A couple of months ago I reviewed Christopher Newfield’s The Great Mistake and said it was a great book that was very much worth reading, despite the fact that I disagreed with its central premise.  Well, I have another one of those, and it’s Peter MacKinnon’s new book: University Commons Divided: Exploring Debate and Dissent on Campus.

What MacKinnon – ex-President of the University of Saskatchewan (1999-2012) and Athabasca University (2014-2016)  – has produced is a truly marvellous re-cap of all the major campus controversies in Canada from the past decade or so.  Jennifer Berdahl, Root Gorelick, Andrew Potter, the Trinity Western law school controversy, Jordan Peterson, etc (the book seems to have hit the printers before the recent dust-up at Wilfrid Laurier).  And he discusses them all, briefly, thoroughly, and with excellent judgement.  He is a good companion on these little historical journeys.

He is, for instance, impressively grumpy about the Berdahl v. Montalbano affair and in particular Judge Smith’s weird report on the matter: no finding of infringement of academic freedom, combined with an opinion that the university nevertheless failed to protect Berdahl’s academic freedom, which is maybe the most “half-pregnant” concept I’ve ever read about concerning a university.  He provides a very good summation of events at Dalhousie during the Dentistry/Facebook affair (and incidentally confirmed my view that President Richard Florizone’s actions in that case were an absolute model of university crisis management, and easily the best example from the last decade).  And as a rather esteemed legal scholar, he provides excellent insight into the Trinity Western University law school case, though I admit to remaining puzzled why, if the issue is the restrictive covenant rather than bias in teaching, the case is about just the law school and not the university as a whole.

For the most part, I agree with his take on all these issues with perhaps two exceptions.  I think he’s far too nice to McGill about Andrew Potter (he thinks McGill did wrong, but IMHO underplays the wrongness).  And I think he asked the wrong questions with respect to Root Gorelick case at Carleton. I  do agree with MacKinnon that the case was not fundamentally an academic freedom issue–that was a dumb defense from CAUT who believe everything is an academic freedom issue.  But the real issue was simply political: if you’re going to allow people to elect a representative, you kind of have to accept who they pick provided they do not fail in duty of fiduciary care. Further, it wasn’t simply a matter of the Board adopting a code of conduct (as he suggests), but rather adopting one which forbade Board members from speaking against a Board measure once it had been adopted, which was goofy (Carleton, to its credit, has since abandoned the code).

Where I part company from MacKinnon is where he tries to weave a common thread into all of these different events.  He believes passionately that the university exists around a “commons” – basically an agora – in which members of the community speak with one another formally and informally, for governance purposes, dialectical purposes, or just yakking/chatting.  It’s worth quoting him here: “This space is essential to life in the academy and to its central mission: seeking truth through advancing knowledge, learning, and discovery.  Because it is essential, it must be robust and safety within the commons must be assured though comfort within it cannot be….contestation is inevitable”.

So far so good and I think he is right to say that this space is crucial to our Canadian understanding of what a university is.  However, I am just not persuaded of his view that together, these campuses crises of the past decade constitute a pattern in which the commons is being put in danger.  Are controversial events more common on campus than 20 years ago?  Probably: but then universities are a lot larger and more central to society than they were 20 years ago, too, so maybe that’s to be expected.  We live in a more litigious culture, one more susceptible to outrage (real or simulated).  That implies a need for greater vigilance on behalf of the commons, but not necessarily that it is under greater threat.  Nor am I convinced that the answer to all this is a new Duff-Berdahl commission to look at issues of campus governance. Not that I disagree with this in principle – I called for the same thing back here – it’s just not clear to me how a governance commission would have made much difference in cases such as Dalhousie or Trinity Western (or Jordan Peterson or Andrew Potter for that matter).

But all things considered, this is a minor quibble: read this book because it’s a great guide to Canadian campus controversies in the past decade and MacKinnon is a great Sherpa.  Two thumbs up.