believe it or not, "the suicide school" has a hate problem.

trigger warning, if it wasn't obvious

I love the University of Waterloo. Not the institution, necessarily, but it’s where I go to school, work, and church. I’ve met a lot people who are very important to me through this school.

some pictures of my favourite campus seating options

I’m about to say some pretty mean things about this school, probably in a bit of a messy fashion as I’d like to speak my piece while people are still focused on this.

But they’re all out of love.

---

There is a certain kind of violence that is encouraged on campus.

Violence against the self, in pursuit of academic and professional success, is a deep part of the school’s culture. Students neglect their health in pursuit of academic success. I’ve had more conversations than I can remember where a ridiculous sacrifice was seen as admirable, or inevitable, in order to compete for research or job positions with other students. No matter how much sleep you are forgoing, ramen you are eating, or hours you are spending hunched over the computer, there is someone who is doing better than you.

The impulse to find and exterminate any potential signs of weakness is only fuelled by school policies and systems which impress unsustainable standards upon students. Co-op students are required to apply for a new job every 4-8 months, often leaving for a new city for a job they are less than excited about.

During my first co-op, I got a call from a co-op advisor, which went something like:

hi i'm calling to check on how your term is going!
                                                                      
                                                             oh, i'm very overwhelmed. i took a course, and it 
                                                             turned out to be an exceptionally hard one, and i 
                                                             can't drop it now without wasting the money, and
                                                             it's my first time living alone without a meal plan   
                                                             and at this point i'm just trying to figure out who's 
                                                             the most ethical party to let down. 

oh. i'm sorry.
                                                            yeah. 

is there anything i can do?
                                                           i feel like you would know the answer better than me.

well, can you drop the course?
                                                           i wouldn't be able to get a refund for it. 

something something campus resources something something

                                                           <polite acceptance of useless information>

Where the paper is cut out, there used to be a poll. “Good” had much fewer votes than “Shit”.

I don’t think it takes too much for an indirect violence against the self to become something larger. Just under a year ago, there was a stabbing at CMH (a dorm on campus). The victim believes his roommate stabbed him due to a mental health crisis. And this is to say nothing of the long history of suicides, which often go unreported by the university.

Provided you don’t massively burn out first, violence against the self breeds hate for vulnerability in general.

If only I was smarter/faster/cooler. Then I’d be able to put up with this system and win like my smarter/faster/cooler peers. I’ll just keep pushing through and never give the weak parts of me what they need, until they shrivel up and die.

When someone is thoroughly disgusted with all the weakness in themselves, they will sometimes take the same look towards the rest of the world and look for someone else's weakness to blame for everything wrong. Someone weaker than themselves, so they can exercise the need to kill that weakness. Women, trans people, and the poor are common targets.

There is, in fact, a dangerous and divisive gender ideology at the University of Waterloo; it’s just not the one that alt-right personalities are telling you exists in universities. Instead it’s the notion that the atomization male students are experiencing is the result of the existence of women, trans people, or the weakness of modern man, rather than the systematic alienation of modern life with all its shit jobs/communication channels optimized for outrage/red tape/constant, low-grade surveillance/lack of moral cohesion/the systems upheld by UWaterloo itself to produce “strong” students.

Most of these students are not violent in a way which is outright criminal. Instead, their beliefs manifest in more banal ways, making the social, academic, and professional scenes for these disciplines all the more isolating and more likely to reinforce such a world view.

---

I don’t actually know how much of this applies to the man who attacked a gender studies class yesterday, stabbing a professor and two students; I don’t have any information on his specific mental state outside of r/uwaterloo rumours. This was clearly a hate crime, not merely an issue of mental illness. But we can’t examine the idealogical issues affecting our communities without examining the conditions they arise from. Having any kind of discussion about an incident on campus without knowing the culture on campus is going to be limited.

And if you're going to have an opinion of what happened yesterday (the fucking prime minister has tweeted about it, so it's not unlikely), you should know about the culture here. There's a sizeable crowd from across the internet who are saying something to the effect of "if hate crime how come he look like that ?????? checkmate libs!" These people are clearly not students at the University of Waterloo. There is, in fact, a certain vibe on campus which blends academic elitism with the myopic hate of inceldom, to the tune of something alt-right.

And hopefully we’ll get better at talking about it.