As Quebec tables religious symbol ban, the rest of Canada should stay zen

2019/03/29 Leave a comment

Bit of an odd piece by Konrad Yakabuski. Yes, all debates have nuances, yes, historical contexts are important, but Bill 62 is problematic on so many counts.

The other aspect I have always found interesting is just how much of a colony Canada appears to be when it imports these debates from Europe, whether critiques of multiculturalism without acknowledging Canada’s aims at integration and participation of much of the language around laicité from France:

The most popular movie in France this year is a comedy about a Roman Catholic couple with four daughters, each of whom marries a member of a religious or racial minority. When the daughters announce they and their husbands are leaving France – for Algeria, Israel, China and India – their parents wonder if they are being punished by God.

The film’s French title, Qu’est-ce qu’on a encore fait au Bon Dieu?, roughly means: What did we do to deserve this? It is the top-grossing film of 2019 in France, drawing twice as many moviegoers as any Hollywood movie. It has also been doing a brisk box office in Quebec, and sparking plenty of discussion about the state of la mère patrie, as France is known.

The film’s success may lie in the fact that it allows members of the white Catholic French majority to laugh at the prejudices they hold toward newcomers, rather than feeling ashamed of them. The French aren’t racist. They’re just nostalgic for a simpler time when they didn’t have to deal with interracial marriage, Muslim rites or Afghan refugees. But once they get used to them, they’ll come around and everyone will get along famously. Cue the happy ending.

Of course, that day hasn’t yet arrived in France. The country remains deeply divided over how to integrate its fast-growing Muslim population, which continues to feel excluded from mainstream French society. Anti-Semitism has been rising again, prompting thousands of French Jews to leave their country, mostly for Israel, the United States and Canada.

To an outsider, it may seem obvious that the French approach to solving the challenges raised by multiculturalism has been a failure. Instead of fostering integration or promoting what the French call le vivre ensemble (“living together”), bans on the Islamic headscarf in public schools and the burka in public spaces have only served to further stigmatize Muslims.

Yet, I have spent enough time in France to know that plenty of its leading thinkers, few of whom could be accused of racism, support such bans in the name of state secularism. No one, much less any foreigner, is going to persuade them otherwise. Even French President Emmanuel Macron, who is undeniably progressive on most issues involving immigration and multiculturalism, would not dream of repealing these measures.

For better or worse, the French approach to secularism has coloured the political debate over religious accommodation in Quebec. As in France, many Quebec intellectuals believe that any society that declares secularism to be a fundamental value must prohibit religious symbols in public institutions. For many, freedom from religion is as important as freedom of religion.

So, while many commentators in English Canada depict Quebec’s seemingly endless debate over religious accommodation as the work of opportunistic politicians seeking to exploit the cultural insecurities of some francophone Quebeckers, such characterizations fail to capture the complexity of the debate and only contribute to a polarization of opinions on the matter.

Make no mistake, as Premier François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec government prepares to table legislation to ban state employees in a position of authority (including teachers) from wearing ostentatious religious symbols, politics is its principal motivation. The CAQ’s conservative and nationalist base is not concerned so much about secularism – it supports maintaining the crucifix in the legislature – as it is with the impact Muslim newcomers are having on the face and customs of their province. Mr. Legault campaigned on a promise to do something about it, even if it means going down the dangerous path of trampling on individual rights in the name of a white francophone majority that seeks to assert its supposed collective right to live in a secularist society.

The CAQ government may be making a fateful mistake by proceeding with a discriminatory and patently unconstitutional legislation. At the very least, it is displaying crass insensitivity in tabling its religious-symbol ban in the wake of the massacre of 50 Muslims at mosques in New Zealand, which revived the pain of the 2017 Quebec City mosque shooting.

Yet, those outside the province should refrain from making blanket statements or condemnations. The debate within Quebec is far more nuanced than the rest of Canada seems to understand. Charging racism is the lazy way to go. It perpetuates a situation that only serves the interests of those who like to stir up polemics, rather than foster reconciliation.

As jurist Rim Gtari and sociology professor Rachad Antonius wrote this week in Le Devoir, invoking the recent conviction of an Iranian lawyer who defended women who went veil-less in public: “One cannot reduce the hijab to a simple piece of cloth, the wearing of which is a sign of piety and its interdiction a sign of racism. The historical context removes this restriction from the domain of the violation of rights or from the logic of stereotypes tied to racism.”

Source: As Quebec tables religious symbol ban, the rest of Canada should stay zen

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Laïcité: des organisations juives sonnent l’alarme

2019/03/29 Leave a comment

A reminder that it is not just Muslims that will be affected by Bill 62:

Interdire à certains fonctionnaires de porter la kippa ou d’exhiber une étoile de David représenterait une grave atteinte aux droits garantis par les chartes et serait contesté devant les tribunaux, préviennent d’importantes organisations juives.

B’nai Brith et le Centre consultatif des relations juives et israéliennes (CCJI) s’inquiètent du dépôt imminent par le gouvernement Legault du projet de loi sur la laïcité.

Selon La Presse et Radio-Canada, Québec va interdire le port de signes religieux aux fonctionnaires en position d’autorité, y compris les enseignants, les directions d’école et ceux qui portent une arme.

