Ideas - 33 years of the campus free speech controversy

Episode Date: October 27, 2025

In the early 1990s, “woke” was "politically correct," "DEI" was known as "affirmative action,” and the term “cancel culture” had yet to be coined. The language was different, but the controversies of today were just beginning. In a 1992 episode of IDEAS, journalist Linda Frum took on the issue of free speech on campus. With notable guests like Dinesh D’Souza and Alan Borovoy, the episode tackled the issue of speech codes, tokenization, victimhood, and a culture of victimhood on Canadian campuses. We revisit this documentary, to see what’s changed, what’s the same, and whether the pendulum is swinging again. We'd love your feedback. Please fill out our listener survey.

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Book at Spexavers.cavers.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. I'm Lister Sinclair, and this is Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayat. This year marks the 60th anniversary of ideas. Roughly 120 episodes a year for 60 years, that's about 7,200 hours of curiosity, criticism, and contemplation. This program has covered a lot, the ebbs and flows of social movements, political thought, and current affairs.

In this episode, we'll revisit a past show, one that's still relevant today. So come with me. Back to the 1990s. Okay, perfect. It's been a long time since I've had that feeling. I could love someone. In 1992, Celine Dion was topping charts, basic instinct was in theaters, and Melrose's place had ever.

Everyone talking at the water cooler. Everything has become a political issue. The clothes you put on, the tuna fish that you eat, the movie that you go to, the words you use to describe the people around you, all of them have become political issues. Meanwhile, on university campuses across Canada and the United States, an unfamiliar phenomenon was unfolding. Something that came to be known broadly as, political correctness, and ideas was on it.

It's about the politics of affirmative action, speech codes, equity rules, and cultural appropriation. All these issues pit the special interests of one group against others. Thirty years before wokeness became an epithet, before the battle over DEI policies, before anyone spoke of cancel culture, the media was seized by what was disliked. describe then as a culture of victimhood on university campuses. People whose ancestors were treated unfairly and who perceive themselves to be relatively powerless are demanding that the scales of justice be rebalanced. The real problem is that American students and people in general are starting to talk

about some of the contradictions of racial preference are beginning to ask why it's all right on campus to have an all-black fraternity or sorority, whereas it would be an outrage and unthinkable to set up in all-white fraternity or sorority. I know people teaching family law who have been attacked simply because they describe the history of the way women were treated. How far are we going to go in exactly what sort of rights are we prepared to suspend in order to create this paradise on earth? Those questions were asked on this program in 1992.

The tone and the language has changed. But the controversies have not. In this episode, we'll revisit this archived edition of ideas and find out what's changed and what hasn't three decades later. Ideas producer Matthew Lazyz and Ryder is here. He's been digging around in those vast archives of the show. Hello, Matthew. Hi, Nala.

We're trying something new here for our 60th birthday. Yes. The concept we're going with is an idea is time. capsule. So episodes that captured a particular moment or flashpoint in the past, which have a renewed relevance to something going on right now. And so the flashpoint we're talking about in this case was campus politics. Yes. So the most recent version of this is starting in 2015 or so, concern and conflict over issues of free speech and inclusion on campus began heating up like they hadn't since the early 1990s. For example, in Canada, it was in 2016 that U of T-Proff

Jordan Peterson rose to prominence with his public opposition to using other people's preferred pronouns, which led to protests on campus in support of and against Peterson in a conflict often framed in terms of free speech. Deplatforming became a word as there was intense media interest in the backlash to various guest speakers on campus in the U.S. That was figures like Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh and Charlie Kirk and others. And over the past few years, it's increasingly become a political issue, perhaps more so today than in the 1990s. So academic diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, or DEI, are in huge political

conflict at the moment in the U.S. and Canada. U.S. President Trump is pressuring universities to remove their DEI policies. And in Canada, conservative leader Pierre Pahliav has vowed to cancel research funding for what he calls woke academic research. So this thing from the 1990s all of a sudden has pretty renewed relevance to us right now. And I have to say, I'm dating myself here, but I do remember those days in the 90s. So the terminology has changed from back then. it was, you know, politically correct, is now woke. Affirmative action is DEI. What is it that we get out of listening to this archive episode? The first is that I think it's very revealing in a way how little progress we've made. And I don't necessarily mean that in a kind of capital P progressive way, but that we can't seem to free ourselves of certain debates that haunt us. The essence of conflicts often stay the same, even if they're reframed.

