Senator Linda Frum's McGill University Magazine (with a bit about The McGill Fortnightly Review)

In November 1926, F.R. Scott was called to the offices of McGill University principal Sir Arthur Currie. The man behind the great victory at Vimy Ridge had been shaken by the student's new McGill Fortnightly Review. Currie worried that the publication might harm the university's "esprit de corps", that it might adopt "dangerous doctrines", that it might descend into things "Bolsheviki". The principal suggested that the publication would benefit from a board of advisors, but Scott stood his ground. Such a body, he said, would send a message to students that they could not be trusted.

I wonder whether Linda Frum experienced anything similar after running afoul of the university three decades ago. Was then-principal David Johnson at all concerned about the politics espoused by her McGill University Magazine? Perhaps not, but administration did take dim view of Ms Frum's appropriation of the institution's name.

A very good account of the meeting between Scott and Currie is found in The Politics of the Imagination, Sandra Djwa's biography of the poet, lawyer, essayist, civil rights champion and Dean of McGill University Faculty of Law. Whether there was ever a meeting between Frum, now a Senator thanks to Stephen Harper, and Principal Johnson, now Governor General thanks to Stephen Harper, I cannot say. There is no biography of Linda Frum.

And why not?

It's been more than four years since the prime minister recognized her talents as a fundraiser for the Canadian Alliance and Conservative Party. Those of us with a literary bent see greater accomplishment in Linda Frum's Guide to Canadian Universities (1987, rev 1990), a work that might be considered alongside Scott's Social Reconstruction and the B.N.A. Act (1934), Civil Liberties and Canadian Federalism (1959), and Essays on the Constitution: Aspects of Canadian Law and Politics (1977).

In 1970, Scott declined the offer of a Senate appointment.

It goes without saying that we all look forward to Senator Frum's next book. Until then, we must be satisfied with rereading past work… which brings me, at long last, to the January/February 1984 edition of McGill University Magazine pictured above. Published four months after the first, we see signs of growth and great change. Where once were just two names – editor Linda Frum and publisher David Martin – the masthead now features fourteen, including graphic director "Jacques N. Gilles".

Never let it be said that the Magazine didn't attract francophones, or that it had no sense of humour*:

All kidding aside, what are we to make of David Martin's absence and the fact that the position of Publisher has been eliminated? Just who's in charge here? Where does the American Institute of Educational Affairs buck stop? How it is that fourteen contributors managed no more than six pieces over a two-month period?

Seems awfully unfair to Editor Frum, who is forced to carry much of the issue. She should not be blamed for botching her interviews with Allan Gotlieb and United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Canada James Medas. When reading the silly review of Uncommon Valor, the movie set in "Vietman", please remember that she had pages to fill. Signs of overwork are everywhere, even in the first sentences of her editorial:

Canada and Poland are both nations of about 25 million people**. They both neighbour one of the super-powers. Russia was invaded from Poland in 1812*** and 1941****; America was invaded from Canada in 1777***** and 1813******.

But for my self-imposed asterisk limit, I would quote more. Frum's point, which she does reach eventually, is that we Canadians are better off than the Poles. We should be less critical of Ronald Reagan, more critical of Pierre Trudeau, thank the Americans for our freedoms and… I don't know, apologize for returning fire in 1777 and 1813?

As I say, overwork.

She's in the Senate now.

She's earned her rest.

Related posts:

Back to School with Senator Linda Frum

Senator Frum's Cold War Campuses

Some Senators Write (or Say They Do)

* The words quoted, belonging to Linda Frum, reference Ronald Reagan's Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Lawrence Eagleburger, who in 1983 at a private gathering compared the prime minister's efforts to broker peace between East and West to "pot-induced behaviour by an erratic leftist.'' Not really the same thing, of course. Again, overwork.
** In 1984, the population of Canada was 25.6 million. The population of Poland at 36.9 million.
*** By France.
**** By Germany.
***** Countering an invasion by the Continental Army.
****** Countering an invasion by the American Army and various Militia.

Back to School with Senator Linda Frum

The McGill University Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1 (September 1983)

Bright young things begin taking their seats at McGill today. When exactly the tired asses of the Senate will be doing likewise is Stephen Harper's secret, but it's a safe bet that Linda Frum will be there. Will anyone notice? The Ontario senator hasn't been terribly active since her 2009 appointment, but look back a few years and you'll see she her working hard raising funds for the Conservative Party. Look back a decade and you'll find her doing the same for the Canadian Alliance. Look back three decades as you'll see her really on the move as editor of the new McGill University Magazine.

