Since the age of 4, I’ve been in school. When I was in grade school I wanted to be a firefighter, a palaeontologist, or Batman. In middle school I just wanted to survive. By the time high school rolled around and my grades had led me into a math and science program called TOPS, my only certainty was that I would either wind up wearing a lab coat and spending my days in a synthetic wilderness of beakers and test tubes, my trusty pipette in hand, or I would transcend to a divine plane of derivatives, parabolas, and imaginary numbers whilst subsisting on chalk dust and rarefied air.

I then made the mistake of discovering Vladimir Nabokov and Neil Gaiman, both of whom inspired my writerly aspirations, and an obsessive Grade 12 fascination with Jean-Paul Sartre solidified my entrance into the humanities. Now, at the age of 21, a major choice is looming. Do I go to grad school or take my chances on the choppy waters of the job market? With a joint degree in Social and Political Thought and English Literature and no “marketable” skills to speak of, unlike my fellow TOPS graduates, most of whom I do not doubt are on their way to becoming engineers, doctors, lawyers, biochemists, physicists, the future leaders of tomorrow...  my prospects don’t look so hot.

But then I look at the institution I’m considering pledging my life and soul to and think maybe I should just get the hell out, if only to keep a clear conscience. The academy has gone down the tubes, penetrated at every turn by corporate culture and cancerous bureaucracy. Either you kiss ass or you register for Employment Insurance. The ivory tower is stained yellow, smells a bit off, and is cracked up the middle. And I think some punk detonated a stink bomb on the ninety-third floor.

Historian Howard Zinn once called the university “a playpen in which the society invites its favored children to play -- and gives them toys and prizes to keep them out of trouble.” It’s true that there are few academics willing to cause a raucous, which makes York University PhD student Tasia Alexopoulos an exception. An “atypical” case, if you will.

On April 16, 2009, Tasia filed a harassment grievance against one Dr. Linda Briskin, esteemed scholar and self-proclaimed feminist activist. Dr. Briskin has published such works as Women Challenging Unions: Feminism, Democracy and Militancy and Union Sisters: Women in the Labour Movement among many others. On her York University website Dr. Briskin writes about another area of her research:

"I have a long-standing interest in pedagogies and am currently completing a book titled Negotiating Power and Silence in the Classroom. It explores the potential for the collaborative negotiation of power between and among students and teachers. Such collaboration offers a vehicle to educate students as political subjects and enhance student agency; at the same time, it provides teachers with strategies for dealing with the increasingly complex and often fraught environment of diversities which exists in many classrooms."

So, dear reader, you are forgiven if Dr. Briskin’s complicit silence in the following transcript of a recorded meeting between Tasia, Dr. Briskin, and the then Undergraduate Program Director of York’s Social Sciences Division, Dr. Larry Lyons, seems a little confusing, a little incongruous perhaps...

Larry Lyons (LL) [addressing Tasia (T)]: “So let me say something general about grading. If we don’t offer the normal York grade, uh, rigor, we’re really hurting our students. They will not get into law school. They will not get into grad school. The York degree will be not... will be considered no good. So, this is extremely sensitive for us. You do the initial grading. The final grades are approved by Linda. After she approves them they’re reviewed by me. If they’re atypical I have to have them changed. Then they’re reviewed again by the Dean’s office. If they’re atypical they come back to me... have to go back to Linda. So. It’s a very sensitive topic for us. We really have to fight this. It is possible for students who aren’t the best to get a York degree--”

T: “I think it’s more than possible for students who aren’t the best to get a York degree.”

LL: “Right, but what’s absolutely crucial is that York good grades tell professional schools and grad schools that these students are exceptional or excellent.”

T: “And I have a group of exceptional students who some of them have been to--”

LL: “You may have, you may have.”

T: “--100% of the lectures and--”

LL: “Listen, listen.”

T: “--100% of--”

LL: “Listen.”

T: “--the tutorials.”

LL: “Listen, you may have, but that’s up to Linda [Dr. Briskin] to judge.”

T: “And I’m more than happy to--”

LL: “Good.”

T: “--give my work to Linda, to have it compared with the other TAs work to see the quality of my students in comparison--”

LL: “No.”

T: “--to the other TA’s.”

LL: “Linda is an eminent professor. She’s been teaching here for a long time. She’s a person who tells other people what the York standards are. It’s not up to her to compare to other TAs. She knows. She's an expert. She’s very highly respected. If I need someone to tell me ‘is this a proper grade or not’ given the York standards, I go to someone like Linda.”