and repurposed and weaponized over time, and as you said, the language and the insults that are thrown back and forth are different. It's also just kind of awfully entertaining with the distance of time to hear how the media used to cover an issue that we're all still familiar with today. It lets you kind of think, what sorts of talking points do we hear today that in 10, 20, 30 years will sound dated and passe. So the idea here is we listen to parts of an old episode, add some fresh context, and get a little insight into where the conversation is today. Okay, let's do it. So this episode was originally called Special Interests, and it was produced by then journalist and author Linda Frum, who was daughter of Barbara

from. Yes, Barbara, of course, the much beloved and long-term host of As It Happens and the journal on CBC. Linda went on to become a senator. She was appointed to the Senate by Stephen Harper in 2009 and served until 2021. She was recently appointed chair of an organization called the UN Watch, which is an NGO that critiques and provides testimony at UN hearings. And they particularly focus on anti-Semitism and what the organization sees as an anti-Israel bias. This episode, like some ideas episodes today, definitely has a perspective from chose to focus on the people sort of raising the alarm, as it were, about what these trends might mean for society. It's the old canary in the coal mine treatment. In some places, it feels understandably dated. Other times,

feels very current. And I have a feeling that some listeners will find the way the show covered these issues objectionable by today's standards. And others will feel like it really nailed it back then and today, maybe. Okay. Well, let's have a listen. From Thursday, April 9th of 1992, here's part of special interests. Anybody who spends time on a campus these days is bound to notice it's not paradise yet. But lots of people think they know why that is and what to do about it, starting by eliminating sexism and racism.

I'm certainly not saying that racism, sexism, and a host of other ugly is. don't exist both on campus and off. They do. But what's to account for so many men and women wanting to identify themselves as the victims of one sort of hardship or another? People see themselves not only as victims of racism,

sexism and sexual puritanism, but also bad parenting, bad politicians, the beauty myth, wasp men, wasp women, the tobacco companies, twinkies, insensitive textbooks, PMS, and probably even the phone company. phone company. I'm going to be talking with people tonight about the fallout from this, the threat of anti-free speech codes, especially at universities, and about the moral censure

directed at people who presume to discuss the historical or emotional experiences of others. The activists on campus are not the numerical majority, but they are the moral majority. By this I mean that although relatively few in number, they exercise a powerful moral claim on the rest of the campus, particularly on the grumpy and queasy liberal majority. The liberal majority is very eager to do right by minority students, to atone for past injustices, and is willing to bend over backwards to accommodate the political activists. The activists are also very effective at silencing any dissent by branding it as bigotry.

This is Dinesh D'Souza, whose book called Illiberal Education is about the politics of race and sex on campus. DeSouza was born in India and now works at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. One of the stories he tells in a liberal education illustrates how special interests are influencing the intellectual environment on campus today.

At Harvard University, Professor Stephen Thornstrom teaches a course on race relations, together with a very distinguished historian and Bernard Baylon. Both of them are social Democrats, politically speaking, liberal, mealierist in their views, and Professor Thuronstrom had complaints filed against him with Harvard's racial harassment committee. He was accused of verbal offenses. For example, he had apparently not used the politically correct term Native Americans, but had referred instead to American Indians. He had also discussed the problem of poverty as partly caused by the breakdown of the black family.

And he was said to have stigmatized and insulted black families. And finally, perhaps most egregiously, he had defined affirmative action as, quote, preferential treatment for minorities. Now, anyone who's familiar with these policies knows that that's a fairly clinically accurate description of how the programs work. And yet, minority kids in the class said, Professor Thurndstrom is implying that we're not qualified. We don't deserve to be here. How dare he say that? And they filed complaints, which resulted in a public vilification of Professor Thurndstrom, and the administration far from coming to the defense of his academic freedom, instead issued an open letter to the community that essentially said that people

