You literally couldn’t go get something to eat unless some man got it for you.
That’s a quote from theatre designer Martha Mann, describing what it was like to be a woman at Hart House in the 1960s – permitted in the Arbor Room only after 3pm, excluded from the main hall entirely, and dependent on male students to fetch anything from the building’s facilities.
I’m standing in that same building on a Saturday lunchtime, and the first thing I notice is that I’m not sure if I’m allowed to be there – and not just because I look like a European tourist in a Eurovision hoodie.
The neo-Gothic grandeur has that effect – honey-coloured stone, wood panelling, portraits on the walls, the sort of place that feels like it was built for people who already belonged.
A student in a Hart House hoodie spots me looking lost near the Great Hall and points me towards the café without my asking. “It’s open to everyone,” she says, as if she’s had to say it before.
It’s one of the things I’ve stumbled across on an unplanned extra day in Toronto – my flight was delayed, I missed my connection to Heathrow, and so instead of heading home I’m mooching around the University of Toronto’s two very different approaches to student space while the snow thaws outside. It’s minus 12 today, which feels comparatively tropical.
The gift that kept on taking
Hart House was a gift to students. Vincent Massey – who would later become Canada’s first native-born Governor General – commissioned it in memory of his grandfather and handed it to the university in 1919. “The bricks and mortar are but the bones,” he said at the opening. “The community must provide the spirit.”
Today it describes itself as a “centre for experiential education outside the classroom” at the University of Toronto. It was one of the earliest, and still is one of the most beautiful, student centres in the world.
The building is quite the thing. The Great Hall has a gilded inscription from Milton’s Areopagitica running around the walls – an explicit statement about freedom of speech and thought. Nine student committees still programme everything from debates to music to theatre. The Board of Stewards has students holding 14 of its 22 positions. It’s student-majority governed, open 365 days a year, and it works.
But the gift came with conditions. Massey insisted it be restricted to men, and he maintained that restriction until his death.
In 1957, women attempted to enter a high-profile debate in disguise – and were caught when a guard spotted nail polish. They were escorted out and joined pickets outside. For decades, the Arbor Room was opened to women only “after 3:00 pm,” as if female students might contaminate the morning coffee.
The policy didn’t end until 1972, after Massey’s death finally allowed the deed to be modified.
What nagged at me as I wandered through: Hart House is beautiful, well-resourced, and student-led in its programming. But students didn’t build it, didn’t fund it, and couldn’t change its fundamental rules for over fifty years. The gift came with strings that took half a century to cut.
Climbing out the window
The building’s debating legacy is formidable – the Hart House Debating Club has won the World Universities Debating Championship twice, and the programme has hosted everyone from former prime ministers to Nobel laureates. But the most famous incident happened in 1985, during a debate on whether the West should divest from South Africa.
A protestor grabbed the twenty-pound ceremonial mace and threw it. Students fled. Brian Burchell, one of the debaters, later recalled: “I escaped by climbing out a window in the south sitting room and running across the roof of Hart House.” An RCMP evidence sticker apparently remains on the oak speaker’s mace to this day.
The story gets told and retold in debating culture – part cautionary tale about protest, part proof that argument here has always had stakes. The building’s Milton inscription promises free speech; the mace incident showed what happens when that promise gets tested.
The chess club is even older – dating to 1895, predating the building itself, with six Pan-American championships and visits from world champions. The Film Board has been lending equipment to student filmmakers since the early days, launching directors including Atom Egoyan, who made his first films with their kit before picking up Academy Award nominations.
There’s an orchestra of 80-90 musicians, a 23-year-old Black History Month luncheon that started as a staff potluck and now fills the Great Hall, and a swimming pool that once featured – I’m not making this up – a flying trapeze for “fancy diving.”
Fifty years of digging
A twenty-minute walk round the corner, there’s a different model entirely. The Student Commons at 230 College Street is the first student-run centre on U of T’s main campus – which sounds unremarkable until you learn that this is one of Canada’s largest universities, that its two satellite campuses have had student centres for decades, and that the main campus only got one in 2022.
The campaign took over fifty years. Students first proposed a centre in the 1960s. A referendum passed in 2007. The building was supposed to open in 2017. It actually opened – partially, at 25 per cent capacity – in October 2021, fourteen years after students started paying the levy to fund its construction, with the full opening finally happening in September 2022.
