Zero Tolerance: Hot Button Politics in Canada's Universities

George G. Ambury is an associate professor of adult education at
Queen’s University.

What is to be made of the current turmoil in and around Canada’s
universities? Peter Emberley, who envisions the university as an
institution that “serves society by offering it a higher idea of
itself and endowing it with decency and grace,” discerns a major
threat from the “corporate right” and others who see universities as
engines of economic growth. However, the author believes that the
university is also under siege by what he calls the “cultural
left”—the students and faculty who once fought for social justice
and equal opportunity for all, but who are now fighting

for their own communities and ideals. In response to the hot-button
politics seen in our universities, Emberley suggests hot-button
solutions, including abolition of tenure, greater emphasis on teaching,
development of univer-sity performance indicators, consideration of
tuition as a user fee, and a perspective that sees academic freedom as a
responsibility rather than as a right.

Emberley’s writing is powerful, his research is thorough, and his
arguments are passionately presented, The university could be imprisoned
from without or eviscerated from within; Emberley sees the solution not
in a middle ground but in a higher one.