On November 4th I had the opportunity to sit down with a Ubyssey reporter to talk about cancel culture at UBC. The sprawling hour long interview covered a lot of topics and most of it is unlikely to make it into the article. If all [reporter's] interview subjects do the same I imagine it might take a few months for the story to see the light of day!
Update (Nov. 22). After originally posting this the Ubyssey features editor sent me an email
Hi Professor Menzies,
I hope you're doing well. My name is [features editor], I am the features coordinator and {reporter's] editor for the cancel culture story.It has recently come to our attention that you published the transcript from your interview with [reporter]. We are kindly requesting that you take down the transcript. While we did provide you with the audio file, it was for your own files, not for publication. We were never made aware of your desire to publish the transcript, and if we were, we would have informed you that it is against our policy to publish interview transcripts. During interviews, the journalist is not on the record and [reporter] provided with personal information that she does not wish to be public.We hope this issue will be resolved expediently.Best,[features editor]
Dear [reporter],
My apologies for assuming that you would have no issue with me publishing the interview transcript on my low circulation blog. This is a standard feature and normally I would have recorded the interview myself, but was pleased when you offered to share the audio file with me. For several years now this has been my practice. I don’t always publish transcripts, unless it seems relevant and important – and this one did. I normally wait for the article to come out to publish an interview. I hadn’t understood that you were writing a feature, I assumed it was a shorter, quicker, news item. For this I apologize.
I do consider my answers to be my own intellectual property and that I retain the right to use and publish them as they are. One of the reasons I do interviews almost always when asked is that as an anthropologist I make my livelihood asking other people questions and then writing their words into my narratives. I think it behoves me to be therefore willing to be likewise interrogated and also be willing to be on the record even when I am asking the questions.
Nonetheless, I am sorry for making an unwarranted assumption and I have reedited the transcript to only show my words. I very much enjoyed our conversation and trust that you did as well.
If you feel that you would rather not quote me in your feature I total understand and am completely fine with that.
Yours, Charles.
Hello Dr. Menzies,
Thank you for your email and I hope you’re doing well.
I wanted to reach out and thank you for understanding and taking my name off the blog post. I also very much enjoyed our interview and thought it was both informative and important to current political and social discussions. I also want to apologize that I didn't make it more clear I was working on a longer feature piece.
Unfortunately per the Canadian Association of Journalists’ guidelines which The Ubyssey follows, I’m unable to use your comments in the article, but I really appreciate that you took the time to meet with me on the issue and thank you again for your time and effort.
All the best, [reporter].
I look forward to seeing what they eventually write, now with perhaps less apprehension :).
<SNIP>
[00:00:58.370] - Charles
Charles Menzies. Hagwil Hayetst, which is my Gitxaala name. So I'm a faculty member here at University of British Columbia. I've been here for a quarter century, officially, ... . And having received a little gift box ... Yeah, it's very exciting.
<SNIP>
[00:01:34.470] - Charles
I don't publicly announce my pronouns. Okay, though, for a long time, I come from the second feminist moment where we wrote. We predated the he/she alternating he/she conversations, but I actually try to write from a third person pronoun or avoid pronouns [and gendered speech].
<SNIP>
[00:02:03.910] - Charles
It's hard to define something that doesn't exist.
<SNIP>
[00:02:12.910] - Charles
Cancel culture. Like a lot of things like, for example, political correctness, are inventions of a conservative group of thinkers who feel threatened by viewpoints that challenge themselves. Right now, I forget which state, there's so many of them to choose from. Down in the US, it has the legislation going through banning something called critical race theory. I'll be honest. I never heard of critical race theory before the right wing started talking about critical race theory. There's been critical theory that comes from the Frankfurt School years, decades ago.
[00:02:48.730] - Charles
But the whole notion about the idea of this thing that it's a thing. And I'm sure you're going to find academics today, probably half my age or younger who might actually say there's critical race theory. What there is is basically good social science and philosophical examinations and understanding that explores the way in which we construct and conceptualize what constitutes race. And people in anthropology have a long history, [arguing against so-called scientific racism.] From its North American origin. The origins of anthropology in North America. Not that it originated in North America.
[00:03:25.210] - Charles
Just to be clear in which question the whole concept of scientific racism. So if you go back to the eighteen hundreds, a lot of European theorists were going around the world measuring people's skulls and declaring that there's a biological linkage between types of skulls and forms [of race] and anthropology and it's North American variant had it's basically its roots contesting challenging that notion, suggesting there is a diversity of humanness, and then looking at how race is constructed socially. So that is, you could say, critical race theory in the sense that it doesn't assume race is a reality that just exists definitionally.
[00:04:03.850] - Charles
So in that sense, cancel culture is the same kind of idea what I see, but it's mostly promulgated by people who are fairly conservative in their political and social outlooks. It is claimed that the people of the right are the ones who are the object of it. My experience has been that when you take a look at the Silencing, those of us who situate ourselves politically on the left who come from various types of progressive politics are actually more likely to be silenced.
[00:04:37.970] - Charles
To Receive letters from concerned citizens to our Department heads to our Dean's. In some cases just anonymous threats and I was actually threatened one time around. The John Furlough thing was in the news. I was quoted and actually received an explicit threat to my person that came through and [I] actually reported it to the police who weren't very helpful. Just because what you do, the police officer said, unless they're really going to come up to you and telling you they're going to be physically violating you. And then more recently, I received this a few years ago when an economics Professor ... [criticized the fraternities fo laying a wreath at the Remembrance Day events.]
[00:05:20.210] - Charles
so I was quoted because I've been publicly supportive of the right to say that and act that way. Publicly recorded did an interview just over here with one of the local news channels. I had some strange gentleman phone me about four times to my office phone with explicit threats to my person. We actually had the police and the security come and listen to the phone calls. The guy left his actual number on the phone. He was automatically recorded, ... He was down in the states somewhere.
[00:05:54.630] - Charles
So ... A lot of the actual kind of threats in Silencing comes both from outside the University, toward people who are more oriented toward the social issues. Even the state's prosecution and persecution of people tend to follow these lines. So Sunera Tubanni, for example, some years ago made a statement after the 911 event and basically faced a hate crimes investigation. No charges were laid. [Nothing was done.} But because she made the linked between the US military aggression overseas, its imperialist actions, et cetera, and the adverse impact of people of colour globally, et cetera, and even the long history, both in Canada and the US [she faced criticism].
[00:06:43.210] - Charles
Basically people who are supporting sort of racial justice in the McCarthy period that was who was targeted. It actually wasn't communists. If you read the historical work, there are a lot of Communists who managed to go through that period of time it was the ones who really expressed, [were] working with communities, especially in the academic sector, who were working with anti racist types of programs. ... When you have to take a look at it, the question becomes whose power? There is a kind of political puritanism that exists in today's world, which is ironic.
