Documenting Dissent: Archives of Student Protest in “Montreal”

by Arismita Ghosh

Universities cannot—and should not—exist without student activism. Students have been leading change in university settings across the world for centuries, from advocating for academic freedom in 13th century Paris, to fighting against Quebec’s tuition hikes in 2012. The best way for us to learn from past examples of student organizing is to turn to the archives—but a huge amount of recorded material from these protests is owned by the very institutions students were fighting against. University archives have historically claimed the right to collect material that once belonged to students, which allows them to control the messaging. 

The best examples to highlight this can be found right here in Montreal. Canada’s largest student protest took place in 1969, at the Sir George Williams University (SGWU) campus of what is now Concordia University. Hundreds of students organised a peaceful sit-in at the university’s computer lab, protesting the university’s anti-Black practices, before they were assaulted by Montreal riot police on February 11, 1969. Most of the recorded material from this protest is held by the Concordia University Records Management and Archives. These materials, once freely available on the Internet Archive under the “Computer Center Incident” Collection. As of July 2025, however, clicking on the collection on the Concordia website displays an error message. While the individual files are still available to view, they are no longer preserved as a unified archive. 

When perusing this archive, one can find statements and newsletters written by Concordia student activists that show their commitment to creating space for Black voices within the university. 

On January 29, 1969, Black students at SGWU published a list of demands for the administration: to form a hearing committee to listen to the grievances of Black students and to drop all criminal charges against them. In a 1969 issue of campus paper The Georgian, Philip Griffin wrote about a “Black Studies Program” organised and led by students to educate their peers on racial inequalities; only to be met with very limited participation. A letter to the editor in Concordia’s Thursday Report from 1994 reveals that students were still calling on the university to “accommodate a Black Studies programme” 25 years after the protest. Even so, it took Concordia University over 50 years to acknowledge their complicity in the SGWU protests. 

If the material evidence from the SGWU protest—the declarations, statements, flyers, and newspaper articles—had not been under the complete ownership of the Concordia Archives, would the university have been able to carry out this “enforced silence” for so long? Having control of student protest materials also allows the current-day university to have control of the narrative around student protest. 

This becomes evident in a “formal apology” issued by Concordia in 2022. The university’s apology diverts attention from the 1969 protest and onto the university-issued “Task Force on Anti-Black Racism.” Concordia claims that their task force has put forward measures that “span most aspects of university life” and “aim[s] to encourage Black knowledges.” However, one only needs look at the 1969 student protest archives to see that all these ideas had previously already been presented by students, to an administration that simply ignored them. Not only does this erase the important role that student activism has historically played in reshaping the university, it also affects how present-day student activism is perceived. If Concordia Archives did not have the power to hide the impact of student-led efforts on the university, is it possible that the current attitude towards student activists at Concordia would be less hostile?

The dangers of institutional archives having ownership over student material is not just limited to this incident. McGill’s African Studies Department—the first of its kind in any Canadian university—would not exist without the efforts of student activists in 1997. All of the existing material on this incident sits behind a  paywall/institutional access at the McGill University Archives Collection. There is a single scrapbook lying in the archives’ trenches, compiling various written materials and newspaper clippings about the African Studies Department. 

A look into the archives hints at why it might be in McGill’s best interests to hide this information. Budget cuts and hiring policies in the 1990s were rapidly destroying their existing African Studies program; a report from the student-led Africana Studies Committee (ASC) shows that the university attempted to remove several courses and reduce the program from a major to a minor. Minutes from an ASC meeting further show that hundreds of students rallied in front of the Arts Building to maintain the status of the program, in addition to over 400 letters of support signed by students that were handed to the Dean of Arts. The archives also contain flyers calling for students to mobilise, educational pamphlets about administrative policies, and calls for emergency protests. All of this evidence reinforces how essential student activists were to reviving African Studies at McGill, even in the midst of their disagreements with the University.

Though Concordia eventually disclosed the details of the 1969 protest on their website, McGill continues to obfuscate the full extent to which student involvement influenced their present day university structure. It is impossible to access the African Studies archives online, anyone wishing to view it has to submit a request to McGill archives to view it physically and then wait months to get approved. By restricting access to  the material evidence of student protest history, McGill safeguards their image and suppresses the documented history of  student criticism. Such conflicts of interest are one of the primary reasons as to why institutional archives cannot be relied upon to preserve student material. 

The onus is on students to create rogue and independent archives to keep protest memories alive, to ensure that the historic efforts of student activists are not erased. As long as students are in control of the narrative around student activism, they can use the same praxis as the past in order to make real change today. 

Work Cited

Mark Edelman Boren, Student Resistance: A History of the Unruly Subject (Psychology Press, 2001), 10; Emma Bainbridge, “Learning from the 2012 Québec Student Strike,” Midnight Sun, 2023, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/learning-from-the-2012-quebec-student-strike/.

Bill Brownstein, “Brownstein: 1969 Sir George Williams Protest a Watershed Moment,” Montreal Gazette, January 29, 2019, https://www.montrealgazette.com/opinion/columnists/article381613.html.

Zachary Fortier, “Anti-Black Racism at Concordia: 53 Years of Inaction,” The Link, 2022, https://thelinknewspaper.ca/article/anti-black-racism-at-concordia-53-years-of-inaction

“Educational Resources,” Concordia University, https://www.concordia.ca/about/history/1969-student-protest/educational-resources.html.

“To Whom It May Concern,” Computer Centre Incident Collection. Concordia University Records Management and Archives, January 29, 1969, https://archive.org/details/1969-01-29-to-whom-it-may-concern. 

Philip Griffin, “What Happens to a Dream Deferred,” The Georgian, January 28, 1969, https://archive.org/details/the-georgian-vol-32-no-32-1969-01-28.

Robert Douglas, “Begin the Healing Process,” Concordia’s Thursday Report, February 17, 1994, https://archive.org/details/thursday-report-1994-february-17/.

 “Concordia’s Apology,” Concordia University, https://www.concordia.ca/equity/task-force-anti-black-racism/apology-1969.html.

“The African Studies Program at McGill University,” 1997, Item 005, Series 03, Collection MG 4319. McGill University Archives Collection. McGill Library Archival Collections Catalogue, McGill University Libraries, Montreal, QC.