As an outsider, I find it depressing to see the Canadian Literature community tear itself apart over the open letter on the Galloway case rather than using the letter to come together over their evident common desire. (The letter is here; a response letter by Lawrence Hill is here; there are many other responses.) I understand that the original open letter could be much better. It is possible to read it as suggesting that the evidence of lack of due process comes from the result or that justice is due only to Galloway. It is regrettable that the letter has caused additional pain for people in the UBC Creative Writing Department and strife for that Department.
For all its faults, the letter does call for due process. Everyone in the CanLit community and everyone at UBC has an interest in knowing that due process was in fact followed in this—as in any—case involving allegations of misconduct and the eventual firing of personnel. In this case, many people, whether they speak on behalf of the complainants or on behalf of Galloway, have suggested due process was not followed.
Now we are seeing a social media war within the CanLit community. Meanwhile, UBC itself sits on the sidelines and watches that community inflict damage upon itself. Marsha Lederman’s reporting has quoted from a four-paragraph statement from VP External Affairs Philip Steenkamp on UBC’s handling of the case. I have seen that statement only as screen shot attached to a tweet from a local reporter; as far as I can tell, it has not been sent to any faculty or students at UBC. Why is UBC again talking to the press but not to its own academic community?
The issues here, as has become depressingly common at UBC, are these: We don’t know what level or nature of allegations trigger an investigation at UBC; we don’t know how processes of evidence gathering are set up in those investigations; we don’t know what standards of evidence are followed. In the case of Galloway, we don’t know what the original allegations brought to UBC’s attention were or what the findings of the investigation were; thus, we don’t know what findings triggered the decision to fire Galloway; we don’t know why those findings warranted firing for “breach of trust.” That’s a partial list of the known unknowns.
UBC claims not to be able to provide any of this information due to “confidentiality” concerns. It is not at all clear that the reasons for firing of an individual for “breach of trust” at a public institution are not in the public interest to know. (Steenkamp’s statement seems to admit that it is in the public interest.) Thus, it is not at all clear that, under the BC Privacy Act, confidentiality pertains in this case at all. In any case, “confidentiality” seems at UBC a euphemism for “secrecy.” If UBC doesn’t figure out a much more robust and compelling internal as well as external communications strategy, it is going to leave more and more communities—at UBC and beyond its walls—in tatters.
Meanwhile, CanLit community, can you do everyone at UBC a favour? Can you have a ceasefire in your social media war for long enough to agree that the reason you are fighting is that no one knows why UBC took the actions it did and in the absence of such knowledge no one has any reason to trust the process that led to those actions? Reports from witnesses and complainants give us more reason not to trust that process—which itself seems to have caused additional harm.
I’d like to do more than believe survivors. I’d like to help survivors and to help prevent actions that would lead to more people becoming survivors. As a faculty member at UBC, I have no take-home lessons I can use in the Galloway case. I have no idea what actions UBC finds to be a breach of trust; I have no idea what UBC even thinks happened. I cannot do my job better because of UBC’s handling of this case. I can, however, do my job worse: I can (from fear of processes I don’t understand and due to concerns about ripping apart my own community of scholars) withdraw into my office, look the other way, shrug my shoulders, try to stay out of harm’s way. Keeping my head down easy for me—another one of those privileged middle-aged white men with tenure—and much, much harder for those who really do need institutional protection and justice.
Commentaria 