like Professor Thurndstrom should be very careful about what they say in class so that they avoid giving any offense to victimize groups in the classroom? I wrote down from your book the definition that Harvard has for their procedures for dealing with concerns of racial harassment. And that concerns anything. It's an offense consisting of any actions or words which cause another individual or group to feel demeaned or abused because of their racial or ethnic background. And of course, this brings to question, just like you've given this example, of who's to say? what a racial slur is, whose definition is it, and who has the moral authority decide who's

at fault? I'm not a free speech absolutist, and I'm not arguing that one should be able to say anything you want, at any time you want, wherever you want, on a campus. If a university code, particularly at a private college, were to say, students shall not yell racial epithets at each other, period. End of code. That might be able to say, command my support. But that's not the problem. There's no epidemic of hundreds of thousands of American students doing this. The real problem is that American students and people in general are starting to talk about some of the contradictions of racial preference, or are starting to notice the widespread existence of racial separatism, are beginning to ask why it's all right

on campus to have an all-black fraternity or sorority, whereas it would be an outrage and unthinkable to set up an all-white fraternity or sorority. These questions, which are uncomfortable, are nevertheless legitimate and need to be debated and cannot be settled through censorship. So I think that the universities are using the argument about hate speech to outlaw what is essentially proper and legitimate discussion on topics surrounding ethnicity and gender and sexual orientation. Alan Borvoi is the General Counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

I think we can all envision some kind of speech that is unacceptable in a campus setting, in the sense that it renders the educational enterprise unable to function properly. I think an example of that, if I could say harassment for those purposes means pestering, hectoring, taunting, besetting. if it's seen as a synonym for words like that, I think we can all imagine situations where that would be unacceptable. But then the thing that I ask is, why then limit it, why limit unacceptable pestering of people to the categories of race and gender and sexual orientation? If there is unacceptable pestering, you can pester people for all sorts of reasons and it could become unacceptable.

The moment you attach these categories to it, what I'm worried about is you convey a message to the members of the campus that there are certain taboo areas for discussion. And that, of course, a university should not be caught doing. Dinesh D'Souza. I think that sensitivity is clearly a virtue, although it's a little hard.

to enforce it. It's a little hard to coerce it. At the University of Michigan, for example, a student was hauled before a disciplinary committee and accused of making derisive remarks about homosexuality. The student pleaded guilty and said that he was opposed to homosexuality, whether on aesthetic or moral grounds, I don't know. The university said, you are insensitive and your punishment is to write a forced apology titled Learned My Lesson, which we will publish in the campus newspaper, and we want you to attend sensitivity or consciousness-raising sessions to transform your unenlightened point of view. Now, here's a subject which is controversial, which should be discussed, I think, in a sensible way. But instead of having the discussion by seeking to persuade, the university is doing so by,

imposing force. And I think it's not hard to predict that this student is likely to become more reified, more solid, more unflinching in his private views, even though he might concede in public. So you really achieve nothing in terms of really transforming one's point of view. Alan Boravoy. I have long believed that if you hear somebody come out with some racist invective, you ought to respond to it or sexist invective. or homophobic stuff. In other words, as a moral proposition, we ought not to appear to tolerate what is really genuinely offensive speech.

Now, of course, since I realize that our various tolerance levels are different, the problem is translating what might be morally impermissible to what you make legally impermissible. And at that stage, that's where we have the problem. But there is this growing wave of moral coercion and moral censorship, specifically on campus, where a professor may not be prohibited legally from saying things, but if he has a center of all his students and the student press and the student press and the university administration, that that is pretty severe pressure. I don't have as much difficulty with pressure as I do with coercion.

In short, there is nothing wrong with people criticizing each other. Now, you may be bothered, and I might even be bothered by some of the excesses to which that goes. I can object to that. I can criticize that. In my view, so should the professor. But we can't give people a sanctuary that immunizes them from criticism. What we can do, I think, is try to establish

a situation where you will not be legally punished. They won't face employment discipline for it or students won't be expelled for it. But the fact that people have to answer to other people for their expressions, I can't protect people against that, even as I recognize that some of that could be excessive. But their response to excessive criticism, I would think, is legitimate counter-criticism. In other words, it's all open for debate.

That's what a university, in my view, is supposed to be about. Nala, that's Alan Borrevoy, Toronto Lawyer and Civil Libertarian, General Counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and Officer of the Order of Canada, who passed away in 2015. So the controversy over diversity and free speech on campus hasn't gone away. So what has changed? In other words, Matthew, what can we actually glean by government? going back 33 years. So I had someone listen to this episode for their thoughts. I spoke with Dax Derazio. He's a postdoc fellow at the University of Guelph.

