Vol102Iss29

Volume 102, Issue 29

January 31, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

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NEWS 03 NEWS

Updates on the campus flood

Securitization demo at UQAM

06 COMMENTARY The corporatization of knowledge at McGill

Letters from our readers

08 FEATURES Arthur Porter: man of mystery

11 HEALTH&ED Racial profiling alive and well in Quebec

Living with a learning disability

13

CULTURE

Album reviews! A$AP Rocky, Burial, and more

McGill should divest from harmful investments

16 COMPENDIUM! Administration says it “must lie more” University in water-slide scandal

3

Laurent Bastien Corbeil The McGill Daily

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espite plans to hold a summit on higher education next month, the Quebec government reiterated its support this week for a tuition hike of between $46 to $83 per year.

The amount would vary depending on whether a rise in household disposable income and an increase in operational costs are considered, according to a plan submitted by economist Pierre Fortin at a preliminary meeting in December.

Government officials have been touting the summit as a way of building consensus about university funding and management.

Pierre Duchesne, the Quebec minister of higher education, called free education “unfeasible” and said on Tuesday that the notion of a tuition freeze needed to be “defined.” The remark comes a month after Fortin described indexation to inflation as a “tuition freeze in every practical sense.”

In an interview with The Daily, Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ) President Martine Desjardins said in French that the “game was still not set.”

“We still have a lot of time to make sure the government understands that a tuition freeze is the only measure that can ensure accessibility,” she said. “Most of the actors [at the summit] are against indexation, and the consensus seems to be against that proposition.”

On Wednesday, the Coalition opposée à la tarification et à la privatisation des services publics – an organization composed of unions and community groups – held a dem-

Anti-austerity demo held downtown. onstration in downtown Montreal against some of the government’s austerity measures, including the proposed tuition hike.

“It was clear in December after the [government] budget was submitted that we weren’t talking about a tuition freeze anymore, but of indexation,” André Frappier, president and co-spokesperson of progressive provincial party Québec solidaire, told The Daily in French. “At every level, [the government] is taking steps away from the promises it made.”

“The summit will be used to let off some steam, but I don’t think it will come up with solutions comparable to the mobilization we saw last year. It’s also written in the bud-

get; it cannot be anything else but indexation,” he added.

Another provincial party has suggested a much more significant hike. François Legault, the leader of the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ), said on Monday that a select group of universities, such as McGill and the Université de Montréal, should be able to determine tuition unilaterally.

“It’s important to protect accessibility, but we have to be able to tell the truth in Quebec,” he told reporters in French at a press conference in Quebec City. “Right now, some universities don’t have the means to attract the best researchers. It’s obvious that the Université de Montréal doesn’t have the same resources as

Photo Hera Chan | The McGill Daily

the University of Toronto, all proportions considered.”

According to his plan, students at other universities would have to pay between 15 and 20 per cent of the cost of their education. The price for studying medicine, for example, would thus be higher than for an Arts degree.

“It is obvious that Legault doesn’t understand the system and is applying principles which aren’t relevant to the university system,” Desjardins said. “We’ve invited him on a number of occasions to the summit and he has never proposed anything to solve the problems we face.”

Quebec’s summit on higher education is slated to begin on February 26.

PGSS condemns McGill’s intention to limit access to information

What to watch instead of Django Unchained

EDITORIAL

mcgilldaily.com

Government set stage for indexation to inflation

Coffee gets classy

15

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Tuition hike debated as summit draws near

Trans* people denied access to homeless shelters Gender equity in math

The McGill Daily

Juan Camilo Velásquez The McGill Daily

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he Post-Graduate Students’ Society (PGSS) called on McGill to withdraw parts of a motion filed by the University which would grant McGill the authority to deny Access to Information (ATI) requests submitted by McGill students.

The University filed a motion on December 7 to the provincial body that oversees ATIs, the Commission d’accès à l’information, seeking to exempt

itself from fulfilling ATIs filed by 14 respondents. The motion also asks for authorization to deny future requests submitted by any McGill student.

The student society’s motion, passed by its executive committee, asks McGill to “acknowledge that any McGill student shouldn’t be prohibited from submitting ATIs based on previous requests from other students.”

PGSS External Affairs Officer Errol Salamon proposed the motion after seeing a lack of responses from different campus groups regarding this issue.

“I thought it would be important for PGSS to take a stance, particularly because I’ve been working on a project regarding industry and university research partnerships. And if it goes through, if the motion passes, it would limit the extent to which PGSS would be able to gather information for research,” Salamon told The Daily.

SSMU is in the process of dealing with the issue internally and has yet to issue a formal, public response, according to President Josh Redel.

Two of the respondents named in McGill’s motion are SSMU executives.

While PGSS denounced specific clauses in the motion regarding the University’s request to dismiss ATIs, it did not condemn the motion as a whole, due to a lack of consensus within the executive committee.

“From my perspective, I wanted PGSS to be able to denounce the entire motion, but, it was amended to…particular issues that everyone in the executive could agree to,” Salamon said.

Salamon told The Daily that he would try to get other associations on campus involved before determining a further course of action.

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NEWS

The McGill Daily | Thursday, January 31, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Trans* people denied access to Montreal shelters ASTT(e)Q asks shelters to debunk essentialized ideas of gender Hannah Besseau The McGill Daily

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any homeless people were left vulnerable last week, as excruciatingly cold temperatures and a harsh wind chill hit Montreal. Many trans* people were left out in the cold, as they were rejected from homeless shelters. These shelters have been denounced by a prominent trans* rights group.

The Action Santé Travesti(e)s et Transsexuel(le)s du Quebec (ASTT(e) Q), released a statement last week on the increasingly dismal prospects of trans* people accessing shelters in Montreal. According to the statement, CACTUS Montreal, ASTT(e)Q’s parent organization, “witnessed several of [their] members … denied shelter on the grounds of being trans*.”

This has been particularly the case in night shelters, where government-issued identification is required in order to gain access to services. In women’s shelters, gender is verified when examining these IDs. “This becomes problematic when your presented identity is different from your legal one,” explains Gabrielle Bouchard, Centre 2110’s Peer Support and Advocacy coordinator. “In women’s shelters, if you don’t look the part, then questions are asked.

These questions can be fundamentally discriminatory.”

The ASTT(e)Q reports that women’s shelters require trans*

people to have undergone sex reassignment surgery in order to obtain matching gender identification.

“That F on your ID is hard to obtain. Sex reassignment surgery modifies one’s body forever, in a very significant way. Much authorization from a variety of people is needed in this process to confirm trans* identity prior to an operation taking place. If you are homeless this becomes near impossible,” Bouchard told The Daily.

Nora Butler Burke, program coordinator at ASTT(e)Q, also notes the role poverty plays in legal gender assignment.

“There are particular ways that low income trans* women encounter being denied to all sorts of essential services from health care to legal documents. There is lack of access to proper support for people transitioning and a lot around the process is not ensured until people are wealthier or privileged. Class and economic status create vulnerability on an individual level,” Burke told The Daily.

Burke explained that not all shelters are perpetrators of such inaccessibility. Day shelters do not typically require extensive documentation. Some night shelters make conscious efforts to be inclusive and accessible.

Matthew Pearce, the director general of the Old Mission Brewery, stated that trans* people are not excluded. The Brewery “regularly hosts trans* [people], particularly in our women’s pavil-

Illustration Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

ion,” Pearce said.

Burke, however, is not entirely convinced this is enough.

“Discrimination still takes place within the shelters even if accepted. Trans* women entering shelters still have a hard time because of different discriminatory attitudes. Shelters don’t often do work on educating and raising awareness of different people within the space and different issues such as ableism, rac-

ism, et cetera,” Burke said.

Burke argues that this exclusivity comes from “a certain brand of feminism that is not able to understand trans* women as women, and that’s something important to talk about fighting essentialist ideas of what is woman.”

“Legislation is used to legitimize this logic and so we often see shelters replicating the same barriers and exclusions that are directly out of state regulations, which

reproduce certain components of social violence. Those who don’t fit properly within gender norms still face many forms of social violence,” Burke added.

To make shelters more accessible, Bouchard believes that myths of trans* women being dangerous or making others uncomfortable have to be debunked. To do this, Bouchard believes that shelters and those using the services should be educated on the topic.

Math conference highlights lack of women in faculty Carla Green The McGill Daily

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he Society of Undergraduate Mathematics Students (SUMS) held a discussion on Wednesday about the underrepresentation of women in mathematics at McGill.

Women make up almost 60 per cent of McGill’s overall undergraduate population; however, the math department estimates that between one-third and one-half of math majors are female.

SUMS President Catherine Hilgers told The Daily that she was more concerned with the low number of female honours students. According to Hilgers, between 10 and 15 per cent of honours math students are female.

Hilgers also pointed out that of the Math department’s 37 professors, only one is female.

In an interview with The Daily, Math Departmental Chair

Jacques Hurtubise said that the department was “working on” hiring more women.

“There is a desire to get more women [into the department],” he told The Daily. “There’s a policy in the faculty, which we entirely support, to interview at least one woman for every opening. We’re actually in the process of hiring a second woman right now.”

At Wednesday’s meeting, Colleen Alkalay-Moulihan, an honours student in Applied Mathematics, spoke about having felt marginalized as a female, by her peers and certain professors.

“Someone once told me that it’ll be easier for me to get into graduate school because I’m a girl,” she said. “My second year I had a rude professor – my male friends didn’t notice, but his attitude affected me. I felt like he treated the male students like peers, and me like an idiot.”

“We should identify the environmental factors that make [the

Illustration Oles Chepesiuk | The McGill Daily

Math program] unfriendly to women, and figure out how to change them,” Michael Snarski, an honours Math student, explained during the meeting. “Confidence is key to being in math – if you

don’t believe you can solve a problem, you won’t solve it.”

Students at the meeting underlined a number of areas the department could work on.

