April 2014
This column was drawn from opening remarks presented at a
March 27 Macdonald-Laurier Institute debate in Ottawa, on the resolution: “Free
speech in Canadian Universities is an endangered species.”
In
the past year, a wave of moral panic has swept universities over an alleged
campus “rape culture,” which former governor-general Michaëlle Jean went so
far as to label a “disease.” Whenever I express skepticism of rape culture’s
existence in columns, my Twitter feed lights up with abuse. I have noticed that
the most retweeted invectives aren’t the ones merely telling me I’m wrong;
rather it’s the tweets declaring, “@BarbaraRKay should be fired.”
Where are these young polemicists — they are all young — taught that the proper
response to dissenters is professional death? Why, at the universities, of
course where it is common Marxism-derived practice to suppress “offensive”
discourse through speech codes, forced sensitivity training or worse. Brave is
the university student today who would deny rape culture in any campus forum.
Students are at least free to speak their minds once they leave the
universities. But pity the rare faculty member at odds with the leftist echo
chamber he is condemned to inhabit for decades. Faculty and administration can
be very tough on their own. The epidemic “mobbing” of academics beating against
the culture’s near-monolithic current, at its peak in the 1980s and 90s, remains
a shameful, ongoing chapter in our campus histories.
Google the names of Lucinda Vandervort, Heinz Klatt, Irwin Silverman, Martin
Yaqzan (an anti-rape culturist avant la lettre), Alan Surovell and
Kenneth Westhues, a very partial list of academics savaged by their peers
and/or administrations for politically incorrect speech, or following unfounded
allegations of sexism, racism or homophobia. You hear about fewer such cases
now, but only because most academics got the message, and now prudently
self-censor to avoid similar bouts of “re-education.”
Still, the recent mobbing of now-retired University
of Calgary academic Tom Flanagan by his peers and the liberal media, the
academy’s branch office, for voicing a reasonable doubt as to the efficacy of
prison for pederastic voyeurs demonstrates that lust for the blood of
politically wayward peers still burns fiercely in academia.
Nevertheless, free speech isn’t entirely extinct on Canadian campuses. After
all, it positively flourishes for those who hold politically correct views. For
anti-capitalists, anti-Zionists and members of official identity victim groups —
women, gays, natives, people of colour, any religion other than Christian —
speech is as free as the birds, even if it offends conservatives, Zionists,
heterosexual white men or Christians.
So
free speech for the “righteous,” but:
Pro-life
demonstrators have trouble getting official status for their clubs, their
demonstrations are routinely disallowed, and some have even been arrested for
“trespassing” on their own campuses.
At
Ryerson University in Toronto, when a men’s awareness group applied to the
Student’s Union for official status, the Student’s Union quietly amended their
charter to specifically exclude any men’s issues group that did not make
women’s voices central, therefore denyingthem speech;vandalismand
disruption have attended several men’s issues campus events.
—
Israel Apartheid Week is free to peddle its hateful canards every year on
campuses across Canada, but when a McGill pro-Zionist club called a members’
soirée, “Israel: a Party,” a gently ironic reference to the absurdity of the
word “apartheid” as applied to Israel, the Student Union threatened to take away
their club status unless they changed the name. Too-onerous security fees are
imposed, an indirect but blatant attack on free speech.
—
Faculty, administration and student unions collude in monitoring and policing
what can be said and what can’t by guest speakers. Speakers with conservative or
pro-American/Israel views have received veiled threats from university
presidents concerning our hate-speech laws, encouraging hostile disruptions,
buildings forcibly occupied and access to speeches denied. Or too-onerous
security fees are imposed, an indirect but blatant attack on free speech.
For
a plethora of other examples, one has only to peruse the 2011, 2012 and 2013
Campus Freedom Index reports compiled by the Justice Centre for Constitutional
Freedom, which monitors the state of free speech at 45 public universities,
tracking the often enormous gulf between benign official policies and Orwellian
practices.
One
of the most egregious offences against freedom of speech cited in the 2013
report was the shutting down of a free-speech wall built by Students for Liberty
at Queen’s University to raise awareness of free expression rights. The grounds
cited for its removal were “offensive content,” but no specifics were offered.
Notably, no policy or bylaw had been violated.
“Free speech wall.” Ominous words. Such walls emerged in authoritarian societies
such as China, where citizens quite reasonably fear speaking truth to power in a
non-anonymous context. That there is an entire generation of Canadian students
who think a free speech wall for anonymously written incorrect thoughts is
something normal, acceptable and necessary in a democratic society —
well, this saddens me, and scares me a little too. Campus rape culture is a
social construction. “Unfree speech culture” is the real campus disease.
National Post, March 28, 2014.
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