CANADA’S UNIVERSITIES INCREASINGLY DIVIDED
Book analyzes campus incidents of racial genocide, sexual harassment among others
Canadian universities are being torn apart over gender, race and sexuality in ways that threaten their mission as forums for authentic discussion, maintains a new book by a noted dean of law and university president.
Peter MacKinnon’s book says the public is bewildered by explosive campus incidents involving allegations of sexual harassment, racial genocide, transgender phobia, bullying, trigger warnings, censorship and even the banning of yoga.
University Commons Divided: Exploring Debate and Dissent on Campus (University of Toronto Press) analyzes UBC disputes involving gender studies professor Jennifer Berdahl, as well as former creative writing department head Steven Galloway. It digs into showdowns at Dalhousie over sexualized Facebook pages and at Ryerson over a professor who exited an anti-racism forum. Amid the bitter turmoil, exacerbated by mainstream and social media, many have lost their positions.
MacKinnon, a former faculty association chair, dean of law and president of the universities of Saskatchewan and Athabasca, believes institutes of higher education are no longer debating over mere “differences.” They’re fracturing, with ominous implications for their traditional role as forums for discussion and collaboration.
The mission of the university — which MacKinnon says is “seeking truth through advancing knowledge, learning and discovery” — is endangered. Too many righteous academics and students are not willing to tolerate debate over important ideas, “even while contestation is inevitable, indeed, definitional, and with it comes unease, discomfort and dissent.”
The wide-ranging book opens with the termination of former UBC president Arvind Gupta, followed by Jennifer Berdahl’s denunciation of the UBC board of governors, including chair John Montalbano. “She accused Montalbano and the board of three damning isms of modern discourse: racism, sexism and lookism.”
Specifically, MacKinnon said Berdahl, whose chair had been funded by Montalbano, had opined on her blog, without evidence, that Gupta had agreed to termination because he “’lost the masculinity contest,’ ‘wasn’t tall or physically imposing ’ and was the ‘first brown man to be the university’s president.’”
The board and Montalbano, however, could not publicly respond to the unfounded claims, MacKinnon said, even while UBC’s faculty association called for release of the “full story.” Media voices joined in and Montalbano — who had privately phoned Berdahl, whom he considered a friend, to discuss her allegations — stepped down to defuse the situation. He and the board had been silenced by a demand for confidentiality.
MacKinnon says the faculty association took the opposite approach to sexual misconduct claims against the former head of UBC’s creative writing department, Steven Galloway, an acclaimed novelist. The association defended Galloway’s privacy, even when he was terminated for reasons that remain unknown. Margaret Atwood is among those who have condemned the process.
Of the lessons to be learned from these UBC debacles, MacKinnon said one is that critics, when making accusations that may lead to people losing their jobs, need to show more responsibility. Accusers do not have the right to be protected from “reply, contradiction or criticism,” he writes. “Proportionality and tone matter too, and both were wanting in the attacks.”
That issue of proportionality, which stipulates that punishment should be commensurate with the wrong, is also key to the Dalhousie scandal. Thousands of media stories were pumped out after a student revealed the private, sexually crude Facebook pages of male dentistry students talking about which colleagues they would like to have sex with.
While many on campus argued for the dentistry students to be shamed, expelled and Dalhousie’s president fired, MacKinnon (and the New York Times) end up applauding how administrators resolved the ugly situation by severely reprimanding the students, whom apologized while taking part in restorative justice.
There was no justice, however, in the way the director of social work at Ryerson, Henry Parada, resigned after he simply left an anti-racism rally. The Black Liberation Collective publicly accused Parada of “a violent act of anti-Blackness and misogyny” and more. No one knows to this date whether Parada just had to take a phone call.
MacKinnon brings his reasonable voice to many more hotbutton Canadian cases. They include Trinity Western University’s attempt to open a Christian law school, University of Toronto psychologist Jordan Peterson’s refusal to be legislatively coerced into using transgender pronouns, the right of anti-abortion students at the University of Calgary to hold graphic vigils and the overall upsurge of authoritarian student activists bent on stopping speakers from having a platform.
One of the most startling instances of moral panic occurred when a yoga instructor teaching free lessons to disabled students at the University of Ottawa was ordered to stop. The students federation accused her of supporting “cultural genocide,” “colonialism” and “Western supremacy” by allegedly misappropriating another culture’s sacred practice.
In a rare note of justified sarcasm, MacKinnon writes: “This may come as a surprise to the United Nations, whose General Assembly in 2014 designated 21 June as the International Day of Yoga.”
While many taxpayers who fund Canadian higher education will appreciate MacKinnon’s perspectives, they will still be left scratching their heads over the peculiar fundamentalisms seizing hold on so many campuses.
One of the most startling instances of moral panic occurred when a yoga instructor teaching free lessons to disabled students at the University of Ottawa was ordered to stop.