T he McGill Daily looked like the Gazette or the New York Times , and we were just as stodgy. Monty Berger, BA'39, was the sports editor and used to fight me all the time because he wanted sports on page one and I was very uptight about what was on page one. The great thing about being editor of the Daily was living in the Union Building with other student union executives. I was from Montreal and I could easily go home for a home-cooked meal.

I was the first Jewish editor and that was a big thing. McGill had quotas for Jewish students but incredibly nobody questioned or challenged that at the time. We were so grateful to get into McGill, the attitude was "don't rock the boat." [His family name was Klughaupt until it was changed at the Canadian border; he was born Jacob but his sister called him Gerald.] My mother wanted me to be a doctor, so I was taking pre-med courses. But the Daily changed my vocation. I came home and told my mother "I am going to be a journalist." She said: "I don't care what you do as long as you become a doctor."

I won the Beatty Scholarship in Classics and liked the program but found it somewhat confining both academically and socially, so I joined the Daily staff to broaden my horizons. My first assignment was to cover a meeting of the Medical Undergrads' Society, which turned out to be an illustrated talk on "The History of Childbirth over the Ages." I was only 16!

I look with gratitude at my four years on the Daily ñ for the practice in writing under pressure, all stories were read by a couple of thousand people including the Principal.

The main external influence facing McGill as the 1939-40 year began was without a doubt The War. The October 2, 1939, edition was published only three weeks after Canada's war declaration and our 72-point headline ran, UNIVERSITY ASSISTS CANADIAN WAR EFFORT. There was no large-scale action in the west that year. So, unlike 1914, there seemed to be no need to send a McGill Regiment to France.

We had good relations with the Principal's office. His secretary, Mrs. MacMurray, gave me early warning that F. Cyril James would replace Lewis W. Douglas. As a result, I was able to scoop the Gazette by getting the first interview. I had to bend the truth a wee bit to the doorman of his apartment building. He asked if I were a reporter; I replied innocently that I was a student coming to see Professor James.

I was an innocent lower middle class liberal from Montreal. The most radical thing I did was cheer for David Lewis when he was leader of the CCF. The Daily was leftist, but in a not radical way. I wrote a couple of fiery editorials for civil liberty. The key issue was that the premier of the province was a fascist bastard [Maurice Duplessis] who slapped a padlock on restaurateur Frank Roncorelli. I wrote that this was an insult to Canadian democracy. Some weeks later, the British National Service said the McGill Daily was full of communists. Our cooler heads prevailed and we came out with a spoof issue called the McGill Daily Worker. We mocked and satirized this comment, and talked about films of the day, making them sound Russian.

The other issue I can recall was the ridiculous behaviour of the University of Montreal, which had prevented its students from watching a popular French film, Les Enfants de Paradis, which was very sexy for those days. We wrote against censorship, which was like being for motherhood, not very hard to do.

Some technical talk. In our time, the McGill Daily was a broad-sheet newspaper, to provide students with a larger barrier against the words and frowns of the lecturer as they devoured my column in the morning classes. It was set in hot type and printed at the Gazette, in its old building on St. Antoine Street, near Peel, around the corner from Mother Martin's. How many late nights we spent at the Gazette, looking over the shoulders of the tolerant compositors who set the columns of the hot metal type, as suggested on our mock-ups! These pros deserved a medal for their patience and good humour, dealing with the guess work and vagaries of the would-be journalists from McGill. . . if it hadn't been for them, generations of McGill students wouldn't have had their morning fix of the Daily with their coffee or classes.

McGill's historian, Stanley Frost, wrote that in 1950 the McGill Daily "found its metier." I guess what he means is that the Daily was beginning to recognize the existence of the world outside the Roddick Gates.

In my year, the Daily carried the publicity blurb promoting the Red Feather Union Charities with girls doing a high kick describing the Union party in midway fashion. This sent the Dean of RVC, Muriel Roscoe, over the wall. Everybody lost their heads except for the Principal's secretary, Dorothy MacMurray. We believed that she ran the place; she was a very experienced lady. The paper was suspended for three days and so was I. This was well before the liberated sixties; the University responded as if students were part of a private grade school.

The Daily was in its Joe College days, with a lot of attention to McGill sports teams, a lot of enthusiastic reporting of campus activities and as many names as possible. This was the beginning of the Cold War and there were early signs of hysteria about communism.

I went on to work for the Montreal Gazette and later joined Time magazine as a writer and worked in New York, Montreal, London and Ottawa.

Perhaps it is important to set the context of the McGill I entered. This was 1948. I had just graduated from high school and was still a callow teenage youth. Upper classmen, who are always intimidating, were particularly so in my year, as they were composed largely of the huge influx of veterans who had entered university at War's end.

It is always difficult to summarize the temper of the times but the mood in the universities in the country was not one that would produce any unusual degree of intellectual or moral or social ferment or discontent. There was a mood of expansionism in the air and this was echoed by tremendous government investment in the expansion of services. The future looked bright and there was a strong sense that society had answers to most of the problems that had plagued the past. A major Time magazine cover story called us the "silent generation."

For those who were associated with the Daily there was a sense of being the stewards of a venerable and important institution. Many hours were spent poring over the bound copies of the Daily and most of us knew of the life and career of W. Gladstone Murray, BA'12, the founder of the McGill Daily.

As I look back on those events I realize that being editor gave me an insight into the breadth of opinions, feelings and lifestyles of Canadians and Canada, one that had not been so obvious to me before. This instilled in me a profound sense of Canadianism, one which has dominated my life and, despite sojourns out of the country, has influenced, in a large measure, my staying in Canada. I remember writing an editorial on Canadian culture ñ mostly about Can Lit. I couldn't be so arrogant and confident now. The experience also helped me to de-mythologize leaders and heads of institutions. The then principal of the university, F. Cyril James, used to meet with me from time to time. He would give me an informal education about his views on education, about what the university should stand for, the importance of religion and a sense of the political drama in Quebec and about the then two major characters on the French side, Premier Duplessis and Cardinal Villeneuve. McGill and other English-speaking institutions (the term anglophone had yet to be coined) benefited in that era as they had no qualms about taking federal money whereas the French Canadian (QuÈbÈcois was still in the future) institutions were forbidden by Duplessis to participate as this would weaken the protest against the intrusion by Ottawa into matters assigned to the provinces by the BNA at Confederation.

This was the era of the quieter, silent generation. The Student Executive Council decided to have a "No Activities Day" for the last term of the academic year. The Daily managing board agreed to this and the big fight, the biggest of my life at the time and career, was which day to choose to close down the Daily so that we would publish only four days a week. For some reason and with some error in judgement, I had chosen Monday, which was the most important time for the Sports department, and all hell broke loose. After a riotous meeting, things quieted down. However, I think I learned the benefits of consensus decision-making and used that approach thereafter.

Although this did not directly affect the Daily, the death of King George VI early in 1952 led to the cancellation of the annual Winter Carnival to provide a suitable atmosphere of mourning, grief and sadness at this loss. After graduating from McGill I was able to fulfill a long-time ambition of entering medicine and then, after some peregrinations, ended up in psychiatry. I am head of the Department of Psychiatry at Sunnybrook Medical Centre in Toronto, and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at McMaster.

Perhaps more interesting and more germane has been my experience in editing other vehicles, including the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry. Clearly, being editor of the Daily had a great effect on me and my own subsequent development. I have always looked back at that period in my life as a great high point and perhaps a synthesis of what a good university liberal arts education should be about.

I came to McGill from South Africa when my stepmother, a Canadian who had been neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield's operating room nurse, returned to the "Neuro" upon my father's death. My McGill transcript shows I studied English and philosophy, with a post-graduate year in comparative religion, but I really graduated in journalism. Heading the Daily, with a staff of about 75 (most worked one day a week so there were really five staffs), was a baptism of fire.

