[First published in the Toronto Star (24 September 1996).

On the same day I received an email message from

Professor Emberley: Thank you for your mud-slinging, ideological squib on my book in the Toronto Star. You
are obviously so mesmerized by the Zeitgeist that you cannot even see what's at stake in the university debate.
Where there could have been an opportunity for us to have an interesting discussion, you evidently have
dismissed me as 'intensely conservative' and 'ignorant.' Well, I suppose that's why the public thinks so poorly of
academewarring over turf, while ignoring the true needs of the students. I was utterly appalled.]

[Index: political correctness, higher education, First Nations]

[Date: September 1996]

Hot Button Academic Politics

Michael Keefer

Review of Peter C. Emberley, Zero Tolerance: Hot Button Politics in Canada's

Universities (Toronto: Penguin, 1996)

It might seem hard to imagine a better guide to the embattled terrain of Canadian
higher education than Peter C. Emberley, a product of three distinguished institutions of
higher learning, the director of Carleton University's new College of the Humanities, and
author now of three books on what he calls hot button issues affecting Canadian
universities.
Emberley's diagnosis in Zero Tolerance is direct and simple. Canadian higher
education has been politicized by the corporate right and the cultural left, and the
plainly evident collapse of the university is the result of turf wars and a fierce
jockeying for power and control between groups that neither know nor love the
university, but are pursuing their own political agendas.
This diagnosis is elaborated in nine wide-ranging and often exhaustively
researched chapters. A tenth and final chapter restates Emberley's positions on key issues
including tenure, public accountability, the relation between teaching and research, tuition
fees, inclusivity, core curricula and academic freedom.
Zero Tolerance is valuable for the information it brings together on many of the

issues currently under debate in and around Canada's universities and colleges. However,
Emberley's assessments of the material he has assembled are often oddly inconsistent
most commonly at points where his posture of judicious neutrality breaks down in the
face of a desire to advance his own intensely conservative cultural politics.
Thus Emberley correctly identifies recent steep increases in tuition fees, along
with income-contingent loan repayment schemes, as a privatizing of public debt, and as a
transfer of that debt from the baby-boomers who benefited from generous social and
educational policies to a younger generation which is being denied the benefit of
inexpensive access to higher education. However, he prefers to interpret these
developments as a form of moral education which will teach this generation of students
that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. (Clichs of this sort, notably that weary
equation of university study with an odyssey, resound through the book.)
Emberley's pose as a defender of the culture of humane scholarship is more
directly self-contradictory. He denounces terms like discourse, marginalization, and
inclusivity as pseudo-intellectual jargon. He heaps scorn on those who protest against
cuts of 25 percent in university library acquisitions, since about that proportion of
library holdings is 'research' that has done little more than pad faculty rsums. (One
wonders, in passing, what proportion of his own writings Emberley would dismiss as
padding.) He is no less contemptuous of faculty who feel threatened by the bogeyman
of the corporate world. In his view, It is only because teaching and research have been
gutted of most of their meaning that the issues of the relevance of what faculty do have
become so volatile.
After this, Emberley's suggestion that the major culprit in his story is the
cultural left's identity politics comes as no surprise. Some readers may accept his
definition of postmodernism as an intellectual tool currently being used in various social
sectors to rewrite history and to re-engineer the evident experiences of living. Many,
however, will be shocked to find that his prime example of a postmodern rewriting of
history is the United Church's recent apology to First Nations people for the suffering it
inflicted on them through such Eurocentric projects as residential schools.
Emberley's loathing for those tendencies in contemporary scholarship that he
lumps together as postmodern is exceeded only by his ignorance of recent work even in
fields so directly relevant to this book as social history, cultural theory, and the sociology
of education. (Thus, for example, Paul de Man's name heads a list of French academics

who helped inspire the May 1968 Paris student revoltsthough de Man made his
academic career in the United States, published his first book only in 1971, and never had
a significant following in France.)
None of these objections would count if this book projected a compelling vision
of what liberal education is or ought to be. But here Emberley offers little beyond gush
about the aspirations of young people and vague remarks about core curricula. Perhaps he
is holding his best thoughts back for the benefit of his students and colleagues at
Carleton.