Marginalized at Vic

Vic needs to be honest about its lack of support

I’ve developed a habit of counting the number of people of colour present in traditionally white spaces, such as when I watched the procession of our college’s leaders during the 2017 Orientation Traditional Ceremonies. At Victoria College, I’ve found that the final tallies often do not exceed what I can count with my ten fingers.

Vic’s institutional leadership is mainly composed of powerful, white individuals who want to provide a welcoming, beneficial undergraduate experience for its students. This goal results in higher student fees, exorbitant prices for meal plans, and blanket services offered by Vic offices that are intended to benefit as many students as possible. However, Vic’s established operating systems do not address the specific needs of its marginalized students. These systems cater to Vic’s majority demographic of upper middle class, privileged students who can afford to live in residence or pay steeper incidental fees, such as the $200 yearly Victoria Goldring Centre charge on our invoices, without much concern. Moreover, Vic students with racial and socioeconomic privileges are not sufficiently aware of the daily obstacles that marginalized students face on our campus, since the administrative and student leadership has not made a concerted effort to expose these entrenched issues.

During my time at UofT and Vic, I’ve interacted with affluent people who are oblivious to the necessity of working two part-time jobs, an experience of many marginalized students, and others who do not notice when a syllabus’ reading list consists of exclusively white male authors. Class disparities and other forms of discrimination are only made more complex when the intersections between additional systemic barriers are considered, such as the struggles of identifying as a queer person of colour, a person of colour with visible or invisible disabilities, or being an Indigenous student in Vic’s white colonial spaces.

While Vic wants incoming students to “find [their] place” here, we are still welcoming first-years to a campus that was never designed for all of its students. Racialized and marginalized students do not receive enough support at Vic because our college has yet to address its structural inequities. The lack of representation can be discouraging to first-year students who attend O-Week events and see that the majority of student leadership positions at Vic, whether they be VUSAC members or levy heads, are held by white students. The incoming Class of 2022 should not be deterred by this fact, but instead work to implement meaningful, lasting change at Victoria College. For example, there are no programs at Vic specifically dedicated to benefiting new students of colour. Many post-secondary institutions in the United States offer orientation sessions tailored to prospective students from marginalized communities that introduce them to life at schools where they are historically underrepresented. Amherst College’s Office of Admissions hosts fully-funded Diversity Open Houses for rising high school seniors; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology selects 100 Black, Latinx, and Native U.S. high school seniors to attend their Weekend Immersion in Science and Engineering program. With its endowment, Vic has the means to establish similar application-based programs for students from underrepresented minorities that would enable them to visit UofT before they apply, to help increase access to the campus for low-income students. As well, the Vic Registrar’s Office and the Office of the Dean of Students could create merit-based admission and special scholarship awards for racialized students that recognize systemic discrimination in higher education. Vic’s problems should not be hidden from first-years only to be discovered when experiencing a racist slight in the line at Ned’s, or when watching students protest at Bader against an all-white panel questioning whether social inequality is “a real problem.”

Marginalized students deserve the excellent level of post-secondary education UofT touts on Boundless, banners and attaining such excellency requires honesty from our leaders and our student body about how we treat our most vulnerable students. The intention must not be to simply fill a diversity quota or accomplish a superficial goal of equality or parity; Vic is flawed and must enact change to begin operating under an intersectional, anti-racist, and decolonized framework at every level. All students, especially first-years, should feel comfortable when speaking out to the administration or to their student representatives within governing bodies about the college’s shortcomings—for instance, if they consider a Vic One syllabus to contain an insufficient number of writers who are Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC) in comparison to the number of white, canonic writers.

The lack of visible representation on our campus is evident to me when I sit in a VUSAC meeting or look around a Vic One Hundred seminar class. An effective personal solution to this is to connect with upper-year students who have lived experiences of being racialized students at Vic. University gives you the freedom to shape your time, and I encourage incoming minority students to reach out to someone and start a lasting conversation throughout first year. The support and advice I’ve received from my mentors and role models at Vic have carried me thus far in an institution that has a reputation for being a white, elitist college with outdated practices. The Class of 2022 should not be denied these truths; instead, Victoria College should use its resources to dismantle the racial and socioeconomic stratification of its student population.