« Ce qu’on entend du projet de loi est contraire aux valeurs canadiennes et québécoises. La CAQ doit éviter la pente glissante qui consiste à réduire les droits fondamentaux », prévient Harvey Levine, directeur du bureau québécois de B’nai Brith.

Le débat public sur les signes religieux au travail s’est surtout centré sur le hidjab. Mais les organismes juifs canadiens rappellent que la kippa serait aussi visée, tout comme le turban sikh ou la croix chrétienne.

« Il s’agit selon nous d’une menace pour les libertés religieuses des juifs, des musulmans, des sikhs, et tous les autres groupes religieux visibles dans cette province », indique M. Levine.

La laïcité de l’État peut être atteinte sans que l’on s’attaque aux droits religieux, estime le Centre consultatif des relations juives et israéliennes (CIJA).

« Bien qu’il existe un fort sentiment en faveur de la réaffirmation de la laïcité au Québec, notre communauté estime que la laïcité de l’État est un devoir institutionnel et non personnel. L’attachement à la laïcité ne repose pas sur l’apparence des individus », indique Reuben Poupko, coprésident du CIJA-Québec.

Pour le chef de l’opposition à l’hôtel de ville de Montréal, qui porte la kippa, l’idée d’interdire les signes religieux à certains fonctionnaires est basée sur une mauvaise prémisse : celle selon laquelle un employé de l’État qui porte un signe religieux ne peut être neutre.

« Il est difficile pour moi de croire qu’en 2019, on remette en question les motivations des gens selon leur manière de s’habiller, a récemment écrit Lionel Perez dans Montreal Gazette. Retirer les signes religieux n’éradique en rien les préjugés. »

Jusque devant l’ONU

Le B’nai Brith et le CIJA craignent que le projet de loi sur la laïcité n’enfreigne des droits garantis par les chartes. La Charte canadienne des droits et libertés protège certaines libertés fondamentales, parmi lesquelles les libertés de religion et d’expression.

Le premier ministre François Legault se dit prêt à utiliser la disposition de dérogation (communément appelée clause nonobstant) pour soustraire sa future loi aux tribunaux. Pour lui, il s’agit de « protéger notre identité ».

Selon l’avocat montréalais Julius Grey, la disposition de dérogation ne peut toutefois protéger le Québec et le Canada contre un camouflet devant le Comité des droits de l’homme de l’Organisation des Nations unies (ONU).

« Si le gouvernement espère éviter le débat judiciaire en invoquant la clause nonobstant, il doit se rappeler qu’il existe un forum international où ce genre de chose peut être débattu », souligne Me Grey.

« Il est téméraire de préjuger de ce qui sera dans le projet de loi, dit-il. Mais il me semble que la confrontation judiciaire est plus ou moins inévitable. »

Ce comité de l’ONU a par exemple épinglé la France à au moins deux reprises sur la question des signes religieux. Dans un cas, l’ONU a donné raison à une employée d’une garderie congédiée car elle portait le voile islamique. Les décisions de ce comité ne sont toutefois pas contraignantes.

« Bien sûr, la décision du Comité des droits de l’homme des Nations unies n’est pas contraignante comme le jugement d’une cour québécoise ou de la Cour suprême », explique Julius Grey.

« Mais je vois mal comment le Québec, malgré un jugement de cette nature, justifierait de maintenir sa position. »

Source: Laïcité: des organisations juives sonnent l’alarme

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Notwithstanding clause could stop debate over Quebec’s secularism bill before it starts

2019/03/28 Leave a comment

To watch:

As the Quebec government prepares to table its secularism bill, constitutional experts are raising concerns about Premier François Legault’s reported plans to pre-emptively invoke the notwithstanding clause to ensure public workers in positions of authority are banned from wearing religious symbols.

Robert Leckey, dean of McGill University’s law faculty, said doing so would effectively make it impossible to challenge the constitutionality of the legislation.

“It really immunizes the law from the more obvious charter challenges,” Leckey said in an interview.

Montreal’s La Presse newspaper reported last week that a provision to invoke the clause could be written into Bill 62 itself.

The notwithstanding clause, officially called Section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, allows provincial or federal authorities to override certain sections of the charter for a period of five years.

Sources told Radio-Canada earlier this week the bill will go further than originally expected. New teachers, as well as school principals, would be subject to the ban, which would also apply to lawyers, judges, police officers, courthouse constables, bodyguards, prison guards and wildlife officers.

‘Collective rights’

Civil rights groups have already vowed to challenge the legislation, but Legault has repeatedly said he’s prepared to use the notwithstanding clause to impose the ban.

He said so again on Tuesday.

“It’s not a small thing. It’s a big decision. But sometimes, in order to protect collective rights, we have to use it. I think we have to protect our collective identity,” Legault said, pointing out the clause has been invoked numerous times by different premiers.

“To separate religion and politics is important in Quebec.”

The bill by his Coalition Avenir Quebec governement will be the fourth successive attempt at laying out a framework for religious neutrality in the province, following previous efforts by the Jean Charest Liberals, the Parti Québécois under Pauline Marois and the Liberal government of Philippe Couillard.

The most controversial sections of Couillard’s legislation are still before the courts after being subjected to a charter challenge.

But given the province’s long history of debate about religious neutrality, Leckey is skeptical that moving quickly will allow the CAQ government to settle the matter once and for all.

“I just don’t think it’s the case that it will put a lid on these things,” he said.

