On March 3, 1992, the British Columbia Court of Appeal ordered a new trial of Barry James Evans of Calgary, Alberta, for the 1989 murder of his friend Rick Sample, computer systems manager at the Computer Science Department of the University of British Columbia. Chief Justice Allan McEachern – later UBC’s Chancellor – viewed the investigation and prosecution as very strong (“Court orders new trial for man acquitted of friend's murder”, by Larry Still, March 4, 1992, The Vancouver Sun):
“There was no sign of forced entry or a struggle at the scene. And since the fatal shots were fired at extremely close range, police assumed the killer was known to the deceased.
Although the murder weapon was never recovered, McEachern said, “meticulous police work” resulted in a match between shell casings found beside the body and casings known to have been fired from a gun bought by Evans.
“In my view, the Crown had a very strong case,” the judge said. “Except for (some matters), the Crown’s case was almost an unanswerable one.””
In Calgary, serial killer Charles Ng’s former lawyer Don MacLeod – Ng had been deported back to California in September 1991 – conferred with Evans on behalf of his lawyer Noel O’Brien who was vacationing in California, and told the media the defense likely would appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada (“Murder acquittal set aside”, by Helen Dolik, March 4, 1992, Calgary Herald).
Around that time at the UBC Computer Science Department where I was a faculty member, I was involved in some confrontational incidents that had hints of danger of violence just as a political dispute was heating up with Department Head Maria Klawe.
That politics was a mix of management and personal issues, wasn’t my preference but I reluctantly decided to pursue – much to my detriment as it would turn out.
Part of the contexts for that political dispute had been in place when I came to Canada.
In 1988 after my job interview acting Department Head Uri Ascher, once a scientist with the Army Math Research Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (mentioned also in Part 3 of this blog article), offered me an assistant professorship that would be tenure-track if the new Department Head and her husband, both theoretical computer scientists offered tenured positions, chose not to come and otherwise a fixed-term of 3 years with future in the hands of the new Head Maria Klawe.
Under Head Klawe my senior colleague David Kirkpatrick – Klawe’s jogging partner as in Part 3 of this blog article – also in the Theoretical Computer Science group, often acted as a mentor and go-between. David had played a role in my hiring, and his former master’s degree student Raimund Seidel was already a UC Berkeley professor when I was a Ph.D. student there.
Having been from a math Ph.D. background with research interests partly in Theoretical Computer Science and partly in Ascher’s field of Scientific Computing, both older fields, I was of lesser priority for the new Head.
In 1989-90 we saw the hiring of quite a few tenure-track faculty, like University of Washington Ph.D. Norm Hutchinson, computer-networking specialist moving back to Canada from Arizona, and Berkeley Ph.D. Rick McGeer, logic design specialist and son of former B.C. Social Credit government cabinet minister Pat McGeer; elite school Ph.D.s like Cambridge Ph.D. Jeffrey Joyce, programming language specialist and Stanford Ph.D. Jack Snoeyink, computational geometry specialist in computer graphics applications to arrive in 1991; and two Waterloo Ph.D.s, circuit design analyst Carl-Johan Seger arriving via Carnegie Mellon University and computer graphics specialist David Forsey whose animation modeling was based on spline functions – a type of math that had been a focus at the Army Math Research Center with automobile design applications and I had done work related to.
The new, top-priority Computer Graphics group was led by two new, tenured professors, Kelly Booth from Waterloo and Alain Fournier from Toronto.
In late spring of 1990 with hiring over for the year, David Kirkpatrick described to me the remaining open positions and suggested that I have lunch with Klawe to discuss my situation. It turned out Klawe had no time for lunch with me but quickly laid out her priorities for the remaining tenure-track positions – I noticed she told me one fewer than David did.
Klawe then raised the alternative of a one-year extension to my 3-year job – with her help to convince Dean of Science Barry McBride about it. Intelligently I asked that my ongoing tenure-track application be withdrawn, and a few days later Klawe told me I would be given an additional year 1991-92 – as Lecturer instead of Assistant Professor due to UBC Faculty Association’s objection to a non-tenure-stream position lasting too long.
The first 3 years of funding for my job had come from the B. C. Advanced Systems Institute, secured by former Department Head Jim Varah who then headed UBC’s Centre for Integrated Computer Systems Research. Klawe’s arrangement for the 4th year included our co-teaching a graduate course – her first teaching work as a busy Department Head.
Soon there was malcontent among some faculty and staff members that every former Computer Science Head had served at most 4 of a 5-year term but Klawe, who thrived at using confrontational pressures and office-politics tricks, showed every intent to break with the tradition. Those who expressed it to me included Klawe’s friend David Kirkpatrick; and colleague Jim Little of the Artificial Intelligence group, a former MIT scientist, said that Ascher would make a better Department Head.
Given my colleagues’ personal concerns and that I would be leaving, I expressed my willingness to help bring the issue to the table of discussion.
In February 1991 there was a Department retreat, an occasion for faculty members to discuss issues they felt important. My colleague Gerald Neufeld of the Computer Networking group encouraged me to attend and raise the issue, but Kirkpatrick told me it was too early.
Gerry had been a leader of the UBC EAN project – Canada’s first national networking initiative – while studying for his Ph.D. (“A Nation Goes Online: The Early Years of Internet in Canada, Chapter 2, Networking Takes Root”, Historical Archives, Dalhousie University Information Technology Services), and had been supervising Rick Sample in the project and for a Ph.D. before Rick’s tragic death in 1989.
A West Coast soft-spoken type, Gerry had been courted in 1982 by Sun Microsystems founders but opted to stay in British Columbia or could have become a Sun founding scientist. I presumed he was left-leaning like Rick and Rick’s successor John Demco, both politically active such as sponsoring a peace rally featuring James Anderton, New Zealand Labor MP and George Ignatieff, former Canadian Ambassador for Disarmament under Liberal Prime Minister John Turner, or like his former colleague Raymond Reiter in opposing the Star Wars program (“A Nuclear Freeze or a Nuclear Winter: The Choice Is Ours! End the Arms Race Walk for Peace”, and “UBC scientists protest Star Wars”, April 3, 1985, The Ubyssey).
In the summer of 1991 I entered my last year at UBC, so without naming anyone I spoke to Head Klawe about some sentiments against continuation of her Headship. She was surprised by my willingness to push her but agreed to include airing of criticisms of her in the new monthly Department meetings starting in the Fall.
The theme I was raising went like this: Klawe was a great fundraiser for the Department in a period of major expansion she had been hired to oversee, and was good at handling relatively difficult situations, but her style of management wasn’t a good fit for an academic department in normal situations where faculty and staff would enjoy a high degree of autonomy. This theme had substantial input from David Kirkpatrick, and some from David Lowe of the Artificial Intelligence group who pointed out Klawe’s management was of a corporate style.
Maria Klawe had in fact moved from IBM Research in California where she had been group and department manager. Moreover, unlike most North American universities UBC’s academic departments were not run by elected chairmen, but appointed heads hired with the advice of departmental head-search committees.
At the start of the first Fall 1991 faculty meeting, Head Klawe voluntarily expressed that I had brought to her attention existence of dissent about her leadership and she would welcome criticism. I was pleased, but no one aired anything during a few minutes of waiting and the meeting then moved on to other topics.
