Scary Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
I’ m guessing almost nobody wants to read another column about Andrew Potter’s misadventures with McGill University. I wasn’t keen on writing one — not so far into the controversy over Potter’s possibly-coerced resignation as director of McGill’s Institute for the Study of Canada. But ... it’s such a fertile topic! I have two dozen things to say about it! There is no way I will get to all of them in one column, which should not be taken as a warning that I will write two.
The r ush by scholars and writers to defend academic freedom at McGill is obviously self- serving, and this fracas is getting extra column- inches because Potter is one of our own, a former newspaperman. But if the freedom to speak harsh truth and engage in adventurous social critique means nothing at McGill, it is doomed at younger universities — especially those that have materialized, or been promoted to new feudal rank, during the ongoing academic bubble era.
The stakes are high. We all enjoy a laugh at McGill’s perception of itself as the Canadian Harvard, but if there is one university from which others in our country are bound to take ethical and stylistic cues — well, McGill probably is Harvard.
It seems possible to me, as a former Maclean’s columnist watching a man get sanctioned and abused for a column in Maclean’s, that this did not start out as a true academic freedom controversy. To review what we know of the affair, Potter wrote a piece for the magazine about the failure of police and government to rescue trapped motorists during a Mar. 14 blizzard in Montreal. He argued that this was not merely a malfunction of the state, but that it reflected deep, chronic “alienation” and “low trust” in Québécois society.
Potter made his case by lining up facts and statistics, columnist- fashion, about disparate social phenomena in Quebec. Most of this data has gone unchallenged, but he fumbled a couple of anecdotal points. And I can tell you what a columnist feels when something like this happens: bottomless hopelessness. Total despair. There is no point in trying to defend a C- minus magazine column or in trying to make a plea for the good parts. If you do not have petty details in order, almost no one will entertain your major thesis, and you are better off crawling into bed with the phone off.
Potter’s piece was i nstructive, full of accurate information about Quebec that most people did not possess before reading, and it may be true in essence despite the bugs. Certainly no one is tak- ing much trouble to rebut it, as opposed to denouncing it. But if you wish to castigate a nation, it is definitely advisable to secure the moral high ground first.
Could Potter have resigned from the directorship out of sincere embarrassment, without encountering exterior pressure? He has not said anything to contradict this possibility — only disavowed the column and left the director gig, while remaining on McGill’s faculty.
With t hat said, every hour he lets pass without saying “Leave McGill alone: my resignation was a free choice” must intensify our suspicion of a politically motivated firing. And McGill University’s principal, Suzanne Fortier, popped up in The Globe and Mail on Sunday to deliver a bizarre coup de grâce.
Fortier said that the notorious column was “not a good piece of scholarship” and emphasized t hat it might have made Potter’s administrative responsibilities impossible. Her reason for this: it was unclear that “politicians would be happy to come to an event” run by such a careless Quebechating zany.
This mess is not, in Fortier’s view, a question of scholarly standards or academic freedom. She insists it is a mistake to think of Potter having been hired to produce speculative essays or social criticism or any of that tomfoolery. He was, it turns out, hired to run a prestigious sort of permanent talk show for politicians and other worthies. Moreover, he was aware of this, and was aware he had failed.
Fortier’s background is as a crystallographer, an ultrahard scientist. ( I am not sure what her credentials for judging a philosopher’s essay on the state of a civilization might be, although, again, Potter has forsworn his right to defend the piece.) I worry that she may be letting hardscience standards influence her behaviour improperly. A flawed, “bad” essay on a social or philosophical topic can be useful, and can contribute to argument and progress, in a way that methodologically “bad” chemistry findings cannot.
More likely, we should take her at her word: the university was merely borrowing Potter for a while to put a classy patina on meaningless conference and debate activity that is unrelated to any legitimate purpose of a university. Do we fund McGill in order to provide meeting space and snacks for politicians? Is it a social club?
If so, it is a mighty expensive one. The explicitly stated mission of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, which you can look up, contains a lot of fine talk about promoting and supporting the study of Canada. There is no footnote stating “If someone actually scrutinizes or critiques Canada, or any part thereof, his head may be summarily removed from his body.”