I would not ordinarily do this: I wouldn’t ordinarily attack a colleague in public over something that colleague said in a non-academic publication. Thankfully, David Gilmour isn’t actually a colleague of mine, despite what you might have read. Gilmour is emphatically not a “University of Toronto literature professor.” He is a novelist and a broadcaster; he teaches a few classes at Victoria College; and he makes extremely blinkered statements about literature. He’s not a member of the English Department, or of any other department of literature at U of T. His title of “Professor,” as listed on the Victoria College website, is an honorific, as far as I can tell.
As he says himself, “I got this job six or seven years ago, usually the University of Toronto doesn’t allow people to become professors without a doctorate. You have to have a doctorate to teach here.” Damn straight. (Actually: no, not really. Though it’s mostly true. Thankfully, most instructors without a PhD don’t sound like David Gilmour.)
Anyway: David Gilmour is not a colleague of mine. And as far as I can tell from his published comments, he isn’t much of a literature professor either. I don’t want to belittle the man: he evidently puts in the work. As he told the Hazlitt blogger, he loves Proust so much, he’s read him twice. A true worker in the vineyard of the literary gods.
The biggest hits on his shelf, he says, are Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Proust. His love for these guys is reflected in his teaching, which focusses on “Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.” But not, it seems, the twice-read Proust. The massively guy-guy Proust, notorious philanderer, heavy drinker, gregarious man-about-town Proust. (Not the Proust you know? Someone might want to drop David Gilmour a note. Or a biography.)
And of course, Gilmour won’t teach women authors, because he just doesn’t love women authors enough. Except for Virginia Woolf, whom he loves so much he can’t teach her, because his students, even in third year (he teaches third-year classes?) aren’t smart enough for Woolf.
Here’s the thing: I’m glad David Gilmour isn’t teaching Virginia Woolf. I’m sorry he’s teaching Chekhov, and Tolstoy, and Fitzgerald. I don’t really care about Roth or Henry Miller: he can teach them to death as far as I’m concerned. There must be other authors who need the kind of pseudo-biographical rubbish Gilmour heaps on Chekhov, who apparently was “the coolest guy in literature.” (Christopher Marlowe called to complain: What makes Chekhov so cool? Whom did Chekhov ever kill? Did Chekhov ever catch a knife in the eye? Or get done for coining? Fuck that milktoast Chekhov.) Chekhov also laughed loudly. And he made everyone around him a better person. Man, that Chekhov. What a guy. What a guy-guy.
I don’t know if this inane interview bears any resemblance to what Gilmour is telling his students. If it does, I’m sorry. They might as well read Wikipedia. Rather notably absent from the interview: literature. Rather notably over-present: authors. Profession of the interviewee: author.
So that’s all a curdled mess of intellectual mediocrity. And really not worth bothering with. What is more troubling to me than the initial interview, though, is Gilmour’s follow-up conversation with the Globe and Mail, in which he explains what he really meant to say:
People are calling you a sexist for refusing to teach books by women. Were your statements in Hazlitt misrepresented in any way?
They were totally, totally misinterpreted. I said, look, I’m a middle-aged writer and I am interested in middle-aged writers. I’m very keen on people’s lives who resemble mine because I understand those lives and I can feel passionately about them – and I teach best when I teach subjects that I’m passionate about.
So in order to teach, you have to relate?
I believe that if you want to teach the way I want to teach, you have to be able to feel this stuff in your bones. Other teachers don’t, but I don’t think other teachers necessarily teach with the same degree of commitment and passion that I do – I don’t know.
It is obviously Gilmour’s prerogative, as a middle-aged writer, to be interested (exclusively?) in other middle-aged writers. He sounds staggeringly narrow-minded and parochial to me, but he’s allowed to be those things. I kind of thought “write what you know” was a first-book sort of principle, but I’m not a writer, and I don’t know. But what such an attitude has to do with teaching is entirely beyond me. And I am a teacher, so I believe I know a thing or two about that.
Is passion about your subject matter important in teaching? Absolutely. Is the passion required in teaching typically stirred because the teacher identifies with the author or the text she teaches? I seriously hope not. I can only speak for myself, but I can categorically say that I have never identified with Shakespeare. (Marlowe, well. Is wanting to be someone the same as being someone? [For the record: I don’t want to be Marlowe. I like my eye-sockets too much.]) I don’t believe I have a reputation for lacking passion for my subject, though. But what do I know. From what I can observe in my colleagues, I don’t think too many of them only teach authors in whose works they see mirror-images of themselves. English Departments would otherwise be rife with psychopaths, morbidly jealous types, would-be kings and queens, and wealthy socialites. And people who ride around on donkeys. (They’re not?) I don’t even want to think about how dangerous a work environment history departments would be.
The exact opposite of Gilmour’s point is true: good teaching requires empathy — an effort to understand things, ideas, and people totally unlike you. Some of those people are your students. Some of those things are of the past. Some of those ideas are the ideas of authors from different cultures than yours, and yes, shockingly, even of a different gender. Engaging with those people, things, and ideas is not just what research means, and why research is necessary, it’s what reading is.
Gilmour’s account of his teaching, by contrast, is strikingly devoid of empathy. Chinese authors? Can’t love them. Queer authors? Can’t love them. (But Marcel….) Female authors? Can’t love them. White men who are like me or who I want to be? Love those. Sympathy is what this view of things is all about: one big group hug among guys across the twentieth century, all guys like Gilmour. What’s genuinely hilarious, rather than merely depressing, is the predictable homophobia that goes hand in hand with this chest-thumpy, circle-jerky, narcissistic literary self-love-fest: Gilmour loves Chekhov so much, he’d marry him tomorrow if only they weren’t both so amazingly straight. Though “literary” seems almost incidental. None of what makes Chekhov a cool guy, after all, has anything to do with the plays or short stories he wrote. It’s all about his “personality.” His grace. His generosity. And his “bellicose laugh.”
This is a ranty post, because I’m in a ranty mood. I’ll stop ranting now. But not without this: David Gilmour is not a professor of literature. He’s someone who teaches a couple of courses on an odd assemblage of texts. David Gilmour does not talk or think like a professor of literature. He doesn’t say the sorts of things professors of literature tend to say. He doesn’t seem interested in the sorts of things professors of literature are interested in. David Gilmour is not my colleague.
Most crucially, David Gilmour doesn’t seem to grasp why anyone should read literature at all. We can argue about whether Hamlet is right or not when he claims that art holds a mirror up to nature. But let’s just say he is. Here’s what Hamlet doesn’t say: that art is a mirror you choose to pick up to see yourself. Art shows you a mirror. That thing you see in there isn’t supposed to be your pre-conceived self-image. It’s something strange, and alien, and scary, or ridiculous, or dull. But it’s something that demands engagement. And sometimes, it becomes something that you realize is in fact you — but that’s not meant to be a happy realization. If the thing you see when you look into a book looks exactly like what you think you look like, you’re doing it wrong. And David Gilmour is most certainly doing it wrong.
