Let us open with two different conceptions of what the University of Toronto is. Firstly, the interests of students, staff, faculty, and others on campus are intertwined. We meet at this site to share and learn, to arrive at something better for ourselves and collectively facilitate this process. In this scenario, the interests of students may not immediately align with those of faculty or staff. However, together, we decide what and how to negotiate. We are the university. To ignore, or fail to account for any group on campus is to act against the best interests of the university.
Another conception of this university has students elected to the Governing Council to prioritize the long-term wellbeing of the institution above the broadly articulated needs of students. As a result, we become suspicious of demands for better working conditions and resigned to program cuts. However, our fees continue to climb amid the underfunding of programs and casualization labour. The familiarity of this scenario should indicate what kind of university we currently find ourselves in.
When students, faculty, staff, and groups within these do not combine their interests, we weaken ourselves and give more power to governing bodies at U of T. These bodies exist to undermine the needs of students. Many groups and individuals came together to oppose, flat fees, the Faculty of Arts and Science proposed Academic Plan, the G20 campus closure, restrictions to space booking policies on campus, and contracts with corporate sponsors that threaten academic freedom. Though we come in numbers, our bodies are blocked and our voices are ignored.
The misbehaviour of our governing bodies is no accident. The Governing Council for instance, is structurally predisposed to ignore student, staff, and faculty interests. Of the 50 GC seats, only eight are reserved for students; the majority are reserved for university and corporate appointees. The minority of students and faculty on GC cannot sway a group of CEOs to consider the needs of the students they are supposed to represent.
Substantive change cannot come from cajoling the GC — trust us, we have tried. It is time that we stop investing our power in the GC, and take governance into our own hands. It is time that we break from inhabiting a familiar conception of the university that does not benefit any of us. Rather than hoping that these governing bodies will finally make one decision in our favour, we need to redefine our relationship to each other and reclaim our autonomy.
The crisis in education is not limited to U of T, and cannot be separated from broader political trends in our province, country, and abroad that increasingly deny access to education and the chance for a good life among a majority of the people on our planet. The good news is that we are not alone in our revolutionary project. Students in the US, UK, Ireland, Spain, Italy, and even Quebec, have recently mobilized in unprecedented numbers to protest the increased privatization of education.
We have not yet seen such large-scale collective action in our province or at our university, which prompts us to ask why, given the magnitude of poor decision making at U of T. The most satisfactory reason that we have arrived at pins the blame on a default level of disengagement and disconnection. It is common to feel like a number on this campus. Many students find it difficult to speak to their professors, TAs, or the people they sit beside in class. Others find that they have nothing in common with the people that they’re surrounded by. We are all in someway disconnected from each other, so we trust a third party to mediate between us. This third party facilitates disconnection so that it continues to have a reason to exist?
Some have suggested that commonalities in ethnicity and a more coherent class identity contribute to why mobilizations in Europe, as well as at the City University of New York and the University of California, have been so much more powerful than elsewhere in North America. Whether true or not, I think that connecting to each other should be both a part and the goal of governance reform at this university. To this end, a group of concerned students, staff, and faculty have called for the first U of T General Assembly to happen on Wednesday January 19, from 5-8 p.m. in the Multifaith Centre.
Make no mistake — we want action. We want to build and articulate commonalities across populations and interest groups. We want to generate strategies and campaigns to combat looming threats to our education, and want as many people as possible to shape these. We also want something that may be less concretely measurable, which is an entirely different university, where the power to govern is in all of our hands.
Zexi Wang, Johanna Lewis, Patrick Vitale, Vivien Endicott-Douglas, William Nakhid, Faraz Vahid Shahidi, Alex Conchie, and Daniel Vandervoort are members of the U of T General Assembly Organizing Committee and contributed to this article.
