More than a year after our last collective agreement expired in June 2014, TAs at McGill are reaching the end of the bargaining process over a new contract. McGill’s administration made its final offer at the bargaining table on September 1, and TAs will be voting at the General Assembly for their union, AGSEM, on September 30 to determine whether to accept this offer or fight back by striking.

AGSEM’s primary goal in bargaining has been to keep TA hours consistent with undergraduate enrolment in order to maintain the quality of education at McGill. Essentially, we want to ensure that there are enough paid hours during which we can do the work that needs to be done. Over the past decade, the number of TA hours per undergraduate student at McGill has plunged significantly, from 12.86 in 2006 to 11.25 now, with the fraction of the operating budget dedicated to TA wages dwindling every year. Skimping on funding for teaching support means that there are fewer and lower paid TA jobs for graduate students, many of whom are already struggling to make ends meet in programs with no guaranteed funding. It means that some of the work TAs would have done is picked up by professors at the expense of their other commitments, by overworked course lecturers with limited union protection and no job security, and by underpaid course graders. Mostly, however, it means that undergraduate students end up with more and more multiple choice tests, fewer office hours and opportunities for one-on-one or small group learning, and a less fulfilling education overall.

McGill’s teaching assistants deserve – and desperately need – better working conditions.

AGSEM’s bargaining demands include indexing TA hours to increasing undergraduate enrolment and guaranteeing sufficient TA funds in McGill’s budgets for faculties and departments (as deemed necessary by professors in those departments). AGSEM also wants to establish stricter limits on TA positions  of fewer than 45 hours per semester, as these often lead to more work being offloaded onto grader positions that provide less educational support and pay much less per hour.

These demands – intended to preserve both the quality of educational support at McGill and the ability of our fellow TAs to pay their tuition and rent – have been met with absolute refusal by the McGill’s  senior administration, who declared the University  was only willing to bargain regarding the hourly wage. Even on this front, the University’s offer is inadequate. The administration’s final offer to TAs would only increase wages by $200 to $250 per year (assuming a student manages to get 180-hour positions in both the fall and winter semesters). With stagnant wages, increasing costs of living, and a shrinking pool of TA hours, this proposal isn’t enough to meet the needs of TAs. Additionally, under this offer, out-of-province and international students, who make up roughly 45 per cent of McGill’s graduate student body and are particularly reliant on on-campus jobs, cannot even cover their tuition increases. TA conditions are set to get worse, not better, under this proposal.  

Although McGill’s administration claims to be short on funds, its words at the bargaining table make it clear that cost is not the barrier preventing it from meeting our demands. When discussing AGSEM’s demand that McGill partially reimburse TAs’ health insurance and tuition, as is standard at other universities, McGill’s negotiators stated that the University’s objection was a matter of principle, not of cost. Much the same can be said of McGill’s refusal to guarantee an adequate number of TA hours or an adequate budget line from which to pay us. The issue is not cost, which would be well within its means (the TA budget is currently about 1.1 per cent of McGill’s operating budget), but rather the administration’s refusal to set any sort of precedent that might commit them to prioritizing fair and equitable conditions for students and workers.

One last option: a strike

On September 30, AGSEM members will vote on whether or not to accept McGill’s offer. As present and former members and elected officials of AGSEM, we know that McGill’s teaching assistants deserve – and desperately need – better working conditions. We also know that McGill’s administration concedes nothing without pressure. Although this is the final offer at the bargaining table, TAs still have a chance to fight for our university – by rejecting this offer and voting to strike.

Consider some of the gains that workers have won from going on strike.

First, every major gain McGill TAs have won has been due to a strike. And every time we have gone on strike, we have won something important: in 1976, a base salary and protections against overtime that set a precedent nationally; in 1998, a reduction in salary disparities across the university (TA salaries were completely equalized in 2006); and in 2008, after a two-month strike, the TA workload form that ensures that contract hours are equivalent to the amount of work required, as well as another significant pay increase.

Second, teaching assistants at the University of Toronto won increases to the guaranteed minimum funding packages for graduate students when they went on strike this year. They had initially won guaranteed minimum funding by striking in 2000.

This fall, students and workers across Quebec will be mobilizing against public funding cuts and increasing labour precarity. With other education sector workers also facing worsening working conditions, we will have opportunities for media exposure and solidarity actions with other workers. There is no better time to go on strike.

Voting for McGill’s offer will lock TAs into another four or more years of struggling to secure jobs to pay the bills, working unpaid overtime, and neglecting our studies and research to get second or third jobs to make ends meet. It will mean years of hard-to-reverse changes to undergraduate education as courses are cancelled or modified to provide little to no feedback for students or contact with instructors.