[00:07:29.730] - Charles
I find there's all kinds of ironies with that. But there is a kind of political puritanism where left, right, center, upside down, underneath, over are all going on about what you can or can't do, what you can or can't say how you can or can't say it. So people say that. But whether it actually carries you with institutional force, that's a different matter. And it's really hard to see any empirical evidence of that.
<SNIP>
[00:08:02.910] - Charles
Well, that particular action was Twitter shaming.
<SNIP>
[00:08:05.730] - Charles
Where a large group of people came together and highlighted particular sentiments and then sort of.
<SNIP>
[00:08:23.130] - Charles
I don't think people are turning to that.
<SNIP>
[00:08:25.590] - Charles
I think this is, unfortunately, the way human beings have been. There's a whole notion of how do we maintain social cohesion in social groups before we had large scale capacity to broadcast digitally, right. Face to work. We had systems of social control in terms of gossip, communications, chiding control, what people today now called microaggressions. But in the old days, that just was parental control and authority. I'm being facetious. But when I say, if you look at human society, if you take a look to societies that were organized by kinship level organizations without large external state mechanisms behind, there's a lot of work.
[00:09:15.670] - Charles
I mean, there's existing 20th century societies this way. Where joking teasing. Chiding ostracizing socially use the technique. This is just another expansion, and it has a wider reach, whether it's emotionally any more.
[00:09:34.390] - Charles
Difficult.
[00:09:35.650] - Charles
If it's your closest group of 100 people that you live with and you see every day of your life, and that's all you're going to see. Or it's 10,000 online piling on you. The one difference that I would say that I think is an empirical fact is the ferocity irrespective of what the issue is just the ramping up to the kind of the anger, the level of obscenity, the personal attacks, the violent commentary that flows through. I think I just constantly. I have a long list of blocking.
[00:10:10.850] - Charles
I block people, and some people think I block for really weak kneed reasons. I don't care. It's my emotional social life.
<SNIP>
[00:10:22.430] - Charles
It's my account. I mean, of course it is my account, but it's my account on a corporate network. And so a certain extent, I lose certain types of control because of the fact that these forms of communications have been privatized and corporatized but all the kind of open access ones that have attempted never really managed to make it.
<SNIP>
[00:10:54.830] - Charles
Across the board. All kinds of different because he's prominent, but it doesn't matter what even look at some of the stuff around the vaccine mandates and things like that. There's been a lot of kind of for people. These things become real personal, direct relationships. And I saw how some of these are going. I just decided to remove myself from engagement with a whole range of colleagues who it just because you have to think there's something that they're in their personal life. It's affecting how they respond. And we all have personal lives.
[00:11:29.390] - Charles
We think about things in particular fashion. But yeah, I interrupted your question.
<SNIP>
[00:11:49.030] - Charles
I think the thing there was interesting is he was an individual a bit older than myself, worked his way in the resource sector, this province as a lawyer, working for Patterson and other companies like that and doing things in his own right, politically conservative, but also one thing I found interesting about him. He made large, significant donations to both the provincial Liberals and the provincial NDP. He was actually a person, unlike his predecessor, my personal opinion, who couldn't work with people who he disagreed with. Kornberg actually was able to work with people and was actually a political moderate.
[00:12:32.650] - Charles
When it came to working on the board of governors. I'm not going to articulate any of my opinions or theories about how on Earth he came to view Twitter. Except I got a feeling this is a really lame explanation that he didn't have a clue of the social reach of Twitter. He didn't have a lot of followers. He wasn't following a lot of people. And I think there was just a little bit of blindness, but beyond that, but yeah, he allegedly, I never saw this, wore mega hat to a meeting.
[00:13:12.110] - Charles
My colleague, the mathematician Nassif Ghousoub, said that. And he turned up one day with what's that American New Yorker who's a Democrat who's a little bit radical.
<SNIP>
[00:13:27.890] - Charles
Yes.
[00:13:28.490] - Charles
So he came with one day with a hat like that on. And it's like I'm thinking big deal American politics. I really don't care. I hope you're not American.
<SNIP>
<SNIP>
[00:13:53.970] - Charles
Back in the 80s and some of my more youthful politics, I was involved with the group from the Kurdish Workers Party in Vancouver, which is, of course, another whole issue in history because that's 40 years ago. I'm sure it's different people today.
<SNIP>
[00:14:28.270] - Charles
There's no more. No, they're all intersected. For example, here's the thing I studied with a guy called Gerald Sider. So this is a little bit academic of me. Do it this way, but I'll try to pull down something you can quote if you want. Gerald Sider was a classic New York, grew up working class. New York, became an academic, drove a taxi through his graduate studies, managed to get a job. And then by the time I got to him, he was a fairly reasonably recognized academic. And he talked about, he says all this stuff about experience, the academic theory about experience based work and drawing from experience to understand.
[00:15:14.370] - Charles
He says, to hell with that, you have to act against experience because experience teaches you the injuries of class, the injuries of race, the injuries of gender. And to act with that experience, to build from that experience, in a sense, is to replicate and continue it. And he had an example of people. You can read the chapter if you want to. In a book called Silence and Silences. Silence is in Commemoration, I think, edited by him and Gavin Smith. He has a piece and there called against experience.
[00:15:47.770] - Charles
But.
[00:15:49.630] - Charles
His point being oftentimes our experience teaches us the wrong lessons. It really teaches about how to accommodate how to acclimatize to the world we're living in. So we need to act against experience. It's like in this whole in the late 70s and 80s, the political movement and progressive people said, there is no problem saying I'm racist, I'm sexist, I'm homophobic. I'm et cetera, et cetera. The point is to recognize that and act against it, to acknowledge that, not to go on a Liberal white guilt trip and cry about how terrible things are and how I'm personally responsible.
[00:16:25.210] - Charles
But to actually recognize that and say, so, how do you act against that? How do you change? How do you parents different? How do you engage with people in different contexts differently? How do you organize your work differently because of that acknowledgement. When people say the personal beliefs matter, sure they matter. The Mayor in Williams Lake, who is tweeting, on Facebook, on his private page giving this idea that residential schools weren't really that bad, which really misunderstands the moment we're in. It misunderstands the whole nature, what the schools were designed for, which was actually a common technology of assimilation used globally.
[00:17:07.850] - Charles
It wasn't just the Canadian government. The French used it against the breton and minority language speakers. The Soviet Union used it in the period of Stalinism as a clear way to change people. The Americans used it. The British used with the workhouses for poor people to reeducate. ... So this was a technology of control and assimilation to fundamentally change people. So to sort of focus on the idea 'oh, well, it's balanced,' 'there's two sides to every story' crap. Really misunderstands the dynamic. So yes, those things do shape how people feel and behave.
