To the administration of the University of Guelph,
Like thousands of other alumni, I recently received an email asking for $20 donations to the University. Ten years on from graduating, I have become used to these requests. This email, however, has left me perplexed, frustrated, and sorely disappointed.
Seemingly the University — a multimillion dollar institution with dozens of employees on the Sunshine List — requires the help of alumni to expand and maintain proper mental health support networks for students. Students, the email says, “vulnerable to start with.” During an unprecedented crisis a University which — to the best of my knowledge — is still charging students full price for an inherently inferior distanced education, needs money from alumni to properly provide a basic necessity to students. A service these vulnerable students have long deserved.
I have lived here for sixteen years, and attended UoG for six. I have heard from dozens of students who felt the University did not handle their mental health, disabilities, or special situations, with the necessary care, compassion, and competence. I have heard the frustration, tears, anger, and the feelings of failure from students who struggled to complete their education, if able to at all. I hear similar accounts today. To be asked now, during a pandemic which has cost us our careers, health, livelihoods, loved ones, and the little joys we find in socializing, to essentially prop-up a program the University is unwilling or unable to fully fund itself, is an insult.
Your students deserve the best support available, and those staff who continue to try their best to accommodate students deserve a proper network backing them. I fervently believe our job is to make the world a kinder place for the people who follow us. As students, as alumni, as neighbours.
If that is not in the budget without my $20, what exactly have you done to change lives, or improve life?
Sincerely,
Cory Houghton
University of Guelph Alumnus, 2004-2010
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