It’s 2026, and I’m reflecting on an experience a decade ago, of embarking on an exhausting, time-consuming, and very expensive (roughly 13K in legal and professional fees) effort to hold my then-employer to account.
In 2014 I was hired into a full-time, non-tenured, teaching-stream position that should have been a permanent job. Over the next two years I experienced discrimination, academic bullying, and sexual harassment. I tried to make the university I worked for take it seriously, but the human rights office–and my Faculty Association–made some serious blunders. At one point, my Faculty Association (in an email I acquired after making a Freedom of Information request) debated whether they should be seriously concerned about my threat of a s. 13 complaint for incompetent representation. The FA lawyer, to my embittered amusement, said he wasn’t concerned: I could prove, potentially, that they were inadequate, but that didn’t meet the s. 13 standard. He seemed unembarrassed about this.
So why I am re-visiting this matter now, when I am gainfully and happily (albeit part-time) employed in a wonderfully supportive English and Creative Writing department?
Because I’m finishing an article that may be unpublishable, and I’ve been working on it, off and on, since 2017. This is my year to put it to bed, one way or another.
A chunk is below, and this is very much work that is in progress.
The work is the work of complaint, as per Sara Ahmed. To make visible how academia harms people who are disproportionately female, racialized, Indigenous, disabled, caregivers, and members of other vulnerable groups.
Because this harm continues, and we are all complicit in not talking about it, not fixing it.
I’ve written to my former employer to give them a heads-up and request their guidance in what I publish. I bear them–truly–no ill will. Many faculty, staff members, and students have a very positive experience there, including my own child (whose Creative Writing and History professors offered stellar, life-transforming experiences).
Here you go:
“My University is a Creepy Place”: Queering the Academic Gothic in an Age of Precarity and #MeToo
Campus novels are once again prominent in contemporary Canadian literature, with recent examples including Randy Boyagoda’s Original Prin (which nods to both Nabakov’s Pnin and Robertson Davies’s fiction), and the more Gothic and feminist takes of Maureen Medved’s Black Star and Suzette Mayr’s Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall. And of course there is Sarah Henstra’s 2018 Governor-General’s Award-winning The Red Word, a complex look at campus sexual politics, set at a fictional American Ivy campus in the mid 1990s.
Issues of gender and sexuality are highlighted in all of these works, which also examine how power works in complicated ways within evolving university and college structures.
Less prominent are works that portray the current experience of students (who appear relatively briefly in most of the works I’ve just mentioned), whose escalating debt loads reflect the past several decades’ struggle to ensure ongoing stable provincial funding. Where students do surface—as in playwright Hannah Moscovitch’s Essay and Sexual Misconduct of the MiddleClasses—it is most frequently in their relationships, personal and professional, with their professors.
An exception, which centres students’ experiences and portrays faculty and administrators at the margins, is the 2015-17 web series Carmilla, a contemporary adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s nineteenth-century vampire story.
In this paper, I compare the web series, which highlights student experiences of assault, and Suzette Mayr’s brilliant Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, which depicts a black tenured professor’s ongoing sense of professional precarity. I’m interested in the ways both works take up Gothic tropes in relation to depictions of queer female characters, who forge relationships of intimacy and solidarity across complex divides of race, class, education level, and professional status.
These texts also take up the discomfiting preoccupations of much of the recent non-fiction writing about the academy: the presence of bullying, discrimination, harassment, and assault on campus. Without intending to read these work as sociology, I want to suggest that fictional works are doing important cultural thinking about power differentials and the abuse of power that move beyond binary relationships of victim and victimizer. Instead, both Carmilla and Edith Vane link contemporary crises on campus to a problem that merits much more sustained attention: the extent to which institutional branding and public relations activities are steering us away from confronting the scope of systemic discrimination and harassment, isolating complainants and (often unwittingly) protecting misconduct.
In the depictions of these writers, the contemporary Canadian university is a fraught space where faculty members feel susceptible to marginalization. As we all know, our campuses are less frequently the site of free speech (or in the Canadian context, more properly freedom of expression) debates and controversies that absorb most of the media’s fickle interest in the academy, more often the home of competitions over resources, status, and autonomy, as the traditional (albeit historically-specific and limited) notion of the professoriate is undermined by casualization of academic work. I recently received an email update from my alma mater, sharing news of their unprecedented fundraising campaign that raised billions.
In 2014, a Canadian-made web series inspired by Sheridan LeFanu’s late nineteenth-century vampire novella Carmilla, acknowledged as an important precursor of Bram Stoker’s Dracula,began streaming brief episodes. Presented in the form of a vlog, or video log, they describe a first-year student’s investigation of her roommate’s disappearance and their university’s indifference as several other young women go missing on campus.
Laura, the protagonist, has been unable to prod the university into action after she reported her roommate missing, and she undertakes an investigation on her own that soon arouses strong pushback from the institution. Laura comments on the gap between her expectations of university life and the reality: “[I was someone who] thought that university was gonna be some big adventure full of books to read and parties to dance at . . . . Well, it turns out the world doesn’t work exactly how I thought it was going to. My university is creepy. And parties are full of numbskulls getting hammered and girls go missing and nobody seems to care” (Carmilla S.1 E. 6 “Why Bother?”). But this indifference can be breached by public exposure: Laura shares her investigative research online, and a security alarm and lights immediately begin to blare, signally the university’s automatic response to anything negative posted about the institution online.
I’ve described this vignette in detail because it brings together the conflicting anxieties and paranoid fantasies of the contemporary academic gothic, and the ways in which students, faculty and staff, and administrators define campus safety and “security.” In Carmilla the Dean holds a Town Hall to threaten students with disciplinary measures if they spread rumours about students’ disappearances, and a troop of fraternity brother pledge to protect all campus “hotties” from harm . . .
In Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall Suzette Mayr presents an academic satire within the mode of the queer Gothic. While the title character is tenured, she is still precarious, threatened by an ambitious new Dean (who wants to increase research productivity) with being “refreshed” right out of her job if she does not publish at a more rapid pace. Mayr’s novel illuminates the neoliberal university’s creeping precarity, recently highlighted in the CAUT’s report on the prevalence of contract faculty and in the University of Regina administration’s proposal, withdrawn after an outcry, for revoking tenure after three consecutive negative reviews.
Edith is cognizant that she is, effectively, on her own. The hope of collegiality she had entertained has evaporated, and after ignoring a colleague’s pleas for solidarity in confronting the administration about the “sick” building housing their department, she tries to focus on teaching and research. To boost her confidence, she consults with a tele-therapist who soothes her anxiety with reassurances about Edith’s ability to construct her own foundation and select the furnishings. But the ostensible therapist is a disembodied voice at the end of the phone, and ultimately revealed to be a set of shifting personas—individualized for particular faculty members—who vanishes before the end of term.
[The next section deals with Shirley Jackson]
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 