ELDON Writer feels more academic freedom in Hanoi, than in Ontario
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
109.8803
Summary
Eldon Brock is a writer and academic living in Vietnam. He went to university in Canada, got a degree, studied overseas, then went to Queen's University, and found a lot of things came unglued. He thought that the same professional standards, the same standards of integrity, and the quality of the scholarship would all still be there, but he found otherwise.
Transcript
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I think all of us have rolled our eyes at some time or other in the last few years
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But woke can be very personal, and it can be very devastating.
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I have with me today a young man who has lived it
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And of all the places to go to, he's gone to a communist country
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because he finds life easier there as an academic than he does in Canada.
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We have Joe Biden visiting today, so there's a lot of blocked roads in the city.
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Okay. Brock, your story, and I'm just going to ask you to tell it,
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but basically you went to university in Canada, got a degree, studied overseas,
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then went to Queen's University, and a lot of things came unglued.
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You thought that the same professional standards, the same standards of integrity
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and the quality of the professors and the rigor of the scholarship would all still be there,
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Beginning in Queen's in 2016 to 2017, I had begun a master's degree planning on pursuing a Ph.D.
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It's been my, it was my dream as a B.A. student to be able to establish myself in a position
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I wasn't allowed to write about what I wanted to write about, which was American revolutionary novels.
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When we're defining this term woke, it's essentially shut down of anything that goes against a post-modern Marxist agenda
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that is being pushed down children's throats, like forced pills.
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It's a highly dangerous doctrine that swaps out the economics from Marxism with identity categories like race, like gender, and so on.
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I found the classroom policies were quite shocking to me after having spent so much time overseas.
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I'd spent time in South Korea, Beijing, Vietnam.
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I was quite shocked that it was impossible to question this content and that it resembled so closely
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what I'd seen 10-year-olds learning in three hours in Beijing.
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The resemblance was uncanny, so it was immediately alerting.
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So, with the, what does it actually feel like to be in class?
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I mean, how do they, you were told you couldn't write about what you wanted to write about.
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Okay, so what, did they tell you what you must write about, and how did the classroom discussions go?
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We weren't explicitly told what we had to write about, but we knew what we had to write about.
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The, I took a very traditional, as traditional as possible, course of study,
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because I wanted a wide breadth as a student of English language and literature to be able to teach
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But the, it became impossible to avoid with two-thirds of the class, classes consisting of
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courses without time periods, without authors, Black Lives Matter, the refugee crisis,
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indigenous masculinities, these courses overwhelmed the course listing to the point where it bled into
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And you asked about the feeling, particularly after my experiences in communist countries,
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And I don't think that most of the students knew exactly what was going on, but there was a general sense of dread
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and guilt instilled by the professors again and again.
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And how you earned a grade was by writing about oppression.
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Whoever managed to write about oppression covering the most number of groups to the highest extent
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got the highest grade, but no one got a grade lower than 80% or an A-.
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So it was impossible to distinguish between quality work, attempting to pursue a PhD when
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I said, what about the people who couldn't write or came up with a different point of view?
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Topics, mandatory presentations by academics as well, which we were told to.
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Queerness and ice hockey, the niqab and the geopolitics of the face.
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As long as you addressed those moral points, it didn't matter if you could write.
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Now, I know that you're going to be writing a lengthy piece for our friends at C2C on this.
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That's how I first came to hear about it and was intrigued by your story.
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But I know in the preview of what I saw that you talked about a talking stick.
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So this was one of these classroom policies that became mandated.
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If all of these things were mandatory, they were not in school documents, but the professors
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were enforcing rules like in this indigenous gender studies class, the professor requiring
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us to introduce ourselves by our preferred pronouns.
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We had to talk about our background connection to feminism, and we were not permitted to speak
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in class after that unless we had asked for the stick.
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So in a classroom of MA and PhD students, you could not interject.
