Working an eight-hour shift at a menial job can be exhausting. Couple that with daily classes and a growing debt from student loans and doing anything more than just completing assignments can be far from many students’ minds.

Decolonization may have begun in the 1940’s, but at last weekend’s RSU Equity Conference - RESIST!, Ryerson faculty and students set out to show how tuition fees, academic curriculum and attitudes of those running the university keep the colonial legacy alive in the minds of students and the walls of the institution supposed to nurture them.

“University today is a colonized space,” said Dr. Camille Hernandez-Ramdwar, Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology at Ryerson.  “Neo-colonisers have taken over from the original white-male elite, and since then the way the university works has not changed.”

While elites once had the financial backing to learn at their leisure students today struggle to finance their studies.  For Hernandez-Ramdwar this has led to the creation of universities as degree factories, rather than disseminators of wisdom. 

“Students think you are just there to keep their GPA up so that they can leave the university to make money,” said Hernandez-Ramdwar.  Ryerson’s history as a career college only increases this attitude on campus, she added, with students regarding their professors as conduits to achieve the degree that will get them the job they need to pay off their student loans, not as people who can teach them to think and challenge ideas around them.

“Today the way universities work has not changed, “ said Hernandez-Ramdwar. “But what has changed is the diversity of the student body leaving the university as a shell.” 

To stop students’ viewing their university experience as mere career training, universities’ Eurocentric curriculum need to evolve to reflect the student body, agreed Hernandez-Ramdwar and her fellow conference speakers.  Changing university curriculum to reflect a greater number of cultures and ideas would not only increase students’ ability to relate to what they were learning, they argued, but would push students to challenge other obstacles they may face in society.

All the conference speakers said they have faced hostilities from both students and the university when proposing change.  “Students assume that professors have privileges if we speak out” said Hernandez-Ramdwar “but we are always under scrutiny, we are always watching our backs because we are always being watched.”

Dr. Aparna Sundar, Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson, said she meets “polite academic” resistance whenever she proposes expanding courses to include a broader curriculum. Even when she offers to teach extra courses, excuses range from a lack of staff, to a lack of demand from students, to the universities need to respond to market forces that demand courses be career centred rather than culturally rich.

And when new courses or curriculum are approved difficulties can still arise.  University and department heads expect those wanting to teach outside of the current curriculum to have knowledge of entire continents or regions, said Sundar.  “I have colleagues who specialise in the Politics of Toronto,” she added. “But if I want to teach outside of the curriculum I am supposed to know about many different areas.”

“I myself have difficulties teaching some of the courses I want because I was taught under the colonial system,” Sundar adds.  “Actually finding text and theories that apply to what I see in the present is a challenge.”

For change to occur students, faculty and administrators need to work together to erode the colonial structures still in place at the university, the speakers concluded.  “We need to break down the structures from within,” said Hernandez-Ramdwar, “and together we can make the shell explode.”