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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A response to the "Spotted at Mac: 'punch a Nazi'" article from the Sept. 21 issue.
By: Lilian Obeng
I remember when every single social science and humanities professor chose to dedicate a portion of their lecture time to discussing this infamous question last year. A video showing white nationalist Richard Spencer getting punched by an anti-fascist protestor had gone viral and captured the attention of western liberal media. Everyone had a hot take, everyone picked a side to this debate and everyone continued to miss the mark. The article published this week did just the same.
Let’s begin with the campus-specific premise on which this article was based. First, the Revolutionary Students’ Movement is not an MSU Club. Any affiliation to McMaster and the larger McMaster community is tangential at best. Second, this article is rife with logical inconsistencies. The author states that expressing “violence against those who identify as Neo-Nazi is a violent act in itself.” Contained within this statement is the failure to acknowledge the initial violence of being a Nazi. Let me make this very clear — Nazism and white supremacy are ideologies that advocate for genocide and hatred. To view the stances of the RSM without interacting with this historical fact is a failure to acknowledge the violence and oppression that have gone into marginalizing certain groups. Power dynamics are ever-present in our discussions, and the resistance of the oppressed in in no way equal to that of their oppressors.
“Is it okay to punch a Nazi?”
Additionally, this useless question gives rise to an even more irrelevant debate. For starters, this whole punching Nazis business is quite literally a joke. It can be argued that it is in poor taste, but the vast portion of internet memes follow this suit. No person interested in rational debate is actually suggesting that punching individual Nazis is a productive use of time or is conducive to social justice. To act as though this is the case to be fundamentally intellectually dishonest. The fact that people are attempting to derive some sort of knowledge from this joke is troubling. and use it that the basis on which to draw conclusions as to the validity of the use of violence as a means of resistance is particularly irritating.
This question does nothing but obfuscate the real, pressing conversations we should be having here on this campus and beyond.
Why do we as a society hesitate to condemn Nazism and white supremacy in the strongest possible terms? What do we define as violence, and why are certain acts by specific parties excluded from this definition?
What this debate displays is our poor collective analysis. We continue to distill matter of systemic oppression and violence down to the actions of isolated individuals. We continue to refuse to examine our dependency on oppressive and state-sanctioned regimes of power. In this case, it is white supremacy.
The tension between what exists materially and what is conceived within the confines of purely academic and theoretical thought — divorced from the social reality marginalized groups face and what our society perpetuates — is the root of the frustrating practice. It results in disjointed attempts — such as that article — to appeal to “both sides” when one side is morally incorrect. It legitimizes actively harmful beliefs, and displays the extent to which we have these conversations in vacuums. Bigotry will be challenged. Hate will be challenged. No amount of intellectual posturing changes these premises.
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Dear baby,
Welcome. This is the Earth. It’s a big, big place with little, little people. I’m on it. And now so are you.
None of this makes sense to you, of course. Right now you’re just a rubbery jumble of Jello wrapped up in human flesh. What else can I expect from you besides the occasional burp and belch and bumbling bellow?
Don’t think of that as an insult, baby. It isn’t. Most of the time, I can’t understand these words myself. Imagine that. I look back on these clunky sentences like tombstones and I wonder who the heck wrote all this because I definitely wouldn’t. I’d be more careful, more caring, and less self-indulgent. There would be flow. No fragments. Things wouldn’t run on and on and on and I’d ensure that in each sentence, from the first to the last to every awkward middle bit, I’d be less exhausting. And I wouldn’t bridge my thoughts with worn colloquialisms like and so on.
And so on.
One day you’ll have these thoughts of inadequacies too, baby. It’s inevitable. You see – this is a funny circle you have plopped yourself onto. We don’t know much about much despite waffling around for some thousand of years. Of course, we don’t admit this to anyone, ourselves included. Though we’re wrong more often than we’re right, and we’re probably wrong about that too, we live every day as though we were a godsend. The world is our oyster and goddammit if we aren’t the shining pearl at the center.
But this, baby, is wrong. Know this. Besides that some are allergic to shellfish, we’re all pretty much the same, no one person better than the other, and we’re all just sifting around trying to make sense of the world. Some of us are better than others. Some of us have opportunities to do so that others don’t have. And some of us forget that we have either.
That leads me to the one truth that I have learned, baby. It isn’t much, but it’s enough. In fact, it’s all we have after everything.
Try. Really – that’s it. Try, try, try in that order. Again and again and again, get up, do your best, and see what happens. Even if you fail. Especially if you do.
