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Volume 102, Issue 29TRANSCRIPT
Volume 102, Issue 29January 31, 2013mcgilldaily.com
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The McGill Daily NEWS 3Thursday, January 31, 2013
mcgilldaily.com
NEWS
COMMENTARY
The corporatization of knowledge at McGill
03
06
Trans* people denied access to homeless shelters
08 FEATURES
13 CULTURE
16
15
What to watch instead ofDjango Unchained
Letters from our readers
McGill should divest from harmful investments
Administration says it “must lie more”
Gender equity in math
Coffee gets classy
EDITORIAL
COMPENDIUM!
Arthur Porter: man of mystery
Album reviews! A$AP Rocky, Burial, and more
Updates on the campus flood
11 HEALTH&ED
Living with a learning disability
Racial profiling alive and well in Quebec
University in water-slidescandal
Tuition hike debated as summit draws nearGovernment set stage for indexation to inflation
Despite plans to hold a sum-mit on higher education next month, the Quebec
government reiterated its sup-port this week for a tuition hike of between $46 to $83 per year.
The amount would vary depend-ing on whether a rise in household disposable income and an increase in operational costs are considered, according to a plan submitted by economist Pierre Fortin at a prelim-inary meeting in December.
Government officials have been touting the summit as a way of building consensus about univer-sity funding and management.
Pierre Duchesne, the Quebec minister of higher education, called free education “unfeasible” and said on Tuesday that the notion of a tuition freeze needed to be “defined.” The remark comes a month after Fortin described index-ation to inflation as a “tuition freeze in every practical sense.”
In an interview with The Daily, Fédération étudiante universita-ire du Québec (FEUQ) President Martine Desjardins said in French that the “game was still not set.”
“We still have a lot of time to make sure the government under-stands that a tuition freeze is the only measure that can ensure acces-sibility,” she said. “Most of the actors [at the summit] are against index-ation, and the consensus seems to be against that proposition.”
On Wednesday, the Coalition opposée à la tarification et à la pri-vatisation des services publics – an organization composed of unions and community groups – held a dem-
onstration in downtown Montreal against some of the government’s austerity measures, including the proposed tuition hike.
“It was clear in December after the [government] budget was sub-mitted that we weren’t talking about a tuition freeze anymore, but of indexation,” André Frappier, president and co-spokesperson of progressive provincial party Québec solidaire, told The Daily in French. “At every level, [the govern-ment] is taking steps away from the promises it made.”
“The summit will be used to let off some steam, but I don’t think it will come up with solutions com-parable to the mobilization we saw last year. It’s also written in the bud-
get; it cannot be anything else but indexation,” he added.
Another provincial party has suggested a much more significant hike. François Legault, the leader of the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ), said on Monday that a select group of universities, such as McGill and the Université de Montréal, should be able to deter-mine tuition unilaterally.
“It’s important to protect acces-sibility, but we have to be able to tell the truth in Quebec,” he told report-ers in French at a press conference in Quebec City. “Right now, some universities don’t have the means to attract the best researchers. It’s obvi-ous that the Université de Montréal doesn’t have the same resources as
the University of Toronto, all propor-tions considered.”
According to his plan, students at other universities would have to pay between 15 and 20 per cent of the cost of their education. The price for studying medicine, for example, would thus be higher than for an Arts degree.
“It is obvious that Legault doesn’t understand the system and is apply-ing principles which aren’t relevant to the university system,” Desjardins said. “We’ve invited him on a num-ber of occasions to the summit and he has never proposed anything to solve the problems we face.”
Quebec’s summit on higher education is slated to begin on February 26.
Laurent Bastien CorbeilThe McGill Daily
Photo Hera Chan | The McGill Daily
PGSS condemns McGill’s intention to limit access to information
T he Post-Graduate Students’ Society (PGSS) called on McGill to withdraw parts
of a motion filed by the University which would grant McGill the authority to deny Access to Information (ATI) requests sub-mitted by McGill students.
The University filed a motion on December 7 to the provin-cial body that oversees ATIs, the Commission d’accès à l’information, seeking to exempt
itself from fulfilling ATIs filed by 14 respondents. The motion also asks for authorization to deny future requests submitted by any McGill student.
The student society’s motion, passed by its executive commit-tee, asks McGill to “acknowledge that any McGill student shouldn’t be prohibited from submitting ATIs based on previous requests from other students.”
PGSS External Affairs Officer Errol Salamon proposed the motion after seeing a lack of responses from different campus groups regarding this issue.
“I thought it would be impor-tant for PGSS to take a stance, particularly because I’ve been working on a project regard-ing industry and university research partnerships. And if it goes through, if the motion passes, it would limit the extent to which PGSS would be able to gather information for research,” Salamon told The Daily.
SSMU is in the process of dealing with the issue internally and has yet to issue a formal, public response, according to President Josh Redel.
Two of the respondents named in McGill’s motion are SSMU executives.
While PGSS denounced spe-cific clauses in the motion regard-ing the University’s request to dismiss ATIs, it did not condemn the motion as a whole, due to a lack of consensus within the executive committee.
“From my perspective, I want-ed PGSS to be able to denounce the entire motion, but, it was amended to…particular issues that everyone in the executive could agree to,” Salamon said.
Salamon told The Daily that he would try to get other associations on campus involved before deter-mining a further course of action.
Juan Camilo VelásquezThe McGill Daily
Securitization demo at UQAM
Anti-austerity demo held downtown.
NEWSThe McGill Daily | Thursday, January 31, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com4
Trans* people denied access to Montreal sheltersASTT(e)Q asks shelters to debunk essentialized ideas of gender
M any homeless people were left vulnerable last week, as excruciatingly
cold temperatures and a harsh wind chill hit Montreal. Many trans* people were left out in the cold, as they were rejected from homeless shelters. These shelters have been denounced by a promi-nent trans* rights group.
The Action Santé Travesti(e)s et Transsexuel(le)s du Quebec (ASTT(e)Q), released a statement last week on the increasingly dismal prospects of trans* people accessing shelters in Montreal. According to the statement, CACTUS Montreal, ASTT(e)Q’s par-ent organization, “witnessed several of [their] members … denied shelter on the grounds of being trans*.”
This has been particularly the case in night shelters, where govern-ment-issued identification is required in order to gain access to services. In women’s shelters, gender is verified when examining these IDs.
“This becomes problematic when your presented identity is different from your legal one,” explains Gabrielle Bouchard, Centre 2110’s Peer Support and Advocacy coordinator. “In wom-en’s shelters, if you don’t look the part, then questions are asked. These questions can be fundamen-tally discriminatory.”
The ASTT(e)Q reports that women’s shelters require trans*
people to have undergone sex reas-signment surgery in order to obtain matching gender identification.
“That F on your ID is hard to obtain. Sex reassignment surgery modifies one’s body forever, in a very significant way. Much authori-zation from a variety of people is needed in this process to confirm trans* identity prior to an opera-tion taking place. If you are home-less this becomes near impossible,” Bouchard told The Daily.
Nora Butler Burke, program coordinator at ASTT(e)Q, also notes the role poverty plays in legal gender assignment.
“There are particular ways that low income trans* women encounter being denied to all sorts of essential services from health care to legal documents. There is lack of access to proper support for people transitioning and a lot around the process is not ensured until people are wealthier or privi-leged. Class and economic status create vulnerability on an individu-al level,” Burke told The Daily.
Burke explained that not all shelters are perpetrators of such inaccessibility. Day shelters do not typically require extensive docu-mentation. Some night shelters make conscious efforts to be inclu-sive and accessible.
Matthew Pearce, the direc-tor general of the Old Mission Brewery, stated that trans* people are not excluded. The Brewery “regularly hosts trans* [people], particularly in our women’s pavil-
ion,” Pearce said. Burke, however, is not entirely
convinced this is enough.“Discrimination still takes
place within the shelters even if accepted. Trans* women enter-ing shelters still have a hard time because of different discrimi-natory attitudes. Shelters don’t often do work on educating and raising awareness of different people within the space and dif-ferent issues such as ableism, rac-
ism, et cetera,” Burke said. Burke argues that this exclusiv-
ity comes from “a certain brand of feminism that is not able to under-stand trans* women as women, and that’s something important to talk about fighting essentialist ideas of what is woman.”
“Legislation is used to legiti-mize this logic and so we often see shelters replicating the same barri-ers and exclusions that are directly out of state regulations, which
reproduce certain components of social violence. Those who don’t fit properly within gender norms still face many forms of social vio-lence,” Burke added.
To make shelters more accessi-ble, Bouchard believes that myths of trans* women being danger-ous or making others uncomfort-able have to be debunked. To do this, Bouchard believes that shel-ters and those using the services should be educated on the topic.
