"I would certainly want Catharine Parr Traill College and Peter Robinson College to continue in a different location", said Board of Governors member William Saunderson. Mister Saunderson, like so many of the BoG members is not a Trent graduate, nor does he have children who attend Trent. He doesn't even live in this city.
What Mr. Saunderson fails to realise is that fluids take the shape of their containers. We, as people, are as fluid as anything. The pertinent difference is that we get to choose our containers. Point being that PRC and CPTC are our containers now because we like their mental and physical shapes, and the feelings they evoke.
You cannot simply move the people from one space to another and call it the same college. Space and people combine, and "the college" emerges as its own entity. Unlike corporations (Mr. Saunderson's realm) our colleges have no operations manuals. There is no student rulebook (save general guidelines.) Within corporations, people are depersonalised into "roles." Roles do not have feelings or emotional relationships; they simply follow rules. They are relatively easy to transplant. The corporation is a set of automatons, running on rules. We are not automata. We are human. We feel. Within our space we become the colleges. "That special feeling" Peter Gzowski spoke of is something that is evoked by these spaces.
If PRC & CPTC are moved to new spaces, they will evoke different feelings, and the colleges we know and love will cease to exist. Trent will have buildings and spaces, but they will be as hollow as a parent who has just betrayed its child.
Sincerely,
Derek Martin
dcmartin@trentu.ca
To tell the Honourable Dianne Cunningham, Minister of Colleges and Universities why Trent should not be given Superbuild funds, call 416-326-1600 or fax: 416-326-1656
To email Mike Harris to tell him the same thing, go here