Truth and Reconciliation and Blindness

September 30 was the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, now a statutory holiday in Canada. I have searched the governmental Canada.ca website to find the original legislation that proclaimed this holiday, but cannot locate it. I wanted to read what our parliamentarians thought the point of this holiday is supposed to be. Cannot find those words.

I keep reading in many places about how one should ‘commemorate the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation’ in yet another abuse of the language. The Day is presumably intended to commemorate something, just as Remembrance Day is intended to commemorate those killed in military action while serving in the Canadian Armed Forces. You can ‘celebrate’ a holiday, but you cannot commemorate it. Christmas is to commemorate the birth of Christ, not to commemorate Christmas. Such basic aspects of grammatical logic are beyond the ken of much of our current chattering classes.

So, absent any clear statement on what precisely this Day is commemorating, I will just say that so far as I know, it is intended to be about – in some way – the people who lived in Canada before the Anglo and French settlers came, and who, without a doubt, got treated badly by said settlers. Broken treaties, lands taken, you name it, it happened to them.

However, this post is not about the Day itself, but about my former employer. The Day only serves to highlight the degree to which one must remain blind to the reality around you to work in any position of responsibility for the university. Or, at least at UWO, but I think UWO is pretty typical.

On September 29, I got an email from the Econ Dept’s chief administrator which said this:

Good Afternoon, Everyone,

This is a reminder of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation & Allyship event tomorrow.  I attended this event last year, and it was a great way to bring the community together to collaborate on allyship and inclusivity.

I hope to see the Department of Economics well represented in orange shirts tomorrow. 😊

The ‘orange shirt’ remark is because someone somewhere decided an appropriate thing to do on Sept 30 was to wear an orange shirt. Now, let me be clear that I don’t wear a pink shirt when one is supposed to do that. I do own a pink shirt, and wear it when I feel like it. I think it looks great under a blue sportcoat with a blue-striped tie. I don’t grow a moustache in Movember, either. I find all these sorts of things highly irritating, a way for people to show their virtue without actually doing anything virtuous.

So, in light of this email, I resolved to go to my old-guy office on Sept 30, and looked through my wardrobe for a shirt whose colour could be described as ‘opposite of orange’. I chose green, but later a more colour-wheel savvy friend of mine convinced me blue would have been a better choice. Next year.

As a retired guy I have to park some way from my retiree’s office, a fact about which I am not complaining. That I have an office and any kind of parking on campus are two things for which I am genuinely grateful. It was a beautiful warm afternoon, so I got to see lots of university folks walking about the campus during my stroll. I did a haphazard survey as I walked. I would count off 10 people within my sight and note how many were wearing orange shirts. Came up with 0 or 1 every time. So, I put at 5% or less the number of people on campus who did the correct thing as to attire.

But there is more. ‘Allyship’ is one of those non-word words of which university types are so fond. The ‘allyship event’ which is referred to in the email above was explained in a previous email from the very bureaucratic Dean of Social Science, thusly:

On the 30th, we are excited to invite you to our second annual “Afternoon of Allyship” on September 30, which is open to students, faculty, and staff. This is a valuable opportunity for our entire campus community to come together and engage in meaningful dialogue about allyship and inclusive practices:

Second annual “Afternoon of Allyship” on September 30 from 12:00 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. at Western

Location: Social Science Centre (SSC) Room 2050

Admission: Free

 This event, co-organized by the Faculties of Social Science and Science, is an opportunity to reflect on what allyship means in your role as a student, supervisor, researcher, or leader at Western.

 Our speakers include:

1. 1. Dr. Christy Bressette, presenting the new “Principles of Indigenous Allyship at Western” guide (12:15)

   2. Drs. Lindsay Bell and Tania Granadillo, Anthropology, Social Science, speaking on “Availability without Expectation: Allyship in Indigenous Language Reclamation” (12:40)

   3. Dr. Desmond Moser, Earth Sciences, Science, speaking on “Allying Western Science with Indigenous Priorities” (1:40)

 A light lunch will be served at 12:00 to the first 75 attendees, so come early!

