All Posts Tagged With: "protest"

Alcohol Studies, the Sandy Five, & a riot over Obama

1. A protest by disgruntled Republican students at the University of Mississippi following President Barack Obama’s reelection on Tuesday wasn’t a riot, according to the school’s chancellor. But it sure looked like one. There were racist epithets and Obama signs lit on fire as hundreds gathered on campus, reports ClarionLedger.com.

2. I regret to inform you that the University of Calgary is not offering a course called Alcohol Studies with samplings in class, as The Gauntlet student newspaper had reported in a humour piece, and which I pointed to in an earlier post as fact. (Mea culpa.) Too bad. It sounded fun.

3. The more than 110 deaths in the United States and the tens of billions in property damage weren’t the only consequences of Superstorm Sandy. New Yorkers say that after a week of eating processed foods while the power was out, they have trouble buttoning their jeans. The New York Times is calling the five pounds of weight gain the “Sandy Five.” Our thoughts are with them.

Continue reading What students are talking about today (November 8th edition)

You’re angry. We get it. Now offer some constructive ideas.

Drop Fees balloons by Tania Liu on Flickr

A group of students staged another pedantic tuition protest last week at the office of Glen Murray, Ontario’s Minister of Training Colleges and Universities.

The daylong “occupation,” attended by executives from Canadian Federation of Students locals, was to protest the five per cent tuition increase expected in the fall. Armed with recycled chants and glossy placards, the group of about 20 people shut down operations for the day.

To those students, I say “well done.” Yes, if your aim was to give the minister a day out of the office, or if you sought to expedite public exhaustion with student foot-stomping, you likely succeeded. I just hope you weren’t pining for actual change to Ontario’s tuition structure.

Continue reading How will an ‘occupation’ lower tuition fees?

Protests underway from coast to coast

Today, students from Memorial University of Newfoundland to the University of British Columbia are participating in the National Day of Action organized by the Canadian Federation of Students.

Through marches and on social media, they’re promoting the idea that Education is a Right.

Their explicit demands are for lower tuition fees, less student debt and more public funding.

The CFS says that the average student with debt owes $25,000 by graduation and that public funding has dropped from 81 per cent of operating costs of universities 20 years ago to 57 per cent today—all while tuition has risen from 14 per cent of operating funding to more than 35 per cent.

In other words, students are paying more of their own costs for university than ever before, which makes it difficult for low and middle-income students to get through school and then pay off debts.

The campaign is being discussed widely on Twitter with the tags #feb1 #cfsfcee or #cdnpse.

Peggy Nash, a candidate for the New Democratic Party’s leadership has already tweeted in solidarity and provided a link to her Plan to make Post-Secondary Education Accessible.

In Newfoundland, which already has among the lowest tuition anywhere, conservative Premier Kathy Dunderdale attended a National Day of Action event this morning and said that, during her lifetime, she’d like to see students’ first degrees paid for by the province, reports VOCM radio.

Video goes viral

Capture from YouTube video by asucd

The police chief and two officers at the University of California are on leave after a video emerged online that shows riot police pepper spraying peacefully-seated protesters on Friday.

Police had been ordered to clear the tents of Occupy Wall Street protesters who had built an encampment on campus the night before. The university had given occupiers letters of eviction the following day. Eleven students were injured by the pepper spray and two went to hospital for chemical burns. Ten protesters were arrested.

“Yesterday was not a day that would make anyone on our campus proud; indeed the events of the day need to guide us forward as we try to make our campus a better place of inquiry, debate, and even dissent,” Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi wrote in a statement online. She has announced a task-force to look into the incident.

There are three million views of the top three YouTube videos of the spraying, including this one.

Zombies protest 17 per cent U-Pass increase

Photo by Jane Gerster of The Charlatan

Zombies welcomed public transit users at Carleton University’s main bus stop on Halloween morning. The students in costume were protesting what they called “the death of affordable and accessible transit,” and were collecting signatures from supporters to send to city council.

The protest was a response to the local transit authority, OC Transpo, which announced that Ottawa university students will pay $180 per semester for their universal transit passes (U-Passes) next year. That’s a 17 per cent hike from the $145 they paid this year. According to the Carleton Undergraduate Students’ Association, the new price—$360 a year for most students—means Ottawa and Carleton will have Canada’s most expensive student transit passes.

In contrast, consider that students at Dalhousie University in Halifax pay only $69 per semester.

Continue reading Students declare “death of affordable transit”

Nothing to gain

Protest photo by shahk on Flickr

University students in Quebec continued their fight against annual $325 tuition increases on Nov. 10, protesting in large numbers by skipping classes. Classes were even cancelled at Dawson College and students marched in the streets of Montreal.

