CAUT | ACPPU
Association canadienne des professeures et professeurs d'université
Enjeux et campagnes
Vingt ans depuis le 6 décembre : 1989 sous la perspective de l’immédiateté et de la distance
Pour souligner le 20e anniversaire du massacre de Montréal, Brenda Austin-Smith, présidente sortante de l’association du personnel académique de l’Université du Manitoba (UMFA), a présenté l’exposé ci-après aux délégués présents à l’assemblée du Conseil de l’ACPPU le 27 novembre 2009.
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When I was asked to give a talk on the topic of December 6th for this meeting of CAUT Council, I thought somehow that it would be easier. I thought of how much in the post-secondary sector has changed since 1989, and of the visible gains women have made in participation and graduation rates, as well as in entry into the ranks of tenured faculty.
But preparing something to say to you that could somehow strike a balance between considering the positive changes for women in our sector and acknowledging the painful resonances of that December confronted me with one of the more difficult writing tasks I’ve had in quite a while. Trying to combine my sense of the distance we’ve travelled since that winter, and my experience of the unwanted intimacy of its still-potent emotional reverberations seemed impossible. Reading about, thinking about, and remembering December 6, 1989 twenty years later has been a significant undertaking for me. Surrounded as I have been by information on the changing demographics of the university population, and the consistently upward trend in the numbers of women in post-secondary professional education, the more I have been reminded of the connections between women, education, and violence, connections which we are sometimes quick to indentify in places other than in our own country.
My solution to the problem of presenting on this topic then, is to make the difficulty of reconciling these two stories—one of positive change, though qualified by persistent challenges, and the other about remembering the losses of that December day—part of the fabric of this talk by moving back and forth between them. As awkward as these transitions between past and present may be, I think there is value in my inability to make these elements fit together smoothly, a value that comes perhaps, in preserving the shock of juxtaposition rather than attempting to incorporate a memorialization of gendered mass murder into a soothing academic talk.
In an article published in 2003 in the journal Feminist Theory entitled “Neither Forgotten Nor Fully Remembered,” Sharon Rosenberg studies what she terms the “strategic memorial practices” associated with the observation of the tenth anniversary of the Montreal Engineering School murders. One of the memorial practices Rosenberg identified as a legacy of the killings was the mobilization of efforts to recruit and retain women in Engineering programmes as a gesture toward a future “redeemed” from the violence. On the 20th anniversary of Poly, it is with that legacy that I will begin, before moving from the details of numbers and participation rates to engage with broader areas that deserve to be our shared concern as academics.
By 1989 the trend toward increased enrolment of women in undergraduate and graduate programs in Canada was well underway, fuelled in part by the state-funded expansion of the university system in the 1960s, and by policy actions focused on the equalizing function of higher education that encouraged making colleges and universities more accessible to previously underrepresented groups, including women. In a review paper produced in 1989 for the Council of Ministers of Education entitled “Accessibility to Post-Secondary Education in Canada: A Review of Trends and Current Issues,” Dr. Paul Anisef, a professor of Sociology at York University, remarks in view of this history of expansion that women’s access “has increased substantially,” and notes that “tremendous strides” have been made in reducing the “gender imbalance” in several professional programs such as Law, Medicine, and Pharmacy (5).
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The radio made it seem so close. I was a grad student with a grubby apartment and no television, so a friend and I sat for hours listening to the radio that night as the initial fragments of information multiplied, and then coalesced into a message whose headline repetition every few minutes seemed strangely to add to the horror. There had been a mass shooting of women on a Montreal campus. Fourteen women, twelve Engineering students, one Nursing student, and a member of support staff, had been shot and killed by a man who had singled them out because they were, he said, feminists, and he hated feminists. He separated the women from the men in the first classroom he entered—there were fewer than ten women in that class, along with fifty men—and opened fire, killing six of them. It didn’t matter that some of the women he pointed the gun at in the classroom and in the hallways cried out that they weren’t actually feminists at all, just women studying to improve their lives. “You’re women,” he said, “You’re going to be engineers.” For the killer, these students were women out of place. Their presence in those buildings, in programs conventionally associated with a male-dominated profession, was enough to make them targets for his misogynist rage.
