The cannon has “Welcome” painted on it – bright letters against whatever colour was underneath, which was probably something else entirely last year.
Oh. Student associations take a turn to paint it, in the dead of night. So it was probably something else yesterday.
Old Jeremiah sits in Branion Plaza at the University of Guelph, a British naval cannon from the War of 1812 that students have been painting most nights since the 1950s.
The etiquette is well understood – don’t start until sundown, be finished by the time students arrive for morning lectures, and if you want your message to last, you’d better guard it until sunrise. Leave it unattended and someone will paint over it before dawn.
It’s one of the things I’ve come across on my continuing mooch around Canadian SUs this week, and it says something about the texture of this place – a campus where traditions run deep enough to generate their own rules, their own rivalries, and their own contested politics.
In 2022 the Ukrainian society painted Old Jeremiah in solidarity – it was painted over before dawn. The Iranian society painted it after Mahsa Amini’s death – that got contested too.
In the current crisis, someone painted it in Palestinian colours on the anniversary of October 7th, and the university painted gold over the elements it deemed violated community guidelines. A piece of artillery that fell silent over a century ago has become a live battleground for everything students care about – and a welcome sign for new arrivals each September. It’s quite something.
Anger born of love
War Memorial Hall is harder to miss. It was built in 1924 to honour the 109 students from the Ontario Agricultural College who died in the First World War. Two bronze tablets face each other in the Memorial Chapel – one for each war – and the hall still operates as a lecture theatre today.
The origin story is what stays with you. In 1919, students wanted a memorial. The university was facing budget pressures – “hey, that sounds familiar,” as one professor put it – and there were disputes about where it should go. So one evening, the students took matters into their own hands.
They cut down the trees on the proposed site, hand-dug the foundation, and held fundraising concerts to bring the memorial to life. John Walsh, who directs the School of Languages and Literatures and teaches in the building every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, put it simply at a centenary event in late 2024:
It was a product of love. Anger born of love.
Walsh went further:
This building reassures me that youth has the power to affect the world. I spend a lot of time hearing criticism of young people. These people sacrificed their lives to give us a better life, so I’m struck with the magnitude of that every time I stand in here.”
The university has since built on that legacy with the Serving Scholars programme – ensuring students who are also members of the Canadian Armed Forces can reconcile military and academic duties, with early course registration when deployed, extended assignment deadlines, and accommodations that mean they can serve with peace of mind.
The hall isn’t just a monument. It’s still working.
To Improve Life
Most university mission statements are forgettable twaddle. Guelph’s is three words – “To Improve Life” – and it appears everywhere. On the website, on the buildings, in the strategic plan.
The University of Guelph, and everyone who studies here, explores here, teaches here and works here, is committed to one simple purpose – To Improve Life.
It sounds like marketing until you see what it produces. The university was founded in 1964 from the merger of three much older colleges – the Ontario Agricultural College dating back to 1874, the Ontario Veterinary College, and the Macdonald Institute – and the agricultural roots still shape the institution.
There’s still an apiary, still a research farm, still a veterinary programme. The mission is less abstract aspiration – it’s what the place was built to do.
And it shows up in the student experience. The Central Student Association – the undergraduate SU, founded in 1973 after a spectacular falling-out with the university over a student union building – runs the full suite of services you’d expect plus a few you wouldn’t.
There’s the Student Help and Advocacy Centre offering confidential support on academic appeals, housing disputes, and legal aid. There’s SafeWalk, a volunteer escort service running since 1991 for anyone who wants company after dark. There’s a food bank serving both undergraduates and postgraduates, though registration for this semester is already closed because demand has outstripped capacity.
There’s a Menstrual Hygiene Initiative funded by a 90-cent-per-semester levy that stocks free products in washrooms across campus. There’s a Bike Centre where you can learn to do your own repairs. There’s over 130 accredited clubs.
And then there’s the Bullring – a fully licensed café with fair-trade coffee, open-mic nights on Wednesdays, and comfy couches that make it feel like someone’s actual living room. The building is 114 years old. It used to be a cattle ring.
Walking around Guelph, you get the sense of a place that knows what it’s for. The agricultural heritage isn’t hidden away or treated as embarrassing vocational history – it’s celebrated, built on, turned into a distinctive identity.
Every student gets experiential learning
The “Improve Life” mission shows up in the academic experience too. The university’s strategic plan commits to guaranteeing every student an experiential learning opportunity – not as aspiration but as promise – and Guelph runs the second largest university co-op programme in Ontario and the fifth largest in Canada.
Over 5,000 students across 67 programmes alternate paid work terms with academic semesters, applying classroom learning to real workplaces and getting paid for it. A President’s Summer Co-op Initiative now allows departments to hire co-op students with wages fully covered by the university.