[00:17:40.670] - Charles
But you also have to say, how much are they really willing to work with other people? Even though I've been critical of American politics, a lot of the criticisms of JFK when he was first elected in the US, and I only know this from history. He was Catholic. A Catholic President would do what the Pope told him. You can't have a Catholic leading the US because he wouldn't be a free man. So there is a point of view with saying that because of that person's personal religious beliefs, they couldn't actually carry out their job effectively.
[00:18:19.910] - Charles
And if it's okay for the President of the United States to be a Catholic and lead the so called greatest free nation of the world, or whatever the hell they call it, you can have people who have divergent views. It depends on how do they fit within what is the considered the norms of society, and of course, that's going to shape their things. I mean, Kornberg was no progressive in terms of, no leftist in terms of a radical socialist.
[00:18:43.970] - Charles
No.
[00:18:44.990] - Charles
But none of the NDP appointees are either.
[00:18:47.210] - Charles
Thank you.
[00:18:47.990] - Charles
I mean, I'm sorry, you can quote that. Even a couple of them I like.
[00:18:59.850] - Charles
So.
[00:19:02.430] - Charles
Like Santa Ono is a conservative Christian, and that does inform some of his ideas about service leadership. There's a strand within the Christian tradition about service leadership that's informed in a particular kind of biblical reading, et cetera. Every religion, every culture has its own particular variant of this, of course, but he comes in a particular tradition. Does it make him unfit to be the President of UBC?
[00:19:30.330] - Charles
No.
[00:19:32.790] - Charles
Does it shape some of his response to how we do things?
[00:19:36.390] - Charles
Yes.
[00:19:39.150] - Charles
I think we have social norms where we see there's certain types of political leadership that actually are outside what is the contemporary norm today. And then you have to just look at that and say, Because change comes when there's people on the margins, on the edges and they push and they often get penalized for that. But that's often how society moves in those kinds of directions, falling upon those things. The question becomes a matter of principle and conviction, an idea about how beyond that norm can you go?
[00:20:12.150] - Charles
Because it's important to have a diversity perspective, and that's where you get reasonable disagreements and then you get unreasonable things like the Dorchester Review right now this morning, which is a right wing history paper general in Canada is basically spam tweeting, what's the Twitter word for it? They're retweeting, but they're replying. Spam Replying to wveryone who has commented about the change over happening in the Royal BC Museum, how they're going to change the kind of settler exhibits and stuff. I made a comment on it this morning. These guys, I blocked them.
[00:20:57.550] - Charles
I'm not interested in even engaging with them at that level because they took an example of saying, hey, look at this. Indian societies in BC had slaves. And the only people who saved it was British imperialism and evangelical Christians.
[00:21:12.730] - Charles
Of course.
[00:21:13.150] - Charles
The point is, the evangelical Christians in the 1800s are very different than evangelical Christians today. And I think to say standards, those ones were fairly Liberal in the 1800s. But it's a kind of gotcha moment that, AHA, look, all humans are bad, therefore and really, what you were saved by, was what you're criticizing, this imperialist power really brought light and truth and justice to you. And you just are rejecting it. I wouldn't want somebody from that Journal to be involved in governing this University.
<SNIP>
[00:22:00.590] - Charles
There's also a left wing panic, too. I don't know. One of the sad things is seeing people who are hardcore cultural leftist, which is different than the old style leftist that I locate myself within.
<SNIP>
[00:22:17.210] - Charles
Well, actually critical. I like would say the NDP is in the center to the right.
><SNIP?
[00:22:26.210] - Charles
A lot of people south of the 49, I think a lot of people in Vancouver think of the NDP as leftist.
<SNIP>
[00:22:31.010] - Charles
I'm not convinced they are. They might be cultural leftist. So everyone's about all this kind of panopley of difference variation except the one difference that this encounter is economic difference in terms of the issues of social class.
[00:22:48.330] - Charles
But.
[00:22:50.490] - Charles
You get some of these people from the cultural left who talk about these things, think they're up to dates and other things. And then all of a sudden they get called out for something. And then there's two approaches. They go roughly, they either start apologizing, profusely, and then they resign from everything and leave all this behind, or they try to fight and then they get kicked out.
[00:23:09.870] - Charles
But.
[00:23:13.210] - Charles
I don't think that because what gets left behind is you change the people. You don't change the power. And that's the question. If we're interested in changing the people, this is a great approach to do. It is my thing, if that's what you want to do, if you don't like the people and you think it is and it's all individual. But one of my critique in politics, it's not about Justin Trudeau, it's not about Erin O'Toole, it's about the social interests they actually represent and that coalesces around them. It's that political power that they bring to the table and that moves things.
[00:23:48.790] - Charles
And I think for me that's the important thing. At the same time. I also think it behooves us to pay attention to what we say, how we say it. And for a long time that goes back to the early feminist movement, looking both at speech patterns in groups. And so you get these great early social linguistic studies in the 70s and early 80s about how conversations in a group work, how men will talk. So you get three men in a group of ten people and the three men will talk to each other and continue and ignore everything that happens to say.
[00:24:26.290] - Charles
A woman steps up to say something, listen, and then the conversation continues. And so the idea. So that's not cancel culture to say, we've got an issue here. This is about participation. And how do we engage this? How do we change the dynamics? Because there might be something interesting from this person, probably is something interesting from this person. How do we hear that in this conversation? And how do you do it also, without making the three people who are talking all the time feel excluded. But at the same time, they need to be able to relinquish the stage a bit.
[00:24:59.830] - Charles
And this is a pattern that's been taught and things. So it's in looking, thinking about how those changes and shifts occur. But I also take great delight from the book written a long time ago by a women called Ellen Meekson Wood, The Retreat From Class, where she critiques then emerging post structuralist, post modernist theories, which everything was focused on discourse and words. So Chantel Mouf and Ernesto Laclau wrote a book on something called The Postegemony or something like that. And she just was ripping them to shreds from her vantage point because it was as though everything is about the words we use.
[00:25:39.950] - Charles
And so if everything is only words, then we enter into a world where material effects have no impact. It's only what you say, how you say it when you say it, et cetera becomes the issue where that is part of the dynamic. But it's not just that.
<SNIP>
[00:26:04.370] - Charles
I think a lot of people who are benefiting from the current system, both left and right would find themselves excluded.
<SNIP>
[00:26:13.310] - Charles
Because they already are included.
<SNIP>
[00:26:16.790] - Charles
I'm reading a book right now called Mistaken Identities, and I just blanked on the gentleman's name [Asad Haider]. He created something called Viewpoint. He was part [of], an activist in, the Occupy movement. So he wrote this little book. It's relatively recent, and I was mentioning that because ....