“We’re going to suggest that the

department work to increase the number of women in math, increase the sense of community, and increase the number of female mathematicians hired,” Hilgers said.

news

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The McGill Daily | Thursday, January 31, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

After the flood, McGill recovers Conflict over cause of smaller leak Lola Duffort The McGill Daily

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ore than a quarter of the McTavish reservoir’s contents gushed through campus into downtown Montreal between 4 p.m. Monday and 2 a.m.

Wednesday, when an 88-year-old water main gave way during construction near the intersection of Pine and Doctor Penfield.

The cause of the break has yet to be determined, according to city spokesperson Valérie De Gagné, who said that an excavation of the pipe would be underway soon to determine the cause.

A majority of the water’s flow had abetted by 7 p.m. on Monday, but water continued to pour down University until late Tuesday night.

At the time, McGill and two city officials gave three contradicting reports to press about the source of the continued flooding. The school reported a second break in an 8-inch pipe, one city official reported to the Montreal Gazette a second break in a 54-inch water main, and another told The Daily that all the valves to the first break had not yet been shut off.

“It seems that they were all sort of right,” according to Director of Internal Communications Doug Sweet. “What we had was the equivalent of an 8-inch water main coming out of that first break.”

The aftermath The school is now scrambling to relocate classes and offices, continue de-icing main passageways, and de-humidify buildings. The University has barely begun the process of calculating the costs of repairs and contingency measures,

Photo Cyril Rahgoshay

according to Sweet, since many of them have yet to be incurred.

The University has contracted the services of Première-Action, a disaster restoration company, to help clean up buildings, but McGill’s own grounds services are doing most of the outside work salting and de-icing affected areas.

The James Annex, which is attached to the James Administration building and houses the University’s graphics depart-

ment, seems to have been hit the hardest. The Annex sits on the slope that faces the reservoir, and a window at ground level broke during the flood, inundating the offices inside. It will not reopen for “weeks, perhaps months” according to Sweet.

The Wong building and 3435 University, which houses the School of Environment, also incurred significant damage. The administration is unsure of when

the buildings will be reopened.

Some of the school’s archived administrative records were damaged – as they were during a September 2011 flood – when Service Point experienced some flooding, and have been sent to freeze-drying facilities for restoration.

At the McLennan library, “the basement experienced some flooding, but the flooding was not extensive,” said Sabrina Hanna, the library system’s media relations

officer, in an email to The Daily.

Most of the library’s collection has been moved to different floors until the necessary repairs are conducted, she added.

Other affected buildings include Leacock, Macdonald, McConnell, and the James Administration building, although no further classes have been cancelled, and the buildings are expected to be fully operational within the next few days.

UQAM students fight increased surveillance Administration targets campus activist hub Café Aquin Farid Rener The McGill Daily

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lanked by three security guards, approximately 200 Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) students stormed through the halls of UQAM’s DeSève, Thérèse-Casgrain, and Aquin buildings on Wednesday.

The protesters, who gathered in the agora of the Judith Jasmin building on Ste. Catherine at 12:30 p.m., voiced their discontent over new security protocols recently established by the UQAM administration.

The new security measures, slated to cost UQAM more than $300,000 over the next two years,

included the installation of 15 cameras on the walls and ceiling around Café Aquin, a cafe co-run by the science and law (AFESPED), and the social science (AFESH) associations at UQAM. The university has already spent $300,000 over the last four years on similar security measures.

Café Aquin was a centre for mobilization during the student strikes of last year. It was abruptly closed on December 20 when the UQAM administration announced that the entire area had to be walled-off as strong acids were being used to remove graffiti.

They also announced that AFESH would foot the $50,000 bill. The cafe reopened yesterday after several rounds of negotiations with the administration.

The walled-off area also included the meeting spaces allotted to the handicapped student’s association, the studentparent support network, the social science, and political science associations.

Without informing students, the UQAM administration also installed 15 surveillance cameras in the area.

“They put surveillance cameras everywhere, there isn’t a way to walk around the university without being filmed,” Annie, a student at UQAM who didn’t want to give her last name, told The Daily in French.

“Today we are here to oppose the fact that they installed these cameras. Also to denounce the fact that there are 16 employees that haven’t been paid since the clo-

sure,” Annie said.

Cafe employees were only given 24 hours’ notice before the cafe was closed. These employees have not been compensated for their lost hours. According to Annie, the administration told AFESPED and AFESH that they would have to cover employees’ salaries for this period themselves.

“The administration is putting in place controls of the spaces we meet. They saw what happens when we get together; it allows us to resist,” Annie said in French through a megaphone to the assembling crowd.

Protesters who were not masked were handed beige scarves to cover their faces. Moving toward the student services office, demonstrators

threw confetti into the air and blew air horns.

The anger over the installation of cameras was made evident as the protest reached the Henri-Aquin building when several protesters brought out hammers, smashing two wall-mounted cameras. One camera was ripped from the ceiling.

Several other cameras were spraypainted with red and green paint.

One protester broke through one of the walls around Café Aquin, as demonstrators around him evaded the debris.

The protest dissipated quickly as people announced that more security guards were on the way.

The UQAM administration did not return calls from The Daily by press time.

commentary

The McGill Daily Thursday, January 31, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

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Illustration Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

Inside the knowledge factory Profit = 1, Ethics = 0 Mona Luxion Through the Looking Glass

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here’s a lot of buzz about university governance and budgeting these days. A scan of recent issues of The Daily reveals a number of articles highlighting calls for a review of where the money’s coming from and what it’s being spent on (“Bloated bureaucracies weigh down university budgets,” News, January 28, page 3; “Universities using teaching dollars for construction,” News, January 24, page 4; “Admin talks university finances at SSMU Council,” News, January 17, page 5). This timing isn’t coincidental: the Parti Québécois (PQ) government has called for a summit on education at the end of February, and discussions are ongoing about what will – and should – come out of that process. As the articles above suggest, many observers are not convinced the summit will ask the right questions, or that those present will be likely to come to the right answers.

As students, we tend to think that the university is about us.

After all, from our first moments of thinking about applying to schools, universities are courting us. We are both their primary clients and their most important products, they tell us. Universities exist to provide a service to us: just think what you could do with a university degree!

The fact is, of course, that even if that was true fifty years ago it is most certainly not true now. And the University’s administrators

make no secret of it, if you step outside the glossy advertising brochures and back-to-school MROs. At the end of last semester PGSS and SSMU put on a McGill-centric education summit to get a sense of where the McGill community stands on all sorts of issues related to university education. The format was unfortunately far from interactive, and the voices of the administration overpowered those of students, but it was an interesting opportunity to hear about McGill’s strategic objectives in a way that we rarely do as students.

I was particularly interested in a session on partnerships between the university and corporations.

Although universities have always done research that benefitted the private sector, direct partnerships with corporations are becoming an increasingly prominent part of what universities do – and how they fund themselves. In fact, a muchoverlooked part of the university funding plan that spurred last year’s student strike was the expectation that universities raise more of their operating funds from corporate partners – even going so far as to make some public funding dependent on universities’ ability to raise private funds.

In her presentation on the topic of these partnerships, Vice President (Research and International Relations) Rose Goldstein made it clear that all contracts signed with corporate partners include an academic freedom clause making sure that researchers can publish their findings whether the corporate funders like them or not. (McGill’s track record on asbestos research

raises questions on whether this is always enforced, but that’s a different story.) That freedom is essential to scientific integrity, of course, but it hardly addresses the full ethical picture.

Imagine a university – a “research-intensive” university, to use that term the administration loves so much – that exists mostly to do research that others pay for.

In the Department of Mining and Materials Engineering, researchers supported by grants from De Beers, Barrick Gold, and other giant mining corporations investigate more efficient techniques for extracting highly toxic minerals from often-contested lands. In Mechanical Engineering, a professor researches de-icing technology that he then markets to military contractors through a business he owns. Speaking to the University Senate, the head of research urges faculty to look at the priorities of the university’s funders and tailor their research questions accordingly. The University wants them to get these grants, she says, and is putting all sorts of resources at their disposal. Meanwhile, who is funding research into the environmental impacts of tar sands extraction or the neocolonial causes of war? Freedom to publish adverse findings does not guarantee freedom to ask challenging questions, nor does it ensure university resources are made available to support the development of such projects in the first place.

The paragraph above is not a dystopian fantasy. All of those things are currently happening at McGill. At the same time, 100 Arts classes are being cut to save money,

leading to fewer of the small seminars in which we get to hone our critical thinking skills and ask the broader questions. (Full disclosure: I’m actually in Engineering, so they aren’t my classes that are being cut. But students in all faculties need small classes.) Dr. Goldstein assures us that McGill is “very strong” in the areas of Arts and Social Sciences, but then admits that there are no specific safeguards in place to prevent endlessly pitching public money after private, as the university invests more and more in the areas it sees as prime candidates for developing profitable partnerships.

The buzzwords that keep coming up are “keeping McGill competitive.” But what are we competing on? Like the most reckless financial players on Wall Street, McGill’s administrators deal in numbers that no longer have any bearing in reality. Cutting classes to increase the percentage taught by tenured professors increases your rankings but does zilch for the quality of your education. Redirecting resources to support partnerships with business, rather than supporting less profitable research projects might make McGill number one on a chart in some investor’s office, but it probably won’t get us closer to solving the big problems our society needs to deal with.

As we discuss the state of our universities and our education system here in Quebec, these are the sorts of issues we ought to be tackling. Making budget sheets balance is great, but unless we are questioning not only the line items on the budget but the priorities behind them, our universi-

ties will continue to be dysfunctional: state-subsidized non-profits that aspire to be publicly-traded corporations, and end up failing miserably at both. I don’t want a top-ranked university that is internationally competitive across the world, I want a university that provides me and my society with the ideas, tools, and knowledge that we need to live well together – now and generations into the future.

Perhaps you agree with me.

