Western Standard - HANNAFORD： Woke won't work on Widdowson

00:00:00.000 good evening western standard viewers and welcome to hanaford a weekly politics show on the western

00:00:22.880 Standard Channel. Anybody over the age of 50, growing up in Canada, assumed that we had

00:00:30.040 substantial free speech rights and nobody would have more free speech rights than a university

00:00:35.300 professor who had tenure. Couldn't be fired because that might interfere with their quest

00:00:42.040 for truth. The ultimate, in fact. Subject to the laws of libel, you could say what you wanted to

00:00:47.900 say write what you wanted to write and publish what you thought people needed to see and this

00:00:55.340 free country nobody was more free than the university professor with tenure but ladies 1.00

00:01:04.080 and gentlemen western standard viewers i am joined today by one professor who found out the hard way

00:01:11.900 that this was all just sentimental fiction professor francis widdowson welcome to the show

00:01:20.620 thank you for having me on uh this has been a been a bit of a dream actually you were a professor of

00:01:27.180 economics justice and policy studies at the university of mount royal mru you were fired

00:01:34.460 and you were fired for challenging the narrative of murderous priests at indian residential schools

00:01:40.060 I believe specifically for six satirical tweets.

00:01:44.480 I didn't realize humor was a problem in a university.

00:01:49.160 Evidently it is.

00:01:50.380 And you were also accused of filing what was perceived to be a frivolous and vexatious complaint.

00:01:57.400 And you didn't like Black My Lives Matter either.

00:02:01.440 You sued for wrongful dismissal and you won.

00:02:05.140 But now they won't give you your old job back.

00:02:08.680 That, to me, sounds like you were ripped off.

00:02:12.880 It also sounds like in Alberta, even tenured professors don't have free speech rights.

00:02:19.860 That's what it seems like to me.

00:02:21.620 And you say?

00:02:23.280 Exactly.

00:02:24.340 And people have to really wake up about this.

00:02:27.780 Universities, there are all sorts of constraints now on professors.

00:02:31.980 Being able to openly and honestly discuss ideas.

00:02:35.660 A couple of issues that I had serious problems with, trans activism and indigenization, but there's a whole host of other issues.

00:02:46.360 Israel-Palestine being another major problematic area, whereby if you say the wrong thing, upset the wrong group, you will find yourself in serious trouble.

00:02:57.780 and that's you have to go through all sorts of processes which are to be frank abusive very

00:03:05.660 very abusive processes and I have gone through these processes for four years now and I've had

00:03:12.200 enough of them and I am just going to speak about what's happened and tell people that they should

00:03:18.940 be very worried about our universities and that's what I'm going to be doing for the rest I guess for

00:03:24.280 the rest of my life until things turn around. May I just ask you, before we go any further,

00:03:31.320 in the political spectrum, as most people understand it, you know, left or right,

00:03:36.020 where would you place yourself? I'm a socialist, a follower of George Orwell. So I, that's the

00:03:43.400 person that I admire the most in terms of his ideas, because he was on the left of the political

00:03:49.160 spectrum in the sense of being behind the working class and wanting everyone to be able to have what 0.97

00:03:56.760 they needed to thrive as human beings but at the same time being very very concerned about the

00:04:04.680 autocratic impulses that often exist in these in political movements of various kinds and so we

00:04:12.360 We always have to be very, very worried, especially about the crackdowns that happen on freedom of expression and things like academic freedom,

00:04:22.800 because that means that the universe of ideas that are available for people to try to understand things are being cut off.

00:04:30.660 And we can be led down very, very disturbing paths if that happens.

00:04:36.380 But I'm having a little bit of cognitive dissonance here.

00:04:39.260 you are a socialist

00:04:41.300 a self-described socialist

00:04:43.000 most socialists

00:04:44.820 are disagreeing with you

00:04:48.180 on these matters

00:04:49.020 they accept without reservation

00:04:51.300 the narrative of

00:04:53.360 the Indian residential schools

00:04:55.500 they tend to be submissive

00:04:57.780 to Black Lives Matter

00:04:59.000 they

00:05:01.300 don't seem to

00:05:03.760 you don't seem to be in that

00:05:05.660 so how

00:05:06.080 what happened to socialism?

