[F]ormer Concordia student Mike Spry exposes the undergraduate creative writing department at Concordia University and the Canadian literary scene, also known as “CanLit,” as places where nepotism, abuse,and overinflated egos reign, and where women routinely endure a poisonous structure that enables and allows the men in power to abuse their entitlement; often manifesting itself as sexual predation.
Spry goes on to explain how the exclusive and insular CanLit scene, often functioning primarily as a conduit between university departments and small government-grant-operated publishing presses, protects “its own monsters from public indictment.”
[…]
“English departments and publishers are guilty of sustaining this environment. Publishers could end this cycle of abuse by simply refusing to endow those who abuse the agency and legitimacy that they provide. The departments could fire professors, withhold tenure, censure faculties, punish deans. At the very least they could prohibit fifty-year-old profs from trying to date twenty-year-old students. They all know about profs/writers harassing, abusing, and inappropriately dating students. They all know about drunken nights of misbehavior. They all know of the prevalent lechery of writers.
“Even if a student comes forward, nothing is done. English and creative writing departments across Canada and the US knowingly cultivate environments that are criminally unsafe for young women and aspiring writers.”
So, incestuous and predatory.
*
“known to friends as ‘T-Rex‘” is pretty much a
guarantee somebody’s gonna light his @ss up.
diversity… gotta get me summa dat
*
This is common knowledge and behaviour at many universities and not just in literature depts. I know personnally of a very important/well known prof in a canadian west coast university chemistry dept who intentionally seeks out young female students to form part of his team. They were quickly showered with gifts for which of course they were expected to ‘say’ thanks. Private apartments were maintained for these ‘thanking’ events so that not only the prof involved could be thanked but also some of his friends. I believe the term sometimes used was ‘elephant’ parties, or something to that effect.
The university was clearly aware of this, but as this prof brings in millions in grants from both gov’t and industry they certainly weren’t going to kill the golden goose.
This is common knowledge and behaviour at many universities and not just in literature depts.
Yup. While I was working on my Ph. D., we had a foreign student in our lab. After a while, there were indications that she and our supervisor might have had dealings that were less than arm’s length. He tended to pay particular attention to her, leading me to suspect that his interest was more than academic, if you get my meaning.
He was married and old enough to be her father, so he should have known better. She, on the other hand, was quite intelligent, so she certainly didn’t need that sort of “assistance”.
She now has tenure at a university elsewhere in the country, though whether it was coincidental that she got the position is questionable.
Even at the place where I used to teach, there were similar rumours about certain colleagues carrying on with their students in certain, to be polite about it, “extra-curricular” activities.
Academe is far from the noble and pristine environment that people have been led to believe through movies and literature.
Carpe diem, or something
I have a few random thoughts from my own experiences trying to find publishers, etc. One of the things you will learn when you actually try to get a book published in Canada is that grants are everything. Publishers/printing houses are not interested in books that do not come with a grant, tied to some social issue, attached. That includes works of fiction. That’s why we have a rather unusual number of authors who are either immigrants/persons of color, or native, or female, or gay, etc. For the publisher, the grant is the profit. An inordinate number of the books published only sell in small runs to a small and fairly insular crowd tightly tied to the issue that is tied to the grant. (I’ll interject at this point that I didn’t even get to the approach point in my search for a publisher. Of the dozens I looked into, the submission terms are fairly well spelled out- Do not submit a manuscript unless you have all your grant paperwork filled out. I didn’t even get the opportunity to get rejected.)
As Kate points out, the CanLit industry seems geared towards using tax dollars to help rich people buy books that would otherwise not get published.