229 Responses to The Loneliness of the Old White Male
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Holger Syme's work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.Images may be reused as long as their source is properly attributed in accordance with the Creative Commons License detailed above. Many of the photos here were taken at the Folger Shakespeare Library; please consult their policy on digital images as well.
[…] The Loneliness of the Old White Male […]
[…] Syme, Chair of the Department of English and Drama at U of T’s Mississauga campus, who wrote a blog post casting Gilmour out of the charmed circle of the intellectual elect: Gilmour “does not talk or […]
[…] Syme, Chair of the Department of English and Drama at U of T’s Mississauga campus, who wrote a blog post casting Gilmour out of the charmed circle of the intellectual elect: Gilmour “does not talk or […]
Self-aggrandizement not withstanding, Mr. Syme loses all credibility when he plumbs the depths of self righteous indignation and sarcasm. I’m always leary when self proclaimed literary cognoscente start their opening gambit with, “I would not ordinarily do this:” when clearly, more often than not, it’s exactly what they would normally do. I would’ve hoped Mr. Syme was more adroit than that petty display of literary gunslinging he wears so proudly.
As I said, only points of fact: I could have written “I have never done this.” So whoever the “they” you have in mind might be, don’t count me among them.
The critics of Holger Syme have become more reprehensible than Mr. Gilmour was in his interview.
[…] An author’s controversial statement causing backlash and […]
[…] the most prominent people from the University of Toronto speaking out against David Gilmour is Holger Syme, a professor of early modern drama. In general I like the cut of his jib. His rant is epic and is […]
[…] at the University of Toronto, where he teaches classes. English professor Holger Syme wrote in a blog post: “David Gilmour is not a colleague of mine.” Paul Stevens, the acting chair of the […]
[…] the course description in the catalogue. There are a number of really good responses, including one from Dr Holger Syme of the University of Toronto. There is a lot of valid perspectives and […]
[…] But in due course, teh interwebz erupted with outrage. People felt this was a reflection of white male entitlement in the English establishment. Profs from the same institution denounced Gilmour’s statements with anger and contempt. […]
I’m not shutting down the comments section (partly because I don’t really know how to do that), but I’m also not responding to any of the recent posts. I’ll correct factual misstatements, but beyond that, I’ve had my say here, and in the Huffington Post, and elsewhere. You, dear unhappy reader, are free to ascribe motivations to me, and you’re free to call me “Professor Shithead.” I leave it to others to judge whether that strengthens or undermines your argument, and I leave it to others to agree or disagree with your attempts at psychoanalysis. If you agree with my views, the same applies (though I’m glad, obviously, that we agree).
Many of the negative remarks, I will say this, seem to be based on a simple misreading of my post, and all I’d have to answer is: read what I wrote. The most obvious example is the bizarre notion that I’m so elitist and stuck-up that I don’t think anyone without a PhD can say anything of value about literature. I couldn’t teach if I thought that. But I also said explicitly, in the post and in the comments, that I don’t believe that. But if I start down this road, I’ll never stop; as I’m not a full-time blogger, I can’t start down this road.
I have a few things more to say about teaching and love, which I’ll put in a new post.
Here, I’ll just add one more observation, and it has nothing to do with David Gilmour. I am, in all honesty, more than a little astonished by the fragility of the male ego on display in some of the comments. There seems to be a notion that any special attention to underrepresented people, ideas, or subjects comes at the price of suppressing those people, ideas, or subjects that are currently overrepresented. As a middle-aged white male in a position of relative social and economic privilege, I find this incomprehensible. As someone who teaches pretty much exclusively the works of very dead, very white, male authors, I find it bizarre. My rights aren’t infringed by someone else gaining the same rights; my intellectual interests aren’t curbed by my profession’s opening up to a broader range of subjects and ideas. I might have cause to worry if Margaret Wente, in her ludicrous column in the Globe and Mail today, were right that “anyone who’s set foot on campus in the past 30 years ought to know” that “courses in guy-guy writers are vastly outnumbered by courses in women writers, queer writers, black writers, colonial writers, postcolonial writers, Canadian writers, indigenous writers, Caribbean, African, Asian and South Asian writers, and various sub- and sub-subsets of the above. But if you’re interested in Hemingway, good luck.” Of course, as anyone who’s bothered to look at U of T’s course calendar, freely available online, would know, this is total and utter tosh. It’s not even remotely true. In fact, you could quite easily manage to get a BA in English here without taking a single class focussed on any of those “special interest” subjects. If you don’t believe me, check our degree requirements. I’m not sure that’s a good thing. But it’s prima facie evidence that the hysterical defensiveness on display in Wente’s column and in some of the comments here is just that: hysteria. At what, I honestly can’t fathom.
‘You, dear unhappy reader, are free to ascribe motivations to me, and you’re free to call me “Professor Shithead.” I leave it to others to judge whether that strengthens or undermines your argument . . ‘
No one called our dear dear professor “professor shithead”. It was ‘”Professor” Shithead’. In the new regime, no detail is so petty that it fails to generate outrage! This misquote is intolerable! And, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t taking satire as a direct argument, you know, intellectually dishonest? And isn’t condemning an argument because it contains naughty words, absurd? Perhaps not. It is, after all, a demonstrable fact that cloaking hostility behind phrases like “the lonliness of the old white man” is a far more effective means of seduction than the dullard’s profanity. Another excellent point from the former “professor”. Regardless, I for one am shocked that Syme the Pedagogical would take issue with phrases clearly (if ironically) motivated from a profound lack of charity. I thought uncharitability was step one of his empathy-centered method for better public discourse in and around and beneath the arts, famously published in now defunct, but always memorable, “Journal of Various Delusions That Justify My Hypocritical Bullshit”..If memory serves, it read:
Pillar 1) Profoundly uncharitable reading
Pillar 2) Unprofessional denunciation
Pillar 3) Self-congratulation
Pillar 4) Repeat and prey no one notices; flourish with condescension
Certainly, I would be happy to consider alternative modes of engagement, but what alternative could there possibly be?.What innovative agreement might we come to that would hold back this tide of uncharitable hostility? Perhaps one day, the human race will dare to imagine such a thing. They will no doubt structure an institution of some sort around it, and endeavor to teach this idea through word and action. Maybe they’ll call it a university and in the spirit of respect and tolerance spend their days exchanging ideas freely, and generously. It sounds crazy. But it might just work!
You know, it always amazes me how the cultural guardians and elite are the first to be unsympathetic. You accuse Mr. Gilmour of being narrow and unsympathetic–and your response proves that you are more alike than you might at first think.
Dear Michael,
I expressly did not accuse David Gilmour of a lack of sympathy. I said quite the opposite: that his approach to reading and teaching, as described by himself, was too much fuelled by sympathy, and lacked empathy. I don’t think my own response to Gilmour was entirely devoid of empathy: I think I read him in his own terms and recognized the otherness of his views. I also, admittedly, made fun of those views. And I’m certainly unsympathetic towards them. But I don’t think I misrepresented his statements. I think I understand where’s he coming from, I just don’t think where he’s coming from is an especially positive place, let alone an adequate basis for pedagogy.
