Already angry at being stuck in school an extra month because of the strike, York University students and professors are also blazing mad at a rash of false fire alarms they say are disrupting tests and contributing to an already smouldering campus mood.
“It’s just ridiculous what some idiots are doing in a school year that’s already been messed up by the strike,” said second-year student Hossein Davarinejad, one of 400 students who rewrote a psychology test Friday that had been cancelled the week before because of a false alarm.
False alarms have plagued York exams in recent years — a record 162 false alarms were pulled in 2005, for which the university is charged $1,000 each — but lingering stress from a 12-week teaching assistants’ strike may be fuelling extra frustration this year, suggested President Mamdouh Shoukri
Already a petition is calling for a fix to the problem has drawn more than 350 signatures from students and staff on the sprawling campus at Keele Street and Finch Avenue, where a bomb threat was called into school authorities last week.
