Indigenous students lead an opening ceremony and land acknowledgement during the three-day camp-out at New Brunswick’s Mount Allison University. Photo by Lauren Latour.

On a February morning in 2017, Tina Oh and more than 50 students are waiting impatiently in Mawita’mkw, a small gathering space for Indigenous students and community members at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B. Anxious chatter fills the room until suddenly, it’s silent. “It’s time,” Oh tells them, and the students, dressed entirely in black, follow her lead and file into the halls. As they make their way through the building, the group begins singing quietly to calm their nerves. “People going to rise like the water, going to calm this crisis down,” they chant. Their voices grow louder and more confident, echoing as they march through the doors to Tweedie Hall in the student centre. Within seconds of arriving in the room, they collapse suddenly on the hardwood floors.

Suit-clad policy makers stand in surprise, moving to the sides of the space, and watching on with with crossed arms as the students lay limp for nearly an hour. The group is staging a “die-in”—a protest representing the lives endangered by the devastating effects of climate change and the fossil fuel industry. The group has interrupted a board meeting with a set of demands: They call on the administration to cut Mount Allison’s financial ties with the top 200 publicly traded fossil fuel companies within the next five years; they urge them to establish a sustainable and transparent investment policy.

After some muttering among board members, it becomes clear they will be agreeing to no such thing. Holding hands and chanting, the students stand their ground. They are not leaving the building until their demands are met. “We are demonstrating today against the inaction and the violent silence that this board has demonstrated to us,” Oh says. “Understood,” chair Ron W. Outerbridge tells her, and the board members shuffle out of the room, trying not to step on the bodies in their way.

“Being an advocate for climate justice has always been mandatory for me, especially as a woman of colour,” says Oh, a philosophy, political science, and economics student who was born in South Korea and grew up in Edmonton. Most of Oh’s relatives still live in South Korea, where many rely on agricultural work for their livelihood. In recent years, floods, typhoons, and droughts caused by climate change have had a severe impact on the country. That damage is echoed in the devastation caused by recent climate disasters around the world—hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, wildfires across North America, earthquakes in Mexico, and monsoon rains across South Asia.

The divestment campaign at Mount Allison, Divest MTA, began in 2013. It is one of more than 30 active divestment campaigns on campuses across Canada. The groups are calling on their schools to remove investments from the fossil fuels industry and buy into students’ futures by directing new funds in sustainable industries. As campaigns gain momentum, organizers are turning to public, often radical actions to spread their message and sway administrative bodies.

Students at Mount Allison participate in a die-in to protest divestment on campus. Photo by Lauren Latour.

On campuses from coast to coast to coast, divestment organizers are behind one of the most ambitious efforts to fight climate change in Canada. Universities hold a unique position as leaders in thought. Subsequently, organizers believe institutions’ commitment to divestment will tarnish the fossil fuel industry’s reputation in the public consciousness, rendering the industry untouchable.

The divestment movement speaks to a growing understanding that individual commitments to environmentalism no longer suffice in the efforts to tackle climate change. Organizers also know they cannot rely on performative promises of sustainability from governments and corporations. And for many leaders on campus, channelling people power through grassroots collective organizing—and figuratively dropping dead in front of authority figures—is the only way to hold major institutions accountable, effect change, and secure our rights.

***

Fossil fuel divestment has roots in the student movement, beginning on campuses in the United States in 2011. More than 100 educational institutions, many based in the U.S. and U.K., have since committed to divestment. The campus movement has also grown into something much bigger, reaching a vast range of influential establishments, including governments, religious organizations, and philanthropic groups. To date, more than 800 institutions have divested $5.5 trillion from the fossil fuel industry globally.

