No Forbidden Zones
What the case of Frances Widdowson tells us about academic freedom in Canadian Universities
A guest long read from Tyrel Cameron Eskelson*
Academic freedom ended at Calgary’s Mount Royal University on 20 December 2021. It was then that a gang of MRU staff ambushed Dr. Frances Widdowson, a tenured Associate Professor in the Economic, Justice, and Policy Studies Department, with a letter of dismissal as she was walking to her office with a stack of student exams. The ambush was unexpected and so confrontational that Widdowson, who had no union representative present, phoned the police because at one point a male member of the group had attempted to barricade her in a room. She was not to finish correcting her students’ final grades and had until the end of the following day to remove her things and person from campus.
In the summer of 2024, a judge in an arbitration hearing decided that Frances Widdowson had been unjustly dismissed from her job, however, as part of that ruling, the judge also decided that she should not be allowed to return to her former position. This latter decision, and the one by the university to dismiss her in the first place, demonstrate that academic freedom in many institutions across Canada is de facto dead.
There is a crisis at the heart of Canadian universities, which is part of a wider erosion of epistemology and conviction in the Western world. Campuses are losing, giving up on, or in many cases have already lost, one of the greatest accomplishments of Western Civilization, namely, the liberal science method of discriminating truth from falsehood.
Canadian universities are intellectual communities with the Enlightenment mission to pursue knowledge and the truth. Academic freedom is vital to this pursuit, but it is vanishing on campuses across the country. Illiberal threats often come in the guise of protecting something, and they succeed when the intellectual community is ignorant to the dangers posed, or enough of its members assume the safest course is to remain silent. It follows then that part of the job is to be informed and to also be courageous enough to uphold this condition when it is under threat from illiberal ideology.
Instead of rising to this obligation, Canadian professors are surrendering their academic freedom to a solidifying force of radical Counter-Enlightenment trends on campus. These include the ideological concepts and administrative practices of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE); decolonization; postmodernism and standpoint epistemology; critical race theory; and the values of social justice. The convergence of these illiberal ideologies are colloquially known as “woke” or “wokeism,” and they are destroying academic freedom on campus across the country.
Frances Widdowson lost her job in 2021 trying to stand up for the liberal science method at Mount Royal University. Despite losing her position, she is still fighting for academic freedom in Canada. I believe the details of her case are important.
Frances Widdowson worked as an analyst in the Northwest Territories, where she gained first-hand experience with indigenous communities. After her PhD work, in 2008 she published Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation, a work critical of how the Canadian government funds indigenous communities without incentives to improve health, education, or labour productivity. This book’s original research earned her a teaching position at MRU that same year. She argues that the first hurdle is for government officials to recognize how institutional funding perpetuates unemployment and despair in many aboriginal communities, especially remote ones. She advocates for a type of integration where indigenous people can maintain certain cultural aspects, but they need to become productive. The reality facing many indigenous tribes is the trade off involved in this process. As she has said, “Productivity and participation in the labour force is the key issue here” and “certain cultural features are obstacles to being productive in the labour force.” Government policy has been to ignore this and blindly send money to these communities, with little care as to how it is allocated or spent.
The second hurdle is to admit that traditional indigenous knowledge contributes little to creating the modern political institutions that allow most Canadian communities to thrive. As Widdowson observed in her book:
The extensive literature promoting the funding and incorporation of traditional knowledge into public policy maintains that traditional knowledge constitutes a “tremendous insight,” providing “more and sometimes better information” that is of “greater breadth and depth” than existing scientific data (233).
When Widdowson joined Mount Royal University in 2008, she taught these issues in political science courses and challenged the academics who were writing papers praising traditional knowledge as a utopian remedy to reviving indigenous cultures in the 21st century.
Widdowson never argued that all traditional knowledge is false or useless, nor does she think that the history of indigenous Canadians should not be studied or known. Her argument is that all opinions put forth in the intellectual community, regardless of their cultural source, must be subjected to the scrutiny of others. As she herself has stated, “This is a question of method, not the particular attributes of individuals…The value of science is not that its research is always “right,” but that the methods used are revised and conclusions discarded if they are shown to be inadequate.”
