VANCOUVER—Rain is keeping everyone indoors and so the sessions are well attended. When it’s sunny it’s easier to avoid that paper on the metaphysics of milk, or whatever. Margaret Somerville drew several hundred people to her “Research in Society” lecture. It’s not surprising that the woman who has argued the case against same-sex marriage to the Supreme Court of Canada would be described as controversial. The Globe and Mail quoted my designation of her as such, and so she mockingly riffed a bit on that at the start of her lecture. I’m not sure if she enjoys being called controversial or not. Maybe she’s not sure either, although there is very little she isn’t sure about.
Somerville discussed the culture of political correctness on our campuses, and how it has silenced debate and discouraged a democratic exchange of ideas, ostensibly what universities are designed to be about. The ideas she has been discouraged from speaking about, even at McGill, her own campus, have everything to do with an argument for the fundamental right of a child to know who its natural biological parents are. It’s hard not to agree that it’s probably a good thing for a child to know where it came from. It’s easy to feel that there is something alarming for a child to have been produced from some recombinant molecules nourished in a test tube, the way animals are being created in some experimental labs in 2008. But it’s a hard sell to say that a child is better off being raised by a man and a woman than by a woman and a woman or a man and a man.
So when Somerville walks into a room, a lot of people are not only NOT listening—they are raging crazy. Knowing this, she drew on her own experience to point out how universities inhibit debate. She’s been denounced and bitterly protested, and a McGill alumnus once told the president that if Margaret Somerville weren’t fired immediately he would stop donating to the university. She’s clever and witty, however, and by the end of her hour-long talk most of the audience was clearly on side, if not with her strong views than with the principle of free speech. The Q&A session drew out a few troubled listeners, and one guy accused Somerville of puffing up her CV with non peer-reviewed papers—a low and probably inaccurate blow, but she deflected him like a pro who’s heard it all before. Eventually, I thanked her, claiming my right to keep describing her as controversial.
Her call for more committed and tolerant debate on university campuses was echoed in a talk delivered by UBC President Stephen J. Toope, who like Somerville is a graduate of McGill Law. Toope is a passionate and persuasive orator, which is not always the case of university presidents. He urged us all to stop being complacent. In a way, he was talking about Canada in general. Canadian academics have made it a mission to get comfortable, to avoid risk. Enough of that, he argued. Be activists, more engaged advocates for social justice. Well, you don’t hear that every day, at least not these days.
There’s an older woman who is attending all these VIP talks. Short and fearless, she walks up to the microphone after each session and no matter what the topic of the lecture she challenges the speaker to address the issue of nuclear disarmament. By now people have started to look at each other knowingly as she winds up to state her case. It’s a recurrently uncomfortable moment. She’s relentless, an ancient mariner calling on us all to pay attention to the threat of nuclear war. Her intervention is urgent and irrefutable, but no one is quite sure what to do with it. We shuffle our papers and move on to the next session.
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