By Reagan Russell

As we approach the time of year when Take Back the Night takes to the streets of Lennoxville as a student-led protest against sexual violence, the Sexual Culture Committee has been confirmed inactive by the SRC. After eight years of Take Back the Night, the failure to transition executive teams has caused the unplanned hiatus of the SCC. With huge changes to the Sexual Violence Support Centre this year, including two new Sexual Violence Response Advisors, it is imperative to have at least one constant: a student-led, university-supported outlet and resource for students to refer to.

Graphic courtesy of Gabrielle Lalonde

It is wildly disappointing that the SCC is not active this year. With the recent news of the horrors committed at Cornell in the United States, it is important to uplift survivors, amplify their voices and take back the night, though I don’t see that happening this year at Bishop’s. This is also particularly frustrating as last year’s committee secured funding to support new executive teams through paid honorariums. Clearly, that is not needed this year. That said, there were completed executive team applications last year that seemingly fell through the cracks. If that was you, I’d reach out to the SRC and see how this club can be reactivated.

This also speaks to a larger issue at Bishop’s: clubs failing to pass the baton to new Executive Teams. Ask almost anyone in a leadership role for a campus club, and they will tell you that emails, transition documents and passwords are constantly going missing. “They didn’tsign us into our email, and it took me like three weeks to get an answer,” says a President of a student club. Unfortunately for Bishop’s, the SCC’s failure here is a failure for survivors.

The extracurricular culture at Bishop’s also falls on the shoulders of a handful of people. Many club executives are executives for more than one club as well, and most club members simply enjoy the benefits of the clubs without putting in any of the harder, behind-the-scenes work. This is unfortunate, as this is how groups like SCC come to a premature end, student executives become burnt out from unpaid gigs, and then people last-minute apply for leadership roles to bulk up their CVs in their last months of university. A student executive of many clubs states how they are bordering on burnout as “everything is…happening at the same time and each of the clubs are asking for more and more and more,” leaving little room for personal time and academics. A dilution of the concentration of power could help with this, but people need to take on these roles for this to happen.

Looking towards when Take Back the Night usually takes to College and Queen, consider what impact you have made on extracurricular groups you enjoy. Do you vote in their executive elections, participate in meetings to make quorum or simply complain when their events aren’t quite what you imagined? Extracurriculars are what make your time in university special, and we lose a bit of our special Bishop’s culture when we lose clubs due to club politics and failed executive team successions.