Long battle over prof’s firing continues with new twists

The plot thickens as Steven Galloway’s war drags on.

The award-winning Kamloops author never imagined that his career would become mired in a warzone similar to the one portrayed in his award-winning novel.

Things looked rosy for Galloway until he came under fire in 2016. His life now in ruins, he earns a bare living doing physical labour.

Galloway attended the University College of the Cariboo in the 1990s before it became Thompson Rivers University.

He is best known for his 2008 novel The Cellist of Sarajevo which sold 700,000 copies, was translated into twenty languages, and had film options. His prospects soared and he became chair of the creative writing program at the University of British Columbia in 2015.

image: NBC News

In Galloway’s novel, set in the 1990s Siege of Sarajevo, a cellist watches as a shell falls and kills people waiting in a bread line. To commemorate the dead, the cellist is determined to play an Adagio in the crater created by the blast while avoiding sniper fire.

Now under siege, Galloway grimly watches as friends and foes exchange shots.

Galloway was terminated in 2016 over breach of trust and misconduct. A former student of his known as A.B. claims that Galloway had abusive sexual relations with her from 2011 to 2013. He says the relations were consensual.

In 2018, an arbitrator ruled that UBC had harmed Galloway’s reputation and the author was awarded $167,000.

Now Galloway sees some light from the pit dug by the explosive allegations. The B.C. Supreme Court recently ruled that his court case can proceed.

The plot of Galloway’s rise and fall has twists and turns worthy of a novel.

At first, Galloway had reason for hope that A.B.’s charges would prove unsubstantiated. In 2015, UBC hired retired B.C. judge Mary Ellen Boyd to investigate the matter. She found that it was not likely that Galloway committed sexual assault or assault (Globe and Mail Dec. 3 2021)

More support came for Galloway in form of a letter from some of Canada’s most celebrated writers, including Margaret Atwood. In 2016, she wrote:

“My position is that the UBC process was flawed and failed both sides, and the rest of my position is that the model of the Salem Witchcraft Trials is not a good one (Vancouver Sun Nov. 17 2016).”

The letter sparked an online backlash from former students who said the letter was an attempt to silence and intimidate them.

Andrea Bennett, a former student who said she witnessed her friend being slapped by Galloway but did not file a complaint, said she was disappointed by the letter (Maclean’s Nov. 16, 2016).

That prompted some of the writers to withdraw their names from the letter. Yann Martel author of the Life of Pi author, said:

“I did NOT sign the letter to defend an empowered white male. I did NOT sign it to silence young women, or anyone else (Maclean’s Nov. 16, 2016).”

Galloway shot back with a defamation suit against A.B. and 20 of her supporters.

A.B. and others fired back with a request to throw out the defamation suit in order to protect their freedom of expression. Under B.C. law, a legal action can be shut down if a court deems it to be a strategic attempt to silence and intimidate others, called anti-SLAPP law.

In a win for Galloway, Justice Elaine Adair firmly rejected the anti-SLAPP arguments. Galloway’s defamation suit can now proceed. Justice Elaine Adair said that there have to be consequences for “publishing on Twitter,” and added:

“It is difficult to see how something so extreme and potentially reckless [as A.B.’s] would be in the public interest (Globe and Mail Dec. 3 2021).”

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Homoeopathy debate re-ignited

Questions about the practice of homoeopathy have been re-ignited by two recent events. One has to do with a homeopathic rabid-dog-saliva treatment and the other about the retrial of a couple originally found guilty of failing to provide for the necessities of life.

Samuel Hahnemann   image: thefamouspeople.com

 

If you thought that dog spit was an effective treatment because Health Canada approved it, you would be wrong. Health Canada approved rabid dog saliva and 8,500 other homeopathic remedies, not because they are effective but because they have concluded that they are safe. Health Canada doesn’t test these remedies for efficacy.

Other homeopathic treatments are made from cancerous cells, black mould and the smallpox virus; they sound dangerous until you realize just how much they have been diluted.