“I think there will be a messiness in applying the law.”

Rarely used, except in Quebec

Political leaders across the country have been reluctant to use the notwithstanding clause, which is viewed by many as politically perilous. It has only been invoked three times outside Quebec.

“The view was that this would be a clause used infrequently and in very specific circumstances. I’m not sure whether that is what’s qualifying the use of it today,” said James Kelly, a constitutional expert and political science professor at Concordia University.

The clause is more commonly invoked inside Quebec, where it has served as both a means of symbolic resistance and as a tool to defend Quebecers’ collective identity.

The most controversial use of the notwithstanding clause was in 1988, when then-premier Robert Bourassa used it to override a Supreme Court ruling on minority language rights, passing a law requiring outdoor commercial signs to be in French only.

The possibility of the clause being invoked pre-emptively harkens back to how a former PartiQuébécois government used it.

Between 1982 and 1985, the PQ objected to the terms of the new Canadian Constitution by including a notwithstanding clause in every piece of legislation it introduced.

Philippe-André Tessier, the head of Quebec’s Human Rights and Youth Rights Commission, said the CAQ’s proposed bill should be put to a debate at the National Assembly.

“The commission believes that it’s only in exceptional circumstances that the notwithstanding clause should be used,” he said.

Source: Notwithstanding clause could stop debate over Quebec’s secularism bill before it starts

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Opposing Anti-Semitism Is Great—But Don’t Forget Islamophobia

2019/03/28 Leave a comment

Indeed (and if one doesn’t want to use the word Islamophobia, one can always use anti-Muslim hate):

You are Jewish,” the young man who had knocked on my hotel room door in Tampa told me.

I told him I wasn’t. “No, you are Jewish,” he replied. “I can tell by your smell.”

The exchange, though back in the 1990s, shows how people can be quick to make ignorant stereotypes, loading them with hate. Similar animosity is being spread around today.

Chelsea Clinton is getting a lot of praise for standing her ground after being unfairly blamed for the New Zealand massacre of Muslims. And Donald Trump Jr. rightly stood up for the former first daughter. The question is whether those who oppose anti-Semitism will also take a stand against Islamophobia, as Clinton has done.

Clinton, who opposed Rep. Ilhan Omar’s recent anti-Semitic comments, incredibly found herself accused by some students of being culpable for the New Zealand Mosque massacres.

“This right here is the result of a massacre stoked by people like you and the words that you put out into the world,” the student said to Clinton, directly confronting her. “I want you to know that, and I want you to feel that deep down inside. Forty-nine people died because of the rhetoric you put out there.”

Clinton found herself defended by Donald Trump Jr., who tweeted, “It’s sickening to see people blame @ChelseaClinton for the NZ attacks because she spoke out against anti-Semitism. We should all be condemning anti-Semitism & all forms of hate. Chelsea should be praised for speaking up. Anyone who doesn’t understand this is part of the problem.”

Trump’s defense of Clinton is laudable. What is needed however is to also speak out against Islamophobia and caustic comments that promote the same malignant stereotypes as attacks on Jews.

This all started when Minnesota Rep. Omar accused a colleague of only supporting Israel because of Israeli money.

Omar probably didn’t give it a second thought. If she had thought about things from the other person’s perspective, she might have thought better of her comments. Imagine if someone accused one of Omar’s defenders of being motivated by Saudi money.

As unhelpful as those comments were, they pale in comparison to a lot of anti-Semitic vitriol spewed out by neo-Nazis and white supremacists, as well as odious comments from the Nation of Islam, which is far more deserving of our scorn.

Furthermore, those unfair attacks on Clinton are typical of the type of hatred out there that needs to be opposed.

But let’s not pretend that we’re elevating Jews, or even Muslims, by attacking the pair of speakers.  Remember that the Christchurch shooter was motivated by hate speech and horrible rhetoric lambasting Muslims, not Chelsea Clinton.  I doubt his “manifesto” even mentioned her. Similarly, the synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh was not inspired by Muslims like Omar. Most of our efforts against the hate that leads to killings and massacres should be redirected elsewhere to be more effective.

The NYU student accusing Chelsea Clinton was a Bernie Sanders supporter. Though he’s under no such obligation, the Vermont senator might express his own opinions on the attacks of the daughter of his former primary opponent, a person his supporters accuse of “stealing” the primary election. Does he agree that her words were responsible for the attack? Probably not, but clearly someone’s not getting the message of “stop the hate.”

Omar needs to understand how her comments feed into the old Nazi stereotypes about Jewish money and get a chance to make amends. If she uses her position as a platform for continued anti-Jewish rhetoric, the party needs to think about who will be a better representative for the people of that district. Given that she apologized for her words, it’s a positive start.

But now we need those unloading on these two speakers to call out Islamophobia for what it is. It goes against American values. Left unchecked, such a tragedy like the one in New Zealand can and will be repeated in this country. It would be sad if we said nothing when there was a chance to do something positive.

Source: Opposing Anti-Semitism Is Great—But Don’t Forget Islamophobia

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Taking stock of Ottawa’s diversity promises

2019/03/27 Leave a comment

My latest in Policy Options:


Each of the mandate letters given to cabinet ministers by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over the past three years has included the following commitment: “You are expected to do your part to fulfill our government’s commitment to transparent, merit-based appointments, to help ensure gender parity and that Indigenous Canadians and minority groups are better reflected in positions of leadership.”

