Ten years ago, 19 students were arrested in the Knoll Protest, a demonstration where students demanded the preservation of the grassy hill outside the soon-to-be Nest. The protest worked: the knoll they were fighting to save still stands today.
This type of activism isn’t new on campus. Students have always protested at UBC, as the university itself was founded on protest. The Knoll Protest did, however, change activist culture on campus — a culture that has only grown with the explosion of the internet.
“In 2018, protesting has become so oversaturated,” Free Speech Club Director Angelo Isidorou said. “... I feel like people are protesting over some issue every other week to such a degree that nothing really ever stands out, whereas with the Knoll Protest, it really stands out because at that time I don’t think were protesting to this degree. That’s why 10 years on, people are still talking about it.”
Sociology Professor Dr. David Tindall agreed that sometimes the number of protests can be overwhelming and demonstrations lose impact due to the “issue attention cycle”: the idea that “the general public and also the media to certain extent, have [a] limited attention span for certain types of topics.”
“Something will be in the news or will be of interest for a period of time. But then, people kind of lose attention for variety of reasons,” he said. “Protest is very much like that.”
#Protesting
Internet activism with hashtags, notably the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements, has grown in prominence over the last few years.
According to Tindall, social media’s impact on protest culture both benefits and hinders society.
“Social media plays this connector role. You can have people who at one point in time would have been relatively more isolated who are able to connect with one another on social media and … coordinate for things where that would have been much more difficult [before social media],” Tindall said.
As a result, people with extremist ideas are more easily connected, resulting in those groups having a larger, more visible presence. Recent right leaning protests on campus, including people protesting abortion and an anti-transgender protest that was quickly countered by LGBTQ+ advocates, are examples of this new phenomenon.
For Isidorou, giving extreme opinions a voice is beneficial to the conversation, citing the Ben Shapiro event the Free Speech Club orchestrated as an example.
“We think that when the radical left pushes ideas into the underground … it festers and it becomes really kind of negative, and the next thing you know, you have Charlottesville happening,” Isidorou said. “So, if you see bad ideas like that [...] it’s better to give them a stage and actually be able to judge them in public and have that on the record.”
UBC’s stance
Where does UBC stand on protest today and has its position changed in the last 10 years?
Neil Guppy, senior advisor to academic freedom on campus, says no. In 1976, Senate approved the Academic Freedom Statement outlining students’ right to protest. Since then, it has introduced a Respectful Environment Statement, ensuring a mutual respect among people with different opinions and backgrounds.
On paper, UBC supports protest, but for some clubs it’s been harder to find their platform. According to Emily Leung, communication coordinator of UBC’s environmental activism collective UBCC350, UBC has made it difficult since 2013 for the collective to lobby the university to divest from fossil fuels.
Leung said that in the initial stages of their divestment protesting, the UBC Board of Governors (BoG) required the collective to hold two referenda to prove student and faculty support for shifting investments away from fossil fuels.
“In the beginning, they had quite a lot of obstacles for us and it was pretty hard to voice our opinions through the channels that they provided us,” she said.
After the referenda, Leung said that “they continued to not really acknowledge the effect and student’s efforts. They kind of go with their own agenda.”
But over the years, she said that the BoG has opened up to the collective and allowed them to speak at meetings. In 2017, after four years of the collective’s protesting, UBC finally voted for sustainable investment.
Shifting ideas of protesting and activism brought on by the increase of online interconnectedness have changed the way students choose to make their voices heard. But while the changes in the last 10 years have changed the protest culture at UBC, Guppy affirms that UBC’s position remains the same.
“Protest is part of what is accepted, expected activity on a university campus,” Guppy said. “That’s always been the case.”