Amr El-Orabi said that on November 19, he told Professor Gary Dunphy that he was leaving his lab, prompting Dunphy to yell, “Get the fuck out of the country.”

When El-Orabi asked if there was anything else the professor would like, Dunphy replied, “Yes, your death.” El-Orabi captured the exchange on tape.

Since the incident was first reported by Global News earlier this month, several prominent students, including a student Senator and a SSMU equity commissioner, have called for Dunphy’s firing.

No one employed by McGill agreed to be interviewed for this story, citing the confidentiality of the university’s ongoing investigation into the matter.

El-Orabi’s story began last May, he says, when he noticed Dunphy taking an unusual interest in his religion barely a week after registering for McGill.

“In the first week or something he asked what religion I am,” El-Orabi said on the phone from his home in Cairo. “It’s not that I did mind the question – but it doesn’t work like that in Canada, you don’t ask people what religion they are.”

Soon, Dunphy’s curiosity turned into mockery, El-Orabi says. During a meeting between the two later in the month, the student’s phone began buzzing with a pre-recorded Muslim call to prayer, a song that rings out five times a day across the Islamic world.

When Dunphy heard this, he gave his opinion on how Muslims worship, El-Orabi says. “‘I don’t see the point of you going down on the earth where people can walk with their socks, and your asses flying up in the air,’” El-Orabi remembers Dunphy saying.

El-Orabi says he was offended by the comment, but did not respond at the time.

“I didn’t give it that much attention in the beginning I thought it would fade out with time,” he says. “Whenever he brings up religion or culture, I dismiss it.”

But as the summer wore on, Dunphy’s comments become more inflammatory, El-Orabi says.

The professor did not limit himself to religious or cultural insults, according to El-Orabi: “There were personal things; he would call me names. We were in the middle of a conversation about work. He called me an insufferable bastard in the middle of the conversation.”

The abuse continued into the fall semester, El-Orabi says. While El-Orabi was a TA in one of Dunphy’s courses, the professor openly questioned his graduate student’s sexuality.

“He said that people in [the] downtown campus – because I was going back and forth between two labs [at Mac Campus and downtown] – they think you’re gay because you don’t interact with girls that much,” El-Orabi recalls.

“I didn’t know what to say.”

The alleged harassment began taking a toll on El-Orabi. “He was visibly depressed,” says his former roommate, who asked not to be named. “He mentioned to me that he found it difficult to focus on his studies because of the harassment at school.”

“He would say this professor was making his life a living hell.”

On the advice of a friend, El-Orabi began recording his interactions with Dunphy.

“There were long recordings of what sounded like the rants of a mad man,” his roommate says.

Other students have remarked on Dunphy’s sometimes bizarre conversation topics, especially during his office hours.

Evan Henry, student Senator for Mac Campus, who took a biology course with Dunphy in fall 2010, previously told The Daily that Dunphy once said during office hours that he “likes suing people” – a remark that Henry acknowledged may have been tongue-in-cheek.

Another student, who asked not to be named, told The Daily that Dunphy proposed dropping a “neutrino bomb” on the Middle East in order to kill a large number of the region’s residents in 2009.

The student was attending Dunphy’s office hours to discuss an exam, when the professor brought up the Middle East.

“At one point while talking about how screwed up the region is, he remarked that maybe we could drop a ‘neutrino bomb’ on the area,” the student wrote in an email to The Daily.

“The point of a neutrino bomb, he explained, was that it killed people but preserved such priceless artifacts as books or buildings.”

El-Orabi’s tipping point, he says, came in November, when Dunphy’s comments about Islam became harsher.

“Finally, I couldn’t dismiss what he was saying. He started cursing the prophet and calling him names. This hurt my feelings,” El-Orabi says.

“He said, I remember it crystal clear: ‘Muhammad was an asshole and he was married to a whore.’”

A few days later, El-Orabi went to Dunphy’s office and told the professor he was leaving his lab.

Dunphy lashed out at the student, raising his voice to say, “your biggest and only problem with me is that you put your goddamn god before my asshole god….All I wanted you to do is do your damn thesis but you got some fucking stupid idea in your head and everyone has to be like you…Don’t ever think for a minute that your culture is the be all end all.”

Dunphy also accused El-Orabi of “cyberstalking” during the confrontation, and threatened to press criminal charges against the international student.

El-Orabi says Dunphy was referring to the student’s Skype profile picture at the time, a thumbnail image of a hand with its middle finger extended.

“He thought it was directed at him, but it wasn’t,” El-Orabi says. “That image had been on my computer for months.”

“To me it sounded like someone trying to intimidate me with my ignorance about the law. I contacted my friends, and everyone was laughing, because if this picture was a breach of any law, most of the people who used it would have been in jail for a long time.”

In a five-page written statement he made the next day on McGill letterhead, El-Orabi says that Ian Strachan, associate dean for graduate students in the Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, and another professor told El-Orabi he should not stay alone that night because of Dunphy’s threat. El-Orabi’s roommate was out of town, so he stayed with another friend on the night of November 19, he says.

El-Orabi began planning to leave Canada immediately. “I had a reservation to go on vacation in December – I contacted my airline, and I changed the reservation to the earliest date possible, the 29th of November, ten days after this happened,” he says.

When his roommate returned to Montreal, they tried to convince him to stay.

“I was playing devil’s advocate and I really wanted Amr to stay,” the roommate says, “so I said to him, you know, ‘Maybe [Dunphy] just said that in the heat of the moment.’ But [El-Orabi] told me that he had to take that seriously, and he didn’t feel safe. Knowing that nothing would happen to the professor, he told me he did not feel safe in the same environment as someone who said those words to him.”

The day before El-Orabi left, he says he emailed Stachan to ask for a meeting. “He told me that the case was closed,” El-Orabi says. “I asked for the outcome of the case, and he refused, he said, for confidentiality reasons.”

Back in Egypt, El-Orabi exchanged emails with McGill’s ombudsperson, Spencer Boudreau, who recommended that El-Orabi file an official grievance with the University. On February 14, he did.

“They tell you to summarize in bullet points the grounds of your grievance,” El-Orabi says. “So the grounds of my grievance was cultural and personal and religious offences, that’s point one. Point two was intrusions on my privacy by asking about my sexuality. And point three was the threat.”

The post The Daily talks to McGill student claiming harassment from professor appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The story, first reported by Global News, pits Amr El-Orabi, a former Master’s student at McGill in Natural Resource Sciences, against Gary Dunphy, a professor at McGill who teaches mostly at Macdonald campus. El-Orabi left McGill last November before completing his degree.

Beginning last May, Dunphy allegedly insulted the student’s religion and once questioned his sexuality over the course of several months. During their final encounter, which El-Orabi recorded, Professor Dunphy allegedly said he wanted his student dead.

 “Is there anything else that you want from me now?” El-Orabi said as he left the professor’s office.

“Yes, your death,” Dunphy replied.

This prompted El-Orabi to leave McGill and return to Egypt a week later. In February, he filed an official grievance with the University, which has yet to be resolved.

Some students have called for Dunphy to be fired.

“I think that he shouldn’t be teaching here,” said Evan Henry, the student senator for Macdonald campus. “Islamophobia shouldn’t be tolerated, let alone death threats.”

“In my ideal world, he would be fired,” said Shaina Agbayani, one of SSMU’s two equity commissioners.

Agbayani also called on McGill to “recognize that hostility towards any student, even if it’s not a serious threat, is not an appropriate thing to happen at McGill.”

Dunphy has declined The Daily’s requests for comment, saying that McGill has asked him not to speak about the case until the official grievance process is complete.

Students at Macdonald campus – where much of the alleged harassment took place – have expressed shock at the charges brought against Dunphy. The small, rural satellite campus is home to a tight-knit community of students and teachers who rarely deal with major disputes or discord.

The Macdonald Campus Students’ Society (MCSS) is currently reviewing its own investigation into the matter and is expected to make the results public shortly.

“Mac campus is known for having smaller, more intimate classes,” said Irene Dambriunas, a U3 Environment student at Macdonald.

“You get to know your professors – they’re really easy to approach and easy to talk to. So in that way it was shocking that [Dunphy] would talk to a student like that – really shocking.”

Student opinion on Dunphy’s persona is divided, with some describing a caring, if eccentric, teacher, and others calling him a sardonic loose cannon.

“This case disturbs me regarding the reaction from the greater McGill community downtown,” Zachary Goldberg, a U2 Environment student, told The Daily by email. “I have taken the professor’s biology class and he was very professional and treated everyone fairly to my knowledge. The class was very diverse. I was friends with fellow students who were arab [sic], and I remember one of them expressed to me that they liked him in conversation.”

Dana Holtby, who has since graduated, took a biology class with Dunphy in second year.

“He was extremely helpful and understanding to me as an Arts student in a science class,” Holtby said. “He reassured me after a difficult midterm and even seemed sympathetic to the allophones in our class. When I expressed concern about an error I made on the [midterm] he assured me that I would be able to make it up on the examinations to come, and that he was sympathetic to mistakes as he knew that for many students in the class English was not the first language.”

Henry, who took a biology course with Dunphy in the fall of 2010, remembers the professor in a less flattering light.

“I remember he had a very dry sense of humour,” Henry said. “This one time when I went to his office hours, he talked to me about how he likes suing people. He talked to me about that for a while.”

“‘I like to be in a lawsuit about once a year,’” Henry remembers him saying. “[It was] probably tongue in cheek, but I don’t think he was lying at all about liking to be in lawsuits.”

Henry says he learned about El-Orabi’s case when people shared it with him on Facebook. Since then, he and his fellow student Senators have been discussing the case in a private Facebook thread.

Asked what the Senators have been saying about the case, Henry said, simply, “That it’s horrendous.”

The McGill administration sent an email to students last Friday that referred to the incident without mentioning either Dunphy or El-Orabi by name.

“McGill takes allegations of harassment and threats very seriously,” the email read. “The University has carefully addressed the matter […] We have no grounds, however, to conclude that anyone in the McGill community is in any way at risk in connection with this matter.”

In response, Agbayani said the McGill Media Relations Office (MRO), who sent the email, made her “really angry that McGill didn’t want to do anything to be held accountable for this.”

