The Thursday Question 2:1: Universities...

The Thursday Question 2:1

Happy New Year. Glad to hear from some readers of The Thursday Question over the break. To make up for the publishing, or maybe because I am an undisciplined writer, this issue of TheThuQ is quite long.

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I have spent most of my life studying or working at universities. Every campus runs into a public controversy from time to time. Tempers heat up, newspapers take notice, politicians weigh in, and then campus life returns to normal. There is nothing wrong when this happens: a vibrant campus debate should spill into the public square from time to time. Fortunately, I have always had teachers and colleagues who embraced public engagement. A university that never end up in the news would be a dull place.

And yet. Since that terrible weekend in October, the reactions to Hamas’ massacre of Israelis have provoked something different on our campuses. The normal level of conversation brought to a head simmering debates about the DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) efforts that have been going on at almost every North American university for a decade. Some of the commentary has been good, but some has been disturbing. Most disturbing is the re-emergence of an emboldened campus antisemitism.

The crystalizing moment came on December 5, when the presidents of three prestigious universities testified before a Congressional committee. Their deeply disappointing responses to pointed questions about campus antisemitism embarrassed all of us on campus. How could the leaders of esteemed universities fail to stand up for basic principles and the essential place of Jewish scholars on campus? Are Jews not welcome on campus like everyone else? Do DEI efforts not protect Jews from harassment and threats? Faculty members, alumni and major donors were, to their credit, quick to react. One president resigned straight away. Another, Harvard’s Dr. Claudine Gay, resigned after problems of academic integrity in her research were brought to light. Some of us have argued that DEI offices and policies should be scrapped. Others of us want explicit protection of Jewish faculty members and students in DEI policies.

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo and his team did a service to Harvard by publicizing the alleged problems in Dr. Gay’s research. No one needs to like his role in the DeSantis administration in Florida to acknowledge that. The fact that neither Dr. Gay nor the board of Harvard can yet recognize that service points to continuing problems at that institution. The worst outcome for Harvard would have been for Dr. Gay to continue in office. That would have sapped the university’s credibility. Efforts to enforce plagiarism and other rules of academic misconduct would have ground to a halt in a blizzard of lawsuits. Any effort she made to restore a scholarly culture of inclusion for Jews would have been second guessed. The DEI efforts she led would have been left without much legitimacy. Instead, she returns to the ranks as an ordinary faculty member, where she can properly deal with the accusations about her citation problems. As a scholar, she is entitled to due process in those matters. If she wants to return to teaching and research, the norms of academic freedom will protect her academic work. Some observers are not persuaded that her work is serious. That’s fine - universities protect unserious work so that serious work may flourish. Most efforts to push the frontiers of knowledge will fail. Even Harvard professors are protected when they fail. If academic work doesn’t teach humility, nothing will.

However, Harvard might now be left with the second-worst outcome. Its board now embarks on another presidential search even though it will not acknowledge how badly it acted by defending Dr. Gay and, it seems, by threatening the New York Post over its investigation of her academic work. Admissions applications are down, some donors have announced plans to withdraw financial support (how many are doing the same quietly?), and countless firms are checking to see if the Harvard grads they have hired are implicated in antisemitic actions on campus. Can the current board right the ship? Or will Harvard fall from its hard-earned spot as one of the world’s the most admired institutions of higher learning?

Conservatives have long criticized the leftward political leanings of America’s universities. William F. Buckley, a founder of post-war conservatism, came to public attention with his first book, God and Man at Yale (1951). As more Americans were exposed to university education, more conservative critiques of universities found a ready market of readers. Some of these critiques have an enduring value. Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1989) probably had the greatest impact on conservatives, although not on most universities. The best Canadian criticism, Emberley and Newell’s Bankrupt Education (1994), celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this year.

The more that conservatives paid attention to the universities, the smaller the place of conservatives at universities became. Study after study documents the shrinking ranks of conservative thinkers at universities. The academic mission depends on academic freedom, but intellectual diversity matters, too. Campuses pay a price when the range of academic viewpoints shrinks. So does the broader community. The departure of Jordan Peterson from the University of Toronto hurt the academic world, especially those who disagree with him. The research agenda that tried to “prove” conservatives are less intelligent, or more paranoid, or more authoritarian than the rest of the population could only flourish where the absence of conservatively-minded academics led to less rigorous peer review, less rigorous hiring and promotion, and left questionable research unrebutted for too long (“Freudian Quips,” The Remnant Podcast, Dec. 28, 2023). Teaching suffers when our students are left to discover traditions of philosophy or social thought on their own because no one teaches them on campus.

