VOL102ISS40

Volume 102, Issue 40

March 21, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

McGill THE

DAILY

cut out by children since 1911

Published by The Daily Publications Society, a student society of McGill University.

pg. 3

NEWS 02 NEWS

The McGill Daily Thursday, March 21, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

Leacock space reallocation plans under scrutiny

Senate approves Statement of Principles

Profs say admin “clustering” will undermine departments

Campus Eye: Labour Rally

06 COMMENTARY

Anqi Zhang The McGill Daily

PGSS against indexation

A

The rise of agency workers Equity and sustainbility are not empty words

08

FEATURES

2013: A MOOC Odyssey

11 HEALTH&ED The ethics behind clinical trials Depression at the movies

13

CULTURE

High noon in Hollywood Documenting the Printemps Erable The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology More study, please

15

2

EDITORIAL

Our sexual assault centre should not be up for a vote

16 COMPENDIUM! Obama telephones student Women need to grow bigger feet

n initiative aimed at restructuring the Leacock building by consolidating all administrative services on one floor, breaking up the current departmental structure, was presented at a Town Hall in the Redpath Museum on Monday. The Arts faculty’s People, Processes & Partnerships initiative – in development since Fall 2012 – was put before students, faculty, and support staff.

According to Dean of Arts Christopher Manfredi and Associate Dean Gillian Lane-Mercier, the initiative is a response to concerns that specific departments may be left without qualified administrators after a voluntary retirement program is put in place. This program, coupled with a recent provincial administrative cost-cutting initiative, Bill 100, will reduce the number of administrators in the faculty.

Two potential restructuring plans to be carried out by Summer 2014 were put forth by Manfredi. The plans would group administrative officers (AOs) and services on the sixth floor of Leacock. A welcome centre and student service hub would be built on the third floor. The Faculty has estimated that this could cost up to $2.5 million.

The plans would also move the Jewish Studies department into Leacock, from its current location on McTavish. This building would subsequently be used to house Arts faculty course lecturer, TA, visiting scholar, and student association clusters.

Ahmadiyya Muslim Students’ Association presents

World Peace Conference

Is World War III Inevitable?

Friday, March 22nd, 2013

Main event from 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM Leacock 232

The first of the two plans moves department chairs to the sixth floor, keeping them in close proximity to their AOs, moving a total of 68 people. However, the second plan, which would move a total of 57 people, would keep departmental chairs with their departments, but separate from their AOs. The response at the Town Hall was one of concern. Art History professor Amelia Jones, who came to McGill from the University of Manchester after similar centralization of administrative services, said that this restructuring would lead to a “dysfunctional noncollegial community.”

At Manchester, Jones said, “students had no interface directly with the departments [...] academic staff became the only possible interface with the students, [and are required to do] low-level administrative tasks.”

Manfredi said that the project team would attempt to avoid such issues and pointed to other faculties, such as Engineering, that have already implemented similar structures.

Professor Elsbeth Heaman noted that such a restructuring could change the nature of the university itself by removing departmental inertia.

“If I wanted to completely transform the university, to make it into a political creature, make it into a corporate university, [...] I would begin by weakening departmental cultures,” Heaman said.

Manfredi responded by saying, “If there are serious risks to our current mission, we won’t do them. I don’t want to replicate bad mistakes made somewhere else.”

While many faculty mem-

bers prefaced their concerns by acknowledging current administrative and organizational issues, Communications professor Darin Barney told The Daily by email that these changes would potentially have detrimental effects on important qualities of the university.

“These qualities include departmental autonomy and solidarity, collegiality, and personalized relationships among faculty, staff, and students. Losing these would be too high a price to pay for whatever economies or efficiencies might be gained – especially as it is far from certain that ‘clustering’ support staff and removing them from departments would make things more, rather than less, efficient,” he wrote.

VP Internal Affairs of the History Students’ Association Laure Spake and other student association representatives present at the Town Hall criticized the lack of outreach to students, and the lack of clarity from the administration. While Manfredi had previously held eight poorly attended consultations on the new advising services that the Leacock space reallocation would provide, Manfredi told The Daily: “the Town Hall was the first opportunity to discuss the proposed Leacock space scenarios publicly and collectively.”

Spake especially took issue with the means of communication from the administration, pointing specifically to the inaccessibility of their website. “The administration is saying that they’re putting out this information for us, but they’re not putting it out in a way that we can easily reach,” she said.

She pointed to the miscommu-

“Not only does this potential change undermine the community, it also undermines intellectual development, which is what the university experience and what graduate students are supposed to do.”

Laure Spake VP Internal Affairs of History Students’ Association nication regarding the advising consultations as an example, suggesting that if students had been informed that the advising services would be linked to the Leacock space reallocations, “more than one or three students would have showed up.”

However, Manfredi told The Daily: “Department chairs and student leaders also have an obligation to keep their constituents informed, and to communicate the concerns of their constituents back to me and others.”

Lane-Mercier presented the two reallocation at the AUS Council meeting on Wednesday. In an interview with The Daily, Lane-Mercier stated that the consultations were and would be “ongoing.”

In response to a question as to the next step, given the recent feedback, Lane-Mercier said that the project team is “pausing to reflect.” Particularly, she suggested that some of the previously rejected plans may now be revisited in light of student and faculty comments.

Wednesday, March 27th Leacock, Room 232 5:30pm

ANNUAL

GENERAL MEETING Students interested in voting for directors of the DPS board of directors must attend the society's AGM with their student IDs.

McGill University

Talk + Q&A Session – Free & Open to All Various Speakers - Free Refreshments

For more information and free registration:

islamevents.ca loveforall.ca facebook.com/groups/AMSAMcGill/ faraz.rajput@mail.mcgill.ca (514) 649-6191

Members of the DPS are cordially invited.

The presence of candidates to the Board of Directors is mandatory.

For more information, please contact

chair@dailypublications.org

news

3

The McGill Daily | Thursday, March 21, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Post-grads instate gender equality, divestment at annual meeting Quorum lost before vote on tuition indexation Molly Korab The McGill Daily

W

ith a long-standing history of failure to reach quorum, and a year haunted by intersocietal tensions, the McGill Post-Graduate Students’ Society’s (PGSS) Annual General Meeting (AGM) passed motions calling for gender equity and tar sands divestment. The AGM lost quorum before voting against tuition indexation.

A special council meeting also appointed a new Chief Returning Officer (CRO), Colby Briggs, a former community assistant at Concordia University. The appointment comes after a tumultuous year for the organization that saw three CROs leave the position due to tensions with the council.

The council laid out several motions prior to the meetings and succeeded in reaching quorum for a few – notably, motions regarding gender parity on its Board of Directors and divestment from McGill’s tar sand holdings.

The AGM voted to establish a recommendation to increase diversity on its Board of Directors, with consultation of the Equity Committee. Although PGSS’s membership is made up of 53.3 per cent self-identified women, the board has historically been all-male.

Originally proposed as a motion to ensure gender parity, CoraLee Conway, Education Graduate Students’ Society (EGSS) councillor, emphasized the motion as a means to open further discussion on diversity, rather than institutionalizing strict quotas.

“What does it say about our society when the occurrence of

Photo Hera Chan | The McGill Daily

Graduate students vote in the PGSS Annual General Meeting white male normativity goes uncontested?” Conway said to the AGM. “It’s about bringing more perspectives and more voices from diverse backgrounds around the table.”

This year’s first female Board member, Danielle Meadows, was approved at the AGM. The debate turned to McGill’s tar sands investment, with Divest McGill present to field members’ questions on the benefits of divestment.

Some questioned the feasibility

of the motion, while others pointed to McGill’s direct role in industry investment as problematic.

“As students at McGill, we are subsidizing the tar sands,” said Nora Hope, a PGSS member. “It’s time to send an important message that we do not want to be a part of these unethical practices that are going on there.”

The motion regarding tar sands passed.

Members then debated a motion against tuition indexation

to inflation, with many arguing that PGSS needs to complete its research before deciding on the matter. PGSS’ by-laws state that all policies must be “evidence-based.”

“It doesn’t really matter what the researchers find, because they will not find that indexation increases accessibility to education,” one PGSS member stated.

However, the AGM lost quorum during debates on indexation and adjourned immediately.

PGSS will work with an appointed researcher on the topic of indexation.

A censure motion against Secretary-General Jonathan Mooney and Academic Affairs Officer Adam Bouchard was brought forward at the start of the meeting by PGSS councillors, but was voted to be removed from the agenda. The motion took issue with Mooney and Bouchard’s failure to complete an audit of private security on McGill’s campus.

Night demonstration leads to mass arrests Laurent Bastien Corbeil and Hera Chan The McGill Daily

A

night protest against the provincial government’s plan to implement an annual tuition increase of 3 per cent was shut down by the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) on Tuesday as officers strictly enforced by-law P-6, a municipal ordinance that requires protesters to provide an itinerary of demonstration, and prohibits the wearing of masks.

The crowd, numbering around sixty people, gathered at Place Émilie-Gamelin at 8 p.m., where

police immediately prevented them from beginning a march down Ste. Catherine. Protesters did not divulge their itinerary beforehand.

SPVM mediation officers mingled with the crowd to explain the reasoning behind the decision to stop the march. They noted that the snowstorm earlier in the day factored into concerns about safety.

“We’re stopping them here for their safety and because of the weather. It would be a safety risk if we allowed people to walk through the streets with all the plowing going around,” a mediation officer told The Daily.

