Still teaching
Today marks the beginning of my 22nd year teaching at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. I still pinch myself that I landed this marvellous gig. Nowadays I am the most senior person in the department in terms of both age and in the number of years “on campus.” The fine folk who hired and then mentored me have retired and gone off to various happy adventures.
In early 2003 my business – Basil Communications Inc. – was not bringing in a lot of dough. My main clients were still recovering from the economic fall-out after 9-11 in the investment community. (Traditionally communications are the first expenses to be cut in hard times.) I was running on fumes. It was hard to think.
A friend gave me some money to make sure I made it through that spring. The instant I deposited the money, my mind cleared, and I went home and applied for jobs at three local universities. Kwantlen set up an interview. It was gruelling but I thought I did well. After a couple of weeks went by without me hearing anything, though, I guessed that I hadn’t gotten the position; I know I shed a tear or two the night I accepted that.
Just as I walked into my Scotia Tower office the next day, my late friend John Fraser asked me whether I’d been hired. As I was telling him I hadn’t been, the phone rang at the front desk. The receptionist said the call was for me. The job, it turned out, was mine.
I still think, thankfully, of those tears that fell the night before I received this news. I’ve never forgotten how much I wanted this job teaching undergraduate students. I’ve also never forgotten that it was a friend’s generosity that cleared my head.
The fellow on the phone that day mentored me through my first several years at Kwantlen. We ended up coauthoring a textbook together.
Apropos
My colleagues and I at The Spectrum – the University at Buffalo’s student newspaper – published a special issue in May 1979 to commemorate the demonstrations and police presence that took over the university at the beginning of that decade. We republished this searing editorial, written by Linda Hanley, from February 1970:
Easter on TransLink
On my way out to Surrey on the Skytrain to share sushi with friends yesterday, I saw a fellow furtively smoking heroin off of foil with a straw. To keep from staring I moved to another part of the train. The train was filled with sunshine.
On the final leg of the trip back home to Vancouver, on the shuttle bus, a tiny young Latina woman got on holding a splendid ukulele, then was strumming very quietly and tentatively. She was seated right behind me. After a while, I turned around and told her how nice her instrument sounded. She said she was trying to learn a song, then sang it in Spanish in a very quiet voice to the six or seven people left on the bus; the guy in the seat behind her knew the song and hummed in harmony. It was really beautiful. I told her she had a lovely voice and put my hand over my heart. It was my stop. She insisted on shaking my hand before I went out the door.
What a great Easter I had.
Always seems bright on Palm Sunday
“Go to the village ahead of you, and as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there, which no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ say, ‘The Lord needs it.’ ”
Vancouver West End, Comox Street
My favourite Trotskyist website …
… has changed its homepage design.
I always learn a lot from these people.
Happy birthday, Mom
Maureen Basil was a generous and unfailingly honest woman whose words resound in my mind every day.
She’s still in diapers!
A post from basil.CA’s third year:
27 February 04: On Tuesdays and Fridays I have a long commute from the West End of Vancouver to the pastoral town of Langley, where I teach university part-time. I pick up my first bus at 5:42AM, switch to the Skytrain downtown, then zip off to Langley from the Surrey Station in a bus that’s getting less and less quiet. With the sun rising earlier, I’m enjoying the trip more, listening in to conversations. Tuesday:
“My son said ‘motherfucker’ yesterday. He’s three years old! Monique told me I should put hot sauce on his tongue every time he swears.”
“Won’t work,” said a cherubic toughie whose lips held an unlit cigarette for the entire trip. “I tried it once, and the next day I came into the kitchen and my little girl was drinking hot sauce from the fucking bottle. It’s beyond hope. Last week we’re in the car and we hear a siren, and she goes, ‘Shit! Cops!’ She’s still in diapers!”
Catching up with Thanos
Your favorite editor standing by his university‘s Entertainment Arts hallway, on the Richmond campus.
Certain Days …
And apropos:
I admire and have supported this project for many years, as many dear friends who have found the calendar in their Christmas stockings know:
The Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar collective will be releasing our 24th calendar this coming autumn. We are doing an open call for abolition-related art and article submissions to feature in the calendar, which hangs in more than 6,000 homes, workplaces, prison cells, and community spaces around the world. We encourage contributors to submit both new and existing work. We especially seek submissions from people in prison or jail, so please forward this call to any prison-based artists and writers. Deadline: Friday, May 31, 2024. Send your submissions and brief bio by May 31 to info@certaindays.org.
Crossing the Fraser River in the early morning
There is almost nothing I love more than taking the Amtrak Cascades train south and across the border. Coming back up north, to Vancouver, comes close, though.
A complex feeling stretched over time
I’ve been a truly fervent fan of Stanford University’s women’s basketball team since the early-mid 1990s, during my second span of time at that school. A former student of mine helped manage the team, and she gave me floor tickets to some of the home games. That was it for me – I was a lifer.
Last night the coach of that Stanford team, the great Tara VanDerveer, won her 1203rd college game (in front of the home crowd) – more than any other college basketball coach, man or woman, surpassing Coach Mike Krzyzewski of Duke. In front of the crowd after the win, she said,
I want to bring attention to the wonderfulness of these players that work so hard and I’m so jealous because I never got to do what they get to do, but I’m able to watch a little girl’s dream play out through them. I’d be outside shooting by myself and thinking about what it could be like to play in front of a full arena and have a great game like this, but I never got to do it. But I’ve got the best seat in the house and I love it. [h/t Michelle Smith (McDonald)]
Bittersweet.
“A big swing, and it works.”
