University Centres close after attack on women

The University of Waterloo has closed both its Women’s Centre and Gay and Lesbian Support Centre because of fears that their female leaders may be targets of violence after a recent misogynistic campaign on campus. The decision to close the centres was announced on Feb. 19 in The Record, a daily online newspaper for the area.

During the University’s Federation of Students election, an unknown individual covered up election posters of female candidates with posters of Marie Curie, the scientist who discovered radium, next to a picture of an atomic bomb. The Record reported that the poster said ‘the brightest woman this Earth ever created was Marie Curie, the mother of the nuclear bomb. You tell me if the plan of women leading men is still a good idea.’ The attacker also sent out a mass email to students, purportedly from the university president, saying that the defective moral intelligence of womankind needed to be exposed. A Facebook page was set up that said in part ‘over-educated women are truly dangerous.’

Dan Anderson, director of the University of Waterloo’s police force told The Record that under Canada’s hate crime legislation gender is not included as a category, and due to the nature of the comments made the attacker couldn’t be tried for a criminal offence.

However, if the attacker is found, the individual would be tried under the University’s justice system and expelled, even without a court decision.

Campus police are attempting to trace the email account from which the attacker sent the mass email, and are also working on forensic tests for the posters.

“I feel so targeted right now that I made my stepfather walk me around campus when I had to hand something in,” student Jaelle McMillan told The Record on Feb. 19.

— Katherine Fernandez-Blance

Student Union team boycotts elections

Team StudentsFirst, one of two major teams in the University of Toronto’s Student Union (UTSU) election, has boycotted the election because of supposed corruption within the election proceedings.

U of T’s campus newspaper The Varsity reported that the team declared their decision on Feb. 27, following an all candidates meeting. Immediately before the meeting, the Chief Returning Officer (CRO) announced that three of the five candidates from StudentsFirst were disqualified because incorrect student numbers appeared on their nomination forms.

When the remaining candidates for StudentsFirst asked the CRO whether the disqualified candidates could rejoin the race if appealed successfully, the CRO allegedly provided no formal answer.

Matthew Gray, presidential candidate for the team said StudentsFirst felt the CRO was trying to stifle competition.

“It’s clear that the democratic principle, which the UTSU claims to respect, is not being honoured,” Gray told The Varsity on Feb. 28. “The task falls to us, basically as the challenger slate … and so I think that by boycotting this we’re drawing attention to the fact that UTSU’s election processes are institutionally biased towards incumbents.”

The Varsity also reported that the their staff were banned from the all candidates meeting, even though the UTSU election procedure code mentions nothing about these meetings being exclusive to candidates.

The opposing team UniteforAction refused to comment and the CRO was unable to be reached by The Varsity.

Since the boycott was announced, a Facebook page named ‘Students for Democracy at U of T’ was created, calling for a university-wide boycott of this student union election. At the time of print the group had 239 likes.

— Katherine Fernandez-Blance

Business school forced to reinburse students

The Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia has been ordered by the University’s Board of Governors to pay back $4 million to the University and to commerce students after they were found to have significant reserves at their disposal.

The money will partially reimburse commerce students and the University for funding Phase One and Two renovations of the Henry Angus Building. The decision was announced at the Board of Governors meeting on Feb. 7, at the same time that it was decided that Phase Three renovations would begin in April.

The Board of Governors found that Sauder had $24 million in unrestricted operating reserves. Connor McGauley, outgoing Commerce Undergraduate Society president told UBC’s campus newspaper The Ubyssey that Sauder hasn’t hidden financial information from anyone.

“The rule is that $6 to10 million has to be kept in case of a down year in the real estate market such as 2008. And so what happened this year is because of such a strong real estate market, at the end of the fiscal year, [reserves] were higher than expected [and] the school decided to donate it back,” McGauley told The Ubyssey on Feb. 21.

Out of the money that Sauder will pay back, $2 million will go back to the University, which supplied Sauder with $10 million in emergency funds for Phase One renovations of the Henry Angus Building. The remaining $2 million will be paid to incoming commerce students, whose student fees will be increasing by $500 in September 2012 to fund Phase Two of the renovation.

— Katherine Fernandez-Blance