Indigenous Health and Cultural Safety

 

University College, U of T

Are the universities salvageable? Would it make more sense now to just close them and start again?

Looking at recent faculty openings for any established mainstream university is disheartening. 

The University of Toronto is currently calling for a tenure-track instructor in “Indigenous Health and Cultural Safety” for the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, and Women’s College Hospital. Both parts of that discipline title are troubling. Is indigenous health different in principle from the health of humans in general? Should it be studied separately? What can this imply but discrimination? But a fundamental difference in kind among people, that would justify different treatment?

And what is “cultural safety,” and what does it have to do with one’s health?

“Excellent Indigenous knowledges methodology skills are essential.” Is “indigenous knowledge” different in kind from human knowledge? If aboriginal groups “know” differently than the majority, there is presumably no chance for integration. If their reality is different, any conceivable action against them might, in principle, be justified.

“Preference will be given to candidates who self-identify as Indigenous. Recognizing that there are a variety of terms that potential candidates may use to self-identify, the University uses the term ‘Indigenous’ in this search, which forms part of the U of T Response to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to encompass the people of Turtle Island, including those who identify as First Nations, Métis, Inuk (Inuit), Alaska Native, Native American, and Native Hawaiian people.”

Those who have posted the job notice do not seem to understand that “Turtle Island” refers to the entire Earth, indeed the cosmos, not to any one geographical area. Accordingly, anyone native to the cosmos should properly identify as “indigenous.” 

But it is just as well, since hiring someone on the basis of their race is a violation of the Canadian Constitution and of human rights.

Perhaps this descent into objective madness was inevitable once the universities lost their religious raisons d’etre. They are now like ancient masted ships without a keel or anchor. They blow any which way, or no way at all.

Nothing to Sneeze At

Following the progress of COVID-19 with grim fascination. It feels like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

Among the businesses and industries that are going to be disrupted by this: universities.

For a few past generations Canadians and Americans have more or less stopped having children. One might expect the universities to have been emptying out. The more so since they now face growing online competition.

Yet they have mostly been growing, while tuitions have been spiraling upward. I am amazed, on returning to Toronto after some years, at how Ryerson has expanded to take over much of the downtown. And new universities keep being founded.

Looks like another bubble bound to pop.

Until now, universities in Canada, the US, Australia, and the UK have been making their budgets by offering the traditional American/European university experience to international students. Especially large cohorts from China and Korea, where education is deeply valued. Walking through the Annex, the old U of T student shopping strip, I find mostly Korean stores and mostly Asian faces.

Now, suddenly, that finger is going to be yanked out of the dam, at least for a semester or two.

We’ll see how well the red tide will be contained.

In other coronavirus news, latest reports are that Israeli scientists think they have an oral vaccine, using new technologies, that might get through testing within ninety days.

It might fit well with a God-directed viral plague to have the hated Jews gallop to the rescue. Making it rather more difficult for a time to sustain the growing tone of antisemitism everywhere.

A Plan to Revive the Secular Humanities

The Humanities are in full collapse. Nobody wants to study “Humanities” any more, and for good reason: they are not taught. Instead, left-wing politics is taught under their guise.

What has happened, and how can we fix it?

The traditional system, peer review, cannot work any longer. It relies upon the field being essentially sound, and only preserving whatever already is. If the system is already corrupted, it only preserves the corruption. How do you clean house and start again?

One approach often suggested is to return to the idea of a Western Canon, a fixed body of knowledge, the “Great Books.”

This seems attractive, but there are two problems.

First, it is artificially limiting, and in a way that is insupportable. We ought not to be studying only the “Western” canon. Any honest search for truth and wisdom must also include the great books of the East: the Confucian classics, the Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching, the Analects, Ibn Khaldun, and so forth.

Okay; not so hard to fix that, on the face of it.

But there is a second problem. It is not just the subject matter that is depraved. It would be perfectly easy to teach a course, or write a research paper, on “the problem of patriarchy in the Old Testament,” or “The homoeroticism of the Arjuna-Krishna relationship in the Bhagavad Gita.”