Divestment is part of the intersectional climate justice movement, which recognizes climate change is an ethical and political issue that disproportionately affects Indigenous people, people of colour, women, poor nations, and LGBTQ folks. The divestment movement is also largely driven by young people, generations who will be disproportionately burdened by the effects of climate change. Members of Divest Dal emphasized this point in fall 2016, when 30 students occupied an administration building on Dalhousie campus to receive stick-and-poke “birthmark” tattoos. Each person was marked with a three-digit tattoo representing the amount of carbon in the air in the year they were born. Climate scientists agree that 350 parts per million (PPM) is the safe limit for a healthy climate. Laura Cutmore patiently waited her turn and tried not to flinch as the needle dug into the skin of her wrist, marking her with a small 356. Last year, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air passed 400 PPM.

To date, more than 800 institutions have divested $5.5 trillion from the fossil fuel industry globally

“Getting a tattoo doesn’t seem very radical compared to the damage that’s being inflicted on the earth,” says Cutmore, who has been organizing with Divest Dal for about two years. A handful of people got tattoos after learning about the severity of the issue, and there was so much demand, Divest Dal had to set up another session at a later date.

Back in New Brunswick, student activists have taken on less permanent methods of action—writing and presenting reports to board members, hosting a sit-in at a local MP’s office, and staging a vigil in protest of the Kinder Morgan pipeline. But after years of lobbying, Divest MTA’s actions left administration unmoved. The group opted for an even more in-your-face demonstration than a die-in. Last March, they organized a three-day camp-out, occupying the lawn of the school in protest. They stayed put amid -10 C temperatures and a massive blizzard; many tents collapsed in the middle of the night. When Robert Campbell, the school’s president, refused to acknowledge the group’s presence, more than 80 people took the protest to the steps of his office, demanding a meeting.

Hours later, after they refused to leave, Campbell agreed to meet with Oh and another student. He disagreed that it was his role to recommend divestment and left soon after. Crestfallen and exhausted with no idea what to do next, Oh burst into tears. Much of the group cried with her. As she was taking down the camp, Oh started feeling significant pain. She realized that sleeping on the ground had aggravated a severe prior internal injury from a car accident. Later, at the ER, a doctor told her she should have been bedridden with agony days earlier; only the adrenaline kept her going.

Out west, Sadie-Phoenix Lavoie, a Two-Spirit Anishinaabe land defender from Sagkeeng First Nation, is a member of the divestment movement as a former student at the University of Winnipeg. Lavoie grew up with a deep connection to the environment, fishing and hunting with their family since they were young. But that environment is under threat. Located at the mouth of the Winnipeg River, 120 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg, Sagkeeng has been deeply affected by industry pollution and development projects, leading to the erosion of reserve lands and a decline of fisheries. Lavoie organized with Divest UW because they believe the school’s ongoing investment in fossil fuels is upholding colonizing behaviour. “It’s disrespecting Indigenous land rights, the right to denial of consent to pipelines, and Indigenous knowledge of what sustainability means,” they say. “It’s just a huge slap in the face for Indigenous students who want to come to a university where the school is respecting them and their connection to the environment.”

“I wanted to make it known that they didn’t break me. They weren’t going to silence me in any way”

The work done by divestment organizers is not restricted to the campus bubble. In October 2016, Lavoie, Oh, and Cutmore were three of 99 young people arrested on Parliament Hill as part of Climate 101, a youth-led mass civil disobedience in protest of rumours that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau planned to approve the Kinder Morgan pipeline. Two weeks later, Lavoie and Oh attended COP22, the United Nations Climate Change conference in Morocco, where they were part of a group of youth holding Canada accountable to its international environmental agreements. Lavoie also had a high-profile confrontation with the prime minister, standing behind him at a town hall in Winnipeg with a banner that read: “Water is Sacred / No Pipelines!” While there, Lavoie and a handful of other young people interrupted him to ask about the lack of Indigenous consent for government-approved resource extraction projects. Trudeau gave a short speech—in a tone Lavoie describes as condescending—about the importance of listening to each other respectfully and asked for permission to continue speaking. Gaining applause from people in the crowd, Trudeau told the young people that if they didn’t allow him to speak, he would have to ask them to leave. “I thought it was really ironic that he was asking for consent to speak but he was denying our right to consent to refuse these pipelines,” Lavoie says.

Lavoie graduated in October, but their work is far from over. When they crossed the stage to accept their diploma at graduation, Lavoie held up a banner that read, “Stop Funding Fossils.” “I wanted to make it known that they didn’t break me. They weren’t going to silence me in any way even though I was leaving the university,” they say. “I will never give up.”

***

Despite mounting pressure from students and alumni, Canadian post-secondary institutions have been hesitant to jump on board. After five years of organizing across the country, one major post-secondary institution has committed to full divestment. In February 2017, after a brief four-month campaign, Quebec City’s Laval University agreed to redirect its endowment fund investments in fossil energy elsewhere, including into renewable energy.

Alice-Anne Simard, who founded ULaval sans fossiles, says their campaign was similar to others across the country: They reached out to students, wrote letters and petitions, compiled researchbased reports, and gained support from student associations. She credits the victory to student involvement and one powerful administrator’s genuine commitment to sustainability. Most of all, administration at Laval recognized the value of bragging rights: The school can say it is the first university in Canada to divest, a claim to sustainable leadership that boosts their image.

Now Simard is encouraging other campaigns to organize, noting how bad it will look for a school to be the last to do so. This could be the reality for schools that have refused to address or flat-out reject divestment. The University of Toronto, McGill, and Queen’s are among schools whose boards of governors have considered and voted down tabled motions to divest. When McGill turned down divestment for the second time in 2016, it stated that there is no proof it would have a real-world impact.

A sign from the Mount Allison camp-out, where dozens of students set up tents in freezing temperatures to protest. Photo by Catherine Dumas, Radio Canada Acadie.

Some post-secondary institutions have responded by creating alternative investment policies. In 2017, UBC reversed its prior refusal to consider divestment, investing up to $25 million in a fossil-free fund over the next two years. A year earlier, the University of Ottawa committed to “shifting” its fossil fuel investments to reduce its carbon footprint by 30 percent by 2030. And in 2015, Concordia University agreed to redirect half of its $10 million investment in fossil fuels elsewhere. But divestment organizers refuse to consider these steps victories, believing a rejection of full divestment undermines the idea of institutions distancing themselves from fossil fuel companies. Lavoie, for example, calls UWinnipeg’s plan to create a sustainable investment policy and optional fossil-free fund for donors a greenwashing measure taken to avoid concrete change.

When Canadian universities reject divestment, they frequently cite a fiduciary duty to students and shareholders, stating divestment would compromise the financial well-being of the school. Katie Perfitt, the Canadian divestment organizer with 350.org, an online organization that supports grassroots campaigns to oppose international oil, coal, and gas projects, says this financial argument has become the most prominent reason why universities refuse to reject divestment across the country. She hesitates to bring money into the divestment conversation—the purpose of the movement is to focus on and bring justice—but notes that some research shows divestment can be healthy for financial assets. A report by Genus Capital, a B.C. investment firm with a fossil-free investment division, shows that fossil-free funds performed just as well— sometimes better—than funds invested in the industry.

Perfitt also notes that the fossil fuel industry is on the decline. The Canadian oil industry currently relies on $3.3 billion in government subsidies a year. On a global scale, the expense of sustaining the fossil fuel industry is staggering—and on the rise. According to one report, subsidizing the global fossil fuel industry cost $4.9 trillion in 2013. By 2015, the cost rose to $5.3 trillion.

Those numbers account for government policies that lower the cost of fossil fuel production, raise the price received by producers, and lowers the price paid by consumers. But they also reflect broader costs, such as expenses related to global warming and deaths from air pollution. As the push for green energy grows, even the CEO of Shell has stated during a conference that public trust in the oil industry “has been eroded to the point that it is becoming a serious issue for [Shell’s] long-term future.”

The goal of the divestment movement, however, has never been to affect fossil fuel companies’ bottom line. “The idea isn’t that we’re trying to bankrupt them. We’re trying to stigmatize them in the public realm,” says Perfitt. “So many institutions in our world are complicit in the climate crisis by remaining tied to the fossil fuel industry. We want to expose those relationships, and bring an issue that otherwise would have not been in the public realm to light.”

