00:02:50.040And then we were shocked to find a statement from the university administration wholeheartedly supporting ScholarStrike
00:02:56.420and encouraging faculty to not teach their disciplines, to teach the content provided by ScholarStrike,
00:03:03.180and violate, you know, the inherent contract, right?
00:03:08.280Like, we're selling a product, which is our courses, and the administration was saying,
00:03:13.800no, no, you'll just teach something else that's very political instead of what the student has paid to receive.
00:03:21.600And that seems to be key here, because you're not viewing this as a discussion of they don't have the right to pursue these things.
00:03:29.140I mean, you're a big believer in free speech and academic freedom, as am I.
00:03:32.120You're basically saying this is false advertising to the students.
00:03:35.280Yeah, yeah, it's like a form of fraud.
00:03:37.880You know, ScholarStrike supporters are free to support that opinion.
00:03:42.660I don't happen to agree with most of it.
00:03:44.320Of course, you know, we're all against police brutality, of course.
00:03:47.420But the laundry list of demands that they came up with becomes farcical.
00:03:54.660One of their planks called on everyone to support the custodial union at the University of Toronto.
00:04:02.660Apparently, the U of T is trying to outsource its custodial work to a third-party company.
00:04:08.560And ScholarStrike wanted us to support the CUPE local in their fight against outsourcing of custodial work at the University of Toronto, right?
00:04:16.580It has nothing to do with police brutality and race.
00:04:22.480That's what George Floyd's memory is about now, is the who takes out the trash at U of T.
00:04:39.280They're entitled to have that opinion.
00:04:40.680But the problem here is having a there's two problems here is having the university sort of act fraudulently with respect to the students and offer to sell them something, which is a course on, say, Shakespeare accounting, and then substitute it with critical race theory, which is outrageous.
00:05:00.420And the other problem here is having the university administration take a position on all of this university administration should be studiously agnostic on political issues and allow faculty and students to explore these issues, to discuss them.
00:05:17.980And in that process, sharpen our understanding.
00:05:21.640And if they come out and say, no, no, the right way to view this is that it's systemic racism and to take a critical theory lens really distorts the capacity of people to find their own opinions.
00:05:34.800And really puts a lot of pressure on dissenting opinions.
00:05:39.660Students who who might not agree with the administrative line really are at a disadvantage because other students can hit them over the head by saying, hey, you know, we have the authority of the administration on our side.
00:05:53.380And and so therefore we're right and you're wrong and you should shut up and, you know, we'll get a cancel mob going after you.
00:05:58.680Yeah. Yeah. And that's, I think, something especially Laurier would be aware of with everything that went on with Lindsay Shepard, who's now a colleague of mine here at True North back in in 2017.
00:06:09.000And you'd think Laurier would be keenly aware of what happens when administration gets involved in stuff like this.
00:06:15.700When I look at this story, I mean, the big problem is that this critical race theory and this narrative is injected into everything now.
00:06:23.020I mean, there used to be certain places where you'd expect to see it certain faculties.
00:06:27.160But the fact that, as you mentioned, you going to your Shakespeare class or your accounting class is now to some people supposed to be a learning opportunity about race relations suggests that they're really trying to expand this where there will be no safe space from it to use the university lingo.
00:06:45.800You know, the Lindsay Shepard affair, just to mention that, when that happened, a central issue there was whether Lindsay had the right to show the agenda episode with Jordan Peterson and whether it was appropriate to the communication studies class.
00:07:02.280And she was eventually exonerated. And the university, the president came out with a statement saying, hey, it's really important that we stick to the material that is, you know, in the course description and is appropriate for the discipline.
00:07:15.680And she said that back in late 2017. Here we are, you know, three years later, and now she's saying, oh, go ahead and teach critical theory.
00:07:24.080It's now infused our HR department, our administration, the president uses terms like systemic racism and anti-racism.
00:07:36.120And these are critical race theory terms. And, you know, once you start using that language, you're going to start using that lens for viewing the world.
00:07:43.660And it's only one lens. There's lots of other ways to view these phenomena.
00:07:48.920How many professors say, maybe not an exact number, but how many actually took part in this? Or was it mostly this, you know, by email battle?
00:07:58.660In the scholar strike, it's almost impossible to tell because all of the classes are now on Zoom.
