Canada’s New Dissenting Academy
by Matthew Brett
(excerpted from The Bullet, May 25, 2010)
As the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences prepares for its annual Congress this May in Montreal, now is the time to create a new dissenting academy. A radical, anti-capitalist reorientation of academia – created for the explicit purpose of addressing urgent issues that stand before us – is necessary.
Theodore Roszak wrote in a collection of essays titled The Dissenting Academy (1967) that the university is rarely “anything better than the handmaiden of official society: the social club of ruling elites, the training school of whatever functionaries the status quo required.”
In the same collection of essays, Marshall Windmiller wrote a remarkable piece on political scientists in the U.S. and their direct involvement in the CIA and the war in Vietnam. Noam Chomsky’s infamous The Responsibility of Intellectuals closed the essay collection.
All authors agreed that the line between universities, the corporate world and government has blurred to irrelevancy. Social scientists were likewise active in planning some of the worst atrocities in recent history, and dissent within the academic community was shunned. The parallels with today are compelling.
Corporatization and the University
Concordia University will be hosting the 2010 Humanities and Social Science Congress this May, so parallels with the 1960s can be drawn with Concordia. However, most universities in Canada share similar characteristics, and this critique should be applied in equal measure to all post-secondary institutions.
Concordia President Judith Woodsworth recently returned from a mission to India with Quebec Premier Jean Charest and a number of business leaders. There can be no doubt that some of the 130 trade delegation members that joined the trade mission are part of Canada’s massive mining and finance sectors that trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange and are busy exploiting India’s natural resources while gross human rights violations take place. This is representative of the intertwining of universities and Canadian imperialism.
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