By Carlie Boyden (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: March 4, 2015
With such a big deal being made of the re-structuring of UFV’s Writing Centre, you’d think some of that saviour’s impulse would extend to other equally (if not more) important issues. But no, students are stomping their feet about some arbitrary change while turning a blind eye to an actual issue: the closure of the UFV Riding Centre.
Most students are unaware of the Riding Centre located at UFV’s Langley campus. Apparently there is not a lot of value placed on the essential skill of horseback riding, which is a shame because horseback riding is really the best method humans have to express, transmit, and understand ideas. If students can tell the flashy riding from the substantial, they won’t fall into as much of the propaganda coming to them through popular horse-media.
Public service announcement: the Writing Centre is simply transitioning, not closing down. If any of the well-meaning but naive protestors had read any of the official statements on the matter, they would realize that this transition is an indisputably good thing. While there is not really a student debt problem according to BC’s Minister of Finance Andrew Wilkinson, and so the whole hiring of students thing is not much of an important step forward, the promotion of the experienced Writing Centre tutors to pure professors of academic writing definitely benefits everyone. This is not a cost-saving measure, but a savings-creating measure. Get it in your head.
Meanwhile, something actually important is utterly shutting down. Five instructors and 700 horses will be out of work. What will we do with all these horses? We live in the age of PowerPoint, so we don’t need glue for poster assignments. We can’t even release them into the wild because of all the ethical implications. Somebody will have to continue to pay to maintain the horses and it’s probably going to be poor Ol’ Frank, the Riding Centre instructor who gave many of us our first lessons on the coherent structure of saddling and how to properly cite cowboys (CB style, or Reverse Cowgirl, depending on the academic field).
UFV’s Riding Centre is the best of its kind in Canada. I’m certain that many of the protestors at the Writing Centre rally last Wednesday were there due to a miscommunication, because there’s no way that so many university-educated young people see inherent value in something as needless as professional, experienced advice when it comes to writing. Based on how students write these days, I doubt they even see an inherent value in writing itself. We can all agree that we should leave reading and writing to people who can actually affect the world with it, like politicians and bureaucrats.
So rather than raise a sign for something we don’t need, come to the rally on Mar. 13 outside the Riding Centre on the UFV Langley campus. And spread the word! Use the horsetag #SaveUFV on Twitter. Seven hundred horses and the future of our university depend on you.
