The signed lease sees an increase in rent costs with SSMU paying $130,000 in rent for the current academic year, as well as $100,000 in energy costs. Rent will continue to increase by $5,000 a year up to $165,000 in the 2020-21 academic year, and energy costs will increase yearly according to inflation.

Under the newly-signed lease, SSMU will pay a total of $230,000 for the 2013-14 year, whereas it paid a total of $110,000 in 2010-11, the final year covered by the previous lease.

The Society will seek to cover these increased costs by introducing a non-opt-outable student fee of $6.08 per semester for full-time students and $3.04 per semester for part-time students. The fee would also be indexed to a rate of 5.6 per cent to cover yearly increases in rent and utilities. The implementation of these fees, however, is up for approval by undergraduate students in the upcoming winter referendum.

Throughout the negotiations, the duration and financial responsibilities of the building’s utilities were the main points of contention.

SSMU VP University Affairs Joey Shea told The Daily in an interview that “most other student associations within Canada pay a symbolic $1 for their rent, or their structure is different and they don’t pay anything.”

According to Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) (DPSLL) Ollivier Dyens, the University asked SSMU to assume the utility costs due to constraints in McGill’s financial situation.

“It’s just because it’s very expensive. We are still paying for three quarters of the utility costs, and we are having budgetary issues, same as SSMU. We have to be responsible to our constituents, the university, the way SSMU has to do the same thing with its members,” Dyens told The Daily.

Shea also said that the way McGill chose to negotiate with SSMU delayed the signing of the lease. Following various instances of miscommunication between the two parties, Shea and SSMU President Katie Larson decided to negotiate with the Deputy Provost directly.

“The most important decision that we made this year was asking McGill to send the DPSLL and not a proxy from McGill Legal to the negotiation table. Having a more clear line of communication definitely made it easier to come to agreements. It is clear to me that being able to talk to the DPSLL directly made it easier to get SSMU’s concerns and points across, since they were not going through a third party,” Larson told The Daily in an email.

The first public impasse in negotiations came in 2011, when SSMU signed the Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) – a document that outlines McGill and SSMU’s legal rights and responsibilities to each other – but decided against signing the lease. At the time, then-SSMU President Maggie Knight expressed financial concerns over a structure that required SSMU to “take over the responsibilities of the utilities.”

The 2012-13 SSMU executive, led by then-President Josh Redel, also publicly expressed concerns when it drafted a letter stating, “These negotiations could vastly affect student fees by mandating a significant increase to the SSMU base fee in order to maintain continued operations.”

“We understand that running a building costs money, but this is a contribution to the entire McGill community that SSMU needs help with in order to operate. Student life on the McGill campus has a massive value for the University, and we ask that McGill acknowledges [sic] this in ways more tangible than philosophical agreements,” the executive wrote.

Despite these disagreements, both Shea and Dyens stated that a major part of the negotiation was done in the previous years by different teams of executives and administrators.

Shea commented on the difficulty of the negotiation process, despite being satisfied at the completion of the process after four years.

“You reach a point where you realize that there is a huge power differential between SSMU and McGill and no matter what we are going to be in this building and they are pretty much setting the terms of the negotiation,” Shea said. “After four years of negotiations there comes a point where you have to sign something.”

– With files from Hera Chan

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Walking through campus is a skill I have mastered, probably the most refined talent I have developed in university. I’m not talking about the literal action of moving my legs (not my arms, they are usually awkwardly static); I am talking about the performance inherent in the walk. Performance in the sense that I see myself as a focal point, performance because it demands my concentration and it forces me to calculate my gestures.

In most aspects, my upbringing in Colombia was a privileged one; I do not remember any instances of having to worry about having food on my plate, as some of my peers often did. I lived in an upper stratum of society that allowed basic freedoms to pass off as niceties. But the unlimited abundance of food did little to appease the ever-pervading hole in my stomach; instead, my growing pains were aches of a different kind of absence – I lacked myself.

In my memories, the men surrounding me were masculine and macho. They were capable, strong, and powerful. In a sense, they were everything I thought I could never be. I grew up knowing I was different. In most social situations I was on the outside looking in: window-shopping for social affirmations and positive reinforcements. Queerness created the gap between me and them. To this world, queerness was signified by effeminate mannerisms and deviation in physical appearance. From an early age, I learned to adapt and move my body to mimic those of the macho ideal.

I went through childhood and adolescence constantly oscillating between safety and danger – between hiding and showing. At an early age, I started my magnum opus, the same performance I have continued to this day, and the day-to-day performance by which I undo my queerness when I feel surveilled. It is a perfect balance between self-loathing and self-control, in which a constant fear of being different morphs into supervision of body flow. The way I move my hand to smoke a cigarette governs my thought and debilitates my confidence.

By experiencing a type of privilege, I grew to loathe its absence in other aspects of my life. Leading up to my high school graduation, McGill’s campus took upon itself bold tones of utopia. I thought of it as a space I could truly inhabit; after living life in moving between various stages and catwalks, the university was the place where I destroyed the macho character I had perfected. It didn’t take long for me to realize that it was less about the campus and more about my life and experiences. It took an even shorter time to see that I had not reached utopia.

In a sense, McGill’s campus is a maze, a space of confluence where all our stories and experiences intersect in a common physical space. We interact with it in similar ways, yet these interactions vary tremendously, just as our backgrounds do. In the process of navigating to the end of the maze, we realize that it is harder for some to make it to the end, that every experience we live informs our decisions to turn left or right, and that in end we are all lost.

***

Angel* is a U2 Sociology student at McGill, and a newcomer to the Montreal performance art scene. After being encouraged by a friend with more experience in the art, Angel gave it a try with a performance relying heavily on drag. They described the performance as being grounded in a concept of “a sad striptease.”

“[…] I wanted to start out your run of the mill popular drag performance where it is just like fun and silly. But as the performance progressed it got more and more intense, so I pulled a marker out of my underwear and I would write insults on my body that I have received and then I would lick them off and then undress, and at the end I would unroll my dress, I was just in the bottom of the dress. Before the performance I had written a whole bunch of shit over my stomach.”

Angel’s performance asked for a physical transformation in many senses, transforming the way they were dressed and painting themselves in “blue alien-y” paint, and also adapting their mannerisms to their performance.

“I was in this outfit the whole night. It was weird; I was pretty frightened to be honest. […] I had friends come with me, but taking the bus from […] the venue was pretty terrifying. I got a lot of funny looks… It was terrifying but it was really empowering, I felt really badass. To be honest, the looks I was getting were looks of confusion, scared [ones]. I feel like if anyone did anything, I would have the confidence to freak them the fuck out. But the venue itself, going there, was great. It felt fine there, because it was a performance,” Angel said.