“The police will always find an excuse to repress and to prohibit

the right to demonstrate, so this is complete bullshit,” Pierro Desbois, a protester, told The Daily in French.

After being rebuffed by police several times, the crowd poured into a nearby subway station and continued the protest underground.

Chants reverberated through Berri-UQAM metro as demonstrators made their way toward the nearest train.

“I’m not sure if this is the first time we’re [demonstrating] in the subway, but this is my first time and it’s a great thing,” Desbois said. “We’re very respectful. We want the people of [Quebec] to understand we’re not against them. We’re on their side.”

Protesters then crowded onto

an orange line train in the direction of Montmorency before disembarking at the Mont-Royal station. From there, the demonstration continued west on Mont-Royal.

Dozens of police cars closed in on the protesters shortly thereafter.

The march turned south on St. Laurent toward riot police, who were lined up in anticipation of the protesters’ arrival. Soon after issuing muted warnings, another police formation descended on protesters from behind, trapping them in a kettle near the intersection of St. Laurent and Rachel.

Police investigator and SPVM Chief of Police Station 21 Alain Simoneau identified protesters

within the kettle and made targeted arrests under by-law P-6. The other detainees were held for around two hours before being searched, arrested, and processed by the police.

A bus from the Société de transport de Montréal was later brought in to carry the 45 detainees to the police station.

Simoneau told The Daily that protesters would be released in “a few hours,” after being issued a fine for violating P-6.

This is the second time in a week that the police have enforced P-6 through mass arrests. Last week, police used the same tactic to arrest 250 protesters at a march against police brutality.

Daily Publications Society’s

STUDENT JOURNALISM WEEK 2013

B N !

Z B NPOE

S V I U !

P U !

9 2 !

SDI

2 3 !

I D S B N !

Z TEB /dpn z m j b e m m ndhj

Wednesday ATI, MEDIA LAW AND INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM

Tuesday CAREER PANEL

Monday PHOTO EDITING WORKSHOP SSMU BUILDING, DAILY/DÉLIT OFFICE, B-24 2:00 P.M. TO 3:00 P.M.

ETHAN COX (RABBLE.CA) DOUG SWEET (McGILL RELATIONS OFFICE) + OTHER PANELISTS

SSMU BUILDING, LEV BUKHMAN ROOM 1:00 P.M. TO 2:00 P.M.

COPY EDITING WORKSHOP

SSMU BUILDING, CLUBS LOUNGE 3:00 P.M. TO 4:00 P.M.

MONIQUE DUMONT, RADIO-CANADA (ENQUÊTE) FAIZ LALANI AND ERIC BROUSSEAU, McGILL LEGAL CLINIC

SSMU BUILDING, MADELEINE PARENT ROOM 1:00 P.M. TO 2:00 P.M.

BEHIND THE SCENES

QUEEN ARSEM-O’MALLEY, THE MCGILL DAILY COORDINATING EDITOR NICOLAS QUIAZUA, LE DÉLIT, RÉDACTEUR EN CHEF SSMU BUILDING, MADELEINE PARENT ROOM 2:00 P.M. TO 3:00 P.M.

Today - Thursday March 21st JOURNALISM SCHOOL PANEL + MEET & GREET

ACTIVISM PANEL

HENRY GASS, COLUMBIA JOURNALISM SCHOOL ADAM KOVAC, FREELANCER (MONTREAL GAZETTE) RICHARD TARDIF, JOURNALISM INTERNSHIP PROGRAM SOPHIE TREMBLAY, CBC MONTREAL

HOLLY DRESSEL, BEST-SELLING AUTHOR & ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, McGILL SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENT GRETCHEN KING, CKUT-FM MARTIN LUKACS, MONTREAL MEDIA CO-OP

BURRITOVILLE - 2:00 P.M. TO 5:00 P.M.

ARTS BUILDING, AHCS-GSA, B-22 - 6:00 P.M.

RECEPTION GERTS’ - 7:00 P.M.

/t k x

news

5

The McGill Daily | Thursday, March 21, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Senate approves Statement of Principles Operating procedures only presented for information Juan Camilo Velásquez The McGill Daily

S

enate voted in favour of adopting the administration’s Statement of Principles yesterday. The document, brought forward by the administration, proposes definitions for freedoms of expression and peaceful assembly to respond to dissent at the university.

The document arose from modifications to the protest protocol, which was met with fierce opposition earlier this semester. The protocol was then divided into two documents: The Statement of Principles Concerning Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Peaceful Assembly, and the Operating Procedures Regarding Demonstrations, Protests and Occupations on McGill University Campuses.

Provost Anthony Masi presented the Statement of Principles for Senate approval at their meeting yesterday.

The Operating Procedures document, however, was only presented for information.

Masi opened the discussion by stating that the community has been discussing the “fundamental matters” regarding dissent on campus for over a year. The Statement of Principles, according to Masi, “is an overarching document… this document [that]

inform[s] the operating procedures and the people applying those procedures.”

The administration’s rationale behind the adoption of the document is that “the McGill community will be best served by an agreedupon Statement of Principles which would protect the rights of freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom of peaceful assembly,” according to the document presented to Senate.

“The Statement will contain the overarching principles that guide decisions concerning the rights of members of the McGill community as they relate to these freedoms,” the document read.

Some Senators, however, questioned the existence of the documents altogether. SSMU President Josh Redel questioned the necessity of having those documents and added, “I feel it is a bit lofty for the University to attempt to define our fundamental rights in two mere sentences.

Furthermore, the attempt to define peaceful is, in my mind, ideologically dangerous.”

Faculty Senator Derek Nystrom urged Senate to vote against the document and stated that the body should have also voted on the approval of the Operating Procedures document. “[The Operating Procedures] is where

the rubber hits the road. Where we’re going to be defending our principles of freedom and peaceful assembly.”

Masi agreed that resolving specific conflicts using the Statement of Principles is a “question of judgment.”

He also stated, however, that the separation of the two documents was an outcome of the consultation process.

Arts Senator James Gutman criticized the consultation process because of its failure to bring together all actors on campus, citing campus unions who “are very upset about this.”

Campus unions held a demonstration against the documents on January 23.

“If you didn’t take part in the consultation, quite frankly, that is your problem,” said Masi.

PGSS Secretary-General Jonathan Mooney, on the other hand, questioned the drafting process and committee. Pointing to the representation of students, staff members, faculty, and administrators in the Senate, he stated: “if Senate is going to vote on the adoption [of the document], why was a committee not struck with the same broad constituency to write the document?”

Masi said that the people involved in the drafting of the document came from the offices most involved in the consultation process this semester.

Following a failed motion

to table the discussion, Senate approved the motion to adopt the Statement of Principles.

Vice-Principal (Administration and Finance) Michael DiGrappa then presented the Operating Procedures that will accompany the Statement of Values. The document is set to “provide a framework for determining whether or not action or intervention is necessary in the case of demonstrations… and actions that contravene internal policies or the law.”

“Tolerance is expected for the

restrict it. To restrict it, regardless of intent, defeats the purpose of having direct action in the first place, which is in direct contradiction to the statement that opens the documents.”

“Finally, it mentions that action takers are responsible for their actions, but it is crucial further that it mentions that McGill is as well responsible for its actions. This is clearly required as per the Manfredi report in regards to proper management of hired security agents, where it was made clear that security agents did not handle certain situations

The attempt to define peaceful is, in my mind, ideologically dangerous.

Josh Redel SSMU President expression of dissent, and for a certain degree of inconvenience arising from the means by which dissenting opinions may be expressed. At all times, decisions will be sensitive to context and will reflect the exercise of sound judgment by those in charge,” the document reads.

The document continues on to give benchmarks to decide whether demonstrations, assemblies, protests, and occupations are peaceful.

Redel questioned the role of the document.

“To define direct action is to

appropriately,” Redel said.

When asked by Nystrom why the Operating Procedures were not up for approval, Principal Heather Munroe-Blum replied that operational procedures are not usually approved though governance structures like Senate.

Senators also discussed the process surrounding McGill joining edX and the implementation of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), as well as changes to the student code of conduct to be voted on next time Senate meets.

CAMPUS EYE Labour rally outside of James building Hera Chan Faculty, students, and staff gathered in front of the James Administration building yesterday to rally against recent administrative actions. The rally was held roughly two hours before Senate, where the administration’s new rules governing protests were to be put forward for information – though not officially voted on.

Union and student representatives also criticized the administration for targeting jobs, and asking unions to reopen collective agreements in light of provincial budget cuts.

—Lola Duffort

commentary

The McGill Daily Thursday, March 21, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

6

L’indexation, on s’en câlisse The misuses of the public university Errol Salamon Commentary Writer

O

n the night of February 25, after the first day of the Quebec Summit on Higher Education, the PostGraduate Students’ Society (PGSS) executive passed a motion that may really surprise people: in the event that the Parti Québécois government decides to index tuition, the PGSS would advocate for students to demonstrate in the streets.

On February 26, the final day of the Summit, the government confirmed that they intended to index tuition.

Indexation is problematic for numerous reasons. According to research conducted by the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ), an annual increase of tuition by 3 per cent of household income will amount to a hike of $421 by 2018 and will generate only $127 million over five years for Quebec universities.

Considering the extremely high annual revenue of Quebec universities, this increase, over five years, would amount to a small percentage of the total budget of universities. Indexation may satisfy the government’s political ends, but it won’t provide longterm solutions for universities.

This hike will bring not only minimal additional revenue to universities but also no additional funding to students. Student income from employment and scholarships simply does not follow an inflation curve (i.e., it will

not be indexed). If the government does not index employment income and university funding, they shouldn’t index tuition.

