it as having originated from similar marches in the United States. “It was an American event in the beginning,” Scully told The McGill Tribune. “Once Trump was elected, he started trying to silence all the scientists. To counter his actions, specifically what he’s been doing with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a march was created. Now, there have been over 50 marches in cities around the planet to support them.”

As solutions to environmental issues continue to be negated, events such as these are crucial to gathering public support to make issues visible in spite of a government trying to hide the truth.  

“With the march we hope to show people that without science you can’t have a democratized world,” Scully said. “Scientists are being silenced all the time, and they can’t talk about what [their] research is about [or] what [they’re] doing to make the world a better place. Similarly to what we saw when Harper was prime minister, the government continues to silence scientists and journalists.”

Scully explained that the movement also hopes to bring attention to the censorship of people working for environmental agencies in the government. Employees of these organizations are often limited by their superiors in the extent to which they can express their thoughts on environmental issues.

“The EPA doesn’t allow people to voice their concerns about a lot of things,” Scully said. “Scientists working for the EPA can’t write a bunch of words like ‘climate change’ in their documents. We’re trying to get that voice back.”

While the event is a great way to educate attendees about current environmental issues, it also offers a  space for students and scientists to come together and take a stance in showing their support for environmental action.

“Science is an integral part of society,” Scully said. “We need it in order to move forward as a community and a country. An event like this is important for anyone who wants to be a part of working towards a better future. Specifically for students, what we’re trying to do [through this event] is show that they have a voice and if they work hard enough they can make themselves heard in order to make political change.”

Whether you have a passion for environmental policy, or simply want to learn about current environmental issues, Scully encourages you to do so alongside a community of supporters and attend the March for Science on April 14.

“Through making ourselves heard, we can make the world look more like what we want,” Scully said. “We can make it more environmentally-friendly and more peaceful. If we don’t do everything in our power to get our point across, the government will keep doing what they’re doing and nothing will change.”

Science & Technology

A story of community: Trees, fungi, and microbes work hand-in-hand

by Ronny Litvack-Katzman on

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Researchers at McGill, in partnership with the Université de Montréal’s (UdeM) Plant Biology Research Institute, have discovered a hidden ecosystem that works to clean polluted land. The project consisted of a collaboration between Nicholas Brereton, a research fellow at UdeM’s Plant Biology Research Institute and senior author of the study, and Emmanuel Gonzalez, a bioinformatics consultant in McGill’s Department of Human Genetics. The team demonstrated the existence of a tripartite relationship between plants, fungi, and bacteria that allows trees to break up petroleum hydrocarbons in contaminated soil. This symbiosis of sorts allows trees to thrive in stressful conditions, in which their integrity may usually be compromised.

The study, published in Microbiome in March 2018, followed the lives of willow trees planted at suburban sites in Montreal, examining their roots and soil profiles. By looking at these two factors, the researchers were able to understand the extent to which they had been affected by pollution.

“We walked in and [assumed that we] knew what the answer was,” Brereton said in an interview with The McGill Tribune. “[This is] the worst way to do science. We [assumed that] the roots established themselves and produced monooxygenases, enzymes which would degrade the oil, but they weren’t there.”

After noticing that the soil was essentially depolluted, the researchers intuitively concluded that the degree of purification was too extensive to have been the work of the tree alone.

“From a biologist’s perspective, if we had just targeted the tree, we would have walked away with the wrong story,” Brereton said. “It is a collective function. You don’t see these complicated interactions across life unless you look [closely.]”

Using differential expression, an advanced type of genetic analysis in which genes are isolated and compared to a vast database, Brereton and Gonzalez’s team was able to observe entire pathways of genetic activity.  

Bacteria, which express genes in large groups, cannot be taken apart and analyzed individually through gene sequencing. To address this problem, Gonzalez developed a novel program to decode the order of these bacterial genes and the genes themselves.

“The order [of the genes] is quite important,” Gonzalez said. “If you switch the order, the story is hard to understand. This order is what told the story.”

What they found in the soil was a rich assortment of microbes and fungi, interacting with the roots of the willow tree. By conducting their research in the natural conditions of the ecosystem, the team was able to see the full scope of organismal interactions.

“The vast majority of [the] complexity is in the fungi directly interacting with the willow to create a response,” Brereton said.

Previously, researchers thought that the tree did the majority of the work in the decontamination process. According to Brereton, the study identified approximately 8,000 fungal genes in the genetic pathway that cleaned the soil, and only about 2,000 willow genes, indicating that the tree does not work alone.

The trees, fungi, and microbes not only rid the soil of pollutants, but reinvigorated it.

