Students entering university are faced with many new things: new classes, new friends and sometimes even new living arrangements. But students living in on-campus residences should not have to worry about their safety.
To help students transition into living away from home, and to enforce the rules of residence life, McMaster University community advisors live with first-year students in their residences. Their purpose is to “develop and maintain an environment that is conducive to learning and personal growth.”
To be a CA, one must fulfill many qualifications including maintaining a minimum sessional average of 6.0, being a full-time McMaster University student, demonstrating responsibility and leadership abilities and have a working knowledge or building community within students.
But for all the listed requirements, CAs are not required to complete any sort of police background check, including a very important vulnerable sector check.
VS checks are a collection of offence information that is restricted to applicants seeking employment or volunteering in a position of authority or trust over vulnerable persons in Canada. They can be obtained easily from the police service in your residing jurisdiction.
The lack of VS checks for CAs is problematic for many reasons. For one, many incoming students are under 18-years-old. In these cases, it is evident that these students are considered vulnerable persons and subsequently require additional protection from those in positions of authority and trust like CAs.
But even for incoming students who are legally adults, their role as a first-year student inherently places them in a lower position of power relative to their CAs. This power dynamic can be harmful if the CAs have a history of offensive behaviour.
CAs have a lot of influence over the first-year students under their supervision. CAs are oftentimes students’ first interaction with upper-year students and are meant to be the go-to person for questions about campus and residence life. To not conduct a proper background check on them is negligent of the university in ensuring that students are protected.
The lack of VS checks is not an exclusive issue of CAs. In addition to CAs, residence-affiliated positions such as the residence orientation representative are not required to complete VS checks.
In fact, part-time managers, the board of directors and other McMaster Students Union positions do not require the completion of a VS check.
Considering that almost all of these roles involve interaction with and power over a vulnerable population of students, it makes no sense why these roles do not require VS checks. If anything, the lack of VS checks puts students in avoidable danger.
In addition to VS checks, McMaster University should do a more thorough job of ensuring that individuals hired for their positions are positive reflections of the university. This includes ensuring that these individuals have not been reported to university administration or asked to withdraw from their positions previously.
The lack of sufficient and necessary screening of individuals in positions of power within the university is alarming. For McMaster University to truly commit to ensuring student safety, they must create better hiring policies that begin with implementation of VS checks.
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What is the value of an apology? That is one of the questions that JUNO-nominated singer and songwriter Khari Wendell McClelland is exploring in his new concert, We Now Recognize. The show, which consists of all new songs, will tour six Canadian cities for Black History Month. It comes to the Lincoln Alexander Centre in Hamilton on Feb. 19 at 8 p.m.
We Now Recognize is a partnership between McClelland and Project Humanity, a non-profit organization that uses the arts to raise social awareness. The two collaborated in 2017 and 2018 to create the documentary theatre musical of the Vancouver-based artist’s debut solo album, Freedom Singer. Freedom Singer interpreted songs that might have accompanied McClelland’s great-great-great-grandmother Kizzy as she escaped from slavery via the Underground Railroad.
This show is another personal work, although McClelland originally took inspiration from the current sociopolitical landscape. The number of political apologies that have occurred struck him in the past decade or so and especially in Justin Trudeau’s term. He began to question what constitutes a substantive and meaningful apology.
In writing the show, McClelland found himself reflecting on being wrong and the extent of his compassion for those who do wrong. He considered how recognizing wrongdoing feels and how to move forward from it. With this, he also thought about the relationships he has with the generations of men in his family.
“[I was] looking at my grandfather and my father and my brother and even considering what it would be to be… a father and what the implications might mean for a larger society… [I]t's men who are exerting power and have a lot of control in society… What are some of the ideas… I grew up with that I have at different times perpetuated in my own life and trying to figure out like what that might look like through a generational lens,” said McClelland.
The show explores other ideas that McClelland cares about, such as community and the way we wield power over the natural world. In bringing different ideas in proximity with one another, McClelland sees the work as an assemblage like a quilt or collage.
McClelland sees being able to explore a multitude of ideas as a way of celebrating Black life. Unlike his past work with Freedom Singer, which tackled the history of slavery head on, We Now Recognize, is a subtler approach to Black history that it more rooted in the present and in the future.
“I feel like there are ways in which black life can be can be understood as a monolith, that black people in Black communities aren't allowed to have a diversity of experiences and perspectives. I'm very curious… about creating some kind of radical subjectivity around Black life, like being able to be all these different ways that we are just as human beings,” McClelland said.
Not only will the concert allow McClelland a chance to bring forth the multiplicity of Black life, it will allow him to stretch himself and grow as an artist. The personal show will force him to be vulnerable in a way that he hasn’t been before with the communities across Canada that has supported him.
McClelland sees the connection to music as something that erodes for many people over their lifetime. For him, however, it is something that he hasn’t stopped doing ever since it became a part of his life as a kid growing up in Detroit. It moves him in a way that isn’t necessarily positive or negative, but just is. He also sees the medium as essential to building community.
