Category Archives: Free speech

Free Expression Often Stifled: Scholars seem reluctant to discuss certain subjects for fear of being labelled ‘culturally insensitive’

Douglas Todd
Vancouver Sun

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

There were two things I couldn’t help noticing last January when I began my eight-month fellowship as a “visiting scholar” at Simon Fraser University campus.

One: In winter the mountaintop university in Burnaby seems perpetually smothered in a sea of clouds.

Two: “Visible minorities” are actually the majority on campus — by a long shot. East Asians and South Asians appear to account for more than two out of three students.

What did these two realities, the weather and ethnicity, have in common at SFU?

Virtually no one was willing to talk about either.

At least publicly.

I can understand why the people of SFU would not bother discussing the hilltop campus’s foggy winter micro-climate. Why obsess about the depressing way January’s grey fog mirrors Arthur Erickson’s grey concrete architecture — when everyone knows spring always brings the Burnaby campus to life in all its green, awe-inspiring glory?

But why were so many people unwilling to discuss the quiet ethnic revolution that’s taken place on this B.C. campus and others? What’s the significance of non-white students growing in proportions on campuses that far outweigh their demographic strength among the Greater Vancouver population?

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with a preponderance of East Asian and South Asians among SFU’s roughly 25,000 students, who will be the leaders of tomorrow. But only a few brave souls were even willing to question, sotto voce, what it means for the future of Canadian society.

I raise this issue only as an example of some of the subjects it seems scholars today are reluctant to discuss for fear of a student or colleague reporting them for being “culturally insensitive” or, of course the ultimate epithet, “racist” — both of which in academia can be your career’s kiss of death.

I’ve had the pleasure of staying in contact with academia through friends and my work at The Vancouver Sun, so I know that the issues and trends I experienced during my months at SFU generally reflects reality at the University of B.C. and many of the country’s roughly 100 universities and many more colleges, which currently enrol more than a million students.

CLIMBING DOWN FROM THE PROVERBIAL IVORY TOWER

This three-day series on the state of academia in North America is anything but a slam of SFU or other Canadian post-secondary institutions.

My eight months on SFU’s campus as the first Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities were fascinating and fabulous, one of the best things that’s ever happened to me.

The Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellowship was brought into being by SFU’s dynamic dean of arts and social sciences, John Pierce, and others to make it possible for more SFU scholars to engage with non-academics such as myself.

While many journalists are cynical about academics, I revelled in their company as I taught, gave public lectures, moderated panels, wrote, read, participated in conferences and meetings, enjoyed fascinating lunches and organized my own symposium on spirituality and values in the Pacific Northwest.

Not only are academics highly intelligent, the ones I have to come to know are gracious, good listeners. Many are teaching important subjects. To put it simply, I like and respect them, and believe their students are fortunate to be in their classes. Academia, despite its challenges, is still a wonderful, mind-stretching place to be.

The Shadbolt Fellowship is one of many projects SFU is implementing in an effort to climb down from the proverbial ivory tower, to keep itself at the forefront of Canadian universities that are trying to engage the so-called real world.

In addition to such appointments, SFU was the first university to create a vibrant downtown Vancouver campus. Now it has a new Surrey campus, the Wosk Centre for Dialogue, a far-reaching continuing education department and numerous other outreach programs.

In the third section of this series, I will outline more of the strengths of SFU and other universities. But today, without wanting to seem like an ungrateful SFU guest, it’s necessary off the top to raise the issue of possible self-censorship on campus.

I do so because I’m one of those idealists who has higher expectations of universities (and colleges) than almost any other of the western world’s governmental and corporate institutions, many of which struggle much more than post-secondary institutions with free-expression restrictions and contributing to the public good.

But I believe if academic freedom — and academic relevancy — are not absolutely robust on Canada’s universities and colleges, we are all in trouble, perhaps particularly in B.C., which has the most highly educated population in the country.

In this series, I will in many ways be passing on the laments many scholars, staff and students at SFU, UBC, the University of Victoria and elsewhere have expressed to me in private. They include concern that:

– There is too much reluctance on campuses to frankly discuss issues of “identity politics.”

Ethnicity, as mentioned, is still too explosive to touch for most. Issues around gender are also mostly avoided, unless it is to champion women’s rights. I wondered if the restraint on thoroughly exploring these identity-group issues came out of an overweening desire to be fair to these groups, which were once minorities on campus, but are no longer. Tough topics surrounding aboriginals, who do remain under-represented on campus, are also largely evaded.

– Religion is still a difficult subject on secular campuses.

Quite a few scholars and staff at secular campuses have come to me and said they fear being exposed to other academics as religiously active. Many did not want to admit they were Lutheran, Catholic, “New Age” or evangelical Christian. And woe unto the nervous scholar at SFU who I heard was Mormon. Apparently he lived in fear of being outed. There are, however, tentative signs of more openness to religion.

– There seemed to be nervousness in secular higher education about discussing one’s values.

It’s hard for scholars to air the ethical convictions they actually hold on the issues of the day — because that could be construed as being “unobjective,” and possibly as moral indoctrination of students. Some academics adamantly believe they should teach in a “value-free” way. They oppose the idea of frankly expressing their own values with students. Others quietly wrestle with the reality that we all have biases and maybe it’s more fruitful to be open about them.

– There is not much dialogue over ultimate questions.

In academia, explorations of subjects such as truth, goodness and beauty are often slim to non-existent. I wonder if young, searching students can’t talk about these issues of meaning on a campus, where will they get the chance to talk about them in a concerted way? No wonder some students are drawn to private religious institutions.

