Zero Tolerance. Hot Button Politics in Canada's Universities by Peter C. Emberley (review)

HUMANITIES 107 Humanities Peter C. Emberley. Zero Tolerance. Hot Button Politics in Canada's Universities Penguin .Books. xiv, 314. $19.99 Imagine discussing a weather guide before an audience of weathermen: everyone knows what you know; nobody knows how to change it. Such circumstances force you to react to the hook rather than analyse it, since anybody working in a Canadian university is graced with omniscience on the subject of this book. As I write, a Globe and Mail headline asks, 'Why can't our universities make their sexual-harassment policies work?' Insert 'or anything else' before the final word, and you will absorb the meaning of the dreary list of disasters that EmberIey takes us through. The list of errors precedes a"briefer one of remedies. Like any observer of our present disarray, Emberley discloses the crumbling of the idea of disinterested,non-quantifiable, learningbeneath the onslaughts ofLeft (the Post-[fill in the blank] agenda) and Right (the Corporate job-skills agenda). Curiously, after an acute critique of such groups' obsession with accountability, the abolition of tenure, rankings and performance indicators , inclusivity, and value-added auditing, the author concludes with advocating these practices as essential to the preservation of the academy . This may puzzle readers, like a diet for obesity that includes chocolate. Whether or not one agrees with Zero Tolerance's remedies, a reader follows with shocked fascination Emberley's recalling of the various publicized threats to tmiversity autonomy and civility during the recent past. Government reports with their unblinking visions of universities as engines for social engineering and the advancement of political aims; the Corporate Right's insistence on marketing criteria as the chief template for devising curriculum and retaining faculty; the Cultural Left's pretensions to innate righteousness and consequent pillorying of those lacking it: atrocity after atrocity passes agam before our eyes. There seems nothing, absolutely nothing, to which our profession and its administrative leadership will not stoop. It is instructive (in the way that a history of the Thirty Years' War is instructive) to read page after page of catastrophes in compressed form, rather than in the banat distracted manner in which we first experienced them. Emberley's sense of our present discontents owes much to his sense of historical roots. Thls is fine,but only to a point. Chapter 2'S survey of the university's medievalorigins inspired and uplifted me. Then I reflected that the university's more prOximate ancestry in Canada lies in the realm of a social engine designed to polish a leadership elite that has for some time been folded into the project ofmass training for the demands oftechnology. Beheldfrom thatperspective, that oftheinstitutionwhich actuallyemploys me, the various ailments now besetting the university can be viewed as the 108 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 minor pains attendant upon fitting this institution within the bounds of global-market culture. The I conversation and good books' that Emberly uses as shorthand for a liberating education are now, we all realize, minor-leaguepreoccupations that exist along the periphery of the grant-grabbing, project-oriented, socially engineered academic enterprise in which dignities are measured and bestowed. Even to invoke these ancient traditions of contemplation entails the dangers of sliding into nostalgia. I cannot imagine a Canadian academic failing to find Zero Torerance interesting, in the way that Senior Common Room discussions often are. It presents a compelling survey of the mess that we are in. Like every other conunentary that Ihave come across, itpresents us withno very convincing guide for getting out of that mess. (DENNIS DUFFY) Christine Storm, editor. Liberal Education and the Small University in Canada McGill-Queen's University Press. x, 234. $42.95 cloth, $19.95 paper 1his collection of essays, from authors associated with Mount Allison University, promises more than it delivers. Although several ofthe discrete chapters are interesting, the volume as a whole lacks coherence and ends up as less than the sum of its parts. Beginning with chapters that discuss the development of the concept of liberal education from classical times to the present, the book continues with a chapter on the history of the Arts and Science curriculum in North America before turning to Mount Allison as...