Deconstructing the arts faculty

Doctrinaire feminism tightens its grasp on the U of A's biggest department

Steve Sandford

The old University of Alberta arts building: Feminists are consolidating control.

Recently retired English scholar Bob Solomon knows better than most how one well-intended act can produce a multitude of horrible consequences. A self-described classic liberal, Prof. Solomon taught 20th-century American literature at the University of Alberta for 28 years. Eight years ago, he helped write a petition calling for fellow English professor Patricia Clements to be appointed the next dean of arts, and circulated it among his colleagues, a third of whom signed on. "I did it with the best of intentions," recalls Prof. Solomon. "We never had a woman as dean, and a number of us thought it was time we had one. It was a fashionable thing to do, and she had a fine scholarly record."

Little did Prof. Solomon realize that the petition would initiate a chain of events that would significantly bolster the influence of feminist ideology in the faculty. It began when Patricia Clements was appointed dean of arts in 1989. The latest development in the saga came last June, when York University political scientist Janine Brodie was appointed chairman of the U of A's department of political science, and her close personal friend and colleague Lise Gotell, also of York, was made assistant professor of women's studies.

Several senior professors interviewed last week said the recent appointments are part of a troubling trend. Under Dean Clements, they complain, ambitious, power-driven feminists have secured tenure and helped hire like-minded academics. Collectively, the feminists adhere to a "post-modern" ideology that rejects the intellectual and cultural heritage of Western civilization.

The U of A academics who decry this development are not all pipe-smoking greybeards in tweed. They include female scholars and students, liberals and conservatives, all of whom warn that the grand liberal arts institution envisioned by former Alberta premier Alexander Rutherford is in ideological peril.

Prof. Solomon took early retirement partly out of frustration with the authoritarian tone of the faculty administration, feminist gamesmanship, and the English department's growing emphasis on dubious scholarly pursuits like "queer praxis." Although the 57-year-old holds many of his female colleagues in high esteem, and is a great champion of women's equality, he now regrets the pro-Clements petition. "I was ignorant," he admits. "I didn't know about power feminism. I never knew that intellectual life in the faculty would become so corrupt."

Is the faculty corrupt, though? Or are the liberals who have run the show for two decades merely uncomfortable with new ideas? At the U of A's annual general meeting last week, there was ample evidence that the institution still receives tremendous support from the wider community. Within the university, however, there is heated debate about whether the post-modern ideology promoted by feminists is just another perspective, or illegitimate scholarship.

Post-modernists have "come on very, very strong" for the past decade, says anthropology professor Ruth Gruhn. "They believe that particular ways of thought and knowing are associated with particular groups that can be defined on the basis of gender, race and class. They also deny the existence of objective reality, so they get into trouble with those of us who have been raised on a more rational, scientific approach."

The post-modernists' subjectivism gave rise to political correctness, which holds as its highest virtue the tolerance of groups and ideas that were allegedly "marginalized" by the Western intellectual tradition. That, of course, is the grand paradox of political correctness, which has proved in practice to be rigidly intolerant of all contrary opinions.

Spearheading the post-modern epistemology are "second-wave" or "gender" feminists. Unlike "first-wave" feminists, who pushed for equality of social status, the newcomers are out to extirpate "male bias" from scholarly pursuit and replace it with their feminist world-view. They hold that for the whole of Western civilization, men have dominated women through something called the "patriarchal system," so they demand the "deconstruction" of traditional knowledge, and endeavour to reconstruct the world from the perspective of women.

The new chairman of political science at the U of A, Janine Brodie, 44, has articulated feminist political theory her entire career. She has written and edited a handful of books on women in Canadian politics, class divisions and abortion. Her writing is solidly feminist, though not particularly inflammatory. In the introduction to Women and Canadian Public Policy, for instance, she writes that neo-conservatism is turning back the clock for women. She calls on feminists "to identify the various webs of subordination and domination on which the emerging order rests."

Like most feminists, chairman Brodie is a proponent of big, intrusive government. "Key feminist policy demands, such as universal and affordable child care, income security, the protection of women from male violence, affirmative action and pay equity, call for more, not less government intervention and public spending." Feminist concerns "are necessarily state-centred," she argues. Phrases like "patriarchal hegemony" and the "gendered underpinnings of the welfare state" appear throughout her writing.