“And then when I was going home, at this point I was wearing shorts and a tank top, I had washed most of my makeup off but there were still remnants of blue, I actually got followed and kind of attacked by two guys, not physically, but like a verbal fight.”

***

Apart from being a Social Work master’s student at McGill, Kai Cheng Thom is a queer performance artist. In an interview, Thom and I discussed our experiences with performance and gender. When we were about to start, I asked what pronoun to use for the article, and inadvertently started a discussion about the politics of self-identification.

Thom spoke of an acquaintance they met at a critical ethics studies conference, where they discussed giving people the choice of pronoun identification. In our interview, Thom problematized the institutionalization of this practice, “I generally go by they, but I have a long answer to that question,” they said. “[It is] not necessarily liberatory, it creates this illusion that gender is a choice, when gender is not a choice, it is a systematic expression of violence.”

“If other people want to self-identify and go by they, she, he, that’s awesome and people should definitely respect that. But the institutional practice of saying what gender pronoun do you prefer as a way of alleviating liberal guilt is not necessarily something that erases the fact that when people look at our bodies, […] there’s a kind of violent choice that occurs when gender is imposed regardless of what the person says he/she/they/zie are,” Thom said.

Thom started as a literary artist, focusing on experimental poetry. Their transition to performance art arose from a confluence of elements: their desire to experiment with drag and an opportunity at Radical Queer Semaine. Thom’s performances have evolved from their desire to be a storyteller incorporating theatricality in actions, as well as an emphasis on vocalization in all its variations – screaming, chanting, singing, sighing, et cetera.

Thom strives to make people uncomfortable through their art, but for the right reasons. “People who are oppressed are often prevented, literally, from speaking what is true to them. This attracts me: the idea of speaking truth to power, the idea that when we speak a thing, it becomes reified as truth and then we can reify our own experiences – these violences, wars, and oppressions that are actually happening. That draws me to performance art, and I also like making people feel uncomfortable.”

In speaking truth to power, Thom brings these ideas out of their performance and into the spaces they inhabit. Like me, Thom comes into contact with campus quite often, and this particular space influences a lot of our experiences outside of it. In spite of this, our relations to it differ immensely.

“There is a constant knowledge that I am not normative, or that I don’t fit. This plays out a lot around narratives of who should be in the academy and who gets to do things,” Thom mentioned.

“This speaks about the necessity or pressure of attempting to conform to an ideal through […] which you can attain safety or power, respect. […] I [certainly] think the academy is conservative in some ways; McGill particularly. It can exert this pressure to comport ourselves in a certain way, in terms of gender it came down to this decision of: ‘do I try to conform?’ […] I made the decision to not change myself for school in terms of gender, or not try to restrain myself. I don’t really see a difference in how I perform gender [at] school and other spaces, but there definitely was a time [when that was the case],” Thom said.

“Being non-normative in gender performance creates a lot of backlash. You are constantly reminded that you are different. I’m sure that has some sort of effect on how I feel; it’s stressful being at school, I’m not going to deny that. There are spaces, queer spaces, where I work, where I feel more relaxed. I’m sure my physicality changed in relation to how I feel, but I don’t intentionally try to change gender physicality for school.”

For Shahir Omar, an Arts student, performance at McGill’s campus is also a way to push boundaries in an attempt to make people question gender roles.

“This school is extremely conservative, in terms of queerness and identity. I definitely feel like I try to test limits at this school, I try to push aesthetic choices that relate to identity politics because […] that’s how I feel, but also what I hope people […] question. This school forces you to feel like an outsider as a queer person, or as not really feeling like you fit. But I… started to embrace that, because it is not going to change here, and push those boundaries, because I think that [pushing boundaries] is beautiful.”

Omar has encountered performance in different ways. Although they have just started experimenting with performance art, Omar was part of Effusion, a campus acappella group.

“I was always really conscious of the fact that I was transforming to have a way more masculine presentation in order to perform. […] So it did feel, in a microcosmic way, like a transformation to perform in a way that I was never comfortable with,” they said. “It definitely comes with a certain vibe or a certain mentality that you take on. But I guess I just felt very insecure about myself and the way I was orienting myself toward my environment as a performer. I felt [like] I had a projected path of ‘this is how you are going to relate to the space as a conformist, mainstream singer who wants to appear the same as everyone else.’ It was a constant place of insecurity for me, because it was so not how I would feel, or how I would want to perform, and none of my politics were in my performance. […] That is what made me quit.”

For Thom, performance was at first an opportunity to explore a more feminine physicality.

“I started out doing drag. I was gender bending for artistic effect and now I find that my, like, daily appearance has been modelled around my stage appearance. I think my stage appearance is a lot more hyped up; I wear a lot of makeup and really try to create a mask – like a storytelling mask out of makeup. I try to embody the same physicality now, [wherein] the physical body is embraced… I believe I can perform any kinds of gender regardless of anatomy, and I try not to work with progressions from male to female or from female to male just in case, it’s not who I am,” confessed Thom.

Performing is institutionalized in many ways: by placing oneself up on a stage, by standing in front of an audience, but most importantly, by acknowledging a performance as performance. For Angel, Shahir, and Kai Cheng, many actions become institutionalized performance in this way; their self-expression becomes an emancipatory act, or gesture of rebellion.

Performance is, and will always be, present in my actions, but after talking to other performers I realized that I am privileged in many senses. Cis privilege earns me a sense of security and access to many spaces on campus with which other students have more difficulty interacting. From the people I talked to, I learnt that there are many similarities, but also immense differences, in our experiences. For many students, moving through campus comes with many more prejudices that affect their lives. I also came to realize that to many of them I owe a lot for their constant efforts to engage in ‘gender-fucking’ actions. In the end, on a day-to-day basis, my performance is much less subversive and much less pervasive.

I also gained a grasp of what my performance ought to be. Art and performance are about self-expression, about the creation of characters and acting out their storylines. The script I want to act out is one written by me: with all its complexities and falsities, sure, but a script I can fully support, no matter what the plot twist. This is my way of effacing empty gesture, of getting rid of generic movements and performances that don’t speak of me. It is my way of burning the tired, destructive script.

*A stage name has been used

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It is important, then, that the festival’s visual art component showcased an array of rising artists in their headquarters, Quartiers Pop. This year, the festival featured local artists, as well as semi-established artists with lots of buzz surrounding them, like Brooklyn-based Cory Arcangel and UK Turner Prize winner Elizabeth Price, whose work is to be presented at the Musée d’art contemporain later this month.

During the first day of the festival, Price gave a talk in which she presented excerpts from her recent work in video. Following her presentation, Symposium and Art POP co-hosted a talk with New York-based conceptual artist Dan Graham, known for his sculptural and installation work. Graham presented excerpts of the video documentation of “Don’t Trust Anyone over Thirty,” a satirical marionette show poking fun at the baby boomer generation and their psychedelic sensibilities.

