00:14:00.280The fact that LGBT go back to women, the fact that any of these so-called vulnerable groups ever got the rights that they have is because of free expression.
00:14:14.400So, again, this is the way that the left throws out these false equivalencies, this asymmetrical ideology.
00:14:40.720One that disturbs me is they say there's a difference between personal opinions expressed on social media versus ideas expressed in the classroom.
00:14:49.240And they say because in the classroom, these ideas might not reflect the university's values of equity, diversity, and inclusion.
00:14:57.840So this gets right at what Bruce was just saying.
00:15:00.280Is our free speech outside the university different from inside?
00:15:05.740Well, that, I think, is an important point because the whole premise here, and I think Bruce touched on this well by talking about the laws of Canada applying in a university, because people will say, well, free speech isn't hate speech.
00:15:19.420And I would say no, and we already have in criminal law in Canada, a very narrow, justifiably so definition of what hate speech is.
00:15:26.920The issue is that universities want to further narrow and further narrow the confines of what is not just socially acceptable speech, but legally acceptable speech.
00:15:37.040And if I can put out a more general or philosophical question here, it used to be that universities were the ones that were pushing the boundaries of speech outside what was socially acceptable, and now they're narrowing.
00:15:50.300And this is, I think, the biggest contrast of, you know, the traditional and I would say positive view of universities.
00:15:57.780And what's happening now is that they're not pushing the boundaries out.
00:16:00.820They're constraining those boundaries.
00:16:02.820Sorry, I just wanted to clarify something that Will was saying, because, and we've spoken at great length about this.
00:16:08.660So when he says that you shouldn't say, I'm sorry, when our administration in the policy he was referencing says that what's said on social media shouldn't be said in the classroom, I think that I'll just clarify that you should always be talking in the classroom about what is relevant to the course, right?
00:16:29.000We don't advocate someone politicizing the classroom.
00:16:33.660I don't want to see people who are talking about 17th century poetry bringing in Black Lives Matter, although that happened at our university.
00:16:42.120I mean, I'm against when that happens, but my point would be, let's say you are commenting on something on social media.
00:16:49.560Often I'll quote studies that go against the narrative that's being taught at my university.
00:16:58.140But sometimes those come into my class because it actually relates to the course content.
00:17:03.520So I just want to kind of put a finer point on what Will was saying.
00:17:09.220Well, the thought that I was going to express was this.
00:17:11.640It's very easy for universities to endorse academic freedom these days, partly because most of the people at the universities are singing the same song.
00:17:26.660So if you're a person at the university, a professor or a student, and you believe in the prevailing narrative, then you have the freedom to say what you think.
00:17:35.120And that's not the same thing as embracing the idea of of ideological or viewpoint diversity.
00:17:44.840So, yeah, there are outliers at the universities who will cause trouble by saying what they think in the name of academic freedom.
00:17:51.920And that's that's where these conflicts arise.
00:17:53.760But they don't arise nearly as often as you'd think for the very reason that a particular constituency has essentially captured the university.
00:18:01.040And most people are reading the same book.
00:18:03.520If they really wanted diversity of thought.
00:18:07.540Then they would need to go out today and hire a whole lot more conservative, classically liberal, libertarian professors, because there are very, very, very few of those on campus right now.
00:18:19.820That's the age old expression about free speech that you don't need free speech for speech you agree with.
00:18:25.200You need it for speech you disagree with, which is exactly the type of speech that would find itself subject to censorship in various forms.
00:18:33.700And that actually brings up a topic I wasn't planning on getting into, but I feel it is important, which is the makeup of Academy of the Academy and of the various professors in it.
00:18:44.860And with all due respect to you, David, I think we expect a lot of this wokeness from the area of study that you've picked.
00:18:50.380So it's good that you're there pushing back against it.
00:18:53.000But I've noticed that these attitudes are infiltrating areas where I think a lot of people thought they were kind of immune to it.
00:19:00.420And I'll go to you on this one, William.
00:19:12.380Well, I'm in a department that combines business and economics, and I'm probably the most right most member.
00:19:20.600There's over 125 faculty feel quite lonely.
00:19:28.020And finance is kind of it's still pretty good, but it's going in this sustainable finance direction now that we hear from David Carney and Tiff Macklem.
00:19:38.100So even it is getting polluted by these trends.
00:19:43.340And so I've got to be careful of what I say even around the business school.
00:19:47.680Even the sciences now are coming into this.