00:05:08.900 Socialism. There are not very many socialists anymore. What you have is something called

00:05:14.820 wokeism, especially in the university system. Wokeism is identity politics that has become

00:05:21.940 totalitarian and is really not interested at all in what socialism is interested in,

00:05:27.140 which is class politics. So wokeism is concerned about trans activism, racial politics,

00:05:35.460 uh sexual politics and so on but class is not something that they really concern themselves

00:05:41.620 with so that what happened starting around the 1960s is people who originally were sort of

00:05:48.580 connected to socialism went off on this other path which is about subjective identities demanding

00:05:56.260 that the subjective identities that people claiming to be oppressed have must be affirmed

00:06:03.060 by other people and if you do not affirm those identities for example someone who is a male

00:06:11.780 who is a sperm producing individual with x y chromosomes if that person believes that they

00:06:18.660 are a woman everyone is expected to affirm that they are a woman and if you don't you will find

00:06:24.420 yourself in serious trouble especially in the university system that's what wokeism is all

00:06:30.100 about and it is an absurd position that everyone should push back against if you want to believe

00:06:36.980 something that is your affair but if you cannot force other people to say that they also accept

00:06:44.420 your belief if they do not believe what it is that you believe and this is where we've gone

00:06:49.300 completely off the rails in the university system not long after you were let go from

00:06:56.260 MRU, you went down to Lethbridge to give a lecture. What happened there?

00:07:02.980 That was a complete meltdown of that university. So I was invited by Paul Viminitz, who's a

00:07:11.140 philosophy professor, to give a talk on ironically how wokeism threatens academic freedom, which it

00:07:19.300 does. It is a serious threat to academic freedom. The Indigenous Studies Department and a whole

00:07:26.580 bunch of other professors opposed me being able to speak there on the grounds that this would

00:07:34.420 cause psychological harm and be unsafe for faculty, students, and the public in that institution.

00:07:43.860 the president Mike Maughan who should be completely embarrassed about how he responded

00:07:51.400 originally said that although he found that my ideas were deplorable I would have to be allowed

00:07:58.860 to speak because of the free speech policy that they had at that university which had been directed

00:08:04.580 by the government of Alberta that was going to go ahead and then when the pressure began to mount

00:08:13.580 because of all the activists, there's embedded activists within that institution.

00:08:19.060 He caved and cancelled the space that was supposed to be given for me to be able to speak.

00:08:28.900 I said that there's no way they are going to push me off of campus,

00:08:33.860 and I showed up there anyway to give a speaker's corner type of speech.

00:08:38.080 I was met by about 700 people, not all of them activists, but at least 100 activists all holding signs, and they basically shouted me down and prevented me from speaking.

00:08:50.700 The president congratulated the students for shouting me down.

00:08:55.620 Really?

00:08:56.220 Yes.

00:08:57.200 So much for teaching free speech at the University of Lethbridge.

00:09:00.500 That was a complete embarrassment. All those administrators and we got, because we're suing the University of Lethbridge, myself and Jonah Pickle, who's a student, who was a student there who wanted to hear the talk.

00:09:11.380 We got 700, sorry, 250 pages of emails from that institution through the disclosure process.

00:09:19.480 That is a shocking bunch of documents because it shows about 15 professors who are complete

00:09:26.760 totalitarians, administrators who have no respect whatsoever for academic freedom and freedom of

00:09:34.900 expression at that institution. And that institution needs a serious overhaul. It is

00:09:40.920 no longer an academic institution it is being run by activists so that i think there's a headline

00:09:47.480 right there i want to come back to your suit against the university of lethbridge a little

00:09:53.720 later but you're actually you've got a speaking tour planned in the next what month and you're

00:10:01.240 going to going to other universities which ones are you going to and what's the message

00:10:05.320 So this is going to be over a number of months, but just in the near future, next Monday, which is October 28th, I am going to universities in Ontario in the Toronto area, Wilfrid Laurier on the 28th and Brock University on the 29th.

00:10:28.440 And then I'm hooking up with Greg Wycliffe, who's a free speech advocate in Toronto on the 30th to do some what's called Spectrum Street epistemology in Toronto, at a university in Toronto.

00:10:43.260 I want to come back to you on that as well.

00:10:45.060 But so we're talking about October here.

00:10:48.200 Yes.

00:10:48.700 All right.