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You had to politely ask for a stick, and that made it softened the environment so much that
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Is there anything particular that made you, I'm getting out of here.
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As I said, it had been my dream since I was a high school student and wanted to become a
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That's one of the few ways I could afford a living as a writer was to be institutionalized
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Why did I come to Vietnam was why I came to Vietnam, I'd been in Vietnam for a year before
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I'd been to, I'd been in Korea prior to that, and I was constantly, it was like I was physically
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in one place, mentally in the other, realizing that I was much more free as a writer in Vietnam
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People who fled from Vietnam came to Canada, they're boat people.
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Yes, they have a strong foundation in science, and they believe in biological reality.
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They're not terrifying their children with environmental doomsday propaganda on a daily basis.
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And the restrictions on speech are there, but they're very clear, and it is for the purpose
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Most of the censorship involves keeping the North and South intact and not continually on
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So I think there are politicians in this country who might also argue for limitations on free
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How is it that you find it congenial in Vietnam, when in Canada, I think you would probably...
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Vietnam is a generation away now from a horrific war on all sides.
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But I think that in the Vietnamese case, it's too raw.
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And as long as people are thriving and they're happy and you're giving them freedom to live
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out their lives in a common sense way, in that sense, I think it brings me to tears.
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It brought me to tears thinking about living in a country where common sense, science, logic,
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reason, reason, skill, were tossed out the window and needlessly replaced by this Marxist ideology.
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No one, Vietnam, communist country, Marxist, communist.
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And my students, I've worked at a number of international companies which are peddling this
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stuff to developing countries like Vietnam, developing one-party state countries like Vietnam.
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And it's not working because the people have this, again, this scientific, rational foundation.
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The arts aren't particularly thriving, at least in a culturally dominant sense, but they aren't in Canada either.
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However, I think that when I've presented materials that I would classify as woke,
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the general response from students has been disbelief.
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Well, I believe you've found personal happiness in Vietnam.
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Okay, well, one day she's going to be, you know, God willing, she's going to be looking at what she's going to do with her life.
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And she's going to ask you what you think she should do.
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Will you recommend a university education to her?
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Not in the current state of the universities in Canada.
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It's so pervasive that it's not nourishing thought.
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Would I encourage her to go to a university in Canada?
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I would encourage her to read and learn how to do things with her hands.
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You said just now that Western companies were peddling woke materials.
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I think it is only Western companies that peddle woke materials, and primarily to the United States, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, maybe in the European countries too.
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Why do you think that this particular philosophy is being directed to those countries and not to naturally what one would think would be a naturally warm, welcoming reception as a communist country?
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I think it's a lack of historical awareness, first off.
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I know from my experience at Queen's that as a high school student, I learned nothing about the Cultural Revolution in China.
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I learned nothing about the Russian Revolution or Pol Pot's Cambodia.
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I think it's historical ignorance, and why is Canada being singled out?
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I think that's a challenging question, but I wouldn't say – I just don't think Canada can withstand it because of its reliance on group identities from the start.
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English, French, indigenous, it is founded on group identities, so it's particularly bad in Canada because we have this sensitivity already about the collective.
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We are not one collective in our political discourse.
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It is a fractured struggle for power, which is the perfect – it's the perfect place for an ideology like this to take root because it's all about taking down other – taking down merit, history,
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It is about revenge, and if you look at the history of communism, it does not equalize things in any other sense than that it brings people to the bottom.
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I think that we're at risk in Canada because we have that immediately, this idea of group rights and groups in conflict as being so predominant in our political narrative in my lifetime, at least.
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That's a – I think that's tremendously insightful, Brock.
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Ladies and gentlemen, Brock Eldon, a man from a small town near Owen Sound who has tried the education system in Canada, found it oppressive, and took himself to what we all thought was an oppressive country, Vietnam, and found more academic freedom there.
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We'll have an extract from your C2C article in the Western Standard.
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And really appreciate you taking the time this morning, Brock.
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