Laurier café closed over ‘slave’ joke
Operator, staff out of work after grad students group ends his contract over tongue-in-cheek ad
Students and faculty at Wilfrid Laurier University are slamming the graduate students association after its sudden decision to close a popular campus café this week.
The apparent reason? A tongue-incheek help-wanted ad that asked for a “slave” to help run the café.
On Monday, Veritas Café operator Sandor Dosman was brought into a boardroom and told the recent advertisement he’d posted online had ruffled some feathers.
In the ad, he joked he wanted “a new slave (full-time staff member) to boss (mentor) around Veritas Cafe.” The ad was clearly intended to be humorous, with jokes about man-buns, tattoos and food safety because “we try to not kill our customers.”
But Dosman said he was told his contract with the student group was being terminated as a result, and soon he was being escorted off campus by two security officers.
“This came completely out of left field. I’m still in shock,” said Dosman, who had run the café for 4 1⁄ years. “It was just
2 black and white, ‘You are done.’ Now I’m out of the job and I have no idea what I’m going to do next.”
Running the café was his primary source of income and a paycheque for 11 employees.
The sudden closure drew criticism from many of the café’s customers. Laurier ethics professor Byron Williston penned a scathing open letter to the graduate students association, accusing them of acting like “spoiled children.”
“I suppose it’s a sign of the times, especially on university campuses whose student bodies — undergraduate and graduate — seem to have been taken over by the terminally thin-skinned and self-righteous,” Williston wrote. “Perhaps you should direct your moral outrage at some of the many real problems in the world rather than behaving like petty bullies.”
Williston said in an interview the termination was a gross overreaction to a joke, even if it was in poor taste. Samantha Deeming, president and chief executive officer of the GSA, declined to comment when asked about the decision. But in a story in the Cord, the Laurier student newspaper, she said her student group was looking for a new café operator that would reflect “Laurier community values.”
“We invoked clause 3.2.3.3 in our contract, which states that: ‘conduct on the part of the Service Provider that is materially detrimental to the Business or would injure the reputation of the WLUGSA as determined by the sole discretion of the WLUGSA shall be grounds for immediate termination,’ ” she wrote in an email, according to the Cord.
A statement from the university said that “Given the importance that Laurier places on being an inclusive, welcoming and respectful community,” it supports the GSA’s decision. “The university appreciates the challenges of dealing with confidential personnel and contract matters and we support the GSA in its efforts to re-open the café and rehire the affected employees.”
Dosman, meanwhile, is left trying to figure out how to pay his bills. His living room is stuffed with equipment and food that he was given just hours to remove from the café. The future of his food truck, which used the café to prepare meals, is also up in the air.
“I apologize if I offended anyone, that certainly wasn’t my intention,” he said. With files from Megan Dolski