What Happened to the Canadian University?

Silence, Complicity, and Consent under Pandemicism

The following remarks were delivered on February 2nd, 2022, at the conference organized by REINFO COVID QUEBEC, titled: “Dommages collatéraux des mesures gouvernementales” (Collateral Damage of the Government Measures). The presentation in the video is in English, preceded by a brief preamble in French.

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When a Canadian university tells a professor in the natural sciences that, “this university does not recognize natural immunity,” then we have arrived at the lowest intellectual point in the history of our universities. Natural immunity is a basic biological fact. For it to be erased from recognition gives you just one indication of the assault on science and on academic knowledge committed in the name of a “public health emergency,” used to justify irrational, arbitrary, harmful, and discriminatory rules.

Self-censorship has prevailed in Canadian universities, encouraged by castigating the few who express doubts, and by university administrations presenting unsubstantiated monologues advocating for restrictions and for dubious pharmaceutical products. We are further hampered in Canada by an inadequate number of public intellectuals, while we instead have a surplus of public relations intellectuals with close ties to pharmaceutical companies and corporate media.

This is a country which has now purged a wide range of scholars in the natural and social sciences, and the humanities, because they expressed dissenting views and stood by the ethics governing their disciplines. Academic freedom is now, de facto, cancelled. Tenure is also, de facto, nullified. Faced with the first real test to their integrity and their ethics, the vast majority of Canadian scholars failed to stand up and speak out.

Rather than serve as a source of diverse perspectives and challenging questions, universities instead fell in line with encouraging mass panic. This conformity has not only damaged public discourse, by taking leave of our duties as the critical conscience of society, it has damaged universities themselves, and I think the damage is now irreparable. University presidents have repeatedly produced unquestioning endorsements of the so-called “vaccines,” masking, and social distancing. Universities have internalized the “vaccine passport” system. Professors have been enlisted to police their students by enforcing mask mandates. Faculty unions loudly advocated for tougher restrictions, such as mandatory inoculation. These are extremely dangerous precedents. One’s place in a university can be cancelled at any time based on one’s health status. Just as dangerous is the Canadian university being conscripted by the state-corporate alliance.

What will remain as a simply inexcusable and unforgivable reality of this period, is that open scientific debate was blocked during what was called a “pandemic”. Asked to rise up to meet history, Canadian academics mostly preferred to stand down. To see such conformity and obedience prevail in Canadian universities, which have turned on their own members for failing to follow the silence, is an abject display of intellectual collapse. Consequently, the university itself is a casualty of this emergency, with limited prospects for recovery.