‘Toronto Metropolitan University’ is bland, and that’s the point

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/04/2022 (1262 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Seldom in the long human history of naming things can the general reaction “meh” to a chosen name have so delighted the namers.

The downtown university formerly known as Ryerson has been redubbed Toronto Metropolitan University, or TMU as it will soon undoubtedly appear on T-shirts and scoreboards.

It is the John Doe of university names, as if someone christened Beelzebub had legally changed their name to George.

And that was probably the point of the exercise.

It had become plain that honouring the memory of Egerton Ryerson, the pioneering Ontario educator who had been linked to the foundation of residential schools in Canada, could not stand.

That system of government-funded, mostly church-run schools – which subjected many Indigenous children forcibly taken from their families to physical, psychological and even sexual abuse – remains an ongoing trauma for First Nations and a festering wound in this country’s history.

The school embarked on the renaming process in 2021 after a summer of protest that saw Ryerson’s statue on Gould Street toppled following the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves on the grounds of residential schools across Canada.

With the change, those who demanded an end to constant reminders of such sorrow felt, by most accounts, a sense of relief.

“Truthfully, any name probably would have worked as long as it wasn’t Ryerson,” Hayden King, executive director of the Indigenous-led Yellowhead Institute at the school, told the Star.

And any name was pretty much what the former Ryerson got, following a vote by its board of governors to approve the name recommended by president Mohamed Lachemi.

“I cannot think of a better name than Toronto Metropolitan University,” Lachemi enthused in a statement.

Which might well be grounds for dismissal if one did not take into account what Lachemi was trying to achieve.

The imperative was plainly flight from controversy toward the peace of inoffensive blandness.

That goal has been well and truly met with a new name that launched scores of mocking memes, but no evidence of offence taken or outrage stirred.

Toronto Metropolitan University has the sound of having been plucked from the 1970s, a sturdy John or Mary of a name joining this city’s ranks of the Toronto Metropolitan Zoo, Toronto Metropolitan Library, and Toronto Metropolitan Church.

It slips, zebra like, into the safety of the herd, alongside University of Toronto, University of Toronto-Mississauga, University of Toronto-Scarborough.

In the best light, it can be seen as an historic gesture of reconciliation. But after the initial reactions of relief at the announcement came the general shrug at the chosen replacement.

Some will find it antithetical that institutions given to free and creative thought reached so smartly for the safe, inoffensive and mundane.

But, after the years of controversy, it may have been the best way of restoring calm and getting on with the business at hand — teaching and research.

As Lachemi wrote in the Star on Wednesday, “it is a new chapter focused on growth, transformation and aspirations for our community, our city and beyond.”

To be sure, the most important thing about any post-secondary institution is less the name on the door than what goes on inside in the classrooms and the labs.

At the diverse, dynamic, downtown TMU, that potential is immense — regardless of the name it goes by.