1. Preface and Summary Just how liberal is contemporary liberalism? Many people have asked this question in light of a multitude of situations where freedom of expression has been effectively denounced by those purporting to be within a liberal tradition that upholds both openness and tolerance. Professor Peter Emberley of Carleton University, Ottawa, examines an aspect of this question in the following paper which developed out of a forum sponsored by the Centre for Cultural Renewal and held in Vancouver in the Fall of 1996. In his last book, the late American writer Christopher Lasch made an important observation that provides a sort of frame within which to view Professor Emberley's paper. In The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: Norton, 1995, pp. 12-13), Lasch noted that: Once knowledge is equated with ideology, it is no longer necessary to argue with opponents on intellectual grounds or to enter into their point of view. It is enough to dismiss them as eurocentric, racist, sexist, homophobic in other words, as politically suspect.In recent years, mostly south of the border, a variety of books have sought to describe and critique developments that, it is argued, pose a threat to the spirit of free enquiry and exchange that is necessary for academic pursuit and intellectual honesty. Books such as Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: Free Press, 1991) and David Lehman's Signs of the Times (New York: General, 1991) have raised serious questions about higher education and the threat to liberty posed by contemporary theories that, amongst other things, attempt to explain social evils as rooted in class or gender and suggest that their solutions reside in the power politics of class and gender. Whether from the right or the left—McCarthyism or Marxism (or their numerous and various progeny), liberty is and always has been threatened by partial totalisms that, in order to further group interests, will have others excluded. That central misdiagnosis about the nature of evil—that it is located in the other instead of in each of us—causes great harm and may be seen as an identifier of erroneous schools of thought. Students come to places of learning with a host of longings and in order for these longings to lead to freedom, a higher vision must be provided. In this paper, Professor Emberley discusses the important role that higher education should serve in the formation and maturation of this vision. For, as Emberley notes, "Freedom will not rise above mere instinctual response unless instincts are matured towards higher satisfactions." Quoting the English academic Michael Oakeshott, Emberley draws upon the distinction between a universitas and a civitas and says that we need to recover an understanding of the university as a civitas as well as the more-commonly understood model of universitas. A universitas was defined as an association that pursued some recognized substantive end and promoted some enduring interest, be it salvation, profit, military conquest or study, and it was ruled accordingly. It was this model that became dominant in medieval Europe by the end of the 13th century. A civitas, on the other hand, is defined as an association bound by rules rather than common undertakings, and by civic decencies rather than moral precepts. Civitate are associations whose members have a common acknowledgment of the authority of civil laws specifying the conditions for undertaking a diverse range of actions. Civitate, says Emberley, encourage merely the continuous exploration of the conditions of association. The idea of the university as a civitas came equally to prevail at some European universities in the late middle ages. The difference between universitas and civitas can be seen as a distinction between modes of understanding that continue to compete as options for our current debates about the university. Emberley suggests that: When the university expresses its commitment to freedom of speech, recognizes the essential plurality of human ends and elevates the virtues of civility and tolerance above all others, it retrieves this idea of the university as a civitas.In addition to problems of self understanding, related to the nature of the community of higher learning, are the substantive problems of content themselves. Emberley reminds us that: However remote the legacies of Athens and Jerusalem may appear from the daily enterprise of teaching and learning in today's university classrooms, the symbols "intellectual knowing" and "moral doing" still constitute the major forms of students' intellectual and spiritual search.However, the higher goals are being undercut by certain developments that have occurred in higher education. Where students need a language to understand existence, the contemporary focus on "empowerment" fails them. It is thin and partial and, ultimately, unhelpful in the important tasks that face those charged with teaching. At the same time as they are deprived of a rich framework within which to understand their own lives and studies, the new students are subjected to a barrage of regulations to govern their conduct because, without being taught manners, the universities, like the wider society, must fall back on increasingly draconian regulations. As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man, "we laugh at honour then are shocked to have traitors in our midst" or "castrate then bid the geldings to be fruitful." Emberley notes another aspect of this double standard that creates objective tests for conduct while denying the validity of objective moral frameworks and states: "dating contracts, discipline codes, rights charters and other regulative devices are necessary only when and after the university has failed to forge the link between the scholarly culture and civil association." In the final section of his paper, Professor Emberley turns his attention to the chill that political correctness has unjustifiably placed on education. While being careful to set out the valid aspects of concerns about civility between men and women and equitable treatment for women, Emberley notes some of the nonsense that hides behind valid claims. And there is more than nonsense in the wilder regions of the new ideologies. Emberley comments on the danger of the now discredited Ontario NDP's "zero tolerance" guidelines to harassment and how they would have avoided the protections of the rule of law for those alleged to have been harassers. Though beyond the scope of his paper, it is perhaps worth pointing out that support for Emberley's concern has come from civil courts. Various rulings arising from decisions of internal discipline tribunals have shown clear attempts to circumvent proper standards of proof in the cause of rooting out harassment. In recent years, the British Columbia College of Teachers attempted to justify a teacher's dismissal on thin evidence on the basis that a lower standard of proof was appropriate in a case in which sexual harassment had been alleged. The College argued that it wished to protect "young females from intentional but unwanted and unwarranted physical contact" by males. The British Columbia Court of Appeal rejected the College's arguments, overturned its decision and noted: "that concern must not become so dominant as to erode universal standards of proof adopted and applied so as to ensure for all members of society that the innocent are not convicted or those without fault held liable." [Hanson v. College of Teachers (Disciplinary Sub-Committee) (1994) 110 D.L.R. (4th) 567 at 577 per Gibbs J.A.] While it is too early