At that time, the Daily strove to emulate the big-city papers, serving readers by reporting what was going on at McGill as completely and objectively as possible. The Daily was not a journal of opinion, and writer's views were confined to the editorial page or to bylined opinion pieces. At each morning's post-mortem, lapses from this rule would be red-pencilled with EC ("editorial comment").

But opinions ñ sometimes strong ones ñ did find their place in the paper, and the Daily won the John Bracken trophy for the best editorials that year. One of the best editorials concerned the decision of the francophone universities to secede from the National Federation of Canadian University Students if a proposed student exchange with the Soviet Union was ratified, even though campus votes had already shown a majority of Canadian students approved. I dictated my editorial over the phone from Quebec City, and strongly criticized the Quebecers' refusal to respect the majority. Unfortunately, the staffer who took down my copy over the phone spelt "secede" as "seceed" every time it appeared, which rather took the edge off the editorial's fine indignation!

Two other things are notable about that occasion. First, the students involved, Denis Lazure and Marc Lalonde, went on to achieve prominence in discussions about Quebec's secession from Canadian federation. Secondly, Principal F. Cyril James called the McGill delegation into his office to suggest a compromise proposal ñ a student exchange with Poland! Apparently, the "word" had come from Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis that McGill support for an exchange with Polish students would not jeopardize McGill's funding from the province, because the Roman Catholic church was recognized in Poland.

In another memorable misprint the Daily marked the royal visit to the campus of Philip and Elizabeth (she became Queen only months later) with a special edition which included a biography of Philip headed "Prince Abandons Navel Career. . . "! The gaffe was fixed for the special copy presented to the royal couple, but somehow Prince Philip did see the original and was apparently much amused.

I went on to work for the Montreal Gazette, the McGill News, trade magazines, Weekend magazine, Du Pont of Canada, and then at Royal Bank. After nearly 30 years of fascinating work at the Royal Bank, including heading the Public Affairs function and writing speeches for three successive CEOs, I retired in January 1995, and continue extensive volunteer work.

As far as I know, I was the first Latin American Editor-in-Chief, and the first foreign-born editor. And although there were relatively few foreign students, I never felt unwelcome ñ perhaps because I was blue-eyed and white. But I like to think that it was more the cosmopolitan atmosphere of McGill and Montreal that made it possible for a Mexican to be a student leader on campus.

My term as editor was marked by several events that permanently re-shaped the Daily. It was the last time the McGill Daily was printed as a full-size, eight-column newspaper because the Montreal Gazette cancelled the long-standing printing contract.

Daily traditions included the rather secret and underhanded practice of grooming future editors. I think the Daily and the Students' Executive Council were micro-reflections of power structures in the academic and corporate world. In 1953, I, in collusion with Fred Lowy, BA'55, MD'59 (now Rector of Concordia University), and John Fraser, BA'55, decided to break a long-standing tradition and groom the first female Editor-in-Chief of the McGill Daily: Flora (Davis) Ball , BA'56, who became a well-known writer and journalist. I am rather proud of this decision.

Early in the fifties radicalism was muted. The war was too recent, the spectre of fascism too vivid. Communism was a daring option a few students embraced, but in a rather timid manner. The CCF provided a warm refuge to those striving for socio-political reforms. The fuel that would ignite in the '60s was beginning to trickle into consciousness, but was not yet volatile.

I went on to work as an art director. The New York art scene introduced me to the avant garde, and to the explorations of art alternatives such as mass production, particularly printing. Today my wife and I run a small publishing business that produces and distributes interactive cards. The McGill Daily was the most important activity I engaged in during my university years.

During my editorship, we fought off an attempt to completely subrogate the McGill Daily constitution to the whims of the Students' Council. The University administration also attempted to interfere. In particular, before I became editor, it suspended one of the editors because the Daily mentioned that a social event, held in the Union building, involved the consumption of alcoholic beverages, then a "no-no." In effect, the newspaper was censured for reporting the truth.

