UVIC threads on Recruiting, Protests & Students against War

[larry Strong]

Are there really that many naive/stupid people in University? How did they ever get that far.

 

[chanman]

Are there really that many naive/stupid people in University? How did they ever get that far.

No, the problem is that there are too many people in University that don't give two hoots about the Student Society, so they can get away with such crap.

Combine the resulting low participation rate in student politics with the power that is actually allocated to the Student Society, and you see why things like this actually get pulled off.  The SFSS at SFU was considerate enough to hamstring themselves with a moderate required quorum that they consistently fail to meet, but not all schools have such considerate Student Societies.

 

[Kirkhill]

Behold the Word.

There is only One Truth and it is vouchsafed to very few.  We, the few, must protect the many from the Untruth.

42. From what has been said it follows that it is quite unlawful to demand, to defend, or to grant unconditional freedom of thought, of speech, or writing, or of worship, as if these were so many rights given by nature to man. For, if nature had really granted them, it would be lawful to refuse obedience to God, and there would be no restraint on human liberty. It likewise follows that freedom in these things may be tolerated wherever there is just cause, but only with such moderation as will prevent its degenerating into license and excess. And, where such liberties are in use, men should employ them in doing good, and should estimate them as the Church does; for liberty is to be regarded as legitimate in so far only as it affords greater facility for doing good, but no farther.   ... LIBERTAS, ENCYCLICAL OF POPE LEO XIII ON THE NATURE OF HUMAN LIBERTY 1888

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_20061888_libertas_en.html

Apparently our friends on the UVSS are of a mind with Pope Leo XIII.   Somethings are just too dangerous to allow individuals free and undirected thought.  I sense some excellent Bureaucrats in the making.

 

[a_majoor]

Behold the Word.

There is only One Truth and it is vouchsafed to very few.  We, the few, must protect the many from the Untruth.
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_20061888_libertas_en.html

Apparently our friends on the UVSS are of a mind with Pope Leo XIII.  Somethings are just too dangerous to allow individuals free and undirected thought.  I sense some excellent Bureaucrats in the making.

These future Inquisitioners may be swept away by the next Reformation. (We can only hope).

 

[PJOsborne]

I have sent them an email, calling into question their bias and their lack of logic. The very nature of the a career fair is to give students the chance to browse and then CHOOSE their preferred career. Their argument that, "students are ignorant" makes no sense to me. Why deny the already "ignorant" students (of which i am one :) the chance to gain at least one side of the story? Whatever happened to the freedom of choice?

 

[Ex Ranger Instructor]

This isn't new- the UVSS banned the military from the SUB previously.  I think it was in around 2000 or 2001.  I was a student at UVic at the time.  There was a real furor over the fact that recruiters had brought in some swag to display, including dummy munitions and/or inert weapons.

I don't really care what the UVSS thinks.  Let them have their tempest in a teapot.  The SUB is their building, they can do what they want with it.  Maybe I would be more upset if I thought a recruiting drive at UVic stood a snowball's chance in hell of attracting some applicants, but having worked at them in the past I doubt that they will- a leper colony would draw a better crowd in that place.  Maybe I would also be more upset if I thought there was a snowball's chance in hell of reasoning with UVic in general/the UVSS in particular, but I really don't.  This is just the way it is at UVic, and I don't have it in me to get worked up over it anymore.

 

[vangemeren]

I never seen stuff like this here North Bay. Military personal come in all the time in their Cadpat and take courses at the university. They have always been welcome at the job fairs and nobody seems to say anything about it.

The student union here has enough trouble keeping itself together let alone pass policy statements. In the 4, going on 5 years I've been here, the elected president has never served a full term of a year. Durring the melt down (in fighting) last year the University did not step in because the student union is a separate entity from them and does not intervene as policy.

 

[29CARR]

Some of the rather inflamatory statements made in the article really remind me of statements made by racists.  A lot of hatred, with very little/no truth, no logic, and justification for their own inappropriate actions (ie. it was important to ban the military from recruiting because some students are ignorant about the issues.).  I wonder if some of them are Anti-Dentites as well. 

