While York’s vice-chancellor, administration, and philanthropic alumni enjoy a disproportionate share of financial wealth, the workers, teachers, and students at York University remain left out in the cold, with their concerns and demands for living wages and a safe and protected educational environment going unmet.

The estimated millions it would cost to search for and recover the remains of three slain Indigenous women buried in a Manitoban landfill would be much better spent on regenerating the site to create a national memorial to murdered and missing Indigenous women. As Robert France explains, “the site must become a double place: the unnamed healed and the named re-named.”

My vision for this CEGEP is guided by one question: What do students need from higher education as a young human on this planet at this extraordinary time? If we base the answer to that question in scientific consensus, preparing students for their futures requires nothing short of transformative systemic change in all aspects of society.

The next time the National Post comes calling with its accusatory “questions,” university spokespersons should take the opportunity to explain what academic freedom means, and why they will vigorously defend it. In the meantime, university leaders might do some thinking about how their own priorities and actions either reproduce or resist racial capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism.

In his 2021 memoir, Life in the City of Dirty Water, Indigenous activist Clayton Thomas-Muller defines a warrior as someone who is “not defined by fighting. They are defined by fighting for.” Imagine what could happen if we all fought for an education system laser focused on creating just, sustainable, and democratic societies.

Why is it so difficult for university administrators to express sympathy with all students, staff, and faculty who have been impacted by the events of October 7? To acknowledge that there are diverse Jewish views about Israel, Palestine, and what is unfolding now? Laurie Adkin writes on the tactics being used to silence critics of Israel and curtail free speech on campus and beyond.

My greatest wish—as a student and a human being—is to live in a world where all peoples, regardless of race, creed, or faith, can live in peace and dignity. A world where children can grow up free from the horrors of war. We must fight, when all seems dim, so that the world of our dreams can be born. We must fight on, for hope.

How do you tell a student who earnestly feels that they are in danger that you think their fears are unfounded or exaggerated? That was the question that came to me in the classroom, and the one that animated this essay. Maybe it’s unnecessary. A group chat of fellow adjuncts and late-term PhDs who share my politics have advised me to keep my head down.

In this moment of global upheaval, and even as we acknowledge how much the political climate has been changed by anti-colonial and anti-racist movements, what would those who are bearing the brunt of our age’s most brutalizing forms of dispossession, disenfranchisement, wars, violence and ongoing genocides have to say of what we do in these institutions today?

Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce must really want to be a magician: making elephants disappear, then reappear behind you. Maybe that explains his tactic of making cuts to education, then announcing the addition of nearly 2,000 more educators all while introducing new legislation that will further centralize education and enable his Tories to make school properties available to their developer friends.