At AGSEM’s general assemblies over the past year, TAs have consistently demanded wages with which we can pay the bills and protections against declining TA hours. Our bargaining team did what it could to make those demands heard at the bargaining table. Now, it’s up to us to take a stand for ourselves, for future TAs, for current undergraduates, for the quality of education at McGill, and against the austerity mentality that is attacking education and public services across Canada. Negotiations at the bargaining table have come to an end. The only option left is to go on strike.

In addition to the authors’ active involvement in AGSEM in the past five years, Benjamin Elgie (also former chair of the Daily Publications Society), Megan Mericle, Sunci Avlijas, and rosalind hampton have held elected positions on AGSEM’s executive. Mona Luxion is also a former Daily columnist. To contact the authors, please email m.luxion@gmail.com.  

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In principle, all broadband users have equal connection speeds, but practices such as selective throttling (artificial connection speed slowdown) and IP blocking (which prevents access to certain websites) have been used by large providers such as Telus, AT&T, and others to hinder virtual private networks (VPNs), online voice services such as Skype, file sharing, and to block access to websites such as those created by striking employees (as was done by Telus in 2005 to a Telecommunications Workers Union site).

The symbolic protest endorsed by these campaign groups involved placing a ‘loading’ icon on a variety of websites. Tumblr, Grooveshark, Reddit, Netflix and Vimeo all took part in the protest, as well as other media-heavy sites that would be forced to pay for a faster connection. The icon even showed sporadically on the Media@McGill site.

The protests in favour of net neutrality were mere tokenism – real resistance would have involved taking concrete action.

The action was labelled a ‘slowdown’ to highlight the consequences of the proposed FCC rules, but the organizers were quick to reassure users that no actual slowing of services would occur. A much more impactful and significant action would have been to actually slow internet traffic to demonstrate the effects of the proposed rules. What’s more, an actual slowdown would have drawn on successful labour tactics. The net neutrality protest merely appropriated the language of labour organizing.

Workers undertake ‘go slow’ actions, or slowdowns, to put pressure on employers without resorting to strike action. As a form of direct action, they can be undertaken for a variety of reasons – a strike might be illegal, impractical, or too expensive – and can be extremely effective. If inexperienced strike-breakers are brought in to force striking workers back to their jobs, for example, the experienced workers can go at the pace and skill used by the strike-breakers, resulting in an obstruction of production.

A similar strategy is work-to-rule, in which workers follow their duties to the letter, ignoring all the small shortcuts that typically smooth the functioning of a workplace. These actions inconvenience the employer by causing economic damage, but they also inconvenience any clients and customers. A road crew that deliberately slows down will also slow traffic, sending the message that those who wish for a smooth morning commute should support the crew’s demands.

An actual slowdown would have drawn on successful labour tactics. The net neutrality protest merely appropriated the language of labour organizing.

However, sabotage is not a tool limited to workers. Despite the negative attention given to worker actions that inconvenience employers and clients, the same tactics are employed by those who denounce their use; this is because these tactics are effective. Employer and business sabotage also inhibits production to achieve specific ends.

For instance, the deliberate destruction of crops, or milk quotas, destroys production so that the price of goods become artificially inflated. Closer to home, McGill’s refusal of provincial conditional grants (Quebec promised $32 million in grants if McGill would reduce its deficit by $9.6 million), and the transfer of funds from the university’s operating budget to its capital budget, represent a form of sabotage. The intent was to force reorganization of the university structure and increase tuition fees by creating a condition of scarcity on campus.

Somewhat hypocritically, McGill won several injunctions against MUNACA, the university’s labour union for non-academic support staff, during their strike against pension cuts. The University forced picketing workers to keep to small, distant groups on the grounds that standard pickets were too noisy and inconvenienced students and staff. So companies, governments, and institutions are only averse to sabotage that harms their interests, not to the tactic itself.

The proposed changes to FCC rules can be seen in a similar light, as they represent artificial limits on broadband speed intended to force users to pay inflated prices for faster access. However, the situation with net neutrality is not precisely analogous to those of workers facing pressure from their employer. The powerful organizations and websites backing net neutrality are not employed by the businesses lobbying for increased control of digital infrastructure, and both ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ net neutrality corporations are represented by well-funded lobby groups.

It’s much harder to ignore your Netflix being interrupted by constant buffering than it is to ignore a loading icon.

However, ‘pro’ corporations depend entirely on the broadband access controlled by the ‘anti’ corporations, and the new FCC rules would have a major impact on their ability to conduct business. They would also impact individual internet users by forcing a reduction in high-bandwidth media use, or would accept web plans even less competitive than those in North America today.

The rules also open the door to arbitrary access to certain websites at any speed, potentially allowing large telecommunications companies to extort increased payments from economic or political competitors. If proponents of net neutrality are serious about their campaign, they should drop lacklustre awareness raising and adopt the proven tactics of direct action. They should slow down their sites.

