Velvet totalitarianism on Canadian Campuses: Subverting effects on the teaching of, and research in, the discipline of psychology.

Abstract

AbstractCanadian campuses have proved particularly hospitable to Political correctness (PC), so that although the label may be tactless and even offensive, it is applicable to these Canadian islands of repression in a sea of freedom. Areas of psychology such as developmental and individual differences are particularly, but not uniquely, vulnerable to the totalitarian, anti-epistemic principle that the soundness of a view has to be evaluated in terms of subjective comfort rather than of evidence and logic; harder areas like physiological psychology and neuroscience are also vulnerable. This paper discusses recent Canadian examples of gross abuses of academic freedom in the teaching of and research in psychology, as well as considering some more subtle but nevertheless influential abuses. A final point of discussion is the relation between these developments and recent problems of fragmentation in Canadian psychology as a discipline and as a profession.In this paper, I hope to convince at least some readers that even if my contentions appear extreme at first, they are nevertheless justified in the light of the evidence. The four sections to follow deal, respectively, with the four sentences of the abstract that I have provided.As one who has experienced both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism systems, I am keenly aware of the fundamental difference between those systems and those of Western democracies. That difference is primarily the severity of punishment for transgressing the dominant (in political regimes, the state) ideology. Even in the darkest days of McCarthyite fifties in the U.S., there was an enormous difference between the penalties meted out for being perceived as a communist in the U.S., and for being perceived as an enemy of the state in the Nazi or Soviet regimes. That is why I have used the qualifier to describe what has happened on Canadian campuses during the last 10 to 15 years. To justify my application of this admittedly extreme and startling label of totalitarianism, I will discuss five features that velvet and real totalitarian systems share, in each case giving at least one example from both.Velvet totlitarianism on Canadian campusesThe first common feature is the presence of ambiguous laws and rules which are essentially uninterpretable in objective terms. So in the Soviet system there were no clear grounds for knowing when one has broken the law against being a crypto capitalist. Even in a free society, of course, laws are difficult to interpret, which is why we have so many lawyers. Still, even if there are situations where it is difficult to decide between, say, murder or justifiable homicide, under a rule of law we rely on objective criteria in trying to decide. During the McCarthy era, Un-American activities could be specified relatively objectively (e.g., present or past membership in the communist party), even if, in the view of most, such characterization was unjustified.On the other hand, the speech codes that have been instituted on most Canadian campuses [whether they are termed as such is irrelevant, as long as they proscribe not only acts, but also speech (for the distinction between acts and opinion, see Furedy, 1994)] are as uninterpretable as those of the Soviet regimes, because it is not possible to clearly indicate what speech will be offensive or harassing to some individual. Similarly, when campus rules against sexual harassment are defined solely in terms of the (subjective) comfort of the person deemed to be harassed, and not in terms of the actions of the harasser, those rules are uninterpretable and become similar to those governing crimes against the state in the totalitarian sense.The second feature that the two forms of totalitarianism share is the presence of so-called experts who have an influence over decisions that is grossly out of proportion to their actual expertise. …