T: “I know, and I greatly respect Linda and I--”

LL: “So it’s, it’s her...”

T: “--greatly respect her work.”

LL: “It’s her... to judge. It’s not comparison to other people.”

T: “O.K., so in great detail, I need you to tell me what I need to do for marking. In detail. So, I would need to mark lower?”

LL: “It seems to me that Linda has done that. She’s sent you quite a lot of email.”

T: “So the midterm marks are too high?”

LL: “All of those marks are too high.”

T: “All of my marks are too high?”

LL: “That’s right.”

T: “So for all of my assignments, without seeing them, without ever speaking to my students, without ever coming to a tutorial--”

LL: “They're atypical.”

T: “They're atypical? Right.”

LL: “And if Linda looks at them and says that you're correct, then you’re correct.”

T: “So you can tell they’re atypical just by the percentage of how many A’s there are.”

LL: “I’ve been teaching here since the 1980s. One year, in 1989, I was teaching comparative economics, and because of the situation in the Soviet Union, I had a thirty five student class with a bunch of people who came from the Soviet Union whose educational system was much higher than here. I had those kinds of grades, in that. Once. Just in terms of statistics it’s like a million to one chance that that would happen.”

T: “Right, but I think we're coming at really different perspective of what grades are for, and I think that in this sense you want me to grade punitively--”

LL: “No.”

T: “--and I think--”

LL: “I want you to grade properly.”

T: “--it's more important for my students that they’re rewarded for good work and coming back after a three month strike really dedicated to this course and really--”

LL: “Well let me tell you--”

T: “--excited about it.”

LL: “Well let me tell you how unpleasant this is going to be for your students. Because they won’t get the grades you assigned them.”

T: “And I was told before I submitted midterms, after Linda saw the grade profile, that the grades would not be changed, and you had seen the grade profile at that point and you knew how many As and A+s I gave away.”

LL: “I’m going to review the grades. I had this problem last year. A whole class full of people were... atypically high grades. They had to be reviewed. I had to bring in an outside reviewer. I had to get all those grades reviewed, and I had to lower the grades for all of these students. And it’s very, very hard on these students to have that happen. It’s much better that they’re graded appropriately.”

T: “Well, clearly they haven't been graded appropriately by your standards.”

The students “were... atypically high grades.” Interesting choice of words, Dr. Lyons.

I recently conducted an interview with Tasia in a room down the hall from Prof. Linda Briskin’s office. The topic: meritocracy. Dear reader, even if you didn’t attend university, do you remember the holy A+ from your school days? A grade that transcended reality! Transcended possibility! A+! Think about it too long and it could drive you insane. Many have pondered its meaning and have lost themselves in pursuit of it. Some have declared it a myth, a legend, an old wives’ tale told to bedazzle children. I, too, grew up hearing stories of it. It’s a concept so big you can’t hold it in your mind for longer than a third of a second. It is the very ideal form of Platonic form. The fingerprint of God. The holy A+.

Well, I have news for you. It’s no mere myth. Tasia has crossed over to the other side and she has seen it. What’s more, as Prometheus brought fire to man, Tasia dared to defy the gods to bring the A+ to her students. And as with Prometheus, the gods saw fit to punish her for her nerve. (I apologize to Herbert Marcuse.)

“It all started when we got back from the strike and we had a midterm that the students had had for three months,” Tasia told me. “They got a copy of the exam in advance, and then we didn’t know if we would go on strike or not because we were having a vote, but once the vote went through, we were on strike and we didn’t have another class with our students. So they had their midterm and they studied for three months, came back, and did really well on the midterm and got really high grades.”

The strike to which Tasia refers is last year’s CUPE 3903 strike. CUPE 3903 is the union representing TAs, contract faculty, GAs, and RAs at York. Among the union’s major faculty supporters: one Dr. Linda Briskin. So what happens when your employer is a big supporter of your union and you find yourself on her bad side? Well, for one thing, thus far Tasia has been fighting her battle alone, her union rep doing little more than encourage informal discussion to resolve the matter. And what is this matter exactly? Well...

“When Professor Briskin got my grade profile, she was really concerned that my grades were atypical, that I had a lot of A+s, and I did have a lot of A+s. I had a group of 24 students and I had about nine A+s. And apparently that doesn’t happen at York very often. So it originally started as emails back and forth saying that she was surprised that there were so many A+s and she would like to see photocopies of the best and the worst... but as she asked for the photocopies of the best and the worst, she changed her mind in the same email and asked for all of the midterms. She wanted to read every midterm, all 24, and see what I had done wrong, because there was a discrepancy between my profile and the other TAs’ profiles [8 other TAs]... The one TA whose profile was similar to mine, I had one more A than her and four more A+s, and I had more students in my tutorial...