Arjuna meets Krishna

This is the deeper problem: not the current subject matter of the Humanities, but the interpretive lens.

The hard sciences are all about the interpretive method. It is simple, straightforward, and mechanical: experiment and observation.

By comparison, the Humanities are all at sea, and that is our problem. You have a play by Shakespeare: what do you do with it? How do you, as a scholar, add any value to what Shakespeare has already done?

What, in other words, is the purpose of the Humanities? Very well; read Aristotle. But what do you need a professor for?

This used to be clear: the interpretive lens was theology. Or rather, since theology itself has oftgen become free-form, it was the magisterium, the deposit of faith. One was adding to the mountain of known truth. How did Shakespeare’s Portia conform to or violate the moral law? How did she illuminate it?

Portia: Millais

This is why universities—and schools at lower levels as well—were originally religiously based. That anchor of faith was necessary to the enterprise. Theology was the queen of the sciences.

What we have now is an ark without a rudder. This is actually a problem for the hard sciences as well; but less obviously. For the Humanities, the problem is almost immediate.

The obvious attempt to compensate for this was scientism: the elevation of the techniques of science and its current conclusions to the status of theology.

This was disastrous.

Science cannot touch the Humanities. Science can deal only with what is observable by the senses, the physical, and, by definition, metaphysics is beyond what it can see. So this approach required the invention of a series of pseudo-sciences, ultimately nonsensical, but immediately embraced and pressed into academic service because they offered the Humanities and Humanities scholars an interpretive lens, a mechanical method, which would allow them to churn out papers and courses. Marxism was the original one, and still widely popular: you could do a Marxist or class interpretation of Shakespeare, or Plato, or anything. Freudianism is another popular one. Then there is feminism, behaviourism, structuralism, deconstruction, post-colonialism, and on and on. A new one pops up every few years. All the better, because the low fruit gets picked by that time. The definitive Freudian interpretation of Hamlet has already been written; to write it again, you would have to do better. But now there is an opportunity to do the feminist interpretation.

All of them start out as nonsense in any scientific or philosophical terms, and as a result anything they produce is nonsense. GIGO. Their sole advantage is that they are easy to do.

The obvious solution is to re-establish the Humanities on a religious basis. And this has started to happen, in the movement to re-establish the Christian college. Examples are Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy in Barry’s Bay, Redeemer College in Ancaster, and Trinity Western University in BC.

There is still perhaps a bit of a problem with that. It is hard to fit in non-Western materials, because they begin with such different assumptions. And, of course, there is an issue for many with public funding of denominational institutions.

Failing that, at a minimum, public universities’ Humanities departments might set the following rule: no interpretive method may be legitimately applied to a work if the interpretive method is newer than the work itself.

This principle alone would kill much of the faddish nonsense.

It would actually be reasonable to offer a Marxist interpretation of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath or Malraux’s Man’s Fate. Here, after all, Marx might well have been an influence, and pointing this out could help in understanding the work.

It would, on the other hand, not be reasonable or academically legitimate to offer a feminist interpretation of either, Malraux or Steinbeck, since modern feminism came later, and so cannot have been an influence.

Without this rule, lazy scholars can spend their time learning feminism instead of engaging Malraux.

With it, the work must be engaged with on its own terms, and some awareness of the history of ideas must be displayed and conveyed.

How to Write Real Good

Kaia Shivers, as posted by herself on InDesign

Now this is chilling.

It has come to the point that not being able to write a grammatical sentence is no bar to becoming a writing professor. Skin colour and sex are what qualify or disqualify you.

This exposes, I think, a fatal flaw in the entire academic exercise. It is all based on “peer review”: which means, those who already hold the job get absolute discretion over who else gets the same job. This is true for academic publication, and even more so for hiring and tenure at universities.

This is an automatic conflict of interest. You get to choose your competition. What are your incentives to select the best? Aren’t they instead to select always and only someone clearly worse at the job than you? This also puts a premium on group solidarity and on not rocking the boat, saying nothing that is going to upset your colleagues. As in, no new or revolutionary ideas that might alter the field. This almost forces the creation of a class mentality: us against the outsiders.