***

In some places, these relationships are more evident than others. When Emma Jackson walks to class at the University of Alberta, she is bombarded by reminders of the institution’s intimate ties to oil companies. Hallways in academic buildings are covered in gold plaques boasting the names of major donors: Imperial Oil, Encana, Enbridge, Suncor.

“Everywhere you turn, you’re surrounded by donor walls dominated by oil and gas companies, student organizations branded by Shell, and corporate representatives who have been invited into academic departments as guest professors,” says Jackson.

It isn’t just U of A. Most postsecondary institutions are entangled with the industry beyond their investment portfolios. Oil companies regularly donate to universities across the country, funding research, scholarships, and fellowships. At UWinnipeg, Enbridge Pipelines Inc. funds a scholarship specifically for Indigenous students. Last August, Dalhousie announced a $2.2-million donation from Irving Oil to revamp the school’s engineering and architecture campuses; the donation will also fund more than $700,000 in scholarships, including co-op opportunities with the New Brunswick-based company.

In Edmonton, climate organizers were met with violent criticism—even death threats—from pipeline supporters

Katie Perfitt says one intention of such sponsorship deals on campuses is to “train our minds to think about those companies as just a natural part of our life. The fossil fuel industry wants to maintain control of the way we think about climate change and its relationship to the industry.” These deals also come with a more explicit ability to influence campus life. Leading up to Dalhousie’s 2014 vote on divestment, the school’s Dean of Science told media a representative from Shell threatened to withdraw academic funding if the motion passed. A Shell spokesperson later downplayed the concerns.

In October 2017, an investigation of the University of Calgary’s establishment of the Enbridge Centre for Corporate Sustainability revealed a professor lost his position as director of the centre after he disclosed his opposition to Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline.

It also named a “troubling” conflict of interest involving the school’s president, who at the time held a highly paid position on Enbridge’s board. The sponsorship came with a commitment from the university that it would “enhance Enbridge’s reputation.” (Enbridge denied this in a statement, calling it a “no-strings-attached” pledge.) The investigation called for an overhaul of the board of governor’s approval process, transparency in its decision-making, and stricter regulations on corporate gifts and sponsorships.

Jackson moved to Edmonton to pursue a master’s at the University of Alberta after nearly four years of organizing with Divest MTA. She says doing climate justice work is hard no matter where you are, but she finds it particularly challenging in Alberta, where ties to oil companies are pervasive.

There is interest in divestment on campus, but it’s one of the most difficult places to sustain momentum in Canada. One of the main challenges in Edmonton, Jackson says, is not that people are ardently pro-oil, but that they have “resigned themselves to the degree of influence the industry holds in the province and feel powerless in the face of it all.”

Because of the environment in Alberta, Jackson and other climate justice organizers in Edmonton are focusing their energy in areas other than divestment—in particular supporting Indigenous land and water protectors. Because of its proximity to the oil sands, Jackson refers to Edmonton as “ground zero of extractivism” in Canada. “Every pipeline that is being fiercely contested across Turtle Island can be traced back here,” she says. “So I think it becomes a question of how we can use this geographic position to our advantage.”

After it was announced that Energy East was killed, Jackson and a small group of activists dropped a “No Kinder Morgan” banner from the High Level Bridge to dispel the myth that all Albertans support the project. It was praised as a “beautiful action” by climate organizers, but was also met with violent and condescending criticism—even death threats—from pipeline supporters online.

Jackson says backlash is common when organizing around climate justice, but she has never received such a hateful response as after the banner drop. She thinks the reaction speaks to many workers’ fears about the industry losing ground. “It’s hard to contend with fear when it manifests as such violent anger,” she says. “But if we can find ways to cut through that and have people believe us when we promise they won’t be left behind, then we’ll have won.”