“In the email she says, ‘I have another thought. If you have the exams at home I can pick them up on Monday or Tuesday since you live so close, or I’ll be out today so I could pick up today if you will be around. Then I can give them back to you on Wednesday. FYI, a lot of the grades on exams are high. What is unusual in your group is the number of A+ grades. Please let me know if you have them at home.’ I thought that was a little aggressive. That was on a Saturday. I don’t really know why I couldn’t just bring them in on Monday. Why she needed them that second on Saturday and that she would want to come to my house to get them. So I said no, that’s O.K., why don’t I bring them in on Monday. And I also said I don’t think it’s unusual for students who have had three extra months to study to do well. That’s how it started. I don’t know how to summarize what happened next. I’ll try not to go into too much detail, because there are a lot of details.”

Later, in a meeting with Professor Richard Wellen, the then Chair of Social Sciences and heavy-hitter for the faculty union YUFA, Tasia was told that this offer by Prof. Briskin to visit her home was just a part of York culture. “He says that I’ve misunderstood Prof. Briskin and that her asking to come to my house on the weekend is just ‘York culture.’ I’ve misunderstood the intent. Which is interesting because harassment isn’t about intent, it’s about how you perceive it, so any time someone is being harassed, you can’t say, ‘well, he wasn’t trying to harass her’.”

To define harassment in this context, the CUPE local 3903 Collective Agreement states in article 4.02 that employees have the right to “work in an environment free from harassment and undertake to take all reasonable and appropriate actions to foster such an environment.” According to this Article, “harassment in the work place includes, but is not limited to, threats or a pattern of aggression, insulting or demeaning behaviour by a person in the workplace, where the person knows or reasonably ought to know that her behaviour is likely to create an intimidating or hostile workplace environment.” To demonstrate a few ways in which Linda Briskin contributed to a hostile workplace environment, here are some of the details Tasia described for me.

“She [Prof. Briskin] started to send out a lot of emails to the rest of the TAs as a group saying lots of the grades are too high so we’re going to need to have a marking meeting. Which is brutal. Marking meetings are the worst. You sit around for five hours and show everyone your work and talk about how you graded it. And so we had to have a marking meeting because of me. And she made sure that everyone realized who was responsible for the marking meeting...

“She would also send out mass emails to the TAs to remind us of the ‘typical grade profile.’ A ‘typical grade profile’ is about a C baseline. You should start from a C. A good assignment is a C. And something that’s perfect is an A+. But that doesn’t happen often. Which is kind of bizarre, for me, to give someone who has fulfilled every step of an assignment a C. It seems like having done the assignment correctly is automatically a B. And in graduate school, a B is a low grade, a really low grade. This was a first year class so I understand the logic of where she’s coming from, her grading paradigm, but that everyone should fit into the same grading paradigm is not logical.

“What led to the actual harassment grievance was that I asked to meet with her about the way she had dealt with me so far, and when I asked for that, she totally cut off all communication with me and said, meet Larry Lyons, who was the Undergraduate Program Director of the Social Sciences division. That’s highly unusual. Generally, asking for an informal meeting with your professor is something that is just granted. As the first step to any conflict resolution is an informal meeting with your professor. So she sent me a one line email to meet with Larry Lyons, this is his phone number. Then Larry Lyons emailed me saying why don’t you come and talk to me and we’ll figure this out and hopefully bring about more cooperation between you and the professor. I cancelled that meeting when I realized Professor Briskin had no intention of coming to it. It was a meeting between the Undergraduate Program Director and a teaching assistant in a course who was having trouble with the professor, who asked to have a meeting with the professor, and was denied. So I cancelled that meeting until they would agree to both be there.”

And of course, we saw what came of that meeting, which ended in Tasia having to walk out.

“In between all this, there’s a lot of other stuff going on at the same time. Small things, like... for example, I can’t go to class one day because I am working on a paper so I email her and say I’m not going to be in class today, I’ll get notes, I’m really sorry. And another TA does the same thing and says I’m not going to be in class today, I’m doing other work, I’ll get notes. And her response to me is, it’s your job to come to class, your students were looking for you, I looked for you, you weren’t there, and you get paid to come to class. Her response to the other TA was, thanks for letting me know...