With three years of appointments under the Trudeau government’s belt, it’s possible to conduct an analysis of its record with respect to judicial, Governor-in-Council, deputy minister, head of mission and Senate appointments, using available data and public records.

The government has largely delivered on its commitment, but with mixed results on its promise to be more transparent on appointments…

Full article: Taking stock of Ottawa’s diversity promises

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ICYMI: Australia – Multicultural programs get $71m investment

2019/03/27 Leave a comment

In contrast to some of the anti-immigrant language and more restrictive immigration policies:

The federal government is putting $71 million towards ensuring multiculturalism blossoms across Australia.

Immigration Minister David Coleman announced the scheme on Wednesday as part of the government’s migration plan.

The money will go towards various programs to “promote, encourage, celebrate multicultural Australia”, the minister said.

Religious tolerance education charity Together for Humanity, chaired by retired teacher and former Liberal Party president Chris McDiven, will receive $2.2 million.

“It is so important as a society that we are cognisant and accepting of our differences,” Mr Coleman told reporters in Canberra.

“Religious freedom is so fundamental to this nation.”

Mr Coleman said $10 million will be provided to community languages schools, with grants of up to $25,000 on offer to help young Australians connect with cultures.

“It helps to enable them to learn more about the culture that maybe their parents or grandparents have come from,” the minister said.

“Of course, there are other kids who learn languages that are not their background culture but also enable them to learn more about the diversity of our nation.”

Source: Multicultural programs get $71m investment

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Douglas Todd: Offspring of Chinese and South Asian immigrants reaping high-skilled jobs

2019/03/26 Leave a comment

The overall national numbers somewhat amplify the differences between visible minorities and not visible minority given rural Canada is overall not visible minority, and where levels of university education are lower. However, even at the city level, the differences are significant in terms of income but with the same relative pattern of visible minority groups that are doing better compared to those that are not:

Second-generation immigrants are proving adept at moving into high-skilled careers in Canada.

The offspring of Chinese and South Asian immigrants, especially women, stand out for obtaining a much higher percentage of high-skill careers in Canada than the rest of the population.

A new Statistics Canada analysis reveals more than 40 per cent of second-generation Canadians of Chinese or South Asian background — the two largest minority groups in Canada — have found mid-career jobs in high-skill sectors.

That compares to less than 30 per cent of second-generation male Southeast Asian or white immigrants — and 20 per cent of white males whose parents are not immigrants. The study’s surprising, mixed results may cause some public-policy makers to re-think their traditional understanding of employment equity.

The StatsCan analysis, by Wen-Hao Chen and Feng Hou, shows children of nearly all immigrants are significantly more educated than their parents. And second-generation Chinese, South Asian, Japanese, Korean and West Asians are obtaining the highest proportion of university degrees and strongest percentage of jobs that rely on such educations.

But other second-generation immigrants — particularly Filipinos, blacks and Latin Americans — are not doing nearly so well at snagging high-skill jobs.

Neither are whites whose parents are not immigrants, whom the report refers to as “third-plus generation whites.” The StatsCan analysis did not include data on Indigenous people, who tend to score low on educational and labour rankings.

“Second-generation Chinese and South Asians, in particular, are over-represented in high-skill occupations relative to third-plus generation whites,” say Chen and Hou.

“About 40 per cent or more of second-generation Chinese, South Asians and West Asian or Arabs worked in high-skill occupations, compared with 20 per cent of men and 31 per cent of women among third-plus generation whites,” says their February study, titled Intergenerational Education Mobility and Labour Market Outcomes.

“The shares of second-generation Filipinos, Latin Americans and blacks working in high-skill occupations were similar to or smaller than those of third-plus generation whites,” said the report, noting that less than 22 per cent of Filipino, Latin American, black immigrants, or white males of Canadian-born parents, were employed in the high-skill sector.

Canadian women are in general doing better than men at obtaining high-skilled work.

Especially excelling are second-generation women of Chinese, South Asian and West Asian/Iranian origins. More than 43 per cent of women in these cohorts work at high-skilled jobs, compared to just 31 per cent of white women who are not the children of immigrants.

The StatsCan report, based on the 2016 census, defines high-skill occupations as those that generally require a university education, such as senior and middle management roles, as well as professions in business, finance, health, applied sciences, education, law, community services, arts and culture.

The report shows a strong link between obtaining a university degree and, before age 45, getting a high-skilled job. The exception was among Filipino, Latin American and black women, whom the report suggested may be vulnerable “to a certain degree of over-education.”

Table 4: Percentage of workers aged 25 to 44 in high-skill occupations among second-generation groups. (Source: Excerpt from Statistics Canada analysis.)

One of the paradoxical findings in the report is that there is not always a direct parallel between getting a university education, obtaining a high-skill job and achieving a strong salary.

“All second-generation groups, both men and women, had higher university completion rates than third-plus generation whites,” write Chen and Hou. Many of the minority cohorts had twice the university completion rate of whites whose parents are not immigrants.

Yet the veteran researchers found university-educated second-generation male Chinese and South Asians end up having roughly the same annual earnings — in the low-$60,000 range — as male whites whose parents have resided in the country for decades.

