AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey The Enlightenment-inspired higher education that I encountered during my 1958-72 studies at Antioch College and the University of Chicago, and at McGill University for much of the time when I was a professor there beginning in 1968, was...
An arbitrator has ruled that Calgary’s Mount Royal University (MRU) acted in a “disproportionate” manner in late 2021 in its firing of Frances Widdowson, a tenured political scientist with a speciality in Indigenous issues. Dr. Widdowson, an outspoken critic of...
National Citizens Inquiry
While there are malevolent outside actors doing what they can with universities, the influential corruption is internal.
A Snapshot of Property Rights Protection in Canada After 10 years
The writ has been dropped and Albertans are off to the polls on May 29. That leaves just four weeks for political leaders and voters to sort out what is arguably the most divisive, yet significant, issue for this election - health care. On Day 2, NDP leader Rachel...
The sudden uprising of university students across North America in support of Hamas and allegedly about the welfare of Palestinians does not result, for most students, from close ties with people on the other side of the world. Of course, there is in North America a...
Do we really want dishonest people driving research that has real-world consequences for the rest of us?
They might not agree on much else, but the political far left and the far right strive to perfect and project their hate of Jews and Israel. They converge in this hatred, as in many other aspects of politics. Conventionally, following the spatial distribution of the...
Big Topics & Big Ideas
In a recent Free Press article, “We Were Taught to Hate Jews,” five individuals from Muslim families report on the anti-Semitism that was integral to their upbringing. One said: “It’s like asking me how often I drink water. Anti-Semitism was everywhere.” Ayaan Hirsi...
American and Canadian university campuses rang for weeks on end with celebrations of Hamas’s “great victory” of Oct. 7. The murder of civilians, the burning alive of families, the gang rape of women to death, the roasting of children in ovens, and the beheading of...
Universities must remain strictly neutral on issues, save for one thing: the defence of academic freedom
In November 2022, Paul Viminitz, a professor in the philosophy department at the University of Lethbridge, invited me to give a talk on the threat “woke-ism” poses for academic freedom. After pressure mounted to cancel the talk, the president of the University of...
If you wonder why university students celebrate the barbaric atrocities of Hamas, the lies of postcolonial theory and critical race theory explain a good part.