He studies free speech issues broadly, but has a particular interest in campus speech controversies. And also sort of the history of these kinds of controversies, dating back to the 1990s and the 1960s before that. So here's Dax with a little bit more of the political context of the time. The 1990s is one of those major flashpoints looking at the history of freedom of expression on university campuses where you had this almost moral panic related to political correctness. A lot of that had to do with an importation of what was happening in the United States

at the time. So on university campuses, there were speech codes that cropped up at university on university campuses. A major one was at the University of Michigan that was found unconstitutional in a seminal or landmark legal case and subsequently similar speech codes fell like dominoes across the United States. Some of that had trickled into Canada around the same time. And so that was one of the major things that stood out. A lot of this reflects American culture and American politics and Canadians are kind of picking up on it. It was also interesting to think about some of the cast of characters that were interviewed for the segment. So, like Alan Borrevoy is really well known for anybody that studies human rights in Canada. Sadly is no longer with us. And

Dinesh D'Souza obviously went on to have an illustrious career as an American, sort of shock and awe culture warrior, at least towards a later stages of his career. The arguments from the right and conservatives have more or less stayed the same for that entire time. But when you look on the left, I think the left and progressives, the arguments, that are being made about this stuff has changed immensely. And the major change that I see is that whether you want to call it a small L liberal approach or a progressive civil libertarian approach, the idea that you need to defend peoples' right to freedom of expression, even when they express things that are

potentially harmful as a matter of principle, that specific position has waned, I think, over time. You know, Alan Borrevoy used to have a really interesting way of describing this. He would describe freedom of expression as something like a strategic right in that you can take away all of my rights except freedom of expression because if you leave me with freedom of expression, I can get all my other rights back. And that's a really powerful way of describing the importance of freedom of expression. But I think that's less persuasive now than ever.

at least for people on the left and for progressives. And there are a whole bunch of reasons for that. A huge one is just that our communication environment is just so saturated with public relations and propaganda and misinformation and misinformation and hate speech, especially online spaces, have just become incredibly toxic as time goes on. And so the dominant civil libertarian paradigm or approach, that the way that you combat harmful expression is just by having more and better expression just seems ridiculous to people that have, you know, grown up in the last two or three decades. That just seems wrong, that this idea that the marketplace of ideas will naturally allow the best ideas to float to the top and the worst and harmful ones to sink to the bottom.

That general principle, just defending expression that is harmful, it's perceived as untenable much more now than it has been in the past. And according to Dax Nala, all of these same concerns are floated today, usually under the banner of the campus free speech crisis, that students are afraid to say what they really want to say, and that heterodox or conservative opinions are unwelcome. And Dax says in the intervening years, there have been two primary reasons, two frameworks pitched by both academics and commentators,

about why this atmosphere might exist. And I should say Dax finds both of these frameworks a bit unsatisfying, but he calls the two explanations the Snowflake Thesis and the Backlash Thesis. The first is, I think, the dominant framework, and that is what I call the Snowflake Thesis, and that's driven primarily by these really high-profile controversies that people will read about in the media American and Canadian, in which they get the sense that contemporary university students are increasingly

intolerant of differing opinions and also censorious, but also just intellectually and emotionally fragile. So it's not even that they're allergic to things that they disagree with, but they're also so emotionally and psychologically fragile that if they're exposed to contrary or difficult or challenging ideas and opinions, that it actually might do them some form of harm. So that's the Snowflake thesis. I guess the counter narrative or the counter concept, and I term this the backlash thesis, which is we have universities becoming much more epistemologically and demographically diverse. So new and different people are coming into the university as it becomes much more important

and there's much more space. It's just much more accessible. Those that adopt this framework are essentially arguing that concerns about freedom of expression are really masking a backlash to increase diversity on campus, where you used to be able to say things that you're not able to now. There's no social license associated with certain things he might be able to say. So if you're concerned about freedom of expression, it's really about who gets to speak on campus. and wanting to privilege certain voices over others. So what I'm now curious about is what does Dax think about the state of free speech on campus today?