<SNIP>
[00:26:43.510] - Charles
Oh, right.
[00:26:43.990] - Charles
Because what he was suggesting is that a lot of the especially the university of today's politics, is that people who are coming in and utilizing these languages of identity to move themselves into this position are doing so because they all come from the same class. So they're already, call it the loose middle class, whatever you want to call it (I take issues with that term, too), nonetheless, call it that kind of professional, well supported middle class character. Diversity actually advances particular kind of, their own interest, within an internal class struggle between people who are part of the managerial ruling class.
[00:27:23.390] - Charles
And he questions whether their actual experiences again, this word experience, are really that different. And he's writing as a son of a Pakistani immigrant family growing up in Pennsylvania and sort of suburban Pennsylvania, and then looking at, from that vantage point and then seeing these issues. So at the end of the day, it's a difficult balance, because that's the thing. Yeah, it's a difficult balance, only because it's like this is important. But it's not the endpoint. But it's like you used to say, when you had discussions about the state of the Canadian economy is Canada imperialist?.
[00:28:24.710] - Charles
....The debate about whether Canada was imperialist power, a colonized neocolonial economy, all this kind of stuff. And at the end of the day, the question comes, does it matter with the nationality of your capitalist? And of course, some people will say, oh, yes, it does, because they're more invested in the local.
[00:28:56.270] - Charles
But capitalism operates in a particular rule. And if it's advantageous for the guys who are running the parts industry in the auto industry in Canada, which was a local industry or the steel industry in Hamilton, which was kind of local, which to their economic advantage to ship their production south to the US and then down to Mexico, they'll do it .Because at the end of the day, there's a different kind of logic that overrides that. In the same sense, does it really matter the ethnicity, the racial or religious background of your President of your VPs in your office if they're still promulgating the same structure on one level, yes, it does make a difference.
[00:29:36.230] - Charles
There's different things. But at the end of the day, when they look at the decisions that are made about new core decisions about buying $70 million worth of property in Surrey to build in a satellite campus to engage in constant expansion of this University, I'm going to bet they all make pretty much the same decision. And having sat through some of these discussions in the closed door sessions when I was in the board of governors, I'm reasonably confident. And of course, keeping in mind my perspective, lumps them more similar than they themselves would see themselves. I remember one time saying to Stewart Belkin when he was the chair of the board or something along the lines.
[00:30:17.090] - Charles
You guys are all business people. And he says, We're not all business people. And I says, Well, okay. He said this guy is in the real estate industry. This guy is a corporate lawyer, and this guys a banker and I said that's all business people in my world.
<SNIP>
[00:31:10.770] - Charles
It's hard to say because perception doesn't necessarily map onto reality very effectively. So people may feel a perception that they can't say something, but maybe they just don't want to do the work that's involved in articulating their beliefs. And they think, at what point in time? I don't know all the way along, I've had, for example, various colleagues or faculty I've known who said, Well, Gee, I can't do that because I'm still pre tenure, and I want to make sure I get tenure and I don't want to flop.
[00:31:42.090] - Charles
And then I can't do that. Or I can't do this because I'm going up for full professor pretty soon, and I don't want the committee to blah, blah, blah.
[00:31:51.510] - Charles
And.
[00:31:56.650] - Charles
At least in our world, ... what I call the University of Excellence. It seems to me it doesn't matter, except there are some areas that does content of what we do matters, but in a lot of areas, it doesn't seem to matter. It's quantity. How many grants, what dollar value of those grants? Who's issuing those grants? How many publications have they done? Where are they published? The fact that they might be Marxist informed publications seems not to matter to people. There are areas and some of the gender debates.
[00:32:27.610] - Charles
If you go into those, you're going to get slaughtered on all different directions. You have to have pretty tough skin. Some of the political issues of contemporary post 911 that brought in a new kind of McCarthyite period where there are certain prescribed areas you couldn't say. There's other global conflicts have been going for a long time. It just isn't politically wise to engage in. Only because, it's not that people suffer serious consequences. [Rather] you have to be willing to stand up and, be clear on what your convictions are and willing to take the heat for them.
[00:33:06.170] - Charles
So I'm not really sure if there's any validity to in real terms [to fears about speaking out], I wanted to say.
[00:33:14.570] - Charles
Well.
[00:33:17.570] - Charles
I look back lots of times. Maybe you hear students say they feel that they have to write a certain kind of paper. I can imagine the students to say, okay, I'm doing this Menzies guy, and he's got this Indigenous political bias, and he's a Marxist. I better write a paper like this. Well, let me reassure those students. I can tell you're not sincere, and you do a worse job when you write this way. I'd rather have your middle of the road conservative settler paper that extols the values of corporate social entrepreneurial ship.
[00:33:53.030] - Charles
Then your attempt to give me a class analysis paper, pro revolution, because it's like you just don't get it in the first place, right? And because of the way the criteria defined, I'm not convinced that the empirical world [i.e., that fears are grounded] is there, but clearly the perceptual element. There's a lot of people really think this. Some of the subjects I teach, like First Nations B-C, I do, of course I'm going to do it again. And there's always, I find in the group there's always a kind of cohort of students who kind of think they should be there, but not really convinced.
[00:34:43.850] - Charles
And.
[00:34:45.710] - Charles
They're uneasy. And occasionally one of them might blurt out something really, which for anyone who knows anything about, is this just dumb or really totally insensitive.
[00:34:55.550] - Charles
And.
[00:34:57.590] - Charles
Those are moments that in that comment, they really shouldn't say that. But they don't have the wisdom, and so if they don't have the wisdom to understand. So to make a comment, they say all Native people get free education. That's a very generic, bland formulation of that, which is actually false. It misunderstands an awful lot of issues. And there are all kinds of caveats about how that works out, but that when stated innocently is unreasonable. It's bring up a stereotype and trope and irrespective of their intent. I mean, it can cause people to respond to it and period, but say they can sit back and listen to how there's a problem with articulating, that or the problem with stereotype.
[00:35:44.870] - Charles
And they go, okay, I kind of still thought about that. I heard that when I grew up, my parents say that to me all the time, and I certainly looks that way. And I know this kid who went to, but then they start to change their opinions. They might not even change their opinion, but at least reflect upon how they might conceptualize that differently. That's one thing. But let's say that same person keeps coming back the next class with another question and then another question and then another question.
[00:36:10.490] - Charles
Well, that's a deliberate provocation. And there what they're trying to do is actually not engage in discussion or debate. They're actually trying to disrupt, and their reason for disrupting is ultimately based upon what I'd say conception of malice, that their intent is to derail, disturb and hurt. That shouldn't be allowed. But that's not cancelling that's actually saying you have to engage in an environment where you can share ideas, talk about them, explore them. But part of that bargain is you have to be willing to consider shifting and changing your own.