Hannah BesseauThe McGill Daily
Math conference highlights lack of women in faculty
T he Society of Undergraduate Mathematics Students (SUMS) held a discussion
on Wednesday about the under-representation of women in math-ematics at McGill.
Women make up almost 60 per cent of McGill’s overall undergradu-ate population; however, the math department estimates that between one-third and one-half of math majors are female.
SUMS President Catherine Hilgers told The Daily that she was more concerned with the low number of female honours students. According to Hilgers, between 10 and 15 per cent of hon-ours math students are female.
Hilgers also pointed out that of the Math department’s 37 profes-sors, only one is female.
In an interview with The Daily, Math Departmental Chair
Jacques Hurtubise said that the department was “working on” hiring more women.
“There is a desire to get more women [into the department],” he told The Daily. “There’s a policy in the faculty, which we entirely support, to interview at least one woman for every opening. We’re actually in the process of hiring a second woman right now.”
At Wednesday’s meeting, Colleen Alkalay-Moulihan, an honours student in Applied Mathematics, spoke about having felt marginalized as a female, by her peers and certain professors.
“Someone once told me that it’ll be easier for me to get into graduate school because I’m a girl,” she said. “My second year I had a rude professor – my male friends didn’t notice, but his attitude affected me. I felt like he treated the male students like peers, and me like an idiot.”
“We should identify the envi-ronmental factors that make [the
Math program] unfriendly to women, and figure out how to change them,” Michael Snarski, an honours Math student, explained during the meeting. “Confidence is key to being in math – if you
don’t believe you can solve a prob-lem, you won’t solve it.”
Students at the meeting under-lined a number of areas the depart-ment could work on.
“We’re going to suggest that the
department work to increase the number of women in math, increase the sense of commu-nity, and increase the number of female mathematicians hired,” Hilgers said.
Carla GreenThe McGill Daily
Illustration Oles Chepesiuk | The McGill Daily
Illustration Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily
news The McGill Daily | Thursday, January 31, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com 5
UQAM students fight increased surveillanceAdministration targets campus activist hub Café Aquin
F lanked by three security guards, approximately 200 Université du Québec à
Montréal (UQAM) students stormed through the halls of UQAM’s DeSève, Thérèse-Casgrain, and Aquin build-ings on Wednesday.
The protesters, who gathered in the agora of the Judith Jasmin building on Ste. Catherine at 12:30 p.m., voiced their discon-tent over new security protocols recently established by the UQAM administration.
The new security measures, slated to cost UQAM more than $300,000 over the next two years,
included the installation of 15 cam-eras on the walls and ceiling around Café Aquin, a cafe co-run by the sci-ence and law (AFESPED), and the social science (AFESH) associations at UQAM. The university has already spent $300,000 over the last four years on similar security measures.
Café Aquin was a centre for mobilization during the student strikes of last year. It was abruptly closed on December 20 when the UQAM administration announced that the entire area had to be walled-off as strong acids were being used to remove graffiti. They also announced that AFESH would foot the $50,000 bill. The cafe reopened yesterday after sev-eral rounds of negotiations with the administration.
The walled-off area also included the meeting spaces allotted to the handicapped stu-dent’s association, the student-parent support network, the social science, and political sci-ence associations.
Without informing students, the UQAM administration also installed 15 surveillance cameras in the area.
“They put surveillance cameras everywhere, there isn’t a way to walk around the university without being filmed,” Annie, a student at UQAM who didn’t want to give her last name, told The Daily in French.
“Today we are here to oppose the fact that they installed these cameras. Also to denounce the fact that there are 16 employees that haven’t been paid since the clo-
sure,” Annie said. Cafe employees were only given
24 hours’ notice before the cafe was closed. These employees have not been compensated for their lost hours. According to Annie, the administration told AFESPED and AFESH that they would have to cover employees’ salaries for this period themselves.
“The administration is putting in place controls of the spaces we meet. They saw what happens when we get together; it allows us to resist,” Annie said in French through a megaphone to the assem-bling crowd.
Protesters who were not masked were handed beige scarves to cover their faces. Moving toward the stu-dent services office, demonstrators
threw confetti into the air and blew air horns.
The anger over the installation of cameras was made evident as the protest reached the Henri-Aquin building when several protesters brought out hammers, smashing two wall-mounted cameras. One camera was ripped from the ceiling. Several other cameras were spray-painted with red and green paint.
One protester broke through one of the walls around Café Aquin, as demonstrators around him evad-ed the debris.
The protest dissipated quickly as people announced that more security guards were on the way.
The UQAM administration did not return calls from The Daily by press time.
Farid RenerThe McGill Daily
After the flood, McGill recoversConflict over cause of smaller leak
M ore than a quarter of the McTavish reservoir’s con-tents gushed through
campus into downtown Montreal between 4 p.m. Monday and 2 a.m. Wednesday, when an 88-year-old water main gave way during con-struction near the intersection of Pine and Doctor Penfield.
The cause of the break has yet to be determined, according to city spokesperson Valérie De Gagné, who said that an excavation of the pipe would be underway soon to determine the cause.
A majority of the water’s flow had abetted by 7 p.m. on Monday, but water continued to pour down University until late Tuesday night. At the time, McGill and two city officials gave three contradicting reports to press about the source of the continued flooding. The school reported a second break in an 8-inch pipe, one city official reported to the Montreal Gazette a second break in a 54-inch water main, and another told The Daily that all the valves to the first break had not yet been shut off.
“It seems that they were all sort of right,” according to Director of Internal Communications Doug Sweet. “What we had was the equivalent of an 8-inch water main coming out of that first break.”
The aftermathThe school is now scrambling
to relocate classes and offices, con-tinue de-icing main passageways, and de-humidify buildings. The University has barely begun the process of calculating the costs of repairs and contingency measures,
according to Sweet, since many of them have yet to be incurred.
The University has contracted the services of Première-Action, a disaster restoration company, to help clean up buildings, but McGill’s own grounds services are doing most of the outside work salting and de-icing affected areas.
The James Annex, which is attached to the James Administration building and hous-es the University’s graphics depart-
ment, seems to have been hit the hardest. The Annex sits on the slope that faces the reservoir, and a window at ground level broke during the flood, inundating the offices inside. It will not reopen for “weeks, perhaps months” accord-ing to Sweet.
The Wong building and 3435 University, which houses the School of Environment, also incurred significant damage. The administration is unsure of when
the buildings will be reopened.Some of the school’s archived
administrative records were dam-aged – as they were during a September 2011 flood – when Service Point experienced some flooding, and have been sent to freeze-drying facilities for restoration.
At the McLennan library, “the basement experienced some flooding, but the flooding was not extensive,” said Sabrina Hanna, the library system’s media relations
officer, in an email to The Daily. Most of the library’s collection has been moved to different floors until the necessary repairs are con-ducted, she added.
Other affected buildings include Leacock, Macdonald, McConnell, and the James Administration building, although no further classes have been cancelled, and the buildings are expected to be fully operational within the next few days.
Lola DuffortThe McGill Daily
Photo Cyril Rahgoshay
The McGill Daily commentary 6Thursday, January 31, 2013
mcgilldaily.com
Inside the knowledge factoryProfit = 1, Ethics = 0
T here’s a lot of buzz about university governance and budgeting these days. A
scan of recent issues of The Daily reveals a number of articles high-lighting calls for a review of where the money’s coming from and what it’s being spent on (“Bloated bureaucracies weigh down uni-versity budgets,” News, January 28, page 3; “Universities using teaching dollars for construction,” News, January 24, page 4; “Admin talks university finances at SSMU Council,” News, January 17, page 5). This timing isn’t coincidental: the Parti Québécois (PQ) govern-ment has called for a summit on education at the end of February, and discussions are ongoing about what will – and should – come out of that process. As the articles above suggest, many observers are not convinced the summit will ask the right questions, or that those present will be likely to come to the right answers.
As students, we tend to think that the university is about us. After all, from our first moments of thinking about applying to schools, universities are courting us. We are both their primary clients and their most important products, they tell us. Universities exist to provide a service to us: just think what you could do with a university degree!
The fact is, of course, that even if that was true fifty years ago it is most certainly not true now. And the University’s administrators
make no secret of it, if you step outside the glossy advertising bro-chures and back-to-school MROs. At the end of last semester PGSS and SSMU put on a McGill-centric education summit to get a sense of where the McGill community stands on all sorts of issues related to university education. The format was unfortunately far from interac-tive, and the voices of the admin-istration overpowered those of students, but it was an interesting opportunity to hear about McGill’s strategic objectives in a way that we rarely do as students.
