McGill Mess MeToo?

While I was at the ISA, I heard about an effort by the McGill undergrad student society to compel the university to do something about the problem of sexual harassment (Yes, the media are approaching me again since I have been blogging about this for two years).  I was pointed to these reports of the SSMU making public a letter that was sent to the head of the university: "The letter says complaints resurface “year after year” about professors in the departments of history, philosophy, political science, psychology and world Islamic and Middle East Studies."

The university insists that they take this stuff seriously, but they can't provide specifics about complaints or processes.  I think they could provide one stat that would be meaningful: how many professors have been fired for sexual harassment?  If the answer is not zero, then folks might be more willing to buy the assertion that they are doing something.  If the answer is zero, well, that is an answer.

I did tweet that McGill is stuck in a catch-22: that they can't punish without complaints, but why should anyone complain if no one is punished.  The problem that journalists have in covering this is that no survivor is willing to go on the record, and that makes complete sense.  The MeToo movement in Hollywood and now elsewhere broke through this when multiple survivors came out simultaneously.  The women who did come out against Weinstein, for instance, knew they were not alone and that they might be believed BUT they still faced much abuse online and elsewhere.

So, I am pretty thrilled that this student group is focused on this incredibly important issue and providing the collective action that is hard for individuals to organize.  SSMU is putting significant pressure on McGill.  This is a good thing--how does McGill respond to this pressure?  I don't know.  I have kept saying that whatever assertions McGill says about taking this stuff seriously will only believed if they do something very visible, rather than covering things with a cloak of confidentiality.  I have invoked Machiavelli by suggesting that McGill should figuratively take one of the harassers to a public square and, well, draw and quarter them.  In the modern day, firing a harasser would be the visible demonstration that something has changed.

My guess is that this will happen, but not to the guy I know of.  I have heard enough about the stuff at Islamic studies that I would bet one of the offenders there being the demonstration of McGill's seriousness.  But maybe not since the catch-22 might get in the way.

Who to Call About McMess?

I got a comment on my previous post about who folks should contact if they want to blow the whistle on McGill's sexual harassers.  I don't know the McG procedures they have these days, and I won't really trust them until we see someone be visibly punished for their behavior (again, confidentiality tends to protect the perpetrator more than the survivors).  So, my response to that comment is to provide a series of names/contact info of journalists of all kinds who have contacted me about this story (you will note that most didn't end up writing much probably because they could not get any survivors on the record).

Anyhow, here's what I got:
McGill Tribute Editor: Alexandra Harvey <alexandra.harvey@mail.mcgill.ca>
McGill Daily News:  <news@mcgilldaily.com>  The reporter was Marina Cupido--I don't know if she is still there.
Vice: Hilary Beaumont <hilary.beaumont@vice.com>

Maclean's: Martin Patriquin <Martin.Patriquin@rci.rogers.com>, 514.843.2964

The first one listed is based on a very recent conversation.  The other ones are older, so they have probably moved on.

No Joy in McGill-Ville

I have been holding off on commenting on the column Andrew Potter wrote, his resignation (coerced or otherwise), and the reactions of folks.  Mostly because I am traveling this week, but also partly because so many people (especially this guy) have written such smart stuff that I don't have that much to add.  So, what do I have to say?  A lot as it turns out.  I can't help myself.

First, one does not have to agree with Potter's original column to note some stuff in it that resonates:

• having police and firefighters be major political actors is problematic (here's where Phil Lagasse thinks I am to his right--that I am not a fan of unions.  I actually don't mind unions when public service ones don't take sides in city politics and are major actors).
• there is beaucoup de corruption.  Yes, there is an underground economy--any house reno project raises the question about whether one can/should get $10,000s in cash to pay the reno guys.  My fave story is that the firm that had the contract to fingerprints for permanent residency applications in Montreal demanded cash, not checks or credit cards.  Yeah, the one responsible for helping the immigration services identify criminals/security threats.  
• I am not surprised that the truckers were less than cooperative.  Tis a province where customer service is, um, spotty.  When I was at McGill, we had a candidate give a job talk on language politics, and he started by saying, well, in a store, the owner wants to speak in French, but an anglophone customer walks in, and since the customer is king, and we all laughed, interrupted and said, nope, not here.

•  On the other hand, Quebec is not a place where there is little social connectivity/capital. For me, it was a huge, friendly, silly, generous ultimate frisbee community of anglophones, francophones and allophones (those whose first language is not French nor English) that welcomed me and my family.  Bowl alone?  Maybe.  But heaps of communal stuff with much glue provided by the Canadiens.

