Francis Widdowson was a socialist, a self-described socialist, and a follower of George Orwell. He was fired for writing a satirical tweet about the Indian residential school system and the Black Lives Matter movement, among other things.
00:02:24.340And people have to really wake up about this.
00:02:27.780Universities, there are all sorts of constraints now on professors.
00:02:31.980Being able to openly and honestly discuss ideas.
00:02:35.660A couple of issues that I had serious problems with, trans activism and indigenization, but there's a whole host of other issues.
00:02:46.360Israel-Palestine being another major problematic area, whereby if you say the wrong thing, upset the wrong group, you will find yourself in serious trouble.
00:02:57.780and that's you have to go through all sorts of processes which are to be frank abusive very
00:03:05.660very abusive processes and I have gone through these processes for four years now and I've had
00:03:12.200enough of them and I am just going to speak about what's happened and tell people that they should
00:03:18.940be very worried about our universities and that's what I'm going to be doing for the rest I guess for
00:03:24.280the rest of my life until things turn around. May I just ask you, before we go any further,
00:03:31.320in the political spectrum, as most people understand it, you know, left or right,
00:03:36.020where would you place yourself? I'm a socialist, a follower of George Orwell. So I, that's the
00:03:43.400person that I admire the most in terms of his ideas, because he was on the left of the political
00:03:49.160spectrum in the sense of being behind the working class and wanting everyone to be able to have what0.97
00:03:56.760they needed to thrive as human beings but at the same time being very very concerned about the
00:04:04.680autocratic impulses that often exist in these in political movements of various kinds and so we
00:04:12.360We always have to be very, very worried, especially about the crackdowns that happen on freedom of expression and things like academic freedom,
00:04:22.800because that means that the universe of ideas that are available for people to try to understand things are being cut off.
00:04:30.660And we can be led down very, very disturbing paths if that happens.
00:04:36.380But I'm having a little bit of cognitive dissonance here.
00:05:08.900Socialism. There are not very many socialists anymore. What you have is something called
00:05:14.820wokeism, especially in the university system. Wokeism is identity politics that has become
00:05:21.940totalitarian and is really not interested at all in what socialism is interested in,
00:05:27.140which is class politics. So wokeism is concerned about trans activism, racial politics,
00:05:35.460uh sexual politics and so on but class is not something that they really concern themselves
00:05:41.620with so that what happened starting around the 1960s is people who originally were sort of
00:05:48.580connected to socialism went off on this other path which is about subjective identities demanding
00:05:56.260that the subjective identities that people claiming to be oppressed have must be affirmed
00:06:03.060by other people and if you do not affirm those identities for example someone who is a male
00:06:11.780who is a sperm producing individual with x y chromosomes if that person believes that they
00:06:18.660are a woman everyone is expected to affirm that they are a woman and if you don't you will find
00:06:24.420yourself in serious trouble especially in the university system that's what wokeism is all
00:06:30.100about and it is an absurd position that everyone should push back against if you want to believe
00:06:36.980something that is your affair but if you cannot force other people to say that they also accept
00:06:44.420your belief if they do not believe what it is that you believe and this is where we've gone
00:06:49.300completely off the rails in the university system not long after you were let go from
00:06:56.260MRU, you went down to Lethbridge to give a lecture. What happened there?
00:07:02.980That was a complete meltdown of that university. So I was invited by Paul Viminitz, who's a
00:07:11.140philosophy professor, to give a talk on ironically how wokeism threatens academic freedom, which it
00:07:19.300does. It is a serious threat to academic freedom. The Indigenous Studies Department and a whole
00:07:26.580bunch of other professors opposed me being able to speak there on the grounds that this would
00:07:34.420cause psychological harm and be unsafe for faculty, students, and the public in that institution.
00:07:43.860the president Mike Maughan who should be completely embarrassed about how he responded
00:07:51.400originally said that although he found that my ideas were deplorable I would have to be allowed
00:07:58.860to speak because of the free speech policy that they had at that university which had been directed
00:08:04.580by the government of Alberta that was going to go ahead and then when the pressure began to mount
00:08:13.580because of all the activists, there's embedded activists within that institution.
00:08:19.060He caved and cancelled the space that was supposed to be given for me to be able to speak.
00:08:28.900I said that there's no way they are going to push me off of campus,
00:08:33.860and I showed up there anyway to give a speaker's corner type of speech.
00:08:38.080I 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.
00:08:50.700The president congratulated the students for shouting me down.
00:08:57.200So much for teaching free speech at the University of Lethbridge.
00:09:00.500That 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.
00:09:11.380We got 700, sorry, 250 pages of emails from that institution through the disclosure process.
00:09:19.480That is a shocking bunch of documents because it shows about 15 professors who are complete
00:09:26.760totalitarians, administrators who have no respect whatsoever for academic freedom and freedom of
00:09:34.900expression at that institution. And that institution needs a serious overhaul. It is
00:09:40.920no longer an academic institution it is being run by activists so that i think there's a headline
00:09:47.480right there i want to come back to your suit against the university of lethbridge a little
00:09:53.720later but you're actually you've got a speaking tour planned in the next what month and you're
00:10:01.240going to going to other universities which ones are you going to and what's the message
00:10:05.320So 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.
00:10:28.440And 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.
00:10:43.260I want to come back to you on that as well.
00:10:45.060But so we're talking about October here.