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One year after the Polytechnique, Claudette Mackay-Lassonde, then-President of the Professional Engineers of Ontario, spear-headed efforts to establish a foundation to encourage and support women studying Engineering in Canada at the undergraduate and graduate levels, in memory of the 14 women killed in Montreal. The Canadian Engineering Memorial Foundation was incorporated in 1990 and continues its efforts to attract women to the profession today.
As part of its activities, in 2003 the CEMF conducted a qualitative study of the attitudes of 187 undergraduates—some enrolled in Engineering and some not— toward Engineering as a program of study and as a career for women. When asked to list “What are the challenges facing women working in Engineering?” most of the students gave the same three answers. The first response of 33% of the women participants and 52.3% of the men was that Engineering was a male-dominated environment. The second most frequent response from both men and women was that it was a sexist and/or discriminatory environment, and the third most frequent response from both male and female students was that there was a stigma that women do not make good engineers. The students were also asked if they were aware of the CEMF scholarships for study in Engineering. A large majority of them replied “no,” including almost 90% of the women enrolled in Engineering. The study concluded that although these results were not scientific but rather presented as a snapshot of perceptions among undergraduates, they nevertheless indicated that women needed more information about Engineering earlier on in their educational formation in order to make it a more likely career path. The study did not address how or if early exposure to information on Engineering would be likely to affect any of the perceived barriers to women identified by the students, particularly on the part of students already enrolled in Engineering programs.
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Later that evening I received phone calls from friends and family needing to connect and share our collective shock. I remember that we really had nothing to say to each other that night; we sat in silence at either end of the phone, each of us able to hear over the line the news the other was listening to in a faraway kitchen or living room. One person called to suggest that I not go to campus the next morning. “Why not?” I said at first, before being reminded that I was teaching Women’s Studies at the time, and that the huge poster on the window next to my office door proclaiming women’s rights could attract backlash. I hadn’t thought of this. For some reason, even though the killer’s anti-feminist motives were making their way into the news cycle, I had not yet begun to process any of the implications of his act. I did go to the university the next day, but remember feeling exposed and vulnerable in a way I had not ever felt before as I turned the key in my office door. I moved across campus differently, much more aware of my surroundings, and of those who passed me, than ever before. The events in Montreal seemed closer still. I don’t remember teaching any classes afterwards—I think it was the end of term, for which I was grateful, though I did meet with students at the vigils set up on campus and at the provincial legislature building shortly thereafter. But even when term began again in January I was still jumpy, as were my students, super-conscious of noises in the hallway, eyeing the classroom for potential escape routes and hiding places.
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Most of us are at least anecdotally aware of the changes in gendered enrollment on our campuses, but a look back at the first CAUT Almanac, published in 2002 but based on 1998-1999 Stats Canada figures, provides a detailed record of these shifts which allows us to zoom in on how women are doing in the areas of Engineering and Applied Science specifically. In 1998-1999, there were about 573,000 full-time students enrolled at Canadian universities, and the majority of these—55% in fact, were women. 50, 314 of these students were enrolled in Engineering and Applied Sciences, traditionally male-dominated disciplines. The 2002 Almanac doesn’t tell us how many of those students were men or women, but it does tell us that of over 9,000 undergraduate degrees in these areas awarded that year, 21.2% went to women. Women earned fewer degrees in Engineering and related applied fields than in any other discipline except Math/Physical Sciences. Of the Masters degrees awarded that year, 2,182 were given to students in Engineering and Applied Sciences, and of these 24% went to women. And again, women earned fewer Master’s degrees in Engineering than in any other area, with Math and the Physical Sciences coming in second. That same year there were 2,440 full-time faculty members in Engineering across the country, but only 9% were women, the smallest number of full-time female faculty in any of the reported disciplines that year.