“Before the trees were planted, you looked at the soil and there was just nothing there, just small patches of grass,” Gonzalez said. “After a year you look and there is a whole forest.”

The willows present a new opportunity to address affordable and sustainable waste management practices. The impact of planting trees in contaminated land reaps more benefits than simply purifying the soil.

“We can use the biomass produced [by the trees] for renewable energy as well and for green chemistry, such as sustainable chemicals,” Brereton said.

News, SSMU

SSMU Council discusses the presence of far-right ideology in McGill community

by Kendall McGowan on

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The Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) Legislative Council convened on April 5 to discuss methods to prevent the spread of far-right groups within the campus community, and implement policies against sexual violence. Additionally, Council voted to update SSMU’s equity policy, to support the Fiat Lux library improvement plan, and to change the Arab Students’ Network’s status from a club to a service. Council also heard reports from the SSMU Environment Committee and the First Year Council (FYC).

 

SSMU’s relationship to “far-right” politics in a local context

Council members considered adopting a policy to not affiliate with any groups with a connection to the far-right, and to prohibit any individuals with far-right affiliations from working for SSMU. According to SSMU Vice-President (VP) External Connor Spencer, the policy would use RationalWiki’s definition of “far-right” ideologies, which describes them as values rooted in  inequality, like segregation. The motion mandates future VP Externals to annually update a list of far-right groups in Montreal.

Speaker Nikolas Dolmat and other council members questioned whether this ban could violate discrimination laws. Some also argued that any candidate with far-right affiliations would likely not be elected anyway.

“My one concern […] is are we allowed to ban people in our society from positions?” Engineering Senator and 2018-19 SSMU President-Elect Tre Mansdoerfer said. “Is that OK legally with McGill and the Charter of Student Rights, and Quebec legislation? […] It would scare me to pass something that was immediately violating multiple laws.”

Other Council members, including Spencer and Social Work Representative Matthew Savage, defended the legality of the motion by stating that genocide and other far-right beliefs are too hostile to be considered legitimate political opinions and therefore are not protected grounds for employment. They also pointed out that the motion is becoming increasingly relevant with the growing presence of the far-right in Montreal.

“The sentiment that I’m hearing from a lot of people here is that they want to protect that one person that might have some slightly right tendencies,” Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS) VP External Alice Yue said. “But that’s not the purpose of this motion. The purpose of this motion is to make sure that that one far-right person does not get to run and make thousands of students feel unsafe on campus [….] It’s totally fine to be conservative.”

After the debate, Mansdoerfer moved to postpone the question to the second meeting of the 2018-2019 SSMU Legislative Council, which passed by a vote of 16 to seven.

 

Progress on anti-sexual violence initiatives discussed

Guest speakers Caitlin Salvino, the co-creator of the Our Turn National Action Plan and SSMU’s Gendered and Sexualized Violence Policy (GSVP) Coordinator, and Priya Dube, a student policy advisor, presented the progress they made in drafting a GSVP. They explained that the Policy covers sexual violence prevention, advocacy, and response. The GSVP will also offer survivors both formal and informal responses and resolutions to their disclosures.

Additionally, Council voted unanimously to mandate anti-sexual violence training in the 2018-19 school year for all SSMU officers, directors, and councillors and at the clubs workshop and services summit, a requirement that Salvino hopes to continue through the GSVP. Spencer predicts that the final draft will be passed next academic year.

“We’re trying to push McGill to better support their students,” Salvino said. “We tried to mandate this in the policy so that we’re not just relying on an exec who’s passionate […] but it’ll be every year that SSMU has to continuously advocate for survivor-centered policies and appropriate responses.”

McGill, News, SSMU

Open letter demands external investigation on faculty sexual misconduct

by Cherry Wu on

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On April 5, the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) held a press conference to discuss an open letter addressed to the McGill administration regarding sexual violence on campus. The letter, which was sent on April 4, accused at least five professors of sexual misconduct within the Departments of History, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, and World Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies.

Additionally, the letter demanded the launch of an external investigation into the way the Office of the Dean of Arts responds to complaints against faculty members. Currently, the letter has signatures from more than 2,000 students and over 70 student organizations, including faculty associations such as the Social Work Students’ Association (SWSA), the Department of English Students Association (DESA), and the Political Science Students’ Association (PSSA).

At the press conference, three students delivered speeches, followed by a question period moderated by SSMU Vice-President (VP) Internal Maya Koparkar. VP External Connor Spencer delivered the first speech, stressing the urgency of addressing the culture of sexual violence that exists on campus.

“A few weeks ago, we brought to the attention of the administration our concerns of the safety and well-being of a student who was being targeted by a professor who thought they were behind a guerrilla sticker campaign calling him out for violence,” Spencer said. “We presented a dossier of evidence and no action was taken.”

