Loud in thy Honour, our voices we raise.
Full to thy fortune, our glasses we fill.
Life and Prosperity, Dear Old McGill.
~McGill University Song Book
It started at McGill on March 3rd, 2012. A site
reminiscent of Wikileaks went up, called, unoriginally, McGillLeaks. And it
sounded pretty ominous for the university.
We are McGillLeaks. From sources
whose anonymity will be protected, we have received hundreds of University documents,
many marked confidential or strictly confidential, pertaining to McGill’s
corporate fundraising efforts. Over the coming three weeks, beginning today, we
will release these documents to the public. The documents contain strategy
briefs, lists of individual and corporate targets, donor profiles, travel information,
memoranda, and more. We have verified the authenticity of the documents, and
their content has not been altered in any way…
The first set of leaks contained confidential documents from
McGill’s Development and Alumni Relations department. Files replete with donor
information, some of it personal, as well as profiles of donors and potential donors,
including hoped for amounts the “prospects” or “suspects” could be induced to
unload on "Dear Old McGill."
The site sat, ticking like an old fashioned time bomb
until, several days later, it was mentioned in The
McGill Daily.
According to The
Montreal Gazette, “Prominent alumni were on a list that gave new
campaign expectation amounts, with the top candidate being targeted for $25
million and eight others targeted for $10 million, while a host of others were
targeted for $1 million and more.”
The McGill Daily,
after taking legal counsel, was also induced to take down its links to the information.
According to The Daily, McGillLeaks
also had files on “industrial partnerships – notably a Memorandum of
Understanding between McGill and Canadian pharmaceutical company
GlaxoSmithKline Inc.”
McGill has apologized to its donors and a police
investigation is under way.
Clearly, somebody has it in for “Dear Old McGill.”
Though it wasn’t long ago that the university launched
Media@McGill, mandated to function as “a hub of research, scholarship and
public outreach on issues and controversies in media, technology and culture,”
it’ll probably be a cold day in hell before we’ll see this organization, based
in McGill’s Department of Art History and Communication Studies, analyzing the
significance of the week’s humiliating McGillLeaks event.
Which leaves us to do the dirty.
Let me practice full disclosure here, even though McGillLeaks—while
paying lipservice to transparency--did not: I have a BSc and MSc from “Dear Old
McGill,” and worked in McGill affiliated research labs for a good two decades.
But I am not a mindless McGill booster—in fact, the meagre
donations I’m capable of I send along to McGill’s School of Social Work,
on the off chance that they will actually do some true short-term good with it,
rather than spending it on some amorphous future payoff of genetic research.
But—as I am unfortunately wont to do—I digress.
So let’s look at what McGillLeaks intended to do, and take a
stab at figuring out whether they accomplished their brief.
Their intentions, as stated on their now empty website (http://mcgillleaks.wordpress.com/),
were threefold:
Provide
“a clear account of a corporate university’s inner workings, including how
the university goes about acquiring capital and expanding its reputation”;
supply “accurate information on the university’s relationship with the private
sector” and; create “transparency within the university.”
Puhleeze.
I wasted a good chunk of my life lamenting having missed coming of age during the incredible effervescence the 1960s represented: Woodstock, the Vietnam War, “the whole world’s watching!”, the burning of bras and draft notices, the civil rights movement, “Black is beautiful,” “Vive le Quebec libre,” “maitres chez nous”…arriving at McGill in 1979, it felt like I’d missed all the action.
But nostalgia ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Many of Quebec’s current CEGEP and university students, currently
voting on striking over increases in tuition fees—guys, a strike means
withdrawing services that OTHERS depend on!—are clearly suffering from the
identical adolescent need to rattle the cages of their elders (“squares” in ‘60s
parlance), not to mention hoping for a little respite from mid-term cramming.
McGillLeaks may have sprung from there, or from one or more
of the disgruntled employees we saw during the
recent MUNACA strike (and, as a former McGill non-unionized employee who
stupidly accrued zero pension benefits despite nearly two decades in molecular
genetics research, I salute MUNACA’s having stuck to their guns).
Which brings us to the leaks themselves.
Does anyone really need to know McGill donors’ birthdates?
Or that a locally-born billionaire has never given McGill one red…er, martlet,
cent? Or the history of a Montreal
magnate’s “frequent clashes in business as well as in his personal life”?
The affairs of the rich and infamous are often paraded as
“news” for the amusement of the hoi polloi. McGillLeaks at least makes a switch—momentary
though it may be--from the discussion of the undies of starlets (or lack
thereof), not to mention the state of Angelina Jolie’s forearms.
No doubt, it is grossly embarrassing to the university to
have the personal information of major donors—or, even worse, potential big
fish—revealed for general consumption. But in the Vikileaks era, does anyone
really believe in privacy anymore?
For me, among the most interesting
tidbits a brief scan revealed was that noted genetic researcher Lap-Chee Tsui
has become Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Hong Kong.
I also learned about Hong Kong’s Order of the Bauhinia Star, created to replace
the British honours system following the reversion of sovereignty to the People's
Republic of China.
But this kind of trivia is also
available on Wikipedia.
Creepier are the dossiers about
more ordinary people, donors of little-to-nothing, evaluated via “research” as
potential big kahunas. The entries include notes about the value of the homes
in the areas in which they live. Eww.
What the documents reveal foremost is
the tremendous undertaking that is major modern fundraising. But is it a surprise
that an enterprise like McGill, which raises hundreds of millions of dollars,
would do so in an organized, systematic manner?
Could we expect any less?
Do the people at The McGill Daily or McGillLeaks really
think this kind of money is raised over a couple of beers at Gert’s? Would
they rather even more of our tax dollars replace the money patiently gleaned
from the wealthy and corporations?
Despite some ruffled feathers, McGill
will survive, and so will its donors. Hopefully, the adolescent need to
humiliate their elders will pass with this generation.
But frankly, I’m not holding my
breath.
The children now love luxury; they
have bad manners, contempt for
authority; they show disrespect for
elders and love chatter in place
of exercise. Children are now
tyrants, not the servants of their
households. They no longer rise
when elders enter the room. They
contradict their parents, chatter
before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and
tyrannize their teachers.
