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I can’t quite get my head around Alberta these days. You’ve got a left-wing government banging on about accessibility while providing proportionately the fewest need/income-based grants of any provincial government.  You’ve got a right-wing opposition which is just mad as hell that the federal government doesn’t have a national policy to force Eastern Canada to buy Canadian oil instead of foreign oil (a policy which used to go by the name “National Energy Program”).  And, at the University of Alberta, there are protests about an honorary degree…from the Establishment.

The story so far: the U of A announced it was giving an honorary degree to biologist and environmentalist David Suzuki at right around the time that Kinder Morgan decided to hold everyone to ransom by announcing it was (almost) giving up on the Trans-Mountain pipeline.  Albertans, who not unreasonably see access to markets for their products as being a crucial step in selling said products and earning a living from them, were on the whole not very happy about the KM decision and put the blame on Suzuki-inspired environmentalists in British Columbia.  So, let’s just say the timing of the announcement wasn’t great (I don’t know the exact timeline, but my guess is that the actual committee decision was probably taken a few days before the KM decision).

Now, just so we’re clear, I probably wouldn’t have voted to give Suzuki an award.  That’s not because I have a problem with his environmentalism, but because he is wilfully ignorant and disrespectful of large swathes of social science (mainly but not exclusively economics) and at a university which promotes all branches of knowledge, that’s a tricky thing to be seen as endorsing.  But it’s not like Suzuki is prima facie unworthy of recognition.  The man’s an institution.  The nation has made him one of the 1,000 or so Officers of the Order of Canada (that’s the second level, below exalted “companion” status but above mere “members”), and that suggests he has made significant contributions to the life of the country.  If the GG can give him an award for contributions to public life, so can universities.  Not every degree holder has to command undivided respect.

But of course, this is 2018 and people can’t resist turning what used to be mundane university matters into major political affairs.  This particular case is a little weird because it’s the establishment (i.e. big donors and those who wish to benefit from them) who seem to be doing the attacking.  Usually it’s the other side in the news, protesting that Establishment figures with dodgy backgrounds or controversial views are getting awards, like Victor Dadaleh at York University, Margaret Somerville at Ryerson, or even Nestle CEO Peter Brabeck-Lemanthe at the University of Alberta (cultural conservatives sometimes get in on the act too, like when Henry Morgentaler got his honorary degree at Western).

What’s particularly weird in this case is how much of the opposition is coming from members of the university’s top administrators, with the Deans of Engineering and Business both signing letters – the latter is considerably more measured that the former – to the effect that the Suzuki decision was a bad one and then posting them on the university website.  Possibly this is some genius 3-dimenisonal chess move plan by the university to contain the blowback on the decision by saying to external critics “hey, don’t blame us, some of us hate it, too”, but I kind of doubt it.

Because at the end of the day University of Alberta President David Turpin is right when he said: “Withdrawing David Suzuki’s honorary degree might seem an easy solution to the controversy (but)…we will stand by our decision because our reputation as a university—an institution founded on the principles of freedom of inquiry, academic integrity, and independence—depends on it.”  If you start to let short-term political considerations affect the independence of your internal decision-making process, it’ll never end.  And it’s not like universities in Alberta haven’t had a loooooong history of interference from Government (starting – not coincidentally – from the University’s refusal to give an honorary degree to Premier Aberhardt in 1941, in retaliation for which the government of the day stripping the University Senate of many of its decision-making powers). Concerns re: loss of independence are not abstract in Big Sky country.

Sometimes universities make controversial choices.  But their value as social institutions lie in their independence.  If they bent to the wishes of infuriated donors every time something happens, pretty soon they wouldn’t be universities, at least not in the sense that we in North America have come to believe in and value.  So, yeah, Suzuki is, in many ways, an irritating choice.  But at this point, not giving him the degree would be an awful lot worse than giving him the robe and letting him make his speech this June.