Why are you here?

 

 Peer pressure is what brought you here. Everyone in your grade is picking a university. You have your doubts but do you really want to be the one kid that doesn’t go? Do you want to tell everyone that university is a waste of money and time? Everyone will likely assume that you couldn’t get in. Even if they don’t, you are still an outcast. Just the question “where are you headed next year” will drive you insane. Plus – and this is the greatest pushfactor by far – you will miss out on the fantasies you have about campus life. Frosh week, drinking, sex and all that. So you end up going. You meet people, make friends and it’s great. But why are you actually here?

“A job!” Maybe because all the current employers took the university path. You can’t get hired unless you’ve lived like the boss. Imagine going into an interview for an engineering job and telling the boss: “I have not gone to university but I have studied and learnt every necessary skill for this job. I am just as well-equipped to work for you as someone with a handful of professors’ seal of approval.” Good luck with that. Bosses want to see that Xring for example. They want you to reek of student debt and beg you for work. They want you to be desperate just like they were in their twenties. It’s the “hazing” equivalent in the professional world.

Maybe you’re here for the knowledge. Well, everything you learn here is in a textbook or online. The professor tells you what to read then repeats it back in class, usually in a more disorganized way. Then they test you to make sure you’re learning the way they want you to. I have had professors spout on about Trump for half of their lecture. Anyways, you’re paying everything you own to have a professor judge how well you’ve memorized their textbooks. Paying to see how well your theories and knowledge matches up with theirs. Then you pat each other on the shoulder. Am I here to get high-fives from my teachers?

It doesn’t matter what program you’re in. “My dad really wanted me to go into business. I didn’t want to waste his money.” If you need to spend four years to learn how to ‘network’ then you’re probably missing the point. If you’re learning to code, do you really think the best way is to have a professor and his textbooks play catch-up with the relevant coding scene? Sure, he can teach you the basics, but so can you yourself. One textbook of information per eight months is a joke compared to the capabilities of the internet. The sole reason textbooks exist is for the huge profit margins. There is no reason why your curriculum can’t be available for free online, just like ‘Khan Academy’. Calculus is not copyrighted. Shakespeare is not copyrighted.

“What about the laboratories?” or “what about the university experience?” Here’s my solution. The university becomes a sort of community centre. People can pay to book laboratory time, as they need it. The “university” can rent out more sophisticated equipment for higher prices. Classrooms are large open forums with computers. The computers can be rented or you can bring your own laptop, or books, or whatever. You don’t pay to sit as a class. People just meet up in groups naturally to study what they need to. If you don’t know something, you learn it. People who are more experienced would teach those who are less experienced like independent contractors. If what they’re teaching you is wrong in your opinion, then you take your business elsewhere. You are not locked down for eight months; you can come and go as you please. A “university” community would develop naturally. Clubs and sports teams would create themselves, as they do in the real world at places like the YMCA. People would live with other students of their own age and share their interests naturally. We need a free market of learning, not some out-dated business model. Like any other industry, technology will pass it by. The only question is “when?”

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Making it visible: why we made our sexualized violence issue

This issue focuses entirely on sexualized violence and the ways in which it pervades our campus, our community, and our culture. Timed to align with International Women’s Week, this issue’s publication has proven even timelier in light of last week’s acquittal of Halifax taxi driver Bassam Al-Rawi. Judge Gregory Lenehan’s ruling is yet another reminder of how far society is from taking sexualized violence seriously.

These sixteen pages feature testimonies, analyses, statistics, and news stories all pertaining to the prevalence and normalization of sexualized violence. We didn’t have to look far for these stories: even among our thirty-person news team, this theme hit close to home for many.

Society at large has seemed to accept sexualized violence as part and parcel of reality, and accordingly such behaviours remain invisible. Abuses of power, acts of harassment and violence, manipulation and silencing are normalized to the extent that it can be difficult to even label them as problematic. Experiences of violence are minimized (“are you sure you didn’t lead them on?”), and many who speak out are humiliated, repudiated, and silenced.

“We cannot afford to shy away from this conversation, no matter how uncomfortable it may be.”

Our tendency to conceive of sexualized violence as a clearly defined set of criminal charges further distorts our relationship with its underlying cultural causes. Sexual assault is a physical manifestation of a series of beliefs that have been culturally and socially constructed and accepted. Addressing cases of sexual assault and harassment is certainly challenging enough, but limiting the scope to these extreme demonstrations of entitlement is ultimately a disservice. We need to move beyond the ‘convenient’ lens of a stranger in the bushes and come to terms with the full complexity of the only violent crime in Canada that is not declining.

We cannot afford to shy away from this conversation, no matter how uncomfortable it may be. In assembling this issue, there have certainly been moments where we felt uncomfortable, whether by sharing personal experiences, learning something new, or by trying to deconstruct concepts such as hook-up culture, revictimization, “tradition” – the list goes on. These are hard questions to ask, and even harder questions to answer.

But rather than dismissing these matters due to a lack of clarity, we need to make a concerted effort to unpack the plurality of ways in which sexualized violence is reinforced in our society - through our legal systems, socialization, gender binaries, pop culture, heteronormativity, etc. – and address them directly.

When sexualized violence is so often made to be invisible, the first task at hand is to bring these elements to the fore, call them what they are, and make them visible. This is the central focus of our issue. We do not have all the answers, but we are intimately aware of the need to have these hard conversations.

We acknowledge the important work the university has done this year in establishing StFX’s first sexual violence policy, as well as the developments made by the Bringing in the Bystander program. Yet as the administration has done well to admit, the policy is only a first step. We still have a long way to go in shifting the narrative from one that normalizes and silences experiences of sexualized violence to one that does not tolerate the exploitation or violation of another person’s bodily integrity.

Our world is one where being sexually assaulted is either widely ignored or is considered shameful, where the victim/survivor is made to feel as though they did something wrong in being violated. How victim/survivors are made to feel is the foundation of the culture surrounding sexualized violence, and it is only once we fully address this fundamentally twisted stigma that we can start dismantling the remaining toxic mentalities that pervade our society.

The response to acts of sexualized violence must transition from shame and indifference to outrage, and this outrage must in turn be harnessed into action. While broad social change over time is ultimately required, it starts with speaking truth to power and being vigilant in rendering sexualized violence truly unacceptable through action as well as words.

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