The founder of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, devised a dilution system that he called “C scale.” Homeopathy claims that the more remedies are diluted, the more effective they are. A 6C dilution will result in the original substance being diluted to one part in a million million. Kamloops’ tap water has a million times more naturally occurring fluorides than such remedies.

No wonder Heath Canada has deemed homeopathic remedies to be safe. They are purer than the water we drink. So, why go to all that trouble to make pure water?  The difference between pure water and homoeopathic pure water, homeopaths claim, is that the later contains a “memory” of the original substance even when it is diluted virtually out of existence.

A Vancouver Island naturopath got into trouble when she provided a remedy containing (or not containing, depending on the dilution) rabid-dog saliva. Anke Zimmermann, gave a child lyssin because he demonstrated behavioural issues after a dog bite. The problem, according to Health Canada, had nothing to do with the fact that it contained rabid-dog saliva: five others had been approved. The problem was this one, lyssin, which is made in Britain and not approved.

People can imagine whatever they want, but if they think they are taking medicines when they are drinking pure water, that’s a worry. B.C.’s Provincial Health Officer, Bonnie Henry, wrote Health Canada expressing her concerns.

“I believe all of these products that are purportedly based on infectious or dangerous material should not be classified as ‘medicines’ and should not be regulated as health products (Globe and Mail, May 13, 2018),” Dr. Henry said in an e-mail.

Professor Bernie Garrett at the University of British Columbia’s nursing school says:

“It’s absurd that these homeopathic remedies should be licensed for use when technically, they’re nothing more than water because of the dilution process. But they still cause harm by delaying access to effective treatment and by causing people to lose money.”

David Stephan and his wife, Collet, were found guilty in 2016 of failing to provide the necessaries of life for 19-month-old Ezekiel. They treated him with garlic, onion and horseradish rather than take him to a doctor. Ezekiel’s body was so stiff from meningitis that he couldn’t sit in his car seat. She took him to naturopathic clinic in Lethbridge on a mattress where she bought an echinacea mixture. Ezekiel died later.

The Supreme Court allowed a new trial based on a technicality. The couple appealed the original decision and lost. But because appeal court’s ruling wasn’t unanimous, the couple had an automatic right to take their case to the Supreme Court.

Michael Kruse, executive director of Bad Science Watch, is blunt in his assessment of homeopathy:

“These self-regulated professions are based on magical thinking, and until provincial governments take responsibility to be the arbiter of what is scientific and what is not, the doors are open for any profession with a training program and standard of practice to make potentially deadly claims.”

 

The trouble with Steven Galloway

Award-winning Kamloops author Steven Galloway has problems of his own making. They could have been avoided.

Penguin Speakers’ Bureau

Galloway was raised in Kamloops and attended the University College of the Cariboo in the 1990s before it became Thompson Rivers University; where I taught for twenty years.

Galloway is best known for his 2008 novel The Cellist of Sarajevo which sold 700,000 copies, was translated into twenty languages, and had film options. His career took off and he became chair of the creative writing program at the University of British Columbia on July 1, 2015.

A year ago, Professor Galloway was dismissed from the writing program and has since been fired by UBC, which cited “a record of misconduct that resulted in an irreparable breach of the trust placed in faculty members.”

His firing set off a storm in Canadian literary circles. University of Victoria faculty of the Writing department signed a letter critical of the firing process, a letter also signed by literary heavyweights such as Margaret Atwood. UBC’s faculty association said it has serious concerns with the administration’s “misleading public and private comments regarding Professor Galloway.”

Former students don’t see it that way. They say he fostered a sexualized atmosphere, drank regularly with students and played favourites –bringing some students into his inner circle while casting others out.

Reporter Kerry Gold investigated some of those misadventures in her feature-length article in The Walrus (December, 2016). Galloway would convene Thursday-night sessions in a local canteen known as the Legion with up to ten students. “The group would stay late, consuming alcohol at a pace that made some uncomfortable,” says Gold.

