by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

In my younger and more vulnerable years, I believed school offered a gentle refuge from the cutthroat savagery of the working world. In school lay the wondrous, endless meadows of the world of ideas, all far from the harsh brutality of the rat race.

Back then nobody seemed to tax you of your Mae West from your lunchbag. The hyper-excited young adults of those years seemed disinclined to worry about Mideast geography. The closest thing to a riot at sleepy McGill was a beloved female early-riser hollering propagandistic praise for the great socialist state of Albania, where nobody had cars.

But change has come. Now everybody's professional hopes hinge on getting a university degree. These days, the upper echelons remain locked to the three of four Montrealers who didn't bag a degree. Thus all the world's ambition gets funnelled through schools, turning academia into fractious circuses of human conflict and desperately competing agendas.

Of course, two of the city's most heinous crimes took place in schools. Marc Lépine killed 14 and Valeri Fabrikant four, with bullets, in universities.

Beneath those high-profile, splashy tragedies, one hears the odd, troubling report suggesting that meanness and backstabbing are the academic new normal.

In March 2004, five student members of the Engineering and Computer Science Association at Concordia wanted to fire their president. I'm not sure what this group does but I know their ritual includes a weekly Lizard Lounge, a meeting where the prez has to drink beer.

So the prez drinks beer and the five rebels complain of her drunkenness. Worse still, the five upstarts argue that she should be impeached for promiscuity. Yes, promiscuity. Like it's a bad thing. They provide no actual examples.

From watching movies, I know that the only time you can be fired for promiscuity is if you're a defence minister and a Russian hooker steals military secrets from your briefcase. If people could be fired for enjoying sex with multiple partners, just imagine the lineup outside the Plateau Employment Insurance office.

Ultimately, the supposedly drunken and promiscuous president called a lawyer. The five accusers hastily retracted their ridiculous claim. The president and I have discussed this pathetic story a few times and she's still deeply hurt and shaken about it.

Of course, teachers can be just as hostile and crazy. One CÉGEP prof acquaintance described staff meetings where teachers would glare spitefully at each other, using the forum for their petty vendettas, shooting down good initiatives simply because years ago its proponent had voted against theirs.

In 2001, Gabrielle Gourdeau of Université Laval in Quebec City wrote a short story about a "social-climbing, careerist, pig-head" professor. Colleague Roger Chamberland reckoned the character was based on him, so he tried to sue her for libel, even though his name didn't appear anywhere in the story. Chamberland even asked the courts to keep his name secret in the lawsuit. The judge nixed that.

The case never went to trial. Gourdeau declared bankruptcy and wasn't rehired. Chamberland died in a car accident. Just earlier, at the same school, professor André Drainville wrote a novel about a professor plotting to kill his colleagues. His fellows profs were also unimpressed.

School administrators can also be slimy. In April, officials from Collège Charlemagne - ranked as the province's best private high school - were busted for, guess what? Tampering with the student test results that contribute to their high ranking.

And a parent recently noted to me that pencil pushers at an elementary school were casually informing parents that their funding goes up when mothers of students report to have little schooling. The less education that the mothers report, the more cash the province doles out to the school. Not that they were directly encouraging the mothers to underreport their education to get more money, but... you know.

Society invests schools with the responsibility of producing good people. Schools fill our heads and produce tomorrow's elite. But too often the stories that come out of them are more like Rambo than Kindergarten Cop.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca