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National Post

Christopher Dummitt: How Canadian universities can avoid the American dumpster fire of de-woking

Article content Large segments of the university world — though by no means all — emphasize their role as activists. They celebrate it. Article content The Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences that met in Toronto last week, brought together researchers from all over the country. As part of their program, they hosted a ' Big Thinking ' series to highlight what the Congress thought of as the most important research. Every single one of the 'Big Thinking' events — the sessions that the Congress wants the public to know about — were focused on topics including wildfires and climate change, ' benefits and challenges' of implementing EDI in post-secondary research, and far-right (but not far-left) extremism. Article content There was no ideological diversity in these sessions — no sense that there could be anything other than a leftist-version of what counted as 'justice.' The more than 41 per cent of the Canadian population who voted Conservative in the last election would not have seen their ideas of justice represented anywhere in these discussions. Article content Article content Some universities have whole departments focused on social justice — and again, here, the notion of what is justice is politically-slanted. Job advertisements continue to call on candidates to demonstrate their commitment to DEI and social justice. These are political litmus tests — though universities act as if they are politically-neutral. This is what happens in politically-lopsided institutions. People come to see their own beliefs as simply normal and neutral. Article content A recent open-letter from over 200 Canadian professors called out this sort of taken-for-granted activism by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT). The letter noted CAUT's activist tilt on issues from Israel to DEI, and also the bizarre choice of the organization to announce a travel advisory for researchers going to the United States. CAUT has announced no travel warning for any other country — not to war-torn Ukraine or the Sudan, nor has it warned of authoritarian surveillance, even in countries like China or Russia. Article content These actions — and more — show the weird political activism that is taken for granted in Canadian universities. When everyone around you refuses to wear deodorant, maybe you don't notice that you all smell. But when an outsider enters the room, freshly showered and clean, you'll have to excuse them for thinking that something stinks. Article content It's incredibly unlikely that, if Poilievre's Conservatives had won the recent election, they would have engaged in the kind of all-out war that Trump is now embroiled in. Despite accusations to the contrary, Poilievre is no Canadian Trump. Article content But it would have been logical for a Conservative government to look at universities and see them as major sources of anti-conservative activism in ways that are baked-in — and to want to depoliticize these institutions. Article content If you sell yourself as a political institution — committed to highly politicized versions of social justice — and then populate yourself with only those from one political persuasion, you'd have to be crazy for thinking that those who come from the other side of the political spectrum won't consider that you are exactly what you claim to be: and then act accordingly. Article content