My friend Kristi Coulter‘s second book, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career, gets some love in this week’s New Yorker. Anna Wiener writes,
The jacket copy for “Exit Interview” describes it as “an intimate, surprisingly relatable” story of “a driven woman in a world that loves the idea of female ambition but balks at the reality.” True enough, and Coulter is particularly attuned to sexism in the workplace, including the way women can internalize corporate logic: when she learns, from an exposé in the ‘Times,’ that a colleague was put on probation after having a stillbirth, Coulter finds herself wondering if there was more to the story. “Well, how long post-stillbirth was she off her game? Are we talking three weeks, or three months?” she thinks. When it comes to her own experiences of sexism, she doesn’t spin off into polemics, or belabor the point. For the most part, the microaggressions—and macroaggressions—speak for themselves. …
The book is mostly written in the present tense, adding momentum to workplace conversations about “the checkout pipeline in China,” or the appropriate Web copy for a DVD promotion. One chapter, loosely structured as a travel itinerary, is written in the second person: “Bienvenue à Amazon France, and prepare to be barely tolerated!” Footnotes are sprinkled throughout, adding meta-commentary: “The Leadership Principles are basically Amazon Commandments . . . in the middle of the night I once told my dawdling puppy to show some Bias for Action and pee already so we could go back to bed.” These notes are unobtrusive and clever, but they are also strange: isn’t memoir already a form of meta-commentary? In the final pages, the writing gets cinematic and a little experimental, as Coulter entertains a fantasy while on a run. A big swing, and it works.
I am thrilled by Kristi’s success. I don’t know a better writer.
The work international students must do in B.C.
Several years ago my late Kwantlen colleague Arley McNeney organized a class project in which her students presented research on the challenges international students at our school face. I was embarrassed when I read their report; I had been so clueless, about so much, regarding the lives of my own students. I was particularly alarmed by the report’s findings illustrating how many international students faced continual food insecurity. There were additional widespread problems these students face, including precarious living situations (usually far away from a KPU campus) and abusive work environments.
This week The Tyee published what can be read as an update of the report prepared by Arley’s class: “Cash Cows and Cheap Labour: The Plight of International Students.” One disquieting theme: Students recruited internationally were shocked by how many hours they needed to work outside of school simply to survive in Canada. One study surveyed
1,300 international students at Langara and the College of New Caledonia in Prince George. They found the vast majority of students were working, and many were struggling. Only 28 per cent of surveyed Langara students said they had enough cash to meet their basic needs.
In theory, international students need to show they have the financial means to support themselves for one year in Canada. Since the early 2000s, that figure has been set at tuition, travel costs and $10,000 in cash. The federal government has recently announced that figure will double to $20,635.
But McCartney said the government likely knew for years that the $10,000 threshold was far too little to make ends meet, especially in cities like Vancouver, where the cost of a vacant rental unit stood at $2,373 a month as of last year.
The result was that students, either by plan or by necessity, found jobs. …
“At the end of the day, I think that we all believe students shouldn’t have to work 40 hours a week to pay for their rent, their groceries, their food. I wish that was the reality,” Chirino said. “But when you look at their fees and how much they have to pay, that simply isn’t feasible.”
At least 90% of my international students have jobs, very often more than one job. But it is not rare for me to hear growling stomachs in the classroom.
A couple of weeks ago, our university president, Alan Davis, wrote an open letter to the university community on this topic:
We have done significant work to improve the experience for international students in the past few years, but we also heard what you said [in a recent large survey] and there is more to do….
This won’t be an easy road. The federal and provincial governments are taking a close look at international education and some of the changes they are making or might propose could have a significant impact on KPU. While we’ve been gradually increasing the diversity of our international student population and we’ve seen a softening of international enrolment, the emerging external factors provide additional complexity in forecasting future trends.
Our annual student satisfaction survey repeatedly shows a higher proportion of our international students have more positive views of KPU than domestic students across several important metrics, including supporting student success and feeling part of the community. We have some strong foundations, but we will build on them in a careful and considerate way.
Toby Cleary and the insurance company
“B.C. man battling Stage 4 cancer denied insurance coverage for last-hope clinical trials: Maple Ridge’s Toby Cleary was denied insurance for ‘last hope’ clinical trial because he forgot to disclose an ER visit nearly two years before his diagnosis.”
This is from a front page story in today’s Vancouver Sun (by Sarah Grochowski, photo by Ashliey Wells). The Vancouver Province also ran the story.
Toby and his wife Danielle Raymond are friends of mine. I admire them both very much.
Nashville holiday
My partner and I just spent a truly lovely long weekend in Nashville with my son, daughter-in-law, and two grandsons. I will feel the glow from this visit for a long time.
“Unlimited Growth Increases the Divide”
Somehow I had never really looked at this building before. It’s the only old building left on that block, Hamilton Street in downtown Vancouver. The text installation is by Kathryn Walter, 1990.
American Thanksgiving …
… will always be my favourite holiday, even in Canada. There has always been an emotional weight, almost religious in nature, to the day, and even when I spend it mostly in solitary reflection just walking around, it is also festive.
“The B+ Squad”
Lux Alptraum‘s Substack blog by that name is my *other* favourite place in the Substack universe right now. Since September 2022 Lux has written approximately one stand-alone post *a day* – without ever really repeating herself. This is of course not possible, but there you go – she does it. Her topic is “the modern bisexual.” Her themes reach into an ever-unfurling array of cultural topics without once stretching. She’s brilliant and hilarious. She’s taken my breath away, many times.
Her Twitter feed is also always edifying, these days taking a less buoyant but nonetheless to-me wise tone while discussing ways of regarding the Israel-Hamas war.
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