Juno News - On C2C： Are Canada’s universities too far gone？

00:00:00.000 and let me just take a moment on this to talk about the importance of free speech now this

00:00:16.380 has always been for me the absolute hill to die on for me because my belief is that without freedom

00:00:21.740 of speech we do not have any other freedoms we can't argue for the things about which we care

00:00:27.100 if we don't have freedom of speech so when I see protesters however many there are coming out and

00:00:32.780 speaking up for parental rights and I see counter protesters even if I disagree with them I look at

00:00:38.460 that exchange and I say this is a profound win for society that these two groups can meet in the

00:00:44.700 middle and despite the tensions express their position on what is a very real and very important

00:00:50.800 issue in society now the difference is that the parental rights folks are not trying to shut

00:00:56.380 anyone down the counter protesters are the counter protesters actually do not believe that the

00:01:01.380 protesters have a right to be there they believe that it should all be denounced and dismissed as

00:01:05.940 hate as an illustration of this let me share a statement from British Columbia's human rights

00:01:11.480 commissioner she has issued what she calls a response to the hate-fueled marches planned for

00:01:17.740 today she says she's very disturbed by news of the hate-fueled marches she says the human rights of

00:01:24.540 trans and lgbtq2sai plus people are not up for debate denying the existence of trans and gender

00:01:33.600 diverse people including calls to a race trans and lgbtq2sai plus people from our province's curricula

00:01:40.700 is hate and hate should have no place in our community or in our schools she goes on to talk about

00:01:48.060 hate hate hate everything is hate it's hateful she says it's time to take action against the campaigns of

00:01:53.940 misinformation and organized hate and it goes on to say that we must stand together against hate

00:02:00.280 there's no space for hate hate hate hate hate hate hate now i did not see a great deal of hate going

00:02:07.140 towards the counter demonstrators i saw a lot of hate coming away from them but even so hate is an

00:02:13.220 emotion which people have a right to feel in a free society it may be undesirable it may be something

00:02:17.980 we want to counter but the human rights commissioner of british columbia would do well to look at what

00:02:23.100 is the most fundamentally important human right in existence the human right to freedom of speech is

00:02:31.340 the foundation of a free and democratic society and for a so-called human rights commissioner

00:02:38.140 to spend time denouncing freedom of expression rather than focusing on the importance of preserving and

00:02:44.700 protecting it is absolutely disgraceful she has a right to weigh in on whatever issues she wants to 0.99

00:02:50.940 weigh in on she's a very well-paid civil servant i am not immune from the understanding that human

00:02:56.700 rights commissions are not places that generally respect and uphold free speech but without freedom

00:03:02.220 of expression you can't do any of these things that you care about and advocate for any of the issues

00:03:07.180 you want to advocate on now all of this all of this is part and parcel of why these exchanges are so

00:03:14.060 very important and why this is a display that we should be welcoming even if we disagree with someone

00:03:19.980 on the other side and i have a lot of respect for anyone that is counter protesting who believes that

00:03:25.820 both sides have a right to play in this but when this human rights commissioner says there is no place

00:03:31.980 for debate or she says it's not up for debate well you don't actually get the right to decide what is

00:03:38.140 or is not up for debate in a free society we are able to discuss these issues now i tweeted about this

00:03:43.980 earlier and someone said oh you're saying that trans rights are up for debate i would say that they are

00:03:50.140 in the context of what follows you cannot unilaterally assert broad trans rights whatever those are

00:03:58.300 without weighing those against let's say women's rights the rights for women to have a space that is 0.99

00:04:05.340 single sex the right for women to be able to participate in women's only sports so this is a very 1.00

00:04:10.940 easy way of seeing that women's rights and trans rights unless defined narrowly will be in conflict

00:04:17.180 with one another now how do we solve that we solve it by debating it so to say that this is not up for

00:04:23.660 debate means that your way is the right way and no one else can have a different opinion and that is

00:04:29.820 the danger of what's being argued here and i should just say to segue into an interview i had planned

00:04:36.140 irrespective of this this is not something that is just existing on the streets of toronto and ottawa

00:04:41.980 and calgary and vancouver and london and pickering today this is an issue that goes at its core to a

00:04:47.500 long-standing academic problem and by that i mean a problem in academia now we've seen over many

00:04:55.020 years alan bloom wrote about this 35 years ago in his seminal book the closing of the american mind

00:05:00.460 that universities have become more hotbeds of indoctrination and ideological intolerance than

