A response to the "Taking the Pulse of campus projects" editorial from the Sept. 21 issue.

By: Shaarujaa Nadarajah

From being an SRA member to being on the Board of Directors, I have always tried to take criticism with grace. I am a strong believer in the notion that there are always ways we can improve as a community and the day I choose to reject feedback was the day I fail as a representative member. However, in my time as a representative, I have also recognized the value of using my voice to share perspective — maybe a perspective someone hadn’t considered and one that is integral to conversations we were having.

As a member of the 2016-2017 board, I can answer the first question posed in the editorial. I’ve held a Pulse membership for the last four years and am a frequent user of the facility. In my time as a Pulse user, one thing that was blatantly apparent was that the Pulse was overcrowded. But I wasn’t the only student that recognized this need as countless surveys sent out in the years before my term indicated that students wanted to see improvements being made to their athletic and recreation space.

Years of on the ground feedback collected by boards before us set the foundation for a space referendum to be sent to students where they directly got to vote on fee increases and whether this was a project they wanted the MSU to invest time and resources into. I guess the “true vanity” in this project came when the referendum failed by 10 votes the first time and how we had to go knocking on every administers’ door day after day begging the university to invest money into this project because that is what students asked us to do.

Construction takes time and expansions can’t happen overnight, however. The athletics department discussed in length the measures they would take to address the increased traffic they foresaw happening by planning to open up a pop up Pulse for students by end of October and by extending gym hours.

I will admit having an overcrowded gym is an inconvenience, but alternatively, I would gladly wait five more minutes for an elliptical if it means hundreds more students were taking advantage of their membership. I am willing to endure the short term pains to ensure the long term gains of working to build a healthier campus together. Are you?

But an overcrowded Pulse was just a small moot point in the greater systemic problem the writer was examining that was calling to question whether board members should work on long term projects. Making reference to Teddy’s failed Perspectives on Peace initiative and Ehima’s gender neutral bathrooms, the article does a good job of highlighting that one year is, in fact, a short time frame to work on some student projects.

However, what the article failed to recognize is the follow through these projects had years beyond these Presidents’ terms in office. After Teddy’s term, he went to work for Patrick Deane where he began the Model UN Conference, which was founded on the same principles as Perspectives on Peace and now continues to run as a yearly conference. As for gender neutral bathrooms, sustainability of projects are just as important to consider with the MSU’s yearly turnover and the gender neutral project is a true representation on how the MSU continued to work with the Equity and Inclusion Office to carry this project between multiple board terms because it remained a priority for students. In fact, I doubt many students even associate gender neutral bathrooms with Ehima any longer.

In order to leave a legacy, people need to remember you actually worked on the project. Using the expansion as an example, I hardly think three years from now students will even remember what board was responsible for initiating this project. All that will be seen is the hundreds of students who no longer have to eat their lunch on their ground or the religious faith groups on campus who will finally have a prayer space. The reality is we don’t do these projects for the vanity. We don’t spend over 60 hours a week working on these projects because we want the recognition. We do it because we care about students.

Students critique board members of coming short in making large-scale changes for them during their one year terms. However, when they attempt to take on large projects, they are critiqued for their lack of forethought in picking projects they can complete in their term. So, what I have come to realize is that whatever you do, you will always be faced with criticism. And that is okay because that is part of the challenge that comes with representing such a diverse population of 22,000 students here at McMaster.

So, I guess I will end it off here and bid you all farewell until the next 600 word article is written about us.

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In November of last year, a small act to amend the Canada Evidence Act and the Criminal Code was introduced to the Senate. The purpose of this was to help protect the confidentiality of journalistic sources.

There are two, main situations this would apply in. The first is allowing a journalist testifying in court to refuse to disclose information, except if the information cannot be obtained otherwise and if public interest in justice outweighs public interest in the source’s confidentiality. The second is that search warrants and court orders may only be issued for that information if there is no other way to obtain it or if the tradeoff for public interest in the first case applies.

