Fanshawe Revisited
As some of you may know, on St Patrick's Day there was a riot in London, Ontario and the media would have you believe that the sole responsibility and blame was to be placed on Fanshawe College and its students. Although out of the 15 people who were arrested only 6 were actually registered Fanshawe students, the media keeps reinforcing the proximity to the college campus and thus assumes in their reporting that all involved must have been students there. For those of you who are math savvy 6/15 is a whopping 40% (yes less than half). Some who were present even admit that there were high school students there, students from other post-secondary institutions in the region, namely from the Waterloo area; yet, this continues to be a PR nightmare for Fanshawe and I would argue for all Ontario colleges.
I will be discussing this phenomena further in my future work (conference paper and article) since one of my areas of research interest is the tension between colleges and universities. However, some points I wanted to make at the moment is that I was very disappointed (yet not surprised) at how skewed the reporting on this riot has been.
Though London, Ontario is also home to my alma mater The University of Western Ontario (or Western University , as they wish to be called now), no where in the media reports was Western mentioned. As @qui_oui states on Twitter, "the silence was a bit deafening" (Fullick). The media coverage suggested that this was a college problem, that those who attended college were young, were immature, were underage, were in need of supervision.
This kind of rhetoric does nothing but perpetuate a hierarchy in post-secondary education. It is the same type of stigma I have discussed previously on my blog.
I am posting these preliminary thoughts here as a way to start a larger discussion about this topic. I encourage you to post your thoughts on the riot and on the portrayal of colleges in the Canadian media. By creating a dialogue about these tensions we can hopefully better understand the very complex issues that underlie the rhetoric. I look forward to your comments.
Work Cited
Fullick, Melonie (qui_oui). "@AnnGagne The thought had occurred to me... that silence was a bit deafening." 19 March 2012, 10:19 p.m. Tweet.
I will be discussing this phenomena further in my future work (conference paper and article) since one of my areas of research interest is the tension between colleges and universities. However, some points I wanted to make at the moment is that I was very disappointed (yet not surprised) at how skewed the reporting on this riot has been.
Though London, Ontario is also home to my alma mater The University of Western Ontario (or Western University , as they wish to be called now), no where in the media reports was Western mentioned. As @qui_oui states on Twitter, "the silence was a bit deafening" (Fullick). The media coverage suggested that this was a college problem, that those who attended college were young, were immature, were underage, were in need of supervision.
This kind of rhetoric does nothing but perpetuate a hierarchy in post-secondary education. It is the same type of stigma I have discussed previously on my blog.
I am posting these preliminary thoughts here as a way to start a larger discussion about this topic. I encourage you to post your thoughts on the riot and on the portrayal of colleges in the Canadian media. By creating a dialogue about these tensions we can hopefully better understand the very complex issues that underlie the rhetoric. I look forward to your comments.
Work Cited
Fullick, Melonie (qui_oui). "
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