Gregg Blachford: Career consciousness

The toughest part of Gregg Blachford's job is getting his service known to students early enough. All too often, says the director of McGill's Career and Placement Service, it's only when students are in their final year that they cross the threshold of the place that may hold the key to their future.

"I think students should start thinking earlier in their studies about how they are going to prepare themselves to look for work," says Blachford. "At fourth year, you can't catch up on extra-curricular activities."

Extra-curricular activities? A component of career preparation? Yes, says Blachford, in the sense that any activities a student participates in from her high school years on -- jobs, student organizations, volunteer work, travel, sports, theatre -- constitute "added value" to the degree she's doing.

"That's why leaders in student organizations get jobs," says Blachford, pointing out that when an employer is looking at a potential employee, the actual degree is only one part of the pie; computer skills, languages, analytical and problem-solving abilities, organizational and leadership skills -- and the ability to articulate all of that in written and oral form -- being the remaining pieces.

Blachford believes strongly that in today's job market -- which is much tighter than that of the '60s, '70s and early '80s -- career education is more important than ever. Dispelling myths about the job market is part of that education.

For instance, Blachford notes that while most arts students love what they're doing, they're often in a panic because they don't know what they'll be able to do with their degrees.

"In arts, I spend a lot of time with students calming them down. I tell them: 'You will get something, but it may take longer then you expect,'" says Blachford, describing some of the workshops offered by CAPS such as networking, writing a curriculum vitae and successful job interview techniques -- not to mention "How to get a job with a BA."

As for students in professional programs, Blachford, who also directs the McGill Engineering Career Centre, and the other advisors work with those schools' or faculties' own career or placement people to complement the services they offer.

For the student who just doesn't know what he wants to do after university, Blachford says: Don't fret. Try different things, see different places and don't be afraid to take risks.

Blachford's own career path demonstrates that the man practices what he preaches.

After graduating from Queen's, he hadn't thought much about what he wanted to do -- "You didn't have to in those days" -- but landed a teaching job in a primary school in Sydney.

He knew then that teaching was his vocation, so proceeded to London for formal teacher training, after which he taught at secondary and college levels in England and in Germany -- pausing for a year to do an MA in sociology -- all the while developing an expertise in career counselling.

Blachford then returned to his native Toronto, to see what the old country had to offer. Following a short stint as a guidance teacher, he moved to Montreal in 1991, where the "Ontario-bilingual" teacher found part-time work at Dawson College before starting at McGill.

During his off-hours, Blachford trains volunteers at Gay Line, a crisis and information phone service for gays and lesbians in Montreal, where he also staffs the phones two nights per month.

Given the usually anonymous nature of the work, Blachford never expected to find himself and Gay Line catapulted into the national limelight, as happened recently.

It began with a phone call to Gay Line from a man suffering from amnesia requesting help in finding accommodation and in finding his identity. Blachford obliged and looked after James Edward Brighton, as the young man believed he was called.

Gay Line contacted the media in a bid to discover Brighton's identity. Soon after, Hard Copy reported that Brighton was, in fact, Matthew Honeycutt, from Tennessee, accused of fraud and subsequently accused by the Montreal police of faking his amnesia.

Blachford remains convinced of the young man's amnesia and was shaken by the change in public support for his charge after the accusation of fraud was reported. He and Gay Line quickly tried to regain support for Honeycutt through interviews in the media. Six Montreal police officers arrived at Blachford's house at 1 a.m. to arrest Honeycutt. "It was major overkill.

"Even if he had committed fraud, does that mean we shouldn't have helped him? No matter what he did, Matthew was a found person, needing to find who was missing him," says Blachford. Honeycutt recently returned to the U.S. to be with his family.

Helping people find themselves, then find who's missing them, sounds a little like what Blachford does at CAPS.

Bronwyn Chester






Not Catholic enough for the Pope


Roman Catholic universities in the United States -- including the University of Notre Dame, Boston College, Georgetown University and Fordham University -- have become more secular and diverse over the years, a trend that doesn't sit well with many Catholic leaders.

A committee of American bishops, in response to a request from the Vatican, has proposed new rules that would make the schools more answerable to the church.

If the committee's proposals are adopted, these universities would be restricted to hiring only "faithful Catholics" as their presidents. The majority of board of trustees members would also have to be Catholics and all new theology professors would have to be approved by the church.

The National Conference of Bishops will vote on the proposals later this year. While the bishops have no direct control over the schools, the proposals would carry considerable moral weight.

Most Catholic university presidents decry the proposals. Says Boston College president Reverend William Leahy, "I don't want Protestants, Jews, agnostics, Buddhists and others to think they have no place here."

Reverend David O'Connell, president of the Catholic University of America, supports the proposals. "I do believe that the church should clearly be involved in the institutions that exist under its sponsorship."

Source: The New York Times








Are we willing to see Canadians die to prevent genocide in other settings? A lot of people who call for intervention or preventative deployments are people who don't know what they are asking for.



Dean of Law Stephen Toope, quoted in The Globe and Mail. Speaking at a McGill conference on hate, genocide and human rights, Toope noted that the price for preventing the sorts of massacres that have taken place in Rwanda and Bosnia could be fatalities among the peacekeeping forces we send in to stop them.





Another Clinton casualty


"My e-mail has been absolutely smoking," says medicine professor Ken Flegel. The associate editor of The Canadian Medical Association Journal, Flegel and his colleagues at other medical journals are up in arms about the recent firing of George Lundberg, the editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association.

"The reaction has been uniformly angry," says Flegel. "This was clearly a violation of editorial freedom."

Lundberg was sacked for his decision to publish a paper about how undergraduates define sexual intercourse. It turns out that the students pretty much define sex the way embattled U.S. president Bill Clinton does -- 60 per cent indicated they wouldn't say they had sex if they had engaged in only oral sex.

According to Lundberg's former boss, American Medical Association executive vice-president E. Ratcliffe Anderson Jr., the decision to publish the paper during Clinton's impeachment trial was unforgivably partisan. "It grieves me greatly that this magnificent journal, which should be focused on science and medicine, was being used to extract political leverage," Anderson said, accusing Lundberg of rushing the paper into print in a bid to assist Clinton.

Flegel, who with his fellow CMAJ editors wrote an editorial defending Lundberg that was published in the CMAJ, The Globe and Mail and on the World Association of Medical Editors web site, thinks the AMA is being hypocritical. The organization itself isn't politically neutral, favouring Republicans over Democrats in the millions of dollars it donates to political candidates by a ratio of two to one.

As for the charge that Lundberg pushed forward the publication of the paper, Flegel says, given the newsworthiness of the topic, "an editor should be fired if he didn't do that."

Flegel says it's also unfair to characterize the paper that cost Lundberg his job as a sneaky defence of Clinton. "It made an important point to the medical community -- when you're finding out about someone's sexual history, you have to ask very specific questions."








It is often forgotten that the death rate associated with anorexia nervosa exceeds that of all other psychiatric disorders. We should not be afraid to re-examine our values. As a culture, we're obsessed with thinness.



Psychiatry professor Howard Steiger, speaking to Le Journal de Montréal. Steiger's research focuses on eating disorders.