[…] of Canadian womankind. His employers have distanced themselves from his position and his peers have roasted him roundly. My question is, how many of us have actually read the interview in question? What he seems to […]
[…] written from other perspectives, it does not bode well for the average reader in our society. As another U of T instructor points out, reading promotes empathy, but if we only read from perspectives we “love”, how much […]
[…] Response by Holger Syme […]
BRILLIANT. Absolutely brilliant. Utterly scathing. I aspire someday to write rants as brilliant as this. (And no, I’m not being sarcastic.)
Also, regarding the idea of having to be it to teach it, as a soon-to-be-M.A. in history, I can tell you, our department would either be dead of plague or full of heads on pikes. Either way, it’d make a hell of a story.
[…] at the University of Toronto, where he teaches classes. English professor Holger Syme wrote in a blog post: “David Gilmour is not a colleague of mine.” Paul Stevens, the acting chair of the […]
Here is a thought – we should have an open meeting at the JHB, book a conference room, invite Prof. Syme to moderate the debate, and invite David Gilmour to attend the debate to defend himself in person. Any takers?
That would be awesome.
There was a book by John Myers Myers named Silverlock which took place in the Commonwealth of Letters. The major character is on trial for a reason that I can’t remember but his defence was that although he did not partake in the adventures of the major works of literature that he took different paths, though not the preferred paths are just as valuable. That one professor does not approve of how another chooses the books he teaches is irrelevant. What matters is are the books worth teaching? Has the professor who castigates Mr (Professor) Gilmour ever sat in on one of his classes to determine the quality of the teaching? I suspect that he never has. I also suspect that the Professor is not completely aware of the book list which is taught. If my suspicions are true then the entire opinion of the Professor is irrelevant. He would be like a jury member proclaiming someones guilt before the evidence is heard. If this is true,and I am not saying it is, then I personally would suspect that while the credentials of the Professor may be technically appropriate, they are not supplemented by one of the necessary requirements as proposed by the Professor himself which is approaching something with an open mind.
Hm, this is like Green Eggs and Ham all over again. You may recall that at the end of Silverlock the protagonist, through his personal experience with the major works of literature (as defined by Myers), comes to understand their value–and has this insight during his conversation with Faust toward the end of the novel. But contrariwise no one here is criticising Gilmour for not taking the ‘preferred paths’–quite the opposite; the point is that he seems incapable of straying very far from the basics, or understanding why it’s important to do so. Plenty of us teach the Bible, or Shakespeare, or Milton, but none of us would say that these authors have captured the entirety of what’s worthwhile in literature and nothing else is worth teaching or being exposed to.
The essence of the charge against A. Clarence Shandon (MBA, Madison) is that he has failed to avail himself of the glories that Literature offers him, to experience (if only vicariously) the myriad goods and evils that can happen to a human being (man or woman alike), or which can be committed by one. He is charged, in brief, with squandering his opportunities to become fully part of the human race, by voyaging through the Commonwealth of Letters. (The [successful] defense is that while he may not have visited the specific/canonical works cited by the prosecution, he HAS come to others equally worthy of a fully-realized human being, has learned from them, and should be allowed to proceed on his way in that most glorious of commonwealths.)
Syme is the typical self-absorbed, narcissistic, petulant, fatuous, Brown Shirt of the concept of epistemological communities: only a chosen few, an exclusive club as smug and exclusionary-in-membership as the Masons but without the silly handshake, have access to the Moses of prescriptive interpretation of literature (a secret knowledge they may convey as Priests of the Temple to a few selected lay people out there) and its authors. Symes writes: “David Gilmour does not talk or think like a professor of literature. He doesn’t say the sorts of things professors of literature tend to say. He doesn’t seem interested in the sorts of things professors of literature are interested in. David Gilmour is not my colleague.” Gee, this man is as prejudiced about fellow members of his profession because they don’t have formal credencials like his, as Gilmour is about fellow writers because they don’t have testies like him.
You, on the other hand, say exactly the things professors of literature tend to say. You’re kind of a chump, albeit a sesquipedalian one.
This is a great blog post and I really honor it. Although its gotten sidetracked by some weird internecine arguments about authority and empathy I’d like to bring it back a bit to a central point: The guy has been “teaching” the same stuff for 30 years–not because he’s teaching a specific canon but because he thinks the point is to teach about himself as a white male writer. He’s under the impression that he’s done his job as a teacher when he has spent a few hours a week teaching the same damned thing over and over and over again and that thing is a “song of himself.”
Whats most amusing of all is that he thinks that “what I like about literature” is that he identifies with the writers as a male and as a writer and an older one of both categories but he teaches this to his young (male and female) students. Clearly he must believe that its possible to learn and grow through reading about the kinds of people his students are not–since the women are thought to need to read about men and masculine concerns. The only person who does not need to grow intellectually or emotionally, who does not need to expand his experience of the written word or the writer’s life–is the professor. That’s stultifying and no matter what he says it can’t make for exciting teaching. He is confusing some level of overannuated “boyish” enthusiasm for actual teaching.
Thank you for a brief respite from this serious discussion…now go back to bed.
You’re embarrassing, Syme.
Gilmour was one of the best professors I came across during my undergrad at the University of Toronto.
Great response to a stagnant pool of uninteresting, privileged booolshit.
The amount of people who are willing to defend him is youtube comments level depressing though. Yeah he’s an immature dolt and it’s sad that he’s getting his 15 minutes of (negative) fame but there is good reason to repudiate him and his comments. Despite his convoluted attempts to present himself as a rebel, what he’s saying and teaching is reinforcing an entire system that values the voices of “serious heterosexual” white authors and silences the voices of everyone else. To simply laugh him off as the pretensions bore he clearly is is not enough because he is not a lone jerk. He is reinforcing to readers of the article (and the full transcript, which shows him to be every bit the prig he is in the article, not misrepresented as some have claimed) and to his own students that it is unnecessary to challenge their own limited perspective and to pat themselves on the back for following the easiest, most tedious instincts of privilege. And jeez, getting stuck in that class if you’re a woman, not white, not American, not a guy’s guy straight serious to the maxxx man must be so so disheartening and infuriating.
Ugh ugh triple ugh. And I’m not even going to delve further into that serious/heterosexual equivocation because I will Hulk out and beat someone to death with a copy of Maurice. Much as I must ignore the “perennial teenager” dithering in the first comment. There is a reason everyone hates teenagers, it’s not charming and that “boy’s will be boy’s” shit makes me want to puke.
Again, thanks for your spot on post!
I’m with you Gabby. It’s fascinating, though, how invisible this is to some readers and how apparent it is to others. I guess that’s what change looks like. Or resistance. Or both.
Isn’t it interesting how so many of these post-war/baby boomer types style themselves as “rebels,” yet were perfectly happy to embrace the “establishment” view of women, GLBT folks, and people of color? They have no idea how much they sound like the “squares” they used to deride when they get up on their soapboxes to harrumph about “political correctness.”
