Medium Magazine 2014

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CONTENTS

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FROM AGE TO AGE PARENTS & CHILDREN WHO SHARED THIS STUDENT LIFE

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HOW TO MAKE A NEWSPAPER STUDENT JOURNALISM’S CHANGING FACE: 1

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THE MOUNTAIN WE’RE STANDING ON THE MEDIUM’S ORIGIN 40 YEARS AGO IN A VERY DIFFERENT WORLD

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ON THE LISLEHURST CRICKET PITCH THREE PRINCIPALS. ONE CASUAL CONVERSATION

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FADED GLORY A THROWBACK TO UTM SPORTS’ EARLY DAYS

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HOW TO READ THE NEWS STUDENT JOURNALISM’S CHANGING FACE: 2

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RAGTAG DYNASTY RICHIE MEHTA, ROBERT PRICE, & MY UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

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PARTING SHOT

E D I TO R LUK E S AWC Z A K

P U B L I S HE D B Y M E DI U M I I P U B L I CAT I O NS 3 3 5 9 MISS I SS AU GA RD . N. , S T U D ENT C ENT RE, RM2 0 0 MISS I SS AU GA, O N L5 L 1 C 6 WWW. MED I U MU T M. CA ED I TO R@MED I U MU T M. CA

L E A D D E S IG N E R ALEX BERCEANU

E DI TO R I A L DI R E CTO R : LU K E S AWC Z AK

I L LU S T R ATO R GR AC E Y IP

DI R E CTO R S : C O REY BELFO RD , C HRIS T I NE CAP EWELL, NO U R HASS AN- AG HA, MAT T HEW LO NG, P RI T HVI MY NAMPAT I , FARI S NATO U R, VALERIA RY RAK

CON S U LT IN G D E S IG NE R M UB A S H IR B AWEJA P HOTO E D ITO R JA SM E E N V IR K CON T R IB U T IN G E D ITO RS L A R ISS A H O , C O LL E E N MUNR O , JA SO N C OE L H O, M A RIA CR UZ CON T R IB U TO R S CA R IN E A B O U S E IF , A L AIN L ATO UR

AD D IT IO NA L R E S E A R CH O LGA T K AC H E N KO , MAR IA IQ BAL

T H A N K S TO T H E D I M ASSIMO FA M ILY , T H E H O FA M I LY, BIL L W HI TA K E R , D U N CA N KO ER BER , T I M OT H Y S P E C K , R YA N DUQ UET T E, J O H N P E R CY , S U E P R IO R , GUY A LL E N , A LA N LOV ET T E, & GR EG G - M IC H A E L T R OY

COMMENTS, CONCERNS, OR COMPLAINTS ABOUT MEDIUM MAGAZINE’S CONTENT SHOULD BE DIRECTED TO THE EDITOR, WHO CAN BE CONTACTER AT THE EMAIL ADDRESS ABOVE. ALL CONTENT PRINTED IN MEDIUM MAGAZINE IS THE SOLE PROPERTY OF ITS CREATORS AND CANNOT BE USED WITHOUT CONSENT. OPINIONS EXPRESSED IN THIS PUBLICATION ARE EXCLUSIVELY OF THE AUTHOR AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THOSE OF MEDIUM MAGAZINE. ADDITIONALLY, THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED IN ADVERTISEMENTS APPEARING IN MEDIUM MAGAZINE ARE THOSE OF THE ADVERTISERS AND NOT MEDIUM MAGAZINE. MEDIUM MAGAZINE IS A DIVISION OF MEDIUM II PUBLICATIONS. MEDIUM MAGAZINE HAS BEEN PUBLISHED ANNUALLY (MOSTLY) SINCE 2010.

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E D I T O R ’ S N O T E

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hen I pitched my idea for this magazine, just for fun, to former editor Michael Di Leo—how I wanted to celebrate the 40th volume of the Medium, how I could get a hold of long-lost alumni, how I’d found all this great old stuff in the darkroom—his response was something like the scene in Inside Llewyn Davis when Llewyn plays a heartfelt song for the producer in Chicago. Michael nodded, paused, and replied, “So who will this be interesting to?”

He didn’t mean to disparage the idea; the danger certainly is clear. Many a student might pick up this document and see nothing but an indulgent self-tribute, an homage to a newspaper nobody reads—and not even something relevant, but a collection of mouldy scraps passed off as still valuable.

But I don’t believe that’s the inevitable character of retrospection. There’s something more to be found here. As library technician Alan Lovette told me when I stepped into this role, the Medium is important because it’s the memory of the campus. This paper remembers even when we don’t, and even when we can’t, considering it has about 20 years on most of us here.

The newspaper goes back to the earliest days of Erindale College, and follows its progress from a wooded plot with half a dozen buildings, through long years of self-definition, to the explosion of growth we’re still riding in the modern day.

It’s also sensitive to changes in the wider world: it registers Trudeaumania, John Lennon’s shooting, the fall of the Soviet Republic, the advent of the Internet. But most importantly, it remembers not only events and entities but people: real live people like you and me who went to the pub on weeknights, nearly burnt out every March, and shivered at the bus run. These are long-distance friendships—the distance is just time instead of space.

We’ve now travelled through and dwelt in their various worlds (because UTM has never been just one world) all year, and we’re eager to share what we’ve seen and heard. But soon the door will be open to everyone; the library is currently digitizing our entire archives so they can be read online. So take this magazine as a sampler, an invitation to spend time in these worlds yourself.

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A young Frederick and Lin Ho circa 1988

WORDS & PHOTOS LARISSA HO

FROM AGE TO AGE PA R E N T S & C H I L D R E N W H O SHARED THIS STUDENT LIFE

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was five when I decided I would attend the University of Toronto Mississauga.

I sat in my father’s lap in my grandmother’s house, where my mother grew up, one day before I was to enter first grade. I asked him what it said on his T-shirt. I knew the letters but couldn’t sound them out to form recognizable words. “The University of Toronto.” Papa told me that I must work hard when I start school because when I got older, I’d have the chance to attend university.

“University.” It sounded so… sophisticated.

He almost hadn’t had the chance to follow his dream of going to university, Papa said. His family didn’t really have the means. It was also across the ocean in a country he’d never set foot in. The odds were against him, but throughout the three years that he spent in mandatory Singaporean military service as a teenager, he couldn’t get the dream of going to university out of his head. So he applied to U of T and got in.

Off Papa went to Toronto for the first time.

It was January. Snow was falling. It was the first time Papa had ever seen snow. His coat was inadequate, and he was freezing. He didn’t know anyone or where he would sleep the first night.

He called his friend whom he had met in the army and who was studying at U of T. “I’m in the airport,” Papa said.

“Sure, call me when you get to Toronto,” said his friend.

“I’m not in the Singapore airport, I’m in the Toronto airport!”

After he convinced his landlord to let Papa stay the night with him at his place, the friend found Papa a place with a few other U of T students not far from Erindale College. Papa figured out how to take the subway the next morning to the Eaton Centre to buy a better coat. Then he needed to figure out where to buy groceries. It wasn’t easy, but these struggles didn’t stop him from pursuing his university education. I kept going, Papa said.

Good thing you did, I like to tell him. If you hadn’t gone to Erindale College, you wouldn’t have met Mama, and I wouldn’t be here right now, nor would any of my four younger siblings.

Two of those siblings are U of T students at the St. George campus. Rachelle is taking neuroscience and psychology. Stephanie studies kinesiology. Since these programs aren’t offered at UTM, my sisters commute every day on the shuttle that

brings students to St. George and they return to UTM when classes are over. Papa picks all three of us up from UTM at the end of the day and brings us back home in northern Mississauga.

My two youngest siblings, my sister Elizabeth and my brother Mathias, both want to attend UTM after graduating from high school.

“I mean, it’s the place where Mama and Papa met,” Elizabeth said to me once when she was nine. “It’s special.”

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ccording to Mama, she and Papa met in the South Building—now called the William G. Davis Building, though the name change is recent and upperyear students like me can’t shake the habit of calling it by its old name.

It happened just beyond the front doors leading to the Meeting Place during Orientation Week.

He was sitting at a table with a friend. As Mama and her older sister walked by, Papa tried to convince her to join the club he was representing—the Malaysian Singaporean Student Association. He made her laugh, she said.

For the next year, she’d see him around campus every now and then. She asked her friend to figure out his name and report back to her. Even though Papa knew Mama had a crush on him, he never asked her out. Finally, she got the guts to ask him. They ended up seeing a funny movie at her place.

After that, they went to another movie, this time at the theatre, and then they started going together to dances and club socials, and talking all the time on the phone. Papa knew everybody here, she said. He knew more people than she did, and she’d lived in Mississauga since she arrived with her family to settle here when she was twelve.

He also knew he was going to return to Singapore after university was over and that he couldn’t commit to a relationship with her after he graduated. That was why he hadn’t asked her out earlier.

He went back to Singapore when he graduated in 1985 with a bachelor of arts in economics and communications and a minor in computer science. As a souvenir of his presence in her

September 19, 1974: “I don’t know anything about administration. My general approach to life is to be somewhat pragmatic about things.

Being a scientist, I believe if you understand the problem you can solve it.” Principal E.A. Robinson interviewed on his appointment.

October 10, 1974: “The Canadian Indian wants a better deal from the Canadian people. Unfortunately, we hear about these claims mostly connected to incidents prompted by only a few instigators who … draw unfavourable attention to Indian causes and we tend to become indifferent to their demands.”

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life, he gave her his winter coat to keep. It was over. It was time to say goodbye. She cried.

They talked on the phone when he arrived back in Singapore. It was expensive to place a long-distance call back then, Mama said. And the signal was so bad. She wanted to visit him in Singapore. Her father forbade it.

When she graduated from Erindale College with a bachelor of science in chemistry and biology three years later, he came back for her and they got married in a church seven minutes from campus.

Twenty-five years and five kids later, they sent me to UTM, a mere 15-minute drive from our house near Heartland Town Centre, and watched me climb the stairs to the front doors of the South Building where they first met.

We still have the coat he gave Mama to remember him by. It hangs, patched and frayed, in the closet of our foyer. Papa digs it out every winter to wear before he shovels the snow from our driveway.

We are never throwing that coat out, Mama said.

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hen I was in first year at UTM in September 2010, the university held a “Meet the Principal” reception in the atrium of the RAWC where students were invited, over a buffet breakfast of muffins, coffee, and fruit tarts, to meet Deep Saini, who’d come from the University of Waterloo to be our principal.

I wanted to meet the new principal. University is a good place to meet people, I thought. I didn’t want to have no idea what was going on. I wanted to know who ran things around here. Having not heard of Deep Saini until the e-invite, I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t that ignorant again.

My mother brought me to campus just to meet him. I felt like I was going to meet a celebrity. I braced myself for a huge crowd.

When we entered the RAWC, I saw him. I pointed him out to my mother with a quick jerk of my head. He stood in the middle of a circle of what seemed to be older faculty. I looked around.

No crowds. Four or five students munched on the muffins and fruit tarts off to the side by the tables set up near the glass separating us from

the swimming pool.

“Where is everybody?” I asked my mom. She had prepared to park her car for at least an hour, thinking we’d have to line up to see him.

Instead, we stood off to the side and a few moments later, he noticed us.

“Hello,” he said to me, his face breaking into a smile. The circle of faculty parted so that we could reach him in the middle. He held out his hand. “I’m Deep.”

“Hello, I’m Larissa and this is my mom,” I said, as if I were in kindergarten and it was show-and-tell time. I shook his hand. “She came to UTM, too, when it was called Erindale College.”

“Oh, so you have a history with UTM!” he said in an impressed tone.

“Yes. She and my father met in the South Building.”

“Maybe you will meet your future husband here, too!” he joked. People around us laughed.

I decided I liked him. My mom’s face changed as the realization that I could find my future husband in university dawned on her.

“Sure…” I said, drawing the word out. “No pressure, right?”

I couldn’t say I hadn’t considered the possibility, but I’d never mentioned it to my mom before. As people laughed at my words, I realized that maybe I should have. She was stunned by the idea.

I couldn’t believe it—the principal was now voicing one of my secret hopes for university life and almost giving me his blessing. I inwardly thanked him for introducing Mama to the idea that I might actually date in university.

Later in the car, she said, “You aren’t actually going to date, are you?”

“Why not?” I asked. “You and Papa did. And that turned out splendidly. Maybe I’ll stop by some tables at Orientation Week and some cute guy like Papa will make me laugh.”

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tories like ours, the fruit of an Erindale marriage coming back to find everything changed at their old campus, aren’t the most common, but they do exist. I met up with one other family to get their perspective.

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John and Lilly Di Massimo met in a first-year accounting class in September 1978 at Erindale College, where they were both completing a bachelor of commerce, accounting stream. They attended Erindale at a time when there were few international students, when the only buildings on campus were North, South, and Crossroads (later expanded into the Student Centre), and when no assignments, essays, or course selections could be done electronically. It was a nightmare, said John, who remembers in detail the woes of doing a computer science class manually. At the time, computers ran on physical punch cards.

John and Lilly formed a friendship with other Erindale students in first year before starting to date two years later. It helped that Lilly knew John’s older sister from her Italian electives. They were pioneers of today’s well-known and popular Italian Club of Erindale. John acted as the vicepresident and Lilly was the treasurer. They would coordinate dances with York’s Italian club, play intramurals in the gym in South, and grab a bite to eat at the Meeting Place or the Blind Duck. Not everything is so different from today.