The live performance of “Don’t Trust Anyone over Thirty,” which premiered in 2004, was recorded and projected at the POP headquarters during the first night of the festival. Yet, mostly due to technical insufficiencies ­– a very small screen and unclear sound – the numbers in the audience started dwindling and by the end of the recording almost half of the attendants had left. Aside from this, the excerpts themselves did not provide enough material for a clear understanding of Graham’s performance. The selection of clips for the talk did not effectively evoke the ethos or aesthetic mission of the performance, leaving viewers to interact with a set of moving images that were almost impossible to relate to. With more meticulous curatorial oversight, and perhaps better technical capabilities, Graham’s talk could have truly lived up to its POP-level expectations.

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Even though they are easily comparable to other ‘chillwave’ acts, DIANA deviates just enough as their 1980s-influenced, upbeat synth-pop tracks are actually capable of making heads nod, a fact that was apparent last Wednesday night during their POP Montreal show. The night started with Empress Of and MORI, who served as a perfect preamble to DIANA. The headliners proved that just ‘chilling’ is not what you ought to do when seeing them live.

In their live set, as in their album, DIANA are at their best when performing their own unapologetic strain of pop. With their live performance of Perpetual Surrender single, “Born Again,” the band proved that although Elle’s vocals can gracefully and successfully adorn atmospheric songs, the best output comes when her voice takes hold of the melody. “Born Again,” the best song of the night, exploits Elle’s vocal abilities to create catchy hooks that I might just be humming as I write this.

Another highlight of the night was the cover of Roxy Music’s “More Than This,” beautifully carried out by Elle’s vocal creativity. This rendition was an effective homage to their 1980s influences, an essential part of their sound.

As with many Canadian acts, DIANA’s rise to indie pseudo-stardom has come with nationalistic exaltations and excruciatingly loud buzz. This is dangerous. Many acts that are heavily influenced by their peers end up with a somewhat generic sound, and the buzz ends up being their demise. DIANA is close to being this sort of band, but at POP, they lived up to a lot of the praise, especially surrounding their ability to move a crowd in their live shows.

Most importantly, the show proved that DIANA has a promising horizon. Yet this might be the biggest problem with the band. DIANA is good enough to display signs of perhaps becoming a darling in its own niche, but they presently lack enough ‘oomph’ and experience. In an explicit indication of this, the band was unable to perform encore songs despite the audience’s demand because, according to Elle, they didn’t know how to play any more songs. This earnestness mimics the sincerity in their sound and lyrics, which is perhaps what keeps the buzz and hums going.

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Anarchism Without Adjectives: On The Work of Christopher D’Arcangelo (1975-1979) is the first attempt at creating “a posthumous exhibition or coherent analysis” of the artist’s work, according to its curators, Dean Inkster and Sébastien Pluot. Displayed at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University, the exhibition features texts and visual archives that document D’Arcangelo’s life and work. D’Arcangelo himself chronicled his work through visual and written documents, which were donated by Cathy Weiner – the artist’s girlfriend from 1974 to 1979 – and the D’Arcangelo Family Partnership to the Fales Library at New York University. The Anarchism Without Adjectives collection has travelled to several venues in New York City, Spain, and Belgium before arriving in Montreal last Tuesday.

D’Arcangelo became notorious in the 1970s for his confrontational performances intended to question the institution of art. Focusing his critique on the curatorial process and the way art is viewed, D’Arcangelo constantly deconstructed the museum as a space, as seen in his action at the Louvre.  He gained some notoriety in 1975 when he chained himself to the door of the Whitney Museum during its biennial exhibition and remained there for about an hour as visitors walked past.

The exhibition dwells heavily in the past via second-hand accounts to tell D’Arcangelo’s story. Recorded interviews with art historians and other artists – including the likes of Lawrence Weiner and Benjamin Buchloh – give attendants a broad grasp of the introspective critique of his art. Throughout the space, one also gains a sense of his network of collaborators, including big name artists like Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman, with whom he participated in a display at Artists Space in New York City. Although the D’Arcangelo oeuvre did not fall into complete oblivion, his work was largely ignored in comparison to these artists.

Anarchism Without Adjectives, therefore, is a display that evokes the ethos of his work. In the video installation “Yours in Solidarity,” Nicoline van Harskamp creates “a global network of anarchists in the 1970s by displaying mail correspondence between them and making a video re-enacting the text in the letters. The piece helps to call to mind the political climate informing D’Arcangelo’s work.

D’Arcangelo’s unwavering commitment to this critique of art shaped the form of his work to the fleeting and immaterial, making it especially challenging to document and construct his legacy. Because the exhibition achieves the goal of conjuring his anarchist spirit and political determination, it is crucial to question the way in which it is set up. In spite of explicitly engaging with a critique of art, the fact remains that this is an exhibition displayed in the traditional space of a gallery. In this sense, as his work is materialized, its uncommodifiable character is destroyed, making it readily accessible for the comfortable consumption of gallery attendants.

To be sure, the exhibition displays original works that serve a different political function than D’Arcangelo’s, and are not to be examined under the same light. But to keep his legacy alive, and commit to the intention of the exhibition, it is crucial to call into question the way this exhibition is displayed. Anarchism Without Adjectives lack the immediate, ephemeral, and communal aspects of his work. Many have drawn parallels between his work and Occupy Wall Street, which is perhaps a useful analogy as both are manifestations of radical non-conformism, something not found in a gallery at Concordia.

Anarchism Without Adjectives will be running until October 26 at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Room LB-165, J.W. McConnell Library Building, 55 Maisonneuve.

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Organized by Passovah Productions, the festival is in its second instalment this year, following the success of its inaugural year which featured over 24 local acts. The mastermind behind all of this is Noah Bick, creative director of Passovah who, despite his youth, has been active in the Montreal music scene for almost half a decade.

It is partly due to his experience with local independent music institutions like Pop Montréal and Blue Skies Turn Black that Bick has been able to put together a festival with over 50 acts, mostly local and undoubtedly independent. Scheduled artists include Miracle Fortress, Cinema L’Amour, Ari Stone, and Holobody.

“I’m in my fifth year of promoting shows independently as Passovah, so we started in February 2008, and then last summer was the first edition of Passovah Fest. It was kind of a way to say let’s try doing something new…a space where I can do my own thing,” Bick told The Daily in an interview.

In a way, being entrenched in the local scene gives Passovah Fest its distinctive feel of a community-based event. Through his experience in the independent scene, Bick has been able to meet the burgeoning artists showcased in the festival, thus the event he has planned ultimately looks more like a gathering of extremely talented friends. “It’s a way of doing local shows but keeping it exciting, so for me 50 acts over three days is something fresh that no one else doing,” said Bick.

