For most of the 1980s I was a fixture on the second floor of the University Centre or UC at the University of Guelph. Those who went to Guelph will know what this means. The second floor was the location of the offices for the university's and each college's student government, for both student newspapers, and for the campus radio station. I was on the board of the student government, the Central Student Association or CSA; spent a decade at the paper, The Ontarion , eventually becoming it's editor-in-chief; and for most of the 80s, had a weekly morning show on CFRU, the radio station. I started volunteering on the second floor in 1981 when I was 17, two years before I actually became a student at Guelph, and, despite my best attempts to stay there forever, I didn't leave the place until the early 1990s.
One of the things I Ioved about Guelph at the time was that its politics were decidedly anti-establishment. Guelph stood up for the underdog, for peace, for social justice and for tolerance. Some called us leftist and, for some, that might have been true. I don't think I was that dogmatic and I know that some of my contemporaries at the time — people like Mike Wallace, now the Conservative MP from Burlington but back then, a leader of the student government for one of university's colleges — would vote and work for both the Liberal and Progressive Conservative parties at election times.
Still, it seemed to me that, for the course of a decade, The Ontarion's writers and editors and most of the leaders of the student government had a decidedly anti-establishment bent particularly compared to our student politician/journalist contemporaries at Western, McGill or Toronto, I'm certain I was the author of anti-free trade columns, for example, and was no fan of then prime minister Brian Mulroney. And no one I knew then thought much of Ronald Reagan and the military activities of the U.S. in Central America. Guelph was radical enough, in fact, that we had not one, but two very active student communist clubs — the Maoists had their office and the Marxist-Leninists had theirs. And I loved all that radicalism.
With that context, let me now say how saddened and ashamed I was this morning to see, thanks to a pointer at The Torch, a hateful and vicious smear at the online newsletter of the Central Student Association. I have never, in more than 25 years as a professional journalist ever written a letter to the editor complaining about somone's coverage or asking for someone to censor themselves but I did so today. I believe that speech must be free and should have as few limits as possible, even if that speech is occasionally hurtful. But this morning's piece, its placement, and its prominence was beyond the pale so here's what I wrote:
Hello —
As an otherwise proud University of Guelph alumni, a former Ontarion Editor-in-Chief, and a former Central Students Association board member, I ask you to consider removing the piece found here:
http://www.thecannon.ca/viewpoint_details.php?id=7723
This is a piece the editors of the Cannon.ca now have at the top of its main index page with the absolutely shameful headline “U of G to honour war criminal”.
As a journalist, I encourage and defend robust discussions of Canada's foreign policy and recognize that participants on all sides will have opinions and views which others in the debate may find objectionable. I'm personally and professionally committed to fair and accurate presentations of this discussion.
But labelling any individual “a war criminal” is a tremendously serious charge. Not only that, I suspect your lawyers would advise you that you have just committed monstrous libel. I know the lawyers who work for our chain would provide that advice.
More seriously, though, your vicious attack on Canada's former chief of defence staff does little to advance any debate on an important public policy issue. And to allow such a smear to be published in a forum which claims to speak for “the undergraduate students at the University of Guelph” brings dishonour to the University, the CSA and the those undergrads.
Thank you, Mr Akin.
Mark
Ottawa
Thank-you for this blog. At the very least I think you encouraged them to change the title. It's now “Editorial: U of G to Honour War Monger” instead of war criminal.
The post has been removed – but you can still google “The Cannon” and “Rick Hillier” to get the cached version.
Latest at The Torch:
“The courage (hah!) of their convictions”
Mark
Ottawa
I wonder about how such things occur. If you’ll forgive the tangent, I’ve been reading recently about the Internet, how we find information and how this affects us. There was a reference to a stat stating only 15% of web sites link to opposing viewpoints (stat from roughly 2002). I’ve also been reading books about social networks, marketing etc., all employing the term “tribe.”
And what all this reading, and my own online activity on blogs, Facebook, Twitter and so on has me wondering is if we’re all just talking to ourselves. The word “tribe” seems appropriate, more so than the more frequently used “community.” More than ever we are choosing what information we receive. Are we all just “preaching to the choir,” so to speak? Whether it is politics, the environment, the economy or some other issue, it strikes me we’re all just hearing what we want to hear and staying away from anything that might be an opposing view. And this leads to extremism.
Is this how such an article as the one you refer to occurs? Or the recent fiasco with the Carleton University Students Association and cystic fibrosis (deciding to drop support claiming the disease only affected white people, primarily men)? Are we all living in little tribal bubbles, so convinced of our own “rightness” that we’ve lost the ability to think critically, unable to even consider opposing views? To think through what we’re saying?
What is worrisome here is that these things come out of a younger generation, though the problem is multi-generational. It seems worse than intolerance. It’s the inability to think for ourselves. We join a tribe and just go with whatever the tribe says. In fact, agreement pulls us deeper into the tribe.
We also seem unable to make an argument for whatever our position might be because we frame issues in extremes. Perhaps the author here had a legitimate point yet who, but those who already agree with him/her, would hear the point when it’s presented in such an extreme and offensive way?
By the way, the book I’ve been reading has the mind-dulling title Ambient Findability. Despite the title and some tongue-twisting terminology, it is about on how we find information and how we give authority to information. For one thing, it discusses how ease trumps validity when we search for information, especially when so much information is available. In the online world, ignoring the libel issues of the item you referred to, were it still online and get enough traffic, backlinks etc., it potentially could find itself climbing in Google rankings, gathering more traffic still and, simply through being high in the rankings and being repeated enough times, become “true” in the sense that people would start believing it was true even though there was no actual legitimate, factual information to support it. You Google a name. This comes up. It must be true. Google is easy. Other research is not and takes more time.
We all say extreme things. But in this case, where it was public, was there no one to say, “Hey, you’re over the top here”? Not likely because, within the tribe, it tells us what we want to hear. Truth is a secondary consideration (if considered at all).
This may just be an off-the-charts example of something we’re all doing now.
(Sorry for being long-winded.)