A Campus or a Cemetery?
The University of Toronto’s Bizarre Memorial Stones: originally published in Canada's C2C Journal: Ideas that Lead.
Dear friends and readers,
Below is an updated version of my Medea Stumbling on Stones Part II essay, originally published in Canada’s C2C Journal in my first publication. I have re-produced it here with the editor’s permission. Thank you to George Koch, Chief Editor, for taking me on and for a wonderful first-publication learning experience. Thanks also to Paul G. Conlon, author of Citizen One: Case Against Digital ID for providing helpful comments on the original draft.
Here is the: link to the original story.
Although the slide of Canada’s universities into wokism is well-known, few who don’t spend their days on-campus probably grasp just how far it has gone. Administrators chase academic respectability through “performative inclusivity” – at the expense of educational standards and even students’ health. One Toronto resident watched her beloved institution devolve deep into ideological rebranding with an expensive “campus greening”, a contrived “Indigenous landscape” and donor-bait memorials that cheaply evoke a Holocaust memorial while eerily conflating living adults with dead grandchildren. In this intense first-person telling, P.M. Szpunar recounts her horrifying discovery of the U of T’s strange new proclivities and seeks to unravel how they came about.
I always associated universities – especially their libraries – with freedom. They instilled a belief that I could discover anything. Sometimes I simply long to sit in the quiet surrounded by the vast intellectual legacy, marvelling at the scent of aged books. It fosters a deep contemplation where time disappears. I like the soft rustle of pages in reading rooms, the thinking minds around me working through their last, agonizing term paper, the soft clatter of laptops, the whispers of students, and yes, that cute guy across the room…reading. It always seemed the more I studied, the less I knew, faced with endless tentacles to unravel. The library’s ambience of a sanctuary became a conduit to doing my best work, in making sense of the curious thoughts swirling in my confused mind.
One gorgeous autumn day at the University of Toronto, I decide to study at the Bora Laskin Law Library, the only remaining place on campus at the time with publicly accessible wi-fi. On my way, I meet a delightful young woman, clearly a European, a tourist. “Do you know which way is the subway?” she asks. Eager to help, I smile and, since we’re headed in the same direction, lead the way. Strolling down the beautiful Philosopher’s Walk towards the library, we instantly connect, her warm smile engaging, her blonde hair shining brightly in the afternoon sun. Her name is Agrita and she’s visiting from Latvia, here to explore studies in architecture.
We head down towards Hart House Circle as I am eager to show her the beautiful places around campus. “I just wanted to check the place out, I thought it would be interesting, and I wanted to see the dome,” Agrita says. “The dome? That one?” I reply, pointing to Convocation Hall. “No, not that dome,” she assures me. “It’s a different dome.” We search around and soon spot the smaller, less-impressive dome of the Louis B. Stewart Observatory. “Oh, that’s it?” we say, laughing.
Our chat slides towards politics. “It’s very strange here, this place has become so weird, this city,” I obliquely probe, trying to detect her political leanings. “Ugh!” she agrees with an acknowledging look. “Yeah, it’s pretty extreme, the ideology in society,” I push further, as I feel a connection to her. “Can I show you something?” Agrita readily agrees, although time is short as she wants to see the CN Tower and I want to show her Massey College and other noteworthy feats of architecture. Eager for her reaction to what is in store, but feeling a bit selfish in doing so, I lead her down Hart House Circle towards Knox College, pointing out places along the way.
We arrive to find the scene depicted in the accompanying photos. “Ugh, it’s like a graveyard!” Agrita exclaims, visibly shocked. “I know,” I say, unsure how to respond. “What has become of our world?” I ask rhetorically. “You must know what ‘Stumbling Stones’ are?” I inquire, referring to the dispersed Holocaust Memorial of Stolpersteine – stone cubes faced with brass plaques, more than 100,000 in total, placed at more than 1,000 sites throughout Europe to commemorate the innocents abducted by the Nazis and sent to the death camp at Auschwitz. “Of course,” Agrita says solemnly. But this, she continues, is “really, really weird.”
We stand in silence, upset and confused, unsure what to make of these stones. We look for signs of an explanation. “Oh, look!” Agrita exclaims, “Some are in memory of…” On closer inspection, some of the names refer to deceased persons, others seek to celebrate people who seem very much alive, but mingled in plaques on the ground amongst the dead.