When they graduated in 1982, they didn’t suspect that over 30 years later a son of theirs would attend the same campus and earn the same degree.

John also worked for several years at Erindale College and sat on the Principal’s Advisory Council when Bob McNutt was principal, and on the committee that chose Ian Orchard to succeed him. John even put a brick in the wall of the Kaneff Centre when it opened in 1992. More than 20 years later, it’s being expanded into the Innovation Complex. When we talked in January, he told me that he’d only just received his plaque that week for participating in the Principal’s Advisory Committee, now that it’s been disassembled along with Erindale College Council. UTM now has a decision-making instead of an advisory body—Campus Council.

“They changed the way things are run,” reflected John, “which is good. It was almost expected. The size of the campus is unbelievable. That it’s grown to be the size that it is is just phenomenal. I don’t think you’re going to find too many of these types of campuses around Canada, how it’s set up with the greenery. It’s beautiful.”

One of the Di Massimos’ sons, Robert, graduated from UTM just last year—June 2013. He

knew plenty of international students during his years at UTM, had the advantage of more than three buildings on campus, and never had to do his course selections manually, nor most, if any, of his assignments without the aid of computers.

When I met with the three of them to talk about their years here, Lilly remembered that theirs was the largest graduating Erindale College commerce class to date.

“When we graduated with the B. Comm. degree, we were 23 people and that was the largest graduating class ever for B. Comm. at Erindale. Fifteen hundred started and 23 graduated right to the end,” she said.

Today the number of students entering the commerce programs is in the thousands, but the same thing happens as it did during John and Lilly’s time at Erindale—the numbers dwindle as students progress deeper into their degree.

“In second year,” said Robert, “they had us at a breakfast and they said that our numbers were cut by about 50 to 60 percent when we had to specialize.”

The program still requires a double major in commerce and another subject, such as accounting. But the cost is very different.

“Price-wise, it’s like night and day,” said John. “What we paid is not like what you’re paying now.”

This is because of the deregulated fees of the commerce program. Students now pay around $14,000 a year, as Robert did when the new fees were introduced.

Robert, who commuted to campus every day from Vaughan during his undergrad years like his father, said his decision to go to UTM was made freely of his parents’ history.

“It was something I felt on my own,” said Robert. “I felt that it was a place where you always felt welcome, where professors and students and everybody were always trying to help you and make sure you have the best experience you can have. That’s the vibe I always got from UTM. I loved it.”

It’s unlike the St. George campus, he said, which has always sported a more competitive environment. “At the St. George campus, it’s really intimidating. Nobody wants to give you the time of day,” said Robert with a smile.

October 31, 1974: “You know so many of us, once a ragtag bunch. […] We might have been lovable if we had had the good luck of being a failure.” Sports essay on the need to expand Erindale College’s athletics and give teams a chance to play.

November 10, 1974: “Only after considerable discussion did a special Nomenclature Committee, set up by the Erindale College Council, settle on [campus titles],” says a Medium II reporter. These titles included “South Building” (formerly “Main”), “North Building” (formerly “Preliminary”), and “the Pub” (formerly “the Watering Hole”).

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His parents said it was the same in the ’80s.

“A bunch of friends and I did get accepted to the downtown campus,” said John. “We chose here. It felt much more at home.”

“It wasn’t like the downtown hustle and bustle that was so impersonal,” Lilly added. “The ambience makes a big difference. When you’re downtown you’re plopped in the middle of downtown Toronto and trying to find a niche, whereas here you’re part of the same community.”

Their favourite places to study were almost the only places one could study: North, South, and the library, which was inside South, just across from the Meeting Place in the area now occupied by the office of the School of Continuing Studies.

“That’s a very small place for a library,” I observed.

“Yes, it was,” said Lilly, laughing. “Very small.”

John and Lilly reminisced about handing in everything on paper. You lined up at a set time to

drop off your work. If your handwriting wasn’t good enough, you were screwed. So everybody learned to type.

I was taking the interview down with an iPad, so far removed from the time John and Lilly were describing to me. I felt utterly relieved to have technology that allows me to be a student in a way that I never could have been if I had been here when my parents were, when John and Lilly were. I’m sure Robert felt the same.

I wrapped up the interview when I realized that we could go on forever talking about life as a student of Erindale College 30 years ago versus life as a UTM student today. At some point, you have to wrap up the nostalgia.

I teased Robert about the idea of marrying someone he met at UTM, like his parents and mine did.

“You never know,” said John as Lilly laughed. Robert just smiled.

No pressure. MM

John and Lilly Di Massimo with their son Robert

November 28, 1974: A story on the creation of the Harold Sonny Ladoo prize, which is still active at UTM, is accompanied by a touching account of Ladoo’s life, immigration, education at Erindale College, and early death at 28 years old.

January 30, 1975: “It was gravel most of the way, and that’s hard on the old feet.” Quote by Kathy Wistowsky, a 19-year-old student who walked over 14 miles from her home near Royal York to Erindale College as a protest against the inadequacy of Mississauga Transit. She saw only six busses pass her during the four hours that she walked. Would she do it again? “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

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how to make a newspaper 1

STUDENT JOURNALISM’S CHANGING FACE ON THE SURFACE, THE PROCESS HAS EVOLVED UNRECOGNIZABLY WITH THE TIMES. BEHIND THE SCENES, IT’S ALMOST EXACTLY THE SAME AS IT’S ALWAYS BEEN.

WORDS CARINE ABOUSEIF

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very Monday morning, a stack of fresh newspapers appears on stands around campus. But how does it get there? It takes people, planning, programs, papers, and printers— not to mention hours of research and editing. When we think back to when the Medium was first born in the 1970s, it’s hard to imagine how all that happened without shiny iMacs, swanky software, and automated machines.

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TYPESETTING IN THE ’70s

t’s the decade of Farah Fawcett fluffy hair, big bell bottoms, and Pink Floyd.

At UTM, or rather Erindale College, the doors of the South Building open into its brick-lined hallways for the very first time.

Medium II, as it’s called, also turns up on campus with headlines like “Woman to be nominated for mayor” and “Erindale quest for basketball team continues”.

It’s hard to imagine the Medium office—or any other campus office, for that matter—without a few sleek monitors. But let’s try. Instead, the newspaper staff had bulky, metallic equipment like typesetters and waxers.

The editors trickle into a campus office over the weekend. Each editor assembles one section of the newspaper. The editor procures a large, sticky, blue-lined, cardboard-like piece of paper about the size of the final newspaper page it’ll produce. In some years these papers or “flats” were stuck on the office walls for safe-keeping.

The blue lines form a template; they mark where the headlines, body text, photos, captions, and ads will fit.

The editor starts with the articles already typed up and printed. (The process differs from year to year.) Depending on the generation, the editor takes either full 8.5x11” papers or smaller strips to a metal machine called a waxer.

The editor slides open a small compartment in the machine. He drops a roll of wax into the drawer, and the machine melts the wax. The editor rolls the first strip of printed text, and the machine coats the back of the paper. The editor walks the wax-coated paper over to the flat and sticks it down in its place, aligned with the blue template.

The editors wax and stick and wax and stick until all the articles, headlines, photos, captions, and ads fill the flats.

Now, the editor looks over his pages.

Are there any grammatical errors or unsatisfactory sentences? He makes corrections with a special blue pen.

When all the “its” and “it’s”, “you’res” and “yours” and “weres” and “we’res” are found and fixed, the flats are finished. One of the editors volunteers to physically drive the boxed-up flats to the printing house.

PRINTING IN THE ’70s

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hat was once known as Medium II has worked with many printing houses over the years. The specifics of the software and machinery differed from printer to printer, but here’s what a typical set-up looked like.

The flats are now in the hands of the printer. Pre-press production starts. People and programs review the pages. Textboxes are aligned, edges sharpened, and colours corrected.

February 6, 1975: Professor Josef Skvorecky, a renowned writer at Erindale College, gives an interview on his novels. “If we have real respect for something we express it best in art by absolute realism,” he says.

February 27, 1975: “This last brand [of condoms] should be of particular importance to Erindale students, as it is sold in the vending machines on campus. ‘Non-Stop’ should be avoided as its possibility of leakage is high.”

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In a technique called “photo offset”, chemicals are poured on the flats, exposing them to a precise amount of light. The hardcopy is transferred to film that is then stripped into “film flats”, which will finally be imaged onto aluminum plates hung on the press. The images are transferred from plate to paper via cylinders and rollers: some rollers pour water, others pour ink, others absorb the liquid, and still others distribute it. The last roller brings the ink to a rubber cylinder. The rubber cylinder presses onto the paper, releasing a waterbased fountain solution that covers the areas that will be whitespace. The solution repels the ink that flows over the page.

The pages roll out from the press. They stand a few minutes while the ink cures.

If you’ve ever wondered why you get ink on your hands when you read a newspaper, here’s why. Because of the breakneck pace of newspaper publishing, printers opt for a quicker-drying ink in a process called “cold web printing”. This process isn’t as precise and permanent as the kind you get in magazines or books. When you think about the purpose of a newspaper—to be read fast and discarded fast—the ephemeral nature of the medium (thin paper, smudgy ink) make sense.

To answer those questions, we need to step back a little. Today’s newspapers, magazines, and book publishers are still trying to figure out where they fit in now that the Internet has uprooted much of the culture that formed their foundation. The best answer, at least for the moment? People are still reading print.

A few studies have shown that people still prefer paper when reading texts longer than 400 words. This encourages a trend that many publications have been gearing towards in the last few years: longer, more in-depth pieces appear in print issues like magazines and weekend papers, whereas short, hard news is what quickly flies down their screens.

What does that mean for student newspapers? For now, the Medium will continue to print. But will it look exactly the same in a few years? Probably not. All that can be said for certain is that news—whether it’s broken through tweets, Facebook posts, pint-sized paragraphs on the website, or lengthy print investigations—will outlive any particular medium. MM

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f you’ve made it this far, you probably have questions. You’re wondering: Why do these processes matter? And why do student newspapers still print anyway?

It would be a lot faster—not to mention cheaper—to cut out all the above. Upload some articles online. The information is what constitutes a journalistic publication, not the medium. Right?

March 20, 1975: “‘It is a lot of bull [that men don’t cry],’ says trainer Blackwell. ‘You should have seen the men’s varsity hockey team two years ago when they lost to St. George in the final. I’ve never seen so many grown men cry.’ ” On the roles of men and women, particularly in sports.

March 27, 1975: “Impressions of the night.” Headline of an article about an evening spent with Peel Regional Police’s Sgt. Young, who is “typical of the new university-educated police officer”. Constable positions are also advertised, with salaries ranging from $10,669 to $15,611.

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THE M O U N TA I N W E ’ R E S TA N D I N G O N

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W O R D S L U K E S AW C Z A K PHOTO JASMEEN VIRK

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t was a simpler time. Mississauga as you know it is not how it was then.

“Most of Mississauga in those days was apple orchards. The North Building was the original campus. When I got there, the South Building was less than two years old. None of the ancillary things that you now take for granted—all of the additional housing, all of the additional buildings—none of those existed then. There was no Square One—the largest mall we had in the area was Sheridan Mall. And Papa Luigi’s pizza was the only pizza we had in a 20-kilometre radius.

For us to get downtown there was either the intercampus bus or Mississauga Transit, which only started running, in ’75, a shuttle service up to Sheridan Mall, and then… Ha, we called it the scenic route. For us to get to Islington so we could take the subway downtown was a two-and-a-halfhour bus ride that just wound its way through all kind of areas. There was no bridge across there on Burnhamthorpe. To cross that river, you had to get down onto Dundas. That was the only bridge across. There used to be a small A&P, not even a supermarket, just a small A&P grocery on the other side of the bridge. We would walk down; it was a 20-minute walk for us to go and buy milk. It was nothing on campus. You have no idea.

“But it built a sense of community. For people who lived on campus, we were family. Everybody knew everybody else. The only residence was that little group of townhouses there at the north entrance. That’s where people lived on campus, was in those houses. I was lucky: I was put in McGill House, which no longer exists. It was on Mississauga Road, just there at the south entrance, and there was another couple of residences in between there and the north houses, which were farmhouses that the university had bought over. One was called Hasty House, which we used to nickname ‘Tasty House’, because it was only girls that lived there. That was across the street from Colman Place. Even Colman Place used to be a residence, but that was converted too.

“All three houses had outdoor pools! If the building has not changed any, when you’re inside Colman Place and you’re looking out towards the path that runs between North and South Building, it used to be right outside that thing. Hasty House had its own pool, McGill House had its own pool.

But they’re long gone. Long gone.

“We were like a little community, a little village, you know, just 300 or 400 people on residence, and everybody knew each other. Because we were in essence just this little island community in the middle of nowhere. It was a simpler time.”

That’s how Robert Sabga, Medium II’s first editorial cartoonist and a DJ at Radio Erindale, described “the good old days” at what was then known as Erindale College.

“Nostalgia” would be an uneasy classification.

Nostalgia elides inconveniences. But the difficulties of the time were indeed alive to Sabga, as they were to Mark Brown (Medium II operations manager), Ralph Szalay (DJ at Radio Erindale and finance commissioner of SAGE, the Student Administrative Government of Erindale), and Bruce Dowbiggin (Medium II’s third editor-inchief), all of whom were on the campus of 3,000 students in 1974, the first year Medium II was published.

