by Laurel Scott
The Alternative Campus Tour at York University, led by Professor Anders Sandberg, provided a unique perspective of the campus where I have attended university for the past 4 years. It was a fantastic opportunity to see York’s campus through a critical albeit unconventional lens that challenged dominant narratives, revealed suppressed historical narratives, and really encouraged me to question who and what our spaces are built for. Instead of being guided through the campus and being shown the carefully curated image that the University tries to show by highlighting a polished narrative about institutional pride and prestige, Professor Sandberg encouraged participants to allow our minds to wander, to follow what caught our eye, and let curiosity lead us. It made me think about and reflect what we miss when we only look at a place in the ways we are told to, and this tour helped me deconstruct those kinds of narratives as they relate to York.
Professor Sandberg presents York’s Keele campus as a microcosm of the broader world – one where power, money, and resistance collide. Walking through the campus, Professor Sandberg got us to think more critically about how space is named and claimed, highlighting buildings like Vari Hall, Kaneff Tower, and the Seymour Schulich and Victor Phillip Dahdaleh Buildings. He made the important connection that these are not just buildings — they are monuments to wealth, legacy, and in many cases, erasure. He explained how the structures of York University itself started, rooted in Enlightenment ideals, as a space that was dedicated to knowledge, critical inquiry, and public service, and was largely funded by the state rather than by students’ tuition fees and private donors. In this earlier model, education was viewed as a public good and free from market pressures. Over time, however, universities like York have shifted toward a neoliberal model, increasingly reliant on tuition fees and private donors to sustain themselves. This transformation is visible across campus, where buildings are named after wealthy benefactors who have contributed large sums of money. These names are not just acknowledgements — they represent how financial capital now plays a major role in shaping the physical and symbolic landscape of the university.
Not only did Professor Sandberg use buildings to make his point — he also talked about another fund-raising initiative of the University, the sale of benches for $3,500 each. Donors are typically incentivized to purchase the benches, with a memorial plaque, to recognize deceased relatives and to remember and incorporate them into the everyday fabric of the university. These commemorative gestures may seem unproblematic; however, they reveal how public spaces are often privatized and shaped by those with economic means. In doing so, he invited us to question whose histories are made visible, whose contributions are celebrated, and whose stories are left out, emphasizing that even the most ordinary features of a campus can carry deep social and political meaning. Ultimately, the campus becomes a reflection of the neoliberal university, where market values increasingly dictate whose presence is acknowledged and whose is forgotten. Professor Sandberg highlighted a bench that he sponsored and dedicated to the “citizen taxpayer.” It is a thinking piece that serves as a reminder that we all support the university through paying taxes and should all be thanked for it. But it also suggests that taxes rather than donations should be the backbone of support for a university education.
There was a specific line at the beginning of the tour that echoed throughout the walk and stayed with me: “Do you respect the land, does the land respect you?” an expression inspired by Wendat scholar and film maker Nicolas Renaud who uses it in the context of Indigenous people’s relationships to fish. It served as a powerful reminder to shift how we think about respecting land, not as property to be owned, developed, or dominated, but as something living, relational, and deserving of care and respect – that the land is not passive – it holds memory, spirit, and agency. Professor Sandberg highlighted how the land existed long before our institution was built and will remain long after. In this aspect, the land becomes a teacher offering lessons through its histories, ecologies, and the deep relationships Indigenous people have long held with it.
These messages coincide with what Prof Sandberg teaches in his classroom. I took one of his courses (ENVS 4310 – Extraction and Its Discontents) this past semester and was able to incorporate themes and concepts from that course into his Alternative Campus Tour.
I found it particularly interesting when Professor Sandberg talked about the Dahdaleh building, because I had just completed a group paper on this topic a few days prior. Through our research, I was introduced to the concept of philanthrocapitalism—a framework that critically examines how financial elites donate large sums of money to institutions like universities, not purely out of altruism, but as a strategic way to shape public spaces, secure legacy, and often gain influence. These donations may appear generous on the surface, but they often come with strings attached, subtly steering the values and priorities of the institutions they support. What struck me even more was the discussion around the origins of this wealth. In the case of Dahdaleh, the money that funded the building came from extractive practices in Guinea—processes that are not only environmentally devastating but also raise ethical concerns about exploitation and colonial continuities. This raised a deeper question: What does it mean for an educational institution to accept and celebrate wealth that has been accumulated through harm? Furthermore, these philanthropic acts often come with tax benefits, allowing the wealthy to store their capital in socially prestigious ways while avoiding public accountability. It made me reflect on how the university becomes complicit in these systems, transforming spaces of learning into monuments of economic power and erasure.
Finally, Professor Sandberg highlighted the perspective from one of his students, Fatima Minhas, in another course he taught last semester (ENVS 4750: Political Ecology of Landscapes). In that course, students were asked to choose a landmark on campus and explore its political and ecological meaning through a walking tour and research essay. Fatima chose a London Plane tree in the fenced-in yard of the York University Co-operative Daycare at the Atkinson Residence Building—a tree she at first mistook for a Chinar, which is sacred in her Kashmiri heritage. In her presentation, she began with the line, “This tree is racist.” It wasn’t meant literally, but rather as a provocation, a way to unsettle the idea that nature is neutral.
Her project moved between personal reflection, political ecology, and emotional knowledge. As a Kashmiri Muslim, she spoke candidly about how diasporic grief, displacement, and cultural longing shaped her relationship to the tree. In Kashmir, the Chinar tree (Platanus orientalis) holds deep cultural significance, it is a site of mourning, worship, poetry, and refuge. But the tree on campus was not a Chinar. It was a London Plane, a hybrid species developed in colonial England and planted widely across cities like Toronto because it could withstand pollution and urban planning constraints. The tree’s presence here felt, to her, like a kind of erasure, one that mirrored both ecological and cultural displacement.
Over time, however, her perspective shifted. Drawing on Indigenous scholarship and theories of “felt knowledge,” she began to see the tree not simply as a symbol of colonial infrastructure but as something more complicated. She admitted to feeling both anger and comfort in its presence, recognizing that her relationship to the tree was shaped not only by critique but by recognition and contradiction. The tree reminded her of Kashmir even though it wasn’t native to that region or this one. It was the only thing on campus that looked like home.
Her work is part of a growing movement in political ecology that asks us to take emotion seriously, not as sentimentality but as a legitimate form of knowledge. Her claim that the tree is “racist” was less about the tree itself and more about the systems that shaped its presence, systems of landscape design, urban forestry, colonialism, and erasure. What she ultimately offered wasn’t just a critique of the campus landscape but an invitation to think about how memory, power, and personal history live in the places we pass by every day.
Professor Sandberg used Fatima as an example to highlight how students can critically engage with their surroundings, questioning not only what we see in the landscape but also whose stories are embedded, or omitted, in the shaping of that space. The campus tour, informed by this discussion, served as a living classroom that provoked meaningful questions about power, identity, memory, and belonging: Who has historically had the authority to shape the land? Whose values are reflected in its design? And whose narratives have been marginalized or erased in the process?
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Laurel Scott is a recent graduate of EUC’s BA in Global Geography with combined direct-entry into the Bachelor of Education program. She is continuing her studies in the field of education (starting Teachers’ College at York in the Fall) and is passionate about fostering critical thinking and creating learning environments that center equity, curiosity, and care. During her studies in EUC, she has developed a strong interest in the politics of space, specifically learning how important it is to question dominant narrative structures that are so often rooted in power dynamics. With decolonial approaches to education through activities like the Alternative Campus Tour, she has learned to take notice of space and how it has been created: shaped and really question who “belongs” and who are “excluded” in everyday life.