This now manifests itself in the academy’s universal “left wing” ideology. It is the academy openly against the interests of those outside the academy, or its wider web of social allies. Against the interests of the economy, of the culture, of the average woman and man, of the nation.

The argument for it, of course, is that only “experts” can judge good work in their field.

This is true enough, I guess, so far as it goes, but it works only if you have some other reliable scheme for picking your first experts, who then pick all other experts. Otherwise, the whole thing rests on an infinite regression. And the experts you choose must also always be impeccably moral, an improbable assumption, with a devotion to truth and knowledge for its own sake, or they are not going to choose their successors well.

This might work if the whole thing rested on a sincere religious foundation—if professors were selected at least in part on their faith and moral character. Keeping pay for professors relatively low would also help: it means the job would tend to attract in the first place only those to whom knowledge and the pure pursuit of truth were more important than personal or material considerations.

Medieval scholars in debate.

Traditionally, our university system in the West indeed relied on both of these foundations. A university professor had to be an ordained minister or priest. Universities were confessional. Harvard and Yale were Congregational; Princeton was Presbyterian: Colombia was Church of England. Queen’s was Presbyterian; U of T had separate colleges for the various denominations; McMaster was Baptist; Western and Bishops were Anglican; and so forth.

The further back you go, the clearer the religious character.

And pay for profs was modest.

We have been systematically sawing off this branch on which we sat.

In the old days, too, the mettle of professors was established by public lecture, and by public debate. So there was some input from the general population.

If we are going to fix the crisis in our universities, we are going to have to go back to these practices.

Otherwise, we get writing profs who write like this:

Teaching Statement: Taking from Paolo Freire, “knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention” with pedagogies that resist hegemonic regimes of knowing when those who are learning are as empowered and humanized as those who are teaching.

My philosophy is to offer a safe space for students to cultivate intellect, understand and develop personal and collective agency, connect with peers, and actively participate in their own learning. The two main objectives in teaching is to facilitate learning by helping students to gain the necessary skills to take control of their own learning — and eventually use their intellectual growth and skills as productive global citizens.

I focus on assisting students in developing critical viewpoints, while sharpening their skills of written and verbal analyses and articulation in current and historical themes; and employing multimedia and interactive pedagogical methods.

It is tiresome to translate this into English: it is language written deliberately to obscure meaning, which is a moral offense against language, and especially against teaching and learning, which it is designed to prevent. But the meaning is chilling:

Knowledge is something you invent yourself to suit your own purposes. My philosophy is to teach nothing. I give them assignments, then sit and judge. But I do teach them to be “critical” of current themes—in other words, I mark them on whether they share my politics.

The Stripped Gears of Social Science

Photographed in an antique shop window. Is it live, or Memorex?

There are only two kinds of discoveries in the social sciences: those that do no more than confirm common sense, and those that are wrong. The latter is more common.

This study is probably correct. It suggests that bullies have high self esteem than the average person and are less likely than others to experience depression. So much, indeed, is common sense. Unfortunately, it goes directly against everything social science have been telling us for a generation or two. For at least that long, we have been told that bullies and abusers act as they do because they were themselves abused in the past, and because they have low self-esteem.

Teaching and parenting practice has, of course, been altered, sometimes forcibly altered, to reflect this for that same two generations, always sparing the rod in hopes of more perfectly spoiling the child. Everything a child does is now awesome. Nothing a child does can be punished in any meaningful way.

No surprise if we now have a much bigger problem with bullying in schools. We of a certainty also have it in the wider world of work, in society, in marriages, in life in general.

And we paid large sums to get screwed in this way.

What's worse, we've been told for about the same time to work on our and our children's “emotional intelligence.” Sounds good, put in that way, but it really means learning to falsify your own true feelings while manipulating those of others. In other words, training to be a proper psychopath.