***

The anger and violence directed at those fighting the fossil fuel industry is far from confined to the west coast. Back at Mount Allison, Tina Oh can relate to Jackson’s experience. In 2016, she was followed home and videotaped by a member of the community in Sackville who is pro-oil and offended by Oh’s advocacy work. The person had confronted Oh before but never to such a physical extent. Terrified, she called the police. An officer told her that police get videotaped all the time, but they don’t complain about it.

“It was one of the last things you’d want to hear after being so scared and so removed from the positions of power that police are in,” says Oh.

Despite her fear and trauma, Oh can still make sense of the experience. “A lot of the attacks we get are from people who would be personally affected if we had a carbon-free future because the industry employs a lot of people and those people have mouths to feed,” she says. It’s personal for Oh too—she has family and friends who have been, and still are, employed by the Alberta oil industry.

She stresses that the climate justice movement is not forgetting about the workers of the industry, but making sure they’re being taken care of, too. Working to include industry labourers, she says, is just one way the divestment movement can improve.

Perfitt believes it could take a long time before we know the lasting impact of divestment campaigns in Canada. She knows campus organizers who have been working on this for many years are frustrated because they feel like they are not winning. “But as someone who has been in it for five years, I am constantly in awe of how powerful the movement has been and how transformative it’s been for hundreds of organizers,” she says. “One of the legacies of the campaign is that there are now hundreds of more people involved in the climate movement.”

Oh counts herself among that frustrated and exhausted group. But she says the Canadian campaigns’ collective tiredness has bonded them, and that connection has given them the momentum to go forward.

“The point of escalation is to escalate,” she says. “And after what we’ve been through, we have to keep going.”

University of British Columbia’s sexual assault policy. Screenshot taken from UBC.ca.

In April 2016, British Columbia passed a bill mandating all public post-secondary institutions establish policies for handling reports of sexual violence on campus. B.C. schools instituted formal procedures in May 2017, becoming the second province, after Ontario, to do so. This change follows a long pattern of dissatisfaction with how B.C. universities handle sexual assault claims.

The University of British Columbia was criticized for its treatment of sexual misconduct allegations that arose last November against Steven Galloway, the now-fired chair of the school’s creative writing program.

Two of the complainants, Chelsea Rooney and Sierra Skye Gemma, say the school did not adequately protect their identities or confidential testimonies, and that the investigation took a serious toll on their mental health. This, they say, gravely damaged their futures in the literary community.

Meanwhile, UBC graduate students Caitlin Cunningham and Glynnis Kirchmeier say it took the school more than 18 months to act on their sexual assault and harassment complaints about now-expelled Dmitry Mordvinov. The women say the delay put other students in danger, with six reports against Mordvinov accumulating in the process. Cunningham says she has “been more traumatized by the process of reporting than… by the incident of assault.” The pattern prompted Kirchmeier to file a human rights complaint in 2016 on behalf of anyone who has reported sexual misconduct to a west-coast university.

The cases led UBC to establish a new sexual violence policy, including hiring directors of investigations to review sexual assault reports and refer them to external investigators. But complaints of university inaction regarding campus sexual violence extend across the province. At Simon Fraser University, students say campus security ignored multiple reports of sexual harassment on campus in weeks prior to an assault in February. And at the University of Victoria, the school wrote one student a letter suggesting she not discuss the findings of the investigation into her November 2015 assault.

The efficacy of B.C. schools’ new policies will show with time. But there is still much work to be done—to create campuses where survivors are believed and protected, where their voices are not silenced, where they are not re-victimized in the process of reporting.

Tamsyn Riddle was excited to start her university courses in 2015. At the University of Toronto, where she majors in diaspora and transnational studies and minors in equity studies and political science, her academic successes would be appreciated in a way that they weren’t at her Peterborough high school. Plus, she could be a part of Trinity College’s elite culture, where many students dream of someday becoming prime minister.

But that excitement quickly dissipated in her first year, when Riddle says she was raped by a fellow freshman student at a quad party hosted by the college. She reported the incident to the school, having faith they would help her. Instead, the school spent more than a year on an investigation that let her accused assailant walk free.

