Speakers used humour, levity, anecdotes and even a thinly-veiled threat to get their point across at Carleton’s Board of Governors’ public forum on Jan. 11.
There were eight presentations at the forum, organized by the board and open to anyone from the Carleton community. The forum was different from a Board of Governors meeting and as such, the board members did not speak or reply to the presenters.
Support services for sexual assault victims figured prominently in many presentations. The Coalition for a Carleton Sexual Assault Centre reiterated their demand for a student-run sexual assault support centre that would be university funded but independent of the university administration.
“This university has spent the past five years telling students and media that sexual assault doesn’t happen at Carleton, that we don’t want to be known as a rape school,” said Sarah McCue, a Coalition member. “To expect survivors to come and seek support from the same people who they’ve seen in the media saying that sexual assault is not a problem here and doesn’t happen is to just completely misunderstand the issue of sexual assault itself.”
James Meades, co-president of CUPE 4600, the union that represents teaching assistants and contract instructors at Carleton, asked for increased office space for teaching assistants.
“We have members who now have hallways as offices,” said Meades, adding that the office he was in had just nine desks and 17 people.
“Having a one-on-one conversation with a student who may be in their first year or second year, who’s having serious trouble with the material in the class can be hard for them because they’re surrounded by that many other people,” he said.
Jeff Dubois, a part-time graduate student with a visual impairment, said it’s a “blatant form of systemic discrimination” that there are only three public computers with voice synthesis technology on campus.
Dubois, who had to hold up a sheet of paper in front of his face while wearing thick glasses to read text, asked that the university provide universal access to voice synthesis technology on all public computers, adding that he had other avenues at his disposal if the university didn’t comply with his request.
Patrizia Gentile, spokesperson for the Carleton University Academic Staff Association, claimed she heard rumours that the university was looking at a private company, CultureWorks, to undertake non-credit English as a second language (ESL) courses for Carleton students.
Carleton’s provost and vice-president (academic) Peter Ricketts confirmed that the university was considering CultureWorks, but emphasized that it would undertake only non-credit ESL training to help students accepted into Carleton to reach a sufficient level of English proficiency for their course.
A running theme through several of the speeches was a perceived secrecy and lack of openness surrounding the university administration and the board.
“We have, what, less than half of the actual [board] members present?” Meades said. “Not a bad turn out; certainly not a good one.”
“You should be under no, no illusion that this is in any way a replacement for our participation in [board] meetings, whether that takes the form of protest downstairs or whether it takes the spot of observers,” he added.
The speakers also asked for real action from the administration rather than a pledge to “look into it.”
“This isn’t a Dickens novel. I’m not here to play Oliver Twist,” Dubois said. “I’m not here to say, ‘Yes sir, may I have some more please.’ It doesn’t work that way.”