to proclaim a meltdown of the frigid edifice of political correctness, the first signs of a thaw in the seeming permafrost may now be noted in certain areas. There are indications that a vast number of people and an increasing number of institutions are more willing than they were a few years ago to stand up against some of the more blatant threats (such as the Ontario NDP government's "zero tolerance" attempts and College of Teacher decisions such as that overruled in Hanson, both referred to above). Whatever the precise causes of the dominance of "political correctness," it seems clear enough that a long period of intellectual and moral neglect has permitted much greater infiltration into the academy (and society at large) by illiberal frameworks than would ever have been allowed had the process been recognized for what it was and firmly resisted years ago. It will take considerable time to undo the unfair processes and properly educate the confused students and their teachers that have been misled by decades of silly teaching. In this context, Professor Emberley's paper raises important points for wide consideration. Perhaps his paper will strengthen the resolve of those who have seen so many teachers and students (virtually an entire generation) led into a false freedom that squanders liberty and makes a mockery of real liberalism. Resolve is necessary because so many have been cowed into silence by the lack of civility (or worse) exhibited by those with whom they disagree. It is time to bring down the curtain on a sad period in higher education when liberal education was led astray by false-freedoms and chilled by the anger of uncivil and partial totalisms.—Iain T. Benson, Senior Research Fellow, July 1997The Role of Political Correctness in the Decline of Liberal Education by Peter C. Emberley Every fall, one hundred thousand new students arrive at Canada's universities. They are curious and intellectually hungry; they have known or are hoping to know love; they fear or revere or are indifferent to their gods; many have seen or heard about death; individually, they are tasting of that absolute freedom which is given to human beings to enjoy; they have all suffered some injustice at the hands of the stronger; they have encountered mercy and charity and forgiveness; they have nearly all appreciated in one form or another the essential mystery of being. Their longings are beautiful, inchoate, passionate and sometimes dark. Many of these students come to acquire job skills and equip themselves to become productive and informed members of society. No one should discount the role the university must play in designing programs, building research units and encouraging partnerships with business, government and diverse social agencies to meet these expectations. Two factors in particular suggest that student expectations must be seriously entertained. First, with the increasing financial burden students are being expected to shoulder, their expectations are legitimate calculations of the price and worth of their investment. Second, the far greater worldliness of today's students their broad awareness of world events, their appreciation of the cunning and shrewdness informing the ways of the world, their scepticism about ancestral traditions and authority serves as one of the most potent expressions of society's perennial concern about the relevance of the university. In light of the fact that all human institutions, the university included, are subject to decay and to sclerosis, the eruption of novelty reflected in the free actions of young women and men in the university is one of the most important components of that institution's ability to undertake periodic renewal and be truly relevant in the most ecumenic sense. Contrary to what many advocates for students say however, expectations of future prosperity and social well-being do not exhaust what students long for. It is essential to recognize that these young men and women, troubled with the anomie of their times and with the personal horrors that modern life has brought to visibility, also arrive with needs more enduring and potent than those arising from the contingencies of their personal and social lives. Their sense of drift and meaninglessness, their apparent inability to see the importance of meaningful personal and social relations, and the gulf between their interior lives and public institutions, while real and widely observed, obscure other vibrant needs. For, lying dormant in their consciousness are layers of historical culture and legend, nascent intimations of spiritual adventures, primordial fears and hopes, incipient conceptions of justice and charity, and anticipations of wholeness. Indeed these other, and often much more important, forms of understanding are what the university is best at cultivating and maturing, even when it does so imperfectly. Students will express these expectations in myriad ways. It is not accidental that, when students were polled across Canada in 1994 about the "hottest" courses on campus, all five courses named were on sex. Controlled by law, convention and habit, desire is nonetheless the potent force that percolates in every classroom. Every conversation students conduct is a seduction, every search for meaning is a longing for reconciliation and completion. Students love to seek the extreme they are naturally drawn to the works of Rabelais, Boccaccio, D'Annunzio and the Marquis de Sade for the transgressions and ambiguity into which they are invited by these authors. They are awake to the powerful images of primordial wandering that will lead them to reject stability and continuity. Their awakened peripatetic ways may be expressed as the desire to travel to foreign lands or to embark on a spiritual odyssey, an illustration of which is conveyed beautifully in Bruce Chatwin's Songlines a book that has a cult following among students. Students are also in search of a narrative in which the contingencies and predicaments of their lives are given meaning. What students seek when they pick up a book and immerse themselves in its world is the key to developing and harmonizing all the parts of their being. They search for unity and proportionality, thereby expressing a need for forms of reconciliation transcending a world given to strife and difference. Their renewed interest in the cosmological visions and life-affirming rituals of Canada's indigenous cultures and the spiritual adventures of many non-Western peoples reflects their longing to understand the mystery of existence and to satisfy their thirst for wholeness. Any of these expressions of human need can be easily derailed and deformed. Freedom will not rise above mere instinctual response unless instincts are matured towards higher satisfactions. Students' natural desire for recognition may become a powerfully disruptive passion such as the urge to bully or lust for domination. The pleasure of wandering may lead to dissolution of their selves and to cynical abandonment of all principles. The search for wholeness may find surrogate forms of satisfaction in prejudice and dogma. The expression of religious need may become maudlin sentimentality. For this reason, a balanced assessment of the priorities of the university must recognize that folded within the scholarly culture's commitment to the intellectual life lies a moral responsibility to mature the needs of students. Those needs are often inchoate prior to an engagement with the scholarly culture. When students arrive at a university, they often have only an elusive sense that the scholarly culture