00:13:58.720I mean, if they can clear you out of the room,
00:14:00.900can't they clear you off the parking lot or wherever you're doing this?
00:14:03.820Well, 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.
00:14:22.580And I just said, well, I don't respect your, your, I do not respect the fact that you prize
00:14:30.680safety, all these kinds of psychological safety concerns over freedom of expression and academic
00:14:39.620freedom. I don't, I don't respect that. So I'm going anyway. And when I arrived there,
00:14:45.060the security, they had one security person there and he welcomed me on campus and said,
00:14:49.400can I do anything for you? So they'd obviously had their lawyers look over everything and they knew
00:14:56.740that they were not allowed to prevent me from engaging in this exercise on campus.
00:15:03.680The same thing is not true for Ontario. So Ontario, we don't have the court decisions like we do in
00:15:11.740Alberta and Saskatchewan about freedom of expression. So potentially they could issue a
00:15:17.200trespass notice or something like that in which case I will not leave the campus. If they would
00:15:24.360want to order me off campus for discussing ideas with faculty and students at a university
00:15:31.140I'm not going to go any you know they'll just have to arrest me and we can have it out in the courts
00:15:37.500about these matters. Then let's come back to your suit against Lethbridge. Yes. If there's a pattern
00:15:46.840starting to emerge here as to how you are fighting back you're actually exerting your rights and if
00:15:54.440people push back say all right sue me you end up in court now let's just say that this works its way
00:16:02.440all the way up to the supreme court of canada yes and the issue is you're right never mind the fact
00:16:09.160that you're a university press professor you could be a journalist or you could just be a
00:16:13.320you know a truck driver who was going by and happened to see something interesting going on
00:16:17.400and got involved yes you are saying i have a right to be here i have a right to say these things yes
00:16:23.720i believe them to be true i'm not libeling anybody yes but you're you're putting me in front of the
00:16:30.440judge that works its way up through a very politicized court system yes i'm making an
00:16:35.880editorial judgment there that the court system is politicized and some people would take issue
00:16:41.320with that. But given how the judiciary is appointed and on what grounds they are appointed,
00:16:48.240I think it's a fair statement. If you get to the Supreme Court of Canada, do you have any confidence
00:16:54.160that your free speech rights will be upheld? Well, I've heard it's a very dicey situation
00:17:01.440and it depends on the judges, as you've alluded to. So it's not very clear how it's all going to
00:17:09.160wash out in the end. But my own view is, is that I think it's the public that is really the
00:17:15.660important factor here, is that people need to understand that universities are incredibly
00:17:22.540important institutions. And if we cannot, if we are not able to say what we believe to be true
00:17:31.080at a university, then we do not have a democratic system anymore. This is a huge
00:17:39.700danger sign. We are traveling down a path which is going to have serious consequences for society,
00:17:48.760and people don't really realize that yet. And it's already unfolding how bad it is we don't
00:17:56.100know yet and we're going to find out, but I'm going to test it out. And I'm totally confident
00:18:02.900in my own integrity and my own positions. Obviously, I could be wrong on many things
00:18:10.640and I will stand to be corrected, but I have the confidence to put forth what I believe to be true
00:18:19.560And 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.
00:18:41.220So I'm going to test them and we're going to see how all the universities do across the country.
00:18:47.260But 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.
00:18:58.840But if you have institutions that are seriously corroded, then the courts often are not very effective in trying to fight back against this.
00:19:09.740Well, I've got three questions left for you in the time that we have remaining.
00:19:13.660The first one is entirely serious, and the other two maybe less.
00:20:05.120Well, 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.
00:20:21.980Because 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.
00:20:34.600So 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.
00:20:56.760And 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.
00:21:06.640I 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.
00:21:25.420because that is a very, very tragic situation there.
00:21:29.940And it's not the fault of the students.
00:21:32.120It's the fault of the administrators and it's the fault of the professors
00:21:36.760and it's the fault of the unions that represented the professors.
00:21:40.700That's where the systemic problems lie.
00:21:44.120And we need to overhaul our institutions.
00:21:46.780That's not going to work the way those institutions are working.
00:21:49.660So that video that you have just described will be part of this total presentation.
00:21:53.960Viewers who are watching it now, if they just go back to the initial page, find it embedded in the text.
00:22:02.160So people, I would encourage people to do exactly what you said.
00:22:06.420So two last questions, Professor Wittowson.
00:22:58.460Robin Fisher as a provost, Manuel Merton as the dean.
00:23:02.080And they knew what an academic institution was all about.
00:23:05.900And it shouldn't take that much to, you know, recapture the academic ethos that existed at that university 15 years ago.
00:23:18.960So 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.
00:23:32.020I thought, I think it was about 2016, that's when I first started to sense something was wrong.
00:23:39.600I thought that Mount Royal could be a leader in academic freedom and freedom of expression universities.
00:23:47.420And it still could be. It's not too late.
00:23:50.460And all you need is the right kinds of incentives at that institution to restore the academic character of what used to exist there.
00:24:01.300well i i hope it works out exactly as you have described so i'm going to let you go with this
00:24:06.100one last thought about two weeks ago we had a we printed an article here in the western standard
00:24:12.740and i'm going to put this link in the uh in the process as well and it was dr barry cooper from
00:24:18.340the university of calgary you know there is a member of the calgary school a hunting and fishing