Point – The strike: York doesn’t care

Mike Sholars
Features and Opinions Editor

None of us have to be here at York.
We have all made the choice to stay here, to learn here, to spend thousands of dollars here. While I have no illusions about the university being anything other than a business, I had always assumed that my loyalty would be rewarded.
During my first year in 2006, I was only at York in order to build a portfolio and apply to Ryerson for journalism. Before I was 20 years old, I had secured an extremely beneficial internship at a magazine, and I was halfway through the process of transferring to that other journalism school.
By this point, however, I had fallen in love with my life at York. I liked my easy commute from Mississauga, I liked my friends and our campus outside of the downtown core. I cancelled my transfer to Ryerson, and threw my hat in with York U for good.
The strike happened in my third year, and I understood that it was a complex issue. I was content to use the time to catch up on my courses, and crossed my fingers that the strike would take us into the winter break. December came and went, as did January.
If I wanted to visit my friends living in the Village, I’d have to cross picket lines. Of course, few of them stayed during this period, and some of my international student friends actually had their visas expire during the strike; a few of them have yet to return.
I took on more hours at my retail job, and when customers would ask how school was going, I’d simply tell them I was at York, and the sympathetic looks they gave me mirrored my feelings on the situation.
In the media, the strike was quickly nearing “biggest ever in Canada” status. I felt several groups on campus were made to show their true colours; the administration infamously said students were paying for “credits, not classes” and the CUPE spokesperson for the region seemed to say something inflammatory every other day.
On top of that, YFS bafflingly took the side of the strikers, abandoning all pretences of being a neutral force in the matter. I watched all of this from the grim shadow of retail, feeling completely directionless. That direction failed to return once classes were back in session.
The first morning I returned to campus, both Breakfast Television and CBC Radio One interviewed me. It was like there had been a murder on campus, and that dark mood persisted throughout the week. My TAs, if not openly hostile, were definitely bitter. A few of them never came back to work. The campus had a feeling of a fight left unresolved – and to be fair, that’s exactly what happened.
I remember one thought sticking in my head at that time: my university doesn’t give a single fuck about me. It was a hard truth, but one that only became further reinforced in the following years. My friends got back into the swing of things, eventually shrugging off the strike and being good students again. I guess in my naivety, I had felt that York U was going to look after me.
When I stopped attending classes, only a handful of my professors noticed, and when I failed the majority of those classes, no one asked why. When I applied for an academic petition to get those failed grades removed, it took me a year to gather the required paperwork from my profs. Once I submitted the petition package last May, the supposedly 80-day wait period took 140 days, at which point, it was too late for me to enrol in full-year courses.
When I stated the reason for failing those classes was “personal depression, followed by months of therapy,” the petition committee requested I provide hard documentation of my depression: a letter from my psychiatrist.
I’m not suggesting that York put me into a depression; the strike coincided with a lot of bad moments in my personal life; however, returning to a school that I knew for a fact didn’t give a damn about me, continuing through a major that I was only finishing for the sake of a degree, and realizing that I had become the student York said I was, one who only cares about credits, certainly allowed me to be in a dark mood.
The administration at York is synonymous with bureaucratic nonsense. When I was in high school, my counsellors warned me about York. When I was taking my year off before university, people I worked with warned me about York. I went anyway, and I chose it over Ryerson.
For me, the strike clearly highlights the moment where I stopped being a student, and became a client. It marked the point that will eventually turn me into someone who warns prospective students against attending my alma mater.
The strike, essentially, is when I stopped giving a damn.