If you’ve been on campus the past month, you’ve likely seen the encampment set up at the Grad House by a group called Occupy UWaterloo. Students, faculty, and community members live in tents, day after day, relentless in their efforts to make change happen at UW. The encampment’s goals involve full disclosure of the university’s investments and divestment from companies on the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) list. On their website, BDS states that the list was created by “170 Palestinian unions, refugee networks, women’s organizations, professional associations, popular resistance committees and other Palestinian civil society bodies.” Throughout the history of UW, students have partaken in protests for various causes — however, encampments are seldomly done. On the contrary, divestment is not an uncommon goal for protests in UW’s past.
After flipping through countless pages in the Imprint archives from the 60s and 70s, I found that UW is no stranger to encampments from students.
Setting the scene 52 years ago in March 1972 – unrest is brewing across UW campus. A new act has been proposed, aptly named the University of Waterloo Act. For two new university governing bodies, the Board of Governors and the Senate, students will only hold 12 out of 113 seats for representation. A university is meant to be a cooperative institute between students and faculty, with students holding a strong say and power within its government as they are the main demographic of a university. No one would know what they want or need quite like themselves — after all, it takes one to know one. How could students do that when they hold only 10.6 per cent of the power in their own government?
The students were enraged and decided to demonstrate on March 22, 1972. They went to Dana Porter in the evening and trekked up to the university business offices mere minutes before closing. Over 200 students gathered around desks and filing cabinets, filling the floor to the brim. After the office staff clocked out, security poured in to monitor the occupation. Students were not forced to leave or offered an ultimatum. The president of the university at the time, Burt Mathews, responded to the occupation, saying he was “willing to let the group stay in the offices as long as they wished and not bring about a confrontation with security officials.” In a matter of hours, the number of students had dropped to 50 as they waited for the discussion that would take place in the campus centre the next afternoon. In the morning of March 23, four students were arrested for petty trespassing after some refused to leave the desks that the office workers returned to use. Mathews claimed he didn’t know why those students had been charged.
At the time, it was believed by staff that if the students were ignored, they would go away. This was a vain hope as students continued their protest, with their numbers now growing to almost 400. Students had protested for over 24 hours to regain their voice on governing bodies. The bill ended up being taken all the way to Queen’s Park, where action on it was delayed due to the version of the bill being different from advertised. It was decided that legislature would wait until February 1973 to make a decision on the bill.
As for the conclusion of the University of Waterloo Act, the Board of Governors has students now representing five out of 36 seats. The Senate has 99 seats, of which undergraduate and alumni students represent 16 seats, holding 16 per cent of power there
Seventeen years later in March 1989, a representative from the African National Congress spoke on campus. During this time, apartheid would be an ongoing issue in South Africa. Black people did not have the freedom to choose their jobs, salary, education, or even where they could travel in South Africa. They would be forced into reserves where nothing could grow, not to mention the lack of access to healthcare. Unfortunately, 50 per cent of Black children in these reserves would die from malnutrition before they reaching the age of five.
The name of the representative is not known from the archives. They were asked how UW students could get involved with being heard on the issue of apartheid. The representative responds, “It is a very common misconception that the youth of this society have little influence in determining Canadian foreign policy. How many students are there in Waterloo? Imagine 20,000 students demanding that the university divest of any financial involvement in South Africa. Twenty thousand students demanding that all companies in Waterloo divest their holdings with South Africa, and picketing local stores that carry South African products would be a voice that the community could not ignore.”
Students are the majority across the university campus. As the majority, what they desire could be reasonably fought for if working together, which the representative emphasized. A commonality from the past to the present of student resistance is the presence of group collaboration. They know strength in numbers, and so they ensure that numbers are present.
Fast forward to the present, there is an encampment for Gaza at the Grad House. As reported from their Instagram page @occupyuwaterloo, at 3 a.m. on May 13, students set up an encampment on campus to “demand the end of UW complicity in the genocide in Palestine.” The university sent out an email that supported an environment where students could protest, while making sure that said protests would stay peaceful. However, not long after the encampment was set up, many noticed the security cameras installed on the roofs of Dana Porter and the Tatham Centre to monitor the encampment. This encampment lacks huge numbers compared to the past, as only about 20 people could be observed on the first day, but the actions they have taken make up for the small number.
According to a statement by Nicholas Joseph, the encampment media liaison, “We’ve helped rallies, we’ve had petitions, we’ve had senate meetings, we’ve done everything in our power to end the University of Waterloo’s complicity and the admins simply won’t listen to its students, so we’re here camping, much like many other people and we intend to stay here until our demands are met.”
If anything could be learned from the past and present, it’s that when students are truly passionate about an issue, they will take any action to make their voice heard. When one voice is alone, its power is small, but multiple voices together can be a powerful force. It doesn’t matter how long they must stay in one place or how big their demands are — if they desire action from the university, then they will get it, come hell or high water. After all, as previously mentioned, in a university, student voices are the majority, and so they must be heard. It is a universities responsibility to foster an environment where students’ concerns are properly heard and addressed.
