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Edward R. Vrscay

Editor of FAUW Forum, 2000 - 20004
and the subsequent Forum "Imbroglios"

From July 2000 until September 2004, I was the Editor of the Forum, the newsletter of the Faculty Association of the University of Waterloo (FAUW). My goal as Editor was to promote the Forum as an instrument of academic debate and discussion on the UW campus. You may access past issues of the Forum at the FAUW web site. In September 2004, I resigned as Editor because of a conflict with the Board of Directors of the FAUW. You can read a detailed account of the Forum "imbroglio'' (I thank columnist Robert Fulford for such an apt description of the affair) in a summary that I wrote back in November 2004 entitled,

"The FAUW Board, the FORUM and Free Speech - Seeking to avoid offense, but at what price?"

I intended to submit this piece for publication in the December issue of the Forum but the newsletter ceased to operate until March 2005. There is a Part II to the imbroglio -- read on!

In February 2005, Jeanne Kay Guelke of UW's Department of Geography took over as Editor of the Forum. However, in May 2005, after having supervised only two issues of the Forum, Jeanne also resigned because of a conflict with the Board of Directors of the FAUW regarding a controversial article by a UW professor that was submitted for publication. (I have summarized the events leading to Jeanne's resignation in the next article below.)

Thanks to a motion put forward by Ken Westhues of UW's Sociology Department at the Fall General Meeting of the FAUW in December 2005, a special meeting of the FAUW to discuss the mandate of the Forum took place on January 25, 2006. Jeanne and I were also invited to submit our own viewpoints on the nature of the conflicts between the Forum Editor and the FAUW Board of Directors. My commentary is available below:

"What the hell is happening with the FAUW Forum?"

You can also download the article by Prof. J. Novak of UW's Department of Philosophy which some members FAUW Board of Directors judged to be unsuitable for publication in the Forum. (For example, one member referred to it as "irrational". Some members of UW's Status of Women and Equity Committee judged it to be "hate speech".)

"An open letter to the Members of the Canadian Parliament regarding the issue of same-sex marriage"

In response to subsequent e-mail commentaries by Ken Westhues, Len Guelke and Jeanne Kay Guelke on the Forum mandate meeting, I wrote the following assessment of the meeting:

"Response to the FAUW meeting on the FORUM mandate held on January 25, 2006"



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