Editorial: Closing Remarks. By Olga Stein

Editorial: Closing Remarks

Dear Readers,

As we appear to be on the last edition of WordCity, I want to take a moment to thank all of you for your support and attention to our magazine. We started this project in 2020, at the height of a world-shattering pandemic, and we’ve continued it through events that even the pandemic couldn’t have prepared us for — Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, Hamas’s barbaric attack on defenceless Israelis on October 7, 2023, Hamas’s hostage-taking of hundreds of civilians, including infants, and the ensuing war on Gaza, a state whose two million people have paid a terrible price for being governed by Hamas, a proxy for the theocratic and ideologically imperialistic dictatorship of Iran.

We started this magazine as a way to offer writers a platform that was inclusive and supportive. Our aim was also to counter the effects of the COVID pandemic by doing something productive and creative (look up my editorial on the connection between writing and well-being in our March 2022 issue: https://wordcitylit.ca/2022/03/18/editorial-by-olga-stein/). Importantly, our editors saw an opportunity to help other writers get published, whether experienced or new to their practice. This is no small public service, especially at a time when a vast number of people were confined to homes, and watched with horror the rising number of COVID’s victims.

For our Canadian contributors, WordCity turned out to be a boon. Canada’s CanLit community has a genius for gatekeeping on the one hand, and incestuousness on the other. Many Canadian writers debuted their work in this magazine because we made a point of being welcoming to all. Authors from the Indian and African subcontinents also had the chance to reach North American readers — many of for the first time — because of WordCity. Of note is that a number of our editors are non-Canadian, and this allowed us to forge friendships across national borders and continental divides. These literary networks and associations feel entirely normal today, but five years ago, they stunned me by rendering whole continents accessible for frequent conversations with fellow editors and contributors.

For me personally, the welcome extended by our chief editor, Darcie Friesen Hossack (who, I might add, is a truly gifted, accomplished, and published short story and novel writer), was a gift for which I’ll always remain grateful. I never tired of thanking Darcie for giving me a voice! I hope, likewise, that my curatorial and editing efforts have given others a chance to speak out, express themselves and leave a literary footprint they can build on in other literary venues. That is certainly one of the ways I viewed our publishing project.

While doing all of the above, WordCity endeavoured to keep an eye on world events, and discuss issues that mattered to each and everyone of us. When Roe vs Wade was overturned in 2022, for example, we were on it. We dedicated an issue to the social harms the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision would cause. When Russia began its senseless, corrupt, expansionist war on Ukraine, we spoke out, and featured stories, memoirs, and poems translated from the Ukrainian that addressed Russia’s ambitions, and described the toll on Ukrainian people. We published reviews of books and series, as well as lengthy, deeply researched essays, some of which made Canada’s best magazines look modest by comparison.

With this last issue, we mustn’t forego the opportunity to speak of the danger to the world order posed by Russia, Iran, and to a lesser extent China. Iran and Russia, Russia and Iran! If you need a current-day equivalent of an evil empire, look no further. How anyone can argue that Russia isn’t a Neo-Imperial order, with a small cadre of corrupt inner-circle bureaucrats bent on self-enrichment at the expense of Ukrainians and their own citizens, is beyond me. How anyone can deny that Iran is a theocratic dictatorship, driven by its own brand of religious-political ideology, and determined to export it via its proxies throughout the Middle East, is also beyond me. Nor should I or anyone else who isn’t from Iran be the voice that speaks on behalf of Iranian citizens and informs others about the country’s current regime. Persians who’ve fled and are now are our much-admired neighbours and beloved students, tell us about how Iran’s mullahs have degraded the country since 1979. Hear them. Iran’s Supreme Leader is also known as the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution. Shouldn’t his title clue in and worry our talking heads (not to mention the students protesting on university campuses) just a little? How much, we need to ask, have Iran, Qatar, China, and Russia paid (oh, yes, the influence-peddling is very real!) to shape the narrative we depend on to understand the world?             Take a look at the donors’ lists of America’s Ivy League universities and you’ll get an inkling of what and who is managing our young people’s education. ISGAP’s 2023 report on this state of affairs states: “At least 100 American colleges and universities illegally withheld information on approximately $13 billion in undocumented contributions from foreign governments, many of which are authoritarian….Speech intolerance — manifesting as campaigns to investigate, censor, demote, suspend, or terminate speakers and scholars — was higher at institutions that received undocumented money from foreign regimes.” Google for yourselves “Qatari involvement in higher education in the United States,” and you’ll find part of the explanation for the well-coordinated pro-Palestinian encampments (with their perfectly matching tents, y’all) at universities across the US and Canada.

