Shunning Galileo

It smarts, bruises the ego, when an individual who prides himself on his academic achievements and respect within the academic world discovers that rash decisions taken in one's youth that impacted hugely on social safety within a secure society can come back to haunt. Although Chicago academic William Ayers, once a co-founder of the Weather Underground radical group, now a still-radical but respected academic, claims not to "feel personally offended, nor particularly aggrieved" at being declared persona-non-grata at the Canadian border, it's clear he is both offended and aggrieved.

To assuage his feelings and to put things in the kind of perspective he feels should teach Canadians a lesson in democracy and the need to respect open borders for academic exchange to enable students to learn all the facets of life and human existence, he has set out to good-naturedly, heavens, not patronizingly, teach us a well-earned lesson about democracy. Perhaps overlooking the fact that many democratic governments do not appreciate the appearance on their borders of rabble-rousers whose past indiscretions include violence and inciting to violence in disagreement of their own government's policies.

That too is a democratic right, for any government to make choices of that nature.

In the interests of free speech perhaps anything should be open to a public airing, to allow people to make up their own minds. There is reason to hope that individuals on a learning curve in academic situations are open to all facets of reasonable debate, exclusive of violent civic disobedience clearly representing criminal offences. Destruction of public property by means of the manufacture of explosive devices not intending to kill people, merely to alert them of a difference of opinion might not be seen by all to represent democracy in action.

As to Mr. Ayers's comparison between Democratic and Authoritarian societies' academic openness, in exposing students to fresh new ideas that might be counter to those that their society values and prioritizes, he must also be aware that all societies pattern their education systems to reflect their social mores and political values. Which does not hamper philosophical, political and scientific enquiry that goes beyond an accepted mode or rote in democracies; rather people remain free to pursue and develop alternate research and publish findings that further the boundaries of free thought and research.

That Mr. Ayers is confounding his personal experience as a former felon rehabilitated to represent a fashionable leftist-radical educator - rejected entry by a country that sees no particular value in admitting him because generally speaking, people with criminal backgrounds no matter how elevated they may be in other spheres of endeavour are not welcomed to the country - as an indication of Canada's failings as a free and open society is unfortunate.

It's more than likely that his personal appearance to speak as an invited participant in Carleton University's Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences would do no harm to the country, and the theories he expounds might seem to be valuable to the participants, and in that sense it is unfortunate that he has been excluded. But his theories are not likely very unique; university settings are hotbeds of disdain of government and politics and tradition and the social compact. There will be others, without criminal pasts, who can espouse what he does.

His unctuously ingenuous invocation of the "sense of solidarity, brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect" of human beings "born free and equal in dignity and rights, each endowed with reason and conscience" is redolent of academic purple prose. Don't we all believe in the potential to achieve, and the worthiness of mutual respect and understanding? It is not only achieved through academic introspection and minute inspection of human relationships, but within the larger arena of the public marketplace of interaction.

Finally, introducing to the debate and his condemnation of the decision of a government agency at the border to exclude him from entry on the basis of his past associations and behaviours, the historical instance of the Catholic Church and its hounding of Galileo for daring to uphold truth through his astronomical observations, as though his experience is no less an example of a rigid authority belittling and demeaning truth smacks of an intolerable hubris.

And while this professor of the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago claims that what is at stake here is academic freedom of exchange and the marketplace of freedom of expression in the public sphere; "the right to a mind of one's own, the right to pursue an argument into uncharted spaces, the right to challenge the state or the church and its orthodoxy in the public square. The right to think at all", he is unimpressively overwrought in his condemnation.

I think we're all right without the wisdom of his profundities.