My only encounter with Principal F. Cyril James was to be summoned one day to be told that he found the publication of Tampax ads on the editorial page of the newspaper to be in poor taste and suggested relegating them to the sports page! Because of a newspaper deficit (the previous administration!), we published more four-page than eight-page editions. The size of the Tampax ads were amenable on the editorial page whereas larger advertisements from the cigarette companies, for example, interfered with the editorial page layout. I explained the situation to the Principal and we did not change our policy.

We did not take ideological positions in support of a "command and control" society, or for that matter even the very generous welfare state which Canada has developed into.

When I joined the Daily I was a 16-year-old freshman straight out of grade 11 ñ there were no CEGEPs in those days and my parents had started me in school a year early.

The Daily office then was a large untidy room in the basement of the old Union (now the McCord museum) where editors and reporters worked on manual typewriters that were almost as old as the building. During my years at McGill I spent more time in that room than in any other. I was successively reporter, desk editor, features editor, executive editor and (as a graduate student) an occasional contributor to the editorial columns.

The Daily in my time was more conservative than it became later, but not enough for the McGill Progressive Conservatives, who complained repeatedly that we gave more space to the Liberals and the NDP. To avoid the flak I agreed to interview two Tory cabinet ministers, Howard Green and George Hees. Green was such a charming gentleman that my story provoked a letter from my friend Philip Resnick, BA'65, MA'69 (now a political scientist at UBC), urging us to be more critical of the government's foreign policy. The media can never please everybody! On another occasion I was sent to cover a speech by RenÈ LÈvesque at the UniversitÈ de MontrÈal because I was the only reporter who understood French. I mention this because nowadays I presume all the Daily reporters are bilingual.

I also remember that it was my day to write the editorial when the U.S. government forced the University of Mississippi to admit its first Afro-American student, James Meredith. Either I or someone else had the ridiculous idea of trying to telephone President Kennedy at the White House for an interview. Needless to say we did not get through, but I wrote an editorial praising Kennedy's handling of the issue, which I still think was one of the best I ever wrote.

On a lighter note, I was asked to make the travel arrangements when virtually the entire Daily staff attended the CUP conference at Carleton in 1963. I decided we would go in style on the Canadian, a very elegant train in those days. To my chagrin, and to the amusement of the staff, we returned from Ottawa on one of the oldest and slowest trains I have ever seen in an industrialized country. It made 23 stops in 111 miles. That ended my career as a travel agent.

The Daily had a major influence on my life. It stimulated an interest in politics, and led to my career as a political scientist. It also introduced me to touch-typing, a skill that has stood me in good stead. Most of all, it introduced me to many interesting people, some of whom have become lifelong friends.

I am proud to say that I was once Editor-in-Chief of the Daily, and likely the only one with the distinction of never putting out a paper. It was in 1966. Patrick MacFadden, BA'66, was editor, and gave the paper a more leftish slant than the student council could bear. Council was meeting that evening to fire him, in front of a ballroom packed with pro-Daily students. I was busy in graduate school and hadn't worked on the paper in a few years, and showed up at the meeting to give my brother a ride home. Council latched on to me as an experienced and reasonable guy, and after they fired Patrick they made me Editor-in-Chief. I explained that I had only come to pick up my brother. So I resigned. The place exploded, and I got the only ovation of my life. The downside was the hug and kiss from Patrick!

There was a more serious and professional side to putting out the paper. We worked hard, the training was great, we made lifelong friends and we were very proud to be full-time students putting out the only college Daily in the country. Our mast- head read "The Oldest College Daily in the Commonwealth." MacFadden, that Irish lefty editor, changed it to "The Oldest College Daily in Canada." That must have angered the spirit of James M., for a few years later the Daily regressed to several papers a week. There are no college dailies left in the country. It's Patrick's fault.

When I started working for the Daily, it was the pillar of the student establishment. Editors Joy Fenston, BA'64, and Patrick MacFadden, BA'66, changed all that. By the time I became editor, the Daily was opposed to the war in Vietnam, fully supportive of Third World liberation movements, critical of our tradition-bound University, and fascinated by new directions in Quebec nationalism.