Among these inconveniences were the bus service—the crawling Route 1 ran from the west end to Islington, and later was altered to bypass Erindale College to cut 10 minutes from its route; the lack of food—the pub didn’t serve proper meals, and after the North and South cafeterias closed, you were stuck with vending machines and lumpy coffee; and even the architecture—the South Building (now Davis) had just been built, and was immediately recognized as “a mass of concrete, nothing very subtle or very light—it was just heavy, Stalinist”, in Dowbiggin’s words.

Yet there was a life in the campus that isn’t always apparent today. When South was finished, Sabga recalls, the members of SAGE took one of the mixing pans in which the workers had

October 10, 1978: Medium II runs a story on the U of T Faculty Association’s outrage at a report that proposes freezing the number of tenure positions. The Faculty of Arts and Science was at 80% tenureship, with 10% more in the tenure stream.

October 12, 1978: Bob Dylan plays at Maple Gardens; an article in Medium II calls it a “surprising jolt to the senses… he flicked in and out of the spotlight with a devilish smile on his face”. He closed the night with the now-classic “Forever Young”.

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Mark Brown: Operations Manager 1974/75

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moulded the cement panels that clad the building and they turned it into a raft: the SS Erindale.

They launched into the pond outside the doors, and made it about 15 or 20 feet in before they sank. “On its maiden voyage it went down with all hands,” he laughs. “So that’s still down there.”

The North Building was then, as it is today, a haven for English students. You could go there and hear academic discussions “that sounded like they were of some other planet, and if you didn’t agree you were ostracized,” as Szalay, an English specialist himself, put it. Also housed in the North Building was the radio station, which had begun in 1968 as “a bunch of kids playing records on a record player over the PA system”. The principal, John Tuzo Wilson, liked that idea himself. It was he who bought the first control panel. Officially, it was for the communications courses, but somehow it ended up in the care of the radio station.

Meanwhile, Friday and Saturday nights were always pub nights in what had just been dubbed the “Blind Duck” (for reasons none of them recalls, although a naming contest and cartoon character are vaguely remembered). Brown, who cleaned the pub’s washrooms one year—in those days you could pay tuition on a summer job and a weekend job—remembers there always being about four inches of popcorn on the floor and, curiously enough, always more full beer bottles left in the women’s than the men’s.

The pub had multiple purposes, and was even used for classes sometimes. Once, Szalay was late for a class in which he had to give a thesis presentation—he was getting his notes together in the pub. When the prof asked his friend Bob where Ralph was, Bob replied, “He’s a little under the weather.” He then quipped, “I’ll be joining him under the weather after the class.” To Szalay’s surprise, while he was still sitting there, the prof and the whole class trooped into the pub, got themselves some beers, and did the presentations there. It was a great time; it was casual.

It was in this milieu that the Erindalian, the campus’s first newspaper and Medium II’s predecessor, had been founded and was still operating, in the cottage known as Colman House.

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THE OLD GUARD

he ill-fated Erindalian had been founded in 1969 by Bob Rudolph and Doug Leeies.

The newspapers of the day—before the Internet and its provision for all kinds of venting—were more political. People were often a part of them, Dowbiggin remembers, because they believed in “the revolution” or in a particular political cause. But speculation in the Erindalian’s case is obscure. All we can say is that it was unique. In a 1997 history of the publication that is now history itself, Medium editor Duncan Koerber, now a writing professor at York, quoted Leeies: “It all started on a shoestring budget upstairs at Colman House. Erindale was a blank canvas for us. Nobody else was doing what we were doing.

We were cutting our own trail.”

Here Szalay, then a DJ at Canada’s First Radio Erindale, met Gregg-Michael Troy, Matt Shakespeare, Dowbiggin, and other students who would soon become influential in campus media.

But both CFRE and the Erindalian were in trouble. One day Szalay, who wanted to go into program production, discovered that the radio station’s tape decks didn’t work. He made the mistake of asking why: because there was no money to fix them! He found out from the people running the Erindalian that they had the same problem. In fact, they were short an issue or two because they didn’t have the money to print them.

They were running out of cash, and the editor-inchief quit that spring, leading to the folding of the publication. They were going to disband CFRE, too. Desperate, they all decided that one of them

April 10, 1979: “Students want Quebec in Canada.” Front-page headline. A Canada-wide poll of university students run by Canadian University Press at Medium II’s request reveals that 85% of students agree, 6% disagree, and 9% are undecided.

September 11, 1980: “The name of the paper is Medium II … We don’t have any specific purpose, or if we do we’re certainly not aware of it but we do try and inform and/or entertain.” An introduction to the publication for froshies.

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should run for communications coordinator of SAGE the next year and sort it out. Because he’d asked in the first place, Szalay was voluntold.

Once he had been elected, he discovered that the funding for both campus media had been waylaid—not stolen, but used for things it hadn’t been allocated for, including vans for the pub.

When it came time for SAGE to present their budgets to the downtown council (to which it was linked back then) Szalay and another member of SAGE proposed a separate account for the $26,000 that was to run Erindale’s campus media.

Their communications commissioner, Michael Sabia—son of feminist Laura Sabia and the CEO of Bell Canada from 2002–08—agreed, and the groups got what they were budgeted for that year.

But it was already too late for the Erindalian.

It had fallen apart. Using the last of its budget, Gregg Troy (as he was known for short) pulled together a few people and published the very first issue of Medium II, with perhaps the most striking headline it has ever had: “Man charged in Erindale Campus murder.” (That young woman was Constance Anne Dickey, who, to our knowledge, has never been memorialized as a victim of violence at U of T.) Troy and his team’s very tangible proposal worked: SAGE approved of the publication and added it to their portfolio and budgeted for it. So the first year of Medium II, the student government was in charge.

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THE MICROCOSM IS A HOTHOUSE

ven Medium II’s name, which was finally changed to the Medium in 1995, was a source of contention. Troy wanted to call it the University Journal, but that was taken for a literary publication. It’s an irony that has never been forgotten that the “II” signified that it was secondary to the first medium on campus,

CFRE, considering that Troy, by all accounts, resented the radio station to the core.

Indeed, Szalay and Brown in particular remember Gregg Troy as difficult to get along with. “I gotta tell you about him,” says Szalay. “He was one of those people. At first he had company manners. He was a nice guy, but after a while he was a royal pain to get along with. When I agreed with him, then he was great. When I didn’t agree with him, aw, he could be so cruel.”

Of course, it has to be accounted for that Szalay was from the student government, and, as news editor Mark Brown recalls, “Everything in the microcosm is a little bit of a hothouse. At school, you live in a little bit of a bubble and the temperature gets turned up, and it’s the whole world.” Money was a big issue. It was tight, and sometimes a group needed something that hadn’t been budgeted for, such as a punched tape machine used in the offset lithograph printing process. Hence, “The budget process was always quite intense, because everybody was really passionate,” Brown adds. “The paper wanted some money, and someone else wanted this, and the clubs wanted this…”

Considering that, to Troy, Szalay both represented the money and the competing media—he was still a DJ there that year—Radio Erindale became a particular thorn in his side. In editorials and letters, Troy described CFRE as “fatuous”, and anything that they got that Medium II didn’t get was another source of disagreement. One year, CFRE held a Christmas party on the main floor of Colman House, and it was licensed. Troy came over, says Szalay, “and he made such a fuss! He was pouring alcohol on people’s heads.” Szalay came up beside him and told him to pipe down, and Troy was ribbing him, “being really antagonistic. He was like, ‘How come the Medium II wasn’t invited?’ I says, ‘Well, it wasn’t something I had to do with! Radio Erindale had a Christmas party for their staff.’ I don’t know if Medium II had one.”

October 2, 1980: “Concerning the article published in the Varsity about the rising concern of attacks on women (at St. George), I [...] encourage the women of Erindale College to take an interest in being able to defend themselves and avoid such happenings on our campus.”

October 23, 1980: “My God, I find it impossible to do any [studying] where I’m surrounded by empty coffee cups, discarded newspapers, apple cores, ashtrays filled beyond their brims and numerous other affronts to order and cleanliness.” Letter from Stephen Welford.

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Yet Gregg Troy was a genius at what he did.

With nothing for a model but the defunct Erindalian and perhaps the Sun, and with no incentive but his own, he ran the paper to a standard that has arguably been hard to match in subsequent years.

One week, “He and Johann Barr managed to get the van,” Brown recalls, “and they went down to Québec City and interviewed René Lévesque,

before he took over the government. So it was early when he was getting involved. And they took a photograph and, quite frankly, I think it’s one of the best photographs that’s ever been taken of René Lévesque. Gregg did a whole two-page story on the interview, and that was a really key, important thing to him. We didn’t know you couldn’t do something, so we went ahead and did it anyways.”

He also points out the article’s prescience concerning the discussion surrounding Québec today and the Charter of Values. One question was, “How did French culture survive?” Lévesque replied, “That’s a hell of a good question, because we’re in a transition period. What kept the culture

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going, at least the language and some very minor cultural achievements, was mostly the fact that we were a rural society, basically a peasant society tied to the Church and tied to tradition.”

Particularly stunning to Brown is that Lévesque would describe as a “peasant society” what was an important rural vote. And there it was, exclusive to Medium II. Troy’s staff, of course, had a hand in the paper’s success. Szalay had recruited Sabga as cartoonist (Sabga had been his high school’s cartoonist in Barbados), and some great cartoons were produced. When the campus opened up the first townhouse residence—superseding the farmhouses the university had previously converted—he had fun with the idea of the quaint community, drawing Hobbiton with its little hillocks and doors in the hillocks. When the mayor of Mississauga who (if it can be imagined) preceded Hazel McCallion suggested separating Erindale College and creating the University of Mississauga, the staff got wind of it and satirized it with a huge pair of scissors cutting the link between the two.

Several other stories were of high calibre.

When Formula One was running out of Mosport, Brown called them up and asked for a press pass on the grounds that he was from a university newspaper—in fact he just liked cars. Boom, press pass showed up, and he covered a day of racing. Medium II also sent him to the old CNE stadium to document a Blues game, and he called it in to CFRE so they could broadcast it.

Because of Brown, Medium II was also one of the first papers to do a journalistic ride-around with a police officer, which he did one evening with Peter Young of the Peel Regional Police. When the police saw the write-up, they placed full-page ads in the paper to recruit officers on campus.

Many other names the interviewees remember fondly were involved in the elaborate production, which involved everything from physically

pasting articles onto the boards to driving the rickety van out to the printers in Acton. Certain names recur in the conversation of Brown and Szalay: Heidi Putzer, Vivien Anderson, Tom Maloney, Jackie Tremblay, Linda Kuschnir, David Leslie…

One frustration of Gregg Troy’s was the difficulty of getting writers, if not readers. Sometimes, in order to spark a debate, he would write a letter under a pseudonym, such as Peabody. It wasn’t upfront, but it exemplifies the lengths to which he would go to light a match under someone’s butt and get things moving. He also invited Szalay to contribute, despite the tension between them. (And yet— another of Troy’s contradictions—he would sometimes take the teeth out of an article.)

“He certainly drove issues, there’s no question about it,” says Brown. “He was the driver to get it going, and tremendous effort on his part to do it.”

Even Szalay concedes that it was worthwhile putting up with him, because he was doing good work: “And his legacy, since it still exists, is a pretty darn good legacy.” Here Brown interjects: “Oh, yeah. It’s the mountain you’re standing on.”

“Yeah,” says Szalay, “there wouldn’t have been a Medium II without him.”

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THE MOUNTAIN WE’RE STANDING ON

f we zoom out, the campus was, in some sense, unchanged.

It was still the same Erindale College, a tiny, unserious place in the middle of nowhere where, Szalay remembers, there was stretcher service to the pub from the blood donor clinics, where the student government was “loosey-goosey”, where there was one pizza place in a 20-kilometre radius.

When Brown moved to Mississauga from Windsor in 1967, he recalls, they were taught in grade 8 geography that Peel County was one of the largest producers of dairy products in the Commonwealth

(“and I don’t know if you could find a cow in that region right now”)—and south of the 401, there were no houses till you got south of the railway tracks, everything was extensive country, and Highway 10 had two lanes.

Likewise, the campus was still homey. Mike Spigel, for whom Spigel Hall is named, was then just a professor with a big pipe, on whom students played pranks, turning his behavioural psychology hypotheses against him (“But he was one of the originals, that’s for sure”). Desmond Morton, later the dean, was a professor who was tough on spelling in essays, before computers and spellchecks. You could get pretty far on a rumour, too. Sabga and a professor once joked with an abnormally gullible TA about the dry dog food they had just come out with, which had nitrates in it to enhance its so-called nutritional value.

Dogs, they said, couldn’t metabolize the nitrates, and the major part of their body fat is glycol, so when a dog got excited and began to metabolize the glycol, there were pockets of nitroglycerine in it—you’d be calling it, “Here, Spot!” and it would explode. It was a joke, but suddenly they started hearing it repeated, even off campus. Szalay took part too, faking a photo of a guy holding a leash with a charred collar on it. CBC was going to send a team down to investigate, and that’s when the professor told them to shut it down. How hard would it be to get away with that today in the face of websites like snopes.com?

Even Principal Tuzo, world-famous for his theory of continental drift, shared that air of fun.

Every week he’d invite people in student affairs and alumni to the grand old principal’s house, Lislehurst. For his goodbye party, a bunch of Erindale students made a huge cake out of cardboard out of which someone playing a Mississauga tribe Indian jumped out to give the principal the key of the city. And a certain Matt Shakespeare cooked up the idea of a giant punch bowl—Tuzo’s wife was famous for punch—that they made out of

October 30, 1980: “Crack a pack of Colts along with the great outdoors.” Ads for cigarettes were once common (and legal) in the media.