 

[Jarnhamar]

Why complain?

This just means we can allocate more recruiters to elementry school. This way we can nab the kiddies before the university prof's begin *their* brain washing.

 

[Brad Sallows]

>“A lot of students don’t know about the issues and don’t know about the facts,” she said. “We have to make this decision for students.”

Apparently the council doesn't realize the council membership falls into the set of people who don't know about the issues.  Regardless, it's amusing that they have appropriated to themselves the right to act in loco parentis for adults.  The student body of UVic is, apparently, composed mostly of children - especially the graduating 22 (or so) year-olds who would be the people primarily interested in the job fair.

If the UVSS is correct - that the students are ignorant - we must question whether the students' judgement can be trusted on any other issue.  They might not know about the issues or know the facts.

 

[Greymatters]

>“A lot of students don’t know about the issues and don’t know about the facts,” she said. “We have to make this decision for students.”

Apparently the council doesn't realize the council membership falls into the set of people who don't know about the issues.  Regardless, it's amusing that they have appropriated to themselves the right to act in loco parentis for adults.  The student body of UVic is, apparently, composed mostly of children - especially the graduating 22 (or so) year-olds who would be the people primarily interested in the job fair.

If the UVSS is correct - that the students are ignorant - we must question whether the students' judgement can be trusted on any other issue.  They might not know about the issues or know the facts.

Based on that kind of logic, then these same students should not be allowed to vote, or drive, or drink alcohol, or get married or handle their own finances.  And any consequences of their past votes should be null and void - including SVSS election results...

Really, what drivel.  If these guys actually provided any 'facts' instead of paranoid accusations, then the students would be informed.

 

[BC Old Guy]

Who cares if the CF is not welcome there.  It is their loss anyway.

Actually - I care. Part of my job is to provide accurate information to people that are making employment decisions - especially for themselves.  The UVic website notes that it has 19,475 students enrolled.  Out of that many, I would normally expect to get 4 enrolments, which requires 12-15 people applying.

I think that out of that number of students at UVic that there are 15 or more people who would do well in the military.  So now we have to consider -  how do we let these people know that the military is a viable career choice?

Interesting tactical problem.

 

[max flinch]

This is typical of what the UVSS has been up to at least since I was at UVic from 89 - 93, so it's nothing new. I must applaud the Marxist - I mean, the Martlet, for reporting what appears to be pretty neutral account of the event. That's a change since I was there. They used to be to the UVSS what Pravda was to the Central Committee in the old USSR.

I just have to shake my head at the reasoning. "Don't confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up." They are banning the military because of things that they assert they don't know about, have never heard of, but are sure that exist. The assumption that if you don't agree with their viewpoint, you must therefore be to stupid to form your own opinions, seems to be the basis for the reasoning of a lot of issues on the agenda of people in this area of the political spectrum. That said, it only bans the military from recruiting in the Student Union Building, correct? That's an awfully small part of a big campus.

During the first Gulf War, when Canadian ships were in the Gulf, there were people about who were gleaning names from the newspaper of serving members, then phoning their spouses to say, "This is Major so-and-so, and your husbands been killed. We'll let you know more later." Some of the members of UVSS at the time were quoted as supporting this kind of behaviour, because it was that kind of a tactic that was needed to make all members of the military community realize how wrong the war was. "No blood for oil, blah blah blah." These people and their ilk forget that Hitler was a socialist, and that many of the ways they see as legitimate strategies have some nasty parallels in history.

 

[00334]

One of the directors that was absent from that meeting is making a motion at Monday's UVSS meeting to overturn that Sept 10 motion.  The motion will be this:

"WHEREAS UVic students have the right to evaluate all career options and points of view;
and WHEREAS the UVSS has no right to censor the information that is provided to UVic students;
and WHEREAS the decision to ban the Canadian Armed Forces from the SUB has caused considerable outrage in the Campus Community;
BIRT that the motion passed at the Monday, September 10, 2007 meeting, banning the Canadian Armed Forces from the SUB, be rescinded."