“After I had the meeting with Larry Lyons I received in my York U inbox, a bunch of emails from Prof. Briskin sent out to every listserv saying that there would be one or more positions available in the course that I was teaching for next year. This is in April. People don’t generally look for new TAs in April. I understood that to be bullying.”

During her meeting with Prof. Wellen, Tasia was even offered to sign a settlement form, to drop the grievance, walk away unscathed, and with full pay. Classic employer negotiation tactics. Tasia refused to sign.

A more fundamental concern, however, lies in the ideological war being waged behind all of the petty intimidation tactics and posturing: the notion of what grades are and that these professors are practicing the opposite of what they preach every day in lectures. We often hear about the division between theory and practice. A situation like this makes that division apparent.

“This whole group of people is coming from areas of the university that are historically progressive,” Tasia told me. “You have women’s studies scholars, feminists, union organizers, people who are active within the faculty union, people who used to be part of CUPE 3903. This is the left of the university in a lot of ways, especially in the administration, so for them to be upholding this grade curving, which they want you to do voluntarily... So many times I was told that York University does not curve grades, we don’t have a curving policy, but following the grading guideline to the letter is curving grades. If you’re only supposed to have a percentage of A+s, that’s curving grades. That’s making grades fall into a profile. That’s what’s really interesting. People who are not practicing their own work in academia. What you write and what you work on is your life, right?

“You know, as a TA you’re responsible for... you educate the students.  They see the professor two hours a week if that, if they come to lecture. Tutorial is where you learn. Any student knows that. We grade their work. We see the progression of their work over the year, so someone who writes a paper in September writes something very different in April. And you see that as you go along. Part of grades is supposed to be, I think, acknowledging that progression. In first semester, a student may have had no idea what something meant and they worked really hard and now they have a better understanding of it, and their grades should reflect that. I think. But according to this paradigm, it doesn’t reflect that. It just says, students are a grade, students have to fit into a grade profile, and if students don’t fit into a grade profile, force them to, otherwise you’re doing something wrong and you’re not teaching your students.

“In these courses, people teach activism. They encourage students to look at the structure that they belong to and look at the university and big institutions and the government and to deconstruct them, but when somebody does it in their own life and in the classroom, they get punished for it. If you’re teaching students about how universities are sites of privilege and how that privilege plays out in different ways and then students show that they know what that means and they can apply it and you still want them to get a bad grade even though they’re demonstrating their knowledge of the course... It just shows that the grades are important because they keep students in the structure. It shows that even the lefty professor, even they uphold the system because they get privilege from it. And so they don’t want to give up that power that they’ve gotten from controlling students and controlling their grades because then they lose something.”

And Tasia’s students did learn first-hand about the injustices of meritocracy. Having heard the recording of Tasia’s meeting with Larry Lyons, some of the students decided to compose a letter, which they signed and handed to Linda Briskin in class, applying knowledge they had gained in the class. While I cannot reproduce this letter for you in full, I have plucked a few of my favourite excerpts. For instance:

The professor and the Undergraduate program director only focus on the marking by the Tutorial leader as the problem and not focusing on the systemic inequity that is embedded in York’s grading structures.

We were encouraged to not accept claims of objectivity and 'truth' because they are always informed by the person behind the claim. In this situation, we find it interesting that [Larry Lyons] is using a truth claim to support his position. Assuming that the professor has no bias and that she can objectively know what the 'truth' based on her expert status is highly problematic.

Can the professor decide on marks without having any contact with the individual students?

It is very apparent that the male undergraduate program director kept interrupting the female TA and asserting his masculinity. As well, he kept talking at her not to her. During the whole conversation there is a tone of aggression and command toward the TA. The professor's collusion in such activity is an example of horizontal violence, of women who maintain privilege by reinforcing other women's oppression.

...throughout the meeting there is an implication that the stereotypical student will only get a baseline C grade. Professor Briskin said it best when she taught us about stereotype and stated that stereotypes are a subtle system of social control that justify forms of discrimination to facilitate the reproduction of dominance.

