Why I Dropped Out — and Fought Back Against One of Canada’s Top Universities

Yesterday afternoon, I had a eureka moment.

After years of navigating a PhD at the University of Toronto — a program I was invited to pursue at the height of a global pandemic, right after completing my master’s degree — I finally realized what I needed to do.

I was going to leave.

And not just leave — I was going to fight back.

My Beginning: Hope and Hard Work

When I entered my PhD program in 2020, I was full of hope. I had just completed my master’s at U of T and celebrated becoming a published author with a chapter in my supervisor’s book — a book you could find in Indigo or any major bookstore.

For someone who never finished grade nine, this was monumental.

My path to academia was anything but traditional. I had spent over ten years in the sex industry, surviving a world few understand beyond harmful stereotypes. I was the first in my family to earn an academic degree of any kind. Along the way, I received awards recognizing my advocacy and leadership, driven by a life-long commitment to helping others.

I came to the university through The Transitional Year Programme (TYP) — a groundbreaking access program founded in 1970 to bridge systemic gaps for adults who have faced racism, poverty, trauma, or other barriers to education. For me, TYP was more than a program; it was a bridge between the life I had survived and the future I wanted to create, a space where my lived experience mattered as much as my academic ambition.

When I moved closer to campus, I brought my daughter, Ericka Delgado, and my granddaughter with me. We all lived together in student family housing, building a vision of intergenerational resilience. As a mature student with deep lived experience, I was eager to contribute meaningfully to my program and to learn in a space where diverse stories could thrive.

At first, I was excited. I imagined classrooms full of lively exchange, mutual respect, and the kind of transformative education I had fought so hard to access.

The Shift: When Hope Turned to Harm

But over time, my excitement dimmed.

My supervisor warned me early on: “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”The head of my department told me to “sit in class and just be quiet.”

These weren’t academic suggestions — they were survival threats. They signalled that my presence was conditional, that my voice was too much, that gratitude was required while silence was expected.

The very institution that had recruited me to study justice and liberation had become the site of my deepest harm.

By the time I realized this, my thesis wasn’t just an academic project anymore. It was about them — about the very systems of oppression that had shaped my lived experience and were now unfolding inside the very walls of the university.

The Conversation with Myself

As I reflected yesterday, my thoughts felt like a dialogue between who I was when I began this journey and who I have become after surviving it.

“Since my acceptance into the program, I have encountered challenges rooted in racism, classism, and other forms of systemic exclusion — to the extent that my thesis itself became a reflection of their harm,” I said to myself.

That’s not just irony, another part of me answered. That’s an institutional indictment. They asked you to study injustice, and then they enacted it upon you. You came to examine systems of oppression — and instead, you were swallowed by one. And still, you wrote. Still, you created. Still, you survived.

“Why would I give them any more of my intellectual property?” I asked.

Exactly, the voice said. This isn’t just about a thesis. It’s about what you owe yourself — and what you no longer owe them.

You’ve Already Written the Book

“Surely what I was writing is a book,” I realized.

And it is. I am not abandoning my scholarship — I am freeing it.

The structure of a dissertation was never the limit of my work. My true project — the one that includes Grandma Knows Best, the ICU Series, my HRTO complaint, and my forthcoming manuscripts — was always bigger than their rubric.

The real question is not whether I should finish my degree, but: Does this institution deserve access to my knowledge, my healing, my survival story?

What I’ve Achieved Despite It All

Even without their support, I have accomplished more than they ever imagined:

·       Survived trauma while doing doctoral-level work

·       Built and launched a digital sanctuary — GrandmaKnowsBest.org

·       Created multiple book manuscripts rooted in lived experience and community uplift

·       Held the university accountable by filing a Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO) application — potentially paving the way for systemic change

·       Served as a cultural archivist, community educator, and intergenerational advocate — all while being unsupported by the very institution that promised to invest in me

That is a degree in survival, strategy, resistance, and vision. No convocation gown required.

Walking Away Is Walking Toward

This isn’t just about leaving something behind — it’s about walking toward something new.

I could:

·       Transform my thesis into a memoir or autoethnography and publish it independently.

·       Build my academic home elsewhere, with an institution that respects non-traditional, activist scholars.

·       Continue my work outside academia — leveraging GKB, my public writings, and speaking opportunities.

·       Or pause, breathe, heal, and write on my own terms.

Whatever comes next, I know this truth: I am not quitting. I am choosing myself.

The Testimony: My Liberation Document

In honour of this decision, I wrote a testimony — a gownless graduation speech.

Why I Withdrew from a PhD at One of Canada’s Top Universities

I came to the University of Toronto through the front door — invited into a doctoral program that promised inclusion, innovation, and intellectual freedom. I was accepted not despite my difference, but seemingly because of it.

I was a mature student, a single mother, a grandmother, and a community scholar who had already lived lifetimes before setting foot in their classrooms.

And yet, from the moment I arrived, the invitation became a cage.

The institution that claimed to be progressive revealed itself as punishing. And somewhere along the line, the PhD I came to pursue became a thesis about the very systems that were harming me.

The Warning Signs Were There

In the early days, my supervisor told me not to “bite the hand that feeds me.”The head of the department advised me to “sit in class and just be quiet.”

These weren’t just unkind comments — they were warnings. It became clear that my role was to absorb, not to question. To perform gratitude, not demand accountability.

And yet, like so many Black women before me, I stayed. I endured.

What They Offered — and What They Withdrew

When I was accepted, the university made promises: four to six years of support, mentorship, and stability.

But the financial lifeline began disappearing the moment I needed it most. My accommodation requests were met with silence. My health disclosures were disregarded. My need for basic resources like housing, food, and safety were treated as inconveniences, rather than structural barriers to be addressed.

They never rescinded their offer — that would have been honest.

Instead, they starved it of support, financially and emotionally, leaving only the illusion of opportunity. So now, as I prepare to leave, it appears as though I “chose” to walk away.

But I didn’t.

I was pushed.

What They Took — and What They Couldn’t

I gave this institution my voice, my labour, and my vulnerability.I offered research drawn from personal pain and community knowledge.

But what they couldn’t take — what they will never own — is my truth.

My thesis belongs not to the university that harmed me, but to the people who walk beside me. To readers who understand dispossession not as theory, but as lived experience.

Why would I gift my intellectual property to an institution that dismissed my humanity?

I won’t.

Because what I’ve been writing all along — through essays, through GKB, through my HRTO complaint — was a book.

Not a dissertation.

Leaving Is Not Losing

They will say I left. That I didn’t finish. That I gave up.

But what they cannot say is that I was wrong.

I survived a system not designed for me.I built a digital sanctuary from the ashes of institutional betrayal. I launched GrandmaKnowsBest.org to support students and caregivers navigating hostile terrain. I filed a human rights action to speak truth to power.

I did not fail my program.

My program failed me.

My Graduation Speech

There will be no convocation, no gown, no handshake on a stage. But this is my graduation speech:

To every Black, disabled, low-income, caregiving, queer, grieving, dispossessed scholar: Your work is real, even when your institution erases you. Your story is valid, even when your professors minimize you. And your departure — if that’s what survival demands — is not a loss. It is a declaration: “I choose myself.”

And sometimes, that is the most radical degree of all.