Part 1. I am Being Pushed toward the Sharp Revolutionary Blades of Cancel Culture. Includes non hit song (button below picture) "Stand My Ground"

And will I get out alive?

The context for the story in National Post articles (links below)

Newspaper article #1

Newspaper editorial #2

Newspaper article #3

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I had started to write an essay on how dating apps damage relationships.

My academic suspension, though, left me anxious. The surreal experience of falling (or being pushed) into slowly grinding cancel culture gears is so relevant that I can’t avoid it.

(Even though my title uses a guillotine metaphor, I prefer gears. I couldn’t find a good free grinding gears photo).

And indeed, it has become personal. 

If we do not choose the type of society we live in, we will have one made for us. We are not powerless victims or lost souls drifting on ice floes, dependent only on prayer to bring us closer to the safety of the shore. 

Nobody has pushed us out to sea. We are just on a massive ship called Culture. However, we cannot assume that those who guide the cultural rudders are not sacrificing societal gains for their immediate personal gain. We must keep an eye on them. 

Culture and cultural norms move slowly and rarely make sharp turns, like giant container ships traversing the ocean. Right now, I fear Canada's direction.  

One should assume academic institutions are open to ideas; I remember sitting in my dad's faculty lounge when I was eight, learning and participating in societal discussions. I remember these University of Manitoba professors; I was young, but they listened to me. They loved inquiry. Those were good days. 

(Two friends that will be loyal no matter what vile accusations the human rights folks dream up. )

But today, after teaching for many years, there is an entirely different culture; the administration at the university is not a partner in facilitating learning. Indeed, I see no evidence that the administration cares about learning. They certainly care about academic activities, classroom numbers, and the optics of appearing to care about learning; it's typical in a marketplace culture; perceptions are as good as reality. 

Full-time faculty have been mainly replaced by sessionals, those desperate souls hired and fired each semester. Of course, administrators are predominantly full-time; it’s odd how the ratio of administrators to students keeps climbing over the ratio of teachers to students! 

Administrators have created few incentives to improve student learning. Indeed, the natural incentive for a sessional is to do the minimum, not rock the boat, get your grades in on time and purchase student happiness with a fistful of grading dollars.

In a few years, students will be in a better position to access the quality of their education, and we will have moved on. By then, the schools will have invested their tuition in new couches and discovered more Vegas-based January academic conferences. 

 

How can an implicit purpose for an academic institution as obvious as “learning” drift to the periphery of its reasons for existence? When I complain about students writing exams on a computer next to another with the entire answer key, I am told to "shut up; it’s just the way it is."

When I complain that a class that ends with a 96% average is a failure, why am I told to mind my own business? (That professor was later hired full-time, so congratulations to her.) 

Faculty, so often made up of timid and precariously employed sessionals who feel they need to apologize if they slam the faculty fridge, have deliberately been placed in a weak position. Don't expect them to ring the alarm. There aren't many idiots like me who can be counted on to poke more than his share of bears. 

Suppose one uses the left’s patron saint, Michel Foucault, and looks through the lens of power. In that case, it is clear that in a university or college, power resides in administration, with contract faculty strangely disempowered even in institutions that call themselves teaching institutions. 

I live with a Russian mother-in-law who doesn't speak much English. Her upbringing was forged in the Soviet system dominated by fear and suspicion, and I see how it has affected her to this day. But I was raised in a house full of books, flowing with discussion. Sometimes, it was volatile, occasionally feelings were hurt, and sometimes discoveries weren’t made, but there was always growth and vitality.  

During my father's academic career, the idea that someone would be driven out by a Machiavellian administrative process based on his private message to an individual who was advocating for the elimination of Israel - which also includes the killing of the Jews, they aren't moving to Saskatchewan - would be unthinkable.  

Back in the day, we didn't fear conversation; if there was disagreement, it was expected. It was like sweat when you played ball hockey on the street. When you disagree with someone, you tell them why, give them evidence, move forward, and stop the discussion if you stopped moving forward.  

But the idea that when confronted with a view that hurt your feelings, offended you and that you thought was based on incorrect information would cause you to pull away from having a proper discussion? Unthinkable. And crazier still, how could it cause you to divert your resources to scheming, plotting how to destroy the offender, how to ruin their reputation, how to make it so they can't pay for their mortgage (oh joy, my oppressors cry, he might not be able to make a mortgage payment if he is canned!) is pure evil, pure schadenfreude; it has no place in a civilized society.  

The fact that university and college administrators and students drive cancel culture is perverse. It is like the universities are OCD parents who raise their infants in a bacteria-free bubble, preaching to their children about the dangers of bacteria and thus leaving their kids unprepared for the pathologies of the world outside their bubble.

But still, it's hard to convince intellectual agoraphobics to venture out of their cultural bubbles.  

Administrators have sold their souls to the marketplace; they are driven by optics, propelled by the market, which pretends there is a correlation between capacity percentages in a classroom and the value of what happens in that classroom.