I was particularly interested in a session on partnerships between the university and corporations. Although universities have always done research that benefitted the private sector, direct partnerships with corporations are becoming an increasingly prominent part of what universities do – and how they fund themselves. In fact, a much-overlooked part of the university funding plan that spurred last year’s student strike was the expectation that universities raise more of their operating funds from corporate partners – even going so far as to make some public funding depen-dent on universities’ ability to raise private funds.
In her presentation on the topic of these partnerships, Vice President (Research and International Relations) Rose Goldstein made it clear that all contracts signed with corporate partners include an academic freedom clause making sure that researchers can publish their findings whether the corporate funders like them or not. (McGill’s track record on asbestos research
raises questions on whether this is always enforced, but that’s a different story.) That freedom is essential to scientific integrity, of course, but it hardly addresses the full ethical picture.
Imagine a university – a “research-intensive” university, to use that term the administration loves so much – that exists mostly to do research that others pay for. In the Department of Mining and Materials Engineering, research-ers supported by grants from De Beers, Barrick Gold, and other giant mining corporations inves-tigate more efficient techniques for extracting highly toxic miner-als from often-contested lands. In Mechanical Engineering, a profes-sor researches de-icing technology that he then markets to military contractors through a business he owns. Speaking to the University Senate, the head of research urges faculty to look at the priorities of the university’s funders and tailor their research questions accord-ingly. The University wants them to get these grants, she says, and is putting all sorts of resources at their disposal. Meanwhile, who is funding research into the environ-mental impacts of tar sands extrac-tion or the neocolonial causes of war? Freedom to publish adverse findings does not guarantee free-dom to ask challenging ques-tions, nor does it ensure university resources are made available to support the development of such projects in the first place.
The paragraph above is not a dystopian fantasy. All of those things are currently happening at McGill. At the same time, 100 Arts classes are being cut to save money,
leading to fewer of the small semi-nars in which we get to hone our critical thinking skills and ask the broader questions. (Full disclo-sure: I’m actually in Engineering, so they aren’t my classes that are being cut. But students in all fac-ulties need small classes.) Dr. Goldstein assures us that McGill is “very strong” in the areas of Arts and Social Sciences, but then admits that there are no specific safeguards in place to prevent end-lessly pitching public money after private, as the university invests more and more in the areas it sees as prime candidates for developing profitable partnerships.
The buzzwords that keep com-ing up are “keeping McGill competi-tive.” But what are we competing on? Like the most reckless finan-cial players on Wall Street, McGill’s administrators deal in numbers that no longer have any bearing in reality. Cutting classes to increase the percentage taught by tenured professors increases your rankings but does zilch for the quality of your education. Redirecting resources to support partnerships with business, rather than supporting less profit-able research projects might make McGill number one on a chart in some investor’s office, but it prob-ably won’t get us closer to solving the big problems our society needs to deal with.
As we discuss the state of our universities and our education system here in Quebec, these are the sorts of issues we ought to be tackling. Making budget sheets balance is great, but unless we are questioning not only the line items on the budget but the pri-orities behind them, our universi-
ties will continue to be dysfunc-tional: state-subsidized non-profits that aspire to be publicly-traded corporations, and end up failing miserably at both. I don’t want a top-ranked university that is inter-nationally competitive across the world, I want a university that pro-vides me and my society with the ideas, tools, and knowledge that we need to live well together – now and generations into the future. Perhaps you agree with me.
SSMU Council’s proposal for an états généraux on education brings us closer to discussing these goals than any part of the government-mandated Summit process has or will. But these conversations need to be happening not only in our legislatures and closed-off confer-ence rooms, but in our living rooms, newspapers, streets, and, of course, in our universities. Which is why it is particularly concerning that the McGill administration has decided to bypass any further consultation or even a Senate vote on their new “operational procedures” regarding protests and disruptions on campus. With nowhere to discuss our goals for the education system, and no way to express our dissent with the effects of those imperatives, we may well wonder if the University is past saving as a useful societal institution. If, like me, you believe there may still be some redeeming value here, then we’d best get to work fanning it up into flames, because it’s well on its way to being muffled.
In Through the Looking Glass, Mona Luxion reflects on activism, current events, and looking beyond identity politics. Email Mona at [email protected].
Illustration Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily
Mona LuxionThrough the Looking Glass
commentary The McGill Daily | Thursday, January 31, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com 7
Dear Daily,
Two weeks ago, Minister of Higher Education Pierre Duchesne announced that the final meetings for his government’s Summit on Higher Education would take place on February 25 and 26 in Montreal. As of yet, there has been no formal announcement about how many people will attend those meetings, who will be there, what the struc-ture will be, or what the goals are. But we know that it will take place over those two days.
Two days. After a process that will have lasted less than four months from the time it was first announced, the conclusion will be a mere two days. After a student strike that lasted six months, saw thou-sands of people arrested, and was the largest student mobilization that has ever been seen in this province.
The summit is structured around four themes: financing and governance, quality of education, participation and accessibility, and research. Four meetings, with only sixty delegates in attendance, have been held to discuss those specific topics. Other participation includes a “winter school” for youth that had a cap of 500 attendees, four forums for citizen participation, and a Facebook page.
On January 10, SSMU Council adopted a position calling for an états généraux on the subject of education in Quebec. We took this position with the belief that the cur-rent Summit process is simply not adequate if we are to address the long-simmering issues surround-ing higher education in Quebec, which the strike brought into the public eye. There has not been an examination of the entire educa-tion system in the province since the Parent Commission in the 1960s. We feel that it is time again to really talk about what the role of education should be, and that this summit is not long or large enough to really do that.
—Robin Reid-FraserSSMU VP External
Dear Daily,
The Dean of Arts is missing a very important point in defending the cuts to Arts classes “AUS holds Town Hall on elimination of 100 Arts classes” (News, January 24, page 5). If you are an Arts student who already has a tough time find-ing classes that study critical top-ics, this letter is for you; if you are an Arts student who finds McGill’s extreme lack of faculty diversity repulsive, this letter is for you; if you find McGill’s Eurocentric bias in many departments disingenu-ous, this letter is for you; and if you have a tough time studying the leg-acies of colonialism, slavery, and imperialism in Canada at McGill, this letter is for you.
Although the Dean of Arts would likely consider these issues to be entirely separate, I think there are connections: one of the effects of the Dean’s decision will be, in my opinion, to shore up the exist-ing selection of courses, which are currently insufficient in covering these crucial topics. Furthermore, one of the messages sent from this decision is that the Faculty of Arts has too many classes currently, as opposed to diversifying its courses and offering more. Finally, critical subjects are best learned in small classroom settings, where students can connect readings to their per-sonal experiences – it appears from the Dean’s decision that large classes are in the Faculty’s strate-gic interests.
Instead of cutting classes, I say that Arts students demand more: major programs in Indigenous Studies, African and African-Canadian Studies, Diaspora Studies, and Ethnic Studies, among other marginalized fields, in addi-tion to diversifying programs like Philosophy or Political Science by hiring professors of colour. All of this would be to simply ask from McGill what comparative Canadian or elite American universities already have. The time is now Arts students: ORGANIZE!
— Eliyahu FreedmanU3 Philosophy
To the writers of “Lies, damn lies, and pseudoscience” (Commentary, January 28, page 7),
I find your arguments against the effectiveness and thus legiti-macy of homeopathy to be very weak. I am going to assume that homeopathic medications are “just sugar pills” for the sake of argumen-tation. Placebos have been shown to have a clinical effect on patients. The power of the mind in expec-tancy and conditioning can be used in order to affect bodily healing according to Miller & Brody, 2011. Additionally, Kirsch and Raz have shown that many commonly used drugs, such as anti-depressants, are actually no more effective than sugar pills. Unethically, drug com-panies will exclude the placebos from their studies, and while they are right that placebos don’t affect everyone, they are administer-ing their drug to a population that includes placebo-sensitive people. As far as I am concerned, if home-opathy helps the population that seeks it out feel better, it is a legiti-mate form of healing.
In response to the cell phone argument, I have heard both sides and honestly do not know which to believe. However, citing an American Cancer Society (ACS) page as a worthy source for prov-ing that non-ionizing radiation has not been shown to cause cancer is ludicrous. It is most probably in the ACS’s interests to not put cell phone companies out of business, as they may be sponsoring some research the ACS is conducting. Capital is a huge driving force in today’s science and therefore it is important to remain critical of where the research is coming from.Who funded it? What stakes might this group have in certain out-comes? Is it biased?
Science is flawed in many ways; let’s bring these flaws to the surface instead of trying to hide them in an attempt to continue glorifying it.
