“And Now I Say It.”

by Dinu Mahapatuna

Stories are archive, archive is warning, and mine is this. 

When I was first considering Creative Writing at Concordia, my writing mentor cautioned: “The program has run into some trouble in the past. I won’t get into it. You can do your own research.” It was a nervous blur of words, a seemingly passing remark that rubbed me the wrong way, but not wrong enough—I was eighteen after all. 

At first I was puzzled, and only nodded to appear more adult than I felt. My mentor, seemingly satisfied with my reaction, moved on quickly. Still, I lingered on the warning and its deliberately confusing delivery for my first few months of university. By my last year, I realized that my mentor’s vaguely worded warning was a canary in the coal-mine, and that there truly was an awful secret lingering within Concordia’s Creative Writing Department. A lot of people, in a very tight-knit community of writers, readers, and teachers linked to Concordia, knew something awful that the rest of us didn’t; and would not tell the rest of us, burgeoning young writers, about it. With either luck (good or bad) we would find out. Kind of. 

Somehow the scandal of immense media coverage from 2014-2019 hasn’t been enough to render obscurity futile. I will, as someone who has only seen obscurity work in favour of the institution hoping to forget its damning past (and present), attempt to just tell you the fucking truth. 

In 2014, Emma Healey published “Stories Like Passwords”, a piece about the sexual misconduct she experienced at the hands of a creative writing professor at Concordia. I’m not going to attempt to paraphrase Healey—her piece is perfect as is—but I will give credit where credit is due. In a few hundred words, Healey does what so many creative writing professors claim (while failing to demonstrate) to do: she tells a true story. Narrating the abusive dynamic between her and a Concordia professor over the course of years, while juxtaposing the narrative against the backdrop of a circle of writers who have similarly experienced sexual misconduct and been swept under university-sized rugs, Healey sent a ripple effect through the social fabric of Concordia University. She exposed the department (and university’s) open secret: professors can and do date students. Occasionally, professors can and have assaulted students. Yes, there are many abuses of power. Obviously it bleeds into classroom dynamics. Certainly, everyone knows. But not enough to change. 

Healey’s account wasn’t enough to start a total upheaval at Concordia. While impactful within writer’s circles, it was largely ignored by the rest of the university population. Conveniently, as Julie McIsaac notes, until 2018, when “[…]a man said it, so now everyone is listening.” 

The “man” in question is a former Concordia student named Mike Spry. His piece was titled “No Names, Only Monsters”, and—in no small part due to McIsaac’s response piece “And Then a Man Said It”, where she justifiably calls him out for being a misogynist piece of shit in his own right—his piece, about having witnessed multiple professors engage in predatory relationships with their students (and notably not speaking out about it at the time), is scrubbed from the internet. It’s strange to note that I only have secondary access to an essay published digitally and less than ten years ago, but it’s true. I can now only tell you that The Link reported that Spry, “alleged that one professor ‘rented a hotel room so that he could entertain young writers away from his house and family.’ Specifically, he referenced an article by Emma Healey, published in The Hairpin in 2014, in which she describes an assault she experienced at the hands of an unnamed Concordia professor while she was a student”. Spry’s invaluable gospel aside, in 2019 several other alumni reported experiencing instances of sexual misconduct during their time within the English and creative writing department at Concordia. Heather O’Neill told CBC she was sexually harassed while she was a student in the department in the 1990s; while, Meredith Marty-Dugas, president of the Concordia Association for Students in English noted that students “to this day, students [will] tell each other ‘watch out for this professor or that professor’. […] It was going on for decades… some profs treated their classrooms like a f***ing dating pool”. 

In 2018, as a result of Spry’s ‘bravery’ (insert eyeroll), Alan Shepherd, Concordia’s president at the time, took notice. Issuing a statement within days, Shepherd stated: “I am disturbed by what I read in the blog post.” While Concordia spokesperson at the time, Mary Jo Barr, refused to discuss the matter in detail (citing confidentiality like all the good cronies do), she did clarify: “When Concordia is made aware of allegations of any type of misconduct, those allegations are thoroughly investigated and appropriate actions are taken.” Still, in 2019, “Concordia cleared two creative writing professors of wrongdoing in a sexual misconduct investigation, but never informed their accusers. The students who came forward to report their alleged harassment learned of the university’s decision through the media.” 

