Canada's Nuttiest Professors

Checking out what's going on in my homeland across the pond, I stumbled on to this:

http://www.westernstandard.ca/website/index.cfm?page=article&article_id=1998&pagenumber=1

Isn't it kinda cute? We're wading into the culture wars. Us Canadians are so late (and not even fashionably so). I'm curious as to why this particular debate- the apparent left wing bias of universities, the apparent "nuttiness" of its professors- is being resuscitated? Hasn't this been done already? Is it just part of the West's and Alberta's newly enlarged balls now that they're swimming in oil sands revenues more than ever and Stephen's master of 24 Sussex? Was it just a slow day at the Western Standard's editorial office?

Stories about nutty professors raise the ire of right-wing pundits not because these professors are drawing their money from the public purse eventhough the complaints are usually clothed in such monetary protestations. At the same time that these stories question the value of what's being taught in universities, there's the underlying assumption that the value of a university is that it is the centre of knowledge production. Believing universities have considerable influence, so the conventional wisdom goes, these nutty professors must be stopped before they pollute young minds.

Whether coming from the right or the left, these assumptions are incorrect.

Your mother had the right fear: you can learn things anywhere. Usually, it was sex on the streets. Ya, you can learn about sex or anything else but, these days, it'll be more likely on the internet which has given more people more access to information than at any other point in time. True enough, knowing who won the 1957 World Series and the name of the Prime Minister who succeeded Louis St. Laurent (things you can easily look up with a few strokes on the keyboard) doesn't necessarily add up to a university degree but such pieces of information can contribute to some kind of knowledge and ideas and the exchange of information. Everyone's got an opinion and the forum to express these opinions. The internet's a real fantastic self-fulfilling environment, isn't it? The result is a culture that's simultaneously intellectual, insofar as that term, "intellectual" is defined in functional terms as in people can read and write and form opinions, and anti-intellectual, where places of learning, like universities, are cast under suspicion.

A part of me, for sure, is jaded from time in a Yale classroom where undergraduate students- the most precious and fragile of minds, the ones most sway to influence (so conservative pundits will have you think)- see the classroom as only one site of learning.

Now, I think I'm a pretty egalitarian guy and my pedagogic approach is one that believes learning can indeed happen in many different places. But that hasn't been my experience during my time at Yale. Generously, the classroom, along with their clubs to frats to secret societies to the NGO-slash-journal they just started, is just one place in a very long chain of not so much learning but networking opportunities. This is magnified at a place like Yale where undergraduates are inculcated with the belief that they are America's, the world's, next generation of leaders. With such expectations, why bother reading the assigned readings when I have to go lobby a Congressman? Pragmatically, the classroom is in direct competition with these other places. And something's gotta give and, from my experience, too often, it's the work for the classroom, the readings and the response papers and such that are left last to be done, if at all.

My real interest in this article is that I personally know not 1, not 2 but 3!of Canada's nuttiest professors (and am related to another in an off-handed kind of way).

The Western Standard was doing some selective reporting when they profiled Taiaiake Alfred. Along with not thinking he's Canadian, they forgot to report that he's also an ex-Marine. He calls himself a "former gangster of capitalism." When he talks about how bad the man is, he knows how bad the man is. He's been inside the belly of the beast. Listen to him.

As much as I try to erase York from my memory, the fact is I went there. All those late night buses from Wilson (then Downsview), the sea of Invicta bags, the wind tunnel and day-after-the-bomb atmosphere, I went there. Sigh. So there's Leo Panitch and Shannon Bell. Even before he got the Canada Research Chair a couple of years back, Leo was the granddaddy of the Political Science department. But I got a smile on my face when I saw Shannon Bell's name in the article.

I still remember how, on the first day of our Introduction to Political Science class, she walked into Curtis Lecture Hall looking like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction in a crisp white long sleeve dress shirt, a knee length black skirt almost as dark as her hair. I also noticed her dark purple John Fluevog sandals with heels. And she noticed me noticing them, too. "The shoes are nice, aren't they?" she said to me, with a wink, as she passed out the syllabus.

A decade later, we're still friends. She's nutty, she's a great dresser, she's a terrific teacher and a terrific human being.

Shan: I just remembered: you're a prairie girl, straight from farmland Manitoba. You should write a note to them oil-rig-pumpin' boys and smaller-government-tax-cutters at at the Western Standard. They're kinda like your brethren. You can show em what happens to a country girl when she goes to the big city. You can show them their future if they loosen up the bowties and get the Wranglers a bit dirty.