Typical of Klawe’s trickery, from the next Department meeting on airing of criticism of her was no longer on the agenda – everyone had a chance already. I could see frustrations on the faces of some colleagues, like Kelly Booth, and even two Israeli postdoctoral researchers with MIT Ph.D. – one was Yossi Gil – working under Klawe’s husband Nicholas Pippenger who had multiple MIT degrees including Ph.D.
It was now a stalemate. I had only promised to bring the issue up, not personally start the criticism, which I had not prepared for. I tried to remind Klawe but was politely reminded instead of the busy official agenda.
Some colleagues, such as Jim Little, then said to me in private, “How about your tenure-track job application? Maybe Maria did something wrong.”
Around the last Fall meeting Jack Snoeyink began to tell me about a dispute the mathematician Jack Edmonds – a recipient of the same von Neumann theory prize John Nash of “A Beautiful Mind” had received – was having with the University of Waterloo where the two sides disagreed on whether he had quit his job (“CAUT called in on Jack Edmonds case”, October 1992, UW Gazette; and, “Editor's Introduction”, in Workplace Mobbing in Academe: Reports from Twenty Universities, 2004, The Edwin Mellen Press).
So I reluctantly decided to use my case as a ‘lightning rod’ and informed Head Klawe and others that I had a employment grievance. It was scheduled among the February 1992 Department retreat agenda.
I had real reservation about mixing a personal employment case with general criticism of management style, and of course the former would be considered a harder subject. In hindsight it was a mistake but for a different reason: I should have focused on other problems of Klawe’s – there were including on handling job applications – until if and when my case became necessary, for hidden behind Jack Snoeyink’s enthusiasm and in David Kirkpatrick’s sensible advice was something akin to a “hidden cross” for me.
Back in early 1990 I had submitted an application to convert to a tenure-track position, and David was quite supportive and wrote one of my letters of reference. Then sometime around March he initiated to bring in Jack from Stanford also in the Theoretical Computer Science field, for an interview and assured me it was only for a postdoc position. In early April I became nervous as quite a few candidates had interviews but there was no activity for me, yet David said not to worry as Maria had things in hand. At this time former UC Berkeley friend Paul Wright invited me to visit AT&T Bell Labs, so I did in mid-April and also went to the University of Toronto, with seminar presentations. After return I read an e-mail announcement that Jack was offered a tenure-track position, went to ask David, and was told the decision was based largely on the connection of Jack’s work to the Computer Graphics group. It was at this point David Kirkpatrick suggested I have lunch and discuss with Head Maria Klawe.
So while Head Klawe then may have pressured and tricked me into giving up my tenure-track conversion effort, including misinforming me about the number of open positions for 1991, Kirkpatrick had already reneged on his words and possibly the last open position in Theoretical Computer Science had gone to Jack Snoeyink.
Now going forward in the 1992 dispute I was to focus on my case as an instance of Klawe’s management problems but not draw attention to Kirkpatrick, how could I be sure these two old pals wouldn’t cut me out again behind my back? The wider Department’s involvement in the headship issue would be a safeguard in itself, or so I thought.
Only in December 1992 when I was committed in a psychiatric ward by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police after they had conferred with David Kirkpatrick’s wife, a former lawyer appointed a Justice in November, that I was given information that only 3 of the 5 letters of reference I had requested in the spring of 1990, namely Kirkpatrick’s, one by my Berkeley Ph.D. adviser and another by a Columbia University professor, were in the Department file. The other two requested from Berkeley professors were no shows, but the Department Head didn’t bother to inform me even if only three were required.
One of the missing reference was to be from Berkeley theoretical computer scientist Richard Karp, who had told me on the phone he would write that my recent research was in Theoretical Computer Science, when my Ph.D. had been in Math.
A meticulously commanding professor, Karp was also a close friend of Maria Klawe and Nicholas Pippenger, and in 1988 at Berkeley when I was wondering if Klawe and Pippenger were going to UBC and hence my job would only be fixed-term, “Dick” Karp confirmed it first.
Kelly Booth, a leader of the Computer Graphics group, had received his Berkeley Ph.D. under “Dick” Karp years before, thus apparently the offer to Jack Snoeyink had to do with Jack’s research connection to Computer Graphics as well as lack of a key affirmation for me. Alain Fournier, the other leader of the group, unfortunately died of cancer in year 2000.
After my withdrawal the 1991 tenure-track hires were University of Toronto Ph.D. Craig Boutilier and Cornell Ph.D. Denish Pai, both in the Artificial Intelligence group. Then also around year 2000 Boutilier moved back to Toronto, where Fournier had been before UBC.
Richard Karp’s continuing influence can be seen in his receiving the 2008 Kyoto prize – Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel prize – with two Canadians, Toronto biologist Anthony Pawson and Montreal philosopher Charles Taylor (“Canadians win Japan's Kyoto Prize”, November 10, 2008, Toronto Star).
The February 1992 Department retreat, held over two days in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, was larger than usual, attended by faculty, staff and representatives of graduate and undergraduate students. I remember sitting for dinner with the Computer Science undergraduate student society’s president, an Asian Canadian woman originally from the Philippines.
David Kirkpatrick was absent from this retreat, who had begun to avoid being openly in the middle of a dispute where the boss was also his friend – especially now that my employment issue was at the center.
My grievance was the last item on the retreat agenda, and Head Klawe had promised beforehand she would not stay for it so others could discuss freely.
But at the prior session’s end Klawe refused to leave, instead insisting on hearing first what I wanted to say.
It was threatening to be a stalemate again.
So I said briefly to the effect that I felt Maria had committed wrongdoing in her handling of my tenure-track application, it was part of a pattern of political tricks possibly interrelated and potentially scandalous, and it reminded me of a former U.S. president of the 1960s and 1970s who had to resign early and unceremoniously.
Some were a little taken aback by it. To the astonishment of everyone, the usually very competitive and assertive Maria Klawe suddenly started the motion of weeping, and said something like Feng I had been nice and helpful to you – it was in a sense not untrue other than her trickery which sometimes could be her way of hard bargaining. Sensing others’ impatience she now got up and left the room – with a rueful but vindictive expression on her face – but stayed outside.
The last session was then led by Kelly Booth, who asked that I provide the facts to support my assertions.
Now I made my second major mistake – the first being starting the dispute with a rather serious personal case instead of general criticism more likely for others to join in. I said that Maria was in tears, that considering the good things she had done for the Department it wouldn’t be a good time to push the details – unbeknown to me this was my only realistic chance as political and administrative counter-measures from her and the Dean would come immediately.
At this time Jack Snoeyink, who had been especially eager to show interest including telling me the Jack Edmonds case at Waterloo, suddenly proposed a resolution to offer Maria sympathy, support and appreciation for her contributions to the Department.
I didn’t know what to say to Jack – at this point he reminded me of my elementary and middle school buddy “Ling” (his given name 凌) as discussed in Part 3 of this blog article, encouraging political outspokenness and then ‘backstabbing’.
Fortunately few people followed Jack so no such resolution was discussed, but the intent to stir it up and then quickly clam it down on the part of whoever was coming to the fore with Jack speaking.
As we exited the room Head Klawe was waiting outside to inform me that Dean of Science Barry McBride had just ordered me to see him at the Dean’s office once back at UBC campus.