The levelling out of annual wages among the different ethnic and immigrants cohorts is partly owed to the way the Statistics Canada report tallies only people who obtain university degrees, not those who finish college or technical-school degrees or diplomas.

Chen and Hou note the children of the Canadian-born tend to go to colleges. Other demographers point to how white Canadian males are increasingly avoiding university and finding employment in the trades, such as plumbing, carpentry and electronics, which can often be well compensated compared to jobs in the arts, community and culture sectors.

One factor that might hold back some second-generation Canadians could be language. Chen and Hou suggest male offspring of Latin American and Southeast Asian immigrants end up earning less per year than most males, roughly $45,000 annually, in part because they tend not to speak English at home.

Women in general also earn less per year than most males, regardless of immigration status, according to the Statistics Canada analysis, which suggests that “discrimination” and “cultural factors” could be relevant in regards to the differences between male and female annual earnings.

All in all, data show offspring of immigrants are doing either decently or exceptionally in both higher education and the job market. And this StatsCan analysis of the 2016 census complicates the picture of who is flourishing and struggling in the Canadian workplace.

Source: Douglas Todd: Offspring of Chinese and South Asian immigrants reaping high-skilled jobs

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Conservative Universities and Intellectual Diversity

2019/03/25 Leave a comment

Some interesting reflections on academic freedom and constraints, along with the risks of further political and ideological separation:
“Academics, on average, lean to the left. A survey being released today suggests that they are moving even more in that direction,” began a study released in 2012. By 2014, another study reported, the ratio of liberals to conservatives among American college and university faculty was 6 to 1 nationwide, and 28 to 1 in New England. Still more recent research suggests that the overall national trend may be moving further to the left. As Samuel J. Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College recently learned, even just pointing out these tendencies can land you in troublewith students and peers.So if you’re a conservative scholar who cares about the American academy and wants to participate in it, what are you to do? One recent suggestion: Start your own university.

In National Affairs, Frederick M. Hess and Brendan Bell make the case for a new university hospitable to conservative thought:

What is needed, then, is a place where serious scholars can have the space to pursue questions and subjects that don’t fit the progressive orthodoxy at today’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. We need an incubator where promising young intellectuals could pursue their research without being forced to conform to the prevailing ideology, and where they can find the scaffolding—employment, funding, networks, and publication outlets—to enable them to achieve independent viability. What is needed is an ivory tower of our own.

Hess and Bell frame their proposal in largely constructive and unresentful ways. We might note that their express concern is not to enforce a conservative orthodoxy, but to free scholars from obeisance to a progressive one (“without being forced to conform to the prevailing ideology”). Later in the essay, they write, “Though there is no doubt that conservative thought is unwelcome in the academy, it is a mistake to imagine this is the product of a concerted, organized effort to expunge it. The issue is not one of conspiracy but a matter of rhythms, routines, and behaviors that add up to what those on the left might, in another context, term ‘implicit bias’ or ‘progressive privilege.’” The reluctance to invoke a vast left-wing conspiracy to explain the disparities is welcome, in the way that the reluctance to invoke vast conspiracies to explain anything is generally welcome.

And later still, they make an important distinction: “The aim is to create an incubator—not a sanctuary. Talented graduate students and junior faculty who might be marginalized elsewhere would have an opportunity to find accomplished senior colleagues eager and able to mentor them—allowing them to develop the kind of body of work that would give them a meaningful shot at success anywhere in academe. The goal is to spawn scholars and public thinkers equipped to thrive in other academic institutions and to contribute to the public discourse.”

What Hess and Bell are trying to do here is steer between the Scylla of being insufficiently different from existing universities and the Charybdis of imposing another set of political orthodoxies that merely mirror the existing ones. It’s not easy, and few conservative critics of the academy have managed it.

For instance, Warren Treadgold of St. Louis University recently published a book titled The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education, in which he called for a university that is “traditional in character but not specifically ‘conservative’ in politics”—which sounds good. And yet, in a recent blog post, Treadgold wrote about the need for such a new university to “hire the right people,” and described those people in this way: “From what I know of the best conservative scholars, if they were hired and supported at a leading conservative university, they would be delighted to produce research combating multiculturalism, radical feminism, identity studies, the diversity doctrine, the idealization of victimhood, socialism, sustainability, and postmodernism.” It’s hard for me to see how a university composed of such people would not be “specifically ‘conservative’ in politics,” though I suppose that would depend on how you define conservative.

But what I find more concerning about Treadgold’s model university is how self-consciously polemical he wants it to be, how strongly he wants it to define itself by what it opposes. He warns, in martial language, of “moderates afraid to combat the leftist ideas that have devastated higher education,” and avers that “only a conservative research university could free conservative scholars to combat leftist ideology.” I think Hess and Bell do a much better job of emphasizing what such a new university would be for: academic freedom, the freedom to explore potentially conservative ideas without fear of reprisals from the guardians of unwritten—and perhaps, these days, actually written—orthodoxies.

But as Peter Wood points out in the post to which Treadgold is replying in his post, it’s impossible, in the current climate, to pursue that kind of freedom in a non-polemical way. One cannot, in fact, steer between Scylla and Charybdis—one of them will get you. Wood agrees that “multiculturalism, radical feminism, identity studies, the diversity doctrine, the idealization of victimhood, socialism, sustainability, and postmodernism” are “forces that cannot be excluded by a university simply deciding that we won’t give those doctrines a place in the curriculum. Those doctrines will be imposed, welcome or not, if the university doesn’t make the decision from the outset to oppose them root and branch.”