In her candidate's speech to the U of A political science department, Prof. Brodie made reference to "phallocentric politics," according to one professor who was present. " She spoke in such a way as to lead me to believe that there's no way to have genuine communication between the oppressors and the oppressed," the professor reports. "She's articulate, she's intelligent, but she has a view of political life that's on the other side of the universe from half the department."

Janine Brodie was not the department's first choice for chairman. That honour went to long-serving colleague Don Carmichael. Although no formal vote was held, his candidacy was supported by a majority of the department's 23 professors. But last fall, Prof. Carmichael was rejected by a selection committee chaired by Dean Clements. A majority of professors subsequently voted in favour of a motion demanding a new election for the department's three representatives on the nine-member selection committee (other members are drawn from the larger university community), but Dean Clements rejected the motion. The committee then hired Prof. Brodie.

"We assumed that Carmichael had the job and that the committee work would be routine drudgery, so none of us tried to get on the selection committee," says one instructor who asked not to be named. " We foolishly left the administrative work to those who enjoy faculty politics, the feminists, the very people who wish to comb out of the university partisans of the old view and replace them with a spanking new set of people who are ideologically more in tune with what they would like to see become the dominant political colouration of the university."

A senior university official, who also asked to remain anonymous, offers a different explanation. The source says Prof. Carmichael was rejected because the political science department needed new blood. " They have the worst publishing record in the university. To correct that, it was felt we needed to go outside."

To lure Prof. Brodie, Dean Clements agreed to hire her close friend Lise Gotell, also a political scientist at York University. Ms. Gotell, who has written on lesbian rights, women in politics and pornography, will take up the position of assistant professor in women's studies, effective January 1, 1997, the same day Prof. Brodie officially takes over as political science chairman.

The General Faculties Council hiring policy requires the university to advertise when a position becomes available. In the case of Prof. Gotell, that procedure was waived by vice-president academic Doug Owram. "Where there is urgency in hiring, I can waive advertising," says Prof. Owram. The money for Ms. Gotell's salary was already in the budget, since women's studies planned to fill this position in the coming year.

The Brodie-Gotell appointments may have been by the book, but to some professors they illustrate that "the old boy's network" is alive and well in the faculty. " We thought that a woman dean would mean more faculty participation" in shaping the future of the university, says one female instructor who asked not to be named. "That's not what has happened. There has been a silencing at all levels. The old boyism is worse than it ever was before. The leadership in the faculty and the university as a whole is totally authoritarian. We have seen the closing down of meaningful debate in the arts faculty."

As head of the U of A's largest faculty, Dean Clements wields tremendous power both within and outside it. She makes salary recommendations for every chair in her department. She has the ability to nominate people to committees and hire professors, and can dictate how a significant portion of the faculty's $41.8 million budget is spent. The arts dean presides over 367 professors and over 20% of the U of A's student population; 5,700 are enrolled in the faculty.

Over the course of Dean Clements' tenure, morale in the faculty has deteriorated, says Prof. Solomon. "It has become a very unwelcome place for non-feminists." To illustrate, Prof. Solomon tells the story of one student who came to him several years ago and reported how her poetry instructor warned in the first lecture of the term that to pass the course, students would have to read poetry through the eyes of a homosexual woman. "Five men promptly got up and left," says Prof. Solomon. A complaint was filed, but administrators decided not to proceed, because no minority group could be guilty of intimidating a majority group, even if the men were in the minority in the class.

"One woman hired here wanted to publish a book of anti-male jokes," recalls Prof. Solomon. "One of the jokes was 'How many men does it take to wallpaper your bathroom?' The answer was ' Six if you slice them thinly enough.' Her project was never approved, but underneath the faddishness of her political position and her attempt at payback humour, there was seething anger. Some of these people are very, very angry."

Jim Algio, a romance languages scholar who retired in 1995 and now lives in California, says professors in his department were forced to watch The Chilly Climate for Women in Universities, a movie on sexual harassment "in which white males are portrayed as the most evil creatures to walk the face of the planet."

