[In late 1998, my colleague Ajay Heble and I nominated Professor Noam Chomsky of MIT for an honorary

doctorate at the University of Guelph, an honour which Chomsky graciously agreed to accept. During his visit to
Guelph in February 1999, Professor Chomsky showed his characteristic generosity: in addition to his address at
the commencement ceremony, he found time in a tight schedule for what amounted to a seminar with student
journalists, and spoke to an overflow crowd at Chalmers Street United Churchwhere the Chomsky lecture
was appropriately introduced by Guillermo Verdecchia, co-author of the hit play The Noam Chomsky Lectures.
The church was packed, as were two large meeting rooms linked to the main event by video feeds. As is his habit,
Professor Chomsky refused any honorarium; with his agreement, the proceeds from ticket sales were donated to
organizations working in solidarity with the people of East Timor and Haiti.
On December 1, 1998, after the University of Guelph had released the news that Professor Chomsky would
shortly be visiting our campus to receive an honorary degree, the university's student newspaper, The Ontarion,
printed an interview with Professor Heble and myself about this approaching event. Then on February 2, 1999
one of the newspaper's editors published an editorial which clumsily accused us of having effectively misled the
University's Senate in our nomination of Chomsky. The following response appeared in the next issue of The
Ontarion, on February 9, 1999.]

[Index: Noam Chomsky, US politics, higher education]

[Date: February 1999]

The Chomsky Nomination: A Response

Michael Keefer

The Editor,
The Ontarion,
Room 264, University Centre,
Fax: 824-7838.

February 4, 1999.

To the Editor:
The remarks directed against me and my colleague Professor Ajay Heble by
Jayson McDonald in his editorial of February 2nd (An honourary [sic] criticism)
contain an interesting mixture of malice and misinformation.
This editorial claims that, having nominated Professor Noam Chomsky for an
honorary doctorate at this university, Dr. Heble and I subsequently revealed political
motivations for the nomination which we had concealed from the University's Senate.
Referring to a news item that appeared in the December 1st issue of The Ontarion,
McDonald writes that
Heble and Keefer spent a full one-third of that article describing

their political rationale for nominating Chomsky when indeed

it had little if any mention in their actual nomination letter or the
final selection made by the U of G senate.
As McDonald himself notes, the article in question was written, not by us, but by
an Ontarion journalist. It is a novelty, I believe, for people who have been interviewed by
a newspaper to find themselves reproached by one of the editors of that same journal for
the arrangement and emphasis of the resulting story.
In addition to McDonald's unpleasant insinuation of bad faith, he is also making a
claim, in the sentence I have quoted, about the substance of our nomination. That claim is
false.
Our letter of nomination, after signalling the unparalleled impact of Professor
Chomsky's work in linguistics over more than four decades, and after indicating his
influence on a wide range of cultural theorists, went on to propose that this great thinker
deserves our respectful attention for other reasons as well. In addition to being a scholar
of worldwide reputation, we wrote,
he has also repeatedly been described as the exemplary public
intellectual and oppositional thinker of our era. Since the mid1960s, when he became an outspoken critic of the American
wars in south-east Asia, Noam Chomsky has devoted his
scholarly energies, his analytical lucidity, and his powers of
ethical discrimination to a long series of searching analyses of
military aggression, human rights abuses, political and
economic injustices, and the systems of misinformation and
propaganda which help to make them possible.
One of two things becomes painfully clear: either Mr. McDonald had not bothered
to read the letter of nomination and was misleadingly making it seem that he had, or else
he had indeed read it and was offering a misleading impression of its substance. But he
must have read the text, since he knows that it contains no reference either to Mr. George
Walker Bush or to the University of Toronto.
It would of course be a very strange thing if it did. But I do not think, on the other
hand, that there was anything very astonishing in the fact that the University of Toronto's
presentation of an honorary doctorate to ex-President Bush a year ago came up during
Professor Heble's and my interviews with The Ontarion. That award had been vigorously
opposed by many faculty members of the University of Toronto, and had entered the
public record as a matter of controversy. As is well known, throughout Mr. Bush's career
as director of the CIA, Vice-President and President, the most trenchant and persistent
critic of the many violations of international law and of human rights over which he

presided was none other than Noam Chomsky. And as I have indicated, our nomination of
Professor Chomsky foregrounded his tireless efforts to promote justice no less than it did
the exemplary intellectual rigour of his work as a linguist.
But perhaps we ought to raise our eyes from this petty dispute to the rather more
important fact that during the coming days our campus will be honoured by the presence
of one of the greatest scholars and public intellectuals of our time. Can we hope that The
Ontarion may yet find some more adequate means than Mr. McDonald's editorial of
responding to this event?
Michael Keefer
Associate Professor
School of Literatures and Performance Studies in English