“There are not very many other festivals that showcase local talent in that way, and there is no other festival that has such a compressed [format]. You can walk into a room at 8[p.m.] and stay till 1:30 and you have seen like 12 different acts…no other festival here does that.”

Passovah promises to offer Montrealers a taste of a great number of local bands, at a lower price, and without the annoyances inherent in bigger, more corporate festivals. Using a “pay-what-you-can” model, Bick hopes to keep the festival accessible to those who want to support the artists.

“Some people are really broke, people who are artists and support the artist community don’t have a lot of money, but some people have “9-to-5s” and are still part of the artist community and make a lot money,” Bick said. “If someone wants to drop 30 or 40 bucks you are more than welcome but if you really can only pay one dollar, I’d rather have you in the room than not in the room.”

One thing that makes this year’s festival different from the previous editions is the partnership with the Immigrant Workers’ Centre of Montreal. According to Bick, part of the festival’s proceeds will go to help the organization, which, according to its website, seeks to “[defend] the rights of immigrants in their places of work and fights for dignity, respect, and justice.”

And even though Passovah already seems too good to be true, with its colossal number of local acts, its support for social justice organizations, and its commitment to accessibility for attendants, it looks like it is only going to get bigger and better. Bick has big plans for the festival next year, trying to get funding from the government and hoping to take the festival outdoors.

The post Not a festival to pass over appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Located in Parc-Extension, Eastern Bloc is an arts production centre focusing on New Media and interdisciplinary art exhibitions. The centre is known for supporting young artists and recent graduates. Correspondingly, the pieces in their Sight & Sound festival attract younger and technologically inclined audiences.

In selecting pieces to showcase in the festival, Eastern Bloc Artistic Director Eliane Ellbogen told The Daily that curators took into account “the artist’s process; their critical engagement towards digital media; the quality of [the] project, and how it relates to the proposed theme of the festival.”

This year, Sight & Sound is exploring the theme of the “Black Market” in an attempt to lay bare its dark aura and “clandestine networks.” “We are committed to presenting work that provides strong socio-political content, especially in an era of networked technologies where we aren’t always familiar with or aware of how this technology affects our daily life,” says Ellbogen. “We seek to uncover the mechanisms that dictate how we relate to technology, to demystify the artistic process as it applies to New Media. The proposed theme ‘Black Market’ allowed us to fully explore these concerns, which to a certain extent influence most of our curatorial decisions at Eastern Bloc,” she continued.

With this in mind, one of Sight & Sound’s biggest strengths is its ability to deal with and question its own artistic medium. Replete with self-referential elements, the festival’s installations avoid the aesthetics and gimmicks of traditional high-tech exhibits and, instead, reflect the very nature of technology as it relates to bigger societal structures. Thanks to coherent curatorial decisions, Sight & Sound excels in its goal of deconstructing narratives surrounding New Media.

In The Pirate Cinema, one such self-referential installation, Nicolas Maigret and Brendan Howell expose the ubiquitous yet covert surveillance mechanisms embedded in the virtual black market. The artists create a space reminiscent of a control-room, with three screens each showcasing a different digital, illegal transaction as it happens in real time. Fragments of cultural and pornographic iconography appear on screen, accompanied by a host and receiving IP address, which, in turn, denotes a specific physical location. Here, the artists explore the much-discussed overload of media consumption as the viewer’s attention shifts quickly from product to product. Yet the installation digs deep beneath the surface of digital space, showing its foundations and construing it as an improvised topography where the illegal, contingent, and cultural converge.

With three pieces included in Sight & Sound, Constant Dullaart also injects his own critique of New Media into the festival’s wider scrutiny of technology. Dullaart turns to some of the world’s best-known websites to assess how they have transformed social relations, and how these relations translate to structural power imbalances.

In Terms of Service, Dullaart anthropomorphizes the Google homepage as a search bar-cum-mouth reads the website’s terms of service aloud. Dullaart politicizes the aesthetically-simple, apparently-politically-neutral website, transforming it into a spokesperson against power inequalities in internet user-product relations. The piece sheds a light on the unequal distribution of information inherent in the most common of internet transactions, portraying how often users unknowingly fall into illegality and the cyber black market.

In his video essay Crystal Pillars, Dullaart turns his social commentary to Facebook as a voice actor creates a narrative of personal experiences mediated by a perceived commodification of social interactions. With a deeply emotional and affecting narrative, the Berlin-based artist unveils the ways in which social media has changed the social landscape, transforming groups of friends into networks of contacts, and giving cyber-subjects an illusory sense of control in the curation of their idealized self.

The festival also featured experimental performances, including Erin Sexton’s Phase Space, a hybrid of a lab experiment and rave in which the Montreal-based artist manipulates sugar, copper sulfate, sodium, and other substances that usually belong in a chemistry class to create an enticing visual and auditory spectacle. Using a microscopic camera, Sexton projects magnified views of crystals on a screen while amplifying the sound of the friction made when camera meets matter.

The piece developed out of Sexton’s installation work Crystalline Domains, which, as she told The Daily, was born out of her decision to teach herself how to grow crystals and do basic chemistry. “It started as lab experiments, which I documented, in microscope video,” explained Sexton. Along with “sonifying crystal solutions and crystals themselves, and the documentation process, I’m in the process of turning [this] into audiovisual installation works […] I am a performance artist and a sound artist first and foremost, so I want to do performance work, so [Phase Space] was the culmination of that.”

The performance is at times a parade of textures, at others fiercely grounded in the artist’s physical presence, as Sexton integrates her own body into her magnification and manipulation by making the microscopic camera scrutinize her hair.

“My sound performance is always very physical, it’s always me touching things, me like smashing the table to make feedback, it’s very gritty, but I did a performance a year and a half ago…and then all of the sudden I just decided to put my face down on the table and start making mouth sounds into a microphone and my hair was in the camera that I was using. I love the aesthetic and that sort of raw, visceral, getting right into it, not caring, you know, just going for it…”

Apart from its physically affecting aspect – at a point the artist even gave me a headache by repeating loud, high-pitched sounds – Sexton also engages in a conversation of individual subjectivity by comparing the human time scale to the time scale of nature.

“Nature is very slow, things happen very slowly, especially when you’re growing crystals…it takes a lot of patience and it really makes you reflect on your own subjectivity and your process of perception. It’s about trying to have a dialogue with the time scale of nature,” Sexton explained.

Sight & Sound also features other fascinating installations like Melissa Clarke’s Sila and several workshops where audience and artist interact, which, according to Ellbogen, have been received very positively.

“People are really into the workshop programming because [the workshops] offer a new point of entry into New Media art, another way to engage with these artistic practices,” she said. “The audience also appreciates the opportunity to interact with the artists and our programming allows them to do that.”

“What we are trying to do with the festival and the rest of our programming is let people know – the larger art community, the Montreal residential community, for example – that we are all somehow involved with digital culture,” explained Ellbogen. “Our smartphones are evidence to this.”