Some of us were staying the second night at the retreat so Carol Whitehead, the Department’s administrative manager and I took a stroll on the beach in the late afternoon. Carol said to me that Jack might not be as mature as he seemed, to which I responded that Jack was entitled to his opinion. Carol then asked if I liked Seattle and what I would think of working there after UBC, and I said that I appreciated Maria’s giving me a one-year extension so I could fulfill my residency requirement to become a Canadian citizen, and that most academic jobs were in the United States but I didn’t particularly prefer Seattle.
At the time Maria Klawe’s first graduate student, Brendan Mumey, wanted to go to Berkeley’s Ph.D. program and I provided a letter of reference, but he eventually decided to go to the University of Washington in Seattle.
On our way back toward the retreat building along a short trail, Jack Snoeyink appeared at the other end walking toward us, carrying a neatly folded, tightly strapped long umbrella like a walking stick, which I had no idea why on a sunny afternoon. Jack appeared to be looking for us but then continued toward the beach, with a mysterious smile on his face.
Originally American, around year 2000 Jack Snoeyink moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Years later in early 2009 I began my political blogging, first on Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces as Hotmail had long been my primary e-mail. My first article, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”, appeared in two parts on January 29, stringing together some historical and current events in Canadian, American and Chinese politics, and my second, multipart article, “The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada”, began on February 20, focusing on Canadian politics and related, especially regarding former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.
On March 9, Microsoft Corporation announced the appointment of Maria Klawe to its Board of Directors (“Microsoft Adds New Board Member and Declares Quarterly Dividend – Maria Klawe, Ph.D., leading computer scientist and educator, to join board; dividend of $0.13 per share payable in June”, March 9, 2009, Microsoft News Center).
Microsoft was of course influential. When I was teaching at the University of Hawaii in 1997-1999, my teaching assistant “Hu” (her family name 胡), a very smart girl, did her summer internship at Microsoft in Seattle, and my teaching assistant “Wang Lingwang” (王凌望), a thoughtful man, was hired by Microsoft in Seattle after his master’s degree and – like Carol Whitehead years before – suggested that I get a job in Seattle.
Then in the New Millennium working in Silicon Valley in California, I received a phone call from engineering recruiter “Ken Button” on behalf of Microsoft in Seattle, an anecdote I later recalled in my November-December 2009 blog article, ““Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou”:
“After my 10/11 layoff, a recruiter by the name of Ken Button phoned me, who was recruiting for Microsoft Corporation. Pitching the benefits of working for that company in Seattle, he said someday I could have a private office there (in the small San Jose company I had been allowed the privilege of a private office even though I was not a manager); but I was more interested in engineering-related computational issues, and had had a minor episode with Microsoft in Vancouver when I was in the early 1990s’ political activity which included a dispute with my boss at the University of British Columbia before the end of my computer-science faculty job there.
Looking back, if Bill Gates was to launch a teacher into space, who do you think it would be?
To be fair, I have been using the Windows computer operating system and a Hotmail e-mail account for many years, and when I started my first weblog I also chose Windows Live Spaces.”
Like UBC before, they would like you to be there and Maria Klawe there to rule over you – some things never changed.
Back at UBC campus in late-February/early-March 1992 I met with Dean Barry McBride. Informed of my trying to pursue an employment grievance in relation to Head Klawe’s leadership, McBride said that as the Dean he was unaware of anything inappropriate by Head Klawe regarding my tenure-track application but I could raise the issue to the office of Vice President Academic and Provost Daniel Birch. McBride then instructed me to avoid disruption, not to raise the issues directly to Head Klawe or at Department meetings.
Relaxing a little, Dean McBride then told me his son, a recent UBC graduate, had been visiting China to explore opportunities there, staying in Shenzhen, the special economic zone across from Hong Kong.
I knew Barry McBride to be a friend of former acting Head Uri Ascher who had hired me.
Back in 1988 while still in California my fixed-term appointment was to be for 2 years but after conferring with Canadian immigration authorities Uri increased it to 3 years. My roommate David Chin – mentioned in Part 3 of this blog article – had graduated and gone to teach in Hawaii and I had moved to a rented room in a Japanese-owned house being looked after by a Japanese student couple driving a new Honda Prelude, with the young man’s name “Masahiro Yautomi” as I recall, located on El Cerrito’s Ashbury Avenue only half a block, or one, from the home of my musician friend “Wei Li” (魏立).
Just as my hiring was smoothed out by Head Ascher the Japanese owners put their house on the market so I had to move again. Walking into a two-bedroom Berkeley apartment advertised for summer sublet by “Susanna Cyril” as I recall her name as, I was surprised to see a Taiwanese businessman “Mr. Chang” also there – same family name as Chen (陈) in Part 3 of this blog article.
Thus before leaving for Canada I was roommates for 2 months with this Vice President of a Taipei-based bank chaired by a senior figure of the Nationalist Party in Taiwan. “Mr. Chang” looked after a bank branch in San Jose and several daughters at UC Berkeley, and was also a lawyer interested in visiting Guangzhou if I could introduce him to my father – a Philosophy professor at Sun Yat-sen University as mentioned in Parts 2 & 3 of this blog article. I then introduced “Mr. Chang” to Ms. “Wei Li”, who was well connected in Beijing as her Taiwan-born, Tokyo-educated parents had been prominent Beijing medical doctors and she had graduated from the Central Conservatory of Music; but for some reason “Mr. Chang” still felt my father would be more helpful.
So when UBC Dean of Science Barry McBride mentioned his son visiting Shenzhen – a city just south of my hometown Guangzhou and in a recurrent theme in my blog articles like ““Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou” – I instinctively compared him to this Taiwanese banker “Mr. Chang”.
But though I didn’t contradict the Dean in his office I was not about to give up trying to raise my issues in Department meetings. To me it was like a form of democratic exercise.
I soon sent a e-mail to Head Klawe and copied to other faculty members, requesting my issues be put on the agenda of the next Department meeting. Immediately I received a memo from Dean McBride dated March 11, sternly reiterating his instructions not to raise the issues to Head Klawe or at Department meetings.
It was in this type of repressed and frustrated mode that some nonphysical confrontations took place with a few persons in the Department, who had been agitators over this period if not actually looking for an occasion to do me physical harm.
A few days after the March 11 memo from Barry McBride, at around 7 pm I was walking from the Computer Science building to a nearby parkade and Computer Science graduate student Christopher Healey appeared behind about to catch up with me. I knew about him only so continued walking into the parkade’s corner stairways leading to levels above. It was dark in the staircase but not enough for the lights to be on, no one else was around, and Healey caught up to only a foot behind and intentionally shook a chain of keys in his hand loudly and nonstop. I took it as a form of heckling, ignored him and went to my car, and as I drove down the ramp I saw him at his car so I raised my middle finger at him.
The next day, March 16, I was walking from my office to the Department coffee room and Healey appeared in the hallway walking toward me. A few persons like him had for a while been intentionally agitating, but what Healey had done the day before I felt was about to cross the personal-safety boundary and needed to be responded to in public, so as we walked past I tossed my plastic coffee mug onto the side of the wall, away from him – several others in the hallway saw that.