[00:36:50.450] - Charles
If you get to the point. It doesn't matter where on the spectrum that people are unwilling to consider other perspectives, to put themselves in other people's feet and to think about that in some sense. Well, that's not learning. That's not what University is about. And that's the whole idea in terms of thinking about where this goes, and that's where the problem comes in. Normally, people do well, but the other thing, too, is another side thing. I taught a version of this course many years ago up in Kitamat.
[00:37:24.710] - Charles
Of course, that was taught for then it was AlCN. I think it's reo tinto now that runs the Aluminum smelter now. So for their employees run a program for people to do University degrees to move up the management chain. So this was an elective course in First Nations for BC. So I thought, Well, I'll just make this course as educationally sound, as rich as possible in detail. And through this kind of notion of Liberal education, people will explore these ideas and they'll realize if they have any misconceptions, they'll be able to address them and all this kind of stuff.
[00:38:01.310] - Charles
And it was very eye opening for me because it was really clear because one of the things about when you're teaching people who are basically your own age, some of them are older and they're accustomed to telling people what they think they don't hold back. And there was two individuals in particular who really were dead set about it. And this kind of realization was this isn't about good education quality content. Having properly researched material. The only way to deal with this is addressing racist attitudes directly, head on and it's uncomfortable.
[00:38:34.370] - Charles
Nobody likes that. Nobody wants to have a kind of antiracist pedagogy given to them. I say nobody wants, the people who do want it, don't need it. Or at least they don't think they need it. So you get that kind of dilemma. And so that means it changes the way I teach the course. When I do these kind of subjects, I don't actually test people on knowledge. They may think, they morally, personally and individually can't do it. And 20 year olds, early, younger, 20 year olds tend not to be.
[00:39:09.370] - Charles
Despite all this empowerment, I'm speaking of, tend not to directly confront the profs unless they really have some reason. So they might think. And here Menzies's talk about education system and the inequalities, and they might think and say there's person sitting beside them. That just doesn't ring true. I mean, I blah, blah, blah this, but they're not necessarily going to come from that to me.
<SNIP>
[00:39:35.050] - Charles
Their parents, however, had no problem. It was a real sort of eye opener and nothing new that I discovered, for me at that moment was the kind of revelation. But obviously lots of people have had these understandings and there's all kinds of manuals for how to teach antiracist pedagogy and things like that. So like I said, I changed the type of assessment. So I basically don't say, remember all these ten articles we've read? I want you to repeat the core concepts and all of them. It's more about what have you learned?
[00:40:18.990] - Charles
And how does that shift? Where did you begin this? What have you learned now? Has it altered your perceptions? If so, in what way? So it's a different approach. Clearly, if you take my first year course, you get tested on all the concepts. All the bolded concepts [in the text] have to be defined.
<SNIP>
[00:40:46.330] - Charles
That's right.
<SNIP>
[00:40:54.550] - Charles
The idea about being afraid for what people say?
[00:40:56.950] - Charles
that was all there.
<SNIP>
[00:41:00.670] - Charles
Because one of the things, of course, I've never been restrained by uttering an opinion. I think that I actually value people who have the courage of their convictions and are willing to be direct and honest about it. One of the things I find most problematic are people who think to move ahead or get along, that they have to suppress what they think, because it seems to me to involve a kind of lack of respect in that engagement, because they won't respect me enough to be honest. But they're polite and friendly.
[00:41:37.910] - Charles
And then they do the other things. But no, I think all that was there.
[00:41:44.090] - Charles
But.
[00:41:46.130] - Charles
There'S been shifts in changing moves for this. When I started my undergraduate in the early 80s, I had profs who would say, oh, you guys are pretty tame. You're not [very radical].
[00:41:56.810] - Charles
It used to be. Everyone demanded we had to read Fanon in this class, and then you sit there and go, this is kind of weird. This guy seems to be really got a chip on his shoulder about something. Or the Prof told us that his job was Kathleen Gough's job. Kathleen Goff was an academic up at SFU who was one of the famously fired profs in the early 1970s. That's going way back. So there I am in the 80s. He's remembering this from the early 70s, when you're like, in the early 20s, I mean, ten years is lifetime.
[00:42:33.030] - Charles
It's lifetime now even..
[00:42:37.450] - Charles
So, they thought we were kind of quiescent. But yet we were involved in the boycotts against South Africa, the solidarity work for Latin American revolutionary political struggles like Nicaragua, the FMLN in El Salvador, Guatemala. All those were the political moments of that time. And those are based - the coal miner strike in Thatcher's, England - all these moments sponsoring traveling coal miners who are unionists and doing this kind of solidarity type work. So there's a lot of speaking out. And so in an interesting way, maybe if I say, well, if I presume that my experience was similar to other people in the same environment, which is a big mistake to make.
[00:43:27.750] - Charles
But if that is, and if kids =students- these days are suggesting that they don't feel able to speak out, maybe there is something materially different in their environment. It's not something I've actually studied. Clearly from the faculty side, there's lots of people said, oh, you really shouldn't do this because it might affect your tenure. And I'm thinking if it's going to affect my tenure and it will affect who I am as well, and I'd rather lose tenure for who I am then gain tenure for who I am not.
[00:43:57.090] - Charles
And so right from the start, I was involved in strike support stuff both on campus and off and through the things. And my beginning here began right around the time the No to APEC meetings and stuff. And So standing witness to what was happening there. And I had two senior colleagues come to me after one Department meeting when I said we should have a vote of opposition. [They] aid So-and-So colleague is really involved in doing that. You're really causing him embarrassment. Maybe you should rethink about this because we don't want it to affect your career.
[00:44:32.830] - Charles
And I'm thinking, so both are kind of leftist and a more conservative. And I thought about that.
[00:44:40.850] - Charles
Maybe I was too naive. Quite likely. But I just thought that just seemed how could I try to suppress who I am in? Of course you have a family and other people who are reliant upon. You have commitments to so it has implications and you think but then you just have to do the work that you're supposed to do. And that's the thing with the University of Excellence. It's basically you meet the production targets and you're okay. I mean, there are variations. I've written about some of the ways in which Indigenous colleagues are qualitatively described differently in promotion contracts on my blog site.
[00:45:19.170] - Charles
I have a comment/blog about it. So there are these different things that work in the subtextual realm. So yes, there are things that work out differently, and it's a lower rate of success amongst Indigenous scholars at this University than among non-indigenous scholars in terms of being deflected out, career path changes, increased poor health indicators. But the entire job, from a student perspective, might not be unless you have parents who are involved in the post secondary world. The whole process of tenure & promotion is amazingly stressful and exhausting for everyone, and it creates a lot of strange behaviours because imagine you put seven years in and there's no guarantee you have the job after that.