But if a university decides ab initio to exclude such ideas, then what becomes of academic freedom? Wood clearly shows the double bind: “The new university will have to compromise its commitment to the liberal arts and open inquiry from the very start. It cannot be ‘open’ to the ideas that will destroy it. But if it is not open to those ideas, it cannot be a truly liberal institution.”My own conservative credentials are dubious enough that I might not be acceptable at such an institution—or so I think, living and working as I do in Texas. (On the other hand, if I were at Sarah Lawrence … let’s just say that at Sarah Lawrence I would be, as the saying goes, seen as rather to the right of Attila the Hun.) But I think I have some experience that might suggest a way out of the bind that Peter Wood has rightly identified.

That way out will require some conceptual adjustments, and a willingness to learn from institutions that have had to deal with similar issues. I am thinking of religiously based colleges and universities; I know something about them because I have worked for them all my adult life (after being educated in public institutions). The adjustments begin with reconsidering what we mean, in an academic context, when we talk about “freedom” and “openness.”

Often over the years, I have found myself quoting a passage from an essay by Stanley Fish titled “Vicki Frost Objects.” Fish, taking up his occasional role as legal scholar, was reflecting on a fundamentalist Christian who protested that her local public school was “indoctrinating” her children in secular thought. In the process of explaining why the usual way people think about this kind of conflict is wrong, Fish made a telling point:

What, after all, is the difference between a sectarian school which disallows challenges to the divinity of Christ and a so-called nonideological school which disallows discussion of the same question? In both contexts something goes without saying and something else cannot be said (Christ is not God or he is). There is of course a difference, not however between a closed environment and an open one but between environments that are differently closed.

What Fish helps us to see is that academic freedom is a concept relative to a given faculty member’s structures of belief. As someone who believes that Jesus is Lord, I feel very free when I’m teaching at schools that let me say that, even in class. If I were a socialist atheist, I might be rather uncomfortable. If I were a socialist atheist, Sarah Lawrence might be a better fit.

With respect to the issues under discussion here, the real difference between an explicitly Christian school such as the ones I’ve taught at, or a Jewish institution such as Yeshiva University, and a school such as Sarah Lawrence is this: The religious schools are explicit about their commitments; Sarah Lawrence isn’t. No Sarah Lawrence job announcement is likely to contain the sentence “Conservative Christians”—or Jews, or Muslims, or even atheists, probably—“need not apply.” But then, it doesn’t have to, does it? Especially after l’affaire Abrams.

The general conclusion to be drawn here is simple and straightforward: Academic freedom is always constrained in multiple ways. It is constrained by law; by a given discipline’s sense of its own professional standards and practices; by a given university’s sense of institutional mission. (This is one of the main reasons Jonathan Haidt’s straightforward contrast between two types of universities, Truth U and Social Justice U, doesn’t really match the conditions on the academic ground.)Fish’s point doesn’t render academic freedom illusory or insignificant—indeed, in my experience it has been vital, because at several points in my career, I have written essays that angered influential donors to the institutions where I worked, and if I had not had the protection of tenure, I might have lost my job. Or, more likely, if I had not had the protection of tenure then, fearful of reprisal, I wouldn’t have published those essays in the first place—even though I believed very strongly in what I wrote.

Nevertheless, academic freedom remains constrained. If you make social justice (as it is typically defined) a key component of your institutional mission, then you will deny employment to people who think social justice (as it is typically defined) is a load of hooey. And if, at the level of institutional mission, you think that social justice (as it is typically defined) is, if not necessarily a load of hooey, then at best a highly debatable concept, then you will deny employment to people who insist that they know what social justice is, that you can find it on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter feed, and that its core principles are not up for discussion.

There is, therefore, no need for people who want to found a conservative university to insist that their principles do not put them at odds with a commitment to academic freedom. Their principles, like those of every university, will require a partial and mission-limited commitment to academic freedom; they will differ from the Sarah Lawrences of the world not in that they have limits, but in their openness and honesty about those limits.

To be sure, those commitments create problems. What happens if someone hired to teach free-market economics at a conservative university reads Thomas Piketty and becomes a socialist? Presumably the same thing that happens to a professor at a Christian college who loses his faith in Jesus, or a professor of social justice who finds her eyes opened to new and different truths by a close reading of Atlas Shrugged. It’s a problem. But it’s a problem for all universities, not just conservative or Christian ones.

So the academic-freedom issue is something of a red herring. The larger issue that proponents of a conservative university must face is that of intellectual diversity. Were a few conservative universities to pop up, we might indeed see a net increase of intellectual diversity in American higher education taken as a whole, taken as a single entity. But we would surely get even less intellectual diversity than we currently have within any given institution. This would not be an altogether unappealing future for people, like me, whose stated positions on religious and cultural matters make them unemployable in perhaps 98 percent of American colleges and universities. But would it be good for the country as a whole?