Second, the real story is "Quebec-bashing." That the province overreacts to criticism from certain quarters (English-speakers inside and outside the province) is problematic.  Yes, Quebec was oppressed long ago, but it has been winning for forty plus years.  It has had nearly all of its demands met by the federal government, it has had more than its proportionate share of Prime Ministers, and on and on.  It is a great place in many ways, so it should not become a provincial crisis when one columnist says something that is inaccurate, critical or both. Worse, these reactions provide yet more distraction sauce--rather than focusing on fixing the problems (how are the corruption trials going, I've lost track?), the politics of the place does not lend itself to making much progress on improving things.

Third, I got into an argument with someone on someone else's facebook page about the hypocrisy of all this.  Potter lost his job over criticizing the province, which, in my mind, is a far less of a crime than targeting particular groups.  And, oh yeah, some folks in Quebec can be most insensitive towards groups, such as Jews and Muslims and immigrants.  Do the folks who advocate restricting the abilities of groups to practice their religion get forced to resign?  Hmmmm.   The good news is that those efforts have failed repeatedly.  But the bad news is that the regular appearance of xenophobia and the embracing of it by major parties does not often lead to shaming and exclusion (not just Quebec).  I have long written far more about Quebec's problematic ethnic politics than Ontario's flawed fiscal politics because I have studied ethnic politics and have no clue why Ontario is so stupid about the various fiscal plans.


Finally, while two dots may or may not reflect a pattern, I can't help but note that McGill cares more about reputation than about academic freedom or its students.  When the choice is to do the difficult thing and protect a key part of its mission or do the easy thing and protect itself, it chooses the latter.  Speaking of Potters, Harry would not approve. Will McGill's leadership pay a price for not defending the academic freedom of one of its employees?  I have no idea.  To be clear, I never got any pushback from the administration when I wrote critical things about Quebec or about McGill in my time there.  But if my audience was larger and if they got Quebec politicians yelling about it, I am not sure how much support I would have received.  And, of course, I have tenure whereas Potter and many others do not.  Given that modern universities are staffed primarily by temporary folks, the signal here is clearly that the majority of those on campus should not be doing any public engagement because they might offend someone and find that their contract is unlikely to be renewed (most of the leaders of the temporary faculty effort to get better wages at the school my daughter attends found that their positions have not been renewed).  This bodes poorly not just for McGill but for democracy itself.

McMess McContinues

It has been a year plus since I posted about the McGill mess. Every so often, I get contacted by a journalist who seeks to pursue this story,* but they always come up short because no one will talk to them on the record and name names.

* I also get contacted by students from time to time who say that it has happened to themselves or their friends.  They have been let down by the system again and again.

I was just asked by one journalist what I would ask McGill administrators if I had the chance.  I came up with this:

I’d ask her (the administrator) how she feels about confidentiality protecting the perpetrators more than the survivors.  How can future students protect themselves from being preyed upon by serial harassers if they don’t know who is doing the harassing?  How should students feel when they can never see the profs getting punished, if they ever do get punished, because everything is confidential?

Shouldn’t professors who engage in harassment not be given administrative responsibilities?

Most bluntly: the current system doesn’t protect the students, but does protect McGill’s reputation.  Is that the right set of priorities?

Yeah, I am still pretty angry a year later.

McMess McDaily

The McGill Daily covered the sexual harassment at McGill story.  However, it did so more obliquely than I did by citing my being oblique and not mentioning my less than oblique references.  Indeed, the online story does not link to my post.  I guess many interested McG observers have already been to my post, given the number of hits it has received.

I have reactions to two other parts of the story:

• the focus
• the discussion of punishment

In terms of focus, the discussion in the piece focuses on prof-undergrad relationships although it eventually gets to the prof-grad student problem.  Two problems with this: a) the person in question harassed grad students and not undergrads (as far as I know) which made him safe to be the department's Director of Undergraduate Studies (?!) until his sabbatical; and b) "relationship" suggests a level of consent and friendliness that did not exist.  Coercion was this guy's game with threats a key part of his strategy.  While consensual relationships between prof and student are very problematic, as the article argues quite well, the offender here needs to be called out for not just seeking inappropriate relationships but using his position to bully students into giving in or dropping out.