offers opportunities to satisfy their deepest longings. In a seminal manner—simply through awareness of the evident experience of living—they are acquainted with the world of imagination and poetic creativity, the soul-leading quality of genuine conversation, the "aha"-experience of understanding, true friendship and the exercise of civic virtues. But acquaintance with the scholarly culture, in an environment that promotes leisure and intellectual trust, cultivates and refines these experiences. The question that we are debating today is how liberal is liberalism, or what is the balance between freedom and responsibilities implied by the practice of liberal education? A whole host of subsidiary questions must immediately arise in an attempt to ask that question: what is the scholarly culture? what is academic freedom? what is the place of subaltern cultures at the university? how are the civil conditions within which free speech operates produced? There are no simple answers to these questions, not only because there is a plurality of essentiallycontested perspectives on these questions, but also because the university itself is an institution defined by the tension between these perspectives. In my mind, there are two ways of approaching the complex tensions defining the heterogenous purposes that compete in the scholarly culture; one the result of the historical sediments circumscribing the purpose of the university, the other the result of the symbolic inheritance defining what the university does. Analyzing the scholarly culture through the prism of history garners us an appreciation of how the university's institutional founding in the thirteenth century set in motion two apparently contradicting tendencies. The university, like other more recent institutions such as the law court and the modern political state, is the product of conflicts of the middle ages—between emperor and pope, city and monastery, clergy and layperson, faith and reason—and through them all, the theology of Augustine and that of Aquinas. The major European universities—Bologna, Naples, Toulouse, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge—were established as guilds or corporations devoted to study and as places where masters and scholars could come together in a collective enterprise. The common concern was usually animated within an overarching theological design, even when the explicit discipline of inquiry was medicine, law or letters. Many of the universities were supported directly by the papacy. Like the priesthood, its members were also granted a wide range of privileges, protections, immunities and exemptions, seen as salutary to maintaining the distinctness and singlemindedness of the scholarly enterprise. There is etymological support for the identification of the university with the Church. Universitas is a medieval designation that refers generally to a corporate enterprise with an identified common purpose. An ecclesia, or community of faithful tied together by common belief in orthodoxy, was a type of universitas. Generally, a universitas referred to an association that pursued some recognized substantive end and promoted some enduring interest, be it salvation, profit, military conquest or study, and it was ruled accordingly. As a guild, it was created by an act of authority endowing it with specific powers and franchises—thus the origin of our university charters. By the late thirteenth century, the term universitas came to refer especially and exclusively to a higher place of study the university. When groups today appeal to the moral authenticity they find in ethnic, gender or racial bonds, I believe they are retrieving important elements of the legacy of the idea of the universitas. If Take Back The Night marches (to express solidarity with victims of male violence) or recovery and healing sessions, are two of the more maudlin of these exercises, then the search for forms of commonality, even when they exhibit the fervour of Pentecostal communities, are legitimate expressions of the work of the scholarly culture. There is a place at the university for "transformative" studies and the creation of corporations of solidarity, reflecting its function as a universitas. But the universitas was not the only form of association in medieval Europe, nor did its design alone define the emerging universities. An equally important medieval association was the civitas, an association bound by rules rather than common undertakings, by civic decencies rather than moral precepts. Civitate are associations whose members have a common acknowledgement of the authority of civil laws specifying the conditions for undertaking a diverse range of actions.1 One could say that instead of advancing from a common predicament or specifiable interest, civitate encourage merely the continuous exploration of the conditions of association. The idea of the university as a civitas came equally to prevail at some European universities in the late middle ages. The difference between universitas and civitas, Michael Oakeshott has suggested can be seen as a distinction between modes of understanding that continue to compete as options for our current debates about the university. In a universitas, he writes, members will see themselves as engaged "in a common enterprise and as sharer[s] in a common stock of resources and a common stock of talents with which to exploit it. The enterprise may be described in various terms: the search for Truth, the pursuit of the Common Good; "making nature yield what it has never yielded," etc. It is a co-operative undertaking and therefore in terms of managerial decisions about performances; there is a notional "one best way" of conducting it. In this self-identification, outcomes are preferred to adventures and satisfactions to wants...."2 The civitas, on the other hand, Oakeshott notes, is comprised of "adventures of unpredictable fancy" and rules of conduct. When the university expresses its commitment to freedom of speech, recognizes the essential plurality of human ends and elevates the virtues of civility and tolerance above all others, it retrieves this idea of the university as a civitas. We can fill in the details of these two images by looking at the second way of accounting for the complex tensions defining the university the symbolic order. The essence of the university is more than layers of historical sediment. From these cultures, the university also inherited distinctive symbols that emanate from a perennial human need to interpret experiences characterizing our participation in the process of reality. Symbols such as "mind," "moral goodness," "wholeness," "justice" and "friendship" are attempts to articulate these experiences and assist us in establishing meaning in our personal lives, in society and in history. When the university, as an institution, was founded in the middle ages, these historical legacies and symbols were sifted and synthesized to create a tapestry of myriad invitations to rich explorations and encounters. The great roots of Western civilization were identified as Athens and Jerusalem, and the university was designed to maintain the fertile tension between these two originating forces. From Athens emanates a set of symbols defining intellectual vision, or what Aristotle so magisterially identifies in the first line of the Metaphysics as our primary impulse: "all humans, by nature, desire to know." This legacy is evident in our continuing equations of goodness with reason, order with harmony and unity, and truth with statements of proof all manifestations of how reason