Well, to offer a counterpoint to Dinesh D'Souza there, Dax feels that although there have been big headline-grabbing events over the years, involving speakers, clubs, and demonstrations on campus, claims today of a crisis of free speech don't actually match the experience of most people going to university today. What we tend to do is look at things anecdotally and much of our perception or the public perception of what happens on campus is really driven by the exception rather than the norm. So if controversial pundit X wants to speak on campus and gets shut down by,

giant angry mob. That will be front page news the next day. And Dax isn't saying there aren't issues. Sometimes things occur that are, to be blunt, pretty questionable when it comes to free speech on campus. So, for instance, earlier this year in March of 2025, the student union at UBC Okanagan here in B.C., refused to approve a student conservative party club saying the existence of that club might make black or LGBTQ people feel unwelcome. That decision was quickly reversed. What DAC says is more common is kind of small scale worries from students about sharing their beliefs or opinions at all. I had a student approach me within the last few years and they were very, very quiet in the classrooms, although they were never the most vocal, but they said to me, you know,

I am having a really hard time participating in the discussions in the politics courses that I'm taking at this university. And I don't know what to do. And so I'm looking for advice. And I said, well, what are these things that you would like to say? And he said, well, you know, I don't think that President Trump is the worst president in the world. And I think he's actually done some positive things.

And the rest of my peers and my colleagues, if I were to be. voice that opinion, um, they would ridicule me. They might not necessarily say that I'm a bad person, but they would basically just ridicule me in a sort of elitist or snobbish way. And, you know, that was a really challenging experience as an educator, um, to have to figure out, okay, if we are trying to make our classrooms as open and as equal as possible so that everybody feels comfortable expressing themselves, you need to have a pretty wide, if not all-encompassing view of the range of opinions and ideas and approaches that people are going to inject your classroom with. And so that was a pedagogical challenge.

I had to navigate that. And I've had other experiences where people from a completely different political persuasion will say the complete opposite. And that's just a balancing act that educators in the contemporary moment have to engage in almost on a daily basis, especially if you're studying or teaching politics right now. If anything, their problem isn't that students are making, you know, really wildly inaccurate or offensive claims and statements in class. It's just that they want to get them motivated just in general. They would be happy just to have lots of students engaging in debate

and discussion in their classrooms. It's not, the debate is not whether or not undergraduate students are saying, quote unquote, the right things. It's just getting them to speak and be confident and persuasive in their opinions at all. You're listening to a special time capsule edition of Ideas, featuring an episode from 1992 called Special Interests, all about speech, inclusion, and politics on campus. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers.

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is about the politics of affirmative action policies, speech codes, equity rules, and cultural. appropriation. A little Lister Sinclair there for you, Nala. What a joy to hear his voice again. Mm-hmm. What else are we going to hear from the show? So younger people out there today might not know just how intense the discussions around so-called political correctness were in the early 90s. Sort of the way people kick around wokeness today is pretty much in line. And this episode in 1992 really captured the political correctness panic in the upswing.

So according to Google Books Ngram, which is this engine that searches a huge corpus of texts and newspapers, use of the term political correctness was pretty low until 1990 and then started a rapid rise peaking first in 1997. So this episode was really early in that process. So here's an interview from the episode with a guy named Henry Allen. He was a columnist with the Washington Post and an early decryer of. political correctness. What I've written about is the politics of everything, that everything has become a political issue, the clothes you put on, the tuna fish that you eat,

the movie that you go to, the words you use to describe the people around you, all of them have become political issues, and if you are not on the right side of that political issue, a finger gets pointed. Now, in fact, this took on comic proportions, at the re-release of Walt Disney's Fantasia. Ah, yeah.

What was it? They had the dieters objecting to the hippos and the two-toes, and conservationists were worried about the waste of water and the sorcerer's apprentice, and fundamentalist Christians were upset about the depiction of evolution in the right of spring, on and on. Are these people serious? Well, I think they are.

What you see is things getting broken down finer and finer. It's kind of niche market ideology. It's the boutiquing of politics. And one interest group starts bumping into another interest group. But at heart, it seems to involve a rather profound selfishness, doesn't it? How so? Because it's people saying, I want something, and I am going to yell at you until you give it to me. I suppose at the heart of this struggle is an American belief that we can work towards a perfect world.

