New Student ID

A Meditation on Post-Hike/Post-Strike Student Identity

Graphic Paku Daoust-Cloutier

Where are you right now? Are you in a foyer teeming with backpacks and line-ups for elevators and escalators? Or in a deliberately low-key café smelling like chai lattes? Chances are, your surroundings indicate that you’re a student—and chances are, that means more than you think it does.

In Montreal, the student identity has been shaped and reshaped in remarkable ways. A bilingual, cosmopolitan, diverse hub of culture, this city invites its inhabitants to have opinions.

Your politics are so uniquely tied into your history, your age and your social sphere; your reaction to the recently cancelled tuition hike is likely to be relevant to your field of study, which is likely to be relevant to the kinds of people you talk to and what you talk about.

Upon stepping back into the Library Building this August, I felt an uneasiness I could only attribute to the realization that I had to redefine what it meant for me to be there.

There was a gap between the typical right-wing Quebecer’s assumptions on student “entitlement” and the more authentic, multi-faceted political spectrum of the university setting. I felt, hazily, that I must belong to the latter—but I wasn’t able to figure out exactly where, or how.

If the last year in this never-boring city showed me anything, it’s that the ways I define myself as a student seem to have undergone construction reminiscent of the current work outside the Hall Building.

The ideological battle that took place in Quebec this year was not about bratty students who didn’t want to pay for their education; it was about fighting for our rights to know just what we were getting, and at what price.

The liberties that our administration and our government tried to take from us, followed by the student resistance (and victory) have opened up a new space that demands that we reevaluate our ideas and objectives.

I’ve understood that school means many things to me: independence, a political awakening, a place in a socially engaged universe and most significantly an opportunity to exist as a sponge—as a learner.

A learner not just of textbooks and course-packs, but of culture and subculture, of social discourse and of human relationships. Where else does one learn how to express oneself in a political gathering of thousands according to Robert’s Rules?

To understand that for others, this microcosm instead means a distinctly garish stretch of clubs on St. Laurent Blvd., Canada Goose jackets and scraping by in classes they would rather sleep through anyway, only to graduate with a piece of paper that won’t even get them a job and an average debt of $14,000—that tells me we need to think about what it means to get an education.

This is not an institution for the mere imparting of skills. This is an institution for the creation of knowledge. Here, we are taught how to think for ourselves. Forgive me if I don’t see that reflected in the way students fit into the social hierarchy of this city.

On the heels of all the talk about the words “student strike” being oxymoronic came these words, from The Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente: “The protesters […] sociology, anthropology, philosophy, arts and victim-studies students, whose degrees are increasingly worthless [are] the baristas of tomorrow.”

The anger that came upon me when I read this nearly led me to hurl my 1,500-page Modernism anthology across the room… but I couldn’t lift it. Wente’s remark is a perfect example of the devaluation of knowledge that exists today.

My struggle through philosophic and literary texts is a struggle that brings me enormous satisfaction, but absolutely no respect outside the classroom. Where, besides the university, is the recognition for teaching that gives people the ideas and energy to engage with the world? Where is the appreciation for learning as an end in itself?

Why is it that students are more often being told to understand how to make money, rather than how to become informed about the larger issues and discussions relevant to them?

That profits matter more to our administration than a graduating class who can think critically demonstrates the chasm of opinion between the objectives of this school and my objectives as a student.

The university is not only a place where you are made to write essays or put together lab reports or take exams. It provides the threshold one must cross into adulthood and into financial and intellectual independence.

One must, therefore, not only learn how and why to study, but how and why to live—according to whose ideals, whose priorities, and whose teachings.

We need to re-learn what it means to be educated—and why each of us is undertaking this—in order to learn anything at all.