It is easy to foresee, after this institutional fissiparousness, a future in which children attend ideologically monolithic high schools, pass from there to ideologically monolithic colleges, and afterward go on either to ideologically monolithic graduate programs or to ideologically monolithic workplaces. All of which would bring Americans several steps closer to a fundamental and permanent political separation. People would go through their lives never seriously confronting alternatives to their most cherished beliefs—and, yes, that happens all too often already, but that surely is no reason to press still harder on the accelerator that would take us to that particular future. One can see the appeal of a supposedly (though surely only temporarily) more peaceable future, but that would be a very sad way to see the American experiment come to an end.

Source: Conservative Universities and Intellectual Diversity

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Urback: If Trudeau takes his own advice, he will take a stand against Quebec’s religious symbols ban: Robyn Urback

2019/03/25 Leave a comment

Valid test:

October 2018 was less than two years after a madman named Alexandre Bissonnette opened fire in a Quebec mosque, killing six people. And October 2018 was the same month a gunman walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue and opened fire, killing 11. By that time, reported hate crimes in Canada had reached an all-time high, with every other week bringing a new report about hateful vandalism appearing in public spaces.

October 2018 was also the last time Prime Minister Justin Trudeau weighed in at length on the plan by Quebec Premier FrançoisLegault to implement a ban on religious symbols worn by public servants — a xenophobic dog whistle, for those trained to hear the call.

Not unlike the proposed “values charter” tabled by the Parti Québécois under Pauline Marois, Legault’s religious symbols ban will prohibit teachers and other provincially employed “authority figures” from wearing symbols of faith on the job.

While its defenders point out that the ban will apply to Christians as much as Muslims, Sikhs and Jews — though the crucifix hanging in Quebec’s National Assembly will stay in place, for now — the message is clear in the context of Quebec’s enduring anxieties over immigration and diversity. A province obsessed with maintaining its language and culture is not drawing up legislation to rid the public sector of tiny crosses worn around teachers’ necks.

So back in October, Trudeau issued a warning. When asked about Legault’s threat to use the charter’s notwithstanding clause to implement the ban, Trudeau said: “It’s not something that should be done lightly, because to remove or avoid defending the fundamental rights of Canadians, I think it’s something with which you have to pay careful attention.”

Trudeau also said, ostensibly in reference to clothing such as hijabs, that the state should not “tell a woman what she can or cannot wear.”

It was tepid language for a nakedly bigoted proposal — strikingly so, especially when viewed through the lens of today, after the monstrous act of violence and hatred carried out in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand.

The attack on two mosques there last Friday, which left 50 people dead and dozens more injured, struck a nerve globally in a way the Quebec mosque shooting simply did not. Perhaps it was because of the scale of the violence, or in part because the massacre was live streamed on social media, but the Christchurch attack appears to have catalyzed action worldwide.

Here in Canada, the response was swift. The Liberals on the Commons justice and human rights committee, which had been investigating the SNC-Lavalin affair, shut down its inquiry and took up an investigation on how to stem hate crimes in Canada. Cabinet ministers started showing up at mosques to demonstrate their solidarity with the Muslim community. And the prime minister delivered an impassioned 17-minute speech in the House of Commons about the need to speak out against hatred and discrimination.

“The problem is not only that politicians routinely fail to denounce this hatred — it’s that, in too many cases, they actively court those who spread it,” Trudeau said at one point, taking a not-so-subtle shot at Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer.

“To politicians and leaders around the world: the dog whistle politics, the ease with which certain people choose to adopt extremist ideology — it has to stop.”

Trudeau went on:

“Politicians stand around, and we offer our condolences, and we say nice things in the aftermath. We say that we’ll do better. We say that never again will such hatred be allowed to fester unchallenged. And then, when the flames die down, and the smoke clears, we look the other way.”

Not looking the other way

Legault has signalled he will table his religious symbols ban sometime this spring. If passed, it will essentially allow the state to discriminate against job applicants because of what they wear for their faith. Vigilante enforcement is sure to follow, given that the province says it will grandfather in workers who already wear religious symbols, though the public will have no way of knowing whether a hijab-wearing teacher, for example, has been granted an exception, or if she is breaking the rules.

So here is an opportunity for Trudeau to put his preaching into practice. It’s easy to call out hatred when it is blatant: an anti-Muslim screed on an online message board or a swastika painted on the side of a building. It is also easy to insist we must speak out against bigotry and xenophobia as general concepts, from a nonspecific source.

It is much more difficult, however, to call out dog whistles and subtle efforts at division and prejudice. Especially in an election year. Especially when it comes from Quebec.

I hold little hope that Scheer is capable of doing so; based on recent appearancesand performances, it’s likely he would short-circuit, smile awkwardly and later insist that he didn’t hear the question. But Trudeau stood in the House of Commons earlier this week and specifically called on politicians to own their influence.

To repeat Trudeau’s words: “Politicians stand around, and we offer our condolences, and we say nice things in the aftermath. We say that we’ll do better. We say that never again will such hatred be allowed to fester unchallenged. And then, when the flames die down, and the smoke clears, we look the other way.”

The flames may die down and the smoke clear by the time Legault tables his legislation. Trudeau’s message that politicians should not allow hatred to fester unchallenged is a necessary one. Yet his anemic response when the topic came up in October was the moral equivalent of looking the other way. In the aftermath of the New Zealand massacre, we should hope that he finally takes his own advice.