November 20, 1980: “ECSU accepts sex ed centre. Turnaround of original decision.” Headline and subtitle on the front page. Barb Smith, its coordinator, “expects most people to use the phone-in service”.

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plastic and cotton, and while someone manipulated the cotton with a string backstage to make it form the continents, the guy playing Tuzo fiddled with the foam in his wife’s punch bowl and said, “Ooh! Continental drift!”

Yet something had indeed changed below the surface. That world, bathed in nostalgia or no, was on its way out. Larger-than-life figures were altering it through many channels. The same year he founded Medium II, Gregg Troy resigned, ran for president of SAGE, and “killed the council almost singlehandedly”, in Szalay’s words, to found the Erindale College Student Union, which was later renamed UTMSU. New buildings were put up, phase by phase.

The architecture evolved away from functionalism and brutalism towards the styles we see today. The residences’ outdoor pools disappeared in the process. Universities began campaigning hard for international students (not regrettably).

Erindale College began to be promoted at U of T, and enrolment began sharply increasing across the province, even as the liberal arts degree was starting to slip from prestige.

They also started to formalize offices. The pub and the student government were removed from the small house Dowbiggin says they were run out of and were distributed throughout the new buildings. Medium II was shuffled to North and to a shed called Margeson House by the pub.

The long-standing relationships between various organs of the campus began to crystallize. Not a decade later, when the infighting became more intense, the paper was officially separated from ECSU by a student referendum and shortly thereafter was incorporated. ECSU drafted a constitution and its priority, which could once be summarized as to “make sure the pub had lots of beer”, become more structured and set. The roles of the administration, the paper, the radio, and the union began to develop familiar scripts.

Those were indeed the formative days of Erindale College, and we are indeed standing on the mountain they built. Brown observed that there was no long tradition at Erindale at the time; undeniably, there is now, even as we look to the future and wonder on all fronts whether all these institutions—universities, radios, newspapers, and even governments—have outgrown their usefulness. At such times, the most important thing is to look back and recognize that there’s something to be said for the circumstances of uncertainty, of malleability, in which individual people can shape their world over in their vision, as they could and did then.

It may be Dowbiggin’s words of advice for journalists that ring loudest in the wake of stories like this: “Run with it! Have fun with it! Don’t feel you have to do what they did the year before.

Look at the big world out there and dream big dreams, and most of all—and it’s a hard thing to do at universities these days because of political correctness—try to get the full range of opinions and attitudes that form the community. Don’t just get hunkered off and do the same as everyone else is doing. Understand that free speech is about hearing people you don’t necessarily agree with. That’s the most important thing.” MM

November 20, 1980: Teenage Head plays at the pub. Later, R. Eastman of Medium II interviews them, and gets a “Sure, [he can ask us questions] if he has a bottle of rye with him.” A caption asserts that most Medium II staffers stayed home from the show and watched Dallas.

November 27, 1980: “Chili is the big seller right now in the pub. Every day Angelo makes up a huge pot of chili from a recipe he concocted a long time ago.” Charming description of pub fare.

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Office of the Campus Council

The UTM Campus Council exercises governance oversight of campus specific matters—those affecting the campus’ objectives and priorities, the development of long-term and short-term plans and the effective use of resources in the course of these pursuits.

For the 2013-14 inaugural year of the UTM Campus Council and its Standing Committees, sincere appreciation goes out to current and outgoing members for their thoughtful contributions and service to governance. Collectively and individually, members have served on UTM’s governance bodies in good faith, and with the longer-term view of considering the best interests of the university as a whole.

On behalf of the Chair of the UTM Campus Council, the Office of the Campus Council would like to extend congratulations to those who have been elected and appointed in their respective constituencies to UTM’s governance bodies to serve during 2014-15 and beyond.

Thank you for your ongoing interest in university governance.

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For more information, please visit utm.utoronto.ca/governance.

TIME LAPSE MAPS UTM 40 YEARS AGO, 20 YEARS AGO, & TOMORROW

ILLUSTRATIONS GRACE YIP

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Erindale College is built on land bought in 1965. Its construction began in 1966, and it opened in 1967.

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Erindale got more artsy in its third decade, including a theatre and the Blackwoodhousing Kaneff Centre.

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The pace of growth in the last 20 years has quickened. With a name change, enrolment growth, and a high seat in university governance, the campus is coming into its own.

But is there a limit in sight?

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Left to right: Principals McNutt, Saini, and Orchard

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ON THE LISLEHURST CRICKET PITCH

WORDS LARISSA HO PHOTOS JASMEEN VIRK

A

CO N V ER SAT IO N

SA IN I

&

FO R M ER

( 2002–10)

&

B E TW E E N

P R I N C I PA L

P R I N C I PA LS

B OB

M C N U TT

I A N

D E E P

OR C HA R D

( 1 9 9 6 – 2 0 0 2 )

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I

sat down with the three most recent principals of UTM: current principal DEEP SAINI and former principals IAN ORCHARD and BOB MCNUTT, to chat over Chartwells-catered muffins about the past, present, and future of the little green campus. I discover what the biggest challenges have been for UTM in the past nearly two decades, the principals’ proudest moments, and that there is actually a secret fourth U of T campus tucked away at Dufferin and Steeles for aerospace studies.

planned for the fact that that blip would continue on and then lead to a doubling of the enrolment.

And I guess all of our challenges, which are not unique to UTM but to all universities, are to do with finances from the government, and how do you cope with an expansion doubling student enrolment and creating the space, hiring the faculty and staff, within a certain funding framework. And I think the main challenge that all of us had was to do with funding and the timing of that funding. Often that funding came after you took the students. And so the building always came afterwards, and we were always catching up on space.

LARISSA HO Shall we get started?

DS I could simply say what he and he said. It’s actually, in some ways, the present challenges that we are dealing with today were created by these two gentlemen. During their terms, we decided to seize the opportunity of more students coming to UTM and that growth; we knew very well back then that we didn’t have that space and those resources to support them, and the strategy was that we would build that space and build those resources as we go along. So that’s what we’re busy doing right now. The enrolment didn’t simply increase as the result of the double cohort; as Professor Orchard said, it was projected to increase in response to the demand in the western GTA and elsewhere. So we’ve had this embarrassment of riches when it comes to student numbers, but we have to deal with that embarrassment by dealing with this challenge of the space that is needed. So we’re building as fast as we can, both in terms of as fast as the money can become available and our physical ability to build. Aside from the two major projects we have going now—the construction of the North Building and the expansion of the Kaneff Centre—there are probably around 25–30 smaller projects going around campus. This is going to continue for the next, perhaps, five years. That’s our biggest challenge: to keep the money coming, and to have the physical ability to manage all these projects that are happening.

DS Yes, but will we be on our best behaviour?

LH What were some of the challenges facing UTM at the time, from your perspectives as principals?

BM In my time, the main challenge that came up towards the latter part of my term was the double cohort. In 2003, we had the double cohort of graduates and the decision was made—and we spent a lot of time figuring out how to handle it, but the decision was made to finally grow UTM and Scarborough. So that decision was made during my term, and then I left, and I left that problem to Ian, of actually handling the growth and building the buildings. When I left, the student population was around 6,000 and now it’s 12,000. It’s doubled. So that was the main event, that I say, of the time. Ian was working in the provost’s office at the time and we spent a lot of time figuring out how many students we were going to take, so when the decision was made to grown Mississauga and Scarborough, that set a lot of things in motion. One of them was the CFI grant.

IO Let me follow up with that. Maybe we can go in order of age?

So, I think decisions around the double cohort were also impacted by the fact that the survey showed there was going to be an increase in demand for university places over the following 10, 15 years. So in fact we didn’t just plan for the double cohort, which would then be a blip. We

There are a couple of additional challenges. There is an increasing interest in UTM from international students. So the numbers started going up, and they have really taken off. For the last few years, we have been hovering around 20% intake every

January 15, 1981: The Erindale College Athletics and Recreation Association institutes a new rule for all intramural sports whereby any player caught fighting in a game will be banned from playing for at least one year.

January 22, 1981: A huge photo and in-depth article titled “Requiem for a Common Man” by Rick Harrison commemorate John Lennon, assassinated on December 8, 1980.

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year in terms of international students. And that puts a different type of pressure, not only simply pressure of space and facilities, but also meeting the needs of these students. These needs tend to be very different from the needs of local Canadian students. So providing for that is not going to let off anytime soon. My guess is that if we chose to do that, we could actually go as high as 25% international. The demand is there. UTM is seen more and more as a campus of choice for international students. And then the last thing I would also say that is challenging is that we have positioned ourselves as a comprehensive university for the western GTA. We are that university, but there is increasing expectation from the university that we should continue to expand the diversity of programs that we offer. That adds another challenge now in this financially constrained environment on how to bring in those new programs, how to put the money on the front end to support the creation of those programs. Money, money, money!

BM I remembered some interesting discussions in [Erindale] College Council when we talked about the growth. Some faculty didn’t want growth.

They wanted to stay the same size. They thought 5,000 was a lovely size for a little campus, a beautiful campus, lots of space, lots of greenery. But I kept saying it wasn’t a viable economical model because you couldn’t continue to survive.

Those small numbers, particularly when in those days we tried to have the same arts and science programs that the St. George campus had. St. George campus had considerably more resources to put on the programs. It was tough for a small campus, but the growth I saw was critical, and I think I’ve been proven right. It’s allowed for a lot of things to happen. But a lot of people liked the way it was. A lot of students like it the way it was.

I’ve met some alumni from that time who’ve said, “Oh, UTM’s gotten too big.”

DS That’s an interesting comment. I think there’s another challenge coming our way and you have hinted to that challenge. And that is how to contain growth now in future years. There are attractive elements of UTM that are bringing better students, more students, and so on, and eventually we could lose that if we continue to grow indefinitely. So

at some point, we have to determine what is the optimal size of UTM. We are at 13,500 and counting undergraduate students now, and we have to determine what the sweet spot would be. My opinion is it’s somewhere under 20,000 students.

Once you go beyond that—and I saw Waterloo going through that, actually—you lose that close-knit community that we are coveted for. That’s a challenge we’re going to have to face because the pressure to grow isn’t going away anytime soon.

BM Is Scarborough around the same size?

DS Scarborough is slightly smaller—it’s around 11,000, I’d say. But growing again. It’s interesting. When you start digging up the stats, you get surprises. I got a surprise yesterday. Fifty-seven percent of all undergraduate growth plan is happening at UTM. Fifty-seven percent of all growth. So, there is that pressure. And I think we would do well now to start thinking of a way to stop.

LH I guess we’d lose UTM’s status as a wildlife sanctuary too if we were to continually grow.

IO So, interestingly, some years ago, there was a decision that we’d only build on parking lots in order to preserve the green space. So you’ll see the Instructional Centre went on parking spots. The CCT Building used to be a parking spot.

And so the campus is very green, ideologically, I think, as well as physically. And so that decision was made to preserve the space using parking lots. Then we ran out of parking. Hence, we built an above-ground parking structure, which can be extended further back into all the surface parking layers behind it. I think if you looked at the green space compared now to 15 years ago, we have as much green space actually.

DS This is not embedded in the Master Plan.

BM Yes, you’re staying outside the outer circle.

DS We’re planning for doubling the building space on campus, but pretty much not cutting a tree anywhere. It’s all through intensification within the outer circle road, with the exception of one parking area behind the Alumni Hall—there

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are no trees there. There’s no parking. That’s about it. The only parking outside the outer circle road, where something could go up, is the football field. And if we build anything there, that would be a sports facility.

here and then they spent their time at St. George.

That made it a twofold kind of faculty member. I tried to work on that one. Again, I think growth helped that one. I really came to the challenge. It was the best administrative job I ever had, quite frankly. I really enjoyed myself. There was never a dull day working here in the seven years I was here.

I0 There’s also the soccer field next to the Instructional Centre and the North Building, and we take pride in the fact that that can never be DS It’s interesting you should say that, because built on. Ever. Because we built geothermal under- one of my mentors said to me when he was provost ground the instructional Building. Being British, I here, and I was considering the position, he said, preserved the soccer field.

“Deep, it’s the best position at the University of Toronto. You should take that position.”

DS All we need is a cricket pitch now somewhere and then everything will be fine.

BM I agree.

I0 So, in front of Lislehurst there is an area that I thought would be fantastic for a cricket pitch.

You could have the principals, 11 versus…

DS You could at least have practice. If you put nets all around…

I0 I would be all for that.

DS So would I. LH So what were your priorities coming in as principal for UTM, for each of you?

BM Well, for me, I thought it was an exciting job.

I was the dean of science at McMaster when I was interviewed for this job, and I thought this was a chance to run a campus, with not only arts and science, but arts and science and business. So I have to admit I came in and I thought I understood the University of Toronto but I didn’t. And I had the first year learning of what a complicated, convoluted institution it was—and I assume it still is to some degree—but the relationship between this campus and the Faculty of Arts and Science was something I had to learn. So I guess my goals were the same as anyone coming in late, which was to have the best academic programs you can, hire the best faculty you can, and make the place a viable place to be. And then my goal was to get more faculty doing more research on campus.

