The hack of Carleton Servers today only served to compound the stress of our faculty and students. One of our graduate students had his entire Dropbox account (4 years of research) corrupted with ransomware. Fortunately, Dropbox maintains backups and he can get his original files back, but it will take time and this kind of event on top of the uncertainty around the building eviction just compounds the stress overload.
Since all our lab computers were offline, we took an hour out to hand out information leaflets in various campus locations including in the Ravensnest today. We were shadowed by two burly security guards for much of the time we were there (except that they didn’t follow us into the women’s changeroom). We will continue our information and awareness campaign both on and off campus.
On November 11, we were told it would be one more week for “The Plan”. On November 18th, we were told it would just be a few more days. On November 25th, Ms. O’Reilly Runte said that we needed to “be patient” just a couple of more days and the infamous Plan would be delivered. Is The Plan like the Health Sciences Building? Is it going to get smaller and leave whole sections unfinished as time goes on?
Well, a couple of more days have passed, and we are still waiting. Time ran out long ago on our patience.
All around me I see students working nights and weekends, and planning to give up their family time over the holidays to try and salvage their projects before the coming eviction. There are students suffering from panic attacks and depression and sleepless nights. We will be posting video testimonials and impact statements about this situation soon. But no matter how sick or upset or depressed they are, they are still wanting to fight back.
We will not go quietly into that dark night.
We will rage, rage, against the dying of the light
(forgive me Dylan Thomas for adapting…)
Ms. Runte told us in Senate that the March 1 eviction date was based on being able to complete construction by a Provincially-set April 2018 deadline. But according to the press release, the provincial contribution is only $3.9 million dollars. It will likely cost far more than that to move us twice and house us for close to a year at an interim location. Why not just push out the start date and forgo the provincial contribution?
It’s Giving Tuesday, and we’d like Carleton Administration to give us the consideration and respect of sitting down at the table for genuine and transparent dialogue on this issue. Give us back our family time, our research goals, our hope of completing our degrees on time. Truly, the best gift we could get from the Carleton administration is to have them live up to their original commitment to us – give us our current space in LSRB until the HSB is ready.