Canadian author David Gilmour is taking a lot of shit right now for comments he made here. The gist of it (most often misconstrued, intentionally I suspect) is Gilmour only teaches books by men. Most often American men. He won't teach books by women or Chinese people. The (completely unsurprising) reaction is claims Gilmour is sexist, rascist, homophobic, and an all-round asshole.
I disagree. We could go through the points in detail - for example the reason he doesn't teach Virginia Woolf isn't because he is a misogynist but because she is too sophisticated for his students (first and third year). The quote he is really getting heat about is, "Usually at the beginning of the semesters a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren't any women writers in the course. I say I don't love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall." To me this quote says a number of things - David Gilmour doesn't love women writers and, significantly, there is a course (offered just down the hall) that either has a large number of women writers in the syllabus or is explicitly about women writers. What is does not say is women writers are shit. Only that David Gilmour doesn't love any of them except Virginia Woolf. I don't love Virginia Woolf. If you read the whole interview you will also see he is not saying Canadian authors are shit - only that he doesn't love any of them enough to teach them. I do. I don't love David Gilmour enough to teach him but I suspect that he has absolutely no fucks to give about that.
There is a reason professors cannot be told what to teach - so they do not get embroiled in bullshit identity politics / political correctness shit fights like this. You want David Gilmour to teach something by a gay Chinese woman? Why? Would the quality of his teaching improve? Of course not. The issue is not what David Gilmour teaches but what authors he loves.
Here is the complete list of all the authors he loves enough to mention in the short interview: Proust, Tolstoy, Chekov, Woolf, Elmore Leonard, Scott Fitzgerald, Philip Roth, Henry Miller. Gee, no wonder everyone wants this guy away from impressionable youth!
There is another way to look at the problem. As far as I know, Gilmour isn't teaching a survey course nor a "Modern Literature 1850 -2000" kind of course. He has no obligation to offer a thorough view of literature in any part of the world at any time. He is teaching what he wants to teach - which, as I have written previously, is the best way for professors to teach.
When I was given the opportunity to teach a Cultural History class at the University of Waterloo I had to think of twelve novels for my curriculum. This is amazingly difficult. I started off with a list of about one hundred serious contenders. I whittled down from there by comparison (1 is similar thematically to 2 but 2 has something extra, more compelling, whatever). In many cases that "whatever" was fewer pages - the curriculum demanded the students read a book each week. And that's fine for an English program but this class was for a design school. So I limited myself to three books of more than 300 pages. Certain authors absolutely had to be represented - Michael Ondaatje, Don DeLillo, Haruki Murakami, Primo Levi. Five remaining. I wanted to introduce the course with an experimental short story - John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse. Four remaining. One graphic novel. Three remaining. Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red would have made the list if it was half the size so two remaining. They were on a field trip for 5 days during which they were supposed to also read a book, toss in an easy to read piece of "trash". One remaining. I don't know, or care, if any of the authors I taught was or is gay. Some are Canadian, some are American, Murakami is Japanese. As for the rest, I don't know. Nor do I care. That isn't why I chose them.
I had a chance to force one group of students to read a very small number of books and I wanted the ones that meant the most to me.
I honestly don't know why this interview is getting so many people so mad. I think it has more to do with the massive demographic dominance of straight white guys in academia than David Gilmour. He will probably lose his job for this and that isn't a terrible thing as far as this one situation goes - U of T without David Gilmour isn't very much different than U of T with. It is a terrible thing is professors start writing syllabi with a checklist beside them - "Gay", "Canadian", "First Nations", "Female (x4)", and so on.
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