Here’s a small but important reminder of how things actually stand: Billions of dollars in foreign aid to Gaza were used by Hamas over the past two decades to construct hundreds of miles of underground tunnels for the express purpose of destroying the only country in the world with a Jewish majority. For the Hamas dictatorship, this goal has overridden all others, including the protections of its civilians. Not a single Palestinian child was given protection in those tunnels. And yet, to listen to, and read, the rhetoric that Israel’s defensive campaign has produced is enough to depress anyone genuinely concerned about human rights generally, and women’s rights in particular.

So-called feminists in academic settings all over the world (certainly in Canada), have used their positions and platforms to do what exactly? Not to denounce the rape and murder of Israeli girls and women on October 7, 2023. Nor have they condemned the hostage-taking of civilian men, women, children and tots, or the brutal murder, just recently, of six captives held underground in unimaginable conditions — tortured, starved, sexually abused — for 11 months. Very strangely, these same ‘feminists’ are also failing to speak up for the real apartheid established by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Please see Meryl Streep’s speech in support of Afghan women and girls at the United Nations, where she’s pleading for Sunni communities worldwide to intervene on behalf of “half of the entire population [in Afghanistan], who are incarcerated” (watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGMphi9w85c). Do I hear female academics speaking up in outrage over the forcible confinement and silencing of Afghan women? I don’t. Does it detract from my mental health to know that I’m surrounded by blinkered hypocrites? You bet it does.

Don’t even get me started on the UN, an organization that is corrupt to its marrow. Iran’s appointment to chair the 2023 UN Human Rights Council Social Forum speaks volumes about this circus. As Gianna Gancia, an Italian politician and member of the European Parliament (since 2019), wrote in response: “The appointment of Ali Bahreini, Ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Permanent Representative to the United Nations, to chair the 2023 United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Social Forum (2 and 3 November 2023), is nothing more than a slap in the face, given the human rights situation of most Iranians, particularly women, and the repeated executions in the wake of the ongoing protests in the country and, more generally, the Islamic Republic’s gross human rights violations and its catastrophic and politicised handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, when its refusal to import Western vaccines cost hundreds of thousands of lives” (https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2023-001936_EN.html).

The UN did issue a press release in July of 2023, titled “Strongly Condemning Rise in Conflict-Related Sexual Violence, Speakers Urge Security Council to Better Prevent, Enforce Accountability for Such Crimes,” where it stated:

With gang rape, sexual slavery and other forms of sexual violence used as tactics of war amid rising militarization and weapons proliferation, the Security Council must close the gap between its commitments to address conflict-related sexual violence and the shocking realities for victims and survivors, delegates heard today during the 15-nation organ’s open debate on sexual violence in conflict situations.

During the day-long meeting titled “Promoting Implementation of Security Council Resolutions on Conflict-Related Sexual Violence,” 70 speakers took the floor, united in their condemnation of sexual violence in conflict, with many highlighting the urgent need for the Council to fully implement its various resolutions on the matter (https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15357.doc.htm).

The above-given press release was likely a belated response to the rape of Ukrainian women and girls by Russian soldiers. The reports and witness statements compiled are so voluminous by now that it’ll take years to document and organize the information so as to bring charges of crimes against humanity against the Russian perpetrators. For more recent materials on these crimes, read the Florence Aubenas’s article for Le Monde, published in April or 2024 (https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/04/23/ukrainian-rape-survivors-experience-silence-or-shame_6669224_4.html).