When I think about “weaponized incompetence”, I think first and foremost of a byline from an article on a Concordia-admin formed taskforce on sexual misconduct and sexual violence: “students don’t know how to complain, aren’t aware of university’s limitations set by privacy laws, says report.” It’s the sort of nonsense byline that begets nonsense questions like: Is there a right way to complain? Should we rely on the pre-existing mechanisms of a university that has consistently failed to create a safe campus? The answer to both those questions is obviously no, but only if you understand the kindergarten-level principle that change begets change; and that non-comprehensive policy, underfunded resources, and non-representative advisory bodies cannot be relied on to facilitate change in an atmosphere where sexual misconduct runs rampant. The answer is only yes to both those previous questions—yes, there is one right way to complain, and yes, we can rely on the tools that have previously failed us—, if you belong to the real subset of people who wish to live in denial of the university’s responsibility to its most vulnerable populations, to maintain age-old structures of inequality, to obfuscate and institutionalize the realities of historical and ongoing abuse because it’s easier than enacting real change. Take as example, Lisa Ostiguy, deputy provost at the university, who in the aforementioned article maintained that the university can’t do much in the way of sanctioning relationships between professors and students. Extremely uneven power dynamics be damned, Ostiguy unashamedly related the university’s incompetence to CBC: “The law doesn’t give us enough actionable things to take place when two adults are consenting to a relationship. I think that as a university, we need to strongly say why these relationships aren’t a good idea”. Zero reflection on the skewed power dynamics inherent to those professor-student relationships and at the heart of the “open-secret” of sexual misconduct within, Ostiguy again affirms that the problem isn’t with administration’s handling of inappropriate but with students… for, and I’m paraphrasing here, being idiots who know fuck all: “The community as a whole doesn’t know a lot about our procedures, policies and what resources we have in place […] We have a lot of work to do to train and educate our community members.” 

What are those resources again? And how did the university come by them? 

Concordia, like all educational institutions unwilling to admit that they can and do buckle under pressure of student discontent, will be reluctant to tell you it wasn’t their idea. The Sexual Assault Resource Centre or “SARC”, the only real recourse for students, faculty and staff dealing with sexual violence at any point in time was not some pet project of a concerned administration, boosted into fruition out of care for the school’s community. Rather, it was created in 2013 by concerned students and the Centre for Gender Advocacy, with the latter having advocated “for a sexual assault centre on campus since the spring of 2011 due to the high rate of sexual assault”.

In 2017, decades of advocacy from CEGEP and university students let to the provincial passing of an Act to prevent and fight sexual violence in higher education institutions or Bill 151; the act required Concordia create the Standing Committee on Sexual Misconduct and Sexual Violence (SMSV) in 2018–the committee, despite having student representatives was reportedly so thoroughly incapable of including student concerns and voices that, in 2023, students banded together to create ITFA (Inter-organizational Table for Feminist Affairs) as a way to make their demands heard. Also as a result of Bill 151, part of SARC’s mandate is reporting the number of sexual assault disclosures made to them for Concordia’s annual report. In the 2021-2022 year alone, 111 disclosures were made. 

A little birdie let me know that the university is thinking about defunding SARC too. The university claimed to be temporarily relocating SARC from its original office in the Hall building to another, considerably smaller and windowless space in the library building; turns out, not only might that relocation be permanent, it might be the first of many steps the university is taking to slowly defund and dismantle the staff. Allegedly, staff are being moved around with the intention of totally discontinuing the service, which Concordia previously had no issue taking total credit for as a beacon of its progressive, caring, and next-generation values.

Work Cited

Healey, Emma. “Stories like Passwords.” Medium, October 6, 2014.

McIsaac, Julie. And Then a Man Said It, January 11, 2018. https://andthenamansaidit.wordpress.com/.

Litwin, Kelsey. “Concordia Graduate Accuses English Professors of Sexual Harassment, Abuse of Power.” The Link, January 9, 2018.

Curtis, Christopher. “Concordia still failing in response to sexual-violence complaints: students” Montreal Gazette, April 12, 2019.

McKenna, Kate. “Concordia University Task Force Proposes Mandatory Sexual Violence Prevention Training for All.” CBC News, June 27, 2018. 

Melian-Morse, Alejandra. “Sexual Assault Centre Officially Opens at Concordia.” The Link, November 12, 2013.