As part of my visit, I presented a couple of public lectures
on embodied cognitive science. Prior to my
first talk, Arturo Pérez, who had stayed with my wife and I in Edmonton last
year, working
on an interesting robotics project in my lab, led me on a walking tour of
the beautiful UDP neighborhood. There
are many striking buildings in the area, including UDP’s Casa Central:
One stop on the tour was
particularly poignant, and provided perspective on our current troubles in the
Alberta postsecondary sector. Arturo
took me into a fairly new building, UDP’s Biblioteca Central. At first glance, as can be seen below, it
looks like many a North American library: books on display on the main floor,
and stacks of books visible as one looks up from the entrance:
A closer examination of the books
on display in the black shelves in the lobby is more chilling. They were all banned by Augusto Pinochet
after his military coup overthrew the government of Salvador Allende in 1973. Along a wall to the left of this display is a
long line of black and white photographs:
Each photograph is a picture of Pinochet’s soldiers in the
process of burning books; here is just one example of the many photographs on
display:
The books being burned were deemed subversive, including
leftist literature and any other material inconsistent with the junta’s
political position, including newspapers and magazines. Arturo told me, as an example, that the ban
included classic work in psychology by Russian scholars like Vygotsky. In addition to being burned, these books were
removed from the shelves of libraries and book stores. The book bans lasted throughout the Pinochet
regime, and book burnings sporadically continued. In 1987 the
Los Angeles Times reported that the Pinochet government burned thousands of
copies of a book by Nobel prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
As one comes to the end of this display, there is a
particularly striking juxtaposition of images.
On the right is a colorful poster, America Despierta,, created by Patricia Israel and
Alberto Pérez in 1972. It is a colorful,
stylized, political map of South America; it creates the shape of the continent
using images related to its various countries.
For instance, Chile is in part depicted by its national flower (the
copihue), miners, and one of its founders, Manuel Rodríguez.
Immediately to left of this poster is a photograph of it being
burned in 1973:
The entire display of banned and burned books was profoundly
sobering. I was deeply moved, not in the
least because of the display’s setting, surrounded by a huge number of books in
a modern, thriving university library in central Santiago. It was as if the books on the floors towering
above me had risen from the ashes of those burned books on display below.
Of course, all of this made me reflect on my own experiences
in Canada. I have never encountered the
violent oppression of ideas that was on display before me. I was astonished at how much I took for
granted my freedom to write, to read, and to think.
Surprisingly, though, I did not conclude that I should be
content with my current situation in an Albertan postsecondary institution,
because – as shown in those stark black and white photographs – things could be
far worse than I could even imagine.
Instead, I realized that the tension between government policy and
freedom to think is universal. The
current ‘push back’ that we are experiencing from the Alberta government seems
(in comparison to Chilean history) fairly benign, in the sense that the only lever
being used is financial.
However, it struck me that this is really a difference of degree,
not of kind. Restricting the
opportunities of students to choose some programs of study relative to others
(e.g. via preferential funding, reducing grants that lead to closed programs, creating
institutes that explore some research domains and not others) reduces the
freedom of our next generation to read, to think, and to choose, for
themselves.
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