I was fired as editor in November by the Student Council for an article exposing a McGill professor doing research for the Pentagon. Reinstatement came two weeks later after some very lively on-campus meetings.

In my time at the Daily a premium was put on good writing. The number of professional journalists who came out of those years attests to that. But most of us also valued critical thinking and social commitment. The Daily provided my writing education, as well as my activist training. When I left academia I moved on to a black community in Oklahoma, to the coal miners' reform movement in Appalachia, to the United Steelworkers in Canada. Now I live with my wife and two cats next to Bronte Creek Provincial Park, Ontario.

Twenty years ago when I was editor, we did not think of the Daily as an evolving institution. Every year was the same old struggle to get sufficient funds from Student Council to keep the thing going. And every year we asked the question I gather is still being asked ñ why? Or, perhaps, Pourquoi? The answer is, every Great University must have a student newspaper ñ and a Daily newspaper is even better.

Yes, the Daily was "daily" then. One of only 37 student dailies in North America. (This was reported frequently in the McGill Daily, so it must be true.) And unlike those wusses at Harvard and Yale, the McGill Daily had no moth-eaten faculty adviser dispensing the wisdom of countless departmental booze-ups to grade-grubbing young scribes.

Instead, we had Ron Fleischman. Ron was the Daily proofreader, and an actual downtrodden member of the working class. Thanks to the preponderance of left-wingers on the Daily, his job was safe, but Ron never let his gratitude get in the way of his true feelings. If I understood him correctly, Ron believed that everyone was scum, especially politicians, and that there was no hope. This view, I've found, is much closer to the values of mainstream journalism, and provided for a much-needed counter-balance to the rampant theory-mongering the Daily is famous for.

I became Daily editor in the first place to prevent yet another yearly Daily Crisis pitting the Student Council against the "other-agendaed members of the Daily staff." On one side we had the Mouvement des Študiants RÈvolutionnaires du QuÈbec. Their emblem was a grizzled, be-toqued, musket-toting habitant ñ in other words, your typical revolutionary student. They stood outside Redpath Library hawking their own newspaper. Their politics were of the "in whose interest" variety: "In whose interest is the McGill administration acting? In whose interest is the Liberal Party ruling?"

On the other side we had the ever-popular McGill student movement ñ the Maoists. Their mission was to synthesize Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Tse-Tung-Thought with the McGill student handbook, which meant using the phrase "at this time" a lot. "Why is the administration raising fees at this time? Why is the Faculty of Engineering hiring new professors at this time? Why is my sociology class being held at this time?"

These two groups were vying for control of the Daily and I was the perfect compromise candidate ñ neither side wanted me.

But whatever petty, petty issues we beat to death paled in comparison with Topic One (all together now): What is the Role of McGill in Quebec? Who would have thought that 20 years later, McGill would still be standing, Quebec would still be part of Canada (although in a state of Perpetual Referendum), and we'd still be asking, What is the Role of McGill in Quebec?

The answer, I think, is that McGill's role is to survive ñ and no matter which political wind is blowing at this time, it will be in the interest of the prevailing powers to keep McGill a Great University.

And a Great University must have a student newspaper. So, Daily-haters, get used to it.

Where do Old Daily editors go? In my case, the answer is, "Not into journalism." I work on moral theory and its application, on the relation of science to philosophy, and on figures in 17th century thought ñ Descartes and Hobbes, mainly.

In 1968, I joined the paper under Mark Starowicz, BA'68, in what I'm sure was one of its best years. By the way, the Starowicz staff thought the Daily under Charles Krauthammer, BA'70, DLitt'93, (now a Washington Post and Time columnist) had been a highly unprofessional, and worse, right-wing affair.

During my years, Daily staffers took Maoist views seriously, and also more mainstream Marxist ones. Some staffers were followers of Hardial Baines and of a form of Maoism imported from the Indian sub-continent and tenuously adapted to the circumstances of Canada and Quebec. The Daily was consistently in hot water with its readers about the relentless reporting of events outside McGill, especially the politics of Quebec and of francophone universities.

