Universities, seats of learning, places where you go to develop your ability to be rational and critical, to allow your imagination and intelligence to flower, for the greater good of humanity, ah, the dream. In fact universities have become factories for turning out the nuts and bolts to further the corporate world, nuts and bolts in the shape of conditioned human beings. What is more, universities make money from these nuts and bolts, universities have become part and parcel of the corporate world, they are now just another factory supplying the needs of the profit driven capitalist system. They are dependent on corporate money, they are an integral part of this economic system of insanity.
The hope is that the students grasp this and decide it is not what they want, and decide they don't want to be programmed to be profit making units for the rich and powerful corporations. Let's hope they decide to take control of the universities and shape them into those desired seats of learning for the benefit of all humanity. Encouragingly, some are already going down this path, and deserve our full support and solidarity.
The following extract from It's Going Down:
Statement from group of students occupying the arts building at McGill University in Montreal.
For the past week, students have been occupying the arts building at McGill University in Montreal. Dozens of tents block the corridor and the atmosphere is festive. These different people occupying the building are clear in their position: they are not asking for anything, they are building, independently, the democratization of their university. We share here their manifesto.
We are tired of demanding change from those who never intended on listening. We will no longer be deceived. We will prefigure a democratically-led university for ourselves.
We are occupying McGill to create a festive, autonomous space for learning. A space which belongs to all rather than to the corporate elite. At present, McGill University, as controlled by the Board of Governors, serves capitalist, white-supremacist, settler-colonial and imperialist structures of power.
When we say McGill is capitalist we mean that it upholds the market’s senseless production, consumption, and environmental exploitation. Under this inflexible model, students, staff, and faculty suffer from exhaustion and mental health issues. Just this semester, in pursuit of profit, McGill prioritized a return to in-person classes over the safety of community members, forcing many to go on strike or to unionize.
This negligence is not surprising; Capitalist McGill is busy with other things:
It is a high-cost, exploitative landlord, charging many students over $1500 for a one-bedroom.
It is a stockholder, managing an investment pool of $1.4 billion across the military industrial complex, banking sector, and fossil fuel industry
We, as students, pay this private entity, the university, to train us for professions that serve human and environmental exploitation. Any other purpose for the university has been deliberately rendered unimaginable. The continuity of corporations relies on the commodification of knowledge, wherin education becomes an instrument of profit.
McGill is controlled by Senior executives from the Bank of Montreal (BMO), Power Corporation of Canada, the National Bank of Canada, Metro Inc., HSBC Bank Canada, and Redbourne Properties Inc. They all sit on the Board of Governors and represent its single largest voting bloc.
The university’s structure mirrors the exploitative and hierarchical logic of corporations. By forming an industrial complex of grants, research, public relations campaigns, and donations, McGill has become University Incorporated.
When we say this structure is also white-supremacist, we mean that, in a white supremacist society that thrives on the exploitation of racialized communities and entire nations, McGill’s education is not revolutionary but reformist and complacent.
For two years, White-Supremacist McGill has refused to #TakeJamesDown as demanded by Black and Indigenous students, faculty and staff, choosing instead to protect the university’s slave-owning founder and his public statue. Scholarships, prizes, and buildings continue to bear the name of James McGill and the legacy of slavery. University administrators have also failed to meet the Black Student Network’s demands regarding the funding of Black History Month and a Black Canadian Studies Department staffed by Black scholars.
Financed by James McGill’s colonial enterprises, the university was founded on, and continues to operate on, the unceded, traditional lands of the Kahnistensera from the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. The land acknowledgements that Settler-Colonial McGill boasts on its brochures and at its public events are empty words as it refuses to meaningfully engage with the Kahnistensera and their demands. The university demonstrates no comittment to upholding Indigneous soveignty. McGill finances colonial projects like the Coastal GasLink pipeline trespassing on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory and refuses to repay the money it received from the Six Nations Trust Fund in 1850, totalling $1.7 billion today.
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