00:10:49.100 October the 29th.

00:10:50.480 How do those campus visits fit in what appears to be a well-thought-out strategy to make your point and to contend with the MRU?

00:11:05.960 Yes, so we're seeing a problem across the country.

00:11:10.440 I don't have a good sense yet as to the depth of that problem.

00:11:15.800 Alberta there's there's good better universities and worse universities in

00:11:20.660 terms of being open to discussing ideas I went to Regina on October 3rd that

00:11:28.280 university is a complete disaster anyway and and my talks got cancelled

00:11:34.560 there but the idea is that I should be able to give the talks at these

00:11:39.740 universities I have professors who are booking these rooms but what happens is

00:11:45.440 that the university will sometimes rescind the space or not allow it to be booked or charge a

00:11:54.160 security fee or do some kind of obstructionist tactic. So that's the first kind of movement

00:12:03.160 is to try to give those talks there. And we'll see what happens at Wilfrid Laurier University

00:12:10.460 and Brock University on October 29th and 30th.

00:12:14.140 If they cancel the talks or rescind the space,

00:12:17.720 then I have the backup plan,

00:12:19.880 which is doing the Spectrum Street epistemology.

00:12:22.720 Yes, I've heard people talking about that.

00:12:25.440 Could you explain what that is in a very short time?

00:12:29.520 Yes.

00:12:30.000 It's quite novel.

00:12:30.840 It's done by Peter Boghossian,

00:12:33.620 who was a professor at Portland State University

00:12:35.800 who got pushed out of there because of the totalitarianism.

00:12:38.660 he developed this method where you have you can either have lines or you can have some mats with

00:12:45.880 with the words strongly agree strongly disagree neutral they have gradations on that and you put

00:12:53.360 those mats you don't need a room you can do it anywhere and you have I have a sound system I

00:12:57.780 have a portable sound system so you just put the mats down and then when you you have you put forward

00:13:04.680 claims and you get people to start on neutral. And when you state the claim, people move and

00:13:10.260 stand on the mat that they think best represents their degree of confidence about that claim.

00:13:17.520 And then you ask them why they are confident about accepting that claim or not confident

00:13:26.380 and what evidence they would require or arguments that they would need in order to become

00:13:34.320 towards the more agreeable side, the more confident side,

00:13:38.840 or the more disagreeable side, the less confident side.

00:13:42.360 You can do this for factual claims or you can do it for value-based claims,

00:13:48.160 but the idea here is to fight back against the censorship

00:13:53.720 and the self-censorship that currently exists.

00:13:57.020 Okay, how is that effective?

00:13:58.720 I mean, if they can clear you out of the room,

00:14:00.900 can't they clear you off the parking lot or wherever you're doing this?

00:14:03.820 Well, in Alberta and Saskatchewan, they cannot. So that was very, very helpful in Regina, because they strongly suggested to me and asked me to respect their demand that they did not want me to go there and hold an event of my own.

00:14:22.580 And I just said, well, I don't respect your, your, I do not respect the fact that you prize

00:14:30.680 safety, all these kinds of psychological safety concerns over freedom of expression and academic

00:14:39.620 freedom. I don't, I don't respect that. So I'm going anyway. And when I arrived there,

00:14:45.060 the security, they had one security person there and he welcomed me on campus and said,

00:14:49.400 can I do anything for you? So they'd obviously had their lawyers look over everything and they knew

00:14:56.740 that they were not allowed to prevent me from engaging in this exercise on campus.

00:15:03.680 The same thing is not true for Ontario. So Ontario, we don't have the court decisions like we do in

00:15:11.740 Alberta and Saskatchewan about freedom of expression. So potentially they could issue a

00:15:17.200 trespass notice or something like that in which case I will not leave the campus. If they would

00:15:24.360 want to order me off campus for discussing ideas with faculty and students at a university

00:15:31.140 I'm not going to go any you know they'll just have to arrest me and we can have it out in the courts

00:15:37.500 about these matters. Then let's come back to your suit against Lethbridge. Yes. If there's a pattern

00:15:46.840 starting to emerge here as to how you are fighting back you're actually exerting your rights and if

00:15:54.440 people push back say all right sue me you end up in court now let's just say that this works its way

00:16:02.440 all the way up to the supreme court of canada yes and the issue is you're right never mind the fact

