Opinion: God and Marx at Queen’s University

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I live in Brisbane, Australia, almost halfway around the world from Kingston, Ont., home of my alma mater, Queen’s University. That’s a long way away to have a bone to pick with the current principal of my former university, but here goes.

The problem started when I received a recent issue of the university’s in-house magazine for graduates, the Queen’s Alumni Review, specifically, the third issue for 2020. I’ve received myriad issues of this journal over the years, having graduated from Queen’s Law School back in 1985, with a Queen’s B.A. (1982) before that, and having played on the varsity basketball team for three years. In fact, I come from a dyed-in-the-wool Queen’s family: my Golden Gael relatives include my wife, both my kids, my sister, both my parents, a paternal uncle, and my two maternal grandparents, my grandmother being one of the first women to have graduated from this or any Canadian university.

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I know Queen’s University’s history. I know it was one of the most tolerant and accepting of Canadian universities. It took Jews when other top Canadian universities would not. It took Blacks on the same basis. It was small. It was Scots Presbyterian. It stood up to the Anglican powers-that-were in its infancy. In fact, its name is a tribute to Queen Victoria for granting it a Royal Charter after Upper Canada’s legislature had refused to give it statutory foundation. On any sane set of criteria, comparing like with like, Queen’s has nothing much for which it needs to apologize.

Patrick Deane, the current, rather newish principal of Queen’s, seems to disagree. To the above-mentioned issue of the Alumni Review he contributed an editorial steeped in identity politics and filled with social justice sloganeering and jargon-filled prose that makes plain he subscribes to the “white male privilege” worldview and may well believe Queen’s needs to apologize for its past. No one could read his remarkable mea culpa (or rather, “the university I lead’s fault”) and be in any doubt whatsoever about the outcome of the process he has set in motion as to whether Sir John A. Macdonald’s name will be removed from the Queen’s Law School that graduated me some 35 years ago. (Last month, in a non-binding but telling ballot, the school’s Faculty Board voted 29 to three, with five abstentions, in favour of expunging the name of our first prime minister and the pre-eminent father of Confederation.) The principal’s editorial was chock full of the language of “dominant culture,” “equity,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” “reconciliation,” “economic privilege,” “unconstructedness” (your guess is as good as mine on that one) and so on.

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Even worse, and certainly more remarkably, it began with a sort of tribute to Karl Marx and some of “Marx’s most distinctive insights.” Marxist rhetoric can hardly be made of sterner stuff. I say this as a law professor who has worked around the globe, including in Hong Kong for four wonderful years before the handover, where I had to teach a small segment on Marxist legal theory. What the principal nowhere mentions are Marx’s own racial views. They were orders of magnitude worse than anything Sir John A. Macdonald ever expressed. To take but one example, go and read some of Marx’s letters to Engels from, say, 1862 to get a feel for his “distinctive insights” as regards Blacks and Jews. But it seems cancel culture does not extend to heroes (sorry, providers of distinctive insights) of the political Left.

I’ll be blunt to finish. Patrick Deane’s editorial evinced everything that is wrong with the mindset of so many top university managers around the common law world — something I have experienced first-hand in at least five countries. It revels in apologizing for the actions of others, but not before taking them out of historical context. It purports to be against cancel culture while taking steps to make it real. It expresses itself in the worst sort of jargon — though this is the first time I’ve come across an actual paean of praise to Marx. Its lament about white male privilege never stops the white male maker of such claims from quitting his “privilege-enabled job” to make room for a supposedly less privileged “other.”

It pains me to conclude this way but my hope is that fellow alumni who read Principal Deane’s Marxian insights will take the only practical steps available to them: close their wallets and not give our much-loved university a penny.

James Allan is Garrick Professor of Law at the University of Queensland.