There was a group in science—biology, psychology, chemistry. Some people were doing research here. But most faculty taught undergraduate

I0 Yes. So, I arrived in 2002, and what Bob had started at the end of the ’90s and leading into that time was that planning for growth and in the longer term, increasing the population that was going to double. Bob then started a process that was going to continue on, in which UTM had to alter its relationship with the University of Toronto and with the Faculty of Arts and Science. So, this is a little bit before your day, but Bob was principal of what was called Erindale College, and then Bob changed the name of Erindale College to University of Toronto at Mississauga, which was then changed to University of Toronto Mississauga. That was to emphasize was that this campus was part of the university system, and not a college in the context of what a college is. Also before your day, and what Bob lived through and that changed—the course of this growth was that formally, this college was part of the Faculty of Arts and Science at St. George. And because we were part of the Faculty of Arts and Science at St. George, we were not able to have a dean or formally have chairs of departments or even departments. And so there were no departments at this campus. There was a biology group, there was a chemistry group, there was a physics group and an English group. And so the priority was to change our relationship. So we formally seceded from the Faculty of Arts and Science. So we became a division in our own right. That then enabled us to create departments, have a chair of each department, have a dean, have vice-deans, and so on. So that process was the priority in the first year or two.

September 17, 1985: “Parents were … voicing their concerns about their children sharing a classroom with an AIDS child. … Doctors are not quite sure how the disease is transmitted [but] if the parents of children with AIDS have not contracted the disease, and the healthcare workers of a child with AIDS have not either, then the risk of a healthy child sitting beside an AIDS child in a classroom cannot be that great.”

September 17, 1985: Medium II runs a student union ad for the addition of late-night shuttle bus service and for the “Lottuition” lottery, in which the first prize is tuition—a value of $1,215.

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BM This position of principal also allowed you to become vice-president, which allowed you to interact on a different level with the university.

IO Precisely. So this just used to be principal of Erindale College or principal of University of Toronto at Mississauga. But in the restructuring, this position was elevated to vice-president of the whole university. Now because we were a university system with three large campuses, plus there’s a fourth campus… up on… Dufferin and Steeles? There’s a department of aerospace and other things. People often forget about that. But there’s actually a fourth campus. But it’s really just a department plus other environmental things.

But three large campuses, which is essentially a system of U of T, rather than the notion of Scarborough and Mississauga being called suburban campuses, or…

BM “Satellite campuses”, which I never liked.

IO President Naylor then banned the terms “satellite campuses” and “surburban campuses”, and said you refer to it as “the Mississauga campus” and “the Scarborough campus”, because it’s equal with the St. George campus. And so those were the priorities in the early 2000 era, started I guess around 1999 with Bob, the planning for it. And we managed to implement the change and we actually created the departments. And that led into what Deep was referring to, which is that we can create critical mass. So you suddenly have departments of critical mass faculty, which can then do critical mass research and so on. So, that was a huge change of the history of this campus, and interestingly, the U of T wrote a rather thick book called The History of the University of Toronto and are doing an update to the history that will begin with Scarborough and Mississauga’s change of status, becoming divisions in their own rights.

campus, which it is not. It is quite a different beast.

They were called principals as well downtown, the same title, but the principal of Scarborough and I had different jobs than the people at St. George. I also, quite frankly, satisfied the mayor. She wanted to see the word “Mississauga” in the title of this campus.

IO I think it also emphasized that you come to this campus, you get a U of T degree.

DS Exactly. Yes. IO And that wasn’t so self-evident when it was called Erindale College. I think people questioned, was it the same as the St. George degree?

And it absolutely is. So that was a critical change, although you’ll also meet people who call this place Erindale College.

BM It’s still the official name.

DS It’s still officially Erindale College—yup, in the charter.

BM It’s Erindale College, also known as the University of Toronto Mississauga. I think it was good that you took out the “at”. We had this debate in the council of “at” and “of”… which preposition were we going to put in this name?

But the important thing was the University of Toronto was put in.

DS That evolution continues and it’s actually very interesting to hear Bob and Ian. The institutionbuilding is such a multigenerational thing. So now we’ve left off where Ian left campus. We recognized that there was the opportunity to transform this campus into a fully comprehensive university.

A very different type of comprehensive university, which is part of a larger system of three universities, essentially. So that’s what we’re workBM Yeah. One of the reasons why I wanted to ing on. And there is another unique opportunity change the name was I was asked to do some here, which is to turn this into a unique campus, fundraising. I had to go out to the major CEOs almost an elite campus, of the University of Toronof major corporations and they did not under- to, because of the smaller size and everything stand that Erindale College was not like Appleby we have available—the environment and so on. I College. I had to explain that this was a campus would use, you know, informally, a term such as of the University of Toronto, right? People said “Mount Allison at the University of Toronto” where it was like one of the colleges at the St. George you have a strong emphasis on undergraduate

September 24, 1985: Atari advertises a $600 word processing system, including a disk drive with “127K RAM storage per disk, enough for more than 100 pages of text”. It produces “typewriter-like, elite (12- pitch) typeface”.

November 26, 1985: Medium II runs an interview with two students who’ve created a “So You Wanna Be a Head Banger” kit, on sale for $14.

The kit recommends that you have long, unwashed hair, resent everyone, do lots of drugs, and compensate for the fear you may be gay by acting especially macho. Later in the volume, a lot of space is given to praising gay activism and coming out.

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training, but also in the context of the University of Toronto being a very research-intensive university— Canada’s leading research-intensive university.

BM When I was there, the faculty and staff were loyal to U of T, but they felt they were not quite equal.

That’s what we are focused on now, to see how we can expand this campus’ offerings, make them as comprehensive as possible. The Academy of Medicine was one major step started during Ian’s period.

IO Yes. BM That was very hard for me to live with. Because nobody badmouthed U of T. Everyone really wanted to work here and be part of it. You’ve done away with that and it’s fantastic.

BM That was a great move.

DS Now we’ve just created an Institute for Management and Innovation, which is a de facto business school but different from the downtown business school, Rotman. And we are now starting to work towards expanding and building the Institute for Communication, Culture and Technology, which has existed since… 2000?

BM Yes.

BM Yes.

LIGHTNING ROUND

IO Yes.

LH Did you or do you buy food on campus and from where?

DS 2000. But the time has come now for us to take it to the next level. So that’s a high priority to expand that. The space is there. It’s the people that are needed there. So we are rapidly creating positions there and programs will be expanded there, and exploring other opportunities of that nature.

How do we create this larger structure that looks like faculties and schools and so on, but have a very different flavour from what you would see at other universities? They are very interdisciplinary.

They bring departments together rather than rule over other departments, like faculties do. So that’s the next phase.

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DS Actually, we’re starting to go from the next step from there. It’s a campus of choice, and we have a significant number of transfers to here after the students have experienced both campuses.

BM Did I buy food on campus? Right downstairs.

When I was here, they changed the food vendors.

The students were fed up with that one that was handling the food so we got another one in. And then they got fed up with that one in six months.

IO So my entire life—my entire working life—I’ve always brought sandwiches from home. But the rare occasions that I have food on campus it’s at the pub.

LH Oh, really? The Blind Duck Pub?

LH What were some of your successes?

BM Yeah. I used to eat there too. Yeah.

IO I think the campus gained a lot of self-confidence, and despite the growth and development and the massive increase in population and so on, we elevated entry requirements. So we became very much what was described as a “university of choice”. Students were choosing to come to UTM rather than like in other eras, when they were getting in there because they couldn’t get into anywhere else.

IO Yes. Especially when soccer was on TV.

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LH (to DS) And I see you in line at Tim Hortons all the time.

DS I buy food here all the time. So, we are actually eating campus food right now.

IO When I arrived, faculty complained that you couldn’t get good coffee on campus. Yes, there was

Tim Hortons on campus, but you couldn’t get good coffee. So we brought Second Cup and Starbucks to campus.

DS Yes, and they’re expanding. But what you may not know is that I occasionally pick up a dog at Mike’s.

LH Did you or do you exercise on campus?

BM I did. Down in the basement. This beautiful facility didn’t exist at the time. There was the basement and it was crowded and it was smelly. And they had the weight machines and I used to get around there and work out.

IO I’d jog around the track occasionally and used the squash courts.

DS If you are a person who wakes up before 6:30, you’d see me at the RAWC before 6:30.

no more ball hockey. So they would write about what score there was a year ago, what a great lead we had and everything. But I had to do something.

The physical director created a code of conduct for behaviour and everything. Another thing that made it bad was that I didn’t stop the females, so the men were really irate.

Another thing: the parking. I decided that parking was an administrative decision to cover revenue.

And so I said I’m raising parking. I’m just doing it because we have to, to raise that money. We need the money. So, the student reps would come with tape on their mouths because they said democracy had been destroyed, you couldn’t talk about these things… but it passed. Because if you had people voting on increases, it wouldn’t happen.

People who came here from St. George had to pay for parking there and then here again. I don’t know if you ever sorted that one out.

DS Nope.

LH Wow, so that’s a good time to catch you for a word.

DS Actually, there’s a small group of students who actually wake up that early and are at the gym.

IO No, they’ve just not gone to bed yet.

DS So it’s a good place to meet students and a good place for them to meet me.

LH Can you recall any episodes with the Medium?

BM Oh, I can. I can recall episodes with the Medium. There were times I wouldn’t read it and I would have someone else read it and I’d say, “What’d they say about me this week?” One year, ball hockey got out of hand on this campus.

IO Oh yeah! I remember…

BM I banned it. Not female hockey, just the male hockey. They’d get the fights. It was the sport on this campus. Everybody played it. And it got racial.

So I stopped it.

So the Medium started writing articles saying “This Year in Ball Hockey History”, because there was

IO Bob built a building that didn’t have a name.

And it was to do with a program at Sheridan College. And the building was built and, by default, the building took the name of the program: Communication, Culture, and Information Technology. The CCIT Building. So I decided it should be named and I ran a competition to rename it. And the suggestions were so useless. We didn’t want to name it after a program. So we named it the Communication, Culture and Technology Building.

Just removed the “Information”. So CCT, not the CCIT Building.

So the Medium thought this was really funny and so they renamed Kaneff and spelt it with one “f”. I thought it was very funny as well.

DS Well, the Medium has been very kind to me, and I actually can’t recall anything that…

IO Well, we solved all the problems! There were no problems to inherit.

DS So I’ll have to think about doing something pretty…

BM Outrageous.

February 4, 1986: “The Erindale College Council has listed the construction of an astronomical observatory for this campus as its second major private funding campaign behind library enhancement. … The cost of the project is estimated at between $350,000 and $500,000.”

Professor John Percy proposed it and said that the college has always needed an observatory.

April 30, 1986: Medium II splits from ECSU, whose portfolio it fell under, and is incorporated as Medium II Publications (a name it still bears).

An agreement with ECSU recognizes the need for editorial independence and declares the sale of all equipment from ECSU to Medium II for $1.

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DS Yes, like close the Blind Duck or something.

LH Who is your favourite UTM alumnus?

BM Oh, I couldn’t do that one. I couldn’t pick a single one.

IO I’m going to be diplomatic as well and say all of them.

DS Yes. LH What’s your proudest UTM moment?

BM I don’t have one. I think at my going-away party they had at Lislehurst, I had a tremendous feeling of satisfaction, that I had accomplished something. And that I did do something here. And that was a good feeling. And I think I felt I left it in a better shape than it was in when I came. So that’s all you can ask.

IO Deep’s going to have to think of a different answer because I’m going to say the same one: the farewell party. When you’re in the job you’re not sure whether you’re doing a good job, but when you leave people have to say nice things, so you think you’re appreciated.

DS Yes, I will have to wait for my moment… No, actually, I would have a hard time picking one moment because I can tell you that I—and I mean it, this is truth—I was just telling this to somebody yesterday… I get up every morning and I can’t wait to get to the office. So every moment is a proud moment.

IO But it’s really the gym you’re going to. MM

September 12, 1989: “Oh my God, what are these people doing? They must be crazy.” Attributed to UTM pub manager Uwe Stoetzel watching slam dancing (moshing) at a Teenage Head concert.

October 17, 1989: Editor-in-Chief Norman Saunders runs a front-page apology for an article on an exhibit of nude photos, writing that they “facilitate the use of female images as an object of male gratification”. Multiple letters condemn the apology. “Censorship is wrong because it hinders knowledge,” writes the arts editor. One columnist defends it, pointing out that readers can’t choose they see before they see it.

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Our food spaces have changed drastically over the years.

When UTM first opened as Erindale College, there were few places to eat. Some of them, like Spigel Hall, have had a familiar look over the years. Others have undergone more significant changes. There is no longer a Harvey's; a Starbucks and Second Cup have cropped up; and a Subway now stands at the spot in the Meeting Place where a stage once stood and Convocation was held each year.

Spigel Hall, 1980s

Spigel Hall, 1970s

Spigel Hall, 1980s

Harvey’s, 1990s Harvey’s, 1990s

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Meeting Place, 1980s

TFC Entrance, 1980s

Tandori at TFC, 2014

Tim Horton’s at Meeting Place, 2014

Location of Meeting Place Tim’s, 1990s

Eating space in IB, 2014

Starbucks at HMALC, 2014 Seating at Colman Commons, 2014

And we’re still growing rapidly with 3 new operations in September!

North Side Bistro in North Building, Fall 2014

Hospitality and Retail Services

Second Cup in Kaneff, Fall 2014

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FADED FADED FADED FADED

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GLORY GLORY GLORY GLORY

WORDS JASON COELHO

“THE GOOD OLD DAYS.”

