Editorial
Democracy is Alive – and Unwell
The Board of Governors spoke to students on Wednesday morning and, though the message took over an hour to be made official, it can be boiled down to two words: Fuck. You.
Let’s recap: last week was a week that exemplified the use and misuse of democracy at Concordia.
The night before the BoG meeting at a special session of Concordia Student Union Council, students chimed in, again, on the matter of a student centre being located in the Faubourg Building.
Last year, a referendum that was actually about an increase to the $2.00 per credit student centre fee levy became about the building after it was outed as the intended site.
Demanding more information, 69 per cent of students were against the project, a percentage that the Concordia Student Union managed to top when its members unanimously voted to quash a $54 million dollar joint deal with the administration.
That was democracy, both direct and representative, at its finest.
Unfortunately, democracy only goes so far at this university. The very next morning, a 27-7 vote at the Board of Governors made official the contentious reforms to the makeup of BoG.
Undergrads, who currently have 10 per cent of the voting seats at BoG, will now hold only four per cent. The students who give this school a reason to exist were told in no uncertain terms that their opinion doesn’t matter.
Now, you might be saying, “Well, the Board of Governors isn’t a democratic institution. Most members don’t get elected to their posts by a constituency. They are like the Board of a corporation, and are there to make sure the university is run successfully.”
And that’s true—with one caveat: Concordia is not a business, whose only goal is a profit. Its goal is to provide students with an education. Shouldn’t they be seeking as much input as possible from those students?
There are more than 35,000 undergrads hoping to get a degree from this school, each with a different opinion on how it can be improved. To think that one person can properly represent them is an insult to the diversity we have here.
It’s the equivalent of leaving a one-penny tip at a restaurant—a token gesture designed to show contempt.
But this shouldn’t be a surprise at this point in the government games being played at the university, considering that contempt has come to define the culture of Concordia’s upper administration.
What’s truly disturbing about the failure of democracy at the Board level is that even criticizing their decisions is something they apparently see as unacceptable.
When the student reps repeatedly tried to convince the Board that a reduced student presence would harm the school, they were spoken to condescendingly, and an executive member even said, “we’ll talk about democracy later.”
When undergraduate student and hell-raising activist Alex Matak passionately voiced her displeasure with what was happening to the Board, Chair Peter Kruyt mused that having an audience might not be a good thing in the future.
And voicing dissent isn’t just inappropriate in person now, either. Events later in the day would prove that online protest is also unacceptable at Concordia.
Hours after Board meeting ended, members of The Link’s editorial staff received phone calls from the school, inquiring as to whether we knew who was behind the mock Peter Kruyt Twitter account KruytPeter. (The account has since moved to Peter_Kruyt.)
The account, which featured messages like, “I hate how the first thing you get when you google my name is a petition against me,” is clearly an effort by a frustrated student to blow off steam and find humour in an otherwise dire situation.
But apparently this use of social media is crossing the line, as the school attempted to contact Twitter to take the profile down and is pursuing legal action.
The bottom line is that dissenting student voices—whether they have voting power, are in the audience of a boardroom, are on Twitter, or in the hallways—matter.
Despite what happened Wednesday, it will never be the Board against one student. If students don’t take this—or tuition, or student space negotiations—lying down, if we shove that “fuck you” back in the Board’s face, 35,000 pissed-off undergrads will have more of a say than a single student rep ever could have.
—Adam Kovac
Current Affairs Editor