can become a living presence in society. And in our personal lives, our continuing endorsement of the Socratic accent on conversation ("yes, but...") as the vehicle of understanding ("aha!") has decisively moulded our intercourse with others, especially our expectations concerning the purposes of friendship and citizenship. That we should think of the university as one of the chief means of preparing citizens by linking the life of reason and political order, and conceiving of the state as the individual soul writ large is testimony to the Socratic heritage that the Platonic Academy transmitted. From the second root emerges a different set of symbols and human needs the desire to do good in the world. The Hebrew and Christian legacy offers us paradigms of right action, affirming our capacity for compassion, forbearance, humility, charity, love and above all else, faith in the simple goodness and mystery of existence. The injunction to live a moral life, within the rhythms of a spiritual pilgrimage and within a community of believers, is simultaneously a recognition of the individual's free power to make the world better. It is an injunction to use human gifts to serve and to improve, as externalization of our interior struggles to heal ourselves. The symbol of Jerusalem endures whenever individuals today affirm in strict conscience our duty to do what is right, or exhibit redemptive hope in free actions and new beginnings, or demonstrate faith in the binding power of love with which human life can be graced or dwell on the link between the richness of their interior lives and the capacity to do good in the world. But there is another legacy the university has inherited from this root. The moral imperative to do good in the world comes with an admonishment against letting our moral accomplishments become objects of pride. Central to the Judeo-Christian teaching is a warning against human pride, of virtue become irascible because it believes falsely that humankind's weakness and dependence on grace can be overcome. Such presumption, that gives rise to sinful fantasies and projects of self-deliverance and self-redemption, is a betrayal of the patience, forbearance and mercy also required within Christianity. And from that legacy flows the Western world's continuing recognition of the need for tolerance and of the capacity for forgiveness even in the face of evil. However remote the legacies of Athens and Jerusalem may appear from the daily enterprise of teaching and learning in today's university classrooms, the symbols "intellectual knowing" and "moral doing" still constitute the major forms of students' intellectual and spiritual search. They continue to be the horizons within which the business of the university is conducted and the tension between them is, in great part, the source of the alternative positions put forward whenever reforms and restatements of the university's essential mission are undertaken. While these symbols come down to us through the distinctly medieval appropriation of the complex cross-fertilization of near eastern and far eastern, Judaic, and Hellenic ideas, and became associated with specific doctrines promulgated by scholastic philosophers in the thirteenth century, it would be reducing severely the richness and suggestive quality of these symbols to believe they are narrowly "Western" or "Christian-Platonic." One might say, instead, that these two primals contain a vast range of meaning, and that vital threads present at the origins of the "West" which may have been marginalized by the medieval idiom are always available to be unearthed and used for their restorative possibilities. Indeed, one of the great virtues of the present recognition of the achievements of other civilizations and the creative efforts to recover ancient wisdom is the discovery of the enormous impact near eastern and far eastern thought had on defining the legacy of Socrates and Christ. These discoveries are now serving, amidst great tumult and fertile creativity, to renew symbols like "intellectual knowing" and "moral doing" that have become, in part, dogmatic and sterile in Western life. Our growing reacquaintance, for example, with the cosmological visions and life-affirming rituals of our aboriginal peoples, with the Hindu understanding of the sacramental nature of everyday existence, with moral authenticity in Islam and the oral tradition amongst native peoples is not a repudiation of the figures of Socrates and Christ, but a renewal of the deepest meaning of the symbols we have inherited from them. I would like to use these images of the university as the backdrop to my comments on academic freedom and on the meaning of "liberal" in the term liberal education. Let me begin with an example that highlights the confusion in today's university. In 1992 at the University of Calgary, a poster, announcing a student party, sported a bare-breasted woman. Two female students complained to the university administration that they were offended. The official response was to place a "censored" sticker over the woman's breasts. This little story tells the whole story of the breakdown of the moral society of the university: for failing to attend to the culture within which moral attitudes are formed, the university is brought finally to using technical regulations to impose social order, whose zealousness stamps out the opportunities for ambiguity and intellectual play that characterize a healthy scholarly culture. At the heart of the scholarly culture is the pure, unadulterated pursuit of understanding, unfettered curiosity and the courage to question contemporary shibboleths down to first principles. The discerning judgement, cultivated imagination and critical detachment that are formed in this intellectual adventure, where every theoretical option is dispassionately entertained and weighed, is the university's enduring form of accountability to society. What the scholarly culture offers is a powerfully transformative effect on a young person's needs and expectations, preparing him or her to become a productive employee, an informed citizen and a person with a sense of direction and purpose. How powerful can the student's metamorphosis be? Even in the first year of university, many eighteen-year-olds will become permanently estranged from former high school friends, siblings and parents. A genuine education, as Socrates taught, is quintessentially the work of "corrupting the young," of bringing individuals to see opportunities that betray their own lives as provincial and limiting. The powerful myth of ancestral wisdom, of the authority of the seniors, of the supreme virtue of continuity, will have been broken. This is what Harold Bloom means, in his book The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, when he speaks of the "uncanniness" of the great works: "their ability to make you feel strange at home." Having accepted the invitation to question and to uproot, students lose the innocence of early pieties and will experience restlessness, dissatisfaction and tension. They are awake to the powerful images of primordial wandering that will lead them to reject stability and continuity a spiritual odyssey conveyed so beautifully in Bruce Chatwin's book, Songlines. As Northrop Frye points out, education is a militant enterprise, a constant warfare against "prejudice and malice, the attitude of people who cannot stand the thought of a fully realized humanity, of human life without the hysteria and panic that controls every moment of their lives."3 But this exploration, tentative and vulnerable to so many