Newsletter

April 2015

What are universities for?

Here we go again: Riot police clashed with roughly 500 “striking” student
protesters in downtown Montreal on Monday. There was tear gas. There were
arrests. And student leaders vow there is much more to come unless the Quebec
government abandons its austerity agenda.

The Université du Québec à Montréal in particular, while always a militant
hotbed, seems of late to be going off the rails: Last month a group of
professors complained that gangs of “sometimes masked commandos” had rendered
the campus atmosphere intolerable with “intimidation, harassment, shoving,
vandalism, looting and repeated strikes” — bursting into classrooms, shutting
down classes — in name of their various radical causes.

The professors were moved to action after protesters successfully shouted down
an event with the deputy minister of National Resources, political science
professor Jean-Guy Prévost told the Montreal Gazette. “They came in with
banners and screaming until the event had to be called off,” he said. “This is
not good for the university.”

Indeed. And this culture of self-righteous lunacy is not limited only to the
soi-disant “strikers.” As Judith Shulevitz observed in Sunday’s New York
Times, university campuses are increasingly succumbing to the tyranny of a
philosophy that believes students must be protected from unpopular opinions and
speakers — not on grounds of political correctness per se but because they might
be made to feel unsafe.

At Brown University, a debate on “rape culture” was challenged on grounds
it might “serve to invalidate people’s experiences,” a member of the
university’s sexual assault task force told Ms. Shulevitz. The university
responded by staging a concurrent debate beginning from a more politically
correct premise. A “safe space” for students was provided, featuring “colouring
books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music … and a video of frolicking puppies.”

In this case, at least, the debate went ahead, albeit in deference to a false
perceived obligation for balance. (Healthy campuses should produce balance on
their own.) At Christ Church, Oxford, of all places, last year a debate on
abortion was cancelled outright amidst uproar that the two participants were
men. “It clearly makes the most sense for the safety — both physical and
mental — of the students who live and work in Christ Church,” said the student
union’s treasurer.

There are myriad examples of this tendency in Canada as well, from National
Postcolumnist Christie Blatchford being protested out of an appearance at
the University of Waterloo, to the University of Ottawa’s toe-curling caution to
Ann Coulter to mind Canada’s speech laws on campus, to any number of pro-life,
men’s rights and other mal-pensant groups being harassed or denied
standing outright in precisely the milieu that should be more open to free
speech than any other in Western society.

There is no such thing as “mental safety” on university campuses — or if there
is, then the university is failing wretchedly in its primary role. Meanwhile, on
some Quebec campuses students and professors have reason to worry about their
physicalsafety, should they dare insist upon a right to learn and teach
even if the Bolsheviks-in-short-pants don’t like it.

The link between these two phenomena is that universities have in too many cases
simply lost their nerve. In the name of hurt feelings or “security concerns,”
they take the easiest way out of any sticky situation. Higher learning cannot
survive such cowardice.

National Post, March 23, 2015.