By Rochelle Raveendran
On Monday, a manila envelope was slipped under the door to The Eyeopener’s office, with no sender information. Inside were the shredded remains of typed documents with Ryerson’s letterhead. Hours of careful reconstruction revealed the documents to be three first drafts of Ryerson PR statements. The restored statements have been presented in their entirety below.
Statement on inadequate responses to racism on campus
Ryerson maintains its stance that racism is terrible but also kind of…inevitable? You’re going to meet a lot of people in life who you won’t get along with, whether they don’t like your haircut, disagree with your politics, think you belong to an inferior race and so on. We’re just helping you get ready for the real world.
In fact, we’ve been inflating students’ tuition fees for the past forty years in order to pay for the high-quality subconscious racism-resilience training you receive as a Ryerson community member. We’ll do anything to ensure we don’t lose that extra income, and if that sometimes means doing nothing, well, we’ll do that too.
We are, however, in the process of considering taking the necessary steps towards possible eventual changes that may potentially create a more inclusive environment—theoretically speaking. You can quote us on that.
And to those of you who insist on sending us email complaints: stop sending follow-ups! They’re clogging up our Gmail storage. We’re just taking our time to ensure that we’re in the clear before we respond, like when we didn’t publish a report about anti-Black racism on campus until seven months after it was supposed to be completed.
Statement on the cost of tuition
Let’s get something straight: Ryerson is first and foremost an esteemed business institution. We’re not some hippie Scandinavian publicly-funded elementary school where students call teachers by their first names, sit on beanbag chairs and are graded on a scale of dolphin (A+) to possum (F-). We’re not saying your long-term economic and emotional health aren’t a priority, but we’re not not saying that, either.
Be honest: is it that hard to take out a loan, get a second or third job and even skip a couple meals? That’s called adulthood, kiddos. If you’re whining because you think we charge too much, feel free to go to another university that probably charges the same.
And another thing: you don’t think we have our own expenses to deal with? We spent over $10 million dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s twice the money we get from our deal selling all the footage we collect from your webcams to CSIS. Bet you feel bad about complaining now. Ungrateful much?
Statement on environmental issues
Ryerson has factored the inevitable explosion of the Earth into a massive fireball into our twenty-year fiscal plan. As such, we will make no further commitment to environmental initiatives. Our current operations will continue until New Year’s Day 2040, at which point the Dean and their advisory council will kiss their families goodbye, make their way to the bunker located under Kerr Hall and hope for the best.
You can find more information about our environmental initiatives on our web page. Sure, we included Ryerson mainly being a commuter campus and the lack of available parking space as “initiatives,” but we needed a couple hundred extra filler words to make us look legit. Don’t act like you haven’t done the same. We’ve read your essays.
And on that note, can you cut us some slack? Seriously. You should’ve accepted by now that civilization as we know it will end within your lifetime. Stop bugging us about this. Don’t you have a second or third job to get to?
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