Although some people have contended that the increase is minimal – only $70 per year – we campaigned last year against any tuition hike. Indexation puts more of a financial burden on students.

It accounts for neither the current level of student debt nor an increased level of debt that students would incur due to indexation.

The real problem is a lack of clarity regarding the amount of funding that universities actually need. Injecting new funds into universities must happen following an in-depth evaluation of universities’ needs, linked to their objectives. In this way, universities could be held to account for their financing.

A discussion about objectives also opens up broader issues.

By using strictly economic language like indexation to explain tuition, the Quebec government is reducing university education to a commodity. The Canadian government also adopts this language; for example, in a recent statement to CBC News, an anonymous Conservative politician said: “There’s a general feeling there are too many kids getting BAs and not enough welders.” The government not only conceives of university education as a training ground for the Canadian labour force, but also devalues degrees that have little productive economic power and are less commodifiable.

This commodification of public universities, however, isn’t new.

It is part of a long shift in the purpose of the university that can be traced back to at least the 1960s.

In 1963, Clark Kerr, an economist and President of the University of California at Berkeley, outlined some of the key premises for modern university reform, in his influential book The Uses of the University. Adopting economic language, Kerr writes, “The basic reality, for the university, is the widespread recognition that new knowledge is the most important factor in economic and social growth.” He referred to the university as a “knowledge factory” that, like most factories, has an industrial purpose. Kerr ultimately accepted that one of the roles of the university was to engage with a corporate-driven economy.

Another role of the university, at least at Berkeley, was to ban political groups and suppress dissent on campus. Radical students and faculty were quick to attack Kerr’s position. They conceived of a different role for the university: to empower students, challenge the notion of a depoliticized university, and, ultimately, democratize society.

In 1964, responding to Kerr’s conception of the “knowledge factory,” the Free Speech movement at Berkeley was born. At a rally, Berkeley graduate student organizer Mario Savio explained that, “just like any factory, or in any industry…you have a certain product. The product is you. Well, not really you. And not really me.

The products are those people who wouldn’t join in our protest.”

Savio’s words are a reminder

Illustration Alice Shen | The McGill Daily

that a student movement challenged the university and fought against an institution that attempted to convert students into silent and passive products. Today, in Quebec, we must take a forceful position against indexation, pose a threat to the Quebec government, and offer a tentative plan of action to voice our opposition to this potentially unlimited tuition hike.

We should increase our tactics to oppose the perpetual hike of the PQ government’s indexation. We must revive en masse a contre la hausse campaign. If the government plans to index tuition, our only choice is to protest.

Errol Salamon is the PGSS External Affairs Officer. Reach Errol at external.pgss@mail.mcgill.ca.

Why outsource, when you can insource?

Temporary agency workers and the war on labour Mostafa Henaway Commentary Writer

A

s an organizer at the Immigrant Workers Centre (IWC), every day I see how the people who are the backbone of the working class experience the current economic crisis.

It is no longer exceptional for an immigrant with precarious status to have a job that pays minimum wage and includes no benefits or pension; it has become the norm.

Immigrant workers are a central part of the neoliberal strategy to ‘internalize outsourcing’. Rather than further ‘outsource’ labor, current

governments choose to drastically escalate their ‘insourcing’ of cheap labour. Insourcing means that, rather than moving jobs to the global south, companies are filling thousands of jobs with immigrant workers who receive little money and work in horrible conditions. The lives of migrant and immigrant workers are where the effects of the current economic crisis are often most visible.

Temporary placement agencies are quickly becoming one of the most important tools for moving migrant and immigrant workers throughout the Canadian economy. These agencies create a more ‘flexible’ – which really means precarious and underpaid – workforce. In the past year

alone, temporary placement agencies recorded over $2 billion in revenue, as industry seeks cheap labour, most of which comes from migrant workers. Largely as a result of the use of agencies, sectors that at one time provided permanent and unionized work, such as manufacturing and agriculture, are now staffed by a high percentage of temporary workers who receive no union protections.

One particularly stark example of the harsh conditions effectively imposed by temporary placement agencies, and the companies that use them, is Dollarama. Dollarama’s CEO, Larry Rossy, is one of Canada’s sixty richest people; in 2011, he was the 16th wealthiest person in

Quebec, with a net worth of over $1 billion. One of the reasons that Rossy’s Dollarama is so profitable is that he keeps his workers in precarious and underpaid positions. He calls this a “minimum wage strategy,” implying that if he could pay his workers less, he would.

The Dollarama distribution centre in Montreal employs 500 workers – almost all non-white. Most of them are hired through temporary placement agencies. Even the workers who have been there for several years are still considered ‘temp’ workers, and have no benefits or pensions.

Dollarama workers also experience an oppressive working environment: workers have reported being fired

when they get ill, and staff are made to compete with one another just to retain their jobs stacking shelves.

In this context, building a just and effective labour movement means communicating with and organizing temporary agency workers. These workers can be a source of strength in popular movements for economic justice that resist austerity measures, and attacks on collective bargaining and the right to strike.

Mostafa Henaway is an author and community organizer at the Immigrant Workers Centre/Centre des Travailleurs et Travailleuses in Montreal. Contact the IWC at info@iwc-cti.ca.

commentary

7

The McGill Daily | Thursday, March 21, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Who’s campaigning on equity and sustainability?

Oh right, everyone Cameron Butler Commentary Writer

“

Our campus needs to be more equitable! More sustainable practices!” It’s election time, and all across campus undergraduate societies are choosing new representatives. Candidates are campaigning and promoting their platforms. “Equity,” “accessibility,” and “sustainability” are popular buzzwords. But, in the flurry of repetition, these words, which are fundamental to the structure of our student organizations, often seem to lose their meaning. The new representatives elected this year must ensure that the mission and mandates of our organizations are upheld.

Being elected as a representative means working to ensure that clubs, services, projects, initiatives, and outreach are accessible to all. It means understanding that certain events can result in people feeling unsafe, marginalized, and excluded unless serious thought is put toward making them more equitable. This year’s blackface incident at 4Floors clearly demonstrates how consistent policies and guidelines are necessary to ensure that long-term progress doesn’t fall apart year-to-year.

This is why we have mechanisms in place for evaluation and accountability: institutional memory must be maintained, and longterm goals must be implemented.

Constitutions, by-laws, and policies are documents designed to ensure an organization’s vision and commitment to important issues on campus.

Next year, the use of space will be an important issue on campus, particularly within SSMU. A large portion of the SSMU Sustainability Policy,

developed last year, and the related implementation plan, which will be completed this year, focuses on the use of space and how to ensure that the spaces students use minimize energy and water use, produce less material waste, and are accessible to all students; the policy and plan provide clear guides for representatives to follow to achieve broadly-defined goals such as “sustainability.”

Equity and sustainability are not vague concepts to which we can simply pay lip service; they are continual processes, driven by demonstrated needs and the desires of students. Certainly, they are difficult concepts that encompass many terms, discussions, and ideas, but it is not enough to simply say, “Our campus needs to be more equitable! More sustainable practices!” Commitment to these issues requires serious thought and needs to be implemented at every level of University governance and operation.

As a SSMU student-staff member for two years, I’ve seen how important it is for representatives to meaningfully engage with these issues; working with those who legitimately care about them allows for huge progress to be made. I hope that as all of you are deciding how to cast your vote, you will think about electing individuals who believe in the mandate of their organization, and will act in good faith, aware of their responsibilities.

Cameron Butler is a U4 Bioresource Engineering student, one of the SSMU Environment Commissioners, and the SSMU Equity/Sustainability Integration Researcher. He can be reached at cameron.butler@mail. mcgill.ca.

Illustration Oles Chepesiuk | The McGill Daily

An ugly cover and unclear endorsements A response to Monday’s SSMU elections special Austin Lloyd Readers’ Advocate

T

he front page of Monday’s issue of The Daily (March 18) is the ugliest thing published in recent memory.

For starters, the pictures of the endorsed candidates look like they were cut out by children using safety scissors. Seriously, I haven’t seen edges that rough on Photoshop cutouts since I was mentoring grade-nine students in my high school’s journalism program. Then, the editors continue the middle school scrapbook feel of the whole thing by haphazardly sticking the cutouts around the border at whatever

angle they could be crammed in.

I mean, why is Tyler Hofmeister upside-down? Why is Joey Shea sideways? Could they have found a more smug-looking picture of Chris Bangs? It’s baffling, really.

Anyways, as egregious as these flaws are, they are far from the biggest issue with the front page. Dig Monday’s issue out of your recycling bin and try to find some sort of title or headline on the front page. Here, I’ll do it with you. Starting at the top we have “SSMU” looking like it was stamped in red ink across Hofmeister’s face. But that’s not really much of a title or headline on its own. Neither is the aforementioned “SACOMSS” that is floating around Chris Bangs’

head as if it just crawled out of his skull.

Oh, now I get it. The phrase “Say yes to…,” which is angled so that it flows into the bookstore ad beneath it, is actually supposed to apply to the candidates on the rest of the page. That seems to be a bit of an oversight, I’d say. It doesn’t help that the advertisement’s colour scheme is similar to the rest of the page, giving the sense that the rest of the front page is merely an extension of the ad.

Anyways, I guess we can move past the first page and take a look at the rest of the issue, the candidate endorsements in particular. For the most part the endorsements are fairly standard until we get to VP Clubs & Services. In this instance, The

Daily has opted to endorse a “No” vote for Stefan Fong. While I understand that endorsing a vote against Fong is a viable option, I feel that the Daily has sold him short as a candidate. For instance, when discussing Fong’s experience at the Musician’s Collective, they say that “he claims he’s served as President.” He claims?