Source: If Trudeau takes his own advice, he will take a stand against Quebec’s religious symbols ban: Robyn Urback

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The White-Extinction Conspiracy Theory Is Bonkers

2019/03/22 1 Comment

Farhad Manjoo, who used to write on tech issues, takes down the “replacement” arguments:

“The Great Replacement” is a racist and misogynistic conspiracy theory that holds that white people face existential decline, even extinction, because of rising immigration in the West and falling birthrates among white women (caused, of course, by feminism).

That’s pretty much the whole argument; as a bit of rhetoric, the theory is about as deep as the one pushed by flat-earthers, though without that group’s scientific rigor. White people are not going extinct. As a group, they are only maybe, possibly, becoming a smaller share of the population in the United States and Europe — but how much smaller is a wide-open question among demographers, because the future is unknowable and demography is an imprecise science.

Demography is not destiny, either. Even if, several decades from now, whites do become a racial minority, they will not automatically lose much of their vast economic and political power, because this is America, where inequality is tolerated and an aggrieved and wealthy political minority can hold sway indefinitely, thanks to the Senate and the Electoral College.

But what “The Great Replacement” lacks in any factual basis it makes up for in digital branding appeal. The white-extinction theory plays well online. It has found its greatest purchase among a certain type of basement-dwelling incel edgelord, to whom it offers both an explanation for self-pitying personal circumstance and a set of convenient antagonists (roughly, the blame falls on race-betraying, sexually empowered women; immigrants; and the Jews said to control the whole system).

The theory has also found a foothold in more mainstream political circles. Donald Trump has flirted with Twitter users who espouse white-extinction theory, Tucker Carlson caresses it lovingly every now and then, and Steve King grabs it by the baby.

Still, to really pop, the theory needed a hashtag, something catchy. “White genocide” was one branding possibility, but that label has failed to take off — perhaps because a claim of “genocide” requires unmistakable mass death, and what we’re talking about here is gradual, peaceful demographic change. As one pseudonymous YouTuber who has made a fantastic video debunking the white-extinction theory notes tartly: “That’s white privilege for you: We even get the nice version of genocide.”

Enter “The Great Replacement.” For white supremacists, the new term offers several branding advantages. First, it sounds kinda smart. The phrase was coined in 2012, as “le grand remplacement,” by theFrench writer Renaud Camus, giving the whole movement a patina of ivory tower intellectualism. “Replacement” is also more polite than “genocide,” which fits with a long-term effort among white supremacists to craft a cleaner-cut image for themselves (that’s why the hipster new term for “white supremacist” is “identitarian,” though to me that sounds like a Brooklyn dietary preference.)

But for budding racist influencers, perhaps the best marketing feature of “the Great Replacement” is that it offered fantastic possibilities in search results. On Google and YouTube, there are not a lot of sites and videos tied to that keyword — and, in particular, there are not that many sources countering their arguments.

Which brings us to why I’m writing to debunk the theory now: when a man killed 50 people in a mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, last week, he called his loopy manifesto “The Great Replacement.”

“The attacker was structuring his manifesto not only to speak to audiences but to algorithms,” said Joan Donovan, director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard. “‘The Great Replacement’ is a ‘data void,’ in the sense that it would be very easy to capture that space on the front page of Google.”

Which is just what happened. After the shooting, Google searches for “great replacement” spiked. And although Google returns several skeptical articles and videos for the term, it also gives a lot of pro-conspiracy content — including, for much of the weekend, the shooter’s manifesto on the first page of search results.

Consider this column, then, an attempt to fill that data void. Research shows that when you present white people with facts that counter the white-extinction theory, they become less alarmed and anxious about demographic change.

So, to anyone who got to this piece after searching “great replacement,” here are some facts:

Racial categories are blurry, and there’s a big debate among demographers about how one of the fastest-growing racial groups — people of mixed-race who have one white parent — will identify in the future. It could be that they will not be thought of as “white.” It could also be that they will marry white people, have mostly white children, and generally become “absorbed” into mainstream white culture, which is what has happened with previous generations of immigrants who were not considered white (like Eastern and Southern Europeans). Under the most inclusive definitions of whiteness, America could remain a white-majority society indefinitely.

It’s true that there are some pernicious social problems affecting white Americans, among them a rise in death rates from drug overdoses and suicide, known as “deaths of despair.”

But these negative trends are not racially existential. Overall, across a range of health measures like infant mortality and life expectancy, white Americans are neither the least nor the most healthy Americans — they are somewhere in the middle. And white people are still by far the wealthiest Americans. The net worth of the median black American family is only around fifteen percent of that of the median white American family. While most other groups experienced a net decrease in wealth in the six years after the Great Recession, “white families’ net worth was essentially unchanged,” according to government surveys. Whites are also less likely than people of other races to live in poverty, and they are more likely to be among the superrich. Just about every American chief executive, billionaire and large political donor is a white person.

The current Congress is the most racially diverse in history — and about 8 of 10 members is white. Every single one of our 45 presidents has been a white man, except one, who was half white. By my count, there are now 17 candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination; 11 of them, or almost two-thirds, are white, including the two who have raised the most money so far.

Sure, white political overrepresentation is likely to fall. But not quickly, and not drastically. According to one projection, in the 2036 election, 59 percent of voters will be white.

The Great Replacement is a lie. The country is becoming more diverse, but white people are not losing their grip on America, nor on the world, not by a long shot.

Source: The White-Extinction Conspiracy Theory Is Bonkers

Filed under Multiculturalism

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