Um, Origami, I am by common definition a post-war/baby boomer type, yet I do not fit a single one of your descriptions, so let’s forget the ‘type’ thing and just say that he’s an ass, pure and simple, of which there are plenty, in all genders, ages, generations and types. Typing him serves little point when it equally types others who have moved on (millions of us). Blessings, Harold
I’ve never seen empathy used as a cudgel before. This post is, if nothing else, a shining demonstration of the poverty of empathy. (just kidding, people use empathy as a cudgel all the time–I think Henry Miller wrote about it.)
The hardest part about being an English student? I’m glad you asked. I think the hardest part is reminding myself that it isn’t that I’m smarter than half the faculty, it’s that they’re so painfully romantic. (just kidding, I am totally smarter.)
Now that we’ve dispensed with the old-school collegiate code and replaced it with the newfangled code (where we include and exclude colleagues according to arbitrary criteria we invent on the fly; that’s the rule now, right?), I’m excommunicating Professor Syme on the grounds that his ideas about empathy in literature are dredged from the bowls of the 19th century and are therefore naughty. As he is no longer a colleague, I will be henceforth referring to him exclusively as “Professor” Shithead. In live performance, I will be forced to make quotes with my fingers, which is seriously no longer in fashion, but either am I, so what the hell, right?
Ah, the new empathy; it’s not like your grandma’s empathy!
(OMG, the pretentious stupidity of this post secretes satire all on it’s own. This isn’t even work. It’s like picking on a little kid and my god, I feel terrible now. This poor pathetic peacock, desperately, thoughtlessly struggling to demonstrate his fine society credentials in a plea for acceptance. No, I wont throw you overboard Professor Shithead–I mean Syme. You’re one of us. It’s okay. Yeah, have a little cry. We’re here for you, little guy–we’re here for you, because that’s what we do).
“It’s like picking on a little kid” – I had no idea that middle-aged white male authors were like “little kids,” at least in terms of the societal privilege they enjoy. Especially vis-a-vis their female students. I suppose this is another “boys will be boys” lament?
You’re confused.
> This isn’t even work. It’s like picking on a little kid and my god, I feel terrible now.
It’s funny you say that, because all of your writing on here comes across as the unedited spew of an emotionally stunted 14-year-old who has swallowed a dictionary and has indigestion.
Honestly? What you really come across as is Gilmour’s sock puppet. I’m sure you aren’t, because your writing style doesn’t really match his (inasmuch as the phrase can be applied to said spew), but you display the exact same utter disinterest in even understanding the opposing viewpoint enough to argue with it. Your choice, instead, is to just throw feces at your opponent, all the while meditating about how wonderful you are and how awful he is.
You appear to be here to prove something, or win some argument, but I’m not sure anyone reading your screeds is even sure exactly what. Nevertheless, I’m sure you will totter on, gleefully confident that you have ‘won’. And in the world you inhabit, the one embedded firmly between your ears, you have.
Exactly!
[…] The Loneliness of the Old White Male […]
God bless you, Holger Syme.
Many thanks for your very measured rant, Professor Syme. With your elitist views about teaching giving a voice to women and other ‘marginal’ groups that make up the majority of the world’s population, you’re silencing the ‘ordinary’ guy in the street who just wants to go to a Davey Gilmour seminar, shotgun a beer and shoot the shit about other guy-guys who wrote books about what total guys they were. (In the UK, they’re called ‘massive lads’ and you’d be told to ‘sort your banter’, which seems to be what several comments are telling you.) You’d probably even stamp down on simple pleasures like being a pest to their women classmates, you killjoy, you.
I feel in awe of all the intelects on display here.
I suppose the main thrust of this is that Mr Gilmour has expressed views which are in conflict with lots of other peoples views, which of course he has a right to do. Perhaps an issue is that he is in a position of responsibility and possibly influence, which could be an aspect we may wish to challenge – but this is almost insulting to those whom he educates.
Whatever has come out of this is it has encouraged us all to think, perhaps challenge some of our own beliefs.
As an outsider looking in there is no doubt that he has belittled or insulted female authors and even singled out some countries at the same time. Again that is his right and our right to challenge this.
Context is important here as someone else pointed out, if Franky Boyle (English comedian) was saying things that Mr Gilmour has said (and he has) he would be pilloried but Franky does it to make us laugh, satire, or comedy, of course he is not everyones cup of tea (he is not mine) but to a lot of people he provides entertainment and an escape from reality. But is seems if there is comedic intent it is actually much more acceptible – as this is all we expect from Mr Boyle – so we should expect better from Mr Gilmour, he has a history?
Perhaps he was playing or had some deliberate alterial intent or motive.
As someone else points our that this gentleman is a bit of a micreant, so far it seems he has heightened interest in himself and drawn much negative and no doubt some positive publicity, which is likely to increase books sales.
I must be a cynic
Holger, for your comments on Marlowe alone I applaud! For the rest I simply say “huzzah.” Happy to discover your blog.
Right. Among many horrible and alarming comments in his post, the one that most stood out for me was his comment on Roth as having the best understanding of middle-aged sexuality he’d come across. Why, please, is middle-aged sexuality an important thing to be teaching undergraduate students? Oh wait, it isn’t. It’s an important thing to David Gilmour. Because he is (or at least was) middle-aged. It’s all about him and his needs. And that is a sure sign of a bad teacher.
Just on the criticism that there are courses specifically about women writers – I don’t know how it works at the University of Toronto, but in many English departments there are courses on specific aspects of literature. When a subject is chosen – whether it’s Gothic, or Women, or Mediaeval Literature – it’s done to illuminate a specific aspect of literary development and history. It sits in a theoretical framework. So the Gothic students aren’t given any old horror texts, they’re given books that work both as literature but which also illuminate both the time they were written in, and the development of literature as a whole. So when you sit reading Stephen King on your own time, you should be able to see where he’s paying homage to Poe, or how his strand of horror rises specifically from the American experience.
Teaching about women authors falls into this same intellectual framework – courses on Women in Literature are also about the means of literary production and who was exluded from it and what impact that had etc etc. Nobody gets taught about Virginia Woolf in isolation – they get to learn about the Bloomsbury Group and maybe the Arts & Crafts movement as well etc etc
What Gilmour seems to be doing is teaching “texts I like”. He could be a very gifted teacher and use those texts to teach something about the canon and about literature in general. But it’s not a very academic approach. Sounds more like a course in “books I enjoy and you might too”.
A notable post. Sometimes we engineers wonder why there is so much of the taxpayer’s money being spent on the humanities. If you always teach in this vein then I think we are getting value for money. I hope your students appreciate this.
(And you are dead right about Roth and Miller.)
[…] most prominent person from UofT who has spoken out against Gilmour is Holger Syme, a professor of early modern drama. I should say here that while I have been in the same room as […]
Thank you for writing this.
