Batshit crazy Universities

An “Anti-Canada Day” barbeque and fundraiser will be hosted in Montreal on July 1 by the McGill students’ union, a group called the “Palestinian Feminist Collective” and other equally worthy student activist groups.

They form one of many cancerous cells of post-secondary students who spend most of their energy trying to undermine and demoralize everyone around them.

Elite American universities have been the brunt of severe criticism by alumni, donors, the public and politicians in a culture war that could have profound implications not only for academia, but for broader societal values and democratic politics. These issues are relevant in Canada because of the obvious parallels.

Some of the resulting penalties imposed on American colleges are overwrought — especially U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies barring foreign students from attending Harvard and defunding research. However, elite universities brought this existential crisis on themselves by failing to respond meaningfully to legitimate concern about civil rights violations and a lack of viewpoint diversity.

The rot is deep.

True to his campaign word, President Trump continues to pursue the reformation of our failing institutions of “higher learning” –– the long decay of which has earned them the scare quotes. Harvard, with international prestige (especially in Communist China), and the country’s largest tax-free endowment, is currently Trump’s Admiral Byng, whom the British Navy hanged “to encourage the others,” as Voltaire quipped.

At the American Compass Gala in Washington, Tuesday night, Vice President JD Vance delivered a scathing critique of elite academia that cut straight to the heart of what’s wrong with American higher education. In a room filled with conservative thought leaders and policy minds, Vance did what few Republican politicians have the guts to do—he called out the intellectual rot inside places like Harvard for what it is: ideological groupthink masquerading as enlightenment.

Harvard University is in crisis. The Trump administration has gone for the jugular, attempting to cut off the flow of federal funds. Perhaps most importantly, it has sought to cut this prestigious university off from its economic lifeblood: international students.

But this crisis is largely one of Harvard’s own making. It could have made an effort to avoid having a monolithically progressive campus culture that fostered savage behavior and terrorist sympathies in corners of the student body. It could have worked to ensure that it was not overly reliant on federal funding for its research endeavors and that the university’s financial stability was not contingent upon accepting thousands of international students who are willing to pay full tuition.

Is it known for anything beyond the manufacture of progressives assholes?

‘The treason of the tenured… what Saint Mary’s University reveals about the ideological capture of Canada’s universities.’

The modern university, once a sanctuary for critical inquiry and truth seeking, has become a laboratory for fashionable ideologies. Mark Mercer, a professor of philosophy at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax and a longtime defender of academic freedom, has provided us with a disturbing case study that reveals the depth of this transformation.

In his recent essay, “No More Loud Discussions of Private Matters, the Cabal Decrees”, Mercer chronicles the steady bureaucratic colonization of his university by a growing army of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) functionaries. It is a disturbing read. 

Athabasca University, like all other Canadian Universities, fully embraced the COVID-19 vaccine coercion with a policy requiring staff be injected.1 A search of the Faculty of Health Disciplines’ research outputs demonstrates a clear ideological singular divisive narrative demonizing “anti-vaxxers” and a doctrine that pushes the inclusion of “pregnant and breastfeeding populations in clinical trials leading to market approval or emergency use authorization should be undertaken early or concurrently at the time of trials in the general population.”2

And …

Occam is an old friend of this blog.