Now, Riddle is trying to enact change. On April 4, 2017, she filed a human rights complaint against the school. The complaint outlines “[discrimination] against Ms. Riddle based on sex by failing to properly investigate and remedy the assault that she experienced and by failing to provide Ms. Riddle with a safe, discrimination-free learning environment.”

Riddle made her complaint public, sharing it at the Silence is Violence press conference “Survivors Speak Back: Confronting Sexual Assault at the University of Toronto” this April. There, she told media that she loved Trinity College and the University of Toronto, and it was hard for her to believe that the school loved her back as a survivor of sexual violence.

Riddle filed the complaint after the school took 16 months to finish an investigation into her and another student’s sexual assault allegations against a first-year male student. “The human rights complaint is for me, but it is also about changing the institution,” Riddle says.

U of T has not commented on Riddle’s case specifically in the media. “We can’t comment on the specifics of individual cases,” University of Toronto director of media relations Althea Blackburn-Evans told This.

In spring 2015, when Riddle says she was assaulted, she told a friend. Her friend knew someone who said she was assaulted months earlier by the same man. Riddle and the other woman reported their cases to school officials together. Riddle then heard her options. She could report the case to police, but there could be potential drawbacks, such as retaliation by her assailant or disappointment in police actions. Riddle was already aware about institutional rape culture and victim blaming in the state’s justice system and was not planning on reporting to the police before these comments.

Instead, Riddle decided to proceed with a hearing through the university. In a hearing, a school administrator decides what the process will look like and what evidence will be admitted. Because Riddle would be considered a witness to an alleged crime, she would not get a lawyer—but her alleged assailant would, and she could be cross-examined. In January 2016, Riddle received correspondence from the school that they were proceeding with a hearing. She tried to prepare for a hearing mentally and emotionally, educating herself on policy. But she says it was hard for her to keep focus on her studies with such uncertainty around her.

As per the university policy at the time, interim measures would be in place for a year: The accused could not lead any school clubs, join any Trinity College clubs (though any outside of the college were considered fair game), live on residence, take the same classes as Riddle, or eat in the dining hall. He also had to see a counsellor. Despite these measures she still saw him around campus.

After months of waiting, the hearing never came. On August 29, 2016, Riddle was informed that the university had settled the case with her alleged assailant and his lawyer. The resolutions the two sides had come to were deemed confidential.

Over the summer of 2016, while the school was dodging her calls, Riddle joined the University of Toronto chapter of Silence is Violence (SiV). The survivor-led group, according to its official site, “aims to radically alter the culture of institutional violence on university campuses across Canada.” Members of the group—Jassie Justice, Mira El Hussein, and U of T chapter founder Ellie Ade Kur—sat with Riddle when she announced that she was filing a human rights complaint. It was the first time Riddle says she found a sense of community on the campus since her assault.

In January 2017 universities and colleges legally had to make changes in accordance with Bill 132, Ontario’s Sexual Violence and Harassment Action Plan Act. The bill states that with student input every college and university must have a sexual violence policy that sets a process for how the school will respond to such incidents and complaints. But U of T’s policy—along with the policies of other schools—has been criticized as confusing. Riddle describes the language used in the 13-page document as vague. “If you are reading through it as a survivor, you would get tired,” she says.

The school, however, says students were part of the process to create the document. “I can tell you that we’ve been consulting with our community—including our students—very broadly over the last couple of years to develop our new sexual violence policy,” Blackburn-Evans told This.

Riddle’s recommendations in her human rights complaint are clear: She wants improved communication, timelines on action, automatically giving academic survivors counselling and help, and legal counsel for sexual assault survivors. “I’m looking for the university to start seriously addressing sexual violence,” Riddle said after announcing her filed complaint, “in a way that shows that it sees itself as being accountable to survivors at this institution.”