Apologies for including all that in this post, but I think it is good for non-University types to see the kinds of things that are written by University types. Note that Deans and other U-bureaucrats are very often ‘very excited’. I think it’s something in the wine they serve at their meetings. I could go on about a professor of Earth Sciences suggesting that Science should by allied with anything other than scientific priorities….but I won’t.

As I proceeded to my office on Sept 30, I walked past the room in SSC in which this event was being held. Some folks were grabbing their free lunch outside the room, and one of those people was a staff member from Econ, wearing an orange shirt. I know her well, she worked in the dept for a number of years before I retired. Of course she attended in her orange shirt. Given that email from her immediate Dept supervisor, what else could she do?

I got set up in my office on the fourth floor, turned the computer on and checked on some things that I can only access from a University computer, then walked over to the library to return a book. On the way back I passed the same room again, and with the free lunch scramble finished I could look in. It’s a big room, and there was somebody at the front saying something, and it was….pretty empty. As I kept walking I was preceded up the steps by the highly clueless and useless Dean, in his orange shirt, which you could just see under his black sportcoat. Guess he had other things to do, but that image was what prompted this post.

If you are said Dean, or the hapless new Dept administrative officer, you simply cannot look around at the paucity of orange shirts (I saw exactly 0 in the Econ Dept other than that one staff member) or at the low turnout at your ‘allyship’ event (despite classes being cancelled and a ‘free lunch’) from two faculties and wonder – ‘is this a worthwhile use of our energy and resources?’.

You do not ask yourself that question, and you do not raise it with those above you in the hierarchy. That would be blasphemous. Those lower down in the chain do what they must to not antagonize their own supervisors if they are staff members, and faculty and students, who are harder to put pressure on, mostly ignore the whole thing. Still, those nearer the top of the chain press on, oblivious to the lack of attendance at the ‘valuable opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue’.

A well-run organization has as a basic requirement confronting sometimes difficult questions about priorities. That is not allowed at a university today. One carries on with things that are known to be ‘the right thing to do’, and asks no questions about their value.

A long final note. It is only somewhat related to the above, but it happened in the following week, and it is, I think, yet another indication of how cluelessly universities operate these days.

I got an email the next week from the History Dept, inviting me to a ‘Research Seminar’ the next day. Now, the Econ dept does not send emails outside the dept about its seminars and workshops. There is no reason to expect historians or sociologists to be interested. However, for some Depts, widely disseminating such notices is an important device for signalling said Dept’s virtue, and that was the case here.

The email from History had this in the subject line:

Today: Accidental Queer, with reflections on masculinity and coloniality in studies of gender and sexuality in Southern Africa

The email itself said that the presenter of this seminar, a Professor of Global Development Studies at Queens U, would indeed be sharing ‘a mix of story-telling and reflections on his personal experiences, motivations and ethical challenges…’

Your tax dollars at work, eh? I am all in favour of hearing stories and reflections. When I worked in the Dept we had a weekly coffee hour (not to mention Happy Hours at the Grad Bar) where we did just that. In particular, some of the older (than me) members of the Dept had been involved in things like putting the economy of Botswana on its feet in the 80s and 90s, or being part of the team that negotiated the first Free Trade Agreement with the US. Those cats had great stories to tell about all that. But…..we didn’t call that research. It wasn’t a seminar, as informative as it was – it was chat.

The attitude is different in UWO’s current History Dept, clearly. I’m sure they would find the stories about my senior colleague’s work in Botswana horrible, anyway. Coloniality, don’t ya know. Here’s Botswana’s history of GDP/capita, btw – just because I like graphs so much.

 

 

A final irony. There was a link in the email from History which I was supposed to click on to RSVP for the seminar. Under the link it said ‘Location shared upon registration’.

Yea, I guess History feels it needs to be cautious about who to let know about the location of this Research Seminar. I was rather tempted to click on the link to see if I would be considered an acceptable attendee.

I didn’t. Had better things to do, fortunately.