I am going to wade in here again. To recap, I am a UofT alumni who graduated as an English major, and while at UofT I attended a seminar taught by Prof. Syme, and one taught by Prof. Gilmour. I thoroughly enjoyed both seminars, and these two professors both kindly wrote me reference letters in my (unsuccessful) attempt to go to on to get an MA in English at UofT. So, not only did I study under both, but they were my two references for my grad school application.
First, in response to other comments, it serves no constructive purpose to try to diminish Prof. Syme by saying he is a UTM professor. He also teaches at the main campus, and the English Department faculty are integrated. For students who live downtown and attend the main campus, UTM may appear as a far off place on an asteroid (the sleepy students rolling off the school bus from UTM that disgorges people in front of UC adds to that distant feeling UTM conveys) but it isn’t, as far as the English Department goes, second tier. Students can take classes downtown, an the English Department does not pack off the worst professors into exile there. If Prof. Gilmour was a member of the English Department, I am confident both he and Prof. Syme would rank in the top 25% of professors. Both their seminars were well done and they are both knowledgeable, entertaining , and capture student’s interest and make them want to learn.
Second, the whole issue of Prof. Gilmour being a colleague or not is a play on words. decades ago, Victoria College and Trinity College had their own English Departments separate from the UofT English Department. This was before either I or Prof. Syme were born. Sometime later, this changed, and the UofT English Department included everyone. However, Victoria College (the college I graduated from) and Trinity College still offer courses, some of which are English courses outside the official bureaucratic committees and structure of the UofT Department of English. These courses are prefixed differently than standard English courses – whereas a standard English course would start with ENG, a course done by Victoria College would start with VIC or one from Trinity College would start with TRIN. Other colleges also offer courses with their own prefixes, such as University College and Innis College. So what Prof. Syme is saying is that since Prof. Gilmour was not hired by the UofT English Department, and thus can not be disciplined by that department, he isn’t technically a colleague. However, from an English student’s perspective they are colleagues as they both teach English at UofT. Almost every student in Prof. Gilmour’s class when I took it was, like me, an English major or specialist. So, if they share students and are both teaching English at UofT, I would think they are colleagues. Technically no, but also technically yes. I take issue with those who say Prof, Syme’s association with UTM is a mark against him, just as I take issue with saying Prof. Gilmour isn’t a colleague of everyone teaching English at UofT.
The sudden rush to attack Prof. Gilmour is perhaps related to the English Department being in a unpleasant situation since this media storm broke this week – angry members of the public calling to complain to the English Dept chair that Prof. Gilmour has gone off the wall, and the Department administration being unable to really do anything other than to sound ridiculous by saying he doesn’t work for us. Reporters who did not attend UofT scratching their heads and thinking ‘Wait, he teaches English at UofT to English students, but he doesn’t work for the English Department?’. Actually this is great – better than tenure. A talented instructor can say his mind and can’t even get called into the Chair’s office for a tongue lashing. Seriously though, Prof. Gilmour and the English Department co-existed peacefully before this week, but now the Department is trying to throw him under the bus. Not the UTM bus either. That Prof. Gilmour’s interview incorrectly twisted a lot of what he meant to paint him, wrongly in my opinion, as a ranting loon, made life difficult for the Department. Their peers at other universities read the article – supposed to be a puff piece on what books were on famous people’s bookshelves but turned into a hatchet job worthy of the National Enquirer – and called their friends in the department wondering why they employ a person such as the article describes. What does the Department say? They can’t say they’d called him toi the Chair’s office to yell at him, and so they have to say he isn’t a member of the Department at all – he just teaches their English students and gets great reviews doing so. His interview made life uncomfortable for everyone in the English Department. I get that. The article does not accurately portray the man, but that is being lost in all of this duck for cover.
Prof. Syme’s blog post I found distressing as rather than talk to Prof. Gilmour about the interview he has attacked him, assumed him guilty as charged without trial so to speak. I don’t mean by the ‘is he a colleague or not’ dancing about – I mean by attacking what he teaches and the way he teaches it. Saying you regret he is teaching Tolstoy and Chekhov based on that interview? I can confirm wholeheartedly that Prof. Gilmour does an excellent job of teaching those two authors, with a passion only found in the best professors in the English Department. Students can tell if a Prof loves the material he or she is teaching or is doing it because the Department has assigned it to them to fill a gap. Prof. Syme, you love teaching Marlowe – it seeps from your pores and kept us, your students, fascinated and interested. Prof. Gilmour loves Chekhov and Tolstoy in that way too – we could see that with him just as we could see your own passion. Love of the material is, in my opinion a good thing. As for Philip Roth, he is an important modern Jewish-American writer – like Mordecai Richler – and time will tell if writers such as Roth remain popular in centuries to come. Maybe or maybe not. I had not read Roth before Prof. Gilmour’s class, yet was fascinated by the quality of the writing in one of Roth’s books. Roth is no Marlowe or Chekhov, but in a course on modern fiction Roth is hardly out of place. I realize that Prof. Gilmour has put you and the English Department in a difficult position and that in light of the interview you want to distance yourself from what you perceive to be his opinion. I do take issue with the Marlowe-like intensity of your attack though, which I find rather cruel and, having studied under the man, rather unfair. Yes, if Prof. Gilmour was the man portrayed – or rather demonized – in the media this week, you would be justified to speak as you did, but the truth of the matter is he is being very unfairly portrayed. He doesn’t exclude women writers from his courses – there were three women writers on his course when I took it, and he taught them with the same care he taught the male writers. Also, he doesn’t just teach a first year course – he also teaches a 300-level seminar, which is what I took. His 300-level seminar was every bit as academic and enjoyable as any 300-level course I took in the English Department.
That Prof. Gilmour is a writer of fiction and not an academic in the traditional sense (doing academic research for publication) does not make him a poor teacher. I know in response to another person’s comment you went back to clarify that you were not saying one needed a doctorate degree to be a good teacher. There are wonderful professors in the English Department at UofT who are true research academics – I listed some I enjoyed learning from in an earlier post, and have a shelf full of books they (those professors I have had the honour of learning under) have published. There are also some professors in the Department who are – personality-wise at least – somewhat lacking and rather unpleasant to study under. Another person on here brought this up in more detail than I care to give other than to say a certain degree does not make one a great teacher. It would be politically incorrect for you in your position to agree with me that some members of the Department are better suited to pure research than teaching undergraduates, but I think we both know this is true, as do most undergraduates majoring in English by the time they reach 4th year. Prof. Gilmour, like yourself, is a great teacher. I would not say this if I didn’t believe it to be true. He has been unfairly maligned – I do not blame your blog post for this as you do not know him and were responding to an article and the media aftermath which exaggerated the original piece even more. Yes, he is a character, a card, is mischievous and has a sense of humour…but the media storm claiming he is a misogynist and doesn’t like women writers is not accurate at all in my opinion, having spent a full academic year with him.
