A university is meant to be utopian. While there are countless cultural biases inherent in the concept of an academy, a university is supposed to be its own liberal oasis. In 1968 at Columbia University, it was unthinkable that the police would ever be called onto campus. Even when students had occupied several university buildings for almost a week, the university president hesitated to call police for fear of breaching the sanctity of the space, an act that one person compared to violating the right of asylum bestowed by a church.
It’s been a long 40 years. As detailed in these pages last spring, the idea of institutional independence has faded from the upper echelons, replaced by a craven ambition to acquire funding from whoever can foot the bill.
What does a university aspire to, if not to be a public space? It is a forum for exchange and inquiry, unburdened by the motives of profit, corporate or government intervention. A place of equality and equity, with no person having any advantage other than their own talents and abilities. Certainly no university has ever been all of these things at once. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
The university is integrated with the city and proud of it. It flows through, in, and around the surrounding urban environment. Most buildings are open for exploration. Security is light.
The substitution of public money with private money erodes both the public realm withers and democracy. When the Harris government cut back on post-secondary education in the mid-’90s, U of T and other schools started selling washroom space to Zoom Media, a company that boasts 8,500 billboards on Canadian campuses, including 650 at St. George.
Zoom Media: selling you stuff while you piss since 1992.
U of T: whoring you out to advertisers since 1996.
According to Zoom’s website, students are an excellent target for advertisers because of our “socio-cultural values:”
Asserting the various facets of their identity
Intensity, strong emotions, pleasure, permissiveness
Very stimulated by consumption—a way to stay connected to novelty and to indulging oneself
Openness to non-traditional models
At first there was backlash to this particular corporate intrusion, now it’s rarely discussed. At McGill, students have taken things into their own hands, recouping their space in rather direct fashion. It’s been too long since U of T has been the site of such an action.
Students have to take back the campus not so much for ourselves as for everyone, to illustrate that the university is only a public space. To reclaim the institution from corporations, government, and the administration. To restore the idealism and possibility and hope that the world, starting with our own campus, could become more just, inclusive, and sustainable.
Explore. Meander. Climb. Go on psychogeographic walks. Engage in clandestine expeditions to the hidden corners of the school. Organize large-scale games. Take ownership of neglected spaces, decorate them, plant flowers. Replace advertising with art. Fight for accessibility. Integrate and ingratiate yourself into the formal decision-making structures. Affect policy. Write new policy. Use the space however you want.
Our university is perhaps the only place in society where you can get away with doing anything you want. Not really, but it should be, and you can act as though it already is.
