Ryan Reisert / McGill Tribune

On Nov. 24, McGill’s Mob Squad held a communal assembly to discuss McGill’s governance and to propose changes to the way the university is run. 

Democracy and accountability were the major topics of the night, held at Café Alternative on Parc Ave., where the newly formed McGill Governance Reform Project (MGRP) met. The MGRP, a working group comprised of 15 students, was created in response to the events of Nov. 10th. Around 100 people attended the meeting, which was held off-campus so that MUNACA members could attend. The event included large numbers of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members, all of whom expressed concern about the way McGill operates.  

Set up like a town hall, the meeting began with a discussion of McGill’s current governing system. The group went over the guidelines of the MGRP, using Robert’s Rules to allow anyone in the room to motion to make changes, most of which were semantic. The end goal of the meeting was to allow nominations for the 12 spots on the commission and vote on them; it was required that the commission contain at least one undergraduate and one graduate student, one non-academic staff member, one faculty member, one alumnus or community member, and one francophone. These quotas were to account for the diverse array of perspectives that form the McGill community. 

Niko Block, former news and features editor of the McGill Daily and a founder of the MGRP, discussed the proposal they planned to present to the university on how to best restructure McGill’s administration. 

“[The goal is to] create a viable commission that will do research and prepare a proposal by Jan. 31, 2012 that everyone will stand behind and benefit from,” Block said.  

The general consensus was that in order to have a Board of Governors (BoG) that represents the needs of the McGill community, key decision making must be done by faculty, and the rest of the McGill community should also have a say. 

Daniel Simeone, a former McGill senator, member of the BoG and VP Internal of the PGSS, described McGill’s BoG as a place where people “don’t feel comfortable to speak their mind,” and pointed out that “the budget wasn’t presented in as much detail as it should have been.”  

“This lack of granularity stemmed from an increasing disconnect between the interests of the [Board of Governors] and the interests of the faculty, staff, and students, who interact with McGill on a daily basis,” Simeone said.   

A faculty member who wished to remain anonymous noted that this disconnect “reflects the fact that the real decision makers at McGill are no longer faculty members as they once were, but corporate executives who have little do with McGill.”  

“Since [2003], the McGill administration has become increasingly corporatized,” MFLAG member Kristin Norget said.

Upon its completion, a general assembly open to the entire McGill community will be held to ratify the proposal. It will then be petitioned, and when enough signatures are collected—it was suggested that the aim should be in the thousands—it will be presented to the McGill administration. Fraser added that possible public demonstrations similar to the ‘We are McGill’ gathering on Nov. 14 may be organized if the administration does not recognize the petition’s requests.

Attendance dwindled after the two-and-a-half hour debate over finer points in the commission’s statement of purpose preceding the election. When it came time to share nominations, there were only about 15 people left in the room and, as the group was about to elect 12 people to the commission, it was deemed inappropriate to hold such a vote with so few people present. After three and a half hours of deliberation, the organizers decided to adjourn and conduct the nominations and elections this week.