CASC piece controversial
Re: Group seeks to change ‘racist’ course choices,
March 26
As a member of the Critical Area Studies Collective, I am dismayed and appalled at The Varsity’s coverage of the event we held last Friday. The event occurred over five hours, involving 12 different speakers and panelists, and had plenty of contributions and questions from the audience as well. Yet Ben Spurr chose to highlight the comments of one panelist and represent those comments as those of CASC, despite the fact that we have a clearly outlined statement on our website (www.ut-casc.ca, the URL of which was not pointed to in the article) and that Mr. Spurr took me and Preethy Sivakumar aside for interviews. The nuanced responses we gave to Mr. Spurr were jettisoned in favour of sensationalism and easy quotations, which were then spun to represent those of CASC. Additionally, the remark about throwing pies at administrators was taken wildly out of context: it was referring to statistics from pie charts. While Mr. Spurr took the space to explain who the pies were to be thrown at, he simply forgot to add “charts.”
Noaman Ali
Editor’s Note: As reported in Ben Spurr’s original article, CASC’s presentation included calls for protest through both official and unofficial channels. The phrase “throw pies at the administration,” though originally made in reference to pie charts, was frequently used on its own in the presentation to encourage dissent against the university administration.