Especially noteworthy, given the UN’s demonstration of interest in protecting women, is that it took until 11 March, 2024, for it to issue a statement that condemned the sexual violence perpetrated against Israeli women (and very young girls). The published statement, “Reasonable Grounds to Believe Conflict-Related Sexual Violence Occurred in Israel During 7 October Attacks, Senior UN Official Tells Security Council” (https://press.un.org/en/2024/sc15621.doc.htm), shamelessly engaged in its signature wriggling out of the morally imperative unequivocal condemnation of Hamas, as well as a curious if not nauseating what-about-ism (but then look once more at who chairs the UNHRC). First the author acknowledged what its investigator found: “‘It was a catalogue of the most extreme and inhumane forms of killing, torture and other horrors,’” including sexual violence, she stated.” Yet the same report also goes on to say: “On her visit to Ramallah, she spotlighted instances of sexual violence in the context of detention, such as invasive body searches; beatings, including in the genital areas; and threats of rape against women and female family members.” I’m all for punishing even the slightest form of abuse under detention (truly, these allegations are sickening), but pardon me for thinking that mass slaughter and multiple instances of gang rape and dismemberment aren’t quite the same things as “body searches,” and “threats of rape.” If such abuse is going on, it’s doubtlessly reprehensible, and should be punished with imprisonment, nothing less. Again, though, accusations of abuse aren’t quite the same things as material proof in the form of, say, videos taken by high-on-Captagon Hamas terrorists (NOT resistance fighters — get this straight!) and the charred or dismembered remains of the murdered, including those of entire families.

The continued refusal to admit and condemn the full scope of the horrors inflicted on Israelis by feministas whose pity, it seems, extends only in one direction, the celebration of the atrocities committed on Oct 7 on campuses, and the support for these celebrations by members of university departments, does impact our mental health. What’s worse, it undermines the nation’s collective moral health. Currently, we’re witness to wide-scale degradation of the public sphere with aggressive and hate-filled rhetoric. You ask, “What comes next?” The answer is further social breakdown, but this time through violence. Any government that continues ignoring this rhetoric and demonstrations of aggression toward its citizens is remiss in its duties, and will have cause to regret it.

Finally, since mental health is the subject, let me narrow the focus, and say something about the state of Ontario’s colleges, just one of consequences of what I call the gold rush created by the internationalization of Canada’s education industry. On September 24, the Ontario College Faculty, representing all unionized college instructors, published a list of the earnings of the 24 college presidents (by no means representing the entire senior administrative/management staff at the colleges). The presidents’ combined annual salaries amount to $7,340,429.88. This drain on the college systems’ available moneys (that is, the use of profits for personal enrichment by senior administrative teams), is why the recently introduced federal cap on international students has caused scores of part-time instructors across Ontario not to be hired for the fall of 2024 term, myself included. This unceremonious exclusion of instructors who invested years in improving their course materials and teaching methods, often without even so much as a word of warning or a ‘thank-you for your hard work and contribution to our school’ is directly linked to these outsized salaries. The biggest worry for Ontario colleges now, it would appear, is how to keep paying the administrators’ salaries without the profits they’d grown accustomed to accumulating from the tuitions of foreign students. These profits are in the billions, I sh-t you not. Yet part-time instructors have been ‘prudently’ pruned so that payments to college presidents and other senior admins can continue undiminished.

The situation of profit-mongering and resulting exploitation at these colleges is even worse than the above-given suggests. The vastly expanded flow of funds from international students (many of them poor, and literally selling everything their families owned to pay for one year’s tuition) was a real Huzzah moment for administrators: they realized that by increasing enrolment of international students while hiring instructors on a part-time basis only, and thereby avoiding any obligations to these folks, including the need to provide benefits, they could quadruple their organizations’ profits. It’s a simple business formula. Get as much as you can from the sale of your product, while reducing the costs of creating and maintaining it.