00:05:07.100 the halls of inquiry that they once were we've seen this get worse and worse and worse over time

00:05:14.540 however and now one of the big problems is that good people who envision a future in academia want

00:05:19.980 to self-select out of this because they do not see a place for their worldview and that was at the

00:05:26.060 crux of brock eldon's story now brock eldon teaches at the rmit university in vietnam though he is

00:05:33.180 canadian and he's written in c2c journal about this ground zero in the culture war it's a three-part

00:05:40.700 non-fiction novella chronicling what was at one point a bit of optimism he held about academia to

00:05:46.540 at the end a bit of cynicism and perhaps a more jaded outlook brock eldon joins me now from hanoi i

00:05:53.020 know it's very late where you are brock so thanks so much for coming on yeah thank you for having me

00:05:57.580 andrew let's start first off with the way you're telling this story because i think we've seen and

00:06:05.020 there's merit to them and i've written a few of them just the garden variety columns about you know this

00:06:09.420 happened on this university this happened on the others you've told it as a story

00:06:16.060 um yeah the the motivation for that was i guess just as i was uh completing the degree back in

00:06:25.020 canada at queen's following two years overseas getting some more context about when we talk about

00:06:33.260 woke's wokeism you know uh talking about marxism um living in south korea you know within 200 kilometers

00:06:45.740 of the north korean border then moving on to beijing vietnam um i suppose i've told it as a story just

00:06:53.660 because it it felt like such uh it it felt like as i say at one point in the essay being in a kafka

00:07:02.700 it was kafka-esque um from the outset from the very first class with that context and with that

00:07:09.820 background it was it was like coming back to a completely different place and the idea came quite

00:07:20.860 late in the degree but i think the feeling of this being a surreal kind of alternative world um to the

00:07:30.620 one that i had known uh growing up in canada that came early on and i also i wanted to show as you said

00:07:40.700 there's a lot of columns about this but i wanted to show the reader what this actually feels like

00:07:47.980 from the student perspective and i think that was the main objective i've written other kinds of

00:07:55.260 non-fiction but a narrative from the student point of view about this based on my experience

00:08:01.660 i mentioned in my crude summation that you went in wide-eyed and enthusiastic and you came out with

00:08:06.780 all of these challenges and problems that you've raised here was there for you a flash in the pan a

00:08:14.140 pivotal moment where you realized this is not what i thought it was or hoped it would be or would you

00:08:19.900 say it was much more of a slow burn it was a more gradual process i would say it was immediate with the

00:08:28.540 onset of classes it was from um i arrived about a month early uh socialized with people in the program and

00:08:39.260 there were there were some um minor red flags there were arguments that came up that i disagreed with but

00:08:49.500 it wasn't until we got to class and um we were asked to introduce ourselves with a a sharing stick

00:09:01.660 um some kind of appropriated indigenous object by a white professor we were asked to pass around this

00:09:11.980 sharing stick and identify ourselves by our preferred pronouns and then talk about our background with

00:09:22.140 feminism um and the idea the language of safe spaces came up a lot and the policy the classroom

00:09:32.860 policies of trigger warnings all of that within about a 20 minute um window was quite it was like this

00:09:41.340 is reminding me of a lot of teaching in middle schools in china um and just on that note you were punished

00:09:50.380 for not using trigger warnings right yes uh early because it's not in any classroom documents

00:09:59.340 but it's it's it's enforced at least when i was there it wasn't in classroom documents but

00:10:06.380 it was enforced and i didn't the first time around i simply didn't understand that this was expected

00:10:15.900 demanded demanded of students that you begin any presentation presenting potentially triggering

00:10:26.140 subject matter with a trigger warning um i wasn't aware and but i was punished twice for not using trigger

00:10:35.500 warnings and the difficulty for me was determining what what's problem what's problematic and what's not

00:10:44.860 not yeah um this the first time it was in this um indigenous gender studies class where the sharing

00:10:55.500 stick was used um i wasn't especially i could sense that there were going to be problems there but i did not

00:11:04.380 expect there to be problems presenting a paper on othello um i was reprimanded for that in an email and

00:11:13.820 i to this day i still can't figure out which passage i read that was offending

00:11:22.780 um and uh for that i was docked three percent just the one aspect of this that i i find kind of

00:11:34.380 interesting is that i i do believe there are good places and good pockets and good professors in

00:11:40.300 in university and i i actually had not a terrible time with this i mean certainly there was a bit of

00:11:46.620 a cultural clash on campus when i went to university and i'd even returned for something more recently

