In an academic environment where there is only one righteous path, university leaders have lost the right to nuance
The encounter that may have sounded the death knell for cancel culture in higher education was almost Shakespearean in terms of its drama.
The Bard talked about Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, being “hoist by his own petard” — blown up by his own bomb — after he killed the Danish prince’s father and married his mother.
Something similar happened at congressional hearings on antisemitism in Washington last week.
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The presidents of Harvard, MIT and University of Pennsylvania — three women culpable for the creation of censorious utopias in three of the West’s most eminent universities — were persecuted for appearing to hold a different opinion to the prevailing opinion.
They were asked one simple question: Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university’s code of conduct regarding bullying and harassment?
Their answers were nuanced — it would depend on the context, said all three.
“If speech turns into conduct, it is harassment,” said Liz Magill, the now former president of Penn.
She might have argued that the U.S. Constitution guarantees that speech alone is not punishable, as she tried to do after the fact; that harassment would not be tolerated but offensive speech would be.
But neither she nor her colleagues have earned the right to nuance. The 2024 College Free Speech report by an organization called the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) gave Harvard the lowest score possible, judging it “abysmal.” Penn and MIT scored only a little better.
Universities across the Western world have adopted a culture that rejects nuance and the benefit of the doubt; an academic environment where there is only one righteous path, and it is increasingly narrow.
University administrators have built up bureaucratic structures that leave teachers and students treading lightly, lest they cause offence to marginalized groups. Truth has been superseded by social justice, as the principal goal.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has presented this struggle as being between the teachings of free speech advocate, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx.
Mill asserted that individual freedom should only be infringed to prevent harm to others and that “he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”
Marx believed that political diversity was an obstacle to overthrowing power structures.
It is Marx who has been in the ascendancy at universities across the Western world. He divided the world into the oppressors and the oppressed, and the culture that predominates on campus is the secular worship of the oppressed. “Trigger-warnings,” “safe spaces” and the crushing of “microaggressions” are necessary to protect morally ranked identity groups. Political diversity, including conservative ideas, are threatening, and so banned from campuses.
The end game is to produce equality of outcomes for oppressed groups, even if that proves unfair to individuals and equal rights.
Equality of opportunity is seen as a ruse to protect the status quo.
Marxism has long been dominant on campuses — I speak as someone who attended Glasgow University during the Thatcher years, amid class turmoil such as the miners’ strike. Yet, there was always room for robust debate. My political education was conducted in the bars of Byers Road by an alcoholic, communist former shipbuilder.
Crucially, university administrations didn’t weigh in to crush dissenting views.
As CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria put it in a penetrating analysis this week: “Good intentions have morphed into a dogmatic ideology — pervasive goals are political and social engineering, not academic merit.”
Zakaria concluded that the most obvious lack of diversity these days is political diversity.
Signs that Western societies have soured on this rampant bullying have been coming. Last June, the Supreme Court of the United States ended affirmative action in higher education, saying that accounting for race at various stages of the process violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Civil Rights Act.
There is no irony here. Martin Luther King made his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 during the March on Washington, and it was influential in the passage of the CRA. But in his speech, King was clear that his dream was that his children would one day live in a nation “where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.” He sought equal opportunity for individuals, regardless of their race — not equality of outcomes for groups.
Canada has been as afflicted as its southern neighbour. A Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training slide at Western University defined microaggression as a comment, intentional or otherwise, that expressed a prejudicial attitude toward a marginalized group. One example cited was: “I believe the most qualified person should get this job.”
A particularly Canadian twist has been attitudes toward Indigenous issues like residential schools. Frances Widdowson was a professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary who said she was fired in 2022, in part because she refused to acknowledge her university’s proclamation that deemed residential schools genocidal (though she never denied the harm caused by the schools).
The Canadian Historical Association went one better, saying that Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples was genocidal, and still is, in that it is trying to eliminate native people as a distinct culture and physical group. Not surprisingly, 60 or so academic historians took issue with this interpretation.
Another academic, Jeff Muehlbaur, fell afoul of the Native Studies department at Brandon University, where his work as a linguist who spoke Cree turned up some inconvenient truths about residential schools — namely, that a number of his interviewees said they had benefited from their experience. His findings were expunged because they ran counter to the narrative of relentless religious persecution. He eventually resigned his post in frustration.
But there are grounds for optimism that pluralism is making a comeback. The opprobrium heaped upon the disingenuity displayed by the university heads — not least from the donors who forced Magill out — suggests that the public appreciates that, as Walt Whitman put it, people “contain multitudes”: that they are complex and not simply good or evil.
Movements like the Heterodox Academy — a virtual organization of staff and students who rally around the slogan “great minds don’t always think alike” — are growing.
Universities have done great damage to themselves and need to regain public trust. If that wasn’t apparent before last week’s congressional hearings, it is now. To do that, they should dismantle the DEI bureaucracies and end the intimidation, disinvitations, classroom invasions and blockades.
Most of all, they need to remind their students of John Stuart Mill’s belief that conflicting doctrines often share the truth between them.
National Post
jivison@criffel.ca
Twitter.com/IvisonJ
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