WOW! FINALLY SOMEONE GETS IT!
A refuge from moral relativism
Ian Hunter, Special to the National Post · Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2011
In a Feb. 11 letter to the National Post, responding to recent criticism of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, CAUT executive director James Turk defended his organization's witch-hunt against faithbased universities. He argued that CAUT's investigation of religious schools was necessary to ensure that parents know what kinds of institutions their sons and daughters are attending-- and, as Mr. Turk puts it, "to ensure that neither universities nor outside groups impose ideological requirements on academic staff." In other words, we are asked to believe that CAUT commissioned studies of Trinity Western University in Langley, B.C., Redeemer University in Ancaster, Ont., and others, in an effort to glean information readily available to anyone who took the time to glance at the universities' respective calendars.
I found the CAUT report on Trinity Western University particularly risible: Two academics (Professors William Bruneau and Thomas Friedman) burrow away through 22 turgid pages -- plus four Appendices and 24 footnotes -- to discover what the university's mission statement says on the first page of the calendar; namely, that TWU is a Christian institution intended "to develop godly Christian leaders, goal-oriented University graduates ... who [will] serve God and people in various marketplaces of life."
Likewise Redeemer, and the other institutions under scrutiny, do not exactly hide their light under a bushel.
And that is precisely the problem. These institutions, you see, are committed to something other than secular relativism; and that sticks in the craw of the CAUT and however many of its 65,000 members actually support these ludicrous investigations.
As it happens, I have lectured at both Trinity Western and at Redeemer College, as well as many secular Canadian universities, and, for that matter, at Oxford and Cambridge in England. So I am in a position to offer a bit of direct evidence, evidence overlooked by the prolix twosome of Bruneau and Friedman: Yes, faith-based universities are different. Allow me to explain.
At Redeemer and Trinity Western, the buildings are clean, the walls undefaced by graffiti. The knuckles of their students do not drag the ground. I noticed immediately that informal and animated discussions were going on everywhere on campus between students and faculty -- and the faculty seemed to know each student's name.
The Staley Lectures, which I was at Redeemer and Trinity Western to deliver, continued over several days: public addresses, seminars and discussions, an evening panel, etc. I experienced culture shock.
I discovered that these faculty and students were unafraid of concepts such as "truth," or "good" and "evil" -- words not only foreign to, but suspect in, the secular university. The students, mirabile dictu, were not intimidated by intellectual debate; ideas were not threatening to them, nor was free-ranging inquiry immediately challenged as "offensive." In fact, I never once heard the word "offensive." Controversy was not something to be avoided. I quickly realized how long it had been since I had spoken at a school without speech codes and "equity officers."
It was the experience of lecturing at such institutions that reminded me of what universities once were.
One manifestation of the contemporary university's moral and intellectual vacuity is the transposition of the labels "liberal" and "conservative." In the multiversity, it is generally those called "conservative" who are disturbed by what these institutions have become and who propose drastic change. It is those termed "liberal" who are content with abandonment of core curricula, with rampant grade inflation, with declining standards of scholarship wrought by affirmative-action hiring and with the emergence of courses and departments based on ideology. In times past, a university "liberal" was identified with free speech; today, a university liberal is likely to be leading the charge to suppress free speech on the ground that someone, somewhere, might take offence.
A university's real mission is the pursuit of truth, however unpopular or politically incorrect that truth may be. In his classic essay, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill wrote: "Ages
are no more infallible than individuals; every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd; and it is certain that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present."
Today, university dissenters from politically correct orthodoxy are encouraged to keep quiet, to fit their conclusions to premises they believe to be false. Instead of providing intellectual leadership, our universities are full mostly of CAUT-types, those whom J.S. Mill aptly called "conformers to the commonplace."
Serious students, looking for the kind of liberal education that was once available in many Canadian universities, will be fortunate indeed if they secure a place at a faith-based institution. Condemnation by the CAUT, in our topsy-turvy world, should be considered the academic equivalent of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
-Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at the University of Western Ontario.
