Confronting the Post-Academic University: In Conversation with Mark Mercer
"Before decolonization, deplatforming, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) mandates, Indigenization, Black Lives Matter, safe spaces and the war on merit consumed intellectual life on Canadian campuses, there were the Mohammed cartoons...
March taped the cartoons to his door because he thought his students had the right to decide for themselves whether they were offensive or not. School administrators quickly decided no such right existed. March was told to remove the offending comics and, 17 years ago, the time-honoured concept of freedom of expression for all was replaced by a new right for some to be kept safe from self-defined offence.
As Mercer later noted in C2C Journal, “In ordering him to take down the cartoons, [the university was]…violating Dr. March’s academic freedom and dampening freedom of expression on campus.” As the March affair grew into a national news story, Mercer came to realize his school’s administrators had no interest in defending what he thought to be the core purpose of any university. They “consistently sacrificed academic values to serve such non-academic values as avoiding offense and promoting harmony.” Even worse, he wrote, very few of his colleagues felt the same way he did about intellectual freedom on campus. Notably, however, “One organization did stand up for freedom of expression at Saint Mary’s: The Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship.”
So began Mercer’s long connection to SAFS. Founded in 1992, the non-profit organization’s primary goal is to “maintain freedom in teaching, research and scholarship” at Canadian universities. It’s a lonely task. And getting lonelier, as universities have grown increasingly intolerant of heterodox opinions, unfettered debate and even the very notion of merit. Among recent examples of the decay are the firing of tenured Mount Royal University professor Frances Widdowson for expressing controversial views on Indigenous issues and DEI, the proliferation of race-based hiring programs, the chilling of free speech and open discourse and numerous disciplinary actions taken against academics for expressing a conservative viewpoint. Since the Mohammed cartoons, allegations of offensive behaviour backed by administrative sanction have become a trump card against free speech on campus.
Through it all, Mercer – who would become president of SAFS in 2015 – proved himself to be Canada’s most visible and vocal defender of academic freedoms...
The campaign has at times become intensely personal. In 2020 Mercer was hauled before a disciplinary inquisition at Saint Mary’s over his own freedom of speech. This followed the uproar about University of Ottawa art professor Verushka Lieutenant-Duval’s mention of the word n****r in a lecture on subversiveness in art. While she displayed no animus or intent to demean, its mere utterance offended some students and Lieutenant-Duval’s class was suspended pending a university investigation.
This prompted a requisite letter from SAFS. “The University of Ottawa could have simply affirmed Dr Lieutenant-Duval’s academic freedom in teaching and informed the students that their complaint was groundless,” Mercer wrote. He forwarded this letter to administrators at other universities. And because his email included the forbidden word spelled out in full, Mercer soon found himself caught up in the same punitive disciplinary inquiry that the SAFS deplores when it happens to others...
Mark Mercer: Peter posted the cartoons on his office door when Canadian news organizations declared they wouldn’t publish them. But the day after he put them up, Terry Murphy, the academic vice president of Saint Mary’s, ordered them down. Both Murphy and university president Colin Dodds said the presence of the cartoons posed a threat to property and personal safety.
Naïve as I was (and still am), I thought the university had perhaps been temporarily overcome by emotion. It took me a long time to realize that most academic administrators in Canada have no love for or commitment to academic freedom, freedom of expression on campus or the educational mission of their institutions. It continues to pain me that our universities are in the hands of people who appear disdainful of these academic values. Saint Mary’s and many other Canadian universities have become what I call “post-academic institutions.”
I initially got involved by writing memos to the central characters at my school explaining how their actions were contrary to academic values and would have baleful consequences for the educational character of Saint Mary’s. I was surprised and disappointed that so few others at Saint Mary’s spoke up...
C2C: Was the cartoon issue an early example of what has since grown to become the Woke revolution afflicting universities and society-at-large?
MM: At least three trends were already taking shape as early as the 1980s. The first was political correctness. This involved censoriousness about how you referred to people of certain groups. That was troubling not only because it was an initial attempt to control people through sanctions rather than argument, but it also diverted attention from what people were saying to the way they said it. Political correctness seemed to die down in the early 2000s, but then it came back with a vengeance as callout culture, cancel culture and now wokeness.