Is the paper trying to imply that Fong is lying about his previous positions? I don’t mean to be overly defensive on Fong’s behalf, but this endorsement does come across as somewhat arbitrary in its criticism.

The problem, I think, is that the format of the candidate pages makes it easy for this sort of factual manipulation to occur, because the free-form blurbs written about each candidate allow the writer to

include or omit whatever information best suits the conclusion they want make. In order to combat this problem in the future, I suggest The Daily use a more standardized template for each candidate, perhaps one that lists the candidates’ experience and their responses to specific questions. This will assure that the same information is included for each candidate, allowing the readers to make their own conclusions, rather than merely taking The Daily’s word for it.

Readers’ Advocate is a twicemonthly column written by Austin Lloyd addressing the performance, relevance, and quality of The Daily.

You can reach him at readersadvocate@mcgilldaily.com.

features

The McGill Daily Thursday, March 21, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

Basic to the (at least implicit) American feminist texts, one of the most striking narrative politicizes the organizing mode of the text.

Progress and Disillusion The Peculiarities of America Introductory Chapter

DSFSFZ

Vanity in the Creation To the species , they may sometimes still subsit in Scotland. Those ancient Engish tenants have a lease for a term of years.

In the further improvement of land

a la porte de la maison qui une porte une porte le monde bat a la porte de la maison qui une porte une porte le monde bat a la porte de la maison qui une porte

Writeen by architect Charles S. Keefe, it describes how more effort goes into the architectural features and interior design of small spaces costing less money than expansive, and expensive homes. He writes, "when the opportunities for effect are so circumcised, every care must be taken to insure Writeen by architect Charles S. Keefe, it describes how more effort goes into the architectural features and interior design of small spaces costing less money than expansive, and expensive homes. He writes, “when the opportunities for effect are so circumcised, every care must be taken to insure Writeen by architect Charles S. Keefe, it describes how more effort goes into the architectural features and interior design of small spaces costing less money than expansive, and expensive homes. He writes, “when the opportunities for effect are so circumcised, every care must be taken to insure Writeen by architect Charles S. Keefe, it describes how more effort goes into the architectural features and interior design of small spaces costing less money than expansive, and expensive homes. He writes, “when the opportunities for effect are so Writeen by architect Charles S. Keefe, it describes how more effort goes into the architectural features and interior design of small spaces costing less money than expansive, and expensive homes. He writes, “when the opportunities for effect are so circumcised, every care must be taken to insure Writeen by architect Charles S. Keefe, it describes how more effort goes into the architectural features and interior design of small spaces costing less money than expansive, and expensive homes. He writes, “when the opportunities for effect are so circumcised,

8

features

The McGill Daily | Thursday, March 21, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Michael Lee-Murphy illustration: Amina batyreva

T

here are things we used to do in person that we can now do entirely remotely, using machines. We can rent movies (Netflix), have sex (pornography), gaze into the eyes of a friend (Facebook), and develop a crippling insecurity about our careers (LinkedIn).

(Some people still like to do these things in person. Soon these losers will be called Luddites and mocked openly by children on city streets.)

Starting in 2014, we will be able to add another entry to this ever-expanding list: attending McGill University.

Through their increasing dominance of the lives of North American human beings, the iPeople of Silicon Valley have also made significant progress in mangling all language utterly. So, here comes another cute sounding techno-word-noise that will be passing through all our lips over the next several years: MOOCs. The acronym stands for Massively Open Online Courses – and if you don’t know about them, you should.

Because they know about you, and they’re headed straight for us.

MOOCs are a growing (marauding, maybe) trend in academia, and allow students from anywhere and everywhere to take college classes, sometimes paying money, sometimes for credit. There are a couple of companies – consortiums, in eduspeak – that partner with universities to offer MOOCs. Some are for-profit and some are not-for-profit, if the latter still means anything. They’re all the rage in academia, with heavy hitters like MIT, Harvard, and the like getting on board.

McGill’s Senators learned about them at the meeting on January 23 from Provost Anthony Masi.

There was furrowing of brows and wagging of jaws amongst faculty and student Senators. There was talk of the “exporting” of the “McGill brand.”

There were questions about form, shape. How could we grade these massively open courses? Who’s going to grade 1,000 papers? McGill employees? People on other continents? One professor advocated for “ancient” methods of pedagogy. Others were enthusiastic about MOOCs, trumpeting their “accessibility.” Will students get credit? How much would this cost?

The verbal construction “if and when

McGill [decides something]” was used, and often.

It was decided that discussion had been good and helpful. Lots of food for thought and all that. On to the next topic. That evening, I filed a story for The Daily, which contained discussion of McGill’s budget as well as the provisional protocol on protests – the juicier elements of the Senate meeting, I thought. This was how provisional the Senate discussion on MOOCs seemed. I left Senate thinking that we might have at least a year or two to prepare for the dawn of the age of remotely administered tele-pedagogy at McGill, before the cyber-sun rises over the St. Lawrence and we all bow down to worship its electro warmth.

Exactly a month later, it was announced – remotely, via an MRO email – that the people who decide these things had decided. McGill shall have MOOCs, and it shall be good.

The announcement thanked the contributions of the “Academic Working Group on Innovative Pedagogy,” which few people had ever heard of. The words do not appear on the McGill website. Some Senators thought that they, in fact, were the people who decided things. An email was circulated among Senators, asking some essential questions, questions like: What? When? How? According to a follow-up email from Masi, Senate had decided (even if they didn’t know they decided).

What? In the Achieving Strategic Academic Priorities (ASAP) policy statement. When? Back in October.

How? Masi pointed them to several sections of the paper – an eightypage policy statement containing mostly platitudes like “achieving new directions” and “dynamic learning environments.” The letters ‘MOOC’ appear three times in the paper. The first appearance of the word is in the context of McGill studying MOOCs. On the following page, the paper says that McGill will implement “Action 2.7.1,” and study the “integration of information technology into pedagogy... based on analytics derived also from [MOOCs].” The third time MOOCs make themselves known is some thirty pages later in a summary of all the previous action plans.

Action 2.7.1 now has an interesting change – the phrase now reads

“McGill’s own MOOCs.” So there we go. Masi’s email went on to assure Senators that, “if and when new courses or programs may be offered via this consortium for McGill credit, Senate will have an opportunity to discuss these issues again.”

It seems like the dense interplay of words and their meanings are a big part of the MOOC experience at McGill. When he was reminding Senators that they had already voted for MOOCs, Masi also wrote that his take-away from the MOOCs discussion in January was that “McGill should occupy the MOOCs space...deliberately.” It’s an interesting word, deliberately. As in the opposite of “accidentally,” which might be a description of how Senate came to vote on MOOCs back in October. Besides, Masi writes, MOOCs were implicitly recognized ten years ago, when Senate voted to allow the recording of lectures.

“Modality of delivery” cannot be used to say that a course doesn’t meet McGill’s standards, Masi wrote.

In other words, Senate voted twice to approve MOOCs, in the administration’s mind. The first time they voted, MOOCs didn’t exist (ten years ago).

The second time, they voted based on the words “McGill’s own MOOCs,” which weren’t actually a thing.

Responding to Senators’ concerns at the March 20 Senate meeting, Masi said that MOOCs have been discussed dozens of times, because ASAP has been discussed that many times. He also assured Senators that all issues that are truly academic (including specific courses) would be brought before Senate in the future.

So that’s how McGill (or some part of it) decided to get into MOOCs,.

But what are we to make of MOOCs themselves? It’s still quite early in the MOOC epoch of higher education. All of the questions asked at Senate still await answers. It hasn’t been decided or announced yet whether or not McGill’s MOOCs would be available for credit, but it’s a possibility.

(Full disclosure: This is a cynic’s polemic on a particular and particularly important development at McGill and elsewhere. There have been far more optimistic assessments elsewhere in these and other pages.)

The chattering classes are certainly very excited. In January, New York Times columnist and high priest of chattering, Thomas Friedman, wrote that MOOCs were a “budding revolution.” Apparently not impressed with the actual revolution that’s been going on in Egypt over the past two years, Friedman fantasizes in his January column about how the revolutionary MOOC might change American foreign aid. “For relatively little money,” he writes, “the U.S. could rent space in an Egyptian village, install two dozen computers and high-speed satellite internet access, hire a local teacher as a facilitator,” blah blah blah. Nevermind that there is a bricks and mortar university in Cairo that has been around for about 1,000 years. America will build an internet cafe with some MOOCs and presto, “revolution.”

As Friedman’s column reflects, much of the rhetoric coming from MOOC proponents is about accessibility. Higher education is not accessible enough, costs are rising every-

where, and a massively open online course solves this problem, goes the argument. MOOCs would make a place like McGill more accessible, but that’s based on the assumption that the sounds and images beaming out of computers in a MOOC would still be “McGill.” The jury is still out on this one, and probably will be until we get a better idea of our future with MOOCs. And by jury I mean students, faculty, and staff, who should be the only ones allowed to make judgments on these matters.

There are some very serious concerns being raised already. Through their union, professors at the University of California at Santa Cruz have asserted a claim for the intellectual property of their lectures, out of a fear that a MOOC consortium would use them to make money. The UC system is moving toward joining Udacity and Coursera, commercial enterprises, while McGill has joined edX, a non-profit started by MIT and Harvard, so the situation in California isn’t entirely analogous to McGill.