Because if you do else wise, you’re going to keep moving, doing, and wearing hats like you always do, and you’re life is going to clop, clop, clop away, and then you’re going to wake up and maybe you’re thirty which is eons away for you now, baby, and maybe you’re eating cereal and you’re wondering where time went and what did you do with it and you’re going to look back and see a place tickled by sunshine, a place where you used to be happy. You’ll ask yourself if that place is still like that, all rosy and beautiful, but then you’ll recall with a laugh that you aren’t like that anymore and the swing is too small and the jungle-gym is actually a man-made construction and you forgot how to fly a kite. The cereal will be soggy by the end of it.
But you still have a lifetime left to live, baby. Don’t get bogged down. Make mistakes. Have success. And do both as much or as little as you want to do. You, and only you, make your fate. It's yours after all.
And don’t listen to people telling you otherwise. Especially to people who give you advice. They know nothing.
Warm regards,
Kacper
Kacper Niburski / The Silhouette
Dear Kacper,
I think I should start with a hello, though it may be wasted on you. Business, and the slack jaw rapidness of an auctioneer, is your mode of conversation, so I’ll instead hope that wherever you are, it’s sunny and you’re happy.
I can’t tell if you are, to be frank. I know that’s hard to believe me not knowing you or really me not knowing me, but you’re young, Kacper. You’re a freshman in university.
You see, I’m you but older though it’s very well possible my archaic lexicon gives that fact away. Words like archaic and lexicon are surefire indicators of how ancient you’ve become.
I’m sorry for becoming old, but there was nothing we could’ve done about it. Your knees crack when you bend and you feel tired even after you wake up and you drink coffee and you’ll figure out the rest as it goes on. Sometimes you won’t; I’m sorry for that too.
That’s why I am writing to you now, freshman Kacper, in order to help fill in the blanks that I, and you by extension, didn’t know way back when you began this whole damned thing. I want to ensure that in the future of this university odyssey that you are just now beginning, I won’t have to write an apology letter to the both of us.
I fear that this message won’t get to you in time, however. I’m afraid that when you receive it, you’ll be starting your fourth year at McMaster with a dirty mop of a haircut and a laziness that seems palpable; your parents will look at you as a they do to a trophy collecting dust, a forgotten memory of triumph reserved for better days; you’ll be a mess of yourself, of who you thought you should be, and who you never were – and the three categories will never be in agreement, and you won’t either, and you’ll wonder if anything ever is, if it ever was.
And then you’ll look back to your freshman self, and you’ll see a boy who seemed steeped in sunlight, who thought that if he only tried in whatever he attempted, he would eventually have success, and that boy, with an indefatigable dream of becoming anything but that boy, would be smiling.
From there, you’ll try to rearrange the haze of memories that you somehow once lived, and there will be millions of them plastered on your ceilings, walls and picture frames. You’ll collect them all if only to see how they changed the way you shake your hand or the way you talk, and at that point, you’ll write a letter to that same boy in an attempt to ensure that his smile lasted.
And here is what you’ll get:
Try in everything you do, Kacper. It’s a simple truth and for that reason, you’ll forget it most of all during the complexity of university. But remember that you don’t want to wake up one day and wonder where the hell the time went and where did you go with it.
Know that in the next four years, shit happens and loads of it will come flushing your way after those cherry-blossom twilight days you find yourself in end. But also know that this is not necessarily bad: terrible events will always occur, even after you’re gone. That’s not exactly comforting, but it’s enough. You are me, and I’m still here, and together we have always gotten through things no matter how bad they seemed at first. As you’ve been led to believe, and still believe to this day, there is sun even on the cloudy days. It’s just somewhere else.
When those cloud-drunk days dwindle down, and you’re feeling like an overflowing sewer gutter trying to drain away rain, get up. Shake the sleep from those legs. Act. Do. Feel. Wear socks. Funny socks. Colourful socks. Live, for Christ sake, and if you’re in those socks while the thirst of life is at your tongue, then you’re all the better for it.
Fall in love, Kacper. It is just about the best thing you can be in, though it won’t always be successful at it. There will be times when you can’t imagine why you allowed yourself to be so exposed, so vulnerable. It’ll all seem so stupid, so forced, so unimaginably regrettable. But those moments will pass, and the relationship will pass with them, and you’ll find yourself still holding her hand after it all and look how soft it is and look how happy the two of you are.
There will be the best nights of your life you’ll never be able to remember and other times that you’ll remember too much that wish you could forget. Both of them will enrich you in different ways because both, on days when you’ve forgotten all about the trivial problems that swarmed you once daily, will one day be called “the days.”