Certainly their clients would complain about the slowdowns, but such complaints would provide a means to explain the nature of the new FCC rules in detail, and to point out how much worse the situation would be under those rules. It would provoke more of a response, and possibly even interfere with the business activities of those involved with the telecommunications lobby and the FCC, potentially forcing them to revisit their own goals. It’s much harder to ignore your Netflix being interrupted by constant buffering than it is to ignore a loading icon.

Benjamin Elgie is a PhD candidate in Neuroscience. To contact him, please email benjamin.elgie@mail.mcgill.ca.

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The term was used by John Langdon Down to describe individuals with trisomy 21 (three copies of the 21st chromosome), based on his belief that they belonged to the ‘mongoloid’ race. This was part of a contemporary theory that racial groups represented the arrest of human development at different stages, with the white race fully developed into adulthood, while ‘mongoloid’ and ‘negroid’ races stopped their development at earlier stages.

What my mother heard from the doctor was hardly encouraging. “The next time the doctor came in he said, ‘You know, you really don’t have to take her home, we’ve got places we can keep her, she’s not going to do anything, your life will be better if you just leave her,’” she relayed.

Six months later, my mother was exhausted. My sister’s heart problems required us to regularly travel to Toronto for consultation. And given my father’s attitude to parenting, my mother was essentially on her own. Her doctor told her to go see the obstetrician/gynecologist (OB/GYN) in town, believing there might be some lingering complications from her pregnancy. The OB/GYN hardly spoke to her, and only asked if she wanted more children. My mother replied that she wanted to wait and see. She had always wanted four children, but at the time knew she wanted to wait before having another pair.

My mother explained to me, “When I said I wanted to wait, when I looked up, he was looking at your sister, and looked over at you, and he said, ‘Okay, we’ll do a D&C and that’ll take care of your health problems.’” My mother wasn’t told that D&C stands for ‘dilation and curettage’ of the cervix, nor did he tell her that it can result in Asherman’s syndrome, which can cause miscarriage and infertility. She didn’t receive any follow-up care, and only learned 25 years later about the surgical damage that caused her three subsequent miscarriages and permanent infertility.

“He looked at me like I was white trash, and young and stupid, and I shouldn’t be having any more kids, and I think he just sort of made that decision,” my mother told me. “I was just one of those young stupid women, and I was just going to be having babies ’til I died, and so he was going to fix it. His attitude toward me was obvious. He didn’t think I was smart enough to bother explaining anything to me, or to give me options. I think our whole interview was 15 minutes. He made his entire judgement of me in that 15 minutes.”

The 15 minutes my mother’s doctor took to make his decision is still more than the five minutes the Alberta Eugenics Board gave to its own life-altering decisions.

The Alberta Eugenics Board

Established in 1928 through the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta, the Alberta Eugenics Board consisted of two doctors, nominated by the Senate of the University of Alberta (U of A) and the Council of the College of Physicians, and two non-medical members, appointed by the Lieutenant Governor. The Act decreed that when an institutionalized patient was to be discharged, the Board had to rule whether the patient could be discharged without “the danger of procreation” and the “risk of multiplication of the evil by the transmission of the disability” to any potential children. In cases where a patient had an inheritable disability or disease, the Board could order the surgical sterilization of that inmate as a condition of their discharge. Originally taking an hour to review each case, by the mid-1930s the Board took a mere five minutes to deliberate the authorization of a sterilization.

Initially, the Act required the consent of the individual’s parent or guardian, but under William Aberhart’s Social Credit government, the requirement for consent was removed for individuals labelled as “mental defectives.” This included “any person in whom there is a condition of arrested or incomplete development of mind existing before the age of 18 years, whether arising from inherent causes or induced by disease or injury.” It also included individuals with drug or alcohol addictions, epilepsy, or syphilitic infections of the central nervous system. The Act protected everyone else involved, including parents or guardians, Board members, the province, and surgeons, from civil liability for sterilizations.

I spoke to Robert A. Wilson to learn more about eugenic practices in Canada. A professor of Philosophy and Educational Policy Studies at the U of A, he is the principal investigator of the Living Archives of Eugenics in Western Canada, a project focused on working together with sterilization survivors in Alberta to inform the story of eugenics in Canada.

“Legislated eugenic practices in British Columbia [B.C.] and Alberta operated primarily through ‘training schools’ for people deemed feeble-minded or mentally deficient – often wrongfully,” he told me. “This meant in practice that people who were poor, who were immigrants thought to be of ‘inferior stock,’ who were Indigenous, who were neglected or abused in their home environments, became the effective principal targets of those practices.”