The future looks bright for Eastern Bloc, the Sight & Sound festival, and its featured artists, but this is perhaps because they are already ahead of their time. In the meantime, it is for the rest to try and catch up.

Sight & Sound will run till Wednesday, May 29 at Eastern Bloc.

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The meeting started with an address by incoming principal Suzanne Fortier. Fortier, who will take office in September 2013, praised the reputation of the university and emphasized her excitement about working at McGill.

The bulk of the session was taken up by the presentation of the Achieving Strategic Academic Priorities (ASAP) 2012 implementation progress update and the McGill University Budget for 2013-2014. The former had been postponed from a previous meeting on March 20.

Principal Heather Munroe-Blum announced that based on indexation calculation for 2011, the government estimated that the tuition hike for the next academic year would amount to 2.6 per cent for the 2014 year – instead of the 3 per cent previously cited by the government.

Provost Anthony Masi presented the projected budget for the upcoming academic year and focused on the financial challenges faced by the University. The biggest challenge that Masi referred to was the government-imposed budget cuts of $124 million for universities across Quebec.

Masi explained that McGill will end the current financial year with a $30-million deficit, since the University put the $19 million government cuts and the $6 million it did not receive – but had included in previous budget calculations – from rescinded tuition hikes, into its overall accumulated deficit.

In defense of the drastic cuts the University has been making to match government cuts, Masi told Senate that the University had predicted an “unsustainable” accumulated operating budget deficit of $43 million for FY 2014

The cuts will be implemented through hiring freezes and suspending job re-classifications; one-year wage freezes for labour units who accept it, with likely cuts in headcounts for those that don’t;  and voluntary retirements via incentive packages. The University also mentioned that there could be additional staff reductions depending on how many voluntary retirements come through.

Masi also referred to the controversy regarding the closure of the Education and Life Sciences libraries as provoked by budgetary cuts, and asked Senate to examine what the physical space of libraries should look like in the future.

Code of Student Conduct and Disciplinary Procedures

Senate also voted to approve revisions to the Code of Student Conduct and Disciplinary Procedures proposed by Dean of Students André Costopoulos and Associate Provost (Policies, Procedures and Equity) Lydia White.

According to White, the revision was initiated to make the Code more “user-friendly” for students and staff, stating that “the current Code is very hard to follow.”

The review process started in 2010 under former Dean of Students Jane Everett, who formed a working group on the issue. In 2012, at the Principal’s request, White started chairing another working group to examine how the Manfredi report would affect the Code.

Among the changes made was the replacement in item 5 of the word ‘disruption’ by ‘obstruction.’ The rationale behind this, the official Senate document reads, is to introduce clarity since “it is easier to define obstruction than disruption, especially given the fact that the Manfredi report recommends a certain amount of tolerance for disruption.

The revision also states that disruption is no longer considered an academic offence

At the March 20 meeting, when the revisions were first presented, Senator Catherine Lu spoke against the proposed elimination of point 5c, which stated that nothing in the Article or Code shall “be construed to prohibit peaceful assemblies and demonstrations, lawful picketing, or to inhibit free speech. 

In response, White pointed to a newly-added article 4c, which states that no article in the Code “shall limit the rights guaranteed under the Charter of Students Rights.

The revised article 5 now reads “no student shall, by action, threat, or otherwise, knowingly obstruct University activities. University activities include but are not limited to, teaching, research, studying, administration, public service, scheduled events and activities.

Student Senator Max Zidel raised concerns over what he considered a “hierarchy” created by the article.

“Is the problem obstruction or unpeaceful obstruction…. [this] suggests that teaching, research, and studying are more university activities than dissent,” Zidel said.

In its revision to disciplinary hearings procedure, the working group also added a provision, 48c, which “allows a student access to relevant documentation in advance of any meeting”, which is currently not the case. Such a provision ensures that students and advisors have access to the same evidence as disciplinary officers prior to scheduled interviews.

In terms of academic offences, the revision changed and clarify the definition of plagiarism in the code, as it was previously inconsistent with the one found in the Regulations Concerning Investigation to Research Misconduct – a document outlining the University’s general framework for conducting research.

The post Senate discusses University budget appeared first on The McGill Daily.

A cache of around 400 documents, most of them from the past six years, provide a look at the inner workings of McGill’s department of Development and Alumni Relations (DAR), including detailed profiles of the University’s top donors, and proposal for partnerships with some of the world’s largest companies.

The documents, made available yesterday by McGillLeaks, are a sampling of the daily traffic between University administrators and researchers working for Alumni Relations.  They chronicle the trips of senior administrators abroad and their meetings with potential donors and partners from across the world.

The leaks depict an administration that is eager to make inroads with new economic partners such as Canada’s growing oil and gas industry and willing to go to great lengths to foster its relationship with its donors. The anonymous group McGillLeaks sent the documents from the SSMU Internal account to all SSMU members on Monday night.

The email, sent around a quarter to 9 p.m., contained a link to troves of documents obtained by the group from anonymous sources. McGillLeaks released similar documents more than a year ago containing donor and corporation profiles, correspondence pertaining to corporate funding, and industrial partnerships.

In their latest email, McGillLeaks stated that they received “hundreds of University documents, many marked confidential or strictly confidential pertaining to McGill’s corporate funding efforts.”

“In March 2012, we released to the public about one third of the documents in our possession. McGill University took legal action that delayed our release of the other documents. These focus on McGill’s fundraising activities in the oil and gas, mining and financial sectors,” the email continued. “We are pleased to now make public these remaining documents…”

McGilllLeaks wrote that their objectives are to provide “a clear account of corporate university’s inner workings,” “supplying accurate information on the university’s relationship with the private sector,” and to create “transparency within the university.”

SSMU President Josh Redel and SSMU VP Internal Michael Szpejda sent an email shortly afterwards apologizing for the mass email. “It was done so without the knowledge or permission of the SSMU VP Internal,” the message read.

They also noted that “no personal information beyond your McGill email is stored in MailChimp” – SSMU’s mass email server.

On Monday night, Redel told The Daily that he would notify SSMU’s lawyer of the situation. He clarified the next day that the VP Internal account was not hacked. In fact, SSMU’s MailChimp account was accessed by someone with knowledge of the password.

“We changed all the passwords [… and implemented ] a new IT policy to make sure that we rotate passwords more often and also work on communication in the passwords and whatnot, how we store them and all that,” Redel said in reference to new security measures.

Redel said that they have received a “decent” amount of emails responding to the incident. “The most unfortunate thing about this is that like in this software people have the option to remove themselves, so we’re seeing a lot of people unsubscribe from the listserv. So that’s an unfortunate fallout,” he said.

