Juno News - The erosion of academic freedom in Canada

00:00:00.000 you're tuned in to the andrew lawton show

00:00:05.920 welcome back to the andrew lawton show here on true north good to have you with us i had the

00:00:15.760 chance to hear patrick keeney who is a visiting professor at chiang mai university but he is

00:00:20.060 canadian speak about this idea of what he called rights talk of this idea of as it sounds just

00:00:25.940 talking about rights and he'll explain it a little bit more eloquently than me but i wanted to

00:00:31.720 interview him about that and delve into that idea a little bit further and also talk about some of

00:00:36.040 the broader issues with academic freedom and patrick keeney actually wrote about academic

00:00:41.740 freedom in an interview he did with the c2c journal a great publication that is a very good friend of

00:00:47.560 true north and a very good example of independent media and he actually talked about it with

00:00:52.040 safs president mark mercer on his way out about the broader themes of academic freedom and what's

00:00:56.580 going on in the world so i wanted to delve into that and lots more with patrick keeney you'll have

00:01:01.860 to excuse my wardrobe change i actually did this interview a couple of days ago so it's a bit

00:01:06.460 disjointed normally on the big film sets they have a continuity director who makes sure that everyone's

00:01:11.660 wearing the same shirts and the windows are shut to the same way but we don't have a continuity

00:01:15.520 director on the andrew lawton show so i just point out that i'm wearing a different shirt and you're

00:01:19.800 going to have to live with it but this was my interview with patrick keeney of chiang mai

00:01:24.240 university and joining me now is the professor himself patrick keeney who wrote that fantastic

00:01:30.940 piece in c2c journal is also a visiting professor at chiang mai university i've been to chiang mai i've

00:01:36.960 not been to the university it's a lovely little spot uh patrick good to talk to you thanks for

00:01:41.760 coming on today well thank you andrew it was delightful meeting you at the safs meeting um that was

00:01:46.860 already what a week ago 10 days ago something like that yeah the time is uh just flying by here

00:01:52.000 and and it was interesting because i i want to talk about safs itself you wrote this uh great piece

00:01:58.060 in c2c journal in which you talked to uh mark mercer who's been on this program very recently about

00:02:04.020 safs and about the the broader landscape of academic freedom and i was wondering for you how that's been

00:02:10.400 because obviously every academic has their own path on this issue it seems like and academic

00:02:16.560 freedom increasingly means different things to different people especially when you decide it has

00:02:22.140 to be balanced against things like diversity or equity or you know oppression and whatever so

00:02:28.040 what's been your relationship with the academic freedom discourse well i've had a mixed uh relationship

00:02:34.920 shall i say i mean i wound up in chiang mai probably because uh of situations here at ubc okanagan

00:02:43.480 um i mean i i think mark has been absolutely uh a national leader in all of this and i'm happy to

00:02:52.700 say that i followed in his path i there's always been a little bit of tension in the academy about

00:02:59.200 how we ought to proceed shall we say so um yeah i i think i've had as i say a mixed bag with uh with

00:03:07.720 academic freedom um yeah i'll leave it at that for now andrew yeah and obviously in your interview

00:03:13.940 with mark here's a guy who's a very mild-mannered even-keeled i don't like the word moderate because

00:03:20.700 it implies a level of political uh classification that i i don't think is necessarily appropriate but

00:03:26.400 he's not a firebrand he doesn't court controversy for the sake of it but he's also been in the thick

00:03:31.620 of this himself himself and i think that's one of the most cautionary tales when you hear these stories

00:03:36.380 is that even people that think they're safe from uh going through what many professors have gone

00:03:41.640 through often aren't indeed and mark is to me at least the epitome of uh of civil discourse i mean

00:03:49.940 uh he exudes the kind of tolerance and uh capacity to entertain uh opposing ideas that i think all of

00:04:00.200 us professors should take on board uh it's sometimes difficult i know we all have strong views about a

00:04:06.700 lot of things and when we hear people who have opposing views who are equally passionate about those

00:04:13.820 views it's difficult sometimes to maintain your um composure shall we say i think mark has been

00:04:20.940 exemplary in you know showing us how to do that his book by the way uh is is a fabulous book i'd like to

00:04:27.980 plug it right now in praise of dangerous universities uh i i can't recommend it highly enough i think uh dr

00:04:35.580 mercer has brought uh into the public domain the kinds of ideas that weren't all that radical even a few

00:04:43.780 years ago i mean my first professorship my first appointment was in 1991 and in the space from

00:04:49.900 1991 to today uh the institution the academy has changed fairly radically uh the kind of ideas that

00:04:58.300 mark espouses um are to my way of thinking um should be just sort of uncontroversial shall we say