—Noemi SternU2 Cognitive Science and History
Dear Daily,
With the recent announcement of the departure of Travel Cuts/Voyages Campus from the first floor of SSMU Building, and of course in the context of SSMU’s frustratingly confidential ongoing lease negotiations with the University, we are in the midst of a his-toric opportunity to establish student priorities for McGill’s only undergrad-uate student-run building. It is in this setting that the SSMU Executive team is excited to announce the beginning of a SSMU building visioning cam-paign to guide current and future decision-making about how space in the SSMU/Shatner building is allocat-ed and managed.
We often feel from the SSMU office that the Shatner Building – the Leacock-esque concrete megalith that I’m told is soon to be considered a his-torical monument – is falling apart at the seams, especially as its 1960s-era heating, ventilation, and air condition-ing system costs increasingly absurd amounts to maintain. Yet everyday I see how vital this building is as the foundation for a huge proportion of McGill’s student life, through the com-ical diversity of events that pack the building every day. So what does “stu-dent-run” mean, especially in terms of space? What values guide student-run spaces, and make them inherently dif-ferent from others? As one of increas-ingly few students left on campus who can remember daily trips to the Architecture Café, I hope the sense of need (and urgency) around the lack of such space on campus is still clear to incoming students who have entered McGill in an ever more corporate sta-tus quo.
This Friday in the Madeleine Parent (formerly Breakout) room of SSMU, we will discuss food opera-tions, the student-run cafe, our priori-ties in the building, sustainability and accessibility, event space needs, and what differentiates this building from the rest of space on campus with the goal of producing a long-term vision to guide future space allocations, cur-rent projects, and SSMU priorities in lease negotiations. This is our chance to make a big impact on the future of this building and some very exciting projects. Whether you want a student-run cafe, more bookable space, a gym, more club offices, or whatever else you can dream up, come learn about the history of the building and current initiatives, and make your voice heard!
The SSMU Summit on Space in Shatner will take place on Friday, February 1, from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.
—Allison CooperSSMU VP Clubs & Services
Dear Daily,
I was stunned to learn, in a recent issue of The Daily, that mem-bers of the “McGill science commu-nity” were so “deeply disappointed” with recent articles in the Health & Education section that they took to the pages of this hallowed pub-lication to form a rebuttal (“Lies, damn lies and pseudoscience,” Commentary, January 28, page 7).
This letter does not attempt to argue against what I assume are well-researched counter-claims on homeopathy (who amongst us could argue against the ineffable study by Shang et al., which needs no explanation but its name?) and radiation from cell phones (their safety is proven by a cursory Google search! Duh!).
In a publication that “recognizes that all events and issues are inher-ently political, involving relations of social and economic power and privilege,” it seems ironic that Palus and Sheridan would, after ostensi-bly recognizing the value of criticiz-ing science, patronizingly demand the caveat that those criticizing science would “not conflate other kinds of speculation, or critical thinking, with science.”
In other words, feel free to criti-cize science, just make sure to do it with scientific language.
To borrow a word from The Daily’s own vocabulary, this demand is problematic. There are countless examples in the history of science and medicine where the language of empirical proof and scientific reasoning has been used to justify practices that later caused great harm. McGill graduate Frances Kelsey, for example, was reticent to give the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for the drug thalidomide, despite evi-dence from Europe cited by her colleagues that ‘proved’ its innocu-ity. The drug, which causes severe birth deformities if taken when pregnant, affected countless babies in the 1950s and 1960s.
The implication that science is somehow a separate, august enti-ty, made up of purely rational and empirical facts is simply untrue, ridic-ulous, and unfortunately perpetu-ated by the aforementioned writers.
—Peter ShybaDaily Health&Education
Editor, 2011-2012
LettersFalse accusations of pseudoscience
Shh! The scientific rationalists are speaking!
How do we (want to) use the SSMU Building?
Eurocentrism and class cuts
The “Summit” needs to be so much more
Dear Reader,
Stop whining, start writing. Love, [email protected]
The McGill Daily features 8Thursday, January 31, 2013
mcgilldaily.com
ARTHUR PORTER
Multinational Man of Mystery
Eric Andrew-GeeGraphics by Amina Batyreva and Hera Chan
features The McGill Daily | Thursday, January 31, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com 9
ARTHUR PORTER
Multinational Man of Mystery
Eric Andrew-Gee
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), ambas-sador plenipotentiary for the government of his native Sierra Leone, and advisor to that nation’s president. He attended garden par-ties 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 ten-ure as the CEO of the McGill hospital com-plex is that it was a nightmare. MUHC now has a $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 receiver-ship. 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 con-struction 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 “irregu-lar” 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 trig-gered Porter’s resignation from the MUHC and the Canadian civilian spy board men-tioned 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 pent-house 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 fantas-tical notion. He used to keep photos of him-self 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 attend-ed 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 start-ed resigning because his myriad of business inter-ests was making him unreliable, Porter skipped town and took the MUHC job. Left those suck-ers 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 necessar-ily know about the lawsuits, but they
Graphics by Amina Batyreva and Hera Chan
“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 towards
the scene of
the crash.”
The McGill Daily | Thursday, January 31, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com10 features
seemed to like his freewheeling, cowboy rep-utation. 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 final-ly 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 ideologi-cal 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 some-thing 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, figur-ing 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 back-drop, 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 dowd-ily 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 com-munity away from the mess and scrutiny of public hospitals and public life, a late capital-ist 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 searing-ly 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, con-struction 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 over-seas, 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 les-sons about the nature of global capital.
* * *
On January 9, 2012, 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 mil-lion 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 snow-fall 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 post-game 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 sev-eral 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 thin-ner in the face, though there’s still that lordly paunch beneath the shirt.
Finally, what the CBC says about his can-cer is the most telling: that it is “self-diag-nosed.” 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 free-style 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 inno-cent 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 effi-ciency, 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.
The McGill Daily Health&ed iiThursday, January 31, 2013
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The sea monster under the diving boardand the slippery balloon are distracting me from doing my work
T here’s something a little wrong with me. These days, I don’t often call it by name.
If I must, I often describe it like this: my mind is a balloon, coated in slip-pery, soapy water. It’s very difficult to keep ahold of. I can hang on for a few seconds at a time, but then it’ll pop from my grasp, and I have to go chasing after the damn thing before I can make another attempt to buckle down and focus on the task at hand. It’s time consuming. It’s tiresome. It eats up my free time, and keeps me from doing things I know I’d be capable of otherwise.
For the longest time, it didn’t occur to me that this might be strange. I just assumed that this was how everyone else’s mind worked as well, and they’d all just figured out how to correct for it. I had missed that memo. It didn’t affect my life much in the early days: I was smart enough and the problem was
quiet enough. I was spacey and fidg-ety, rather than flashily hyperactive. You all knew someone like me: shy, with a bit of an overactive imagina-tion. Maybe more than a bit.
I was accustomed to spend-ing a lot of time alone reading, or lost in my own head. I was used to talking to people my friends didn’t see, wandering through places that looked different to me than to my parents. Too many fantasy books and movies had warped my concept of reality a little: the fact that I was the only person seeing the ghostly orange lights along the New Jersey Turnpike didn’t mean they weren’t there. Wasn’t that just a sign that I was some type of chosen one? That I had a sixth sense of some type? Why are you laughing at me, mom? Adults found me amusingly preco-cious, and my peers were only a little bit wary. I made the best of it. Bring me a pretty rock at recess, and I’ll tell you a ghost story.
I would tell my father about the sea serpent that liked to coil itself at the bottom of our local pool,
and he’d laugh. It became a sort of inside joke. He creatively chris-tened it “Serpie” when I told him it didn’t have a name, and asked me for updates on its welfare on our drives back from swim practice. Happy to have someone listen to me, I’d make up stories about a friendlier, more active version of the monster. It would be boring to tell him the truth, how “Serpie” lurked in the deep end, dark body coiled and twisted, white eyes set in a head like a Chinese dragon, following me back and forth as I swam laps.
Trying to prove things like this to adults was never an option. History had taught me that they weren’t likely to take me seriously when I tried to talk about my more abstract thoughts, especially the semi-invisible things. Something completely invisible, such as my short attention span, didn’t have a chance. It was easier to let my par-ents and teachers think that I was lazy, that I was forgetful, that my head was in the clouds.
Then I got older. My letter for Hogwarts never came, and I was never swept onto a dragon’s back to save an alternate dimension from evil. My fantasy obsession subsided, and was eventually eclipsed by fixa-tions with pop culture and history. At some point, I stopped seeing elves in the shrubbery. My grades dropped. That was what landed me in a psychiatrist’s office, being told that, among other things, I had Attention Deficit Disorder. I was given all the normal prescriptions, and it was a bit like someone had tied my soapy balloon to my wrist with a ribbon. It still slipped away from me, but recovering it was fast-er and easier.