Widdowson’s work drew the angered criticism of fellow scholars, many of whom accused her of racism and hate, but the important point is that her work was more than welcome within the academic community, not least of which because there is evidence to support it. The one thing that seems to get missed by most of her critics is that Widdowson wants the standard of living for the indigenous people of Canada to rise to the same prosperous levels as the rest of the country. Furthermore, as a professor, there are many instances where she provided her students opportunities to hear different sides to controversial topics within society. She began the Rational Space Network in 2016 to hold debates on campus, and even hired third-party moderators to try and remove any bias from the events. This is what is expected of a good professor at a Canadian university.
In Canada, as in the United States and across the Western world, one of our vital traditions is the method we use for producing new knowledge and for distinguishing between opinion and fact. The process of discrimination between these two things is important for who gets to say what knowledge is. The methods come from the Classical, Scientific, and Enlightenment traditions. Over centuries of battle, Western Civilization discovered that the way to reliably produce new knowledge is to uphold the conditions of free inquiry. We allow everyone a chance to demonstrate their experiment or voice their opinion, and if its reasoning and conclusion survive the critiques of others, then we provisionally accept it as knowledge. The knowledge is provisional in that no one gets final say, and others are always free to find new ways to debunk it. There is no such thing as ideas exempted from this process. In fact, progress comes from encouraging the free and open critique of ideas.
Academics like asking questions and demand to know the how and why of things. This includes questioning conventional wisdom, the sacred or holy, and often the most controversial or sensitive topics in society. It requires discipline to dispassionately discuss topics like abortion, fetal alcohol syndrome on Indian reservations, conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, morality, or genital mutilation. When academics do discuss these topics, it tends to attract the offended and censorious. It should not matter whether a threat to academic freedom comes from the political left or right. All threats are on the illiberal spectrum. If the free inquiry of professors does not include expression that some may find offensive, then there is no free expression.
The late journalist Christopher Hitchens wrote, in 2001, that, “In life we make progress by conflict and in mental life by argument and disputation.” He continued that, “There must be confrontation and opposition, in order that sparks must be kindled.” That is the secret to the success of the university, but it is not suited to the thin-skinned. As Jonathan Rauch put it in Kindly Inquisitors, this process “does not give a damn about your feelings and happily tramples them in the name of finding the truth.” That is what intellectual freedom entails. It includes everyone to state their opinion, but for opinion to become knowledge, it must survive everyone’s attempt to falsify it. Society makes progress from the few good ideas surviving the many bad ones. It is the most uplifting and transformative method humans have ever invented, and it is the heartbeat of the university.
Canadian historian of academic freedom Michiel Horn, has summarized that:
“The desire for academic freedom has at various times involved an effort to secure freedom from control by church, state, lay governing boards, the parents of students, and even students themselves, and to validate a claim to the pursuit of knowledge no matter where it led.”
In the 1950s, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) recognized a need for explicit guarantees of academic freedom in the collective agreements between professors and their institutions. This need arose in the late 1950s following the dismissal of Harry Crowe from United College in Manitoba. Harry Crowe was a tenured Associate Professor of history at United College, an institution then affiliated with the United Church and is now the University of Winnipeg. Crowe sent, to a colleague, a private letter containing criticisms of United College. Through illegal means that remain unclear, the letter ended up on the desk of the College Principal, Reverend Wilfred Lockhart. Four months later, the United Board of Regents dismissed Crowe, eventually finding that he had “overstepped the limits of decency.”
The CAUT created an investigative committee headed by Vernon Fowke and Bora Laskin. They published their lengthy findings in a report, which stated that: “it reinforces the Committee’s own appreciation that even the most elementary understanding of security of academic tenure excludes arbitrary dismissal without just cause and without prior opportunity to know and to meet charges on which the dismissal purports to be founded” (p. 34). Furthermore, the report found that there cannot be “just cause in a ground of dismissal which violates academic freedom.”
The CAUT response to the Crowe case led to clarity in academic freedom and the need for making it an explicit part of collective agreements. Between 1977 and 2019, they have continued to update their definition. Former executive director of CAUT David Robinson, in a recent interview with Hannah Liddle, defined academic freedom as
- The freedom to teach, to engage in classroom discussion, choose your pedagogical approach and your materials and how you assess students.
- The freedom to research and pursue knowledge where you think there will be new discoveries without any outside interference.
- The freedom to engage in service to the institution and criticize the institution.
- The freedom to engage in extramural speech.
This is a good statement on the protections and conditions an intellectual community requires to pursue the truth. Universities Canada and UNESCO have similar definitions.