Fundamental questions remain over what exactly MOOCs will mean for professors. They will be the ones producing the type of content that MOOCs advocates are so sure can be easily beamed to thousands around the world. Professors were certainly split on the issue at the Senate meeting I attended, and again at the March 23 meeting. These were the only two meetings where professors have had a chance to talk about MOOCs. The dystopian vision – to which I am prone – is a future in which “McGill” is nothing more than a flag fluttering over an empty Arts building, next to some of the most expensive, high-tech, state of the art (read: least accessible) research labs around, while most of us students blink into computers along massive computer banks, or at home peering out of our blinds trying to remember what the wind smells like. The vision might be a bit alarmist, but back in 2005 who would have thought Facebook would be something that might get us passed over for a job, based on some red cup pics from high school?

Certainly not most.

Here’s a sense of just how seismic the geeks are saying MOOCs will be for our conception of higher education: Clay Shirky, the New York University professor and New Media guru, has said that this early phase of MOOCs (into which McGill is diving head first) is the equivalent of Napster, and the traditional university, the music business. Remember Napster?

Now compare that to iTunes, podcasts, and Mediafire. We know that McGill is seeking to cut costs wherever it can, and why would we pay someone, like a professor, to teach a course on Shakespeare year after year?

Hamlet hasn’t changed, and the scholarship about Hamlet certainly doesn’t change on a year-by-year basis. So why should McGill waste money? McGill could just record the best lectures with a superstar professor and knock out five years of professor salary from its books. To be clear, this is not what has been proposed at McGill, but if this early crop of MOOCs is Napster (because university bosses are clearly following trend-setters like Shirky on

9 this), the mind boggles to think of what these techno-beasts will look like in ten years.

We should all be concerned about a much scarier logic at work here, and it is this: when computers break, it’s relatively easy and cheap to fix them. When the fleshier machines that work on this campus malfunction (get sick, demand higher wages, or question how decisions get made) it’s very expensive, time-consuming, and simply inefficient for the administration to fix them. If the administration’s rhetoric during the MUNACA strike last year was any indication of how the grown-ups in James think about this place, it’s that misbehaviour like strikes cannot be allowed to disrupt the “business as usual” ethos of the McGill campus. Machines don’t put strain on the well-oiled functioning of a university the way human beings do. There will never be a situation in which we have to place a court injunction on a machine. Machines can’t organize and make demands.

(At least they can’t for now; we’ve all seen Blade Runner.)

When Richard Brautigan was poet-in-residence at the California Institute of Technology, he wrote a collection of poems called “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.” A stanza or two of the title poem is worth reprinting: I like to think (right now please!) of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms.

I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.

Think of your favourite experiences in university. I bet they don’t involve a computer screen.

Mine involve human contact with professors and classmates, meandering conversations where it felt like breakthroughs in my thinking were being made. This cannot, and will not, be replaced by a MOOC. I want those experiences to be genuinely accessible, not a computerized machine-mediated version of them. The process by which McGill came to join a MOOC consortium leads me to believe – this is based on nearly four years of reporting on this institution – that the decision was made before Senate ever got a chance to say anything about it. The same people who are trying to make this place less accessible through their tuition hikes are telling us that – not asking us if – MOOCs will solve that problem for us. If that sounds strange to you, it is. Let us remain students and teachers, not users and content producers.

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health&ed

The McGill Daily Thursday, March 21, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

ii

Drugs don’t come easy Taking a critical look at clinical trials Diana Kwon The McGill Daily

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oday, many fatal or permanently debilitating diseases have better survival rates than in the past, as a result of the development of medical studies, and consequently, vastly improved treatments. However, because of the risks associated with testing new therapeutics, ethical considerations are paramount, and procedures to implement ethical practices are often very rigorous.

Ethics in clinical trials have become more stringent over the years. According to Dr. Teresa Trippenbach, a professor and bioethicist on the Clinical Studies Ethics Board at The Montreal General Hospital, this is a fairly recent change. One of the earliest studies that Trippenbach took part in was in the early seventies; it was a relatively low-risk and that involved administering caffeine to premature babies in order to treat them for apnea. “Back then, we didn’t need written informed consent from the parents for such small procedures,” says Trippenbach. “It was only in the eighties that written consent became required for even the smallest procedures.”

Today, before any clinical trials can be carried out, the procedure must be approved by an ethics board such as the one Trippenbach is on.

One of the major considerations is preventing any participant from feeling coerced into taking part in the study. For instance, because there is a widely-held held belief that “the physician is right,” getting doctors to ask participants to take part in a clinical trial is not ideal. Consent forms are thoroughly reviewed to make sure participants receive full disclosure, and to clarify that participation is completely voluntary. The principal investigator’s role in these studies is to determine at which point the patients should receive the intervention, design the trials, and create a protocol to send to the ethics board.

“It wasn’t until the late eighties or nineties when investigators became legally responsible. When we take something on as an investigator, we need to know that we are responsible,” states Dr. Amit Bar-Or, a neurologist and neuroimmunologist at the Montreal Neurological Institute.

In order to study the effectiveness of a drug in a clinical population, there must be two groups, with only one group being given the novel drug.

The other, a control group, is either given a placebo (a substance without an active ingredient used as a control in an experiment), or another drug

Illustration Ralph Haddad | The McGill Daily

that is currently considered a standard treatment. Patients are not told which group they are in. Before the onset of the trial, patients are explicitly told about their chances of receiving the drug or a placebo. Though it does mean that one group may not be receiving treatment that could potentially help their disease, this set-up is required in order to determine how effective a drug truly is.

Clinical trials are carried out in a series of phases. Prior to human clinical trials, efficacy and toxicity of the experimental drug, among other variables, are recorded from in-vitro or laboratory animal studies. If the drug succesfully passes these stages, it officially enters phase one, wherein studies are done on healthy individuals in order to determine whether or not it is safe, so clinicians can proceed to further trial stages. Phase one studies are often considered to be the most controversial, as healthy individuals are offered monetary compensation to participate in testing the safety of

a drug. Once a drug enters phases two and three, it is tested in patient populations for safety and efficacy.

Even though, at this stage, the safety of the drug has still not been fully determined, these patients can potentially receive physiological benefits from the drug, unlike the stage one testers. If a drug successfully passes through phase three, it is allowed into the market for a wider population, during which the drug continues to be monitored for long-term effects.

Often it is not until reaching the wider population level that certain negative effects are revealed. Regulatory agencies expect animal model testing to be a necessary step, but there has been a recent shift to consider the fact that for certain clinical trials, the animal model step may be skipped.

“The reality is, there will be risks associated with any clinical trial,” Bar-Or admits. “If we knew [the new drug] was better, in terms of safety and efficacy, we wouldn’t need to do the clinical trial.” An important

concept in clinical trials is that of equipoise. Equipoise determines whether particular activity – like the administration of the drug – strikes the right balance between potential benefit and risk. In the case of clinical trials, this means looking at whether the effectiveness of the drug outweighs the risks of carrying out the trials.

Unfortunately, only a small proportion of the drugs that enter clinical trials succeed to proceed through all the phases. According to Joseph Tota, a PhD candidate currently involved in the Carregeenan-gel Against Transmission of Cervical HPV (CATCH) study at McGill, the biggest obstacle faced in this type of research is getting the green light on the study.

“Most of the major obstacles come at the beginning [when] you design a trial and you hope there is merit to it. Our study was eventually ranked first in the application pool after multiple rounds of applications…[We also needed to make sure we met all the]

ethics requirements – Health Canada requires very stringent requirements before going through testing,” he said.

Many clinical trials are funded by pharmaceutical companies, though a proportion are also funded by government agencies. Money from the funding agencies goes straight to the institutions that carry out the research (i.e, McGill), which prevents the conflict of interests that could occur if the money was given directly to clinicians. Conflicts of interest could occur if doctors were given a certain amount of money per subject recruited into the study.

It is clear that there are important considerations underlying clinical trials. Because of the nature of the studies – looking at patient populations and testing novel therapeutics – there are many potential risks in carrying them out. And though most drugs don’t pass through all the clinical trial stages, we hope that the ones that pass introduce a large benefit to society.

12

Health&ed

The McGill Daily | Thursday, March 21, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Illustration Alice Shen | The McGill Daily

Possible side effects Portrayal of depression and pill culture in recent media Caitlin Mouri Health&Education Writer

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ide Effects, a film released last month, centres on a woman diagnosed with depression. When her treatments lead to a devastating act, her psychiatrist becomes obsessed with uncovering the truth behind the tragedy.

The subject matter will inevitably prompt audiences to reevaluate their views of mental illness and medication. But how much of the movie is true to life, and how much is dramatic hyperbole?

The film starts with a vivid, sympathetic portrait of depression.

As Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara), welcomes her husband, Martin Taylor (Channing Tatum) home from prison, she falls into a state of despair. She describes her feelings as a “poisonous fog,” which saps her strength, leaving her unable to work or concentrate, and deprived of her former joys.

After she deliberately slams her car into a wall, she begins a course of therapy and antidepressants with Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law). She reacts poorly to the medication, and asks to try an experimental new drug. Things take a turn for the worse, and Banks desperately tries to salvage

his integrity and his career.

“You are a victim of circumstance and of biology,” Banks tells Emily. In Canada, 8 per cent of the population will experience depression sometime in their lives. Often, it can be traced back to a specific trigger. In other cases, it seems to come out of nowhere. Dr. Perry Adler, a clinical psychologist at the Herzl Family Practice Centre of the Jewish General Hospital, compared the emergence of depression in a person with Chinese water torture. “Each individual drop is innocuous,” he said in an interview with The Daily. “A sad event here, a betrayal there. Over a period of years, it adds up.”

