Deep in the Canadian winter of 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump has returned to the White House, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has pirouetted onto the political off-ramp and the Liberals are flailing in disarray.
Despite green shoots of ideological recovery sprouting up everywhere, foretelling that the deranged concept of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is in decline, the batty professors in my department of chemical and physical sciences at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) have quietly barricaded themselves inside their ivory towers and are charting a course that makes about as much sense as appointing Lady Gaga as their scientific spokesperson.
Beginning this year, presumably with a nod of approval from the department chair and a cheer of acclamation from UTM’s fifth revolving-door dean in five years, students expecting to enter a chemistry laboratory and learn about pivotal reactions such as the aldol condensation will be forced to endure a political litmus test in the shape of a DEI “safety” briefing.
The proposed lesson instructs students on navigating such dilemmas as how to react when someone mispronounces a person’s name in class. Because chemistry is all about reactions.
This ideological sermon disguised as a lesson plan — complete with a boilerplate land acknowledgement — is intended to be an “interactive … training module designed to improve the climate in our classrooms and teaching labs.” Its stated goal is to create “an equitable community, one that is diverse as well as inclusive and that is respectful and protects the human rights of its members (and) requires the work of every member of the community.”
These inanities inevitably exclude anyone who might disagree with this and descry the linguistic herd of Trojan horses that DEI devotees use to smuggle new meanings past the unwary. In this case, to achieve “equity” — read: equality of outcomes — we must discriminate in favour of attributes like race and gender, at the expense of merit, conscientiousness and aptitude.
But the “rights” underpinning these professors’ intentions also encompass such things as freedom of speech in our western democracies. Someone really should tell them.
Of course, the purveyors of DEI — long over-represented among university professors — have been exclusively hiring like-minded compatriots and kneecapping academic freedoms with all the fanatical zeal of a sect of religious extremists caught in the sway of an unfalsifiable and wildly ridiculous belief system.
What’s shocking, though, apart from their inability to perceive today’s unfolding reality where woke has passed its zenith and DEI is nosediving, is the decision to impose this cultish catechism on sophomore students hoping to be taught chemistry, as if promoting such stupid unempirical notions belongs anywhere in the science curriculum.
Whoever authored the slides has an unsung talent for humour. A slide titled “Why is diversity important?” shows pictures of two different ecosystems and prompts the audience, “Which one is more resilient and better equipped to thrive over time?”
One is a fantasy rendition of a tropical forest scene implausibly littered with incompatible wildlife — from capybara to a yellow-headed blackbird — the other features a field of maize with bushels stretching uniformly to the horizon. Of course, no effort is made to compare the relative merit of these two ecosystems for, say, feeding humanity.
Yet another slide spotlights the various types of microaggressions: microassaults, microinsults and — no joke — microinvalidations. Proper scientists familiar with the “micro” suffix would naturally assume that a million such goofs equal an actual verbal insult.
One citation equates microaggressions with mosquito bites — one bite is a minor irritation, but a host of them at once becomes “annoying, even disabling.” This analogy is unscientific because a single unlucky bite is sufficient to transmit life-threatening malaria, whereas the angry welts left by microaggressions aren’t all happening simultaneously. It’s a patently muddled and idiotic claim.
A lesson that so overtly fosters grievances and solicits students to inform on their peers has the authoritarian stench of secret policing, albeit in academic apparel. Conversely, cultivating gratitude, charity and forgiveness is overlooked.
The overarching message is if someone says something you don’t like, then speak up and they will be punished. This just amplifies fears, reinforces the ever-present sense of walking on eggshells and encourages sociopathy of the worst kind in malleable young minds, as a recent report shows.
What’s more, affording time to this kind of vacuous ideological legerdemain forces professors to shed other subject material from their classes. Students who graduate with a degree in chemistry will simply be less knowledgeable, and that’s a blow to academic standards.
It remains to be seen whether university administrators will finally walk back the imbecility of this sort of indoctrination — something that will inevitably perfuse the minds of the next generation of Canadian scientists for years to come. But this nonsense has no place in the scientific milieu, and it really doesn’t take a brilliant mind to spot that.
National Post
Leigh Revers is associate professor in the department of chemical and physical sciences at the University of Toronto Mississauga and author on Substack.