00:16:09.160 that you're a university press professor you could be a journalist or you could just be a

00:16:13.320 you know a truck driver who was going by and happened to see something interesting going on

00:16:17.400 and got involved yes you are saying i have a right to be here i have a right to say these things yes

00:16:23.720 i believe them to be true i'm not libeling anybody yes but you're you're putting me in front of the

00:16:30.440 judge that works its way up through a very politicized court system yes i'm making an

00:16:35.880 editorial judgment there that the court system is politicized and some people would take issue

00:16:41.320 with that. But given how the judiciary is appointed and on what grounds they are appointed,

00:16:48.240 I think it's a fair statement. If you get to the Supreme Court of Canada, do you have any confidence

00:16:54.160 that your free speech rights will be upheld? Well, I've heard it's a very dicey situation

00:17:01.440 and it depends on the judges, as you've alluded to. So it's not very clear how it's all going to

00:17:09.160 wash out in the end. But my own view is, is that I think it's the public that is really the

00:17:15.660 important factor here, is that people need to understand that universities are incredibly

00:17:22.540 important institutions. And if we cannot, if we are not able to say what we believe to be true

00:17:31.080 at a university, then we do not have a democratic system anymore. This is a huge

00:17:39.700 danger sign. We are traveling down a path which is going to have serious consequences for society,

00:17:48.760 and people don't really realize that yet. And it's already unfolding how bad it is we don't

00:17:56.100 know yet and we're going to find out, but I'm going to test it out. And I'm totally confident

00:18:02.900 in my own integrity and my own positions. Obviously, I could be wrong on many things

00:18:10.640 and I will stand to be corrected, but I have the confidence to put forth what I believe to be true

00:18:19.560 And I do not want to have administrators, unions, all sorts of these institutions which are seriously corroded and have no respect whatsoever for open inquiry in universities to be the ones that are trying to stop me from doing this.

00:18:41.220 So I'm going to test them and we're going to see how all the universities do across the country.

00:18:47.260 But I think the public, the courts are useful in various ways because they often do allow us to investigate various avenues with respect to the law.

00:18:58.840 But if you have institutions that are seriously corroded, then the courts often are not very effective in trying to fight back against this.

00:19:09.740 Well, I've got three questions left for you in the time that we have remaining.

00:19:13.660 The first one is entirely serious, and the other two maybe less.

00:19:17.640 So the serious question is this.

00:19:19.800 You care. I care.

00:19:21.920 There are people, we all know people who care with us.

00:19:27.260 But we're talking about a population of approximately 40 million people.

00:19:32.900 And let's leave out of consideration those who are underage.

00:19:37.540 many of them didn't grow up

00:19:41.840 in the tradition that we grew up in

00:19:44.300 I'll call it the Anglo-American 0.99

00:19:46.520 tradition of free speech

00:19:47.820 do you think people care enough

00:19:52.600 to actually

00:19:53.220 like if you lost at the Supreme Court of Canada

00:19:56.380 would people take to the streets?

00:20:01.020 well I think that

00:20:02.920 do Canadians care about this anymore?

00:20:05.120 Well, I'm trying to convince them to care, I guess, if they don't care. If they don't care, they don't care about democracy. And so having a population that doesn't care about democracy, then we have a serious problem here.

00:20:21.980 Because if we can't discuss things and figure out mechanisms to settle our differences rationally, and it's the Enlightenment, it basically is the tradition of the Enlightenment.

00:20:34.600 So before the Enlightenment, we were ruled autocratically by aristocrats and so on, and we struggled over many hundreds of years to be able to not perfectly, but to some extent, control various facets of society, and we are on the verge of losing that.

00:20:56.760 And the fact that people don't care is a tragedy in its own right, but we don't have enough serious conversations about this, and we're deluding ourselves a little bit too, I think.

00:21:06.640 I think people don't really realize, you know, where we are at, and I highly recommend people watch this documentary, the University of Regina Rumble, which Daniel Page, who is my videographer and I, produced about what happened at the University of Regina.

00:21:25.420 because that is a very, very tragic situation there.

00:21:29.940 And it's not the fault of the students.

00:21:32.120 It's the fault of the administrators and it's the fault of the professors

00:21:36.760 and it's the fault of the unions that represented the professors.

