ARCH Café: This fall, students returned to McGill to find that the beloved Architecture Café wouldn’t be reopening for the school year. In early September, Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) Morton Mendelson claimed that the café had been losing money for the last several years but refused to cite specific figures. The idea to transform the vacant café into study space outraged a loud minority of McGill students and mobilized a broader slice of the student population who manifested their anger in two rallies outside of university Senate meetings. Though the administration stood firm on their stance to keep the café and their books closed, students’ demands for further consultation eventually paid off with the formation of the Student Consultation and Communication Work Group, which vowed to increase student consultation on major decisions. The Mobilization McGill group also formed in response to calls for more student involvement in university affairs. In early November, a report became public explaining that the café lost $15,000 last year and was projected to lose more than $73,000 this academic year. From the saga, students gained the consultation working group, a welcome sense of student unity, an unwelcome feeling of “us versus them,” and the knowledge that, as Students’ Society President Zach Newburgh recently put it, “if the administration is really bent on something, it is very difficult to change its mind.”

AUS: The AUS had an extremely rough financial year. On September 22, it announced that this year’s Frosh had lost $30,105 after executives overestimated the number of registrations. Shortly afterward, the AUS learned it had to surrender $18,000 of unpaid federal and provincial taxes. To add insult to injury, the administration announced that it would not release the $83,000 of student fees that normally funds the Society.  President Dave Marshall and his team have held up admirably, and have taken steps to change the AUS’ ways. Hopefully, future AUS execs won’t have to make emergency payments for AUS operations with their own credit cards, as the current one has had to.

Jobbook: In the early hours of February 4, the Students’ Society Council nearly voted to remove President Zach Newburgh from office after details of his involvement with the employment-based social networking website Jobbook were released to Council in a multi-hour in camera session. Though Newburgh was censured, not impeached, the details that did surface dealt his presidency a hard blow. In the same Council session, Newburgh came close to passing what had been a promising General Assembly reform question through Council, but ultimately failed to get his question on the ballot. For the next several weeks, students and campus media tried to learn more details about what was being called Jobbook-gate. The inquiries eventually culminated in a February 17 Council session during which Newburgh fielded questions from students and councillors about his involvement with the website. At this meeting, Newburgh revealed details regarding his trips to schools around the world and his confidentiality agreement. Many students wanted even more information which, to this day, hasn’t been unveiled, and probably never will.

Tweets: Haaris Khan’s tweets on March 8 were McGill’s most menacing sentences this year. Attending a Conservative McGill/Libertarian McGill film screening of Indoctrinate U, a documentary about liberal biases on university campuses, Khan wrote about how he wanted to shoot everyone in the room. Other tweets included “I’ve infiltrated a Zionist meeting;” “I feel like I’m at a Satanist ritual;” “I should have brought an M-16.”  When the story became public, Khan issued an apology in the Tribune, saying that he “[didn’t] have a problem with Jews.” He has since been investigated by the university.