Training schools were a form of institution for individuals, mostly children, who had mental or physical disabilities, or who were considered social undesirables. My sister could have ended up at one. The principal training school in Alberta was called the Provincial Training School for Mental Defectives, in Red Deer, Alberta. In 1955, a child named Leilani Scorah (later Muir) was institutionalized by her mother at the Red Deer school, the site of the majority of the province’s sterilizations. Four years later, having scored below 70 on an IQ test, Muir was sterilized without her consent by order of the Board. She was told, like many others, that she was to have an appendectomy. In 1995, Leilani Muir brought a civil case against the Province of Alberta.

Social control in sterilization

Muir’s suit revealed that the Eugenics Board had ignored the minimal standards set by legislation. Testimony from Margaret Thompson, a Canadian geneticist and member of the Board in the early 1960s, showed that the Board frequently authorized sterilization for inmates who were not due to be discharged, contrary to the rules set out by the Act. According to Thompson, the Board rarely attempted to assess whether a disability was heritable.

In considering the case of one hearing-impaired boy who had scored over the threshold of 70 on an IQ test, Thompson decided that since the Provincial Training School reported that he was a poor worker, he would likely not be very socially successful, and thus ought to be sterilized. She also approved the castration of men with trisomy 21, despite their infertility, to, in her words, “make assurance doubly sure.” Furthermore, the judge found that sterilization had been authorized to reduce menstruation or sexual interest for the convenience of the School, as well as for girls who masturbated or showed “lesbian tendencies.”

Thompson’s decisions on the Eugenics Board also supplied herself and Leonard Jan Le Vann, the director of the Provincial Training School, with testicular tissue for genetic experiments. Le Vann’s experiments included non-consensual testing of psychiatric drugs on the children at the School. In an article he wrote for the American Journal of Mental Deficiency in 1950, he stated, “The picture of comparison between the normal child and the idiot might almost be a comparison between two separate species. On the one hand, the graceful, intelligently curious, active young homo sapiens [sic], and on the other the gross, retarded, animalistic, early primate type individual.”

“When people have looked at practice, they have pretty consistently found that the passage of laws is not the key thing. People always say [that] there was no eugenics [movement] in France, or only a weak movement. But the rates of sterilizations in their hospitals were higher than in countries that had sterilization laws.”
Diane B. Paul, professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts Boston

The final ruling found that Muir had suffered “loss of liberty, loss of reputation, humiliation and disgrace, pain and suffering, loss of enjoyment of life, loss of normal developmental experiences, loss of civil rights, loss of contact with family and friends.” Muir was awarded $740,780 in damages and $230,000 in legal fees.

Alberta’s sterilization law was repealed in 1972, though involuntary sterilizations continued after repeal of the Act. A similar act in B.C. was quietly repealed in 1973. The records of the Eugenics Board there were apparently lost.

In Canada, only Alberta and B.C. passed eugenic sterilization laws; however, Wilson explained to me that practices similar to those institutionalized in Alberta and B.C. also occurred across Canada. He gave Northern Canada as an example. “Aboriginal and First Nations peoples became a particular target of, at best, borderline coercive birth control practices, including sterilization and birth control by [intrauterine device] and pills,” he said. “Those practices persisted throughout the 1960s, [and] were subject to parliamentary investigation in the early 1970s.”

Eugenics outside the law

Diane B. Paul, professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts Boston, studies the history of eugenics and modern practices in prenatal and neonatal genetic testing. When we spoke, she suggested that legislation shouldn’t be the focus of people concerned about coercive eugenic practices. “The significance of the passage of these sterilization laws can easily be overstated,” she told me. “Whether laws were passed, whether they were opposed, is often in whole or in part unrelated to ideology. So it just doesn’t tell you very much because so many structural and accidental factors were involved.”

Paul cautioned against looking for coercive eugenic practices to manifest in predictable places. “When people have looked at practice, they have pretty consistently found that the passage of laws is not the key thing. People always say [that] there was no eugenics [movement] in France, or only a weak movement. But the rates of sterilizations in their hospitals were higher than in countries that had sterilization laws.”

In fact, she added, “In some instances where practice was ongoing, the laws may have actually acted as a control, providing some oversight that otherwise didn’t exist. I’ve come more and more to think that we’re way over-focused on the passage of laws.” In some institutions, she explained, sterilizations occurred for reasons besides eugenic ones. And rather than being decided by the laws in place, the decision to sterilize a patient was often made entirely by the director of a particular institution.

Given the ongoing history of coercive eugenics in Canada, I asked Paul about the popular idea that coercive eugenic practices declined with increased public knowledge of Nazi eugenic practices and increased scientific knowledge. “When I looked at writings, what people were actually saying and doing, it didn’t seem to me that was true.” She cited work by Alison Bashford showing that anti-eugenic arguments invoking the Nazis didn’t become popular until the 1980s. “In some places you actually have a resurgence of flat-out eugenic rhetoric, among the new molecular biologists [post-World War II], for example.”

