It’s 2015, and I’m not sure if I like my program. Introductory biology and chemistry courses are an onslaught of weekly quizzes, pre-labs, labs, and other CourseLink conundrums that test high school concepts I assumed were safe to discard. When I go to a counsellor to ask if it gets better, she tells me: “Oh, yeah. First year is just the basics. Just to get everyone on the same track. It’ll get more specific, more interesting. Just you wait.”

2016, 2017, 2018 all come and go. I’m still waiting. During this time, Trump is spreading lies, deregulating the FDA, and banning transgender people in the military based on a shoddy understanding of gender. When are we going to learn about climate change? I wonder. Anti-vaxxers? How to debunk flat Earth theory?

And then, in 2019, as my graduation looms, it dawns. It dawns so hard: For four years, my science degree at Guelph was taught in a political and cultural vacuum, one dangerously divorced from the outside world. For four years, I waited for lessons that never came.

In my second year, Trump is elected. At midnight, I watch a real-time elections map hemorrhage red, and the two glasses of wine that I’m using to cope are not working.

The next evening, I seek comfort in Principles of Toxicology, the first course of my undergrad to open a new dimension of biology: things that go wrong because of the carelessness of corporations. We’re learning about thalidomide, the morning sickness drug of the 1960s that caused fetal abnormalities due to FDA’s neglect to regulate it. We’re learning about risk and how to calculate risk, hazard X exposure X vulnerability. We’re learning about how regulatory toxicologists live by this equation and fear the day when they wake up to see their name in the newspaper below a headline claiming that they’re responsible for the latest chemical disaster. It is in Principles of Toxicology, more than any other course, that I expect to address my growing fears. What do we do now? What will happen for us next? What does an American president who doesn’t believe in climate change and who is fatally anti-regulation and anti-science mean for science and risk and vulnerability?

The professor clears his throat and starts his lecture. Class goes on, one minute, two, then five — there is nothing. It’s business as usual.

I’m dumbfounded, looking around as the orange elephant in the room remains unaddressed. My friend asks me why I skipped our other class that morning, and when I tell her the election seemed to paralyze me in bed, her response is: “Why? It’s not like it’ll affect us. It’s not like we can do anything about it.”

I imagine it was different in the Arts and Humanities courses — entire schedules thrown into entropy, at least for the hour. I imagine classes about racism discussed the future of civil rights under a racist president, and classes about feminism discussed the future of women under a sexist president. But I know for a fact that classes about science simply bowed their heads and carried onwards through the syllabus with a shrug, not once discussing the future of science under a science-illiterate president.

I get it. He’s in the U.S., we’re in Canada. But for years, I waited for my professors to draw connections between other current affairs and their material. Ever since the election, I began noticing that science classes were severely apolitical — and not just in a my professor won’t bring up the president I don’t like way. I mean, we weren’t learning the basics about any science relevant in the political sphere.

One night, while reminiscing about our years at Guelph over a drink, my biomedical science friend says he doesn’t understand how climate change works, not really, despite being almost done his program.

“I wouldn’t be able to tell you its exact mechanism without Googling it,” he says.

I think about it. I don’t really know how it works either. I can’t explain it at the top of my head the way I can explain other things: DNA transcription or the parts of the nervous system.

“Climate change is something about carbon dioxide, the greenhouse effect, and ocean bleaching,” he theorizes like a person who’s heard the buzzwords but knows only vaguely how they string together. “But really, how is CO² causing all this trouble? How did they find out?”

I don’t know.

“Like, what’s it mean when people say we have to stop global temperatures from rising two degrees? How is that bad?”

I don’t know.

We give each other nervous laughs, ones that undoubtedly disguise the panic of being laughably unprepared, unconscious science students.

We joke: At least we know the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.

I graduate with a Biomedical Toxicology degree in June 2019. I do the convocation thing: walk on stage, smile with President Vaccarino, and pay the hundred or so dollars for my frame and diploma. If you look at my grad pictures, you might detect in my smile the imposter syndrome I feel. I worry it’s less a syndrome and more that I am a genuine imposter. What did I actually learn here?

As I look through old notes, my own handwriting reads like a foreign language. I’m slowly forgetting the mechanisms, the drugs, and the equations that I once clung to for midterms and exams. All of it is decaying into a time capsule of stress I used to have and lessons I did not learn.