In the end we may have to agree to disagree on the merits of Prof. Gilmour. I think he teaches a fantastic 3rd year seminar with passion and a love of the material. I can’t be dissuaded as I am basing this on having been in his course first hand. I regret the scorn the media has heaped on the English Department over Prof. Gilmour’s interview, and understand the anger you, Prof. Syme, feel about being blindsided by that. If he was the person the media are claiming he is, you would be justified in mocking him, but he really isn’t that person. You can appreciate, I hope, how difficult it is for me to have you, a professor I admire and learned from, attack another (honorary) professor I also admire and learned from based on inaccurate portrayals. Perhaps I was not cut out for postgraduate study at UofT due to the departmental politics. I know a couple of people who did proceed to get their MA only to abandon plans for a PhD due to their being uncomfortable with the transition from the joy of academic learning to the departmental politics, committees and intrigues.
Stopped reading at ‘alumni’. You’re not an alumni. You’re an alumnus.
HA HA! Well said! And a graduate of English no less! LOL indeed.
Hard to take you seriously when you sign your name ‘lol’ – if you can’t remember your own name, how can I have a discussion with you ‘lol’?
Yes, your grammatical point is correct, but I find many people do not make the distinction and using ‘alumni’ for both the plural and singular works better in a non-academic environment. I used to receive blank stares on occasion when I used the singular in conversation. So, yes, I am technically incorrect, but it was an intentional error and irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
Brent, alumni is fine if you don’t have a PhD., and want to have friends. Stick with it.
Oh mah gerhd HS – MARRY ME! I say that a) because I am a woman and it is what we are preoccupied with and b) because I am currently imagining Jason Bateman saying this in a new Netflix season of Arrested Development where Gob and Michael somehow both end up with jobs in a university English department. I can’t wait to see Will Arnett play David Gilmour.
Where were you when I was dragging myself through U of T Law school ? God bless you and your important sassy work sir.
Funny that he can’t relate to works by women or LGBTQ authors or feel their work in his bones. Women, the LGBTQ community, and POC have had to relate to voices in literature that were very different than our own. We didn’t have much of a choice when it came to the authors we were exposed to school (Shakespeare, Dickens, Fitzgerald). And we went on to be writers and readers and teachers and librarians. I guess David’s just not as creative and empathetic as the rest of us had to be. We saw ourselves in protagonists that looked nothing like us. What I don’t understand is why voices like Gilmour’s are given a platform time and time again. They’re awfully boring and shortsighted.
This.
Yet you’ve got Andrew Gregg upthread implying that the POV of straight white men with dubious judgment is somehow tragically underrepresented in literature — in society overall, too. “What water?” asked the fish, genuinely puzzled.
The idiocy of Adam and Ogier is breathtaking. I went to UTSG where I did my BSc (an actual degree with practical value unlike your BA. Not knocking the field of English Lit, just the Bachelor’s degrees in that field specifically…) and I wouldn’t stoop to the astonishing supercilliousness that you both display with respect to teaching at UTM. The University of Toronto, ALL THREE CAMPUSES, are world class institutions and you only display your ignorance and stupidity to the world with your idiotic posts.
Prof. Syme, your blog post was AWESOME. The internet is of course a fungating cesspool of stupidity and it saddens me that some of these E Coli come from my alma mater
Your spelling of milquetoast was chronologically accurate and that’s… that’s just great.
I am an english undergrad at St. George’s. I was wondering why I didn’t recognize the name Holder Syme. You are not a U of T professor, bubba. You are a UTM professor.
“Bubba”?
Dear Ogier,
and a great credit to our St George undergraduate program you are, too. That said, it might be a good idea to find out a thing or two about the university you attend. You are a student in the St George undergraduate department. I teach undergraduates in the Mississauga English and Drama department. If you were a graduate student, you’d be a student in the tri-campus graduate department of English, of which I, too, am a full member, as are all my tenured colleagues in English at UTM. All U of T faculty, no matter which campus they teach on, are U of T faculty, just as your degree comes from U of T, no matter which of three campuses you spend most of your time on. You might know that you can take courses on all three campuses for equal credit; for you, this would be a little easier at UTM, since our English degree programs are identical to those at UTSG. I teach ENG220Y at UTM, for instance, just as my colleague Jeremy Lopez teaches it downtown. We share the same pool of TAs. And when we hire new faculty, the committees are made up of colleagues from all three campuses. You’re trying to make a distinction, clearly, but there is none. If you’re still not convinced, I’d advise you to have a look at the department websites of the three undergraduate programs as well as the tri-campus department’s website (where you’ll find all our bios) and see if you can discern any difference in the kind of faculty members who teach on the three campuses. Spoiler alert: there is none.
Best wishes,
Holger Syme
Hey Ogier, I hope you’re not in your first year in your undergraduate program because you are royally screwed now…. Take this as a teachable moment and do your research a bit better; important skills for an undergraduate to have, no? I’m glad to see that making idiotic public comments on the internet while an undergraduate is not strictly the purview of stupid law students.
Many years ago I was recruited for a full professorship (tenured, of course) in an Arts and Sciences department at U of T. For reasons having to do with budgetary lines, and teaching needs and so forth, it was halftime at Mississauga and halftime at St. George for some years, and then it shifted to full time downtown. I was an undergraduate at U. of T., (UC to be precise) and so I knew all the colleges, and what they were about. And I saw absolutely no difference between the suburban and downtown slots at a professional level, though of course there are differences among the campuses in other respects. I decided to remain where I was, for a bunch of reasons, but UTM versus downtown had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Of course, I would have had no idea about such things when I was a clueless and arrogant undergraduate either.
Geez someone has a chip on their shoulder, take a breath. Why is everyone attacking this guy? If he’s so crazy why do you care? Students know what he stands for and they enroll in his class because they identify with him. Guaranteed they take away more from this class than any of their other classes.
Must be nice, not having to care about bigotry….
Technically, are you a colleague of anyone who works at the U of T that’s actually in Toronto? I can’t help but notice the words “Mississauga” or “Erindale College” are conspicuously absent both here and on HuffPo.
The ol’ job market must be pretty tight when Harvard grads find themselves teaching at schools where the shiny new “learning centre” is named after Hurricane Hazel McCallion.
Dear Adam,
technically, yes, and in practice, yes — as I pointed in my reply to your other post on this subject. Since you bring up my graduate degree, I’m sure you’ll be interested to learn that I am one of three Harvard PhDs in my undergraduate department. There are also two from Columbia, two from Penn, two from Oxford, two from NYU, four from U of T, and one each from Cambridge, Columbia, Cornell, McGill, and NYU. Your point being?
For your further information, Erindale College hasn’t existed for ten years. And our “learning centre,” the name of which you correctly identify, in indeed one of the best equipped, newest, and nicest libraries at U of T. Thanks for noticing.
You’re a huge douche. And the Munk library, the Munk centre for global affairs, and the Munk Cardiology dept at TGH, all of them part of the downtown U of T campus in some form are named after a fvcking MINING CEO. What’s your point?