Pharmaceutical companies tend to highlight the biological underpinnings of the disease. In commercials and websites, they give equal weight to physical and emotional symptoms, and frame the disease in terms of chemical imbalances.

These same companies have a clear incentive to emphasize the biology, but this view may have another benefit. Lingering stigmas – that depression is a sign of weakness, that the victim is somehow to blame – leave many sufferers unwilling to seek treatment. A biochemical account can help people accept depression as a treatable medical condition, on par with heart disease or diabetes.

However, chemical imbalances are not the whole story. People with depression have less neural plasticity, which can be caused by exposure to stress. As a result, they have trouble forming chemical connections in brain regions that process positive emotions. Antidepressants can help boost plasticity, but ‘the gold standard’ for treatment combines antidepressants with what Dr. Adler calls “talk therapy.” Through the help of a trained professional, patients can learn new coping strategies that help reestablish some of those positive links. Without this extra step, Adler says, many patients relapse when they stop taking antidepressants.

Non-pharmaceutical treatments have also had some success at treating major depression. Dr. Marcelo Berlim, a psychiatrist at the Douglas Institute, is also the director of the Neuromodulation Research Clinic. Neuromodulation encompasses several techniques that deliver controlled electric or magnetic pulses that can either stimulate or inhibit key areas of the brain. Like antidepressants, these new treatments are not cure-alls, but Dr. Berlim believes the results are promising.

At McGill, students can seek treatment for depression at McGill Mental Health Services (MMHS). While MMHS offers

both short-term therapy and medication, it remains cautious of prescribing antidepressants to students. The former director of MMHS, Dr. Norman Hoffman, recommends caution when dealing with Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), a class of antidepressants, which increase the level of serotonin in the brain. In a set of recommendations for the Canadian Organization of University and College Health, closely reproduced on the MMHS website, he states that while SSRIs are effective in treating major depression, this diagnosis is rare among young adults. Instead, universityage students experience a range of depressive states, which are liable to change. The effects of SSRIs have not been well documented among young adults.

Studies have shown that adolescent and young adult brains are still developing, so hasty interference with pharmaceuticals may actually leave youths more vulnerable to depression later in life.

Hoffman believes that labeling depression as purely “biological” is misleading. “While it is important to continue to destigmatize mental illness,” Hoffman believes that “this is best done by helping individuals deal with their emotional difficulties and needs rath-

er than by labelling them.”

Still, pharmaceuticals remain deeply ingrained in psychiatric practice, and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. In Side Effects. the psychiatrist Dr. Banks plays up a more insidious relationship between doctors and ‘big pharma’. In between writing prescriptions for his wife and lunching with pharmaceutical representatives, Banks rakes in money conducting clinical trials for drug companies. “Everyone takes them,” he says of pills. “They just make it easier to be who you are.”

The pill culture portrayed in the film is undoubtedly exaggerated for dramatic effect. “If someone said, ‘I’m sad because the Canadiens lost,’” Dr. Berlim commented, “and the doctor gave him a pill, that would be malpractice.”

While the events in Side Effects may not be the norm, they tell a compelling cautionary tale. “I tend to mistrust doctors who say ‘I’ll do what I want, [the pharmaceutical companies] won’t influence me.’”

Dr. Berlim noted. But, “the idea is not to bash the industry. Doctors should be patient advocates.

You’ve been trusted to offer guidance and you’re doing the best you can with the least bias that you can. The doctor should be someone who tries to be independent and skeptical.”

culture

The McGill Daily Thursday, March 21, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

Surprisingly subversive acid-Western Johnny Guitar

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o far in Forays Into Film, and my life, I’ve trashed mainstream cinema pretty heavily. I snored at The King’s Speech and The Artist, cleaned Quentin Tarantino’s clock, and after the Academy Awards, I nearly castrated Oscar.

While this is a pretty accurate reflection of my views on film, I can’t help feeling like I’m being a tad unfair.

After all, out of the tens of thousands of Hollywood films out there, there must be one or two good ones, right?

These suspicions were confirmed last week after I found a copy of Johnny Guitar, a 1954 Hollywood Western that I’d been hankering to get my hands on. I had read that before he went on to direct Rebel Without A Cause, Nicholas Ray had managed to slip some genuine subversion past the American Motion Picture Production Code censors in the guise of this generic cowboy flick. Last week, two years after I first started searching, the film finally cropped up in the library catalog, and was even more unique than I had expected.

The subject of the film is Vienna, played by Joan Crawford, a tough-asfuck saloon owner who’s as comfortable in an evening gown as she is in jeans and gun holsters. The story begins when Vienna’s former lover Johnny Guitar, played by Sterling

Illustration Catherine Polcz | The McGill Daily

Lilya Hassall Forays into Film

Hayden, rides up to her saloon after a five-year absence. Shortly after their reunion, however, a murder is committed on the outskirts of town.

The murdered man’s villainous sister Emma is desperate to pin the crime on Vienna and a group of her friends, all of whom are innocent. Vienna and Johnny are forced to fight it out with Emma and a posse of townsfolk, first with rhetoric and then with pistols.

Despite the film’s title, Vienna is clearly the star of the show, with more lines and screen time than any other character. A commanding, heavily masculinized female character like Vienna would be uncommon in any genre of that era, but was completely unheard of as the lead in a Western.

While the 1960s and 1970s were full of disruptive, challenging Westerns, the all-American genre was at its allAmerican height in 1954, and initial reviews trashed Crawford as sexless and romantically forbidding, telling her to leave the saddles and Levi’s for someone else.

As well as taking a badass gun-toting woman for its lead, Johnny Guitar powerfully condemns the repression and persecution of the McCarthy era. It subtly suggests that the reason Emma wants Vienna hanged is not for her brother’s murder, or even plain bloodlust, but homoerotic lust, a desire Emma is unable to name and therefore must destroy.

More striking is the film’s allegorical denunciation of the McCarthy witch hunts, as the villainous mob that falsely accuses Vienna quickly

becomes a stand-in for anti-communist hysteria. The posse, clad in black, vividly resemble a mob of puritan witch hunters, and they use the very same interrogation techniques that the House of Investigation of Un-American Activities (HUAC) used to identify Communists in the film industry. Emma promises Vienna’s friend Turkey that if he testifies that Vienna is guilty, he will go free, mirroring the way in which members of the film industry were intimidated into naming names.

The real-life identities of Ward Bond, who plays the sheriff that legitimizes the posse, and Hayden, bring an unnerving realism to the allegorical content. Bond had been active in the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, the main purpose of which was to fight communism in the film industry. Hayden, on the other hand, was

briefly involved in the Communist Party, and as a result was grey-listed and then subpoenaed by HUAC, and forced, like Vienna’s companion, to name names.

Despite the initial negative reviews and challenging content, the film opened to great success at the box office. Pretty soon the snooty film folk caught on, and François Truffaut was hailing it as an “intellectual Western,” a “delirious, hallucinatory Western,” and a “triumph of the heart.” Despite its Hollywood home, Johnny Guitar manages to be a bizarre dissident of a Western, a refreshing piece of proof that films can be both subversive and extremely entertaining.

Lilya Hassall is a U3 Cultural Studies student. Forays Into Film is a biweekly column about alternative films. Email her at foraysintofilm@ mcgilldaily.com.

Documenting the Printemps Erable Carré Rouge: droit de parole presents the student movement through a sympathetic lens Emory Shaw Culture Writer

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week ago, a new photo exhibition on the Quebec student movement, Carré Rouge: droit de parole, opened at the Maison de la culture in Côte-desNeiges. Droit de parole exhibits a series of portraits and scenes of protest violence, taken by a team of two non-student photographers, Darren Ell and Philippe Montbazet. The exhibition covers the span of the entire movement from the first roaring days of protest in February 2012, to its dwindling last September.

The intimate and unpretentious gallery of the Maison de la culture (one of many such governmentsupported neighbourhood cultural spaces in Montreal) presents what might otherwise be purely journalistic images in an artistic light. Indeed, this is not the first time the movement has been portrayed outside of newspapers in the realm of artistic photography. Last year, Jacques

Nadeau, a famed photographer for Le Devoir, hosted an exhibition in which his red square-themed photos were presented alongside his other work. Montbazet and Ell’s work has been featured as part of other exhibitions, including the 2012 World Press Photo competition, but this was the first show devoted exclusively to their photographs of the student movement. The new exhibit effectively emphasizes the individual within the mass movement context – a perspective largely absent from media coverage – presenting this angle to the public in works of topically relevant art.

Of course, many of the first images I saw were quite similar to what has been run in newspapers over the past year, featuring violent standoffs between cops and students.

These photographs prioritize shock value and transmit an overall sense of chaos. Although we’ve seen such scenes before, the quality of the photos saves them from merely depicting a worn-out trope. Interspersed with these are the photos of individuals from a variety of CEGEPs and univer-

sities, francophone and anglophone, to whom the cause was worthy of a strike. Many are accompanied by a story, testimonial, or quote by the individual justifying their involvement, their personal sacrifice for the cause, their frustration, and their hope for the movement’s success.

The photographers were themselves participants in the events, lending their documentation a sympathetic approach, rather than that of a neutral bystander. “The photos take on a historical dimension when viewed by the visitor,’’ Montbazet explained, “a more intimate vision of the movement that was not shown in the press.’’ A select few portraits are of Concordia and McGill students who fought for the right to strike and protest amidst hostile administrations and student bodies that refused to be involved.