Prof. Algio was one of 137 professors who officially protested a 1991 memo from Dean Clements in which she ordered the creation of hiring quotas for "disadvantaged groups," including women. Her opponents complained that the memo contradicted a university policy that employment decisions be based on merit, "without discrimination."

There are other stories, too, about feminists using Orwellian tactics to push their agenda, including attempts to review course material in painstaking detail to probe for politically incorrect messages and the "stacking" of hiring and peer-review committees.

Gary Kelly, a scholar recognized internationally for his contributions to the study of British women's literature, left the university unhappily in 1994 after Dean Clements did not invite him to join in an application for a federal grant to study women's literature in England. He was the top expert on the subject at the U of A, but was left off the research team and was effectively barred from presenting papers at conferences on women's writing. University sources say he was overlooked because he did not subscribe to feminist orthodoxy.

There is also concern over course material. "A student can now graduate without taking courses which a decade ago were core subjects," says Prof. Solomon. "You can take all your material in some very strange areas." One English course on gender and sexuality is reportedly taught by a male professor who once came to class dressed like a woman. In fact, cross-dressing is a theme in a handful of courses. Other courses focus on curious issues such as " fatal women," "queer communities, " "diseases of the blood," and "the liabilities of childbearing."

Over 20 undergraduate and graduate courses in English deal with explicitly feminist and homosexual themes, with titles such as "Feminist Cultural Materialism," and "Post Modernism and Queer Praxis." A course on Chaucer explores how "queer theory" can help post-modern readers "engage with the 'tacitly unfinished' status of the inherited premodern text." Observes one English professor: " We are now reputed as one of the leading schools in queer theory in North America."

The courses in political science and other departments have less overtly feminist themes, but professors are pressured to incorporate feminist interpretations into course material. Leon Craig, a professor of political philosophy, describes how "we keep hearing in meetings that we don't have any post-modernists teaching political philosophy, so our offerings are somehow defective." The conservative scholar says he and his fellow political philosophy professors deliberately avoid "interpretations" of any sort. "We read Plato to interpret Plato and Hobbes to interpret Hobbes. The idea is to learn from past thinkers, not merely to learn about them."

Prof. Solomon says the university has "by and large, lost a lot of respect for diversity. If you're a believing Christian of the kind that sends missionaries around the world, you're going to walk in here and hear attacks on missionaries and attacks on provincialism, and on Christian points of view. You'll hear attacks on those who think English is an important language. Even Western medicine has been attacked. After all, drugs and surgery are no better than chewing leaves, depending on your perspective."

One fourth-year political science student says she was told to "sit down and shut up" by a feminist instructor after she suggested that war is sometimes necessary and good. (The instructor denies it.) The student reports that disagreement with feminist orthodoxy "is generally not allowed." Another undergraduate said she was told in class "that as a right-wing woman I am betraying all women." Students have lost marks on essays for failing to use gender-inclusive language.

Prof. Solomon says many of the graduates are clones of their feminist instructors. The faculty has "created some monsters," he laments. Ironically, however, the feminist professors are themselves the progeny of the classic liberals who now find themselves in the traditionalist camp. The liberals adopted a relativistic approach to truth. The "second-wave" feminists carried this a step farther and realized that once truth is degraded solely to self-perception, all that is left to strive for is the power to enforce their subjective interpretations of reality.

"Everything is reduced to a power struggle," explains Prof. Craig. "The radical feminists may be a minority in the faculty, but they wield a disproportionate power because they are highly political. Traditional academics want to pursue their research, teach their courses and avoid committee work. As a result, we've allowed the feminists to take control."

Demographics and economics have left the U of A ripe for the feminist power grab. The university is undergoing profound changes, due partly to an aging faculty. Over the next five years, at least 450 professors--one-third of the academic staff--will retire. Early retirement schemes created to deal with budget cuts play directly into the hands of the post-modernists, observes Prof. Craig. " The intellectual and moral climate of the place has so degenerated that some of the professors I respect most as scholars can't wait to leave." University officials characterize what is happening as "renewal," but Prof. Craig says it is more like a "transmogrification."