Since you’re repeating the comments, I’ll repeat the replies:
Many years ago I was recruited for a full professorship (tenured, of course) in an Arts and Sciences department at U of T. For reasons having to do with budgetary lines, and teaching needs and so forth, it was halftime at Mississauga and halftime at St. George for some years, and then it shifted to full time downtown. I was an undergraduate at U. of T., (UC to be precise) and so I knew all the colleges, and what they were about. And I saw absolutely no difference between the suburban and downtown slots *at a professional level*, though of course there are differences among the campuses in other respects. I would be teaching the same graduate seminars to the same students irrespective of the specific campus whose budget I was on. I decided to remain where I was, for a bunch of reasons, but UTM versus downtown had absolutely nothing to do with it.
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
There are rules for being an English professor now?
There are rules for any job. If you do enough things that are not part of the job and fail to do enough things that are part of the job, you’re not actually doing the job. If the job requires some sort of training or accreditation, and you don’t have it, you’re not qualified to do the job. A firefighter must fight fires, or he is not a firefighter; he should also be trained in fighting fires, or he will not be able to fight fires. Similarly, a literature professor needs to, at minimum, be a professor, and have a basic familiarity with the field of literature studies. It sounds like this dude meets neither of these qualifications. Above and beyond the bare minimum standards of actually doing a job, there’s generally also a lot of “rules” for what constitutes doing a job well. If you have a problem with this, congratulations, you are completely unemployable in any field at any level of work.
Cynical Romantic–I do my job pretty well thanks. Been employed for years.
Are you suggesting that U of T didn’t know what it was doing when it hired David Gilmour, since he wasn’t already a professor? Do you think it’s true that David’s real world experience of actually writing a novel (8 in fact) has no value? That’s it’s better to take courses about writing than to actually, you know, write?
I’d suggest there is room for all these perspectives when it comes to education. But I need to be clear–I’m not defending what David said. I know him well enough to know he loves the shock value of some of the things that come out of his mouth. And he can be arrogant. But he’s also very bright and a talented writer and he can be very, very funny. Nothing is ever as clear as it seems. David certainly stepped in it this time and there’s a good chance he’ll be fired. But after all the dust settles go read Lost Between Houses or A Perfect Night to Go to China–books about men with huge fallibilities. And maybe you’ll get some perspective on this whole episode.
Why should Thecynicalromantic have to read “books about men with huge fallibilities” to gain some “perspective on this whole issue”? Our entire culture is dominated by the points of view of such men. When was the last time you read a book from a woman’s point of view? Or the POV from someone who wasn’t white?
[…] comments led to very strong backlash, including a long blog post by a U of T English professor that explains how Mr. Gilmour is not his colleague and an angry […]
Aaron nailed it above.
Someone just needs to have a smile, a coke and shut the ___ up.
Meanwhile, where’s that hearth? 🙂
Thanks for this. The worst part of Gilmour’s remarks aren’t that they’re sexist, it’s that they’re boring. I’m 31, which means Gilmour’s been reading for roughly 30 years longer than I’ve been. Let me tell you, if you’ve yet to find a novel written by a woman worth teaching after that length of time, you either aren’t reading well enough, or you’re not reading widely enough. 19 year old undergrads say things like “all the best books were written by men.” With any luck, they’ll have outgrown such ignorance by the time they’ve earned their degrees. Happy reading, y’all.
[…] The exact opposite of Gilmour’s point is true: good teaching requires empathy — an effort to understand things, ideas, and people totally unlike you. Some of those people are your students. Some of those things are of the past. Some of those ideas are the ideas of authors from different cultures than yours, and yes, shockingly, even of a different gender. Engaging with those people, things, and ideas is not just what research means, and why research is necessary, it’s what reading is. via […]
I have a couple of friends who teach English Literature at another university. Some of their courses focus only on women writers from the first half of the 20th century or on Victorian women writers. Those are accredited courses and, yes, I admit are taught by women. I don’t see any problem with them teaching those courses so I really don’t see any problem with Gilmour teaching the course he chooses to teach (would that we could all choose to do what we actually want in our careers!).
I think the problem with Gilmour right now is not what he teaches but his attitude, as he stated (and perhaps was misrepresented) about what he teaches. He definitely should have chosen his words better. I can understand not being interested in certain genres or certain authors. I have no problem seeing why a professor of Victorian English would include Jane Eyre on a reading list, because I love Charlotte Bronte. Although I appreciate the genius of Thomas Hardy, I really cannot stand so much melancholia in his novels. But I wouldn’t expect a course on Victorian literature to not include him. And I certainly would not expect a professor to exclude Hardy’s books because that professor doesn’t like male writers from the Victorian age. That’s what it sounds like David Gilmour is saying – that he just doesn’t choose to teach certain authors for the sole reason that he’s not interested in them or doesn’t like them – and they happen to be women. So the merit of the writing and the importance of the writing in its place and time are secondary to the preference of the teacher.
Gilmour should have been more careful with his words. He’s a writer and therefore ought to know the power of words.
David Gilmour was a colleague of mine, in the olden days, at CBC. And because of that I’m not surprised about anything he said–I’m just surprised he said it to a magablog writer. David is a mischief maker, a perennial teenager who is as liable to say something brilliant as he is to say something offensive. I have no idea what happened that day in his office with the Hazlitt writer, but I can imagine: he would have been distracted, flirtatious, serious, then not serious and most of all, he’d be in a prankish mood. Because that’s who he is.
He’s been talking this way for years and now he’s been caught.
So because I know David I cannot defend what he said. But I can take issue with a few things you’ve said in this essay. First, this line: “I don’t really care about Roth or Henry Miller: he can teach them to death as far as I’m concerned.” Are you not being as dismissive here as David was about female and Chinese authors? Sure, David was casting a broader aspersion, but you’ve just written off two giants of English literature because, presumably, you don’t cafe for them. Isn’t that exactly what David said he was doing?
Secondly, this: “David Gilmour does not talk or think like a professor of literature. He doesn’t say the sorts of things professors of literature tend to say. He doesn’t seem interested in the sorts of things professors of literature are interested in.” There are rules for being an English professor now? There are things you are supposed to say and not supposed to say? Are all of you supposed to behave and think the same? Teach the same? Express yourselves the same? Is it really that uniform? Is it really that boring?
David has been accused of elitist snobbery in some of the internet posts today. And the tone of your essay–when you denigrate him, stressing he isn’t a colleague of yours, because, presumably you wouldn’t have a man like that in your club–is suggesting that Gilmour is out of his depth.
More to the point–out of your depth. It sounds like the rules for entering your literature club at U of T are a bit too stringent for my tastes. I’ll probably by David’s new book and enjoy the read. Bad boys tend to tell good tales.
I’ve liked almost all of his other books. He is an author, above all. Even above being a teacher. Because of that he might know a thing or two about how stories get told. I’d figure that would be a pretty valuable lecture, if I was a student.
There will be a price for David to pay–he’ll probably be canned from U of T and that’s too bad, because I bet his class is really fun.
There are some fairly well established best practices for teaching. A closed mind and the ability to tell good stories? Not very high on the list.
