Newsletter

April 2012

Education Or Re-Education

Mark Mercer

“Queen’s Bands” is the name of the marching
band and associated cheerleaders and cavorters at Queen’s University, in
Kingston, Ontario.

The
Bands performs at campus activities and local and national events. Queen’s Bands
has been noted throughout its long history more for spirit and merriment than
music—which isn’t to imply that its members aren’t serious musicians in other
venues.

The
Bands was suspended last November after some of its in-house materials found
their way to the office of a university administrator.

As
a result of the suspension, Queen’s University cancelled scheduled appearances
by the Bands at an alumni dinner and the Kingston Santa Claus parade. The
university also required members of the Bands to take Human Rights and Equity
training.

The
suspension, made jointly by the students’ association at Queen’s, which oversees
Queen’s Bands and other student societies, and the university administration, is
punishment and warning for the vulgar and sexist songs and writings some members
of the Bands had been distributing among themselves. Vice-Provost and Dean of
Student Affairs Ann Tierney said that the “materials, and the behaviours they
promote, are unacceptable. They point to a sub-culture within the Bands where
explicit, disrespectful and degrading language marginalizes community members
who may remain silent for fear of exclusion.”

The
language Dean Tierney has in mind includes “Mouth raping your little sister
since 1905” and “I will rape you with a lamp.”

The
suspension is also to affirm that Queen’s University values inclusion and to
assure students that the campus is welcoming and safe.

Now
if I were a Queen’s University student, I’d transfer out and ask for my money
back. This latest episode makes it pretty clear that its administration isn’t
much concerned that Queen’s be a place of education.

First of all, to punish people for what they say is to violate their freedom of
expression. Freedom of expression should especially be valued on a university
campus because it is central to what we are as intellectuals: we are concerned
to think and say what we want only for what we judge to be our own good reasons,
and not out of fear of official sanction.

In
sum, by punishing the members of Bands for what some of them said or sang or
wrote, Queen’s University is acting against its mission to foster a free and
responsible intellectual community.

Of
course, the administration and the students’ association don’t see it that way.
They maintain that the behaviour of members of the Bands tends to marginalize
and silence people in the Queen’s community.

If
they are right, though, the behaviour cries out for public discussion, not
punishment. That members of the Bands have been singing obnoxious songs among
themselves provides Queen’s with an opportunity to discuss and debate publicly
issues of sexism and the hurtfulness of exclusion.

By
opting instead to punish the Bands, Queen’s university is failing in its task to educate its students to take their place in
a free society. Those students offended or hurt by the fact that Bands had this
material have now learned that when one is offended, one should appeal to an
authority to deal with the offenders. This lesson is contrary to a university’s
mission to help students to become critical thinkers and autonomous agents.

The
requirement that members of Bands undergo Human Rights training is likewise
inconsistent with Queen’s status as a university. Rather than simply provide
students with opportunities to engage in discussion and argument, which might
well result in changed attitudes among members of Bands, Queen’s is seeking to
re-educate some of its students into the preferred attitudes. They will not
learn anything about sexism or exclusion from this training (“learn” in the
sense of freely accept on the grounds of reasons), except that saying the wrong
thing will get them punished.

Queen’s University is engaging in bullying for the sake of anti-bullying and
exclusion for the sake of inclusion.

Something similar to the Bands’ case happened at Harvard a couple decades ago.
It’s instructive to contrast the reaction of administrators and student
politicians at Queen’s to the reaction of administrators there.

In
1992, Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III became troubled by what he perceived
as increasing racial tensions among Harvard College students. Among other
incidents, someone had hung a Confederate flag in a dorm. (I know of this case
from Harry R. Lewis’s book Excellence Without a Soul, about the continuing
decline of commitment by universities to liberal education.)

Epps responded by assigning all incoming students Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay
“Self-Reliance.” Epps had students meet with professors in small discussion
groups. His goal was to encourage students to understand themselves as
individuals rather than to see themselves as particles of an identity group.
With luck, he reasoned, students would come to be able to offer and receive
ideas and criticism without either hectoring others or taking offence. The key
to community cohesion, Epps proposed, was individual self-reliance.

Dean Tierney at Queen’s is no Dean Epps.

Mark Mercer is a member of SAFS Board of Directors.

Canadian Centre for Ethics in Public Affairs, March 14, 2012.