Indeed, many of the testimonies may sound redundant to a student whose academic, social, and media environments throughout the past year were shaped by the movement.

However, when reminded of the thousands of other students who

remained uninvolved, along with the millions of others of all demographics and social strata in the city who may never have seen a demonstration or who have heard of them only through the media, the stories and perspectives evoked in the exhibition are of great value. The art seeks to generate sympathy among these visitors toward a large part of the student body that has felt misunderstood and patronized by the government and the press over the past year. By ignoring, at least sometimes, the plurality and mass participation of the movement, the photographers bring the audience to face the array of individuals, one by one, who protested – and continue to protest – for accessible post-secondary education.

La Maison de la Culture Côte-desNeiges is located just outside Côtedes-Neiges metro at 5290 Côte-desNeiges. The exhibition runs until April 14. The complete photo essay can be viewed at the photographers’ websites, www.darrenell.com and www. philippemontbazet.com.

WHAT’S THE HAPS

High noon in Hollywood

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Fokus Film Festival

Cinema du Parc 3575 Avenue du Parc Thursday, March 21 6:00 p.m. $6 advance, $7 at the door The seventh annual Fokus Film Festival, the only student film festival at McGill, will have a screening of its short film submissions tonight. This year’s theme is “Blacklisted,” which explores the influence of American filmmakers of the fifties and sixties Red Scare.

Organizers TVM: Student Television at McGill are going all out, with two screening rooms and a red carpet.

Songs in the Key of ...

Club Soda 1225 St. Laurent Sunday, March 24 7:00 p.m. $10 McGill’s Effusion presents an evening of a cappella music that will include “a little India.Arie, a little Beyonce, a little rock, and a little roll.”

There will be two solo acts

by Effusion alumni, followed by classic and new group arrangements, all done without any instruments. Sweet sounds will abound.

Mark Poddubiuk Talks Re-designing Design

Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Integrated Complex, Concordia 1515 Ste. Catherine W., Room EV-6.720 Wednesday, March 27 4:30 p.m.

Free Poddubiuk, a UQAM School of Design and Agriculture professor, will be giving a lecture on design, including “building or landscape architecture, object, graphic, interaction or gaming design.” This lecture is part of the series Design as a Critical Practice: Re-designing Design, which features local and international experts exploring the contemporary role of design.

Montreal Strip Spelling Bee

Theatre Sainte Catherine 264 Ste. Catherine East Wednesday, March 27 9:00 p.m. $10 (free for contestants, with a drink) Like strip poker without the riverboat gambler vibes, the Strip Spelling Bee will be equal parts sexy and intellectual. The evening promises a healthy dose of silliness: winners will choose their prize between an hour-long CD of a cat purring or a chooseyour-own-adventure book from the point of view of a housecat. If you’re feeling daring, show up at 8:30 p.m. and sign up to compete.

14

culture

The McGill Daily | Thursday, March 21, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology Slavoj Žižek on Hollywood Bipasha Sultana The McGill Daily

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deology isn’t something that is voiced out loud by frenzied, disenfranchised individuals hungering for a revolution to overturn the status quo. Ideology, argues Slavoj Žižek in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012), is intricately embedded in the fabric of our cultural products. Directed by Sophie Fiennes, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology can be thought of as a sequel to Fiennes’ 2006 documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, which also featured Žižek in the starring role. The documentary is an odd yet eclectic mash-up of psychoanalytic film analysis and Marxist discourse. Žižek is a contemporary Marxist philosopher whose down-to-earth eloquence, eccentricity, and thick Eastern European accent have captured the attention of many in recent

years, largely due to his online presence. Žižek’s appeal lies mainly in the fact that he blurs the boundaries between everyday issues and esoteric philosophical ideas that many may shrug off as pointless navel-gazing.

In The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, Žižek proposes that ideology is slyly inserted into the cultural products we consume, namely, movies. In this comical and insightful documentary, he states that he and Fiennes aim “to use cinema, especially Hollywood, as the place where we can get your everyday ideology, ideology which really forms our ecology, our daily ideological experience where you get the tendencies at its purest, as it were, in distilled pure form.” This reveals Žižek’s skepticism that cinema’s primary function is as an entertainment medium. Instead, he insists that cinema is a tool that not only contains ideology, but also creates it for viewers to subconsciously digest and incorporate into their

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daily lives. In a 2012 staged interview for the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) that debuted the film, Žižek spoke about his recent analysis of the latest in the Batman franchise, The Dark Knight Rises. He interprets the premise of the film as being a liberal re-appropriation of Occupy Wall Street, using Gotham city to stage “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” in his words. He also insists that The King’s Speech and Black Swan, both nominees for the 2011 Oscars, contain “brutal ideology…[with] the most direct re-assertion of patriarchal authority.” The King’s Speech follows the story of an intelligent man trained to be stupid enough to play the role of king; Black Swan reinstates the sexist double standard that a woman who fanatically pursues a career by default sacrifices her domestic role, and is thus destined for failure. In the documentary, Žižek references a slew of popular films including Jaws, Taxi Driver, and A

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Illustration Amina Batyreva The McGill Daily

More study, please QPIRG’s Study in Action lacks undergraduate research Celine Caira Culture Writer

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Starting March 8, come by the McGill Daily office (Shatner B-26) to get a double pass. First come, first served. Student ID required.

Clockwork Orange, which he argues are coded with ideological lessons.

Make no mistake, following Žižek’s thought process is no walk in the park. You’ll often find yourself wishing you could rewind a few seconds to catch up to his philosophical twists and turns. But his dense and confusing lines of argumentation are made up for through clever editing, where Žižek addresses us in the spatial context of the movies he discusses, standing in for various characters and swapping the original dialogue with his own.

What results is a documentary that is as entertaining and amusing as it is insightful. With a tagline like “We are responsible for our dreams,” Žižek ultimately insists on our moral responsibility as viewers. We need to be roused from our roles as passive consumers and begin to recognize the ideological consequences of the content that we, as a society, are being force-fed.

very year, QPIRG McGill and QPIRG Concordia host Study in Action, a series of free workshops for undergrads focusing on activism as well as social and environmental justice. This year, the conference took place from March 14 to 17 at Concordia, with panels and workshops focusing on a wide spectrum of social justice topics, including everything from Idle No More to feminist graffiti. The Art in Action visual art exhibit complemented the conference, illustrating these themes through works by both students and members of the local community.

The interdisciplinary conference was created in recognition of undergraduate writing and research linked to social and environmental justice, with the goal of transcending the borders between academic and popular knowledge. I attended a panel and a workshop at Study in Action, and although both touched on illuminating topics, I left the conference more confused and disillusioned than when I arrived.

I began my Study in Action experience by attending the Saturday morning panel “Whose strike was it, anyway?” The panel included four speakers, including Alex Matak, a self-identified queer anti-capitalist nerd and student strike activist, and Gabrielle Bouchard, who works with the 2110 Centre for Gender Advocacy. A recent Concordia graduate, Matak opened the panel by presenting her research on the student strike and ways in which power was experienced, constructed, and reproduced within the organizing

bodies at Concordia. She qualified her presentation with data gathered in interviews, and backed it up with academic theories of geographic and social space. Her presentation was by far the most structured, clear, and interesting, despite also being the shortest. The other speakers did not have formal presentations prepared, and embarked on anecdotal rants about their experiences subverting the Concordia administration during the strike. Although these monologues were illuminating at points, for the most part, they were just an outlet to voice disdain for Quebec’s educational institutions. At the end, the panel’s overarching goal remained unclear.

After a delicious vegan lunch served by The People’s Potato, I attended the workshop “A $400,000 Fence and Other Stories: An Introduction to the Prison System.” The workshop gave an overview of the prison system in Canada, particularly focusing on Bill C-10. This bill was created to allow for increased federal funding in prison infrastructure, with the aim of keeping people within these institutions for longer, and consequently creating more jobs in security and prison construction to stimulate the Canadian economy. The workshop was more organized than the previous panel and had a clear topic focus and thesis: how prisons in Canada are a business.

The workshop invited people that had experience with the Canadian prison system to speak about how Harper’s reforms have dramatically changed their day-to-day lives in prison. “$6.90 a day is the most you can make in jail,” said one speaker, “and Harper is cutting this by taking 32 per cent of our annual earnings for ‘room and board’ costs.” The average convict

in Canada serves 27.5 years in prison for a murder conviction, and such cuts to the absurdly small amount they make every day is affecting their ability to support their families while in prison. Perhaps even more upsetting is how the university programs and college workshops that were previously available to prisoners have been replaced by petty chores such as lawn mowing. One speaker expressed that he did not know where to draw the line between being in prison and being a slave. Since 2007, provincial governments throughout Canada have been in the process of building 22 new prisons and 17 additions to existing prisons with an estimated total cost of over $3.375 billion. Through these reforms, the Harper government is not increasing the number of jobs, but simply displacing them by decreasing employment opportunities for prisoners, and increasing the number of guards employed.

Although this workshop was fascinating, I felt it didn’t directly fit with Study in Action’s mandate of showcasing undergraduate student research. I left the conference more informed about the Canadian prison system than undergraduate research on local activism.

As a political science student, I appreciate events that create a space for minds to debate and coalesce. I had hopes that Study in Action would create such a forum, but, unfortunately, the promise of an “undergraduate research conference linking students with community activism” was false advertising. I would have liked to see the conference use a more academic lens when examining local activism, and they could have done so by allowing undergraduates to actually present their research.

