January 2012
Are Canadian universities a threat
to free speech? If you ask me, yes, and if you ask civil rights lawyer John
Carpay, he’ll go even further. Carpay has ranked universities so that you can
see which one is a bigger threat than the other. He demonstrated it last week at
a breakfast organized by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy for Calgary’s
Chamber of Commerce, where guests in the Fireside Parlor were treated to a
preview of Carpay’s “Campus Freedom Index.”
The index isn’t a parlor game.
Carpay and his colleagues at the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms have
come up with a scale to register the comparative magnitude of the threat that
institutions of higher learning pose to constitutional liberties. To be released
in November, the index promises to “evaluate and rank the state of free speech
at Canadian universities.”
Many find this counterintuitive.
People expect threats to liberty and other progressive virtues to come from the
academically challenged. We picture book-burners as knuckle-dragging dropouts
with brows so low they’re obliged to view the world through their hairlines. The
very organizers of Mr. Carpay’s breakfast say in their brochure that
“traditionally, the university was a bastion of free speech” and “universities
abhorred censorship,” adding that they did so “in the belief that the quest for
truth was assisted by the clash of ideas.” The suggestion is that the university
as censor is a recent and aberrant development.
I’m afraid not. The origin of
schools and scholars is ecclesiastical, not liberal, and bookish monks were
looking for heresy, rather than the truth. Theologians thought of truth as being
in their possession already, very much like climate activists today. Their quest
wasn’t to find truth but to eradicate falsehood. What scholars saw as their task
was to ferret out and destroy error. In their early days, universities resembled
madrasahs far more than laboratories. Although this has changed, one doesn’t
have to spend much time in faculty rooms (or, for that matter, in student
cafeterias) to discover that a scholastic temper fits an inquisitor as
comfortably as an experimental scientist, if not more. Scholars may be smart,
but they aren’t necessarily tolerant, patient — or courageous.
Saying that universities reflect
the Zeitgeist is an understatement. Universities are more fashion conscious
thanWomen’s Wear Daily. Academics go sashaying and flouncing like so
many models on a catwalk in their ivory towers as they display the latest whim
of the great designer, Intellectual Currency. Philosophers have better centuries
and worse centuries, as the spirit of the times changes. The 18th century was
good; the 19th century mixed, the 20th century baneful. Universities incubated
both fascism and communism, along with their many sub-versions (pun intended).
Although the great democracies defeated those two particular monstrosities in
the end, it was a close-run thing and no thanks to their academic elites. As for
the 21st century, with jihadists infesting campuses all over the world, we’re
off to a rocky start.
No doubt, today’s universities
“empower their administrators and student union politicians … to censor
expression on campus,” just as the Calgary brochure complains. But that’s no
departure; it’s what universities do. They burn books or express solidarity with
those who do. At Heidelberg, they did it for Hitler — but never mind Heidelberg.
When Nazism was in vogue during the 1930s, trendy academics and administrators
did it for Hitler even at Harvard or at New York’s Columbia University.
As for Stalin, Mao and their
successors, excusing suppression of speech was the least of it. There was hardly
a Western university that didn’t justify, minimize, or apologize for mass murder
as long as it was Marxist-inspired. If the battle of Waterloo was won on the
playing fields of Eton, America’s campuses played a starring role in the loss of
Saigon.
When some brave souls associated
with universities speak out against censorship, as they do on occasion, they’re
the inspirational exception. The rule is an obedient dissemination of the dogma
of the day, including terrorist chic, with Hamas apologists shouting: “No
freedom of speech for racists.” I heard them do it at the Alma Mater of a
noxious doctrine called “Israeli Apartheid,” a.k.a. University of Toronto. A
Canadian institution of higher learning is the least likely place, I’d say, to
encourage a clash of ideas to discover the truth. Greasing the squeakiest wheel
of an intellectual bandwagon, then handing out honorary doctorates to those who
hitch a ride on it, would be more of its speed.
Earlier this year a provincial
government commission, ominously named Working Group on Journalism and the
Future of the News, and headed by a Quebec university professor, former CBC
journalist Dominique Payette, recommended that the government license or
otherwise qualify journalists. This, presumably, would split journalists into
“professionals” and amateurs, the latter with reduced access, privileges and
subsidies. While Charter provisions guaranteeing a free press wouldn’t permit
the immediate exclusion of unlicensed journalists from practice the way
unlicensed lawyers or doctors could be, it would undoubtedly be a step in that
direction. Before long, writing an article or a column without proper
“qualifications” could be a matter for the police.
Next to separating the church from
the state, the most important thing, it seems to me, is to separate the newsroom
from the ivory tower. To protect whatever remains of a free society’s traditions
and institutions — such as free speech and free press — we must protect
ourselves from our universities. Even journalism schools attract the kind of
politically correct conformity that is detrimental to bold inquiry, but turning
news gathering and commentary into a profession requiring academic
“qualifications” would put the lid on it.
No real danger, some colleagues
say. Canada isn’t China. Even China isn’t China anymore. By now, between these
two statements, I have more confidence in the second.
National Post, November 1, 2011.
SAFS Editor’s Note: The 2011 Campus Freedom
Index and The State of Campus Free Speech in 2011, are available on the website
of the Justice Centre for Constitutional
Freedoms, www.jccf.ca/.
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