In between came site displacement (the original location was given to a sports facility), asbestos remediation in a century-old building, construction delays, and financial crises so severe that “bankruptcy was a real possibility,” according to contemporary reports in The Varsity.
The operating agreement signed with the university was criticised by some officers as placing excessive financial burdens on the union, including a provision that the university could seize the building if deficits continued for two consecutive years.
But they built it. Walking through the Student Commons feels different from Hart House – it’s more obviously functional, and visibly belongs to the students using it.
The UTSU – the undergraduate students’ union – runs a food bank from the building that’s been operating since 2001, the only one on campus. There’s a refugee sponsorship programme partnering with the World University Service of Canada since 2003, funded by its own separate levy, that’s twice won national awards for its events programming.
There’s a textbook exchange called the Little Library where students donate and borrow course materials for free. There’s also a programme distributing free transit tickets – around 120 per day when it’s running – because getting around Toronto costs money that students increasingly don’t have.
The levy ecosystem
The Student Commons itself cost $24.5 million, funded almost entirely through student levies – around $20.75 per session once the building opened, with the union empowered to increase fees by up to 10 per cent annually to service the debt over 25 years. Students who graduated between 2008 and 2021 paid for a building they never got to use. Students arriving now inherit something their predecessors built.
But the building levy is just one part of a much larger ecosystem. The UTSU collects fees on behalf of around a dozen independent levy-funded service groups – Bikechain for bicycle repair workshops, Students for Barrier-free Access for disability advocacy, LGBTOUT (which claims to be Canada’s oldest university queer organisation, dating to 1969), the Sexual Education Centre, the campus radio station, the student newspapers.
Each has its own referendum history, its own governance, its own space in the building or elsewhere on campus. Students can opt out of some levies during designated periods – a compromise with provincial regulations that threatened to make everything optional – but most don’t. The result is something closer to a cooperative ecosystem than a single monolithic SU.
Folk folks
And then there’s what happens when the students come back. Kosa Folk Arts is a Toronto-based collective of artists, cultural activists and diaspora community members exploring Ukrainian and Slavic folk traditions – and its founding members met through the Ukrainian Students’ Club at U of T.
Marichka Galadza, who studied Ethics, Society and Law at Victoria College and spent her undergrad years in the Hart House Library savouring what she calls the “amazing gothic atmosphere,” is now one of the faces of Future Folkways – a major residency running through spring 2026 with folk dance socials, Georgian singing workshops, embroidery classes, storytelling circles, and a grief ritual on February 24th marking four years since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The word “kosa” means braid – “we yearned for spaces where we could weave together old rural traditions in a new urban context,” Galadza explains. It’s a long way from the days when women couldn’t enter the Great Hall, but it’s also exactly what Vincent Massey hoped for when he handed over the keys – a space where communities form, disperse, and return decades later with something to share.
Not without drama
It hasn’t all been harmonious. In 2013, three constituent parts of the union – Trinity College, Victoria College, and the Engineering Society – all held votes to redirect their fees away from the central UTSU to their own college-based societies. Majorities in all three supported fee diversion. The engineering students eventually negotiated a deal where half their levies go to their own society while remaining nominally federated – the colleges’ relationship remains complicated.
There was also a 2015 legal case against former executives over a severance payment totalling around $250,000 – roughly ten per cent of the operating budget at the time – paid when the executive director’s contract was terminated. The case was settled out of court, but the dispute generated protests and years of controversy. Democratic accountability doesn’t prevent governance crises – but it does mean they get fought out in public rather than behind closed doors.
And then there’s the Canadian Federation of Students. The UTSU joined the national federation in 2002 but has spent years trying to leave, with successive executive teams accusing the federation of obstructing decertification processes.
A 2021 union report alleged that the exit procedure – requiring 15 per cent of members’ signatures collected by mail, followed by a paper-ballot referendum overseen by federation officials – was deliberately designed to be impossible. The relationship remains unresolved.
But when the advocacy works, it works. For years, the UTSU campaigned for “flat fees” – the principle that students taking less than a full module load shouldn’t pay full tuition fees.
