Letter to John Godfrey, MP

On March 12, 1996, the United States Congress passed the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act, better known as the Helms-Burton Act. This act provided, among other measures designed to intensify the US blockade of Cuba, for punitive actions to be taken against officers and stock-holders (and members of their families) of any company that does business in Cuba on property that was expropriated from American citizens at the time of the Cuban Revolution. These provisions were promptly applied to citizens of Canada, Mexico, Italy, the UK, and other countries trading with Cuba. Many countries protested against the act as a violation of basic principles of national sovereignty and international law, and passed laws to counter its effects. (These include Canada's Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act and Mexico's Law of Protection of Commerce and Investments from Foreign Policies that Contravene International Law.)

Two Canadian MPs, John Godfrey and Peter Milliken, also prepared a private member's bill, the Godfrey-Milliken Bill (C-339):

An Act to permit descendants of United Empire Loyalists who fled the land that later became the United States of America after the 1776 American Revolution to establish a claim to the property they or their ancestors owned in the United States that was confiscated without compensation, and claim compensation for it in the Canadian courts, and to exclude from Canada any foreign person trafficking in such property.

Bill C-339 drew attention to the fact that Loyalists whose property had been confiscated during and after the American Revolution never received compensation—a direct violation of the Treaty of Paris (1783), ratified by the US Congress, which provided for “the restitution of all Estates, Rights, and Properties, which have been confiscated.” It need hardly be said that although the Godfrey-Milliken Bill received first reading in the House of Commons on 22 October 1996, it was never passed: parliamentarians were no doubt aware that the US government has a limited appetite for open mockery from subordinate powers.

I was acquainted with John Godfrey from his time as President of the University of King's College in Halifax (for whose Foundation Year Program I had given lectures), and wrote the following letter to him. It has not previously been published.

Letter to John Godfrey, MP by Michael Keefer

John Godfrey, MP, 
House of Commons, 
Ottawa. 27 July 1996.

Dear Dr. Godfrey,

Hearty congratulations on your response to the Helms-Burton Act.

I assume that your bill will very shortly become law, and that the government of Canada will soon begin amassing information about the properties confiscated by the revolutionary government of the United States from people who remained loyal to the British crown, and were forced after 1783 to immigrate to this country. I would be grateful if you could pass the following information on to the appropriate authorities.

My great-great-great-great grandfather George Kieffer, who enlisted in The Queen's Rangers in 1776 and served under General Sir William Howe, died while participating in the defence of the city of New York against the insurrectionaries. His property was confiscated by the revolutionary government, and his widow and her two sons sought refuge in Canada, settling in what is now Thorold, Ontario. (Once there, my great-great-great grandfather George changed the spelling of his name to “Keefer.”) No compensation was ever paid to the family either by the state of New Jersey or by the government of the United States.

The property in question consists of a farm and a distillery at Paulinskill, near Newtown (now Newton), in Sussex County, New Jersey. I cannot tell you how aggrieved I feel to think that—contrary both to natural justice and the provisions of the peace settlement of 1783—the profits and the produce of my family's farm (and, more importantly, our distillery) have for more than two centuries been enjoyed by lawless revolutionaries and their heirs.

It is my understanding that the farm has been subdivided, and that among the present inhabitants of my family's property there are officers of several American corporations which have dealings in Canada. I expect that, in addition to whatever legal action I myself might take under the provisions of your bill, prompt action will also be taken by the government of Canada against these people.

Yours sincerely,

Michael Keefer

Talk for Freedom to Read Week PEN Benefit: The Bookshelf, February 25, 1996

This text was written as a short introduction to a reading from Lunar Perspectives: Field Notes from The Culture Wars, at a fundraising event for PEN Canada held in The Bookshelf (41 Quebec Street, Guelph, Ontario) on February 25th, 1996, as part of Freedom to Read Week. Readings were also given by Judy Rebick, co-host of Face Off and former president of NAC; by T. Sher Singh, lawyer and Toronto Star columnist; by Yan Li, author of Daughters of the Red Land; by the poet Karen Houle; and by Thomas King, author of Medicine River and Green Grass Running Water. Run for decades by Barb and Doug Minette, The Bookshelf is a one-stop civilization: it includes under one roof an excellent bookstore, a rep cinema, a restaurant, and a bar.