Getting back to my office with fresh tea I received an e-mail with the subject line “What’s The Problem” from Healey:
“I am the person you just about beaned with your coffee mug a few minutes ago. I don’t know what it is you’re upset about. I don’t think we’ve ever spoken to one another before. At any rate, I neither need nor want you running around looking for an opportunity to take a shot at me.
If you think I’ve offended you in some way, we should get together and talk about it. I’ve certainly never said anything to you or about you, so I have no idea why you’re so upset. Nothing is going to get resolved by swearing and throwing things.”
Healey was clever in altering the facts, sounding as if I had “beaned” him with a baseball – a typical use of the word – or wanted to “take a shot” at him when he hadn’t had a baseball bat in his hands and my plastic mug hadn’t gone in his direction, and accusing me of swearing when no words had been exchanged and my finger gesture the evening before had been in response to his heckling which he pretended as nothing.
To make Chris Healey and a few others like him take it more seriously about respecting people, I e-mailed the following reply and copied it to computer systems manager John Demco and Computer Science instructor Vince Manis:
“It’s not me running around looking to take a shot at you. It’s you running around to look for me and so you deserve sh*t in your face. Who the f*cking you think you are that you have the qualification to talk to me?! Pretty ladies who don’t know how to make me happy I don’t even easily turn my head, and when I do I am only giving them an opportunity. Those your kind I ignore and I have said it before and that’s enough. I blast if my individual rights are violated, because blasting is the easiest way for me to respond to harassment. If a dog give me trouble, I kick his ass because it’s the easiest way to get him out my way, nothing worth bragging about because it’s too trivial. Anything you don’t dare to do to David Strangway or to George Bush or to Donald Trump, you don’t do it to Feng Gao. Not that I were big but everyone’s individual rights should be respected. When I blast I blast not just for myself but for all the good people who have been harassed. Some people thought I blast then I must be upset or have complaints so I should talk. No! They were dead wrong! I blast to carry out justice! Start respecting other people or you get “F*ck you!” in public.
P.S. Sorry John. You have nothing to do with the content or the intent of this message. I just want a witness to this and this guy is in your lab. You can choose to ignore it.”
My wordings were offensive, but the thrust of my points were clear though not all explicit, and I would say fair: 1) it had been him who tried to provoke a confrontation; 2) I identified him as likely one of certain gay persons, and said I wasn’t; 3) my anger had nothing to do with sexual orientation but individual rights, i.e., was only a result of his provocation which I considered harassment; 4) I valued equality in individual rights so would mention a few big names whom I wasn’t important like, just to show that respect for everyone was important.
There was a 5th, implicit point in my reply, that I actually felt Healey to be threatening, and unsafe to be with, but given his cleverness I had no direct evidence of such so chose to make some hostility public as a precaution: the word “witness” was to explain to John Demco why he also received this e-mail, whose predecessor Rick Sample had been shot dead in 1989 almost surely by a close friend and former roommate, UBC Computer Science graduate Barry James Evans as discussed in Part 3 of this blog article; so were my expressions stirred by Healey’s words “take a shot”, “Some people thought … I must be upset … so I should talk. No! They were dead wrong! I blast to carry out justice!”
There was a specific context why I reacted to Christopher Healey’s tailing and heckling so fiercely: a year earlier in March 1991 on the same trail to the parkade I came across Rick’s former jogging partner “Moyra” – a women’s volleyball star as noted in Part 3 of this blog article – returning from the Barry Evans trial; right there “Moyra” told me she had just heard Barry’s testimony and realized he was a “crook” that she hadn’t known before – most of the computer systems staff were Evans’s fellow UBC grads and knew him quite well.
The other colleague I also sent the e-mail to but without explaining why, Computer Science instructor Vince Manis quickly reported it to Head Maria Klawe, proposing the sanction of revoking my e-mail and news privileges:
“…the following message appeared (with no prompting) in my mailbox this evening. I have had virtually no interaction with Feng, other than casual greetings in the hall, in my entire time here, with one major exception, back last November when he appeared at my door and screamed imprecations at me. I reported that incident to Carol the next day. I would be quite prepared to make a formal statement on the matter should you deem it appropriate, but at the time, given Carol’s assurances that senior faculty had things in hand on the subject, decided not to push it.
My assumption is that Feng cc’ed me because Chris is a TA in my course.
… Computing Committee meeting tomorrow … may I make clear my vote that unless Feng undertakes to use Department facilities in a responsible manner (I would not, for example, permit a student in one of my classes to send a message of this sort), he should have his email/news privileges revoked.
…”
Like with the February Department retreat, Dean Barry McBride was immediately informed and on March 18 issued a direct order revoking my e-mail privilege, admonishing me with his great sense of morality and indignation:
“In one instance, you threatened a graduate student verbally and subsequently wrote him an abusive e-mail message. The University and indeed society will not tolerate this type of behaviour. I find it particularly reprehensible when it is directed at such a vulnerable target as a graduate student.”
But McBride’s memo also altered the facts like Healey’s e-mail.
For one, I didn’t “particularly” target, threatened or “verbally” abused that graduate student. Healey’s e-mail already stated we had never spoken, while colleague Vince Manis’s email stated he and I had had a verbal exchange several months earlier. So clearly if I had ‘targeted’ anyone it was persons I had problems with – faculty or student – and I never threatened any of them.
For another, that grad student wasn’t vulnerable but I was. My ‘targeting’ was confined to the “abusive” mutual exchanges only, as my e-mail stated clearly I only wanted individual rights to be respected and if that didn’t happen I would yell louder – but without threatening to do any harm beyond it. I identified the student as in computer system manager John Demco’s lab yet only asked John to be a “witness” – fair and equal between two persons dueling – and ignore it otherwise; on the other hand, Vince Manis and now Barry McBride were using Committee and Dean powers to strip me of essential user privilege.
Dean McBride would have been challenged to produce any real evidence that any UBC Computer Science person I had expressed anger with I had ever complained against – except of course Head Maria Klawe above me in authority – or used my faculty position to do harm to, such as in a grade or a reference.
On the contrary, it was my vulnerability Dean McBride immediately “targeted” in a separate memo to me on the same day, making clear that I had no chance of further employment at UBC, implying also that I wouldn’t win the employment dispute, and suggesting counseling for me instead:
“The only sure thing is that you will be leaving UBC no later than June 30, 1992. Given the uncertainty of your future and the obvious stress it is causing you, I would suggest that while you are still here that you seek the help of a counsellor who can help put your problems in perspective and provide you with the guidance to get on with developing the next phrase of your life.”
The fact that Barry McBride subsequently forwarded these e-mails to John Leslie, a psychiatrist at Vancouver General Hospital, shows the so-called “counselling” as intended to be psychiatric, and therefore coercive and oppressive in nature.
Another subtle fact is that when McBride wrote these admonishing memos to me on March 18 he did it without an official copy of my offending e-mail at hand, or at least not a copy he wanted; it wasn’t until March 24 that a copy McBride wanted was faxed by John Demco to Maureen Douglas in the Dean’s office, and forwarded the next day by McBride to Leslie.
McBride also edited out Vince Manis’s e-mail when forwarding to the psychiatrist.
So why should I have been reprehensible for something, risky perhaps, in others’ closet?
Around that time both David Kirkpatrick and Uri Ascher began to suggest that I see a psychiatrist, that some in the Department have concern; then my e-mail privilege was indeed revoked and Demco relayed the Dean’s instruction I needed a psychiatrist’s clearance to get it back.