They collected over 6,000 postcards, lobbied provincial politicians, and made it a consistent long-term voice priority across multiple executive teams. In 2015, the province changed the rules.
Part-time students, students with caring responsibilities, students who need to work – all now pay less because the students’ union kept pushing on the same issue year after year.
The institutional memory required to run a six-thousand-postcard campaign across multiple generations of sabbaticals is held in the association, and it paid off.
Hub-bub
The Student Life Innovation Hub asks – what happens when you let students design the systems that affect them? Launched in 2016 and now based in the Student Commons building, it’s a student-driven design thinking collective that partners with university departments to research and redesign everything from library spaces to mental health services.
The numbers are striking – 85 design thinking projects completed, over 1,900 student stories heard, 150 staff interviewed – but it’s the method that matters. Student researchers interview other students about their actual experiences, then synthesise findings into design principles that shape real decisions.
When U of T Libraries wanted to revitalise the iconic fourth-floor reading room at Robarts – that brutalist concrete tower that dominates the St George campus – they didn’t just hire architects. They asked the Innovation Hub to find out what students actually needed.
The result was a “story-driven approach” that grounded the redesign in lived experience rather than theoretical assumptions. One quote from the research stuck with the project team – a student describing finding a post-it note left by a stranger in a library carrel saying “you got this.”
That insight about connection and solidarity, about wanting to feel part of a community even while studying alone, shaped the final design so that you can now stand at any point in the renovated room and see everyone else.
Current projects include work on the experiences of neurodivergent students, student parents, and international students – including a documentary following eight incoming students through their first 48 hours in Canada.
The project list reads like a catalogue of things universities struggle with but rarely ask students to help fix. There’s work on reimagining commuter student spaces – a critical issue at a campus where most students don’t live in residence.
There’s the trans and nonbinary student experience project, and research on accessibility at convocation ceremonies. A study on food insecurity examined the role of hunger on campus life; another on the university-mandated leave of absence policy looked at what happens when students are forced to step away.
They’ve partnered with the Faculty of Arts and Science on academic programme reviews, redesigned the New College dining hall, and worked with campus safety services on their response to mental health crises. The “Let’s Talk About Failure” project for Academic Success tackled what happens when students don’t meet their own expectations.
And the Indigenous Student Services project focused on building community at First Nations House. Each project follows the same model – hire students, train them in design research methods, send them out to listen to their peers, then translate what they hear into actionable recommendations that campus partners actually use.
Meanwhile in Mississauga
Out in the suburbs near the airport, twenty-five kilometres west, there’s a third model struggling to get off the ground.
The University of Toronto Mississauga Students’ Union represents over 14,000 undergraduates on U of T’s satellite campus. They have a Student Centre that opened in 1999 – decades before the main campus got its own – housing the Blind Duck Pub, the Duck Stop convenience store, multi-faith prayer spaces, and the offices of over 150 clubs. But it’s not big enough.
In 2023, UTMSU put an expansion referendum to students. New levies, phased in over construction, would fund more space for clubs, better facilities, room to breathe. The vote failed – 56 per cent against, on a turnout of 9.6 per cent. Critics raised concerns about cost transparency – accusations flew that the union had pressured clubs to support the expansion.
So now the Sexual Education Centre is being asked to relocate from its current space because there’s not enough room for 150 clubs. The Food Centre – which moved into the building in 2022 with an $18,000 renovation budget, and now includes a seed library providing free seeds, gardening materials, and access to community garden plots – is doing what it can in cramped quarters.
The union’s 2025 elections saw the InnovateUTM slate sweep all five elected positions on 19 per cent turnout, campaigning on expanding employment opportunities and strengthening partnerships with local government.
The satellite campus had a student centre before the main campus did. Now it’s watching the Student Commons open downtown while its own expansion bid failed at the ballot box. The main campus spent fifty years and $24.5 million getting what Mississauga had in 1999 – and Mississauga can’t get the votes to grow what it already has.
Three spaces, three models, three different lessons in what it takes to build and maintain student space. Hart House was a gift with strings attached. The Student Commons was a fifty-year slog funded by students who’d never use it. And UTMSU is discovering that even when you’ve got a building, keeping it adequate is its own kind of fight.
And now – finally – to the airport.