Talk for Freedom to Read Week PEN Benefit: The Bookshelf, February 25, 1996 by Michael Keefer

I want to begin with a little anecdote that has some bearing on the relevance, here and now, of Freedom to Read Week. I've brought with me a copy, wrapped as you see in brown paper, of a book I ordered a little over a year ago through The Bookshelf (that's where the serious ordering of books is done in this city). Don't be misled by the brown paper cover: it's something I do to prevent the books I use in teaching from wearing out too quickly.

This book is one that some of my colleagues and I have used in recent years in a graduate course in literary theory that we've team-taught at the University of Guelph. Feminisms: an anthology of literary theory and criticism: published by Rutgers University Press, it's interesting in several respects. Nice cover under that brown paper, though torn and bruised, as you can see. The book contains fifty-eight well-chosen literary essays written since about 1975 by feminist theorists and critics. And for some reason, just before the last academic year, Canada Customs chose to hold up the shipment of this book between New Jersey and Guelph for almost a month. The book is over 1,100 pages long: perhaps it took all those literary theorists at Canada Customs that long to puzzle their way through it.

Who knows what they were looking for? Leather and chains, perhaps? Wild single-sex sado-masochistic pornography? Or some other form of evidence that feminism, as American televangelist, antisemitic conspiracy theorist and former presidential candidate Pat Robertson has informed us, is “a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians”?

Whatever the Customs officials were looking for, they didn't find it. Hardly surprising, if you pause to reflect for just a moment on the sobering kind of thing that university presses habitually publish. But our books arrived in Guelph almost a month late—and looking, as Doug Minette remarked to me, as though a pretty energetic gang of people had been playing football with them.

So what's the moral of the story? The Bookshelf sold the damaged books to my students at a substantially reduced price, taking a loss of several hundred dollars on the consignment. Since it would be folly to take legal action over such a sum, and since our government shows no signs of wanting to rein in the zealous censors at Canada Customs, these officials have the pleasure of knowing that whenever they disapprove of a foreign book, they can with impunity inconvenience its would-be readers and financially harm the bookseller who imports it. They can also punish stores like The Bookshelf for having engaged in solidarity and fund-raising work in support of the campaign to help Little Sisters bookstore in Vancouver in its ongoing struggle against government harassment.

In a country whose Prime Minister has trouble reading his own speeches, it doesn't make a lot of sense to tax literacy by applying the GST to books. But here we have a second tax on books—and one that is applied, not evenly, but with careful and foolish discrimination, by censors, mountebanks, and misogynists. I don't see why we put up with it.

This little story is related, in a sidelong way, to the book from which I'm going to read you a couple of short excerpts. I wrote Lunar Perspectives (as I said in its preface) “in response to a widespread perception of crisis in North American education—a perception stemming largely from the outcries over 'political correctness' in American and Canadian universities that began in the late 1980s and peaked about a year ago, leaving behind a widespread distrust of scholars in the humanities.” I was prompted as well by a sense “that the PC furore and a longer-term withdrawal of public support from institutions of higher learning are together aspects of a larger cultural and political crisis—the most notable signs of which include an ever more overwhelming dominance of narrowly economic, utilitarian and instrumentalist habits of mind, and a correspondingly steady shrinkage of the public space within which genuinely critical analysis of the present state of affairs is possible.”

That public space or public sphere is threatened when customs officials are encouraged by their political masters to harass and persecute bookstores like Little Sisters which cater to minority communities, and feel sufficiently emboldened by their success that they turn to harassing other bookstores like our own Bookshelf. The public sphere within which it is possible to participate actively in a thriving and humane culture, to imagine a truly democratic social order, and to take part in processes of transformation and renewal designed to sustain and enhance that culture and that democracy, is currently endangered in other ways as well.

It is threatened when, for example, an Education Minister like John Snobelen declares his government's intention to “bankrupt the actions and activities that aren't consistent with the future we're committed to,” and to do so by “creating” or “invent[ing] a crisis”—which means, in more direct language, manipulating the public through misrepresentations and outright lies into accepting panic solutions to false problems. Snobelen and the Harris government threaten our freedom to read because they are committed to a corporatist agenda of massive public disinvestment and privatizing that focusses with particular intensity on higher education, and that will have the direct effect of excluding all but the well-to-do from this sector of our public sphere.