Canadian universities have been successful institutions because they have adhered to these principles, and for a long time, kept at bay and contained the perennial illiberal threats to academic freedom. It is in the nature of the liberal science method to welcome Counter-Enlightenment challenges, which at times can capture the mood of a generation. Julien Benda, in The Treason of Intellectuals, wrote a compelling account of how European intellectuals of the early 20th century attacked the Enlightenment ideal of universal humanity and instead focused on the passions “owing to which men rise up against other men, the chief of which are racial passions, class passions and national passions.” These historic lessons, which are now a century old, teach us that an education, or being an intellectual, is no guarantee of courage, morality, and it is certainly no guarantee against the totalitarian impulse.
Following the Second World War, illiberal threats to academic freedom came from theories that championed the poor, the oppressed, the victimized, and the underdog. These theories survived and spread because they competed with traditional philosophy and science to address real problems such as historic institutional racism, poverty, deaths of despair, or the struggles for families to balance careers and caregiving. They also competed with traditional philosophy and science on many other topics ranging from human nature to international relations. Where does academic freedom come in?
Traditional adherents to academic freedom welcome the challenge from any sector of human thought, including advocates of Counter-Enlightenment ideologies. The problem, however, is that Counter-Enlightenment ideas, in the name of progress, protection, or virtue, argue that Enlightenment ideas and the freedom to make their case are part of an immoral system and no longer belong in an academic environment because they perpetuate trauma and unequal outcomes for minoritized and racialized groups. It is instructive to look at important developments from American history to better understand how these ideologies captured the Canadian academy.
Nathan Glazer explained the difference between these two systems in his essay Student Politics in the University in 1969. The piece reflected on the origins and development of the 1964-65 Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Glazer realized that the movement was not about free speech. It was, rather, about whether the university would, “become the protected recruiting and launching ground for radical political activity directed to various ends, among them the overthrow of the basic system of operation of a democratic society?” The second important characteristic of the movement concerned whether Berkeley’s teaching and research would incorporate the escalating tactics of radical student activism. Glazer identified the Vietnam War as a catalyst that split the liberals and radicals on campus, and which:
…replicated the liberal split on student rebellion in the university and was paralleled by splits on the question of the summer riots and the whole problem of black violence…yes, we are for university reform of political rules, but we are against sit-ins and the degradation of university authorities; yes, we are against the war in Vietnam, but we will not attack or undermine the legitimacy of a democratic government; yes, we are for expanded opportunities and increased power and wealth for Negroes, but we are against violence and destruction to get them.
Glazer saw this divide between radical and liberal as not just a superficial difference between the means and an end goal. It was a difference that went straight to the core of whether the mission was, in the radical case, to ‘improve’ society by destroying the liberal science method through disruption and violence, so that it could be replaced with something ‘better’; or in the liberal case, to improve society by working within the traditional framework of liberalism and Enlightenment values. It is vital to note that the radicals at Berkeley wanted to capture the university, so that the entire institution could be used for their Counter-Enlightenment ends. This raises the issue of institutional neutrality.
Max Weber observed in an important speech called Science as a Vocation, that “The task of the teacher is to serve the students with his knowledge and scientific experience and not to imprint upon them his personal political views.” Weber rightly put forth that “the prophet and the demagogue do not belong on the academic platform.” To the best of everyone’s ability, this ought to be the institutional stance as well. In 1967, The University of Chicago responded to the Berkeley Free Speech Movement when it issued its Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action. In this report, the Kalven Committee affirmed the University’s commitment to academic freedom while insisting on institutional neutrality. The report further warned that when universities take political stances, this encourages conformity among its faculty and makes dissent increasingly more difficult. Just a few months ago, The University of Waterloo published a Task Force Report on Freedom of Expression and Inclusive Engagement, in which they referred to these Chicago Principles and institutional neutrality as an important ideal to strive towards.
Though mostly correct, there is one important caveat to this ideal; to have an intellectual community that strives to produce knowledge and pursue the truth in conditions of academic freedom, requires an institution that adheres to and upholds these values, including under the most challenging and controversial circumstances. To pretend that the university can remain amoral, apolitical, or at arm’s length is to miss the point. The university need not weigh in on the Black Lives Matter movement or the Israeli response to the 7 October 2023, massacre, but the university does need to be committed to upholding academic freedom when its professors weigh in on these topics. In many respects, the radical long march that creeped through Canadian and American institutions required capturing the overall political stance of each faculty and the overall university governance. There are several alarming recent studies that show Canadian universities have been overwhelmed by a radical Counter-Enlightenment ideology with an orthodox Newspeak.