false paths, will make them terribly out of sync with society's demands for certainty, continuity and order. Residence directors and university security officers, not to say harassment officers and human rights consultants, often express their moral outrage at the destructiveness and gratuitous libertinage that they see on university campuses. But the youthful exuberance they observe is a criminality that, having taken the risk of flaunting convention, can also be tamed to form genuine independentmindedness and non-conventional thought and judgment. As illustration, let me recount an incident at McMaster University. Last year, university administrators registered outrage when they learned that frosh, as part of their initiation rites, were required to simulate sex. But those same administrators applaud aboriginal studies and the consciousness associated with respect for aboriginal practices. Native peoples have complex rites to celebrate passage from one state to another. The required acts are fraught with ambiguous sexual imagery, the coincidence of the sacred and the profane, and the mingling of terror and purification. As we are relearning, these rites are important to self-development and group identity. Granted, one major difference distinguishes aboriginal rites of passage from McMaster's frosh activities traditional rites of passage are guided by elders who take on the responsibility of sublimating sexual desire. Left to their own abandon, the McMaster students may have been left, in the absence of authority, with no guidance as to how to satisfy their longing for wholeness in the future at a more elevated level. One should not defend the barbarisms of the hazing practices of the Airborne Regiment, but neither should one be overcensorious about the playful transgressions of young students. Such censoriousness nearly always arises out of bureaucratic over-zealousness and it is fuelled by protestant distrust of the body and the residual, though discounted, Cartesian view that mind and body are separate entities. To be sure, this is the most dangerous time of a young person's life, but also the moment of the greatest possibility. An alchemical imagery is most appropriate for this time in their lives. The privilege of university life is that students have been allowed to enter into an in-between time where contraries coincide, where destruction and recreation coexist and every subsequent moment of understanding recreates this mystical act of recreation. Not all of this dissolution and recreation will be comforting some may be hugely unsettling and distasteful, and the process will include violent disagreement, confrontation and anger. It is precisely here that the university must exercise its most powerful responsibility to tame and sublimate primordial longing. And it is especially here where the language of "empowerment" fails students. So much of the fault for the indecencies that erupt in university classrooms and residences lies with those who are happy to indulge their students to the maximum but then fail to take on the responsibility of maturing that newly-released vitality and exuberance. Imposing regulative codes and punitive actions is no answer, for at best such codes produce only external conformity. Students require instead that their more profound needs be brought forth and that longings for wholeness and completeness be fulfilled in constructive ways that will disarm the new dangers. When indifference to the need for guiding students on to maturity is justified by an appeal to "academic freedom" and the classroom is allowed to be a free-for-all, the scholarly culture has degenerated into a state of moral decay. True freedom is the maturation of instinct towards the higher satisfactions that come from the exercise of moral choice and intellectual independent-mindedness. Student desire left to its own devices, and not invited to participate in the scholarly culture, will exploit the dangers of the in-between time it has been allowed the privilege of enjoying and may become a powerfully disruptive passion such as lust for domination. When university managers are confronted with such wildness, their response has usually been to devise technical rules and codes to suppress it. The scholarly culture is thus badly served. The student is denied the pleasure of the higher forms of freedom and the classroom no longer has the opportunities for ambiguous play that are necessary to the learning process. This breakdown of the university's civil association leads to a dangerous polarity of unchecked desire and technical regulation. If I may be permitted a mild polemical point, the breakdown has, I believe, a historical origin. In a classic example of the sons having the sins of the fathers visited upon them, we now have a generation of students taught by 1960's academics who believed that the lifting of all restraint and the release of the instincts even "polymorphous perversity" would usher in a new age of tolerance and reconciliation. Now, living with the effects of that teaching, where some students believe they can transgress all boundaries and vent the passion of the moment, we are compelled to exercise authoritarian rule by decree, thus vitiating the gains that were made by the generation that rediscovered the power and beauty of desire. Intolerance shown towards the young at this time risks producing submissiveness or uncontrollable rebellion. Few university officials have much inkling of how to act towards students at this time. One would wish that university legislators and administrators would read Rousseau's Emile for its sage insights into the shaping of a young person's naturally irascible will, or note the practical advice in Plato's Symposium on how to weave together strands of human longing. Both Rousseau and Plato are excellent guides, for not only did they recognize the broadest range of relevant longings, but they also offered ways of educating these longings with an eye to the healthy tension between individual desire and public duty. Regrettably, most administrators have been weaned on the cynical teaching that the only relevant questions are "who gets what, when and how," as Harold Laswell once rather narrowly defined the scope of political inquiry. This is ultimately a teaching about power and how it is consolidated. Even at best, most university administrators have adopted the narrow horizon of some branches of contemporary psychology that see humans only in terms of basic needs, the desire for recognition and a creative pampering of the self. Surprise and indignation follows when their students actually exhibit more potent passions such as erotic longings for wholeness, moral righteousness and political idealism, some of which will of necessity be foolish and reckless, but some of which are highly attractive and educable. Education's task is to engage them at this time in the serious reflection that guides these passions to their thoughtful exercise. Dating contracts, discipline codes, rights charters and other regulative devices are necessary only when, and after, the university has failed to forge the link between the scholarly culture and civil association. The humanizing process that the university offers through stewardship to the scholarly culture is far less certain, though vastly more durable, than any lesson that might arise from vain attempts to manage desires that have been left to run wild. There are many grounds for believing that the university has lost its way in terms of moulding and shaping students' longings. While the university must, for the vitality of