Jamie Scriber is a Trent student secretly living in a Lady Eaton College janitorial closet, out of preference. They often joke with their parents about it being fate them to be a writer, given their last name. Their parents often joke back that they’re ashamed of them.
The events of the latest TCSA Board Meeting could be described as beneficial, well-ordered, and thought-provoking. These, however, are not the words that I am choosing to use as one who sat in on the affair. Temporarily displaced from my janitorial closet home by a new floor wax machine, I stumbled into a tense discussion between TCSA Board members and representatives from groups that are funded by levies, levies being the percentages of the tuition money that we all pay each semester.
The meeting opened with the Chair requesting that no yelling, profanity, throwing of chairs or specific insults be hurled during the proceedings, even if we knew Kelly from financial’s dirty little secret. The Board overseeing the discussion was splotchy in numbers, so missing cabinet members were made up by a surplus of interested parties in such a fashion that the meeting resembled an Ikea-furniture building session. The board was left with various screws that didn’t quite fit, but I’ll be darned if that Regissör didn’t look interesting by the end.
The representatives from assorted Trent University Levy Groups included Trent Radio, Trent OXFAM, the P.R. Community at Sadleir House and our very own Arthur Newspaper. All were in attendance to bring attention to and subsequently combat the board on the issue of the TCSA’s proposal to create a Levy Policy Committee in order to further bring the students and employees of Trent University under their iron fist control. In response, the Levy groups sighed audibly, as they already had informal meetings amongst themselves and didn’t need the TCSA charging in and mucking everything up.
The board as a collective was unimpressed and spent the majority of the 2 and ½ hour block rubbing their temples and trying to explain how having power is really hard, okay? An executive member went on to clarify that they in fact did not have to be charitable by talking to the 45 Levy groups of Trent University, and could have the coordinators of each group rounded up and replaced by obedient automatons instead.
So many motions were offered during the meeting that seasickness became rampant, leading several attendees to leave the room to have a good breathe and a quiet chuckle in the hallway. The mediator was able to keep the peace until a referendum proposal to kill puppies was brought up and some present erupted into laughter, which was overruled by the TCSA on the grounds that humour was not something they could understand. I moved to get the tired Chair a cup of tea and a nap, but the motion was not seconded.
When asked for the data on complaints relating to Levy groups, the TCSA requested that any such petitions should be written down on a piece of paper, folded into an airplane, and chucked off the nearest bridge. In a final non-verbal statement, the TCSA began to offer a helping hand before turning it around last minute and flipping off the Levy groups.