(Time travel note: This story concerns when MRU was still MRC)
The BBC once did a story on The Murder That Changed America. A young university student in Laramie, Wyoming, was “gay bashed,” as in beaten severely, tied to a fence, and left to die. His crime? Existing while gay.
Question: Was MRC (Mount Royal College) changed, one fateful year, when there was a political cartoon and weeks later a student was gay bashed and put into hospital? He lived.
Answer: No. Neither the community nor the police were confronted because at MRC the human capital was just not there, probably due to actions, after the cartoon, of the Board Of Governors. (BOG)
The cartoon: Remember students in the 1960’s? Doing cartoons of generic capitalist pigs, with the buttons popping off their vests? I wrote for The Reflector, that year of no-change, among students with traditional idealism. Instead of satirizing bad guys in general, such as the running dogs and imperialist lackeys, my peers were, in the months before the gay bashing, drawing panels on specific individuals. Such as the Ayatollah, expressing stupid beliefs about—I forget, probably hating innocent Jews.
The excited artist-volunteers at the student newspaper, after gleefully describing various infuriating individuals, finally made a Big Mistake. They lampooned a nameless generic “skinhead,” complete with Doc Marten boots for hurting people. The student idealist’s Big Mistake was having the nameless skinhead express his stupid hatred of Jews. Not like showing a named leader with public hatred.
The cartoon created scandal. You might imagine “the establishment” of tweed wearing, pipe-puffing, calm college Board of Governors, (BOG) instantly seeing this as a learning opportunity, and trusting that their students would learn by doing. You would be wrong.
The governors would know that many students had apathy, from the words “a” meaning without, and “path” meaning spirit. True: many students didn’t read the newspaper their student fees supported, and didn’t even know there had been any controversy, although it was reported in “real world” newspapers.
Also true: other students had ample school spirit, believing in getting value out of their Mount Royal years. Shouldn’t responsible governors, if only from their reading of previous cartoons of The Reflector, have realized there were still campus idealists?
Student idealists that year included several born-in-Canada students enjoying the International Student Club. A heterosexual student was in the Gay club on campus, (at first in the straight closet to gays) who never claimed straight privilege, not even when staffing a gay display table for clubs day. There was even a faltering attempt that year to start up a feminist club.
One can imagine spirited students setting up a six foot table with a banner: “Let’s talk about The Reflector cartoon.” True, the ignorant ones would have just passed by the table, but the spirited ones could have talked, educated each other—some from bitter personal experience—about how hatred still exists, not just in the past, but here, and in major cities out east. (As we learned after October 7) The Reflector could have been their forum but…
I remember: At most of the city high schools, one year before attending college, youth had innocently assumed there weren’t any gay students in their homeroom: Back then a few schools supposedly had only one gay student. Similarly, teens wouldn’t realize that they shared a homeroom with a person of the Jewish faith. (There are synagogues in Alberta)
At MRC some students with their hair dyed bright blond, looking so cool, were in fact secretly Indigenous (Metis or Indian)—but they needed to escape the prejudice that some students wouldn’t ever think about.
Deepest into the closet were the gays: Not one young woman walked the halls wearing a pink triangle from the holocaust camps; not one young man walked into the food court with a limp wrist. Nobody dared to wear a humorous badge or T-shirt inscribed, “Nobody knows I’m gay.”
The idealistic Student Association that year was following the advice of Barak Obama’s mentor: “Anything that drags on becomes a drag.” So they would put on, complete with microphone and stage, a well planned one-hour only …activist/teach-in/protest… departing crisply at the end of the hour.
But the Board of Governors, apparently, somehow, didn’t know about the SA being active, or else the BOG wouldn’t trust them, wouldn’t trust students to organize things like putting up posters or talking to Jewish organizations or organizing a Rock Against Racism week.
The most horrible thing, in my eyes, was the BOG shutting down The Reflector: This action destroyed the student’s best forum, and catalyst, for personal growth and social change.
So sad because through organizing, groups would have formed, trust would have emerged. It’s much easier to confront the Chief of Police, telling him his silence enables his constables to enable gay bashing, if you trust other students to ‘have your back.’
The brutal gay bashing was weeks later. An innocent student I knew, looking totally drab and normal, was bashed and put into hospital for the crime of exiting a gay bar… at MRC the human capital was just not there. He left the bar alone, and then he lay in hospital feeling alone.
In fairness, maybe the BOG didn’t believe in student growth. Maybe they repeated a tired cliche and therefore “censored without reading” the previous cartoons.
Maybe as members of “the older generation,” the BOG felt little concern for students, instead being very much concerned for some “real world” cynical older people with their “real world” newspapers about the scandal, those aging cynics who had lived for decades without ever questioning “life, the universe and everything,” the sort of impatient narrow-minds who would never dream of setting foot on campus, or doing the “alumni thing” of reading the campus paper, (as I always do on visits) or of respecting students.
If so, then the BOG erred egregiously.
It would be nice to imagine one of those governors having the grace to enter the hospital and visit with that lonely young man.
… …
… …
Sean Crawford
Note: This essay is a version of a letter I delivered this month to the BOG
Footnote: I found a very moving Doctor Who Youtube clip, about the passing of the 11th Doctor, a clip that to me symbolizes alumni changing—As when I myself, aging and maturing, while earning various parchments down the years from Mount Royal, would always remember my innocent youthful ideals. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nugHWdXZfS8