My mind floods with confusion. ‘Has anyone made the connection between these pavers and the Holocaust?’ It still wasn’t entirely clear whether these particular children were being commemorated or were alive and being recognized for some unexplained reason.
It’s nearly dusk and Agrita wants to catch a glimpse of the CN Tower. We pause for a moment longer in silence, unsure how to process the scene. “If you want to study architecture, maybe try Chicago,” I finally blurt out, wanting to protect her from unhappiness, but trying to safeguard her freedom of self-discovery. “Its skyline is beautiful and the architecture is super-impressive.” We stand in silence a while longer. “Don’t come here,” I say at last. “This is not the place.” “Thanks!” Agrita exclaims, looking relieved. I can tell my new friend is really looking forward to her next destination, the CN Tower. We connect on social and hug goodbye.
On my way back to Hart House I stumble upon another, similar scene: the “Grandchildren’s Garden”, a grassy patch scattered with what look like gravestones masked as pavers inscribed with names of children on campus. Walking around I find more pavers: Ethan Peterson, Woods Peterson, Drake Peterson, Willow Peterson, Odin Peterson, Luke Dirksen, Henry Dirksen. Clearly two families, I reason. But why here? I grow agitated. Why are dead children commemorated at a university? How is this normal? It takes me some effort to research and conclude that they could actually be living grandchildren, some of them ambitious PhD students and apparently off studying at Harvard, commemorated into pavers as one big happy family. Are we really inscribing children into pavers whilst they are still alive? And if so, I wonder, What will distinguish them once they are dead? It seemed downright deranged.
Does fundraising have to get this weird? The “Grandchildren’s Garden” is another graveyard-looking area on the U of T campus, this time with the names of living children inscribed on commemorative stones. Disturbed by this discovery, the author researched the question of what drove the university to do this. (Source of photos: P.M. Szpunar)
My mind floods with confusion. Has anyone made the connection between these pavers and the Holocaust? It still wasn’t entirely clear whether these particular children were being commemorated or were alive and being recognized for some unexplained reason. The “In Memory Of” pavers Agrita and I noticed didn’t carry death dates, yet In Memoriam and its equivalents mean dead. How do students wrestle with their chemistry labs or mathematics assignments, sitting on top of either dead or living children, even if only symbolically, as they nibble on grapes and a salami sandwich? The failure to distinguish between – and separate – the dead from the living was inescapably creepy and chilling. Would happy pictures of talented students placed on a college wall not suffice in imbuing them into the university’s proud history? Did it have to get this weird?
Curious, I delve deeper, as I have a tendency to do. My research disturbs me. It turns out that since before the Covid era, Canada’s most prominent university has been busy transforming some of its most visible and visited spaces into something like a green cemetery. The starting place, I learn, is the Landmark Project, which began prior to 2014 as an effort to remove surface parking, enhance green spaces, make campus more inclusive and make the U of T’s most historic grounds more walkable.
By 2019, Landmark had led to a “decolonization” effort involving creation of an “Indigenous Landscape” at St. George’s College, possibly inspired by U.S. colleges paying homage to their submerged histories. In the spirit of acknowledging Taddle Creek, a built-over stream that was once a gathering place for the Huron, Seneca and Mississauga peoples, Landmark now aimed to revive Indigenous knowledge, culture and history buried through urbanization. As the university approaches its 200th anniversary in 2027, a new Indigenous landscape is meant to unearth the one below it.
As part of its “decolonization” drive, the U of T’s Landmark Project included an “Indigenous Landscape” at St. George’s College with the open-air pavilion at its centre (shown). To the author, the ideological Indigenization of the entire university goes against the panoramic pursuit of knowledge that should be its true goal. (Source of photo: Azure)
After extensive “public” but apparently exclusive consultations with Indigenous leaders, elders and students, the U of T’s Governing Council decided – unilaterally, it appears – that “our university needs to do more to be deserving of Indigenous students.” While I see nothing wrong (though some might) with having a dedicated space for Indigenous students, plus a separate “reconciliation grove”, the Indigenization of an entire institution seems to defeat its very purpose. Aren’t U of T’s 120,000-plus students, faculty and staff positioned to aspire to ideals wider than, or even different from, solely Indigenous ideals?