In the beginning, this was a relief. To know that I wasn’t nor-mal. To know that I wasn’t just lazy. I wasn’t shy about telling teachers. It wasn’t an excuse, in my mind, though it might have sounded that way sometimes. I felt I was just explaining. Giving a perfectly plausible reason as to why I couldn’t focus on a conver-
sation, or finish a chapter of my textbook. But this was not some-thing that the average high school teacher wants to hear. “Doesn’t everybody have that these days?” one math teacher asked me. The scenario felt familiar: Hillary talks about her view of the world, adult shrugs. Hillary keeps her mouth shut, wrestles with doubt, even though she knows something is a bit off. I’m aware that having ADD is a bit more plausible than seeing a cryptid in an indoor swimming pool, but the habit of doubt is just a little too well ingrained in me. Maybe there’s still a part of me that thinks my mind does work normal-ly, and that my ADD diagnosis has more to do with whiny oversharing than genuine chemical imbalance. So no matter the great things I’ve heard about the office for students with disabilities – the workshops, the test services, the advocacy – I haven’t managed to stop by yet, because I’m not quite sure if there’s actually something wrong with me, or if I’m just imagining it.
Hillary PasternakThe McGill Daily
Illustration Tom Acker | The McGill Daily
health&edThe McGill Daily | Thursday, January 31, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com12
On the issue of race and educationExamining racial profiling in schools in Quebec
Quebec, and especially Montreal, like the rest of Canada, likes to consider
itself an accepting and open soci-ety, both on multicultural and secu-lar grounds. Of course, this means that when issues pertaining to race and acceptance do arise, they’re usually treated very seriously: as reported by the National Post and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) vowed in 2012 to end racial profil-ing by their officers and launched an investigation into including the topic as a module in CEGEP police technology curricula.
However, the 2006 case of a Quebec middle school student, who was later identified as being of African origin, being handcuffed and escorted out of school in front of his teachers and peers for no apparent reason, twice in one week, seemed to catch less attention than may be expected. This was odd, especially considering that it was the first investigation into racial profil-ing that the Quebec Human Rights Commission ever conducted in rela-tion to a school. Last November, the Montreal Gazette covered the out-of-court settlement between the student’s family – represent-ed by the Quebec Human Rights Commission – and Montreal’s larg-est school board, the Commission Scolaire de Montréal. Surprisingly low levels of outrage and counter-
action were reached in the province and among school officials.
Why, then, was the eighth-grader in question arrested, handcuffed, and driven off in a police car, in front of his peers and teachers? Simply because he was in the same hallway as two police officers who were in the area in regards to an unrelated incident. Nevertheless, when the principal saw them, she insisted, strongly enough to sway the initially uncooperative police officers, that the young man be arrested. Later that week, disregarding the previ-ous incident, the student went to the principal to complain that he had been attacked by grade 11 students; however, when one of the alleged aggressors, who was Caucasian, told the principal that the eighth-grader was in fact the source of the trouble, she opted once again to call the police and have him arrested and escorted off the premises in handcuffs, leading him to spend a night in a centre for juvenile offend-ers. Eventually, the young man was forced to change schools.
Even after Commission des droits de la personne et de la jeunesse published an exten-sive report in 2011 on the state of racial profiling in Quebec and in Quebec educational centers, school boards were not interest-ed in the matter and “felt there were no problems.” This came after various instances of profil-ing within the school system were exposed, and no changes were made. Simultaneously, the Rights Commission is struggling under the sheer volume of the influx of
complaints related to racial profil-ing in the school sector in Quebec, which more than doubled in the past five years, with 1,047 com-plaints filed in 2011 alone.
If one good thing came out of this deplorable incident is that the attention of Montreal school administrations has been cap-tured, though not nearly enough. According to Gétan Cousineau, the president of the Commission des droits de la personne et de la jeunesse, this investigation has put necessary pressure on the school board to recognize that there is indeed a problem where the school boards have previously claimed there was none to be found. The Commission Scolaire de Montréal is under scrutiny by the Rights Commission to make necessary changes in its treatment of stu-dents who are visible minorities, and is now serving as an example to other school boards that the Rights Commission has the ability and jurisdiction to investigate.
Middle and high school stu-dents are often pegged as being inherently intolerant due to their age group, while the same behaviour does not translate to the higher education environ-ment. However, it is not at all the case that incidents such as that outlined above are rare in higher education, despite lack of media coverage, or statistics available from academic sources. According to the aforementioned 2011 report of the consultation on racial profiling and its conse-quences, black students from a
Montreal CEGEP reported that they were targeted for unjustified indentification checks at a school dance, and that the security per-sonnel exclusively checked the indentifications of young black students on the grounds that they suspected there might be a drug dealer in the school.
In another case, in Ville Saint-Laurent, a borough of Montreal, a 16-year-old black youth left school to wait for the bus. A fight broke out near him, and the police car pass-ing by immediately handcuffed the student and took him to the school principal. Days later, the student jaywalked near his school, and was ticketed by the same police officer.
There have also been cases of “welcoming classes,” classes put in place for new students from outside of Canada for the express, and well-intentioned purpose of helping to ease their transition and improve their French. These often make teens sit through children’s shows, an experience that can be both infantilizing and humiliating. The same report published by the Commission states that many stu-dents from these classes have com-plained that their teachers have been unwilling to invest efforts in their education since there is “no point,” and that they were consid-ered unlikely to succeed in life.
The report states the obvi-ous: students who are profiled often drop out of school, either because they feel ostracized or discouraged, or because of the self-fulfilling nature of prejudice and labelling; time spent in cen-
tres for young offenders, or on the fringes of social inclusion, lead to exposure to crime. What’s more, those who drop out, upon reach-ing adulthood, whatever their ori-gin, are at a greater risk of poverty and socio-economic exclusion.
The people who were inter-viewed for the report were between the ages of 16 to 25, meaning that the students were close to completing high school, or in higher education institutions like CEGEPs and universities.
At McGill, a school where many faculty members themselves come from outside of Canada – something that the study recom-mended all schools attempt to implement (hiring professors of different ethnic backgrounds) in order to curb the racial profiling of students – cases of racial profil-ing seem to be nonexistent. Yet, in a province in which approximately 9 per cent of the population are immigrants, and in which 64 per cent of immigrants are of a visible minority, in a province where over a thousand racial profiling com-plaints are filed in just one year, we can safely say that this phe-nomenon of racism manifested through racial profiling, might not always be visible, and so it is up to us to stay vigilant.
There are processes like equity complaints that people can excer-cise in relation to these types of incidents. Students who feel sin-gled-out should not be afraid to come forward and excercise their rights as contributing members of our community.
Joanna SchacterThe McGill Daily
Illustration Oles Chepesiuk | The McGill Daily
The McGill Daily culture i3Thursday, January 31, 2013
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Christopher Owens – LysandreFat Possum Records
Like a broken down, tin-can-voiced Leonard Cohen but less demure and much shorter, Christopher Owens descended upon le Cabaret du Mile End with little more than a weepy egg-shell of a voice, a finger-picked classical guitar, and two under-aged female singers who might cause great scandal in a Nabokov novel. Owens, formerly of indie band Girls, now also performs with a band replete with an aging and out-of-place Italian flutist/harmonicist.
Owens provided a warm, intimate per-formance in comparison to the removed coolness of many an indie or pop perform-er, sort of like sitting by a fire, hearing each of his words hitting the hardwood floor like embers in a Poe poem, or dust collecting in a student apartment.
This current tour promotes Owens’ first solo album, Lysandre, released January 13 on Fat Possum Records.
Lysandre is a 29-minute album, or more appropriately, musical suite, which builds on
the theme of falling in and out of love on tour with the girl whose name graces the album. The medieval-esque theme that punctuates every other song fluctuates between almost-too-morose and suddenly laid back. Fitting for his performance, the songs haunt you in a spooky, but not necessarily moving way.
Though several songs are quite moving or listenable on their own (for instance, the breezy “Here We Go”) like a tub of ice cream with a season of your favourite show on a lonely evening, the album is best expe-rienced in its entirety.
The album moves between dark and light; originals here sound like covers: Owens moves on from a failed relationship, and so he approaches each song like a living memory, breathing new life into a faded past.
Owens frustrates often, sometimes sound-ing like Conor Oberst, but not as subtly poet-ic, “Love is in the ear of the listener,” Owens sings here, “what if nobody ever gets it.” We get the idea, but next time you perform a Paul Simon cover, how about “50 Ways to Cling to Your Lover”?
