Concordia students win national press award for investigation sparked by university legal threat

Montreal Gazette

02-05-2025

News
Two Concordia students have been honoured nationally for investigating transparency at Canadian universities.
Marieke Glorieux-Stryckman and Aidan Raynor, student journalists at The Concordian newspaper, have won the 2025 Student Achievement Award from World Press Freedom Canada for an investigation into how universities handle requests for internal records.
Published last year, their reporting examined how long schools take to respond to access requests, how often they deny them, and whether appeals succeed. The findings were released as a searchable database and national ranking, along with a digital tool to help other student journalists file their own requests.
However, it was an investigation that was ultimately sparked by a cease-and-desist letter sent from their own university.
In fall 2023, Glorieux-Stryckman, then news editor at The Concordian, filed to Concordia six access-to-information requests, which are formal applications, often used by journalists, to obtain documents from public institutions.
'I was on the bus heading to campus, expecting to get documents back, and I opened an email that began with 'Concordia University v.,' ' she said in an interview.
'My first thought was: 'Wait a second, am I getting sued right now?' '
'That was really the panic state I was in,' Glorieux-Stryckman added. 'Obviously, we weren't getting sued, but I was a second-year journalism student. It was pretty stressful to have this kind of action.'
The university accused the student newspaper of acting in bad faith and demanded the requests be withdrawn, she said.
Eventually, the dispute was resolved through mediation in 2024, but that confrontation, Glorieux-Stryckmam said, helped shape what became a national investigation.
Now 22 years old, Glorieux-Stryckman is a part-time journalism student with a minor in human environment. She served as editor-in-chief of the student newspaper for the past year.
'It got me and Aidan—who at the time was just starting at The Concordian — interested in learning more about how universities handle access-to-information requests,' she said. 'Obviously, the letter was not the response we had expected.'
Working together, Glorieux-Stryckman and Raynor, now 21 and in his third year of studying journalism with a minor in political science, filed identical access requests to 33 universities across the country. Raynor said data from 29 institutions was ultimately included in the final project.
They found, at the time, Concordia had the longest average response time in Montreal, but other schools were not much better.
To make the work useful beyond a single article, Raynor said they then built a tool called the Transparent University Project to open-source their findings and help other students file and track access requests.
'We wanted this to be more than a one-off,' Raynor said.
In response to the students' award, Concordia University said in a statement: 'We are always happy when students get recognized for their work and can showcase what they have learned in courses at Concordia.'
Asked about the cease-and-desist letter, the university said Quebec's access-to-information law requires timely responses, but large volumes of complex requests can strain limited resources.
'Many requests require many hours of work collecting and reviewing hundreds and sometimes thousands of individual documents, in several different units across the university,' the statement said, adding the law allows for mediation or for Quebec's access commission to narrow the scope. 'Mediation prior to the Access Commission hearing the case often produces a compromise solution.'
In fact, Raynor said Concordia has since improved. 'They've been really good with deadlines for my requests recently,' Glorieux-Stryckman added.
Following in Glorieux-Stryckman's footsteps, Raynor will serve as editor-in-chief of The Concordian next year.
It is a paper that's made up of about 20 editors, they said, with another 20 to 30 contributors to produce a weekly issue.
'In student journalism, it sometimes feels like you're shouting into the void,' Glorieux-Stryckman said. 'This took us six months of work, so it's really nice to be recognized.'
'It's not looking good for press freedom worldwide,' Raynor said. 'It's important ... and it starts at The Concordian as second-year journalism students.'
This story was originally published May 2, 2025 at 7:28 PM.