On October 7, 2020 at 2:30pm, over 100 Life Sciences Gateway first year students flooded the Zoom call of a HTHSCI 1E06 class. Determined to deconstruct systematic inequality in course workload by fighting for the right to pursue the same waste courses, Life Science students organized a sit-in demonstration within the most famous BHSc-exclusive course, Inquiry. “Health Sci or not, every student deserves the freedom to an obscene amount of free time,” declared lead organizer Bittyr Lee Rye-Jectid, in an emphatic message within the Zoom Chat.
Curriculum equality is not the only freedom that the Life Scis are fighting for, though. The Class of 2024 is calling upon McMaster University for better treatment compared to their BHSc counterparts. “A big part of justice is about equal funding,” explained one protestor. “Why should the one percent hoard more wealth than everyone else, when that money could be redistributed to create valuable institutions that help as many students as possible? Every program deserves its own library, roach-free cafeteria, and lounge room, because we too need a safe space to play bad ukulele all day.”
Beyond amenities, equal funding would undoubtedly provide equal opportunities for non-BHSc students to create and manage their own program-exclusive extracurricular publications, too. “My friend and I wanted to start our own satirical newspaper called The Plagiarizer, if only the Department of Life Sciences could have provided us with more funding,” lamented Prihmed Keenir, another first year Life Sci.
Spiciness Rating:
The Procrastinator 