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COMMENTARY
March 21, 2012
Fanshawe's riot
The riot in London, Ont., Saturday, was not, contrary to first reports, something new. It was just something bigger for the student ghetto in question.That Fleming Drive subdivision is populated largely, but not exclusively, by Fanshawe College students. This is one of Canada's largest vocational schools, as they were called half-a-century ago; or "community colleges," as they came to be known; or "colleges of applied arts and technology," as they wish to be styled. The next step up is to be chartered as a university: the final ambition of any failed vocational school. I happen to know something about this history, because my late father, perhaps foolishly, devoted two decades of his life to proselytizing industrial design in that place. He was a teacher, not an administrator. At their best, teachers can in fact build standards, through their students, to the honour of their craft or trade or science. Administrators, by contrast, build bureaucracies. Papa spent 20 years fighting administrators with their head count principles. Fanshawe was an administrator's paradise, in the days when Ontario's education budgets were swelling from the baby boom, and for about a decade after, till everyone noticed it was over. Fanshawe grew from a modest three-building campus, in Centennial year, to a sprawling "city within the city," adding four satellite campuses around southwestern Ontario. It has consumed, directly and indirectly, huge patches of prime Ontario farmland. There are two dozen Fanshawe-like entities across the province. Their task is to provide the sort of training once obtained through apprenticeship arrangements, or otherwise on the job. Alternatively, to keep the young out of the unemployment statistics for a few extra years; while inculcating, as my father used to put it when most diplomatic, "laid back attitudes." Frosh week and other tribal partying is a growing component of the post-secondary experience, everywhere. Around Fanshawe, there were riots in 2001, 2007, and 2008. But this was on a smaller scale than Saturday's St Patrick's Day blowout, in which cars were overturned, and a big bonfire was fed with flammables literally "ripped off" neighbourhood properties, while more than 1,000 young revellers gathered in savage awe, pelting police and firefighters with glass bottles and other projectiles when they came to spoil the fun. The drinking started around 10 a.m. It began as yet another student street party. The notion that such parties are in themselves "harmless fun" is a lie to anyone who looks in from outside, and has the observational skill to recognize the transformation of human individuals into the anonymous, finally faceless units of a mob, that will spontaneously attack anything that resists its will. Studies are not needed. They have long since been done. London's police and firefighters were congratulating themselves, afterward, on having delayed decisive action until past 4 a.m., when the party was anyway winding down. They let the fire burn, the vandalism continue, until then. Their fear was that, if they moved earlier, some of the young revellers might get hurt. And you know what that means: Bad media. Lawsuits. By chance, there were no serious injuries when items like barbecue gas cylinders were tossed on the fire. This is the sort of thing people do when their individual brains network into the mob mind. To call such people "stupid" is beside the point; they are beyond thinking. I was struck by a paragraph in the Globe and Mail's roundup story, which mentioned a 36-year-old "stay-at-home" mother, who'd had a window smashed during a previous street party. She spent last Saturday evening holed up in her basement with her six terrified kids, while the cops were avoiding their lawsuits. Bad move. Had the house caught fire, they could have been trapped, and roasted. For sure, within London town, there is a horrified reaction. Even the student council at Fanshawe is helping the authorities identify the worst culprits. But when there are more than 1,000 rioting, that becomes an arbitrary exercise. The "social media," which provide so much evidence, also provide so much misrepresentation, for the most innocent behaviour may look most guilty, and vice versa, depending on little accidents like camera angle. Nothing can replace nonvirtual police officers, actually on the scene, as opposed in turn to dehumanized, radio-manoeuvred "robocop" phalanxes, directed by office staff miles away, like a video game. My father used to refer, sarcastically, to the contagion of - well, he used generic names to describe students who had reached adult age, without having acquired any discernible character, discipline, reading ability, or purpose beyond the pursuit of immediate pleasure. "What should be done?" I asked him this, shortly after he retired from the fray. He thought one answer was to withdraw student loans, and government funding, forcing each institution to "evolve" away from the head count principle. But failing this, we might want to patiently and thoroughly bulldoze the campus, and return it to prime Ontario farmland. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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