And yet, there is more to be alarmed about than the shift of campus perspective and the narrower scope of research and teaching. Survey evidence suggests that university faculties are becoming less liberal, less welcoming of debate, and less committed to free inquiry (see Dummitt and Patterson for Macdonald-Laurier Institute, 2022 and the Note below). Our graduate students – tomorrow’s professors – are even less tolerant of open inquiry (Kaufman, “Academic Freedom in Crisis,” March, 2021). Philosophers have ways to survive intolerant regimes (Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 1952) but students and other academics pay a price in the process.

When I worked for Mr. Harper, one cabinet minister introduced me to a community leader by saying: This is Ian Brodie. You can tell he’s a good political organizer. After all, he’s a conservative who got tenure at a Canadian university. Another Harper-era minister once asked me: How do you survive on campus as a conservative? I never know how to respond to these comments. I don’t think of myself as an avatar for conservative politics when I am on campus. I did not return to the academic world to proselytize for a political point of view. I try my best to be a good political scientist. Although I approach my work with conservative ideas, I aspire to academic standards rather than political ones. That’s how I earned tenure and two promotions: based on academic standards, not political organizing.

And just to be clear: I have always enjoyed working with my colleagues. Nonetheless, being conservative and a professor involves challenges from colleagues, the growing number of campus administrators, and, occasionally, students. Everyone who works in a complex institution, be it a university or a parliamentary caucus, makes compromises to do their work. Still, the rewards outweigh the annoyances. Academic freedom lets me do my thing if I let others do their thing.

Students, especially undergraduates, face a different situation. Students who want a good education must navigate carefully. They are exposed to grading, curriculum requirements, and reference letter practices that can hurt their life prospects, at least in the short term. Students have fewer ways to protect themselves than tenured faculty members do. I do not encourage young conservative thinkers to imagine they could have an academic career like mine. I doubt they could.

Over at The Hub, Sean Speer has been exploring the idea of defunding universities. He, too, has spent time on campus since leaving the Harper government (at U of T’s Munk School) and his reflections on the campus reactions to October 7 are solid. He’s right to worry. The tolerance of antisemitism and the defence of Hamas’s actions on campus are despicable. Rooting out antisemitism and nihilism is going to be hard work. I would not be surprised if Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University) shuts its new law school rather than trying to resolve the ongoing battles about antisemitism, Israel and Hamas among its students and faculty. A number of colleagues have stepped into the public square to justify or explain away Hamas violence, its terror against Israelis, and its oppression of Palestinians. Some academic colleagues have even taken to defacing an Indigo bookstore – a bookstore! – because its founder supports the existence of Israel.

But defund the universities? We depend too heavily on universities to defund them. To begin with, universities credential most of the professions. My father became a Chartered Accountant without setting foot on a university campus. Night school and hands-on work at an audit firm sufficed. That route to the profession is now closed and a university degree is mandatory. Nurses, doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, pharmacists, audiologists, geologists, geophysicists – the list of professions that require a university degree goes on and on. Coding bootcamps and online services are entry points for many computer careers, but university programs in computer science, data science and management information systems are still oversubscribed. Maybe some of these programs should be moved out of universities. Many countries have free-standing schools of medicine or engineering. But would moving TMU’s law school out of TMU solve anything? Not likely. Beyond the professions, and despite efforts to promote the value of the skilled trades and polytechnic education, thousands of high school graduates and their families see admission to a university as a step towards the middle class. Why do many students opt for political science rather than carpentry? I don’t know. People make choices. Voters, including Conservative voters, send their kids to university and expect their governments to make sure spots available for them.

We depend on universities for more than just teaching. Canada has spent decades building out the research capacity of our universities. Every research university has longstanding partnerships to share the fruits of its researchers’ work with governments, private firms, and community organizations. Canada’s oil sands sector was made possible by university research, for example, and the sector’s future depends on continuing that work. Hospitals paired with universities anchor the high end of our public health systems. The research of social sciences departments, faculties of education, and social work schools is consumed by organizations that service the public and help govern our country.