SSMU Council’s proposal for an états généraux on education brings us closer to discussing these goals than any part of the governmentmandated Summit process has or will. But these conversations need to be happening not only in our legislatures and closed-off conference rooms, but in our living rooms, newspapers, streets, and, of course, in our universities. Which is why it is particularly concerning that the McGill administration has decided to bypass any further consultation or even a Senate vote on their new “operational procedures” regarding protests and disruptions on campus.

With nowhere to discuss our goals for the education system, and no way to express our dissent with the effects of those imperatives, we may well wonder if the University is past saving as a useful societal institution.

If, like me, you believe there may still be some redeeming value here, then we’d best get to work fanning it up into flames, because it’s well on its way to being muffled.

In Through the Looking Glass, Mona Luxion reflects on activism, current events, and looking beyond identity politics. Email Mona at lookingglass@mcgilldaily.com.

commentary

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The McGill Daily | Thursday, January 31, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Letters The “Summit” needs to be so much more

Eurocentrism and class cuts Dear Daily,

Dear Daily, Two weeks ago, Minister of Higher Education Pierre Duchesne announced that the final meetings for his government’s Summit on Higher Education would take place on February 25 and 26 in Montreal.

As of yet, there has been no formal announcement about how many people will attend those meetings, who will be there, what the structure will be, or what the goals are.

But we know that it will take place over those two days.

Two days. After a process that will have lasted less than four months from the time it was first announced, the conclusion will be a mere two days. After a student strike that lasted six months, saw thousands of people arrested, and was the largest student mobilization that has ever been seen in this province.

The summit is structured around four themes: financing and governance, quality of education, participation and accessibility, and research. Four meetings, with only sixty delegates in attendance, have been held to discuss those specific topics. Other participation includes a “winter school” for youth that had a cap of 500 attendees, four forums for citizen participation, and a Facebook page.

On January 10, SSMU Council adopted a position calling for an états généraux on the subject of education in Quebec. We took this position with the belief that the current Summit process is simply not adequate if we are to address the long-simmering issues surrounding higher education in Quebec, which the strike brought into the public eye. There has not been an examination of the entire education system in the province since the Parent Commission in the 1960s. We feel that it is time again to really talk about what the role of education should be, and that this summit is not long or large enough to really do that.

—Robin Reid-Fraser SSMU VP External

The Dean of Arts is missing a very important point in defending the cuts to Arts classes “AUS holds Town Hall on elimination of 100 Arts classes” (News, January 24, page 5). If you are an Arts student who already has a tough time finding classes that study critical topics, this letter is for you; if you are an Arts student who finds McGill’s extreme lack of faculty diversity repulsive, this letter is for you; if you find McGill’s Eurocentric bias in many departments disingenuous, this letter is for you; and if you have a tough time studying the legacies of colonialism, slavery, and imperialism in Canada at McGill, this letter is for you.

Although the Dean of Arts would likely consider these issues to be entirely separate, I think there are connections: one of the effects of the Dean’s decision will be, in my opinion, to shore up the existing selection of courses, which are currently insufficient in covering these crucial topics. Furthermore, one of the messages sent from this decision is that the Faculty of Arts has too many classes currently, as opposed to diversifying its courses and offering more. Finally, critical subjects are best learned in small classroom settings, where students can connect readings to their personal experiences – it appears from the Dean’s decision that large classes are in the Faculty’s strategic interests.

Instead of cutting classes, I say that Arts students demand more: major programs in Indigenous Studies, African and AfricanCanadian Studies, Diaspora Studies, and Ethnic Studies, among other marginalized fields, in addition to diversifying programs like Philosophy or Political Science by hiring professors of colour. All of this would be to simply ask from McGill what comparative Canadian or elite American universities already have.

The time is now Arts students: ORGANIZE! — Eliyahu Freedman U3 Philosophy

How do we (want to) use the SSMU Building?

Dear Daily, With the recent announcement of the departure of Travel Cuts/Voyages Campus from the first floor of SSMU Building, and of course in the context of SSMU’s frustratingly confidential ongoing lease negotiations with the University, we are in the midst of a historic opportunity to establish student priorities for McGill’s only undergraduate student-run building. It is in this setting that the SSMU Executive team is excited to announce the beginning of a SSMU building visioning campaign to guide current and future decision-making about how space in the SSMU/Shatner building is allocated and managed.

We often feel from the SSMU office that the Shatner Building – the Leacock-esque concrete megalith that I’m told is soon to be considered a historical monument – is falling apart at the seams, especially as its 1960s-era heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system costs increasingly absurd amounts to maintain. Yet everyday I see how vital this building is as the foundation for a huge proportion of McGill’s student life, through the comical diversity of events that pack the building every day. So what does “student-run” mean, especially in terms of space? What values guide student-run spaces, and make them inherently different from others? As one of increasingly few students left on campus who can remember daily trips to the Architecture Café, I hope the sense of need (and urgency) around the lack of such space on campus is still clear to incoming students who have entered McGill in an ever more corporate status quo.

This Friday in the Madeleine Parent (formerly Breakout) room of SSMU, we will discuss food operations, the student-run cafe, our priorities in the building, sustainability and accessibility, event space needs, and what differentiates this building from the rest of space on campus with the goal of producing a long-term vision to guide future space allocations, current projects, and SSMU priorities in lease negotiations. This is our chance to make a big impact on the future of this building and some very exciting projects. Whether you want a studentrun cafe, more bookable space, a gym, more club offices, or whatever else you can dream up, come learn about the history of the building and current initiatives, and make your voice heard!

The SSMU Summit on Space in Shatner will take place on Friday, February 1, from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Shh! The scientific rationalists are speaking!

Dear Daily, I was stunned to learn, in a recent issue of The Daily, that members of the “McGill science community” were so “deeply disappointed” with recent articles in the Health & Education section that they took to the pages of this hallowed publication to form a rebuttal (“Lies, damn lies and pseudoscience,” Commentary, January 28, page 7).

This letter does not attempt to argue against what I assume are well-researched counter-claims on homeopathy (who amongst us could argue against the ineffable study by Shang et al., which needs no explanation but its name?) and radiation from cell phones (their safety is proven by a cursory Google search! Duh!).

In a publication that “recognizes that all events and issues are inherently political, involving relations of social and economic power and privilege,” it seems ironic that Palus and Sheridan would, after ostensibly recognizing the value of criticizing science, patronizingly demand the caveat that those criticizing science would “not conflate other kinds of speculation, or critical thinking, with science.”

In other words, feel free to criticize science, just make sure to do it with scientific language.

To borrow a word from The Daily’s own vocabulary, this demand is problematic. There are countless examples in the history of science and medicine where the language of empirical proof and scientific reasoning has been used to justify practices that later caused great harm. McGill graduate Frances Kelsey, for example, was reticent to give the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for the drug thalidomide, despite evidence from Europe cited by her colleagues that ‘proved’ its innocuity. The drug, which causes severe birth deformities if taken when pregnant, affected countless babies in the 1950s and 1960s.

The implication that science is somehow a separate, august entity, made up of purely rational and empirical facts is simply untrue, ridiculous, and unfortunately perpetuated by the aforementioned writers.

False accusations of pseudoscience To the writers of “Lies, damn lies, and pseudoscience” (Commentary, January 28, page 7), I find your arguments against the effectiveness and thus legitimacy of homeopathy to be very weak. I am going to assume that homeopathic medications are “just sugar pills” for the sake of argumentation. Placebos have been shown to have a clinical effect on patients.

The power of the mind in expectancy and conditioning can be used in order to affect bodily healing according to Miller & Brody, 2011.

Additionally, Kirsch and Raz have shown that many commonly used drugs, such as anti-depressants, are actually no more effective than sugar pills. Unethically, drug companies will exclude the placebos from their studies, and while they are right that placebos don’t affect everyone, they are administering their drug to a population that includes placebo-sensitive people.

As far as I am concerned, if homeopathy helps the population that seeks it out feel better, it is a legitimate form of healing.

In response to the cell phone argument, I have heard both sides and honestly do not know which to believe. However, citing an American Cancer Society (ACS) page as a worthy source for proving that non-ionizing radiation has not been shown to cause cancer is ludicrous. It is most probably in the ACS’s interests to not put cell phone companies out of business, as they may be sponsoring some research the ACS is conducting.

Capital is a huge driving force in today’s science and therefore it is important to remain critical of where the research is coming from.

Who funded it? What stakes might this group have in certain outcomes? Is it biased?

Science is flawed in many ways; let’s bring these flaws to the surface instead of trying to hide them in an attempt to continue glorifying it.

—Noemi Stern U2 Cognitive Science and History

—Peter Shyba Daily Health&Education Editor, 2011-2012

—Allison Cooper SSMU VP Clubs & Services

Dear Reader,

Stop whining, start writing.

Love, letters@mcgilldaily.com

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ARTHUR PORTER Multinational Man of Mystery Eric Andrew-Gee Graphics by Amina Batyreva and Hera Chan

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he most technically accurate and also the least relevant thing you can say about Arthur Porter is that he’s a physician, a radiation oncologist who specializes in prostate cancer. This tells you as much about the true nature of his trade as saying T.S. Eliot was a bank clerk.

From 2004 to 2011 Porter was the CEO of the McGill University Health Center (MUHC), but from that gig flowed many tributaries. He was also a member of the Air Canada board, one-time head of the civilian board that oversees Canada’s spies (expect the word “board” to come up a lot when Porter is in the conversation), ambassador plenipotentiary for the government of his native Sierra Leone, and advisor to that nation’s president. He attended garden parties with Stephen Harper. Like a boss.

In photo ops from his days at the MUHC, he was sometimes trailed by a wake of labcoated doctors, or seen at the construction site in a hard hat. He always wore a bowtie.

His smile was cherubic. These were his cloak and his dagger.