Sure, it doesn't look like much today, but in the time of typesetting cylinders, wax rollers and blue pencils The McGill University Magazine was pretty impressive. All this put together by just two people? It's understandable then that the paper's appearance in bulk at the University of Toronto, 542 kilometres to the west, sparked rumours. Some said that it was laid out at The Varsity, while others speculated about funds flowing from Murray Frum, Linda's dentist/developer father. The most cynical spoke of American money.

The most cynical turned out to be correct.

This debut issue was modest: twelve pages comprising fewer than 146-column inches of text in a font that the Ulverscroft Large Print people might think too big. It fairly stumbles out of the out of the gate with the first piece, an awkward "General Statement Of Principles":

The McGill University Magazine dedicates itself to the preservation of those of McGill's ancient traditions still extant, and to the revival of those now lost. Without its customs, a university is merely a machine for teaching, indistinguishable from its rivals; with them, it is a great and thriving institution that extends across time to unite our ancestors and our posterity in common enterprise.

Three more principles follow: the demand for academic excellence, the rejection of public funding for higher education, and the peculiar insistence that the prosperity of the university take priority over that of the country. Something about the protection of private property appears tacked on as an afterthought.

Throughout the paper runs an unquestioning nostalgia for the university's past, the very decades in which its editor would have been faced with a cap on the number of Jewish admissions. One page is devoted to "Songs of Old McGill", another features a few sports photos from the 'twenties, 'thirties and 'fifties. An 1874 Thomas Naste editorial cartoon about bank failures in the United States is tweaked in memory of the victims of "Korean Air Flight 077 [sic]", while another 19th-century American editorial cartoon is directed at students who objected to cruise missile testing in Alberta:

 
Given the paper's skewed view of the past, it makes perfect sense that its cover story about the McGill Daily begins by misquoting alumnus A.J.M. Smith (B.A 1925, M.A. 1926), then denying him credit:

What follows is a three-page interview between former editor Richard Flint and some anonymous soul. Who could it be? There may be a clue in the shared queer obsession – pun intended – nameless interviewer and paper have with the Daily's annual Lesbian and Gay issue. The front page of the 1983 edition is reproduced no less than four times in these pages; no other issue of the Daily features. The interviewer raises the subject more often than any other, leading to this exchange in which Mr Flint is accused of giving "homosexuals extra space in the Daily":

RF: No, we don't.
MUM: But you do, you really do.
RF: We certainly don't give a tenth of our coverage to the gay community, which if we were to be fair is what we would give.
MUM: Wouldn't it seem to the other 90 per cent of the campus that you are ignoring their interests?
RF: No. To the minority who are homophobic, there is a problem. That have a dangerous bigotry. This is the problem with reflecting student opinion. If student opinion is bigoted, should we reflect that? I don't think so. The intolerance encouraged by what I would call the Right, these days represented by our Student Society and some of their publications, is really quite pathetic.
MUM: We are not questioning the right to print what you want, but we wonder whether your commitment to letting other sides be heard is as strong as it should be.
RF: I think the Daily is the most accessible publication I have ever seen. There's no doubt about it. We have a number of people whose politics are vastly different from the rest of the staff's. They are accepted. Sure, the majority of the staff have left-leaning views.
MUM: Why then, for example, do we not see any articles against McGill's divesting from South Africa?
RF: Something like divestment is a thing where even our most right-wing staffers don't disagree.
MUM: You wrote an editorial denouncing the right of a representative of a group called the South African Foundation, John Chettle, to speak at McGill...
RF: I don't think people who deny free speech to others should enjoy free speech themselves.

And on it goes for another page and a-half, ending with this:

Now, I've never had an account with the Bank of Montreal myself, but there has been some contact. As a member of a student paper, back in 1980 I voted to close our account with the bank. Old timers will recall that it wasn't until five years later, under pressure from Joe Clark, that the Bank of Montreal finally stopped lending money to the Botha government.