Reading well—with moral acuity, with historical depth, and with contextual richness—is something that our colleges and universities pride themselves on teaching. When people are denied access, for purely economic reasons, to the mind-expanding interpretive exercise of our best humanities programs, their freedom to read is being sharply curtailed.

Our freedom to read is perhaps more directly threatened when neoconservative campaigners against “political correctness” attempt to panic us into believing that the barbarians are within the gates, that our cultural institutions, and our universities in particular, have fallen into the hands of Visigoths in tweed. The Greek poet Constantin Cavafy had something to say about this in a poem I have used as a epigraph to my preface—“Expecting the Barbarians” (in Rae Dalven's translation):

Why this sudden unrest and confusion? 
(How solemn their faces have become.) 
Why are the streets and squares clearing quickly, 
and all return to their homes, so deep in thought? 
Because night is here but the barbarians have not come. 
Some people arrived from the frontiers, 
and they said that there no longer are any barbarians. 
And now what shall become of us without any barbarians? 
Those people were a kind of solution.

The drumbeaters of neoconservatism have tried to persuade us, in particular, that leading roles among the barbarians who are obliterating Western Culture and William Shakespeare are being taken by women—and women of colour, such as Alice Walker or Rigoberta Menchú. A substantial part of my book is devoted to refuting this kind of panic attack—to showing that the charge is false and absurd, to analyzing the sleazy motives which underlie it, and (along the way) to wresting Western Culture out of the hands of such blundering would-be defenders (and censors) as Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, and Dinesh D'Souza.

Here's a brief section in which I pay the panic-mongers back in their own coin: it's from a chapter entitled “Monster Zombies on Campus,” and follows a passage in which I analyze nuclearism, futurelessness and nightmare as part of the context that informs our readings of literature.

[The analysis of nuclearism, futurelessness and nightmare alluded to here, and its application to literary interpretation, will be found on pp. 59-66 of Lunar Perspectives; the passage I read aloud at The Bookshelf, which analyzes and mocks anti-PC panic-mongering by University of Toronto political scientist Jean Edward Smith, appears on pp. 67-71.]  

“PC” and Privatization

This short text was my contribution to a one-day symposium, Finding Our Way: A Public Forum on Universities, Corporate Influence, and the Future of Post-Secondary Education, that was held at the University of Guelph on 22 October 1993. It has not previously been published.

“PC” and Privatization by Michael Keefer

I had the bad luck to be elected to the national executive of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers in the spring of 1991, at just the moment when the “Political Correctness” furore—which had been building up in the United States ever since the collapse of the Soviet empire deprived American conservatives of their favourite demonized Other—burst upon the Canadian scene. As Cathy Davidson observed at the time, academics in the humanities, whom only a few years ago it had been fashionable to dismiss “as silly and irrelevant,” were suddenly being denounced as though, “like Godzilla rising from the muck,” they “threaten[ed] the very existence of Western civilization.”

Does anyone remember the Maclean's issue of May 1991 which informed us that “A New Wave of Repression is Sweeping Through the Universities”? This was not a response to the murder of fourteen young women at the École Polytechnique de Montréal just over a year previously, or to the death threats made that same spring to the editors of feminist journals associated with Queen's University and Dalhousie: from the perspective of Maclean's magazine, those events were invisible.

The “wave of repression” consisted rather of a number of scare-mongering quotations from academic neoconservatives, and of four actual cases. One of these was the genuinely disturbing harassment of Jeanne Cannizzo, an anthropologist who curated what became a controversial Royal Ontario Museum exhibition, by anti-racist activists. Another, the case of University of Western Ontario psychologist Philippe Rushton, was scandalous in a quite different sense: the racialist pseudo-science of Rushton's publications raised the very serious question of how it was possible for a major Canadian university to provide institutional support for work of this kind. The remaining cases were incidents in which it was suggested that unnamed feminists had been rude to two great artists—to William Shakespeare, who gave no sign of having resented his treatment, and to Alex Colville, who as Chancellor of the university at which an objection was raised to the reproduction of one of his paintings on the cover of the university's Calendar can hardly be said to have been “repressed” by whatever was said.

