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.