What the new course on the MeToo movement at University of Toronto entails

For the past few weeks, over a hundred students, mostly female, have been taking classes in a huge lecture hall at the University of Toronto for a unique course. Titled “#MeToo and the Media”, the half-year course that is part of the Books and Media Studies programme at St Michael’s College, is a new effort to give academic shape and heft to a phenomenon that has changed the social, legal and media landscape in many countries around the world, including India. 

The course is being taught by two Canadian journalists, Jessica Johnson, executive editor of The Walrus magazine, and Anne Kingston, a writer for the news magazine, Maclean’s. “We were trying to think how to teach something nobody had explained to us. There’s no textbook for #MeToo,” says Johnson.

While the course focuses on the #MeToo movement, the syllabus predates the hashtag which went viral in October 2017 after a tweet from American actress Alyssa Milano invited women to share their experiences of sexual harassment or assault. That’s because Canada had had its Me Too moment a couple of years earlier, when star radio host Jian Ghomeshi was accused and later tried for sexual assault. Apart from Ghomeshi’s case, the course deals with media coverage of several other well-known cases including movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, comedian Aziz Ansari, former US Senator Al Franken, as well as recently re-elected Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who’d been accused of groping a journalist a few years before he entered politics.

“This isn’t about sexual assault, it’s about power,” says Johnson, “power imbalances, who has power, who’s abusing power, who’s challenging that power.” “It’s also about power on the media side,” adds Kingston, “which outlets were the ones who told it — to begin with, it was the powerful ones with resources to do the kind of investigations required to tell the stories — and whose stories were getting told, rich actresses or blue collar workers.”

The media in the course title includes social media, which played an outsize role in pushing the #MeToo stories forward. As Johnson notes, “Our purpose is to talk about the roles that media played in reflecting #MeToo, contributing to societal conversation, but also the way in which the #MeToo movement, which did start on social media, has actually challenged and galvanised the media, and also exposed the media.” Many alleged abusers who were outed by the #MeToo movement were celebrated mainstream journalists themselves like Charlie Rose, Mark Halperin and Matt Lauer.

Kingston and Johnson found they often had to update their syllabus as new cases emerged and events unfolded. A prominent example was that of the politically connected American financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who was found dead in a Manhattan jail in August while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. “Even things that we talked about at the beginning of the course, I’m thinking I would do that differently or we should revisit because there’s been news,” says Kingston. “The Epstein story, for instance, exploded over the summer when we’d finalised the syllabus.”

The course also covers the backlash that emerged against what were considered the excesses and exaggerations of some #MeToo accusers. According to a poll in The Economist published a year after #MeToo went viral, American public opinion showed a small, but clear trend towards scepticism directed at victims. Shivani Ojha, an Indian-born fourth-year student, plans to become a journalist and wanted to understand how to strike a balance when covering #MeToo stories. “We live in a social media-driven society, which is very supportive of victims but also quick to judge the accused, sometimes without evidence,” she says. “What if somebody is accused wrongly in this trial by Twitter?”

The students taking the course are a diverse lot. The syllabus mainly focuses on North American media, but the diversity of the students brings a wider perspective to the discourse, says Johnson. Ojha points to the fact that the #MeToo movement has not been as successful in Bollywood as it has in Hollywood. “Hollywood actresses showed unity and took down Harvey Weinstein. I’m sure there are similar instances in India but the power dynamics there are completely different. The intense fan following also prevents vigorous debate about stars.”

The passage of two years since the creation of the MeToo hashtag has provided the time and distance needed to take stock of the impact, strengths, limitations and mistakes of the movement and its treatment by various media. It may not be a pretty sight, but as this course shows, the deep dive into the hashtag throws up many lessons for all sections of society.