There’s a crucial difference between hearing out odious ideas and acting on them
By T. David Marshall
A decision by York University this month to accommodate a student who, for religious reasons, declared that he could not tolerate partaking in activities involving women, has once again raised the question of the proper limits of toleration and accommodation.York University's administration, in its infinite "wisdom," decided it was better, or easier, to simply tolerate this student's misogynistic outlook, and make accommodations for him, rather than mount even the most perfunctory of defences for the values thereby put at risk — gender equality, academic freedom and individual dignity, just to name a few.
The administration's decision would have been to the detriment of that portion of the class possessing vaginas — and to those with penises and brains — had it not been for the demonstrated intestinal fortitude of the professor at the centre of this self-imposed mess. This professor, a male, refused to assent to that student's absurd request and then refused to assent to the still-more-absurd demand of the school to permit gender segregation. In doing so, he did what the school's administration should have done in the first place.
His moral courage, in the face of such pressure, is deserving of praise — and is, I fear, an increasingly rare and (therefore) precious thing.
I say "rare" because the disturbing fact is that this school's administration is not alone in its hapless and misguided accommodation of the patently absurd and barbaric. Britain, of late, has experienced its own spate of battles with "accommodation-gone-awry" and has fared only half well. In that country, an association called Universities UK (which represents nearly every university in the country) recently decided to go about the bizarre task of crafting guidelines for the segregation of classes to accommodate visiting Muslim professors (lest one of them be offended by the presence of a woman, or — gasp! — not attend). In these guidelines, the association counselled its members — 133 universities — that the segregation of women was "OK," so long as they weren't relegated to the very back of the classroom.
Such ghastly affronts to reason and sense raise, I think, the important questions of how far the elastic notion of toleration takes us and how far we should accommodate unreasonable ideas.
The toleration of ideas (even patently bad ones) is a good thing — as John Locke's famous 1689 Letter Concerning Toleration rightly points out. The forced conformity of one's mind to the prevailing notions of society concerning matters of right and wrong, good and bad, is both a practical impossibility and very undesirable thing. When it comes to the range of ideas to be possessed and expressed by its possessor and expositor, even the most odious idea is entitled to a fair hearing.
This disposition of liberality, however, has no analogue in the case of accommodation. In determining what to accommodate and what to reject, we are forced to appeal to, and exercise, our reason. Accommodation asks of us not simply that we lend an ear to, or entertain the thoughts of, another, but that we positively make room for (and perhaps even lend a hand to) the carrying of such ideas into effect. This exercise, unlike the other, demands that we reason out the evidence for and against the ideas in question, before deciding how — or indeed, whether — to act.
The necessity of undertaking the task of reasoning, however, appears to have entirely escaped York's administration. The only other possible conclusion is that they haven't the collective wherewithal to reason themselves out of a paper bag, because it's not just that gender segregation is so obviously a bad idea (as it has, at its core, the subjugation of women) but that gender equality is so obviously a good idea.
Reasons abound to support it: What genitalia one possesses is determined by the lottery of birth; differences in the treatment of individuals should be based on salient distinctions and not on the basis of that lottery; it promotes social stability, equality and industrial development; it decreases the likelihood of individual and group poverty and contributes to lower rates of infectious disease — and I could go on.
But without even an attempt at reasoning it out, York University very nearly let the lesser idea win. And that's a problem for us all.
If there is a silver lining to these events, however, it is that we have been reminded that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Tolerance? Yes. Accommodation? We'll see. But in that fight our weapon and our shield is — and forever will be — reason, and we relinquish that at our peril.
T. David Marshall is a lawyer practising in Hamilton.
