40 years of student activism at U of T and beyond

In yesterday's Star,there was an article about Kenneth Stone, a man whose activism at the University of Toronto culminated in him ripping up his degree at his convocation in 1968. The feature was published around the fortieth anniversary of that event.

You can read it here: The Man Who Ripped Up His Degree

The man who resists this today:

"'George Bush's war of terror against Arabs and Muslims, into which our own prime minister bought lock, stock and barrel. We're paying for a losing counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, where our troops control the groundthey are standing on for a moment." He berates Bush, (Defence Minister) Peter MacKay and (Liberal Leader) Stéphane Dion, saying they clamour for humanitarian interventions in Sudan's Darfur region while creating humanitarian crises in Afghanistan and elsewhere.”

…was resisting similar issues at the University of Toronto forty years ago. He fought the same issues that the UofT 14, their supporters and students at many institutions today continue to fight:

"For students like Stone, the civil rights activists who came to Canada from sit-ins in Mississippi and hung around the common room, were galvanizing.

"It was a time of intellectual ferment," he says. "We were not accepting what we were being told ... You could put out a leaflet at 9 a.m. and have an anti-war rally of 600 people at noon."

Stone, who became president of the Innis College Student Society, pushed hard to win the first student representation on the college council, which at that time was made up entirely of faculty and staff. By 1969, Innis was offering courses on cinema, urban studies, the environment and Canadian culture and society, all of which evolved into U of T's first interdisciplinary programs.

"I learned more about politics from the fight for student power than I ever could learn from books and in the classroom," he says.”

Students who fight for greater representation on university committees today are standing on the shoulders of people like Stone. It's easy to forget that the little representation that students have wasn’t handed to students; it was only made possible by others who fought the same battle years before. And greater representation will only be made possible through organised students using a variety of tactics to bring a broad range of students along.

Tomorrow at 12:00, at UofT’s Simcoe Hall, there will be a march against the criminalization of dissent on campus and in support of the UofT 14. Students, like they were forty years ago, will again be fighting for greater representation and their right to dissent against the university’s administration.

As the summer presses on, and as students continue to wake up, who knows that the fall will have in store for activism on our campuses? The Canadian Federation of Students-declared Provincial Day of Action on November 5 will hopefully be a flash point for activists across the province to unite on these issues and force the gatekeepers at the Council of Ontario Universities to comply with these demands that have been made by students year after year.

Students to confront environmental problems at upcoming meeting

This weekend hundreds of college and university student representatives will gather to discuss issues such as fair trade mass purchasing programs, campus anti-racism initiatives, indigenous rights and how to protect education as a right in the face of market forces. Among these themes will be also be a debate on how to further students’ role in the environmental movement.

It has been barely a year since the students’ unions that comprise the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) vaulted their organization squarely on to Canada’s environmental scene. Since then, students have concentrated their efforts to contribute to the work of the David Suzuki Foundation, the Polaris Institute, the Sierra Youth Coalition and others.

This move could not have come too soon.

Consider that Canada’s oil sand reserves, which are on par with Venezuela as the largest known supply of crude in the world, just after Saudi Arabia[1], are under increasing pressure to triple their output in the next ten years, despite being one of the “dirtiest” sources of energy on the planet.

Consider that Canada’s fresh water reserves are under increasing pressure from the US cities[2] and private bottled water companies.

If students are going to translate local campaigns such as those designed to curb driving cultureand stopping the commodification of water, they must continue their collective work at the national level.

Other Links:

The Water Front Documentary—Trailer

Official energy statistics from the US government's e Energy Information Administration—International Petroleum (Oil) Production

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[1] The US Government’s Geological Survey (USGS) says: “The two major sources of unconventional oil ... are the extra heavy oil in the Orinoco province of Venezuela and the ... tar sands in the Western Canada Basin. Taken together, these resource occurrences, in the Western Hemisphere, are approximately equal to the Identified Reserves of conventional crude oil accredited to the Middle East.” [http://www.runet.edu/~wkovarik/oil/3unconventional.html]

[2] Anderson, F. Richard, Brett Rosenberg and Judy Sheaham. 2005. National City Water Survey 2005. United States Conference of Mayors Urban Water Council. [http://www.usmayors.org/uscm/urbanwater/publications.asp].