Numerous examples show that academic freedom is de facto dead in Canada. The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms has been conducting studies of free expression on Canadian campuses for a decade. Their 2016 study, for example, found that nearly half of campuses received a failing grade for policies and practices addressing free expression. Conditions did not improve with time. A 2022 study found that faculty in Canadian universities have become majority left-leaning and that this trend is increasing. More alarming than the homogeneity in political leanings among university faculty is what the study found on academic freedom and expression: “34 percent of all professors admit to self-censoring out of fear of negative consequences should their views on certain topics become known.” Related to this finding, more than thirty percent of faculty “are prepared to limit academic freedom and “cancel” their colleagues out of a commitment to their political views on social justice.”
A recently-published study entitled “The State of Open Inquiry in Canadian Colleges and Universities” examined if university students feel comfortable discussing controversial topics with fellow students. Related to the results found in the 2022 study on faculty political homogeneity, this recent study found that students fear backlash if they expressed their views in class. Examples of consequences were things such as fear the instructor would lower their grade, to having the instructor publicly say that the student’s thoughts were incorrect. These fears are for good reason. The study also found that 40% of respondents experienced negative consequences for sharing their opinions on controversial topics, and nearly 50% said that they had personally witnessed another student experience negative consequences.
This hostile environment, towards free expression and the mission of universities to pursue the truth, has its roots in the takeover of radical Counter-Enlightenment ideologies in university faculties and administrations. They have transformed the mission of the university into one of promoting social justice through enacting the policies of DIE; decolonization; post-modern notions of post-truth; standpoint epistemology; critical race theory; and social justice. There is now an emphasis on identities over ideas to the point where the two have become conflated. This error of discernment increases the instances of thin-skinned students and faculty feeling their identity is attacked when others criticize their ideas. Rauch was prophetic in Kindly Inquisitors, when he wrote over thirty years ago that “The establishment of a right to not be offended would lead not to a more civil culture but to a lot of shouting over who was being offensive to whom, and who could claim to be more offended.” Mount Royal University is now living in this reality and the biggest reason is its decision to indigenize its campus in a way that was institutionally proscribed.
Mount Royal University informed its faculty in 2014 that it would be indigenizing its campus, and henceforth, indigenous “ways of knowing” must be respected and valued. If the reader recalls the arguments above for what constitutes an intellectual community with academic freedom, then Mount Royal’s 2014 mandate to indigenize will strike you as a clear violation of academic freedom. Widdowson argued the same thing at the time and had lots of questions that other faculty and staff had little interest in answering. Those who opposed her arguments went through a process of claiming, firstly, that her views had no place in the university, then escalating to, secondly, that Widdowson herself had no right being there. The administration increasingly felt the same way.
The decision to “indigenize” Mount Royal University is an instructive example of all the illiberal Counter-Enlightenment ideologies and tactics combined into one issue. It draws on radical theories of race, white supremacy, capitalism, colonialism, genocide, and makes ample use of the relativistic postmodern theories of standpoint epistemology, identity, and post truths. This includes taking words with specific definitions, such as diversity, inclusion, truth, genocide, equality, racism, hate, harm, and harassment, and using them in obfuscating ways. For example, hate speech used to have the highest possible threshold before it was met, but today, on Canadian university campuses, anyone with heterodox views to indigenization is alleged to have used hate speech. Anyone who argues that Indian Residential Schools were not genocidal is charged with denialism, a term reserved for denying the overwhelming evidence of the German Holocaust of Jewish people during the Second World War. This is the official view at MRU. On 11 September 2020, Mount Royal held a General Faculties Council open session in which they approved a motion stating that the people of Canada committed genocide against indigenous peoples. As such, MRU had the responsibility to double down on its ongoing efforts to decolonize its campus. This is a blanketed statement that is open-ended and vague enough to draw government funding in perpetuity. It is also a process of getting rid of those who disagree.
In 2017, Provost and Vice-President Lesley Brown indicated that part of decolonization of the Mount Royal campus is to no longer “stumble” and “hold stubbornly to conventional academic and institutional practices.” She is committed to “unbinding” the university from its “established structures and ideas, and step into new territory in which we are not experts.” This includes performance indicators which, according to the Indigenous Strategic Plan, are used to increase quotas of indigenous employees and students.
