How the university lost its sheen
Opinion article by Julius H. Grey
In 1973, when I graduated from university and embarked on my law career, the university appeared as an attractive option to those of us who had higher degrees. We would, of course, never make the big money available in major law firms for those who survived the struggle to the top but the salaries would be perfectly decent with consulting available for a few additional luxuries. In exchange for wealth, we would get lifelong security, as obtaining tenure was almost automatic in the early 1970s. More important, we would get time for leisure, for travel and for research and writings. Sabbaticals would give us the opportunity to live in foreign lands several times during the course of our career. The most attractive feature of university life would be freedom of expression, freedom from conformism, the almost total right to dissent. All of these advantages would be accompanied by prestige and respect equivalent to those accorded to successful attorneys.
Academic jobs were widely available in a university world which was growing by leaps and bounds, opening to people from difficult circumstances and integrating women who, before, had been a relatively small fraction of students. The universities, at least in Canada, outgrew the private foundations which, along with tuition had been their main source of money and tapped the seemingly endless resources of the new welfare state. It was an exciting, optimistic time for prospective faculty.
This was true of graduates in all faculties, not only professional ones. The others had perhaps fewer enticing outside opportunities, but the opening of new colleges and the exponential growth of the public service allowed their graduates too a considerable amount of choice with academic life as the premier one.
It is not surprising that a large proportion of those with the qualifications chose the university. I have always been grateful for my inability to choose — I started out to do both at the same time. This was very lucky because the academic path turned out to be a disappointment to most and a disaster to quite a few.
First, predictably, the money became scarce. The great expansion of the welfare state could not go on forever and massive public spending brought about inflation. At the same time, neo-liberal economic thinking came to dominate economics. The state became less generous and much of university research started to depend on outside grants. Applying for grants took up tremendous amounts of time and became a key factor in evaluating academics. In such an atmosphere, fierce competition developed. Tenure ceased to be a given, and even after granting It, the university could revoke it by closing departments or by re-evaluating individuals. It was in this period that I came to define a university department as “a group of people constantly trying to get rid of one among them”. Student evaluations, private life, the number of publications in any year could seriously affect or even break a career. The freedom which we had been promised waned because any error or any controversy could be dangerous. But worse was to come.
As society moved towards conservative economics and created the gaping social inequalities with which we are now grappling, academic thinking did not generally follow this trend. On campus, the remnants of the student radicalism of the Viet Nam era bolstered by the new ideology of “multiculturalism” created an “identity left” based on half-baked notions of diversity.
In a way this was a natural development. The different groups which had come into being in the halcyon days of the welfare state were bound to turn into lobbies to fight over the scraps left over when the feast ended. Each screamed “me!me!me!” whenever a benefit was to be given out. Soon, origins mattered as much as accomplishments for jobs, contracts, grants, promotions and student admissions. The reality behind the calls for diversity turned out to be largely competition between groups.
It was of course a positive, exhilarating thing to open the university to people from milieus which had mostly been excluded. However, doing it through lobbies meant the repudiation of the democratic left which strove to be colour-blind, open to both men and women and indifferent to sexual orientation. Empowering lobbies also meant making them permanent since they would never accept that their goal has been fulfilled. The world of lobbies discouraged those who did not wish to belong to a group. Who would stand up for you if you refused membership in the collectivity which claimed you?
However, by far the most ominous product of this type of equalization was the obligatory ideology, first called political correctness and now woke. It consisted of fitting history, literature, indeed most disciplines to reflect the woke views. The more absurd the woke position was — on cultural appropriation, for instance — the more strident the call to conform. Indeed, preventing people from rebelling against woke positions requires that rebellion bear a heavy price. And it does!
Contrary to the promises of 1973, there is virtually no freedom of expression at the university but rather a reign of cancel culture. Use the wrong word, tell a joke some find offensive, teach the wrong version of history, and you’re out. The lobbies of self-proclaimed victims claim they need “a safe space” from offence. But the university is supposed to be safe for all persons and no ideas can be granted immunity from challenge. Yet propositions contrary to the current catechism are not only unprintable, but dangerous to express even in private.
Predictably, the university does not stand up for freedom because it shuns controversy. It knows that the practitioners of woke culture will demonstrate, complain to donors, call the media and that such campaigns could affect university finances. The internet and social media ensure that outrage at a heretical position is widely disseminated, adding to the university’s reluctance to protect free speech. In fact, it is the accepted mantra to disparage advocacy of freedom of expression and instead focus on its limits with respect to “victims”.
Of course, political correctness is not new in academia. In the 1930s, German universities with great traditions and sterling reputations started to teach crackpot race theories and distributing jobs on a racial basis. Soviet universities imposed a particularly mindless course in Marxism-Leninism on all students and at various times replaced Freudian psychology, modern genetics and modern linguistics by half-baked, “socialist” versions which party hacks got to teach. Our society does not terrorize or brutalize opponents in the way Germany and Russia did and is therefore no moral comparison. But the sheer stupidity of woke views of history, their distortion of the role of gender and race, of cultural appropriation, of identity and of the need to protect “victims” from exposure to alternative views, matches the stupidity of the earlier examples. Understandably, most prefer silence to being cancelled.
We have thus achieved the opposite of 1973 — limited funds, few opportunities, dog eat dog and no freedom or security at all. It is not surprising that, at least in law, many who joined the university when it glittered like gold left it in the course of their career. Those who stayed are now retiring. But all of us, whatever path we took, continue to dream of a free, humanistic university where all are welcome and none are cancelled.
