● Alumni Feature: Après nous le déluge

Alumni Feature: Après nous, le déluge (cont.)

amusing, enraging, insulting, ridiculing, entertaining, and stoking powerful emotions. Knowing that every good story needs a villain, I enthusiastically embraced that role. Simultaneously vilified and lauded, I put myself front and center and deliberately wrote incendiary editorial content that provoked outrage. I was an enthusiastic student of the Genghis Khan School of Diplomacy. Over the course of my tenure, students plastered Glendon with notices that read, “Say NO to Joe.” One outraged reader pushed me down a flight of stairs. Glendon’s Executive Officer called Pro Tem “a hamster nest.” Our News Editor was cornered in a bathroom by two irate students and barely escaped unscathed. The Frost Librarian wrote a letter threatening to have me arrested, only to write a letter the following week complimenting me on an excellent publication. Three insanely talented students – Lee Zimmerman, Larry Organ, and Linda Lisicky – formed the backbone of my editorial staff. They wholeheartedly embraced the concept of arousing our readers’ passions as a means of encouraging the normally-apathetic student body to vigorously engage with their campus newspaper. Their enthusiasm brought new talent into our operation. The best was Tim Haffey, who went on to become a successful Toronto sportscaster. Tim now teaches sports journalism at a Toronto-area college which shall remain nameless to protect its reputation. Often, we were juvenile, immature, and thoroughly unprofessional. Though, even when we were producing sober, insightful reportage, I did my best to infuse the staff with an irreverent attitude, encouraging them to never take their work too seriously. While I never censored a single word my writers produced, I gleefully affixed flippant headlines of my own creation onto their articles, which invariably gave them conniptions. My Sports Editor’s carefully-composed, balanced article gently critical of the Head of the Athletics Department became “Jensen is a Pinhead”, sparking massive outrage and pages of controversy in later editions. In the ’70s and ’80s, college campuses were often male bastions of neanderthal attitudes towards women (yes, even at Glendon – gasp! ). This was decades before #MeToo. To highlight this issue, we reprinted highly sexist Doonesbury cartoons by Garry Trudeau, a champion of the Equal Rights Amendment known for his pro-feminist views, who used sarcasm to destroy his targets. Of course, the cartoons evoked outrage among those who didn’t understand the reverse-psychology technique, but our goal was accomplished: the discussion lit up our letters pages. Even our seemingly-puerile attacks were deliberate and carefully designed. In our very first issue, I wrote a long polemic about Campus Security entitled “Buffoons in Blue.”.That set the tone for a year of security guard bashing that eventually forced the University to double the Campus security detail – our goal from the start, after several incidents at the women’s residence had revealed the woeful lack of security.

The pieces I wrote myself were valiant attempts at Gonzo journalism, featuring libellous commentaries and a blatant disregard for the facts. These were often the pieces that drew the most outrage and attention. I like to think that Hunter S. Thompson himself would have approved. As the weeks went by, our volume of readers’ letters exploded, and even included letters from York’s Keele campus! Some of our last issues featured several pages of letters – we printed every one we got, especially those which excoriated us mercilessly. If you knew what it takes to make a student sit down, put pen to paper, and actually write an honest-to-goodness real letter, you’d understand what an achievement that was. FINALLY! People were reading, and people cared! But of course, as someone wiser than I once said, a prophet is never respected in his homeland. A half-dozen students became so outraged that they created their own publication, mimeographing [millennials, ask your parents] a six-page handwritten issue that energetically vilified me while decrying Pro Tem’s editorial policies. One persistent refrain among our detractors was that I was arrogant and undemocratic. People complained that I operated the paper as though it were my own personal kingdom. So, for the cover of the issue where we announced a search for the next year’s Editor, I posed for a photo dressed as a king on a throne, above the caption, “Do you want this man’s job?” Ridiculous, unfounded rumours spread on Campus about Pro Tem and me. The modern-day equivalent would be postings from “Q,” accusing us of conducting Satanic child sacrifices below the Café de la Terrasse. The greater the controversy, the more in demand the paper became, and the more engaged the students became with Pro Tem. Pouring oil on the fire, I allowed – and even subtly stoked – false and inflammatory rumours that I was bankrupting Pro Tem with lavish personal expenditures. Since I wouldn’t deny them, the rumours gathered steam. Canadian University Press started a formal investigation into alleged misuse of newspaper funds (they found none, of course). Nonetheless, near the end of the year, the Glendon College Student Union (GCSU), which I had ridiculed in several editorials, arbitrarily closed the paper down and terminated our contract with our printer because I wouldn’t dignify their nonsensical accusations by appearing at the GCSU meetings to refute them. To quote Emperor Darth Sidious, everything was unfolding exactly according to plan. During the week after the GCSU locked us out, my staff and I broke into the Pro Tem offices every evening after midnight, working by flashlight to avoid detection by the lone campus security guard on patrol, to produce our final issue – a lavish, double-sized edition, to boot! I contracted in secret with a new printer, then snuck the raw copies into the University print shop at York, where a friendly staff member let me use their machines to trim the pages. After distributing it in the dead of night on both campuses, we sat back and watched gleefully as the astounded student body (and GCSU members) gaped in consternation at the discovery of the unexpected issue. For the next week, this outrageous, unsanctioned, “bootleg” issue of Pro Tem was all anyone could talk about, and once the supply of that final issue had all been snatched up, students passed around their own copies. It was the ultimate measure of success – like the original Star Trek, we were cancelled early by small-minded bean-counters, but our public loved us. Glendon College’s Principal Garigue said to me when I visited him the following year, “Half the campus loved you, and the other half wanted to tar and feather you, but they complained like hell when the paper was late and they all read every single word in it.” It was never about me, or about the controversies, or my countless incendiary editorials, or money, or notoriety, or juvenile gratification. It was what Marshall McLuhan said: “The medium is the message.” People got involved. Often, the number one topic on Campus was – can you believe it?! – PRO TEM. I encourage all Glendonites to look up online those wonderful issues of Pro Tem from 1980/81: https://protem. journals.yorku.ca/index.php/protem/issue/ view/615

Even after 40 years, you can still feel the enthusiasm, the chaos, the laughter and the controversy behind the lines. Just reading the letters is worth the price of admission. But be forewarned: those editions are politically incorrect in the extreme, and will most likely offend your tender 2022 sensibilities. If you read them, you will want to hunt me down and punch me in the mouth. At least, I hope so.

Photo par Joseph Holmes