The post Mac students react to death threat allegations appeared first on The McGill Daily.

According to a story by Global News published on Wednesday, Amr El-Orabi came to Montreal in May 2012 to study Natural Resource Sciences at McGill, but alleges that he soon became the victim of harassment from Professor Gary Dunphy.

“He would make fun of my beliefs, he would make fun of Muslims and how they do their prayers, and he would do that in front of me,” El-Orabi told Global News from his home in Cairo, which he returned to four months ago.

Dunphy also allegedly called El-Orabi a “homosexual.”

When El-Orabi told Dunphy he was leaving his lab, the professor lashed out, yelling “Get the the fuck out of this country.”

As El-Orabi left Dunphy’s office, he asked the professor, “Is there anything else that you want from me now?”

“Yes, your death,” Dunphy replied. El-Orabi shared a recording of the conversation with Global News, which posted it online.

During the recording, Dunphy accuses El-Orabi of hacking into his Skype account and threatens to press criminal charges against the student.

Later on the recording, Dunphy alludes to longstanding tensions between himself and El-Orabi over religion.

“Your biggest and only problem with me is that you put your goddamn god above my asshole god. It’s your philosophy that ‘you must respect me and I don’t have to respect you,’” Dunphy says on the recording.

“I want to respect the Arab world – I can’t when you insist that I have to do things your way,” Dunphy says later.

In an interview with Global News, Morton Mendelson, outgoing Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) said, “The idea of a death threat against a student is disturbing. It’s something that the university would take very seriously.”

On Thursday, following his last lecture of the semester in the Stewart Biology building, Dunphy was asked to expand on allegations that he makes on the recording regarding “cyberstalking” by El-Orabi. Dunphy declined to comment.

A group of students met outside Dunphy’s classroom this afternoon. One of the protestors, wishing to remain anonymous, said Dunphy’s outburst was part of a pattern.

“McGill has a problem with institutional racism,” the protestor said. “People like him shouldn’t be in a room with students teaching in any educational institutional – those people should be fired.”

An hour into the lecture, protestors entered the classroom, in which there were only three students. One protestor held a sign that read “Racism @ McGill Has to Stop! Racist Profs Out!”

“It’s nice to see so many people – why don’t you sign up for my entymology course,” he told assembled media and protestors.

Putting his lecture to an end, Dunphy refused to comment, as his case is still the subject of an official grievance procedure. “My employer has asked me not to until this thing’s through,” he said. “You’re not getting any more than that, my friends.”

A former student depicts Dunphy under a different light as a kind, tolerant teacher.

“I was shocked to hear this story,” said Dana Holtby, who had Dunphy as a biology teacher in second year but has since graduated. Dunphy “reassured me after a difficult midterm and even seemed sympathetic to the allophones in our class. When I expressed concern about an error I made on the [midterm] he assured me that I would be able to make it up on the examinations to come, and that he was sympathetic to mistakes as he knew that for many students in the class English was not the first language.”

Still, Holtby added, “such behavior is completely unacceptable and I would hope for a more concrete reaction from administration.”

The administration would only say that a student filed a grievance to the Committee on Student Grievances, a Senate committee arising out of University regulations,  specifically the Charter of Student’s Rights. The Committee, with its nine voting members – four students and five professors – has final authority within university jurisdiction and is  “empowered to order such final or interim actions as it sees fit” for appropriate redress.

Protestors followed Dunphy to his car in the Stewart Biology parking lot, chanting “Hey Hey! Ho Ho! Racist profs have got to go!”

Speaking to reporters, Dunphy conceded that there was “wrongdoing on everybody’s part.”

After removing the protestor’s sign placed on his windshield, Dunphy told The Daily, “I don’t have any feelings for the [allegations].”

The Natural Resources Science departmental chair, Professor Jim Fyles, refused to comment.

“This is a case that is been taken up by McGill administration trough the normal grievance procedures, and I cannot comment on it” Fyles said in an interview with The Daily.

McGill Director of Internal Communications Doug Sweet said the administration is also unable to comment.

“No comment, because this is the subject of a grievance,” Sweet said.

A previous version of this article stated that multiple death threats were made. In fact, El-Orabi accused Dunphy of making a single  death threat.

The post Students confront teacher accused of death threat appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The $10,000 grant funds a political theory fellowship in which students meet to discuss seminal liberal texts under the guidance of libertarian theorist and McGill professor Jacob Levy. Undergraduates receive $500 for their participation in the Fellowship over the course of the year; graduate students get $750.

Over 200 American universities receive funding from the Foundation. The grant application page of their website reads, “the Foundation focuses its grantmaking on a select number of programs it believes are best positioned to support principles of liberty and long-term prosperity.”
Levy and several students interviewed by The Daily are adamant that the Fellowship – officially called the Research Group on Constitutional Studies Student Fellowship – meets the highest standards of academic freedom.

Byron Taylor-Conboy, a Master’s candidate who describes himself as a “progressive, left-leaning social democrat” said, “one of the reasons why I thought [the funding] was acceptable in this situation is that there was no sort of constraints on what we could talk about.”
Jake Bleiberg, U3 Political Science, echoed this. “In being exposed to those texts, you’re certainly getting a liberal perspective on the world. But I don’t feel as if there’s a political push behind it,” he said. “I think we’re looking at the books in the same critical way you would in a class.”

While all of the students contacted by The Daily thought the McGill Fellowship in question was free from overt interference on the part of the Foundation and were happy to be a part of it, some felt that Koch grants were symptomatic of larger problems in academia.

“I think the Koch brothers have been an example of using big money to privilege certain views, which I would say is anti-democratic,” said Isaac Stethem, who graduated last semester and has been a Fellow for two years.

Asked if he would be comfortable seeing a Koch grant at every Canadian university, Taylor-Conboy said, “Of course not.”

“I think it’s problematic, a massive private investment in universities, and we see it increasing now,” he went on. “I think it opens the door to a curtailing of intellectual thought and academic freedom.”

“Everything is dirty money. Anything we do now is dirty money – dirty money circulates in the system. So to say, ‘Oh, you know, this Koch Foundation money is dirty money,’ – maybe that’s correct, but the problem isn’t just the Koch Foundation, it’s the system.”

The Koch brothers have been explicit about the ideological control they try to wield over the organizations they fund. In 2007, David Koch told the libertarian journalist Brian Doherty, “If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent. And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding. We do exert that kind of control.”

Presented with the quote, Levy countered that the McGill Fellowship was too small to merit such interference. “There’s one important part of that quote that you read, which is ‘a lot of money.’ […] $10,000 grants to universities aren’t like that,” he said.

In recent years, the Kochs have been in the spotlight for aggressively funding right-wing political causes. Greenpeace called Koch Industries, the brothers’ multinational corporation involved in various industrial and manufacturing activities, a “kingpin of climate science denial,” for spending more than ExxonMobil to fight against climate change legislation between 2005 and 2008.

In 2004, David Koch co-founded the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which recently has been involved in financing Tea Party groups and organizing anti-Obama rallies across the U.S.

Doherty has said that Charles Koch’s goal in entering political activism in the 1970s was to tear government “out at the root.”

“Do I worry about what other causes donors give to? Not as a rule,” Levy said. “I’m concerned about how they interact with their educational and university grants.”

• • •

The Foundation has no say over which students are admitted to the Fellowship, Levy says. Levy picks the Fellows himself, based largely on “the number and range of high-level courses in political theory, political philosophy, jurisprudence, and related fields, and the grades in those courses.”

Levy, who is listed as a guest lecturer on the website of the Koch-funded, libertarian Institute for Humane Studies, declined to show The Daily examples of his grant applications to the Koch Foundation, citing McGill’s donor privacy rules.

In an interview, he said the application consists largely of telling the Foundation what books he plans to assign. In the past three years, Fellows have read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, and The Federalist Papers by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay. This year, students are concentrating on Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. Each book is a touchstone of liberalism.

Levy receives no money from the grant. He has been on sabbatical for four of the six semesters that the Fellowship has been in place at McGill. “This is teaching I’ve been doing in my spare time,” he said.

At the end of each year, Levy writes a report to the Foundation: “I say we met this many times, we successfully covered this many books, and for the students who are graduating, I say, here are the things that students are going on to do.”

The Foundation does not appear to be concerned with the Fellows’ ideological orientation, even if they are dramatically at odds with that of the libertarian Kochs. Mylène Freeman, one of the McGill students elected to Parliament as an NDP candidate in 2011, was a Fellow in the group’s first year at McGill. “I was happy and proud to include her accomplishment prominently in the year-end report I send to the Foundation of the impressive things our students go on to do,” Levy wrote in an email.

• • •

Last year, an employee of the Foundation visited McGill and sat in on one of the Fellowship’s discussions.

“Professor Levy mentioned beforehand, ‘just act the way you would normally act,’” Bleiberg said.

Still, when the employee – Stephen Sweet, Program Coordinator for Marketing and Recruiting at the Foundation – stood before the group and mentioned grants and internships that the Koch Foundation offered, some of the more left-wing Fellows bristled.

“At least one or two members asked questions that had to do with the ideology behind the group, or the principles tied up with it,” remembered Stethem.

“There were a good number of people last year who identified as part of the radical left,” Bleiberg said. “Someone tried to ask whether or not [the Koch Foundation was] open to employing people who really disagreed with them. I think he got a sort of non-answer to that.”

“[The Koch Foundation employee] was very directly challenged and from a radically different position. I don’t think the people who felt they had something to say to him tried to say it gently.”

Bleiberg said he saw this as evidence of the Fellowship’s academic freedom. After all, despite the testy exchange, McGill’s grant was renewed at the end of the year.

Levy says he intends to apply for the grant again this year.

The post Tea Party billionaire funding McGill fellowship appeared first on The McGill Daily.

If it sounds like something out of another world, it’s only partly so. In 1968, there was a student strike contagion going around. French students almost removed the government of Charles de Gaulle in May and June. Campuses across the U.S. roiled with protests against the Vietnam War. It did not seem strange for undergraduates to wield power.

In Quebec, the fever was as high as anywhere. 15 of 23 Quebec CEGEPs were on strike at some point that year – Rendez-Vous ‘68, it was called.

