Patrick Deane reflects on launch of Perspectives on Peace
By: Isaac Kinley
McMaster’s Perspectives on Peace campaign began on Sept. 21 with a field trip to Brantford’s Woodland Cultural Centre and a tour of the Mohawk Institute residential school.
Teddy Saull, a former MSU president, launched the campaign during his 2014-15 mandate, in partnership with President Patrick Deane. Perspectives on Peace is set to involve a number of activities including public lectures, artistic showcases, film screenings and storytelling circles, all centred around the goal of creating dialogue within McMaster and Hamilton about local and global conflicts.
An idea foundational to the campaign is that conflict is at its root the result of inequality. President Deane’s experience growing up in apartheid-era South Africa partly informed the initiative. “My recollection of my own childhood growing up in an appallingly unjust society is that at the root of many of the problems in that culture was a failure to apprehend the humanity of the other,” he said. He was an undergraduate at The University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg at the time of the Soweto uprising, and remembers feeling then that universities cannot cut themselves off from politics.
But unfortunately, they have, according to Deane. “Universities as a whole have become a little shy of dealing with big political questions. We have our origins in monasteries, so there’s that sense that what’s done in the university is best done at a distance from the real world,” he said. Some have argued that McMaster is no exception, having not done enough to address last year’s Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions controversy related to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Deane thinks this is unfortunate since universities are so well positioned to deal with issues of this kind. “You have to be able to talk about any issue in the university,” he said. “[It] can’t be always comfortable. And it’s an odd mistake to think that whenever people feel discomfort the discussion’s got to stop. You have to see your way through the discussion to a different kind of comfort on the other end.”
A sense of critical self-evaluation is central to this, says Deane. The campaign’s overview states that it will involve a “critical [evaluation] of Western liberalism,” which is the dominant perspective at McMaster and in the Western world. “It’s important to realize that one’s own position is ideologically inscribed in some way,” Deane pointed out. “What in one culture you’d characterize as peace another culture might characterise as economic violence of one sort or another.” He believes that events such as last Monday’s residential school visit can help students understand this, and achieve a combination of empathy and self-scrutiny that he sees as essential for productive dialogue.
Deane hopes that Perspective on Peace will facilitate a newfound understanding of the issues at play amongst students, and a better understanding of our fellow peers. “I don’t think people want to just be a tissue of prejudices and assumptions and opinions. If that’s what they’re content to be, university is not the ideal place for them.”