Under the circumstances I accepted David’s advice, who being on the university senior appointments committee was friendly with former Dean of Medicine Dr. William Webber, then Associate Vice President Academic in charge of faculty affairs. Dr. Webber was willing to refer me to private psychiatrist Dr. Ronald Remick, former UBC Head of Psychiatry previously in a similar predicament – he had had a dispute with UBC, filed a lawsuit, settled it and was now in private practice.
David specifically wanted me to consult Dr. Remick about filing a lawsuit, and I took it as both that resolving the dispute with Head Klawe was difficult and that his wife being a former lawyer David was more inclined to it in this respect.
I met with Dr. Webber who wrote a note of referral, and had two sessions of consultation with Dr. Remick in late March and early April at his office across from St. Paul’s Hospital in Downtown Vancouver. Dr. Remick concluded that other than some stress I was normal, and strongly suggested that I filed a lawsuit against UBC.
Dr. Remick also wrote a note for me to get my e-mail privilege back. But I was puzzled that Dr. Remick’s note dated April 6 – still with UBC letterhead but his private office phone number – stated, “This man is a patient under my care and in active medical treatment”, even though neither medication nor further session was needed as I was normal.
It turned out that on April 3 I had written a formal letter of grievance to Vice President Academic and Provost Dan Birch about Head Maria Klawe’s handling of my application for a tenure-track position. On the day April 7 when John Demco forwarded Dr. Remick’s note to Dean Barry McBride, McBride sent Vice President Birch a reply letter draft, which stated there had been nothing wrong on the part of Head Klawe.
As UBC’s de facto chief executive on academic matters Dan Birch sent a letter to me on April 8, nearly identical to McBride’s April 7 draft, with some differences at the beginning and at the end.
Start and end of McBride’s draft:
“On April 3 you wrote expressing concern about the handling of your application for a tenure track position in the Department of Computer Science. I have discussed the issues you raised with Dr. Klawe and Dean McBride and am convinced that your application was handled in a fair and equitable manner.
…
In conclusion I find that Dr. Klawe and the Department dealt with your case in an appropriate manner. I urge you to put the past behind and to move on with establishing a career outside of UBC.”
Start and end of Birch’s letter:
“Thank you for your letter dated April 3 expressing concern about the handling of your application for a tenure track position in the Department of Computer Science. I have discussed the issues you raised with Dr. Klawe and Dean McBride and am convinced that your application was handled in a fair and equitable manner.
…
In conclusion I find that Dr. Klawe and the Department dealt with your case in an appropriate manner, and I wish you well in your future endeavours.”
The differences were that Vice President Birch thanked me for my letter, and didn’t say I would definitely be outside of UBC for my career.
So there was a strong likelihood Dr. Remick’s referring to me as a “patient” made things easier for Dean McBride.
I might not be the person UBC wanted at that point, but Dean Barry McBride’s righteous morality was somewhat suspect in retrospect.
At the time I didn’t know McBride was behind the prompt negative conclusion from Birch, and so also took a shot at Birch besides Klawe and McBride in an e-mail to Department members to say goodbye – it went to Head Klawe also and her secretary sent a copy for Dean McBride to see.
Some might feel the whole thing was a “storm in a tea cup” due to my self-damaging temper, but certain internet activity record of my then colleague Vince Manis, whose accusative action upon my e-mail started the chain of negative events, will show that his righteousness was hypocritical and highly politically motivated.
In 2008 when UBC and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police went to the British Columbia Supreme Court to dismiss a lawsuit I had filed in October 1992 that had become inactive since April 1993, among the documents I filed to counter them was my compilation of pieces of internet information about Vince Manis.
The first piece is the March 11, 1980 edition of UBC student publication The Ubyssey, in which Vince Manis was cited speaking on behalf of an organization “Gay People of UBC”. As a local leader of the gay activist movement Vince obviously had a political reason to be upset about certain content in my e-mail as well as some in my earlier argument with him; but since my wording wasn’t explicit about “gay” he pretended it to be something else yet his initiation of punishment against me was swift and direct.
The next several pieces were select messages Vince had posted on Internet chat groups in the two years leading up to the time of the March 1992 incident. They first show the kind of vulgar language he had regularly used on the internet – much worse than what outraged him in my e-mail.
For instance on April 27, 1990, discussing the “value of ambiguity” in using “multiple meanings of ‘gay’”, Vince lambasted certain Vancouver area persons this way:
“However, we have a suburb of Vancouver named Surrey (most cities have a similar such ‘burb). The inhabitants of Surrey tend to be largish men who come attached to 4X4’s, and similar vehicles. A typical inhabitant has taken Frank’s approach to the limit, with remarks such as ‘Fuckin fuckin fuckin fuckin’ [‘My engine needs a rebuild’], ‘Fuckin fuckin fuckin fuckin’ [‘Basically, Jean-Paul Sartre was quite wrong on the causes of anti-semitism’], and ‘Fuckin fuckin fuckin fuckin’ [‘I feel horny tonight’]. These people are just plain born poets.”
And the signature of Vince’s messages all came with the following quote:
“"There is no law that vulgarity and literary excellence cannot coexist."
-- A. Trevor Hodge”
Already it had been much worse than my e-mail he later condemned so strongly in March 1992, and is evidence that what prompted Vince’s action to initiate official sanction against me was not so much my e-mail being on the Department’s computer systems but his fury over my particular “ambiguity” referring to a few possibly gay-oriented persons.
Four days later on May 1, Vince made the following comment criticizing certain attitude of moral righteousness:
“The problem with Kirk and Madsen is not that they make moral judgements, but rather that they set themselves up as moral arbiters, granting themselves some sort of cachet as guardians of moral truth. Their offense is the air of absolutism in which they enshroud their arguments: agree with us or you’re a low-life creep who deserves no special concern.”
How fitting it would be for Vince’s criticism of others to apply to himself two years later in March 1992, and maybe also to Dean McBride who no doubt knew Vince Manis’s longtime activism in sexual politics – for their sense as “moral arbiters” with “the air of absolutism” in dealing with me.
McBride’s cutting out Manis’s e-mail when forwarding my offending e-mail to psychiatrist John Leslie probably had to do with his knowing things Manis might say.
Also ironic is that the above two messages appeared in late-April/early-May 1990, when a reasonable chance of a tenure-track position for me according to David Kirkpatrick turned out to be a job for Jack Snoeyink whom he brought in.
One may suspect other considerations behind Vince’s action on my e-mail in March 1992, for the reason that he pretended not to know that the “ambiguity” in my wording referred to a few “gay” persons, quite atypical of his own outspokenness as shown in an August 7, 1991 message:
“I’ll support a ‘scientific’ study to investigate the relationship between gays and child molestation, provided we can have companion studies to investigate blacks and rape, Jews and usury, Scots and stinginess, and politicians and the Bank of Credit and Commerce.
Anything can be the subject of an experimental study, no matter how crazy the hypothesis. This one is crazier than most.”
Around this time I had begun discussions with a number of faculty members interested in seeing Maria Klawe’s headship end as Department’s tradition had called for. Obviously Vince Manis was “crazier” than me when it came to politics he would support, yet it was me Dean McBride and others wanted to make a psychiatric patient.