What we now know about Porter’s tenure as the CEO of the McGill hospital complex is that it was a nightmare. MUHC now has a $115-million deficit. It paid out 900,000 hours of dubious overtime since 2009. Its management was so hilariously bad that the province has put it one step shy of receivership. It isn’t yet clear how much of this was directly Porter’s fault, but he was in charge of the place at the time, so the likelihood of the amount being zero is low.

The incompetence at MUHC during the Porter era was peppered with some alleged criminality. Two former top executives at SNC-Lavalin – the engineering and construction group that is currently building the MUHC super hospital in N.D.G. – were charged with fraud in November. The execs allegedly authorized $22.5 million in “irregular” payments related to getting the contract for a $1.3-billion hospital. Fittingly, one of these executives was already locked up in a Swiss jail for another corruption charge and couldn’t be arrested.

The fraud charge was the worst of it, until the Globe and Mail reported that the company to which SNC paid those $22.5 million was called Sierra Asset Management Inc., a company that seems not to have existed and whose address was the same as a colonnaded Swiss bank in the Bahamas painted a lemon meringue colour and flanked by palm trees. The bank was run by a guy called Hermann-Josef Hermanns.

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And, oh yeah, the Hermanns guy was a business associate of Porter’s.

This is the kind of slapstick-level eightycar pileup of fraudulence that makes it so tempting to laugh at Arthur Porter. There’s always another out-of-control Buick veering its way toward the scene of the crash.

For example, a guy named Ari BenMenashe had his Montreal home burnt down about a month ago. In this city of firebombs, that is significant.

This is the same Ari Ben-Menashe who cut a deal with Porter in 2010 to procure $120 million from the Russian government for development work in Sierra Leone. The National Post’s revelation of the deal triggered Porter’s resignation from the MUHC and the Canadian civilian spy board mentioned above – because Ben-Menashe used to be an arms dealer and an Israeli spy! I mean, Jesus. *** Porter’s life is like something out of a Bond movie. His family owns a diamond mine in Sierra Leone, where he seems to have holed up when McGill came looking for the over $300,000 he owed them. In 2008, the University gave Porter a $500,000 loan at 1 per cent interest to help him buy a penthouse condo on Doctor Penfield. Now McGill is suing him for the money he didn’t pay back. To top it off, the National Bank might seize the condo which the loan helped him buy because – wait for it – Porter sold the condo without paying back $800,000 worth of his mortgage. The guy has a lot of pots on the stove, scandal-wise.

Consider his departure from Detroit, where he was also in charge of a series of hospitals until 2004.

According to a great investigation by the Globe and Mail – to whose reporting, along with that of the Montreal Gazette, I’m deeply indebted – he was considered pretty good at this job for a while in part because he could relate to Detroit’s black community. Arthur Porter relating to any community whose members don’t winter in Aspen is just a fantastical notion. He used to keep photos of himself with George H.W. Bush and Dick Cheney in his office and calls himself a Republican.

He talks like Salman Rushdie, and his accent is Oxbridge mahogany (he attended Cambridge med school)

with a slightly Sierra Leonine timbre. He says ‘one’ instead of ‘you,’ as in ‘when one is on a private sector board, the goals are much clearer.’ And then there’s his penchant for saying things like, “I look black but I speak white,” which people in Detroit and Montreal remember as something of a Porter catchphrase, according to the Globe.

When he couldn’t get the Detroit Medical Center’s finances under control – even after reducing its staff from 20,000 to 13,000 – he convinced the state of Michigan to pump $50 million into the hospitals.

Then, as board members started resigning because his myriad of business interests was making him unreliable, Porter skipped town and took the MUHC job.

Left those suckers holding the bag, hard. Porter was pursued up the St. Lawrence by at least two lawsuits for not paying back loans or making good on debts. Neither held up.

Charges don’t stick to dude, he’s Teflon.

The committee that picked Porter didn’t necessarily know about the lawsuits, but they

“This is the kind of slapstick-level eighty-car pileup of fraudulence that makes it so tempting to laugh at Arthur Porter. There’s always another out-of-control Buick veering its way towards the scene of the crash.”

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seemed to like his freewheeling, cowboy reputation. According to the Globe, “They were in a desperate hunt for a decisive leader with teeth – someone who could cut through the morass of the Quebec bureaucracy and finally build Montreal’s new superhospital, which had been nothing more than a discussion for six years. And here was Dr. Porter, a man with a vocal distaste for red tape and the ideological bona fides to prove it.”

Well, they got what they wished for.

Porter didn’t cut through Quebec’s red tape so much as try to wish it away. And this is where you start realizing that there’s something weirdly modern about this otherwise totally vintage charlatan.

There are clues in a 2010 YouTube clip, when McGill management professor Karl Moore sat Porter down for an interview. AP is wearing a pinstripe suit for the occasion, and his black bowtie has red polkadots – it’s like he’s wearing a Halloween costume of a Prohibition-era mobster. But when he starts talking, he sounds more like a seminarian at Davos (the annual meeting in Switzerland where the rich get together and convince themselves anew that capitalism is great).

“I think actually, in many ways, some of the public sector boards can still learn from the private sector,” Porter says. “Some of the inefficiencies, or perhaps diffuseness, you see in public sector boards is because there isn’t a single focus.”

That exaltation of the private sector, that thirst for efficiency, isn’t exactly typical of James Bond’s antagonist. In the Moore interview, Porter’s spy movie aesthetics are hitched to a nerdy technocratic blandness.

That might be the secret of Arthur Porter, his secret mundanity. In important ways, he played by the rules: he fired workers to cut costs, he dodged bureaucracy, he networked.

Most importantly, he passed the buck.

Consider what was happening with mortgages before the 2008 financial crisis: loans being given to people who patently couldn’t afford them; the selling of that debt to banks; the bundling of that unlikely-tobe-repaid debt with less terrible debt by the banks; and the reselling of the bundle to other banks. Lenders pulled the pin out of a grenade, then passed the grenade down the line to Wall Street bankers, who painted it gold and passed it on to another bank, figuring the next guy in line would mistake it for a Fabergé egg, or at least be busy inspecting it when the thing blew up.

In spirit, how was this different from

The McGill Daily | Thursday, January 31, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

l’Affaire Porter? Large corporations were left in ruin by reckless mismanagement, with the mismanagers remaining well-ensconced in Aspen and Davos and Cabo? This is a world that rewards madcap risk-takers, empowers them, gives them public money to gamble with and pocket. Seen against that backdrop, Porter seems kind of normal.

This was not some garden variety Quebec corruption story. It was too complicated, too 2.0. As my Quebecois uncle Jean-Paul once said to me, “The Mafia are good managers.”

Consider that Laval, one of the province’s most luridly corrupt jurisdictions, had the province’s highest Standard & Poor’s credit rating in 2012 – a gentleman’s “AA- with a positive outlook.” There’s something dowdily bureaucratic about the Mafia – if they use violence to enforce their rules, at least they have rules. Compared to them, Arthur Porter is a credit default swap vanishing into air. *** Except Arthur Porter didn’t vanish. There’s a famous Marxist geographer named David Harvey – he teaches at the City University of New York – who says, “Capitalism doesn’t solve its problems, it just moves them around geographically.” I don’t know if that’s true – but if it is, Arthur Porter is a case in point.

After resigning from the MUHC in late 2011, Porter took up residence in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas. He runs a private cancer clinic there, and lives in a gated community away from the mess and scrutiny of public hospitals and public life, a late capitalist dream.

In April, he hopped a couple of islands south to Antigua, for the groundbreaking of a new cancer clinic. Porter was chairman of the clinic’s board.

In a YouTube video of the event that seems to have been taken down, Porter is wearing a cream suit, a white shirt, and a black bowtie. He is standing in the shade of a canopy on what seems to be a searingly sunny day in St. John’s, the capital. He’s in top form, making little jokes – “I, proud holder of an Antiguan-Barbadan medical license,” he says with a coy smile, as if to say, ‘what country’s medical license don’t I have?’

– speaking expansively and sentimentally when the moment calls for it.

“You know, there are not many things that move me,” he says at one point, “but this is one of the things that really does.”

He makes promises about the hospital

and flatters the small island nation’s sense of importance. He says the clinic will be of the same quality you get “in South Florida, or Minnesota.”

“What goes inside,” he says, “has to be of superb, international quality.”

“International” – a word that, when Porter says it, evokes drawers full of passports, Swiss banks on little islands, the ethereal, oceanjumping mystery of money.

Also, evaded culpability. The Cancer Center of the Eastern Caribbean, as it is called, was supposed to be completed by the end of 2012. As of January 10, construction hadn’t begun. On that day, the Antigua Observer newspaper wrote that it had received a letter from Porter saying construction would begin soon – only he couldn’t say exactly when. Back in October, a board member named Cotrille George said the hospital was being assembled overseas, and would be put together in no time once the parts reached Antigua.

The Observer’s coverage of the whole thing has this wounded tone – a sort of ‘But you promised!’ incredulity.

Don’t worry, Antigua. We’ve been there.

It sucks for a while, but then you learn lessons about the nature of global capital. *** On January 9, 2012, probably around the time he was sending his epistle to Antigua, Porter announced that he has cancer. It is inoperable lung cancer. He will have to undergo chemotherapy in the Bahamas.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been, but I was moved when I learned this. Especially after watching video footage of him since the diagnosis. His charm has been pernicious, it has been his weapon, but it humanizes him when you see it in action. On January 14, CBC broadcast an interview with Porter from his clinic in Nassau. As Porter shakes hands with the CBC reporter, Terrence McKenna, you see McKenna kind of throw his head back, laughing at some witticism, a little disarmed.

Porter is defiant. He denies having taken a cut from those unaccountable $22.5 million SNC-Lavalin funneled through the shell company that shares an address with his associate’s lemon meringue Bahamian bank. He denies knowing anything about the payment.