Mount Royal will, “Promote culturally responsible and respectful curricula that integrates Indigenous pedagogies and ways of knowing.” This involves a list of goals that range from the beneficial and benign, such as promoting awareness of indigenous peoples and cultures for Mount Royal employees; but it also includes unfair practices of hiring quotas of indigenous people into the faculty of Mount Royal and revising tenure criteria so that it is culturally respectful of indigenous research. The goal to, “Foster respect for Indigenous ways of knowing and knowledge production” is saying that Mount Royal University will henceforth force everyone to respect whatever an indigenous person claims to be knowledge. This is radical in that it seeks to replace the standards and conditions of the Canadian intellectual community; it seeks to benefit from the prestige the liberal science method has previously gained for the university; and to silence, censor, and remove professors like Frances Widdowson who wish to critique this initiative. Another part of the decolonization process is to refer to those who do not identify as indigenous as “settlers,” which comes with the implication of native-born Canadians not belonging in Canada. It is not just at Mount Royal, it is happening across the country.
At Queen’s University, professors who are not indigenous are categorized as ally-settlers and non-ally-settlers depending on whether they accept radical efforts to dismantle academic freedom. UNESCO Canadian Commission report “Toward a Better World For All,” calls for systemic change and the prioritizing of indigenous knowledge. Decolonizing means including indigenous perspectives, but also examining how Western knowledge systems (i.e. the liberal science method I have defended in this essay) have been embedded into higher education through unjust systems of solidified power. The indigenous “ways of knowing,” “traditional knowledge,” or “situated knowledges” seek to exist within the prestige of the liberal science university, but its adherents are unwilling to submit its knowledge claims to the same standards.
At Wilfred Laurier University, it is possible to earn a certificate in Decolonizing Education which is taught in the “Centre for Indigegogy” (interesting use of Latin and Greek). Last year, Concordia University, in a nod to Stalin-era nomenclature, launched its “five-year plan to decolonize and Indigenize the university’s curriculum and pedagogy,” which among other things, seeks to decenter Eurocentric canons of thought while instead valuing “Indigenous epistemologies.” The problem in each of these cases is that it is institutionally proscribed and forced on faculty and students. The process of decolonizing Canadian universities takes a scalpel to the liberal science tradition that made them great institutions, and with it the intellectual community’s academic freedom. Mount Royal is indicative of what is happening across the country.
From the release of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Report in 2015, to the eruption across North America following the death of George Floyd in May 2020, MRU became increasingly captured by a homogenous political orthodoxy that was hostile to dissenting opinions. The killing of George Floyd is comparable to the way Glazer identified the Vietnam War as a catalyst that fueled radical student politics in the 1960s. In the summer of 2020, the official response from MRU was political and proscribed. President Tim Rahilly said that “we stand with Black Lives Matter,” and felt that faculty and students “must seize on the renewed sense of urgency and groundswell of support to declare our commitment and put words into action.” Rahilly acknowledges that there is a conflict between academic freedom and the indigenous or racialized professors’ lived experiences, but it seems that when tested, academic freedom loses. MRU leadership affirmed identity politics and sided with those who claimed that critiques of Canadian aboriginal policy or indigenous traditional knowledge (i.e. Ways of Knowing), were contributing to a culture of fear, and tolerating hate and violence. MRU is also taking part in the deliberate effort to equate Canadians and the Canadian Government with genocidal fascism. Things really became unhinged when the radical faculty and students got their own, home-grown catalyst that seemed to confirm every terrible notion they had about Canadian and European history, white people, and Western Civilization.
When the news of the alleged 215 children’s graves in the apple orchard at the Kamloops Indian Residential School became public in March 2021, this not only shocked the nation, but to many, it was ghastly, overwhelming proof of what the TRC had concluded: that Indian Residential Schools, on behalf of the will of the government and society, committed genocide against the indigenous people of Canada. University presidents, politicians, business leaders, even the legacy media, all accepted this horrible condemnation without raising an eyebrow. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau flew the Canadian flag at half-mast for months. How eager they all were to believe the worst about their own culture and history.