As important as its Indigenous component is, Landmark’s true core mission appears (perhaps not surprisingly) to be making the university “climate positive” by 2050. That is to say, the U of T’s emissions are to be driven down so far that the institution not only emits zero net greenhouse gases (GHG), it generates enough “clean” energy to result in “net negative emissions.” To that end, not only would vehicles be banished from inner areas, but King’s College Circle itself was to be excavated for a massive geothermal energy field, storing excess heat from above and leveraging the temperature of the ground below to help the university drive its GHG emissions down 37 percent from 1990 levels by 2030.
The largest such facility in Canada, this geo-exchange system would comprise 370 (later 420) boreholes drilled into the bedrock of limestone and shale, some 250 metres deep – nearly half the height of the CN Tower – to “sustainably” heat and cool an integrated campus, reducing GHG emissions by the equivalent of 3,000 cars. Embedded underneath the green field is an underground parking lot accommodating a meagre 236 vehicles (though 48 include EV charging stations!). The cost of this massive transformation was initially reported at $20 million but, given the long time-frame and sprawling scope, one I find hard to believe.
The Landmark Project also aims to serve as a learning tool and be a “ceremonial landscape that predates the automobile.” Capital funding for its key components was approved in September 2019 by the Governing Council’s Planning and Budget Committee acting in camera, i.e., behind closed doors.
The idea for the strange stones seems to have started around the same time as Landmark – it remains unclear who first thought of them, when, or for what original purpose – and I couldn’t find more on them until 2019. Though the process was said to include “public consultations”, there is no evidence other institutional bodies were consulted, no public debate I could find reference to, certainly no university-wide referendum. It all appeared driven by the U of T President’s office and Governing Council pursuing “institutional priorities”, with the Indigenous groups as the (key) stakeholders. This article, written years after the fact by a donor, is one of the few explicit references to the pavers I could find. The stones are also (very) obliquely referenced in one other document I found as being aspects of Landmark that relate to “the importance we place on time as a marker.”
In presuming to commemorate both the living and the dead within an architecture shared with “the generations of alumni that have built UofT into one of the world’s top universities,” as Landmark Project Co-Chair Professor Donald Ainslie put it, the university sought to distinguish itself by imbuing its campus with emotional sustainability through the “temporal effect of memorialization”. Neither the project’s managers nor the institution’s leadership appear, however, to have consulted with external institutions on the advisability of memorializing living alumni and students amongst the dead, nor in examining ethical precedents from broader contexts or research in reactions to them. Instead, they focused their efforts on shaping the space. Landmark’s vision of integrating memory, space and ecological renewal apparently aimed to affirm the university’s commitments to intergenerational continuity, global belonging, collective identity and institutional prestige.
The pavers themselves, though, appear to be fundamentally a fundraising scheme, though one suffused with 21st-century sensibilities. How else to explain – alongside the distinctly old school donor-funded benches and the more contemporary donor-funded mini-gardens – the innovative but haunting and outright bizarre idea of placing in green spaces and on walkways thousands of stones – 3,478 of them, as it turned out – inscribed with the names of both living and deceased members of the community? According to a paper on Landmark published by the U of T’s Ethnography Lab, the university was seeking to integrate public memory and personal reflection within the daily encounters of student life or, as the jargon-riddled piece puts it, to “mobilize the temporalities of History, Future and Timelessness to construct an identity.” And not least, to make the dreary act of donation seem 21st-century virtuous.
All you needed was $2,000 at a Landmark fundraiser to embed yourself (or your child or grandchild) into the university’s “living legacy”. Nothing else mattered: marks, merit or Nobel prizes. The university wanted to “include everybody,” diluting the whole point of achievement, ingenuity, competition and, above all, merit. It appears to have worked, with Landmark drawing some 4,500 donors – many later embedded into pavers – plus a $250,000 gift from the Students’ Union, $1 million from the university’s alumni matched to $2 million from the much larger, $2-billion-plus Boundless campaign, and a $100,000 grant from Toronto’s Parks and Trees Foundation. Everything was blurred, commodified, diluted in the university’s “reshaping of collective memory.” Its stated intent was to “imbue [the] school with a sense of prestige” in order to “maintain relevance and appear ‘sensitive’ to the current social moment.” And attract donors. But shouldn’t high-quality academic output be able to do all that on its own?
Now, standing in the Grandchildren’s Garden, tears stream down my face at the thought of the searing pain from the death of one’s child or sibling. I feel like I’ll vomit, but instead start coughing, overwhelmed by my own lingering grief, carried since childhood, from tragedies that would define my existence.