Here's another instance of this academic game at work. Some time ago, a prominent paper came to the conclusion that there was never any significant discrimination against the Irish in America, and few if any “No Irish Need Apply” signs or ads. The Irish had simply imagined the whole thing. Now, a high school student—a high school student—has managed to disprove the claim comprehensively, simply with a bit of web searching.

A bit of web searching.

How, you might ask, is this possible? How can an academic paper become so widely accepted while making such extremely improbable claims, and on the basis of so little evidence?

It is really quite simple. Academia is set up to make this happen. Imagine if the original paper by the reputable history professor with the Yale Ph. D. had researched the record thoroughly and discovered that, yes, as everyone had always assumed to be true, discrimination against the Irish in America was widespread in past generations, and there were a good number of signs denying them employment. Would there then be a publishable paper, simply confirming what everybody already knew? Probably not. But if you can put out a paper that seems to show that what everybody thought was wrong—then you get it published, get tenure, get a lot of attention. You have discovered something!

All that really prevents this is the sheer honesty of individual academics. Unfortunately, morality has become unfashionable in such circles. Indeed, academics as a group, as a class, have a vested interest in promoting this kind of behaviour, rather than censuring or preventing it. If a field as a whole seems to produce no new discoveries, can produce nothing the general public doesn't already know, it is hard to justify its very existence. Why take a Ph.D. in it, if you learn nothing? Why pay someone to teach it, if he has nothing to teach? Thus, it becomes important for any field to consistently violate common sense. This is probably, on the whole, not a good thing.

Yes, there is the risk that someone will try to reproduce your results and find them wrong; as happened here. But the same problem applies: merely repeating and confirming someone else's study is not generally publishable. So others rarely do it. The high school student's paper made waves because the original paper, arguing that the Irish had not been discriminated against, had become so widespread among academics to have become, itself, a new received wisdom. At this point, “revisionism” begins to pay dividends. And the cycle begins again.

Just as a clock that has stopped dead will still be accurate about twice a day, so all these crazy ideas emerging from the academy probably get disproven eventually. However, what we are witnessing is not a quest for truth or knowledge, and alarmingly little get added year by year to the store of human knowledge. In the meantime, a great deal of damage gets done.

It is worst in the social sciences, because they are based on incoherent premises—primarily, an insurmountable observer paradox. But the same also applies in the humanities and in the hard sciences. The difference is that the social sciences emit nothing but this static; humanities and hard sciences do also sometimes produce valid results.

Even so, anyone who has lived long enough and made some effort over their lives to follow medical advice will surely have noticed the pattern. Sugar will kill you. It will make you fat. You must take artificial sweeteners. No, wait, artificial sweeteners will kill you and make you fat; you must take sugar. No, they are quite safe; sugar is bad and will make you fat. You must get more sunlight for vitamin D. You must stay out of the sun or get skin cancer. You must get more sunlight for vitamin D. You fools! Why have you not been listening to us experts? Cholesterol is bad for your heart; cholesterol is good for you. Eggs are healthy; eggs are unhealthy; eggs are healthy. Aspirin is dangerous; safer to take acetaminophen. Acetaminophen is dangerous; safer to take aspirin. Statistics at least tell us medicine does make some progress; technology proves that hard sciences make some progress; but there is obviously still a huge amount of static involved.

This is one reason why I love the Catholic Church. Of all human institutions with intellectual pretensions, it seems uniquely immune from this disease. All other human “knowledge” seems built on sand; it alone is built on rock.

The Renaissance of the Humanities

I keep hearing about the Death of the Humanities. Nobody is studying them any more. The stats are striking.

But this is probably because nobody is teaching them any more. The truth is, we deliberately killed the humanities about fifty years ago, by government action in Canada, in the US by neglect. Universities are just such conservative institutions that it takes a few generations for the death notice to appear.

Bishop's: The Anglican Church Triumphant.

This was a fatal blunder. The humanities are meant to be the capstone of any education, and hence of any university. We need the humanities to know what is true, and what is worth studying. We need the humanities to know what an education is. If we do not know what is true or what is real, philosophical or theological questions, there is no cause to study one thing over another.

