Concordia and allegations of sexual violence
VP University Affairs
The SSMU VP University Affairs ( UA) serves as the primary liaison between the Mcgill administration and the undergraduate student body, advocating on the latter’s behalf at monthly Senate meetings and maintaining open lines of communication between on- campus student group and SSMU representatives. The VP UA’S portfolio also includes heading the library improvement fund, the SSMU Equity Committee, the academic roundtable, and the SSMU research and advocacy committee.
One of the office’s main projects this semester is the “Know Your Rights” campaign. This campaign will focus on unpaid internships by “getting people thinking about how internship policies are strangely set up against students” as Oke puts it. The campaign will additionally begin to bring attention to open educational resources, which include “anything you can use in classroom for educational purposes that has an open license.” Free material is available online, but textbooks are still mandatory for many classes, and often expensive. The University Affairs office will present the “Textbook Broke” social media campaign in different faculties, which will encourage students to take pictures of their textbook receipts and post them online.
Over the course of the semester, Oke hopes to lay a solid foundation for the establishment of a sanctuary campus program at Mcgill. This program, already in place in some American universities, hopes to provide a safe space for students and people lacking legal documentation. For the past semester Aishwarya Singh, the SSMU Policy and Advocacy Research Commissioner, has been doing research regarding the documentation requirements for students. “Right now, if a student’s visa expires, he or she is immediately de-registered from the university,” explained Oke. “In this case, the idea would be to implement a system where students in the process of renewing their visa would be able to still submit assignments.”
Oke also hopes to mobilize students around what the ideal library would look like. In the future, Mcgill will demolish the Mclennan library to build a new, more modern one. Oke wishes to gather as many student opinions regarding what the new library should look like, in order to recognize their visions.