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he phrase evokes the nostalgia of a simpler, happier time. For the students currently at UTM, those moments may just be ahead, but for those who called this campus home before the turn of the millennium, it’s tough to imagine anything better, especially for a sports fan.

The space available on campus today would amaze those who were on campus in 1967, when the college was founded. The physical education department had set up facilities that weren’t anything to brag about, incredibly small and dainty, including a four-car garage refurbished as an exercise room. The programs included the likes of “Slimnastics”, a popular aerobic class. The sports encompassed basketball, volleyball, badminton, recreational cricket, hockey, and even golf, with practice nets set up along the North Field for UTM’s very own driving range. The tennis courts near the North Building also contained an archery range, and sailing and canoeing were offered to students at Orillia’s Bark Lake.

Over the years, sports culture on campus changed. Fast-forward from its founding to the 1990s, when sports participation peaked. A typical student at Erindale College in 1991 wore loose-fitting clothing, was well-groomed, and regularly read the Medium. The printed word was the lifeblood of the school, and students relied on it heavily for their dose of campus news. A major part of what made the Medium so popular was its strong focus on UTM sports. Sports was one of the most popular sections of the publication; students would scan the paper weekly to look for their name or to read a preview of an upcoming match.

BALL HOCKEY

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f all the sports offered at UTM, one reached unparalleled heights: ball hockey. The student body seemed to flock to the gym every week to watch their favourite teams face off on the court. The sport became such a beast that the Medium would publish a preview issue before the season, dedicated entirely to ball hockey. Attendance and participation were through the roof and always growing.

Jack Krist, a student in the late ’80s and early ’90s and now the program coordinator at the RAWC, recalls the impact ball hockey had on the sports community at UTM. “It got to a point where there was just so much coverage in the paper that it actually just drove the numbers

up for participation since everybody wanted to see their name in the paper,” he says. Krist also recalls a faux Canada-Russia rivalry match played in Gym C: the players for Russia sported Moscow Dynamo gear, while the Canadian team wore vintage 1976 Team Canada jerseys. Like at any international meeting, the captains exchanged tokens before the game. “The guy from Russia gave him a bottle of vodka and the Canadian gave [the Russian] a bottle of maple syrup. And then they played both national anthems. It was pretty intense,” Krist recalls.

Ball hockey became engrained in UTM culture, watching games became tradition, and players attained a degree of fame that was incomparable in the world of UTM sports. A total of 70 men’s and women’s teams were registered at one time, Krist remembers, and the sport took up approximately 24 hours of gym time a week. The gym was set up like an NHL arena with benches where the teams would sit with their backs to the spectators. Reporters would follow specific teams, interviewing players after games, which developed a team’s fanbase. Though the content was highly sensationalized, it garnered an audience for games on campus. Krist hardly suspected the scale of the sport until he attended an athletic conference at Queens, where he was approached by a member of another council who informed him that UTM possessed the largest ball hockey league in North America.

“We said, ‘Really?’ They wanted to know how we got our league to be so big. I said, ‘I think it’s the school newspaper,’ ” Krist recalls.

This was the unquestionable peak of athletic competition at UTM. But although the league gained momentum through the early ’90s, its inevitable downfall came about during a heated scuffle during one game, as Krist remembers it. “It kind of spilled out into the hallway,” says Krist. “Someone got hit with a stick out there that was coming down the stairs, and she wasn’t a student. She went to the principal and the principal decided that after the season ended he was going to shut ball hockey down for the year. It had gotten out of control.” After the year off, ball hockey was reintroduced without the same publicity in the Medium. The numbers declined after that year and never reached the heights of the ’90s again. Krist and the athletic committee were in charge of review boards for ball hockey, which developed the code of fair play for the entire intramural program—a code posted all around campus to this day. “The funny thing is that they use our exact fair play code at the St. George campus, almost verbatim,” says Krist.

While he was a student, Krist wrote for the Medium under the moniker “J-Swish”. The sports section assigned specific writers to specific campus sports. Krist’s was basketball, hence “Swish”, while other writers had names like “Charlie Tuna”, reporting on swimming.

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Besides his sports journalism, Krist was also on the athletic council.

The council we know now as UTMAC was then called “ECARA”, the Erindale College Athletic and Recreational Association. ECARA was formed in 1982 to represent students in the athletic domain, later changing its name when the campus did. The Medium found ways to have fun during Krist’s time at the paper, regularly publishing an April Fool’s issue called the Erindale Enquirer featuring fake campus news stories that were as crude and hilarious as anything you’d find on late-night TV nowadays.

The Medium strictly covered UTM sports: although the writers were allowed to lighten it up to make for better reading, they restricted themselves from anything external. “If you look at some of the older papers, I would guarantee you there’s nothing in here unless it’s all UTM stuff,” says Krist. It built support for UTM sports and later provided Krist with a forum for teams to etch their names on the list of champions.

“It helped us out because we’re not the best at archiving stuff, so it was so much easier just to look in the paper,” he says. “And so as the athletic department, a lot of times we would publish the results from athletic banquets, all the MVPs and athletes of they year. We’d put it in the paper, because it’s just a way that we can kind of put it in history.”

After receiving a trophy donation from a former student, Krist attempted to backdate all the champions from co-ed soccer, relying entirely on old issues of the Medium. “There weren’t computers to save it on, and it was also run by students,” he recalls. The student paper became the running timeline for all major sports events in UTM’s short history.

C H A N G I N G C U LT U R E

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TM’s changing culture of sports is evident to Krist. Participation has been steady, but the competition has dropped. Krist attributes this to students being increasingly pressed for time.

“When I was a student—and probably anything before the year 2000—the students here had a lot more free time on their hands,” he says. “The tuition fees were not this high. I think with students now, the tuition fees are high, they have to have jobs. You’re not going to come to university and not have a job.”

Krist believes the teams are weaker than they used to be. He recalls the talent on a Division 1 UTM basketball team he played for: “Schools from the States would be calling us. We went down to Mansfield, Pennsylvania and lost to the host team by four points.” The reporters who interviewed UTM’s head coach were shocked at the revelation that the team was intramural level, says Krist, and had only scraped together four practices before playing a college-level opponent. When Krist took on coaching the women’s basketball team, offers to play in the U.S. sprung up again, and the team played at the Gund Arena in Cleveland, the home of the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers. Krist and his team played right after the Cavs’ game against Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and lost 57–53. These offers came as early as 1977, when Erindale’s basketball team played against the American Medaille College at the Memorial Auditorium in Buffalo just before an NBA game by the Buffalo Braves (now the Los Angeles Clippers). Since the late 1990s, UTM hasn’t received any offers to play against American colleges or universities.

UTM’s campus companion up until this year, the CFL’s Toronto Argonauts, made their way onto campus in 1996 after reaching a deal with the Department of Athletics. The team took up their practice facility on the South Field by the parking lot. This parking lot was highly underdeveloped before the Argos settled in; it was covered in gravel and space was limited. Behind the parking lot was a baseball diamond, home to co-ed softball leagues. Over the years, as participation in the league began to decline, the diamond was repurposed into what is now parking lot 8, effectively ending co-ed softball and dedicating the nearby field to the CFL football team. Since the increasing enrolment meant less space for sports—all indoor programs were running out of Gym C in the late 1990s and early 2000s—a push was made to expand the facilities. UTMAC and UTM students were the driving force for the 48

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Jack Krist is first from the left in this 1991 shot of the Medium’s sportswriters.

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expansion, which was underway by 2006 and resulted in the RAWC. The facilities meant new programs and higher participation in programs and leagues.

After that step, UTM sought to change its identity even further by renaming its teams the UTM Eagles. Before that, Erindale College was the Wendigoes. When it was brought up that a wendigo was a demon in Native American legend, a quick change was made at the end of the 1980s, resulting in the Warriors for men’s teams and the Hustlers for women’s teams. “It got kind of weird when the [Hustler] magazine came out,” recalls Krist. “Then they said, ‘Hey, why can’t the women be Warriors too?’ So we were basically the Erindale College Warriors.”

Later on, students thought the Warriors logo, which was similar to that of the Chicago Blackhawks, was offensive and pushed to change it. Student Nejatie Bahroz designed the Eagles logo with rings circling it. “They represent a continuum of programs, that we have something from the beginning to the end. From when you start here to when you graduate, there’s always kind of beginner to high-level competition,” says Krist. “We thought it was pretty cool.”

The old Warriors logo that covered the walls of Gym C were covered with padding after the change to the Eagles. Playing basketball in Gym C one day, Krist noticed that certain areas of the gym were padded strangely. He asked the facility manager and was told that behind the gym’s padding remains UTM’s old Warriors logo, still intact after nearly 15 years.

SPORTSWRITING & OUR FUTURE

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he sports programs at UTM offered Jack Krist numerous opportunities that paved the way for his career at the RAWC. Of all of them, meeting his wife Melissa was by far the best and most rewarding. Melissa Krist, née Jazbec, won UTM’s athlete of the year award in 1992/93, and like her husband transitioned into a sports career, working in varsity athletics as a manager of intercollegiate sports for all of U of T. The couple met on the basketball court in Gym C. Jack was sitting on the sidelines as scorekeeper while Melissa played her first basketball game for Erindale.

“Our lives have been entwined in athletics ever since,” says Jack, who proposed to Melissa at Erindale College’s athletic banquet while he was president of ECARA. She was a student at UTM from 1989 to 1993 and was actively involved in sports throughout her four years, playing on the women’s ball hockey team and on the co-ed volleyball, basketball and soccer teams. During her final year at Erindale, she served as president of ECARA, too.

“We were busy creating new leagues, recruiting people to play,” she says. “Everything was word-of-mouth. Ball hockey was the most popular sport on campus and there was a huge rise to co-ed sports.

Jack created many of the co-ed sport leagues that are still in play today.” Melissa and the council lobbied for renovations to Gym C and campaigned for a referendum to create a new building, but she was unsuccessful. “It took almost a decade after our tenure before the new building was approved. It looks wonderful.”

The relationships formed during her days on the court at UTM have flourished over the years and continue to be a large part of her life. “I still keep in touch with many of the people I played intramurals with.

Eight years after graduating, three of them were in my wedding party, and one I married,” she smiles. “The culture was very positive and everyone knew everyone.” Like other students on campus, she got her news from the Medium and says the student-run publication dictated what to pay attention to on campus. Nowadays, Melissa is on the business side of sports, working closely with coaches and intercollegiate staff, managing 43 varsity sports teams, working with league budgets, creating practices and league schedules, and overseeing sports events.

The Krists are not the only ones who found a career after involvement in sports and sports journalism. Isaac Owusu, a former varsity

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football player and sports editor of the Medium, found his calling in sports journalism after being recruited to write for sports. Beginning in 2007 and continuing through his first two years at UTM, Owusu played on the football team after being enlisted by former coach Steve Howlett. During his final two years at school, the criminology major was encouraged to write for sports by a friend. “I always wanted to stay involved in sports after I stopped playing football, so I figured I’d give writing a shot,” he remembers.

Owusu believed his unique perspective as an athlete would be a fit for sportswriting, and he worked his way up from journalist to editor.

After graduating, Owusu decided that this was the career path for him.

“I went and did post-grad in sports journalism and I found myself doing internship at TSN for a bit of time following that,” he says. Recently, Owusu worked with CBC Sports during their coverage of the Winter Olympic games in Sochi, managing social media and writing blog posts on the latest Olympic news. He also worked with CBC for the Paralympic games. “It’s been a short time doing this thing as a career and who knows where I’ll finish up,” he reflects. “I will always have the Medium to thank for giving me the first opportunity in this game of journalism. I learned a lot of things through covering the people here and getting to diversify my work.”

Darryl Sequeira was sports editor during another heyday of UTM sports, enrolling here in 1997 and eventually getting a job at the RAWC as a student. He also played on multiple intramural teams and drove teams to games in the RAWC van. It was because of this that the Medium’s editor-in-chief, Tammi Sulliman, decided his network would be good for sports coverage. Indeed, the requests from coaches piled up and were quickly too much to fit in one section. “I ended up being given four-page layouts,” he says. “If I was lucky I would manage to get a fifth.” In recent years, sports has typically gotten two pages.

And his relentless focus on local sports made it a popular section.

“On Mondays students would sometimes skip right to the sports section at the back of the paper,” he recalls. “It made the hard work over the weekend worthwhile.” The year after he left, the editor happened to turn its focus to pro leagues and opinions on pro athletes, which he felt left very little to the section. That same issue has recurred time and again over the years: the temptation to write about the wider world rather than to stick to our home turf and do it well. Time has taught that Sequeira’s view is the better-read one.

The ever-changing sports culture at UTM reflects the times. But despite changes to the infrastructure, the name of the campus, and, of course, the student body, our athletics always found a means to survive. Regardless of individual high points in its history, UTM’s sports program might in fact be thriving more now than ever. “The biggest change has been the level of participation by the broad spectrum of students on campus,” says Ken Duncliffe, the current director of the department. “Today, we have a very diverse student population making use of the facilities and programs being offered. The breadth of our sport offerings has been driven by student demand, reflecting the culture diversity of the student body.”

What matters most is that we remain in tune with our sports scene, making it a focus of campus life, giving athletes a place to play and compete and students something to cheer for. MM

Department of Physical Education, Athletics and Recreation

UTM EAGLES

VARSITY SPORTS UTM has joined the OCAA and our first-ever Eagles Varsity teams will take flight in 2014/15.

