By Philip Moscovitch
This originally appeared as News item #6 in Morning File, March 28, 2024.
This item in the Events listings, below, caught my eye:
Artist Talk | Protests and Pedagogy: Archival Afterlives and the Sir George Williams University Affair (Thursday, 6pm, Dalhousie Arts Centre, Lower Level, and online) — OmiSoore Dryden talks to Christiana Abraham and Ronald Cumming about their exhibit installed in the Tupper Link.
I’m always interested in how events are perceived at the time and later, and how initial framing persists for years.
Sir George Williams University is one of two very different Montreal universities that merged to become Concordia. Sir George was the grittier downtown school that made a point of catering to what we now call mature students and part-timers. It made a university education possible for many to whom it would have been inaccessible. It offered classes that started in the evening, for instance, some running to 10pm. You could go to them if you had a regular job. Sir George Williams also provided opportunities for people to finish their high school classes.
My father dropped out of high school when fees increased, and his family could no longer afford it. (This was public school; my dad helped lead an unsuccessful strike against the fees). He eventually went to Sir George Williams and finished his high school courses there.
But while Sir George Williams claimed to cater to otherwise marginalized students, the university did not take seriously complaints of racism by Black students, ultimately leading to the occupation of the university’s computer centre, in the campus’s Hall Building.
When I was a student at Concordia, two decades later, this event was casually known as “the computer riot.”
But, as the event listing for the artist talk on the new exhibit at Dal notes:
By revisiting these events over fifty years later, we ask: what do these archival materials say to us now about scientific education and pedagogy? Many of the existing accounts of the “Sir George Williams affair” have focused on violence: labeling the protest as a riot or emphasizing material damages, and have ignored the cost of racism in science practices and education.
A riot is violent. Sometimes it’s unprovoked. It brings to mind images of chaos, rather than students exasperated that their legitimate concerns about injustice are not being heard. We need to interrogate history and how it’s been presented, and I hope to make it out to this exhibit while it’s on. Full details on the artist talk (which is virtual) are in the listings below.
For those interested, there is also a National Film Board documentary, directed by Mina Shum, that takes a deep dive into the affair. You can watch it here.
