The exposed brickwork on the JDUC is beautiful – honey-coloured limestone, the sort that makes Kingston look like it was built by people who expected their grandchildren to still be using these buildings.
Old photographs line the walls, black-and-white faces staring out from a century ago. It’s chic and carefully restored – the kind of heritage renovation that costs serious money.
And then you learn what this building actually was, and the aesthetic choices start to feel less like interior design and more like reckoning.
Until 1927, this was Kingston Ontario’s Orphans’ Home and Widows’ Friend Society – a Victorian institution for children left destitute by disease or accident. The orphans were moved to a new facility, and students took over.
It’s one of the more arresting origin stories I’ve encountered on my mooch around Canadian SUs this week. Queen’s University is your classic elite research intensive – and the traditions here run deep.
A living memorial
What replaced the orphanage was something called the Students’ Memorial Union, which opened in January 1929. Queen’s had sent over 1,500 students to the front lines of the First World War, and 187 of them never came back.
Monuments of stone felt insufficient, so the idea was a “living memorial” – a space that would serve the daily lives of the students the dead had once been.
The heart of the building was the Memorial Room, which still exists today. It was a sanctuary, filled with photographs of the fallen, a quiet space set apart from the noise of collegiate life.
The first warden wrote to the families of the dead to explain that their sons would be kept “in remembrance” on these walls. You can still visit it, and the photographs are still there.
Then, in 1947, the building burned down. Weeks before term started, with enrolment about to surge from returning Second World War veterans, fire gutted the interior. The limestone shell survived, but the living memorial was dead.
A local car magnate stepped in with the cash for a rebuild, and by 1949 something grander had risen from the ashes. When the university added brutalist concrete wings in the 1970s and renamed the whole complex after a beloved principal, the John Deutsch University Centre – the JDUC – was complete.
Between 2022 and 2024, the concrete wings came down, replaced by mass timber and Indigenous design elements, and the whole thing reopened in May 2025.
The governance and operations are deliberately structured so that the building is effectively run by students on year-long contracts.
Strategic oversight sits with the Student Life Centre Council, a joint body of Queen’s University, the SU, and the Society of Graduate and Professional Students, but the day-to-day management of the building is carried out through the Student Life Centre by a student Managing Director supported by a team of student managers covering operations, logistics, marketing, reservations, and staff relations.
They’re all paid roles, normally running May to April, with defined hours and eligibility requirements tied to student status and academic standing. Front-of-house services, bookings, and facilities support are also all delivered by hourly student staff.
The effect is that, while the university and the two SUs retain formal governance and accountability, the JDUC’s operational control is intentionally placed in the hands of students acting as professional managers for a full academic year. And walking round it, you can tell.
The fortress of masculinity
For the first three decades, the Union operated as a gentlemen’s club. The atmosphere was thick with pipe smoke and the click of billiard balls – and women were not welcome. They were permitted in specific “co-ed” lounges and the Queen’s Journal newsroom, but the main hall was exclusively male territory. To enter was to invite swift ejection.
This wasn’t just a rule but a culture – the Union was where “Queen’s men” were forged, separate from the distractions of the opposite sex. The policy persisted until 1960, which feels both impossibly recent and impossibly distant.
You can still see echoes of that era in the jacket tradition. Those returning Second World War veterans – accustomed to the camaraderie of military uniforms – started fashioning golden silk jackets emblazoned with their faculty, year, and a university crest.
Over time, silk became nylon, then leather, and the tradition spread across the university. Each faculty got its own colour, and students added bars to show their subject of study – every Homecoming became a fashion show of alumni sporting heritage jackets from decades past.
Engineering students took it furthest. First-years were banned from wearing their jackets until they’d completed their first-term exams – “forbidden to even touch the sacred leather”. So they collected their new jackets and kicked them home along the streets.
Once exams were over, the annual “jacket slam” followed – a day-long pummelling of the jackets into instant antiques on the sidewalk outside Clark Hall, finished with a coat of gentian violet dye rumoured to honour the engineers who perished on the Titanic. It’s a ritual that survives today – rituals matter.
Five hundred and something
In the building is the Alma Mater Society. The AMS is Canada’s oldest SU, founded in 1858, and it operates as a genuine corporation – incorporated in 1969, with a $16 million budget and over 500 student employees and 1,500 volunteers annually.
The AMS runs eighteen distinct services, and every one of them is managed top to bottom by students. There’s the Queen’s Pub, reopened in June 2025 after the JDUC renovation, and the Common Ground coffeehouse, employing around 130 students annually, hosting concerts and poetry readings alongside the flat whites. Its sister café, The Brew, relaunched in the new JDUC with a redesigned menu.
There’s a Food Bank operating out of room 212, open three times a week, plus a Good Food Box programme. There’s PEACH Market – Providing Equal Access, Changing Hunger – a pay-what-you-can operation with tiered pricing at $1, $3, $5, or whatever you can afford, selling surplus food from campus catering.
There’s Walkhome – a safe walk service where staff wear no identifying clothing so users aren’t marked out, with options for silent walks if you don’t want conversation. There’s a Peer Support Centre with over 100 trained volunteers, offering drop-in and appointment-based peer listening, plus specialist portfolios for BIPOC students and 2SLGBTQIA+ students.
There’s Student Constables – the only peer-to-peer security service in North America, apparently, founded in 1936, with around 60 student staff working at campus venues and supporting the 300-plus clubs in running sanctioned events.
