A response to the "Taking the Pulse of campus projects" editorial from the Sept. 21 issue.

By: Shaarujaa Nadarajah

From being an SRA member to being on the Board of Directors, I have always tried to take criticism with grace. I am a strong believer in the notion that there are always ways we can improve as a community and the day I choose to reject feedback was the day I fail as a representative member. However, in my time as a representative, I have also recognized the value of using my voice to share perspective — maybe a perspective someone hadn’t considered and one that is integral to conversations we were having.

As a member of the 2016-2017 board, I can answer the first question posed in the editorial. I’ve held a Pulse membership for the last four years and am a frequent user of the facility. In my time as a Pulse user, one thing that was blatantly apparent was that the Pulse was overcrowded. But I wasn’t the only student that recognized this need as countless surveys sent out in the years before my term indicated that students wanted to see improvements being made to their athletic and recreation space.

Years of on the ground feedback collected by boards before us set the foundation for a space referendum to be sent to students where they directly got to vote on fee increases and whether this was a project they wanted the MSU to invest time and resources into. I guess the “true vanity” in this project came when the referendum failed by 10 votes the first time and how we had to go knocking on every administers’ door day after day begging the university to invest money into this project because that is what students asked us to do.

Construction takes time and expansions can’t happen overnight, however. The athletics department discussed in length the measures they would take to address the increased traffic they foresaw happening by planning to open up a pop up Pulse for students by end of October and by extending gym hours.

I will admit having an overcrowded gym is an inconvenience, but alternatively, I would gladly wait five more minutes for an elliptical if it means hundreds more students were taking advantage of their membership. I am willing to endure the short term pains to ensure the long term gains of working to build a healthier campus together. Are you?

But an overcrowded Pulse was just a small moot point in the greater systemic problem the writer was examining that was calling to question whether board members should work on long term projects. Making reference to Teddy’s failed Perspectives on Peace initiative and Ehima’s gender neutral bathrooms, the article does a good job of highlighting that one year is, in fact, a short time frame to work on some student projects.

However, what the article failed to recognize is the follow through these projects had years beyond these Presidents’ terms in office. After Teddy’s term, he went to work for Patrick Deane where he began the Model UN Conference, which was founded on the same principles as Perspectives on Peace and now continues to run as a yearly conference. As for gender neutral bathrooms, sustainability of projects are just as important to consider with the MSU’s yearly turnover and the gender neutral project is a true representation on how the MSU continued to work with the Equity and Inclusion Office to carry this project between multiple board terms because it remained a priority for students. In fact, I doubt many students even associate gender neutral bathrooms with Ehima any longer.

In order to leave a legacy, people need to remember you actually worked on the project. Using the expansion as an example, I hardly think three years from now students will even remember what board was responsible for initiating this project. All that will be seen is the hundreds of students who no longer have to eat their lunch on their ground or the religious faith groups on campus who will finally have a prayer space. The reality is we don’t do these projects for the vanity. We don’t spend over 60 hours a week working on these projects because we want the recognition. We do it because we care about students.

Students critique board members of coming short in making large-scale changes for them during their one year terms. However, when they attempt to take on large projects, they are critiqued for their lack of forethought in picking projects they can complete in their term. So, what I have come to realize is that whatever you do, you will always be faced with criticism. And that is okay because that is part of the challenge that comes with representing such a diverse population of 22,000 students here at McMaster.

So, I guess I will end it off here and bid you all farewell until the next 600 word article is written about us.

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A response to the "Spotted at Mac: 'punch a Nazi'" article from the Sept. 21 issue.

By: Lilian Obeng

I remember when every single social science and humanities professor chose to dedicate a portion of their lecture time to discussing this infamous question last year. A video showing white nationalist Richard Spencer getting punched by an anti-fascist protestor had gone viral and captured the attention of western liberal media. Everyone had a hot take, everyone picked a side to this debate and everyone continued to miss the mark. The article published this week did just the same.

Let’s begin with the campus-specific premise on which this article was based. First, the Revolutionary Students’ Movement is not an MSU Club. Any affiliation to McMaster and the larger McMaster community is tangential at best. Second, this article is rife with logical inconsistencies. The author states that expressing “violence against those who identify as Neo-Nazi is a violent act in itself.” Contained within this statement is the failure to acknowledge the initial violence of being a Nazi. Let me make this very clear — Nazism and white supremacy are ideologies that advocate for genocide and hatred. To view the stances of the RSM without interacting with this historical fact is a failure to acknowledge the violence and oppression that have gone into marginalizing certain groups. Power dynamics are ever-present in our discussions, and the resistance of the oppressed in in no way equal to that of their oppressors.

“Is it okay to punch a Nazi?”

Additionally, this useless question gives rise to an even more irrelevant debate. For starters, this whole punching Nazis business is quite literally a joke. It can be argued that it is in poor taste, but the vast portion of internet memes follow this suit. No person interested in rational debate is actually suggesting that punching individual Nazis is a productive use of time or is conducive to social justice. To act as though this is the case to be fundamentally intellectually dishonest. The fact that people are attempting to derive some sort of knowledge from this joke is troubling. and use it that the basis on which to draw conclusions as to the validity of the use of violence as a means of resistance is particularly irritating.

This question does nothing but obfuscate the real, pressing conversations we should be having here on this campus and beyond.

Why do we as a society hesitate to condemn Nazism and white supremacy in the strongest possible terms? What do we define as violence, and why are certain acts by specific parties excluded from this definition?

What this debate displays is our poor collective analysis. We continue to distill matter of systemic oppression and violence down to the actions of isolated individuals. We continue to refuse to examine our dependency on oppressive and state-sanctioned regimes of power. In this case, it is white supremacy.

The tension between what exists materially and what is conceived within the confines of purely academic and theoretical thought — divorced from the social reality marginalized groups face and what our society perpetuates — is the root of the frustrating practice. It results in disjointed attempts — such as that article — to appeal to “both sides” when one side is morally incorrect. It legitimizes actively harmful beliefs, and displays the extent to which we have these conversations in vacuums. Bigotry will be challenged. Hate will be challenged. No amount of intellectual posturing changes these premises.

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