Students at University of Toronto are staging a rally in response to negative comments by a literature professor about female writers.

It’s more fallout from the promotional interview author and lecturer David Gilmour did with Hazlitt Magazine, an online magazine which shares a publisher with Gilmour, Random House Canada.

Author David Gilmour was a student of Northrop Frye. (Nigel Dickson)

The original comments ran in the site’s ‘Shelf Esteem’ column, in which Gilmour said, “I’m not interested in teaching books by women.” He went on to repeat the comment to CBC News, explaining he is just not equipped to teach female authors.

His comments, according to the Hazlitt staff, appeared on the site unedited.

Miriam Novick, a doctoral candidate in the university's English department, has organized a rally for this Friday, September 27.

“As people who learn and teach at U of T,” she said, “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.”

Novick and others started a Facebook page in protest. They titled their anti-Gilmour rally “Serious Heterosexual Guys for Serious Literary Scholarship”, inspired by Gilmour’s comments about only being interested in heterosexual male writers.

The student rally begins, ironically, around the statue of scholar Northrop Frye, who once taught Gilmour.

In addition to authors and critics taking issue with Gilmour’s stance, Paul Stevens, a U of T professor and acting chair of the English department at the school, issued a strongly-worded letter in response, posted below.