Then there’s the CanLit community. I signed up with GoodReads, partly to get more exposure, and routinely get invited to participate in reading challenges related to CanLit. There are precious few novels in those challenges, except those penned by the darling of Canada’s literary community, Margaret Atwood, whom I find eminently unreadable. I’ve sampled a few of the novels, and find them to be far too focused on existential angst, along the lines of what teenaged girls would thrive on. They’re not plot-driven, to put it simply. However, I’ve been pretty much banned from all the discussion groups because I have dared to criticize the CanLit community. Mostly, I’ve criticized the insular nature of the CanLit community, openly asking why it is that the United States book market can support literally dozens of novelists who make a good living writing plot-driven novels, while there’s probably less than a handful of similar Canadian writers. I have been blackballed for making the suggestion that Canadian publishers, and writers, have become addicted to the grant game at the cost of basically eradicating the plot-driven writer from the Canadian landscape.
Simple math should dictate that 10% of the writers on North American best-seller lists are Canadian, but they’re not. Why? Where are the Canadian Lee Child, James Patterson, Michael Connelly, Craig Johnson, or Elmore Leonard? They’re out there, but the CanLit community doesn’t want them. CanLit wants “high-brow” literature, not plot-driven, mass market fiction.
However, that flies in the face of a warning that Robertson Davies famously made decades ago. He noted that American writers work tirelessly writing novels that they hope will be bestsellers, in the hope that they might become wealthy enough to set aside the time to write the Great American Novel. Canadian writers, and publishers, are simply trying to write the Great Canadian Novel, preferably with the help of some grant. One of those approaches is far more successful than the other.
Speaking of writers … creating Art that imitates Life …
The writers of National Lampoons Animal House chose (Canadian Actor) Donald Southerland to portray the English Lit. Professor that Boon’s girlfriend Katy is caught sleeping with. After first, of course, trying to get his class to read and understand Milton.
Ha haha ha ha ha … comedy is ONLY funny when it somewhat tragically depicts the reality of life.
I’ve mentioned this in previous threads…with all the revelations coming out of Hollywood and the Media, when would the third bastion of leftist power, the universities, begin to get called out for their behavior? Is it finally going to happen?
It’s all part of the institutional left, Poseurs attempting to mask their proclivities for coercion.
I don’t know anything about Canadian publishing, but I do know that I love Robertson Davies, and I would rather gouge my eyes out than have to sit through reading a Margaret Atwood book. DO you know anything about Vogon Poetry?
So the scripture gatekeepers of the Laurentian Elite are getting their comeuppance Weinstein style. All their missing is a Canadian “Rose McGowan” to give it that Canadian touch.
I do not know a thing about Vogon Poetry. A few more tidbits. I read a novel called “Rubicon One”, probably 30 years back. I’m a sucker for a good Cold War pot boiler. The writer, Dennis Jones, is a Canadian, but the book was published by an American publisher. Couldn’t get it published up here because it wasn’t “literature”. It sold well, and compared well to anything by Tom Clancy, but the CanLit folks wouldn’t give him the time of day.
Another book by a Canadian author that I’ve tried to find is called “A Dry Spell”. Susie Moloney wrote it, and Stephen King highly recommended it. Again, this was a book that did reasonably well in the US, but couldn’t get published up here because the writer didn’t come with an attached grant. Why not? Moloney’s books sell well, but she’s off the CanLit radar because she focuses on books that sell, not literature.
A parallel exists in films. Paul Gross does not do the archetypical “Canadian” film. “Hyena Road” is a tremendous film, but it does not fit the normal Canadian fare, as it’s not an “art film”. It was deeply Canadian without wallowing in Canadian-ness, which is a powerful but subtle difference. Ditto for the TV series “Motive”. Great series, well acted, plot driven, but far from the usual Canuck fare, and far better for it.
“[The] darling of Canada’s literary community, Margaret Atwood, whom I find eminently unreadable.”
Amen to that.
The popularity of the curent TV version of “The Handmaid’s Tale” is beyond me: The premise was already a nose-stretcher in the mid-Eighties when the book came out.* Love the fact that the lead role is being played by a Scientologist though!
* About the only way that story could be made either “relevant” or “prescient” would be to ditch the Christian fundamentalist leitmotiv and replace it with an Islamic fundamentalist one.