“Long story short, I filed a harassment grievance. I had a meeting about the harassment grievance. They didn’t concede the grievance. That means it goes to the next step. Because I didn’t take their minutes of settlement and I didn’t leave the course voluntarily they filed an article 8 disciplinary action against me. They investigated that instead of dealing with my grievance. So it’s retaliation for a grievance. Then the investigation was closed. They decided that all of the points in the article 8 disciplinary action complaint were true and that I’m dismissed as a TA. After I’m suspended from the course, they have a meeting with the students, that’s Richard Wellen and Linda Briskin. They go to a meeting with the tutorial and they tell them that I’ve been suspended from the course, which is actually a violation of the confidentiality in the collective agreement that we all signed. It’s a violation of 8.02.3. They tell the students that I was suspended with pay and that the order came from the Dean’s office, not because of my grading but because of bigger problems with compliance. They told the students that I had filed a grievance. But they said that they couldn’t give the details because I could grieve that... They said that they had tried everything to resolve the situation and that they had begged me to resolve it. They also told the students that I knew I would be suspended, and so I shouldn’t have marked anything, which I didn’t. They told the students that it wasn’t because I was a bad teacher, and they admitted that I was a good teacher, and that obviously we were all very close and that I was doing a good job with the tutorial, but I wasn’t compliant enough and so I had to be suspended. And I had informed my students every step of the way what was going on. They understood what was happening at that meeting. Had I not done that, which a lot of people wouldn’t... I played the tape recording [of the Larry Lyons meeting]. Because they’re adults and they pay for an education and their grades are important in the bigger picture to them and obviously in the system, I think it’s important that students are given as much information about their education as possible. They’re stakeholders in it, and if their grades are being threatened, I think it’s important that they know that.”

“And how did the students react?” I asked.

“The students were angry. I spoke to a couple of students after the meeting and... I don’t think they expected the students to be as informed as they were. And basically the students just called them on it and said ‘We have a month left of school. You don’t know us. You haven’t read any of our work. How can you do this?’ They were told that their grades wouldn’t change, and everything I marked stayed the same until their final exam and last assignment, on which I assume they marked them a lot harder because they wanted to make sure their grades would be typical. I just don’t understand why anyone would do this to students. First year students. They’re new at the university. And you get a new TA in the last month of your class who has never read anything that you’ve written. For a lot of my students, English wasn’t their first language, and I think it’s not fair to mark those students... I think a lot of people mark ESL students harder because they’re like, ‘Well, this is in your best interest. Because if we’re harder on you then you’ll learn faster.’

“So yeah, I was taken out of the classroom. They sent a lot of emails to my students saying that I had refused to give up their grades, that I had refused to give them any of their assignments, their grade profiles, that the students were going to get zeros if they didn’t re-hand in everything they’d ever done for the course to the new TA. I would get emails from students while they were in tutorial saying, they’re telling us that they’re going to give us zeros on everything and that you aren’t following directions and that you’re not giving them our materials, is that true? And no one asked me to hand anything in. And eventually, the day that I got the email from a student, I brought everything in a package. All they had to do was ask for it, but instead they just lied to the students about what I was doing to scare them. And I think that they wanted to turn the students against each other, because now they’re all fighting for grades, and turn them against me so that they would distrust what I did. So they would think that I screwed them over and that the professor didn’t screw them over.

“Filing a harassment grievance, getting a discipline letter, being suspended from a course, not being allowed to teach at York University... what do you have to do to have that happen? What did you do? Did you sexually abuse a student? Did you beat someone up? No, you give a few A+s and that’s it. And then you can’t teach. You can’t have involvement with undergrad students. All you have to do is give some good grades and not kiss some peoples’ asses.”

These are waters I don’t know that I want to be treading, when the very people I’m supposed to admire turn out to be slaves to the very system against which they claim to fight. By insisting upon competition in education, these professors only serve to uphold capitalist corporate culture and ideology. They promote the illusion that we are alone in this world. Everyone goes into an exam alone. Everyone produces assignments alone. Creativity is wholly independent. One acknowledges the ownership of ideas and the need for an inequality of intellectual resources. Knowledge, in a capitalist economy, can be bought and sold like any other fictional commodity, grades being a measure of that knowledge, a measure of the worth of a commodified discrete student unit. But how does one own an idea? It is a question that we as thinkers and artists, even those of supposed socialist or at least “anti-capitalist” leanings, do not ask enough. We fight so hard for our intellectual property rights yet claim to be against the very idea of property. We claim to be for equality yet uphold structures of inequality.

Do I want to teach at a university? After the things I’ve seen at York... not anymore. Not if I have to kiss ass to do it. But at the same time, how can I live within the system and simultaneously be apart from it? I have no answer to that question.

-- Soon to be bagging groceries at a store near you, Devon.

p.s. -- Tasia will be speaking about her case on the 25^th of January from 12-2pm at an as of yet undisclosed location at York. Her mediation is scheduled for Feb. 3^rd. More details will follow in the comments section of this article.