The most important years of my education were spent at a Quaker college near Philadelphia. Life there was meant to be ruled by an all-embracing honour-code, one that compelled each member of the community to strive for utmost integrity and if someone seemed to fall short, to actively confront that person. Perhaps it is time for UBC to try to reinvent itself along such lines, to repair its moral compass — one that has been so sadly damaged as we are reminded almost on a daily basis by the Board of Governors and by all those who failed to listen to the women in the department of history and elsewhere, who suffered at the hands of predatory men and their enablers.
In 1850, the American literary critic Andrew Delbanco has reminded us, a young student in Virginia wrote the following after listening to a sermon by his college president: “Oh that the Lord would show me how to think and how to choose.” To some, this may seem like a woefully archaic formulation, but the truth is that the student’s plea is what education is supposed to be all about and it underscores what used to be seen as the indissoluble tie between the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of the good. Over and above all the new policies and offices that ultimately will be created in the wake of UBC’s annus horribilis — our horrible year — the Virginian’s question looms so very large for students, faculty, administrators and those members of the Board of Governors who have patently denigrated the public trust.
While I have followed UBC’s descent into administrative and moral chaos — one sympathetic administrator told a faculty group that the university now seemed to be following the course of The Titanic. I have been most closely involved in what has happened in the department of history where I teach and of how one very large issue in our department has been overlooked. The issue: the only reason that the graduate student Caitlin Cunningham, with the support of other graduate students, initially came forward to report on matters of sexual assault was because they suspected, and then learned with certainty, that there was, as they called it, “a larger narrative” of what their colleague Dmitry Mordvinov had been doing. The women understood that UBC would not act unless some sort of complaint was made, even as the complaint could not, because of UBC's rules, address directly Mordvinov’s alleged rape of at least two other women. The decision to come forward and the complaint that Ms. Cunningham made then were in direct response to the willful blindness of UBC faculty and administrators, and the decision was by no means an easy one. It was something the students talked and talked about for months and in no way can it possibly be seen as self-serving or in some way directed at the history department. It was, in plain truth, an effort to stop an alleged serial rapist from raping and assaulting more women. The timeline assembled by the graduate students and one independently put forward by the CBC make it clear that Mordvinov engaged in sexual assaults after reports about him were made by members of the UBC community.
In the wake of the recent release of the “executive summary” of the outside review commissioned by UBC and of the presentation of the history department’s own mediator, I have a few additional observations.
Regarding the presentation by the departmental mediator, my hope was that she would place herself in a position to follow her own advice regarding the virtual impossibility of mediating issues between parties who have vast power differentials between them — in this case, graduate students and faculty — unless an outside authority is willing to place itself in a position to elicit from the more powerful a sense of the injustice that has been perpetrated.
In this regard, I know from extended conversations with our graduate students that an unequivocal apology from the department and a far less ambiguous and perfunctory one than that offered by Dr. Martha Piper, the president of UBC, remain, for starters, the appropriate response. I hope that our colleagues can find a way to do this directly to our students and that there will be a realization that public pronouncements of regret are not likely to cut it. At stake, I would suggest, is nothing less than the future of our graduate program, even if the institutional memory of what has happened may, in the view of some, simply fade away when the courageous students who dared to speak out have moved on to what no doubt will be careers and lives of great import.
“One cannot eat as much as one would like to puke.” These words, roughly translated, were spoken by a prominent German-Jewish artist when Adolph Hitler came to power. The stakes at UBC are of course much, much lower, but I, for one, certainly feel queasy: the mediator succeeded in blaming the grad students and the CBC, and moreover fully exonerated the department without once identifying what precisely has been the problem. That she did not understand why Ms. Cunningham came forward with her complaint in light of the university's unwillingness to move against Mr. Mordvinov remains a troubling question. Ms. Cunningham and those colleagues who supported her possessed an accurate picture of what Mr. Mordvinov had done and was doing — that the mediator and the university’s outside reviewer, despite her erudite suggestions about our departmental failures, chose not to recognize this undeniable fact is beyond merely troubling. That the departmental mediator failed to interview Ms. Cunningham is incomprehensible.
But much good has come out of what Ms. Cunningham and her colleagues have done: there will be a sexual assault policy and there will be a sexual assault response team. And for this, we owe our gutsy students an enormous thanks. The culture of predation and denial of it remain of course, and why this is so remains an interesting political and historical problem. We're talking big-time hegemony here — patriarchal equilibrium even and the specifics of how and why this is the case is a very, very important thing to map out.
Although I am gratified that the university reviewer had the courage to tell some of the truth, I am not surprised that she followed the evident institutional line: while it is impolitic to blame directly the faculty or students in public, why not take aim at the “media”? This is a cheap shot; I hope that that the CBC will figure out a way to respond effectively. The good news is what the reviewer found: plenty of personal oversights. But the true dimensions of these oversights remain obscure as the reviewer but fingered nameless individuals who, admittedly, did nothing for months. In the end, it was a nameless, institutional failure.
Where is the moral compass in all of this? Who is to be held accountable? Where does the question of personal responsibility lie?
Tellingly, the Supreme Court of Canada has spoken directly to this issue in a case that evidently the outside reviewer and the departmental mediator failed to consider. In Jane Doe v. Metropolitan Toronto Police (1998), the court held that duly constituted authorities have a legal obligation to warn women who are at risk of rape. Failure to do so, the court found, is rooted in deeply held sexist mythologies and moreover constitutes a direct violation of Charter rights. The Toronto Police were adjudicated to have failed to warn Jane Doe because she would be inclined to panic, they said, and thereby scare off or effectively warn the serial rapist known by police to be operating in her neighbourhood. Striking indeed are the parallels of our students having been told twice, by two different administrators, that acknowledging Mr. Mordvinov’s actions would be “like saying there is a snake in the room and turning off the lights.”
The problem, of course, was that there was a snake in the room and that we failed to turn on the lights in a timely way. This ethos was captured in a Kafkaesque sentence by one of the many administrators who, officially having been found to have acted in good faith throughout this two-year ordeal, explained why “privacy” was the paramount issue and that talking about the Mordvinov case was ill-advised: “If we talked, no one would come forward and the campus wouldn’t be a safer place.” Moreover, this administrator argued, our department could only discipline Mr. Mordvinov for academic transgressions; non-academic complaints are meant to be handled by other units in the university. But the problem was that other units had extensive knowledge of what Mr. Mordvinov had done – and they too did nothing.
Most of my colleagues in the Faculty of Arts for years have committed their professional lives to the investigation of injustices across the planet, implicitly accepting the argument that the pursuit of knowledge is most worthwhile – most necessary – when it is bound up with the big questions of what is the good and of how we might construct polities of justice and equality.
Why so many across the UBC campus have been unable to endorse this fundamental principle of the Western Enlightenment when in the recent past, push came to shove and the you-know-what hit the fan is, I think, a question worth considering.
Paul Krause is a professor in the department of history at UBC.