00:19:50.760I mean, you'd think that if you are in physics, you don't have to worry about any of this.
00:19:56.360Well, I remember a couple of years ago, I always try to read some of the journals that are not just to read the titles and the abstracts, not even to read the studies.
00:20:05.260And, you know, there was one about how hurricane names are sexist and how one of them was, you know, toxic masculinity in the study of glaciology or something like that.
00:20:14.400And it is getting to the point where it's becoming inseparable reality and parity.
00:20:19.980But this is something that has very real world implications for people that are going into academia in earnest and people wanting to make a difference in their field of study.
00:20:29.560And you, David, I mean, you were in the middle of this conflict with Lindsay Shepard.
00:20:33.660And I know a lot of the professors like you and like Will have become vilified online just by virtue of standing up for free speech.
00:20:42.420And I know professors that have spoken out have been targeted by students in terms of course feedback, complaints to deans and all of these things that have nothing to do with are they providing an education?
00:20:53.520Are they doing what they're supposed to do?
00:20:55.520So what is your read on where things are going with this?
00:21:59.140Is that we've conflated genuine oppression with disagreement, where a student who's from an upper middle class family getting a university education in a wealthy country like Canada could claim to their university and have their claim heard very legitimately that they are being oppressed because you've expressed a viewpoint that disagrees with theirs.
00:22:20.860So with that, I'll go to you on this, David.
00:22:24.380Well, I'm glad that Will actually brought up that we have an official page on our university website that is essentially dedicated to Will and I.
00:22:58.860They're saying and look for this in the classroom.
00:23:01.760Now, I've got a very jaundiced view of this.
00:23:04.380You know, people might say, oh, Haskell, you're reading into that.
00:23:08.400There are some other things that make me believe that this is intentional.
00:23:11.960The fact that our student newspaper wrote two editorials that said the same thing, how to get these professors fired.
00:23:19.960It begins to make you a little paranoid.
00:23:22.800It was Woody Allen who said, if you're paranoid, it's a great strategy when people are out to get you.
00:23:27.480So back to this in my own classroom, just in the last semester, I had two complaints go to to the official office where these kind of human rights complaints go within our university.
00:23:52.900But I was in that for weeks where I was being threatened with disciplinary action, where I was being threatened that you've breached the Ontario Human Rights Code.
00:24:04.600And the interesting thing is, again, in the end, these were all lies.
00:24:25.760But thank goodness there's actually still some semblance of reality in our courts and in our legislation.
00:24:35.160Still not not for long, probably, but still.
00:24:38.300So when these complaints from students are compared to what actually is the threshold for discrimination or harassment, it doesn't meet the mark.
00:24:47.280Like, actually, I'm simply showing them studies or I'm doing my job diligently.
00:24:54.500And they're saying that that is what the oppression is.
00:24:58.380But I had these complaints come against me.
00:25:00.760And I can't help but think that they're reading these documents and they're saying this is what we need to do.
00:25:07.080They're being the good minions of the professors who are also eager to see the exit of Will and I.
00:25:16.700Because these discussions have moved into human rights code territory and all of these other things like racism and oppression and sexism and homophobia, transphobia, all of these things.
00:25:28.520Is tenure still the trump card defense that it historically was in academia or are professors really under the sword of Damocles with these developments?
00:25:39.400Well, tenure is still very important without tenure, you wouldn't have a shot, but it's also not ironclad, because in a dispute about discipline or termination.
00:25:52.580It's really a dispute between the university administration and the faculty association until the faculty association has to take up your case.
00:26:02.000And if they're of the opinion that you've spoken badly and don't mind if you are disciplined, then you've got no place to go because individual faculty don't have legal rights under their collective agreements.
00:26:16.020But all of this is a reflection, I think, the stories that Dave and Will have been telling is a reflection of what has become the dominant intellectual premise of the university, and that is critical theory.
00:26:33.000And critical theory is not really a theory and it's not really critical in the same sense that critical thinking is critical.
00:26:38.900It's it's basically a set of premises it's an agenda proposition and the proposition is that Western society is oppressive period.
00:26:49.500And if you dispute that, then you are in the wrong you are wrong by definition.
00:26:54.800And therefore, you are racist or you are oppressive or you are you are doing the exact thing that the critical theory describes it.
00:27:03.800Your speech is a demonstration of the truth of the theory.
00:27:09.800And why then wouldn't you be disciplined because you've you've you've been shown to be wrong and people who are not familiar with the theory think it's crazy.