Though the album is direct, it fluc-tuates between morose lugubriousness and attempts to ease a lingering sadness; there are songs, like “New York City,” which you know you will learn to love. Dedicated to low-life hipster habits, that tune is a bawdy, over-the-top saxophone solo that sounds like Sun Ra duet-ing with Nat King Cole.
Other songs, like “Here We Go,” where Owens sings, “if your heart is broken, you will find fellowship with me,” are simple, easy to understand, and just as easy to love.
—Matt Herzfeld
Burial – Truant/Rough SleeperHyperdub
In the world of UK-born ambient/2-step/garage/dubstep/house whatever-you-call-it, Burial is a standalone producer. With his static-laced, lo-fi drum-n-bass beats; short vocal sam-ples, and melodic basslines, Burial never really sounds bombastic, or even danceable. Rather, as Derek Walmsley wrote in Wired, Burial is reminiscent of “the balmy gust of air that pre-cedes an underground train.” “Mournfulcore” would be a more accurate way to describe his depressive beat-driven compositions.
Since 2007’s Untrue, Burial has released a series of experimental EPs, including last month’s two-track Truant/Rough Sleeper. While the critical verdict was positive – pre-
dictably, it was listed as “Best New Music” on Pitchfork, which has never given a Burial release less than an 8/10 – Truant/Rough Sleeper doesn’t rank among Burial’s best. Kindred, his last release, marked the begin-ning of a move towards longer, multi-part tracks that experiment more broadly with higher-pitched samples and prominent vocals. In “Truant,” he moves even further in this direction, devoting the middle third of the 12-minute track to an almost upbeat, orchestral-sampled arrangement that breaks with Burial’s normally sombre mood.
You can’t fault Truant/Rough Sleeper for its experimentation with tone and atmosphere. The real trouble is in the disjointedness of the two lengthy pieces, which constantly draw the listener out of the music, suspended in doubt over the direction of the piece. Both songs feature total silence as a barrier between very different arrangements, which feels disruptive compared to the strict, smooth consistency of his earlier EPs and albums. For those who pre-ferred the polish of Untrue and Moth/Wolf Cub, we’ll probably have to wait until Burial’s next collaboration with his natural creative counter-part, Four Tet, who last released “Nova” with Burial in March. The two of them have pro-duced some of the most compelling electronic music of the past five years, combining like Eros and Thanatos to produce sublime deep house.
—Kaj Huddart
Low Culture – ScreensDirtnap Records
Punk rock was never about innovation. At its inception in the late seventies, it was something close to reactionary: stripping away the preten-tions of prog rock and the insincere bombast of stadium rock to supercharge rock’s core ele-ments (power chords, pounding drums, tight song structures) with youthful rage.
It seems fitting, in this case, that Low Culture doesn’t do much innovation on Screens, their new LP. They deliver a playlist of appealingly
shambolic garage punk that might lack in new ideas (you can hear the main riff of “Pills” on at least half the stages at the Warped Tour in any given year), but still succeeds in it’s own low-key way. It’s a collage of every trend that’s tumbled through punk music in the last two decades. Green Day’s simple pop melodies (not the saccharine harmonies, thankfully), the Strokes’ lo fi production, heart-on-sleeve lyrical motifs that have been popular since the Replacements made it okay to have feelings and distortion ped-als in the late eighties. “Touchy Feely,” in particu-lar, could be a crash course in the genre, a sonic collage that splices spikes of eighties hardcore chaos with more modern emotion and melody, some britpop jangle, even a good ol’ one-note guitar solo a la “I Wanna Be Sedated.”
Noisy, joyful, and scruffy around the edges, Screens is a welcome shot of adrenaline for any established punk or pop-punk fan, though it likely won’t do much to earn new converts. “California” might come the closest to univer-sal appeal, straight out of the early nineties Bay Area scene, with something sweet and wistful at it’s centre. It’s currently out on the glori-ously named Dirtnap Records.
—Hillary Pasternak
A$AP Rocky – LONG.LIVE.A$APPolo Grounds Music/RCA Records
Let’s get real: LONG.LIVE.A$AP deserves a “fucking finally” from all A$AP Rocky fans. Waiting almost two years for an album (while barely living on two singles in 2012), and still loving it, just proves Rocky’s fan base is spec-tacular. And so is he.
Featuring artists with just as much tal-ent and cred as Rocky, such as Kendrick Lamar, 2 Chainz, Schoolboy Q, Joey Bada$$, and Skrillex, LONG.LIVE.A$AP meets, if not exceeds, fans’ expectations.
Rocky explores different styles of music, and showcases his voice in songs that have
different vibes and appeal to a larger audience. Ranging from dubstep in “Wild for the Night,” to more mainstream hip hop in “Goldie,” to the A$AP that we know and love in “Long Live A$AP,” Rocky’s originality and soul shine through. While some criticize him for creating ‘shallow’ music, this album was the perfect way to prove them wrong.
My personal favourite from his new album is currently “Phoenix,” if only because it’s dif-ferent than his usual work. Its beat has a mel-lower, dreamy sound, over which Rocky claims he “sings the ghetto gospel.” Something one would expect to hear on a Thursday night at Bluedog, “Phoenix” is music to relax to.
“Goldie” has also become another favou-rite. Sure, it has a beat that inspires moves and confidence beyond a listener’s normal abili-ties, but its fantastic lines like, “you could call me Billy Gates, got a crib in every state,” that remind me why I love listening to Rocky.
But “1 Train” will be a pick for true fans. Not only does it include some of the most talented artists of the genre, the song is six minutes of just rapping to a background of tense music. Though the violin creates a nice consistent beat to move to, once again, it’s the content that makes this song, and the album, spectacular.
—Ceren Eroglu
Boy & the Echo Choir – It All ShinesMy Little Cab Records
The newest album from French indie artists Boy & the Echo Choir, It All Shines, combines the whispy vocals of Caroline Gabard and transient guitar riffs and piano solos of band members Jean-Christophe Lacroix and Florian Chauvet to create an album of melancholic disorder. In contrast to the group’s previous album, the mostly instrumental All We Left
Behind, the newest release focuses more on eerie lyricism and reedy musical inserts. Gabard has a sound strikingly similar to English vocalist Dido, her voice a depressive wail, resonant with loss, especially in songs like “Impossible Heart.”
The group takes an experimental approach with their instrumentals, including electric guitar solos stopped short by intruding saxophone chords – creating an uncomfortable collision of sound. The album creates an extremely depress-ing aura, as the music trudges along in a seem-ingly funeral-like procession of dark pop. While the goal of the album was to create a “deep disorder in beauty,” the mix of sporadic instru-mental interludes along with eerie vocals and tone convey more chaos than pleasure. The only exception on the album is “The Organs,” a song with various electronic guitar loops that break the heavy sadness of Gabard’s lyrics with more upbeat and tribal grooves. It All Shines is set to be released the 30th of this month, however, it may not be worth your precious listening time.
—Hillary Storm
The Daily Reviews
cultureThe McGill Daily | Thursday, January 31, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com14
Espresso yourselfThe world of third wave coffee
P eople used to pray for their food before they ate it. Now, they take pictures of it. As for
coffee, people used to just make it and drink it. Now, they lavish atten-tion on it, from their single-origin beans to espresso machines costing tens of thousands of dollars. They paint pictures in the milk foam. This phenomenon is part of a new coffee movement called “third wave coffee,” a term still unfamiliar to many caffeine addicts. Third wave coffee is about more than just cof-fee consumption. It is about craft, connectivity, experience, and qual-ity, from planting to harvesting, from selection to roasting, from brewing to the final touch.
In the old days, coffee was sim-ply a commodity. Today, in liberal cities across North America, coffee is evolving from a cheap mass-pro-duced commodity into an artisanal pleasure like wine, cheese, and microbrewed beer.
The term “third wave,” coined in 2003 by Trish R. Skeie in The Flamekeeper, the official newsletter of the Roasters Guild, contextualizes this phenomenon in the history of coffee’s place in North America. The first ‘wave’ of coffee emerged in the
late nineteenth century, when coffee was first distributed on an industrial scale. The first wave lives on in your grandparents’ can of Folger’s. The second wave began when specialty coffee retailers like Second Cup and Starbucks started setting up shop in high-traffic spots to give the masses a taste of European-style coffee, and a relaxing place to hang out, work or study. Third wave coffee refers to the rise of independent coffee bars, like Chez Boris, Café Rico, and Caffè in Gamba in Montreal, that make cof-fee beverages out of high quality cof-fee beans roasted by independent local companies. The third wave sees coffee as an artisanal bever-age, from preparation to final pre-sentation, with the attendant care-ful sourcing, roasting, and brewing. Enthusiasts of third wave coffee also beleive in paying every worker, from farmers to baristas, fair wages. This latest wave is a movement toward wine-like appreciation, and a shift away from giant coffee chains.
