Subversion at TWU
February 8, 2007
Jillian Snyder
1988
Mars’ Hill is released as an underground newspaper in a response to the ‘boring’ official publication, The Today. After two editions, the paper was forced to shut down, after administration called Mars’ Hill’s advertisers and asked them not to support this “unauthorized” publication.
1993
The Underground begins its three-year stint as a subversive news publication on campus. Its purpose, according to one founder, Alex Hark, was to “give TWU students a venue for expressing free thoughts and opinions.” While many students complained that The Underground was cynical, members say it accomplished its goal to be “a forum to challenge those in authority and a place for honest opinion to be published.”
1995
Mars’ Hill finally usurps The Today and is established as the official newspaper of Trinity Western University.
1999-2000
MOOSA, the Motivated Organization of Opposition to the Student Association, is established as a reaction to TWUSA elections. Their chief complaint? An unusually large amount of students running unopposed for council positions. Their posters, questioning the motives of the Student Association, were quickly torn down by overzealous council members. As a result, TWUSA resolved to establish better communication between the governing association and the student body.
March 2000
A subversive publication, the Jawbone, is released on campus. According to their mission statement, the Jawbone sought “to challenge naïve assumptions and unquestioned beliefs that often impede a full realization of what following Christ truly entails. While we do not claim to have grasped ‘The Truth’ of the Faith, we hope that we can stimulate productive discussion.”
2001
The Free Press, yet another subversive publication, begins and ends at Trinity Western.
November 2002
Jocelyn Durston and Mike Kaethler post hundreds of posters around the TWU campus advertising for a protest against the newly-opened Superstore for their use of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in food. After being removed from the premises, they took their campaign to the sidewalk and then to Willowbrook Mall, which also rejected them. According to the eager students, “We walked neither with pride nor humility but with the understanding that this was just the first of many more protests to come.”
Spring 2002
Frustrated by the mundane quality of official publication, Mars’ Hill, Carson Mills, Simon Poultney, and Simon Moore anonymously begin a parody version known as Mars’ Hole. The satire paper featured articles such as “Abortion Puts Fun Back in Sex” and “What’s New, What’s Hip: Martyrdom.” While only about a dozen copies were actually circulated, Mars’ Hole kept campus buzzing for weeks afterward. According to Mills, “The whole thing taught me an important lesson about Trinity. It’s both the best and the worst place to do something subversive. It’s good because the school’s small enough to get your stuff noticed, but it’s bad because the school’s small enough that your stuff REALLY gets noticed.”
February 2004
Students Rebecca Haines, Amy Lampard, and Yvonne Wallace protest the “Vision 2012” wall display in the Reimer Student Centre by putting up a display defying Trinity’s slogan, “What the World Needs Now” with images of impoverished children. In a letter to Mars’ Hill, the girls note that their controversial protest does not call into question TWU’s goals for improvement, but “the presentation of this project as a direct provider of world needs: especially using such a phrase “with flippancy” or “as an all-encompassing banner to justify our projects.”
April 2005
Students Advocating Change (SAC) is established by fifth-year history student, Joel Giebelhaus. SAC sought to express dissatisfaction over issues such as student representation on the Board of Governors and the fact that tuition increases were not matching the current inflation rate. To protest the neglect of the student voice, SAC threatened to block the bridge on campus, thereby shutting down the university until their demands were met.
January 2006
The “Dorey Report” emerges through the investigation of fourth-year student Jay Dorey, who researched the amount of student representation across Canada on the Board of Governors. The report revealed that out of all Canadian institutions of higher education, TWU is one of three without any student representation; furthermore, the rest of the schools without representation are not even full universities.
Now you go...
12 Responses to “Subversion at TWU”
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[Note from the Web Editor: Kelcey Brade has disputed authorship of this comment. Posting a comment under someone else’s name is illegal and could result in legal action being taken.]
What the ___.
I was involved with so many of these things yet I get no mention.
Simon, Carson and Joel you are my heroes. LOL
Let it be known I came up with SAC. Highlight of that was when Computing Services tapped into Joel’s email and website and shut it down. LOL.
4and5upper4life.
Kelcey,
Let it be known from henceforth that you are the King of Subversion.
The Bible says that we are to pray for those in authority and that they are God’s annointed. So I don’t know if ‘demanding’ Board of Governor’s representation is necessarily right.
And just because secular schools are doing it is not good enough reason IMO. TWU is supposed to be different than secular schools.
The Free Press was an amazing little piece of work.
Chris, I’m going to have to disagree with your logic.
I don’t understand how you got from “pray for your leaders” to “not asking for representation.” It is not true that one could still in fact be praying for one’s leaders, while concurrently asking for representation? Why should the two be seen as mutually exclusive?
And on your second point - what makes TWU different from other schools is the fact that we are a Christian university - not the fact that our students are not properly represented. Frankly, that’s something for which I’d rather not be known as being “different.”
And…(Chris)
applying that bible verse blindly would do the world a disservice. Praying for our leaders doesn’t preclude questioning their leadership. many Christian germans didn’t question hitler enough, and perhaps they even prayed for his salvation. sadly, it wasn’t soon enough to spare a few people a lot of suffering.
praying for our leaders is good, but it don’t think that the Bible is exhaustive and universally applicable.
Free Press issue number one:
click here
Free Press issue number two:
click here
And that, my friends, was all. Shut down all too quickly by lack of time, shortness of funds, and overt opposition by the Student Life department. Specifically by Ken Kush, the Grand Hegemon of Trinity Western University.
Good to see that folks are still keeping up the tradition of protest at TWU, though.
Also, let’s not forget the protest that Charles Stankievech and I organized via “hacking” the all campus e-mail list after Ken Kush sent a student fund increase e-mail. The subsequent protests on campus were brilliant and organized by us and the then TWUSA president Graham Travis. Mars’ Hill’s counter-admin activity lost steam after Jonathan Burkinshaw, Silas Crews, Alex Mahan and myself were forced out of office (Kush instituted a direct interview process of the students involved. Does he still do that? Does he still work there?) That is when the Free Press started.
Oh…oh…oh… and who could forget the source-ambiguous “TWU Rainbow Club” emails of 2001?
To answer your question, A.F., regarding Ken Kush, this will be (thankfully) the first year he will not be involved with the Editor-in-Chief interviewing and hiring, thanks to the fact that he is no longer VP of Student Life. He does still work at Trinity, though, as VP of Policy, Planning and Research.
As to comment #8…hacking the campus email? I’m not saying we should always agree with those in authority (in fact expressing disagreement is fine IMO), but do you really consider that action to be proper and Christian?
I don’t have a problem with protest in and of itself…just with how some people can conduct it sometimes.
I would like all of you to know that it was not I who posted the comment that sparked this debate. I had left my computer open and one of my roommate’s typed that response.
The contents of that post are true … but by no means are they a reflection of who I am now. It’s not something I look back at and am proud of. So if there are moderators who control these responses could you please remove my post and this one as well. Thanks kindly.