I so admire the direction she has provided contemporary Canadian society on abortion and terminal illness, and so disagree with her on the subject of same-sex marriage, that I am longing both to learn from her as well as to question her about her wrong-headed views on gay marriage (versus gay civil unions, of which she approves).

You have to hand it to Ryerson. When it bestows honours, it is a comprehensive exercise: DSc (Doctor of Science), BH (Branded Homophobe) and POM (Pariah of the Month). The process was not entirely negative, though: Bloodied as she was, Somerville was able to return to Montreal wiser than when she arrived.

In preparation for that fine day, there are useful books out there that feed directly into an understanding of the ivory tower of academe. When Petrified Campus: The Crisis in Canada's Universities (Random House) was first published in 1997, the screed by David Bercuson, Robert Bothwell and Jack Granatstein was received with both enthusiasm and more than a smattering of turned-down thumbs. Well, it was bound to have its enemies, since it was ferociously attacking what many believe is the principal scourge of campus life today -- political correctness.

Their critique of the forces of intellectual intolerance in Canadian universities (a critique, of course, not restricted to Canada) remains devastating. An emblematic observation points out that whenever there is a battle royal on campus over race, creed or gender, and there is no hard evidence of discrimination, the word "systemic" is sure to be wheeled into the fray. Once "systemic" is deployed, all counterarguments are automatically trumped. The more you argue against the point, the more you are thought to expose your pre-conscious intolerance. As an argument in a post-faith age, it is unbeatable and chilling.

Yet political correctness has honourable enough roots within our universities. Big battles have had to be fought. There are many people still living today, for example, who remember when Jews in Canada were subject to discreet quotas in medical and law faculties. As for women's rights, as recently as three years ago, illustrious teachers and researchers such as Ursula Franklin and Phyllis Grosskurth of the University of Toronto were still having to prove, during a vicious pension struggle, that they deserved equal treatment with their male colleagues.

So academics have had to fight for justice within the campus and that struggle has often preceded reform in society at large. On the other hand, the struggle on campus can become endlessly more toxic than on the outside and the reasons for that are both complex and alarmingly obvious. Perhaps the single most devastating account of campus life gone seriously amok is The First Stone: Some Questions About Sex and Power (Pan Macmillan Australia, 1995), Helen Garner's scorching account of what happened to an Australian academic administrator at the University of Melbourne accused of sexual harassment by two women students.

Garner is a noted Australian novelist, journalist and front-line, pioneer feminist who reported how the master of an illustrious college, found innocent of all charges of impropriety or harassment -- in other words an innocent man -- was hounded out of his high office as well as academic life by misplaced persecution and an appalling conspiracy of silence in which fellow academics felt too terrified to join in the fray for fear of the accusations that might come their way.

The First Stone caused a major controversy in Australia when it came out, and was a particular focus of enmity among younger feminists, who were accused by Garner of misusing the positions of strength and power delivered to them by vanguard feminists.

It remains a hugely gripping tale and anyone interested in the kind of hysteria that can be whipped up on the campus -- like that which greeted Margaret Somerville -- will profit from reading it. The role of the media in reporting the case also added to the general misery of everyone involved and probably did as much to undermine the victim at the centre of the tale, and secure his unhappy fate, as anything his accusers managed.

At its worst, campus controversies can be so totally debilitating and vicious not, as Henry Kissinger is supposed famously to have said, because "the stakes are so small," but because they leach out of the university and into everyday life. This is the dark side to all the extraordinary gifts and breakthroughs the academy has always bestowed on our ever-aspiring society. Yet even the dark side has its uses, and sometimes you just have to shake your head and laugh at the abounding absurdities. For this, you cannot find a more brilliant satirical work than Tom Sharpe's comic novel, Porterhouse Blue (Secker, 1974).

Through Sharpe's merciless gaze, political correctness becomes a vehicle for scholarly promotion and an excuse for scoundrel academics to cite "reform" for unconscionable acts of intellectual impiety and dishonesty. His depictions of lazy senior scholars and vapid, stupid administrators are as wicked and hilarious as any that exist in the English language, although no funnier than the statement of the Ryerson awards committee that if its members had known about Prof. Somerville's views "as presented to Parliament and reported in the media," they would never have recommended the honorary degree.

It is getting increasingly difficult to write good satire these days.