Tumbling out of Dundas station and into Toronto Life Square, you emerge in a food court. A video screen advertises Fashion magazine. Taking the elevator up to ground level, two animated beavers entice you to subscribe to their cellphone service. A wall of movie posters, another advertising screen, and another escalator later, you’re at the Future Shop. Up a third escalator, past a few more screens, you’re rewarded with a second food court. One last ascent, another Fashion pitch, and you’ve finally made it to Jack Astor’s. Or to your Ryerson lecture, in the movie theatre next door. Either way.

So, if you choose Ryerson for your post-secondary education, you may be required to study a lot of advertising in order to graduate, even if you aren’t majoring in marketing or design. Which some might think is a good thing. The university, at least, doesn’t have to pay anything to rent the space — unless you count student eyeballs as a form of currency. Which Toronto Life Square developer PenEquity apparently does; according to a Toronto Star article from April, about half of the building’s “entire revenue comes from ads shown on its video monitors throughout the building. That’s why its 24 AMC movie screens, 10 to be used as lecture halls by Ryerson University students during the day, are located on the top, fourth floor....”

There’s no doubt Ryerson needs the space and that government funding for universities is hard to come by. But this substitution becomes a self-propelling model: why would the government pay for something the private sector is willing to offer for “free”? That’s precisely the philosophy that has come to dominate mainstream politics in the past decade, eroding those last few spaces that are supposed to exist apart from, or in reaction to, consumerism. In the face of government cutbacks, corporations step in and make up the difference, and strings of varying lengths always come attached.

Ryerson students are becoming increasingly familiar with this method of funding education. In the case of Ryerson’s Ted Rogers School of Management, which shares a building with a Best Buy and a Canadian Tire, that string is the two-minute slog upwards to get to class: one escalator carries you above the big-box retail, the other above the three levels of parking. By literally placing students above cars and shopping, the building places cars and shopping above students.

Toronto Life Square, on the other hand, directly monetizes students by putting just under three minutes of commercials between the subway (which is how 90 per cent of students access the university) and their “lecture halls.”

The no-class-until-you’ve-consumed-your-ads mentality is reminiscent of Channel One, the company that offers American middle and high schools “free” audio-visual equipment in exchange for the right to broadcast advertisement-laden news reports directly into the classrooms of six million students. (A similar venture, the Youth News Network, failed to take off in Canada after meeting heavy resistance from teachers’ unions and several provincial governments.)

The University of Toronto, according to a November 1996 article in The New York Times, “decided to sell ads in bathrooms to replace lost revenue” when its government funding was slashed by 15 per cent the previous year. The contract with Zoom Media is still running, and the company now claims 650 billboards in 26 buildings at U of T’s St. George campus, and 300 billboards in 13 buildings at Ryerson. One of the frames in a Woodsworth College bathroom even bears a sticker explaining that “revenue from this poster is used to improve student facilities at the University of Toronto.”

But the presence of the posters themselves arguably degrades the facilities. In his PhD thesis for U of T’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Trevor Norris argues that “education must be preserved as the location for the development of the reflective capacity to critique these very dominant social practices and cultivation of civic responsibility within a vibrant public realm.”
When told of the crucible of advertising that Ryerson students will have to navigate at Toronto Life Square, Norris calls it “a particularly troublesome and insidious case of the advertisation and commercialization of education.”

“Insidious” is the key word; the exploitation of students in this manner seems almost an accidental by-product of a deal that was not thoroughly thought through. In the late 1990s, Ryerson granted the developer air rights to construct a portion of the new building over their parking garage at Gould and Victoria, partly in exchange for being able to use some of the movie theatres as classroom space. “Part of our idea was to keep our footprint small,” says Linda Grayson, Ryerson’s VP in charge of administration and finance. “Here you have this incredible facility that was supposed to be open in 2001 that we hoped to use for the double cohort at that time. Our objective was to find classroom space and use space that was on our campus.”

As the project was repeatedly delayed, Ryerson fell back on using the Carlton cinemas instead, something that “didn’t go over so well,” says Ryerson Students’ Union (RSU) Vice-President of Education Rebecca Rose. “There wasn’t a sufficient spot to put your notebook, so you had to use a clipboard,” and writing exams was awkward. “We were pretty happy when the university decided not to continue [using the Carlton],” she says.

Although the AMC auditoriums themselves are certainly an improvement — Grayson speaks proudly of the superior lighting, the writing tablets that fit into the cupholders, and the lecterns that will be stored behind the screens — Rose feels that these refinements obscure the fundamental issue: “It’s obviously good to have a shiny new building to have classrooms in, but we shouldn’t have to rely on these sorts of partnerships to have this amount of classroom space,” she says. “I think that some people take us less seriously as a university. When our school of business management is above a Best Buy. When you have to get to class by going past ads, through a food court and to your classroom that doubles as a movie theatre.” She says that when the business building opened, she and her friends were teased by “quite a few people” about how her university is located above a Best Buy.

Tim Conway, PenEquity’s VP of Media, is unsurprisingly more optimistic about the concept of expanding universities through private-sector partnerships. “It’s a win-win. In our case, nobody goes to the movies in the morning, and it’s free for the university to use the facilities without tying up real estate.... The university gets facilities they don’t have to pay for.”

Ryerson’s recently released Master Plan for the revitalization of its entire campus takes a middle sort of approach, encouraging the exploration of “possibilities to partner with the private sector,” but limiting those possibilities to “exploiting the unused density within the Ryerson precinct” by “co-developing” new school buildings upon which will sit residential towers.

There is, however, still the matter of Ryerson’s new Student Learning Centre, which will occupy the sites of the former Sam the Record Man and Future Shop stores at Yonge and Gould. The city’s zoning requirement is that 60 per cent of the space on Yonge Street has to be retail. Ryerson is “consulting with various experts in the field,” Grayson says, including the Rogers School’s Centre for the Study of Commercial Activity, as well as the Downtown Yonge Business Improvement Area.

“You want to kick-start city-building by attracting first-class retail,” Grayson says. But, other than a student-run café, a commercial component is “something I personally wouldn’t be in favour of,” says the RSU’s Rose, emphasizing that “Ryerson has to truly concentrate on the needs of its students” by maximizing study space. “The students’ union and the university can always agree on the fact that we need more funding from the government, and that the government should be sufficiently funding us so that we don’t have to keep begging corporations for help.”
Begging corporations, after all, inevitably turns into corporations begging you. Lamenting the increasing presence of advertising in everyday life, such as the appearance of video screens in elevators, Grayson observes, “Your personal space is not your personal space anymore.” And neither, it seems, is our educational space still necessarily our educational space.

JONATHAN GOLDSBIE IS A CAMPAIGNER WITH THE TORONTO PUBLIC SPACE COMMITTEE.