McGill students responded late and partially to what was happening in Quebec. This pattern, like so much else involved in the 1968 PSA strike – the rhetoric of radical and moderate, the tactics, the narrative arc  – will seem familiar to anyone who lived through last year’s student protests. The resemblance is often uncanny.

We compiled a history of the 45-year-old strike from newspaper archives, interviews with faculty and students, and footage from a 1970 National Film Board documentary called Occupation. The result will – we hope – provide perspective on  the events of last year, and on where we stand as students today.

Daily front page, October 4. Political Science was far from the only student association pushing democratization.

Arnold August, 1968 chairman of the PSA: “The late 1960s was ingrained in the minds of millions of young people in the world. We got a lot of inspiration from the United States, as well as Mexico, with the [Olympic] Games, where you had two Afro-Americans who won the Olympics and when they were given their medals they had their hands up [in the Black Panther salute]. These were the things that inspired us. Paris. The United States, where you had these massive demonstrations in front of the Democratic Convention, where hundreds of people were arrested. We were definitely conscious that we were part of the movement. It was in our blood at that time.”

September 27, 1968: The Daily reports that students are dissatisfied and are demanding that the Political Science department be democratized. They are seeking a “critical and socially relevant approach to political science.”

Sam  , McGill Political Science professor (retired 2005): “We had something called the Tripartite Commission on the nature of the university [between 1967 and 1970] – divided between administrators, faculty, and students. The Commission met for months and months and months. And what emerged from that was a recognition that students had a right to participate in university life at an important level – at a policy-making, a decision-making level.”

October 1, 1968: The PSA issues a three-page manifesto in The Daily. The manifesto calls for “change in political orientation of the University to one that is explicitly critical of the status quo.” Student Council member Harry Edel says PSA should “adopt the strategy and tactics of labour unions in negotiating.”

The Daily logo, stylish as ever. The paper also faced the same charges of left-wing bias as it does today. Plus ca change.

October 11, 1968: Political Science students meet with faculty for the first time and faculty agree to consider a motion to at least “partially democratize the Political Science department.”  Professor John Shingler suggests that student representation on committees would only add to the present bureaucracy.

October 18, 1968: Thus far, according to August, discussions with the department have not progressed. In a 164-6 vote, the PSA rejects the proposals on student participation made by the faculty. Later that week, three students make the rounds of Political Science classes, criticizing the PSA as a Marxist minority. The Daily reports that “in virtually every class, [the three students] were coldly received and their interpretation challenged.”

Harold Waller, McGill Political Science professor: “The Daily then, and probably now, was very biased in one direction. With the exception of 1970, when Charlie Krauthammer [now a neoconservative columnist for the Washington Post and Fox News contributor] was the editor, then it was a very sensible newspaper. So The Daily had an axe to grind, and they were totally in   of the students’ position and totally against our position. And therefore I don’t think the reporting was objective.”

August: “I remember one article in La Presse and one article in the Gazette – [the mainstream media] barely looked at it. They pretty much ignored it. The fact that the main media virtually ignored, while The McGill Daily supported it – I think that’s fine, that’s perfectly normal.”

November 1, 1968 PSA and faculty meet in an open meeting in the Leacock building. August says, “by reorganizing the department, along functional lines, the faculty has maintained a façade of democracy while making most decisions in secret.”

Waller: “The PSA was organized and led by what I later understood to be Marxist radicals. One of them was Arnold August, who might have been the head of it. Arnold later became very active in the Communist Party of Canada, Marxist-Leninist, ran for parliament on that ticket.” [August ran for federal parliament as a member of the Marxist-Leninist party in 1979 and 1980; and then for the Quebec National Assembly on the same ticket in 1994.]

Noumoff: “[August] had this huge beard at the time. And people with huge beards were looked on at the time as somehow demonic. But it was also part of the uniform of the period.”

The PSA votes overwhelmingly to strike in what seems to be the Shatner Ballroom.

August: “In 1968, I was trying to find my way around politically. And then I read some passages by Marx, and then by Lenin, and then it clicked…At that time, 1968, I was not affiliated with any political party. There was a Students for Democratic Society at McGill – [Marxist political science lecturer] Stanley Gray was one of the leaders of it – I was part of that movement. We were basically left-wing people, for sure. We were against U.S. aggression all over the world – we supported Vietnam, we supported Cuba against the United States, we didn’t like the capitalist system. It wasn’t as sharp as one would have expected, but we were in favour of a new type of society that would be more appropriate for the vast majority of people.”

November 4, 1968: The Daily deems division between faculty and students “irreconcilable.” Chairman of the Political Science department J. R. Mallory says “hiring is a professional matter,” and that no students should be involved in the process.

November 7, 1968: The stalemate continues. Professors Waller, Breecher, Jackson, and Mallory form a commission on student grievances. August feels that the four were unlikely to be sympathetic to students.

Waller: “The essential demand was that students have parity in all aspects of department decision-making. Which meant everything from curriculum to tenure decisions to hiring and so forth. And here I was, a young assistant professor, who had no power, and now the students want to take away half of the power. So I wasn’t sympathetic to that at all.

“I just finished grad school myself – I didn’t think I should be making decisions at the grad school where I was. I thought that would have been quite…presumptuous on my part. And I thought it was presumptuous on the part of the students. I thought the job of shaping the curriculum and deciding on standards and deciding who to hire, or who to continue or give tenure to or promote, were basically professional decisions and should be made by professionals.”

Secretaries fled the 4th floor of Leacock – students took to answering phones with “Political Science, occupied. May I help you?”

November 11, 1968: The Daily reports that 20 per cent of the Political Science faculty would support student parity in many aspects of departmental government. The other 80 per cent could not be expected to support anything more than the one-third representation on the curriculum committee and one-fourth on the “Section” committee, which had already been granted. PSA says faculty are offering too little, too slowly.

Noumoff: “I was in support of them throughout the entire process. And the reason is, I simply believe it. Students are not just pampered, transitory members of the community. They have a stake in what goes on, in what is taught, in how it’s taught, in what the balance is in the department. Students are part of the community, and they should be respected as such, because, indeed, they have things to say which can be valuable.”

November 21, 1968: Faculty holds separate meeting to discuss their response to student demands. Students send all-dressed pizza to closed faculty meeting – faculty accepts alldressed pizza.  Still, faculty insists “no compromise,” stating that student demands represent “beyond what has been conceded in comparable universities. They represent a radical innovation.”

Student prank or Daily in-joke? It’s not clear.

Waller: “I didn’t think giving them half the power over decision-making was appropriate, and certainly not to that group of students, who had an agenda which I didn’t agree with on substance. Their agenda was to promote a left-wing view of political science…and I certainly did not subscribe to Marxism. I felt there was a place in the department for teaching about Marxism. For example, Stan Gray was doing that. But…I thought that the question of what you have on your reading list and what you should teach was a matter of your professional judgment, and it’s an invasion of academic freedom when someone, whether it’s students or departments or deans, tell you what and how to teach.”

November 24, 1968: In the face of the faculty’s refusal to compromise, PSA votes 319–179 to take direct action. 150 Political Science students occupy fourth floor of Leacock building after meeting. One secretary fled, apparently intimidated by the students: “Students are occupying the building. I can’t take any more calls,” she said. Female PSA members began answering the phone: “Political Sciences, occupied. May I help you?”

A suspected “right-wing militant” tried to enter the  fourth floor of Leacock later in the day; occupiers threatened to throw him down the stairs unless he left. “He left,” The Daily wrote. Three Montreal police officers also came to Leacock to manage an abortive bomb scare. A schedule of the day’s ad hoc seminars published in The Daily includes “Guerilla Warfare” at 10 a.m., followed by “The Correct Handling of Authoritarian Professors” at 11 a.m.

Harold Waller, who still teaches at McGill, tried to hold a class during the strike. Picketers broke it up after a bitter shouting match. 

August: “We made sure everything was clean, in terms of the washroom, in terms of the food, and everything like that; we took care of our own cleanliness.

We couldn’t leave the place because we didn’t want to give it up to the administration. So like any occupation, there are the normal difficulties of sleeping there. We had to have a basic, certain number of people who would hold the fort during the night. So we had to organize shifts for sleeping over. Organize food and coffee for people there. We would leave at 8 or 9 at night, so the shift that was sleeping over there would be from 8 to 9 to about 7 or 8 in the morning. So it was a long shift – it was rough…people sleeping on the floor. I don’t think futons existed at the time – I think we based ourselves on old-fashioned sleeping bags…. Me personally, I wouldn’t say I slept more than three or four hours a night.

I would say the prevailing mood was excitement. Because even though many of us, including myself, I wasn’t sure if [the strike] would actually work. When the strike vote was majority in favour, it was festive, because we sort of felt liberated…It was a very liberating feeling: here we are, going against the tide, bucking the status quo on a very important issue.”

Noumoff: “At the time there was a lot of bile and a lot of anger on the part of the students.”

Waller: “A number of my students came to me and they said, “look, we don’t support this action, and the PSA does not have the right to impose a shutdown of classes on us. If they want to stay home, that’s their business – we want to have a class, we want you to teach us.” There were about ten students in the class out of fifty or sixty or whatever.

So I was walking toward the classroom, and they were lined up behind me, following me. And we came to the door of the classroom. And there was a guy there from the PSA who was supposedly keeping people out. And I just kept walking. And he stepped back and I walked into the room and my students came after me. And we sat down in a circle, because it was not conducive to giving a lecture, and we started talking about American politics. And he ran back to strike headquarters. You know, “Waller’s teaching his class, we gotta do something.” So the whole crew comes charging down, they came barging into the classroom, with the [NFB] cameraman in tow, grinding away. They said “don’t you know that you’re not allowed to teach your class.” And I said “you can’t tell me not to teach my class. My students want to learn, I want to teach, that’s our business.” And then [PSA members] turned on the students, they put on the pressure, you know, “the collectivity has decided no classes, you can’t break the discipline of the collectivity.” Eventually they persuaded the students to leave. But they were putting very heavy pressure on them, which I would consider coercion. They harangued them, they browbeat them – I don’t think they used physical force, but there was an implicit threat of physical violence I would say. Eventually the students decided they weren’t going to turf it out.”