its scholarly culture, tolerate a wide latitude of experiments and adventures, there can be no justification for the abuse of academic freedom that manifests itself in taunts and abuse, crude indecencies and belittling insensitivities. An evident case in point is the notorious 1988 case of Professor Richard Hummel who, equipped with snorkel and flippers, followed women swimming in the University of Toronto Hart House pool, staring (some alleged leering) at them through his mask. The indignity suffered by those women, who legitimately advanced charges of sexual harassment, is only exceeded in distastefulness by an ensuing appeal which attempted to have the ruling of guilt overturned because Hummel had not intended to create an intimidating and hostile environment. Equal revulsion should be directed at the criminology instructor at College of New Caledonia who assigned to his male students the homework of planning a perfect rape. These incidents, and far too many more, are what makes so deeply troubling the actions of the Trent University faculty who signed a declaration of the right to be offensive and dared thereby to align themselves with John Stuart Mill's majestic words in defence of liberty "If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind" while forgetting how circumscribed Mill's defence really is.4 Mill, after all, argued that the exercise of liberty must not infringe on another person's liberty and he held that the evolution of liberal society depended on progress in social manners. Some may say that the behaviour of university members is no worse than that in society generally. What a terrible admission! The university community ought to set a standard higher than the behaviour one observes in society at large, not one that merely mirrors it. Academic freedom should not be distorted to mean merely the right to speech of any kind or the right to indulge in any desired behaviour, but the moral and intellectual freedom that is fostered by the maturing process of the scholarly culture. The academic community has not served the higher purposes of that culture well when they have sowed the seeds of confusion between job security and academic freedom, academic freedom and right of speech, and right of speech and "right to offend" (as some Trent University professors would have it). It is an embarrassment to permit, by an appeal to an academic freedom preserved by tenure, the sliding logic that culminates in the indecencies uttered by Matin Yaqzan of the University of New Brunswick (UNB) who wrote that "When a boy invites a girl to his bedroom, especially after meeting her for the first time, she should consider it as an invitation for sexual intercourse" and "If a promiscuous girl becomes a victim of an unwanted sexual experience, she might more reasonably demand payment for her inconvenience or discomfort rather than express moral outrage." Even more embarrassing are the contortions by the Civil Liberties Association, The Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship and John Fekete in his book Moral Panic (declaiming against the "venality of the biopolitical climate" that had presumed to raise concerns about Yaqzan's actions), to defend Yaqzan's right to write these things. Equally questionable was the UNB faculty association's response when the UNB president wrote a strong opinion essay entitled "Date Rape is Never Acceptable" and circulated a letter to the media explaining why he had taken the route of suspending Yaqzan. The faculty association complained of a "witch hunt." For someone who wrote that regular sexual intercourse is a "necessity" for "boys?" For someone who regularly wrote to newspaper editors defending Malcolm Ross, a Moncton teacher debarred from the classroom for his anti-Semitic views? Only more unconscionable are the unconfirmed reports that Yaqzan was given three years full salary as a buy-out. Michael Bliss, at the conference "When Rights Collide" held at UNB in September 1994 in the wake of Yaqzan's date-rape essay, argued that one should distinguish between offensive ideas and offensive behaviour. His argument was reinforced by Alan Borovoy, the General Counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, who argued that freedom of speech was the condition upon which all other rights are based. If there ever was a time in the past when untempered thoughts or words were dissociable in principle from vicious actions, I do not think that by any stretch of the imagination could one think that such a time is now. The distinction assumes a culture of trust, of civic friendship. But our present state is one of mutual suspicion, a highly-volatile atmosphere of potent passions, in which speech too readily precipitates agitation and mobilization. We cannot hang our cap on the liberal distinction between thought and action, in the absence of the moral restraint that ensured a civil association. Neglect of the idea of moral responsibility is the warning sign of decay in the scholarly culture. As the meaning of tenure becomes increasingly identified with freedom of speech, the horizon of the scholarly culture is diminished. Equally humiliating to the scholarly culture is University of Alberta physics professor Gordon R. Freeman's 1990 publication of the notorious "Kinetics of non-homogenous processes in human society: unethical behaviour and societal chaos." Freeman indulged himself with the extravagant thesis that ran: birth control is the source of the feminist movement, feminism leads to socialism and feminism is to blame for the Marc Lepine massacre, a chain of inferences he culled from talking with students of working mothers whom he concluded had a statistically significant predilection to cheat on exams. That the Canadian Journal of Physics permitted its publication, thus conferring the authority of science on such nonsense, reinforces the cry against tenure and for greater accountability. It is not a matter here of extending to academics a right that exists in society generally. The point is that academics, through tenure and academic freedom, are invested with an authority that confers on them a responsibility to express the most enlightened understanding of the predicaments and adventures of our lives. This brings me to the thorny issue of feminism and gender studies at the university. Again, a concrete illustration of the environment in which questions of academic freedom and liberal education are being debated. In 1995, Jackie Stalker, a recently retired professor of education from the University of Manitoba contributed an essay to the Globe and Mail entitled "The Chill Women Feel at Canada's Universities."5 The essay compared universities to harems, where "men are in the positions of authority, as tenured professors and senior administrators, exerting their will over women who are students, staff and even a small number of colleagues...a locker-room culture where they don't understand the game and have few or no mentors to turn to for advice." She complained of "entrenched and prolonged systemic discrimination" and a state of affairs where "the rules, regulations, curriculums, language, cases and support will not always make sense to female students either; they were developed sincerely and with the best of intentions, but by men and for men" and constitute men's "hereditary privilege." "Entrenched and prolonged systemic discrimination," Stalker concluded, has led to "the 'chilly climate' condition, created by the serious power imbalance, consist[ing] of hostility, discrimination, harassment, inequitable treatment, violence and sometimes silent terror