 

[3rd Herd]

Vacant seat on the Board of Governors for a student representative anyone ? http://www.uvss.uvic.ca/index.php?page=students-representation

The UVic Senate is the decision making body for all academic matters of the University. The Senate is the body that approves course curriculum, degree programs and other academic regulations. It also monitors all policies regarding admissions, grade appeals and probation standards. Each faculty has a student elected annually to represent their needs and there are a number of at-large positions.
-vacant (7) http://www.uvss.uvic.ca/index.php?page=students-representation

Elections
Every March, undergraduate students elect student representatives for the Students´ Society, University Senate, and University Board of Governors. These representatives are responsible for ensuring that you are represented and that your ideas and concerns are voiced. Campaigning takes place for two weeks and includes two "All Candidates´ Forums" where candidates present their platforms and students can ask questions on important issue.

 

[big_johnson1]

The problem is mainly that Students Against War have the ear of the current UVSS board, and their small minority manages to pass this ridiculous stuff because they basically are the only ones who show up at the meetings. Personally, as a student at UVic, it's embarassing, but then again, people don't expect much else from that school. I wrote a little email to the chair expressing my (not the CFs) opinion of how I am being painted, especially following a media interview where she essentially said that members of the military are not welcome in the student union building. Her most recent politically minded move is to move this issue to the annual general meeting so that the students can decide: which completely goes against what was said earlier about how the students aren't informed enough to make this kind of decision.

 

[SweetNavyJustice]

It's funny that I actually found this thread while 'killing time' waiting for the meeting here at UVic. 

I am not one prone to showing up for such activities, but when I read the article in the Martlet last Thursday I was outraged.  I couldn't get over how a group of students were calling another bunch of students too ignorant to decide on who is a good employer. 

Being that I have actually spent seven months in Afghanistan and consider myself pretty swept up on the history of the country, it's politics and situation, I also had to laugh that one of the members of the UVSS council's claim that he was well read on the subject of what is going on.  To me, unless you have been to the place, or taken the time to get out in the public and actually talk to Afghanis living in Canada, then your being well read basically means that you've researched a number of other people's opinions that mirror yours (both for a military presence in the country and against), and can either regurgitate their claims or make an opinion off of their opinion.  What is that saying about opinions being like As@holes?!  I also suspect that these same well read people on the subject of AF couldn't tell you who Ahmed Shah Massoud, Gen. Doustem, or Abdul Sayyaf are. 

Beyond my outrage over the UVSS being idiots and lack of understanding over the actual issues in Afghanistan is a greater concern.  It is them trying to censor who should present themselves as a potential employer.  As Mike Wallace mentioned earlier in the thread, it's not as though you are then, through extension, going to ban companies that do business with the CF.  Or, since the UVSS talks of prisoner abuses, if such allegations were true, you cannot blame an organization for the inappropriate actions of an extreme minority.  As a 'company' the CF does not condone this behaviour, and does and will punish it accordingly.  To ban the CF on these grounds would be tantamount to banning every environmental group from the campus because a few of them have spiked trees and caused injury. 

At any rate, with any luck you won't be reading a story in the papers tomorrow about some old soldier who has actually been to Afghanistan and is also a student at UVic having gone over the table at UVSS members for their idiocy. 

 

[sonardork]

If anyone wants to express their personal opinion to the UVic "movers and shakers" here are some key email addees I got from the comments section at the Small Dead Animals blog on this subject:

scarlson@uvic.ca
chanclr@uvic.ca
plaliber@uvic.ca
gmanager@uvss.uvic.ca
martlet@uvic.ca
ombuddy@uvic.ca
academics@uvss.uvic.ca
chair@uvss.uvic.ca
edit@martlet.ca


edit to fix hyperlink

 

[Greymatters]

Here's the site for the UVic 'Students Against War'.  For those of us who were around when the wall was still up and read what the big red machine used to put out, this material will look quite familiar...

http://sawvictoria.ca/

 

[Greymatters]

I posted it on another thread, but its more appropriate here -

Here's the site for the UVic 'Students Against War'.  For those of us who were around when the wall was still up and read what the big red machine used to put out, this material will look quite familiar...

http://sawvictoria.ca/