A common view is that advances in the scientific understanding of genetics undermined the scientific basis for eugenics. But in Paul’s view, these advances had little impact on attitudes towards eugenics. These discoveries generally occurred in the first two decades of the 20th century, when eugenic sterilization laws were still being passed, and were readily accepted by most eugenicists, some of whom were highly respected geneticists themselves. Though these advances showed that elimination of “feeble-mindedness” by sterilization and segregation would be difficult and extremely slow, for nearly all eugenicists, doing something was still preferable to doing nothing.

Wilson agreed that harmful eugenic practices can occur outside of legislation, and suggested that consent can be gained in problematic ways from the kinds of people who have historically fallen under eugenic legislation. “You’re working with incredibly vulnerable people. They weren’t sure what they were signing off on, and there wasn’t really much of an attempt [to] gain consent, just to get them sterilized. And there was no legislation that really governed that.” My mother’s experience with her OB/GYN stands as an example.

Canada certainly isn’t the only place this happens, given the example of a July 2013 Senate report in Australia on the forced sterilization of women and girls with disabilities. “It’s the same kinds of groups that are targeted by traditional legislative eugenics,” Wilson explained. “It’s people with disabilities, especially intellectual disabilities, [and] disproportionately, women and Indigenous peoples.”

He described another recent inquiry in California (where involuntary sterilization has been banned since 1979), that found that more than 150 female prisoners had been sterilized in situations of dubious consent by prison doctors between 2006 and 2010. “Again, it’s at best a grey area in terms of consent, but you can certainly understand the politics of it,” he said. “People could in some sense wiggle out and say they technically had the legal authority to do that.”

A legacy of harm

Despite settlements for more than 700 of the survivors of the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta, Canada has sent mixed messages to survivors and those who could today be at risk of the same, unofficial practices. The Chairman of the Alberta Eugenics Board from 1928-65 was John MacEachran, head of the U of A’s Psychology and Philosophy department and co-founder of the Canadian Psychological Association. Until the late 1990s, a lecture series and an award in the department of Philosophy at the U of A were in his name. The department of Psychology still offers an undergraduate award in his name.

Thompson has received an Order of Canada and is an Honorary Consultant at the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto, where she led a clinical genetics service in the 1960s after her time on the Eugenics Board. She also has a PhD thesis award in her name, offered by the former Genetics Society of Canada, of which she was a founding member. Curiously, her biography on SickKids’ 55th anniversary website makes no mention of her time on the Eugenics Board.

And although the judge of the Muir case found that the Eugenics Board casually and commonly violated the slim protections established by the Sterilization Act, no individual associated with it has since faced any civil or professional penalty for their actions.

“There’s this element of subhumanization,” Wilson told me, “that’s so deep and so callous, and that goes beyond simply, ‘here’s what the laws were at the time.’ It’s got to do with the underlying conceptions and views of people who were regarded as mentally deficient.”

My mother’s own experience with this kind of subhumanization began the day that my sister was born. “I really didn’t know what the doctor meant by Down syndrome, but my mum happened to be there at the time,” she told me. “She said that when she was in nursing they used to kill the babies before the mothers would see them and just tell them that the baby died.”

Many people remain unaware of Canada’s eugenic history, a fact that underscores the importance of community-university projects like the Eugenics Archive. “In my experience, most students in Alberta, the province in which nearly 3,000 people were sterilized on eugenic grounds, don’t know that this occurred,” Wilson told me.

“I think that providing basic information about the eugenic past, and engaging citizens in thought and discussion about that past and its connection to their own lives, is fundamental here,” he said. “Sandra Anderson, Leilani Muir’s lawyer, once said to me that until we come to value each and every person as they are, we’ll never be done with eugenics. I think of that as a deep point to keep in mind as we reflect on surviving eugenics in the 21st century.”

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This socioeconomic climate of academia has an unavoidable effect on the way academics form their ideas. Consider temporal discounting, a phenomenon studied under cognitive psychology and other disciplines, often used as a measure of impulsivity. In a typical temporal discounting experiment, the researcher will offer the participant the choice between something of a small amount of value now (money, chocolate, et cetera), or else something of higher value sometime in the future. By systematically varying the amounts of value and time, you can construct a curve predicting an individual’s choices. This is used to test hypotheses concerning addiction, emotional regulation, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, obesity, reward behaviour, and related issues; similar concepts are present in other fields, including economics.

Of course, the logic of these experiments appear to make sense; by delaying your reward, you increase your value. It’s the simple math of delayed gratification, and if someone has a high curve at short time intervals, they are simply impulsive, and lacking some degree of cognitive control.

This socioeconomic climate of academia has an unavoidable effect on the way academics form their ideas.

