On Governing Council and the no man’s land.

It’s kind of odd when you’re stuck in that place where your spirit is thoroughly broken but your mind refuses to stop thinking about things. Where you’re entirely disillusioned but refuse to acquiesce. I guess one could call it a no man’s land.

I find myself going through this kind of thinking quite often — nearly a year ago I made this post.

A commenter named patlajica left this message:

because you have no other choice! people like you, who refuse to be swallowed by ignorance, have no other choice but to think and fight. you are cursed with a brain that will not shut down, a mind that will not stop asking questions and eyes that will not look away when wrong-doings or abuse happen. your very existence is tormenting but there is nothing more beautiful than your cause.

She summed it up quite well, and in fact that reflects my first paragraph.

I’ve done a lot of thinking this winter, perhaps one of the worst I’ve had (and conversely perhaps also one of the best I’ve had). I’ve seriously considered resigning from ASSU to take a break from it, even as I’ve seriously considered running for a seat on Governing Council — all the while I’ve also come up with some thoughts and ideas to do something about both.

In one capacity or another I’ve been involved in just about every level of student government on campus, from course unions (HBSU and APSS) to a faculty student union (ASSU) to the university student union (SAC). The one that I haven’t stuck my nose in is the Governing Council.

One issue that really bothers me is the fact that there is no public accountability of the University of Toronto (or indeed, at an Ontario university). The results of its internal audit are never made public, the Audit Committee of the Governing Council has no student members (for what reason, I do not know) — it reports back to the Business Board (which has two student members, and the reports are publicly viewable) but many of its items are confidental and undisclosed. The web site for the internal audit serves as a “resource” for members of the “University community” — of course student societies don’t get audited by this ‘Internal Audit’ (so are we members of this “University community”?) and we aren’t given the most important resource of all: the results of the audit.

The very structure of the Governing Council also bothers me. 8 students out of 50 members. That’s one less than the number of alumni (eight plus the Chancellor), four less than the teaching staff (12), eight less than the provincial appointees (16). At the very least, I feel there should be more students on the Governing Council — substantially more — than there are alumni. Sure, they contribute to the “University community,” but really, we’re the ones who go through the crap here on the ground. To change this, one would have to go to the provincial government, because apparently the Governing Council is rooted in Ontario law (hence the 16 provincial appointees).

And that just brings it round full circle. The University of Toronto is established in the law, by the province, and yet it has no public accountability.

Many of the committees on the Governing Council co-opt unelected students. This is a route to get “in” — so to speak — but not being elected isn’t my thing. I used two negatives. I would rather be elected than be co-opted or appointed. (During ASSU’s March 2005 elections, I was acclaimed an Executive Member rather than being elected because not enough people ran for anything. Had I not stood against Yaser for the presidency, he too would have been acclaimed. At that point I didn’t want to become President, but I wasn’t happy at all about the lack of choice and the automatic acclamations.)

I’ve also noticed that no full-time undergraduate student representative on the Governing Council has reached out to faculty student unions — at least not to ASSU. If they had I probably would’ve known about it by now. Of course, I and ASSU have certainly not reached out to them either, despite their contacts being public information. Neither of us initiated anything.

I’ve been thinking a lot more about a lot more (more on that, hopefully, later). And although sometimes I feel like walking away, I think Shawn summarized it best when, in March responding to my post, he said “keep fighting b/c you probably won’t give up either way..”.

Sometimes, though, it just gets awful lonely when yours is the only voice you hear, regardless of how much you like listening to the sound of your own voice. Perhaps you’re not listening, or you’re not listening in the right places. But that just makes you feel even lonelier.

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5 Responses so far

  1. 1

    dee said,

    January 6, 2006 @ 10:12 am

    Don’t give up. We need people like you, who not only want to make a difference but you’re a people who CAN make a difference. For the rest of us, we’re right behind, following your lead and supporting your causes.

  2. 2

    nomes said,

    January 7, 2006 @ 12:09 am

    Part of the problem is that I don’t hear those other voices.

  3. 3

    liv said,

    January 7, 2006 @ 1:30 am

    hey nomes… check your e-mail. I think you embody a great civic conscience, and I’m sure you have some great ideas to contribute. Over the break I also devoted some amount of time to the same questions, partly inspired by another post of yours (at the beginning of dec.?) and partly by other reasons. Trying to make a difference is no small feat and it does take some time for some of them to gain ground. Keep at it though. and check your e-mail.

    cheers,

    liv

  4. 4

    liv said,

    January 7, 2006 @ 1:34 am

    ugh, reading that over, i don’t think ’embody’ was the word I was going for. but you get the idea. it’s late. 🙂 i’m writing the e-mail to you now btw.

  5. 5

    Seeker said,

    January 7, 2006 @ 7:00 pm

    On the point of accountability… It may interest you to know that during the Progress SAC Campaign I asked Paul Bretscher why last years SAC site sucked so much and lacked, what I thought, were important things like pdfs of minutes from SAC meetings. He said that he was concerned about that as well and would relaunch the site and have a lot of things like minutes up.

    While the new site did go up, the minutes didn’t. I e-mailed him about this earlier this year and he said they would go up towards the end of November… While I’ve more or less lost interest, other students may actually still care about the actions of their student government and they would probably be interested to see that those minutes still aren’t online.

    I guess promises don’t matter unless they’re printed on a thick plastic sign.

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