00:05:08.560 uh i i was thinking today you know my dissertation supervisor was sort of uh an unapologetic unreformed

00:05:16.320 utilitarian and uh i'm not and so my dissertation was basically an attack on utilitarian ethical theory

00:05:24.480 shall we say and uh my supervisor was just brilliant at showing me how to construct my argument

00:05:32.240 uh to bring it out as forcibly as rigorously as i could despite the fact that he was in his essence if

00:05:41.840 you will opposed to what i was writing about and uh i i mean i think that kind of ability to uh sit back

00:05:50.480 listen to your interlocutors and say yeah i disagree with you but you are entitled to that kind of idea

00:06:00.320 uh we we seem to have lost that thread somehow and as we discussed at the conference i mean i think

00:06:06.960 all of us were scratching our heads as to what happened how did we lose what was i think at bottom

00:06:13.120 the the essence of the university this ability to sit and disagree with each other civilly have

00:06:19.680 conversations and uh mark and i both share an interest in the political philosopher michael oakeshott

00:06:26.320 and of course for oakeshott education is the conversation that's how we learn about our world

00:06:33.120 is through entering into different kinds of conversations and part of learning those conversations

00:06:39.040 is learning as well the uh the virtues and the nuances of having a conversation uh which means in

00:06:45.760 essence as you're doing now and you should sit and nod and and listen and take on board what what

00:06:51.760 others are saying without without having to demonize them and and understand that they too

00:06:58.480 have passions and they too have differing ideas and that they too uh have good reasons for holding

00:07:04.400 the views that they do do um um what was it churchill i think said uh uh uh uh what what was his line

00:07:13.200 about uh a heretic as somebody who are dogmatists as somebody who uh can't change the subject and won't

00:07:20.480 change his mind i think quote yeah so uh yeah so i i think my experience in the academy has been sort

00:07:28.320 of mixed as i say i had the the great privilege of having a dissertation supervisor who was as i say

00:07:36.400 the essence of million liberalism and uh and then of course as my career progressed

00:07:42.800 uh um what one stumbles on certain individuals who don't take that view shall we say you briefly

00:07:50.880 mentioned a few moments ago the path that led you to where you are now chiang mai university and i i

00:07:57.120 guess that sparks the question of these phenomena we've been discussing the issue of institutional

00:08:02.240 wokeness in the academy the issue of academic freedom and peril of not being able to sit down and have

00:08:07.840 the conversations is that exclusively a western phenomenon i mean how in your experience working

00:08:13.760 for an asian university has that issue manifested if at all there because i think on a lot of things

00:08:20.480 political correctness has tended to be a western creation but i don't know if in the academic setting

00:08:25.600 that's held as well uh you know uh the language of instruction in chiang mai is understandably it's thai

00:08:35.360 and i was hired uh primarily to help with english language instruction so i'm not really in a good

00:08:43.040 position to talk about it except to say that i haven't particularly noticed any sort of wokeness

00:08:49.280 except to say that all of the kind of trends that we see in north america do eventually sort of filter

00:08:55.840 out into asia at some point uh but i'm a little insulated from as it were the hurly-burly of the daily 0.79

00:09:03.440 discourse my job in chiang mai is basically to assist phd students and in in writing their

00:09:10.640 dissertations in english uh the thai government some years ago in order to improve the english fluency

00:09:17.280 scores in the country demanded that all dissertations in every discipline be submitted both in the thai

00:09:23.040 language as well as in english and of course this is a huge uh stumbling block for for most phd students

00:09:28.800 uh my my task is to to help them with their uh with their english dissertation one of the things i i

00:09:36.480 really wanted to talk to you about was what you were actually speaking about at that safs meeting you

00:09:40.800 mentioned which was this idea of rights talk and the perils thereof but just to give people in the

00:09:46.800 audience a bit of a primer here what is rights talk well uh rights talk is a form of political discourse

00:09:52.880 well let me start that sentence again uh it's a form of uh ethical discourse that has i think seeped

00:10:00.560 out into the political realm our rights talk has evolved into a kind of fundamentalist language shall

00:10:09.600 i say and um it wasn't always thus i think if we look at the history of rights talk it goes really

00:10:16.880 right back to the 13th century canonical law but subsequent to world war ii and in particular the

00:10:23.280 1948 declaration of the universal rights of man and and uh i think we've seen over the past uh what

00:10:31.840 shall we say 50 years the evolution of a highly individualistic legalistic adversarial understanding

00:10:41.040 of rights that sees the world in terms of a um a black and white your rights versus my rights which i

00:10:50.640 think is enormously unhelpful uh for so many for so many issues of political issues certainly but just

00:10:58.080 in terms of speaking of ethical moral concerns that all of us have i'm not sure it's entirely helpful