He stands by his characterization of the press investigation as a “witch hunt”: “It just

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seemed as if I was responsible for the snowfall in Montreal,” he says, very dryly, with a dim twinkle in his eye.

As for the cancer, he’s warlike in outlook, rightly. “Prepared like any other battle that you fight – go into it with the idea to win.

That’s the way I always go.” Quite beautiful, the way he puts it. Like a pro athlete’s postgame press conference written in the style of the King James Bible.

But Porter looks reduced, there is no question. He is not wearing a coat or bowtie, literally the first time that this has been the case in maybe two dozen photos and videos I have seen of him. Instead, he’s dressed in a blue pinstripe shirt, unbuttoned several holes, on account of the heat I guess.

His voice is thinner and higher than usual.

He occasionally holds his head in his right hand, in world-weary fashion. He looks thinner in the face, though there’s still that lordly paunch beneath the shirt.

Finally, what the CBC says about his cancer is the most telling: that it is “self-diagnosed.” This is so Porter. Lungs, where the cancer is, are not in the man’s wheelhouse: he’s a prostate guy. But he winged it, and he prevailed. There’s the big, weighty question handled not with the slow-moving caution of bureaucrats and experts, but with the freestyle abandon of his own resourceful mind.

It’s Gordon Gekko as oncologist.

The whole Porter story reminds me of the opening paragraph of Saul Bellow’s best novel, The Adventures of Augie March. The paragraph goes like this: “I am an American, Chicago-born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.”

Could have been written by Porter himself, minus the Chicago part. And also minus the skepticism about fate-dodging.

Because Porter and his ilk – the disdainers of bureaucracy, the hosanna-singers to efficiency, those who have made our world all the more precarious, will always try to toy with the acoustics, so we can’t hear what they’re doing. They will always glove the knuckle, so as not to leave prints. And often we will let them get away with it, and we will praise them for the quality of the kid.

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Illustration Tom Acker | The McGill Daily

The sea monster under the diving board and the slippery balloon are distracting me from doing my work Hillary Pasternak The McGill Daily

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here’s something a little wrong with me. These days, I don’t often call it by name.

If I must, I often describe it like this: my mind is a balloon, coated in slippery, soapy water. It’s very difficult to keep ahold of. I can hang on for a few seconds at a time, but then it’ll pop from my grasp, and I have to go chasing after the damn thing before I can make another attempt to buckle down and focus on the task at hand. It’s time consuming. It’s tiresome. It eats up my free time, and keeps me from doing things I know I’d be capable of otherwise.

For the longest time, it didn’t occur to me that this might be strange. I just assumed that this was how everyone else’s mind worked as well, and they’d all just figured out how to correct for it. I had missed that memo. It didn’t affect my life much in the early days: I was smart enough and the problem was

quiet enough. I was spacey and fidgety, rather than flashily hyperactive.

You all knew someone like me: shy, with a bit of an overactive imagination. Maybe more than a bit.

I was accustomed to spending a lot of time alone reading, or lost in my own head. I was used to talking to people my friends didn’t see, wandering through places that looked different to me than to my parents. Too many fantasy books and movies had warped my concept of reality a little: the fact that I was the only person seeing the ghostly orange lights along the New Jersey Turnpike didn’t mean they weren’t there. Wasn’t that just a sign that I was some type of chosen one? That I had a sixth sense of some type?

Why are you laughing at me, mom?

Adults found me amusingly precocious, and my peers were only a little bit wary. I made the best of it. Bring me a pretty rock at recess, and I’ll tell you a ghost story.

I would tell my father about the sea serpent that liked to coil itself at the bottom of our local pool,

and he’d laugh. It became a sort of inside joke. He creatively christened it “Serpie” when I told him it didn’t have a name, and asked me for updates on its welfare on our drives back from swim practice.

Happy to have someone listen to me, I’d make up stories about a friendlier, more active version of the monster. It would be boring to tell him the truth, how “Serpie” lurked in the deep end, dark body coiled and twisted, white eyes set in a head like a Chinese dragon, following me back and forth as I swam laps.

Trying to prove things like this to adults was never an option.

History had taught me that they weren’t likely to take me seriously when I tried to talk about my more abstract thoughts, especially the semi-invisible things. Something completely invisible, such as my short attention span, didn’t have a chance. It was easier to let my parents and teachers think that I was lazy, that I was forgetful, that my head was in the clouds.

Then I got older. My letter for Hogwarts never came, and I was never swept onto a dragon’s back to save an alternate dimension from evil. My fantasy obsession subsided, and was eventually eclipsed by fixations with pop culture and history.

At some point, I stopped seeing elves in the shrubbery. My grades dropped. That was what landed me in a psychiatrist’s office, being told that, among other things, I had Attention Deficit Disorder. I was given all the normal prescriptions, and it was a bit like someone had tied my soapy balloon to my wrist with a ribbon. It still slipped away from me, but recovering it was faster and easier.

In the beginning, this was a relief. To know that I wasn’t normal. To know that I wasn’t just lazy. I wasn’t shy about telling teachers. It wasn’t an excuse, in my mind, though it might have sounded that way sometimes. I felt I was just explaining. Giving a perfectly plausible reason as to why I couldn’t focus on a conver-

sation, or finish a chapter of my textbook. But this was not something that the average high school teacher wants to hear. “Doesn’t everybody have that these days?” one math teacher asked me. The scenario felt familiar: Hillary talks about her view of the world, adult shrugs. Hillary keeps her mouth shut, wrestles with doubt, even though she knows something is a bit off. I’m aware that having ADD is a bit more plausible than seeing a cryptid in an indoor swimming pool, but the habit of doubt is just a little too well ingrained in me.

Maybe there’s still a part of me that thinks my mind does work normally, and that my ADD diagnosis has more to do with whiny oversharing than genuine chemical imbalance.

So no matter the great things I’ve heard about the office for students with disabilities – the workshops, the test services, the advocacy – I haven’t managed to stop by yet, because I’m not quite sure if there’s actually something wrong with me, or if I’m just imagining it.

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Illustration Oles Chepesiuk | The McGill Daily

On the issue of race and education Examining racial profiling in schools in Quebec Joanna Schacter The McGill Daily

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uebec, and especially Montreal, like the rest of Canada, likes to consider itself an accepting and open society, both on multicultural and secular grounds. Of course, this means that when issues pertaining to race and acceptance do arise, they’re usually treated very seriously: as reported by the National Post and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) vowed in 2012 to end racial profiling by their officers and launched an investigation into including the topic as a module in CEGEP police technology curricula.

However, the 2006 case of a Quebec middle school student, who was later identified as being of African origin, being handcuffed and escorted out of school in front of his teachers and peers for no apparent reason, twice in one week, seemed to catch less attention than may be expected. This was odd, especially considering that it was the first investigation into racial profiling that the Quebec Human Rights Commission ever conducted in relation to a school. Last November, the Montreal Gazette covered the out-of-court settlement between the student’s family – represented by the Quebec Human Rights Commission – and Montreal’s largest school board, the Commission Scolaire de Montréal. Surprisingly low levels of outrage and counter-

action were reached in the province and among school officials.

Why, then, was the eighth-grader in question arrested, handcuffed, and driven off in a police car, in front of his peers and teachers? Simply because he was in the same hallway as two police officers who were in the area in regards to an unrelated incident. Nevertheless, when the principal saw them, she insisted, strongly enough to sway the initially uncooperative police officers, that the young man be arrested. Later that week, disregarding the previous incident, the student went to the principal to complain that he had been attacked by grade 11 students; however, when one of the alleged aggressors, who was Caucasian, told the principal that the eighthgrader was in fact the source of the trouble, she opted once again to call the police and have him arrested and escorted off the premises in handcuffs, leading him to spend a night in a centre for juvenile offenders. Eventually, the young man was forced to change schools.

Even after Commission des droits de la personne et de la jeunesse published an extensive report in 2011 on the state of racial profiling in Quebec and in Quebec educational centers, school boards were not interested in the matter and “felt there were no problems.” This came after various instances of profiling within the school system were exposed, and no changes were made. Simultaneously, the Rights Commission is struggling under the sheer volume of the influx of

complaints related to racial profiling in the school sector in Quebec, which more than doubled in the past five years, with 1,047 complaints filed in 2011 alone.

If one good thing came out of this deplorable incident is that the attention of Montreal school administrations has been captured, though not nearly enough.

According to Gétan Cousineau, the president of the Commission des droits de la personne et de la jeunesse, this investigation has put necessary pressure on the school board to recognize that there is indeed a problem where the school boards have previously claimed there was none to be found. The Commission Scolaire de Montréal is under scrutiny by the Rights Commission to make necessary changes in its treatment of students who are visible minorities, and is now serving as an example to other school boards that the Rights Commission has the ability and jurisdiction to investigate.

Middle and high school students are often pegged as being inherently intolerant due to their age group, while the same behaviour does not translate to the higher education environment. However, it is not at all the case that incidents such as that outlined above are rare in higher education, despite lack of media coverage, or statistics available from academic sources.

According to the aforementioned 2011 report of the consultation on racial profiling and its consequences, black students from a

Montreal CEGEP reported that they were targeted for unjustified indentification checks at a school dance, and that the security personnel exclusively checked the indentifications of young black students on the grounds that they suspected there might be a drug dealer in the school.

In another case, in Ville SaintLaurent, a borough of Montreal, a 16-year-old black youth left school to wait for the bus. A fight broke out near him, and the police car passing by immediately handcuffed the student and took him to the school principal. Days later, the student jaywalked near his school, and was ticketed by the same police officer.

There have also been cases of “welcoming classes,” classes put in place for new students from outside of Canada for the express, and well-intentioned purpose of helping to ease their transition and improve their French. These often make teens sit through children’s shows, an experience that can be both infantilizing and humiliating.

The same report published by the Commission states that many students from these classes have complained that their teachers have been unwilling to invest efforts in their education since there is “no point,” and that they were considered unlikely to succeed in life.

