Freedom of speech for leftist cant only
That’s what universities have always stood for
In the usual modern discussion about universities and free speech, the common wisdom is that golly, they used to be the very places where freedom of expression really had its head and ran wild, but now, it’s all changed.
And maybe that was their experience, or as they say on campuses now, their lived experience. It sure as hell wasn’t mine.
I was a journalism student at Ryerson University (this was before it had aspirations and was just Ryerson Polytechnical Institute) in the early 1970s, when the Toronto Sun first rose from the ashes of the Toronto Telegram. It was only the first brand-new major newspaper in the country in decades, nothing to get excited about, and on the school’s downtown campus, even in the journalism school, they surely didn’t.
Off and on f r om its launch, the Sun was banned f r om t hat c ampus and others, or banned f rom classrooms, and usually talked about with an knowing sneer: In those days, the paper had its quasi- naked Page 3 Sunshine Girl, it was unabashedly conservative, and it was a cop- and- sports tabloid to boot.
Clearly, it wasn’t to be taken seriously.
I later worked at the paper for about 15 glorious years ( the Sun is now owned by Postmedia) and that view of it persisted, and probably still does among the right people, and by the right people, I mean the Brandon Dixon sort, Dixon being the actor who hectored the U. S. vice- president elect Mike Pence last weekend, begging him after a Broadway performance to defend “the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious.”
I mention this only as an illustration of what was, even way back when, a profoundly constipated culture, at least on one campus. At Rye High, as we called it, you were most free to speak as long as you clung to the conventional left-wing cant.
Nothing has changed, as a quick survey of Canadian campuses shows.
In Saskatchewan t his month, a University of Regina associate professor, Dr. Michelle Stewart, organized protests against Candis McLean and her controversial book about the 1990 freezing death of an aboriginal youth.
(I started the book, called When Police Become Prey: The Cold, Hard Facts of Neil Stonechild’s Freezing Death, but was writing one of my own at the time and haven’t finished it. But McLean’s thesis is that the two Saskatoon police officers blamed for the boy’s death couldn’t have been involved.)
McLean had speaking/ signing events booked at a bookstore and three hotels in Regina, but one by one, all cancelled under threat of a scene, which is all it takes.
As the professor wrote on Facebook on Nov. 4, “Hey folks, happy Friday night. We have ONE last hotel to contact to get rid of Candis McLean’s garbage book. … Join me in calling the Quality Inn ASAP….”
McLean complained to university president Dr. Vianne Timmons, and on Nov. 22, Timmons wrote back to say, alas, there was nothing to be done because academic staff have the freedom to speak on “issues not related to the performance of their duties.”
( Stewart updates t hat Facebook page of hers sufficiently it must be part of her duties.)
Give Timmons some credit, in that she recognized the perplexing irony of her defending “the right of one of the university faculty members to impede your ( McLean’s) right to free speech and assembly.”
At the University of Toronto, of course, there is the saga of Jordan Peterson, the psychology professor who has vowed not to use the genderless pronouns already mandated by provincial human rights codes and soon to be added to federal codes, and has been vilified for it — not by the public or students, but by his professorial colleagues.
They spring f rom t he same old sort of cloth that swaddled some of my nonj ournalism professors at Ryerson, early social justice warriors in the eternal battle against the oppressors, whose guises change but are always oppressing someone.
One of the profs who engaged Peterson in purported debate last weekend, for instance, is Mary Bryson, a deeply respected and wellregarded administrator and teacher at the University of British Columbia.
Bryson’s two areas of expertise, as she swore in an affidavit prepared for the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia against Trinity Western University, the evangelical Christian school that wants to open a law school ( and was opposed by the law society in Nova Scotia), are 1) the critical studies of gender and sexuality and 2) the role of “education and educational contexts in the democratization of knowledge access and citizenship, and in the consideration of related human rights, for sexual and or gender-minority individuals and communities.”
I went to a trade school. I barely know what all that means. I wouldn’t have thought those studies a good career made. But they have.
Bryson is a senior associate dean at UBC’s education faculty, happily in the midst of what’s called Teacher Education for All!, or TEFA, which will see every faculty member, staff person and student trained at the same time and on every level in “LGBT-inclusive initiatives.”
Then there’s Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., now actively involved in hunting down the white people perhaps affiliated with Queen’s who dressed in inappropriate costumes ( Viet Cong fighters, monks, etc.) at an off- campus party. And Friday, the University of Alberta law faculty announced it is investigating whether students who wrote a satirical article — meant as a funny piece, it depicted a fictional “desperate drunk girl” and was merely dopey — have breached the school’s code of conduct by perpetuating, and worse normalizing, “dangerous” stereotypes about women.
The humourless are still firmly in charge of the university campus, as ever, but now they’re the hated hegemony.