[00:46:16.890] - Charles
And of course, not getting tenure is like a real career killer. In most places, though, there are some places where some of the Ivy leagues use tenure denial as a way to spread their people out. The empirical reality of perception is really difficult, because if a person believes this is real and if they really fundamentally think they can't be who they are, then that's going to end up in them acting that way and everything will confirm that. And so it's really hard to know, because when you stand at the beginning and you look forward, you don't know how that's going to go.
[00:47:07.330] - Charles
Even like when I went up for a professional, the Department had the time suggested, well, maybe this isn't a good time for you to go. You know, maybe you should do a little bit more this that and next thing. And I remember thinking I said, Well, let's run through the options. What's going to happen if it doesn't work? I'm going to feel really bad. Yeah.
[00:47:22.750] - Charles
Granted, put that to the side. Empirically. It means that you delay my thing for a period. I have to do this. And then I'll come back and do it again. Right?
[00:47:35.830] - Charles
Or I do it now and they say yes. And if I have to, I'll run a little bit longer.
<SNIP>
[00:47:57.870] - Charles
If only I sure wish. Of course, my colleagues won't be pleased if I say they're all right wingers. But when you take a look and even the way decisions get made, some people say all the EDI stuff is a kind of left wing conspiracy. You look at every one of the top 500, the Fortune 500 companies, the major corporate world. This is the model in the corporate world, having equity, having diversity, having an inclusive workplace. It's the mantra of the ruling class. How further from left wing can that be?
[00:48:47.570] - Charles
And not only that, if you want a productive, compliant workforce, you don't want people going around assaulting and harassing people in your workforce. You don't want bullying, you don't want to run down the list. You want a reasonably happy, reasonably compliant workforce that doesn't want to jump ship right away.
<SNIP>
[00:49:14.310] - Charles
Maybe I think where people feel paranoia or going on is that they feel that somehow they can't say the rude, nasty things that they want to say. We all get angry from time to time, but it doesn't give us license to utter forth, anyone who's been a long term relationship, like with a significant other knows that in order to get along, you go along, you make, you work things out, and it doesn't really benefit things to call people names.
<SNIP>
[00:49:45.390] - Charles
Yeah, I could do that. But I just don't understand the long term benefit. And some people it's longer to learn that lesson than others.
<SNIP>
[00:50:02.610] - Charles
It's a lot of work. You use an automatic transcriber.
<SNIP>
[00:50:07.050] - Charles
which then also has problems, too. Sometimes you got to really double check to make sure.
<SNIP>
[00:50:13.830] - Charles
And the old days is like three times. It takes at least three to one for doing the old fashioned way, because I just do hand notes.
<SNIP>
[00:50:46.770] - Charles
It's really hard to tell. I think that we need to be able to use the tools that we have available to ourselves. So way back in the old days Iskra was the newspaper of the Bolshevik Party - the Spark. It was the defining revolutionary, innovative tool of the day, the ability to print on broadsheet form at a reasonably low cost distribute to a newly literate workforce. All this kind of information that was revolutionary. It was time changing. The problem is today groups that think of doing the same thing will make a difference - and it won't.
[00:51:24.090] - Charles
And so we need to use [the tools of the day].. But the problem is with each tool that has advantages, has disadvantages and understanding that and figuring out how to maneuver through that. So that's no magical simple answer. But it seems to me we have these tools. Are we distracted by them? Do they prevent things sometimes, but you need to figure out how you can move.
[00:51:54.610] - Charles
Well.
[00:51:57.250] - Charles
I'm thinking here, like tactics. I really tried to use different types of computer mediated learning technologies in my teaching for a long time, right? When it was really awkward. And my partner did one thing, she was doing an education training program, to become a teacher. And one prof had this kind of thing called knowledge base. And it was really [awkward] you had to download the software and install it. And then it was like a kind of big whiteboard / blackboard where you can move things around. It was clunky. It was horrible.
[00:52:31.210] - Charles
I loved it. I tried to use it with my own students. I got permission to use it. They hated it. And of course, there's all kinds of stuff, we were on dial up then, right?
<SNIP>
[00:52:41.110] - Charles
Students only got 5 hours a month. You can't do this with 5 hours a month. But thinking about, how do you use these tools and what are the advantages? It's like I do ethnographic film. Well, how does film convey information differently than text? And one of the big mistakes social scientists do when they bring film or video into the picture is they just sit the camera down here and I'd be filming you.
<SNIP>
[00:53:06.610] - Charles
And I'd somehow think now I'm doing film. I'm not doing film. I'm doing an interview that's now, I've gone beyond audio recording. Now I've got a video recording. What am I, the hell am I going to do with that? It's really boring film to have just you sitting there talking to me on the film. So this guy, Paul Henley, who's a British ethnographic filmmaker, talks about how we can move some of the new sort of reflexive postmodernist techniques into film. The idea of using different types of illusions so you can understand and
[00:53:39.910] - Charles
Explore culture or human beings using this medium. But you have to understand the medium. And I think we're at a stage. We're not really sure how this medium actually works because it's a kind of free for all, this individualistic approach to the neoliberalism engages, where everyone's an individual and I have my particular things. And we're all out there chipping away at everybody else. And it does seem to highlight the negative component. So in that sense, it's a distraction but this is a learning phase. I, we moved, through, fingers crossed, where we can find the power to deploy it in more interesting ways.
[00:54:19.150] - Charles
And there have been examples which, of course, States have shut down, like the Arab Springs does use a lot of electronic communication. And then, of course, they realize, well, let's just shut down. Let's make all the large corporations who want access to our marketplace actually agree to censoring and providing the information, et cetera. So then that creates a problem. You have to then move to different types of things, and the problem becomes we could use this in an effective way. But then you have to become a software programmer and understand how to use set up some technical things in these tools.
[00:54:52.990] - Charles
Anyway, so maybe it sort of is I think it undermines the possibility of collective action in some cases, but expands it in others. It's peculiar. But unless there's a face to face component, I don't think we can actually fully unleash it's like you kind of move [in these differnt directions.]. So there's a guy I think he was at MIT. I don't know if he's still there. Sociologist called Hartman. I think. It might be like Gary or something like that, but any Hartman, I'm pretty sure it was his last name.
[00:55:25.870] - Charles
He did some early stuff looking at, like listservs in the communities. And that was pre Twitter when he was doing this earlier work. And so what he found is in situations where people joined a listserv, not so much anonymously [but without knowing others] they couldn't realize or materialize action outside of that electronic communication. But if they began, say, in a neighborhood sitting around a kitchen table talking about something, we got a problem with the landlord here and then set up a listserv. More people come to it that's sort of from face to face to virtual, back to face to face led to deeper, more profound political actions, allowing people to work collaboratively.