There’s a WorkAbility programme supporting students with disabilities into paid placements. Over 400 students study abroad each year across 110 options in 34 countries.
And every student gets a Professional and Career Development Record that formally recognises their experiential learning – not just co-op placements but volunteering, leadership roles, and community engagement.
The university claims Canada’s highest rate of student volunteerism, and you can see why – if the institutional mission is to improve life, it follows that students should be improving lives while they’re studying, not just afterwards.
The “To Improve Life” slogan works because the institution has spent 150 years actually doing it. UK universities could learn something about owning their origins rather than constantly trying to become something else.
The heart of Canada’s most dynamic city
The contrast with Toronto Metropolitan University couldn’t be sharper. TMU sits in the middle of downtown Toronto – Yonge and Dundas, one of the busiest intersections in the city – and the campus blends so completely into the urban fabric that you might not notice where it begins.
There are no rolling lawns here, and no cannon to paint. The campus is vertical, compressed, and woven into the commercial streetscape.
The university was founded in 1948 as the Ryerson Institute of Technology, named after Egerton Ryerson, who helped design Ontario’s public school system but also influenced the residential school policies that devastated Indigenous communities. In 2021, after years of debate and a toppled statue, the institution announced it would rename itself. By April 2022 it had become Toronto Metropolitan University – a name meant to reflect its urban character and commitment to inclusion.
What strikes you walking through is the diversity. The Student Campus Centre – a separate building from the newer Student Learning Centre – houses the student unions, campus groups, The Eyeopener newspaper, and a food centre.
But the energy is different from Guelph. It’s a commuter campus in a commuter city, and students seemed to be passing through rather than settling in. Except in one spot – in the SU building, near the food centre, a group of students were painting a banner, visibly diverse, animatedly discussing what sounded very much like actual law.
The first in a hundred years
Lincoln Alexander Law opened in 2020 – the first new law school in Toronto in over a century, and named after the first Black Canadian to become a Member of Parliament and Cabinet Minister. The school’s founding commitments are explicit – over 50 per cent of students identify as Black, Indigenous, or racialized, and the programme integrates articling into the three-year degree so graduates can write the bar exam immediately.
It’s one of only two law schools in Ontario offering this “Integrated Practice Curriculum,” and the employment outcomes have been strong – seven students landed judicial clerkships for 2025-26, the highest number since the school opened, including positions at the Federal Court of Canada and the Court of Appeal for Ontario.
The school is reimagining legal education with an explicit social justice orientation, and watching those students talk felt like watching something genuinely new being built.
But the broader campus doesn’t feel quite so settled. The Toronto Metropolitan Students’ Union has had a rocky few years – a 2020 court battle with the university over recognition, financial scandals involving previous executives, and most recently a Fall 2025 by-election that was ruled null and void due to “widespread evidence of improper interference with members’ votes.”
Multiple candidates were disqualified and new elections will be held in March.
Should have woken up earlier
The precarity runs deeper than governance. Back in 2018, The Eyeopener reported on students unable to enrol in mandatory courses (ie modules) required for their degrees – potentially forcing them into a fifth year of study.
One creative industries student selected two art history courses that were mandatory for her module; when her schedule was released, they weren’t on it. When she contacted advisors, she was told it was too late to fix and that she “should have woken up earlier.”
A global management studies student was waitlisted for a required elective and faced the prospect of his student loans being jeopardised if he dropped courses. The causes were familiar – small class sizes, oversubscribed programmes, and a system that seemed to assume students would simply figure it out.
The university’s guidance essentially told students to monitor the system for openings during the first two weeks of term. It’s the sort of bureaucratic shrug that UK students would recognise instantly.
The feel at TMU is different from Guelph – more hustling, more improvised, more students navigating institutions that weren’t quite designed with them in mind. Although the law school is building something remarkable, and the diversity of the student body is genuinely striking.
Two ways to build
Two campuses, two histories, two approaches to what a university is for. Guelph was built on agricultural improvement and has never stopped believing that knowledge should make life better; its students cut down trees in anger born of love and turned a cattle ring into a café.
Toronto Met was built on vocational training for returning veterans and has reinvented itself repeatedly – polytechnic to university, Ryerson to Metropolitan, always hustling to stay relevant in a city that doesn’t slow down for anyone.
Both are doing things UK SUs should pay attention to – the Bullring alone is a better social enterprise than most UK commercial operations, and the Lincoln Alexander School of Law is a genuine attempt to diversify a profession that desperately needs it.
But the contrast in feel matters. One campus seemed to know what it was for – the other seemed to be figuring it out in real time, with students caught somewhere in between.
More tomorrow as I finally reach Montreal.