Still I wonder, why would permanent engravings typically reserved for memorializing the deceased be blurred and extended to living donors (and their relatives)? How does Indigenization of an institution represent the diverse lived experiences of all its students, faculty and staff? Rather than fostering genuine university values through its physical infrastructure, the U of T appears bent on shaping public feelings about its institutional identity. Rather than neutrally recording its history, it has commodified memory by privileging those who can financially contribute. Its drive for ideologically acceptable prestige dilutes meritocracy, pursuit of excellence and aspirational values, while inadvertently excluding impoverished or marginalized members. Perhaps one might call it “performative inclusivity”.
Actual cemeteries – placed apart, in their own separate spaces – offer solitude, sombre remembrance and even healing to the still-living. They are not, however, an environment where a student would crack open their assignment in quantum mechanics. And neither are universities suitable settings for burials. Now, standing in the Grandchildren’s Garden, tears stream down my face at the thought of the searing pain from the death of one’s child or sibling. I feel like I’ll vomit, but instead start coughing, overwhelmed by my own lingering grief, carried since childhood, from tragedies that would define my existence. I look up at all the wandering students around me, unassuming, unbothered and preoccupied over their paper, exam or night out. How utterly sad.
In contrast to cemeteries, memorials carry different messages and play different roles. Depending on what they commemorate and how they go about doing so, they can arouse a range of emotions. I have no quarrel with statuary or other recognition of long-dead historical figures – in a university’s case, typically commemorating a towering intellect or transformative president – placed there mainly to celebrate the life lived and its achievements, with death incidental. (These, however, the university like other Canadian institutions is proving eager to “derecognize”.) I’m talking about installations in which death – recent death, tragic death, unprocessed death – is central and in your face. It is widely acknowledged that people in a closed system like a university need to be given a choice whether to be exposed to physical reminders of such difficult past events, because they can be re-traumatizing. The associated emotional arousal can reduce cognitive functioning, including the ability to focus on, retain, recall and process information.
On-campus memorials of the recently dead, placed in ways making them unavoidable, therefore pose a risk. In the U of T’s case, students shuttling between classes or on their morning run are now subtly brainwashed with 3,478 death-inspired, cloaked-in-greenery reminders of undefined, unspecified sorrows. Contrast this with the Stolpersteine. Though evoking perhaps the greatest horror in humanity’s blood-soaked journey, they are at least specific. Each one is placed at the individual victim’s last freely chosen residence and provides the person’s name, date of “deportation” and date of death. The Stumbling Stones thus commemorate something real and particular: an unspeakable crime by the one (unmentioned) party and an infinite injustice for the other.
Installed all over Europe, the Stolpersteine, or Stumbling Stones, commemorate the (mostly Jewish) victims of the Nazi regime who were murdered, deported, exiled or driven to suicide. Each plaque is specific, containing the victim’s name, last residence, date of “deportation” and date of death. Shown at top left, the first Stolpersteine, set on December 16, 1992 in front of Cologne City Hall, Germany, displaying Heinrich Himmler’s order to begin deportations. At top right, Stolpersteine honoring Simon and Frieda Herschberg, in Bochum, Germany; at bottom left, Stolpersteine for three members of the Kochen family including Ester Bajla Kochen and her husband Szyja Kochen (bottom right), from Racibórz, Poland. (Sources of photos: (top left) Willy Horsch, licensed under CC BY 3.0; (top right) Syracuse University; (bottom left and right) bruckfamilyblog.com)
This is all rendered even more eerie in that even as Landmark was moving through its planning phases, a horrifying string of suicides ensued on campus correlated to stressful exams: three students died jumping from the same ledge in the now-infamous Bahen engineering building. Yet only after the third death did the university install a barrier, shifting blame to the government for ostensible lack of funding in providing needed health resources for students – whilst heaping praise on its ongoing Indigenization efforts. (A long article in The Otter delves into the suicides and the U of T’s response.) There have been 16 further suicide attempts reported by campus security since 2019. When 13 percent of Canada’s post-secondary students report they are seriously contemplating suicide, we have a national mental health crisis. I went to the Bahen centre to see where the students jumped from, looking up at the barrier placed four storeys above me, but I couldn’t bring myself to go up. I noticed there was no memorial plaque.
