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

"Special report: Endangered family." Newsweek 122(30August 1993): 16-29. "Traditional family outdated, Hite finds." The Globe and Mail (28 May 1994): A7. Volkmann, Frederic M. "What to look for in a candidate. The Art of Hiring in America's Colleges and Universities." Ronald H. Stein and Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, eds. Buffalo: Prometheus, 1993 65-84. "Universities: Towers of babble." The Economist (25 December 1993-January 1994): 72-74. Rpt as "Whatever happened to the university?" The Globe and Mail (28 December 1994): Al7. DAYID HEINIMANN University ofNorthem British Columbia Comment on David Heinimann's "Wedded to the University: The Professor and the Family" In "Wedded to the University," David Heinimann's main thesis is that the family and the university "come together" on the issue of funding and taxes and, that in future, universities will have difficulty balancing their liberal policies with taxbased 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 values 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 disc losure 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 li ves. While he off-handedly satirizes the kind of discrimination that Journal ofCanadian Studies 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, ~e way out is to clean our moral house. This is problematic. Heinimann's tacit claim is that academics should accept traditional conceptions of the family and resurrect traditional family values as the best preparation for the future onslaught by governments intent on getting " more 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 family 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 gi~e in . to pressures that are dictated by a nght wmg agenda. The end result is that the author contributes to the "family values" antiferninist 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 morn (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 statedirected organi zations. 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 him~elf 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 203 assumptions about the family 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 family is the most important, yet gender and family get almost no mention in most commentaries on the New Right (Harding, 1981). Therefore it is imperative, when making assertions about retaining a particular family form, to examine critically the New RighJ's family discourse. Families and family life are profoundly influenced by social...