The main issues were staff and student problems in the wake of budget cuts in Quebec universities; the position of gay students; the effects on McGill of language legislation and campaigning by separatist and more radical francophone groups; education policy and union activity in Montreal and Quebec generally; the attempt to oust a radical sociology professor, Marlene Dixon, from the sociology department; the year-long disarray of the Student Council; and the rise to prominence of an until-then little known body called the Judicial Committee of the Students' Society.

The humour of the Daily staff was liberated with a take off of the Montreal Star called the Montreal Tsar. I am sure many of my colleagues did not think I was enough of a leftist at the time; but since then I have not drifted further to the right than the British Labour Party, which I have supported through the last 16 years of Conservative rule in the UK.

Nesar died from wounds sustained in a 1986 airplane hijacking in Karachi, Pakistan, as he was returning to Boston from the World Sociology Congress. He had been presenting his PhD dissertation, The Origins of Muslim Consciousness in India: A World Systems Perspective.

At the Daily, Nesar was well-known for his gentle ways and quirky sense of humour. Staff members regularly sought him out for his insightful counsel on matters political, journalistic and personal. He was most famous for his editorials and extensive feature articles supporting third world liberation struggles, and progressive movements in Montreal and Canada. It was this stance that led to a conservative Student Council legislating his ouster, but in an open meeting, the student body rallied to defend the Daily and he continued as Editor-in-Chief.
ñ submitted by Joan Mandel

The McGill Daily was my college life; it was journalism school run by students at a university that offered no journalism degree. It was the institution through which much of my philosophical, political, aesthetic, literary and social values took shape. My views on many issues today are fairly similar to those that I held as editor of the Daily: support for social and economic justice across class, race and gender divides. The highlights of our coverage were: support for a McGill maintenance workers' strike and grassroots movements in Montreal, discussion of Quebec and Canadian nationalism, and strong feature articles on international issues. At the Daily, we believed in informed passionate writing, well-explored controversy, and fearless presentation of strong opinions, eschewing the myth of "objectivity" as advocated in most journalism schools.

Since graduating, I have held top editorial positions in "alternative press" publications: Third World Forum in Montreal, MERIP Middle East Report in Washington, D.C., and in 1980 I co-founded Al Fajr, the first English-language Palestinian-produced newspaper in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. During the past decade, I've shifted to producing independent documentary film and video and teaching video production. My latest documentary, Tales from Arab Detroit (1995), explores the largest Arab community in North America.

I certainly feel that my year as editor was a defining element in my life and gave me an understanding of academia which is pertinent to my career. As for the question of its content, the Daily may seem radical to contemporaries. But the year I was editor, I remember the Daily being ridiculed for putting together a special issue for International Women's Day; something the Montreal Gazette did this year. Many positions taken by the Daily have become part of the mainstream with time.

We started doing a lot of feature or focussed issues, including the first Gay and Lesbian supplement. The men on the production team refused to work on the issue, fearing that doing so would make everyone think they were gay, so a number of women from the paper and Gay McGill put the paper out. Autonomy was a big deal for us internally. I was part of the team negotiating with the Publications Board and the Student Council, and we had endless staff meetings about the constitutions, the referendum, etc.

It's impossible to quantify how much I learned there, but the skills I use the most now are: planning, budgeting, negotiating, campaigning, team-building, working through disagreements, and somehow surviving it all. And having fun.

How did this help in my current life? Well, for one thing, I developed a taste for long hours, big causes and slightly offbeat activist types at the Daily which has stayed with me. People on the edge and with a mission in life have always appealed to me, and at the Daily I learned a lot which has made me useful to organizations like Oxfam and Greenpeace.

The paper had been "left-wing" for many years when I was involved, and frankly, as someone who had come to Canada from the hotbed of European student activism, I was attracted to it as one of the few places radical ideas were tolerated. The other "focus" was the South Africa Committee, which the Daily backed in a big way. For the record, brothers and sisters, we won (McGill finally divested) and President Nelson Mandela has thanked all the people who campaigned for disinvestment.

