McGill students Joel Pedneault and Micha Stettin were exonerated Friday on charges of disrupting university activities due to their involvement in a demonstration in support of MUNACA on Oct. 11.
Pedneault, VP External of SSMU, and Stettin, Arts Representative to SSMU, were originally accused of violating two sections of the McGill Code of Student Conduct which included ‘disruption of university activities’ and ‘unauthorized presence.’
Both were cleared of any offences after an interview on Friday morning with Associate Dean of Arts Andre Costopoulos. Costopoulos found the evidence against them to be inadequate.
Stettin and Pedneault were both satisfied by the outcome.
“It was clear throughout the half hour interview that the evidence was patently false on numerous counts and deliberately selective and exaggerated where it described actual occurrences,” Stettin said in an email to the Tribune.
Pedneault had not been present at the demonstration. His name was mentioned in a report by McGill’s head of security to the associate dean, likely because he is a notable activist and supporter of the Mob Squad, the organization that planned the demonstration. Pedneault said he feels that the university had taken issue with the anti-administration stance of the demonstration.
“It’s almost as if [McGill security was] saying, ‘these people are guilty by association, so please be advised to go after them,'” Pedneault said. “I don’t think there’s any doubt as to why they decided to go after [us]. We’ve been in the media a lot to support labour rights on campus and speak out against the administration’s approach to labour relations.”
In the days following the announcement of the allegations, the claims received much attention from local media. On Oct. 25, Pedneault and Stettin appeared on CBC’s Daybreak Montreal to discuss the accusations.
While he wouldn’t comment on the specific incident, McGill’s Deputy Provost of Student Life and Learning, Morton Mendelson, told the Tribune that expression of free speech is always permitted on campus, but that it must be done in an organized way so as to not disrupt the workings of the university.
“All kinds of opinions are welcomed on campus,” Mendelson said. “There are constraints, [however], on forms of expression. Bullhorns outside a building with classrooms, [for example], aren’t acceptable.”
“Permission is granted independent of the content, as long as the content is legal,” he said. “If there is a barbeque to promote cause A versus cause B, there is nothing taken into account that says ‘well, we agree with cause A but we don’t agree with cause B, so we’re going to let cause A hold a barbeque and cause B not.’ That’s not what we do at a university.”
Stettin disagreed with Mendelson’s comments.
“The administration has a robust disdain for any freedom of speech and assembly directed against them and their interests,” he said.