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EDITORIAL

volume 102 number 40

Our sexual assault centre should not be up for a vote

editorial board 3480 McTavish St., Rm. B-24 Montreal, QC H3A 1X9 phone 514.398.6784 fax 514.398.8318 mcgilldaily.com coordinating editor

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Laurent Bastien Corbeil Lola Duffort Farid Rener Illustration Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

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cover design Alice Shen contributors Hannah Besseau, Cameron Butler, Celine Caira, Alice Shen, Oles Chepesiuk, Lilya Hassall, Mostafa Henaway, Molly Korab, Diana Kwon, Michael Lee-Murphy, Austin Lloyd, Caitlin Mouri, Errol Salamon, Emory Shaw, Bipasha Sultana, William Werblow, Dana Wray

A fully-funded sexual assault centre on a university campus must not be thought of as an optional extra. Yet the current fee-renewal referendum for the Sexual Assault Centre of the McGill Students’ Society (SACOMSS) suggests that, on this campus, the opposite is true.

SACOMSS is the sole resource at McGill dedicated to survivors of sexual assault, providing a safe, pro-survivor, and anti-oppressive space that offers confidential and non-judgemental support. The centre is also open to the wider public and is an explicitly pro-trans* sexual assault centre. SACOMSS, which is entirely student-funded by a $0.75 per semester fee, is volunteer-run and provides all its services, including a confidential sexual assault helpline and support group program, free of charge.

By asking students to repeatedly reaffirm their commitment to SACOMSS, McGill asserts that the provision of quality services for survivors of sexual assault is none of its concern, and that the non-existence of these services is a real possibility.

This might not be surprising to many: in an interview with The Daily last week, Associate Provost (Policies, Procedures & Equity) Lydia White commented that the University has services that aid students in crisis and survivors of sexual assault, but none of the services she cited are explicitly dedicated to survivors of sexual assault, showing McGill’s profound lack of understanding of the specialized training and sensitivity with which the issue needs to be approached.

In 2005, the administration evicted SACOMSS from its office in Peterson Hall, and in 2006, McGill

forced SACOMSS out of its night office, expressing concern “that it could be held liable for inappropriate advice given by student volunteers.” Those evictions came after the University forced the organization to change its name from the McGill Sexual Assault Centre (MSAC) to SACOMSS. McGill consistently shows a lack of respect for SACOMSS, and thus that it does not treat the issue of sexual assault with adequate seriousness.

Yet the University has not hesitated to direct its own employees to SACOMSS, whose Advocacy Branch supports students, staff, and faculty in navigating the University’s complex sexual harassment and discrimination policy, advocating on their behalf to ensure their rights are respected and their needs are addressed. This implicit recognition that SACOMSS is not an optional student service, but an essential resource for the entire McGill and Montreal community, must now be backed by action. McGill should commit to funding SACOMSS – that it does not already do so is shameful enough – and must stop asking the centre to funnel time and resources into needless referendum campaigns that only hinder its operations.

In the meantime, The Daily calls on the new SSMU executives to incorporate SACOMSS into the SSMU base fee, just as the McGill Student Emergency Response Team’s (M-SERT) fee is, so that the centre can avoid facing the ballot box every three years, and the McGill and Montreal community continues to have access to one of its most important resources.

—The McGill Daily Editorial Board

Errata In the article “Arts course cuts going ahead as planned” (News, page 6, March 18), The Daily incorrectly stated that the forum was organized by the Political Science Students Association (PSSA). The forum was organized by the Anthropology Students Association. The article also included a headline and paragraph which mischaracterized the administration’s stated aim for the cuts as a cost-saving initiative. In fact, it is a redistributing of resources.

The Daily regrets these errors.

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All contents © 2012 Daily Publications Society. All rights reserved. The content of this newspaper is the responsibility of The McGill Daily and does not necessarily represent the views of McGill University. Products or companies advertised in this newspaper are not necessarily endorsed by Daily staff.

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compendium!

The McGill Daily Thursday, March 21, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

lies, half-truths, and can fish feel pain?

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Obama telephones student President demands more “brilliant and insightful” political analysis Euan EK The McGill Daily

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ast night, Barack ‘Boom’ Obama telephoned a McGill student journalist to demand more “breathtaking” analysis on “that stuff going on” in Afghanistan.

The student, Alexpanda CoatHanger, is a regular contributor to Montreal based political-gossip blog, the Political Soup.

Coat-Hanger is the Soup’s selfanointed expert on “the Middle East, and also the developing world [sic].”

Obama told The Twice-aWeekly that he is “astounded” that an undergraduate student and contributor to a blog had such insight into “almost all of the world.”

“This kid really has got something,” Obama said. “I have the most well-funded departments in the entire world, and yet when we looked at the problems in the places, we just couldn’t see. We couldn’t see like this kid.”

“I read his article, ‘The Balancing Act,’ yesterday and I have to say, I was blown away,” Obama said.

In the article, Coat-Hanger expounds his view that “the failures” in Afghanistan should be blamed on both the West and the Karzai regime which holds power in the country.

“This is really a radical take on the situation in Afghanistan,” Obama said. “But when we looked at his argument, and then compared it to the way that things are

over there, we found he was right.”

Obama noted that he was particularly impressed with Coat-Hanger’s use of assumptions and received truths to back up his analysis.

“I was also very impressed with the way the kid dealt with the question of legitimacy; the question of why America was justified in taking the fire out over there to the sandy places,” Obama said.

“He just didn’t even acknowledge the question. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Even our finest departments and their finest heads haven’t been able to completely dodge that question.”

Obama is now understood to be making an offer of employment to Coat-Hanger, but is worried that the rival Montreal-based political-gossip blog Pencil might land him first.

“We have indeed been preparing a move for Coat-Hanger,” Paneer Tie-el-b, founder of Pencil, told The Twice-a-Weekly.

“We’ve actually been sizing up a move for Coat-Hanger for quite a while, since we were founded, actually [last week],” Tie-el-b said. “We knew one or two of the big shots might come in for him, but we thought it would probably be the Prince Albert Herald, not the President of the United States of America.”

Tie-el-b noted that Pencil welcomed the competition from the Commander-in-Chief of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, stating that “right now, we think the balance

Illustration A. Caffeinator | The Twice-a-Weekly

tips slightly in our favour.”

Prising Coat-Hanger away from his current blog might not be so easy, with the Political Soup making it clear they do not want to sacrifice their man.

“We have been preparing an offer we think he can’t refuse,”

Political Soup’s chief editor, I-am-a-Bell So-lick-me, said.

“Guestlist at Tokyo every week, plus a $50 meal plan card for the Orange-Road cafe.”

At press time, Obama was not sure if the United States of America, comprised of the fifty

states and significant parts of the rest of the world, would be able to match So-lick-me’s offer, but he said he would “seek advice as soon as possible.”

“Unfortunately,” Obama said, “Coat-Hanger is the only man I can trust to give me the right advice.”

Big feet increase earnings; men free of all blame Study finds small feet, not systemic sexism, to blame for women’s low pay Euan EK The McGill Daily

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omen’s smaller feet are to blame for their comparatively low pay, new research commissioned by the Institute for Studies (IfS) shows.

The report proves the link between smaller feet sizes and lower pay, effectively dismissing over 150 years of sociological research that suggested the gradual reification of performed gender roles into male and female over time, an economic system reliant on the exploitation of all non-males, and the all-around

shitty nature of men were to blame.

The report asked women and men – there were no other categories offered – to self-report both their shoe size and their wage. Professor Paul Nathanson, lead-researcher in the IfS team, then compiled the Facts into Graphs and Took Averages.

When quizzed as to why he chose to impose an artificial gender-binary on participants, Nathanson replied with the words “just because” and “common sense” several times.

Nathanson told The Twice-aWeekly that the results “were not un-unambiguous.”

“The data clearly shows that

women earn less, and also have smaller feet,” Nathanson said. “Now I’m not a ‘scientitian’, but I think it’s pretty clear what that data means...women need to grow some bigger feet.”

Nathanson notes that the findings are consistent across race, class, and even across different countries, “proving it.”

“People have been bandying about some radical ideas over the past century,” Nathanson said. “But ‘feminism’ and ‘sexism’ are really just outdated intellectual fads that bare no relation to the reality of my Graph and Calculator.”

“The idea that our society is structurally sexist, that women are sorted,

ordered, categorized, and named according to a ‘value’ system that has been constructed to coerce the female body because of men’s atavistic fear of powerful women, and that this system does not apply to men, is plainly misguided,” Nathanson said.

“I saw a woman with size 10 feet yesterday; I bet she had loads of money.”

When asked if he felt that maybe he had misunderstood “it all,” Nathanson was unequivocal.

“Women need to stop blaming and start growing,” he said. “I grew my feet, so why can’t they?

They could also buy bigger shoes, because of freedom.”

“We agree,” said Ted Turner,

founder of CNN, Bruce Bawer, and new McGall University Principal Suzie Fartier.

Despite Nathanson’s confidence, many of the rest of everyone are “thinking that this is one of those ‘untruths.’”

“I refuse to read anything ever,” said Paul Johnson, first-year BubbleBlowing student and Devout Bro. “But I think Nathanson is doing a bad thing, [yes], he definitely is.”

“It’s not that I know less than him,” said Gee R. King, coordinator of Awesome at Dream-Big Radio. “It’s that I do know more than him and he is wrong. Also, lived experiences.”