There are a few other protections and contingencies, but those are the big ones. It is a decent start that has been long overdue. Gord Johns, an MP for the NDP, noted, “We need to follow the examples of countries such as Australia, France, Germany and the United Kingdom in developing a shield law.”

While student newspapers across the country have largely been exempt from major controversy, there is a problem with this bill. How do you define what a journalist is?

This has changed over the months from being too broad to being too narrow. As of June 20, the definition of those protected with this bill is limited to only those whose main occupation is journalism. Freelancers and student journalists are not covered as a result.

While it is unlikely we would need to use anonymous sources in any circumstance in the near future, the inability to do so and the knowledge this is the case continues to put a barrier on what we can cover. If we cannot legally protect a source, why would a source ever come to us with a big story?

It is a rough situation caught up in semantics. My main fear is that we will be unable to be the check and balance McMaster deserves when the students most need it.

The only saving grace is that I, as Editor-in-Chief, should be allowed to take these stories on if these definitions persist. No one else on the Silhouette’s staff could be involved as this definition loophole may require them to reveal your identity.

Until these definitions change, please talk directly to me in-person or through shane.madill@thesil.ca if you have a story that warrants anonymity.

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City council’s decision to add two bylaw officers to police the Westdale/Ainslie Wood area is a surprise, but only if you have not been paying attention.

At the Dec. 14 Hamilton city council meeting, the group approved a motion submitted by Ward 1 councillor Aidan Johnson that will see two Mohawk co-op students patrol the neighbourhoods surrounding McMaster. This decision is the latest in a series of events that have deepened the divide between McMaster students and residents.

In the late 2000s, some Westdale residents turned into vigilantes, literally hid in the bushes to film the behaviour of intoxicated students leaving the campus bars. When the Phoenix moved to its new location, a community group claimed that the new restaurant would create a “1,000 seat capacity student bar complex” when combined with TwelvEighty, even though they were in different buildings.

When a house on Winston Avenue looked to convert into a rental property for seven students in 2015, Johnson attempted to prevent this from happening.

He said it was “a classic case of over-studentification,” and while he has since said he regrets the choice of words, it hints at the belief that there can be too many people from a certain demographic in one area.

Johnson, elected in 2014, also spoke against a five-storey student-housing complex on Leland Avenue this past summer.

It was a bizarre stance; Johnson has consistently been against the increase in single-family homes being converted in to student housing. Johnson said the proper place for these buildings would be on Main Street West, but residents have complained about those locations too. The Leland development was approved despite some objections from city council.

And now, thanks to our city councillor, we have more bylaw officers to hand out tickets. Yes, property standards and maintenance are important issues.

But so are absentee landlords, who continue to neglect their properties and tenants with very little recourse for students. The McMaster Students Union has consistently asked for the landlord issue to be addressed, but city council has dragged its heels.

It is clear that the Westdale/Ainslie Wood area would prefer students get lost, but they also need the money that students contribute. In fact, councillor Johnson wants more of it.

He asked McMaster to help fund the new bylaw officers, which would mean that the university is paying other people to hand out fines to its students. That’s a great look.

Johnson suggested the university contribute money to purchase the iconic Westdale Theatre because it could be used as a lecture hall. Westdale Theatre is a 15-minute walk from the student centre and most lecture halls are further from the venue than that.

Students would be late to any class before or after a Westdale lecture. Sure, we could take the bus to Westdale, but those busses are already full. Mac rejected both of these requests.

Moving forward, students need to learn how to become better advocates. We need to vote in municipal elections and support a councillor who understands, engages and supports us. Students are not a well of cash that council can go to when it needs something, we are a significant group in this community and our existence has real benefits.

The next election is in 2018, but for now, make your voice heard by electing student representatives who care about municipal issues. Students are not perfect neighbours, but we are not villains either. It is time that we pushed city council to reflect that.

And Aidan Johnson, I challenge you to reevaluate the way you consult students. Asking the student union to support your motion for more bylaw officers is not consultation.