Regarding the punishment, the article asserts that fired profs can go elsewhere and commit again.  Probably not.  This is not the Catholic Church in Spotlight where there are many jobs that the hierarchy can shuffle around.  In academia, a fired prof has a much lower chance of being hired by someone else (University Presidents are another matter entirely).  The market is brutal enough that someone who is fired for sexual harassment is just not going to be hired again.  Again, the primary responsibility of the university is to protect its students, so leaving a serial harasser in place is simply the wrong choice.  The problem is not that the guy can go elsewhere, but rather gaining the evidence that serial harassment has occurred and then the university having the willingness to do what is right.  The problem during my time at McGill was the latter.  The problem today, given what I have been told about the folks who are making the decisions now, is probably the former.  Either way, what the article gets very right is that the university's handling of the situation discourages students from filing grievances.

Oh, and the article does not name who was the provost at the time that the case was blown by the university.  He is no longer provost, but is still at McGill.

McGill Mess Progress Report

It has been a week since I wrote this piece about McGill's shame.  It has gotten a heap of attention--2.5k hits--which is a lot for a Spew post.  I have received emails, facebook messages, phone calls, etc from current and former McG students thanking me for outing RB (my "subtlety" in my original post was not that subtle) and/or citing other examples of sexual harassment.  The questions I have received from two McG student newspapers suggests that the problem is pervasive.

My guess is that this is going to blow up a smidge this week as both student newspapers are working on stories on this, and this comes in the aftermath of other incidents over the past year or more.

Besides telling students to avoid RB, what can one do?  I have been willing to talk to the McMedia to suggest that serial sexual harassment should be a firing offense.  Tenure is to protect academic freedom, not to protect the pathologies of professors who prey upon students.  What got me pissed off last weekend was the realization that nothing had changed.

The penalties--not being able to work with grad students and being forced to work in the main building instead of the more remote office (where one could prey without as many witnesses)--have evaporated.  Whatever other punishment was too invisible to notice and apparently not to deter.

It comes down to this: how do institutions protect their students?  Or is it rather how to protect their institutions rather than protecting the students?  Brock University is undergoing a similar set of events: insisting on confidentiality may be good at protecting the school but sucks in terms of preventing students from being victimized.  Unless the perpetrator can change his ways, how can students be protected?  Either constantly monitor the prof (unworkable), out the prof (probably not sufficient), keep the prof away from students entirely, or fire the prof.

In the US, academic institutions have also been reluctant to investigate these situations.  However, the existence of Title IX and the use of it by students and groups can force universities to take these issues seriously and worry more about the students and less about protecting university reputations.

I will provide updates as I learn more about McGill's reactions/policies. 

McGill's Shame Continues

Really?  Back at it again? I have repeated referred to a particular serial sexual harasser in McGill's Political Science department, but obliquely so.  Why obliquely so?  Because I am not sure what the consequences are for me of violating the confidentiality agreements of a place I used to work and because I didn't want people to speculate about who received this guy's unwanted attention. 

Well, I just learned as a result of this post this morning that the same guy is back at it.  When he was caught during my time there, only a few faculty knew.  They may have wondered why he got moved out of his office in a remote location and put next to my office.  I apparently was supposed to babysit/monitor him (which was strange since I only learned of his behavior informally, not through the administration).  But that was temporary, apparently, as I left and the next guy in that office probably didn't know that oversight of this guy came with the office (and I think the harasser moved back to his remote location where he can predate without oversight). His ban of supervising grad students apparently has lapsed as well.  When I was on grad admissions, I tried to keep students who wanted to do Mideast or peacebuilding from coming to McGill because I had little confidence that they would stay away from him.

Yes, most of the students knew because word gets around, but there was no guarantee that the word would keep being shared over time and all it takes is for a new student to have a few interactions with a serial harasser to have their trust in the institution and in academia irrevocably broken ... especially when the institution knows but does little.

The confidentiality that is thrown over the situation means that the prof in question appears to get away with it--those who know he commits these acts again and again do not see any consequences and those who don't know think nothing of it, perhaps even referring students to him if they develop an interest in Mideast politics and/or peacebuilding.

There, alas, is no internet trail to follow (there was once a post on Rate my prof about him but it disappeared) ....

Anyhow, as I have said before, if you have students or are a student thinking of going to McGill's political science program, I'd be willing to be more specific.  It is a great school and a great program with mostly great people, but there is poison within and it continues to remain and it remains under-identified and under-sanctioned.

