Ideas - Making the case for what a university could and should be

Episode Date: July 30, 2025

Universities have always been places of protest and dissent, but University of Toronto English professor Randy Boyagoda argues that it should be something more — a place for productive discourse. He says we must check the assumption that our lived experience, well-formed arguments, or even knee-jerk responses are all there is to any given matter. That means staying open to the possibility of being wrong.In January 2024, he became the university’s Advisor on Civil Discourse, the first position of its kind in Canada, prompted in part by campus convulsions since October 7th. Boyagoda explores the question: what are universities for? *This episode originally aired on Oct. 7, 2024.

The Shaw Festival in Niagara on the Lake presents The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, filled with breathtaking battles, mythical creatures, and unforgettable characters. This new adaptation of C.S. Lewis's classic will mesmerize the whole family. Don't miss this epic adventure. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, this season at the Shaw Festival. For tickets, go to Shawfest.com. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed.

In the year since October 7th, university campuses throughout the West became a flashpoint in the polarization over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The controversy and tensions led to high-level resignations, major donors withdrawing funds, and even physical violence, and direct civil conversations seemed impossible. But swirling in and around all the news is one question that never seems to get articulated clearly. I'm going to ask everyone listening to this right now one question.

What's a university for? Randy Boyagoda spoke recently at the University of Windsor, which also experienced protests. Now, I predict there's as many different answers to this question as there are people listening. Actually, most of you probably have multiple answers to that question. Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto. He's also an advisor on civil discourse, the first position of its kind in Canada.

And I'll predict one more thing. Anyone who has an answer to the question of what a university is for is currently not satisfied with universities, with their living up to their purpose, no matter what you think that purpose is, or should be. I was in Windsor as part of an event put on by the university's humanities research group to introduce Randy and to moderate a discussion with him after his talk, which was entitled, Thinking Out Loud Together. Good evening, everyone. What a pleasure to be here with all of you. There's nothing we love more ideas than ideas, but especially when we get to talk about them in public. And that is

what we're doing here today with Randy Boyagoda. Please welcome Randy Boyagoda. I'd like you to join me in imagining what it'd be like to experience what a university can be at its best. I know this might be hard to do these days, but let's try. My experience of this happened a few years ago. I was attending a dinner on campus at the University of Toronto, where I'm a professor of English, and we were in a grand old dining hall, dark carved wood, stained glass windows, elaborate gothic stone, work. I was dining with a group of undergraduates. We were discussing ideas, and we were doing so outside the classroom. This wasn't for credit. This wasn't an assignment. This wasn't something

to add to a transcript or a CV. This was a group of thoughtful, curious young people thinking out loud together in a beautiful setting. Where else but a university can this transformative shared experience happen? The subject of cultural appropriation came up. Now, I'd describe myself as middle of the road on this issue. While there have definitely been situations where an artist or an institution has appropriated someone else's culture for personal or institutional gain, we shouldn't all be limited only to our own cultures as sources for inspiration and art making, as I think this would place too narrow to final a limit on the range and power of the imagination for writers and readers alike. That was my position. One of the students at this dinner

had a very different position. She insisted on an absolute prohibition against any form of cultural appropriation when it came to indigenous peoples. She was unwilling to consider any alternative viewpoint or break from this position. The more I proposed alternatives or raised questions about the deeper implications

of her view, the firmer and more animated, even impassioned she became. And while all this was happening, I experienced a deep sense of gratitude, Not frustration at disagreement, but gratitude. To myself, I was thinking, this is what university is all about. Here we are in this beautiful dining hall, breaking bread, and thinking out loud together about something that matters.

But then I noticed something. Sitting beside the student I was speaking with was another student. They were filming us with their phone. The feeling of gratitude I'd had just moments earlier vanished. In its place, I felt anxiety, even dread. I felt like I needed to stop talking, that I needed to change the subject. Here I was, a senior university administrator and a tenured professor, going back and forth with a young female student of color

on a subject about which she was getting increasingly exercised while I appeared to be enjoying myself. I had no idea how this exchange was going to be edited or shared. What if it went viral? And so the conversation, it ended quickly. Or more accurately, I ended the conversation quickly. I lament this. Years later, I still lament this.

Separate from my perhaps too romantic notion of the university at its best, cultural appropriation is not a settled issue, and it hasn't been for decades, whether in the context of indigenous culture in Canada or the relationship between white and black musicians in the United States, for example. I don't have a complete view of cultural appropriation, and I wasn't interested in convincing the student to give up on her view and agree to mine. Instead, I was hopeful that by thinking

out loud together, as we were doing, in ways that were spirited, argumentative, intense, we would reach a new and better set of possible answers to the question of cultural appropriation. Failing that, we might at least better understand different positions and very very the people who took those positions. But none of that happened, because without permission or explanation, someone started filming us. What was clear in that moment to me

was that I had a very different understanding of what it meant to have a conversation on campus than the student filming the conversation did. And for reasons of personal and professional security, I stopped thinking out loud. In his novel, The Satanic Verses, Soman Rushy describes the modern city as a place where, quote,

incompatible realities sit side by side on the bus. I wonder if the contemporary university has become just such a place, a place marked not only by arguments and debates alongside conflicts and protests, but also by fundamentally different, even incompatible ideas and expectations of what the university is, what it's for, what it means for someone to be part of it, whether you're a student, a professor, a parent, a politician,

or a member of the public newly interested in what's happening on campuses these days. To be sure, for as long as universities have existed, there have been arguments about their purpose. In the 1850s, for instance, the theologian and writer John Henry Newman, author of one of the most famous books on higher education, the idea of a university, was named Rector of a New Catholic University in Dublin, in part the forerunner of today's University College Dublin. His effort to build support for the university proved a permanent struggle because of the widespread skepticism Newman encountered,

both from bishops who weren't interested in supporting something that wasn't a new seminary and from ordinary Dubliners who weren't interested in supporting what they were convinced was just going to be a new seminary. But never mind Newman and his struggles to argue for his idea of a university in the face of skepticism from all corners nearly 200 years ago. I'm going to ask everyone listening to this right now one question. What's a university for? Now, I predict there's as many different answers to this question as there are people listening.

Actually, most of you probably have multiple answers to that question. Then I'll predict one more thing. Anyone who has an answer to the question of what a university is for is currently not satisfied with universities, with their living up to their purpose, no matter what you think that purpose is or should be. Satisfying correspondences between one's idea of the university and the reality of the university are the stuff of either highly personalized

and I suspect romanticized memories or the stuff of people working at think tanks and research institutes who are convinced that they've found the perfect idea of a university and just need someone to fund it. I'll add that for critics of the university and particularly for politicians looking to score points with the public, there can be satisfying failures of correspondence

between ideas and realities of the university. In other words, some people only want to see what's wrong with universities, which often involves pointing to evidence of out-of-touch elites, educations that have little relevance beyond campus, and double standards of treatment for various members of the university community. These gaps between the ideals of what a university should be and the realities put immense pressure on schools. We expect universities to provide the conceptual and practical means for young people to discern, develop, and be prepared to live out their vocations in intellectual, cultural, social, and professional terms.

We expect all of this to take place in beautiful settings that are somehow both completely safe and also provide the opportunity for expansive, risk-taking, and personal freedom. We expect universities to conserve, transmit and advanced knowledge. We expect universities to question this knowledge. We expect universities to make life-changing, world-changing scientific and technological discoveries, and to do so in ways that either make responsible use of public funds or through private and corporate interests while remaining independent of private and corporate interests.

It's no surprise that so many people tend to be disappointed, frustrated, sometimes outraged by the reality of the university. But this is because I think too many people, frankly, have too many ideas about too many kinds of universities, none of which measure up to the reality at any one university. The October 7, 2003, Hamas attack on Israel, and Israel's subsequent ongoing military campaign in Gaza, have convulsed university campuses with protests, encampments, physical altercations, police interventions, and arrests in Canada and the United States, and also, particularly in the United States, high-profile political responses. These include congressional testimony offered by the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University

of Pennsylvania in late 2023, and interned by the president of Columbia University in spring 2024, all of which have led to resignations and increased scrutiny on the part of elected representatives convinced that universities were failing their students and the greater public. This isn't the first time, of course, that universities have been faulted along these lines. The godfather of modern American conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr., first came to national prominence in 1951 with the publication of God and Man at Yale, his extended attack on professors at his alma mater for putting the university on the wrong side of what Buckley called, quote, the most important duels in the world, between collectivism and atheism on the one side,

and individualism and Christianity on the other. Worse, Still, Buckley argued, these professors taught and trained students in ways directly antagonistic to Yale's longstanding traditions, and likewise antagonistic to the United States' emerging conflict with the Soviet Union, and all the while they invoked, quote, academic freedom to justify their actions. The success of Buckley's book, evident in the national conversation had generated at the time, and it's being selected by Time Magazine in 2011, that's one of the 100 most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century reflected widespread concerns about what students were learning

at American universities, concerns that generated enormous public attention and political currency in the decade that followed. Just think of the rise in campus protests against the war in Vietnam and for free speech that took hold during the 1960s, most prominently, at the University of California, Berkeley. When he was running for governor of California in 1966,

which was the first major political step on the way to his becoming president of the United States, Ronald Reagan vowed to, quote, clean up the mess at Berkeley if he were elected. Like Buckley before him, Reagan blamed professors and university administrators for encouraging students into destructive behavior through their teaching, for their inability to discipline the students and take back control of the campus, and for invoking the special rights of the university to justify a situation that, to most ordinary people, seem confusing. chaotic and dangerous. In a 1966 campaign speech, Reagan asked, and again I'm quoting directly here, quote, what in heaven's name does academic freedom have to do with rioting, with

anarchy, with attempts to destroy the primary purpose of the university, which is to educate our young people? But modern American conservatives and politicians aren't the only ones convinced that universities are failing in their primary purpose. In fact, universities seem to always be subject to this criticism. They also seem subject to another and have been for a very long time, in fact. Quote, amongst so many

great colleges in Europe, I find it strange that they are all dedicated to professions and none left free to arts and science at large, because there is no university education which is free where students might give themselves to study histories, modern languages,

books of policy, and civil discourse. That complaint was made in 1605 by the English thinker and essayist Francis Bacon in a treatise entitled The Advancement of Learning. Now, I want to make two observations about this passage. The first is about how Bacon assesses the state of universities in Europe at the turn of the 17th century. He's disappointed.

He's disappointed that universities have become too professionalized in how they educate students, preventing them from the kind of free and open thinking and learning that he thinks is the primary purpose of the university. Again, this is in the early 17th century. My point is that everyone everywhere at every time has an idea of the university that never, ever finds satisfying correspondence in the reality of any university anywhere at any time.

The second point I want to make is more specific. Among the things that universities are failing to teach their students, according to Bacon, is civil discourse. Perhaps that's not surprising to anyone paying attention to campus life across North American universities these days. But what may be surprising is this. Bacon's use of the term represents the very first time that civil discourse appears in the English language. And how does it appear in a lamenting criticism that universities are failing to teach students civil discourse? Shortly after my appointment was announced, a friend called me and he asked,

Is this a promotion, or are they getting ready to fire you? I think his question reflects a sense of how fraught and high stakes the question of civil discourse has become on our campuses these days. In my role as advisor, I work with faculty, students, and staff to establish the state of civil discourse and the stakes for civil discourse. This work has taken shape through a working group of faculty and students that I chair, through programming that brings external speakers to campus, and through consultations with students, faculty, staff, academic leaders, and alumni.

So far, what I can tell you from dozens upon dozens of conversations with people of varying political and ideological commitments is about three things. First, everyone more or less agrees that civil discourse is important at university. Second, everyone agrees civil discourse is hard to find at university. Third, everyone likes the idea of civil discourse, and everyone is terrified of the reality of civil discourse. This doesn't mean it's impossible or that we should give up on universities where civil discourse can be both

cultivated and sustained. To appreciate this idea, I think we need to step back from the concept of civil discourse itself and be reminded of one particular feature of the human person that I think universities depend upon and encourage. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal famously observed in his 1670

book, Ponce, that it is, quote, thinking that constitutes the greatness of the human being, only a read, the most fragile thing in the world, but a read that thinks. Our whole dignity consists in thinking. It is by thinking that we must elevate ourselves. This idea resonates profoundly with me, particularly as someone who spent the better part of his life at a university, as a student, a professor, an administrator, and also as a novelist who writes often about campus life. I believe that the role of the university is to affirm and even defend this wholeness of human dignity as consisting in thinking. I believe the university elevates the people that it serves by making it possible for faculty and students

to think out loud together. But with apologies to Pascal, it's easier to think something to yourself than to think out loud with others. This effort asks that you recognize and reckon with difference and disagreement, and that you regard these as good things in service of even better things. To my mind, civil discourse seeks to increase mutual and shared understandings, both of each other and of subjects of common interest. I propose that civil discourse contributes to the common good, advances knowledge, and is crucial to the pursuit of truth. I acknowledge this isn't a new idea. It probably sounds old-fashioned, if not romantic. And it has to be said that there are parts of the world where educations have much higher personal stakes than for anyone studying in North America

these days. This includes students studying in Hong Kong after the passage of its 2020 national security law, which followed years of pro-democracy activities often led by local university students. This law provides the government with the license to prosecute people for challenging the official state version of Hong Kong's identity and political structures. This also includes students studying in Bangladesh, where in recent months, students protested against state-imposed preferential hiring practices that put them at significant disadvantage upon graduation. This eventually led to the fall of the Bangladeshi government, with students involved prominently in efforts to rebuild trust and trusted institutions in the country.

And beyond these examples, let's think about students in war zones across the world, including Gaza and Ukraine. So keeping in mind the very high stakes for people at schools beyond North America, I think we can nevertheless reckon with the undeniable fact that North American colleges and universities have become places where thinking out loud together is a fraught exercise, no matter what's being thought or by whom. Now again, if you agree about these as the ends of civil discourse, mutual and shared understandings amongst people with different ideas and worldviews, efforts and work that contribute to the common good, and all of this advancing knowledge in the pursuit of truth, then I'd imagine you'd also agree I'm describing an important

part of the mission and work of universities like our host this evening, the University of Windsor and its Humanities Research Group. My own job as my university's advisor on civil discourse is to help people see how civil discourse itself aids a university's mission and work. I propose that thriving, robust civil discourse depends upon thriving, robust universities, and vice versa. 19th century English poet and essays Matthew Arnold, a contemporary of John Henry Newman's, conceived of culture as the best that's been thought and said. I propose the university as the signal conservator and transmitter of that culture on all matters of thought and endeavor, and this mission and work is accomplished through and within a continuous

and coherent tradition of learning, reflection, and creation. All of this cultivates and promotes a students flourishing as a fully formed thinking person. Intern a university education, when understood in these terms, creates the conditions for students to leave school and become thoughtful and competent contributors to civic life, to find gainful employment in professions, and intern to pursue personal and family life for the greater good of all concerned. For my money, and acknowledging just how much money is involved in higher education from every vantage, that's the idea of a university. And I hope for many of you, regardless of how you feel about universities right now, it describes at least some portion of the reality you

experienced if you have or if you currently attend one. Randy Boyagoda, giving a talk at the University of Windsor, entitled Thinking Out Loud Together. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America, on Sirius XM, in the United States on U.S. Public Radio, in Australia, on ABC Radio National. and around the world at cbc.ca.ca.c. ideas. You can also find ideas on the CBC News app or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Nala Ayad. The Shaw Festival presents. Anything Goes. A dazzling production of Cole Porter's timeless musical set on the SS American. Follow the antics of a nightclub singer as she navigates love triangles and hilarious hijinks on the high seas. Anything Goes on this.

this ocean liner featuring spectacular tap dancing and hits like you're the top don't miss anything goes at the shaw for tickets go to shawfest.com hey how's it going amazing i just finished paying off all my debt with the help of the credit counseling society whoa seriously i could really use their help it was easy i called and spoke with a credit counselor right away they asked me about my debt salary and regular expenses, gave me a few options, and help me along the way. You had a ton of debt, and you're saying Credit Counseling Society helped with all of it? Yep, and now I can sleep better at night. Right on!

When Debt's got you, you've got us. Give Credit Counseling Society a call today. Visit No More Deets.org. Novelist Randy Boyagoda is a frequent contributor to the Globe and Mail, Financial Times, the New York Times, and the Atlantic Magazine, as well as to CBC Radio, ideas. Randy teaches literature at the University of Toronto, where he also serves as an advisor on civil discourse, the first position of its kind in Canada. I'm often asked about how the position itself came into being. The assumption is that this has something to do with events of

October 7, 2023, with the ways in which university campuses have been convulsed by the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. I think that's absolutely the case, not least in light of the encampments that took over parts of university campuses across North America this past spring, including here in Windsor. But the events of October 7th and thereafter didn't create the need for civil discourse. Those events only revealed dramatically its absence. In other words, civil discourse on university campuses wasn't exactly robust and healthy on October 6th, 2023.

As to why, while university leaders are struggling with the structural problems and public issues with the university itself, I'd point to the anxiety that faculty and students both feel about speaking their minds and likewise hearing other people speak their minds. The sources of this anxiety include the promise and peril of technology's increasing presence in our personal, professional, and public lives. I think another factor is generational differences of expectation about why, what, and how we learn and interact with each other. And at least for the present generation of undergraduates, graduates and new professors, the formative loss of embodied encounters person-to-person during the pandemic. All of this points have the heightened need to renew the conditions for

universities to be understood and valued as places where we can think out loud together. I can't see a better way or place to learn about something or learn more about someone else than by thinking out loud together. But I will admit, even knowing about the solid and durable protections offered to professors by academic freedom, articulated this way in the early 20th century in Germany, where it was known and demanded as the foundational rights to teach freely and to study freely. I found myself self-editing or watching someone else self-edit for fear of what's going to happen to them. With the ubiquity of cell phones, security cameras, and so on, the distinction between public and personal has been obscured, might even seem false

or artificial, particularly to younger people. While faculty lament loss of an intellectual space free from technology-enabled monitoring. This intersection of technology and generational difference pose ongoing difficulties when it comes to civil discourse. On this subject, I'd like to cite recent writing by New York University professor Jonathan Haidt. In an essay related to his 2024 book, The Anxious Generation,

how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness, he observes, quote, a simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on campus has changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting safe spaces and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to microaggressions and sometimes claimed that words were violence.

These transmistified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development. I want to underscore two points in this passage. First, that the material height argues Gen Z students found, quote, more threatening than prior generations,

has become even more threatening after the pandemic with the return to in-person learning and socializing after an extended period of social isolation and remote, individualized, atomized learning. I had a direct experience of this dynamic in spring 2022 when I was among the very first faculty of the University of Toronto to take students on a study abroad experience. At the time, I was teaching a first-year course

that culminated in a two-week international learning experience in Rome. We stayed in an 800-year-old former Benedictine monastery in the hills south of the Eternal City overlooking a volcanic lake and the Pope's summer castle. Zoom just didn't work for this one. For several of these students, this time in Rome was, in fact, their first in-person university experience. What surprised me, at least in those early days? One surprise was witnessing a friendly debate among students about which Harry Potter novel was their favorite.

The debate stopped when one of the students demanded that no one say the author's name. A demand, I presume, was associated with J.K. Rowlings, having fallen afoul of transgender rights activists and allies by way of her ongoing commitment to a feminism based on biological definitions of gender. The other surprise, seeing some students constantly on their phones rather than mixing with others who were all nearby in chatting. I was surprised that they were constantly on their phones because we were in parts of the building that had no Wi-Fi or data. I don't know what they were doing on their phones,

what they could have been doing, but the phones seemed to be functioning as shields from contact with others rather than means of contacting others. But we can't just blame Apple and Google and TikTok for this. It's too easy and I don't think it's accurate. And that brings me to the second point I want to emphasize from height. He notes that members of older generations have fundamentally altered young people's development. How?

Well, in retrospect, I think universities pursued a too enthusiastic and idealistic adoption of new and expansive reaching technologies, with vexing consequences both in the the classroom and among the professoriate, whether this has to do with cheating on the part of students made possible by the same technologies that have created smart classrooms or controversial social media posts as the flip side of asking professors to use their smartphones to disseminate knowledge and research. But universities are part of a much larger continuum when it comes to the corrosive effects of aggressive technology adoption. Consider for a moment the formation we give children these days when they're in public and their parents or grandparents are shopping, socializing, or dining.

How many times have you seen one generation engage in active dynamic conversation while the other is staring blankly, passively at a device that their parents gave them? What kind of daily interpersonal and communicative formation is that child receiving? They're being pacified. And in turn, as they get older and more autonomous, they very naturally seek more pacification over and against the comparative agitation of direct encounter with others, all the way until they're in a university classroom and then being asked to think out loud about something. Of course they reach for their phones.

All of this so far represents both large scale and highly individualized barriers to civil discourse. But regardless of the pandemic and smartphones and generational differences, there's still Israel and Palestine. There's still sex and gender. just as there was America's war in Vietnam, or France's war in Algeria, or the 1980s movements against South African apartheid. Never mind, more recently, Canada's reckoning with the history and legacies of its treatment of indigenous peoples. There's always an issue of social and political

injustice that transfixes us, especially at universities. What I've heard so far in my work is the University of Toronto's advisor on civil discourse, and this is primarily from faculty, is that rigid, reductive, and often personally targeted ways that these subjects come up work against the spirit and idea of rigorous scholarship, free inquiry, new discovery, all of which poses challenges to research and teaching both. People are becoming less willing to question or pushback if the consequence is public shaming or professional shunning, rather than informed counterargument consistent with civil discourse.

But expecting informed counterarguments suggests why many people, particularly activist-minded scholars and students, are skeptical of civil discourse itself. Rather than experience it as a thinking out loud together, they perceive it as a form of control, of policing. In creating conditions for how something is said, civil discourse excludes people who hold dissenting views or feel that those views can't or given the ethical states shouldn't be conveyed in polite. terms. Let me say that I've received messages from people suggesting as much. People, I add, who occupy positions very much to the left and very much to the right, who all presume that their views would not be permitted into the university's culture of civil discourse, because they care so much about how a subject is and isn't discussed at a university, they're not going to be polite about it. And meanwhile, from their vantage points, the kind of people who engage in civil

Discourse are completely secure in terms of their professional and personal identities and not particularly implicated or affected by the subject under consideration. In other words, the messages that I receive from left and right share a sense that civil discourse is a fashionable luxury for privileged elites. I agree very much with this criticism. The problem, though, is this. What's being criticized isn't actually civil discourse. Instead, its civil discourse understood as rules for politeness as the terms and techniques for having a good-mannered conversation, maybe even a debate about a difficult subject, which is undeniably easier for some rather than others. And likewise, there are some subjects for some people, at some points in their personal

lives or the news cycle, where anything other than protest or personal lament is unrealistic, if not offensive. But let me make something really clear. I'm not interested in good-mannered conversation per se. What I am interested in is working with colleagues, with faculty, with students, with academic leadership, in creating conditions on university campuses for members of one single community to approach university life with a governing disposition for civil discourse. Disposition, not technique. In other words, what we want are members of the university to approach their time on campus as an opportunity to learn, to create, to discover, None of which can be done alone, and all of which requires what Michael Spence,

president of the University College London, calls, quote, a mindset of epistemic humility. He goes on to explain it as follows. An openness to the possibility that I might be wrong, even about my most passionate convictions, and even when I believe those convictions flow from my personal experience. For some, of course, this is a much more difficult task than for others, perhaps sometimes even impossible.

How difficult it is often stems from what I perceive, right Spence, to be the relative power of various participants in a dialogue. If my passionate conviction flows from experience that I regard as identity forming, and particularly if that experience has entailed being oppressed or rendered powerless, then being asked even to entertain the possibility that I might be wrong seems like in and of itself a form of oppression. But it is hard to imagine how genuine engagement can happen across difference unless I approach it with at least some willingness to conceive

that my understanding might be incomplete, even wrong. This approach, this willingness, defines epistemic humility. But leave aside Israel and Palestine, sex and gender, truth and reconciliation, climate change, leave aside the future of democracy at home and around the world for a moment. Leave aside the civil discourse-related challenges these subjects pose to people, possessed of justifiably strong views about our most controversial subjects these days.

Leaving all of that aside, epistemic humility is plain hard, by which I mean it's hard for everyone at a university. It's hard for intelligent and talented and competitive students who find themselves surrounded by other intelligent and talented and competitive students. It's hard for professors whose professional success and often personal self-worth rests, on their having developed and sustained profiles and positions as authorities and experts. These are the people we are asking to take the great risk of thinking out loud together and being revealed as incomplete, even wrong.

But I'd like to say in closing that this is a risk I think we need to make all the more necessary for both public and personal reasons. In her 2024 review of threats to social cohesion and democratic resilience, Great Britain's Dame Sarah Khan observes that, quote, unlike high-risk threats such as terrorism or other national security concerns, many of the threats to social cohesion are chronic, insidious, and sit below the radar where they are not assessed, measure, or even fully understood. These threats are sometimes very much on radar when it comes to universities these days.

But more generally, and for a long time now, I think they've been quietly at work in classrooms, lecture halls, and labs, where people are not willing or able to think out loud together. What happens then to these unspoken thoughts? For students, this self-containment can gradually wither their desire in capacities for hard thinking. Or the thoughts they perceive as unwelcome are dissenting from a solid-seeming consensus can fester into resentment or mutate into cruder forms and cruder settings than a university campus. As for faculty who likewise limit their participation in free and demanding intellectual exchange, their own research in teaching lives will become increasingly circumscribed, self-confirming, stale. These potential consequences, I hope, suggest the high stakes for civil discourse.

Universities without strong cultures of civil discourse fall prey to pursuing knowledge in self-limiting ways, while sending young people into professional and public life already less willing and able to work towards social cohesion. Young people less willing and able to live out the freedoms of thought and speech integral to a healthy democratic culture. I know this sounds dire, and it is dire, but we shouldn't run the risk of practicing civil discourse on campus just because it's a good civic deed, or because it's good for research and teaching,

or because we think it helped us address the critics of the university. We should run that risk because of the great human and humane reward of pursuing knowledge and truth and every now and then finding it. Everything good that happens on a university happens because of that. Everyone in this room, everyone listening to this,

can I hope remember at least one moment at a university when you didn't know something and then you did? That's the moment when the idea of a university and the reality of a university are one. We are, as Blaise Pascal said, fragile and temporary as reeds, but we are thinking reads. The rush of newness, of discovery, the struggle, even pain of feeling stretched and changed, maybe even transformed.

None of that would be possible for any of us had we not made the decision to place ourselves in a position of epistemic humility, of incomplete understanding, of knowing this and accepting this, and wanting to do something about it, which is to say going to university, going to university to think out loud together. Thank you. Epistemic humility. Knowing that we don't know everything,

even when our own experience tells us that we do know everything, or at least everything that needs to be known. There was another distinction, Randy made, that I wanted to zoom in. on. I also thought maybe it was important for us to go over again the difference between the idea of civil discourse and politeness. Could you just define and explain the difference between those two things? I'm convinced that one of the challenges for civil discourse is a misunderstanding

of it as a kind of workplace civility. Rules in order to have a difficult conversation, that strikes me as a form of over-determining what you're allowed to speak about and who's allowed to speak and how, whereas there has to be at base, I think, a sense maybe consistent with humility of uncertainty with civil discourse. I'm not sure.

That's why I'm speaking with you. Together maybe we'll get somewhere better. That strikes me in a kind of very informal way as a working definition of civil discourse, as opposed to rules that if you offend them, you've offended the person, and then we're going to report you to HR. That strikes me as the politeness version of things.

So given that, would you say that civil discourse precludes protest? No, I don't think it does. And I think perhaps more importantly, civil discourse doesn't have to cover every function and every activity at a university or in our public life, if that were the case, then you'd have to kind of water it down to mean nothing.

Or you'd have to use it as a form of control. I think absolutely universities should be places, have always been places, of protest and dissent. And so in other words, it isn't sort of, oh, if it's not civil discourse, it can't happen. It's more like, what does civil discourse contribute to the shared life of an academic community that otherwise wouldn't be there?

But unlike other periods of protest, as you mentioned, you know, there's the protester in the war in Vietnam. These are protests that we have seen since October 7th that add the university to the list of complaints. Not only is the university the locus of a protest, but it's also the subject of, or partly the subject of the protest. How does that conversation change when those two things are true, both that it's the place where the protest is happening

and it's also the subject? It's a superb way to put it. Let's just go back for a moment to Reagan and Berkeley, where Ronald Reagan's politically emergence in the 1960s was because he made the decision to criticize the university as this object because of what was going on inside universities. And so I think without taking away from the real-time high stakes of, let's say, post-October 7th

criticisms of the university and within the university, the university criticizing itself constantly, members criticizing itself. This is what I meant now, I think, by just pointing out, no one is ever satisfied with the university. Please, find me anyone who says, this is exactly what a university

should be, and I'm happy with it as it is right now. An impossibility. And so I think it's been made that much more convulsed since then, but let me just step back for a minute. Universities have, I think, some responsibility for this because of the message

that they've given the world at large in recent years. On questions of climate, after George Floyd, in the context of the war in Ukraine, in all of these ways, universities understood themselves as institutional actors, making statements,

encouraging, in some ways protest, and now that really has doubled back. And I think it speaks to the question, the fraught question of institutional neutrality, a reasonable person would say, but for years you've been telling us to protest for years, you've been protesting as a university. What's wrong now? Of all the institutions that we have in our society, what is it mostly about universities,

do you think, that invites kind of these unmeadable questions and expectations? I think it's because if you step back from, and I will often say this, in academic orientation sessions at the University of Toronto students. If you step back for a moment and you just think about how remarkable it is to live in a time where societies make this decision to allow people between the ages of 18 and 23

to spend these incredibly, materially productive parts of their lives, not in the army, not in forced labor, not in the fields, but where, sitting around reading books, thinking with each other, it's a remarkable fact in and of itself, in kind of world historical terms. At the same time, universities transform people's trajectories

like no other institution in terms of who you meet, what suddenly becomes available to you as a possibility. I remember my first year of university at the University of Toronto, I was a kid who grew up in Oshawa, hearing the term graduate school. I'd never heard that term before. Suddenly, a different world was open to me just by virtue of going down the 401 and moving into a residence at U of T. You know what else I've never heard of is the title, advisor, on civil discourse.

Could we talk just about your role there? Given, as you acknowledge in your lecture, that this position came about because of the the context that we're living in, you know, why in God's name would you take this job? Well, when I'm not a university administrator or a professor, I'm a novelist, and I often write about campus life in my novels. If this whole civil discourse thing totally fails, I've got great material for my next book. So in that sense, I'm okay with it. But in a more serious way, in a more sincere way,

I guess I would just say that my life as a professor, as a writer, as the former president of Penn Canada, the freedom of expression organization, all of this points for me at least to a very personal and professional interest in finding ways to keep difficult conversations going, to sustain them, when often I can see these moments

when they might not come about. And so I think from the concept of a novelist who thinks about kind of larger stories and then also my own investment in the goods of a shared public life and that thinking out loud together is, again, it's just a kind of like a working phrase for me to explain what happens in a classroom,

what happens in a thriving, healthy public life, what happens in families and with friends, all of that is something that I think I can help contribute to as an advisor on civil discourse. How do you measure success in such a role? I think when we no longer need an advisor on civil discourse. I'm somewhat serious in saying this. Earlier this year, I led a research project

involving undergraduates at UFT, looking at the history and contemporary context for civil discourse. And one of my students did something, I think, along the lines of what's called the Google Ngram that looked at word frequency. And to some degree, you can map this. The frequency with which the term civil discourse shows up in public life and newspapers and journalism, et cetera,

flatlines until the 1960s, and then it spikes. Then it drops. And then it goes up again in the 1980s during the time of the anti-apartheid movements on university campuses. Then it flatlines. Then it goes up a lot in the last few years. The point is we talk about civil discourse

when we're not doing civil discourse. So too, a colleague of mind of the, University of Toronto said, you know your university has a problem with civil discourse when they appoint someone as the advisor to civil discourse. So I think success, frankly, is when we don't need to talk about it like this the same way because we're living it rather than talking about it. I was pleased to see in your... I mean, we've had other discussions about this in the past and I was pleased to see in your lecture that you acknowledge that there is a sense that the idea of civil discourse may be, you know,

