By Daisy Sanchez Villavicencio

From conversations with ANT473 peers, focus groups, and friends, I have concluded that Student Life (SL) has a reputation for offering a complex range of services that can overwhelm students and deter them from accessing the support they were promised. According to an SL staff interlocutor, SL has ten units and 350 staff members. SL’s 2023 Annual Report states that 46,507 students attended 5,341 SL events. My ethnographic focus for the course was SL professionals, specifically those involved in preparing the Annual Report and the Strategic Plan, to understand the theories they apply to making sense of all these units, programs, and events and the impact they have on student wellbeing. I learned a great deal from the insights of my SL interlocutors and the data they shared with me. I also felt compelled to consider outsider data or perceptions of SL’s scope. I started to browse the websites for other Southern Ontario universities, such as McMaster, York University, and the Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) seeking to identify their version of U of T’s SL. Initially driven by curiosity, my search turned into a revelation as I found large disparities between the universities.  Although all four university websites required users to navigate at least two or three web pages to locate an aspect of student services, such as clubs, health, or academic support, neither McMaster, York, or TMU student service pages led users to a separate website dedicated to a single division equivalent to U of T’s Student Life. Both McMaster and TMU seemed to advertise services such as housing and experiential learning as stand-alone initiatives.  With this comparison in mind, I came to understand that the distinguishing feature of U of T, and one reaffirmed in student perceptions of SL, is that it is a vast division, intimidating,  overwhelming, and hard to navigate, especially online. 

Some staff members at U of T’s SL recognize this problem. In conversation regarding U of T’s infamous reputation of being academically challenging and “U of Tears”, an SL Strategic Planning interlocutor described the organization as “massive” and noted that it was impossible to assess a plethora of SL unit incentives and measure their impact on the wellbeing of a diverse student body. However, rather than consider this impossibility a problem to solve through restructuring, my interlocutors seemed to be at ease with the idea that there was no tangible end goal for the organization but rather an intrinsic commitment to reimagination, expansion, and adaptation in the ongoing effort to meet complex and changing student needs. 

Interestingly, a similar sentiment came up in an assigned reading for a master’s level Higher Education OISE course taught by the above-mentioned interlocutor, which trains university and college organizational staff to assess change in higher ed. The article, titled “Introduction and Context Setting” by Peter Manning (2013), delves into a business rationale for organizational change in universities, understanding them as enterprises that go through a life cycle from early years to maturity. According to the teachings, a mature enterprise, such as U of T, is a concrete structure with minimal flexibility, and thus, challenges are perpetually reoccurring and unchangeable. To avoid a decline in the success and profitability of the enterprise, “a fresh look at… organizational perspectives can help colleges and universities rejuvenate and revitalize…” (Manning, 2012, p. 1). I argue that, put together, the teaching of this article and, more broadly, the skill of employing diverse organizational tactics, such as by committing to a broad range of services and the well-being of an entire student body, reveals an important incentive behind SL’s complex and impossible attempts. Considering this as a disparity amongst competing universities, such as McMaster, TMU, and York, one might understand this feature and the hurdles experienced by students as an integral asset for U of T’s overall capitalist success.