November 25, 1968: Faculty agree to cancel all classes. PSA gains support from other student groups and associations. Some anti-strike students try to attend class.

Students slept in sleeping bags on the floor of Leacock.

August: “You had two positions there. One was the students who wanted to go back to school. They said, “I want my education, I want to go to school, I want to take my class.” While the other side, including a person who voted against the strike, we all said the decision was made in a general assembly of the PSA – the PSA voted several times in favour of the strike, and that mandate has to be respected…Now, the individual students, the I-want-my-education types, in the spring 2012, as in the PSA strike 45 years ago…they were saying je, me, moi: me, myself, and I. It’s a very profound thing: whether you see society from the point of view of your own individual interests, or you see yourself as part of a society, as part of a movement that wants to improve the society. And that’s what hit me when I watched that movie 45 years later.”

November 27, 1968: Strike continues.

August: “[I said]: ‘No one’s gonna flunk: we’ll do our own papers, we’ll correct our own papers, our own exams.’ I was reacting to the faculty saying just before that, “If this thing goes on, you’re going to lose your session, and you’re going to lose everything.” When I said no one’s gonna flunk, if I remember correctly, there was a pretty strong round of applause. I think that was the main psychological, political obstacle that we overcame right at that moment, when we said, “No way, they’re not going to intimidate us into giving in.” That was the turning point.”

November 28, 1968: Professor John Shingler declares unequivocal support for the strike. “There comes a time,” he said, “when those who have substantial positions of authority in institutions yield only under pressure of political demands.”

August: “[Shingler] contacted us. He said, “Look, I agree with you, I’d like to explain my position at the PSA,” and we said sure. And that’s exactly what he did.”

Noumoff: “John Shingler had been president of the white South African union of students in South Africa. So he had been a student activist himself previously. He may have been tormented by it for a while, but I think he saw the historic writing was on the wall, and that it made sense to accommodate it.”

John Shingler, once anti-strike, dramatically announced his support for students at a PSA meeting on the fourth floor of Leacock. 

December 2, 1968: After three days without any negotiation, the occupation is one week old. The first round of student-faculty negotiations begin; they are filmed on CCTV for students to watch in the Adams auditorium. PSA demands one-third representation on departmental committees.

Harry Cowen, a student negotiator, calls the department “politically monolithic.”

“The arguments of the faculty are bankrupt and intellectually bankrupt,” said August. “Professor Nayar, your field is very important – political development – it encompasses a lot of people in the third world, and we know very well there are a lot of positions in the third world who are not of the orientation you have and the orientation you have in your reading list.”

Breecher denounced the students’ interrogation of professors’ political beliefs. “Those of us who have had the pleasure of living through the McCarthy era recall vividly the kind of television display in which individuals in universities were harangued but precisely for the opposite reason.”

August: “I asked the professors there, when we had that closed-circuit exchange, how come there’s no literature by Lenin in any of the books, when it could be interesting for students to hear what Lenin had to say about capitalism and imperialism. I was proud of myself when I saw that.”

Students watching PSA-faculty debate in what looks like the Adams auditorium. 

December 3, 1968: Round two of CCTV negotiations; faculty refuses to concede regarding hiring and firing. Breecher: “Is a first year medical student the equal of a doctor?” Cowen quotes T.S. Eliot and John Lennon.

Professor Nayar speaks against the idea of racially specific teachers for certain topics: “[Mr. Cowen] says if we’re going to talk about black power, we should get a black person to come talk to us. If somehow blood is necessary for the communication of ideas, if that is so, none of the people in our department, except perhaps for myself or Professor Mallory who teaches Canada, and I who teach Asian politics, would be qualified to teach here. Mr. Noumoff wouldn’t teach his East Asian group – you should get a Chinese to come and teach it that. Or if it goes further, with Mao’s philosophy, somebody from Hunan.”

Allan Stanovici (PSA exec): “We’re all pretty well white, middle-class people, all within a certain mould, we’re all individuals within this mould – it’s very free and egalitarian. But it’s all within a certain context: certain people will come from outside this mold and we see very quickly how quick the reaction forms, how quick the shell closes.”

August: “I would say that the professor who most antagonized the students was Breecher – Professor Breecher, Michael Breecher. He was quite arrogant and he was obviously trying to divide us. Harry Edel said he’s trying to divide us and we have to be careful.”

Left: Baldev Nayar, professor of Indian politics. Right: Arnold August, the Leninist PSA chairman. Nayar would become August’s Master’s supervisor. 

December 4, 1968: Students accept one third representation on curriculum and section committees, less than the parity they sought but a big improvement over the lack of representation they had before.

August: “[There] was jubilation, because it was rough, and everyone was wondering, how long can we keep it up? We played their bluff; we stuck to our position that we want to be on the committee. It’s quite possible that if we did not win it, the strike might have disintegrated. It’s quite possible.”

December 5, 1968: PSA votes to end strike after ten days – but not before it had made clear that its drive for parity is far from over. Strike officially ends at 2 p.m.

At the time, August said, “Victory for PSA. A turning point in the student movement at McGill.”

“Victory in that we weren’t totally defeated,” said Harry Edel.

August: “It wasn’t a celebratory party with beer or anything like that. It was handshakes, and hugging each other – “we won” and “classes are starting again.” It was relief that we won. If we wouldn’t have won, and been forced to go back to classes without that, it would have been very depressing. People were really tired – we hadn’t slept much, we had been occupying that place for a while. So we hugged, we were happy and all that, then people went home to try and recuperate physically.”

Noumoff: “It was a final vote within the Political Science faculty, with one vote against it, when it finally was resolved. And it was resolved primarily because one of the members of the department, who at that point was Associate Dean of the faculty, a man by the name of Saul Frankl – who was a labour negotiator – he came up with an argument that seemed to echo with many of the more conservative colleagues who didn’t want any change at all. Saul said, “Look, you know how bureaucracies work, and you know how systems work. We all know this as political scientists. Well, I can assure you, when we let the students in, they’ll get tired, they’ll get bureaucratized, they’ll be sucked in to the system, and they really won’t be too much of a threat.” And that seemed to work with what I would call the recalcitrant members of the department…While I didn’t welcome what Saul Frankl said, I believed he was right, as a lot of the history since then would demonstrate.”

Students vowed to keep fighting for parity as they accepted a compromise. In fact, student representation in Political Science remains largely unchanged from the settlement of 1968. 

Before they conceded, Harry Cowen delivered a speech to members of the PSA: “Once upon a time we would have been prepared to sit, like Estragon and Vladimir, on the cold moors of Leacock, waiting for Godot, listening in hope to the messenger who tells us that Godot will be coming not today, but tomorrow. But we are no Vladimir, we are no Estragon. We know that Godot never comes of his own accord, if at all.”

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Correction appended February 10, 2013

The most technically accurate and also the least relevant thing you can say about Arthur Porter is that he’s a physician, a radiation oncologist who specializes in prostate cancer. This tells you as much about the true nature of his trade as saying T.S. Eliot was a bank clerk.

From 2004 to 2011 Porter was the CEO of the McGill University Health Center (MUHC), but from that gig flowed many tributaries. He was also a member of the Air Canada board, one-time head of the civilian board that oversees Canada’s spies (expect the word “board” to come up a lot when Porter is in the conversation), ambassador plenipotentiary for the government of his native Sierra Leone, and advisor to that nation’s president. He attended garden parties with Stephen Harper. Like a boss.

In photo ops from his days at the MUHC, he was sometimes trailed by a wake of lab-coated doctors, or seen at the construction site in a hard hat. He always wore a bowtie. His smile was cherubic. These were his cloak and his dagger.

What we now know about Porter’s tenure as the CEO of the McGill hospital complex is that it was a nightmare. MUHC has a projected $115-million deficit. It paid out 900,000 hours of dubious overtime since 2009. Its management was so hilariously bad that the province has put it one step shy of receivership. It isn’t yet clear how much of this was directly Porter’s fault, but he was in charge of the place at the time, so the likelihood of the amount being zero is low.

The incompetence at MUHC during the Porter era was peppered with some alleged criminality. Two former top executives at SNC-Lavalin – the engineering and construction group that is currently building the MUHC super hospital in N.D.G. – were charged with fraud in November. The execs allegedly authorized $22.5 million in “irregular” payments related to getting the contract for a $1.3-billion hospital. Fittingly, one of these executives was already locked up in a Swiss jail for another corruption charge and couldn’t be arrested.

The fraud charge was the worst of it, until the Globe and Mail reported that the company to which SNC paid those $22.5 million was called Sierra Asset Management Inc., a company that seems not to have existed and whose address was the same as a colonnaded Swiss bank in the Bahamas painted a lemon meringue colour and flanked by palm trees. The bank was run by a guy called Hermann-Josef Hermanns. And, oh yeah, the Hermanns guy was a business associate of Porter’s.

This is the kind of slapstick-level eighty-car pileup of fraudulence that makes it so tempting to laugh at Arthur Porter. There’s always another out-of-control Buick veering its way toward the scene of the crash.

For example, a guy named Ari Ben-Menashe had his Montreal home burnt down about a month ago. In this city of firebombs, that is significant.

This is the same Ari Ben-Menashe who cut a deal with Porter in 2010 to procure $120 million from the Russian government for development work in Sierra Leone. The National Post’s revelation of the deal triggered Porter’s resignation from the MUHC and the Canadian civilian spy board mentioned above – because Ben-Menashe used to be an arms dealer and an Israeli spy! I mean, Jesus.

* * *

Porter’s life is like something out of a Bond movie. His family owns a diamond mine in Sierra Leone, where he seems to have holed up when McGill came looking for the over $300,000 he owed them. In 2008, the University gave Porter a $500,000 loan at 1 per cent interest to help him buy a penthouse condo on Doctor Penfield. Now McGill is suing him for the money he didn’t pay back. To top it off, the National Bank might seize the condo which the loan helped him buy because – wait for it – Porter sold the condo without paying back $800,000 worth of his mortgage. The guy has a lot of pots on the stove, scandal-wise.

Consider his departure from Detroit, where he was also in charge of a series of hospitals until 2004.

