It’s the most wonderful time of the year—or at least the most chaotic. Queen’s students are presented with the thrilling and mildly terrifying opportunity to step up and run for a student government role.
When visualizing a menstruating individual, the picture that usually comes to mind is one of a cisgender woman. This restrictive view, however, ignores one important fact: menstruation isn’t limited to cisgender women but is also experienced by genderqueer people, including non-binary and transgender individuals.
It’s no surprise that, because this role is unlike any other at a Canadian university, it comes with privileges and challenges. While I’m not going to gripe about the challenges, I don’t want you to be fooled by my smiley social media feed.
Queen’s University’s recent budget cuts to the Faculty of Arts and Science (FAS) has left the department in a precarious position. While the Smith-funded School of Business and Engineering faculty thrive, the University continues to handle the situation with a lack of honesty and transparency, leaving students frustrated.
I’m sick of living in “unprecedented times.” I’m truly at my limit. In the last four years, my generation has lived through the COVID-19 pandemic, online school, rising temperatures, and six seasons of Too Hot to Handle.
In my office in Dunning Hall, there’s an image of an ampersand hanging on the wall. I’m fond of ampersands. Beside the fact they just look cool, the ampersand (&) is for me a kind of value statement. It’s a guiding star. To me, that “&” is an icon for one of the things I love the best about the Faculty of Arts and Science (FAS). We’re a Faculty of Arts and Science.
More than a year has ed now since Oct. 7, 2023, and it’s been difficult to put into words and even fathom what that really means—what it means for a whole year to have ed since the massacre of our loved ones, our people.
The first time I witnessed an Honorary Degree (HD) at graduation, I was a third-year student hidden behind the stage arranging hoods and gowns—a job taken on by the AMS operations team. The organized chaos slowed as my attention drifted to the voice on stage, listing off a litany of achievements that stretched so long the audience began to chuckle in disbelief.
For much of human history, academia was always treated as a holistic pursuit. Science was a type of natural philosophy, and it shared the same inquiry methods as history. It wasn’t uncommon to find an astronomer who was also a philosopher, or perhaps a historian who studied biology. It’s in this melting pot of subjects that teaching and learning flourished, and much of what we study in more well-defined fields today originates from this time.
You may have noticed a gap in your schedule on SOLUS for Sept. 30. At first glance, it might seem like an opportunity to get some extra sleep and catch up on—or procrastinate—your readings. In reality, that emptiness is a call to action.