There’s a Media Centre formed from the merger of a print shop and photography service. There’s Society 58, selling student-designed Queen’s merchandise and running bus services to Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa. There’s a Housing Resource Centre offering confidential support on landlord disputes, tenant rights, and lease advice.
Out in the community
Then there’s the community work. Here it’s embedded in something called the Commission of Municipal Affairs – one of five “commissions” that sit under the elected vice-president (university affairs).
Generations pairs students with pensioners in care homes for weekly visits, plus two annual events – Silver Bells and something wonderfully called Senior Prom. Kaleidoscope matches students with at-risk primary school children for weekly one-hour sessions, supplemented by annual Craft Day, Movie Day, and Carnival events. The Breakfast Club sends volunteers into schools to serve breakfast to kids who’d otherwise go without. HYPE puts tutors into secondary schools.
The High School Liaison programme runs “Degree-for-a-Day” campus visits and sends ambassadors into local schools to talk about university life. The United Way Committee raises over $20,000 a year. There’s even a Holiday Housecheck scheme where volunteers monitor student houses over the winter break to prevent burglaries.
Add to that the Commission of Environmental Sustainability – which runs a Sustainable Action Fund for undergraduate environmental projects, a Sustainable Event Certificate programme, bi-annual Sustainability Hub events with repair cafés and local environmental groups, and a community garden donating produce to the Food Bank.
There’s a Collective Closet running a take-one-leave-one sustainable clothing swap. There’s the harm reduction work during Homecoming and “Fauxcoming” weekends – coordinated with Kingston city council, involving extended food truck hours, Gatorade and snack distribution, safety workshops in partnership with Queen’s First Aid, and organised street clean-ups the morning after.
There’s a Social Issues Commission running Consent Week events, Take Back the Night events, a Menstrual Equity Project installing free product dispensers across campus, and a Black Legacy Mentorship Programme.
There are over 300 ratified clubs, with grants available for everything from equality initiatives to sustainability projects to Black History Month events. There’s a health and dental plan through a provider called Studentcare. There’s a bus pass scheme giving unlimited Kingston Transit access. There’s also a Judicial Affairs system – founded in 1898, when the university Senate delegated non-academic discipline to the student government – operating on restorative justice principles with peer-led, non-adversarial dialogue.
It is, by any standard, a formidable operation. There’s a very small permanent staff providing continuity, but all the services themselves are student-managed, student-staffed, and student-directed.
What’s missing from the list
One thing nagged at me as I walked around. The AMS has five “commissions” – External Affairs, Campus Affairs, Environmental Sustainability, Clubs, and Social Issues. Education or Academic Affairs? Not so much.
There is an Academic Affairs Centre, but it’s a support service – helping individual students navigate regulations, pursue appeals, and resolve academic integrity matters. It’s a student run advice centre, not policy. When I asked where the academic advocacy happened, the answer was a slight pause and then – the faculty societies.
This matters more than it might seem. Queen’s has a student-to-staff ratio of 35:1 – higher than comparable Canadian research universities. The university has been running a $30 million deficit and has implemented recruitment freezes – when professors retire, they’re often not replaced.
The Faculty of Arts and Science, which contains the majority of students, is bearing the brunt of cuts while the institution shifts resources toward high-fee programmes like Commerce and Engineering.
The Queen’s Journal reported in late 2023 on new policies cutting low-enrolment modules and increasing the use of teaching fellows – graduate students – to teach undergraduate classes. First and second-year lectures routinely exceed 300 students.
The culture is famously “work hard, play hard,” but student commentary increasingly describes something closer to “hustle culture” – where rest is pathologised, burnout normalised, and suffering treated as a badge of honour.
It’s not that AMS isn’t responding – there’s over 100 trained peer supporters, a Peer Support Centre with specialist portfolios, drop-in listening services, and harm reduction event – all excellent, all necessary, but all treating the symptoms of an academic culture that nobody in the central student SU structure seems to have the mandate to interrogate.
The AMS runs brilliant services to help students cope with the fallout of cuts, but seems to have no role in asking why the fallout exists in the first place.
Picking up the slack
Work does happen in the faculties. The Arts and Science Undergraduate Society, representing over 13,000 students, does have an Academics Commission. Their commissioner sits on Curriculum Board, oversees departmental student councils in every department, runs teaching awards for professors and TAs, manages academic journals, and operates affordable peer tutoring during exam season.
They’ve even created an Academic Assistance Process with a manual and portal for students facing grievances or appeals.
The Engineering Society has a Director of Academics collecting feedback on courses and working with staff to address issues, plus discipline clubs for each programme. The Commerce Society represents students to “the various academic administrations”, and student senators hold roughly a quarter of Senate seats, a proportion established in 1970 – they are elected through faculty societies, not through the AMS. A separately elected Rector sits on both Senate and the Board of Trustees as a voice for all students.
But there’s no coordinated student voice on academic quality or academic issues across the institution – no equivalent to the meticulous, professionalised approach they take to running a pub or training peer supporters or distributing Gatorade at Homecoming.
Maybe I’m still missing something. More tomorrow as I reach Montreal.
My time at Queen’s was the best years of my life, it’s a campus community unlike any other! It might be confusing that there’s more interest in running a campus pub than academic issues, but that is the joy of Queen’s.