David Suzuki and the curious case of Alberta vs. the University of Alberta.
Sometimes you don’t need the writing on the wall translated for you. On Monday, the University of Alberta’s dean of engineering issued an extraordinary document: a self-abasing spew of sorrow that was obviously (though not explicitly) linked to the earlier announcement of an honorary degree for Canada’s favourite ecological prophet, David Suzuki.
“It truly saddens me,” Fraser Forbes told the “Engineering Community,” “to know that many of you are, as am I, left feeling that one of Alberta’s most favoured children, the University of Alberta, has betrayed you by choosing to confer this honorary degree. I am not surprised,” he added, “by the level of outrage being expressed ... surely such is to be expected when one’s fundamental values are so directly questioned!” “Supporters” of the university, Forbes claimed, have been left “feeling hurt and devalued.”
They say money talks, but you so rarely hear it screaming. And in two-part harmony. Joseph Doucet, the dean of the U of A’s business school, followed up Forbes’ press release with a less purple apology on Wednesday.
The nature of the University of Alberta is pretty much there in the name, especially if you emphasize the “the.” It is, in every conceivable way, a fossil-fuelled institution. Its everyday operating budget rises and falls with oil and gas prices, and it has special research funding envelopes that are entirely oil and gas money, and when someone wants their name on a new campus building, it is almost always, directly or indirectly, oil and gas money that closes the deal.
If the University of Alberta never intended to become an enormous monument to the enterprise of transforming carbon into gold, it needed to conduct itself very differently from 1948 on. The idea that the university is about diverting greasy lucre to something higher and more significant and more permanent — i.e., to the life of the mind — has been present, indeed explicitly visible, on campus all along. Donors whose names are on buildings there would all say they are “repaying” something.
Nobody really needed to yell at or abuse the poor faculty heads who are opposed to giving David Suzuki his latest honorary degree (he has 30 or so) for, essentially, television stardom. The conversations would be more like: “How are you this afternoon, Dean? I was just sitting around, cutting the U of A out of my will, and I naturally thought of you.”
I hope my reference to television will not be thought rude. Let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that Suzuki used his celebrity very worthily: TV is still at the heart of it, no? The U of A cannot intend to reward Suzuki’s scholarly life, which is long forgotten even by him. He is being honoured as the advocate of a philosophy, but broadcasting in the precable era is what sets him apart from a thousand other like-minded persons. TV is surely to him as oil is to the University of Alberta.
The university’s president, David Turpin, met the clamourings of his own professors and faculty bosses with a statement of defiance on Wednesday. Turpin argued that the promise of an honorary degree to Suzuki cannot be reversed without major negative consequences for the institution’s reputation, which is obviously true. He defended the choice of the award to Suzuki on the grounds that a university cannot avoid controversy. “Instead, we must be its champion. Stifle controversy and you also stifle the pursuit of knowledge, the generation of ideas, and the discovery of new truths.”
This does not seem like a particularly sound defence of a decision that Turpin admits is “unpopular and untimely.” (One reason it’s untimely: a recent spate of news stories about the $824,000 Turpin earned last fiscal year.) He is, so far, the only person who was involved with the decision and is making himself visible to answer for it. In 2018, isn’t a university president kept busy enough dealing with the publicity problems that arise from the ordinary activity and foibles of actual scholars?
Suzuki is not a member or employee of the University of Alberta. The University’s Senate went out of its way to honour him, specifically with a fancy piece of paper destined to end up in a bulging file (although “Alberta” does start with “A,” so, hey, it will be near the front). In order to do this, the Senate sped past hundreds of actual environmental scientists and theorists — as opposed to poet-philanthropist-messiahs — who might deserve the recognition. Who knows: some of them may not even be cranks who equate economics with “brain damage”! (A few may be economists!)
Controversy is certainly part of a university’s business, but it is perhaps not the business to which a university is consecrated; and this incident is a gratuitous, contrived controversy whose harm to the university’s supply of funding and goodwill was foreseeable. So what is the gain from allowing a crater to be blasted in the institution’s future endowment? Did Turpin go along with this just so he could write a rapturous, indignant letter mentioning “inquiry” and “academic integrity” and other things that haven’t pertained to David Suzuki, however highly you regard him, within the past 50 years? And how did he end up in a bizarre pamphleteering battle with his own professors?