According to a great investigation by the Globe and Mail – to whose reporting, along with that of the Montreal Gazette, I’m deeply indebted – he was considered pretty good at this job for a while in part because he could relate to Detroit’s black community. Arthur Porter relating to any community whose members don’t winter in Aspen is just a fantastical notion. He used to keep photos of himself with George H.W. Bush and Dick Cheney in his office and calls himself a Republican. He talks like Salman Rushdie, and his accent is Oxbridge mahogany (he attended Cambridge med school) with a slightly Sierra Leonine timbre. He says ‘one’ instead of ‘you,’ as in ‘when one is on a private sector board, the goals are much clearer.’ And then there’s his penchant for saying things like, “I look black but I speak white,” which people in Detroit and Montreal remember as something of a Porter catchphrase, according to the Globe.

When he couldn’t get the Detroit Medical Center’s finances under control – even after reducing its staff from 20,000 to 13,000 – he convinced the state of Michigan to pump $50 million into the hospitals. Then, as board members started resigning because his myriad of business interests was making him unreliable, Porter skipped town and took the MUHC job. Left those suckers holding the bag, hard. Porter was pursued up the St. Lawrence by at least two lawsuits for not paying back loans or making good on debts. Neither held up. Charges don’t stick to dude, he’s Teflon.

The committee that picked Porter didn’t necessarily know about the lawsuits, but they seemed to like his freewheeling, cowboy reputation. According to the Globe, “They were in a desperate hunt for a decisive leader with teeth – someone who could cut through the morass of the Quebec bureaucracy and finally build Montreal’s new superhospital, which had been nothing more than a discussion for six years. And here was Dr. Porter, a man with a vocal distaste for red tape and the ideological bona fides to prove it.”

Well, they got what they wished for. Porter didn’t cut through Quebec’s red tape so much as try to wish it away. And this is where you start realizing that there’s something weirdly modern about this otherwise totally vintage charlatan.

There are clues in a 2010 YouTube clip, when McGill management professor Karl Moore sat Porter down for an interview. AP is wearing a pinstripe suit for the occasion, and his black bowtie has red polkadots – it’s like he’s wearing a Halloween costume of a Prohibition-era mobster. But when he starts talking, he sounds more like a seminarian at Davos (the annual meeting in Switzerland where the rich get together and convince themselves anew that capitalism is great).

“I think actually, in many ways, some of the public sector boards can still learn from the private sector,” Porter says. “Some of the inefficiencies, or perhaps diffuseness, you see in public sector boards is because there isn’t a single focus.”

That exaltation of the private sector, that thirst for efficiency, isn’t exactly typical of James Bond’s antagonist. In the Moore interview, Porter’s spy movie aesthetics are hitched to a nerdy technocratic blandness.

That might be the secret of Arthur Porter, his secret mundanity. In important ways, he played by the rules: he fired workers to cut costs, he dodged bureaucracy, he networked. Most importantly, he passed the buck.

Consider what was happening with mortgages before the 2008 financial crisis: loans being given to people who patently couldn’t afford them; the selling of that debt to banks; the bundling of that unlikely-to-be-repaid debt with less terrible debt by the banks; and the reselling of the bundle to other banks. Lenders pulled the pin out of a grenade, then passed the grenade down the line to Wall Street bankers, who painted it gold and passed it on to another bank, figuring the next guy in line would mistake it for a Fabergé egg, or at least be busy inspecting it when the thing blew up.

In spirit, how was this different from l’Affaire Porter? Large corporations were left in ruin by reckless mismanagement, with the mismanagers remaining well-ensconced in Aspen and Davos and Cabo? This is a world that rewards madcap risk-takers, empowers them, gives them public money to gamble with and pocket. Seen against that backdrop, Porter seems kind of normal.

This was not some garden variety Quebec corruption story. It was too complicated, too 2.0. As my Quebecois uncle Jean-Paul once said to me, “The Mafia are good managers.” Consider that Laval, one of the province’s most luridly corrupt jurisdictions, had the province’s highest Standard & Poor’s credit rating in 2012 – a gentleman’s “AA- with a positive outlook.” There’s something dowdily bureaucratic about the Mafia – if they use violence to enforce their rules, at least they have rules. Compared to them, Arthur Porter is a credit default swap vanishing into air.

* * *

Except Arthur Porter didn’t vanish. There’s a famous Marxist geographer named David Harvey – he teaches at the City University of New York – who says, “Capitalism doesn’t solve its problems, it just moves them around geographically.” I don’t know if that’s true – but if it is, Arthur Porter is a case in point.

After resigning from the MUHC in late 2011, Porter took up residence in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas. He runs a private cancer clinic there, and lives in a gated community away from the mess and scrutiny of public hospitals and public life, a late capitalist dream.

In April, he hopped a couple of islands south to Antigua, for the groundbreaking of a new cancer clinic. Porter was chairman of the clinic’s board.

In a YouTube video of the event that seems to have been taken down, Porter is wearing a cream suit, a white shirt, and a black bowtie. He is standing in the shade of a canopy on what seems to be a searingly sunny day in St. John’s, the capital. He’s in top form, making little jokes – “I, proud holder of an Antiguan-Barbadan medical license,” he says with a coy smile, as if to say, ‘what country’s medical license don’t I have?’ – speaking expansively and sentimentally when the moment calls for it.

“You know, there are not many things that move me,” he says at one point, “but this is one of the things that really does.”

He makes promises about the hospital and flatters the small island nation’s sense of importance. He says the clinic will be of the same quality you get “in South Florida, or Minnesota.”

“What goes inside,” he says, “has to be of superb, international quality.”

“International” – a word that, when Porter says it, evokes drawers full of passports, Swiss banks on little islands, the ethereal, ocean-jumping mystery of money.

Also, evaded culpability. The Cancer Center of the Eastern Caribbean, as it is called, was supposed to be completed by the end of 2012. As of January 10, construction hadn’t begun. On that day, the Antigua Observer newspaper wrote that it had received a letter from Porter saying construction would begin soon – only he couldn’t say exactly when. Back in October, a board member named Cotrille George said the hospital was being assembled overseas, and would be put together in no time once the parts reached Antigua.

The Observer’s coverage of the whole thing has this wounded tone – a sort of ‘But you promised!’ incredulity.

Don’t worry, Antigua. We’ve been there. It sucks for a while, but then you learn lessons about the nature of global capital.

 * * *

On January 9, 2013, probably around the time he was sending his epistle to Antigua, Porter announced that he has cancer. It is inoperable lung cancer. He will have to undergo chemotherapy in the Bahamas.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been, but I was moved when I learned this. Especially after watching video footage of him since the diagnosis. His charm has been pernicious, it has been his weapon, but it humanizes him when you see it in action. On January 14, CBC broadcast an interview with Porter from his clinic in Nassau. As Porter shakes hands with the CBC reporter, Terrence McKenna, you see McKenna kind of throw his head back, laughing at some witticism, a little disarmed.

Porter is defiant. He denies having taken a cut from those unaccountable $22.5 million SNC-Lavalin funneled through the shell company that shares an address with his associate’s lemon meringue Bahamian bank. He denies knowing anything about the payment.

He stands by his characterization of the press investigation as a “witch hunt”: “It just seemed as if I was responsible for the snowfall in Montreal,” he says, very dryly, with a dim twinkle in his eye.

As for the cancer, he’s warlike in outlook, rightly. “Prepared like any other battle that you fight – go into it with the idea to win. That’s the way I always go.” Quite beautiful, the way he puts it. Like a pro athlete’s postgame press conference written in the style of the King James Bible.

But Porter looks reduced, there is no question. He is not wearing a coat or bowtie, literally the first time that this has been the case in maybe two dozen photos and videos I have seen of him. Instead, he’s dressed in a blue pinstripe shirt, unbuttoned several holes, on account of the heat I guess. His voice is thinner and higher than usual. He occasionally holds his head in his right hand, in world-weary fashion. He looks thinner in the face, though there’s still that lordly paunch beneath the shirt.

Finally, what the CBC says about his cancer is the most telling: that it is “self-diagnosed.” This is so Porter. Lungs, where the cancer is, are not in the man’s wheelhouse: he’s a prostate guy. But he winged it, and he prevailed. There’s the big, weighty question handled not with the slow-moving caution of bureaucrats and experts, but with the freestyle abandon of his own resourceful mind. It’s Gordon Gekko as oncologist.

The whole Porter story reminds me of the opening paragraph of Saul Bellow’s best novel, The Adventures of Augie March. The paragraph goes like this:

“I am an American, Chicago-born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.”

Could have been written by Porter himself, minus the Chicago part. And also minus the skepticism about fate-dodging. Because Porter and his ilk – the disdainers of bureaucracy, the hosanna-singers to efficiency, those who have made our world all the more precarious — will always try to toy with the acoustics, so we can’t hear what they’re doing. They will always glove the knuckle, so as not to leave prints. And often we will let them get away with it, and we will praise them for the quality of the kid.

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Between 1998 and 2009, administrative salaries leapt from $129 million to $328 million, a 154 per cent increase. Details of the report, written by the Fédération québécoise des professeures et professeurs d’université (FQPPU), were published in Le Devoir on January 19.

The revelation comes at a time when administrators have been decrying the underfunding of their schools. Two weeks ago, the Conférence des recteurs et des principaux des universities du Québec (CREPUQ) announced that the Quebec university system faced an $850-million shortfall relative to other provinces.

The sometimes lavish paychecks of top administrators drew fire during last year’s student strike as symbols of waste at a time when the government and administrators were asking students to pay more. As of 2008-2009, the last year for which accurate figures are available, 43 Quebec university administrators made over $200,000 a year, including 13 at McGill.

In 2011, McGill Principal Heather Munroe-Blum’s salary stood at $369,250, with perks totalling upwards of $200,000, making her the best-paid administrator in Quebec.

But Michel Umbriaco, one of the study’s authors and professor of university administration at TELUQ, a correspondence university, says it isn’t extravagant salaries that are breaking the bank, but swollen administrative staffs. He notes that the average Quebec administrator is making just 4 or 5 per cent more now than in the late nineties, and even less in the Université de Québec (UQ) system, where managerial salaries are negotiated with the government.