The thing is, colleges aren’t private businesses. They’re still subsidized by our governments, and instructors are, in effect, public employees. Part-time and sessional college instructors just happen to be the most exploited ones at the moment. Those inflated administrative salaries mentioned above are achieved by means of the colleges’ bottom-line strategy of employing a large and precarious workforce of teachers. They get away with it because our governments have enabled them to do so for decades.

This is how I too came to be offered a galling contract by Suzanne Suarez, at the time an Interim Associate Dean in Sheridan’s Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences. She offered me a job teaching English and Communications courses. The catch was this: I would have to agree to teach five courses (about 170 students in all). To be clear, this was a sessional offer — i.e., a part-time job without any benefits. When I asked for two courses instead (with a more manageable workload of 70 to 80 students), I was told that I had to take her offer as was; how much work I was to take on was non-negotiable, in other words. Worse yet, she expected me to start at the lowest step and least pay possible, despite the fact that I have a PhD in English, and worked at Seneca College for two years at step 13. In all, I’d been teaching for 13 years while doing my PhD and after. Suarez, if you look at her LinkedIn profile, comes armed only with an ESL certificate (not an MA or PhD!) — great credentials for today’s wild west of college-level credentialing. Still, it amazes that all one needs to get where she got at Sheridan was ESL certification. Heck, if I wanted an ESL diploma, I’d have earned it in three months (unlike the average eight years it takes to complete a PhD program).

This is what it has come to: shameless lowballing — as if instructors are now mere ‘things’ colleges pick up at bazaars at bargain-basement prices. It’s full-blown commodification of instructors and education. I turned down the Sheridan offer, and two months later, Centennial College asked me to teach starting at step 17, taking all my career and educational credentials into account. Sadly, many instructors, especially those new to Canada, can’t afford to turn down their first opportunity to teach here, even if they end up working at McDonald’s-level wages. When I worked at Seneca College, I encountered many female instructors whose accent was so heavy, I worried their students would have difficulty understanding them.      Seneca College hires these women precisely because they can get them at the lowest possible pay step. They are vulnerable and exploitable. Suzanne Suarez’s mistake was to assume I was one of them.

Simon Lewsen’s recent article for the the Walrus, “Are Universities Failing the Accommodations Test” (August 13, 2024), isn’t inaccurate. It’s good as far it gets. The problem is that it doesn’t get very far. It fails to fully lift the curtain on what’s happening in our universities and colleges: the institutionalization of accommodation. To be clear, I’m not arguing against accommodating students with special needs, or those who’ve had a loss in the family and need time to grieve. Of course all rules need exceptions. But exceptions can’t become the rule. Yet in today’s environment of taking students’ money first, and coping with their lack of preparedness later, the notion that university and college instructors are the ones who should donate their time to making learning possible for ALL has become entirely normalized. We no longer even pretend that education is a privilege, and its credentialing not a right, but something students have to work hard, and excel at, to earn. This was understood by all when I was a student at the University of Toronto in the ’80s and ’90s. High grades were rare in the humanities and social sciences. Now they’re commonplace. I happen to credit the really high expectations I had to contend with and the very demanding professors I had as a student at U of T for just about everything I’m able to do today. I wonder whether current U of T students will be able to say the same thing two decades from now. I recommend Jascha Mounk’s “Abolish Grades: A Modest Proposal” (August 29, 2024) for its superb overview of the ubiquitous crisis of grade inflation in the US. Much of the same is going on here, especially because colleges and universities require their international students to pass (whether they can speak and write in English or not). They need to give students their diplomas, so that the next cohort can deliver the profits to which these institutions have become addicted.