It was well organized and peaceful. To get a sense of that, consider that marshals in fluorescent vests helped defuse the tense moments between protesters and police outside Charest’s Montreal office where things might have become violent. Although the sight of riot police on campus is always disturbing, there was only a small cadre of roughly 100 students outside the McGill Administration building when police moved in.

But as big and peaceful as the demonstration was, will it change anything?

Although the 2005 student strike ended with the government giving in to some student demands, Thursday’s much shorter “strike” takes place in a much less friendly political climate and a much more uncertain economy. Even as students were marching in Montreal, education minister Line Beauchamp stood up in the National Assembly to reiterate that students must pay “their fair share.”

It’s easy for her to have such bravado. Premier Jean Charest faces no threats on the left who might gain from angry student voters. The Parti Québécois, the only other party to have formed government in this province since the 1970s, is tearing itself apart.

At the moment, Charest’s biggest political threat comes from the right. François Legault, a former PQ cabinet minister, and his centre-right Coalition pour l’avenir du Québec (CAQ) are leading in recent polls. The Action démocratique du Québec (ADQ), a right-wing party with four seats in the National Assembly, is entering into formal negotiations with the CAQ concerning a potential merger.

Legault is on the record saying that students in programs which lead to higher paying jobs should pay more tuition. Considering that kind of thinking, it’s safe to bet that students wouldn’t find a CAQ government any more supportive of their demands.

Tuition rally fizzles

Outside the LSX. By Paul Robertson on Flickr.

Despite having 4,000 police ready in case the protest got out of hand, Scotland Yard says that only about 2,500 protesters showed up for a mass rally against high tuition fees in London, U.K. Organizers, on the other hand, told Sky News that 10,000 showed up, though they hoped more would have joined. After all, more than 50,000 marched with the same demands in the summer, during which protesters smashed the windows of the Conservative party’s headquarters.

At today’s protest, students carried placards denouncing the government’s policy that allowed tuition fees to rise to $14,500 at many schools. Some showed their middle finger as they passed the London Stock Exchange. Twenty were arrested by 4 p.m. local time, police told The Telegraph.

Police had warned on Monday that they would use rubber bullets and batons if necessary to quell violent protesters. Twitter users blamed police intimidation for the lower-than-expected turnout.

Tantrum tactics don’t lead to social change: Urback

Photo by j.dubb on Flickr

When a toddler is exasperated, he will hurl himself on his back and kick his feet up in the air. The action rarely wins him the coveted extra cookie or forbidden toy of mystery, but incapable of more advanced reasoning techniques, the child becomes subservient to his own uncontrollable desires. Eventually, this child will learn that he might acquire an extra Oreo by sweet-talking mom or taking on additional chores. He’ll come to realize that flailing and shouting may win him a feeling of persuasiveness, even though he’s actually just hurting his cause.

Trouble is, this youngster will regress again when he hits that tumultuous stage of young adulthood. Armed with terrible rhyming couplets about capitalism and a ‘Twitter for iPhone’ app (oblivious to the irony), he’ll march with his comrades, protesting for a vague, better tomorrow free of corporate greed.

Such men and women have taken to the streets of New York over the past few weeks, ostensibly with the aim of achieving some sort of goal. I say “ostensibly,” of course, because protesters have yet to put together a coherent, unified explanation of what they hope to accomplish by taking over the Brooklyn Bridge and releasing rainbow balloons into the air. A prettier skyline, perhaps?

The protesters have said they are against corporate greed, climate change, occupation of Indigenous land (uh… perhaps ‘Occupy Wall Street’ was a naming oversight), corruption, militarism, and whatever else will fit on the press release.  Might I suggest Sarah Jessica Parker romantic comedies and ubiquitous displays of public affection as well?

We lucky Canucks are not immune, poised to receive our first demonstrations October 15 in Toronto and Vancouver. The “Occupy Toronto” movement is, as of yet, just as poorly focused, if not more. Spokesperson and college student Bryan Batty told the Toronto Star that we, too, have many issues that merit sitting in the street, including youth unemployment, growing debt, environmental destruction, and the increasingly illustrious issue of corporate greed. The Vancouver protest will happen at the Vancouver Art Gallery for some reason—down with Emily Carr paintings!

The movement is unfocused, but that’s nothing new. Conflicting messages clouded the G20 protests in Toronto last summer, the unfortunate havoc that greeted the end of Vancouver’s NHL season this year, and the recent rioting in Britain where protesters were divided in their quests for social change and free sneakers. These sorts of demonstrations, void of any remnant of pragmatism, inevitably turn to clashes between protesters and police.