We are actively recruiting athletes for these sports:

MEN’S & WOMEN’S INDOOR SOCCER

CROSS COUNTRY

utm.utoronto.ca/athletics

BADMINTON

Contact Jack Krist at j.krist@utoronto.ca 51

how to read the news 2

STUDENT JOURNALISM’S CHANGING FACE IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE A WORLD WHERE THE PRINTED WORD ISN’T THE FIRST PLACE YOU LOOK. BUT BOTH MAKING IT AND READING IT TAKE TIME WE CAN’T SPARE.

WORDS COLLEEN MUNRO

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or 125 years, the Buchtelite served as the University of Akron’s student newspaper, until in January an announcement was posted on the Buchtelite’s website stating that the paper was suspending operations in order to “craft a plan that will assure the Buchtelite’s future as a sustainable, student-run, multimedia enterprise”. Although it cited staff departures and “unforeseen circumstances” as major factors in its temporary shutdown, the statement also read: “Like its counterparts in the professional print media, the Buchtelite is facing the challenge of how to remain relevant in a digital age.”

It’s a familiar story. Most people know that traditional print media is struggling, and depending on who you listen to, the newspaper’s position in society could be considered extremely precarious. Many major publications, including the Cincinnati Post, the Baltimore Examiner, and the Halifax Daily News have shut down for good.

Even staples of print media such as The New York Times have struggled to stay afloat in recent years. Postsecondary print publications may be in a more secure spot, since many receive funding from their respective universities and they generally thrive on volunteer writers. But how long can that respite last? The public is moving away from traditional forms of print media and towards digital, and the quaint, historic tradition of college newspapers is not exempt.

But is the shift entirely negative? Perhaps there’s something naïve and nostalgic in suggesting that a piece of writing is more meaningful if it’s printed in ink on a piece of newsprint than in through pixels on someone’s iPhone screen. And what better

avenue for the digital leap than the publications attached to universities—institutions generally associated with innovation and forward-thinking?

In earlier days, university newspapers were generally the primary source of news on a campus, aside from good old-fashioned word-of-mouth. Printed weekly (or monthly, bi-weekly, or daily), they gathered everything in one convenient, easily folded document. You got your news about the last budget meeting right next to the results of the football game and another student’s letter about campus food selection.

Nowadays, we instantly find information about a campus event on Twitter feeds belonging to students, campus clubs, or the university itself. Online directories lead us to the exact group of people we’d like to get in touch with, a Facebook rant about unsatisfactory food selection can reach hundreds of students, and Instagram can provide an immediate, sepia-toned peek behind the curtain in any corner of campus.

Among adults, social media still isn’t generally considered a primary source of news. But for Americans under 30, roughly a third get their news from social media, according to a 2013 study by the Pew Research Centre. Besides, social media sites are often among the first parties to break news. Of course, Twitter and Facebook have seen their share of factual inaccuracies, but significant news stories are now frequently initially “reported” by everyday people who simply witness the event and post about it on their personal accounts.

Social media also has the advantage of being more than just a means to spread news. It can also be an incredibly viable way

November 7, 1989: The Erindale College Student Union plays a football game against the staff of medium II and wins, 36-35. “It was possibly the greatest game ever played by two most talentless teams.”

November 14, 1989: “The Rock Lab, also known as the Moon Lab due to the fact that it housed the first rocks back from the moon, is located on the road to the principal’s house. The lab has an illuminated moon crescent outside it that looks like ‘Mac Tonight on a stick’.”

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to make news. Take the recent and very local example of this year’s Student Centre referendum, held by UTMSU, which saw a pretty good voter turnout and was struck down by the majority. UTMSU cited student dissent on various Facebook groups among the reasons for the failure.

Comments on social media websites might not be as dramatic as some of the go-to tactics for protest of days gone by, but perhaps we’re looking at the face of 21st century activism. News now exists in the moment, and the line between newsmaking and reporting is being blurred.

It can be easy for student journalists to get caught up in the traditional ways of reporting news and to think that it’s the “right” way to share information. And it is more comprehensive, sure. Typically, it takes at least a couple of days to put a full story together to go into a newspaper. Between researching the story, contacting people for comment, writing the article, and sending it off for editing, there’s a sense of structure to it all. And for traditionalists, there’s a satisfaction in seeing your name printed in the byline of a newspaper. The story’s now documented and you’re credited. But if it’s a big story, there are inevitably dozens of people who tapped 140 characters into their phone and broke the story first. Who’s the more relevant reporter in that situation?

It’s easy for a journalist to look at this feel like journalism is on the decline and their particular set of skills phased out.

Many lovely laments about the so-called “death of print media” have been penned, but there’s no foreseeable reversal in store.

In this time of transition, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for journalists to avoid

the shift towards more collaborative, immediate, and public news reporting.

For example, Mashable posted an article last year titled “9 Breaking News Tweets That Changed Twitter Forever”. Including early tweets about Whitney Houston’s death, the raid that eventually resulted in Osama bin Laden’s death, and the Boston Marathon bombings, the article more or less reads like a “greatest hits” recap of the last five years in journalism. Technology has fractured our culture and the deluge of information is overwhelming, but these major news events are arguably among the few things that have brought people together.

Whether or not it qualifies as journalism, social media potentially allows many more people to share their voice and provides an immediate forum for discussion. The number of voices talking about these stories doesn’t dilute the impact.

Journalism purists need not panic, though. Immediacy isn’t everyone’s priority. There’s always room for thoughtful analysis, and long-form journalism is far from dead. Many thoughtful blogs and website offer timely and in-depth reactions to the barrage of news fragments constantly whizzing around the Internet. There is undeniably more noise and fewer definitive voices in journalism now, but it’s nothing that some critical thinking and thoughtful writing can’t contend with. MM

January 30, 1990: “Buy a modem and interface intimately with other user-friendly people all over North America!” Headline of an article that explains the brand-new Internet in detail, including instructions on how to send “electronic mail”.

February 6, 1990: “Erindale is proud of [Roberta] Bondar, for she provides some physical proof that not all university grads are still working at Tim Hortons.”

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R A G TA G DY N AST Y

WORDS LUKE SAWCZAK

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arly afternoon. My friend Larissa and I peer out the window of the office at the snowy ground of the Five-Minute Walk.

She’s calm. I have to admit I’m a little nervous. We’re waiting for Richie Mehta to appear. His name might not be instantly recognizable, but it should be. It’s on the banners around campus. The Star talked to him last September about his new movie Siddharth at TIFF. Six years ago TIFF also listed his debut Amal in their top 10. Actually, Amal was my favourite movie for years.

A couple months ago I learned that Richie was also editor-in-chief of the Medium at the turn of the millennium. Today he travels all over the world. Feels kind of strange, filling the shoes he filled 13 years ago. I wonder if he was as good then as he is now, or if he felt as unsure about his creative future as I do.

We remember that the Student Centre’s doors are locked. We head down to let him in. As we do, he appears through the glass towards BikeShare. He’s wearing a hat with fuzzy earflaps and big green coat.

Back home.

As the three of us climb the stairs again and sit across from each other on the Medium’s couches, I explain that we’re looking for his memories.

He looks around the office as he settles in.

This prompts an obvious preliminary question.

“What was the Medium like when you came to it?”

Richie pauses and nods. “The Medium, when I came to it, was more ragtag,” he says.

“Because it was in the Crossroads Building.”

We’re confused.

“So what’s under this right now, this shell, was the Crossroads. It was an L. And it was just open air—I mean, there was no court, no inside corridors; you’d walk into the next office from the outside.

“At the time we were already using computers, and Duncan Koerber was the editor-inchief,” he goes on. “I only got a glimpse of that

environment, but it was really committed, very professional, lot of jokers.” Professional jokers? I make a mental note to follow up.

Richie continues. “This was the late ’90s, so it was still on the heels of the non-technology days, doing everything yourself. And then when I came in after, they moved to the North Building cuz they were building the Student Centre.

This didn’t exist; it was all under construction. So we had a temporary office. They took a chunk of that café in North and made a makeshift cement wall and they gave us a corner.

And it was like half the size of this room. And there were no windows.”

“Probably always smelled like food, too,” I say.

“Oh, disgusting! It was Panzerotti Pizza. It was greasy pizzas.” Richie pauses to reflect.

“I’d come in at like 8:30 in the morning, get my stuff, and leave at like midnight. So in winters I wouldn’t even see the day; I’d just be inside the building. But it was fun! I mean, at night we would run around the building. We worked our asses off, but it was really stuffy, in the winter especially.

“Actually, the wall they put up temporarily?

I did a big mural of the Death Star. I painted it, since I was doing an art program. So it looked like we were looking out a window into space, and you could see Endor and the Death Star.

It gave us something to look at. That wall was demolished in the summer, and some construction worker took away the Death Star piece…”

He looks wistful. I’d be too. I love Star Wars.

Larissa realizes that we need some more background. Richie explains that he came here in 1997 for art and art history. “At first I thought I’d go through art and then potentially through animation,” he says. “At the time there was a booming animation thing for Sheridan, and there was a post-grad program for computer animation, so I was like, ‘Well, okay, I’ll do a fine arts degree, and by the end of four years, I should hopefully have a good portfolio,

February 13, 1990: “The Pond Scum’s mascot, Eddie the Algae, was one of the numerous forms of bacteria and plant life in the stands cheering on the Scum. Unfortunately, the upright mammal part of the food chain was conspicuously absent from the pool gallery.” Coverage of a water polo game.

March 13, 1990: Sven Spengemann—today listed as a democracy expert on banners around campus and last seen running for Liberal MP— writes a letter in his capacity as a student union member, saying, “I urge the medium II to stop bullshitting the students of Erindale College.”

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get into animation.’ And then they introduced a post-grad film program of directing—and that was my end-goal, so I was like, ‘Why go into animation when the program I really want to go to now exists?’ ” “So it was always about filmmaking rather than journalism,” says Larissa, and voices what was on both our minds: “What drew you to the Medium?”

Richie grins. “I remember the first day of Orientation, I walked into one of the lecture halls thinking, ‘This is going to be great. New people, a whole new life!’ I walk in and there’s a whole section from my high school. They were like, ‘Ayy! Richie! Come sit with us!’ I saw that and I was like, oh man. I love the group, but that’s not why I came here. It was time to expand my horizons.

“I was really involved in high school, clubs and sports and drama,” he goes on. “I started joining stuff, and I realized everything was just a variation on social gatherings. I said, ‘I feel like there’s no school spirit. It doesn’t exist within the confines of this environment, as a UTM thing.’ So when the Medium came along, I thought, ‘This is way for me to completely integrate into this environment, to really get to understand and know it .’ ” Richie pauses. “I mean, there was school spirit in a few other pockets. Not amongst the people who came from commuting, right.

Obviously, you go home at night and on weekends.”

Sad fact. Or maybe not. Hard to say.

“You said the Medium was ragtag when you came to it?” I ask. “What did you change during your time?”

“It was kind of evolutionary, because first I started writing in Crossroads, then North, then here. So we were moved around for three years. It wasn’t that there was any radical changes, it was just that it was happening on its own, settling into a new home.”

Just before I can press further and ask about the “professional jokers”, Richie starts

up again. “When I was editor-in-chief, I just wanted to make sure it was running smoothly, because I had found something before that was disturbing to me. And this wasn’t just the Medium,” he says. “It was what I knew before and had seen across the student body. Often people get too involved in this stuff. When you graduate, you’re left in a bubble, because you haven’t been focussing on your own future.

You’ve been getting too involved in the present of the student union, the campus, student politics, which snuffs itself out once you’re not involved. It has nothing to do with anything else, unless you’re going for a career in politics and it’s practice for you.

“You do your job and you do the best you can,” he says, “but you also don’t take it too personal. So I wanted to make sure the infrastructure was solid, but I also didn’t want to lose myself. Because things happen that piss you off and you want to get involved with. And I was like, ‘Hold on. My end goal is to make movies, to enter that world. I’m here to learn management skills and to learn how to write— and then back off.’ ” That phrase “lose myself” sticks in my mind. As Richie talks, I let the iPad do the listening for a second and try to guess the story he’s thinking about. One sticks out in my mind from the 2000/01 year: the student union’s special projects director was given a $25,000 budget but failed to realize it and ended up neither organizing nor advertising half his scheduled events. I ask Richie if he remembers how the Medium ran a picture of the guy where it looked like he was taking a leak in the woods, and then he came up to the office and told Adam [Giles], the news editor, that they’d hear from his lawyers, and— “…And I’m gonna beat the shit out of you and Richie!” Richie completes the quote for me from memory. “Yeah, he became angry with us. I mean, I don’t know where he is now, and I’m not here to slander him or anything, but there were a lot of students who didn’t really

March 14, 1990: Over 300 students protest the administration’s decision to close the South Building from midnight to 6 a.m. due to vandalism.

“We’re not living amongst angels in this community,” says principal Desmond Morton. Talks result in the Erindale College Student Union agreeing to staff the building from 11:30 p.m. to 2 a.m. Morton says that if students have time to protest, they have time for this.

March 20, 1990: “There is one thing the police do good… They give tickets… They do a good job on that… Am I right?... I just want to say that they can find a car in the bushes, under snow, and they will give it a ticket.”

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know what they were doing, and it was our job to jump on them and QC the whole thing,” he points out. “We would just use a prism of logic and say, ‘This doesn’t make any sense.’

And if it requires us making fun of it, we made fun of it.”