While some people think that this new trend is snobbish bullshit, third wave fans are growing in num-ber. Most ostensibly go for the cof-fee quality, but others like to sup-port local businesses, to experience a non-Starbucks ambience, or to simply just enjoy a unique beverage.
Guillaume Kittel, owner and founder of Kittel, an indepen-
dent coffee roasting company in Montreal, believes it all comes down to flavour: “Coffee is all about opinion. What tastes good, what tastes bad, it’s an opinion. I like the third wave movement, the way we think, but then, it’s just an opinion.”
Kittel, who roasts the coffee beans at his workshop, finds the
exchange of opinion touching, because coffee roasting is a personal art form to him. “It’s like doing an art work and receiving the feedback from people. If the people love it, it means they love your work,” he says.
I like to frequent third wave cafes because they each have have their own personality and signature.
Prices at a third wave coffee out-let are comparable to Starbucks or Second Cup, and the quality of cof-fee is almost always higher. Rather than a chain outlet, why not check out an independent shop that offers a unique ambience, serves artsy cof-fee beverages and allows you to sup-port the local entrepreneurs?
Margie RamosCulture Writer
Beyond DjangoFilms Spike Lee hasn’t complained about
T hree weeks ago, the Academy announced this year’s Oscar nominees,
and Quentin Tarantino found his blaxploitation spaghetti Western Django Unchained competing with the likes of Lincoln and Argo for the title of Best Picture.
Sadly for Tarantino, the two most recent “Best Pictures,” The Artist and The King’s Speech, literally put me to sleep, so I feel fairly certain that a flick about a freed slave (Jamie Foxx) exacting revenge on white slavers doesn’t have a shot with the som-nambulant Academy.
If there were an Oscar for most offensive picture, however, Tarantino would be a shoe-in. Using slavery as a platform for an action/revenge film that notoriously uses the N-word over 100 times, the director has been called out everywhere from Buzzfeed, to the New Yorker, to Spike Lee’s Twitter account. Most recently, civil rights groups like National Action Network and Project Islamic Hope spoke out against Django action fig-ures marketed to children.
Now, as I’m not black, and the film has already been extensively dis-cussed by a host of critics who are, it would be irrelevant and inappropri-ate for me to spend time explaining why Django is so problematic. What I can add to the discussion, however, are a few recommendations for politi-cally conscious films about race that wouldn’t make Spike Lee cringe.
My first recommendation is Nothing But A Man, a 1964 film made by two Jewish men that would become Malcom X’s favorite movie of all time. In 1963, Michael Roemer and Robert Young had no experience making nar-rative cinema, and decided to make a feature about black people living in the southern United States. Members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored (NAACP) advised the pair on the script, and they shot the film that same turbulent summer John F. Kennedy announced his civil rights bill, Medgar Evers was assassinated, and Martin Luther King Jr. marched on Washington.
With cinéma verité style real-ism, the film tells the story of a young black couple (Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln), who struggle through life in small-town Alabama as systemic racism threatens their livelihood and their love for each other. The film
deftly portrays not only the grave poverty suffered by much of the black community, but also the devastating emotional effects of those conditions.
When the film was released in 1964, the American Motion Picture Production Code still forbade show-ing black characters kissing, and no film had ever shown black charac-ters in close-up. With their laugh-able $230,000 budget, Nothing But a Man had trampled Hollywood’s racial taboos and condemned white supremacist America like no other film ever had.
The next two films I recommend were made the following decade by members of a group of black art-ists known as the L.A. Rebellion. These directors studied and made films at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) between the late sixties and early eighties. In the words of Jacqueline Stewart, these independent filmmakers “attempt-ed to both address socio-economic plight of black people still struggling for rights and recognition... and simultaneously develop their own personal artistic visions.”
One of the best known films from the L.A. Rebellion is Killer of Sheep, which Charles Burnett made on the weekends while he was enrolled at
University of California, Los Angeles UCLA in the late 1970s. Like many L.A. Rebellion films, Killer of Sheep deals with the bleak everyday of Watts, L.A., the ghetto that played host to one of the worst race riots of the 1960s.
Here, while the protagonist Stan goes to work at the slaughterhouse, neighbourhood children play in the sun-drenched, decrepit cityscapes of industrial southern Los Angeles, and his friends pull off low-level heists. As the camera wanders directionless through tableaus of life in Watts, the limited narrative structure and the crumbling backdrop of the neigh-bourhood underscore Stan’s sense of emptiness as he drifts further away from his wife and children. The film acts as a devastating revelation of the trap residents of lower-income neigh-bourhoods are forced to live in.
Lastly, another excellent film from the L.A. Rebellion is Bush Mama, made by Ethiopian-born director Haile Gerima as his thesis project, with Charles Burnett as the cinema-tographer. Through a startling fusion of documentary realism and surreal-ism that relied heavily on improvisa-tion, Bush Mama follows Dorothy, a pregnant woman at the mercy of the racist welfare system in Watts. Her social worker pushes her to abort her
pregnancy, her husband is impris-oned for a crime he did not commit, and the neighbourhood is terrorized by the police. Slowly, Dorothy, and the film itself, become radicalized by extreme circumstances as she explores the ideology of black power.
Unfortunately, the radical racial rhetoric and innovative style that make Nothing But A Man, Killer of Sheep, and Bush Mama some of my favorite films also ensure these films will never reach large audiences. Indeed, Django Unchained, with its relatively superficial treatment of racial issues, has been seen more times in the month since its release than these three films have been viewed in the decades since theirs.
I don’t mean to suggest you shouldn’t see Django, even if it is highly problematic (what Hollywood film isn’t?). At least this one was enter-taining. I do suggest, however, that Django is purely entertainment, and that if you’re looking for meaningful racial commentary, you can look else-where and be highly rewarded.
Photo Margie Ramos
Lilya HassallForays into Film
Lilya Hassall is a U3 Cultural Studies student. Forays Into Film and Feminism is a bi-weekly column about alternative films. Contact her at [email protected].
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As it stands, McGill holds investments in 645 publicly traded corporations, 35 of which have the largest carbon reserves in the world, and 14 of which extract crude oil from tar sands – an increasingly popular source of fuel extraction, although one widely criticized on both environmental and social grounds.
Universities use their endowment – the total value of their investment portfolios – to fund things such as pensions, programs, and scholar-ships in perpetuity. McGill’s total endowment is $983 million, $56 million of which is invested in various forms of fossil fuel extraction.
McGill turns a large profit from these invest-ments, but it comes at a great ethical cost: tar sands are one of the largest contributing fac-tors to greenhouse gas emissions in Canada (20 per cent are from Alberta tar sands alone). As an institution of higher learning and advanced scientific research, McGill is surely aware of the disastrous global consequences of climate change; the International Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body, warns of loss in biodiversity and a 50 per cent reduction in agricultural yield in the near future as a result of climate change. Among other detrimental effects, sea levels are projected to rise between one and seven metres over the next century.
McGill is also aware that certain investments are unethical: it adopted a policy of Socially Responsible Investing in 2004. To fulfil this commitment in more than name, McGill should divest from environmentally harmful and social-ly detrimental industries and corporations, par-
ticularly those involved in the tar sands.Divestment pressure has worked in the
past. During the 1980s, students at the University of Toronto, Carleton, McGill, and other universities launched a campaign to withdraw investments from companies and institutions with ties to apartheid South Africa. At McGill, following a combination of sit-ins, demonstrations, and educational efforts, the Board of Governors approved divestment from such companies. Students, when mobilized, can be a tremendously persuasive force.
Divest McGill is one segment of a growing movement spreading across North American cam-puses – including branches at Brown, Cornell, Carleton, and many others – that is attempting to persuade universities to divest from environmen-tally and socially harmful investments. Given this widespread effort, it is time we McGill students stand up and recognize the positive effect we can have – and the effects we can prevent – by con-vincing the University to change its investment policy. Petitioning the McGill Board of Governors to divest is a simple and effective means of mak-ing our voices heard. As students and constitu-ents, students must continually push for higher environmental standards: the test of our actions will be the state of the environment we leave to the next generation.
