In a possible new twist on social justice avant-gardism, Carleton University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology put an alleged terrorist mass-murderer on the payroll. (“Ottawa prof charged in 1980 blast to return to teaching at Carleton,” Citizen, July 28)
Of course, any 12-year-old Law and Order viewer will remind us that Hassan Diab is not guilty until proven so in a court of law. And Junior will be correct. But this doesn’t really deal fully with the matter of university employment, does it?
It seems that Carleton University was no more obliged to make a teaching contract with Diab than it was obliged to make one with you or me. If so, taxpayers, alumni and parents of CU students must wrestle with a perverse possibility: that Carleton’s sociologists excluded countless qualified people and, specifically, knowingly, selected one of the rare Canadian sociologists facing charges of mass-murder in an apparently religious-based, hate-motivated terrorist bombing outrage against a Paris synagogue. I can only imagine the gory credentials specified in Department of Sociology and Anthropology “help wanted” posters these days.
Late Tuesday the university came to its senses and, in a terse press release, announced it was removing Diab from the classroom. That will be a relief to some, but we still have to wonder why and how Diab got the job in the first place.
We know full well that far lesser reasons than mass-murder charges would bar us from contract teaching at Carleton or any other university -- and that such a bar would be in line with painfully obvious tenets of administrative law. Consider, for instance, a former contract prof facing charges for certain sexual crimes, maybe even for harassment of a student. Or an otherwise-qualified alleged war criminal. Seriously, now, would they have reasonable expectations of a Carleton teaching invitation?
Other considerations make this matter curious. Carleton polices and propagates its “inclusiveness” message to a near-fault. Its website homepage flashes pictures of the words “Dignity Equality Respect,” a plethora of languages, and six flags -- none of them Canadian, of course. With all this, one wonders if it ever occurred to anyone how Jewish students and others statistically likely to be blown up in synagogues would have felt about submitting themselves to instructors having certain legal difficulties. Perhaps those undertaking Carleton’s next “annual human rights audit” might apply themselves to this knotty problem.
And even without an alleged race-based murder to your credit, scholars like former Marxist David Horowitz argue -- incorrectly, one hopes -- that informal networks of left-leaning professors already effectively ban outspoken conservative academics from many a North American social science faculty position. True or not, it would not seem unheard-of to find personal factors figuring in hiring decisions.
So, the question: why did elite sociologists exert themselves to employ someone in Diab’s position? Was this one of those brave, cost-free acts of bourgeois “resistance” and bravura -- a cheap political, moral or other self-regarding statement made on the public tab? Or simply an extraordinary failure of due diligence?
Or was it some of this, and something else?
The Citizen reports that Diab’s bail-release is being supervised by “his common-law spouse Rania Tfaily,” who has a “Carleton University office.” Is Mr. Diab’s partner the same “Rania Tfaily” who appears on Carleton’s list of “sociology faculty”? Would having a partner in a Carleton faculty override suitability standards ordinarily applied to a teaching candidate? Who in the relevant department facilitates hiring, and why the appearance of privileged treatment?
Again, this is about issues of administrative and academic ethics, principles, standards and -- especially -- consistency involved in a hiring at a public institution, not about the guilt or otherwise of an individual.
Taken together, these issues have raised questions about the credibility and integrity of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and of Carleton University itself. Taxpayers, alumni and parents are owed an explanation.
David B. Harris is a lawyer with nearly 30 years’ experience in intelligence and counterterrorism affairs. He is director of the International and Terrorist Intelligence Program, INSIGNIS Strategic Research Inc., Ottawa.
