How did U of A get so out of touch?
Something has gone haywire at the University of Alberta with its decision to award an honorary degree to David Suzuki, a prominent science educator but also a controversial anti-oilsands crusader.
The U of A’s misstep suggests a blind spot. How could everyone in on this decision have failed to see the significance of Suzuki’s incendiary and unbalanced brand of anti-oilsands activism?
It’s not like his views are a secret. Suzuki has savaged the oilsands for years. He’s never said a good word about the role of oil in promoting a historic improvement in human health and prosperity, and he’s never backed off on any of his allegations, even as Alberta has taken action on climate change with its carbon tax and improved environmental standards for its oil industry.
For example, Suzuki has compared making a living in the oilsands to profiting off the slave trade. He has labelled its emissions an “intergenerational crime.”
This is the rhetoric of propaganda, not of science, yet Suzuki is to give the convocation address in June to science graduates.
A university senate committee made up of academics and community volunteers, mainly drawn from educational institutions and non-governmental organizations, made the decision to honour Suzuki.
How did alarm bells not go off for them? They certainly did with leading Alberta politicians from right to left. United Conservative Party Leader Jason Kenney has led the charge, but Premier Rachel Notley has also said the U of A decision is “a bit tone-deaf.”
I’m also against honouring Suzuki, though I can’t agree with the call for revoking it. The university has the right to honour who it wants and it would badly tarnish the university’s reputation and chill free speech to renege.
The real issue is to ascertain how the university became so out of touch.
On this count, U of A engineering dean Fraser Forbes argues honouring Suzuki points to a larger issue at the university: “It has become pointedly clear that the problem runs much deeper ... Our university has become, certainly in this process, too disconnected from the people that we are meant to serve.”
It’s certainly true that in general, the political leanings of university professors are no longer representative of the political views of the general population. In the mid-1990s, the left-toright political leanings for American university professors was two to one, says New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the leading researcher in the field of diversity of viewpoint on university campuses.
In the next 15 years, there was a radical change, with the ratio changing to five on the left for every one professor on the right, Haidt says. In the humanities and social sciences, the left-toright split is between 17-to-1 and 60-to-1, depending on the department.
So much for balance.
The most recent Canadian data on this trend comes from a 2008 study by the Canadian Journal of Sociology, which looked at 2000 data. It found that only about one in 10 professors had voted for a conservative party in the 1990s (as compared to 35 to 38 per cent of the Canadian population), and that profs voted NDP about three times more often than the general population. Each generation of profs was also more left-leaning than the previous one.
We don’t know whether or not Suzuki’s anti-oilsands stance was mentioned during the process to decide on honouring him. I’ve talked to committee members who helped make the decision, but the meeting was in camera and they’re forbidden from talking about the deliberations.
What is clear, however, is that even if a red flag was raised about Suzuki’s views, it wasn’t seen as important enough to back away from bestowing the honour.
Of course, many academics and many people won’t have a problem with honouring Suzuki — or even with a university dominated by left-wing thinking. These folks are as convinced of the rightness of their ideas and the fairness of their outlook as any of us are. But that’s the problem.
We all think we are in the right, but often we are wrong. To do our best work, all of us — left, right and centre — need critical input. A key to making sound policy decisions and doing excellent academic work is to hear arguments from folks with forceful opposing viewpoints.
So what to do? More wonky decisions like the Suzuki honour are inevitable if the
U of A doesn’t improve its institutional decision-making, likely by hiring professors and seeking administrators and leaders who represent all viewpoints, as opposed to increasingly seeing the world through one particular lens.