Gray, Kirchmeier, and another woman referred to as “Jane Doe”, who has been through a similar experience, are raising money for when they go to court. The Silence is Violence Legal Defense Fund is meant to even the playing field when it comes to court fees. As the group’s Indiegogo campaign page reads, “Our universities are multi-million dollar corporations. UBC recently announced raising more than 1.6 BILLION dollars.  Our universities have a team of lawyers employed to challenge our claims.” In the case of Jane Doe, the alleged abuser is a university professor, which means he is entitled to legal representation from a faculty association.

Since all women are students with precarious employment they cannot afford the same legal protection as their accused or their schools. In addition to the financial strain they continue to be re-victimized in the court system. All this knowing the odds are not in their favour. In the episode Gray’s lawyer says that out of an estimated 1,000 sexual assaults, only three are convicted. A lot of this has to do with victim blaming and the collective denial society has when it comes to the placating binary that bad things only happen to “bad”people.

On a positive note, since last week’s post, Dmitry Mordvinov was expelled, after several reports of sexual harassment and assault.

Donations to the Silence is Violence Legal Defense Fund can be made here.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her second year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange. 

Image from CBC’s preview of this week’s The Fifth Estate

For years the University of British Columbia (UBC) has told those speaking out against sexual assault to stay silent. “In January 2014, I reported a graduate colleague named Dmitry Mordvinov to the UBC for his unprofessional, sexual harassment behavior I observed,” writes Glynnis Kirchmeier on November 10 in a letter to colleagues, her former students, mentors, and friends. “I was told that the university would not speak with him, that as an alumna (of six weeks) I had no business taking an interest in the matter, and that I should be quiet.” After sharing her story about her report, Kirchmeier learned of other reported assaults and rapes made to a variety of UBC administration members, all involving the same man. Nothing had been done.

Alana Boileau, a resident in the accused’s on-campus housing described the misogynistic atmosphere she lived in (maintained through the alleged  behaviour of Mordvinov’s and others). In an article for Guts Magazine, Boileau talks about men threatening women, verbal and physical bullying directed at women, rape “jokes” (threats), and cases of rape.

“UBC stated that they appreciated my concerns over and over, but ghosted away when I demanded to know a plan or timeline for assessing Mr. Mordvinov’s misconduct,” writes Kirchmeier. “Meanwhile, he continued to travel using UBC’s money, and representing UBC at conferences as a scholar in good standing.”

UBC has since arranged for a Non-Academic Misconduct Committee Hearing. Kirchmeier says her report and the evidence of at least one of his alleged rape victims has been excluded. Three of the 20-plus committee members attended the meeting, which had no staff observer or official minutes taken. Until the UBC president comes to a decision, Mordvinov remains a student in good standing.

Monday November 23 CBC’s The Fifth Estate will lifestream an episode including their investigation into UBC’s response to the reports made against Mordvinov as well as rape culture, and how victims of rape are treated in court. The episode will include Kirchmeier.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her second year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

www.theglobeandmail.com

For guys (unless they’re in engineering school), life is a paradise of sexual opportunity. For women, it’s a wasteland. The old-fashioned custom known as “dating” (as in: guy calls up girl and asks her out next Friday, takes her to a movie and a meal, picks up the cheque, takes her home, kisses her goodnight and, if he’s lucky, gets to third base) is something their grandparents did. Today, people just hook up.

Okay I get that the “guys in engineering school are too nerdy to get laid” thing is a joke, but it’s not funny, it’s outdated. And while it’s true that there are more females than males in university today, saying that it makes school a “paradise of sexual opportunity” for men and a “wasteland” for women is bogus, for a few reasons. First, Wente makes it seem like men are just dogs who think with their penises and will literally sleep with any female who blinks twice at them. That isn’t true; guys have types and “deal-breakers,” too. Second, does Wente think university girls look around campus and pout, “But I wanted to have seeexxxxx tonighttt and there are noooo boyyyyssss“? (We don’t.) Finally, that last line: “Today, people just hook up.” Are you serious? Yeah, sure, young people do that. But to say that “hooking up” is all “young people” do is a major generalization. I have a lot of friends, both male and female, in serious, long-term relationships. Some of them even live together. Some of them even talk about marriage. And we still go on dates! Seriously!