While ten years after the Montreal attacks, men still outnumbered women in this area, female students outnumbered male students in almost every other university discipline. For example, of the almost 125,000 recipients of undergraduate degrees that year, 58.9% of them were women. The same was true of graduate degrees awarded in 1998-1999. Of the 22,000 Masters students receiving their degrees that year, over 52% were women. Still working with 1998-99 data, it is not until post-graduate studies that the balance tilts sharply. Of the nearly 4,000 students who received their Phds that year 36.1% were women. But in Engineering and Applied Sciences, only 11% were earned by women, a much more dramatic imbalance.
Since 1980, according to some sources, participation rates in post-secondary education for women have doubled. Again, the most recent CAUT Almanac gives us some much-appreciated details about this phenomenon. In the “Highlights” area of the section on “Students,” we find that full-time university enrollments have increased from 573,000 in 1997-98 to 788,000 in 2006-07. And of these students, women accounted for the majority enrolled at both the Bachelor’s (58%) and Master’s levels (54%), and for 46% of Phds. When we look for more information on the presence of women in Architecture, Engineering, and Related Technologies, we see that women made up 20% of those enrolled in the discipline. Not knowing how many women were enrolled in Engineering ten years earlier makes it difficult to say something definitive about a trend here, but we can compare the number of degrees in the area earned by women in 1998-99 and in 2006-07. And when we do, we see that in comparison to the 21.2% of bachelor degrees in Engineering awarded to women in 1998-99, not much has changed eight years later, with 22.2% of bachelor degrees in Engineering awarded to women in 2006-07. But there is considerable improvement in the percentages of women enrolling in graduate and post-graduate studies in Engineering, with 28% of Masters degrees going to women, and 16% of Phds in Engineering going to women. There is also real change in the representation of women in the ranks of those who stand at the front of the class: while in 2006-07 9% of full-time faculty teaching Architecture, Engineering, and Related Technologies in Canada were women, by 2006-07 that percentage had risen to 14%, a figure gradually approaching the percentage of undergraduate women enrolling in that area.
It is impossible to anticipate all of the occupational, social, and political changes that may flow from this story of an increased female presence on our campuses, and from their contributions to the careers their studies engender in the most literal sense of that word. With that pun in mind, I can’t help but quote from a story published in February 2007 in the Ottawa Citizen on exactly this topic, while noting the word choices that characterize the increased presence of women in university programs as an “experiment,” and as an element of “girl power.” I wonder, for example, if anyone might think of calling the previous several decades of women’s exclusion from, or under-representation in, higher education an experiment in boy power. In any case, here is the extended quotation in full:
People get ready, there's a change a-coming. An extraordinary experiment is brewing at university and college campuses across Canada. Girl power has seized the day, setting the stage for a seismic shift in hospitals and clinics, legal practices, corporate headquarters and academia, changes that will reshape the way the country works in the generations to come, determine who earns what, even who has children and how many.
Women make up more than 60 per cent of university students across this country. More women than men are training to be doctors, dentists, lawyers, pharmacists, and scientists. The trend is most pronounced in Quebec, where the high-school dropout rate for boys is higher. Think of it this way: Within the next 10 to 15 years, by the time the last gasp of baby boomers is ready to retire, nearly every profession will be overwhelmingly female.
Already, more than half of Canada's doctors and dentists are women. Given the current trend, odds are by 2015, your pediatrician, investment broker, family veterinarian, divorce lawyer and therapist will be a woman but your computer technician, housing contractor, electrical engineer, orthopedic surgeon and member of Parliament will still, most likely, be a man. At McGill, 60 per cent of medical students are women. Females also hold down most of the spots in architecture, law, dentistry, environmental science, and management.
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Many of us can still remember, as I can, where they were and what they were doing when that news broke. And while family and friends of the murdered women, and of those others wounded on that day, still bear the most terrible burden of us all, the Polytechnique killings shaped a generation of academics, most notably women, in its alteration of the world we learned in, taught in, and thought we knew so well. I was a certain kind of grad student in 1989, active in feminist, pro-choice, and student union movements. The energy and achievement associated with those commitments had been accompanied by the experience of entrenched political opposition to the causes I struggled for. I was prepared for debate, disappointed, but resigned to the reality of dismissal, insult, and name-calling. But nothing prepared me for the possibility of being shot to death on campus because I was a feminist. The realization that it could have been me, could have been my class, changed me utterly, and continues to affect the way I experience both the physical and the psychological space of academia.
