When I was hired to teach at Toronto Metropolitan University, I was still teaching at Seneca. I mentioned the new job to one of my classes. Dave asked, “Isn’t that Ryerson?” “Yes,” I said. “It was. They changed the name last year.”

“Why?” Sheila asked.

I gave the condensed version as I understood it. The history surrounding Egerton Ryerson and the residential school system, the reassessment of public monuments and institutional names that accelerated following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, and the broader cultural moment in which many long-established symbols came under renewed scrutiny.

Then Bimlah raised her hand.

“Why didn’t they just say it referred to Stanley Ryerson instead?” she asked. “He was Canada’s Marxist historian. Nobody on the left committed genocide.”

Before I had the chance to respond, Cimi, who was from China, and Mikhail, who was from Russia, looked at one another as if they had been waiting their whole lives for this exact sentence. They informed Bimlah, with considerable enthusiasm, that history was rather more complicated than she appeared to think. For the next half hour the lyric writing class transformed into an impromptu seminar on ideology, historical memory, authoritarianism, and the politics of monuments. Students compared the destruction of the sixth-century Buddhist statues at Bamiyan by the Taliban with Iraqis pulling down Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad, then moved on to the dismantling of hundreds of Lenin statues after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nobody agreed on everything. Everyone had something to contribute. My role became less instructor than traffic controller.

Those were the classes I loved most. We had ostensibly gathered to discuss songwriting, but songwriting has always been an excuse to discuss people, history, power, memory, and the stories societies tell about themselves. I had once invited the dean to sit in on a class. I wish she had accepted. It was, in every sense, an invigorating lyric writing class.