Canadian universities are being torn apart by battles over racism and sexism, by what has been collectively called political correctness. Old white male heterosexual professors, the supporters of the great books (all by older white males), have been denounced by feminists, African-Canadians, gays, and lesbians all demanding that their histories and literature be taught and that they be freed from harassment, real or imagined. Sometimes, the issues have revolved around what professors research – racial differences are one hot button subject. But sometimes, as at the University of British Columbia in the early 1990s, an entire department can come under attack, producing investigations, public furor, and posturing.

Patricia Marchak was UBC’s dean of arts when a small number of political science graduate students charged that professors had sexually harassed and racially demeaned them. The university tried to deal with the complaints informally, failed, and then at Marchak’s suggestion appointed Joan McEwen, a Vancouver lawyer, to do an investigation. The resulting $247,000 report, based on McEwen’s belief that if someone believed they were harassed they must have been, created a firestorm of protest in 1995, not least when UBC’s president stopped graduate admissions in political science.

In this drama, Marchak played a central role. A well-known feminist, she found herself defending a threatened department and opposing the president and the graduate studies dean, both anxious to show that, though white males, they shared the students’ pain. Brief and relatively dispassionate, her book damns her opponents with their own words.

What was going on here? The reality of universities today is fear – fear of offending anyone, of putting a comforting hand on a shoulder, of doing research that might draw anyone’s baleful gaze. At UBC, a few graduate students, conscious of their own political power, showed how easily a frightened institution can be brought cravenly to its knees. Marchak was no heroine of the culture wars, but her book is a useful, if ultimately self-serving, primer on one of the major threats faced by higher education.