Never Say You're Sorry

Yes you are.

Recap 

My story about The Hearsay started a month ago, so a recap may be in order. If you would rather cut to the chase, you can skip these paragraphs and start reading below.

In late 1992, after the roaring success of the DisOrientation Guide and ReferENDum issues of The Hearsay, U of T Law's student-run humour magazine, my co-editors and I opted to close the first term of the school year with an issue dedicated to jokes about sex. As editors, we had the power to exclude any submissions that crossed the line. Nothing, we were certain, could go wrong. 

Of course something did go wrong. The randomly-selected sponsoring firm Fasken Campbell Godfrey felt we had published the issue just to make fun of them and their recent internal review of their allegedly sexist hiring and promotion practices.

Two days after we released the issue, I received a call from the dean of the law school who wanted to talk with me on Friday. A friend at Fasken Campbell Godfrey told me of two full days of hysteria at the firm. She said a senior partner, and the President of the Law Society, would be riding shotgun with the dean at the Friday meeting.

So What Happened? 

On Friday, before the meeting with the dean and who knows who else, I met with my fellow editors to discuss strategy. I would do the talking, as both the Hearsay's senior editor and its feminist shield. We weren't going to say anything about the situation at the firm that had brought this firestorm down upon us. I said, "we didn't know about it when we put the issue together. It won't hurt our protestations of innocence if we make no mention of it now."

So, armed with what is by now to everyone the very familiar defence of "deny, deny, deny" we walked into the fray of the dean's office, where he sat, at his desk, all alone. This is how I described the meeting to the Jewinskis:

The dean also disavowed any knowledge of the political situation at the firm and said only that, to the eyes of the privileged white male in his early fifties (the senior partner), our issue looked sexist, female-objectifying and the stuff of engineering newsletters. The firm, said the senior partner, did not want its name associated with such stuff.

I imagine the review of sexist policies at the firm had raised the consciousness of the senior partner, so he saw our little rag with freshly woke eyes. Just our luck.

We told the dean, in our not-a-defence-because-we-did-nothing-wrong that no one at the law school had taken offence at the issue and that -- contrary to the claims we made in our letters asking for sponsorship dollars -- no one ever noticed who the sponsoring firm was, nor imagined that the firm had anything to do with the publication. So the law firm could rest easy that a student publication with a circulation of 350 (that's both readers and square metres) could not sully the reputation of a 300-lawyer firm that billed two hundred million dollars a year.

That satisfied the dean. He offered to set up a meeting for us with the senior partner. We accepted his offer, but the senior partner did not. I never got the chance to not apologize to his face. Instead, I wrote him a nice letter expressing my regrets for any misunderstanding and my heartfelt hope that Fasken Campbell Godfrey would see its way clear to sponsoring The Hearsay again.

Some of my covers: the giant bat on the cover at the lower right was originally drawn perched on the head of the statue of Bora Laskin. A staff advisor - who seems to have disappeared by my third year - suggested we do something else.

Now I expect you'd all like to read a story about day drinking.

For that, and more, stay tuned.

Thanks for reading!

A federal carbon price is constitutional!

Karen

Patios are open - for now.

 

J'Accuse

 

Centre spread by Michael Piaskoski - the Hearsay Sex Issue 

Before I continue the tale of the small student publication and the giant downtown law firm, I thought I'd mention that a reader of this blog told me that she thought the whole idea of a sex-themed student humour magazine was utterly irredeemable. Talking about sex in the workplace is a form of sexual harassment.

She's right. 

But, in 1992, just to prove we had a ways to go, while I was uncomfortable with the concept, it also had the allure of the taboo. As I told the Jewinskis: "I am, by most accounts, a fairly nice person, with only a few, very small, evil bones in my body."

Those evil bones did not help me with my brief chat with the Dean on that dreadful Wednesday morning. He didn't want to talk over the phone. He wanted to meet in person. The only time we could do that was at 3:00 p.m. on Friday, so I would have a full two days to figure out what else I might do besides pursue a career in law.

After the Dean hung up, I called my fellow editors, gave them the good news about the meeting on Friday, and then went to class.

Back at home around 4:30 p.m., I saw I had four messages on my phone. Three messages were from my co-editor Mike Dunleavy, who said in his first message that he had worked at Fasken Campbell Godfrey as a summer student just a few months before. 

In his second message Mike said he would call the firm himself. He recorded in his third message what he found out:

We decide to put a raunchy picture of Madonna on the cover, and say "SEX is sponsored by Fasken Campbell Godfrey" at the same time that the law firm is undergoing an emotionally-charged sexual harassment policy review and is worried about being seen to have sexist hiring and promotion practices.

The conclusion drawn by the firm was that the editors of The Hearsay had deliberately chosen to mock them.

The fourth message on my phone was from a friend of mine who was articling at Fasken Campbell Godfrey. I called her back first.

She confirmed what Mike had said in his message. The minute our obligatory sponsor's copy showed up at the firm, rumour ran rampant, hysteria flew high.

At the time, to me, this was both terrifying and preposterous.  Whatever else you could say about the questionable content and dreadful writing in The Hearsay, there was no deliberate intention to mock the firm. We had no knowledge of their internal policy reviews ... but I wondered, when I learned Mike had worked there, if we could deny that.

Still, guilt needs to be proven. I felt in my few, small, evil bones that the best way to deal with a tempest in a teapot was to let it blow itself out.

So, even though Mike called and offered to apologize to the firm, and even when my friend called me again and said I could apologize, I stood my ground. I said we had nothing to apologize for. The intended audience of the magazine - the students - had seen nothing wrong with it; our motives were innocent. The law firm over-reacted. In a week none of this would matter.

