Their Lives are Worth More than Your Endowment Dollars.
A quick reminder: If you’re a university, a smart investment isn’t one that commits your students to death.
Returning to Mount Allison University after a few year away is bizarre, to say the least. Everything feels very slightly different- like someone’s broken into your apartment and shifted all of your furniture 2 inches to the left. Despite feeling that everything is a little surreal, at it’s heart, Sackville, and the University itself remains unchanged. The institution is the same, or, at least, the administrators and their steadfast ideologies are.
Last year was Mount Allison’s Year of Sustainability. The President’s Series of Speakers (sounds fancy, I know) that year included Naomi Klein, and Tzeporah Burman. This year marks the Year of Indigenous Knowledge, when once again, in an effort to appeal to the liberal masses, MTA throws around meaningful language as though it were confetti, and makes hollow pledges it has no intention of upholding. This institution, which has yet to develop a Sustainability Office, has yet to commit to long term funding of an Indigenous Affairs Coordinator, dissolved it’s Green Fund operations fund, and also had hella leaky windows this morning (hello energy efficiency) continues to ignore the students and faculty (many experts in geography, environment, politics, and economics) when they call for fossil fuel divestment.
The students of Mount Allison have been calling for the University (2nd wealthiest per capita in the country, and now 2nd best, according the Gospel of MacLeans) to divest its holdings from the fossil fuel industry for 4 years now. The University’s response has been to form committees, hold panel discussions, take time to “conduct research” and attend conferences with names like “Building a Toolkit for Effective, Ethical and Responsible Responses to Divestment Campaigns” (we see you, Robert Inglis) and otherwise postpone, push off and avoid providing a real response to the question of fossil fuel divestment. The University and those administrators at it’s helm remain silent in the face of critique and protest because to do otherwise would require Mount Allison to publicly admit that the institution places more value on the perceived risk of loss on return, than on the actual risks of death, destruction and loss of livelihood that will increasingly result from climate change.
This morning, at approximately 8:30am students demanding fossil fuel divestment disrupted and ultimately shut down a Board of Regents meeting taking place at the University. Calling for an immediate response to their demands, and a cessation of investment in the oil and gas industry, the students were met with bewilderment, frustration, and ultimately...wait for it... silence.
Instead of choosing to meaningfully engage in conversation with the students, the Chair of the Board ultimately chose to adjourn the meeting after only half an hour. As the activists continued to sing and chant, the Regents were forced to step over their bodies as they took their exit.
The activists involved in Divest MTA demonstrated to the powers that be today that far from keeping quiet and engaging only when called upon, they will demand to be heard. For over four years the students and faculty members have cried out for action in the face of mindless acquiescence to catastrophe, with little attention being paid to them. That ended today when those students commanded that elitist space, and took back the conversation from those who have ignored rationality. That ended today, with the voices of those students who sang “we believe that we will win”.
Fossil Fuel divestment may not happen tomorrow, this year, or even the next for Mount Allison, but this movement is strong, it is formidable, and these students who are quite literally fighting for their lives, are in this battle for the long haul. They are driven by anger, by passion, by fear and by hope, but most of all they are driven by the knowledge that to give up is not an option, for to give up would be to forget that they have everything at stake, and everything to lose.