By the time I became public in the Department about Head Klawe’s management problems, Vince Manis was into political bashing that could include physical violence, as shown in this February 11, 1992 message he posted declaring himself a B.C. New Democratic Party member who wanted to bash the federal Progressive Conservatives like in a “national sport”:
“Here in Canada, we have a national sport called ‘fed-bashing’, practiced by politicians from all the provinces in Canada. Fed-bashing consists of blaming the Federal government for all of the problems a given province is experiencing. I love to fed-bash right now, as my provincial government is run by a party of which I am a member (the New Democratic Party), and the federal government is run by a party which about 86% of Canadians, according to recent polls, despise (the Progressive-Conservatives).
I think that, given the long history of ‘fed-bashing’, the notion of bashing as extending to verbal as well as physical abuse seems quite reasonable.”
How could I not be worried in March about psychological craze like this on the part of Vince Manis and the young men I identified as associated with him in their activity?
To show that Manis wasn’t alone, that such foul mood was probably quite common among some university gay activists, here is a message posted by Francis, a representative of “Gay & Lesbian Association of Dalhousie” on March 14, two days before my e-mail response to Chris Healey, coincidentally using the same phrase “your kind”:
“For your information, gays and lesbians were routinely rounded-up and slaughtered by the Nazis in much the same way the Jews were at that time. The pink triangle was used to identify gay men in the same way the star of david was used to identify a Jew.
As far as being institutionalized, ignorant bigoted fools like yourself are the *real* menace to society, and your kind should be castrated (at the very least) to help rid society of this scourge of hatred and inhumane treatment of decent people perpetrated by morons like yourself.”
Their cursing of others in political debate was much worse and had violent intents – even if it was responding to someone sympathizing with the Nazi’s ways – whereas I stood by the need to respect individual rights and my reaction to what I felt as violation remained nonviolent.
On March 17, i.e., one day after he’d forwarded my e-mail to Head Klawe proposing revoking my e-mail privilege, Manis joined the above thread of group discussion on Nazis and gays, focusing on the execution of Ernst Roehm, the only openly gay man among the Nazi leadership:
“The only significant Nazi who was (openly) gay was Ernst Roehm, the leader of the SA. Hitler and the leadership knew about his homosexuality (he made no effort to hide it), but did nothing about it until 1934, when, as part of the Night of Long Knives, Roehm was executed. …
A number of Roehm's coterie were gay, and were dealt with during the Night of Long Knives.
As for the rest of the Party leadership, they were all quite heterosexual (in Goering's case, exuberantly so).
There certainly was a great deal of homosexuality in the lower levels of the Party, especially in the SA. There was, no doubt, as much in the Social Democratic Party, and in its storm troop, the Reichsbanner. …”
It wouldn’t be a “crazy hypothesis” to second guess that leading the effort to punish me somehow made Vince Manis feel like getting even with the Nazis’ execution of their top openly gay man.
The next day March 18, the day when Dean McBride wrote the two admonishing and punishing memos to me, Alberto Adolfo Pinkas, an Argentine Jew, complained in a message that half of his family had died in the Nazi concentration camp and now a Nazi bomb had just exploded at the Israeli Embassy at Buenos Aires (with 29 deaths the deadliest attack on an Israeli diplomatic mission, “Attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires”, Wikipedia), and yet he was supposed to “respect” the Nazis and “their rights”. Vince Manis replied:
“I, a gay Jew, would be very interested in watching a diseased goat piddle all over Adolfo Pinkas.”
Lacking sympathy where sadly needed, to say the least.
Vince Manis was apparently well known in the larger gay social circle, as among my compilation was a document from the Queer Resources Dictionary website listing a Vince Manis quote alongside his favorite quote of A. Trevor Hodge and quotes of other famous persons like Adam Smith, Abraham Lincoln, Adlai Stevenson, and even Adolf Hitler.
The interest in violence for political goals among some of these gay activists, and the indifference to its other consequences, remind me of the Chinese Cultural Revolution discussed in Part 2 of this blog article.
The moral righteousness exhibited by Vince Manis and Barry McBride against me over my offensive but individual-rights focused e-mail, in coexistence with the much nastier expressions and borderline behavioral intents in Manis’s own internet political discussions which were most likely aware of by McBride, reminds me of the psychological shock I recently felt when discovering that a favorite, inspiring 1961 Chairman Mao poem of my childhood enlightenment had most likely been adapted by Mao from traditional Chinese erotica – as discussed in my Chinese blog posts “忆往昔，学历史智慧”(“Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom”) and its English Synopsis.
According to Dean McBride society wouldn’t tolerate my type of behavior – even though it accepted worse types.
Where Christopher Healey has since been is also evidence of Healey’s political motivation back in 1992. After Ph.D. study under Alain Fournier in Computer Graphics, he was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley where I had done my Ph.D., and since has been professor at North Carolina State University at Raleigh where a feature research project of his is visualizations of U.S. election results, and also adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he collaborates with Jack Snoeyink – pretty cool graphics.
Provocateur and trickster, I hope they weren’t especially valued for such in North Carolina, where at Greensboro my former Sun Yat-sen University roommate “Jie Wang” (王洁), a martial-arts expert like Rick Sample, also had a professor stint as discussed in Part 3 of this blog article.
In April 1992 after the quick negative conclusion from Vice President Dan Birch I consulted David Kirkpatrick and on April 16 filed a grievance with UBC President David Strangway, despite Strangway being really a ceremonial figure according to Kirkpatrick. My hope was that a formal grievance in place would allow me more attempts at getting my issues discussed in the Department.
Given the oppressive rules set by the Head and the Dean unusual acts were necessary on my part, which could be disruptive but I worked carefully not to cause more disruption than needed.
I sent out an e-mail to the Department faculty about putting my issues on meeting agenda, and immediately Head Klawe banned my attendance for the next Department meeting. I then announced in an e-mail to the entire Department my plan to sit in and protest to win the chance of a separate meeting for my case. Despite my friendly tones toward Klawe and expression of sorriness about e-mailing the entire Department which I had promised not to, both e-mails were reported by her to Dean Barry McBride with a request to have Associate Dean David Measday monitor the Department meeting.
The sit-in protest did not materialize, as Klawe “outfoxed me” by moving the meeting from 1 pm to 12 pm without my knowing, and when I arrived to find a presentation by her husband Nick Pippenger already in progress I left instead of making a disruptive scene which I had intended to make at the the meeting’s start.
Apparently Head Klawe wasn’t content with “outfoxing” me for this April 24 meeting but had it also reached a “unanimous” agreement that my e-mails “constitute a form of harassment and should be stopped immediately”.
Below are excerpts from an e-mail I then sent to Head Klawe requesting a special meeting, and from one my colleague David Lowe on the computing committee then sent me, with our contrasting interpretations of where my efforts stood:
I said:
“Even though I have taken my grievance to the President, in the long process of pursuing it my grievance has never been presented formally and in details to the dept. The only chance I was given was during the dept retreat, when I decided not to push hard out of my sympathy and concern for you because you didn’t feel well at that time.
I believe that my request is a reasonable one. My colleagues in the dept are the ones closest to the decision making process of the dept to judge whether what you did in handling my job application was fair. Their opinions and the opinions of the staff and students in the dept could be influential on the final decision by Dr. Strangway. An approval from you for a formal meeting does not necessarily constitute an admission of guilt (although I myself believe you committed wrongdoing there). But it would be a vital sign that the dept is being run in a democratic manner, that mistakes are being corrected, and that cover-up is unlikely.”
