Canada's nuttiest professors
From the conspiracy kooks to the commies, the radicals to the revolutionaries, meet the profs that students (and their parents) will want to keep far away from this school year.
Terry O'Neill - September 25, 2006
Back in the early 1970s, when B.C.'s Simon Fraser University was considered Canada's most radical school, one professor offered a geography course featuring an alluring multimedia presentation on the development of technology and civilization. Many wide-eyed undergrads rated the course among their favourites.
But would the prof have had many admirers among the students' parents if they'd known what he was advocating in his lecture hall? Throughout the semester, the professor gradually led his eager charges along a path to one destination: the conclusion that Maoism was the solution to the world's problems. Democracy was a ruse, he suggested; capitalism, evil. Over time, the intellectual indoctrination become so overt that at semester's end, just before Christmas, he had one of his tutorial assistants dress up as Santa and parade into the lecture hall waving Mao's "little red book."
Professor Michael Eliot Hurst (who died a few years ago) may have been unique in his methods, but not his message. At the time, universities across North America and western Europe were in the thrall of a jarring cultural upheaval that saw left-wing ideologues win senior positions in the ivory tower. The disturbing and tumultuous times were put under the microscope most brilliantly in Allan Bloom's 1987 masterpiece, The Closing of the American Mind.
But that was then. Surely, things have changed. Surely, the radicalized universities of the past have been replaced by institutions of higher learning that uphold standards of intellectual freedom and embrace liberal and democratic ideals. Surely, yesterday's stereotypical radical professor has been replaced by an open-minded academic committed to the highest ideals of truth and justice.
Nope.
Universities today are hothouses of intellectual repression, encumbered by censorious codes stifling free speech and weakened by employment-equity programs that force faculties to favour diversity over accomplishment. Just ask Lawrence Summers, the former U.S. treasury secretary who was hounded from the presidency of Harvard this year after suggesting publicly that males and females may have innately different capacities for science and math. Or Margaret Somerville, the distinguished McGill ethicist, nearly denied an honourary doctorate from Ryerson University this summer after faculty protested her skepticism toward same-sex marriage (she got the degree but several professors turned their backs on the ceremony).
Today, there are probably just as many, or more, left-wing professors than a generation ago. If our situation is similar to American universities (where there's been extensive research on the issue), most faculties are tilting so far left they're lucky they haven't slid into the Pacific. One study last year found that three quarters of all faculty members at U.S. colleges considered themselves left-wing (as much as 87 per cent at Ivy League schools and even higher in the humanities).
Should Canadians be concerned? They should when those professors use their lecterns as bully pulpits from which to inculcate students with their own ideologies--especially if it means suppressing contrary viewpoints. And, if you ask students, that's exactly what's happening. One McGill student reports that, in a course about terrorism, her professor told her bluntly that: "No educated person can support Israel . . . If you don't change your political views on terrorism, Israel, and just in general, you'll get nowhere in academia." After being repeatedly harassed for challenging his sociology professor's viewpoints on homosexuality, one University of Regina student summed up his education this way: "What did I learn? Keep my mouth shut, follow the professors' line . . . get your marks and get out with that piece of paper that shows you can jump hoops."
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