Candidate Emergence Project: Canada's Turn

At APSA, I had dinner with a friend of mine, Cherie Maestas, who studies candidate emergence--where do politicians come from?  Why do they choose to run when they do?  Her study made it to the House floor since Congressfolks were worried that NSF money was being spent on finding competitors.  Silly Congresspeople.

Anyhow, I was thinking about this when I returned to Canada and found that the Conservatives have not one but two candidates that they had to ditch.  One was caught on video peeing into someone else's mug (really) and the other turned out to be an internet pranker with poor judgment/taste/humor.

Despite the timing (election is next month), this will probably not directly affect the outcome of those two ridings (what they call districts up here).  Why?  Because these were ridings that the Tories would only win in a landslide, and that landslide ain't coming.  With the party controlling who runs in each riding, the question of candidate emergence is different than in the US--the party picks folks.  And the Conservatives apparently have a shallow bench or a strange sense of humor.

In the last election, we discovered that the NDP slotted inexperienced McGill undergrads into the spots in Quebec (and elsewhere) to fill the slots.  They didn't expect these kids to win, unless the Bloc Quebecois fell apart and the Liberals failed to gain much headway in Quebec.  And, gosh darn it, those things happened, and the NDP won so many seats it was called Orange Crush.  Four McGill undergrads and one grad student ended up serving in Parliament.  From what I have heard, they have all performed very well, doing far more than just occupying seats. 

I have no idea how many of them will be returned after this next election, but my guess is most, as the Bloc is dead, dead, dead; the Liberals are performing weakly in Quebec; and Harper is none too popular these days. 

So, my suggestion to the Conservatives is that they stop choosing drunk frat bros from other parts of Canada and simply find some Conservative McGill students to parachute into the ridings where they need bodies.  Not that I want the Conservatives to do well this time, but perhaps the party would do better if they had some well-educated young blood from where the students are mighty sharp.

A Reminder

Montreal was pretty cool, the ultimate scene was great, and I miss most of my colleagues, but when I look back, there is one element that I miss more than any other--the students.  Here is a nice illustration of why:


Oh, and the video features heaps of places I hung out, but unsurprisingly Leacock 132, the big lecture hall, seems to be missing.

Putting Lipstick on a Pig, Academic Budget-Style

McGill didn't have to fire people to get within the budget parameters set by Quebec. Woot!  I guess we can declare victory, eh?  Um, not so much.  The Voluntary Retirement Program worked well to meet the $43.5 million cut in the budget, but that is only good news if you think that these 250 people were not really doing that much.  That they were entirely extraneous or made redundant by technological improvements. 

Me, I am not so sure.  My last couple of years at McGill saw significant cuts that were making matters worse for the students, for faculty and for administration.  Fewer course offerings, more service heaped on fewer people, department staffs being cut back so that offices have shorter hours and serve less...  And that was before the last couple of rounds of cuts. 

There are a lot of reasons why I left McGill, but one was that I thought its future was mighty bleak (Ontario is not terrific but it ain't this).  I knew the PQ would not be kind because of its ideological hostility that which McGill is--English and excellent.  The folks in the party have long complained about how disproportionate higher ed funding in Quebec is since there are so few Anglophones.  Which implies that McGill (and Concordia and Bishops) should be cut.   I also guessed that the PQ would cut the tuition increases and would otherwise mismanage things.  So, yes, there is this victory that the budget has been cut significantly without firing people, but I would guess that there is now a freeze on hiring. Which means that there will be fewer people around to do the work that more people used to do. 

McGill is still a great deal for undergrads as the tuition is dirt cheap, but one of these days you will get what you pay for--less and less.  I worry about the friends I left behind--faculty and staff--who are now expected to worker harder and harder.  Sure, they can say work smarter, not harder, but that only works for my defense in ultimate--it is no way to run a resource deprived educational institution.

Rank Rankings continued

I have never been a big fan of rankings of universities and programs, but I will take responsibility for this one.  You see, last year McGill was ranked 25th in the world and now it is 31st.  What changed?  I left.  Sure, I thought that my departure might cause McG to move down one spot in the rankings, maybe two, but six?  Wow. I would say I am sorry, but I am loving Carleton and Ottawa.

Seriously though, this change is both irrelevant and significant.  They are irrelevant as they will not affect anything directly--it will not change the students that apply, it will not affect the school's ability to hire faculty and so on.  Rankings matter most to media and to the administrative folks. 

