April 2001
It is precisely to safeguard academic freedom that universities must
not succumb to granting students particular privileges to attend specific
political event. Once a university decides that one or other such events
warrants the granting of such privileges, independence has already been
tainted. This is because the vetting of political initiatives taken by
students involves value judgments about the importance of each event. If
the university were to allow students privileges to attend any political
event, an option clearly unworkable, there would be no such compromise.
Would the university allow students of conscience privileges to protest
at, say, an abortion colloquium? A world conference on feminist issues?
A forum on Third World health issues? No way.
My father was a Holocaust survivor and it has been edifying to me, in
recently reading the social history of Germany in the Thirties, to see
how insidiously and almost unconsciously the universities contributed,
by just such small capitulations as this, to the rise of Nazism. University
students and professors were encouraged to, and did, as the rot spread,
show their allegiance to the Reich by a certain kind of heinous activism.
Marianne Bluger Neily, Ottawa
Published, March 22, 2001
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