Even as a major snowstorm walloped southern Ontario, and the mercury plunged well below zero, a group of Indian international students continued to camp out in the open in downtown Brampton on Friday evening, protesting against their university after receiving failing grades in their course exams.
This comes after the institute—Algoma University—said it would give the 32 students who flunked the course, even after a reassessment, another chance: a makeup exam that will be graded by a different teacher than the one who originally assessed them. However, students, who have been here for 11 days, insist the university hasn’t reached out to them directly and addressed the main demand, which is to prove that they indeed deserved those poor scores in the first place.
The students said their protest wasn’t a pressure tactic to overturn the result, as many are claiming on social media, but to clear their name.
Many protesters have alleged racial bias in the incident, though a vast majority of those who took the course and passed were Indian international students too.
The incident is a major PR disaster for Algoma, which depends heavily on Indian students for revenue. The university has three campuses in Ontario: in Sault Ste. Marie, Timmins, and Brampton. It’s the Brampton campus that is its cash cow. Now, with videos of students raising slogans against the institution going viral on social media, it’s going to take some effort for Algoma to undo the damage. It must also be making other colleges, which depend on the same foreign student revenue model, queasy. Their students can expect more relaxed grading going forward as the institutions will likely strive to protect the bottom line.
Speaking of bottom lines, there’s another protest going on in Brampton where (mostly Desi) landlords are up in arms to protect theirs. Their revenue model also depends on cooping up as many international students in their basements as they can. Legally, no more than four unrelated persons can live in a house. In Brampton, it’s not unusual to find 20 students staying together under one roof. Now, the City of Brampton, wary of the risks such overcrowding poses, including fire hazard, is launching a pilot project that would require landlords to obtain a permit for 300 dollars a year if they want to have tenants. At a time when mortgage rates are high, landlords are balking at the idea of having to cough up more dollars. And they have received support from an unlikely quarter, the very people the City wants to help: tenants. They say landlords will simply pass on the cost to them. “You saw what happened when mortgage rates went up: if their payment increased by 300 dollars, they raised the rent by 600 dollars,” a tenant, who is a former international student, said. “It’s going to come on us. We are going to have to pay ultimately.”