Then there was the Canadian iteration of affirmative action, with its insistence that places be reserved for women in student associations and teaching assistants’ unions. Affirmative action implied that values other than academic merit should prevail in academic contexts. This in turn led to DEI mandates, in which social and political ends, such as seeing more black or Indigenous people in the professoriate, now overrule academic goals, such as sound teaching and research.
Finally, there were the “canon wars” of the late 1980s. [Editor’s note: Often popularly expressed as disdain for studying the work of “dead white males.”] This was initially presented as a way of bringing new voices into the humanities, but what was really going on was the imposition of a sociological viewpoint: a preference for one group of writers over another for reasons unrelated to intellectual merit. A scholar can choose to teach Hamlet because of its quality as a work of imagination, not because it belongs to a certain “canon” of Western literature. This is a very different thing from selecting a book by a woman author for the mere sake of seeing more women authors represented. Hardly anyone speaks of canons anymore, but the idea that we are to read literature and philosophy with a sociologist’s eye has become firmly entrenched.
C2C: With the 1980s as backdrop, how have things changed on campus more recently?
MM: Universities in Canada have become much more hierarchical and managerial. The ascendency of human resources departments, with their proliferation of new and worryingly vague rules, has led to greater oversight and control of professors, departments, programs and students. Administrative discipline is frequently used as the means of control. Sadly, faculty unions don’t seem to mind.
At the same time, there has been tremendous growth in seeing people as representatives of types rather than as individuals in their own right. Hiring and promoting by race, ethnicity, cultural affiliation, sex, gender expression and other academically irrelevant characteristics is now pervasive on campus. Beyond its effect on freedom of expression, the pursuit of non-academic goals such as social justice has also meant a decline in sincerity, honesty and easy personal relations. And this has had a devastating effect on teaching as well as public discourse.
C2C: Let’s talk about what a university should be. Since the Enlightenment, universities have been idealized as places where a culture of intellect is created and where students’ characters are moulded, habits formed and minds educated. How is that going in Canada today?
MM: I don’t want universities to create anything, not even a culture of the intellect. It is true that characters are moulded and habits formed at an academic university. However, developing, forming and educating are not purposes universities should serve or ends they should seek.
Universities should be places where people who prize their own intellectual and moral autonomy and that of others gather in community to try to figure things out, to construct interpretations and to articulate their appreciations of the things around them. We can expect that people with university experience will become certain kinds of people – most prominently, people who can think and feel for themselves and are courageous enough to do so. But if we make moulding, forming or educating our goal, we corrupt the means. Education is a valuable by-product, but it’s not the goal.
Unfortunately, Canadian universities are no longer serving this academic mission. Rather, moulding and forming have become the central tasks of contemporary universities. They see themselves instilling in students a set of approved understandings and values that will enable them to conform to a particular social justice perspective and promote social justice goals. They want to be models of equity, diversity and inclusion for other institutions to follow. But our students have not agreed to have their souls engineered. We should not use them as means to a particular set of ends. And as ugly as the goals of social justice are, I would say the same thing about seeking ends of which I approve...
If a society wants to be a liberal democracy, it should want its institutions of higher education to be places of freedom of expression. And to do so, they should be light on rules and discipline. Their job might be explicitly to create productive citizens of a liberal democracy, and that task cannot be done through social justice means...
C2C: You make a good point about civil discourse. It was once understood that a prerequisite for university life was the ability to engage in respectful disagreement. Today, intellectual debates are often marked by extreme incivility. How do codes of conduct fit into this process?
MM: The codes of conduct now popular on campuses introduce artifice and insincerity into our community of scholars, especially when sanctions are threatened. The atmosphere changes. Once someone’s actions draw administrative attention, such codes become dangerous.
The sort of respect that these codes and policies require is respect for feelings and identities in contrast to respect for intellectual and moral autonomy. These two forms of respect are antithetical to each other. When we respect a person as intellectually and morally autonomous, we will be sincere, candid and direct with that person. We will engage with that person as an equal, whether they be a colleague, student or administrator. On the other hand, imposing respect for feelings and identities requires us to watch what we say to avoid causing offence or harm.