Galloway’s former teaching assistant, Erin Flegg, says the sessions became an informal part of the curriculum. Participants would vie for Galloway’s approval and the rewards it could bring: references, teaching positions, introductions to agents and publishers.

One night in 2012 was particularly rowdy when they met after graduation. It wasn’t late but Galloway had quite a lot to drink, a witness told Gold. “It’s time,” Galloway said, as he got up and slapped the face of a female student next to him. It was revenge for what she had said in class –that she didn’t like Galloway’s writing. Galloway then responded that he would like to slap her face but that he would wait until she was no longer a student.

Partying with students is a bad idea. As a high school teacher and later an instructor at TRU, my policy was never to date or revel with students. The obvious problem is the power differential. Teachers have the power to promote students and advance their careers.

Another student hoped to get into Galloway’s writing class and was drawn into to the struggle for his attention. “He invited her to come drinking,” says Flegg, “That’s how the relationship began. The power dynamics were there from the start.” The two had a relationship for three years.

Intimate relationships are a temptation for teachers. For me, I only had to remind myself that I had been placed in a position of trust: the betrayal of which would diminish me and my profession, and would harm my students.

Eat your vegetables, feed your microbiome

Your mother was right: vegetables are good for you. Not only do they contain essential nutrients but they also feed your microbiome with fiber.

For each of our body cells, we carry around ten microbe cells. In this light, the definition of “we” could be refined. It would be more appropriate to state that we, the microbiome, tolerate the conceit of body cells to suit our own needs. The body cells of so-called civilized societies haven’t been serving us well. Our population has declined in comparison to those in the majority world who eat more fiber and take fewer antibiotics.

It’s counterintuitive that modern societies, while relatively free of infectious diseases that cause inflammation, suffer from inflammatory diseases. Antibiotics have reduced deadly diseases while inflammatory, autoimmune, and allergic diseases are on the rise. If infection is not causing these diseases, what is?

It seems that we (microbiome et al) have traded one disease for another. In reducing infectious disease with antibiotics, we have killed off the bacteria that suppress autoimmune diseases such as asthma.

Brett Finlay, a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia, explored this connection. He found that mice treated with the antibiotic vancomycin had an increased risk of asthma later. The antibiotic had killed beneficial bacteria that are part of the clostridial group.

The clostridial group is related the scourge of hospitals: Clostridium difficile which causes death by diarrhea. But where C. difficile prompts endless inflammation and bleeding, bacteria in clostridial clusters do just the opposite—they keep the gut healthy and soothe the immune system. Moises Velasquez-Manoff explains in Scientific American:

“Scientists are now exploring whether these microbes can be used to treat a bevy of the autoimmune, allergic and inflammatory disorders that have increased in recent decades, including Crohn’s and maybe even obesity.”

The exact cause of inflammatory bowel disease remains a mystery but the picture is becoming clearer. Finlay’s findings confirm earlier results from Harry Sokol, a gastroenterologist in Paris. He ran laboratory tests on his patients with Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammatory disorder of the gut.

All his patients had one thing in common –a scarcity of just one common bacterium, Faecalibacterium prausnitzii. Rather than “bad” microbes causing disease, maybe a could a single “good” microbe could prevent disease. Studies suggest that antibiotics may deplete the very bacteria that favorably calibrate the immune system, leaving it prone to overreaction.

Our microbiome is more integrated into ourselves than previously thought. The state of our gut influences our state of our mind. Happy bacteria love munching on plant fiber, something we get too little of. Some of the byproducts of this munching include neurotransmitters and metabolites that act on the brain.

Our brains respond through the brain-gut connection, the vagus nerve, to help calibrate our immune system. Studies on mice with sterile guts by John Cryan, a neuroscientist in Ireland, indicate how profound the effects of our microbiome is. He found that sterile mice lacked the ability to even recognize other mice with whom they interact.

We kill off gut bacteria with antibiotics, and fail to feed them with fiber at our peril; leaving us susceptible to  anxiety, depression and even autism.