#The Trial

by Abe Berglas                                                                                                                                    abe.berglas.net 

When McGill came after me for handing out flyers in Douglas Farrow’s classroom I chose to ragdoll down the rapids of the disciplinary process to see how far they would go. I was accused of obstructing academic activities – specifically, his class – and of the behemoth section 10c) – to “knowingly create a condition that unnecessarily endangers or threatens or undermines the health, safety, well-being, or dignity of another person or persons, threatens to cause humiliation.”

When the School of Religious Studies complained to the Dean of Students’ Office I was assigned a disciplinary officer. I told him I wasn’t looking for his take on protest tactics, a quote he re-used in his opening statements of my disciplinary hearing as proof of my insolence. The disciplinary hearing is a mock trial with faux-gravity. The disciplinary officer never got over the injury of our opening remarks spilling over the 5 minute time slot. The hearing took place in the Board of Governors meeting room, the one occupied by Pro-Palestine activists about a year before, forever tainting any symbolic power it once held. As I sat, silent for most of the hearing, I imagine the chaos of that June 6th.

When I talk to reporters, I am passive. “I have no idea what’s going to happen next”, I tell the Tribune. To highlight McGill’s antagonism, I must play the victim. But now, having graduated, and seeing the process for what it is, all ritual and no reason, I’ve outgrown this role. Once my guilt was determined by the subcommittee on student discipline, I asked for the harsher sentence; to have this noted permanently on my record. I said I would be proud to have it. My disgust was real; my surprise was feigned.
The queer politics of McGill seem designed to emotionally manipulate. When we storm Robert Wintemute’s fake academic talk about transness, the then Dean of Law, Robert Leckey, berates us. He’s a keynote speaker at the following Lavender Graduation, a ceremony dedicated to queer students. The University punishes me for the Douglas Farrow campaign. “Thanks for all your work”, the Director of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) said to me a month later while shaking my hand. What ‘work’ is he referring to? My outbursts at SSMU board meetings, my disruption to Farrow’s class, my paragraphs-long complaint to everyone on McGill’s EDI committee, an email list I had to manually look up, because the recipient list is purposefully hidden to avoid this sort of communication.

Queerness as per the McGill Reporter is uniquely celebratory, passive, and amicable. It strolls steadily forward, hand-in-hand with the university. In Tribune reporting, mediated by the McGill communication’s team, and my own sidestepping of agency, my issue is not with the idea of a code of conduct and an intra-university disciplinary institution, but its specific application to my case.
In truth, I chose this. I signed the flyers with ua@ssmu.ca knowing it would make it impossible for McGill to ignore. I am not a passive victim nor martyred. I’m not ashamed, embarrassed, or afraid. And I like to think that I spent my entire term making those with power worry about humiliating themselves.