Lower your operational costs by hiring contract instructors, raise grades to improve "customer" satisfaction, and control dissent by making your faculty a few weeks away from termination. You don't have to fire someone when they are hired semester to semester; you don't rehire them; it's easy, breezy. Don't worry; they'll stuff socks in their mouths. 

I was stupid enough to keep my socks on my feet. 

In my experience, administrators are motivated by a lust for power and control. This is why I have never had a conversation with an administrator about where our students are intellectually accessed, where we want them to go, how we can help them develop an intrinsic love of learning, and how we can defeat the frenetic bursty attention-seeking culture that can never be friends with critical thinking.  Zip.

However, some middle-aged white women's committee got a grant to buy an Aboriginal painting to put under the staircase. This is a big step in race relations and a big win for their Instagram accounts. If you combine this with their pious land acknowledgement statements, they now deem themselves fully engaged with the indigenous community. The next step is to enroll more than one Indigenous student, so for the first time, allowing one of the committee members to have their first over 30-second conversation with an Indigenous student, minus hoovering school photographers.

No, I see administrators reading prepared speeches, not even raising their heads, and then circulating the room in their designer clothing, shaking hands and smiling at people with whom they never had a two-minute conversation. They don't have time for the prols. 

This giant container ship is called Culture, and the culture of post-secondary education is adrift.  

As you will see in the Ivison article, it seems like I am to be cancelled because I referred to Hamas and their supporters as Nazis in an intemperate way, but perhaps there is no temperate way. Students? My students who claim a divine right to political indignation and self-righteousness might not be accurately sourcing their feelings - maybe a poor score on a presentation or paper in my class has also upset them; I have no idea who they are. I am smart enough not to look, and they are smart enough not to tell.

Regardless, students in my class have emerged out of their postmodern intellectual haze to lockjaw me, grab onto one post that was not meant for them, ignore what I was reacting to, and not consider it was a message directed to a person calling for the eradication of (us) Jews (I’m not, but by the way that the Jewish community has rallied around me - maybe they can make me an honourary Jew, does that exist? - but I still want to use my phone on Saturdays) but meant for someone with a more thorough understanding of history and culture.

(The poster in Pakistan immediately deleted his vile post).

As to the students who have embraced the frenetic joy of shaking their cancellation sticks at me and snarling at me while tossing a fine selection of the cliched modern human rights tribal team words -"safety, hate, feelings, misc. phobia," etc. - for them, it’s all exciting and fun. Who said that university was boring?

While they may not get an excellent education, they have discovered a great hobby - and developed a blood lust that moves cancel culture forward. And they are thirsty. 

The entire dynamic between administration, students, and faculty is decidedly Stalin-era Soviet, or perhaps the French Revolution is a more appropriate metaphor.

But I suspect Stalin spent more time amongst the plebs than the modern university administrator.

I'm still trying to figure it out; I don't want to diss the old Georgian boy. The gulag is the DEI sessions, and the guillotine is the termination letter that wishes you the best in your future endeavours. And “future endeavours” in teaching at my age are unlikely.

Regardless, it is a wretched, cruel, anti-intellectual charade of justice. It is to make a decision, remove the instructor after 13 years of dedicating himself to the students, heart and soul, but remove the venues for his passion, fracture his relationship with his precious students and replace him with a more compliant troll that reads powerpoints to 80% empty classrooms, responds to students with bureaucratic professor speak, and creates a number for each student at the end of the course, another solid Potemkin storefront of learning to sell the university’s wares.

Look at the pretty basket shop!! Trade your basket of those course grades at the end of four years; we will call it learning! And if we call it something, that makes it so because it makes it so. Right?  It’s a word! If it’s a word, it’s true.

It's a sad state of affairs. The monster ship of academic culture moves slowly, but it moves. Look at where it is, from a culture of ideas, growth, productivity, creation, and vitality to a culture of fear, conformity, and chasing symbolic ends while ignoring that it is the refinement and execution of the process that matters, that grades are signals of learning, not ends in themselves, and that you jump that middle piece at significant risk.

Giving a piece of paper to someone wearing a thin polyester robe in a room stuffed with bored, overdressed people is a meaningless ritual if there isn’t much real education. It’s just a well-funded obstacle course.

This post doesn’t break any school gag order. Still, even if it did, it's a free country. They have no authority under the law to completely cut me off from my community, smearing me in the process with impugned guilt and finally rubbing their hands together in MachiavellianBut before becoming utterly flummoxed, it’s important to note that pink-haired Hamas-loving lesbians are not the only example of irrational pursuits; persons with behavioural addictions, gaming, sexual obsessions, and other unsafe behaviours are also resistant to arguments that clearly show their behaviour runs contrary to their self-interest.

It’s still mostly a free country.

Thank you, Paul 

Please subscribe and get at least three pieces /essays per week with open comments. It’s $5 per month and less than $USD 4. I know everyone says hey, it’s just a cup of coffee (with me, not per day but just one per month), but if you’re like me, you go, “Hey, I only want so many cups of coffee!” I get it. I don’t subscribe to many here because I can’t afford it.

But I only ask that when you choose your coffee, please choose mine. Cheers.

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