I take it that’s the jokers part. I look over at Larissa and decide to voice one of my doubts.

“When we try to hold people accountable,” I start, “for the most part it’s us calling them on things and then them saying, ‘You shouldn’t have called us on that.’ And nothing follows from it. Should we become like a small-town paper where we say, ‘Here’s the nice things that are happening…’ ” “No, no, no!” exclaims Richie.

I pause.

“As a matter of principle, you have to call them out.

Always, always, always call them out,” he continues.

“Because even if what they’re saying is what they’ve always said and if nothing even comes out of it, no matter what, you guys will come out of here calling people on stuff forever.

It’s a habit to develop as a person, and I’ve taken that out with me, to my service. I’m really, really glad I have that.”

He continues. “That’s another thing, is that we wanted to be creative. People would come in and say, ‘Why did you write this?’ And we’d be like, ‘Well, at least you read it.’ And that was our thing: what will it take to get people to read this and care? As long as it’s not libelous, what can we push just so people will read this, within the confines of truth?”

I nod and look down at my hands. It’s hard getting readers. Next year we might cut back on circulation. In Richie’s year there were several letters sent in per issue. In my year we’re lucky to get two a month. What am I doing wrong?

The conversation carries on. We talk about other things— how Richie learned to write, how Robert Price persuaded Richie to be the editor in the first place, what a weekend was like here at the Medium. Friday nights, says Richie, the staff would always go to Swiss Chalet for a couple hours “for a lark”. Larissa laughs and says that for us, articles have to be in by Thursday night. Richie tells us we must be thinking of the organized world. They were just holding on, barely…

But he clears his thought and qualifies the thought. “We got a kick out of it. It was just fun. But we had in fact cut it down significantly, cuz before me, when it was Rob and Duncan, they averaged finishing 3, 4, 5 in the morning on Sunday. Average. So when I came in I said, ‘I want to get home in decent time.’ I was actually the conservative of the group. So what you guys are talking about? Unheard-of.”

Before we can talk much more, Richie gets distracted by old headshots scattered on the table that we were sorting through. They happen to be from his era and he recognizes a few people. Erin Findlay, Robert Sabga. Friends and mentors.

“Oh my God,” says Richie. “Youssef.”

He holds up the picture.

“This guy is the funniest man I’ve ever known! Adam and I still talk about him. We talked about him yesterday. First day of school, we’re walking up to the South Building from the parking lot—we’d just met this guy, we didn’t know who he was—and there was a group of girls standing in the middle of the path. So Adam and I just kind of walked around; he walks right in the centre of them and stops. He says, ‘Hello, ladies. My name’s Youssef. I’m gonna be around.’ And every girl just ran in a different direction. And we’re like, ‘Did that just happen?’ Like, this is like a Rob Schneider movie: he’s the guy who nobody’s ever gonna like, and he has the most confidence for some reason.”

The interview wraps up. Our photographer isn’t here, so we get Richie to help us take a good photo or ten.

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Riche painted this mural of the Death Star on a temporary wall that sectioned the Medium office off from the North cafeteria. A construction worker may have taken it after tearing down the wall.

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Finally we pose him in the editor-in-chief chair. Here he looks professional again. I think about how our next source will have to be Robert Price, Richie’s last editor-in-chief.

Larissa snaps a picture of the man. He looks thoughtfully around the office.

“This is so much cleaner, oh my God,” he says suddenly. “I do have photographs of our office at the time, and it was really messy. We used to play Frisbee a lot. At the opening of the Student Centre, they served food on Frisbee plates that said ‘Opening Day’, so we took a lot of those. We would just play sometimes when we needed to not sit and work. We got really good. Like, you’d be sitting there?” He mimics tossing a Frisbee. “Just right to you.”

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e head up to the third floor of CCT. We’re on our way to see Robert Price. He’s now a professional writing instructor.

The office is cozy. It extends mysteriously to the right when you come in. Rob sits across from Larissa and me at his desk. The forest is visible in the window behind him, growing greyer.

The man introduces himself with the year he started at Erindale (“1995? I can’t remember”) and a disclaimer about some “really terrible” poems he wrote for the Medium (“and they published”). We came here expecting dry facts, but stories pour out. Rob called Richie a great storyteller, but I start to make out a more complex picture. Richie’s the idea man.

Richie matches a memory to a maxim. Robert tells stories for their own sake. If something philosophical comes up, it’s because it fleshes out the story.

And the time passes quickly as he speaks, his pace measured, his tone sometimes affected, as if reading off a mental script but simultaneously writing it, intrigued by each new line. The stories he tells are great.

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There was the time the school got donors for turning the Crossroads Building into the Student Centre, but one donor had never signed anything and withdrew a million-dollar donation and the university dumped it on the students via a referendum. The Medium pounded the principal about it at a town hall, says Robert. “Where’d the million bucks go?”

The artistic renderings of the Student Centre disappointed them, too. In all the pictures it was empty. Underneath one of the drawings they ran the caption, “Do you hear the lonely wind?”

Even when the building was completed, Robert and his team hated it. He looks at us across his desk and says it’s a horrendously ugly building. The first week, they were all high from fumes. They went to the workers and asked what was going on, and a worker said, “I don’t want to be quoted, but this building is a piece of shit. The quality of the workmanship and the materials is low-grade.” So Robert tells it.

I pipe up. “They had to repair that roof recently. You look at the shape, and it’s like snow and rain is designed to accumulate there.” “it’s an award-winning roof! Don’t make fun of it,” Rob cuts in. “That award-winning roof, there was a bunch of people who didn’t want the Student Centre built. We got us all together, we went up onto the roof and then we urinated on it. That roof is like one big urine trough, that’s what it is. And so christened that roof, and then we went and urinated through the ocular.” And then he wrote about it in his weekly satirical column, “Life at the Centre”.

Another beef was with Radio Erindale. They didn’t broadcast. They were a radio station without a signal. “They actually had a line, like a Rogers cable, and they were broadcasting in Manitoba for a while,” he says. “Shut it down!” He compares it to a players’ den: nice couches, soundproof walls. Bring your girl, light a candle, smoke up, listen to music. The

Medium blasted them week after week. But he concedes they got their act together, eventually.

Muckrakers, he calls his team. Chasing after scandal was fun. Given the keys to an office, a budget, and a newspaper they could do anything they wanted with, they pursued the news mercilessly. Like the ball hockey fights that would break out in the Meeting Place, a league that got out of hand with racism and violence on a campus that was all about ball hockey. Then the university stepped in and shut it down for a time. “Take the ball hockey league, shoot it in the head. There’s a lesson to all of you.” They wrote open letters to the principal making fun of his eyebrows. They followed the “clowns who have no clue what reality is, and they run for student council”—he’s referring to a couple of candidates who ran on the promise of giving away half their salaries to fund student bursaries, but conveniently forgot after they were elected.

Every week the Medium ran their picture with an empty thermometer labelled “The Baghai/ Oliveira Scholarship Fund”. One of them apologized in the end. Never gave away any money.

Their attitude earned them flak. Once, a certain Patrick Scantlebury—I’m amazed Rob remembers his name—observed that although student fees to the RAWC had gone up, the equipment was still ratty. Rob got a call from the athletics director, saying, “Patrick’s writing a letter; I don’t want you to run it. He doesn’t like me.” So he ran it, and she got mad. She called Rob and his sports editor to her office, and “She bitched us out.” Solution? Rob ran a story about the meeting. And they reprinted Patrick’s letter in case readers forgot it. Then someone named Mike came up to the office and told them, “You shouldn’t question what the administration is doing.” So they made a cartoon about him. A common retort was drawing enemies with small penises. “We had letters from morns who thought we should behave,” says Robert, a hand going thought-

fully to his chin. “I thought that was a compliment.”

I take all this in with amazement. Larissa says she has to go—her ride is here—and the interview, a mess of stories in my mind, twisting and turning into each other, feels like it’s going to wind up. But how? How did the paper not crash and burn? Everything I was taught had to do with…

“Professionalism?” snorts Robert. “I hope I wasn’t professional when I was at the Medium.

The news was hard-hitting and we followed stories, which is a virtue: we kept coming back to the Student Centre story and the ball hockey fights constantly. So that’s the Medium’s job.

You aren’t professional. I don’t care. If you look at the bottom underneath the editorial, there’s the blurb. It was written in four-point font. We would talk to each other in the blurb. I think some of the best writing was there. You know, like ‘The Medium plays Les Paul air guitars exclusively.’

What’s the point of professionalism?” he continues. “Being neutral? Telling both sides of the story? I guess so. That’s what they say.

In the news world. But you can’t be objective.

And some people need to be humiliated on this campus. Sometimes you need to punch someone in the face.”

The argument is compelling. He goes on to compare professionalism to wearing white gloves. He mentions the mornings after pub night when he’d see two of his staff cuddling on the couch, having gotten wasted, sleeping there all night, breaking wind. On Sunday they turned on the Mighty Q and had wrestling matches. There were a couple all-nighters, he says. There were a lot. Usually by choice.

“We came together,” he resumes. “We had some harmless guys and meditative people, guys who were really well-versed in journalistic ethics, who’d spend time reading books.

There was a good institutional memory that I think is lost. Like, there was a guy who stole a bunch of money—our business manager stole

October 10, 1991: A body is found less than a kilometre from UTM grounds after months of decomposition. The Medium runs a rare full-colour photo and invites tips to help the police identify it.

1995: The name Medium II is changed to the Medium. Speck’s year is marked by significant changes, including bringing the paper back from the “tabloid” quality he felt it had sunk to and bringing its finances into the black for the first time in years. Meanwhile, at the end of Speck’s second term, Dom Mochrie and cartoonist Ryan Duquette steal some fake snow used in a movie being shot at UTM and dump it on his desk.

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seventeen grand from us. It broke my heart.

You can quote me on that, it broke my heart.”

He pauses and reflects. Larissa has already left. The sky is dark outside his window. The day is over.

“If I had my choice for the Medium of my era to remembered as the Globe and Mail or Mad Magazine, I’d choose Mad Magazine. I think it’s smarter,” he says.

Smarter. It’s hard to argue, considering he’s now a professor at the same campus of which he was a watchdog. Heck, so is his own editor-in-chief, Duncan Koerber, now teaching writing at York.

“And I also say that the Price-Koerber dynasty is the high point of the Medium,” are the last words I remember from the interview.

“No offence, it was awesome.”

Those words ring in my head as I return to the office, carrying an iPad laden with an hour of recording. The high point? Can we ever define a high point? Am I jealous? Or is cleanliness a good thing? Washing your hands of it? I remember a friend who stopped giving interviews to the Medium because he felt he’d been misquoted. I know what Rob would say— there’ll always be a few bloodied noses.

I shake my head. I know that’s not me. I have to keep doing what I’m doing. It’s not a matter of choice. And I think of Richie’s quote again— the one about not getting too involved, never leaving.

But here’s to the dynasty. MM

September 25, 2000: “Vamoosed! Campus Police rescue stolen moose.”

September 4, 2001: “The new beach volleyball court (located beside the outdoor basketball courts by the North Building) was installed by the same people who installed the courts at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona.”

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Parting Shot W O R D S A L A I N L AT O U R

I

was flattered when Luke Sawczak, the Medium’s current EIC, asked whether I wanted to write for this year’s Medium Magazine. I did co-found Medium Magazine, along with Michael Di Leo and Matt Filipowich.

But that was seven years ago. It is an honour to be granted the opportunity to write for it one more time.

You probably don’t care what I have to say.

As a writer I’m tempted to think otherwise. Yet when I was a student I didn’t much care for what other students had to say—or for that matter, recent graduates. I doubt you’re any different.

With that in mind, I’m going to abstain from offering unsolicited advice. Nor am I going to reminisce about the good old days at the Medium (although I’m sure you wouldn’t believe some of the stories).

Instead, I’m only going to ask you a small favour—one that I too was asked a long time ago. The person asking the favour was my friend Ali Kasim, then one of the paper’s editors and its subsequent EIC. Ali wanted me to write for the Medium. I was busy with work and school and commuting, as I’m sure you are. But I did as he asked. And it changed my life.

To be clear, the favour I’m asking isn’t that you write for this newspaper or magazine— although you damn well should.

The favour is that you leave a mark at UTM. That you do something besides passing your courses. Besides getting admitted into grad school. Besides merely surviving.

That mark may involve creating a website

that allows students to contact one another for help with schoolwork. It may involve creating a magazine like this one, or a student-run media organization like UTM/TV, or becoming editorin-chief. It may involve starting a club. It may involve many different things, but whatever it is doesn’t matter as much as the fact that you do it.

See, it’s tempting to think school isn’t real— to regard it as an expensive, annoying formality that you have put up with so that you can later join the real world, the one where you make real money and earn respect and end up buying a house.

But school is very real. And what you choose to do at it counts more than doing merely what you’re expected to do. So trust me when I say that if you leave a mark here and now, the immediate world around you will notice. MM

September 12, 2011: An op ed by Amir Ahmed takes a critical look at comments by Stephen Harper to the effect that Islamism is the greatest danger to Canada. “When Harper says ‘Islamism’, people hear ‘Islam’...” he writes. “I believe these words will legitimize discrimination.”

February 6, 2012: “Shouting ‘fuck fees’ won’t result in budget changes to fix the province’s deficit.” Op ed by Stefanie Marotta on the importance of policy-focused student groups instead of protest-focused ones in a look at how the Canadian Federation of Students operates.

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