A number of years ago, I sat through an online presentation on instructors’ ‘positionality,’ offered by the Teaching Commons at York University. I had expected to pick up tips on how to address students’ flagging attention when teaching my courses online. Instead, I was given a ridiculously basic lecture on our obligations as instructors to keep students’ ‘situatedness’ in mind. We were reminded that our own privileged positions could make us less attentive to students’ needs than we needed to be. Pardon me, but what privileged position  is that? Does a course offered me now and then give me actual privilege? And how accommodating is education supposed to be? Should students be allowed to hand in essays any time they’re ‘able’ to? Should exams be endlessly postponed until every student feels ready to take them? And how do we grade students’ work without making distinctions between those who are smart and capable, and those who are neither? The Teaching Commons’ presentation, I grasped quickly, was an all-too-transparent effort to normalize accommodational teaching. We had to care for our students’ mental health, after all. Our own mental health? We don’t count. We aren’t paying customers.

In October of 2022, The Fifth Estate aired a documentary, “How recruiters in India use false promises to lure students to Canada” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNrXA5m7ROM). Coincidentally, just before the documentary was released to the public, I had spoken up at a Seneca College staff meeting, stating a bit too frankly that international students were being exploited and so were we, the instructors, because we were forced, without being consulted, to teach students who were largely unprepared in terms of their language and writing skills.

Seneca College doesn’t operate on the basis of prerequisite courses. This means any student can sign up for any course that fulfils a program’s required range of study. In the courses I had created for Seneca’s interdisciplinary BA with largely Canadian students in mind, I was inundated with people who couldn’t write even a few literate sentences. The situation was intolerable. These students, Seneca’s very policies, were eating up my time and mental health while students were losing their money and the opportunity to learn in a more productive setting. And to what end? There was no way I could pass them in good conscience.

For speaking up, the then-head of Seneca’s English Department promptly demoted me from partial-load to part-time instructor status. That’s one way of dealing with an inconvenient truth, isn’t it? I could say more about the vindictive, unethical practices of this particular individual, but it’s probably best to spare readers the unpleasant details here. Meanwhile, Seneca’s president, David Agnew, continues boasting about the ever-rising number of Seneca’s graduating students, strangely forgetting that prestige is a matter of quality not quantity, not to mention exclusivity (something U of T once prided itself on).

Our colleges and universities, rapacious and unsympathetic to the suffering of academics who, despite their many publications and years in the teaching trenches, can never hope to get job security and equitable remuneration relative to their tenured colleagues, have forgotten a simple truth. People who are abused can be pushed only so far. At a certain point, they begin speaking up, spilling the beans, airing the dirty laundry, so to speak. There is so darn much of it in our universities and colleges that it would take at least a decade to clean it. As for endlessly accommodating students who shouldn’t be in university or in certain college programs in the first place, that sort of policy is sure to do one thing: make university and college diplomas meaningless.

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Olga Stein holds a PhD in English, and is a university and college instructor. She has taught writing, communications, modern and contemporary Canadian and American literature. Her research focuses on the sociology of literary prizes. A manuscript of her book, The Scotiabank Giller Prize: How Canadian is now with Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Stein is working on her next book, tentatively titled, Wordly Fiction: Literary Transnationalism in Canada. Before embarking on a PhD, Stein served as the chief editor of the literary review magazine, Books in Canada, and from 2001 to 2008 managed the amazon.com-Books in Canada First Novel Award (now administered by Walrus magazine). Stein herself contributed some 150 reviews, 60 editorials, and numerous author interviews to Books in Canada (the online version is available at http://www.booksincanada.com). A literary editor and academic, Stein has relationships with writers and scholars from diverse communities across Canada, as well as in the US. Stein is interested in World Literature, and authors who address the concerns that are now central to this literary category: the plight of migrants, exiles, and the displaced, and the ‘unbelonging’ of Indigenous peoples and immigrants. More specifically, Stein is interested in literary dissidents, and the voices of dissent, those who challenge the current political, social, and economic status quo. Stein is the editor of the memoir, Playing Under The Gun: An Athlete’s Tale of Survival in 1970s Chile by Hernán E. Humaña.