Let’s look at my four years at Guelph: not one peep about the science of climate change, the misinformation around climate change, or the infrastructure of climate change denial. Nothing on renewable energy either, how it works, or the need to transition. This last point made all the more frustrating given that Guelph invests in fossil fuels. I was in a toxicology program — studying chemicals’ effects on the body — so maybe climate change was beyond the scope of my courses, but I got barely anything about politically relevant chemicals: vaccinations, opioids, or the opioid crisis — which we know was caused by pharmaceutical companies overprescribing to make a buck. I learned about the effects of lead on the brain but nothing about the Flint water crisis or environmental racism. I learned briefly that the rise of breathing issues and asthma rates is caused by air pollution, but this is the trivia at the bottom of the slide — unused, untested. The book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which warns of a world conquered by pesticides and arguably jumpstarted the entire environmental and regulatory movement, was a lightly suggested reading, tucked away on the bottom of syllabi, recommended and never read.

Any “relevant” material I had to glean from student presentations in upper-year Topics classes. But by fourth year, these are too little, too late, and too forgettable.

For four years, I walk through my science degree with a kind of tunnel vision — a tunnel so bad that I won’t even realize it is a tunnel until much later. My friends and I, guilty of scoffing at humanities students who lament about capitalism and politics every two seconds, do not realize our work directly relates to these things. We tell each other we are too busy to look at the news, to read books, to understand a larger context of power. We are doing the “real work” after all, learning the processes of the body and how to treat the things that go wrong in it — there’s no time to talk about that society stuff. We go through PowerPoint slides whose designs are indicative of Guelph’s approach to the Bachelor of Science (BSc): a series of mechanistic steps or atoms on a white page, here memorize this — while the occasional picture of a child, poisoned or deformed because of a lack of care by governments or corporations, is (too often, too easily) skipped over. For interest only.

At best, the Guelph BSc’s unwillingness to connect present-day issues with science is an intellectual push for students to connect the dots themselves. At worst, it is a malicious oversight, one that robs students of vital critical thinking skills and the knowledge base to be frontline defenders in the current war of (mis)information.

Yes, a science degree is supposed to teach you how to teach yourself about science, and you are given the tools to learn whatever else you want to learn. But I’d argue that there are basics that need to be taught in a classroom.

First year science is advertised as “the fundamentals,” the things that get every science student in every discipline on the same track. People in physics, chemistry, and biology are forced to endure memorization of the same basics with the elusive promise that you’ll be able to learn the “real stuff” of your program in another year or so. You’d think that climate change, the most pressing crisis of our time, would qualify as the basics — explained over and over in mandatory first-year courses and beyond, providing the training grounds for future scientists of Canada to spot the lies of politicians and the many different forms of climate denial, and then to learn how to tell the truth.

But with climate change, with plenty of other relevant issues, there is nothing, or there are important things hidden away in electives or student presentations.

And so will this issue be solved with a mandatory course or two, titled something like “Science and Society?” Maybe, but probably not. Especially if we approach it like we do with every semi-controversial subject in undergraduate science: by slapping it on the CourseLink discussion board and forcing students to comment three times for 2.5 per cent of their grade and a participation certificate.

No, creating conscious science students should be an active, ongoing process. In Biomedical Sciences courses especially, more instructors should have the courage to tie their material to present events, to criticize current power structures, to look at growing inequality and poverty’s effects on our health, to address the black hole of misinformation, and to teach their students about corporatism and its ties to climate change, the opioid crisis, and several other chemical disasters. Science students should walk away angry as hell at all the corruption and discrimination, and be able to become activists uniquely armed with the current research and facts. We should be able to look at Trudeau’s pipeline and declare its violation to Indigenous rights and health while also explaining how it will make it impossible to meet our climate targets.

Instead, we walk out dazed and confused, thrown out of the vacuum and into a world that is radically different than how it was when we started our program. The structure of the program has made us unable to step back from our work and look at the broader sociopolitical implications of what we’re studying. And yet, we boast that we are science students, able to gather multiple perspectives, research, and disciplines in order to address issues at their root causes, and able to make life better for everyone, one memorized chemical structure at a time. But all the while, the world and the people we want to help are hidden from view. Their inequality is just an afterthought, their politics beyond our scope. It’s taken me four years to see this.

Photo courtesy of Jodre Datu