The bottom line was that while most staff were leftists, they were also journalists and, crucially, the paper was a democratic, collective effort ñ anyone could join the paper and any staff member had a vote.

Most students loved to hate us, but at least we made people think. In recent years, I have met former students who are grateful that the Daily was what it was because of this reason. Not to mention the fact that all the socialist lay-abouts I used to work with on the Daily are now all successful career media professional sell-outs. Ho, ho.

Me, I'm a left-wing bureaucrat. More info can be found on http://www.itf.org.uk or e-mail: info@itf.org.uk.

Free-sprited, highly-charged bright young idealists that we were, it frustrated us no end that so many students seemingly didn't want their peaceful college idyll disrupted by any uncomfortable thoughts. For the Daily, like most student papers, had the propensity to attract rebels, angry young men and women who had something to say. I'm not talking just student leftie politicos: the staff also ran the gamut of budding intellectuals, aspiring journalists, the arty and creative, the hip and unconventional, and sometimes the socially-alienated and somewhat mad.

I cannot escape the irony that it was a referendum that allowed 1,500 students (out of a readership of 20,000) to impeach the entire staff in March, 1986, just as my time as editor was ending. My successor, Joe Heath, wrote in the "Impeachment issue," "The lengths people will go to in order to eradicate individualism astounds me."

Well me, too. Still does, though since then I've understood just how frightened people are of difference or change. I was the fourth female editor-in-chief in 75 years; that alone seemed to threaten many. That I was outspoken, once had a purple streak in my hair, edited a paper that wrote stories about gays and cases of date rape, already made me rather unpopular with fraternities and the engineers.

That I had the nerve to criticize the Plumber's Pot for publishing a long poem that could only be described as a graphic contravention of Canadian hate literature laws (in that it celebrated the violent and ultimately fatal gang rape of a woman), meant war. Soon, I saw my name in print as part of a sentence advocating my brutal rape. Once I was physically threatened by two, fortunately drunken engineers who tried to push me down on a dark icy street in the Ghetto, all the while telling me that all I needed was a good, well, you can guess.

Good journalism does require some bravery. Though I can't claim to be the firebrand I suppose I once was, I've never shied away from asking the awkward questions, whether interviewing a Bosnian Serb or NATO commander. In 10 years of print and television journalism, I've never experienced the intimidation I had at the Daily. Three hours each weekday of live broadcasting to a worldwide audience is more exhilarating than editing the McGill Daily. But only just! The fan mail from BBC World is certainly better than the anonymous hate letters which arrived in the McGill Daily postbag.

When I was at McGill, the Daily provided what was undoubtedly the most intense and exciting intellectual environment on campus. We were all highly politicized, but could never rest content with merely being opinionated. We argued out our positions and exposed them to public scrutiny.

This experience led me to pursue an academic career in philosophy (where I specialize in moral and political theory). Although many of the people I worked with at the Daily went on to careers in journalism, I found myself increasingly dissatisfied with what I perceived as a lack of ideological coherence on the left. In particular, I found that most of our political convictions rested upon concepts of social justice and civic responsibility that were inadequately articulated and theoretically ill-defined. Of the contemporary political theorists, I felt that Jurgen Habermas had the clearest understanding of this problem.

At the time, McGill students were a pretty conservative bunch. The most important issues for us were nuclear disarmament, the environment, South Africa, feminism and gay rights. My first year at the Daily, our annual gay and lesbian issue still provoked widespread outrage. Most of our newstands were vandalized and the majority of the copies were destroyed. By the time I left, it barely ruffled a feather.

I mention this because I have considerable reservations about the currently ultra-leftist politics of the Daily. My feeling is that over the last 10 years there has been an enormous liberalization of social attitudes among students. Subsequent generations of Dailyites have interpreted it as their mandate to stay to the left of the student population, no matter how far out that takes them. Because of this, the paper has become quite marginal on campus.