Anger Over Lecturer Who Won't Teach Female Authors

Academics at the University of Toronto and elsewhere are rushing to condemn a visiting lecturer there who said in an interview that most female authors are not worth including on his syllabus. The controversy concerns comments David Gilmour gave to the website Hazlitt. He said: "I'm not interested in teaching books by women. Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. Except for Virginia Woolf. And when I tried to teach Virginia Woolf, she’s too sophisticated, even for a third-year class. Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren’t any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth."

As outrage over those comments spread, Gilmour told The Globe and Mail that his comments had been “totally, totally misinterpreted,” and that he believes Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro are “top-flight international writers.It’s just that I don’t connect with the material as profoundly as I do with, say, Phillip Roth’s The Dying Animal." The latest comment has not stopped a round of criticism. Paul Stevens, acting chair of Toronto's English department and a professor of early modern literature, said Gilmour’s comments "constitute a travesty of all we stand for," and noted that "David Gilmour is not a member of the Department of English at the University of Toronto."