The recent spectacular and decisive presidential election victory by Donald Trump — a self-styled benevolent “dictator” swept to power with an unequivocal mandate from U.S. voters — has become what can only be described as a political tsunami for left-leaning observers.
Vast change is in the offing. The political tectonic plates have shifted, prompting shattering eruptions along a number of predictable fault lines.
One such fiery volcano is gender ideology, a demonstrable fantasy that, mercifully, will soon be banished from American institutions, its many purveyors quickly to be bankrupted by Trump’s proposed state-assisted lawsuits brought by the swelling ranks of detransitioners.
A second is education, a metaphorical marshmallow that is no longer merely the artificially-sweetened confection promised to so many young people, but has instead become more like a skewered and charred husk grilled remorselessly on the three-pronged toasting fork of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
Americans need worry no longer, however. In a recent post on X, Elon Musk shared Donald Trump’s radical vision of a reformed college education system — one that demands the eradication of all DEI and its apparatchiks, and even threatens uncompliant institutions with severe taxation or complete forfeiture of their sprawling endowments. Inevitably, we will witness brazen back-peddling by the cadre of top-tier administrators desperate to remain gainfully employed. Harvard’s board, sitting on a treasure horde of US$53.2B (C$74.8B), will doubtless respond accordingly.
How will Canadian universities survive? While plunging needles into voodoo dolls of Pierre Poilievre, the left will eschew the ‘scary’ stateside politics, make accusations of neo-fascism, and point to Canada as a progressive retreat, a haven for the many orphans of woke ideology who, even now, are threatening on their social feeds to lay siege to our border, waving their American passports.
But what is far more likely, judging from predictions by even the state-sponsored CBC which suggest with 99 per cent certainty a Conservative win in 2025, is that the Canadian government in a year’s time will follow suit. Even the dullest minds in the upper administrations of Canada’s top universities — and trust me, they are spectacularly dull — must see the writing on the wall.
Here is the unvarnished reality in Canada in higher education in 2024. Students are being ripped off. Their degrees have been continuously devalued by the twin cudgels of enrolment inflation, as ballooning cohorts are funnelled through our universities, and the softening of standards in the face of academic appeasement and growing accommodations.
You might raise an eyebrow at that last remark. Academic accommodations are a form of concessionism where, according to a recent report at Queen’s University, where nearly one in four students (22 per cent) gain some kind of benefit, usually in the shape of extended time allotments for examinations, to correct for what is often a largely imagined state of mental impairment.
In short, if you get anxious, the university concedes that you deserve more time than everyone else. This hardly constitutes quality education, and it inevitably dilutes academic standards. Obsequious compassion is showered on the deserving minorities; but if you are a hard-working student with no stakes in the victimhood game, well, you just have to suck it up.
Universities have consequently become expensive pre-adulthood training grounds that now choose to deride diligence, talent, and commitment in favour of equitable practices that attempt to champion anyone choosing to identify into minorities defined by inherent characteristics — gender, race, and sexuality. Indeed, their compulsive obsession with “belonging” — cited a mere 27 times, for example, in UofT’s most recent 17-page DEI report — has all the allure of a brain hemorrhage.
It will be interesting to see how they adapt to this new, inclement climate. For instance, in my own department, there are 40 staffers who support a suite of professional graduate programs. Based on published United Steel Workers’ pay scales and benefit rates, this costs the university — a taxpayer funded enterprise — well in excess of $3.5M per year. For a typical program, a quarter of the allotted budget is sucked up by administrative overhead. All of the appointees would doubtless declare graduate-school exceptionalism and, in the same breath, grouse about the ever-present patriarchy. But inspection shows only 24 per cent are men, and 40 per cent are, unsurprisingly, white women.
Now, sandwiched between provincial funding cuts and a collapse in international student admissions, campuses like mine will have to muster major savings as budget holes dilate in an ever-gloomier climate. Punitive financial incentives imposed by an incoming Conservative government will doubtless see a rapid turnaround as academics and administrators alike rush to gaslight everyone claiming that woke waste — characterized so effectively by journalist Charlotte Gill in Britain — was all “unintentional.”
Pull the other one. Recent propaganda sheets such as The Bulletin of the Canadian Association of University Teachers and Academic Matters, the journal of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations, which purport to represent professors like myself, are awash with racist DEI and tout a slavish fealty to obsessive and damaging social justice ideology. If you belong to the editorial team of either of these absurd political pamphlets, please drop me from your mailing list.
There is hope for students. Jordan Peterson has lately launched his academy, which, though limited to the social sciences so far, has breached the universities’ monopoly and comes at a bargain price. And the content is excellent, featuring such stellar authorities as Andrew Roberts, James Orr, John Vervaeke, Eric Kaufmann and a host of others. I’ve signed up.
Time is running out for legacy universities across Canada. I have a fancy next year we will see the same wave of comedy meltdowns that followed Trump’s re-election, just this time by an army of capitulating academics. “We didn’t mean to indoctrinate you with our untested ideology — Please give us more money.” Clink-clink. Too bad. It’s not in the cards.
National Post
Leigh Revers is associate professor with the Institute for Management and Innovation at the University of Toronto.