At Mount Royal University, which had been fortifying indigenous culture within the academy for years, it was no longer acceptable to question any findings from the TRC or the Kamloops IRS. The whale-sized taboo, however, is that there is no evidence of any children’s graves at the Kamloops IRS, nor even an investigation. Furthermore, it is not even remotely believable. To accept that at least 200 children are buried at the Kamloops IRS is to further believe that more than four-hundred parents either did not notice their children had gone missing, or did not care they had gone missing.
Widdowson pointed out these problems in 2021. She was told at Mount Royal that her opinions were hurtful to indigenous people and that she should not put forth those kinds of arguments. Widdowson kept asking critical questions, continued challenging her colleagues, and kept fighting to maintain academic freedom at Mount Royal throughout the year 2021, to the point where a mob coalesced against her with the goal to take her out. By December of that year, she received an official letter stating, “Several issues have arisen, which call into question your continued employment at Mount Royal University.” She was dismissed from her position “for just, sufficient, and reasonable cause,” and that she had significantly contributed to a harassing and toxic workplace.
It is important to state that Widdowson’s conduct as a professor never deviated from the academic mission to pursue knowledge and the truth. Professors are allowed to be challenging and certainly allowed to be controversial. That includes, as per point number four in the CAUT’s definition of academic freedom, the right to engage in extramural speech. In her thirteen years at MRU, Widdowson did what university professors are supposed to do. She studied Canadian society and its policies and raised strident and thought-provoking challenges to its order and implementation. Much of her unsparing scrutiny fell upon indigenous policy in Canada, something she has studied for nearly thirty years. For this, students and faculty filed complaints against her which claimed she was a racist, claimed she engaged in hate speech, and moaned that she created a toxic work environment. These complainants disagreed with Widdowson’s opinions and worked to have her removed from MRU, despite her having tenure.
What is tragically ironic about this case is that MRU claims to ensure the protection of academic freedom for faculty. The Mount Royal Faculty Association has explicit statements saying that professors have academic freedom. MRU is even one of the few Canadian institutions with a separate Expression and Free Speech Policy Statement which highlights that, “the university will not suppress presentations or debate whether or not the points of view being expressed are thought to be offensive, unwise, immoral, extreme, harmful, incorrect or wrongheaded.” It is significant that this statement includes “offensive” or “harmful” points of view will not be suppressed. This is how traditional liberal conditions of academic freedom are to be, yet issues of offense, harm, violence, hate, and harassment are precisely the areas where Canadian academic freedom is dying in the 21st century.
Frances Widdowson challenged her dismissal which went to a long arbitration hearing in 2024. The arbitrator decided that she was wrongfully dismissed but ruled that she should not get to return to her job and instead monetary compensation is required. It is important to note that this is not a victory for Frances Widdowson, who lost her job. It is also not a victory for the intellectual community because Mount Royal would rather pay a professor with dissenting views to leave rather than uphold the values of academic freedom.
Widdowson is still committed to fighting for academic freedom and uses her well-documented case to educate others. I encourage every Canadian to support her at The Woke Academy and there you can learn how the fight is not finished. She is appealing the decision to not be allowed to return to her job. This is a case where the line is drawn between liberal and illiberal ideologies, and it is transparent on which side Canadian academics need to be. All threats to academic freedom are illiberal in nature. When Frances Widdowson lost her job at Mount Royal University, it was not just the death of academic freedom at MRU. It was the death of academic freedom across the country, and the ostriches of the Canadian academy remain silent.
Postscript
Recently, Frances Widdowson had the fitting opportunity to speak at the inaugural Tomas Hudlicky Memorial Lecture for Academic Freedom. There she opened the talk with a promise to “fight until the end of my days to be reinstated at Mount Royal University because the fact that I am not there shows that Mount Royal University is not an academic institution. It is an institution that is ruled by activism.”
“The battle is not over yet.”
* Tyrel Cameron Eskelson grew up in Rosetown, Saskatchewan, a Prairie town in central Canada. He is a graduate of the University of Saskatchewan and Norwich University in Vermont. Today, he lives in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo, where he works as a researcher and teacher at Hokkaido University. He is the author of articles on history, education, and academic freedom. He has written two books, the first is called The Island of Mora Mora: A Journey into Madagascar and the second is called Taiwan 22: History, Travel, and Talking to Locals. He has conversations with other authors at The Interlocutor Podcast.
Tyrel is an AFAF network member, he writes in a personal capacity, his views are his own and not those of AFAF.
Photo Credit: Maksim Sokolov: “Freedom” protest on July 1, 2023 (Canada Day). This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