00:11:51.660 and was still managed to sidestep any of the landmines you were picking courses it sounds like

00:11:56.460 where you could have seen this from a mile away like you know indigenous gender studies that just seems to

00:12:01.660 me like the epitome of wokeism shakespeare and cross-dressing another one that jumps out here so

00:12:07.500 i i say this respectfully but what were you expecting with that course selection that that's a question

00:12:14.140 that's come up a fair bit um i think that's fair the the issue was um that the only those are the only two

00:12:23.740 courses that i had any reservation about from the outset um but the issue was that all of the other

00:12:33.180 courses were so objectively questionable just in the their obvious political bias um the other courses i took

00:12:47.340 are very were very traditionally titled jane austen and her contemporaries um 18th century manuscripts

00:12:57.180 there weren't a lot of i i did not sign up for black lives matter or indigenous incarceration

00:13:06.700 or the refugee crisis or victorian bodies i i tried to avoid all that but there there are certain

00:13:15.180 requirements and i figured at least with the shakespeare course we must be talking about something

00:13:21.740 other than cross-dressing in a shakespeare course that's hard for 12 weeks you'd think but apparently

00:13:28.060 not yeah it's it could go on for a long long time and it did um the indigenous gender studies course was

00:13:37.500 just a requirement because we needed a credit in post-colonial literature um it wasn't something

00:13:44.620 in and of itself a requirement that fundamentally skews the academic environment because post-colonialism is

00:13:50.700 a very fraught and politicized approach and it's a discipline that we see i mean i thought it was a

00:13:56.300 political science and history discipline but now it's even a literature requirement i'm learning absolutely

00:14:02.380 um and since i've left the courses have gotten much worse um all the way back to when i was there

00:14:13.820 the medieval course was old english and translation um last year it was queer medievalism so all of the 0.75

00:14:25.660 historical um all of the canon has now been politicized and it's right in the course titles

00:14:33.500 and right in the course descriptions and it's all public

00:14:35.660 when you look at the environment that you were in how many of the students did you believe

00:14:44.380 that you were in school with were true believers in this versus skeptics or people that were just sort

00:14:51.020 of along for the ride and you know maybe they have a higher tolerance for it but they're not really

00:14:55.820 immersed in that worldview themselves i would say

00:15:00.620 about about about certainly two-thirds were highly invested wow um about 20 percent were just

00:15:17.180 indifferent there they were there um just accepting whatever came to them um and what was

00:15:26.220 and what was disappointing about that was i kind of expected a swing but because your your grades were

00:15:37.020 rewarded based on uh your it was kind of the this oppression olympics thing going on so whoever wrote about

00:15:51.180 oppression the most um addressed the most categories of oppression was rewarded with the highest grade so

00:15:59.980 you actually saw those those students actually became more more radicalized like if you were to listen

00:16:08.620 i wouldn't say i don't know if they believed it but they knew what they had to do so they were willing to

00:16:14.620 go to further extremes and then the remaining 10 percent um a lot of whom were international students

00:16:22.940 um were just uh a chinese international student very early on uh without

00:16:31.900 my having interacted with her just said outright outright um this is the cultural revolution

00:16:37.500 well and uh but that was just completely shot down because it's we're not taught about the cultural

00:16:46.700 revolution in canada i i think that's an important segue to the time that you had spent abroad and you

00:16:54.700 had actually had a world of experience that you saw you had been to china before you did your your ma and

00:17:01.740 was a lot of this just so quintessentially north american in your view like so quintessentially

00:17:08.700 north american when you were seeing just this this cultural attitude because i've heard stories from

00:17:13.260 people that have like tried to explain pronoun politics to people from india and it's just like

00:17:18.860 they're speaking in in completely different tongues because it just is so completely absent from

00:17:25.100 the motivating forces in uh countries that for whatever their issues are uh doing pretty well

00:17:30.780 economically like india and china well according to my students at rmit um

00:17:39.420 rmit is an australian university with campuses in vietnam so we're we're getting it's a technical

00:17:46.940 university it's not too much but we are getting a lot of these cultural sensitivity workshops that we

00:17:53.740 have to present and um when you brought up this idea of so quintessentially north american um the story

00:18:03.900 that came to mind the that came to mind right away was i presented i've had to present a workshop like that

00:18:12.540 twice and two separate students three years apart have said this is who also uh had studied in north

00:18:23.260 america had said this is what happens to countries that have no problems the students uh that's not to say canada