[00:56:07.390] - Charles
So in that sense, these become tools of mobilization and technique.
[00:56:20.090] - Charles
When you think of Kornberg, I think back on that. When we're in these kind of positions of responsibility, we should have an awareness of the implications of our participation and then do that participation deliberately and willingly. Whereas sometimes people aren't as aware, it's hard because it leaves a trace. I always get a kick out of like I'm following the UNA elections here right now. I'm blogging about it, too. Of course, The Ubyssey is trying to cover a little bit of it, since there's four students running for being sponsored and pushed by the AMS.
[00:57:10.570] - Charles
But it's always interesting thinking about what kind of traces do people leave in digital traces. You can see differences where people, have some of the candidates. A couple of the students made no apparent effort to clean up their digital traces. At least one of them has almost virtually nonexistent digital trace, which I find that they probably shifted something somewhere along the long ways. Then the older people who are running, varying degrees of engagement [with social media]. And of course, the people who are working who are first language manager and who come from either Hong Kong or China are in a completely different universe online, which is one of the big sort of Balkanizing aspects of things.
[00:57:52.630] - Charles
If we're working in different language groups and even not just the fact that the language is different, but the applications and the communication technologies are different ones. And so that makes it hard to intersect into link them.
[00:58:11.650] - Charles
That's always, I find it intriguing how that works. Are you going to do any of the Una coverage?
<SNIP>
[00:58:22.390] - Charles
I won't ask you who the profile is. I don't want to put you on the spot.
<SNIP>
[00:59:00.730] - Charles
We're microcosm of the wider society. 15% to 20%? I think it's the number of our students come internationally, probably depending on which faculty or Department up to 40% to 60% of the faculty are from a place other than BC or Canada. My Department, the majority are American, in some other departments it's less. Stem fields tend to be more local than over in the faculty of arts or even education. ... So we're a microcosm, but we also represent we're a bit different than, so we don't represent Vancouver necessarily.
[00:59:49.670] - Charles
But we kind of do. We kind of don't. And a lot of the issues that motivate wider discussion, of course, motivate public discussion here. We teach the subjects in these areas or the people who aren't teaching those kind of subject areas in computing science are affected by them discussions of enrollment limits and criteria and admission. So it's all floating around.
[01:00:21.510] - Charles
I find the current framing about polarization very American based upon their two political party models, which, to me, if you want to talk distractions, that's a distraction, because I think that by and large, the fundamental contradiction of society is not between whether you vote blue, vote red. It's really about whether you own property or don't own property. It's about whether you're in control of the collective labourer or you're part of the collective labourer. And so for me, that's the primary issue. And we're distracted when we talk about these other issues, about being concerned about the vaccine, no masking thing and this whole thing about the people who and how like if you look to say Germany, for example, where 40% of people aren't vaccinated.
[01:01:17.050] - Charles
Where you look at Quebec, which I forget has a very strong antivax movement. Even some of the people from BC I've run into a few of them who visit, like the interior in the Okanogan. There's been a really virulent group there really attacking public media and things like that. Those are divisive. But the fact, by calling it divisive is a way to actually accentuate and make it. So there's a kind of interest and then the other side, we all have to talk together. We all think and I think what's going on here for these people?
[01:01:59.690] - Charles
Gabor Marte had a commentary a while back suggesting that motivating people kind of antivax motivation. He put it to a kind of sense of an incoherent sense or lack of connection or identity, where people were sort of out there without any meaningful connection to society, and that this gave them a sense of belonging and connection. So there was an interesting kind of social psychological explanation for what motivates people who seem to be people who have lower levels of education, at least the ones who are the shock troops, not necessarily the people who leadership, that plays into a wider anti intellectual sentiment in society and a sense of anger.
[01:02:47.070] - Charles
And that being unfair, that people who have an education, who do they think they are. They think they're so smart, they think they're so smart, et cetera. But they don't really know what it's like. What do you see as a divisive issues?
<SNIP>
[01:03:41.710] - Charles
That makes sense. It's all there oftentimes these are things that reach the people's conception of themselves. Years ago, I did a paper never published it. It was just presentation paper. There's a place where I go in Prince RUpert where I grew up, that when I was growing up. They called it Apache Pass and down Third Avenue. There used to be a whole bunch of bars and in the World War II and media postworld War Two area this was a big working class drinking area, and people would spill out after closing time in the street and they'd be all kinds of fights.
[01:04:14.830] - Charles
Rupert even had the riot act declared in town in the early 50s. Of course, Apache Pass refers to the kind of American Western movies about this. A lot of people, up until relatively recently, Knew where, especially if you grew up in Rupert, knew where it was. But in an interesting way, even though it's a racialized term, it wasn't a racialized space. It was an actual intersection where everyone was there in terms of white, Indian, Asian. There was a whole range of people, basically as working class. I think the allusion comes out of the World War Two, cowboy Western movies, John Wayne stuff like that, which, of course, is clearly both colonial, imperialist and racist.
[01:05:03.970] - Charles
You keep on naming sexist to boot. I mean, the whole kid and kaboodle. But the kind of looking, ... the issues of race. It's basically about what I found is that as time went on, by the time in the 80s, when I started thinking about it and becoming an academic, and then I started talking to people, I found that the incoming professional classes had never heard of this place or they denied its existence or suggest it was inappropriate to talk about. But one of the things that really at the core of Prince Rupert's history is the racial divide between Indigenous and non Indigenous people.
[01:05:46.010] - Charles
One time I was interviewing one of my uncles, and we were talking, we try to do a study for the Nation on the Prince Rupert space and who owns, which nation's territory was and this kind of stuff. So we were working through the questions, and I said to him, I said, Well, are there any special places in town or certain things where you go or not go? "Well, he says my dad used to tell us when we got off the boat at Cow Bay to walk straight up Third Avenue, not deviate."
[01:06:16.470] - Charles
Okay, I said, hold on a minute here..
[01:06:17.610] - Charles
I said, this sounds a bit peculiar. I said, "how come?" "He's going to get the shit kicked out of you if you went off that street?" And so is that kind of the different questions, but the revealing these kind of fault lines around race and place. Of course, the white community in town always says there's no racism in Prince Rupert. They always say that. Then you always get some letter where somebody would write in from one of the villages about how they were denied access to hotel.
[01:06:43.170] - Charles
Their Hotel is full. And then you see a white family come in right after them and got a room in the hotel. All this kind of stuff going on. So you have these things playing out. But people often feel that it's part of their sense of belonging, identity. And the other thing with the Apache Pass paper that I always wanted to mention to you. So my mother, who wasn't Indigenous, she had a lot of stories. Her family came out through the US, and they had settler families back in Minnesota and places like that.