“I feel like healthy communities move together. That they practice together, that they have rituals together… [O]ur connection to artful practices actually has the potential to heal us as communities and individuals coming together… has this real potential for a deep kind of healing… I think it is just a deep medicine in the way that we come together and make music and make art,” explained McClelland.
McClelland is looking forward to this tour to see how audiences connect with the new songs. He is eager to see the way in which people are moved by this meditation on wrongdoing and apology, whether positively or in a way that is a little uncomfortable.
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By: Isaac Kinley
McMaster University President Patrick Deane is assembling a fossil fuel divestment advisory group in response to a petition demanding that the university pull its endowment out of fossil fuel investments.
The petition, an initiative of Fossil Free McMaster, aimed to collect 1,000 signatures but has so far managed to garner just over 900 in the two years that it has been online. Its text warns of the disastrous effects of climate change and says that McMaster students “deserve the opportunity to graduate with a future not defined by climate chaos.” It calls on the university to halt new investments in fossil fuel companies and to divest from all fossil fuel-related investments within five years, which it argues is also a financially responsible decision.
The advisory group will counsel the McMaster Board of Governors’ Finance Committee, responsible for the University’s investment decisions, on whether to divest from fossil fuels. Deane aims to form a group that is unbiased and includes both an undergraduate and a graduate student. To this end, he has contacted the Student Representative Assembly and the Graduate Students Association to ask them to provide candidates.
Conner Hurd, the head of Fossil Free McMaster, feels that this lack of bias may be difficult to achieve. “There’s very few people who sit on the fence on this issue,” he said. “It’s going to be hard to find an unbiased sample.” He expects that the advisory group’s eventual verdict will be in Fossil Free McMaster’s favour, but also stresses that his group advocates an approach that will allow the University to avoid losing money.
“Going forward with integrity doesn’t just mean taking the moral high road on any argument, it means being pragmatic. Ultimately we don’t want the university to lose out on money that comes back from endowment funds because it goes towards bursaries and grants,” he said. “Plus it is donated money, so the people who’ve donated [it] want to see it go back into the University.”
Professor emeritus of economics Atif Kubursi, who has been involved with the initiative along with Biology professor James Quinn, is also optimistic about its outcome, although he said he would like McMaster to move more quickly on the matter. “We should be at the vanguard of things,” he said. “It would be terrible if the university were a laggard and always reacting to others.”
He also feels that the recent 50 percent drop in oil prices may provide McMaster with a financial incentive to divest. “If they had listened to us, they would have saved a lot of money. This is an opportune moment to rebalance your portfolio by going into the kinds of investments that are sunrise, not sunset. The oil industry is a sunset industry. Sunrise would be renewable energy,” he said. “The University, even for pure financial reasons, is ill-advised to remain in fossil fuels.”
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Sarah O’Connor / Silhouette Staff
During a Linguistics tutorial last term, I overheard a classmate complaining about an article written in The Silhouette, eagerly wanting to write an editorial reply.
I turned to her and said, “I write for The Sil, I can help if you want.” I was then greeted with a few shocked stares from my classmates.
“You write for The Sil? What year are you in?” one person asked, confusingly. I responded, “First year.” I was in a first year class after-all.
This moment shocked me and made me question why my fellow first-years would expect me to be older for the sole reason that I wrote for the university paper. What was it about writing for The Silhouette that makes me seem older, mature, better? Did writing for the paper make others see me as more educated or clever? What was it that made me seem so different for writing 600 words every week?
After all, anyone can write for The Silhouette. A neat little advertisement calls for student’s opinions and stories every week in every issue. Even The Silhouette website asks for News Tips where students can give the paper a heads up on what’s going on around McMaster.
But with all these options, what’s stopping people from writing?
And then I started thinking about all the other areas students can get involved in McMaster, like the SRA and the MSU Presidency. There are about 20,000 students at McMaster.
Each and every student is allowed to run for these things. But how many students actually go out and try?
These positions don’t ask for a vast knowledge of politics, they just ask for students.
And out of 20,000 students, only handfuls actually feel they are worthy to try. Not necessarily win, just to try.
We live in a world made of hierarchies. They are everywhere and rule who we are and where we stand in society. Hierarchies tell us that only some people are good enough to do certain things. Only some people can do great things and be remembered while the rest of us decay, not knowing that we could do great things.
Its power people want; power to lead them, power to make them safe and power to keep the public knowing what is right and wrong. Power creates these hierarchies, telling us that only some people are good enough, only some people are special and the rest are the followers.
But no one has to be a follower. No one has to stop him or herself from attempting great things because thepy feel they aren’t good enough, that they don’t fit into the “status quo”. You can do great things and you can be a part of the big things around McMaster.
All you have to do is try. We are all capable of doing great things, but these hierarchies try to crush our spirit and convince us we can’t. We can’t write for the paper because our opinions aren’t important enough, we can’t run for the SRA because we don’t know what it’s about, we can’t run for MSU President because we don’t know anything about politics.
But we can. We have to push through these hierarchies and obstacles that tell us we can’t and show them we can.
We can write for the paper, we can run for SRA and MSU president. We can learn and grow and achieve great things as long as we put our minds to it.