Divest McGill can be found at divestmcgill.wordpress.com
— The McGill Daily Editorial Board
Divest and conquer
Illustration Hera Chan | The McGill Daily
The McGill Daily compendium! I6Thursday, January 31, 2013
mcgilldaily.com
lies, half-truths, and counter-counter-counter-points
“We need to lie more,” says administratorAdmin “concerned” at student body’s tendency to “point to the facts”
C hristopa P. Manfredo, Dean of Farts, has told The Twice-a-Weekly that
he believes McGall University administrators are not “lying enough.”
Speaking in the wake of McGall’s announcement that it plans to cut 100 Arts courses “to enhance the connection between research and undergraduate teaching by increasing the pro-portion of courses taught by pro-fessors who devote their careers to advancing their disciplines, as well as increasing the avail-ability of teaching assistant sup-port to professors and students,” Manfredo said the response of the student body, faculty, and var-ious small rodents showed that “this administration is not lying enough, or with enough skill.”
“This isn’t a new problem,” said Manfredo. “[The objective] of lying more, and with increased tactical nous, has been part of this University’s strategic plans going back to the Provost’s 2006 White Paper titled ‘How can we get away with it this time?’”
The paper outlined the McGall
administration’s commitment to “deception and untruth” at every opportunity, and even opened the possibility of McGall “creating opportunities for increased bold-faced lying.”
At the time, campus reaction to the White Paper was muted, with many students saying they were impressed with the admin-istration’s discovery of gold reserves beneath McTavish.
Now, however, many students are raising questions about the administration’s stories, claiming that they make “zero sense.”
“These stories do not add up,” said Mattyias R. Queen, a U4 Brewing and Fermenting student. “I pay very little, if any, atten-tion to the stories put out by this administration, but let me tell you one thing: the total b-s they are spouting now makes abso-fuck-ing-lutely no sense whatsoever.”
“Cutting Arts courses and then claiming this will provide ‘more time for professors to have substantive interactions with stu-dents’? I’m sorry. What? I’m two pitchers deep at Gert’s and I can tell that’s a piss poor lie. Do they even get anyone to do their PR? I’m actually offended – straight up offended – by this attempt at lying: Lance Armstrong did a bet-
ter job when he said he had ‘no idea how all them needles ended up in his sleeping bag.’ Seriously.”
Queen’s sentiments are believed to be widely shared by the student body. In a recent poll con-ducted by the Bison and Bulldog, students were asked to pick “the thing they would most improve about McGall’s administration.”
Out of four possible respons-es – “lying,” “comprehension of basic moral and ethical duties,” “resemblance to other land-based mammals,” and “ability to do things after thinking about them” – McGall students unanimously chose “lying.”
“It’s not that I don’t think they could improve in any of the other categories,” said Queen. “It’s just that they’re so bad at lying it makes the Parti Québécois look like a cross between Lisa Simpson and Mahatma Ghandi. They are just not good at making things which are not true look like they are true.”
It was these criticisms which led Manfredo to call for a “dras-tic improvement” to all McGill administrators’ lying ability.
“Some of the reactions to these polls have tended toward the apocalyptic. But we do need to make some changes to our
lying procedures: the old system was just not working.”
Under the old system, admin-istrators were expected to cross their fingers behind their backs and then quickly recite their lie with their eyes closed to McGall’s PR Mascot Sweetie Boy-Sweet, who was then charged with embellish-ing the lie and “making it look it came from carbon-based life.”
Manfredo told The Twice-a-Weekly that plans for a new sys-tem are “ongoing” but that he hopes they will be ready “before we need to make major changes to the University that no one asked for” again.
“Discussions about these objectives go back to 2008,” said Manfredo. “In 2010-2011, the faculty held important consulta-tions with students, including a Town Hall – in which the issue of the diminishing lying/getting away with it relationship came up frequently – and a Dean’s Working Group on How To Fool Effectively, that included students [no one] and consulted widely [we just heard about this].”
“I suggested [at that time] it would be valuable to pretend to hold an AUS Town Hall on the topic,” said Manfredo. “I again pretended to update the Faculty
Council on the proposal on January 15 – which seems to be when people began to realize nothing I said was true. Rather than a sudden announcement of something new, my discussion on January 15 was a last-ditch attempt to persuade everyone that I am interested in discussion and con-sultation: we have been trying to lie better for quite a while.”
The Twice-a-Weekly under-stands that McGall’s new propos-als for “How to lie better” include a series of numbers described by one McGall Mathematics professor as “increasingly baffling and less like real numbers the more one looks at them,” and a list of “promises” that appear to be nothing other than various portmanteaus made up of the words “thou,” “believe,” “destiny,” “Daniel Radcliffe,” “barn owl,” and “demand.”
“Many have asked about the message the faculty is send-ing to potential students,” said Manfredo. “I think the message is this: that when the Faculty of Farts promises prospective students that they will be taught by some of the world’s leading experts in their fields, we are able to hon-our that promise by having those experts in undergraduate class-rooms. Demandthoubelieve.”
Euan EKThe Twice-a-Weekly
Administration disappointed by reaction to latest world record attemptClaim world’s biggest waterslide “thoroughly misunderstood”
Internal documents leaked to the Twice-A-Weekly have revealed disappointment with-
in McGall’s administration over their recent world record attempt. In a memo from VP (Purchases and Receipts) Mortono Joaquin Fendelson to Principal Heatha Mama-Boom, Fendelson says that “after the Rousing Success (TM) of our World Record Fruit Salad (which united McGall’s campus under a banner of Friendship and Love), students’ reactions to the attempt at ‘World’s Largest Water Slide’ were unexpectedly nega-tive. They thought it was merely a f lood.”
Other documents found by The Twice-a-Weekly lay out the administration’s plans. The offi-cial plan was to spring a leak in the McTavish Reservoir, leading
to a massive water slide down McTavish. At that point, students, professors, and administrators alike would rush into the stream and joyously ride to the bottom. The administration also planned to hand out McGall-branded inner tubes, but the delivery truck was not able to arrive in time.
In an email to VP (Counting and Adding Up) Princes Di Anna, Mama-Boom steams over the lack of enthusiasm. “We had a student who went in to show everyone how fun it would be! We had told her about it before, and she had volunteered! And yet, somehow, people were somehow dissuaded to join in. It might have been the chunks of debris that were also going down the slide.”
“God damn,” she added, “I can’t wait to get out of this soul-sucking, no-fun-allowed place.”
These emails and memos are dated to approximately hours after the flood had begun. When
reached for contact by The Twice-a-Weekly, McGall PR Mascot Sweetie Boy-Sweet responded sixty hours later with a full expla-nation. “Well, the world record attempt was thoroughly misun-derstood. We even had a nice lady from the Guinness Book of World Records there to take it in. She claimed not to see enough partici-pation to truly call it a waterslide.”
Boy-Sweet’s email continues: “We didn’t really expect it to flood the buildings like it did, though. But we didn’t want to waste this primo opp[ortunity]. The city kept calling us and telling us that they could shut off the water, but we kept telling them to wait. Heatha had this great idea.”
Boy-Sweet’s email then describes what he calls “the best night of [his] life.” According to Boy-Sweet, Mama-Boom Fendelson, Di Anna, and Manfredo, along with key mem-bers of the BoG, snuck over to
McTavish around 3 a.m., dressed in swimsuits and toting their own, personalized inner tubes. (“Mine is so awesome,” Boy-Sweet added. “And it only cost an extra $1,000 (or, 1 Arts class) to pay for it!”). At first, Boy-Sweet alleges that he was against the plan. “I was so worried we would get caught. I said, ‘Heatha, come on, do we have to??? We could get in so much trouble!’ To which she replied, ‘Joaquin and I will not have our fun spoiled by you, VP of being a wet blanket.’ So I went with them.”
At this time, the water was (somehow) still f lowing. “Heatha and Joaquin took their tubes and just dove in! And then, whooosh! They went down the street! At first I was scared, but then Manfredo gave me a shove and then, whooooosh! There I was going! It was so much fun. I just looked at Heatha and gave her this huge smile.”
Boy-Sweet then goes on
to describe, in detail, how the administration members took approximately twenty more rides. “Then,” he claims, “we had a great idea. Another water slide. So we broke one [pipe] above Wong and started going down that!”
By 6 a.m., Boy-Sweet claimed, the administrators were “very tired.” They were so tired that they decided to “pretend that James was flooded, so we could take the day off. With pay, of course.”
Twice-A-Weekly reporter Cherry Cola was thoroughly per-plexed by the news and asked Boy-Sweet if the high costs of the administration’s waterslide was worth it. 67 hours later, Boy-Sweet responded with a short note.
“You know, as long as the administration is having fun, and top-level administrators from around the country know we are having fun, and we are drawing them in that way, then no expense is too much. Best wishes, Sweetie.”
Heaven SentThe Twice-a-Weekly