And yet, if you grow up poor, taking less now rather than more later makes sense. Not because you’re impulsive, but because you must take less money now, because your rent costs half as much as (or more than) your monthly wages. Plus, who knows if the money on offer will still be there six months from now? Money now is much more certain than money later.

But you’ll hardly ever hear a cognitive psychologist or social neuroscientist tell you about the socioeconomic history of their participants, even with the rare study that examines the effects of “resource scarcity” and “mortality.” Instead, you hear that a population of poor people have high impulsivity, which explains the high rate of alcoholism among that population (though, of course, it’s rather easier to manage your alcoholism if you have money). Or that obesity among the poor is related to impulsive behaviour, rather than trying to get the most calories for the least cost.

Cue middle-class academic liberals clucking their tongues, wondering how they can get funding for classes for welfare recipients so that they can learn how to delay gratification. This is no random example. Such courses have been especially popular in colonial nations – particularly in North America, Australia, and South Africa for their Indigenous and poor populations. Approaches that treat impulsivity as an undesirable cause, or even effect, of poverty, then attempt to use behavioural remedies rather than economic ones. Books such as Teaching With Poverty in Mind, or programs such as “Money Smarts 4 Kids” give strategies for reducing impulsive behaviours in children, and misunderstand both the nature and the origins of the behaviours they describe.

Middle-class academics treat such behaviours – which have their own logic for someone who is poor – as personality or character flaws, rather than adaptive traits.

The seemingly short-term, impulsive thinking attributed to the poor is absolutely frustrating to many of my peers in academia. Consider the sort of middle-class investment that works by saving money now to buy something of higher quality in the future. This is the logic of the middle and upper classes. The logic of poverty, on the other hand, can be clearly described by author Terry Pratchett as the “Vimes Theory of Boots.” His character, Samuel Vimes, muses that he can only afford cheap boots, which fall apart in a few months, requiring him to purchase a new pair. He will easily spend more on several pairs of cheap boots than a wealthier person does on a single pair of high-quality boots, all without ever having the ability to afford to save up for quality boots. Not only does he spend more over the long-term than a wealthier individual, but he’ll have wet feet the whole time as well.

Middle-class academics treat such behaviours – which have their own logic for someone who is poor – as personality or character flaws, rather than adaptive traits. Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer with The Atlantic, described how this played out for him as he grew up in a rough Baltimore neighbourhood in the 1980s, and later transitioned to the New York professional writing scene. The behaviours that in the former environment had been adaptive for him, such as threatening someone who refused to back off of an argument, in the new environment put him at risk of losing his job, or even facing legal action.

The underlying assumption is that the ways we, as academics, conceive of ideas, and the ways the people in our studies respond, are somehow universal.

This idea that certain traits are adaptive in some circumstances, and maladaptive in others, is a simple enough concept for ecologists dealing with animals, but seems to escape many academics who deal with humans. The underlying assumption is that the ways we, as academics, conceive of ideas, and the ways the people in our studies respond, are somehow universal.

As Dr. Joseph Henrich, economics and psychology professor at the University of British Colombia has suggested, the individuals who have participated in seminal social science studies, such as the Stanford Prison Experiment, are largely unrepresentative of the world’s population. His group labels the typical psych subject as Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic, or ‘WEIRD.’ While his label itself carries some assumptions, the point should be reflected on by anyone who works in relevant fields. As academics working with humans in any kind of behavioural science, it must be understood that both our studied populations, and we ourselves are heavily unrepresentative of the bulk of humanity.

Benjamin Elgie is a PhD candidate in Neuroscience and Chair of the Board of Directors of the Daily Publications Society. He can be reached at benjamin.elgie@mail.mcgill.ca.

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These techniques all measure some proxy for neuronal activity. In the case of fMRI, the measured activity is a blood-oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal, which describes the ratio of oxygenated to deoxygenated blood in the brain. When brain cells are active, they consume oxygen, and as a result, blood oxygen levels in active area decreases. The BOLD signal is used as a representation for neuronal activity, though the time-course of this signal is much slower than actual changes.

fMRI is popular among scientists because it has the potential to reveal the roles of specific networks of brain regions. It has also taken a front seat in media coverage of neuroscientific research, in no small part because the final products of fMRI analysis are attractive, seemingly convincing images of brain activity.

This is troubling for several reasons. fMRI is popularly regarded as a direct measure of what is going on in the brain, but this is not the case. The BOLD signal is much slower than the neuronal activity that causes it, and can only measure relative changes in the brain. Therefore, most fMRI experiments must compare different BOLD signals; usually a resting signal and a baseline signal recorded during the experiment (which can cover a broad range of cognitive and behavioural tasks and states). Because of this comparison, ‘activation’ or ‘deactivation’ is only relative to the baseline measures of brain activity. Furthermore, a region that becomes more ‘active’ during a task might be indirectly exciting or inhibiting other brain regions.

