On the bottled water ban

On the whole, the banning of water bottles on campus is misguided. There is no solution in substituting a perceived authoritarianism with a real one, however willingly submitted to. The university is not a haven of “redemption” from ugly external forces, nor a “global partner” but an institute of knowledge and the training grounds where an ethic of personal responsibility can be cultivated. While the consequentialist notions of environmentalism and healthism carried the day, the normative question has been glossed over entirely. Rather than reflecting on what the University of Winnipeg Students’ Association (UWSA) can do to achieve X, which is “happy-consciousness” thinking, one must seriously engage and ask what it ought never do, which is to ask what function a university performs in the liberal tradition, and the responsibility it and students owe in the broader society. There is nothing liberal about “banning,” and I doubt the UWSA even turned their heads to this question, nor understand what liberalism is.

The real core of the issue is that the UWSA feels the university to be occupied territory, and that they are student politicians entrusted with, among other things, ridding the U of W of unnecessary commercialization. But it is not their university, and they should have no authority to coerce everyone into the same moral stance, nor deprive all actors of all moral agency by simply collecting their consent (in addition to their dues). This is a worrying trend, and one only need reflect how arguments banning water bottles are similar to those one would use for banning politically opposed opinions; namely, that they are unsafe, unnecessary, tossed out with flagrant disregard, unpopular with the majority, and overall better for everyone if they didn’t exist.

– Stephen Harfield, University of Alberta, University of Winnipeg class of 2006

Published in Volume 63, Number 27 of The Uniter (May 20, 2009)