The Bank of Montreal receives the lone – pun unintended – acknowledgement of support in the debut issue of the McGill University Magazine. There are no ads. What Messrs Fogler, Donato, Hart, Evans and Muggeridge did to warrant "special thanks" I cannot say. What I do know is that the Magazine received some funding from the Institute of Educational Affairs, an American organization founded by William Simon and Irving Kristol. The IEA also helped support David Frum, Tony Clement and editor Nigel Wright – yes, that Nigel Wright – in establishing their own magazine at the University of Toronto. Still more of the Institute's money was given to Libertas, a paper that was starting up at Queen's University. It was edited by John Mulholland, son of William Mulholland, Chairman and CEO of the Bank of Montreal.

It's who you know, I guess.

The McGill University Magazine promised an exclusive interview with once-and-future Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa in its second issue. I couldn't be bothered to pick up a copy. Still, I was impressed; it was quite a coup for a fledgling "student publication".

It's who you know, I guess.

It bears repeating.

Related posts:
Senator Linda Frum's McGill University Magazine

Senator Frum's Cold War Campuses

Some Senators Write (or Say They Do)

Some Senators Write (or Say They Do)

News this morning of five more Tory senate appointments, including yet another published author. This time the honour goes to Pierre-Hughes Boisvenu, whose Survivre à l'innommable is, perhaps, the best book penned by a Harper appointee. Not to slight skier and Mars Bar pitch queen Nancy Greene, but her autobiography, published when she was 25, was a tad premature. For one, it contains nothing of her decades of battle against biologists, environmentalists and native groups.

(Honestly, all this fuss over watersheds and endangered species when our millionaires are suffering long lift lines.)

Of the authors the prime minister has sent to the upper chamber, Pamela Wallin is the most prolific. She's also a publicist's dream. Her link at the senate homepage is unique in that it leads away from things governmental to a commercial site: pamelawallin.com. There you can read all about the senator's career, including her three books. You'll remember the first, Since You Asked, which appeared in 1998, at about the time she and the CBC gave up on each other. It seems that a few years later, we were offered something called Speaking of Success: Collected Wisdom, Inspiration and Reflection.

Doesn't ring any bells?

Publisher Key Porter says the book was a bestseller. In fact, they trumpet the accomplishment on the cover of her 2003 The Comfort of Cats, which "explores the bond between Kitty, a creatively named Siamese cat, and the woman who lives with her, Pamela Wallin."

Interested?

The senator provides convenient links to amazon.ca and amazon.com.

(Senator, why do you snub Heather Reisman? After all, how much money has Jeff Bezos given to your party?)

Fellow author Linda Frum can learn a lot from her enterprising colleague. Frum's senate website has nothing about Linda Frum's Guide to Canadian Universities or Barbara Frum: A Daughter's Memoir, and nearly six months after her appointment, her pages seem such skeletal things. Sure, there's that strange speech she gave about her grandmother having been born at home, the recent "Grey Cup match" and other stuff, but the rest is nothing more than a bunch of links. That said, I was interested to see that she presents four that concern Parliament. In these dark days of prorogation, what reassuring words does Senator Frum recommend we read? Well, there's an intriguing sounding article titled "The Parliament of Canada — Democracy in action", but clicking on the link only takes you to this page:

Anyone looking to bring this to the senator's attention will find that her contact page says, simply, "Contact Us".

Us?

The senator offers no hint as to the identity of this mysterious group, but then she offers no address or phone number either.

Senator Frum may be reached by writing:

The Honourable Linda Frum Sokolowski

Senate of Canada
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A4

Senator Frum's Cold War Campuses

Another year, another prorogation. Bracing for this season's round of senate appointments, thoughts reach back all of four months to the last batch: Conservative Party election strategist Doug Finley, Harper advisor Carolyn Stewart-Olson and Judith Seidman, who proved instrumental in Harper's victory at the 2004 leadership convention. There were many others, of course, including Linda Frum, who is now enjoying the first of her 28 years in our upper house. The daughter of Barbara, the sister of David, she hasn't exactly been a Chatty Cathy; it was not until last month that, during the debate on the Economic Action Plan, Frum rose to deliver her maiden speech. She spoke at length about her family history, her husband, her volunteer work, her views on the military, her misgivings about diplomacy and the pride she takes in having her name "associated with the Harper government". "The moral courage shown by our Prime Minister is a model to leaders around the world," she said of the man who had bravely appointed her.

Senator Frum never did get around to talking about the Action Plan – just a fleeting observation that reports are good things – but she did devote a couple of paragraphs to the decades old Linda Frum's Guide to Canadian Universities, which holds the grand distinction of having been the subject of my very first book review. And so, I present this forgotten piece, published in the 13 November 1987 edition of the Montreal Mirror. Though I had come of age, please think of it as juvenilia.

