UBC sociologist Patricia Marchak in her analytical and ethnographic study of this battle in the culture wars being fought all across the English settler society world, finds the conclusions of the McEwen Report less than credible in her book Racism, Sexism, and the University: The Political Science Affair at the University of British Columbia (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996). To Marchak, who was the Dean of Arts in the Faculty of the Arts when the affair began, the evidence, in the McEwen Report was not only anaemic. It was grounded in ideological correctness. In fact, according to Marchak, it was McEwen, who introduced racism and sexism into the report by repeatedly using terms like “white”, “female”, and “Jewish" in her final report, a report that sounds from its description more like a prosecutorial brief than an investigation of the facts of the case.
While racism and sexism seemed to be, on the surface, what the UBC Political Science affair was about Marchak argues that this battle in a long standing culture war was really about power. It was about, Marchak argues, who had the power to determine the Political Science curriculum at UBC, who had the power within the hierarchical Political Science Department at UBC, whether the Political Science Department at UBC would be one in which truth grounded in empirical evidence was pursued or good causes were promoted, and whether academic freedom and Enlightenment rationality (empirical facts and empirical context as evidence) or postmodern relativism (perceptions as facts) would prevail in the UBC Department of Political Science. As Marchak notes, this battle for the soul of the university was hardly singular to UBC or Canada. There were battles like this in other universities across the English settler society world in Canada, Australia, the UK, and the US, where Trump and his comrades are trying to remake universities and colleges in their own political and ideological correct image.
In 1995 the dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies ended the ban on the admission of graduate students to the Department of Political Science. In 1998 then UBC president Martha Piper apologised for how UBC’s administrative bureaucrats had treated Department of Political Science during the affair (these apologies seem to always come after time has passed and the damage is already done, don't they?). As is so often the case with these after the fact apologies, however, it could not erase memories of the damage caused by vigilante like attacks on the Department between 1992 and 1995.
I enjoyed Racism, Sexism, and the University quite a lot. Marchak was spot on about the impact of consumer capitalism with its mantra that the customer is always right on North American universities (one of the original sins of the modern North American university). I personally experienced this culture of consumer feelings when I received a visit from the college lawyer and the college equity officer at the college in which I worked when one student in a class of 34 complained about a joke i told which apparently offended her or him. She is right about the impact of managerial corporate capitalism with its mantra that professionals, well non-academic professionals, know best how to run the institutions of higher education (another of the original sins of the modern North American university). She is spot on in her contention that the anti-hierarchal attitudes of postmoderns undermines the notion of professionalism and professional training and its accumulated cultural capital and that the cultural war between moderns and postmoderns is a battle for power in the North American university. She is spot on that illiberal intolerance can be found among many postmodernist sects. The radical right hardly has a monopoly on illiberalism. She is right that many varieties of postmodernism have a radical democratic aspect to them. This makes some postmoderns close cousins to religious fundamentalism with its ideology of every man a Bible interpreter regardless of educational level and cultural capital accrued. She is spot on about the need for a middle way, a middle way that respects the seeking after truth, natural justice or due process, and merit (even if this is unequally distributed for class, race, and gender reasons), and respect and equity for all.
Finally, I do agree with Max Weber that value, what someone values, does impact what academics and fan boys and girls study but that does not mean that we have to throw out the scientific method with its dispassion with the everything is about power ideologically correct water. One can and should be trained in the fine art of dispassionate analysis grounded in an understanding that every human thing is grounded in economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic realities, even if many of those realities are nothing more than social and cultural constructs.