Such a wave, as I wrote at the time, would scarcely fill a teacup. But Maclean's was not interested in reporting on any actual events within our universities. The object, rather, was to pass on to Canadians an alarming sense of the dangers posed by the politically correct “storm-troopers,” “moral vigilantes,” and “new McCarthyists” whom the American press was already vigorously denouncing.

Let's consider for a moment the last of these terms: “new McCarthyism.” This is a brilliant rhetorical inversion. As a matter of readily ascertainable fact, the people who have been most active in claiming that North American universities have been “taken over” by humourless and authoritarian women, minority groups, and radicals themselves form part of a very interesting alliance of government agencies, corporate foundations, and the corporate news media—an alliance that bears an uncanny resemblance to the constellation of forces responsible for the original McCarthyist Red Scare of the late 1940s and early '50s. Appropriating the one term—neo-McCarthyism—which best describes their own agenda, and applying it to the objects of their attack, was a stroke of genius on the part of the Reagan-Bush cultural revolutionaries. Their story was out and accepted long before anyone could object that no U.S. Senator had stood up before the television cameras waving a list of supposed racists and sexists in the universities.

I'd like to make a couple of suggestions—one outlining a possible research agenda, and the other proposing a principle of caution.

Here's the research agenda—for anyone who remembers how hundreds of billions of dollars were looted from the U.S. treasury by American elites during the Savings and Loan scandal of the 1980s (which was directly enabled by the deregulation policies of the Reagan-Bush administration). The PC scare has a clear structural articulation, in terms of the recently burgeoning networks of right-wing think-tanks and foundations that fund political correctness polemicists and their publications. It might be interesting to see whether Savings-and-Loan loot is being recycled into ideological structures whose principal function is to close down any space from which a critique of the Reagan-Bush era might be launched. You know the proverb: “Follow the money!”

And here's the principle of caution. I tell my students to be sceptical of everything they read and hear—especially when it comes from someone who has an axe to grind (present company not excluded). One way of exercising caution is to check out whether writers say the same kind of thing when they're trying to persuade you and when they're letting their hair down among like-minded people. Here's an instructive example, from Dinesh D'Souza, author of the polemical book Illiberal Education (1991), and a young man whose whole adult life has been funded by the right-wing foundation gravy train. Writing in The Atlantic Monthly for a liberal audience, D'Souza represents himself as a troubled and scrupulous occupier of the “middle ground” who finds that “It is not always possible in such disputes for a reasonable person, in good conscience, to take any side....” Sounds decent, doesn't it? But writing at the same time and on the same subject for a corporate readership in Forbes magazine, he bares his teeth. Claiming that “the propaganda of the new barbarians” threatens “to do us in,” D'Souza urges a defunding of the universities. “Resistance on campus to the academic revolution is outgunned,” he adds, “and sorely needs outside reinforcements.” How genuine do you think his concern for academic scruples—and academic freedom—might be?

I'll conclude with some thoughts on privatization. A recent article in Taipan blamed the inadequacies of American secondary and university education upon a “rewriting of history by 'politically correct' academics” which “threatens to have a negative effect” on the “progress-oriented work ethic” of the U.S., and could even “result in the redistribution of property rather than the creation of new wealth.” The solution proposed is a continued privatizing of the educational system: “If just 15% of the government's education budget ends up in private hands by the year 2010, it will mean billions of profits for the savvy entrepreneurs who act now.”

So what's it really all about: some notion of improving 'quality,' or a simple looting by “savvy entrepreneurs” of institutions paid for by public money?

Don't make the mistake of thinking that the “PC” furore is mainly just a problem of noise from south of the border, or that “privatization” is a matter of speculative corporate buccaneers casting greedy eyes on a public system they see, from the outside, as offering possibilities for large private profits.

They're inside already, as well as outside; and the process of privatization is well underway. One of the theorists of this process, John Pannabaker, is a past CEO of the Mutual Life Assurance Company of Canada and former Chancellor of McMaster University. In a 1992 address to the Canadian Corporate-Higher Education Forum, he claimed that the government bureaucracies, the “hierarchical corporations,” and the “educational, health and social service systems” which absorbed most of the graduates of Canadian universities during what he called the “golden age” of “mass tertiary education” between the mid-1950s and mid-1970s are now visibly contracting, and argued that Canadian universities must accept the challenge of developing a “new paradigm” which will respond to current needs.