Those truly enslaved by the inequities of “corporate greed” don’t have the luxury of taking the day off work to protest, and the police, confronted with hoards of unpredictable demonstrators, usually react with an inappropriate amount of force.

So if we know it tends to end badly, if we know it’s not going to compel social and economic reform, why do so many people paint posters and hit the streets anyway?

Well, for the same reason that rogue senate page Brigette DePape donned a “Stop Harper” sign in the House of Commons last June, and why our lustful little toddlers kick their feet up in the air when they want a cookie. Because it makes us feel good. It makes us feel as though we’re making a difference. Brigette wasn’t going to “stop Harper” with her sign, and Occupy Toronto protesters aren’t going to stop corporate greed with their catchy rhymes. But occupying a street, or throwing a temper tantrum for a cookie, is a much more cathartic, immediately gratifying expression of discontent than working to reform legislation, which is what actually leads to change in democracies.

Canadians are fortunate in that they have the freedom to work within the system to compel social and economic reform—however slowly. Yet we so often opt to stage demonstrations in the name of “awareness,” and revert back to our lives when our voices become hoarse. Children eventually learn the key to cookie autonomy is to change the wafer power dynamic through negotiation or economic independence. If they can retire their temper tactics, we youth may find a better way too.

“If you do nothing illegal, we won’t bother you,” say police.

Photo courtesy of Yannick Gingras on Flickr

A Quebec student lobby group claims that a Montreal police squad, which monitors anarchists and “marginal political groups,” has violated the province’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.

Now, they’re going to file a human rights complaint.

Four members of  L’association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante, including three of the group’s executives, were arrested in connection with several protests in late March against higher tuition fees. Some of those protests turned violent.

The group claims that those arrested were targeted because of their political views. ”There is no doubt about the political nature of these arrests,” ASSÉ spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois said in a press release. “This is clearly an attempt by the [Montreal police] to decapitate the Quebec student movement on the eve of one of its historical struggles.”

Montreal police deny that the arrests were politically motivated. ”When you occupy an office and someone gets a broken wrist and there’s a broken window, that’s not a peaceful demonstration,” spokesperson Ian Lafrenière told the Montreal Gazette. “I agree that people should be allowed to demonstrate. If you do nothing illegal, we won’t bother you.”

The human rights complaint focuses on the police’s Guet des activites des mouvements marginaux et anarchistes (surveillance of the activities of marginal movements and anarchists) or GAMMA squad, which ASSÉ claims conducted the arrests. Police said GAMMA did not make the arrests in question and that the squad was formed as a reaction to increasing levels of violence at protests.

Another activist group, the Coalition Against Repression and Police Brutality, has also filed a complaint accusing the squad of discriminating against people based on their political views.

ASSÉ says it represents more than 40,000 students across Quebec.

STU profs who plan to boycott convocation should be wary of the message they are sending their students

A group of professors at St. Thomas University are protesting the decision to award an honorary degree to Fredericton Mayor Brad Woodside, and some have now threatened to boycott the graduation ceremonies.

In an open letter to the Daily Gleaner, the professors at the liberal arts university objected to the decision to award the degree to a “sitting politician,” as well as because of Woodside’s “record on the environment and by his unwillingness to recognize gay and lesbian citizens.”

Back in the 1990’s, Woodside refused to declare a Gay Pride weekend in Fredericton until he was ordered to do so by the Human Rights Commission. However, since taking office again in 2004, Woodside has declared Pride Week and even participated in some of the events.

But for other professors, their decision to boycott the ceremonies has more to do with the ethics of awarding an honorary degree to a politician who is still in office.  “There’s a general sense of unease about the kind of vulgarity and the crassness of that,” Ian Nicholson, an STU professor who signed the letter of objection told Global Saskatoon. “Of sorta paying up to power, of trying to buy favours from politicians by giving them one of these impressive sounding degrees.”

For these reasons, a group of STU professors may be absent at the convocation ceremonies of their students this weekend. And while I don’t agree with their position, it is understandable why they would choose to be so. The ethics of awarding an honorary degree to a sitting politician is undeniably complicated, and that decision is made even thornier when the recipient has held controversial opinions in the past, despite recent reforms.

But by boycotting the ceremonies, these professors are putting their own politics over their students. Which is fine, of course. But small liberal arts universities, unlike large, research-driven institutions, are driven by the reputation of having intimate classrooms and personal connections between students and professors. You go to the University of Toronto if you want to be lectured by a world-renowned theorist who probably doesn’t know your name, but you enroll in St. Thomas University if you want to develop a relationship with faculty and engage personally with your instructors. If these professors don’t show up to their students’ graduations, they will be inadvertently forfeiting one of the great merits of their institution.