Statistics used to analyze fMRI results are another issue with interpretation of findings. Small changes in data processing or statistical analysis can bias results. This problem is exacerbated by the use of multiple analysis packages across the field, which often use different terminology and approaches for similar analyses. Neglecting small steps can lead to false positives, as intentionally demonstrated in an article in the Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results by Craig Bennett and colleagues, who used fMRI to demonstrate BOLD activation in the central nervous system of a dead fish.

Compared to other scientific studies, neuroimaging studies require additional scrutiny, because their output has more persuasive power than many other techniques – paricularly in the case of fMRI. Several studies, including one by Deena Weisberg and colleagues published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, have found that non-experts are more likely to be persuaded by a scientific study if it is accompanied by fMRI brain images, rather than a different type of graphical representation of results.

Researchers have also shown that potential jurors who read summaries of a criminal trial were more likely to be convinced of a defendant’s guilt when fMRI evidence was produced. A study by David McCabe and colleagues in Behavioral Sciences and the Law found that the evidence provided by these brain scans was perceived as more powerful than similar evidence from polygraphs, or thermal facial imaging. This bias was removed when the participants received additional information critiquing the use of fMRI as a lie detection technique.

The use of fMRI in lie detection brings up many of the same issues as the use of polygraphs, the so-called ‘lie detectors,’ which compare physiological measurements of arousal during questioning to the same measurements during a neutral baseline. Polygraphs can be moderately accurate at detecting deception (around 70 per cent), but also have very high rates of false positives (around 65 per cent). According to creators of fMRI lie-detection, these methods are about 90 per cent accurate. However, as discovered in a study by Giorgio Ganis and colleagues published in NeuroImage, associating covert movements or mental imagery with irrelevant or baseline stimuli can reduce that rate to 33 per cent – less than chance.

This vulnerability to false positives, and to simple countermeasures, is only one technical limit to fMRI deception detection. Other issues exist, especially as laboratory studies of lie-detection have all involved willing, neurotypical (those without a developmental or psychiatric disorder strongly affecting mental function) participants in a safe lab setting, instructed to give a binary true/false response, none of which might be true in law enforcement or other similar settings, as discussed by Jeffrey Simpson in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, among others.

Technically speaking, fMRI may not be effective for deception detection, and the possibility of false positives remains. There are also a host of ethical and legal issues. Given the persuasive nature of fMRI results, even equivocal findings might be taken as strong evidence of an individual’s guilt or dishonesty. Privacy issues are highly relevant, as individuals are generally assumed to have some right to their private thoughts. Furthermore, conflicts of interest abound. In a recent American civil case, for example, a private corporation scanned their client a second time after the first scan delivered a ‘guilty’ result, on the grounds that their client had been tired during the first scan.

Of particular concern is the inaccessibility of fMRI technology. Scanners are expensive, running into hundreds of dollars per hour of scanning, and data processing and presentation requires a high level of expertise. If used by the legal system, criminal defendants may lack the resources to hire their own experts or pay for their own fMRI evidence. The costly nature would widen existing disparity between wealthy and poor defendants’ ability to defend themselves, as wealthier individuals would be able to afford convincing fMRI evidence of their innocence, and poorer individuals would not.

Similar problems regarding technical ability and economic disparity plague other potential applications of fMRI. While pain researchers have made a great deal of progress in determining neural correlates for the perception and experience of pain, given the subjective nature, it is not possible to say whether an individual is in pain simply by assessing brain activity. This problem exists throughout the medical field, where diagnoses based primarily on brain scans can run up against subjective experience, risking further denial of medical resources to individuals who already struggle to obtain help.

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McGill states that in its 2009 survey, 36 per cent of students reported facing discrimination from other students and 28 per cent from staff (with the report stating a “vast majority” reported no discrimination), but neither this nor the 2013 survey can possibly capture any useful assessment of oppression when it overlooks discrimination ingrained at the institutional level. Individual acts of oppression do occur, both in the form of microaggressions (small but relentless words and actions which perpetuate hurtful assumptions), and in more overt shows of prejudice (such as McGill’s Chancellor referring to Native peoples as “sauvages”). However, a major form of oppression is institutional or systemic oppression, whereby structural inequalities perpetuate existing power disparities.

Consider single parents, particularly single mothers; the 2011 Canadian census found approximately four times more lone-parent families are headed by women than men. The 2009 McGill diversity survey says only 4 per cent of respondents reported having one or more children, compared to 22 per cent of all Canadians aged 15-34. While there are various reasons for this difference, among them are the extremely limited childcare facilities at McGill. If you’re a student parent trying to raise children while attending school, you need access to childcare; you need sufficient funding to cover your living expenses (funding that is more difficult to claim without the free time to build a CV); and you need a support network that allows you to work in your spare time without impacting your grades. Additionally, you have to hope that the stress of your situation doesn’t lead to anxiety or depression, because mental health services on campus are scant and overburdened. It’s entirely possible that you could be forced to drop out of McGill because you can’t support a family, manage school, and keep yourself healthy all at once.

