11:06 A.M.
Oona St-Amant, at centre, teaching firstyear nursing students Jamie Spiegel (left) and Manjot Salh.

11:11 A.M.
The Ryerson Image Centre’s holdings include the Black Star Collection, and 6,000 prints from The New York Times Photo Archive.

In a time when dominant cultural narratives are being challenged, journalists must also ask who and what their journalism serves. “Not only have you experienced racism growing up as an Indigenous person in Canada, now you have to write about it and be fair to the people who are essentially being racist in front of you,” says Edwards. “I’ve interviewed people who have no problem saying racial slurs in front of me while I’m interviewing them. … It can be really challenging to find that quote-unquote ‘balance’ in journalism.”

Students must also interrogate their own relationship with their subjects. “We don’t want to be story-takers—we want to be story-makers,” says Malik. “Be humane; be respectful. I think students had to take a step back from, ‘I’ll just call this person and write this story.’ That was the hard part: finding people to talk to outside of your networks. It takes more than just one phone call—it’s about building a relationship.”

BY NOON, the once-empty Gould Street is dense with activity. In 2010, this street between Victoria and Bond was closed to traffic—walk along it at the right time of year and you might find yourself in the Ryerson Farmers’ Market, or watching skaters on Lake Devo. You might take a detour into the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC), the public gallery that houses one of Canada’s biggest collections of photography (the Black Star Collection) and The New York Times Photo Archive.

Ryerson’s impact on the city stretches beyond the campus. Walk north to College Street and you’ll find the Mattamy Athletic Centre—longtime home of the Toronto Maple Leafs (when it was known as Maple Leaf Gardens), reopened in 2012 as a state-of-the-art athletics/recreation facility and community hub. Walk back down Yonge Street and find the Student Learning Centre (SLC), the “library of the 21st century,” housing everything from the Isaac Olowolafe Jr. Digital Media Experience Lab to the School of Performance.

Travelling west on Dundas, the Ted Rogers School of Management (TRSM) looms over Bay Street; the building opened in 2006 along with the new MBA program and became Canada’s largest undergraduate business school. TRSM is also home to Enactus Ryerson, the student society dedicated to harnessing entrepreneurship for social good. Its influence has spread all the way to Nunavut through Growing North, a food-security initiative designed to generate sustainable food sources in remote, underserved areas. In 2015, Growing North built a $250,000 greenhouse in Naujaat, Nunavut, which has local employees and a student co-op program. Now an independent non-profit, Growing North will build a new greenhouse in collaboration with the community of Arviat this summer.

1948
The Ryerson Institute of Technology is founded

1963
Name officially changes from Ryerson Institute of Technology to Ryerson Polytechnical Institute

1972
First degrees are awarded to nine students