The report states the obvious: students who are profiled often drop out of school, either because they feel ostracized or discouraged, or because of the self-fulfilling nature of prejudice and labelling; time spent in cen-

tres for young offenders, or on the fringes of social inclusion, lead to exposure to crime. What’s more, those who drop out, upon reaching adulthood, whatever their origin, are at a greater risk of poverty and socio-economic exclusion.

The people who were interviewed for the report were between the ages of 16 to 25, meaning that the students were close to completing high school, or in higher education institutions like CEGEPs and universities.

At McGill, a school where many faculty members themselves come from outside of Canada – something that the study recommended all schools attempt to implement (hiring professors of different ethnic backgrounds) in order to curb the racial profiling of students – cases of racial profiling seem to be nonexistent. Yet, in a province in which approximately 9 per cent of the population are immigrants, and in which 64 per cent of immigrants are of a visible minority, in a province where over a thousand racial profiling complaints are filed in just one year, we can safely say that this phenomenon of racism manifested through racial profiling, might not always be visible, and so it is up to us to stay vigilant.

There are processes like equity complaints that people can excercise in relation to these types of incidents. Students who feel singled-out should not be afraid to come forward and excercise their rights as contributing members of our community.

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The McGill Daily Thursday, January 31, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

The Daily Reviews

Christopher Owens – Lysandre Fat Possum Records Like a broken down, tin-can-voiced Leonard Cohen but less demure and much shorter, Christopher Owens descended upon le Cabaret du Mile End with little more than a weepy eggshell of a voice, a finger-picked classical guitar, and two under-aged female singers who might cause great scandal in a Nabokov novel. Owens, formerly of indie band Girls, now also performs with a band replete with an aging and out-ofplace Italian flutist/harmonicist.

Owens provided a warm, intimate performance in comparison to the removed coolness of many an indie or pop performer, sort of like sitting by a fire, hearing each of his words hitting the hardwood floor like embers in a Poe poem, or dust collecting in a student apartment.

This current tour promotes Owens’ first solo album, Lysandre, released January 13 on Fat Possum Records.

Lysandre is a 29-minute album, or more appropriately, musical suite, which builds on

Burial – Truant/Rough Sleeper Hyperdub In the world of UK-born ambient/2-step/ garage/dubstep/house whatever-you-call-it, Burial is a standalone producer. With his staticlaced, lo-fi drum-n-bass beats; short vocal samples, and melodic basslines, Burial never really sounds bombastic, or even danceable. Rather, as Derek Walmsley wrote in Wired, Burial is reminiscent of “the balmy gust of air that precedes an underground train.” “Mournfulcore” would be a more accurate way to describe his depressive beat-driven compositions.

Since 2007’s Untrue, Burial has released a series of experimental EPs, including last month’s two-track Truant/Rough Sleeper.

While the critical verdict was positive – pre-

the theme of falling in and out of love on tour with the girl whose name graces the album.

The medieval-esque theme that punctuates every other song fluctuates between almosttoo-morose and suddenly laid back. Fitting for his performance, the songs haunt you in a spooky, but not necessarily moving way.

Though several songs are quite moving or listenable on their own (for instance, the breezy “Here We Go”) like a tub of ice cream with a season of your favourite show on a lonely evening, the album is best experienced in its entirety.

The album moves between dark and light; originals here sound like covers: Owens moves on from a failed relationship, and so he approaches each song like a living memory, breathing new life into a faded past.

Owens frustrates often, sometimes sounding like Conor Oberst, but not as subtly poetic, “Love is in the ear of the listener,” Owens sings here, “what if nobody ever gets it.” We get the idea, but next time you perform a Paul Simon cover, how about “50 Ways to Cling to Your Lover”?

Though the album is direct, it fluctuates between morose lugubriousness and attempts to ease a lingering sadness; there are songs, like “New York City,” which you know you will learn to love.

Dedicated to low-life hipster habits, that tune is a bawdy, over-the-top saxophone solo that sounds like Sun Ra duet-ing with Nat King Cole.

Other songs, like “Here We Go,” where Owens sings, “if your heart is broken, you will find fellowship with me,” are simple, easy to understand, and just as easy to love.

—Matt Herzfeld

dictably, it was listed as “Best New Music” on Pitchfork, which has never given a Burial release less than an 8/10 – Truant/Rough Sleeper doesn’t rank among Burial’s best.

Kindred, his last release, marked the beginning of a move towards longer, multi-part tracks that experiment more broadly with higher-pitched samples and prominent vocals. In “Truant,” he moves even further in this direction, devoting the middle third of the 12-minute track to an almost upbeat, orchestral-sampled arrangement that breaks with Burial’s normally sombre mood.

You can’t fault Truant/Rough Sleeper for its experimentation with tone and atmosphere.

The real trouble is in the disjointedness of the two lengthy pieces, which constantly draw the listener out of the music, suspended in doubt over the direction of the piece. Both songs feature total silence as a barrier between very different arrangements, which feels disruptive compared to the strict, smooth consistency of his earlier EPs and albums. For those who preferred the polish of Untrue and Moth/Wolf Cub, we’ll probably have to wait until Burial’s next collaboration with his natural creative counterpart, Four Tet, who last released “Nova” with Burial in March. The two of them have produced some of the most compelling electronic music of the past five years, combining like Eros and Thanatos to produce sublime deep house.

—Kaj Huddart

Low Culture – Screens Dirtnap Records Punk rock was never about innovation. At its inception in the late seventies, it was something close to reactionary: stripping away the pretentions of prog rock and the insincere bombast of stadium rock to supercharge rock’s core elements (power chords, pounding drums, tight song structures) with youthful rage.

It seems fitting, in this case, that Low Culture doesn’t do much innovation on Screens, their new LP. They deliver a playlist of appealingly

A$AP Rocky – LONG.LIVE.A$AP Polo Grounds Music/RCA Records Let’s get real: LONG.LIVE.A$AP deserves a “fucking finally” from all A$AP Rocky fans.

Waiting almost two years for an album (while barely living on two singles in 2012), and still loving it, just proves Rocky’s fan base is spectacular. And so is he.

Featuring artists with just as much talent and cred as Rocky, such as Kendrick Lamar, 2 Chainz, Schoolboy Q, Joey Bada$$, and Skrillex, LONG.LIVE.A$AP meets, if not exceeds, fans’ expectations.

Rocky explores different styles of music, and showcases his voice in songs that have

Boy & the Echo Choir – It All Shines My Little Cab Records The newest album from French indie artists Boy & the Echo Choir, It All Shines, combines the whispy vocals of Caroline Gabard and transient guitar riffs and piano solos of band members Jean-Christophe Lacroix and Florian Chauvet to create an album of melancholic disorder. In contrast to the group’s previous album, the mostly instrumental All We Left

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shambolic garage punk that might lack in new ideas (you can hear the main riff of “Pills” on at least half the stages at the Warped Tour in any given year), but still succeeds in it’s own low-key way. It’s a collage of every trend that’s tumbled through punk music in the last two decades.

Green Day’s simple pop melodies (not the saccharine harmonies, thankfully), the Strokes’ lo fi production, heart-on-sleeve lyrical motifs that have been popular since the Replacements made it okay to have feelings and distortion pedals in the late eighties. “Touchy Feely,” in particular, could be a crash course in the genre, a sonic collage that splices spikes of eighties hardcore chaos with more modern emotion and melody, some britpop jangle, even a good ol’ one-note guitar solo a la “I Wanna Be Sedated.”

Noisy, joyful, and scruffy around the edges, Screens is a welcome shot of adrenaline for any established punk or pop-punk fan, though it likely won’t do much to earn new converts.

“California” might come the closest to universal appeal, straight out of the early nineties Bay Area scene, with something sweet and wistful at it’s centre. It’s currently out on the gloriously named Dirtnap Records.

—Hillary Pasternak

different vibes and appeal to a larger audience.

Ranging from dubstep in “Wild for the Night,” to more mainstream hip hop in “Goldie,” to the A$AP that we know and love in “Long Live A$AP,” Rocky’s originality and soul shine through. While some criticize him for creating ‘shallow’ music, this album was the perfect way to prove them wrong.

My personal favourite from his new album is currently “Phoenix,” if only because it’s different than his usual work. Its beat has a mellower, dreamy sound, over which Rocky claims he “sings the ghetto gospel.” Something one would expect to hear on a Thursday night at Bluedog, “Phoenix” is music to relax to.

“Goldie” has also become another favourite. Sure, it has a beat that inspires moves and confidence beyond a listener’s normal abilities, but its fantastic lines like, “you could call me Billy Gates, got a crib in every state,” that remind me why I love listening to Rocky.

But “1 Train” will be a pick for true fans. Not only does it include some of the most talented artists of the genre, the song is six minutes of just rapping to a background of tense music.

Though the violin creates a nice consistent beat to move to, once again, it’s the content that makes this song, and the album, spectacular.

—Ceren Eroglu

Behind, the newest release focuses more on eerie lyricism and reedy musical inserts. Gabard has a sound strikingly similar to English vocalist Dido, her voice a depressive wail, resonant with loss, especially in songs like “Impossible Heart.”

The group takes an experimental approach with their instrumentals, including electric guitar solos stopped short by intruding saxophone chords – creating an uncomfortable collision of sound. The album creates an extremely depressing aura, as the music trudges along in a seemingly funeral-like procession of dark pop. While the goal of the album was to create a “deep disorder in beauty,” the mix of sporadic instrumental interludes along with eerie vocals and tone convey more chaos than pleasure. The only exception on the album is “The Organs,” a song with various electronic guitar loops that break the heavy sadness of Gabard’s lyrics with more upbeat and tribal grooves. It All Shines is set to be released the 30th of this month, however, it may not be worth your precious listening time.