In the real world of Canadian politics, universities aren’t going anywhere. 

Nor can a future federal government simply leave the universities for provincial governments to figure out. Universities have been a federal issue for decades. Under St. Laurent and Diefenbaker, the federal government helped to fund the expansion of Canadian higher ed to absorb demobilized troops and the Baby Boom. Although Mr. Trudeau’s father was an early opponent of federal support for universities (“Federal Grants to Universities” in Federalism and the French Canadians), his government continued to fund student loans, federal transfer payments in support of universities, and direct federal funding of university research. Mr. Harper was committed to limiting the use of the federal spending power in areas of provincial jurisdiction. Yet, his government’s Knowledge Infrastructure Program funnelled federal cash into campus building projects. Federal funding is often tied to matching provincial and private sector contributions. Untying those agreements to withdraw federal money from the field would see blowback from powerful quarters.

Recent conservative efforts to use provincial powers to impose reform on universities have been notable failures (Brodie, “Taking on ‘Repressive Tolerance’ at Canada’s Universities,” C2CJournal, 2021). The Kenney government forced universities to adopt the Chicago Principles on free speech. Ontario pursued a similar course. Neither effort provided help in the current campus disputes about Israel, Hamas, and antisemitism. In fact, the American university presidents who appeared before the Congressional committee in December were lambasted by some critics for their (admittedly insincere) appeal to free speech principles. The Conservative Party’s 2019 platform commitment to deny federal research funds to universities that violate free speech principles was a good idea, but it is far from clear that it would have been more effective than Alberta or Ontario’s efforts. 

Nor do Conservative governments have a good track record of defending campus conservatives when they are under attack. In 2013, Tom Flanagan, a high profile campus conservative and once an ally of Mr. Harper, ran afoul of public opinion when he defended John Stuart Mill’s classically liberal position on freedom of expression at a public speech in Lethbridge. The federal and Alberta ministers responsible for higher education – both Conservatives – called for him to be fired (see Flanagan’s excellent account, Persona Non Grata: The Death of Free Speech in the Internet Age, 2015). Everyone else noticed that Conservatives were attacking a conservative academic and piled on. The consequences of the Flanagan incident continue to weigh on campus conservatives today.

A future Conservative federal government will find itself under pressure to “do something” to fix our universities. Outside intervention to protect students from antisemitic threats and criminal hate speech is in provincial hands. A future federal government could encourage provincial authorities to use the existing legal tools. But if the illiberal ranks on our campuses are likely to become stronger in the years to come, new regulations of speech, expression, research, or debate will likely be administered by those most likely to use them for illiberal ends.

There are two types of solutions to the problems that Sean Speer and others have documented. One is to create new institutions – either new universities or new organizations within existing universities – dedicated to a better pursuit of free inquiry and scholarly debate. Some American states are experimenting with these types of solutions. The best ones provide funding and support to existing groups of scholars. Canadian decision-makers could benefit from seeing how those experiments turn out. The federal government could support new institutions with capital grants and by recognizing their academic programs. Then, let students and research funding flow to institutions that attract students and researchers.

The second set of solutions are efforts at reform from within. The Penn Forward effort, A Vision for the New Future of the University of Pennsylvania, is a promising start. There is a lot of work to be done to flesh out the Penn Forward vision, but this faculty-led initiative starts by correctly diagnosing the need for Penn to return to Benjamin Franklin’s “enlightenment values” by fostering “excellence in research and education” rather than pursuing “social and political agendas.” Reports that some members of the Harvard board are meeting with its leading scholars are also encouraging. Faculty members have a long-term interest in the health of their institutions that will outlast any short-term political effort. Governments come and go. The tenured outlast them all.

Trying to impose reform on our universities from outside has not worked. Defunding or ignoring universities is not possible. The hard work of reform remains ahead of us.

Note:

Dummitt and Patterson’s study for MLI was criticized by Alex Usher, an analyst of post-secondary education I have known and admired for years.  Dummitt and Patterson responded to his criticisms. I was not persuaded by Usher’s criticisms. Imperfect and sometimes indirect measures of political viewpoint are commonly used in social science research, but studies using different measures all point in the same direction. Curious readers of The Thursday Question can read the exchange and make up their own minds. In the spirit of free inquiry.