This is not to say that these big subject areas — of ethnicity, gender, religion, values and meaning — don’t sometimes get discussed on campus, especially outside lecture rooms. They’re quietly mentioned among trusted friends in offices, hallways and less formal moments.

As well, in my time at SFU, I was fortunate to be placed under the auspices of the Institute for the Humanities, which has funding from the Simons Foundation to engage wider society on social issues, as well as the related humanities department. Members of SFU’s education department, where I also spent time, had a similar mindset about finding appropriate ways to serve as agents of social change.

Since one purpose of the Shadbolt Fellowship — funded by a legacy from Jack Shadbolt, one of B.C.’s most dynamic painters, and his wife, Doris, a leading culture analyst — is to bring non-academic writers and artists into the university to stimulate creative interchange, consider this series my effort to build more fruitful connections between our large, influential universities and those of us struggling to understand and make a small difference in the “real world.”

DARING ACADEMICS TO BE MORE PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS

In my first public talk at SFU, I encouraged academics to stop worrying about what their colleagues might think about them and to dare to become public intellectuals — to share their vast knowledge with the world.

I urged a group of scholars who gathered over sandwiches and coffee to get over their nervousness and work with journalists to spread their expertise through the mass media to hundreds of thousands of people, rather than restricting it to a few dozen students in their class or a handful of specialists reading obscure journals.

I referred to a controversial package I wrote a few years ago in The Vancouver Sun that ranked B.C.’s top 50 public intellectuals. The list included, from SFU, economist Richard Lipsey, Philosophers’ Cafe founder Yosef Wosk, ethicist Mark Wexler, community planner Mark Roseland, and, from UBC, medical economist Robert Evans, historian Jean Barman and ecologist Bill Rees.

Thinkers on this list, and many more who could have been on it, show courage to engage the wider world. They’re prepared to test their insights in the marketplace of ideas, where merely “interesting” thoughts are also expected to be “important.”

Public intellectuals are willing to deal with harried, deadline-pressured journalists desperate for a quick quote to meet a 5 p.m. deadline.

More bravely, they’re also prepared to expose themselves to most academics’ biggest fear: the censure of other scholars. I’ve heard academics dismiss such public thinkers as “grandstanders” and “egocentrics” and other unpleasant things.

Since I am one of those rare journalistic creatures who write about ethics for the mainstream media, I also seized the opportunity to challenge the group of scholars to heed the pleas that a philosopher, Rutgers University’s Bruce Wilshire, set down in his ground-breaking book, The Moral Collapse of the University: Professionalism, Purity and Alienation.

Wilshire argues the university has been disintegrating since the 1930s by succumbing to cold rationalism, professional specialization and careerism. He maintains that, while it’s still possible for students to jump through enough hoops to get a technique-based job in engineering, law, medicine, education or computer science, most students have almost no opportunity to ask questions about goodness or beauty or (that difficult concept) truth.

Wilshire says the more prestigious a university becomes, the greater emphasis its professors place on arcane, isolated pursuits. He argues an academic’s teaching ability — the art of expressing warmth, of listening and of stimulating creative thinking — make up just a tiny percentage of the criteria for advancement. Almost all of it is based on the quantity, not necessarily even the quality, of what they’ve published in often-obscure journals.

PEERS MAY TAKE EXCEPTION TO UNPOPULAR STATEMENTS

After my talk, a buzz ensued. Many scholars said later they’re deeply worried academics have been cowed by the tenure-approval process.

They’re anxiously aware tenure decisions are made largely by peers who may take exception to unpopular statements, or even jokes one makes about, you name it — politics, women, multiculturalism, religion, personal morality, politics or economic theory — all of which may lead to an academic being pigeon-holed in a way that could damage his or her career.

Several professors sadly said the system works against them becoming public intellectuals. Faculty tenure committees (which are made up of peers, not administrators) are not supposed to judge scholars’ and researchers’ abilities only on their publications, but to put significant weight on their teaching and public service (which includes being a public intellectual).

But I’ve been constantly told the unfortunate academic reality (for academics, students and the public) is that virtually all of one’s academic worth is based on one’s research and publications, often in obscure journals. Publish or perish is not an empty cliche. It’s virtually the law in academia. And it’s crushing many hard-working, devoted, up-and-coming scholars.

In the increasingly lengthy period before a budding academic can crawl up the ladder and grab the secure ring of academic tenure, most academics said it’s often a disadvantage to devote more time than one has to to teaching — and it’s especially dangerous to air one’s voice through the mass media.

Not only might a scholar’s comments be taken out of context by a reporter, they will invariably be condensed or simplified. What’s far worse, the scholar runs the danger of being seen by colleagues as crudely self-promoting. It’s a self-serving slur, justifying the non-engaged academic’s passivity.

To say paranoia about educating the public through the mass media runs deep in academia is an understatement, especially among young, untenured, low-paid and justifiably anxious sessional instructors.

It is the more mature scholars, who have earned tenure or have at least been around the block a few times, who finally conclude they no longer give a damn about colleagues’ backbiting or public timidity.

They’re determined to serve the larger society. They’re going to express their knowledge and insight through the mass media and other means. Whether one agrees with their views or not, they deserve kudos for engaging the rough-and-tumble world.

dtodd@png.canwest.com

STATE OF ACADEMIA

Today

Connecting academia with the wider world

Wednesday, Jan. 10

Raising controversial issues in academia

Thursday, Jan. 11

What Universities are Doing Right and How they can do more of it.
© The Vancouver Sun 2007

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