Of course, the meeting wth the Dean was less than two days away and, according to my friend at the firm, my co-editors and I would be talking to the formidable threesome of the Dean, the senior partner at the firm and, god help me, the President of the Law Society of Upper Canada.

To give you an idea of my raw nerve in the face of such absurdity, this is what I said to my friend:

"Let them bring on the big guns if they want to. I'll just let them keep talking until they convince themselves they are being unbelievable asses. It'll also give me a chance to do some networking. How many opportunities am I going to get to meet the President of the Law Society?"

Next week, the thrilling conclusion to "two days that went down in the history of the firm as the 'least hours billed in a 48-hour period'." 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Not my puppy.

 

  

Innocent Enough

The Hearsay had a three-person editorial team, because one person working alone wouldn't have been able to get themselves into enough trouble.

My co-editors were Mike Dunleavy and David Kaufman. Mike was a 3rd-year student whose sense of what was funny is illustrated by his sex advice column for law students:

Some Hearsay articles were thinly veiled slanderous attacks on recognizable people, which I assume (I didn't take Secured Transactions) is the case here. 

David was a 2nd year student whose contribution to editing the Hearsay was to sometimes write one article per issue and hand out the printed copies (leaving the hard work for me and Mike). He didn't have a funny bone in his body. Case in point, for the SEX issue, he wrote - at length - about how he found it hard to use a public urinal when another man was present. 

As for me, I was the brainy one with glasses, and, as the sole female editor, also the Hearsay's "feminist shield." For the SEX issue, I wrote a fake interview with Madonna who allegedly got it into her head that she wanted to go to law school.

Standard conventions of the publication were, as illustrated in the photo at the top of this post, that contributors were ritually humiliated by having their names turned into bad puns or stupid aliases (the editors got the same, but gentler, treatment), and every issue had a theme.

As an editorial team, it was our collective idea to publish a sex issue. When we picked the sponsoring law firm on the rigorous basis of who was next on the list, we also agreed as a team to spice up the sponsorship line to say SEX is brought to you by Fasken Campbell Godfrey.

When I wrote to the Jewinskis about the SEX issue, I said I'd had some misgivings, one of which was my drawing of Madonna, which was supposed to have gone inside the magazine. But, we had so many submissions, there was no room for it. Rather than cutting it, my two male co-editors said we should use it on the cover.

The issue went out on a Monday. As I told the Jewinskis, for all of that day and the next all I heard from my fellow students was that "the treatment of sex was playful and funny."

I was glad, and relieved.

Relieved, that is, until Wednesday morning, when I picked up the phone to hear Robert Sharpe, the dean of the law school, say to me, "the law firm doesn't think it's funny."

Thanks for reading!

Get that vaccine!

Karen

Another source of misgivings - a 2-page
spread of law prof dress-up dolls,
by M. Piaskoski

No Lessons Learned

Before there was hurricane Katrina, there was Ivan. Before the devastation of 2005, there was the near miss of 2004, a category five storm hurtling across the Gulf of Mexico that, had it hit New Orleans, would have done everything Katrina did, but, instead, it took the turn to Pascagoula, and everything was fine (at least for New Orleans). For some people, that was proof enough that the worst would never happen. 

And then it did. 

Before the Nov/Dec '92 issue of The Hearsay, there was the Jan/Feb issue the same year. Both issues alluded to other publications (the latter to SPY a real magazine that was actually funny; the former to an unintentionally hilarious book, SEX, published by Madonna in 1992). I drew the cover art for both. 

All issues of The Hearsay were sponsored by one or another of the big law firms downtown. The sponsorship rate was $500 and covered the per issue cost of printing 350 copies. Other than sending them a copy of their issue for their files, there was no communication between the editors and the firms.

The Jan/Feb issue, with the theme "great pretenders", included the usual mishmash of articles ranging from mildly amusing to dreadful, authored by law students relentlessly nagged by the editors to please just submit something, anything, or by law students whose writing no one ever wanted to read.

An article in the second category pretended to be postcards describing despicably punny, unfunny adventures. One adventure, set in Egypt, tastelessly alluded to the crucifixion of Christ, and made a bad pun turning "jury" into "jewry."

  

As a co-editor, I suffered from the embarrassment of publishing such trash, but balanced that with the knowledge that the magazine was just good, clean fun.

Then, as I told the Jewinskis in a letter: 

I was confronted by a member of the class who demanded of me, on behalf of all the jewish students at the law school, an apology ... and, if the apology was not offered ... he threatened to send a copy to Goodman and Carr, the sponsoring firm, which would waste no time in calling the Dean and have The Hearsay laid to rest forever.

The upset student didn't know Goodman and Carr already had a copy. 

I told him I was sorry that he'd taken offence, and told him we would publish any rebuttal he thought appropriate to write and submit. Of course he did not do that, and he did not blow the whistle to Goodman and Carr.

Because my co-editors and I were lawyers in training, every subsequent issue of The Hearsay that term (so, two more issues) included a disclaimer that has more words in it than this post. Highlights were:

... articles are written in the spirit of satire ... we would never print an article motivated by prejudice ... we cannot be the final arbiters of what is appropriate ... sorry if past articles ... have caused offence ... we'll adjust our editorial policy ...

By the beginning of the next term, my two co-editors had gone on to their glamorous legal careers. That disclaimer was never again seen in the pages of The Hearsay.

I didn't "adjust" the editorial policy either, because the Jan/Feb issue was proof enough to me that the worst would never happen.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen