Comment on David Heinimann’s “Wedded to the University: The Professor and the Family”

Abstract

In Wedded to the University, David Heinimann's main thesis is that the and the university together on the issue of funding and taxes and, that in future, universities will have difficulty balancing their liberal policies with tax-based financial support. One of his claims is descriptive: governments and the public are demanding increased accountability on all fronts, including faculty members as role models to students. This surveillance is backed by a direct attack on the liberal currently held in disdain by the New Right reactionary forces. Heinimann is correct in his assessment and description of the economic and social tensions facing the professoriate. Increasingly, institutions can only be held accountable when full disclosure is the normal condition of discourse.... (CAUT, 1995: 1). Indeed, full disclosure and openness mean greater public scrutiny not only of our financial operations but of our research, our teaching and to some extent, our personal lives. While he off-handedly satirizes the kind of discrimination that accompanies retrenchment, Heinimann seems to concur with and underwrite the conservative philosophy reinforcing the economic squeeze. He does this by arguing that while it may endanger us, the way out is to clean our moral house. This is problematic.Heinimann's claim is that academics should accept traditional conceptions of the and resurrect traditional as the best preparation for the future onslaught by governments intent on getting scholar for their dollar: tacit because, while it is not stated directly, his analysis leaves the door open for this kind of interpretation. And it is this normative claim that presents important problems, not only in terms of his usage of the term but in the total neglect of how gender prefigures in his analysis. In arguing about the problems posed by the conservative forces driving government funding policies, Heinimann inadvertently suggests that we should give in to pressures that are dictated by a right wing agenda. The end result is that the author contributes to the family values anti-feminist backlash variant of contemporary discourse, while at the same time implying that we are abandoning the very ideals that academia stands for: freedom of thought, action and critical inquiry. This is perhaps the most crucial point. Succumbing to such forces means much more than staying married, getting married or keeping children home with mom (as suggested in the daycare example). It also means accepting a corporate curriculum--researching what governments want researched and ignoring all else; it means relinquishing everything that distinguishes the academic enterprise from other state-directed organizations. In this sense, having less government funding ironically might be one way for us to exercise our independence. It seems that this is what the professoriate might be considering.My sense is that Heinimann has come dangerously close to aligning himself to some of the ideologies of the New Right as well as its reasoning on the family. Central to New Right philosophy is a set of assumptions about the and about the relationships between women and men. A key tenet is that the ideal society must rest upon the tripod of a strong family, a voluntary church and a liberal minimal state (Petchetsky, 1984). Of these, the is the most important, yet gender and get almost no mention in most commentaries on the New Right (Harding, 1981). Therefore it is imperative, when making assertions about retaining a particular form, to examine critically the New Right's discourse. Families and life are profoundly influenced by social and economic policies, and any evaluation of the influence of the New Right must be concerned with how its policies have actually been experienced by families. It thus seems essential to understand their reasoning, since policies based on their recommendations (e. …