know, a romantic notion or sort of a quaint idea. And in fact, there are people who equate restoring civility or civil discourse with maintaining its status quo or, you know, in favor of those who currently benefit from the status quo. How do you count to that argument? I agree. I think it's a, it's a very strong argument. And I think it's an argument that points to a kind of comfy middle, full of mushy moderates who don't want to rock the boat or have anything destabilized. And my view is that that comfy middle, that mushy, moderate space has replaced what used to be there, which is something we would call a vital center. This is a concept of the American historian Arthur Schlesinger. And the idea is we all contribute to a vital center, but none of us occupy it.

We come to it from our various advantages, from our various political or ideological positions. we join in the middle, we engage, then we go back, and hopefully you'll go back a little changed. You go back mindful of a view that you didn't otherwise here, but the thing in the middle is sustained rather than protected and occupied by people who want no disagreement, no discomfort, just keep everything the same.

Did you have a chance with wearing their hat on, did you have a chance to speak to some of the students at the encampments at UFT? Yeah, I did, absolutely. And what about counter-protesters? Likewise, yeah. So can you talk about what you learned from those interactions, given the hat that you're wearing?

I would say that I would point to a couple of things. I would say that both students, and I'll let me add faculty, who would have been, to put it in simple terms, pro-encampment, understood it as a form of legitimate protest against the university, and a form of protest that was chosen in absence of other ways of effecting change. And the efficacy of the encampments, their success, would be then much more disputed, I would say. I think each encampment in each situation had a particular resolution.

But it was almost as if consistent with forms of protest at a university in lots of different ways, this is the best way failing others to have our voices heard and have our position heard. Now, to counteract that, you would certainly have people who would say the very way that you are having your position heard, the way that you are demonstrating your commitment to this cause,

poses, I think, two kinds of challenges. Okay? The one would be, and again, we're using the very specific version of it here, someone who would be Jewish and would see the way that the encampment represented the conflict as either a direct personal affront or as something much more offensive and threatening than that. And then the second would be someone who would not be, let's say, part of a Jewish community, would not feel that personal threat, but would think this is a form of obstruction in what was otherwise a free space for me.

I would say that those are the two things that I heard repeatedly. Given that you'd like to see more civil discourse, how does that impact these other important values on campuses like freedom of expression and freedom of thought? Yeah, and academic freedom. And academic freedom. I think freedom of thought is there. It's how it's articulated.

It's articulated sometimes in freedom of speech, sometimes in academic freedom in those two contexts. I think there always needs to be a tension between these concepts. rather than going all in for just one of them. It's easier to just say everything has to be academic freedom, everything has to be civil discourse, everything has to be freedom of speech. That's so easy compared to finding and living within the tension

of all three of those things, having competing claims on an issue, having a competing claims on yourself, and then finding a way to keep that up and running, I guess you could say. That would be where I see it figuring. The last thing, Randy, and of course we could talk about this forever, but you point out, of course, that everyone you've spoken to in this role

believes that civil discourse is important at university and also that civil discourse is hard to find at universities these days. I'm wondering if there's been a moment in your interactions over this past year that convinces you that thinking out loud together is actually possible. Yeah, I can give you one example. Very recently I was chatting with a graduate student at the University of Toronto, who had a very strong and critical view of the university's newly articulated policies on protest and gatherings on campus. And we went into a conversation about it with them kind of convinced that this was a direct response to the encampments and it was new, et cetera, et cetera.

And I suggested and said these have been preexisting. they've been brought to attention by the reality of dealing with the encampments. And then she wondered how she could sort of engage with it. And I explained to her that it wasn't, in fact, in this case, let's say the president's office or the provost office had responsibility, but these would be documents associated with our governing body called governing council. And over the course of that conversation, we came to a shared understanding. I shared an understanding of where this came from, what it is,

and how and where you could do something about it if you wanted to take action. And I would say that the two of us had a better understanding of each other and of this shared issue. I understood more her concerns. She understood more in an institutional sense what she could do with those concerns. And I think that gave me, it was very recent, but that gave me absolutely some hope. Randy, thank you so much for thinking out loud with us. Thank you.

Thank you. I really appreciate it. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. You've been listening to Thinking Out Loud Together, a lecture delivered by Randy Boyagoda. Special thanks to Trevor Pittman at the University of Windsor

and Kim Nelson, Director of the Humanities Research Group at the University of Windsor, who organized the event. And to our colleagues at CBC, Windsor, Michael Hargraves, Carrie Breen, and Samantha Craggs. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of ideas.

Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. The senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.