In Spring 2013, I accepted an offer to complete my PhD at Laurentian University in the Human Studies program. Having completed two degrees in Toronto, and having accumulated some debt, I was looking for a more affordable option for my degree.
I knew of LU’s reputation as a small, student-oriented university with big ambitions. At the time of my entrance, LU was a bustling intellectual community that had a lot to offer. The cool thing about my program and many programs like it was how it brought together professors from across the campuses to teach in graduate studies.
What I didn’t expect was how much my time at Laurentian changed me in personal and positive ways. After the experience of being a student at larger institutions, I was delighted by the warmth, encouragement, and support I received from the professors.
Let’s start with Cynthia Whissell, who taught me research methods and statistics. I never thought I would like statistics, but she made it incredibly accessible. While she sometimes challenged the research I was doing (my dissertation was on film and philosophy, subjects that are difficult to put into statistical form), she was so understanding and inspired me to imagine different problems and disciplinary foci.
I actually had a lot of fun applying statistical analyses to opinion surveys, average shot length in contemporary cinema, and consumer behaviour. Dr. Whissell gave me the confidence I needed to be there.
Alain Beaulieu, whose graduate supervisors were esteemed philosophers Jean-Luc Nancy and Alain Badiou from France, taught me that philosophy’s main purpose was to create a conceptual persona that allows the philosophical discourse to reach and relate to people.
By embodying the concepts involved in philosophical inquiry, one could live a richer and more authentic existence. If you have a viable concept and work on it and argue with it and show people how useful it is, then you too can be a philosopher, in Dr. Beaulieu’s world. He taught me that philosophy is completely egalitarian.
Michael Yeo taught me the value of understanding the questions specific to different disciplines. Dr. Yeo was routinely more interested in the social needs behind questions: How does this method benefit the students in a classroom; how does this technology impact the lives of patients living in rural communities; how does this research create opportunities for Indigenous peoples?
If the question wasn’t good enough, you had to throw it out and restart. Dr. Yeo taught me to never stop being curious and ask better questions.
Brett Buchanan just supported the hell out of me. He was so enthusiastic about my research and the necessity to understand film through Derridean phenomenology. He understood the humanity of my project and how film can create situations in which we have very strong ethical responses to other human beings (dead or alive). Dr. Buchanan’s philosophical expertise was invaluable to my work at LU. He taught me to be unafraid of what I was actually all about.
Equally formative for me was the community of Indigenous scholars that were there at the time. I worked on projects with several colleagues, such as Dr. Sharla Peltier (who is now a professor at University of Alberta, and who was in my PhD cohort).
We organized panel discussions focusing on Indigenous representation in the media and an international conference on precarity and colonialism in higher education. Many of the friends I made at LU have gone on to do incredible things, in education, in film, in their communities and beyond.
I don’t think these relationships would have been possible without the Indigenous Studies program and faculty at University of Sudbury that attracted people from all over to go there and be part of the community.
They’re all gone in one fell swoop.
All of these people were terminated due to the awful mismanagement of our beloved LaurentianU. If this group of people affected me to the core, imagine all of the hundreds of other students affected by these craven cuts.
Just because of our geography, we’re not the centre of attention, but LU was a beacon of hope for Northerners. The work being done at LU, the university-industry collaborations, the thriving intellectual and cultural communities, are all under threat.
For all the people that truly need Laurentian, these actions will likely discourage them from attending. Ross Romano, where is your Northern Ontario pride? How did we get here?
Dr. Tyson Stewart
PhD, Laurentian University
Caribou Clan, Temagami First Nation
Assistant Professor, Indigenous Studies, Nipissing University