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Later in her article on how we memorialize December 6, Sharon Rosenberg refers to the social “ruptures” occasioned by the murders. One of these, she writes, “was the rupture of what was expected and anticipated for women attending an institution of higher learning in late 20th century North America; that is, that they (we) were (are) safe, welcome and therefore could attend classes without the threat of death” (13). I certainly experienced the killings this way, as a rupture of the bubble that had encased me in my privilege, but that had also shielded me from the recognition of how intimately violence and education is woven together in the lives of women all over the world, no matter how distant their situations might seem from my own. Looking back twenty years to December 6, 1989 means acknowledging a singular event, an act of violence with its own incomparable shape and never fully measured effects. But looking back for me, now, using the broad and international lens of women and education, of which women’s increased presence on Canadian campuses is one part, enlarges rather than diminishes the meanings of that day, and more crucially, the meaning of remembering it. Women in many countries have sought escape from oppression and violence, poverty and hardship, through education, and many of them have been confronted by violence as they tried to change their lives through learning. The research of Jenny Horsman with women adult literacy learners in Canada, the UK and Sierra Leone in books such as Too Scared to Learn provides one example of these struggles in the voices of those who live those struggles daily. And of course, we need only be attentive to the news in order to become aware of how often the learning efforts of girls and women are challenged and thwarted by violence, both the violence of intimate partners, family members, teaching staff, classmates, and the more distant violence of political and state actors. Ms. Magazine reported online earlier this very month that another girls’ school was bombed in Peshawer, Pakistan, one of approximately 130 primarily girls’ schools destroyed in Pakistan in the last year. CARE and Amnesty International have also documented school-based physical and sexual assaults on girls and women in countries in North American and elsewhere. CARE reports over 1,000 instances of education-related attacks or threats in Afghanistan. According to that agency, though only 20% of Afghanistan’s schools are for girls, they have suffered 40% of the attacks in the last twelve months. Plan International’s campaign “Because I Am a Girl” reports that 20 million girls worldwide never go to school, or quit because of the violence they encounter there. As the recent CLC postcard “A Chance to Learn,” part of the “20 Days, 20 Ways to End Violence Against Women” campaign, says, women need “publicly-funded education to achieve independence—and the security it brings.” Our member association efforts, and CAUT’s activities, to keep education public and accessible is part of that campaign, and one of the many ways we can best remember December 6.
Sharon Rosenberg’s article is a complex one that argues for significant changes in the ways in which the Polytechnique deaths are memorialized, calling for an end to “emblematization,” by which she means the tendency to frame the Montreal Massacre as an emblem or example of male violence against women that forces men and women into unsupportable positions of either symbolic victim or symbolic assailant, something that divides those who could and should work together, from each other. Rosenberg writes instead about how else we could begin to remember December 6 in a way that would allow us to address, in her words, “the relation between memorializing and activism, grieving and change.” Our memorial practices, writes Rosenberg, “cannot fully contain or console the loss of the women murdered,” and neither can they repair the break in the contract that we, women, thought we had with the world of education. Nor should we expect memory alone to mend these breaches, or make up for these losses. More is called for than that. We need action to make education available and safe for all girls and women, and this December is a fitting time for us to renew our commitment to this goal. I know that I am more open to that suggested connection between mourning and action now, twenty years after December 1989, than I have ever been before. I hope you are too. Thank you for listening.
Works Cited
Anisef, Paul. “Accessibility to Post-Secondary Education in Canada: A Review of Trends and Current Issues.” Report prepared for the Council of Ministers of Education, 1989. On-line.
“Girl Power has seized the day at university and college campuses.” Ottawa Citizen, February 4, 2007.
Rosenberg, Sharon. “Neither Forgotten nor Fully Remembered: Tracing an ambivalent public memory on the 10th anniversary of the Montréal massacre.” Feminist Theory 4.1 (2003): 5-27.
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