The shape of this paradigm is hinted at by his advocacy of “alternative privately-financed and customer-driven institutions,” and his scouting of “possibilities, perhaps at the moment unthinkable, but ultimately the likely way out,” which “probably involve decentralization and 'spin-offs'—even privatization of individual programmes and functions.” It would not, he thinks, be “possible to 'privatize' a major Canadian university”—but the next best thing, it seems, would be to dismember the universities as a group, putting into corporate hands those functions which are most attractive to corporate interests.

What's missing here?

Any notion of a common good, any notion that higher education might have a critical as well as instrumental function, and any recognition that the critical intellectual work carried on within institutions of higher education makes an essential contribution to the self-understanding and capacity for creative and just self-transformation of a democratic society.

Merger Law Unnecessary

First published in the University of Guelph's weekly newspaper, At Guelph (3 February 1993): 2. This letter formed one small part of a widespread campaign against the Mulroney government's proposal to merge the Canada Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the international academic and cultural programs of the Department of External Affairs. Against all odds, the campaign succeeded: the government's legislation passed in the House of Commons, but was rejected in the Senate by a single vote.

Merger Law Unnecessary by Michael Keefer

The press release that formed the basis for At Guelph's January 13 account of the proposed merger of the Canada Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the international academic and cultural programs of the Department of External Affairs is in at least two respects grossly misleading.

Far from strengthening the traditional arm's-length relationship between government and cultural or research agencies, the merger legislation (Part 3 of Bill C-93) actively subverts it by requiring the new council to “take into consideration the foreign policy of the government of Canada.”

Equally dubious is the claim that the new council's governing council can be trusted to protect the interests of the arts and research communities. Bill C-93 says council members should be “broadly representative” of the new Canada Council's goals. But there is no requirement that they have any special expertise or reputation in the humanities, social sciences, or arts.

Against SSHRC's advice, the legislation says council members will be paid for the meetings they attend, which raises the interesting possibility that our present government regards this council as an instrument of political patronage. The likelihood that, before the next election, this council will become a dumping ground for superannuated party bagmen and belly scratchers is increased by the fact that Bill C-93 makes no provision for parliamentary oversight or approval of council appointments.

There is nothing, then, to prevent the government from stacking the council (as the Reagan and Bush administrations did in a quite scandalous manner with the advisory council of the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities) with people whose opinions—or rather prejudices—on cultural matters happen to coincide with its own.

In addition, according to senior Ottawa sources, the social sciences and the humanities will be represented by only six members of the 21-member council. (Six other members will represent the arts, three or four more will represent the domain of international relations—a constituency consisting, one presumes, of scholars and artists who particularly enjoy foreign travel—and the remaining five or six members will represent “the public.”)

The prospect of a council where only 12 of 21 members are to be representatives—and not necessarily distinguished ones—of the productive areas the council serves in the arts, humanities and social sciences is not encouraging.

One last point. Bill C-93 says the new council is to “foster, promote, sponsor and assist the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts” and “to promote, sponsor and assist research and scholarship in the social sciences and humanities.” Omission of the word “foster” in that second clause is presumably one sign (there have been others) that the federal government intends to withdraw support from doctoral fellowship programs.

The government is pushing its merger legislation through in the face of vehement opposition from the Social Sciences Federation of Canada, the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and many scholarly associations that are members of these umbrella groups. This legislation is both ill-conceived and unnecessary. The government's determination to pass it in the current session of Parliament is one more expression of its contempt for the research functions of our university system.

Prof. Michael Keefer, English
President, Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English

Cheap shots

First published in The Globe and Mail (9 June 1992): A16, among the Letters to the Editor.

Cheap shots by Michael Keefer

Anyone who's wondered what goes on at the Royal Ontario Museum's Institute of Contemporary Culture now has at least a partial answer. For the institute's head, Grant McCracken, writes in a manner that suggests at best a slender acquaintance with reasoned, let alone polite, discourse (“Canada's Half-pint Education System”—May 28). It appears that he descended recently from his eyrie among the stuffed egrets and burrowing owls of the ROM to speak at Queen's University. There, after delivering what he himself describes as a “bad-tempered” address, Mr. McCracken was “flattered with compliments” and engaged by “the chairman of the proceedings and several people from the audience” in a convivial discussion at the graduate students' lounge.