“If the principals say they’re like the mayor of New York and their salary is zero point zero, that won’t change anything,” Umbriaco said in a phone interview with The Daily, referring to billionaire New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s refusal to accept his mayoral paycheck.

Rather, it is what Umbriaco calls “a new corporate class” of mid-level administrators that accounts for most of the rise. Often coming from management backgrounds outside of the university, rather than from within the faculty ranks, this new crop of administrators is not only responding to more unwieldy government requirements and bigger, more complicated schools, but in some respects “manag[ing] themselves,” Umbriaco said.

“Is it because there are more tasks to do? Our contention is that yes, the government asks them to do more reporting,” Umbriaco said. “But we don’t think they need more managers to do that.”

The FQPPU thinks an external council should handle the question of administrative salaries, and recommend to the government that a limit be imposed on them. “We don’t mind that administrators make more than junior professors, but when it’s six or five times more, that’s a problem,” he told The Daily.

The McGill administration begs to differ. Olivier Marcil, vice-principal (External Relations), noted that Quebec universities are required to submit reams of paper work to the provincial government, such as sustainability plans, financial audits, and infrastructure plans, that require a huge staff.

“The government asks for more and more accountability, and that’s okay,” he said in a phone interview with The Daily. “But it adds layers, and we haven’t streamlined these things.”

“Universities in 2013 are much more complicated than in 1997,” he added. “We have IT, we’re on the world stage, we have much more research, and there are the environmental issues.”

As it stands, the proportion of salary dollars that Quebec universities spend on non-academic staff – administrators, but also support staff – is 44.27 per cent, almost exactly the Canadian average.

Marcil also defended higher salaries for individual administrators, saying they are needed to lure top talent to Quebec. If the provincial government imposed limits on administrative salaries, he said, Quebec schools would not be able to compete with elite universities in Canada and around the world.

“It’s like you’re telling me the Montreal Canadians cannot pay $8 million for Sidney Crosby. Well, they won’t get Crosby. And they won’t be able to compete in that league,” he said.
Asked what would happen to McGill if the government determined administrator salaries, as it does for the UQ system, Marcil was emphatic.

“That’s gonna kill McGill as we know it,” he said. “Literally.”

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Between 1998 and 2009, there was a 162 per cent increase in funding for capital projects – new buildings, renovations, equipment, and books, mostly – that universities siphoned off from other parts of their budgets, such as faculty salaries and student services, the report says. That amounts to $167 million.

The 426-page report, authored by the Fédération québécoise des professeures et professeurs d’université (FQPPU), comes just a month after McGill and other schools publicly decried the provincial government’s $124-million cut to university funding, which administrators say will hinder core functions like teaching and research.

While the FQPPU oppose the cuts too, their report is the latest salvo in a fight over how Quebec universities spend their money. Administrators recently claimed the province’s universities are underfunded by $850 million, mostly due to low tuition, while student and faculty groups say schools have enough money but are spending too much on unnecessary building projects.

FQPPU President Max Roy concedes that there are good reasons for increased spending on university infrastructure. “The government isn’t giving enough money for capital expenses,” he said in French during a phone interview with The Daily.

Between 1998 and 2009, enrolment in Quebec universities jumped 23.8 per cent, forcing schools to make room for students by buying up real estate. IT costs have also skyrocketed over the past decade.

But Roy says he doesn’t trust universities to determine which infrastructure projects are most important. “All administrations are going to say that projects are prioritized and urgent,” he said.

In their report, the FQPPU calls for the creation of a university council to review spending choices and make recommendations to the provincial government. “We’re not saying that administrators are acting in bad faith,” Roy said. “But we’re saying if they’re acting in good faith, they’ll accept greater transparency around their decision-making.”

The Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ) went further last week, calling for a freeze on university construction until an external review of the schools’ finances is done.

McGill, the eye of the storm

No one in the McGill administration was prepared to comment on the report by press time.

McGill alone accounts for 22 per cent of Quebec universities’ infrastructure expenditures, largely thanks to its huge medical faculty. Indeed, of the 18 universities studied in the report, the four with medical faculties – Laval, Sherbrooke, Université de Montreal, and McGill – account for $3.6 billion of the $6.1 billion in capital expenses across the system.

The abundance of old buildings on campus makes maintenance expensive, too. 33 per cent of McGill’s total space is in buildings erected before 1940, against 5 per cent for the other Quebec universities. In its most recent budget, McGill estimated that it has at least $647 million in “urgent” deferred maintenance work.

Roy says he wants proof. “They have to prove it – they have to put it on paper,” he said. “There is a major transparency problem. We think there are projects that are not justified, but we can’t tell which ones.”

FEUQ President Martine Desjardins attended a roundtable meeting on higher education with McGill Principal Heather Munroe-Blum last week, and said Munroe-Blum bristled at calls for oversight on university spending. “She kept saying, ‘Just keep giving us money and we’ll just decide how we spend it’,” Desjardins said in a phone interview.

This fiscal year, McGill plans to spend $46.7 million on construction and renovation, out of a $717.4- million budget.

In competition for students, winners unclear

The FQPPU report also calls for less competition between universities over scarce provincial funding, much of which comes on a per-student basis.

Desjardins, who agrees with FQPPU’s assessment, believes that the roughly $7,300 subsidy Quebec universities receive per full-time student is driving schools to misspend money on buildings and promotional campaigns. “If you have more and more students inside your buildings, the government is giving you more and more money. This is why we see this competition,” she said.

“We think it’s a good thing to have competition. It makes sure the quality of the universities is high enough. But it’s going to another level. We’re having a lot of expenses for publicity and construction that we don’t need.”

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The dispute centered on the research of retired McGill professor J. Corbett MacDonald, conducted with nearly a million dollars from the asbestos industry, about the health effects of asbestos extraction in Quebec. A CBC documentary last year suggested that MacDonald tailored his results to suit industry interests. In a landmark paper published in 1998 after decades of research, MacDonald concluded that the kind of asbestos primarily mined in Quebec – chrysotile – was “innocuous” at certain exposure levels.

Under the chandeliers of the Faculty Club’s Gold Room, Brown University associate professor David Egilman called on McGill to retract MacDonald’s paper. Egilman, who booked the room himself, called MacDonald’s paper “garbage” and said it used outdated measurement methods and relied on manipulated data.

Egilman also objected to the fact that data on the location of mines containing differing levels of tremolite – a form of asbestos universally recognized to cause cancer of the lung lining – in the Thetford Mines area has not been made public. MacDonald’s conclusions about chrysotile hinge on the existence of these high- and low-density tremolite mines.
Egilman has been attacking McGill’s asbestos research for over a decade; in 2003 he wrote a long study, “Exposing the ‘Myth’ of ABC, ‘Anything But Chrysotile’: A critique of the Canadian asbestos mining industry and McGill University chrysotile studies.”

Egilman noted that MacDonald’s paper is being used by the asbestos industry in Brazil and Canada to downplay the health effects of chrysotile exposure.

“I’m not here because I care that he cheated on his research. I’m here because the research is being used in a way that is counterproductive from a health perspective,” Egilman said. “If McGill withdraws the paper, it’s over. It’s over.”

The Harper government has cited MacDonald’s research to oppose the inclusion of chrysotile in the Rotterdam Convention, the UN’s treaty on dangerous substances. The government abandoned the position last September.

Based on MacDonald’s research, the official position of the Brazilian government has long been that the controlled use of chrysotile is safe.

Last semester, an internal investigation conducted by McGill’s own Research Integrity Officer Abraham Fuks cleared MacDonald of any research misconduct. Egilman has called the review “a shameful cover-up.”

During his presentation, Egilman referred to Fuks as Inspector Fox and included a cartoon in his slideshow of a henhouse guarded by a grinning fox.
“Fuks, by the way, is German for Fox,” Egilman said.

“I extremely resent that,” said Eduardo Franco, Interim Chair of Oncolgy at McGill, interrupting. “Dr. Fuks is one of the most distinguished scientists we have at McGill. You could have made your point without that.”

“I could have, but it’s funny,” said Egilman.

Wayne Wood, an Occupational Health lecturer at McGill, also called Egilman’s presentation “flawed” and “dishonest” in an emotional exchange during the question period. He said Egilman should not have attributed the view that chrysotile was “safe” to MacDonald, as MacDonald did not use the word himself.

Egilman’s talk was in response to a lecture earlier that afternoon by Bruce Case, an asbestos researcher at McGill currently on sabbatical. A long time colleague and backer of MacDonald, Case defended the reputations of several asbestos researchers he feels have been unfairly maligned, MacDonald among them. Case called on the audience to “remember them as the not-always-perfect heroes they are” for pioneering the study of asbestos’s health effects.

At the end of Case’s presentation, held at Purvis Hall, Egilman stood up at the back of the room and invited the audience to his talk.

Egilman and Case have a long history of sparring over asbestos research. In 2005, while Case gave a deposition in Dallas, Texas as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in a case about chrysotile exposure – arguing that chrysotile had not been proven to cause mesothelioma, a cancer usually associated with asbestos exposure – Egilman entered the courtroom wearing a “flamboyant” orange t-shirt bearing a moose and a McGill “M,” according to court documents. One of the defendants’ lawyers accused Egilman of trying to “provoke” Case.
In last year’s CBC documentary about McGill’s asbestos studies, Case said, “I wouldn’t give Dr. Egilman the time of day…because he’s not an honourable person.”

Six scientists who signed a letter to McGill in December requesting that Egilman be invited to speak alongside Case cited Case’s attacks in the CBC documentary as a reason for their “concerns” with the McGill scientist’s lecture.

Egilman called on the press to weigh his claims against those of MacDonald’s defenders, such as Case and Fuks. “One of us is an asshole,” he said.

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McGill doesn’t have a journalism school, and that’s fine. J-schools are kind of a scam. As most journalists will tell you, the best way to learn journalism is on the fly. And that’s exactly what CKUT lets students and community members do. The dozens of students who volunteer, intern, and work-study at the station every year are getting invaluable hands-on experience, doing interviews, editing audio, and doing live, on-air shows. It’s trial by fire, and it works.