—Hillary Storm

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The McGill Daily | Thursday, January 31, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

culture

Espresso yourself The world of third wave coffee Margie Ramos Culture Writer

P

eople used to pray for their food before they ate it. Now, they take pictures of it. As for coffee, people used to just make it and drink it. Now, they lavish attention on it, from their single-origin beans to espresso machines costing tens of thousands of dollars. They paint pictures in the milk foam.

This phenomenon is part of a new coffee movement called “third wave coffee,” a term still unfamiliar to many caffeine addicts. Third wave coffee is about more than just coffee consumption. It is about craft, connectivity, experience, and quality, from planting to harvesting, from selection to roasting, from brewing to the final touch.

In the old days, coffee was simply a commodity. Today, in liberal cities across North America, coffee is evolving from a cheap mass-produced commodity into an artisanal pleasure like wine, cheese, and microbrewed beer.

The term “third wave,” coined in 2003 by Trish R. Skeie in The Flamekeeper, the official newsletter of the Roasters Guild, contextualizes this phenomenon in the history of coffee’s place in North America. The first ‘wave’ of coffee emerged in the

late nineteenth century, when coffee was first distributed on an industrial scale. The first wave lives on in your grandparents’ can of Folger’s. The second wave began when specialty coffee retailers like Second Cup and Starbucks started setting up shop in high-traffic spots to give the masses a taste of European-style coffee, and a relaxing place to hang out, work or study. Third wave coffee refers to the rise of independent coffee bars, like Chez Boris, Café Rico, and Caffè in Gamba in Montreal, that make coffee beverages out of high quality coffee beans roasted by independent local companies. The third wave sees coffee as an artisanal beverage, from preparation to final presentation, with the attendant careful sourcing, roasting, and brewing.

Enthusiasts of third wave coffee also beleive in paying every worker, from farmers to baristas, fair wages. This latest wave is a movement toward wine-like appreciation, and a shift away from giant coffee chains.

While some people think that this new trend is snobbish bullshit, third wave fans are growing in number. Most ostensibly go for the coffee quality, but others like to support local businesses, to experience a non-Starbucks ambience, or to simply just enjoy a unique beverage.

Guillaume Kittel, owner and founder of Kittel, an indepen-

Photo Margie Ramos

dent coffee roasting company in Montreal, believes it all comes down to flavour: “Coffee is all about opinion. What tastes good, what tastes bad, it’s an opinion. I like the third wave movement, the way we think, but then, it’s just an opinion.”

Kittel, who roasts the coffee beans at his workshop, finds the

exchange of opinion touching, because coffee roasting is a personal art form to him. “It’s like doing an art work and receiving the feedback from people. If the people love it, it means they love your work,” he says.

I like to frequent third wave cafes because they each have have their own personality and signature.

Prices at a third wave coffee outlet are comparable to Starbucks or Second Cup, and the quality of coffee is almost always higher. Rather than a chain outlet, why not check out an independent shop that offers a unique ambience, serves artsy coffee beverages and allows you to support the local entrepreneurs?

Beyond Django Films Spike Lee hasn’t complained about Lilya Hassall Forays into Film

T

hree weeks ago, the Academy announced this year’s Oscar nominees, and Quentin Tarantino found his blaxploitation spaghetti Western Django Unchained competing with the likes of Lincoln and Argo for the title of Best Picture.

Sadly for Tarantino, the two most recent “Best Pictures,” The Artist and The King’s Speech, literally put me to sleep, so I feel fairly certain that a flick about a freed slave (Jamie Foxx) exacting revenge on white slavers doesn’t have a shot with the somnambulant Academy.

If there were an Oscar for most offensive picture, however, Tarantino would be a shoe-in. Using slavery as a platform for an action/revenge film that notoriously uses the N-word over 100 times, the director has been called out everywhere from Buzzfeed, to the New Yorker, to Spike Lee’s Twitter account. Most recently, civil rights groups like National Action Network and Project Islamic Hope spoke out against Django action figures marketed to children.

Now, as I’m not black, and the film has already been extensively discussed by a host of critics who are, it would be irrelevant and inappropriate for me to spend time explaining why Django is so problematic. What I can add to the discussion, however, are a few recommendations for politically conscious films about race that wouldn’t make Spike Lee cringe.

My first recommendation is Nothing But A Man, a 1964 film made by two Jewish men that would become Malcom X’s favorite movie of all time.

In 1963, Michael Roemer and Robert Young had no experience making narrative cinema, and decided to make a feature about black people living in the southern United States. Members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored (NAACP) advised the pair on the script, and they shot the film that same turbulent summer John F. Kennedy announced his civil rights bill, Medgar Evers was assassinated, and Martin Luther King Jr. marched on Washington.

With cinéma verité style realism, the film tells the story of a young black couple (Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln), who struggle through life in small-town Alabama as systemic racism threatens their livelihood and their love for each other. The film

deftly portrays not only the grave poverty suffered by much of the black community, but also the devastating emotional effects of those conditions.

When the film was released in 1964, the American Motion Picture Production Code still forbade showing black characters kissing, and no film had ever shown black characters in close-up. With their laughable $230,000 budget, Nothing But a Man had trampled Hollywood’s racial taboos and condemned white supremacist America like no other film ever had.

The next two films I recommend were made the following decade by members of a group of black artists known as the L.A. Rebellion.

These directors studied and made films at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) between the late sixties and early eighties. In the words of Jacqueline Stewart, these independent filmmakers “attempted to both address socio-economic plight of black people still struggling for rights and recognition... and simultaneously develop their own personal artistic visions.”

One of the best known films from the L.A. Rebellion is Killer of Sheep, which Charles Burnett made on the weekends while he was enrolled at

University of California, Los Angeles UCLA in the late 1970s. Like many L.A. Rebellion films, Killer of Sheep deals with the bleak everyday of Watts, L.A., the ghetto that played host to one of the worst race riots of the 1960s.

Here, while the protagonist Stan goes to work at the slaughterhouse, neighbourhood children play in the sun-drenched, decrepit cityscapes of industrial southern Los Angeles, and his friends pull off low-level heists.

As the camera wanders directionless through tableaus of life in Watts, the limited narrative structure and the crumbling backdrop of the neighbourhood underscore Stan’s sense of emptiness as he drifts further away from his wife and children. The film acts as a devastating revelation of the trap residents of lower-income neighbourhoods are forced to live in.

Lastly, another excellent film from the L.A. Rebellion is Bush Mama, made by Ethiopian-born director Haile Gerima as his thesis project, with Charles Burnett as the cinematographer. Through a startling fusion of documentary realism and surrealism that relied heavily on improvisation, Bush Mama follows Dorothy, a pregnant woman at the mercy of the racist welfare system in Watts. Her social worker pushes her to abort her

pregnancy, her husband is imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, and the neighbourhood is terrorized by the police. Slowly, Dorothy, and the film itself, become radicalized by extreme circumstances as she explores the ideology of black power.

Unfortunately, the radical racial rhetoric and innovative style that make Nothing But A Man, Killer of Sheep, and Bush Mama some of my favorite films also ensure these films will never reach large audiences.

Indeed, Django Unchained, with its relatively superficial treatment of racial issues, has been seen more times in the month since its release than these three films have been viewed in the decades since theirs.

I don’t mean to suggest you shouldn’t see Django, even if it is highly problematic (what Hollywood film isn’t?). At least this one was entertaining. I do suggest, however, that Django is purely entertainment, and that if you’re looking for meaningful racial commentary, you can look elsewhere and be highly rewarded.

Lilya Hassall is a U3 Cultural Studies student. Forays Into Film and Feminism is a bi-weekly column about alternative films. Contact her at foraysintofilm@mcgilldaily.com.

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EDITORIAL

volume 102 number 29

Divest and conquer

editorial board 3480 McTavish St., Rm. B-24 Montreal, QC H3A 1X9 phone 514.398.6784 fax 514.398.8318 mcgilldaily.com coordinating editor

Queen Arsem-O’Malley

coordinating@mcgilldaily.com

coordinating news editor

Juan Camilo Velásquez news editors

Laurent Bastien Corbeil Lola Duffort Farid Rener commentary editors

Jacqueline Brandon Steve Eldon Kerr culture editors

Kaj Huddart Hillary Pasternak

Illustration Hera Chan | The McGill Daily

features editor

Christina Colizza science+technology editor

Anqi Zhang

health&education editor

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Evan Dent

multimedia editor

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Hera Chan illustrations editor

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Edna Chan Rebecca Katzman

copy editor

Nicole Leonard web editor

Tom Acker le délit

Nicolas Quiazua

rec@delitfrancais.com

cover design Shane Murphy contributors Eric Andrew-Gee, Hannah Besseau, Oles Chepesiuk, Allison Cooper, Ceren Eroglu, Eliyahu Freedman, Carla Green, Matt Herzfeld, Mona Luxion, Robin Reid-Fraser, Joanna Schacter, Peter Shyba, Noemi Stern, Hillary Storm

As it stands, McGill holds investments in 645 publicly traded corporations, 35 of which have the largest carbon reserves in the world, and 14 of which extract crude oil from tar sands – an increasingly popular source of fuel extraction, although one widely criticized on both environmental and social grounds.

Universities use their endowment – the total value of their investment portfolios – to fund things such as pensions, programs, and scholarships in perpetuity. McGill’s total endowment is $983 million, $56 million of which is invested in various forms of fossil fuel extraction.

McGill turns a large profit from these investments, but it comes at a great ethical cost: tar sands are one of the largest contributing factors to greenhouse gas emissions in Canada (20 per cent are from Alberta tar sands alone). As an institution of higher learning and advanced scientific research, McGill is surely aware of the disastrous global consequences of climate change; the International Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body, warns of loss in biodiversity and a 50 per cent reduction in agricultural yield in the near future as a result of climate change. Among other detrimental effects, sea levels are projected to rise between one and seven metres over the next century.