The suggestion that the struggles of single mothers come down to time management and willpower is, frankly, either ignorant or dishonest. This is a major form of gender discrimination at universities. But which individual can young mothers identify on this survey as having committed an act of discrimination against them?

Or consider students of colour. A 2010 report to the Principal’s Task Force on Diversity, Excellence, and Community found disproportionately low numbers of non-white faculty, who can often make a significant difference in such students’ lives by sharing a lived experience of racial or ethnic discrimination and proving that they too can make a career in academia. This lack of support can mean the difference between continuing in their fields, or leaving academia entirely. But which individual can they point to as making their time here more difficult?

This is why McGill desperately needs offices such as the Social Equity Diversity Education (SEDE) office, and why student associations need equity committees. These bodies recognize systemic forms of oppression, and need to be able to take or at the least advocate corrective measures. While the administration will write, as in the 2009 report, that “the fact that there is any [gender] discrimination is of concern,” it will also spend over a decade in court trying to avoid paying the equity payments required by the Quebec government for majority-female job positions, which are underpaid in comparison to majority-male positions. It is not a surprise that the same 2010 report found a “lack of awareness [or] commitment to diversity as more than [a] catch phrase” and a “lack of understanding of [the] opportunities and benefits of diversity.” McGill’s understanding of discrimination is severely limited by its view that discrimination is a discrete act, directed by a specific individual toward another individual.

Reading McGill student responses to news articles on this topic reveals a similar attitude among much of the student body itself. Many students only seem to recognize the obvious actions of individuals as oppressive (and even those are often excused as ‘unintentional’ or ‘humorous’). When we speak of the oppressive implications of tuition hikes, many McGill students seem to think that such things affect everyone equally. But, in fact, they disproportionately affect those already experiencing structural oppression. If McGill’s students and admin continue to view discrimination solely as a function of individual incidents, they will continue to fundamentally misunderstand why McGill is failing to create or maintain a diverse community.

Benjamin Elgie is a Ph.D. student in Neuroscience. He can be reached at benjamin.elgie@mail.mcgill.ca.

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Two strangers show up. They aren’t anyone’s guests, and no one recognizes them. If you’re new, it’s common to be introduced by people recognized as being members of the scene. They’re obviously drunk, five to ten years younger than anyone else, and they don’t introduce themselves. This makes several people uncomfortable and wary. One of the strangers wants to use one of the beds (presumably with their friend), but the other pulls them away to the bathroom. You begin to wonder why they came and if they might start trouble. Sex clubs have only been legal in Canada since 2005 (after R. v. Labaye, a case involving a private swinger’s club which had to be appealed to the Supreme Court), and patrons often feel like they’re at risk of arrest, if not conviction. If that happens, you can lose your job if you work with children or your kids if you’re in the middle of a divorce.

Emery Saur’s article, “Sex and solitude vs. solidarity” (Health & Ed, October 25, page 10) is striking in two ways. One is the complete lack of respect for the objects of their article. Saur expects us to share their disgust at the idea of middle-aged people having sex, their sensationalistic gawking at their surroundings, and their attitude that sex absent intimacy is lacking something essential. They expect us to be startled that they were treated with respect and weren’t solicited for sex, and to find polite conversation at a sex club to be somehow incongruous. Presumably people at sex clubs don’t chat when they aren’t fucking.

The other is the complete lack of curiosity with which they approach their subject. We aren’t told the name of the club, where it is, what subset of the community it serves (the presence of a bar woman suggests it wasn’t exclusively for men, at least), or when Saur went. All these things can change the social dynamics of a club or scene. Saur questions why someone might attend a sex club (“Is it the thrill? Is it some form of validation?”), comes to various conclusions (“Sex without intimacy is a lonely thing…”), and describes these conclusions in universal, rather than personal terms. At no point does Saur write the answers that the patrons of the club tried to give them. Instead, Saur only mentions their own perplexity and confusion with the seeming incongruity between these remarks and their own naive impressions of the venue.

In place of the information one might expect from a Health & Ed column, such as an overview of sex or fetish clubs in Montreal, the opinions and experiences of their patrons, or the issues and conflicts within the community, the author substitutes their own recollection and introspection of their drunken, spontaneous, slumming experience. The article reads like a blog update, rather than a sincere attempt to inform and educate, and it does not inspire confidence in future offerings on sex and sexuality in this column.

Benjamin Elgie and Amelia Mensch are executives at Sexuality and Kink Advocacy. They can be reached at sakamcgill@gmail.com.

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