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I've been trying to figure out a way to link our discussion of "offensive" or "harmful" student opinion to our recent reflections on the Quebec referendum (or "neverendum," as it has come to be called). I feel a connection, but I'm not sure I can make it - directly, at any rate. At the heart of each issue, it seems to me, is a definition of "us" and "them," a division into camps, a polarization of opinion/belief/loyalty. I agree, Rick, that nationalism, as a response to imperialist oppression, is a healthy, liberating, and progressive answer to the assimilation and cultural genocide that conquering forces impose on their victims. The solidarity and strength in group identification allows the oppressed to withstand and perhaps overcome the (physical, ideological, spiritual, cultural) violence of the oppressor. And I think Quebec nationalism has been a critical reason why a distinct language and culture continue to flourish here, despite our location in a huge, powerful, and English North America. (Aside: I've often wondered why many Canadian nationalists, concerned as they are with the maintenance of a separate and state-supported Canadian identity, have trouble understanding the parallel move in Quebec.) But, one of the most insidious results of oppression is that resistance is shaped by the conditions of oppression - that is, reaction against often takes an obverse form, an attitude or dynamic opposite to the oppression a people experience. So, in response to the diminution or under-valuing of culture or ethnicity, people develop a strong identification with their own group against the Other. (And here, I think, might be part of that link: we are often the Other to our students, and what we perceive as offensive may be reactions against us.) This current referendum campaign, more so than the previous one or discussions in the interval, has had a strong appeal to group membership, often defined as old stock and French. Thus, Bouchard's comments about the "white races," in his discussion of birthrate, were not anomalous - they fit with other comments defining an "us" and "them." And I am one of "them." (I am also, of course, a living example of the assimilation the separatists fear. Over three generations, many in my family became more anglo than franco. Ironically, the trend has reversed, and the anglos of my children's generation are now bilingual.) But being "them" does not make me comfortable with the "Non" side in this absurdly dichotomized debate, not if it means subscribing to the inflexible federalism of Clyde Wells and his ilk. If Canada cannot accept a distinct and different Quebec, if it cannot mature as a collective to the point that it recognizes and respects diversity (whether among the bickering colonizers or between them and the aboriginal people they have supplanted), then, like Russ, I call for a plague on both their houses. Unfortunately, there's no "maybe" on the ballot. (And now I've lost the thread of that connection.) Anthony Pare