Well, sure. That's what the Puritans were all about, right? We were going to build the New Jerusalem, the city on the hill. And it was the heritage of the Puritans and the Quakers, too, is one which is very strong, particularly in the intellectual community, whether these people are Puritans, Quakers, congregation, let's choose, whatever. Still, that way of thinking about things is very popular in this country. We refuse to believe we cannot make things perfect, and we pay the price for it. Now, again, in the zeal to make things perfect, there's been a great contortion of language as well.

I think it's essentially a magical belief that if you come up with a new name for something, you'll change its reality. and so if we call someone physically disadvantaged instead of handicapped, which was instead of crippled, well, then somehow it will change their condition. Well, the problem is that the condition doesn't change. Now, someone would say, having heard that, that you're a very insensitive person.

They would say that I'm an insensitive person. Right, for not wanting to bring your language up to speed to be as sensitive as possible. Yeah, well, or dumb, one of the other, because it's so hard to keep track of them all. At least it is for me, because they change almost daily. For instance, we're in a little problem now where the phrase people of color is being used,

but you dare not say colored people. And because, well, you know, this does have some justification. old terms for oppressed minorities get linked with that stage of oppression they were in when those terms were used. And in hopes of believing about themselves that they have transformed themselves, that they are what the communists used to call the new man, that they have rebuilt their society. Well, we have to change the name of it, don't we? It only seems appropriate. it. So it's a little bit of psychological pump priming that goes on with this.

Now, on this topic, do you have any predictions about the future of the Atlanta Braves' Tomahawk Chop? Ah, you know, that's very interesting because here in Washington, we have the Washington Redskins, too. And we have the mascot as a man dressed up as an Indian feathered headdress and so on. It happens to be a black man dressed up as an Indian, and it could get very touchy. It's very hard to see where we're going to draw the line. It should be noted that Washington does not have that team name anymore. No, since 2022, they are the Washington commanders,

and the status of the Tomahawk chop. is more complicated. It's still performed by fans at Braves games, but the club no longer promotes it by either playing the accompanying song and handing out those foam tomahawks. But no, it is the Washington

commanders now. But there is a little fun story behind Ms. Frum's big question to Henry Allen there, that are these people serious in response to complaints to the re-release of Disney's Fantasia? The question did sound very skeptical.

And she was right to be. So I was interested in that story, that idea that the re-release of Fantasia set off a chain reaction of protests. And I went back to some old newspaper reporting. And yes, so papers from the Washington Post to the Ottawa citizen and the Toronto Star ran columns decrying the politically correct mobs who'd find offense in any little thing because of using the re-release of Fantasia as an example. And for years afterward, columnists would reference the Fantasia incident as proof that political correctness was getting out of control. And so I tried to find the actual source of these complaints. Like what happened when Fantasia was re-released? Who were these protest groups?

And I found that it all leads back to one. Yes, one protest in San Francisco outside a movie theater in 1991. It was reported on by local media, then picked up by national newspapers, by Time magazine, into Henry Allen's column, onto CBC Radio and TV networks and other radio stations and TV stations all over the world. Incredible. One protest. And who was the group behind it? Well, ostensibly, the group was called Cafe, the Coalition Against Fantasia's Exhibition. The Coalition consisting of a network of smaller groups, one called Spasm, which is sensitive parents against scary movies, and another called the Bay Area Drought Relief Alliance Party or Bad Rap, which was opposed to the water wastage in the big magic dancing mop scene

and the aforementioned dieters United who objected to the hippos in tutus. So I'm sorry. So they were for real? No, no. It turns out it was all a prank from a San Francisco colloquy. collective called the Cacophony Society, whose members included Fight Club author Chuck Pallaniuk and who had a hand in creating Burning Man, the annual Weirdo Desert Festival. And the point of their protest in, or their fake protest in 1991, was not to lampoon political correctness or identity

politics, but to show how easily the media could be manipulated and weaponized, and man, were they successful. Unbelievable. What a fascinating detour. But should we get back to campus? Okay. Yes. Back to campus. Another part of the original ideas program deals with gender and racial equity. So we'll hear from two profs here, one from Osgood Hall Law School at York and the other from the Ontario College of Art with a brief interlude from civil libertarian Alan Boravoy. Until recently, there were many more men in the Canadian workforce than women. So in many workplaces, men outnumber women. At the Ontario College of Art, they decided in 1990 to fix this.

