Somerville—Vile to Some but Good for All
June 4th, 2008 by Dr. Noreen Golfman in Uncategorized![[Post to Twitter]](http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/tweet-this-small.png)
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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.
Tags: Canadian Universities, Margaret Somerville
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Posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 4:14 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.
June 5th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
The blog here is well-written and thoughtful. I am sure that if I had had Dr. Noreen Golfman as a professor I would have found the experience valuable. The comments by the President deserve careful consideration. What I would like to know is how many of the participants at the Congress are in Linguistics.
The issue that I would like to raise with them is the inability of Canadian universities to absorb the lessons of the corpus revolution in Linguistics. I would make six books that emerged out of this revolution official for Canadian universities. The COBUILD Intermediate English Grammar and the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary would be excellent as official first year books, to be supplemented by the COBUILD English Grammar, the COBUILD Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary, the Oxford Collocations Dictionary, and the Longman Language Activator for all years.
Many students–Asian and otherwise–are struggling with cohesion, conditions, and abstraction. I am not aware of any powerful and integrated programs in any Canadian universities that teach these subject areas. You never see triangulation where instructors teach “No Country For Old Men” for its wealth of conditions, or “Great Expectations,” full of counterfactuals, as linked to the explanations of conditions in the COBUILD grammars and the grammar patterns in corpus dictionaries.
The school rhetoric and handbook approach so common in first year composition courses is ineffective and has heavy opportunity costs. Even if students learn how to simulate academic writing, they quickly get out of their depth in “The Beast in the Jungle,” or even in “Barn Burning,” because they have an allergy to close reading.
Chapter 9 in the COBUILD English Grammar is probably the best introduction to cohesion in English, but it is not obvious how to teach it. Sentence making based on the word boxes (for reference nouns such as “allegation”) can have a subtle potency, if you master the words in the four official word books, but only if the method is recursive. It is best to come back to this Chapter 9 year after year and study it minutely. When you hear of all the disasters now with documents and information, the issue is often deep misunderstanding of information cohesion and how to teach it. Mysteriously, we have no PhD in Intelligence where the psychology of cohesion would be taught and experimented on in a penetrating way. Informal disarray in documents is better, it seems.
A good reader sees the story with one eye and the structures with the other, at the same time (if you have four eyes, with the other two at least). Now students gaze at the story as if they were gaping at TV, but they show almost no interest in structures. Many cannot get their fingers to turn the pages in the dictionary, either. If we observe a modal past perfect that communicates manner–he might have been standing at the bottom of the sea–it just does not register that this is a special use of the modal past perfect.
The result is the poverty of IELTS, the LPI, TOEFL–tests that could only exist where people do not grasp what language is.
Three poems, Dickinson’s “The Tint I cannot take–is best–,” Blake’s “The Sick Rose,” and Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” tell us something fundamental about human perception. (Misperception). Each one is always misread. And misinterpreted. Why?
Clayton Burns PhD
Vancouver
claytonburns@gmail.com