Lowe said:
“I wonder why you keep wanting to have further meetings when it is clear that the department will not support your position even if there is a meeting. Everyone who is refused a job by the university would like to get the decision changed, but the university has a right to choose who it wants to hire. This is not an issue between you and Maria, but has been agreed to by the department and university as a whole. You have to accept these decisions even if you think they were quite mistaken.”
If David Lowe’s view were final then no institution would need a formal grievance mechanism as any official decision would already represent the institution “as a whole”.
In any case I stopped using e-mail for the purpose and distributed a flier calling a Department meeting, where the focus was now more on whether the Head had broken the rules than if I should have gotten a tenure-track job. Klawe responded that there “will NOT be” a department meeting but individuals were free to meet with me.
I also sent a letter to Associate Vice President William Webber in charge of faculty affairs (who had referred me to private psychiatrist Ronald Remick) to request his approving a Department meeting. Among the perspectives I outlined to Webber is the fact that there once was a formal occasion at the Department retreat but due to my “genuine concern” for Klawe who had “stormed out of the room in tears” I didn’t push it at the time.
It’s unclear to me today what then prompted me but in May 1992 I used e-mail again to broadcast messages to call my own meeting, and on May 13 my e-mail privilege was revoked for good. From this point on I relied solely on distributing fliers.
In June my grievance was still with President Strangway, but I also took the issues to the Faculty Association – acting on a suggestion by phone from the office of Associate Vice President Webber in response to my letter to him.
A formal hearing by FA executive director and personal service committee was scheduled for June 16, and postponed to June 17 then June 18 – on Head Klawe’s management style in general.
I notified the Department of the FA hearing and called for a meeting, and on June 16 Dean McBride sent a job termination notice ordering me to vacate my office by 4:30 pm, June 30.
I was told by a secretary in the Department that newly hired tenure-track faculty member Raymond Ng would arrive soon and need to take over my office space.
In my fliers to the Department, my presentation at the FA hearing, and a June 18 letter to Albert McClean, Associate Vice President Academic in charge of legal affairs who was reviewing my grievance on behalf of President Strangway, I raised the 1990 incident involving faculty candidate Pascal van Hentenryck, here as described in the letter:
“During his seminar talk, Dr. van Hentenryck made some statements which were in my opinion not very accurate, and drew criticism from people in the audience including myself. And a small debate occurred during the question period of the seminar. the incident was in every sense a normal academic exchange of views and opinions, albeit a little heated, but as a result of it Dr. van Hentenryck incurred the wrath of Dr. Klawe. When in April 1990 the Department, after many discussions, finally made a positive decision on Dr. van Hentenryck’s application in the form of an offer doubled with another candidate of a higher priority, Dr. Klawe, I have every reason to believe, broke the rules of the University to prevent the offer from materializing at that time. She took the Department’s decision to the Dean, and came back with the following announcement, “The money in our assistant professor slots has been upgraded so we can make the three offers (Blau, Gibson and Seger) and we are allowed one double offer to Taylor (largely because she is female)”. Dr. van Hentenryck’s name was not even mentioned. …”
I didn’t explicitly mention the fact that it was because Head Klawe’s husband Nicholas Pippenger had debated Pascal van Hentenryck and then showed great anger with the intention to deny him a job offer. I had sided with Nick in the debate but later sent in a balanced written assessment, and Nick became visibly upset with me as well so I cautioned David Kirkpatrick that Nick shouldn’t take the debate too personally.
I was being quite fair at the time of the initial incident in February or March 1990 when my tenure-track application was also in there, and I was conscious of what “Dick” Karp had advised me at Berkeley in 1988 when letting me know Klawe and Pippenger were going to UBC so my job was only fixed-term: “Whatever Nick says must be right.”
Not the least because Nick was a prestigious ‘IBM Fellow’.
Overall few people attending the meetings I called in the spring of 1992 – I remember Jack Snoeyink attended once or twice, a few graduate students showed up sometimes, and I invariably called it off and announced another.
The Faculty Association hearing was held and the committee members expressed concern about Head Klawe’s handling of van Hentenryck’s job application; but they said no formal procedure could commence against her unless van Hentenryck himself complained, who in 1990 accepted a job at Brown University.
Unbeknown to me after the FA hearing the next Monday, June 22, graduate student Andrew Martin wrote to Associate Vice President McClean to counter my grievance. Having headed the Department’s graduate student association and served as a student representative on some departmental committees, Martin vouched, “At no time have I observed any evidence of “Maria’s negative management style”.”
Martin then complained about my “aggressive, inappropriate and often bizarre behaviour” and “an extremely negative impact” on his life, alleging:
“During the last two years, he has, upon three separate occasions unleashed a tirade of verbal profane abuse upon me with absolutely no provocation.”
Martin claimed that I was mentally ill and violent and he feared for his life:
“I am convinced that Dr. Gao is suffering from some form of mental illness. I believe that there is legitimate concern that his violent behaviour may escalate. The result of all this, is that I do not feel safe in the building alone, either at night or on weekends. …”
Martin then requested that McClean neither consider action against Klawe nor extend or renew my UBC job, or he would seriously consider going elsewhere.
Only one part of Martin’s allegations was true: on possibly three occasions I did show temper tantrum toward him.
Andrew K. Martin rather than me was an aggressive fellow who often walked up from behind and breezed past me in a subtly provocative manner when I was on my way to the Student Union building area on campus, but because it happened during the day on a main walkway it was tolerable unlike the time with Christopher Healey.
Then when Martin also appeared to agitate me in the Department I got angry, but a few minutes later I went back to apologize to him, for the reason that he appeared politically more mature, less of a denier. I shook his hand and stated I wouldn’t discriminate against gays and if others did I would fight for the gays. But I became upset again when he resumed the agitation attempts.
For Martin not to consider my past apology and what I had said on that occasion and instead accused me as mentally ill and violent was absolutely unconscionable. Even if he had a wife back in Ontario, privacy should not be a devious excuse for oppression – unless like Vince Manis said the Nazis were in power.
A 1989 graduate of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Andrew Martin had arrived before Rick Sample’s death, studied for a master’s degree under David Kirkpatrick and become a Ph.D. student under Carl Seger. After Ph.D. he went to the computer industry – at Motorola and IBM – in Austin, Texas, where several crucial persons crossing paths with me have been schooled (as in Part 3 of this blog articles): my old buddy “Ling”, and the founding president and engineering vice president of the Silicon Valley startup company I worked in ending with a “10/11 layoff”.
When I got into the first verbal incident with Martin, Kirkpatrick was very worried and said Andrew might not be as mature as he seemed – a caution similar to what Carol Whitehead had given at the Department retreat about Jack Snoyeyink.
Kirkpatrick also said to me, “they just wanted to get you angry so you would fight Maria harder”, and I replied I would look at the facts and handle the dispute professionally, and be angry only to whoever agitated me.
But in my mind I was also saying to David: you had said to be helping me and gotten Jack hired instead, and Jack encouraged me to bring my own issue against Maria and then tried to get a retreat resolution supporting her; now getting angry against her would be like falling for those guys’ worse tricks.