After considerable debate, the college decided to hire only women into vacant jobs until the year 2000. I'm the chairman of the Fine Arts Department at OCA, and I've been teaching there for about 17 years. years. Now, you were part of a coalition that objected to the policy. Can you explain what your objections were? I was part of the coalition not to object employment equity at OCA, but rather as OCA to take it a step further, not to miss other target groups, because in phase one, it was just directed to women only for 10 years. So if we can just make this clear then, the idea was that any retirement position that came up between now and the year 2000 would

automatically go to a woman only a woman only and I think the people who actually suffer who actually victims of the system at this point anyway would be your young white male artists and their family and their children and maybe students too well there is a feeling that if a young Leonardo da Vinci or Caravaggio walked into OCA and said, I'd like a job that he would be turned away. Not only Leonardo da Vinci or Carvaccio would turn away, even if I, a Chinese male or Japanese male or black male

or male of any other ethnic group at this point would be turned away. Do you think that a fair hiring policy could include an interest in sex or race? I think society will always have to provide some kind of legislation and say this is fair. It may be fair for a little while. Then it may not be fair much later. And I think the policy at OCA right now, I would say it's fair. It's just hire women until we make up the balance.

But to continue for 10 years, I would say it's not fair. The challenge, of course, is to accelerate. the pace of job equity for those who have been most victimized. But the problem is that simultaneously we have to ensure that blameless individuals who are not members of the target groups are not made to suffer for sins they have not committed. This is Civil Liberties lawyer Alan Boravoy. The groups we're talking about in the case of women, visible minorities and Aboriginal people, they have put up with a lot of disgraceful discrimination in our society and

that anger is fully understandable. In our view must be, however, that we must not let that anger become the primary basis for social policy. We must not let it be translated into unfair discrimination against individuals who haven't done anything wrong themselves. And that's why, of course, from our standpoint, we have labored so hard on trying to develop affirmative action programs that will still be fair to individuals from the non-target groups even as it proposed.

promotes special measures to recruit and promote people from the target groups. What you are getting is a push for reversing things. The target groups we're talking about, if we are talking about women and racial minorities and the like, those groups are still very much the dispossessed in our society. And it does make sense to try to redress that dispossession. Now as we do it, there are proposals made and programs adopted in various places that are doing it the wrong way, that are committing excesses, and I think it behooves sensible Democrats to resist those too.

So in some ways it was ever thus. If I can go back to the McCarthy period, it was sensible to fight Joe McCarthy, but that never made the communists into heroes just because they were the ostensible target of his activity. Sensible Democrats had to oppose both, and I suggest to you that in today's society, sensible Democrats should be fighting hard to redress the disadvantage suffered by the disadvantaged groups and simultaneously fighting hard to make sure that the machinery we use to do it does not commit other unfairnesses and create other risks that we won't be happy with. Osgood has always been sort of in the forefront of trouble that if you

you have a hard institution, which is known to be right wing, the radicals or the people with ideas won't tackle it. They tackle soft institutions. Oswald's always being soft. I know people in family teaching family law who have been attacked simply because they describe the history of the way women were treated in the 18th century. Well, I just find that ridiculous, that you can't say, did you know that when a woman married a guy, she lost all the property? I mean, it's ridiculous to say that you can't say those things and you're being sexist. But some of the, what I'd call rather badly read, ahistorical people, say that to teachers. And you say, you haven't got any right to raise that. You should be talking about the future and radical

changes for the future where women wear the pants or whatever they think they should say. Now, in criminal, the major area of interest is sexual assault. I think the sad thing is that it's been self-censorship. People have just stopped teaching about it. They don't need their hassle, because whatever they said was wrong, they being males. A little bit more of a free speech and class angle at the end there, Nala, but those were some of the conversations about equity, particularly gender. equity taking place in 1992.

