“I go to Osgoode, not York.” This reflexive clarification is a matter of pride for my classmates at York University’s storied law school. The urge to distance our degrees from the university brand is visceral. Last week, it was once again easy to see why. Late Thursday evening, a young woman was shot in the Student Centre. A bystander was injured by shrapnel. Canada’s third largest university went into lockdown. And an armed suspect remains at large.
Contrast these facts with the carefully wordsmithed statement of the university president, and you wouldn’t be alone in wondering if they were describing the same scenario. President Mamdouh Shoukri writes, “I would like to express my thoughts and concerns for our two students who were injured when a firearm was discharged on the evening of March 6th on our Keele campus.” The full text of the statement is accessible through a bland hyperlink on the university’s website entitled “Presidential statement about the incident on campus”. It was issued by email to the York community Friday morning, after many students, faculty, and staff, had already arrived at school, unaware of the horror that had transpired the night before.
An incident? A firearm was discharged? The level of downplay is galling. An individual brandished a lethal weapon in our school and shot a bullet into someone’s body. The lives of our friends, colleagues, and mentors were put at risk in a manner reminiscent of far too many chilling events in recent history. The situation calls for more than mere “thoughts and concerns”. It calls for proactive condemnation and action.
York’s sanitized statement pales in comparison to the Twitter photos of emergency vehicles, the stretchers being loaded into ambulances, or the YouTube video that offered a bird’s eye view of paramedics attending to a screaming victim on the floor of a chaotic food court. The same place where my classmates and I hastily grabbed dinner only a few hours earlier, and where I often see my own young students working with their friends, is now a crime scene.
Unfortunately, such passive, guarded, and impersonal messaging seems to be part and parcel of the greater scheme of York’s reputational defense mode. Time and time again, we have seen the university take this approach; when hand delivering letters to dormitory residents in the wake of other tragedies, for example. Some suggest that this is to avoid the bad news echo effect of email and the internet.
Likewise, on Thursday, no emergency email or text message broadcast was issued, despite the impossibility of administration knowing that the “discharge” would be an isolated occurrence. Emergency messages were emblazoned across campus video screens advising to “stay in place and shelter inside”. Ironically, you would need to be in a public area to see this warning.
If York’s media selection and message content are crafted to constrain reputational damage, it isn’t working. As many scandal-plagued organizations or public figures know, taking ownership for negative issues is a first step in showing leadership to eradicating them, making change, and rallying a community. Sweeping them under the rug with anodyne language doesn’t solve the problem. Worse, it invites public scorn, raises eyebrows, and is deeply distressing to those affected. Thursday’s impact on our collective sense of personal security is poignant and warrants a more timely, honest, and active response.
Coincidentally, President Shoukri’s counterparts have taken proactive positions on their own campus challenges the same week as York’s dismissive tone on the food court gunman. The University of Windsor is currently facing a questionable student referendum and anti-Semitic vandalism surrounding the controversial “Boycott Divest Sanction” (BDS) movement. When asked about racism on campus, President Alan Wildeman said, “We’re an 18,000-person microcosm of the world, with people from 80 countries. I’m not going to say what happens anywhere in the world does not happen on a university campus.” No sugar-coating or blind eyes here: Windsor has launched a full investigation into this issue.
To the east, responding decisively to two separate and serious allegations of sexual harassment and assault at the University of Ottawa, President Allan Rock stated, “These are very troubling times for [our] community. … As you all know, Student Federation President Anne-Marie Roy was the subject of a sexually graphic conversation on Facebook between five student government officials. And on Monday, the University announced that the men’s varsity hockey program had been suspended because of allegations of serious misconduct. … Both incidents raise troubling questions about attitudes and behaviour.” President Rock called a press conference with Chancellor Michaëlle Jean to announce a task force. He condemned the incidents as “repugnant”.
These unanticipated scandals were given direct and candid responses, whereas York has deferred to boilerplate statements, despite its history of safety concerns. March 6 marks the second time since my 2011 enrollment at York that a “firearm discharge” has hit a little close to home – too close and too frequent for euphemisms and platitudes on campus safety. Yet March 7 was business as usual as far as anyone could tell.
Moreover, York’s approach discredits its community’s ability to have a mature conversation about these important issues, and popularizes the mythology that York is a categorically unsafe place. The sterile response reads as the output of some siloed consultant tasked with reducing campus hysteria. In contrast, SlutWalk and the Wendy Babcock Drag Show are two homegrown York initiatives where students responded with solutions when campus injustices were aired openly. These initiatives have served to unify us around a set of values and goals. In each, a sense of pride has grown out of ameliorating uncomfortable circumstances. On the subject of campus safety, we need a shift in focus from milquetoast public relations towards a real, substantive, and participatory approach.
For the York University brand to become a beloved commodity, these issues require an open, forthright, and honest dialogue from its leaders.
But, until we see this, I suppose I just go to Osgoode.