Similar to Dean Barry McBride’s drafting of a negative conclusion for Vice President Dan Birch to reply to me in April upon receiving psychiatrist Dr. Ronald Remick’s note calling me a “patient”, on June 23 one day after Andrew Martin’s letter accusing me of mental illness and violent behavior, Associate Vice President Albert McClean drafted a negative reply which President David Strangway immediately signed and sent to me.
As the reply only dealt with my employment issue, I wrote another letter to Strangway on June 25 to re-iterate my request for an investigation into the general conduct of Maria Klawe as Head of Computer Science, which McClean had told me was under consideration. Like before I also called a meeting in the Department, and even disrupted a faculty “brown-bag lunch” meeting to request a Department meeting.
On June 30 I still had a meeting called. Only a few showed up like before but to my surprise Hugh Dempster, the senior faculty member leading undergraduate teaching, came and sat for the entire hour, and we chatted it away on other things.
On my last day Hugh talked about his activity in the peace movement, and within it his friendship with John Spencer MacDonald, co-founder of the Canadian high-tech firm MacDonald Dettwiler.
What a sharp contrast to my desolation, when Hugh’s name was known for the Dempster Highway in Canada’s far north honoring his RCMP Inspector father William, and Richmond, B.C. based MacDonald Dettwiler later would own the engineering for the robotic Canadarm in space.
Several years later in 1995 Maria Klawe became a UBC Vice President, and on June 20 in the B.C. press was the following story revealing of Klawe’s management style – even when she acted for the university (“UBC slam dunk coach Thomas: Guard cries foul as abrasive coach let go”, by Terry Bell, June 20, 1995, The Province”):
“Technically foul.
That’s the mood around parts of the University of B.C. campus following the apparent firing of women's basketball coach Misty Thomas.
After arriving in 1989, Thomas revived the moribund UBC women's program, but school officials decided not to renew her contract after it expired May 31.
Thomas, who was the Canada West coach of the year after her team won the division championship for the 1993-94 season, is the second head coach to be fired.
Frank Smith was turfed as head football coach last winter and replaced by his son Casey.
…
No UBC official could be reached for comment. Athletic director Bob Philip and intercollegiate athletics co-ordinator Kim Gordon were on their way to a conference in P.E.I. Monday.
Dr. Maria Klawe, vice-president of academic services, was also away from the office.
But a source said Klawe told Thomas that “competition has no place in athletics at UBC.
“She (Klawe) said she was doing Misty a favor because Misty would not want to stay in that kind of situation.”
The move took at least one player by surprise.
Starting point guard Lori Kemp of Richmond averaged 14 points per game last year. She didn’t like the way the situation was handled.
…
The day after the Thunderbirds lost in the Western Canada playoff to the University of Victoria, school officials sent questionnaires to players soliciting their views about Thomas.
Officials then told Thomas that her players wanted her out and that the desire was unanimous.
Kemp disagrees that the feeling was unanimous, and says several players have sent letters to university administration expressing disapproval of the move.
“Some players weren’t surveyed and there was no indication that the survey could lead to a firing,” said Kemp.
“If they’d said they were going to use the evaluation to determine her contract (status) then it (the results) would have been a lot different.”
…”
Like with my compilation of Vince Manis’s internet activity record, a copy of the above and another news story was filed by me in 2008 at the B.C. Supreme Court to counter a UBC and RCMP proceeding to dismiss my October 1992 lawsuit.
That lawsuit attempted to cover the employment dispute as well as RCMP-led eviction of me on July 2, 1992, as in defiance of Dean Barry McBride’s order I did not vacate the office in the afternoon of June 30 following the unsuccessful meeting spent on conversations with Hugh Dempster.
I understood that the Department’s office space was tight and new faculty member Raymond Ng was coming, but on June 30 I stood by the importance of the issues about Head Klawe’s management style, given that the university had not replied to the parts of my grievance on the Pascal van Hentenryck incident and on Klawe’s headship in general.
Maria Klawe not only won to continue her headship into the 5th year, but apparently was later given further extension and continued until becoming vice president in charge of academic and student services.
Normal UBC appointments began on July 1, so on August 11, 1993, Klawe had begun her 6th year as Head of Computer Science when Department programmer Martin Frauendorf, formerly student president of the 1990 Computer Science graduating class, was beaten to death – only days short of his 29th birthday on August 15 (“1,800 ride in memory of student slain on trail”, by Eve Lazarus and Jes Odam, August 16, 1993, The Vancouver Sun):
“Martin Frauendorf planned to spend his birthday riding in the Multiple Sclerosis Society’s annual fund raiser.
His parents planned to cheer him on.
Instead, Kurt and Anneliese Frauendorf stood by in silent tribute to their son as 1,800 people rode bicycles in the event dedicated to his memory Sunday.
…
A memorial service will be held at UBC next Saturday. …
…
Computer sciences department head Maria Klawe said: “It's not a denominational service, it's for people to come together and talk about Martin and remember him. He really was very special.””
I agree with Maria Klawe that Martin Frauendorf really was a very special young man. Back in 1991-92 during my dispute with Klawe, Martin sometimes showed up where I happened to be like some of the agitators, but he never agitated and I always smiled and said “Hi” to him, guessing that he probably then told others, “see, Feng didn’t lose his temper on me.”
It was sad that the Department had first lost an exceptional technical and managerial member when Rick Sample was shot to death in 1989 as discussed in Part 3 of this blog article, and now lost another exceptional technical member.
Martin Frauendorf died of baseball-bat bashing. But he didn’t “bean” a baseball at anybody, was only riding his bicycle in the woods of the University Endowment Lands when with no provocation or warning he was suddenly bludgeoned several times over his head by a man in a baseball jersey wielding a baseball bat (“Cyclist recalls seeing man beaten with baseball bat”, by Larry Still, March 22, 1995, The Vancouver Sun).
The two newspaper articles referred above, along with two covering the Rick Sample case, have been filed at B.C. Supreme Court in 2008 as evidence that around the time I was with UBC Computer Science Department there were indeed incidents of social violence victimizing Department members but I had no connection to them.
It turned out that like the Rick Sample case Martin Frauendorf was also a victim of circumstances involving a woman between two men.
Japanese student Tamoko Imamichi had been tutoring Martin Japanese since her arrival in Canada in March 1991, then in 1992 began dating Alfred James Bailey of Port Coquitlam, B.C., but broke up with Bailey in the spring of 1993 when she and Martin fell in love. In June Bailey tried to hire his co-worker Martin Lynch as assassin but was laughed off, so he did it himself on August 11 with an accomplice, George Perry Crooks, as his lookout. Crooks pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 1995 and served a short sentence while Bailey was convicted of first-degree murder, appealed, and was convicted of second-degree murder in 1998 and given a life sentence without parole for 12 years. (“Charged mom has bail date”, August 29, 1993, and, “dead man lives on for lover: She was his teacher, then his girlfriend”, by Clare Ogilvie, March 26, 1995, The Province; “Accused tried to hire assassin, trial told: Man says he was offered $1,000”, by Larry Still, March 28, 1995, and, “Man sentenced to life in murder retrial”, February 6, 1998, The Vancouver Sun)
One just didn’t have the safety to get together with others without having to think hard about it.
Posts