Spencer emphasized that this incident is far from isolated: Acts of professor-on-student sexual violence occur frequently, and worse, the administration is aware of many of them.

“Common things that are reoccurring are [the] open secret of faculty members sleeping with undergraduate students, or having abusive relationship with graduate students, and inappropriate behaviour during office hours,” Spencer said. “[There are also] folks [who feel] like they are obliged to do extra, outside classroom work that are not related to the content of the class, because they feel like it would affect their academic careers [if they refused to do so].”

Additionally, Spencer cited a warning that she received in her first year at McGill as an example of widespread sexual violence on campus.

“The culture at McGill is one that led […] some older woman in the program I was entering [to give me] a list of professors and [teaching assistants] to avoid, and to never go to their office hours,” Spencer said.

The second speaker, Maeve Botham, student representative from the Sexual Assault Centre of the McGill Students’ Society (SACOMSS), echoed Spencer’s sentiments. In particular, Botham denounced the administration’s silence in response to sexual misconduct allegations against  professors.

“The University knows who these professors are,” Botham said. “By not taking any action, McGill is failing its students. Students have the right to be safe on campus [….] without the fear of experiencing sexual violence. For students to be truly supported, the structure that is used to protect these professors must be torn down.”

Although handling issues regarding the sexual violence policy does not fall strictly under her mandate, Spencer expressed her frustration with procedures for reporting sexual violence.

“We are no longer accepting that the reason for administration inaction in addressing problems they are aware of stems from the students’ inability to file complaints,” Spencer said. “Instead, we wish to focus on the complaint process itself as the problem, as contributing to a culture of folks not wanting to come forward.”

Spencer elaborated that the current process in place to file complaints against faculty members is overly complicated, thereby dissuading victims from coming forward.

“One of the things that McGill likes to fall back on is the policy against sexual violence passed by the Senate on Dec. 1 2016,” Spencer said. “However, the policy against sexual violence actually [points to the procedures within] the Code of Student Conduct, which you can only pursue complaints against students under.”

Spencer also said that the policy on sexual violence has no procedures outlined for complaints against faculty members, creating a huge obstacle for survivors.

“One of the things that I’ve heard very often from folks is that, ‘I didn’t come forward because I didn’t think they would believe me, I didn’t think they would do anything,’” Spencer said. “Another reoccurring thing that I have heard [….] is that the [negligence victims] experienced from dealing with the University afterwards [only] perpetuated that violence even further.”

The open letter accuses the Office of the Dean of Arts of being ineffective in handling complaints. In order to catalyze policy change, the open letter demanded the launch of an external investigation into the Office of the Dean of Arts. The investigation is partly inspired by a similar case that took place at Concordia University in January, where faculty members in the creative writing program were accused of sexual misconduct. Within days, the Concordia administration responded with the promise of an external investigation.

“We have been having the same discussions here at McGill since September [2017,]” Spencer said. “When we looked over to our neighbour and saw that [changes] are taking place there, we just cannot accept [inaction] anymore.”

Beyond an external investigation, SSMU will also produce a report by the end of June 2018, outlining appropriate steps  to improve the current reporting channel in the Faculty of Arts.

“We need to make sure that everything is documented, [including] exactly what’s going [on], exactly what our demands are, exactly what we want to change, and exactly McGill’s response to these things, [in order to] move forward next year as well.”

Responding to the spotlight the letter places on the Faculty of Arts, Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS) VP Internal Rebecca Scarra expressed her Society’s support for the letter.

“We also want more action, more transparency, and more effective communication with our administration,” Scarra said. “When the system that has been in place for so long does not work, we need to change the system. We can no longer work within [a] system that has been built against us.”

With the help of the SSMU report, incoming executives will be able to continue pushing for policy changes next year. VP University Affairs-Elect Jacob Shapiro expressed his commitment to work with members of the community on this next year.

“I have already spoken briefly with [Spencer,]” Shapiro said. “I am going to seek out as many opportunities as possible to listen to and learn from those leading this work and anyone who wants to share their experience, insight, and opinion on this. Additionally, I know that we have a skilled group of incoming Senators, some of whom know a lot more about this than I do. I am looking forward to working with them.”

As of April 9, McGill University has not responded to interview requests regarding the letter. Meanwhile, McGill and Concordia student communities are coming together to stage a public walkout on April 11, in front of the James Administration Building at McGill University.

“As students, it really shouldn’t be our responsibility to make sure that we are protecting each other,” Koparkar said in her closing remarks at the conference. “But if this is the kind of work that we need to do [to get change], then so be it.”

Editorial, Opinion

Open secrets and closed doors: McGill must do better in handling abusive professors

by McGill Tribune Editorial Board on

More in Editorial:

“After Concordia, McGill faces its own #metoo moment,” an April 4 CBC headline reads.

McGill is failing in its response to allegations of sexual abuse. The Students’ Society of McGill University’s (SSMU) April 4 open letter on sexual violence and harassment allegations against McGill faculty names five specific Arts departments in which complaints have repeatedly come up, and calls on the university to launch a third-party investigation into how the Office of the Dean of Arts is handling complaints against faculty members.

The public letter makes the “open secret”—of certain professors who have a history of complaints against them—explicit. Signed at press time by 2,059 students and 73 student groups, it is a specific, thoroughly elaborated demand on behalf of student safety and well-being. Although McGill provided a statement on the letter to major news outlets, it did not respond directly to the McGill community until April 10, via an email sent on behalf of Provost and Vice-Principal Academic Christopher Manfredi.

The email reiterates that the administration duly investigates every formal complaint against a faculty member, and that McGill “does not tolerate sexual misconduct in any form.” The specific demands of the open letter are not mentioned at all. As a response to public outcry of this scope and magnitude, it is stunningly dismissive.

The fact remains, McGill has yet to convincingly demonstrate that the administration hears and understands students’ concerns about the ongoing issue of abusive professors. When students are being harmed, the continual litany responses, all pointing students to existing procedures or claiming bureaucratic constraints as excuses in lieu of tangible action, are simply not good enough. Moreover, deference to formal complaint mechanisms ignores the fact that there are many reasons why a student may choose not to officially disclose an instance of abuse, and fails to tackle the systemic nature of the problem.

Student dissatisfaction with McGill’s sexual violence and harassment policy framework is not new. However, the 2017-18 school year has seen student groups and SSMU focus specifically on the handling of complaints against faculty members: As part of its C- grade for McGill’s sexual violence policy, SSMU’s Oct. 11 Our Turn report condemned the fact that complaints against faculty and staff are processed under a separate policy than complaints against students. In the same month, the Zero Tolerance student group’s sticker campaign explicitly called for a particular Islamic Studies professor’s tenure application to be denied due to allegations of sexual misconduct.

That McGill students come and go every year, while professors can stay for decades, makes it harder to see tangible outcomes of an investigation—and easier for alleged perpetrators to continue teaching.

 

It’s not surprising that members of the administration are aware of the problem, as the letter states, because many McGill students know of the professors with complaints against them, too. Through Reddit threads, blog posts, and word of mouth, McGill students and alumni inform and keep each other safe when the school has failed to. These informal networks arise out of necessity, but there are significant limits to their reach. Students may enroll in courses, or pursue research positions; under predatory professors without knowing these “open secrets” about them. This has the potential not only to jeopardize students’ academic experiences, but their safety. Alarmingly, for many first years, this letter is perhaps their first introduction to the problem.

In his statement to off-campus media, Vice-Principal (Communication and External Relations) Louis Arseneault said that every complaint or report against a faculty member is thoroughly investigated, echoing the administration’s persistent referrals to existing channels and processes. However, relying on formal complaint procedures misunderstands the barriers to reporting instances of sexual violence and harassment, particularly when a perpetrator has power over a student’s academic career. Moreover, formal complaints must be filed within a certain time period, making them difficult to see through for students who graduate. That McGill students come and go every year, while professors can stay for decades, makes it harder to see tangible outcomes of an investigation—and easier for alleged perpetrators to continue teaching.

All that said, the more likely reason that students have turned to open-letter writing and guerrilla sticker campaigns is that the current processes simply don’t work. Even if they do, students don’t know it: Because of Quebec confidentiality laws, the university cannot disclose current investigations or the results of an investigation. All students see are professors who they’ve been warned about continuing to escape the consequences.

This lack of communication erodes student trust in the University. Skirting the need for a response by citing confidentiality laws is not good enough. The letter does not request any specific information about current or past cases. It simply demands an independent investigation into current procedures being used, following specific criteria. McGill should follow in Concordia’s footsteps, as Concordia recently announced an investigation and campus-wide survey in response to allegations against its creative writing department, under the same provincial laws.

After the 2017 Fall General Assembly, McGill demonstrated that it is willing to act clearly and swiftly on alleged threats to student safety. It must do the same now, and be crystal clear about the course of action it plans to take. Doing nothing new sends as clear a message as the letter does: It tells students that McGill does not care about their safety from sexual violence and abuse.

 

This article has been updated since the April 10 email to all students sent on behalf of Provost and Vice-Principal Academic Christopher Manfredi. The print version of this article (Volume 37, Issue 25) was printed on April 10, prior to students receiving the email.

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