The conflict at the U of A "exists to some extent on almost every campus," says University of Calgary political scientist Rainer Knopff. "There is significant variation in how intense it is from one campus to the next." For example, the feminist influence is even more pronounced at the University of British Columbia, where the university is under pressure to hire its first female president (see story, page 34). Admission to UBC' s political science graduate program was halted last year after a feminist lawyer, hired to investigate complaints made by a small cadre of feminist students, declared the department was rife with racism and sexism.

"The modern universities are in deep, deep trouble," laments Prof. Craig. "They are very expensive institutions, and there's a real disenchantment with what's going on inside them. People are growing indignant over the quality of what passes for education in the arts faculty. Look at the English department. You'd think it's a lampoon or something. It is increasingly staffed with people who despise classic literature."

"Because the doctrine of value relativism holds that there are no universally and permanently true answers to the great questions of human existence, it poses a direct and deadly challenge to the very possibility of liberal education," Canadian political scientists Patrick Malcomsen, Richard Myers and Colin O'Connell write in Liberal Education and Value Relativism: A Guide to Today's B.A. " On the theoretical plane, relativism renders the great quest for human wisdom pointless. And psychologically speaking, relativism creates the most debilitating teaching environment possible. For students are not inclined to pursue in any way questions for which they believe there are no true answers."

"The post-modern world view is at odds with the liberal arts," says Prof. Knopff. "It sees the university's function less as contemplative, reflective; less the pursuit of ideas, and more as trying to reconstruct the world through ideas, using knowledge filtered through a feminist lens as the hammer of reconstruction. If we understand the university to be a place for dialogue in the pursuit of truth, then the post-modern school would not be what many of us recognize as the university."

Prof. Craig agrees. "A liberal education is supposed to acquaint us with the questions that are worthy of a human being," he says, " including the paramount question: what is the good life? It involves the pursuit of truth, but the post-modernists don't believe in truth. To them, all questions involve power relations and the answers are expressions of our socio-historical experience. The intellectual life no longer makes sense. That' s what I find so destructive about the ascendance of this in the modern university.

In France they have abandoned post-modernism and are moving on. We are trying to petrify it in our school." To be sure, not everyone is upset about that. U of A political scientist Saleem Qureshi welcomes the post-modernists. "They design new courses, bring in these new ideas. It's wonderful," he enthuses. "Otherwise we would still be studying Plato." Responds Prof. Craig: "We should be so lucky. I wish I could think as well as Plato on his worst day."

Meanwhile, Melinda Smith, the only feminist in political science who would speak with this magazine, takes offence at the suggestion that there is any controversy. Asked whether feminists are networking to dominate committees and seize power, Prof. Smith bristles: "I think that's just malicious. And frankly, I think the fact that you are printing this kind of stuff is malicious." Dean Clements and Prof. Brodie did not respond to repeated requests for interviews last week.

Vice-president academic Owram, a former history instructor, says, " There have always been debates and divisions over ideology in the arts faculty. In the 1960s, traditionalists fought the New Left; in the 1990s, the battle is against post-modernism and feminism; and 25 years from now, old post-modernists will be defending against some new ideology." Prof. Owram says the university would find " unconscionable any attempt by any faculty member to impose ideology on students or colleagues, but different views should be allowed to come forward and be debated."

The outlook for the university is not entirely grim, offers anthropologist Ruth Gruhn. "People who follow a more rational approach do have tenure, and not all of them are ancient warriors who are going to retire soon," she says. "Moreover, young scholars in the U.S. are getting more and more doubtful about this post-modernist approach." Indeed, many of them are reverting to conservatism. " Before long, that will filter into Canada. One wonders if in the long run, this is merely an intellectual cycle that has had its day and is on the way out."

If not, market forces may correct the problem. U of A chancellor Lou Hyndman says he has not heard an outcry from the traditionalists, " but if there is a problem it will right itself automatically. Students today are paying an increasingly large portion of their tuition and universities no longer have the monopoly they once had," observes the titular head of the university. "I expect students will be sure to get full value for their educational dollar. They will demand a top-flight liberal arts education and will give short shrift to any teaching approach that does not provide them with a quality education."

--Peter Verburg