Munk spunk

Margaret Wente in today's Globe talks about her experience at a panel discussion on multiculturalism in Canada in light of the recent terrorism-related arrests in Toronto. I was in the audience at this event, held at University of Toronto's Munk Centre, and found it interesting and at times amusing. I am surprised to learn, from reading her article, that one of the people present in the audience who (if I remember correctly) angrily denounced the Munk Centre as a racist institution and, in Wente's words, labeled 'the entire proceedings as a racist exercise in colonialist discourse', is a Canada Research Chair in Social Justice and Cultural Studies. Whatever point he wanted to make was lost in his angry tirade and subsequent walkout without waiting to hear the panelists' response.

Nevertheless, Wente seems to be making a vast judgement when she concludes that students of cultural studies and social justice are wasting their money 'to learn that Western civilization is the root of all evil, and that the real oppressors of burka-clad women are people like [her].' No one likes being (unjustifiably) called a racist, but it's equally inane discrediting an entire profession or field of study on such grounds (even if she is deliberately exaggerating to make a point), although the fact that the guy in a 'tight T-shirt and long black dreads' was a well-established academic does add significantly to Wente's case.

Which brings me to the question of whether some of our academics and their institutions are indeed growing farther away from the realities of the day, whether they're stuck in outdated paradigms and excessive theorizing that has little actual import for the fields they're supposed to be addressing. Or whether academia and profession have become so compartmentalized that an expert from one area is unable to relate to arguments and visions of the other - where if one refuses to see anything but gender oppression in the burka, the other only sees cultural expression in the face of a different kind of oppression, and ne'er the twain shall meet.