The rankings are significant because McGill is under stress--that the funding system in Quebec is more broken than funding of universities in the rest of North America--and that is saying something.  The attempt to raise tuition failed when the Liberals lost the election to the pandering Parti Quebecois.  The PQ has now found out that the entitled student movement will fight even token increases.  Of course, the funny thing is that these students are not fighting cuts in how much Quebec spends on universities.  Which directly contradicts the premise of a free higher university education--that dream depends on more government money (which comes from unicorns, I guess) going to universities, not less.  Anyhow, McGill does face a very dark future, as it must face more and more cuts even in the middle of the fiscal year, and with members of the PQ saying ominous things about balancing university spending (less for McGill, in other words). 

The reality is that not that much changed in who taught at McGill (other than my departure) between last year and this year, not much changed in the quality/quantity of research, not much changed in the quality of the students (the students there are terrific).  But the reputation of six schools improved relatively to McGill.  The thing to keep in mind here is that reputation is (dare I say it?) a social construction.  It is not real in the sense that x number of pubs plus x number of Phds plus whatever other factors produce rank x.  No, it is about how the community of the rankers feel about the various universities.  Usually, we do not see much dramatic change from year to year because people do not change their opinions much and do not tend to do much research when they face such surveys.  But McG has been in the news--the protests, the cuts, how Quebec and the PQ are aiming directly at this island of English excellence--so it may have swayed some perceptions. 

The really important thing is that the cuts will continue---and they will affect the quality of the place, perceived by the world or not.  And that is sad and unfortunate and unnecessary.  But who said that Quebec public policy was anything but sad and unfortunate .....

Following the Wrong Role Models

I posted at CIC two weeks ago about the Canadian Forces and Department of National Defence falling back on denials rather than answering question so often that it has become the first response.  Well, my old employer, McGill, seems to be using the Canadian government as a role model.  Students, student journalists and others have ramped up the number of access to information requests that they have made of McGill, and now McGill is essentially asking for permission to deny these folks their rights to get access. 

Sure, some of it may be gratuitous or abusing the system, but a university is supposed to be a creator and disseminator of information.  It should have little to hide and be more transparent than pretty much any other public institution.  Carleton, my current employer, resisted the attempts of newspapers to get info about their Political Management program.  Once they released the info and revised the agreement with the donor, the problem went away. 

McGill should respond to the access requests, provide the docs and move on.  Covering up/resisting becomes the story and not one that is going to be favorable to the university.  If it uses heaps of staff time, then revise/fix how information is stored.

I am familiar with ATIP processes as I have asked the Canadian government for documents and have been mostly pleased by the responses.  Sure, lots of stuff in the Canadian docs on Afghanistan have been redacted, but I could see most of the stuff I was looking for.  It took awhile at times.  I am currently waiting for a Privy Council document, and I am curious as to how long it will take. 

Anyhow, McGill, Carleton and other public universities are government institutions in both good ways and bad--they are obligated to be transparent, they are run by people who want to evade the spotlight, and when they try, the spotlight gets stronger.  This is a lesson that people never seem to learn.  On this one thing, the Borg were right: resistance is futile.

When the Arts are Not So Liberal

It has been an interesting hour on twitter.  First, Jon Western posts a great piece on how teaching at a Liberal Arts college is different from that at a research university.  While I think he underestimates the time-sucks at research universities (we fall behind on the current lit, too), it is a strong piece about how teaching at a small, teaching-focused place is different.  Funny that he starts it with the "If you went to a place Oberlin ...., you would want to end up at a liberal arts college...."  As that is exactly what I thought about 25 years ago.  I wanted to go to grad school and then teach at a liberal arts college.  The job market had other plans.  I did interview at a couple but over my career I had many more interviews at research schools.  Oh well.

Anyhow, the second tweet referred to this article at the Montreal Gazette.  My old place, McGill, is cutting 100 courses in the Faculty of Arts (that would be the equivalent of an American school's College of Arts and Sciences minus those pesky sciences).  So, the Dean in the story, Chris Manfredi was my dean, and, before that, my department chair.  So, the tale is this:

Manfredi said the decision was taken in order to respond to student interest in having more courses taught by full-time instructors.
“We’ve always believed that the quality of teaching programs is better when they’re taught by full-time, permanent teaching staff, as opposed to part-time, temporary teachers – that’s well documented in the literature on the university pedagogy,” Manfredi said.

