JANICE FIAMENGO: English Studies, R.I.P.

The small world that is Canadian literary-academic culture underwent convulsions last week when a novelist named David Gilmour, a part-time English instructor at the University of Toronto, announced in an interview that he doesn’t love women and Chinese writers enough to teach them in his fiction course, and that he prefers books by “very serious heterosexual guys.” . . .

When such literary masters as Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, and Anton Chekhov are dismissed by a professor of English as “dead white guys,” it’s clear that a blanket anti-male animus—of the sort only a feminist could love—has overtaken the ivory tower. Contrary to the self-righteous huffing and puffing of the advocates of gender [sic] justice, Gilmour’s off-hand statements highlighted not misogynist tyranny but the lockdown by academic feminism on even the most flippant and marginal deviations from the correct line.