As if that’s gonna happen.
Yeah. Let’s compare Atwood to Larry McMurtry. I read “Lonesome Dove” 20-some years ago. At the time, I thought it was very good, one of the better reads I had ever done. This past fall, I decided that I needed to re-read it, and found it a far, far greater piece of writing the second time around. Simple life experience made the characters that much more real than they had been when I encountered them in my 30’s. In fact, I reached a point where I didn’t want to go on, because from the moment Gus says goodbye to Clara, there is nothing but heartache and loss. It was gut-wrenchingly emotional, and only a few writers have moved me to tears in the fashion that McMurtry did. Atwood lacks that ability.
It’s a rare movie that packs that kind of emotional punch. But, I defy anyone to watch “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”, then watch it again a couple months later. If you don’t tear up in the first few minutes, knowing how Rance and Hallie came to be on the train, knowing all the emotional baggage wrapped up in that scene, you’re probably beyond redemption.
Wait a minute here. Are the SJWs saying 25-year old female grad students are so sexually immature that the patriarchy is supposed to protect them, but by the same token they are so sexually experienced and self-aware that they could self-identifyas some as yet undiscovered gender by tomorrow morning? Or that they are so sexually empowered as to require equal pay as men, to be adult and mature enough to decide who the hell they sleep with, but so sexually naive and daft as to not have the sexual agency to choose to bang their hot prof or not?
Heck I am having a hard time keeping up with all the weapons grade contradictions and Victorian priggishness and prudishness, against the wild licentiousness that says even something as fundamental as gender no longer exists?
I am getting my @## to church. I think He upstairs is planning something massive..
Witness said: “I know personnally of a very important/well known prof in a canadian west coast university chemistry dept who intentionally seeks out young female students to form part of his team.”
I notice you are not naming this guy. That’s why he’s still having elephant parties.
Easy for me to say, I know. But if it really is that big a deal, the money isn’t worth keeping the secret, is it?
The reason complainants are not coming forward is that they are being told not to by their peers.
UBC alumni involved in Steven Galloway case offer advice to creative writing students at Concordia
“As the system is now, I can’t recommend it,” Chelsea Rooney told The Globe and Mail. “A university asks for your stories of abuse in order to protect themselves from liability. They want to see how much they’re on the hook for.”
Ms. Rooney, an ancillary complainant in the Galloway case, tweeted about an “incredible” power imbalance.
“Universities are corporations,” she wrote. “Your legal action against them sets a precedent that could lead ultimately to their demise. They must do everything they can to prove they are not responsible for your abuse. Often this means denying your abuse occurred.”
I notice you are not naming this guy. That’s why he’s still having elephant parties.
There are also laws with regards to slander and libel. The presumption of innocent until proven guilty applies only to the bad guy. The victim has to demonstrate that he or she was harmed.
TimR:
They must do everything they can to prove they are not responsible for your abuse.
Exactly. At the place where I used to teach, the way problems were handled could be summed up with the words: “don’t rock the boat”. I knew of complaints about certain administrators to be curtailed at, say, the dean’s level.
Also, we couldn’t rely on our staff association as it was more concerned about keeping relations with the senior administration peaceful, particularly when the contract was being re-negotiated. If an individual member had a dispute, they were seen as a problem that had to be made to go away.
Like I mentioned earlier, the academic system is far from noble and pristine.
Given the rest of their behaviour, their blatant contempt for the tax payer and sneering assumption of superiority over all, why would anyone be surprised?
These are very small people in tiny ponds, only the poor deluded students see them as pathways to the future.
There is a reason they seldom leave the cloisters..reality is cruel.
minuteman,
Vogon poetry
You owe me a keyboard!
LOL
This guy is still teaching and has many awards including various orders. Unless the girls impacted come forward then there is no point anyone else naming him. Tim has it right, the abuse system is meant to give early warning to the university so that it can prepare for a fight to defend itself, not to seek justice.