[01:07:09.810] - Charles
She'd tell these stories about that. She'd been passed on to her about Indians chasing them when they're in the ox cart. And then as they get closer, worried they were going to get massacred or something. This little rag doll got tossed back into the cart. And then the Indians melted away. That's how she put the story. And of course, they're playing on. This is supposed to be an informed story about it's. Really not that. But it also played upon the idea that of course, if you ever see an Indigenous person, it's going to be a threat in violence.
[01:07:37.770] - Charles
This is a contradiction and expectations that you get this stuff. And so you only have these stories, you kind of have in the stories of the settler community., there aren't really no Indigenous people, except as phantoms or in the modern version, disruptive, angry in the newscast about rights and title and things like this. And so when you say to a non Indigenous person, you're a settler on somebody else's land and you have to accommodate and reconcile to that, you're actually not just stating a political fact, which it is. You are basically assaulting their conception of themselves.
[01:08:15.510] - Charles
And so it becomes a highly emotionally freighted concept. And so the anger becomes that you're calling me into question. You know, my grandfather came here and worked hard. I came here and I worked hard to make a life for myself, my parents, this story and nobody gave us anything. We made it for ourselves. And so what is happening is that their own sense of self and identity is incorrect because these stories, these narratives don't connect. And so it's like, how do we rewrite these stories? So they do interconnect.
[01:08:47.490] - Charles
And I think the problem is that some people just won't listen. So the Mayor in Williams Lake, despite what he does politically on the outside, he fundamentally presents as someone who is just not accepting and he'll use the language of liberalism and everyone has an opinion, consider all sides, look at the evidence, to basically carry forward a value. Because fundamentally, that means reconciliation, in that sense really means coming to terms with history. And it's not just the long term settlers, the people who are just new here, also, because the possibility to be at UBC is made possible, like removing Musqueam from this place to have these things.
[01:09:35.730] - Charles
The wealth that goes into this institution from the province comes from Indigenous lands that have been extracted, and the wealth has been extracted from them while putting most Indigenous communities into poverty. So all that continues. But that's a real tough thing. And so you can become really defensive on it, which some of the people who see themselves right wing, realists get or the other side is also just a flip side. The same kind of colonial coin are the ones, the people who become really sort of overwhelmed and shooken up by it and get upset and feel that they're going to personally do something to make it all better, kind of have to find some middle ground of accommodation, of recognizing what can you actually do, what's meaningful action and that's hard to do.
[01:10:26.590] - Charles
The Apache Pass paper is a tough one to write, which is why it sat on the burner off and on for years, because it involves so many different strains, some of which time has gone by. I don't think anybody even born in Rupert now might, unless their grandparents told them about it, would necessarily know of this place because it was a unique moment in time. For many reasons. Every moment in time is unique. Which is a cliche.
<SNIP>
[01:11:11.330] - Charles
That was the anthropologist Max Gluckman, I couldn't resist.
<SNIP>
[01:11:21.590] - Charles
Because part of that is this terribly academic thing. So Gluckman was structural functionalist, there's probably in political science, the same kind of concept. But the idea that there are structures in society that function and everything continues, and then they get destabilized. Either an external force comes in or maybe some internal thing goes gets out of kilter. And normally society, this is very Durkheimian. I mean, have you ever read Durkheim?
<SNIP>
[01:12:00.830] - Charles
It was a kind of organic functionalist of sorts. So Gluckman had worked in Southern Africa, studying communities there, seen the disruption, and realized that it wasn't just external things. He was critical of the structure functions model. So he was trying to think, what are the different things that keep things going? So there is a Zulu ritual that he talked about where the power inverted.
[01:12:25.250] - Charles
But then the classic example used was the British Navy, where on Boxing Day, the officers served the [enlisted] man. And so this idea is that inverting the hierarchical structure allowed the hierarchy to continue. It's kind of a neat, a cute idea. I guess I'm suggesting that Twitter shaming is a ritual of rebellion, which makes it feel good, but it keeps power going. It doesn't really change the fundamental structure.
<SNIP>
[01:13:13.750] - Charles
Well, history got Koonberg too, because that occurred after George Floyd. It occurred after a student tried to get into Buchannon Tower, ...
[01:13:57.290] - Charles
So he's in a particular moment, there's all the reporting about the rise of anti-asian behaviors in lower mainland and around all this. So he comes in. We also had some of the other stuff with the different transphobic commentators coming on campus. Everything coalesce at a particular moment. Perhaps if this had happened six months earlier, it wouldn't have been noticed. But it also suggests that the person who's in this position should be thinking about the moment they're in. So that all came together.
[01:14:39.990] - Charles
The other thing, too, is that because Kornberg had a particular agenda that didn't necessarily fit with the executive branch of the University.
<SNIP>
[01:14:58.430] - Charles
No,no, If you look at the way you read some of the commentary that Naisif Gousoub put out about how Korenberg, Goussoub had some very strong criticism of the president's office and some strong praise for Korenberg. And I actually think that the board came more in alignment after the fact. Well, I've said this publicly, came more in alignment with the University administration's directions after that fact. And so everything came together, and he {Korenberg] lost that political battle. But I always, so what was your question again?
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[01:15:46.230] - Charles
In an idyllic, utopic world where we did, how would that look?
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[01:15:57.930] - Charles
I actually think one of the things like Halloween, which is originally and it's sort of Western European origins, a kind of ritual of rebellion where the people would go out and basically shake down the rich folks for stuff. And it was tied to the idea of the disruption and the inversion between the world of the dead and the world of the living. And it was a kind of very dangerous period of time. And then you go around and you say that you bang on all the Lords' and Ladys' doors, yelling, Give us something.
[01:16:30.810] - Charles
And there's a lot of these kind of [festivals] in the feudal worlds, in the ancient worlds, these kind of rituals of basically terrorizing the richer people, threatening that you're going to do something if they don't behave properly and this kind of balances. All around human society. So in a sense, we need these kind of things. Of course, Halloween today is a big commercial venture, and it's like, kids go Happy Halloween. I'm thinking it should be scary halloween not happy. So we kind of need them. But I think it depends on your perspective.
[01:17:07.390] - Charles
You think society is kind of fine and [only] needs some tinkering, then we're okay. This helps tinkering. If you think that society has a fundamental flaw that needs and we need to redress and actually requires a major transformation, then it's not sufficient. It really depends where a person sits on that kind of perspective.
[01:17:29.770] - Charles
Whether this works enough. All society, if you look at the history of society through time, they often get kind of interesting moments where there's, like rejigs where things shift. Sometimes it's really pronounced and obvious. Other times it's kind of slow and gradual. So that's an answer that's not an answer.
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