Um, sure.  The funny thing is that before I left, the poli sci department, and others, were cutting the the number of courses taught by non-tenured/tenure-track profs due to budget cuts, not because of a renewed interest in being a better teaching environment.  That this cut comes at a time where Quebec is cutting its funding of the universities quite drastically in the wake of backtracking on the previous provincial government's efforts to increase tuition is probably not an accident. 

I tweeted "you get what you pay for."  That if tuition remains very, very low, and if the province cuts back on its financing of universities, the universities have to make hard choices.  Ditching the temporary profs is an "easy" choice since they do not have much of a voice, that their contracts are usually year to year, and it does not hurt very much other folks on campus--professors and administrators. 

The story says that the aim is to cut the smallest classes, which sounds fine.  The idea of keeping every classroom full at all hours was something in motion before I left.  But the students I knew already had a hard time meeting their graduation requirements because they could not get into crowded classes.  It was not my popularity that made my classes full every year (perhaps my rep as an easy grader?), but that the big intro class of 612 students was a prerequisite, and the senior level classes I taught always maxed out at the 80 student limit because we offered so few of them.  Indeed, I had banked enough "credits" that I could have taught one less class my last year, but I chose not to, knowing that there was a decent chance I would never use them, because I felt guilty about how little we offered our undergrads. 

For a variety of reasons, I only taught undergraduate classes my last few years at McGill, and had no regrets doing so--I was filling a need and they were a heap of fun.  It sucks that the province and the politics means that they will have fewer and fewer options down the road.  I don't blame the McG students since they didn't protest like those elsewhere.  While I joked here that the McG students sucked at math, they got it, and they understood that less money means something.  And that there would not be a magical source of more money that would compensate. 

More Pride, More Trains

In a continuing series this fall, I am posting again about taking the train to Montreal to attend a dissertation defense.  First, I have to say how thrilled I was that I approached by a couple of undergrads after being on campus for less than five second.  They remembered my big Intro to IR class fondly and wanted to see how I was doing.  Once again, the McG undergrads moved me.  Another student came up to me after the defense as well. 

Anyhow, it was Theo McLauchlin's turn to defend his work.  I served on his dissertation committee.  I am not his adviser, although I plan to take credit for Theo's work for the next twenty years or so.  I first got to know Theo when he took my honors seminar my second year at McGill.  That class was a blast full of really smart, really engaged, really interesting students (some of whom I still manage to follow via facebook).  One of my grievances about the place was that I had not been given the opportunity to teach that class again.  Anyhow, Theo rocked that class, and then went away for his M.A.  He came back for his PhD, and turned out to be incredibly helpful and supportive to the rest of his cohort. 

The irony of his loyalty is that Theo's dissertation is on desertion--when and why do folks flee their side of a civil war to go home or join the other side.  It involved laborious diligent data collection as he found heaps of information on old papers in Spanish archives.  His argument, building both coercive and cooperative means to get folks to do what they might otherwise not do--keep fighting in hard times, was a compelling read.  Indeed, Theo has proven his stuff is sufficiently compelling to get published into of the very best (selective/visible) journals around: Journal of Conflict Resolution and Comparative Politics.  He handled his defense with aplomb.  He even threw up a slide instantaneously when asked a question about interactions among his variables. I am sure he will rock more than a few job talks in the near future.

I enjoyed meeting his family over beers afterwards.  I had met his wife before, but glad to have a chance to chat with her some more afterwards.  Funny that she knows one of my pals in Ottawa, but then again that pal is one of the most networked cupcake makers I know.  Anyhow, it was a great day to be in Montreal.  My ex-colleagues and ex-students remarked how relaxed and happy I am now.  Perhaps it is because I took a day off from a killer grant application. 

Anyhow, you can go home again, if only briefly.  And, yes, I have one defense to attend--next month.

A Good Job

People have been asking me about the IR job at McGill.  Yes, it is to fill the spot that my move created.  Yes, you should apply.  No, really, go ahead.  As I mentioned many times in this here blog, the students at McGill are phenomenal.  Nearly all of the colleagues and especially the young'uns are terrific people.  The department is mostly collegial, and the new chair is a huge improvement over the old one.  Montreal is a great town.  I had my own reasons for leaving, but it is a very good job. 