What explains the campus hookup culture? One widely overlooked factor is the scarcity of men. As buyers in a buyers’ market, they’re on the right side of supply and demand. The price they have to pay for sex – in terms of commitment, time and money – is at a record low. Plus, women are more inclined than ever to say yes.

So basically what Wente is saying is that these horny dog-men finally get the sweet deal they’ve always dreamed of: no being nice to girls, just sex! Sure, there are guys out there who only want sex from girls. But there are also guys who like relationships, who only want to hook up with that girl they’ve had a crush on since the first day of class—and they want to date her, too. Even if it’s easier than ever for a guy to get laid without putting any work in, it doesn’t necessarily he’s going to go that route. Also, why are women “more inclined than ever to say yes”? Because we’re just so happy that one of the few guys on campus is talking to us, so we’d better snatch him up before the bitty in the next booth does? Blah.

In economic terms, our unequal desire for sex means that, in the sexual marketplace, men are the buyers and women are the sellers. Until recently, the price was steep, up to and including a wedding ring and a promise of lifetime commitment. In my parents’ generation, the only way for a 22-year-old guy to have a lot of sex was to get married. Today, plenty of 22-year-olds can get all the sex they want for the cost of a pack of condoms.

Okay not all women want marriage oh and also so what?

Dr. Baumeister argues that, throughout history, it was to women’s advantage to keep the supply of sex restricted. “Sex was the main thing they had to offer men in order to get a piece of society’s wealth, and so they restricted sexual access as much as they could, to maintain a high price,” he says in his essay Sexual Economics, Culture, Men and Modern Sexual Trends (with Kathleen Vohs). But as women began to gain power and opportunity, that began to change. Women can now get a piece of society’s wealth on their own. And life for everyone is a lot more fun, because it turns out that, wherever women have more autonomy, people have more sex.

So sex was only ever our way of feeling successful. It was never an act of passion or love or fun. Nope, it was just our way of feeling like we were worth something. Great message.

The changes in gender politics since the 1960s have been good for both sexes. Women got something they really wanted (access to careers and money) and men got something they really wanted (more sex). But this bargain is having some unexpected consequences. Young men are in no hurry to get married. Why should they be? As my dear old dad used to say when I waltzed out the door in my miniskirt, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” I hated it when he said that. But he’d grasped the central principle of sexual economics.

NO. NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. NO.

A lot of women are in no hurry to get married, either. But it might not work out so well for them. They’ve watched too much Sex in the City. They think they’ll still have the same choices at 35 and 40 that they had at 25. They have no idea that men’s choices will get better with age (especially if they’re successful), but theirs will get worse. Believe me, this sucks. But it’s the truth.

WHAT? Saying that we watched too much Sex and the City and therefore have this distorted view of what it is to grow old and have sex and be a woman is actually making me feel queasy. (If Sex and the City misleads anything, it’s how easy it is to make it as a professional writer. There’s no way Carrie could afford all those Manolo Blahniks off a single column.) Also we’re just supposed to accept that while we get super gross and boring once we hit age 30, men get sexy so they’ll be fine—and therefore we need to get him to put a ring on it pronto for fear of living alone? What year are we in?

University is hard. True. Work is hard. True. Being an adult is hard. True. So why is Wente pointing the finger at those of us who are still trying to wade our way through the muck? And if what young men want most of all is sex, then why work hard if they don’t have to? Young men like sex, for sure, but news flash: so do women! If young females are having more sex, it’s probably because they like it. Also is sex really what guys want most of all? If a 22-year-old guy was offered one night of sex or a university degree, do you think he’s going to pick the former? Are men really that shallow? Are my guy friends really just hugging me when I’m sad because they want to get in my pants? Is the barista who told me to have a nice day as I stirred sugar into my Americano really telling me that he’d like to take me into the staff room and have sex with me? If he was, like, should I go back and talk to him?