00:27:18.800I mean, it's it is crazy. It's it's cuckoo.
00:27:21.800But this is the logic now of the way the university works and one of critical theories propositions.
00:27:30.800Because it's a theory that attacks the the foundations of the Enlightenment, which is at the bottom of Western civilization.
00:27:37.800It's attacking the very notions of reason and evidence.
00:27:43.800So if you bring reason and evidence to your classroom, you are being oppressive.
00:29:11.800But the question I was going to ask him related back to this issue of the Ontario Human Rights Code.
00:29:18.800And what I'm seeing happen is there's a desire to let or get students to complain about topics in a course on the grounds that they're discriminatory.
00:29:31.800So if I if I were in the appropriate course and wanted to discuss whether trans women should compete in women's sports, what I might foresee is a student complaining, saying the very topic is discriminatory.
00:29:44.800Perhaps the students transgender themselves and they would go to the opposite dispute resolution and say, well, this this is violating the Ontario Human Rights Code.
00:29:54.800And this is my question for Bruce is, you know, does the Ontario Human Rights Code cover universities?
00:30:01.800Because the protected social areas are housing, contracts, employment, goods and services and membership in unions.
00:30:09.800It doesn't apply to universities as far as I understand.
00:30:12.800Well, no, it does. The Human Rights Code will apply to universities because education is a service.
00:30:17.800So universities are subject to the code.
00:30:20.800It's just that the code does not do what it at first seems to be doing.
00:30:25.800It seems first to to provide the right to equal treatment for for any reason, for all the enumerated reasons in the code.
00:30:37.800But it has acceptance and those exceptions allow for special programs and those special programs are permitted for purposes of ameliorating what they would consider to be historical disadvantage.
00:30:49.800And the way that all plays out to make a long story short is that permissible for universities probably hasn't really been tested to be.
00:31:00.800But but at the moment, it looks like universities may be able to essentially discriminate against everybody except for a very small group like straight white men.
00:31:14.800So in other words, they may be allowed, for example, to post job opportunities that are targeted at particular racial groups or or women or particular ethnic backgrounds or exclude the other groups that are not historically disadvantaged.
00:31:35.800And that would appear to be exactly the opposite of what the Human Rights Code guarantees. And I would say that it is one of the things that I find interesting about the last 15, 16 months as we've gone through the pandemic is it's it's put a little bit of a freeze in some of the more public examples of this campus attack on free speech because no events have been allowed.
00:32:00.800So the idea of pulling a fire alarm on a vent or having a speaker shut down hasn't been there.
00:32:05.800But you both William and David have spoken about that this undercurrent is still very much alive and well students complaining about you and about your not even about your teaching, but just about your view of the world as though that is somehow oppressive to them.
00:32:21.800And it's interesting because I spoke, I think it was in 2018 at a Laurier Society for Open Inquiry event and I was quite sad that I wasn't important enough to have the fire alarm pulled that was actually the real deflation of my ego that I didn't get deplatformed.
00:32:35.800I wasn't up there at some of the levels, but when school gets back to normal or we hope back to normal in the fall, a lot of these issues are I think going to be coming back with a vengeance, especially with what we've seen in the last year and the George Floyd protests, the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, and it seems a lot more unquestioning acceptance of this doctrinal wokeness.
00:33:00.800What's your prediction on how this is going to unfold?
00:33:03.800My prediction is that rougher times are coming for people who are libertarian, conservative, and that means rougher time for students as well, not just faculty.
00:33:14.800So you may have touched on this in a previous show, Andrew, and I apologize if I'm plowing this field again, but Eric Kaufman just in March, he's at the University of London.
00:33:25.800He's at the University of London with a study that looked at the number of conservatives in Canadian universities and also in the US and the UK, but I'll just talk about the Canadian data and how they're treated.
00:33:37.800Well, it's about 6%, no, it is 6% of professors who would say that they're conservative or right-leaning.
00:33:44.800And the vast majority obviously aren't, but of the leftist professors, about a quarter, and I'm sorry, those under 40, I'll do it by age, those under 40 are willing to punish those who are conservatives, right?
00:34:02.800The next generation of liberal, in quotes, liberal professors say that they are willing to punish someone for their conservative views.
00:34:12.800So what does it look like in the future?
00:34:15.800As these younger liberal professors move through the system, they're even more hostile toward conservative viewpoints and the people who hold those viewpoints.
00:34:25.800So it's going to be, it's going to be terrible.
00:34:30.800Even more for the students though, if you are a conservative student on campus and you make your values known, you are a target.