Vice-Principal of External Relations Olivier Marcil told The Daily in an email that the University was “aware that confidential documents belonging to the University and containing personal information were stolen and published on the Internet without our consent.”

“It’s the second time that McGill has had to deal with this type of incident. The police are investigating and we are doing our best to limit dissemination of the documents in question,” he continued.

In 2012, following the first leak by the anonymous group, Marcil released a statement to The Daily saying that the actions were “an attempt to hurt the wellbeing of the University, and hurts individuals whose only intent is to support our students and professors. We deeply regret this invasion of their privacy.”

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This analysis comes as University administrators across the province prepare to implement provincial budget cuts. At McGill, the cuts have taken a toll on staff, as the University asks different campus groups to accept wage and hiring freezes for the upcoming year and warns of layoffs.

In an interview with The Daily, Marleau explained that the McGill University Non-Academic Certified Association (MUNACA) strike last semester, and the student movement of the past year, prompted him to look into the University’s finances.

“[I was] trying to figure out why McGill was always running deficits every single year. Because it is highly unusual that an organization would continuously run deficits every single year, unless there is something systematically wrong.”

One of Marleau’s problems with the University’s financial reporting practices is the significant gap between its projected and actual expenses and revenues. For example, operating revenues were projected to be $602.7 million in 2011 fiscal year (FY) and $652.7 million in the FY 2012 budget.  The actual operating revenues, however, were $630.9 million in FY 2011 and $709.8 million in FY 2012.

Vice-Principal (Administration and Finance) Michael Di Grappa told The Daily in an email that the inconsistency came in 2011 from changes to the measurement of the fiscal year, following a government mandate to change the end of the year from May 31 to April 30.

“FY 2011 was an 11 month reporting period. The difference is therefore based on real tuition not being prorated over the 11 month period while the budget had prorated tuition and fees for 11 months.”

Di Grappa attributed the discrepancy in 2012 “to sales of goods and services due to the operations of an additional residence (Carrefour Sherbrooke) and government grant adjustment, mostly related to enrolment.”

According to Marleau, some of the differences between budget projections and actual financial statements occur “because the assumptions behind the budgets turn out to be wrong.” To illustrate this, Marleau showed the enrolment projections included in the FY 2008 budget. At the time, the University calculated enrolment increases of no more than 2 per cent a year and decreases in almost every year of Doctoral enrolment. The actual enrolment of all full-time students, however, shows a different landscape, with increases of over 3 per cent for most years, including a 7.2 per cent increase for a year in which a decrease was projected.

According to Marleau, “there is no real explanation to be given, they just make assumptions, and for the enrolment data it is very surprising because you control it.”

Di Grappa told The Daily: “We have no control over how many students will accept the offers in any one year. Our past experience is that we have had more acceptances than anticipated,” he continued.

After this, Marleau focused his talk on the operating deficits the University has been running since 2007, and the decisions that cause these deficits.

McGill’s finances are divided into four funds: the operating fund, dealing with day-to-day expenses; the restricted fund; the Plant Fund, encompassing the capital assets of the University; and the endowment fund, essentially the University’s investment portfolio.

Marleau stated that operating deficits, as defined by McGill, occur only after inter-fund transfers.  “One should look at [the period] before the transfers to see if the operations are running the deficits or if it truly is caused by other activities.”

According to Marleau’s calculations, for example, in FY 2008, the University had an operating surplus of $7,198,000 before inter-fund transfer, and a $16,253,000 deficit after the transfer. This is the biggest discrepancy in the period between 2008 and 2012, but all years show a drop in the operating fund.

In the presentation, Marleau stated that the money transferred is going to capital purchases and to cover shortfalls created when payouts from the University’s endowment were reduced from 5 per cent to 4.25 per cent in 2010.

However, Marleau also pointed to the growth in expenses within the Operating Fund since FY 2007.  18 per cent was in academic salaries, which did not grow after 2010; 9.2 per cent in student salaries, 30.2 per cent in administrative and support staff; 39.1 percent in benefits, largely due to changes in benefits calculations, and 535 per cent in student aid, though he noted this growth only represents $22.7 million.

Within the administrative and support staff growth, Marleau also highlighted that the increase can be largely attributed to a 33 per cent increase in management positions from 2006 to 2011.

Speaking to this, Marleau suggested a reorganization of McGill’s managers, stating that the “increase in centralized administrative managers is troubling, as it is not clear why the growth is so large.”

Marleau later spoke to how choices could be made differently to avoid the current cuts McGill has to undertake.

“Maybe we should target those expenses that have raised too high a rate, rather than expenses that have not. That’s why I wanted to look at those specific items and then see where’s the money going, because you can’t, if you spend the money in a targeted manner and then force across the board cuts, you’re not doing it correctly,” Marleau told The Daily.

As such, Marleau has called for the re-evaluation of capital assets and needs. “The infrastructure is the problem, not the cost of employees, so from my perspective the operating fund normally would be fine if the infrastructure wasn’t problematic.”

In the presentation, he pointed to the $822 million in deferred maintenance costs for capital assets that are themselves only worth $1.2 billion.

When asked by The Daily if these costs could be reduced, Di Grappa stated: “The $822 million is the current value of work required to bring the buildings back to an acceptable state of operations. The $1.2 billion represents the cost of acquisitions of all our current capital assets. The two don’t relate.”

Marleau later pointed to potential discrepancies in the numbers and uncertain questions for the future.

“The evaluation of the capital infrastructure was done at the height of the corruption scandal here in Montreal for public works,” he said, “but to be quite honest, it may not actually be that high.”

“Should we try to have different buildings? Should we try to buy buildings off-campus, could that be cheaper, maybe it’s not worth it to repair certain buildings? Those are the type of questions that need to be asked.”

The post AGSEM official calls McGill’s financial records inconsistent appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The document arose from modifications to the protest protocol, which was met with fierce opposition earlier this semester. The protocol was then divided into two documents: The Statement of Principles Concerning Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Peaceful Assembly, and the Operating Procedures Regarding Demonstrations, Protests and Occupations on McGill University Campuses.

Provost Anthony Masi presented the Statement of Principles for Senate approval at their meeting yesterday. The Operating Procedures document, however, was only presented for information.

Masi opened the discussion by stating that the community has been discussing the “fundamental matters” regarding dissent on campus for over a year. The Statement of Principles, according to Masi, “is an overarching document… this document [that] inform[s] the operating procedures and the people applying those procedures.”

The administration’s rationale behind the adoption of the document is that “the McGill community will be best served by an agreed-upon Statement of Principles which would protect the rights of freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom of peaceful assembly,” according to the document presented to Senate.

“The Statement will contain the overarching principles that guide decisions concerning the rights of members of the McGill community as they relate to these freedoms,” the document read.

