OP-ED: The University of Toronto’s bizarre donor memorial stones
"The U of T has decided to return to a kind of stone age, recently embedding the historic heart of its campus with 3,478 memorial stones inscribed with the names of both deceased and living donors."
Author: P.M. Szpunar
In the age of progressivism and under the banner of truth and reconciliation, the University of Toronto has decided to return to a kind of stone age, recently embedding the historic heart of its campus with 3,478 memorial stones inscribed with the names of both deceased and living donors. Any student or alumnus with a spare $2,000 can embed themselves into the university’s legacy. The result is disquieting, to say the least, because simply walking through parts of the U of T campus today feels like traversing a haunted cemetery.
The stones are part of the Landmark Project, an extensive multi-year effort officially aimed at making the U of T more walkable, inclusive and, of course, green. Dutifully wokeist, Landmark includes a “decolonization” component with dedicated Indigenous spaces such as a “reconciliation grove” and an Indigenous landscape meant to unearth the one below it. After a process of “public” consultations – in reality, exclusive and closed planning – the U of T’s Governing Council decided that the institution “needs to do more to be deserving of Indigenous students.”
But while the project’s Indigenous elements are significant, Landmark’s core mission appears to be making the university “climate positive” by 2050. In pursuit of such a pre-automobile fantasy, King’s College Circle has been excavated to install a massive “geoexchange”. The largest of its kind in Canada, the system includes 420 boreholes drilled into the bedrock of limestone, some 250 metres deep – nearly half the height of Toronto’s CN Tower. The idea is to store excess heat from above and tap the Earth’s temperature below to help cut the U of T’s greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of 3,000 cars by 2030. Beneath the green soccer field sits a parking garage with 236 spaces and 48 EV stations.
Landmark’s initial reported cost was $20 million – an implausibly low figure given its scale and timeline. Publicly acknowledged funding includes a $250,000 gift from the Students’ Union, $1 million from the university’s alumni matched to $2 million from the enormous Boundless fundraising campaign, and a $100,000 grant from Toronto’s Parks and Trees Foundation.
While curiously little has been published about the commemorative donor stones, the material I could find is couched in grandiose jargon. Commemorating both the living and the dead, states one document, will infuse campus with the “temporal effect of memorialization”. The intent, according to a paper published by the U of T’s Ethnography Lab, is to “imbue [the] school with a sense of prestige” through a “process of ruination to animate an unbecoming” in order to “maintain relevance and appear ‘sensitive’ to the current social moment.” Shouldn’t high-quality academic and research output be able to accomplish all that?
The overhauled gardens and flowers are still quite lovely – if it weren’t for the whiff of death metaphorically clinging to every blossom. Neither the project’s leadership nor the university’s administration appear to have consulted external experts on the ethics of memorializing the living alongside the dead. No engagement with broader precedents or potential psychological impacts seem to have taken place. The focus, instead, remained squarely on the physical space – and, it seems, even more squarely on raising money.
I first stumbled upon all of this one glorious autumn day while showing a new acquaintance from Europe around campus. Some of the inscribed stones are like tiles or pavers inserted randomly in a walkway – something one might actually trample on. Others are clusters of slightly raised stones set in green space. In all cases, the living and dead are mingled without distinction – it requires individual research to find out anything about any name.
My new friend and I grew horrified, not just at the creepy mingling but because the whole concept evokes – and thus cheapens and insults – a much more important memorial that uses nearly the same physical design. I’m referring to the Stolpersteine – or Stumbling Stones – small brass plaques attached to flat paving or wall stones, some 100,000 of them set in more than 1,000 European locations to commemorate individual victims of the Holocaust. Each stone is placed at the victim’s last residence, and is engraved with their name, date of “deportation” to Auschwitz, and date of death. Europe’s Stolpersteine movingly honour victims by rooting their individual memory and restoring a measure of dignity by linking their story to where they once lived in freedom.
The U of T’s stones teeter very close to ripping off that concept – and are then applied to the crass purpose of raising funds. All without conveying any real information. One name might refer to a long-passed-away elder who died peacefully at home in bed. Another to someone taken tragically by disease or accident in the flower of youth. Yet another to a 24-year-old grad student now gamboling happily around the halls of Harvard. Who can say? They all look the same. It is grotesque.
And potentially damaging to U of T students. It is widely recognized that in closed environments like universities, individuals should have a choice about whether to engage with physical reminders of death. When such reminders are unavoidable, they risk re-traumatizing those affected. That emotional toll can disrupt focus, memory and the ability to process information.
Recognizing donors in an institution that relies heavily on them is unavoidable and often entirely legitimate. But embedding names of living donors alongside the dead, and scattering that recognition all over campus – as a component in constructing an ideological identity – is a line crossed, in my opinion. No other top university to my knowledge has gone this far – not Oxford, not Stanford, not Harvard, not Trinity Dublin, not Melbourne.
The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.
P.M. Szpunar writes personal reflections about totalitarianism through the lens of opera and the operatic canon. Her work can be found here.