for more than half the population in our male-dominated institutions." Nonetheless, efforts to redress the former injustices, and accelerate the project of equity, are fraught with perils. Leaving aside, for the moment, the concerns being raised about the injustice of reverse discrimination, equity action is also producing numerous negative side-effects on the project for equity itself. Many women legitimately claim that because of the push to improve gender representation on university committees, tenure is harder to obtain. This is the result of a policy that stipulates that service on university committees carries less weight than research publication and teaching. Another peculiar side-effect of current efforts to establish more equity is occurring when larger universities, undertaking preferential hiring, compete vociferously and successfully for outstanding women, leading to a situation where there are fewer of them available for smaller universities. The more modest, and sometimes mediocre, hirings that occur at small universities, legitimately raises the wrath of applicants excluded, on equity grounds, from fair consideration, while following the practice of hiring only on merit, does nothing to balance the proportion of men and women at smaller universities. Perils notwithstanding, Stalker's outrage has a core of truth to it and it is to the shame of Canada's universities that the small steps being undertaken to recognize the rightful place of women, are too little and have come too late. The hot-button politics driving so much of our current university debate began, I believe, in 1989 with the Marc Lepine massacre. In my mind, the most balanced assessment of the massacre is to see it as an isolated incident of radical evil. That is not, however, how radical feminists interpret what happened. They saw it as evidence of widespread misogyny throughout Canada and as a symptom of the violence bred in the patriarchal structure of the university. Then Ontario attorney-General Marion Boyd claimed that when a law professor at Western referred to one of his female students as a good girl, that this condescension was on a continuum with the Montreal massacre.6 Nevertheless, the other extreme regarding the latitude we should permit in our universities is taken by those who assert that their rights are being abrogated by the feminist agenda. My own view is that our politics of rights as entitlements has greatly distorted sound social practice. Those who question the libertarian defence of an abstract freedom of expression are raising important questions as to whether the language of rights and the art of prudent statesmanship are always compatible with one another. Take the arguments of Somer Brodribb (the University of Victoria instructor who headed that university's Committee to Make the Department More Supportive to Women, and whose "chilly climate" findings accused her department of "growing antifeminism"). If she is now excessively vehement in her actions of bringing down the University of Victoria political science department, part of the reason for her views seems legitimate in light of the inappropriate responses to earlier complaints she had made elsewhere. In 1986, Somer Brodribb gave a lecture in Montreal. During the event, a man carrying a rifle case seated himself in the front row. The moderator of the event called security. The man produced a license and so was merely asked to place the case under his seat! When the Montreal massacre occurred, Brodribb recognized Marc Lepine as the man with the rifle case. "I want the administrations," Brodribb later said, "to stop telling the men to put the guns under their seats." A few years later, in the counselling psychology department at the University of British Columbia, where Brodribb was supporting a 1993 rally in support of women, women had been receiving anti-feminist hate mail. Forensic experts brought in to review the letters concluded that they "were not written by a psychopath." Reasonably, Brodribb and the other UBC women replied, "We know there's a threat. We feel there's a threat and we don't need university officials buying time and hiring experts to tell us there's no threat."7 I believe Brodribb is right. The narrowest interpretation of the letter of the law as rights to bear firearms and of free expression has, in these incidents, taken over the spirit of the law, which is to form a civil association. Rights without responsibilities and the web of civic friendships become dangerous instruments. Now it is time to turn our attention towards the overzealous managerialism that is utterly intolerant of the latitudes essential to the scholarly culture. Again, let me begin with an example. In 1994, the Carleton University Students' Association sent out a memo to all faculty a "no-party memo" declaring that professorstudent socializing beyond the classroom was "decidedly inappropriate." The memo read: "This type of social activity creates a haven for harassment and coercion." In the chilly climate descending on faculty-student relations, many faculty will now no longer meet a student behind closed doors, unless with a chaperon. Is this political correctness or justifiable concern with the conditions needed to ensure civility and decency? Nothing has been more notorious on these issues than the Ontario NDP's infamous "zero-tolerance policy." This policy originated in a report produced by the Ontario Council of Regents for Colleges. Its opening words declared: "The government of Ontario has adopted a policy of zero tolerance of harassment and discrimination at Ontario universities." It set out prohibited behaviours and proposed a review of all courses or instructional materials for "sexist, racist, homophobic or Eurocentric content." It recommended that all students and employees be required to attend an orientation on anti-discrimination and antiharassment, that a module on harassment and discrimination be integrated in all courses, and that there be a compulsory course on social relations which would include women's studies, race and ethnic relations, sexual orientation and the changing workplace. The real clincher came with the recommendation to "establish complaint procedures without legalistic constraints," meaning that complainants and respondents, ideally, should not be represented by lawyers at any stage of the process, and that the standard of proof should be that of proof on the balance of probabilities, rather than the criminal law's demand for proof beyond a reasonable doubt and proof of intention. The policy that was finally sent out to Ontario's colleges and universities defined harassment as "something known 'or might reasonably be known' to be offensive, hostile and inappropriate," pertaining to race, ethnic origin, sexual orientation and disability. Central to the policy was the argument that harassment was not restricted to discrete incidents or specifiable actions, but could be "environmental" or "systemic." The zero-tolerance policy was to apply not only to what was said in the classroom, but also to books cited by professors, library reading materials and art. It was to apply to visitors or guests with "no ongoing connection to the institution," to off-campus actions and even to telephone calls from another country to anyone in the university community. Ontario's NDP government pledged to make $1.5 million available to support the development and production of training packages, data collection models, evaluation models and audit models if colleges and universities would make zerotolerance "the central goal" of their policy