In response to one too many of these tragedies, the U of T implemented a mandatory leave of absence policy (UMLAP) authorizing it to place students on indefinite leave if their mental health was deemed to pose a risk. To banish them from the classroom, in other words. The policy drew criticism from the Ontario Human Rights Commission and was heavily protested by student groups in 2018. Students pleaded for help, disrupting public meetings in 2019, warning not to give this institution money until it was made easier to get help, only to be met with gaslighting. In 2023 UMLAP was amended and renamed Supportive Leaves Policy (SLP), enhanced with a new Navi app. It remains unclear to what degree SLP is aimed at improving mental health support for students and how much of it is gaslighting and absolving the administration of responsibility for its students’ wellbeing.
Reading the students’ accounts, it is clear they are stressed, anxious and miserable; some are near a breaking point, and a few tragically have gone past it. They’re struggling in an institution that tells them the burden is on them to develop resilience in a world doing everything to impede it, a place they also struggle in trusting to help them flourish. In their own words, “this university is not the haven it strives to be.” The safest course has become to say nothing at all. So much for freeing the mind in a place where all ideas are considered. Isn’t much of the point of a university to nurture creativity through intellectual rigour, rather than stifling it with compliance through fear? And don’t the constant reminders of death, as the U of T has built into those Landmark Project donor-funded pavers, automatically fill us with fear?
This isn’t, mind you, the productive fear that accompanies intellectual rigour. The fear of facing your professor during office hours knowing that, if unprepared, you’ll walk out with the stark realization you’re not yet the intellect you thought you were. The best professors were always the ones who believed in you, who pushed you to reach a higher standard, the ones you somewhat feared but who never demoralized you, the ones you felt energized by after each conversation, knowing you were supported. The ones who taught you the art of good questioning, of self-belief, of limitlessness, of creativity.
In my case, the ones who encouraged me to believe enough in myself to make complex analysis proofs in Riemann integration actually possible, pushing me through the pain of understanding the Cauchy theorem, and the abstract confusion of bounded and unbounded numbers – but only after I’d spent 20 agonizing hours staring at a barely-filled page written in Greek. This is the satisfying struggle and glory of learning, self-discovery, growth – in which a particular kind of productive fear plays a useful role – yielding the sudden joyful realization that the long sleep-deprived nights fuelled by sugary hot chocolate, cereal and cold pizza were worth it.
But this environment, the one of climate-suicidal nudges, is not that. This is the dull, painful and exhausting fear that dissent, uncomfortable questions and contrarian viewpoints have consequences. It is first and foremost isolating, because the reminder of the inevitability of death almost inevitably evokes and perpetuates fear and loneliness. It is an art, perfected by the university, of silent control through insidious, gentle nudging, signalling to students that the stench of death masked into greenery-shrouded donor-funded pavers conflating the living with the dead and marketed in the spirit of inclusion is not only normal but inspiring and, implicitly, an option appearing on their course-load menu.
The author believes the U of T’s donor-funded pavers have crossed an ethical line, and notes that no other world-class university has followed suit to her knowledge. These include (clockwise starting top-left): Oxford University, shown is the dining hall at Christ Church; Stanford University, shown is the Green Library; Dublin University’s Trinity College, shown is the Long Room of the Old Library; and Harvard University, shown is Memorial Hall. (Sources of photos: (top left) Chensiyuan, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; (bottom right) Diliff, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)
The University of Toronto relies heavily on donations as they enable its stature through progress, so of course it ought to show its appreciation. But embedding living donors alongside the dead all over campus in the pursuit of an ideological identity is an ethical line crossed, in my opinion. None of the other greats have dared to go this far – not Oxford, not Stanford, not Harvard, not Dublin, not Melbourne.
As a concerned Canadian and a lover of learning, I hope no other institution treads along these particular paving stones. It is students who need to be prioritized and returned to the forefront. The Hart House Reading Room wall with the tall, arched windows doesn’t even have wall outlets to plug in one’s laptop. The Map Room is outfitted with wobbly wooden tables and Grandma’s stiff folding lawn chairs. As in so many other Canadian contexts – remember Calgary’s exploding water mains? – ideology has been prioritized at the expense of basic necessities, and of the people whom the institution was set up to serve.
P.M. Szpunar writes personal reflections about totalitarianism through the lens of opera and the operatic canon. Her work can be found here.
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