The external review incorporated the use of the equity office not for feminist ends but as a tool for the control of dissent. It completely concurred with the EMTF's vision of the equity office and equity policy as outlined in their letter threatening legal action. That is, the equity office must be established and known to be established as the proper authority, processor and owner of all women's issues. Any challenges to the discipline/s of power must report there for confidence processing. Dissent and women's speech was privatized and remade the property of the university's equity office where licensed professionals would decide when and where words like "racism" and "sexism" could be used officially and not indiscriminately.

The actions of the administration and the EMTF incited intense hostility towards the CCC. Concurrent with the EMTF's rejection of the internal review and circulation of misogynist diatribes, several women students signed a letter to the media denouncing the CCC and supporting the EMTF. Some of us received threatening hate mail, were followed around campus and at downtown jobs and verbally abused, others experienced harassing phone calls and insulting graffiti at the department and at home. The equity office remained unavailable to us, but had not quite become a resource for our persecution, in spite of the pressures.¹⁶

Distancing/Unavailability: What do
you expect me to do?

To the astonishment of equity professionals and feminist instructors, the "progressive, supportive" VP Academic Sam Scully had ignored the recommendations of the internal review and other professional women's advice, betrayed their faith, and urged the CCC to inform him of our compliance with the demands to withdraw sections of our report by June 4, 1993. He argued that this ultimatum was not the same as that of the EMTF: he was not asking the women to apologize. The CCC then approached the equity office with a class action complaint that now included the administration as well as the EMTF. But the complaint went no further, even though we indicated the section of the policy that had provisions for it. It went no further because the administration was reconsidering the EMTF demand that we be investigated while working us to a June 4 deadline.¹⁷