and assume a role of being "proactive" in a prevention campaign. The "framework," the government hastened to add, "reflects the Ministry's minimum expectation." And what was the university response? Academic administrators and faculty unions were, characteristically, asleep at the switch. The Carleton Faculty Association simply denied that the directives existed, until Ottawa Citizen editor Peter Calamai took them to account: "The Ontario government has banned free thought and expression at the very institutions devoted to such freedoms our universities and there has been no public outcry." Robert Fulford kept up a steady pressure, aptly describing the policy as "relentlessly grim priggishness" and asking, reasonably, whether the policy would apply to feminists who make men uncomfortable, economists urging welfare reform making those on social assistance uncomfortable or law professors lecturing against shield laws in rape cases in the off-chance their views could be construed as sexist. "Being offended," he added, "is part of learning how to think." And Naomi Klein pointed out what should have been obvious, that "zero-tolerance" began as low-cost grandstanding concerning workplace and classroom behaviour and ended as a proposal for high-budget judicial apparatus.8 At the University of Toronto there are eight equity officers, who command a per annum budget of $1.5 million. In 1991, when its only two investigated cases were thrown out, the University of Western Ontario's equity office spent between $400,000 and $600,000. Economy has now pared that budget down to $320,000 annually. Other universities continue to bring in consultants at $90,000 per annum (the average salary of a full professor) to professionally manage the education equity regulations they were compelled to institute. Cost is not the only concern about the new regulations designed to monitor campus behaviour. Human rights jurisprudence is of recent vintage, and the administrative law developed to permit judicial review of its findings is still feeling its way tentatively. In criminal law, the awesome power of judicial authority is tempered by procedural hurdles that weight all proceedings in favour of the accused by putting the onus of proof on the plaintiff. Strict regulations govern every stage of the process. Offenses are set out precisely in statute. Prosecutors must respect the presumption of innocence, are required to demonstrate their case beyond a reasonable doubt and must prove intention. Punishments are based on the application of a pre-determined table of sanctions to the particular case. Tort law between private parties, by contrast, is not hampered by the complex onus of proof. Nonetheless, here too there is a concrete basis for judicial decisions: remedies, in the form of damages, are based on an objective measure of loss, namely monetary costs incurred. Human rights jurisprudence occupies a wholly new space. Like criminal law, its authority comes from statute and it enjoys criminal law's vigorous investigative powers. But its tribunals are not obliged to follow due process as defined in criminal law. They need not name the accuser nor are they obliged to permit legal representation. Nor must complainants prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt or prove intention. In this, human rights law is more like a public version of tort law, with one major difference: its remedies are not necessarily damages based on incurred losses but may also include various punitive remedies. When "climate" or "environment" is the object of a tribunal's attention, these punitive remedies are no longer tied precisely to the alleged "offence" particularly if the offence is "systemic" and thus has no discrete target but can be anything deemed appropriate to the climate the tribunal wishes to create or foster. The adjudication of "systemic" harassment, sexism, racism or homophobia by the new area of law is also slippery in one other way. In the law of negligence (nonintentional torts), the measure that is used to determine whether a case of negligence is proven is whether the "standard of care" that would be held by a reasonable and prudent person under similar circumstances has been met. Particularly in allegations of "systemic" or "environment" forms of harassment, this last concrete standard also vanishes. The accused need not ever know, or even be expected to know, what is required to prevent a "chilly climate." The particulars required to prove a "reasonable person" test are so diffused as to become meaningless. This new field of law, then, constitutes a fundamental shift in judicial procedure, from being based on verifiable circumstances and weighted in favour of the accused to one that disperses the effects and thereby loads the deck in favour of the accuser. The opportunity for politicizing the law, under these conditions, is endless. In formal human rights tribunals, accused persons have recourse to an apparatus of judicial review that can raise concerns about errors of fact and of law. The accused may raise questions as to the impartiality of the adjudicator and whether natural justice was upheld. The more informal tribunals operating at universities run roughshod over most of these options. Zero-tolerance policy (as a generic term to cover the wide array of equity, harassment and human rights codes being applied to the universities), is a dangerous political tool, especially when it is combined with expansive interpretations of "harassment" or "poisonous atmosphere," and when it has adopted an ideology intolerant of the imprecisions and dissenting views comprising the scholarly culture. Moreover, zero-tolerance policy leaves open a huge window of opportunity for what University of Calgary political scientist Rainer Knopff has called "social technology"—using the judicial apparatus to socially remanufacture human relations.9 The traditional purposes of the university are, I believe, lost in the shuffle. Once universities abandon the complex work of shaping moral attitudes, and then find it necessary to introduce hyperrationalist technical regulations to control the license they have allowed to grow, we are hearing the death rattle of the university as an idea and institution. Codes and tribunals do not make for a civil association! We have permitted politicized moralism to replace the careful incubation of a moral attitude that transpires wherever good books are read and soul-leading conversations are pursued.Notes 1 See Michael Oakeshott, "On the Character of a Modern European State, in On Human Conduct, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).2 Ibid., pp. 324-325.3 Northrop Frye, "Language as the Home to Human Life," in Salute to Scholarship: Essays Presented at the Official Opening of Athabasca University, ed. Michael Owen (Athabasca: Athabasca University, 1986), p. 4.4 See Michael Oakeshott, "On the Character of a Modern European State," in On Human Conduct, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 324-325.5 Jackie Stalker, "The Chill Women Feel at Canada's Universities," The Globe and Mail, 25 July 1995, p. D6.6 Peter Emberley, Zero Tolerance: Hot Button Politics in Canada's Universities (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1996), p. 213.7 "Brush with Killer Related as Women Demand Safer Campus," The Vancouver Sun, 12 November 1993, p. B1.8 Naomi Klein, "Why Universities Feel Harassed by Zero Tolerance," The Globe and Mail, 6 January 1994.9 Rainer Knopff, Human Rights and Social Technology: The New War on Discrimination (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989).