“What a world, what a world,” was Fred’s refrain, sounding something like a honeyed mantra: What sweet sounds he takes with him.
He was Professor Flahiff to me when we met during my first year of PhD studies at the University of Toronto when he was acting chair of the English Department, and my “Jane Austen and the Brontes” instructor.
He would become Fred the night his friend, and mine, Professor Leslie Sanders and I burst in on him – surprising the dearly modest man in his pyjamas and robe, and he would remain close to my heart for almost 30 years, and still.
Fred meant a great deal, if not the world, to so many of his students. At the beginning of each year, and this is unheard of, he held a personal meeting with everyone. He was an exceptionally dedicated professor.
While considering the somewhat Eliotic Dr. F.T. Flahiff, it occurs to me that a great professor does not teach you information, but how to think – about the information at hand; about everything.
Fred called his students “Miss” and “Mister”; He never taught without a suit and tie. He was nonplussed by students who wore hats indoors; he had a large laugh and a love of the absurd.
When asked how to write an exam, he said, “Astonish me.”
“I feel like a little bird sometimes,” he told me, of lecturing, “singing on a branch.” When I became a professor, I understood him: how much of what we say is just ambient noise; how much, in his case, was as clear and lovely as, to cite Shelley’s praise of the skylark, “a star of Heaven.”
There is much to say about Fred: about his crush on the city of Rome and the actress Angela Lansbury, his piety, and vast, protean mind; about his collection of signed movie-star glossies, including, which amused him to no end, Claudette Colbert in The Egg and I; about his cherished Jack Shadbolt illustration of novelist Sheila Watson.
His cooking was terrible and endearing (macaroni with onion quarters and corn) and he had an acute love of cinema – a few years ago, he gave a Trampoline Hall lecture about his strange and persuasive respect for The Godfather: Part III.
He loved opera, Stanley Kubrick, writer Sheila Watson, his niece Theresa and near-son, Matthew Bronson, who lived in the flat below him.
Fred grew up in Vancouver, with his adored parents and two brothers – the rough, broad-voweled accent of this city popped up occasionally in his lofty, lovely voice.
He moved to Toronto in the 1950s, where he completed his graduate work at, and was hired by, the University of Toronto.
He never married; he had no children, except the hundreds and hundreds of students who moved in and out of his life; who loved him, truly. The bookshelf in his dining room-slash-office was covered with tacked-up photographs of former students’ children, often sitting with a beaming Fred.
Fred’s thesis, its defence presided over by a harried Marshall McLuhan, having rushed back from shooting Annie Hall, had to do with place. Place, as he perceived it in Shakespeare and Milton, those great writers of artistic blueprints, wherein one’s location and identity is fixed and central in the former, and moveable, fluid in the latter: “All places thou.”
I learned about Austen and Brontë this way, and I learned about humanity, through the notion of who we are and what we value; and through other of his piercing insights – “The world will come to you,” he assured me, in my youth, and it did.
He radiated that life is strange and beautiful: One would leave his small, gorgeous orbit, feeling invested in the possible.
Lynn Crosbie is one of Professor Flahiff’s former students. (Source: https://goo.gl/J4aAFU)
Sheila & Wilfred Watson with Marshall McLuhan
F.T. Flahiff first met the renowned Canadian author Sheila Watson when they were both graduate students in Marshall McLuhan’s graduate seminar at the University of Toronto. The two formed a connection that, 40 years later, compelled Watson to entrust her biography to Flahiff. Always Someone to Kill the Doves: A Life of Sheila Watson was released in 2005. (Source: https://goo.gl/GmVKyt )
Reuters Reporter on Drug War Awarded the 2017 McLuhan Fellowship, Philippines
McLuhan Fellowship for Excellence in Journalism Awarded to Manny Mogato, Philippine correspondent for Reuters (Right)
By Margaret Claire Latug, GMA News – September 28, 2017
The Center for Media Freedom & Responsibility on Thursday presented a prestigious fellowship to Manila-based reporter Manuel Mogato, who has chronicled some of the most explosive events under President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration for international news agency Reuters.
Mogato received the plaque for the 2017 Marshall McLuhan Fellow at an awards ceremony held at the AIM Conference Center in Makati City.
A year ago, Mogato and co-correspondent Karen Lema ran a story on Duterte likening himself to Adolf Hitler and saying he would “be happy” to deal with the Philippines’ criminals just as the latter did to millions of Jews.
The President’s remark drew international criticism from world leaders, Jewish groups and the United Nations.
A few months later, the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) raised concern for Mogato’s safety after hackers were able to deface his Facebook page, which NUJP chair Ryan Rosauro said could lead to physical harm to Mogato.
This August, Mogato, together with fellow Reuters reporter Claire Baldwin, came out with a special report using detailed insider accounts of two senior Philippine National Police (PNP) officials who claimed that most of the killings of criminals under the Duterte’s administration were “state-sponsored.”
The interviews exposed police officers supposedly receiving payoffs for every drug suspect and other “troublemakers” killed.
The Reuters report also found tracks leading to the existence of a so-called Davao Death Squad which was said to “augment and assist” these killings.
Established in 1997 by the University of Toronto and the Canadian Embassy in Manila in honor of the Canadian philosopher, author and media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the fellowship is awarded to a journalist “embodying outstanding qualities in the field of investigative journalism.”
As this year’s recipient, Mogato is set for a two-week lecture tour of Canadian media and academic organizations and, later, a number of Philippine universities.
Previous McLuhan Fellows include Probe Team’s Cheche Lazaro, VERA Files’ Yvonne Chua, TV’5 Ed Lingao, and MindaNews’ Carolyn Arguillas.
Former Philippine Daily Inquirer reporter Raffy Lerma also bagged the Award of Distinction for 2017.
Both journalists join the ranks of the Jaime V. Ongpin Journalism Fellows, a community of journalists and media practitioners poised to take part in programs of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance, the CMFR said.
Apart from Mogato and Lerma, two other panelists for this year’s JVOJS were Malou Mangahas of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, and Aie Balagtas See of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, both formerly of GMA News Online. — BM/MDM, GMA News (Source: https://goo.gl/4y1D6a )
Reuters’ Manuel Mogato (third from left) receives a plaque as 2017 Marshall McLuhan Fellow on September 28, 2017
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