00:21:40.700 That's where the systemic problems lie.

00:21:44.120 And we need to overhaul our institutions.

00:21:46.780 That's not going to work the way those institutions are working.

00:21:49.660 So that video that you have just described will be part of this total presentation.

00:21:53.960 Viewers who are watching it now, if they just go back to the initial page, find it embedded in the text.

00:22:02.160 So people, I would encourage people to do exactly what you said.

00:22:06.420 So two last questions, Professor Wittowson.

00:22:09.380 One, do you want your old job back?

00:22:12.640 I definitely do.

00:22:14.460 My institution needs me.

00:22:16.420 Well, I think it does.

00:22:17.340 And I have great colleagues there.

00:22:21.200 Sinclair McRae, who's a philosophy professor there.

00:22:25.220 Kirsten Kramer, who's a criminologist.

00:22:27.860 Bob Oodle, who's a psychologist.

00:22:29.940 And the list goes on.

00:22:31.880 There are great people at Mount Royal University.

00:22:35.100 You realize the dean's taking notes.

00:22:36.820 And I go and I drink beer with my colleagues on the occasional Friday night in the faculty center.

00:22:43.720 I'm hoping on doing some street epistemology, spectrum street epistemology there shortly.

00:22:49.520 I've been doing it at the University of Calgary.

00:22:51.720 So it was a great, Mount Royal in 2008 was a wonderful institution.

00:22:56.420 It had great administrators.

00:22:58.460 Robin Fisher as a provost, Manuel Merton as the dean.

00:23:02.080 And they knew what an academic institution was all about.

00:23:05.900 And it shouldn't take that much to, you know, recapture the academic ethos that existed at that university 15 years ago.

00:23:18.960 So I haven't given up on Mount Royal and I would be a great person to be put in a position of a freedom of expression institute there, academic institute for academic freedom.

00:23:32.020 I thought, I think it was about 2016, that's when I first started to sense something was wrong.

00:23:39.600 I thought that Mount Royal could be a leader in academic freedom and freedom of expression universities.

00:23:47.420 And it still could be. It's not too late.

00:23:50.460 And all you need is the right kinds of incentives at that institution to restore the academic character of what used to exist there.

00:24:01.300 well i i hope it works out exactly as you have described so i'm going to let you go with this

00:24:06.100 one last thought about two weeks ago we had a we printed an article here in the western standard

00:24:12.740 and i'm going to put this link in the uh in the process as well and it was dr barry cooper from

00:24:18.340 the university of calgary you know there is a member of the calgary school a hunting and fishing

00:24:25.380 guru who teaches

00:24:27.960 politics

00:24:29.220 I imagine in a way that you would

00:24:32.140 probably enjoy

00:24:33.580 an old conservative

00:24:36.140 and

00:24:37.580 he pointed out that some of your

00:24:40.300 most fervent

00:24:42.180 supporters were in fact

00:24:44.020 conservatives. Now you're a socialist

00:24:46.540 an old fashioned socialist

00:24:48.180 not one of these off the

00:24:50.280 line socialists. How do you feel as a socialist

00:24:52.420 having all the conservatives coming to back you

00:24:54.420 up on a free speech fight? I think it's about the Enlightenment. So I think the extent to which

00:24:59.880 people value the principles of the Enlightenment, that's where we have our common ground. What

00:25:06.760 people don't realize is that the arguments between socialists and conservatives,

00:25:12.680 those are now a bit on the back burner because we can't even, we're fighting for the right to

00:25:19.680 have those arguments. We cannot have those arguments anymore because if you just step on

00:25:26.700 the wrong word or the wrong issue, you are going to have serious consequences that you're going to

00:25:34.540 have to face. And I think that people like Tom Flanagan, Barry Cooper, people that I admire in

00:25:40.960 terms of their support for enlightenment principles, we are part of a coalition which is trying to

00:25:47.740 restore the ability to have those arguments, which we can no longer do because of the

00:25:54.020 take order of institutions by this totalitarian identity politics, which is known as what's

00:26:00.160 called wokeism. Well said. Dr. Whittelson, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.

00:26:06.660 For the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hanaport.

00:26:17.740 Thank you.

Western Standard - October 29, 2024

HANNAFORD： Woke won't work on Widdowson

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