00:18:33.980 and america don't have any problems but comparatively um students in in vietnam throughout southeast asia

00:18:46.460 they're not particularly concerned about being identified properly according to their pronouns so they they see this as

00:18:56.220 an issue that is well it's it's it's not an issue it's um it's people trying to make an issue because they have

00:19:05.180 nothing else to motivate them to do anything um conditions are um set up for them it's it's not and

00:19:20.060 from what i would add to that is just what i think it is is it's quintessentially north american because

00:19:26.060 although my students are correct that the the developed conditions are established there's a point

00:19:32.460 where it seems like development sort of uh becomes static and i think that's part of it as well there's

00:19:43.740 not there's not a lot that has changed in on my return trips to canada it's it's the same place but

00:19:54.860 very very different politics um i i hope that answers your question it does and i i guess from

00:20:03.340 there i would then go to the question of why you put up with it because you know for if you're in a

00:20:10.460 law school or a med school there's a very clear reason that you need your degree whereas you know

00:20:16.860 you could read as many books as you want and write as much as you want without having an ma and

00:20:21.260 i know obviously you're now teaching so i suspect this may be a significant part of your answer but

00:20:26.380 if you had such a lofty and ambitious reason for being there which was wanting to learn and wanting

00:20:32.380 to grow was there a point in which you felt that this was actually holding you back from doing that

00:20:38.460 and that you would have been able to self-teach these things outside of the classroom and say screw

00:20:42.940 the ma yeah absolutely absolutely um there was there was a time and i've i've written about this

00:20:53.180 um in a few columns that will be coming out um there was a if you're gonna be a a literary writer

00:21:02.300 becoming a a professor is one of the few ways that you can afford to do it um if you become a tenured

00:21:09.820 professor you're you're engaged in with the greatest writers of all time constantly whilst

00:21:20.620 so shaping discourse about the field while simultaneously contributing to it and changing to it

00:21:28.300 i i had um and there's there's plenty of figures that come to mind that um you know heroes of mine like um

00:21:35.660 um w h audden t.s elliott david foster wallace that seemed to me like the dream route where i could just

00:21:45.420 be immersed in my love of literature all the time and financially secure enough to be able to pursue a

00:21:54.540 career in creative writing um i didn't quit the ma because i knew that it would land me

00:22:04.060 a university job in asia and i knew about halfway i'm not sticking around for this um just seeing

00:22:14.780 what this does to people and especially on on campuses with young people that have grown up

00:22:22.540 with social media i think what distinguishes this culture war and i've experienced some of this since

00:22:31.580 since the release of the first installment now all three parts are out um is what distinguishes this

00:22:39.820 from other culture wars of other generations is that it's mediated by this digital space where

00:22:50.300 your privacy can be completely invaded um the amount of passive aggressive

00:22:56.220 um facebook posting or twitter posting where they're not naming anybody but there's a white

00:23:04.940 supremacist in the class and it's it's like well who who is it what and why why are we creating this kind

00:23:15.980 of panic um it it was an environment that i did not want to stick around in and it was heartbreaking because

00:23:25.180 i'd wanted to pursue the route that i'd described to you um ending up with tenure at a university from

00:23:33.340 the time i i started as a as an undergraduate um really really finding my myself and my my voice through

00:23:45.660 literature and getting the grades that were you know mid-90s high enough that i i was assured that i

00:23:59.340 would have a very successful academic career and and then i came back and it was just completely different

00:24:06.460 um i put up with it because i looked at university jobs in asia the ma was a requirement that was

00:24:16.780 motivation to finish um but if that if i hadn't have had that time overseas i don't know of what would

00:24:24.860 have motivated me and i know of a lot of especially young men who have dropped out of programs including

00:24:32.460 programs like physics um because of this uh inability to express themselves and the detrimental effect it

00:24:43.420 does have on their output well and then it it compounds the problem because all of a sudden the

00:24:49.100 people that would counterbalance this are self-selecting out and it eventually becomes an asylum with only

00:24:55.820 inmates uh to see expression there well it is a fascinating and very evocative series you can read

00:25:01.980 it over at c2c journal where our friends have all three installments up now ground zero in the culture

00:25:08.540 war parts one two and three the author brock eldon joining us from hanoi uh brock good to talk to you

00:25:14.540 thanks so much for coming on today yeah thanks for having me andrew thanks for listening to the andrew

00:25:19.260 lawton show support the program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news

Juno News - September 24, 2023

On C2C： Are Canada’s universities too far gone？

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