Left-wing takeover of the humanities has poisoned our schools
By Joe Oliver
Universities need to recover their moral and intellectual compass. Two examples make that point from opposite directions.
Universities have long enabled anti-Semitism, although it violates the criminal law prohibiting hatred directed against an identifiable group. The discrimination may also extend to women, Muslims, and LGBT people. Here is just one example. According to B’nai Brith, three McGill University students were removed from the Board of the Students’ Society because they are Jewish or opposed to anti-Jewish discrimination on campus.
Then there is Wilfred Laurier University’s (WLU) Star Chamber treatment of grad student Lindsay Shepherd. She dared to expose her tutorial students to a TV clip featuring Jordan Peterson, who became notorious for refusing to use transgender pronouns, like xie and ze.
The appalling reality is that universities, historically safe places of scholarship and inquiry, now accommodate the worst of both worlds – toleration of hate speech and repression of free speech.
Faculties and student bodies seem unable to distinguish between hatred and legitimate policy disagreements. Neo-Nazis and radical Islamists, espousing their racial or theocratic superiority, create fear on campus. At the same time, people objecting to transgender bathrooms, defending Israel’s right to exist or supporting resource development are prevented from speaking publicly. Is it so difficult to see the difference? Apparently, it was for Professor Nathan Rambukkana of WLU, who drew a parallel between listening to Peterson and Hitler.
A left-wing takeover of the humanities has poisoned the environment with political correctness, moral relativism and identity politics. The result is a pile of contradictions that debase intellectual integrity, threaten free speech and erode human rights.
Diversity is our strength, but not diversity of opinion. Racism and sexism are abhorrent, unless the target is white men. Oppression of women is utterly unacceptable, unless it is culturally mandated. A moral hierarchy, based on a ‘progressive’ history of who exploited whom, determines who today is deemed to be privileged and who oppressed. The innocent can never erase their ancestors’ attributed guilt. Human interaction is viewed from the intersectional perspective of systemic racism and sexism, regardless of the specific facts.
Countries contaminated by a colonial past or identified with the West are permanently sullied, whereas a free pass is extended to other countries that may have failed democratically and whose treatment of woman, gays and minorities should inspire loathing. Values core to our national identity are no more meritorious than other values.
The helicopter generation must be protected, provided safe spaces and never threatened with toxic ideas, i.e. those that do not conform to mandated norms.
The result? Indoctrinated students intolerant of divergent opinions and shielded from the real world. Imagine the shock when coddled graduates of diversity studies are hired to do a job that rewards productivity and penalizes failure, that operates according to common sense rather than ideological purity and that doesn’t provide a cloistered safe-house, where no one is exposed to what they don’t want to hear.
Many universities have lost their bearings. They neglect their obligation to protect students against blatant discrimination and to open their minds to disruptive ideas and foster vigorous debates grounded in logic and the facts.
Tenured professors, protected by academic boards, impose their ideology on impressionable students. So it will be difficult to fundamentally repair the system, although alumni can help by refusing to donate or pay to send their kids to schools that have truly lost their minds.
We should have reached a tipping point where the public rejects the repulsive intolerance and dystopian ideology of an insular academic elite. My fear is the dangerous madness has further to go.
Joe Oliver is the former minister of finance.