SOCIAL JUSTICE COMMITTEE
Daniel Vandervoort: daniel@utgsu.ca
When: Every Tuesday @ 5:30pm.
Where: GSU Basement lounge, 16 Bancroft Ave.
From the anti-Vietnam war mobilizations in the 1960s to the movement to oppose sweatshop-produced clothing on university campuses in the 1990s, students have a long history of being strong and articulate leaders of social justice movements.
The mandate of the Social Justice Committee is to defend the right to an accessible and equitable student experience. Activities include working to freeze and reduce tuition fees, informing students about free trade and how it affects public education, and helping eliminate oppressive or exploitative systems.
Students live and work in the broader society as citizens, have ideas about the world and often play a crucial role in bringing about social change. This sub-committee addresses political issues that are not directly related to post-secondary education, but are most definitely directly related to students and our day-to-day lives because our experiences as students and citizens are not isolated from one another.
As founding members of the Canadian Federation of Students—our national students’ union which represents over 500,000 students across Canada—Graduate Students’ Union members have the opportunity to engage in student activities that have a national scope and which draw upon the resources and energy of many thousands of students from coast to coast. The Social Justice Committee will focus on the activities and campaigns that we help to determine at the national and provincial meetings of our Federation. Some of these campaigns include a campaign strategy to entrench students’ rights in provincial legislation and a research campaign on the impact of rising international students’ tuition fees.
Graduate students have been active participants in the successful effort to extract a two-year tuition fee freeze from the provincial government. The campaign to freeze and reduce tuition fees continues to be a primary campaign of the GSU and graduate students all across Canada.
Through the National Graduate Caucus of the Federation, the Committee will work on campaigns focused on graduate student issues including the ‘Whistleblowers’ campaign that sounds the alarm of corporate influence on research and its impact on academic freedom.
Up until the early to mid-1990s, most graduate programmes in Canada maintained a policy of reduced tuition fees for graduate students who had completed the course requirements, or period of “residency” for their degree. The National Graduate Caucus recently adopted a ‘Post-Residency Fees’ campaign calling for a return to the policy of reduced tuition fees for those graduate students who have completed their course requirements and are in the independent research and thesis writing stage of their degree. The Committee will continue working to implement this campaign at U of T.
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