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When I learned that the fifth estate was doing an item on us, I was pleased. In an earlier incarnation I was a television critic and admired the programme because, unlike 60 Minutes, say, the fifth estate didn’t sensationalize stories, provided context. But its item on OCA, entitled “Men Need Not Apply,” offered virtually no context. There was no mention of systemic discrimination, the situation at other postsecondary institutions, the available pool of qualified artists and designers, the nonequity openings at OCA. Certainly, host Eric Malling didn’t even seem to know that there were non-equity openings. “If Michelangelo arose tomorrow and came here looking for a job,” he intoned at one point, “they’d send him packing.” What the item consisted of was a series of Mike Wallace-like confrontations with people on both sides of the equity issue. “What have we got here,” demanded the smart-ass Malling of Porteous, “an art college or a battleground for sexual politics?” (Well, Eric, right now we’ve got both.)
On Morningside, Peter Gzowski didn’t want the discussion of equity at OCA to become too specific. He wanted to discuss the principle. But without going into details, it’s impossible to explain this particular principle. One of those on the programme was Greg Damery, a weekend, summer, and evening instructor in fine arts at OCA who, knowingly or otherwise, continued to inject false information into the discussion here and elsewhere. He stated, for example, that in ten years, the faculty in three departments including his own would be eighty per cent female. (Damery is understandably angry. He’d expected because of his seniority that one day he would replace one of the older teachers in the day school in his department. Equity had thrown a monkey wrench into his plans. He wasn’t responsible for the college’s systemic discrimination but was a victim of it. Lisa Steele isn’t sympathetic. If hiring is to be a genuinely open process, she says, there’s no guarantee that Damery or anyone else will get any particular job. “You can’t be robbed of something you don’t have,” she adds.)
There’s no doubt that the media covered the OCA story poorly. But it’s important to acknowledge that those of us who support equity did a terrible job of getting our side of the story out. Our initial press release didn’t give enough details. We should have held a press conference, if not right after equity was passed then certainly as soon as it was clear that a great deal of misinformation was being deliberately circulated. A letter from Porteous to the Toronto papers correcting some of the misinformation went out too late to do any good.
In response to the media coverage, Porteous received angry letters from alumni worried that their credentials were being cheapened by the hiring of unqualified women. Some withdrew financial support from the college. One suggested that half the Group of Seven’s paintings in galleries should be replaced by the work of women. Another wrote, “These man-hating Female Chauvinists have succeeded in not only infiltrating a spiritual institution but have won control ... by craftiness and unethical means ... . They will continue to poison every fibre of society until they control everything.”
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 ncouraged by the response of the media, the anti-equity forces renewed the battle inside the college. The faculty-association meeting I described at the beginning of this article had been conducted without a quorum. (Faculty-association meetings have been conducted without a quorum for at least fifteen years.) On January 19, however, thirty-three members called for a special meeting of the association to reconsider the vote on equity. They declared the first vote “null and void.”
At the end of January, there were to be new elections for governing council. Two faculty seats were vacant as were all three student seats. As well, four new lay members were being appointed by the government. A new vote on equity might go the other way. The two faculty seats balanced out — pro-and anti-equity incumbents were replaced by pro-and anti-equity newcomers. The new pro-equity faculty member was a woman. Three male students who ran on an anti-equity platform were elected with the active support of anti-equity faculty. Two of the students who’d been sitting on council and who were defeated had been enthusiastic supporters of equity. That meant there were now at least eight anti-equity votes on council, five male faculty members and three male students.
Equity at OCA, continued >
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