The Westdale Theatre lecture hall suggestion was an insult to students: it is unfeasible and if you talked to any of us, you would have known that. If you’re going to suggest our money be spent on something, talk to us about it.

As individuals, students come and go. But as a group, we are here to stay. Stop fighting our existence and embrace it.

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Not too long ago, McMaster made a new hire.

The university was in need of a new director of Parking and Security Services and looked to the community for an option. The person who was eventually hired was Glenn De Caire, the former Chief of Police for the Hamilton Police Service. Looking at title alone, De Caire sounds more than qualified to fill a security-related role at the university, but looking deeper into his background, one surprising detail sticks out.

Under De Caire’s leadership at the Hamilton Police Service, the organization began, and actively chose to continue, the controversial practice of carding. For those unfamiliar, carding is, in general, the checking of someone’s identity card to confirm an identity, age or address. But in the context of Hamilton Police, and many other police services alike, carding refers to the practice of arbitrarily checking the personal identification details of random citizens, often used as a tool of racial profiling, predominantly seen among black men. Carding is currently being challenged as a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and was declared to be “wrong and illegal” by the Ontario ombudsman in a 2015 report.

According to a CBC Hamilton article, De Caire pushed Hamilton Police to continue carding as he claimed Hamilton would be “less safe, and crimes [would] go unsolved” if carding were abolished as a practice. In other words, he felt that profiling black men would help stop crime, as he perceived them to be the primary culprits.

When someone with a background like this is hired at a university with a diverse student body, I can’t help but wonder, how?

De Caire’s hiring involved a board of current university staff from different departments. It even included a representative from the MSU, our current student body president, Ehima Osazuwa.

At what point did this detail about De Caire’s career come up? Did it ever come up? How are the hiring practices at McMaster created without factoring in potential human rights violations at previous places of employment?

McMaster does a perfectly adequate job at hiring competent people. Our university runs smoothly for a reason, and that is in part due to the strong hires running across the faculty and staff. But a stain like this on an otherwise mostly clean record of hires makes it even more alarming.

This year’s Diversity Week emphasized the theme of “Constructing Our Stories.” Its goal was to help the McMaster community better understand the importance of being able to share your narrative and have people accept your story as an intersectional truth. A hire like this runs contrary to the messages of inclusivity and diversity that McMaster pushes. How will racialized students who have been profiled be able to openly tell their story knowing that the security enforcement will not believe them?

During these last few weeks, students and staff have seen firsthand how critical it is to have a space where we all feel safe and can tell our stories without being silenced. A hire like this is a step backward on a campus that is trying to move forward.

Photo Credit: Barry Gray/Hamilton Spectator

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At long last, it’s time for my convocation. Don’t get me wrong, my time here at McMaster has been amazing. I have met people I’ll never forget, taken courses that have changed my perspective, and been exposed to a number of opportunities that many students may not have the chance to see for themselves. But after four years of late nights studying, stressful assignment planning, and working to develop a healthy relationship with caffeine, my time as a student has come to an end, and I couldn’t be more ready.

I’ve been anticipating my graduation for a long time, so when I finally got notice of the date, time, and location of the event, I was thrilled to mark it on my calendar and share the details with my friends and family. But this excitement was weighed down with anxiety and disappointment when I found out the details of the ceremony and realized this convocation would not necessarily be the most enjoyable experience for my guests or myself.

As a student of the arts, I have become well acquainted with disappointment. During the four years of my undergraduate studies I eventually grew accustomed to unfortunate situations like helpful and competent professors being let go due to insufficient funds, workspaces lacking in updated equipment and programs, and sessional professors leaving before getting the chance to get to know them, ask them questions, or even consider them for future references. It was one last blow to my Bachelor of Arts to find out that 500 hundred students would be crammed into one ceremony lasting around four hours, a number of students would not be allotted their requested number of tickets, and at the end of the day, my fellow B.A. recipients and I would not be given the ceremony we worked towards and deserved.

