The plight of American universities right now — Harvard in particular — is a striking example of everything that can go wrong with the politicization of education.
The Trump administration seems determined to undermine the very capacity of elite universities to exist. They are cutting funding, slashing the money to research granting agencies, cancelling international student visas, and justifying the whole thing because of allegations of
and
. Harvard is the sacrificial victim, but everyone is supposed to get the lesson: get into line politically or suffer the same fate.
Despite the very real threat of antisemitism in these places — the attacks on Jewish Americans have been many, and the problem is real — Trump is acting the role of a political thug. He’s like a mafioso boss shaking down one restaurant owner, so that all the other businesses in town get the message.
What’s also true, though, is that the institutions of higher learning in the United States (as in Canada) are politicized. They make for good targets for Trump’s populist anti-elite ethos not only because they are elite universities, but also because they have advertised themselves as such — and have acted as — places of left-wing social justice activism.
Who knows how this is going to end? Harvard is rich, with billions in endowments, but how long can it last? Without long-term funding, it’s going to be strategically smart for its leading researchers to look elsewhere, perhaps even here in Canada, for safer employment.
For Canada, the question is slightly different: what can we do to avoid the American dumpster fire?
The good news is that some universities seem to be getting the message. Over the last couple of years, several Canadian universities have announced policies of
. While individual faculty can speak politically, some universities have announced that they will be politically neutral.
This is fine, as far as it goes. But it’s far from enough. The leftist tilt at universities goes much deeper than public pronouncements. It can be seen in everything from who is hired, and who isn’t; which subjects get funding, and which do not; and which types of diversity issues get treated as problems, and which are ignored. On this, there is no sign that any university is seriously looking at the now long-term trend of
male enrollments in higher education.
The reality is that most Canadian universities continue to act as institutions of leftist activism in ways that will require more than just institutional neutrality statements to unravel.
Large segments of the university world — though by no means all — emphasize their role as activists. They celebrate it.
The Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences that met in Toronto last week, brought together researchers from all over the country. As part of their program, they hosted a “
” series to highlight what the Congress thought of as the most important research. Every single one of the “Big Thinking” events — the sessions that the Congress wants the public to know about — were focused on topics including
, “
benefits and challenges” of implementing EDI in post-secondary research
, and
far-right (but not far-left) extremism.
There was no ideological diversity in these sessions — no sense that there could be anything other than a leftist-version of what counted as “justice.” The more than 41 per cent of the Canadian population who voted Conservative in the last election would not have seen their ideas of justice represented anywhere in these discussions.
Some universities have whole departments focused on social justice — and again, here, the notion of what is justice is politically-slanted. Job advertisements continue to call on candidates to demonstrate their commitment to DEI and social justice. These are political litmus tests — though universities act as if they are politically-neutral. This is what happens in politically-lopsided institutions. People come to see their own beliefs as simply normal and neutral.
A recent open-letter from over 200 Canadian professors
this sort of taken-for-granted activism by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT). The letter noted CAUT’s activist tilt on issues from Israel to DEI, and also the bizarre choice of the organization to announce a travel advisory for researchers going to the United States. CAUT has announced no travel warning for any other country — not to war-torn Ukraine or the Sudan, nor has it warned of authoritarian surveillance, even in countries like China or Russia.
These actions — and more — show the weird political activism that is taken for granted in Canadian universities. When everyone around you refuses to wear deodorant, maybe you don’t notice that you all smell. But when an outsider enters the room, freshly showered and clean, you’ll have to excuse them for thinking that something stinks.
It’s incredibly unlikely that, if Poilievre’s Conservatives had won the recent election, they would have engaged in the kind of all-out war that Trump is now embroiled in. Despite accusations to the contrary, Poilievre is no Canadian Trump.
But it would have been logical for a Conservative government to look at universities and see them as major sources of anti-conservative activism in ways that are baked-in — and to want to depoliticize these institutions.
If you sell yourself as a political institution — committed to highly politicized versions of social justice — and then populate yourself with only those from one political persuasion, you’d have to be crazy for thinking that those who come from the other side of the political spectrum won’t consider that you are exactly what you claim to be: and then act accordingly.
A dystopian vision of what this could lead to is currently on display in Trump’s America. Maybe we could act now before it comes to this in Canada too?
National Post
