University Of Toronto Students Protest English Instructor Who Is 'Not Interested In Teaching Books By Women'

An English instructor at the University of Toronto has come under attack from students and academics alike after saying he is "not interested in teaching books by women."

The National Post reports that Toronto students staged a protest Friday after David Gilmour - who teaches English at the university - gave a controversial interview to Hazlitt Magazine. Gilmour said that he teaches "only the best" literature, more specifically "serious heterosexual guys" and not women or minority writers.

Here's the full excerpt that is causing the most controversy from Gilmour's interview:

I'm not interested in teaching books by women. Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. Except for Virginia Woolf. And when I tried to teach Virginia Woolf, she's too sophisticated, even for a third-year class. Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren't any women writers in the course. I say I don't love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.

In response, more than 100 University of Toronto students and teaching assistants protested on Friday, reading works from authors such as Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, and Tony Kushner.

"We want to make sure the rest of the university community and the public at large knows that Gilmour is not representative of our institution or of the academy and to encourage Victoria College to seriously reconsider his continued employment," one student told CBC.

Gilmour has also been condemned by members of Toronto's English department, including its chair, who in a statement said:

Like all those of you who have seen David Gilmour's comments in the Hazlitt magazine on teaching literature at U of T, I was appalled and deeply upset. They constitute a travesty of all we stand for. I will be pursuing the matter further today. There seem to me two points that immediately need to be emphasized. First, David Gilmour is not a member of the Department of English at the University of Toronto, and second, his ill-informed and offensive views could not be less representative of the passionately held values and actual practices of the Department.