Mt. Allison University, one of Canada’s premiere undergraduate universities, has found itself at the centre of a controversy for its decision to confer an honourary doctorate on Heather Reisman. The annual convocation ceremony takes place May 17th, 2010 and includes the installation of Peter Mansbridge as the university’s new chancellor. The CBC reports that a group of professors is protesting the selection of Reisman because the CEO of Indigo Books is also co-founder of HESEG, a charitable foundation which supports non-Israeli soldiers in the Israeli army. The professors see her ties to a military organization which has committed crimes against humanity as antithetical to the aims of a liberal arts educational institution. One need only look to Noam Chomsky’s treatment by Israeli officials to see that militarism does not tolerate the kind of critical inquiry that is fostered by the liberal arts tradition.
While it is David Thomas who is cited in the CBC article, it is another member of the Mt. Allison faculty who is generating a lot of buzz on blogs. Poet and recent addition to the English Department, Amanda Jernigan, has written an open letter to the outgoing chancellor, provost and other big-wigs in which she decries the harms which Reisman’s organization has done to book publishing in Canada. In short, predatory practices have driven more than 350 independent book sellers out of business and, thanks to economies of scale, this has placed Chapters/Indigo in a position to start picking off small presses too.
While there is nothing wrong with Mt. Allison’s stated selection criteria, which value the contributions of prominent entrepreneurs alongside other forms of achievement, there is something wrong in celebrating an entrepreneur whose efforts are fundamentally anti-intellectual in character. The application of unfettered capitalism to the production, marketing and consumption of books ends up eroding intellectual and cultural diversity.
Apart from militarism and philistinism, there is another concern which I haven’t heard mentioned: Reisman’s membership in the Bilderberg Group. Perhaps it doesn’t get mentioned because serious intellectuals don’t want their criticisms tainted by association with whacked out conspiracy theorists. And talk of the Bilderberg Group brings these people out in droves. Nevertheless, the Bilderberg Group is real, and Reisman’s membership is a longstanding fact. Whatever you might think of the group’s aims and activities, one thing is clear, it is elitist. If nothing else, it serves to justify its members to themselves as they sit at the pinnacle of the hyper-stratified class system that their beloved capitalism has created for them.
Basically, Mt. Allison is pissing in its own bathtub.
Update: It’s worth noting the strange coincidence that Peter Mansbridge is also a participant in the Bilderberg Group. Click here for details.