Some Senators, however, questioned the existence of the documents altogether. SSMU President Josh Redel questioned the necessity of having those documents and added, “I feel it is a bit lofty for the University to attempt to define our fundamental rights in two mere sentences.  Furthermore, the attempt to define peaceful is, in my mind, ideologically dangerous.”

Faculty Senator Derek Nystrom urged Senate to vote against the document and stated that the body should have also voted on the approval of the Operating Procedures document. “[The Operating Procedures] is where the rubber hits the road. Where we’re going to be defending our principles of freedom and peaceful assembly.”

Masi agreed that resolving specific conflicts using the Statement of Principles is a “question of judgment.” He also stated, however, that the separation of the two documents was an outcome of the consultation process.

Arts Senator James Gutman criticized the consultation process because of its failure to bring together all actors on campus, citing campus unions who “are very upset about this.”

Campus unions held a demonstration against the documents on January 23.

“If you didn’t take part in the consultation, quite frankly, that is your problem,” said Masi.

PGSS Secretary-General Jonathan Mooney, on the other hand, questioned the drafting process and committee. Pointing to the representation of students, staff members, faculty, and administrators in the Senate, he stated: “if Senate is going to vote on the adoption [of the document], why was a committee not struck with the same broad constituency to write the document?”

Masi said that the people involved in the drafting of the document came from the offices most involved in the consultation process this semester.

Following a failed motion to table the discussion, Senate approved the motion to adopt the Statement of Principles.

Vice-Principal (Administration and Finance) Michael DiGrappa then presented the Operating Procedures that will accompany the Statement of Values. The document is set to “provide a framework for determining whether or not action or intervention is necessary in the case of demonstrations… and actions that contravene internal policies or the law.”

“Tolerance is expected for the expression of dissent, and for a certain degree of inconvenience arising from the means by which dissenting opinions may be expressed. At all times, decisions will be sensitive to context and will reflect the exercise of sound judgment by those in charge,” the document reads.

The document continues on to give benchmarks to decide whether demonstrations, assemblies, protests, and occupations are peaceful.

Redel questioned the role of the document.

“To define direct action is to restrict it. To restrict it, regardless of intent, defeats the purpose of having direct action in the first place, which is in direct contradiction to the statement that opens the documents.”

“Finally, it mentions that action takers are responsible for their actions, but it is crucial further that it mentions that McGill is as well responsible for its actions.  This is clearly required as per the Manfredi report in regards to proper management of hired security agents, where it was made clear that security agents did not handle certain situations appropriately,” Redel said.

When asked by Nystrom why the Operating Procedures were not up for approval, Principal Heather Munroe-Blum replied that operational procedures are not usually approved though governance structures like Senate.

Senators also discussed the process surrounding McGill joining edX and the implementation of Massively Open Online Courses, (MOOCs) as well as changes to the student code of conduct to be voted on next time Senate meets.

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The Philosophy Students’ Association (PSA), which represents all undergraduate students in the department, currently exists under the Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS). The PSA started the process of accreditation in October 2012 to gain more control over its finances.

In February, the PSA finalized the first step of the accreditation process – incorporation – when it created an independent bank account.

Following incorporation, the PSA was required to hold a vote in which Philosophy students would decide whether they wished to accredit the PSA.

After a week of voting, the PSA announced on Friday that it received enough “yes” votes to continue with the process. The provincial government requires student associations to receive a “yes” vote from at least 25 per cent of its constituents; the PSA needed 92 students to vote in favour.

According to PSA President Jonathan Wald, the final vote count was of 107 votes total, with 105 “yes” votes and two “no” votes.

Until the provincial government approves the voting procedure, the results will be unofficial.

“We are not accredited yet; the Quebec government still needs to give its approval on everything, make sure that everything was done in accordance to their students, it will be, of course, official as of that moment,” said Wald.

The votes were counted on Friday at 5 p.m., after which the PSA sent emails to different campus groups to deliver the news.

“We alerted the AUS, SSMU, and the McGill administration that the vote has taken place and the results of that vote just to start that discussion,” said Wald.

AUS VP Internal Justin Fletcher told The Daily that the AUS has yet to discuss the issue, and will wait until the decision is official before they discuss their relationship with the PSA.

However, he did say that, “it is important that we respect that their students voted for it and it’s something they have been working hard on all year.”

The next step for the PSA, if the provincial government approves the vote, is to hold a GA in which students will create a constitution for the organization.

“The next step for us is to be holding a general assembly, which we are tentatively going to say is in two weeks, and that would be setting our fee and approving a constitution,” Wald said.

The post Philosophy students vote for accreditation appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Fortier will replace Heather Munroe-Blum, who has been leading the University since 2003, and who will be stepping down June 30, 2013. An Acting Principal will be appointed to serve from July until September.

Fortier, a McGill alumna, has been serving since 2006 as the president for the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), a government agency that provides research grants in the natural sciences and engineering fields.

Fortier left her post yesterday to adopt the new role as principal in six months, in accordance with the Conflict of Interest Act.

A 14-person advisory committee was formed to narrow down the pool of candidates. The final list was presented to the Board of Governors (BoG) for a final decision.

In searching for a new Principal, the University hired the services of the international headhunting firm Odgers and Berndtson. According to invoices filed to the University and posted to McGilliLeaked, the price tag for that search for a four month period between June 2012 and September 2012 was $178,690.

SSMU VP University Affairs Haley Dinel took part in the selection process as the only undergraduate student on the advisory board.

“Her skills as a leader are what McGill needs. She’s bilingual, which is great, she’s from Quebec, which is even better. She’s worked in government now for almost ten years, you can’t survive there without a lot of grit, and she’s got a nice balance of that, with passion for education and McGill,” Dinel said.

Fortier will come to McGill at a time of financial uncertainty. Following the retroactive budget cuts imposed upon universities by the provincial government, McGill has to contend with an unexpected loss of $19 million this year alone.

In an interview with The Daily, Fortier addressed McGill’s financial challenges and her experience in dealing with budget cuts.

“I have experience with dealing with some sort of financial constraints in periods where institutions have to make cuts. That was part of the situation when I was at Queen’s [University]… And then of course in the job I just left at NSERC, although the budget for research and grants was totally protected, our internal budget was not,” Fortier said. “We were […] establishing the principles and priorities, our values, making sure that we could be clear on what needed to be preserved, in future benefit of the organization, where we could take a cut, where we could tighten our belt. This is a difficult exercise but I think that it is important that it is done in a team spirit and with the community.”

Fortier’s appointment also comes a year after the beginning of the student strike. When asked whether she believed students should play a bigger role in funding universities, Fortier pointed to focusing on the quality of education.

“To me, the more important question has to do with the quality of education, the quality of the experience of learning in our great institution. Accessibility, the tuition fees are just a small fraction of the total cost of attending universities. The bigger costs are with lodging and food and so on, so I think that looking at the bigger question in terms of what university education and the kinds of doors it opens for you, the quality, the experience that you need to have,” she said.

