What Is the Role of a University?
While many organizations are rightly preoccupied these days with issues of diversity, inclusiveness, and cultural sensitivity, universities should not lose sight of their primary raison d’être. They exist to educate students. To impart knowledge and expertise. To encourage critical thinking (which means exposure to differing points of view). To provide an atmosphere in which students develop an interest in learning that will remain and grow after any particular course or degree. Yet this teaching assistant was told that she should have prefaced the video by cautioning students that its content was offensive and that Professor Pederson’s point of view was wrong.
The stance taken by the Laurier staff involved is preposterous, harmful, and completely contrary to the role a university should play. One of the challenges we face today is increasing polarization. Traditional news sources are attacked and undermined and young people (especially) rely on social media for information. There is a growing tendency for people to turn to sources of information that will tell them what they want to hear. There is a growing intolerance for opposing points of view. Civilized debate has all but disappeared and those who try to present an alternative perspective usually face a personal attack rather than a reasoned rebuttal.
To arrest this worrying trend, we need an educational system that instills in students inquisitive minds, minds open to a variety of views and willing to consider the merits of those other views. For Laurier staff to tell the teaching assistant that she should have begun by telling the students that one of the viewpoints in the video was wrong (before they even had a chance to hear it) makes a mockery of the educational process. One can only hope that the university’s about face on this matter is sincere and not just damage control in the face of the backlash that developed after the teaching assistant’s tape of the meeting with her inquisitors became public.