This past week I had the pleasure of attending a graduation ceremony in the States. I had my own bias about what it would be like before arriving, imagining an uppity and almost inaccessible ceremony. Much to my surprise, it was close to the opposite. The ceremony was short and concise, the groups of students had been separated into their programs to allow them to acknowledge their major and area of expertise, and the ceremony was divided into multiple days, so as not to drag on for too many hours. I was excited to be present, but I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of jealousy, wishing myself and my classmates could experience something similar.

While we’re lucky to even have the opportunity for a graduation ceremony, convocation is meant to be something students look forward to and not dread. Just because students come from a larger faculty, it does not mean their efforts should be treated as less important and granted the unfortunate experience of a haphazard ceremony.

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If you know any of the five candidates on Facebook or other social media platforms, chances are you’ve seen a gratuitous amount of pictures of them this week. Granted, some candidates are more guilty of this than others, but it is an endemic problem that I’ve seen in each of the last four elections I have witnessed. Sometime in this decade (and perhaps before that) campaigns became more about personality than about problem-solving.

Take, for example, the myriad of images in which the candidate is posing with a supporter. Popularized in previous president Campbell’s second campaign, it has become a sort of campaign chic to surround oneself with faces of students, just like you the voter, to get across this idea of approachability and being “one of us.” When David did it, it was during his campaign, not at the start, consisted of students found in MUSC, and he asked them what they want.

On day one of this campaign, candidates were ready out of the gate with a slew of these pictures, without the randomness and requisiton. What purpose does it serve to voters wanting to absorb your message if the majority of your campaign is materials in which you are surrounded by people you selected to support you?

If the imagery wasn’t oppressive enough, many of these campaigns also muddle their message as they try to find some “simple” analogy to wrap it up neatly in one buzzword or phrase. By trying to simplify your message, you are assuming that students are too dumb or apathetic to understand it, and that is not the kind of message you want to start your campaign with. We are not in high school. We are in a place of higher learning, so please have faith that we can understand your platform even if you don’t condense it into one snappy, #hashtaggable quote.

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I am not going to call out any of the candidates specifically, because I do not think I can possibly hurt your campaigns more than you have done already through these tactics.

Don’t pander to the lowest common denomiator. Don’t look down on the student body you are hoping to represent. And don’t try to give us the abstract of your campaign.

We’re smart enough to hear your message the way you see it, even if it is hard to fit beside that enormous picture of your face.

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In this week’s feature article, we examined a topic that has been a long time coming—the Learning Portfolio. Features Editor Christina Vietinghoff takes you through the basis for its establishment, the prevailing attitudes on the tool, and some of the issues with it.

While it’s certainly an interesting read, what’s more interesting is the part that we couldn’t write.

Over the course of the investigation for this piece, we came across many people with good intentions. They wanted to help us out and give their perspectives—but they couldn’t. We talked to students, to administrators, and to faculty, many of whom were ready to speak in casual contexts about the problems they saw with the Learning Portfolio: how they’d tried it with their class and had simply given up on using it because it wasn’t worth the complaints from frustrated students, how they found  it to be slow and awkward and a poor choice of platform, or how it was not at all the tool they knew it was intended to be.

But as soon as we asked them to speak on record, people we knew to have strong opinions on the matter had nothing but positive things to say about what is an ultimately disappointing university initiative. They did this for fear of saying something that might jeopardize their jobs, their relationships at Mac, or their reputations. They watered down their ideas because the general climate of the university is an all-out promotion of this tool, bolstered by the untouchable message of Forward With Integrity.

I wish I could say I was surprised by this situation, but unfortunately it is all too familiar to us here at the Sil.

The goal of our news and features sections is to address and investigate issues relevant to the McMaster community. We try to bring to light the problems that remain unaddressed. We try, in our capacity as a team of (student) journalists, to hold the university to account.

But I don’t think this is a job just for the campus newspaper. If there’s anything I’ve learned from my years at Mac, it’s that the people here truly care about this place where they dedicate so much of their time. And they have a lot of opinions on our university’s operations. What I wish for McMaster, though, is that this dedication to the community extended to action. I wish that everyone would, in their own way, hold the university’s authority to account and give a healthy amount of dissent.

It’s often easier to let the university run in the way it’s been designed to, where many of the big decisions are made behind closed doors and the results just come down the pipeline for us to accept. We can continue to let it be a place where asking any kind of controversial question just means you’re redirected to a trained PR professional.

But sometimes stirring up a bit of trouble produces better results than just leaving the status quo.

We’ll keep trying to dig into issues we identify as problems—if you have any, be sure to let us know—but I hope we won’t be the only ones.

Correction: MSU reserves can only be spent on capital improvements.

What makes an issue universally relevant to a student body? Does it have to affect every student personally? Does it have to be neutral in every ethnic, gender and social category to resonate with the most amount of people? Universal appeal sometimes means the effect on the whole rather than on the individuals that compose it.

You may not be one of the women who is intimidated by entering the ruthless world of political contests, and you may not even be involved enough to know whether you are represented by a man or a woman, but the issue affects the apathetic as much as the die-hards.

Some will criticize us for taking a seemingly one-sided approach to an issue, but it’s not our aim to lay blame, at least not in this case. We aim to explore systemic issues so that the greater student body is educated enough to discuss it among their peers.

It is in your best interest to be as knowledgeable as possible on the issues that affect the people around you, because those people will be your peers for the rest of your life, not only the next few years. These are the issues that affect my sister, my editors, my fellow human beings, so it is my responsibility to ensure that every ounce of scrutiny is expended on the topic.

We’re not asking you to solve these problems, we’re asking you to become aware that there is one, so you can become involved insofar that, as childhood PSAs would tell us, “knowing is half the battle.”

We do our best to touch upon as wide a variety of issues as we can, but like any publication, time and space are limiting factors, so if there is an issue that you think we are turning a blind eye to, just tell us. You’ll find that we are pretty receptive to new ideas, if you make the effort to inform us. It is way more effective than criticizing The Sil in your social justice circlejerks.

And if we seem a bit heavy-handed at times, it’s because some issues need an incredibly strong push.

A few days ago I struck up a conversation with a cab driver that led me to question some of the things that usually go without thought. He seemed vastly overqualified for what he was doing. He spent roughly two years doing communications work for the Canadian army, on nightly flights over Afghanistan. He speaks six languag- es. He has an electrical engineering degree from a respected post-second- ary institution from his home country. It didn’t quite seem right that he was driving unruly students to and from Hess.

The world needs doctors and engineers. There’s no disputing that. Does that world need as many as a standard university enrollment may lead one to expect? Perhaps not.

Too often I see students who were pressured by their parents or relatives into pursuing a path that would lead to a lucrative but difficult career. I’m sure a fair number of these students grew up wanting to take these paths, but I find it difficult to believe that they all imagined themselves doing open-heart surgery at age six.

And a great deal of those students won’t make it. That’s just the harsh reality of the rigourous standards that are in place for medical, judicial or engineering professions. There’s the age-old frosh week chant “half of you will fail.” It’s funny because it has an element of truth.

So instead of spending your gold- en years pursuing a path that you may not actually want might not succeed in, why not do something that might make you happy?

My own parents spent much of my childhood urging me to pursue dentistry or math, which only made me want to do it that much less. It wasn’t my calling, and if I’m being honest with myself, I would probably be a pretty shitty dentist, if they would even ever let me get remotely close to the point of finding that out.

I’m not optimistic about my financial future, but very few jobs nowadays can actually provide that, and with little guarantee.

That cab driver pursued a path that ultimately led him looking for work in his field to no avail, and settled on something that gets him less income, but is, in his words, “extremely calming.”

If you want to cut people open and save lives, more power to you. I will probably need you one day. If you are trying to do it for the salary, you are setting yourself up for disappointment.

The world needs writers. The world needs analysts and event planners. The world even needs snobby restaurant critics. They don’t make as much but we get by.

Your life is only so long. Don’t spend the majority of it preparing yourself for a future that someone else wanted.

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