Letters

Rennie Warburton (The Ring, Sept. 5) gives his game away when he identifies himself by race, age group and gender. Identity as an old white guy is his badge of guilt, but he waves it as the sackcloth of redemption because he is on the side of the “victims” of evil Canadian society. He divides the world into oppressors and victims. The university, from his viewpoint, should be the instrument of social justice (as he defines it), and whoever resists this mission is “authoritarian” and allied with “dark forces.” Being so virtuous apparently frees him and correct-thinking university acolytes from accountability.

He ignores that we live in a democracy where presumably a free citizenry can choose how society should be structured and how individuals can make their own decisions. Membership in an academic, tenured aristocracy is not a license to engineer society according to the agenda of a few self-anointed prophets. The point Jim Cutt and I made in our Times Colonist piece was that the social and socialist activists dominate the non-science faculties in Canadian universities, they are self-perpetuating, they admit only other left-leaners to their circle, they are highly privileged, and they are accountable only to themselves. We could have also mentioned that moral certitude unleavened by pluralism is highly corrosive to the life of the intellect. Without diversity of viewpoint (not diversity of skin colour or diversity of sexual “orientation”) based on objective scholarship, teaching becomes preaching.

Finally, we challenge Warburton to produce evidence that Canadian academic life is not overwhelmingly populated by left-leaning professors.

Dr. Robert Bedeski,
Political science