In an ongoing series, National Post writers are being asked a simple question: If you had the power to change a single thing about Canada, what would it be? Barbara Kay identifies left-wing bias on campus as the country’s most pressing problem.
The Post’s columnists have been tasked with advocating change in one institution, policy or attitude to help “fix” Canada. I have chosen the Petri dish for many of Canada’s problematic tendencies: Canada’s universities, which in the 1970s became—and have remained—hostile to the principle of free intellectual inquiry.
University of British Columbia women’s studies professor Sunera Thobani, who famously responded to the 9/11 attacks by calling the U.S. “the most dangerous and powerful global force unleashing horrific levels of violence.”
In all that touches race, ethnicity and gender, diversity is sacrosanct on Canadian campuses. Diversity of opinion, though, has for a generation been virtually proscribed in the academic community. And yet it is of all diversities the one needful thing and the distinguishing hallmark of any free society: Lacking diversity of opinion, the academy has, like all one-party regimes, succumbed to the “velvet totalitarianism” temptation.
From their ivory towers our leftist ecclesiastics rigorously monitor the four credos from which no dissent is permitted: relativism (each to his own “truth” except the truth of relativism, which is absolute), feminism, postcolonialism and multiculturalism (cultures trump civilization). To this effect: Inscribed over the portals of the humanities and social sciences departments in most Canadian universities should be the words: Abandon critical judgment, all ye who enter here.
Students soon internalize the catechism: Western civilization thrived on white, Christian, Euro-centric aggression against Others; Western literature and art are the patriarchy’s handmaidens; the university’s mission is not about disinterested knowledge, but achieving the just society and empowering the wretched of the Earth; objective “knowledge” is a tool for one dominant race, gender and sexuality to oppress the powerless; reason is but one “way of knowing”; (So if aboriginals’ “story,” that they have occupied Canada since time immemorial, resists the historical “truth” that their ancestors crossed the Bering Strait 10,000 years ago, then aboriginals’ “truth” must be privileged over actual history); any opposition to identity politics and multiculturalism is racism; there are no hierarchies in cultural values—in matters of gender, art and family, all manifestations are equally valid.
Most insidiously, acknowledging and rewarding objective merit is an “institutionalized form of racism and classism.”
Strategies for eliminating intellectual debate on campus are manifold, amongst them: disinviting politically incorrect speakers; eliminating neutral survey courses, but sanctioning group identity courses designed to promote activism (“Womanhood: Black Feminists” as an English Literature course, for example); preferential hiring by ideology and group identity rather than academic accreditation; stifling speech codes to punish “offensive” language to women and minorities.
Especially pernicious is the suppression of conservative voices in reading lists, and indeed—with a few notable exceptions—the entire rich tradition of conservative thought, including the disinterested study of religions and their complex intellectual legacy.
These self-perpetuating closed ideological shops are—to Canada’s enormous moral and cultural cost—churning out highly politicized graduates incapable of autonomous thought, and ignorant of other perspectives.
But all the king’s horses and all the king’s men won’t fix the academy without a paradigm shift in the larger culture. Apart from a small contingency of embattled conservative and libertarian academics within the universities, along with the lonely gadfly Society for Academic Freedom in Scholarship (http://www.safs.ca) and a modest phalanx of media contrarians, few Canadians (certainly not parents, donors and trustees) seem to understand that the civilizational self-doubt flowing from the degradation of a classic liberal education is the plaque in our national arteries.
The traditional university seeks to accumulate objective knowledge and ideas, with the widest possible latitude given to unfettered inquiry and debate (I actually prefer philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s term, “conversation,” which better conveys the free interplay of ideas).
Astonishingly, a few examples of the ideal “groves of academe” stubbornly persist. Consider, for example, the Liberal Arts College of Montreal’s Con-cordia University (LAC). If Canada’s universities could be fixed, all their mission statements would resemble the LAC’s, which in part states: “The LAC presents an intensive introduction to the humanities—the best that has been thought and said in history, philosophy, literature, religion and the arts. Through the study of key primary source writings and texts in the Western tradition, from antiquity to the present, students develop critical and analytical skills, engaging personally with a profound and dynamic Western tradition. The LAC is devoted to the life of the mind. Students and faculty in the College’s demanding and unique program form a community of learners, seeking a better understanding of the complex relationships between ideas, reality and the pursuit of truth.”
A “demanding” program! The “pursuit of truth”! “Dynamic Western tradition”! No speech codes, no equity committees, no victims, no privileged identity groups? Pinch me. In my fantasies a hundred LACs bloom, resulting in a truly free and classically liberal Canada.
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