No cover image, I'm afraid. I had to throw the book away after my dear cat Morley peed on the thing. It was his only "accident".

Morley

(1985-1999)

RIP

Linda Frum's Guide to Canadian Universities

Linda Frum

Toronto: Key Porter, 1987

"University gave me lifelong respect for those who labour to produce a book."

– Barbara Frum, quoted in Linda Frum's Guide to Canadian Universities

Linda Frum is her mother's daughter – and it is presumably for this reason that her name and photograph dominate the cover of this, her first book. Consider this a form of introduction.

Former McGill students might remember Frum as the editor of the short-lived McGill University Magazine, a flimsy paper with the stated goal of recapturing the traditions of Old McGill, but apparently more interested in criticizing the left and extolling its own perceived virtues of the United States.

Frum's Guide to Canadian Universities contains a few brief examples of her political thinking, including a nonsensical argument against the public funding of universities, a reference to the Contras as anti-Soviet guerillas, and this example of Reagan Era paranoia: "At every urban university there is a tiny, highly visible clique that cares passionately, but fleetingly, about El Salvador, Nicaragua, East Timor, South Africa, or whatever issue the Soviet Union is pushing at the moment."

However, for the most part, the political side of the 42 universities covered in this book is ignored – as are academic qualities. "It's not that I don't care about that stuff," Frum writes in the introduction, "but let's leave that stuff to your parents and guidance counsellor. These pages are dedicated to the subjects your family and guidance counsellor are too embarrassed or respectable to talk about."

What follows is a light-weight guide that dwells upon – among other things – the excellent parking facilities at McMaster, the beauty and wealth of the students at Western, the filthy toilets at the University of Toronto and the ease with which one can get laid at Laurentian. Also included are statistics concerning the male/female ratio on each campus, along with a handy section on which universities to attend if the student's goal is to be married by commencement.

If there is any one major flaw in all of this, it's that the author's sweeping generalizations confuse and mislead. Students at the University of Guelph are either leftists or centrists, depending upon which page one is reading. When Frum describes the typical McGill student as dressing in "outfits of all black, including dyed hair, eyebrows, lips", we Montrealers know she's exaggerating (and is really just writing about the ladies).

McGill, it is noted, is located in our fair city, and much of its attractiveness is attributed to this fact: "The best moments at McGill are spent munching on croissants and sipping cafés au lait, touring Montreal's beaux-arts palaces, getting drunk in the bistros of St-Denis, shopping for fresh groceries on St-Laurent, skiing on Mount Royal and going to hockey games at the Forum."

In Linda Frum's world, Concordia is located in a much less idyllic city – one barely worth mentioning. It is a rough place, attracting "off-the-map left", ""off-beat, unconventional characters", most of whom are ethnics who live with their parents.

Inexplicably, the Université de Montréal, the Université de Québec à Montréal and the country's other French language universities are not even mentioned. What can we read from this? That anglophones never attend francophone universities? That Frum knows no French? Is the exclusion in itself a political statement?

Linda Frum's Guide to Canadian Universities can only disappoint. While friends and foes of the McGill University Magazine will lament the near-absence of Frum's entertaining political views, serious students will invariably discover that his or her chosen university bears little resemblance to the one described in his book. Those who have chosen Laurentian will be the most disappointed.

-30-

Redux:

Twenty-three years later, Senator Linda Frum discusses Linda Frum's Guide to Canadian Universities. with Cathrin Bradbury of Maclean's (19 November 2010):

Q: You called York University “ugly, impersonal, bleak, isolated and depressing.”
A: I was there recently, and they have tried very hard to change that. Actually, they’ve put up some quite wonderful buildings.

And now this, from the 15 November 2003 Globe and Mail profile of Howard Sokolowski, Linda Frum's husband:

Mr. Sokolowski, 51, builds homes by the thousands, mainly in the 905 belt, through his company, Tribute Communities. He is the guy who "doesn't put the garage door in the front of the house," he says; his latest venture is what he calls an "integrated" community of 500 homes near York University.

Again, Linda Frum is a Stephen Harper appointee.

Related posts:

Some Senators Write (or Say They Do)
Back to School with Senator Linda Frum
Senator Linda Frum's McGill University Magazine