This week’s local news cycle has taken a vexillogical turn, with two flags becoming the objects of public outrage. Students made their sentiments clear: one absent flag belongs on campus and another flag ought to be taken down.

This is perhaps the first instance of “flag discourse” I’ve witnessed outside the white padded walls of Tumblr, and much like its antecedents, it’s dumb. That being said, I am still a Cultural Studies student, and as such, I think that this string of controversies makes for a fantastic case study (a word we use to refer to niche issues we ruthlessly exploit to write about strenuously-related personal gripes) for the failures of Trent and its surrounding community’s political discourse.

On June 2nd, Digital Media Co-Editor Ian Vansegbrook shared an image to Arthur’s Slack. The photo depicted a line of flags hanging from the side of Trent’s Student Centre, an Israeli flag among them.

We weren’t the only ones to notice this, as Trent student life pages such as Memes of TrentU took to sharing outraged Instagram stories on the matter. The flag remained up during Trent’s convocation until it was taken down on the 11th of June.

The very next day, another flag was making the news, this time by virtue of its absence.

In the midst of Pride Month, students took offence to Trent’s omission of the Pride flag from campus flagpoles. 

In the words of Trent student Theodore Schwartzenhauer, speaking to Global News, “if Queen’s Park and the Ontario government can raise the flag on June 3rd … Trent University can do a lot better than halfway through the month.”

Schwartzenhauer and other critics of the lack of the Pride flag on campus are missing one key detail: Peterborough has, for years now, primarily celebrated Pride in September.

I can attest to this: last September, I had the chance to watch Mayor Jeff Leal stumble over his speech at a Pride flag raising at Peterborough City Hall, which the Trent Central Student Association (TCSA) elected not to attend for the second year in a row, despite looming threats of a homophobic “millions march” in Peterborough.

It’s easy to dismiss these anecdotes as one public relations  blunder and yet another case of a non-story being spun into public outrage through sheer ignorance, and I don’t deny that that’s what they are. But I think there’s more to be said here.

While the Student Centre is operated by the TCSA, I want to clarify that I am in no way arguing that the TCSA themselves are Zionists. Such an accusation would be overly hasty, and I think that the Association’s history of lukewarm anti-Zionism bordering on impartiality is its own indictment of their politics.

I'll be charitable. This is not the TCSA administration that muddied their commitments to anti-Zionism by giving out BDS-sanctioned McDonalds food to those attending their events. Instead, this year’s executive team got their seats at the end of an election where multiple other candidates chalked advertisements of their own campaigns over the names of dead children on Faryon bridge, without much in the way of public condemnations.

“Thoughtless” is the word that stands out to me here. “Tactless” also fits. 

The TCSA’s engagement with  the Palestinian genocide belies a kind of city-wide institutional apathy of which they have long been the vanguards. 

Their continual missteps—ratifying election results against their own By-laws, accusing their own executives of racism while keeping their purported racism a secret, allegedly harassing their own VP—are only the result of their insularization into an organization which exists only to manage itself.

As such, the TCSA’s existence is at its most tangible on a tote bag or the occasional promotional poster, and the average student could hardly be faulted for believing that the Association expends the majority of its resources on maintaining its own public image.

Political action and advocacy—you know, the work of a union—blend seamlessly into a stream of innocuous recreational events in each month’s stream of executive reports, as ancillary pieces of the TCSA’s branding package.

This year’s administration are the inheritors of a self-proclaimed student union which has no institutional direction to speak of, let alone a political vision. Instead, the Association acts upon the disorganized impulses of individuals who answer to a dozen-or-so colleagues about their day-to-day actions and less than a sixth of the student body come election time. 

The question here isn’t so much why an organization like the TCSA would put up an Israeli flag on their building, but why wouldn’t they?

The overwhelming image I’ve gathered from my time covering the TCSA’s antics is that of a deeply disoriented institution. For lack of a concerted vision of their intended role as a counter-power to the university, the TCSA allows itself to be spoken for by the disparate actions of its rotating executive teams. Only when the clumsiness of these actions spark public backlash is the Association forced to answer to its claims of representing the student body.

The student body is similarly plagued by its own sense of political apathy. It suffers from the same problem which plagues meetings of city council and public protests: a politic of pure reaction unencumbered by the burden of actually understanding the institutions it hopes to hold accountable.

Being careful not to write yet another everyone-who-delegates-at-city-hall-gives-me-headache digression, I’ll simply observe that this second vexillogical nano-scandal is indicative of the incompetence of our city’s left wing, whose inability to identify the most naked anti-homeless rhetoric leaves them serving as mouthpieces for it.

Peterborough is one of the few cities where a City Hall delegate wearing a keffiyeh will at once invoke the terrible hostility of our suburbanites who seek the total disappearance of drug users from public life and the screwball claims of NIMBYs who, curiously, love to accuse Mayor Jeff Leal of being 1984’s Big Brother only when he facilitates the construction of an affordable housing complex in their neighborhood—or at least I hope so.

Though I say that a politic of pure reaction is at play here, I must make the important distinction between that and reactionary politics proper. Our student body and the public “grassroots” movements of our city are motivated by a reaction to the most immediately tangible actions of institutions they simply do not understand.

This year, we saw Trent students join a mass movement against “cuts to the arts” which were not included in any actually realized budget and only served as a warning from City staff to council about what might happen were they to vote against the presented budget. 

To this day, I scarcely ever meet any artistically-minded Trent student who does not earnestly believe that these cuts to public art were once part of the 2025 City budget proposal. They might have learned about these alleged cuts through an infographic, a poster, or an Instagram story, but none of them have seen the original documents, let alone read Arthur or the Examiner’s reporting on it.

An angry reaction to an infographic is much easier to mobilize around than a genuine understanding of the city’s cumbersome budget process; yet, when you know what you’re talking about, it’s easier to mobilize around something that can actually happen.

Trent students are full of good intentions. Far be it from me to fault anyone for caring about the public visibility of the Pride flag, or properly funding public arts. Despite growing up in Peterborough, I feel quite connected to my Québecoise origins to this day because I was raised on publicly-funded Québec culture, from toddling in front of Passe-Partout to discovering Xavier Dolan’s J’ai Tué ma Mère as a teenager.

I might not feel personally touched by the sight of the Pride flag, but its absence from the storefronts and flagpoles of many institutions which previously celebrated Pride month worries me. Come the Fall, if Trent chooses not to celebrate Pride week, I’ll be as worried as the students protesting the Pride flag’s absence this month.

All this to say: the progressive wing of the student body is certainly well intentioned. I just wish they were a bit smarter.

The only people who can force our student association to abandon its status quo—a tepid, half-mast liberalism constantly undermined by the spineless and generally confusing behaviour of its executives—is the student body. 

This can’t happen if students start protesting policies that don’t exist.

Combing through 100+ page reports written in thick bureaucracy-speak might seem like an insurmountable task to the average student already drowning in equation sheets or whatever STEM majors do—but fear not! Trent happens to have a radical student newspaper in its orbit committed to doing that for you, and keeping you informed about the institutions which govern your student life. 

If you think our office has too many pride flags and too few Israeli ones, that’s your problem. But if you want to learn more about the forces at play in your life at Trent, we’re right here.