Hi Andrew,
A few points to consider in your rebuttal:
1) “A perennial teenager” sounds a bit too much like another version of “boys will be boys”, and that assumes that people can’t and/or shouldn’t shoot for a higher standard. Not exactly the type of philosophy appropriate for an instructor at an institution of higher learning.
I also feel that you’re trying to substitute notoriety as some kind of qualification in Mr. Gilmour’s case (i.e. “bad boys tend to tell good tales”), instead of hard work and actual qualifications; sadly that substitution leads to exactly this type of controversy, as it assumes that actual professors cannot be interesting or profound.
2) Your first point about Roth and Henry Miller was apt, except for missing the sarcasm laced throughout the entire original statement. I believe that the arbitrary exclusion of literary figures was the point being made by showing how inappropriate it actually is.
3) The ‘literature club’ at U of T is populated by trained professionals, not nepotistic socialites. Casting this as some kind of class-warfare phenomenon (or snobbery) is a specious argument at best. Most people I know working at U of T do so by working very long hours, and hardly live a champagne lifestyle. Higher education tends to cost the instructors (in a personal and financial sense) along with the students.
4) I expect that each and every professor in the English department is different, however the care and consideration that they take in teaching their classes should be to the same high standard; I believe that was the uniformity in professorial conduct that was being expressed, rather than some inference of professors being drone-like (with the notable exception of Mr. Gilmour, who is trying to defend himself by casting himself as a ‘rebel’ rather than simply being needlessly exclusionary).
I know plenty of people who include/read authors with whom they have no immediate identification in order to feel uncomfortable/challenged; this expands their perspective(s). If Mr. Gilmour was simply being provocative, that’s great (I’m a fan of that). However, being exclusionary due to gender and racial lines is devastatingly limited, and should not be taught to eager young minds under any circumstances.
4) Not proofing your rebuttal is a bit of a hanging point. “Cafe” is not the same as “care”, and “by” is not the same as “buy”. I appreciate a passionate response, but a carefully crafted argument makes it far easier to consider.
5) While it may be too bad that Mr. Gilmour “gets canned” because his classes may be “fun” (so is drinking beer and watching cartoons, but that hardly breeds serious qualifications), that doesn’t make the point that his class is worth keeping.
Attending university is essentially a eudaemonic endeavour that benefits the individual after stretching and expanding their perspective(s) on various issues/subjects (which is challenging, and can be temporarily unpleasant); if you want to just have fun (as in the case of your defense of Mr. Gilmour’s class), it may be pleasant in the short term but will ultimately be a waste of time in terms of teaching anything.
If I’ve misconstrued any of your comments, or misunderstood them to any degree, please forgive the oversight. However, I simply feel that any defense of Mr. Gilmour is inappropriate due to the racist/sexist nature of this comments (and yes, I know that you stated that you cannot defend his comments, but the very arguments you put forth in your rebuttal are exactly that).
Adding on to David’s point, whever I see something like ‘…who is as liable to say something brilliant as he is to say something offensive. “, I would like to see proof.
It reminds me of Larry Summers, whose supporters always called him ‘brilliant’, but whose record was, shall we say, not so much.
Let’s leave David alone for now and turn our attention to dean Del Mastro. He’s a way worse person today.
Also, Barry, if you want proof, I suggest you go back into the archives and watch David’s old show On Th Arts, or one of his hundreds of movie reviews, or the documentaries that he hosted, or read one of his 9 books.
He doesn’t have a great rate from his students either, though. I tend to find online rating to be a terrible barometre of a teacher’s talent, but I thought that was relevant to your last sentence.
I think you missed the point of the post. I can give you an alternative example, as a university student myself. My first minor was in history. Somehow, in beautiful B.C., some history professors decided to teach history strictly from a feminist perspective. I think they are trying to counterbalance the Gilmour types of professors. However, those (2 classes) were extremely limiting and did not offer an alternative for students who were not feminists (I am, and still I think this has no place in a university setting). Remember – university is supposed to be about critical thinking. Eventually about generating new knowledge. Not about making minion copies of professors. Moreover, Gilmour admitting that he can only be passionate about authors like him begs the question: how will his students become passionate about literature? I doubt many of them are white, anglo, chubby, middle aged guy’s guys.
A note on the equivocation of Dr. Syme dismissing an author with Gilmour dismissing entire ethnicities or genders. Perhaps to fit your standards professors should stop sneering at Reader’s Digest stories? The point is, a teacher can decide an author is not good enough. Dismissing four fifth of the world’s population based on biology is pretty inane. It’s all about critical thinking.
Finally, how you think Gilmour is a ‘bad boy’ is beyond me. In terms of usage, you wouldn’t expect a ‘bad boy’ to kiss up to power and embrace a 19th century view.
Well said.
“Are you not being as dismissive here as David was about female and Chinese authors?”
Andrew Gregg, I almost admire your convoluted pretzel-like logic! How does not caring about two individual male writers in any way compare to saying that you don’t teach any women writers because you don’t like them enough?
I love pretzels. And I think this David bashing has gone on long enough. Look what you all have done–you’ve gotten Barbara Kay in on the act! Next thing you know Margaret Wente will be writing about it. It’s all downhill from here.
“Secondly, this: “David Gilmour does not talk or think like a professor of literature. He doesn’t say the sorts of things professors of literature tend to say. He doesn’t seem interested in the sorts of things professors of literature are interested in.” There are rules for being an English professor now? There are things you are supposed to say and not supposed to say? Are all of you supposed to behave and think the same? Teach the same? Express yourselves the same? Is it really that uniform? Is it really that boring?”
Mr. Gregg, it’s not that readers at the doctoral level are all thinking the same thoughts. What they have in common is that they are more open-minded. They explore ideas first, and like or dislike them later. Doctors of the humanities are trained in reading the most discomforting ideas and writing styles, stepping back, and analysing them without judging them. There is a place for personal judgement but not in your core studies.*
It’s terribly sad the number of people who think they can attain the level of reading that humanities doctors have, just by reading a lot. You really have to have the right attitude about it, and you have to make it your life’s purpose for years. I don’t know that Mr. Gilmour hasn’t devoted himself to reading, but he certainly hasn’t approached reading with an attitude that might eventually get him to the level of a humanities doctor.
* This is not to say that profs only read offensive work. They read more “comfortable” work too, and are trained not to forget to think just because a piece doesn’t push them. But I don’t have enough information to say whether Gilmour has that problem. Also, no doubt you can find me a doctor somewhere who reads narrow-mindedly, but he is in the minority.
Thanks for this thoughtful response.
David is a mischief maker, a perennial teenager
Ah, yes, dismissing the experiences of half the human race, plus those of everyone of one’s own gender who isn’t the same color as one, as unimportant to literature is just… ~mischief. Nothing serious, of course!
he would have been distracted, flirtatious, serious, then not serious and most of all, he’d be in a prankish mood. Because that’s who he is.
IOW, he didn’t view her as a professional; he viewed her as just another piece of ass.
I bet his class is really fun.
Of course you’d think that; it’s not your identity being dismissed as unworthy of literary exploration.