00:34:40.800Now, if a professor, and we have really good data, Inbar and Lammers did a study, if people want to look it up.
00:34:49.800And they asked liberal professors, would you sink the grant application or would you stymie the job opportunity for someone if you found out they were conservative?
00:35:29.800Let's see if I can get more negative than David.
00:35:33.800You know, Laurier still has a security fee policy and is committed to it.
00:35:40.800Over the last couple of years, only the administration invites visiting speakers.
00:35:46.800Our new vice president of equity, diversity and inclusion had two events in the fall that were about equity, diversity and inclusion and invited social justice academics and administrators in EDI.
00:36:02.800And in one of the more pernicious trends that I'm seeing is the university is taking positions on contentious social issues, which has a very chilling impact on free speech.
00:36:14.800So in particular, Laurier's taken positions in favor of climate strikes, scholars strike.
00:36:23.800They last summer, they fully embrace systemic racism, which means that they embrace critical race theory.
00:36:28.800They've embraced indigenization, indigenous ways of knowing, which is a very contentious issue, to say the least.
00:36:38.800And each time they do this, they take that topic and sort of move it out of bounds that you you can't dissent to the university's position or you'll be pilloried.
00:36:49.800And you can't even really discuss it in a more nuanced way.
00:37:34.800I think you can see that in the in the contradictions inherent in the way the universities now function.
00:37:41.800So on the one hand, if you are to make the proposition to them, for example, the university should not be political, that they're supposed to be in neutral institutions that have professors who themselves investigate questions and they might be political themselves about those questions, which is fine.
00:37:59.800But the institutions themselves shouldn't be taking positions on things.
00:38:03.800And that advice has completely been rejected.
00:38:06.800As Will says, they are adopting political stances on these various political questions.
00:38:12.800And then you say, OK, all right, so you're in now the the realm of politics.
00:38:52.800And the contrary political view is really not considered to be legitimate.
00:38:57.800So we just kept getting more and more negative as these closing remarks ended up, which wasn't the intention.
00:39:04.800But let me just put this out before I wrap things up.
00:39:06.800Do any of you see any source for optimism here?
00:39:09.800Do you think this is just going to get worse before it might hopefully get better?
00:39:15.800I mean, this isn't happening right now, I don't think, but I suppose it's possible that that that people who are thinking about going to university might start to wonder if it's worth it.
00:39:32.800If it becomes apparent that certainly in some fields, all they're getting is a kind of of indoctrination instead of education, then they might rightly wonder if it's worth the time and expense.
00:39:46.800I don't know if that will happen, but it's a possibility.
00:39:48.800Well, that's a bit of an action item for people.
00:39:51.800If you're listening and thinking of going to university or perhaps you're a parent of someone who is.
00:39:56.800I mean, these sorts of changes do take time, but ultimately universities are businesses.
00:40:00.800And if they're seeing their enrollment go down, perhaps in the absence of a more imminent or immediate solution, we could see some hope on the horizon there.
00:40:08.800So thanks for that recommendation, Bruce, and giving us perhaps a glimmer of hope as we head into the weekend and as the school season is getting ready to gear up in just a couple of months time.
00:40:18.800My thanks to Bruce Barty, Queen's University law professor, Laurier finance professor William McNally and David Haskell, also from Laurier sociology of religion and digital media and journalism.
00:40:29.800A great discussion, gentlemen, and thank you so much for your work and your active rebellion just by virtue of thinking something different than your colleagues do.
00:40:41.800Well, like I said, I wasn't expecting it to be as negative, but I think the one little twist I'd say to make that a more constructive close is that you need to be able to diagnose the problem if you want to do anything about it.
00:40:56.800And I think a lot of people who are far removed from universities, people who think, well, that doesn't, it's just those eggheads in the rivalry towers, it doesn't affect me.
00:41:04.800Everything else in society is downstream of this from domestic and foreign policy, politicians, governments, law schools, med schools, all of this is downstream of this.
00:41:13.800And if, as William and Bruce were talking about with critical theory, if the foundations are being stripped away at this core undergraduate level in academia, it means that everything else, everything else is subject to this permeation of what I think I called on the fly doctrinal wokeness or wokeism.
00:41:31.800Yeah, I'll have to look back at the footage and see what I said, but I liked it when it popped into my head.
00:41:36.800In any case, my thanks to William and David and Bruce for coming on.
00:41:40.800Such a great discussion, even if it is a bit of a difficult one.