Codes of conduct are particularly dangerous when it comes to tenure, which is supposed to protect professors from this kind of intrusion. Policies that call for “safe and respectful conduct” have expanded the concept of harassment far beyond its traditional meaning. And this has undermined the protection of tenure. What happened to Frances Widdowson at Mount Royal University is a case in point. Administrators now seem to take it as their job to make sure certain things don’t get said on campus by whatever means are at their disposal.
C2C: Democratic theorists typically emphasize that democracy rests on a liberally educated citizenry. What happens when we fail to educate young people by instead valuing social justice and so-called equity over truth and merit?
MM: Either we lose democracy itself, or liberal democracy becomes illiberal democracy. I think here in Canada, we’re trading aspects of democracy for authoritarianism, and the elements of democracy we’re retaining are becoming illiberal.
A university isn’t a multicultural society. It aims to pursue academic goals, central to which is to think hard about things, including thinking critically about what others are thinking, and to express one’s critical thoughts. If a university values equity, diversity and inclusion it is subordinating higher learning to those other things. A DEI university does not take itself seriously as a university. It becomes an opportunity to do something else. And in pursuing these other goals, the university itself becomes rotten. A university can be a place of intellectual engagement or it can be an agent of social justice. It cannot be both.
Much of what I call the life of the mind consists of the dynamic conflict of ideas. Objections, criticism and dissent are central and stimulate us to thought. In contrast to the dynamism of intellectual life, DEI initiatives see ideas as sitting around a table and they seek to bring more ideas to that table. Ideas are thus exhibited for people to examine and professors become curators. Students are instructed on the nature and provenance of the ideas but are forbidden to examine the actual ideas critically.
This is the case with the Indigenization of the university. “Two-eyed seeing” is the idea that we are to consider a matter from both a Western perspective (whatever that might be) and an Indigenous one. But we are not to examine either perspective critically from the other since to do so would be disrespectful. Such an idea is not characteristic of academic endeavour – or of any kind of rational thinking of the sort that stretches back nearly 2,500 years. Since disrespect is harassing and tenured professors can be disciplined for harassment, engaging critically with Indigenous perspectives can now get a professor into trouble. Again, look at what has happened to Widdowson...
What goes on at a university is important to the general public for three main reasons. One is that our sons and daughters are attending or will attend university, and so we have an interest in seeing that they have a rich experience of intellectual life and get a good education. Second, many young people graduating from universities are entering the work force and will become part of the professional and managerial elite of this country. So everyone has an interest in seeing that these young people are capable of thinking for themselves. Third, one of the crucial roles of a university is to produce new research. Such breakthroughs are significant to business, government and society at large. And that means everyone has an interest in seeing that such research is trustworthy.
If a university is not committed to academic values, it can’t function in a way that provides the public with what it needs. A student fearful of saying the wrong thing is unhappy and not learning. Graduates who have been trained in social justice values can’t think for themselves. Research that has its results predetermined cannot be trusted. Even someone who cares little about dispassionate enquiry or a culture of disputation has plenty of reasons to care that people at universities care about them...
Young people thinking of going to universities and their parents will have a hard time finding an academic university. A university that says it subscribes to the Chicago Principles might be a good bet. [Editor’s note: The University of Chicago’s Principles on Freedom of Expression are considered the “gold standard” for protecting free speech on campus; in 2019 Alberta ordered all post-secondary institutions in the province to adopt these rules or create their own similar free speech codes.] Researching the size and scope of the DEI bureaucracy at universities would be useful but very time-consuming. Skimming papers written by the professors in a potential student’s area of interest is another good way to form an educated opinion of the quality of a university...
Some colleagues and peers have been supportive, but many have not. Most who haven’t been are indifferent, but some are actively hostile. Part of social justice ideology is that social justice must win by any means. Hostility and incivility are effective tools in promoting one’s ends and thereby are to be expected from those dedicated to DEI."
Whenever left wingers talk about "harassment", they mean having to hear ideas they disagree with.