We cut off the heads of our colleges. They went mad with postmodernism and psychotherapy and scientism and fringe politics, random delusions. That is where we are now—with spiralling costs as things are no longer done out of principle, but purely for money. The humanities may have been first to lose their appeal with students—logically enough, as they were the first to be hollowed out—but many are talking now of an “education bubble” that looks about to burst on all faculties. The conventional university has become unsustainable.

Up to the Sixties, in Canada, each university knew what was real and what an education was because each university, with only a few exceptions, was confessional—it had a definite religious point of view, it had meaningful founding principles, which were supposed to guide all that it did. That was, largely, the reason for having different universities in the first place. We systematically demolished that, in Canada, in a deliberate postwar drive to secularize education, and now are reaping the whirlwind.

McMaster. Beware the swimming pool--they like to dunk.

Just for interest, here's a quick historical primer:

Queen's University—Presbyterian

McMaster University—Baptist

Wilfred Laurier University—Lutheran

University of Windsor—Catholic

University of Western Ontario—Anglican

University of Ottawa—Catholic

University of Toronto—a consortium, with colleges representing each denomination.

University of Manitoba—a consortium of Catholic, Anglican, and Presbyterian colleges. The Methodists originally were also included, but later split off as the University of Winnipeg.

Universite de Moncton—Catholic

Mount Allison University—Methodist

St. Thomas University—Catholic

Acadia University—Baptist

Mount Saint Vincent University—Catholic

Saint Francis Xavier University—Catholic

St. Mary's University—Catholic

Universite Sainte-Anne—Catholic

UPEI—formed as a merger of two preexisting institutions, one Catholic, one Protestant.

Bishop's University—Anglican

Concordia University—a merger of a Catholic and a YMCA college.

Universite de Montreal—Catholic

Universite de Sherbrooke—Catholic

Universite Laval—Catholic

University of Regina—Methodist

University of Ottawa: Once-proud tentacle of the International Papist Conspiracy.

Secular universities:

Dalhousie University

University of New Brunswick

University of British Columbia

McGill University

The provincial universities in Western Canada were established more or less on the American model of secular state universities, and were non-denominational. In addition, any university founded postwar was almost automatically secular—until recently.

In the US, the deliberate government elimination of religious influence and of the religious character of universities did not take place; but nominally denominational universities mostly lost their denominational character more or less spontaneously at about the same period. I went to Syracuse University in NY in the late Seventies. It still had odd vestigial traces of its original Baptist character in the Religion Department—most of the professors were still Baptist ministers. But none of them taught, or admitted to believing in, Baptist theology.

The loss of so much heritage and tradition is sad; though not nearly as sad as the loss of so much meaningful education. We have lost, in effect, at least two generations of thinkers, writers, leaders, and artists. We have lost our way as a culture. Individually, we have been swamped by “mental illness.” To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, it ought to be clear to anyone from the raw statistics that some great catastrophe has taken place in the spiritual world since about the Second World War.

Queen's: Presbyterian Gothic. Strange fixation about alcohol...

Happily, however, there has been a revival of religious colleges in more recent years. The humanities may be dying in these older legacy schools. But these new schools, though small, are booming. And they are centred on the humanities in their true, ancient form, the Great Books and Great Thoughts approach, guided by a coherent vision of what man is and why he is here.

The problem, in other words, was never with the humanities. It was with the elites.

I predict a general renaissance in the humanities soon. It should have come long ago, had the devil's wrecking ball not been so hard at work. With increased prosperity, our culture has more time and resources for the finer things in life, more time for contemplation, and this is the sphere of the humanities. With the accelerating pace of technology, a practical degree actually makes less and less sense—all the details will be obsolete more or less by time of graduation, even on the vain hope that one's professors actually still know anything relevant based on their education much longer ago. The only workable approach is to focus on the fundamentals, on how to learn, how to evaluate, how to communicate, and how to make decisions. Everything else will more or less necessarily be on the job, or in night school.