He now rewards his hosts by denouncing the “sheer vacuity” of an audience “hooded by political correctness,” and by suggesting that Canadian undergraduate education “is in the hands of pointy-headed scoundrels who have forgotten or never knew the power of an idea.” May I translate? Rightly or wrongly, Mr. McCracken's audience thought his talk was silly; he is now revenging himself, with the help of Canada's national newspaper, on our entire university system.

Let me concede one point: the university where Mr. McCracken learned how to marshall evidence and construct an argument may indeed have something to answer for. But the women and men who are struggling to maintain the quality of higher education in this country deserve something better than his cheap shots. Is it too much to hope that The Globe and Mail may yet publish a lucid analysis of the present crisis of college and university underfunding? Can we get beyond name-calling? Or are the swivel-tailed jackdaws, the 63-cents-to-a-loony fork-benders whose dreary vituperations have echoed through the columns of this newspaper as a poor substitute for commentary on higher education going to continue to have things all their own way?

Michael Keefer
President, Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English
Guelph, Ont.

Ray Conlogue's Apocalyptic Reveries

This letter, sent to The Globe and Mail on June 12, 1991 in response to an article defaming university teachers of English, was not published: newspapers which would hesitate to print similar comments about other professions evidently feel that academics are fair game.

Ray Conlogue's Apocalyptic Reveries by Michael Keefer

The Editor, 
The Globe and Mail. June 12, 1991.

One hesitates to intrude upon the apocalyptic reveries of Ray Conlogue (“Cross Current,” June 11, 1991): it would be unkind to spoil the pleasure he evidently takes in posturing as a defender of Shakespeare against a new breed of academic Philistines. But only in his imagination are English professors, whom he seems to have trouble distinguishing from Red Guards, engaged in smashing up the monuments of our culture.

As a Renaissance scholar and a teacher of Shakespeare, I honour Mr. Conlogue's love of literature—but not his more obvious fondness for academic gossip, threadbare anecdotes, and cheap gestures of contempt. Samson laid about him with the jawbone of an ass; Conlogue prefers to brandish that of Claude Rawson, whose abusive article in a recent issue of the London Review of Books appears to be his principal source of information about contemporary academic life. Mr. Conlogue also has a friend who is a graduate student in English: rejecting her view of art and culture as “a site of contestation” in favour of a more urbane comparison to “a conversation among related people,” he promptly spoils the gesture by denouncing Jacques Derrida, the philosopher and literary theorist, as “a reactionary intellectual fraud.”

That may be the way some of us talk to our relatives. But one can only regret the intrusion of such language into what ought to be a reasoned debate over the role of the universities in transmitting a heightened awareness both of our cultural traditions and of the liberating potential of contemporary cultural and interpretive practices.

English studies have been revitalized during the past fifteen years by the work of feminist, poststructuralist, new historicist, and cultural materialist scholars. In my experience, and that of many of my colleagues, this work has made us more responsive to the needs of our students, more sensitive to the interactions between literary texts and the social contexts within which they are produced and interpreted, and more alert to the ethical implications of our teaching. It has also given new energy—I speak again from experience—to such traditional areas of literary scholarship as textual editing and the close reading of texts.

There have been and will continue to be lively debates among the exponents of different modes of literary interpretation. Students of literature are exposed to a wide variety of approaches by teachers who, whatever their methodological differences, share a commitment to the inculcation of independent critical thinking. The notion that university classrooms and lecture-halls have been “hijacked” for political ends is thus both malicious and absurd. Equally fatuous, as a glance at the course offerings of any North American university will show, is the claim that the literary classics have been dumped from the curriculum.

Only in ill-informed or ill-disposed minds could the rich diversity of new voices that is now evident in literary studies take on the nightmare shape of a monolithic, anti-democratic wave of “political correctness.”

Michael H. Keefer
University of Guelph
Vice-President and President-Elect, Association of Canadian University Teachers of English