The list of CKUT alumni who have landed high-profile media jobs is a little ridiculous. Adrian Harewood studied Political Science at McGill, but I’ll bet you it wasn’t his grasp of politics or whatever that landed him his current gig anchoring the late-night news at CBC-TV in Ottawa. David Blair, meanwhile, hosted and produced a show at CKUT when he was a McGill student and now does the business segment of the hugely popular Daybreak program on CBC Radio. Stuart Greer was news director and now works in the UK for Global TV. Claire Boucher was an intern and is now FUCKING GRIMES. The list goes on.

The thing is, there is no better journalism training than student media. Nor is there a more cost-effective way of learning a profession. Because it doesn’t need TAs, classrooms, or professors – CKUT only employ five full-time staff – the station is run on a pittance. If you gathered up every penny that CKUT made through student fees last year, you could almost pay two professors their minimum salary, though not quite. To put that in perspective, there are twelve full professors on payroll in the History department, along with eighteen associate profs. And as a History major, I can tell you, most of the students they’re teaching are not flipping their degrees into well-remunerated jobs.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the CKUT office, and the place is held together with spit and glue. Apart from some equipment, without which you could not have a radio station, the place is far more down-at-heel than any other building I’ve seen at McGill. These people are not going on junkets, or buying $10 million microscopes. They’re making student dollars stretch.

And, while CKUT happens to be a very good radio station, it wouldn’t really matter if it were a mediocre one. It’s school: people are learning as they go. If you want to criticize the quality of their programming, show me a couple of papers or lab reports you wrote in first year, and then get back to me.

And, while CKUT happens not to be the exclusive preserve of frothy-mouthed radicals – most of the station’s content is music – it wouldn’t matter if it were. Lots of faculties contain radical professors and students. That’s no reason to starve them of funding.

And maybe you would opt-out of all those radical faculties if you could. Great news! You can still opt-out of CKUT. Voting ‘yes’ in this referendum won’t change that. (Though opting-out is a nasty thing to do.) All it does is allow the rest of us to give an extra couple dollars to support McGill’s incredibly cheap, improbably great, de facto journalism school. If you don’t like that, you don’t like higher education.

Eric Andrew-Gee is a U4 History student and former Daily News and Features editor. He can be reached at eric.andrew.gee@gmail.com.

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Case, a professor in McGill’s Department of Pathology and a leading asbestos researcher, did not say whether he was considering legal action against the CBC.

Case was interviewed about his former colleague, J. Corbett McDonald, who received over a million dollars from an asbestos trade group to conduct research in the sixties and seventies. The documentary spurred McGill to launch a preliminary review of McDonald’s research last month.

In an interview with The Daily, Case accused the CBC of “deliberate misrepresentation and bias.”

“And, believe me, there will be consequences,” he said.

In the documentary, titled “Fatal Deception”, Case appears to give evasive answers in defending McDonald’s record, as well as his own.

Terence McKenna, the CBC reporter, asked Case, “Is it true that your studies have been funded in part by the asbestos industry?”

Case replies, “My personal studies have never been funded by the asbestos industry – not one penny.”

A screen-shot of an academic paper then appears on screen, bearing Case’s name, and a footnote acknowledging funding from the JM Asbestos Company.

Case maintains, however, that the CBC misrepresented his role in the study, saying the paper in question was not one of his “personal studies,” but a student’s work, to which he had contributed research.

In a written response, McKenna and Gil Scochat, the documentary’s producer, said, “There was no bias or misrepresentation…deliberate or otherwise.”

They added that Case claimed the study as his own in a May 2005 court deposition.

In an interview, Case also stated that the CBC had truncated his answer to a request by McKenna to see the raw data from a study Case and McDonald conducted together. The study suggested that certain asbestos mines in the Thetford-Mines area were less contaminated with “tremolite” asbestos, and thus less prone to giving workers mesothelioma, or cancer of the lining of the lung.

In the documentary, McKenna asks of the data, “Will you give it to us?”

Case replies, “No, I won’t give it to you.”

In an interview with The Daily, Case said his full answer was, “‘I love the CBC – I watch the National every night including Saturday and Sunday, but the CBC is not a scientific agency, and therefore I don’t share scientific data with the CBC.’”

Schochat declined to provide The Daily with an unedited tape of the original interview, citing a CBC policy against doing so.

But in their written statement, Schochat and McKenna wrote, “We did not include that portion of Dr. Case’s answer because his testimonial of love for the CBC was irrelevant to the matter under discussion.”

“They edited and distorted my response,” said Case. “And, again, there will be consequences.”

While he declined to say what kind of consequences, Case’s personal website – which features the tagline: “Nobody knows the trouble I seen…” – linked to a letter by the University of Toronto scientist Murray M. Finkelstein calling the CBC documentary “slanderous.”

The post Case vows “consequences” for CBC appeared first on The McGill Daily.

1968: WIN

GOALS

Following the opening of the first CEGEPs in the fall of 1967, Rendez-vous ’68, as the movement was called, was more ambitious than any strike since:

• Abolition of tuition fees.
• Expanded university facilities: 4000 students were denied admission to university in 1968 due to lack of space.
• Greater student control of university and CEGEP governance.

HOW IT WENT DOWN

• College Lionel Groulx was the first school to go on strike.
• 15 of the 23 CEGEPs eventually joined them.
• Soon after, students occupied the now-defunct Écoles des beaux arts, which became a major counter-cultural hub.
• The strike lasted for a month.

RESULTS

• The government didn’t formally concede it at the time, but UQAM opened in September 1969, marking the beginning of the Université de Québec system.
• Mandatory class attendance was abolished at CEGEPs, establishing students’ right to strike.

Although in retrospect the strike may look like an enormous success, at the time more radical students were disappointed that tuition wasn’t made free, and that wholesale governance reform wasn’t undertaken. “Paradoxically, members of the student movement saw it as a defeat,” said Benôit Lacoursière, author of Le mouvement étudiant au Québec de 1983 à 2006, in an interview.

1974: LOSS

GOALS

• More investment in loans and bursaries.
• Elimination of the “independence” clause, which tied the amount a student could receive in aid to their parents’ income, unless the student had completed a first degree, had worked for two years, or was married. (In the early eighties, student groups even mounted a campaign to get their members to marry so they could qualify for greater student aid.)

HOW IT WENT DOWN

• Widespread discontent with the student aid regime, spurred in part by a 30 per cent jump in the number of rejected applicants, brought students back to the picket lines for the second time in a semester.
• 55,000 CEGEP students went on strike for about two weeks.
• Minister of Education Francois Cloutier “threatened striking students with [the] loss of their first term credits,” according to a Daily report on December 12.

RESULTS

• The government promised to abolish the parental contribution provision for loans and reduce it for bursaries. However, it didn’t follow on its promise – there remains a version of the “independence” clause to this day.
• In February of the following year, the Daily’s Larry Black wrote “it appears today that despite that demonstration’s pledge of solidarity, Cloutier’s move to quell student unrest by dividing the CEGEPs has been successful.”
• The province-wide student union L’association des étudiants du Québec (ANEQ) was created following the strike. “During the strike itself, there was an ad hoc organization of the student unions, and a decision was made to make it permanent,” said Benoit Renaud, a former student organizer now working for Québec Solidaire, a leftist provincial party.
• ANEQ continued to dominate the student movement for the next decade and a half.

1978: TIE

GOALS

• Abolition of the “independence” clause (again)
• Free tuition
• Greater investment in loans and bursaries

HOW IT WENT DOWN

• Rural and small-town CEGEPs like Rimouski, Alma, and Ahuntsic began the charge, going on strike in early November.
• SSMU VP External Ted Claxton called the CEGEP movements “unrealistic” and “Marxist.” McGill didn’t go on strike.
• ANEQ’s strategy included getting teachers and unions involved, to neutralize the criticism of students as a “privileged minority.” The Quebec Teachers Union and the Union of Quebec Government Workers jumped on board.
• At the strike’s peak, schools representing 100,000 students were on strike.
• ANEQ finally called off the strike in early February

RESULTS

• Though it was an election promise in 1976, Morin balked at free tuition, saying it would cost $200 million to implement.
• The parental income requirements for getting student aid were altered to make it easier for students to get loans and bursaries.
• The government promised to gradually increase the amount of money available for loans and bursaries.

1986: WIN

GOALS

• Despite being elected with a promise to keep tuition frozen, the Liberal government of Robert Bourassa began making noises about reversing course. Students were determined to keep tuition levels frozen.

HOW IT WENT DOWN

• On day one, 19 CEGEPs and the main student union at UQAM were on strike.
• Thirty student associations, mostly from CEGEPs, eventually joined.
• For students, it was a cakewalk. Renaud, who helped organize the strike at Collège Lionel Groulx, said, “It was a bit of a boring strike. For most students it was just blocking the door to your CEGEPs.”

RESULTS

• After just two weeks, the government caved, and promised to keep tuition frozen. “There were some students who thought we should have continued, because the government gave in so fast,” said Renaud.
• According to Benôit Lacoursière, the government’s acquiescence was a “tactical retreat,” in order to save up political capital for the eventual tuition hikes of 1990.

GOALS

• A broader definition of what constitutes an “independent” student, to allow more widespread access to loans and bursaries (the third time this had been a strike demand).
• Access to financial aid for part-time students
• Maintaining the tuition freeze

HOW IT WENT DOWN

• ANEQ called a three-day strike in late September, frustrated by the slow progress of student aid negotiations with the government.
• SSMU held a GA on joining the strike. Sixty people showed up, missing quorum by 140 students.
• By late October, 100,000 students from 32 CEGEPs were on strike.

RESULTS

• In early 1989, Education minister Claude Ryan announced reforms to loans and bursaries:
• $40 million extra was invested in student aid
• 17,000 part-time students became eligible for limited loans and bursaries: an average of $490 each.
• 25,000 “independent” students became eligible for more student aid money
• However, when the Liberal government was reelected in September 1989, they announced they would be raising tuition, a slap in the face to the student movement.

1990: LOSS

GOAL

• To stop the government’s two-year, $700 tuition hike, which would increase tuition from $500 to $1200, a 140 per cent increase.