Listening to that Osgood professor, you can really hear the beginnings of the free speech on campus debate, the idea that some topics are too risky to even teach in the classroom. Yeah, and in a pretty brusque way there, I should acknowledge. Also, the comments from the OCA prof, which is now OCAD, that some equity programs actually discriminate against ethnic groups, that still has. echoes today. So, for example, there was a hugely controversial ruling in 2023 from the U.S. Supreme Court, which found that Harvard University's practice of considering racial diversity in admissions violated the Constitution and

effectively discriminated against Asian Americans. And also in the U.S., the Trump administration is pushing really hard against diversity targets in university admissions. Yes, so the compact. The compact is a letter to several universities from the Trump administration offering access to federal funding only if, among other things, those universities stop considering sex, ethnicity, and other identity factors in admissions or hiring. And several of the universities have already rejected the offer, saying it violates principles of autonomy and academic freedom, and argue that admissions and hiring would be less meritorious if they followed those rules. I'd like to bring back Dax DeRazio for a second, the postdoc fellow at

Guelph, who studies the long history of campus debates like this to offer a counterpoint, especially to that last speaker. So he feels over time that we've lost an appreciation about why those diversity policies were introduced to begin with. Universities, including Canadian universities, were very monocultural for the longest time, just reflecting demographic trends in Canada. And then also, you know, universities were not always the most hospitable places for those that were different. And following the boom of the higher education sector in Canada, in the 1960s, we have, you know, massive growth in undergraduate student enrollment, massive growth in the number of spaces for undergraduates, massive growth in the number of universities in Canada.

you have this huge influx and you have the entrance of different people. I mean, women is the is the most obvious example and really relevant here because we had employment equity standards that came in in the 1980s. That was a huge game changer for universities. And so it was no longer possible to discriminate in an employment context based on somebody's sex. And that led to a, you know, vastly different employment equity scenarios on university campuses. I come from political science. and mostly from political theory and philosophy.

And if you just look at the history of political theory and philosophy, it's obviously dominated by men. And following the 1960s and also before as well, but I think most of this accelerated in the 1960s as a result of social movements and greater societal consciousness about women's place in the academy and being a valued participant and contributor to knowledge, you see, say, women political theorists and philosophers asking different questions coming at timeless questions from different vantage points.

And so it really wasn't additive to those disciplines, but it wasn't as if they were invited in the door in order to have those conversations and contribute to knowledge production. It took several generations of sometimes agitation. And so you see this replicated with a bunch of other different identity categories as well, within the university. And so one of the constant critiques of this idea that there's a crisis on campus is that this is just a form of policing who gets to be valued as a legitimate contributor to knowledge. Essentially, it's a long-running backlash against the increasing demographic and epistemological diversity of university campuses.

And while that might not explain everything, you definitely see some elements of that in the discourse as it plays out today. Dax-Darazio, postdoc fellow in political science at the University of Guelph. And I think those thoughts there, Nala, as well as hearing that old program, add a lot of context to the battles that we're seeing in the news today. So when you step back and you look to the 1990s and earlier to the 1960s, what you can see is that the conflict isn't just ideological, right? It's not a battle between worldviews that emerge.

between progressives and conservatives out of nowhere. It's a challenge that's inherent to these huge demographic changes, the status of women, the ethnic diversity that makes up Canada and the United States. That, in a sense, universities are a microcosm of the rest of society, right, where we have to constantly navigate these tricky boundaries of expression and inclusion and equality. And for a final thought, one of the things that Dax and I, spoke about was that there is probably a pretty good reason that these society-wide concerns end up getting projected onto university campuses. And that is that university campuses represent

the next generation. And so much of politics is about worrying about what kind of world your children will inherit or what kind of world your children are building or taking away from you. That universities are this perfect symbol for what's wrong with the way the world is headed. So while these conversations on university campuses reflect everything else that's happening in society, they're amplified because they speak to what's happening next. What world will we leave behind? Where will our children take our world from us? Matthew, thank you so much. Thank you, Nella. is a producer with ideas.

And this was a time capsule episode. The original program from 1992 was called Ideas About Special Interests, a program prepared in Toronto by journalist Linda Frum. Production Max Allen with Lorne Tulk and Feyn McPherson. I'm Lister Sinclair. Technical production for this episode by Emily Kiervezio and Orande Williams. Web producer Lisa Ayuso, senior producer Nicola Luxchich.

Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyed.