My Platform for SSMU Vice President University Affairs, 2024 to 2025

Originally published to Elections SSMU

Date of original publication: Spring 2024. As a note: I was since elected.

In a term as Vice President University Affairs, I want to improve accessibility for students, hold McGill accountable to reports of discrimination, and ensure that McGill committees are transparent about the state of equity and student rights.

McGill can go a long way in terms of equity. Earlier this year, I requested copies of meeting minutes from the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee (EDIC); sections of these documents about a potential gender pay gap for faculty, anti-black racism, and gender-inclusive washrooms were blacked-out. This secrecy underscores the importance of student representatives in McGill committees - it is in the best interests of students, but not the university itself, to be open about McGill’s flaws.

More transparency from McGill can be partly achieved by higher participation of student senators in the Senate. I want to foster a Senate Caucus that is informed about the internal structure of McGill and comes prepared to ask critical questions of items on the agenda.

I am also interested in getting McGill to implement recommendations from the SSMU report “Accessibility and Accomodations on Campus” that was published in 2023. In general, McGill lacks resources for its disabled students. McGill’s focus on medical diagnosis denies resources to those who might need it most. Aditionally, the Student Accessibility and Achievement Office has little social support services, and its model of opt-in rather than opt-out exam accomodations is a huge source of stress. Accessibility can be improved even for non-disabled students: a guaranteed, short response time for exam deferral requests, and a larger window to drop classes with a refund.

I’d like to increase the participation of student-input into VP UA projects by reviving the University Affairs website and by consulting with SSMU services and clubs to collect on-the-ground testimonies from marginalized groups.

I’m the Recording Secretary of the SSMUnion, and as a director I will break the pattern of the SSMU board neglecting its legal obligation to ratify the SSMUnion collective agreement. I also hope to collaborate with other unions on campus; I believe that the well-being of workers is linked to the quality of education given to students.

I’m also the Administrative Coordinator at Queer McGill. In this capacity, I sit on the SSMU Equity Committee, the Gender and Sexuality Advocacy Committee, and the Services Committee. I’ve been involved in the campaign to end deadnaming and misgendering at McGill, which involved speaking to many McGill adminstrators, and in sitting on an ad-hoc committee on preferred names, struck by Fabrice Labeau. During this time, I learned that administrators were unaware of huge gaps in preferred name implementation. I’d like to see this campaign to its end of a campus with no deadnaming or misgendering.

Other involvements are with the Queers for Palestine collective and the McGill Student Union Democratization Initiative. I was the copy editor of the Daily in 2023, and I wrote several articles concerning student governance and the university. I was the president of the McSway poetry collective, and the Vice President Communications of the Society of Undergraduate Math Students, in the 2022/23 academic year.