The complications mostly involve Quebec.  No, you don't have be fluent in French.  Not yet anyway, but perhaps that might change with the new Parti Quebecois government.  Courses at McGill are taught in English, although students can opt to write papers and exams in French.  Which is why we have teaching assistants.  The complications are mostly about employment for the spouse if there is one and education for any potential or actual kids.  If your spouse cannot speak French, then getting a job will be hard but not impossible. If you have kids and neither you nor your spouse are Canadian, they are only eligible for the French public school system.  As it stands now, you could send your kids to English private schools, which would add $12k or more to budget on the expenditure side of the ledger.  That option may or may not change--depends on the PQ and whether they gain a majority in any election in the near future (although do not wager against the Liberals selling out the immigrants and Anglos on this, plus who knows what the CAQ will do).

I have plenty of American friends who moved to McGill and navigated these complications quite well.  For us, these challenges were part of the reason we left, but your mileage kilometer-age may vary.

Working in Canada as an academic is mostly quite a good deal.  The pay, according to surveys, is better than nearly anywhere else although taxes are higher in Quebec than anyplace else in North America.  The grant money can be good as not only is there no effort by random fans of ignorance to cut federal funding of political science, but instead of one NSF, there are essentially three with one purely for the Social Sciences and Humanities.

The skiing and ultimate frisbee are great, the beer is terrific, and it is hard to find a bad restaurants (although the Mexican food is pretty weak). 

So, if you are looking for a political science job in IR, apply to McGill.  I did, and I don't regret it.

Moving On

Today marks the end of my ten years at McGill so, if you want to reach me, use my Carleton address (steve underscore saideman at carleton dot ca).Despite the bumps along the way, I had a great ten years.  No regrets about the move ten years ago (except I wish we had not bought a new car the previous year).  I had mostly great colleagues, fantastic students, heaps of interesting opportunities including some great travel.  Moving to Montreal also meant great skiing and ultimate.  I don't regret leaving as Ottawa has been most welcoming, but I do appreciate the folks that I met in Montreal. 

Thanks again for a great ten years.

When The New Guy Seems Like the Old Guy

Francois Legault, the leader of the CAQ, the new party that proclaims to be different from Quebec's older parties, seems to be cut from the same cloth. Why do I say this?  Because he is promising to restrict the exodus of doctors produced by Quebec's medical schools (mostly aimed at McGill).  The funny thing is that Charest of the Liberals has been accusing Legault of being a closet separatist, when the real concern should be that Legault would run the province like any other PQ government--into the ground with over-reaction and coercion and one size-fits all solutions.

Is there a Doctor exodus from Quebec? Probably.  Do I know of McGill-produced doctors who have moved out of Quebec?  Certainly.  One might ask why some leave.  It might be about pay, but it also might be about how poorly administrated the health care system is in Quebec.  I remember early in my time in Quebec lots of discussion of doctors being compelled, rather than persuaded, to serve outside of Montreal and especially in the less populated parts of the province.  Again, coercion, not incentives.  The Soviet style decision-making about how many pediatric oncologists a hospital needs can be a bit of a turn off.

The thing that is most annoying and most typical is that this kind of policy assumes that people do not have choices and will not react.  Certainly, they will do so.  How so?  Well, the most obvious thing is that McGill (and others, I guess) would receive fewer applications as students anticipate and choose to go elsewhere rather than McGill.  Why is that a problem if people intend to leave?  Well, this selects out people who may not intend to leave but want the freedom to do so if they change their minds or get a good offer.  Perhaps the CAQ would argue that we don't need those people.  Well, if you reduce the pool of applications, you will almost certainly reduce the quality, causing a lowering of standards.  This is problematic because advocates of educational reforms almost always forget a key reality--students learn from each other.  So, if you reduce the size of the pool of applicants, you will probably reduce the quality of the educational experience.  I don't know about you, but I prefer that folks doing the doctoring to be not only really smart but also really well educated.  And the quality of the education depends critically on those who are school with the doctors that stick around.

There are other dynamics as well.  Students may come to McGill intending to leave but then fall in love with Montreal and Quebec and stay.  But you will not get those students if they know ahead of time that they cannot leave.  Further, McGill and similar schools, while public schools, do not just exist to help Quebec.  They produce public goods--a better educated medical community in Quebec AND beyond.  They also may help produce research while they are in Quebec or even after they leave that helps out Quebec.  If Quebec punishes those who try to leave and work in the rest of Canada, perhaps Canada might react by considering whether to fund McGill's medical schools.  Ah, yes, some of the med school funding is federal, not provincial.  Ooops. 

Lastly, McGill should be a point of pride in Quebec despite is Anglophone-ness as it has a reputation around the world as one of the finest schools.  Quebec politicians should keep in mind that when they come up with policies that would diminish McGill, they are also diminishing Quebec in the world.

