Nobody teaches teachers how to teach. They have to keep studying teaching right until the end.

“I’ve learned a lot from my students,” Will Straw tells me as we chat over paninis and Brio at Dante Park in Little Italy. We’ve met here on a Kodachrome autumn afternoon, and I can’t ignore the feeling somehow that we’re both skipping class, telling tales out of school.

“I don’t think when I started as a professor that I was scrambling to keep up with all the new technologies and so on that students are into. Now that’s the case.”

It’s a genuine concession from a recently retired and bona fide rockstar academic who for more than 30 years single handedly shepherded an entire generation of Montreal’s foremost inquisitive minds at McGill’s Art History and Communication Studies department.

Anyone who was ever fortunate enough to attend one of Straw’s classes will report that his lectures were among the most interesting and intellectually stimulating experiences of their student lives.

And though he hasn’t yet written a single-author manuscript — something of an anomaly for such a long-serving scholar — Straw’s impact can be felt in the hundreds of journal articles and edited volumes to his credit. It would take days to document them all.

“My citation index — which I look at every day,” Straw quips, “is pretty good. I travel a lot. I get invited places. I’m happy with the take-up of my work even though I still have that perpetual imposter complex.”

Doubtless, however, he’s the real deal. When the history of Communication Studies is written, Straw will surely go down with the Marshall McLuhans and Neil Postmans of the discipline.

Throughout his career, Straw taught dozens of classes and supervised hundreds of graduate students, directing their research with a light but rigorous touch. And now that he’s hanged up his cap and gown, there will definitely be an immeasurable void left in Montreal’s vibrant humanities and social sciences scenes.

“Everybody wants to say that I’m getting out while the getting is good,” remarks Straw, “They want to say, oh, you’re leaving because it’s too woke or too neoliberal or too this or too that. But believe me, when I came in 1993 to McGill, it was an old boys’ network. It was one of these elite universities that its elite status came from the fact that it had deeply encrusted ideas that weren’t changing that much. All of that has improved. It’s much more diverse.”

Surely, Straw himself deserves some of the honour for this. His critical interests over the years have encompassed only the hippest of topics, dragging McGill into less stodgy and far cooler terrain — areas such as Hollywood movie credit sequences and lurid pulp fiction novel covers, Montreal’s tabloid magazines and the circulation of residual forms and formats.

Media and Urban Life might have been Straw’s signature course and perhaps the most popular offering in the Communication Studies department. His aim with that class was to creatively encourage students to engage critically with the media they consume every day.

“I think as professors of media and cultural studies, we can fill in context, we can fill in history, we can encourage different ways of doing academic work,” Straw says. “Like making little films and so on — I’ve done that the last few years. But I don’t think we can just be the ones who wag our fingers and say ‘you’ve got to have a critical perspective’ because I think students already have that. You just have to spend time on any social media and that’s all there is: critique, critique, critique. Maybe it’s not as theoretically informed as we’d like, but it’s there.”

Straw is best known for his literally tireless work studying and teaching about urban cultural scenes and nighttime economies. He’s served on the Board of Directors of MTL 24/24, a not-for-profit that provided analysis and policy frameworks for Montreal’s vibrant nightlife culture. And Straw oversees The Urban Night, an interdisciplinary and inter-university research project concerned with the nocturnal life of cities. It’s a hot topic given the recent discussions around the closure of some of the city’s most storied music venues, as well as the long-awaited comprehensive Montreal Nightlife Policy that the Plante administration released this week.

“I very much like our current mayor,” Straw proposes. “I think that she’s doing what the best cities do. Some people might think that they’re gimmicks, like pedestrianizing streets, bike paths, urban furniture, public pianos, and things like that. But I think that’s great. All of that is kind of new and for the better. Everybody loves to say that this city isn’t what it used to be, or this scene isn’t what it used to be, but I think Montreal is as good as it has ever been.”

Montreal’s four world-class universities are a collective driving force of the city’s cultural activity.

“They attract 100,000 young people with a little bit of disposable income,” Straw points out. “Even if they didn’t learn a thing in their classes, they’re out there doing things and going to music. Starting magazines. Partly, I think everybody who comes to Montreal goes back home and tells everybody how much they like it. That brings people.”

I ask Straw to elaborate on what makes Montreal such a hub for an undeniably disproportionate field of effervescent creative communities.

“There’s just a vibe in Montreal,” Straw observes. “It’s very hard to find people who don’t love Montreal. It’s an easy city to live in and there’s endless things to do. It has the novelty of the French language in North America. So, I think it’s the relative ease and the sense that the city just charms you almost immediately. The neighbourhoods all have their own character, which they don’t necessarily in other cities. That isn’t the case for cities where you have to really look to find out what’s going on, or what’s charming. L.A. might be like that. L.A. is a fantastic city, but it’s not obvious. You don’t walk around the first day and go, ‘I love this place.’ In Montreal, life has always been a little easier and a little cheaper. How long will that continue? I don’t know.”

Montreal has so far fared better than most North American cities resisting gentrification and the capitalist impetus to extract maximum value from metropolitan living. It’s nowhere near the cost of New York or Toronto, but property values have steadily been creeping upward, pricing some people out of their preferred neighbourhoods, or preventing others from moving here altogether.

“It’s changed from the good old days of a 6&1/2 for $500,” Straw notes. “That’s bad. Montreal has to do something about that. And they are doing things that people like me aren’t supposed to like, which is building big high-rise condo buildings downtown. But I’m actually not opposed to that kind of high-density living. It’s not the Bohemian kind of living, but not everybody coming to Montreal is or has to be a Bohemian. I think people like us just have to get used to living in something that isn’t a classic 3&1/2.”

Despite the Legault government’s reckless tuition increases, students will continue relocating to Montreal from across Canada and around the world. And given his wealth of expertise and experience, Straw has some valuable advice for them when they do.

“Learn another language,” Straw recommends. “Break out of the Anglo-American domination of the humanities. Read outside your discipline. As a professor, it took me 25 years to decide that I wouldn’t do any academic work on Saturday. If you wait until you’ve run out of work to have some free time, you never will. Academia is a field where, on one hand, we’re in an office, and on another, we’re in a star system. People are famous to varying degrees. So, the main institutional emotion that can go bad is resentment. I would say try and avoid that.”

Reflecting upon a remarkable career, Straw appears surprisingly aloof, draining the remains of his Brio and popping a piece of nicotine gum from a plastic bubble wrapper. Nonetheless, he cannot help but impart some sort of parting wisdom. While you can take the teacher out of the classroom, you can’t take the classroom out of the teacher.

“The term ‘lecture’ comes from the Middle Ages when the professor was the only one who had the books and would read from them. Maybe it’s ridiculously old-fashioned, but I wouldn’t be ready to do away with it,” says Straw.

“I’m going to miss the moment when it goes great, and you come out bouncing off the walls. On the other hand, I won’t miss the first class when you wonder what they’re thinking about you. And the second class when it didn’t go well, and you think they all hate you. I liked teaching, and I think I was good at it, but I’m not going to be one of those retired professors who’s always looking for teaching gigs. We’ll leave that to the younger people.”◼︎

_{Cover image: Will Straw photographed for NicheMTL.}