HOW IT WENT DOWN

• The student movement was demoralized from the beginning: this was the third strike in five years, and students were fatigued.
• Many thought 1988 had been a bigger failure than it appears today, and thought that ANEQ dishonestly spun it as a victory, sewing fissures in the student movement.
• Still, there were flourishes of promise from the strike, which straddled February and March: Université de Montréal (U de M) students occupied the floor of the stock exchange, and, separately, shut down their university for three days, while some UQAM students refused to pay tuition.

RESULTS

• The strike was a failure: the tuition hikes were implemented.
• The Bourassa government had issued “a challenge to the student movement,” said Renaud, who took part in the strike as a U de M student. “And, basically, the movement was unable to meet that challenge.”

1996: TIE

GOAL

• Maintaining the tuition freeze

HOW IT WENT DOWN

• In October 1996, the Parti Québecois government of Lucien Bouchard proposed a 30 per cent tuition hike.
• Thirty CEGEPs went on strike in response.
• The moderate Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ) began negotiating with the government to keep tuition frozen.
• At its peak, the strike counted 100,000 students.

RESULTS

• Students won on tuition: the PQ backed off their proposed hikes. Tuition would stay frozen until 2007.
• However, Education Minister Pauline Marois introduced differential fees for out-of-province Canadian students. Until 1996, a student from Ontario or B.C. paid the same tuition as one from Quebec. Now, they would pay more.
• During the strike, Marois announced that the government would introduce a “failure tax” the following year, which charged CEGEP students a fee for failing a certain number of classes.

2005: WIN

GOALS

• The reimbursement of the $103 million that Jean Charest’s Liberal government had cut from loans and bursaries the previous year.
• The more radical Coalition de l’association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante élargie (CASSÉÉ) also wanted to scrap changes to the student aid system that sent money out every month instead of every semester – they thought the system was “paternalistic.”
• CEGEP students also opposed a government policy giving colleges the right to choose which classes to offer.

HOW IT WENT DOWN

• At its peak, 230,000 students were on strike.
• McGill grads and undergrads each staged a 24-hour strike in March (though undergrads voted online to reject a second day of striking).
• The government put forward several offers to partially reimburse loans and bursaries, which negotiators for FEUQ, and its CEGEP counterpart FECQ, rejected outright.
• In late March, 103 students sent locks of hair to Jean Charest: one haircut for every million cut from student aid.
• Education Minister Jean-Marc Fournier threatened students with an extended, or cancelled, semester.

RESULTS

• By April, the government had caved and agreed to put back all $103 million into the loans and bursaries system. FEUQ and FECQ called this a victory and told their members to go back to class.
• Still, 70,000 students remained on strike, holding out for the elimination of tuition fees, root and branch reform of student aid, and free contraception and abortion.
• “It was pretty much as much as the movement could possibly expect to win,” said Renaud.

The post Students united usually aren’t defeated appeared first on The McGill Daily.

As a tooth.

A farther sea. The distance from Maine to Wyoming.

When the grass hisses like rising seawater.

A caravel on the rising sea, a sleek hull

and sea-worthy spine. A Portuguese flag.

Rolled and eggy, yellow and smooth. Slipped

Into the hold.

White, island weather.

A history, Barbadoed,

Black and Irish as slaves, as tropically, brown, mixed

Children of finally painless sex

After long caravel rides. An all-white crowd,

Grilling bratwurst at Coney Island, except

Blacks cleaning brass, like rubber and gold,

The little unseen tasks of little black men.

Broken and bent, like a tailpipe in a scrap yard

In Scranton. Rusted and red.

On the thin, watery wind, the words of Gullah

Bringing news of blackened reefs of Congo and Carolina,

A history suppurating in sugar

And lost in the wash of time and in the losing sea.

The post Inkwell appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The professors, who published a letter condemning the administration’s response to the strike in the November 7 issue of The Daily, were offered coffee and sat around a large table in Munroe-Blum’s fifth-floor office in the James Administration building.

“The first issue was what had happened last night,” said Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, an associate history professor of Latin American history, referring to the Montreal police’s violent dispersal of student protestors on campus Thursday night. At the time of the meeting – 8:30 a.m. – Munroe-Blum had not yet been briefed on Thursday night’s events, and was unable to explain why police had been called to campus.

The topic of the meeting, however, was the administration’s handling of the campus environment since the MUNACA strike began on September 1. In their letter, the professors accused the administration of “presenting a one-sided management view of the conflict at a time when other viewpoints are being suppressed.”

According to interviews with professors who attended the meeting, Munroe-Blum addressed her widely-discussed “We are all McGill” email, in which Munroe-Blum accused picketers of intimidating students and alumni. However, citing the privacy of the meeting, none of the professors interviewed went into detail about the contents of Munroe-Blum’s explanation.

Studnicki-Gizbert said that, more broadly, “She acknowledged that there was a problem with communication, that communication was not this one-way flow of demands coming from the administration.”

According to Studnicki-Gizbert, Munroe-Blum then asked professors what they would do to improve the campus discourse. He suggested a constituent assembly, in which faculty, students, administrators, and support staff would gather to talk about the big issues facing the University.

A number of professors also discussed the strike in the context of labour history, noting that the administration’s use of injunctions was unusually harsh. “We’re all historians, so we gave her a historical perspective,” said Brian Cowan, a professor of British history.

The twenty professors who signed the November 7 letter received an emailed invitation from Munroe-Blum last Tuesday, a day after the letter was published. “I don’t think we expected to get such a prompt response,” said Cowan.

According to professors, around a dozen of them attended the meeting Friday – and those who didn’t attend had teaching commitments or were out of town.

Several of them struck a conciliatory tone in interviews after the meeting on Friday. “We were received very courteously, in the spirit of frank and productive exchange,” said Suzanne Morton, a professor of Canadian social history.

Cowan echoed this, saying he believed Munroe-Blum was acting in good faith: “It really was designed to be an occasion for dialogue.”

“It was heartening to see that our collective cris-de-coeur had been heeded,” he added. “More dialogue will help calm tempers, and possibly help us become a community again.”

The post Principal discusses admin’s handling of MUNACA strike appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Beginning in the late afternoon, and continuing until nearly eight in the evening, around two hundred people met on the west side of Parc Jeanne-Mance, chanting “We support Bashar al-Assad” in Arabic and carrying placards sporting pro-Assad slogans, like “We trust our president.”

The Montreal rally came a few days after a government-organized rally, attended by tens of thousands of Assad loyalists, in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo.

Assad succeeded his father as Syrian president in 2000. Since March, Assad has been sending armed troops, tanks, and snipers into Syrian cities in response to largely peaceful protests calling for democratic reforms and, more recently, for Assad’s ouster. The UN estimates that over 3,000 people have been killed in the government crackdown, including nearly 200 children. Opposition groups maintain the number of dead is over 5,000.

Some of the protestors on Saturday denied the existence of large-scale unrest in Syria. “Thanks to God, everything is perfect,” said one man, who did not give his name. “Everything in Syria is positive. There is nothing negative. And all of Syria, they support Bashar [al-]Assad.”

Asked why there were protestors in the streets of Syrian cities – tens of thousands have participated in protests nationwide – the man replied, “The people of Syria are 23 million. If you see a few – five, ten, twenty – that doesn’t change.”

Those that did acknowledge the protests in Syria were quick to label them the product of foreign interference. The countries named by demonstrators ranged from Turkey and Saudi Arabia to France and the United States.

One man called for “the Americans and the French to leave Syria alone. We can fix our own problems. Our president is working on it.”

U.S. President Barack Obama called for Assad to “step aside” in August, the same day the U.S. imposed energy sanctions on Syria.

Several demonstrators suggested that Israel was bankrolling the protests as retribution for Assad’s hard-line stance towards the Jewish state.

Assad is “the only one right now in the whole world who’s standing up against the West and the Israelis,” said a man who gave his name as Reffat A.

Reffat went on to say that Turkey and Lebanon were assisting the Syrian opposition because “they want to give a good face to the Israeli lobby, the Jewish lobby.”

There was a widespread feeling amongst demonstrators that the international media is inflating the scope of the Syrian uprising, and distorting its true nature.

“I think all the media have no respect…for the reality and for the truth,” said one man, who asked not to be named.

“It’s a media war,” said Rami Kaplo, a Montreal lawyer.

“A lot of people just despise the Western media because of the lies,” he continued. “The Western media is not even admitting there are armed gangs” among protestors in Syria.

He pointed to the BBC, CNN, and France 24 as examples.

A number of demonstrators echoed the claim that the Syrian uprising is made up of criminals. The Syrian government frequently defends its use of force against protestors by saying that “armed gangs” have killed hundreds of soldiers and police. Despite recent reports of sporadic violence by members of the anti-Assad opposition, including the assassination of a pro-regime cleric, the vast majority of people killed since March have been unarmed protestors, according to embassies and human rights groups in Syria. Foreign journalists have largely been barred from the country.

Many of Saturday’s demonstrators were also alarmed by the presence of the Muslim Brotherhood in the uprising, saying Islamists threatened to shatter the Syria’s delicate balance of religious and sectarian groups currently held together by a rigidly secular state.

Rex Brynen, professor of political science at McGill, acknowledged that many Syrians who are not part of the majority Sunni sect of Islam are worried about encroaching Islamism.

But, he noted in an email to The Daily, “a great many of the protesters opposing the current regime in Syria are themselves avowed secularists.”

“In any case, the objection rather misses the point. Syrians should be free to decide on the nature of their political system, whether secular or non-secular, through free and fair elections. Rather than offering his people this most basic of human rights, however, Bashar al-Assad instead offers only bloody repression in an increasingly desperate attempt to cling to political power,” he continued.

One man, watching the rally with friends visiting from Syria, called those participating “kind of ignorant.”

“In Syria right now people are dying. So watching people supporting him, [playing] music while you have people dying, is kind of sad,” he said.

A march in protest of human rights abuses in Syria is scheduled for this Saturday, starting at noon in Norman Bethune Square.

Kaplo offered a cautious defence of the actions of the current regime. “Maybe they could have dealt with it differently,” he said of the crackdown. “If you’re talking about human rights, it might be wrong. But we’re talking about politics.”

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