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University of British Columbia president Stephen Toope says Canadian campuses need to be the home of "hot debate," where scholars confront major issues with real dialogue.

"If it does not happen here, where will it happen?" asked Prof. Toope this week as the UBC campus plays host to close to 10,000 academics, including McGill professor and medical ethicist Margaret Somerville - one scholar whose work has addressed controversial topics head-on.

Prof. Toope said he worries academics are steering clear of confrontation, trying to find consensus without really challenging the issues at hand.

"I think in Canada we are a bit too polite," observed Prof. Toope, a Harvard graduate who studied law at McGill before going to Cambridge for graduate studies. "We are a little afraid of controversy."

His concerns were shared yesterday by Prof. Somerville, who warned that the free exchange of ideas on Canadian campuses is being threatened by the growing power of "political correctness."

Prof. Somerville, who has taken firm stands on contentious topics such as same-sex marriage and reproductive technology, says too often her critics respond to her views, not with respectful discussion, but with extreme labels designed to shut down debate. The result, she said, is a clear message to others that such opinions are not welcome on campus. It's a tactic, she said, that threatens a central role of university campuses.

"We need to protect them as places for open dialogue," Prof. Somerville told scholars meeting for North America's annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. "Academics need to be allowed to speak truth as they see it."

Prof. Toope challenged Canadian scholars yesterday to have just those kinds of open conversations. He said if academics from different disciplines are going to work together to address the fundamental challenges of this generation, they need to be willing to engage with those who have different perspectives, not just tolerate them or take part in what he called "dialogues of the deaf."

"Canadians are pretty good at tolerance," he said. "We are not so good at principled, but open-minded, engagement with people whose values are not entirely compatible with our own."

Campuses - especially urban ones, such as UBC - have incredibly diverse populations, but too often students with different backgrounds or from different cultures do not really interact, he observed.

Likewise, attempts have been made to keep scholars and political figures with controversial views from speaking on campuses.