“This is what I’d look to focus on initially. The tuition fees, or funding, are a means to achieving those goals. I always prefer to start with what is it that we wanna do? What are goals? What are our values? Once we define that, we ask, how are we going to be able to achieve that?” Fortier added.

Fortier also told The Daily that the conclusions reached during the education summit were “a step” in a process that will continue in the next months.

“The summit was just one beginning element, if you want, in the exercise that will happen in Quebec in looking at the whole post-secondary sector and looking at the role of the sector and what we need to do in the province,” Fortier said.

McGill’s administration has also had tense relations with labour unions on campus in the past few years. Following the six-month long MUNACA strike, AGSEM recently staged a walk-out from a meeting with senior administrators as a result of the cuts to course lecturer positions in the Faculty of Arts.

Fortier touched upon previous experience in negotiating collective agreements in her interview with The Daily.

“When I was at Queens, my last responsibility there as VP Academic was in fact at the bargaining table. […] I have quite a bit of experience in labour negotiation, and I have learned a lot from that experience… When you look at organizations, such as universities, it is absolutely the case that the best assets is your people and that this is something you have to keep in mind all the time,” she said.

“The most important thing you learn is the values and principles that you bring to the table, and how important it is to have those very well anchored,” she added.

Fortier expressed that her time at NSERC will help bring to McGill the “experience of partnership and collaboration.”

“At NSERC I was very much part of the world of research and innovation, which is extremely linked to the world of education in our country. I had the opportunity to see how this world has evolved. In the recent years there have been incredible transformations. We now live in a world that is absolutely open, without borders, in these areas of education, research, and innovation,” she said.

Dinel echoed those sentiments, stating that Fortier’s experience at NSERC would be useful because “it has a similar budget to McGill’s, it’s about 1 billion dollars that she oversees the allocation of.”

“She gets research from both sides, so she understands it from being the person giving out the money, but also as the professor and the researcher applying to it,” Dinel said.

Fortier, however, stressed that her most recent experience in research will not deter her from developing teaching at McGill.

“My most recent experience was with the NSERC, but before that I was for 25 years a member of Queen’s University, I was there as a professor in the school of graduate studies, Vice-Principal  (Research) and Vice-Principal (Academic). And what I learned through these wonderful experiences at Queen’s is that you have to connect all of these. Research is increasingly connected with the learning experience and they are not separate or competing priorities but ones that are very much interestingly linked,” Fortier said.

The post Suzanne Fortier elected as McGill’s new principal appeared first on The McGill Daily.

In an internal memo addressed to Program Directors and Specialization Coordinators, FAES Associate Dean (Academic) William Hendershot pointed to the likely possibility of the faculty receiving a directive to cut low-enrolment courses, and to create a preemptive plan to manage the down-sizing “in a less damaging fashion.”

The memo reads that “in light of the severe financial situation of the University, it is quite possible that we will be faced with the need to decrease the number of courses we teach. I expect that the directive will focus on low-enrolment courses, without any consideration of the effect that this would have to our programs.”

Hendershot asked department heads to evaluate the relative importance of certain courses in programs, to rank the complementary ones in their programs and to identify those that are not essential.

Attached to the document was a list of courses described as “less important” to each program, which, as the document states, could be dropped with the least impact. These courses include those that are not prerequisites or program requirements.

Natural Resources Sciences Department Chair Jim Fyles told The Daily that the memo was the most recent part of an ongoing discussion, which has been taking place for at least five years.

“This is in part preparation. We expect there to be budget cuts, really serious budget cuts to be coming down shortly and over the next few years. This kind of prior reflection on these courses when we get into that position these are courses that we would look at to say, could we amalgamate those courses with other courses? Do we really need them to be taught?” Fyles said.

“In our case, [the memo] raised a lot of questions about how the offering of those courses link to government funding. Because we know that different courses have different government funding weight…if we decide we are going to close courses, we should have some sense of what that means in terms of its attachment to government funding,” he added.

The document also states that in all probability the budget for course lecturers will be zero in 2013-2014. “That means that other members of the teaching staff will be expected to teach courses that would otherwise be taught by lecturers,” reads the document.

According to Hendershot, teaching fewer courses will increase the time faculty members have to do other tasks that could increase revenue, like writing grant proposals and working on recruiting materials.

There are currently ten course lecturers employed in FAES, who are paid $7,200 per three-credit course.

In an email to The Daily, AGSEM-McGill Teaching Union’s Communications Officer Stefana Lamasanu wrote that AGSEM had not heard about courses being cut, but is “outraged that such decisions continue to be taken without discussing them with the course lecturers,” Lamasanu said.

“The administration is clearly not interested in consulting with those primarily affected by these cuts; this is unacceptable and worrisome.”

“There is no question that it will affect, we don’t currently have a budget line item for course lecturers, but we use a variety of funding sources, some of which are freeing up money from other locations that we use for teaching some courses and those will have to be taught in different ways,” said Fyles in response.

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Incorporation is the first step toward accreditation which, if achieved, would turn the PSA into an independent organization in the eyes of the University and the provincial government.

The PSA is currently a departmental association under the accredited Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS).

According to PSA President Jonathan Wald, the organization is seeking accreditation to obtain more control over its finances.

“It would give us more freedom to run the activities we would like to on a more speedy basis, without much of the red tape. It would also reduce the workload on the AUS, and as we have seen over the past year the AUS has had trouble with its audits,” Wald told The Daily.

The process began last October after the AUS announced its intention to internalize all of the departmental associations’ bank accounts, on the advice of its financial auditors in order to comply with their Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) with McGill.

“The two alternatives were: either the AUS further internalizes us, which we saw as complicating things with more red tape, or complete externalization, if you will, which would be accreditation,” Wald said.

The Accreditation Act requires the PSA to obtain 25 per cent of undergraduate Philosophy students to approve the accreditation.

If the PSA receives accreditation, it will also have to negotiate its own MoA with McGill.

Deputy Provost Morton Mendelson told The Daily that at this stage, “there are other steps that remain in the process and it would be premature for [the administration] to comment right now.”

Philosophy students would continue to pay AUS fees and would remain members and receive the services of the AUS regardless of whether or not accreditation is obtained.

AUS VP Internal Justin Fletcher told The Daily that the society is waiting for the accreditation vote, and the University’s response before commenting.

“When I sat down and talked to Justin Fletcher last [semester] about PSA accreditation, his worry was that if student associations started to [accredit themselves]…if they start to be more autonomous from the AUS, that the AUS could lose some of its relevancy,” Wald said. “I think it’s in the AUS interests’ for the PSA to remain represented in AUS Council meetings.”

The vote on the accreditation is set to begin on March 11.

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