00:08:05.320So there's really no way of knowing. I would imagine a great number in the Faculty of Arts and the humanities, because that's, you know, where most of these academics, quote unquote, practice.
00:08:21.100And this is something as well that I find particularly troubling because, you know, it's not going to end here.
00:08:28.100And at certain points, I mean, you, I know, have already cemented your fate as being loathed by most of your colleagues by speaking out on these issues, as has Professor David Haskell.
00:08:38.120But there are going to be a lot of other professors that perhaps are middle of the road on a lot of these issues that are going to look at this and say, OK, if I want to stay around, I have to jump on that train.
00:08:47.140Yeah, there's a lot of institutional pressure here to to conform to the orthodox opinion and not speak out against it.
00:08:59.360Both David Haskell and I have been getting mobbed on social media, on Twitter and on Instagram by students and faculty for speaking out about these issues.
00:09:10.780So you don't hear too many faculty speaking out, not at Laurier, not anywhere in Canada.
00:09:17.500It's a pretty small group of people who are prepared to publicly even question any of this.
00:09:24.060Do you think the Laurier experience, because we have this, we had the Lindsay Shepard affair, is it distinct from other universities in North America, do you think?
00:09:32.300Or is it just we're hearing about it more because of, you know, people like you and like Lindsay and like David Haskell and like Jordan Goldstein?
00:09:41.440A little bit of it is just, you know, the circumstances around what happened to Lindsay and then us jumping in to defend her and then getting turned on and becoming more vocal about it.
00:09:55.460Because it is happening in every university in North America, this critical theory is like a intellectual cancer that has creeped in everywhere.
00:10:07.440And it's into the human rights departments and the university administrations as well.
00:10:12.840You know, you saw with Donald Trump just signed an executive order banning any critical race based training in any federal department or contractor.
00:10:29.120And again, what people on the left are trying to do right now is conflate critical race based training with anti-racism.
00:10:38.040And that's a very dangerous leap because they're trying to position an argument so that if anyone opposes it, well, they're actually racist.
00:10:46.100You noticed on the debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Chris Wallace referred to it as racial sensitivity training.
00:10:54.420He didn't say anti-racism or critical race theory, so he completely misrepresented it and made it look really benign because who wouldn't be against, you know, who would be against racial sensitivity training?
00:11:11.280This is about a revolution and pulling down the capitalist system and democracy and at universities pulling down reason and the scientific method.
00:11:22.160And banning the outsourcing of garbage collection too, the true social justice battles of 2020.
00:11:28.780You know, if they were to focus only on that stuff, it wouldn't bother me as much.
00:11:36.560You can have two different movements, that's fine, but don't lump them both into the same.
00:11:40.620I know that obviously the school still didn't step in to stop the scholar strike, but I'm curious, did they give any response to the letters that you had put forward,
00:11:50.380to the complaint that was put forward by SAFS, the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship?
00:12:55.220I heard about it in the course evaluations, you know, and on reflection, I think rightly so.
00:13:01.080You know, it shouldn't be my place to use that platform to espouse my political beliefs.
00:13:07.000I should just be teaching the discipline that the students paid to learn about.
00:13:11.880And, you know, if we want to have a meeting after class in the bar over a beer, you know, that would be the appropriate venue to talk about politics.
00:13:19.520Yeah, and I think your point is very valid there, that it doesn't go both ways.
00:13:22.760You don't have the same license on your political views to do what's been done under the scholar strike for people with opposing political views.
00:13:30.560No, no, no, no, no, no, because there's so few conservatives at the university, they get really surprised when they hear a conservative view.
00:13:43.080Just two weeks ago, we got an email from our union talking about a climate committee.
00:13:49.480And the email started out with a reference to the fires in the Pacific Northwest and how this forces us to take emergency action to fight climate change.
00:14:02.380And I had just come across an article by Ross McKittrick at Guelph where he had done a long study of precipitation and found that it was just trending.
00:14:15.600And there was really you couldn't blame climate change for what's happening.
00:14:19.480And I wrote an email back to the author of this letter and they said, yeah, you're right.
00:14:25.920You know, I wasn't aware of that literature, but I was using a little too much hyperbole and I probably shouldn't have.
00:14:31.740And it seemed to me like, well, you're just in an echo chamber then.
00:14:35.340You know, you never get challenged and you feel free to write an email to 550 faculty being alarmist and assuming everyone's going to agree.