McGill is also aware that certain investments are unethical: it adopted a policy of Socially Responsible Investing in 2004. To fulfil this commitment in more than name, McGill should divest from environmentally harmful and socially detrimental industries and corporations, par-

ticularly those involved in the tar sands.

Divestment pressure has worked in the past. During the 1980s, students at the University of Toronto, Carleton, McGill, and other universities launched a campaign to withdraw investments from companies and institutions with ties to apartheid South Africa.

At McGill, following a combination of sit-ins, demonstrations, and educational efforts, the Board of Governors approved divestment from such companies. Students, when mobilized, can be a tremendously persuasive force.

Divest McGill is one segment of a growing movement spreading across North American campuses – including branches at Brown, Cornell, Carleton, and many others – that is attempting to persuade universities to divest from environmentally and socially harmful investments. Given this widespread effort, it is time we McGill students stand up and recognize the positive effect we can have – and the effects we can prevent – by convincing the University to change its investment policy. Petitioning the McGill Board of Governors to divest is a simple and effective means of making our voices heard. As students and constituents, students must continually push for higher environmental standards: the test of our actions will be the state of the environment we leave to the next generation.

Divest McGill can be found at divestmcgill. wordpress.com

— The McGill Daily Editorial Board

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All contents © 2012 Daily Publications Society. All rights reserved. The content of this newspaper is the responsibility of The McGill Daily and does not necessarily represent the views of McGill University. Products or companies advertised in this newspaper are not necessarily endorsed by Daily staff.

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compendium!

The McGill Daily Thursday, January 31, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

lies, half-truths, and counter-counter-counter-points

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“We need to lie more,” says administrator Admin “concerned” at student body’s tendency to “point to the facts” Euan EK The Twice-a-Weekly

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hristopa P. Manfredo, Dean of Farts, has told The Twice-a-Weekly that he believes McGall University administrators are not “lying enough.”

Speaking in the wake of McGall’s announcement that it plans to cut 100 Arts courses “to enhance the connection between research and undergraduate teaching by increasing the proportion of courses taught by professors who devote their careers to advancing their disciplines, as well as increasing the availability of teaching assistant support to professors and students,” Manfredo said the response of the student body, faculty, and various small rodents showed that “this administration is not lying enough, or with enough skill.”

“This isn’t a new problem,” said Manfredo. “[The objective] of lying more, and with increased tactical nous, has been part of this University’s strategic plans going back to the Provost’s 2006 White Paper titled ‘How can we get away with it this time?’”

The paper outlined the McGall

administration’s commitment to “deception and untruth” at every opportunity, and even opened the possibility of McGall “creating opportunities for increased boldfaced lying.”

At the time, campus reaction to the White Paper was muted, with many students saying they were impressed with the administration’s discovery of gold reserves beneath McTavish.

Now, however, many students are raising questions about the administration’s stories, claiming that they make “zero sense.”

“These stories do not add up,” said Mattyias R. Queen, a U4 Brewing and Fermenting student.

“I pay very little, if any, attention to the stories put out by this administration, but let me tell you one thing: the total b-s they are spouting now makes abso-fucking-lutely no sense whatsoever.”

“Cutting Arts courses and then claiming this will provide ‘more time for professors to have substantive interactions with students’? I’m sorry. What? I’m two pitchers deep at Gert’s and I can tell that’s a piss poor lie. Do they even get anyone to do their PR? I’m actually offended – straight up offended – by this attempt at lying: Lance Armstrong did a bet-

ter job when he said he had ‘no idea how all them needles ended up in his sleeping bag.’ Seriously.”

Queen’s sentiments are believed to be widely shared by the student body. In a recent poll conducted by the Bison and Bulldog, students were asked to pick “the thing they would most improve about McGall’s administration.”

Out of four possible responses – “lying,” “comprehension of basic moral and ethical duties,” “resemblance to other land-based mammals,” and “ability to do things after thinking about them” – McGall students unanimously chose “lying.”

“It’s not that I don’t think they could improve in any of the other categories,” said Queen. “It’s just that they’re so bad at lying it makes the Parti Québécois look like a cross between Lisa Simpson and Mahatma Ghandi. They are just not good at making things which are not true look like they are true.”

It was these criticisms which led Manfredo to call for a “drastic improvement” to all McGill administrators’ lying ability.

“Some of the reactions to these polls have tended toward the apocalyptic. But we do need to make some changes to our

lying procedures: the old system was just not working.”

Under the old system, administrators were expected to cross their fingers behind their backs and then quickly recite their lie with their eyes closed to McGall’s PR Mascot Sweetie Boy-Sweet, who was then charged with embellishing the lie and “making it look it came from carbon-based life.”

Manfredo told The Twice-aWeekly that plans for a new system are “ongoing” but that he hopes they will be ready “before we need to make major changes to the University that no one asked for” again.

“Discussions about these objectives go back to 2008,” said Manfredo. “In 2010-2011, the faculty held important consultations with students, including a Town Hall – in which the issue of the diminishing lying/getting away with it relationship came up frequently – and a Dean’s Working Group on How To Fool Effectively, that included students [no one] and consulted widely [we just heard about this].”

“I suggested [at that time] it would be valuable to pretend to hold an AUS Town Hall on the topic,” said Manfredo. “I again pretended to update the Faculty

Council on the proposal on January 15 – which seems to be when people began to realize nothing I said was true. Rather than a sudden announcement of something new, my discussion on January 15 was a last-ditch attempt to persuade everyone that I am interested in discussion and consultation: we have been trying to lie better for quite a while.”

The Twice-a-Weekly understands that McGall’s new proposals for “How to lie better” include a series of numbers described by one McGall Mathematics professor as “increasingly baffling and less like real numbers the more one looks at them,” and a list of “promises” that appear to be nothing other than various portmanteaus made up of the words “thou,” “believe,” “destiny,” “Daniel Radcliffe,” “barn owl,” and “demand.”

“Many have asked about the message the faculty is sending to potential students,” said Manfredo. “I think the message is this: that when the Faculty of Farts promises prospective students that they will be taught by some of the world’s leading experts in their fields, we are able to honour that promise by having those experts in undergraduate classrooms. Demandthoubelieve.”

Administration disappointed by reaction to latest world record attempt Claim world’s biggest waterslide “thoroughly misunderstood” Heaven Sent The Twice-a-Weekly

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nternal documents leaked to the Twice-A-Weekly have revealed disappointment within McGall’s administration over their recent world record attempt.

In a memo from VP (Purchases and Receipts) Mortono Joaquin Fendelson to Principal Heatha Mama-Boom, Fendelson says that “after the Rousing Success (TM) of our World Record Fruit Salad (which united McGall’s campus under a banner of Friendship and Love), students’ reactions to the attempt at ‘World’s Largest Water Slide’ were unexpectedly negative. They thought it was merely a flood.”

Other documents found by The Twice-a-Weekly lay out the administration’s plans. The official plan was to spring a leak in the McTavish Reservoir, leading

to a massive water slide down McTavish. At that point, students, professors, and administrators alike would rush into the stream and joyously ride to the bottom.

The administration also planned to hand out McGall-branded inner tubes, but the delivery truck was not able to arrive in time.

In an email to VP (Counting and Adding Up) Princes Di Anna, Mama-Boom steams over the lack of enthusiasm. “We had a student who went in to show everyone how fun it would be! We had told her about it before, and she had volunteered! And yet, somehow, people were somehow dissuaded to join in. It might have been the chunks of debris that were also going down the slide.”

“God damn,” she added, “I can’t wait to get out of this soulsucking, no-fun-allowed place.”

These emails and memos are dated to approximately hours after the flood had begun. When

reached for contact by The Twicea-Weekly, McGall PR Mascot Sweetie Boy-Sweet responded sixty hours later with a full explanation. “Well, the world record attempt was thoroughly misunderstood. We even had a nice lady from the Guinness Book of World Records there to take it in. She claimed not to see enough participation to truly call it a waterslide.”

Boy-Sweet’s email continues: “We didn’t really expect it to flood the buildings like it did, though.

But we didn’t want to waste this primo opp[ortunity]. The city kept calling us and telling us that they could shut off the water, but we kept telling them to wait. Heatha had this great idea.”

Boy-Sweet’s email then describes what he calls “the best night of [his] life.” According to Boy-Sweet, Mama-Boom Fendelson, Di Anna, and Manfredo, along with key members of the BoG, snuck over to

McTavish around 3 a.m., dressed in swimsuits and toting their own, personalized inner tubes. (“Mine is so awesome,” Boy-Sweet added.

“And it only cost an extra $1,000 (or, 1 Arts class) to pay for it!”).

At first, Boy-Sweet alleges that he was against the plan. “I was so worried we would get caught.

I said, ‘Heatha, come on, do we have to??? We could get in so much trouble!’ To which she replied, ‘Joaquin and I will not have our fun spoiled by you, VP of being a wet blanket.’ So I went with them.”

At this time, the water was (somehow) still flowing. “Heatha and Joaquin took their tubes and just dove in! And then, whooosh!

They went down the street!

At first I was scared, but then Manfredo gave me a shove and then, whooooosh! There I was going! It was so much fun. I just looked at Heatha and gave her this huge smile.”

Boy-Sweet then goes on

to describe, in detail, how the administration members took approximately twenty more rides.

“Then,” he claims, “we had a great idea. Another water slide. So we broke one [pipe] above Wong and started going down that!”

By 6 a.m., Boy-Sweet claimed, the administrators were “very tired.” They were so tired that they decided to “pretend that James was flooded, so we could take the day off. With pay, of course.”

Twice-A-Weekly reporter Cherry Cola was thoroughly perplexed by the news and asked Boy-Sweet if the high costs of the administration’s waterslide was worth it. 67 hours later, Boy-Sweet responded with a short note.

“You know, as long as the administration is having fun, and top-level administrators from around the country know we are having fun, and we are drawing them in that way, then no expense is too much. Best wishes, Sweetie.”