Write about it all. No matter how small or big. Even if you’re exhausted. Especially if you are. Talk, talk, talk until your mouth dries or your hand cramps or until you’re satisfied that you’ve printed your uniqueness on the white pages in front of you. Because the future is made of the words you compose and the words you don’t and you have so much to say. In the end – our end, Kacper – you’ll be left behind with the sentences you use and others will be left with you in those same sentences, and that means something.
What it means you’ll only find out when you grow to be my age. Until then, Kacper, I hope the world for you, I hope that you want more than just a rocky globe, and I hope that we can laugh about it all, whatever it is, after the fact.
Until we meet, warm regards,
Kacper
Kacper Niburski
Assistant News Editor
If there would be one word to characterize the current motif in education it would be optimism.
Despite overwhelmingly large class sizes, climbing tuition fees, and the increasing reliance on private partnerships, educators have shown nothing short of bravery and courage in an uncertain, and at times, questionable future.
This was no better captured in president of McMaster University, Patrick Deane’s, letter to the McMaster community: Forward with Integrity.
Issued on Sept. 21, the document is not so much of a letter as it is a declaration of reassurance, recognition, and hope.
In it, Deane lauded a variety of educational endeavors, including the efforts of the ever-growing role of experiential, interdisciplinary, and community based learning.
But such praise was sordid when compared to the variety of obstacles that still needed to be recognized, and more importantly, delt with.
Among the many, the rarefying of material and commercial funds, the loss of personal interaction in the digital age, and lingering questions of remolding education itself remained a persistent standard not quite met nor realized in between the eloquent paragraphs and sentences.
In light of such concerns, it was determined that in order to create a mutually stimulating environment for the student, the professor, and all the faculty in between, a holistic view was required, and at McMaster, this was simply not occurring on systematic level.
In the months following Deane’s letter, a variety of open forums took place as a means to foster, and perhaps reanimate, the conversation on McMaster’s shortcomings and accolades alike.
On Nov. 24, the second of such discussions was spearheaded by Deane and MSU president, Matthew-Dillon-Leitch, to an audience composed primarily of SRA members and a few concerned students.
Deane began by saying, “Everyone contends that the education experience is meant to be unchanging. Everything is fixed. This is not the case.”
Explaining that much of the education model is based on Harvard University in the early 20th century, and many of the problems are age-old in their inception, Deane added, “Don’t assume everything is tightly circumscribed. It is not. This University is able decide how much this course is worth and how much it isn’t, for example.”
To this, Dillon-Leitch noted that there is an overwhelming temptation to, “redefine what university means. It’s an approach of balance.”
As to where this balance reaches equilibrium, and to what end are things circumscribed, students voiced an array of concerns and fears.
A never-ending rat race, fruitless degrees, students being forgotten in the educational standard, and many more were among those raised.
Both Deane and Dillon-Leitch mirrored each other in their response.
While it is true that there will be constraints in any attempt for change, and it would be foolish to minimize the reality of the constraints, the University can, and is trying, to operate more efficiently. Whether this is to the end of undergraduate studies or graduate research, efforts are being made on all fronts – some successful, others not.
Only through recognition of these successes, and admitting those that have failed, can one move forward with integrity – the entire embodiment of Deane’s September letter.
But it is here in the forward movement where problems arise.
Without a practical and overarching plan, skepticism will amount. Without clear leadership, demoralization will fester. Talk of action can go on until time itself ends, but without action – systematic, broad, and unrelenting action – such talk will be futile at best.
Perhaps this is why the letter itself is not called simply moving forward. Perhaps.
But a second consideration was forgotten at the forum. What if what we seek to fix was built broken?
In between the speeches, rebuttals, and general conversation, few seemed to have recognized that education itself may be the perpetrator of its own problems. Because any University serves as a means of its nation, and thus is hedged in by society’s demands, education appears to require analysis.
Here, Deane admitted, imperfection amounts. “Grading is an imperfect thing and most of the teaching is abhorrent,” he said.
True as this may be, the mantra of optimism still echoed. Deane concluded that, “We have to be optimistic because we have the potential to do something fantastic.”
And yet with only 50 students in attendance at the forum out of a possible 25,000 students, with an ever increasing privatization of education, and an entirely microscopic system built on a macrocosmic national scale, it must be asked whether the next years in education will be more of the same or something else entirely.
If such an answer could be found within the University itself, then the problems would have been fixed by now.