But, of course, it is far easier for Quebec politicians to come up with coercive policies--to threaten doctors, to restrict choice--than it is to develop policies that require some imagination, some creativity, ways to appeal to aspiring doctors to keep them around so that they can help fix a broken health care system.  So, the CAQ, as the "new" party in town seems a lot like the old ones.  The quick reference to the "Notwithstanding Clause" should set off alarm bells.

Talk about restricting choice--this election gives Quebeckers a lousy set of alternatives.

Student Protests and the Academic Job Market

I guess I am surprised it took this long for people to start to speculate about the impact of the student protests on the ability of Quebec's universities to recruit faculty. 

Alex Usher, president of the Toronto-based consultancy Higher Education Strategy Associates, thinks it’s a distinct possibility.
“If I were a Quebec university president right now, I’d be terrified about what’s going on,” he said on Tuesday. “If you’re trying to lure a professor to Quebec, it’s going to be a problem. If you have a choice between an offer in Quebec or elsewhere, you’d go elsewhere.” And he thinks the damage could last five or six years. “Who’s going to want to go to Montreal?” he asked. “For McGill, Concordia and U de M (Université de Montréal), it’s a disaster. The damage is done.”

I wouldn't worry so much if I were he for a couple of reasons:

• on the positive side, the academic job market is still pretty weak.  Indeed, the numbers are quite clear that there are simply fewer tenure track positions than in the past.  So, people are still post-doc-ing and looking for tenure track jobs or took jobs that they want to escape (as I did after the weak job markets and my weak record in the early 1990's).  So, there will still be plenty of applications for tenure-track positions at McGill, Concordia and UdeM.  
• on the negative side, it has always been challenging to attract professors to Quebec schools.  The taxes are very high and yet wages are lower than in the rest of Canada. Language politics complicates not just the education of a potential's prof's kids (discussed at the Spew ad nauseam) but also employment for the "trailing" spouse.  These are very significant barriers, they are not new and they are not temporary.  

Will potential professors be turned off of Quebec employment opportunities by this spring's events? A few here and there, but those are probably folks who would have already been deterred from applying due to the obstacles mentioned above or would have turned down a job offer after they learned about the complexities involved with moving to Quebec.  We moved to Quebec with our eyes mostly shut: we were so eager to get out of Lubbock that we were willing to take a paycut, that we didn't notice that Quebec was about to close the loophole for the rules governing the education of immigrants, and because the opportunity presented by McGill was so good.

We are not leaving in a month because of the student protests.  No, we made this decision last fall partly due to the long-term and structural challenges of Quebec--less resources for universities (including lower pay), infrastructure that is falling apart, high taxes, language politics and its implications (including very little accountability for good governance).  To be clear, the move is more about pull than push--Ottawa and Carleton are attractive for a variety of reasons including both professional and personal opportunities.  The spring political mess makes it easier to justify the move, but the reality is that I and academics like me respond not to temporary events (few, if any, moved north with Bush's election despite the claims otherwise) but to the long-term realities.  McGill continues to present excellent opportunities, but it will also be frustrated in many job searches where non-McG factors kick in to prevent people from taking the job.  And those non-McG factors are often tied up with the long-term dysfunctions of Quebec, which are partly manifested in these protests.

McG Smooth Move of the Year

I have been pretty critical of McGill's handling of dissent this year, so I must take my bandana hat off to the folks running the place.  They sent out a memo today addressing the question of what happens to those students who have been admitted to McGill but will not have completed their requirements (no certification of completion of credits at CEGEPs closed by the shenanigans). 

As the situation unfolded, we anticipated that a number of those admitted would in fact have difficulty in finishing on time. Accordingly, we have designed special provisions to ensure that most of the affected CEGEP students – presently estimated to be about 330 individuals – should be able to begin our fall term on time.

Wow!  What a smart way to go.  Rather than being stuck by past rules and fear of future precedents, the administrators decided that being caught up in the turmoil should not hinder a student's educational journey.  Sure, one can look at this as a raised middle finger at protesters and/or the Quebec government since it is saying that McGill is beyond and above the petty problems and that efforts to derail things will fail, at least at McGill.  But I think this is the right thing.  Sure, some of the students who have not completed are being given a reward for the dissent they supported.  But others, who did not vote or voted against strikes, will not see their lives disrupted by the poor choices of the organizations and the government.

So, on this, woohoo, McGill!