00:11:06.080 to couch every ethical concern in terms of rights um one of the signal problems with rights that was

00:11:14.640 first noticed by edmund burke back in the 18th century was their abstract quality lends to them

00:11:22.160 a kind of absolutism so that when one asserts one's rights there is a kind of assertion uh that this is

00:11:31.600 non-negotiable like rights are just what they are rather than the kind of nuanced uh sort of political

00:11:39.520 things that that they ought to be so my talk just interject there are certain rights not non-negotiable

00:11:46.080 and do they not have to be viewed as such to have any relevance or any weight uh well certainly that's

00:11:52.400 the way that our rights talk has evolved now but i i think yes i think there are some rights that that are

00:11:58.000 non-negotiable for example the right to freedom the right to liberty the right to freedom of expression

00:12:03.840 but what quickly happens with the vernacular of rights talk if i might put it that way is that

00:12:10.000 the grammar our english grammar allows us to assert practically anything any desire any whim any sort of

00:12:19.120 uh idea that pops into our head as a right and again this was first noticed by

00:12:24.560 uh edmund burke and jeremy bentham said the same thing that by opening up rights talk we are really

00:12:32.320 opening up a pandora's box and famously bentham the 18th century uh philosopher said that rights are

00:12:39.840 nonsense on stilts by which he meant that rights have to be tethered to an idea of the good that is to

00:12:47.840 say there has to be a tethering of rights to some understanding of the common good and again i mean

00:12:55.440 what i said at the conference was hardly original and nothing new but it seems to me that we've lost

00:13:01.280 sight of this idea that rights have to be tethered to a common good i live in kelowna and like a lot of

00:13:08.480 uh communities these days we have a lot of homeless in in our community and uh the conversation around

00:13:18.400 the homeless is it's almost exclusively framed in the context of their rights the rights of these

00:13:25.280 individuals to be on the street and one understands that uh every individual homeless or not is entitled to

00:13:34.080 dignity and and and and should be respected but there's another part of the equation that really

00:13:40.640 gets articulated and that's the idea of of the commonality of the commonality of the citizens of

00:13:46.640 this city or any other city to enjoy their city without fear of interference and i think i use that

00:13:54.640 only as a small example of the way that our rights talk seems to have evolved over the last 50 years or so

00:14:02.080 that has become highly individualistic and very legalistic so that now our problems our political

00:14:10.160 problems are solved not through you know the legislature or through parliament but rather

00:14:16.080 through advocacy in the courts so embedded in rights talk i think is this adversarial notion it's

00:14:23.280 your rights versus my rights and we'll have the judge figure it out and and that creates i think a very

00:14:29.600 unhappy situation for society in the sense that one of us is going to prevail your rights or my rights and

00:14:37.200 you or i one of us is going to be the loser and unlike the sort of compromises that politicians are

00:14:43.120 forced into the sort of black and white win lose nature of rights talk i think is unhelpful for the

00:14:50.880 political uh for our our polity i don't think it's a a healthy development a lot of people share this

00:14:58.240 view and in in indeed uh um i i think it was michael ignati a few years ago who wrote a little book

00:15:05.440 called the needs of strangers he said one of the signal failures of rights talk is its inability to talk

00:15:12.800 about virtues that are important for the commonality but which can't be captured in right stock things

00:15:22.320 like love compassion honor friendship all of those are important ideas in the political sphere but yet

00:15:30.160 rights talk precludes us talking about them at least in any meaningful way those are the kinds of

00:15:35.840 old-fashioned virtues that seem to me to have been sort of thrown back into the private sphere

00:15:41.520 and i mean we you and i and i think all of us want to have love and friends and all the rest of

00:15:46.960 it in our in our private life but where in our political conversations do we find time to talk about

00:15:53.600 those very important ideas i think so yeah they're they're harder to quantify i think which is why the

00:16:00.080 more difficult work of holding those things up uh really becomes uh in focus here well it's a fascinating

00:16:06.000 talk i think people should uh have hopefully have the opportunity to see it you should take the show on

00:16:09.680 the road but in the meantime definitely check out patrick keeney's great piece in c2c about academic

00:16:15.200 freedom and the society for academic freedom that interview with mark mercer uh patrick thanks so

00:16:20.800 much good to talk to you thanks andrew that was professor patrick keeney here on the andrew lawton

00:16:26.640 show my thanks to all of you for tuning in today we will be back next week with more full strength

00:16:31.680 of canada's most irreverent talk show here on true north have a great weekend everyone thank you god

00:16:36.640 bless and good day to you all thanks for listening to the andrew lawton show support the program by

00:16:42.240 by donating to true north at www.tnc.news

Juno News - June 15, 2023

The erosion of academic freedom in Canada

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