NP View: Congratulations, academia, you've gone and radicalized the students - National Post

Teachers should remember that they are often the first victims of student revolutionaries

Students from McGill, Concordia and Université de Montréal gather on McGill's campus for a pro-Palestinian rally on Nov. 9, 2023. Photo by John Mahoney /Postmedia News

It’s no small task to hijack a whole system of education to achieve a political end, but Canadian academics — “critical race scholars,” “decolonial theorists” and the like — seem to have accomplished it. Congratulations are in order. Once believed to be underdogs doomed to a life of underemployment and student debt, these scholarly activists have created a red guard of radicalized students willing to march in the street calling for intefadeh.

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Ideological entrepreneurs in progressive academia (most of academia) embraced the theories of Kimberlé Crenshaw, a Columbia University professor of critical legal studies who came up with the idea that identity is the root cause of disadvantage. They then applied the work of academics like Ibram X. Kendi, who discovered the solution to oppression: “anti-racism,” or the levelling of the social justice scales by discriminating against the privileged. The takeaway: those who are considered to be privileged colonizers deserve whatever anti-oppressive resistance comes their way.

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Emerging from this nebula of social justice was a groundbreaking line of work: diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Activist-scholars shepherded in their own research institutes and grants, anointing their work with the oil of legitimacy. Some places, like Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson) transformed their curriculums to spread the good word of decolonization to more willing students.

Others dug deeper into the theology: the University of Alberta’s Canada Research Chair in Feminism and Intersectionality, for example, came up with an “anti-racism lab,” a pillar of ideological reinforcement. One publication by a lab member, “Whiteness and damage in the education classroom,” explained how white people needed to take extra care to prevent their racial energies from contaminating the learning environment. Liberal arts, indeed.

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Houses of ideological expertise don’t just provide jobs to the activist-scholar class — they’re also a source of moral guidance. In the wake of the Israel-Hamas war, for example, the gender studies department of Queen’s University made sure to issue a statement of solidarity for “Palestine” condemning “the erasure of trans and queer Palestinians” and acknowledging how the “settler colonial structure of Turtle Island perpetuates Islamophobia and antisemitism.”

Elsewhere, academics have organized “teach-ins,” in which credentialed people in just about any field find ways to put forth their expert opinions on the Israel-Hamas war. The University of Winnipeg’s English department, disinterested in actual literature, has organized a panel on “imperialism, settler-colonialism and decolonization,” which will include the attendance of radical scholars like Ghada Sasa, who played down the role of Hamas in the Oct. 7 massacre and attributed killings of Israeli citizens to the Israeli military.

Similarly, an advisory panel to the president of Brock University, along with the school’s social justice research institute, will soon host a panel discussion on “Palestine” and “decolonization.”

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The work of DEI can net quite a bit of money and status. Take Western University, which is currently looking to hire an assistant dean in DEI and decolonization for its law program. But for those who don’t fit the qualifications, there is plenty more missionary work to be done: campus workshops on microaggressions and anti-oppression toolboxes won’t run themselves, and these new DEI administrators need people to dig up the anti-oppression pedagogy du jour.

But just as most peewee hockey kids don’t end up in the National Hockey League, most social-justice-crusading students won’t end up becoming chief diversity officer of Corposoft. They sure as hell will try, though, and will happily play foot soldier to the cause if it means a chance at status.

It’s now plain as day that activist-scholars have succeeded in assembling a high-volume social justice warrior pipeline. The bulk of the politically-active student body broadly supports ideas like “anti-colonial resistance” and “decolonization,” which means they’re happy to throw their support behind the anti-Israel, pro-Palestine movement — even in the immediate aftermath of a terrorist attack by a group of mass rapists who support the latter.

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The student body at McGill University, in the wake of the Oct. 7 massacre, voted in favour of a pro-Palestinian policy which is now the subject of a court challenge. Student leadership at York University infamously responded to the Oct. 7 attack by stating, “From Turtle Island to Palestine … these events serve as a reminder that resistance against colonial violence is justified and necessary.” Meanwhile, the student unions of University of Toronto’s Mississauga and Scarborough campuses have organized pro-Palestinian walkouts to pressure university higher-ups. Those are just a few examples.

Students, dutifully applying the lessons from their teachers, have taken up the cause of anti-colonial resistance. Their moral compasses are calibrated to side with whichever side of a conflict can be said to be suffering from oppression. It doesn’t matter that Hamas raped and murdered children on Oct. 7, brutally ending what had been a ceasefire; what matters is that Hamas is on the side of the Palestinians, and the Palestinians are greater victims of oppression.

It’s all good fun to create a generation of zealous students enamored with the idea of progress, but the professors who led the change should be mindful that radical student movements tend to end poorly for educators — the Chinese Red Guards of 1966 and the Hitler Youth of the 1930s being prime examples. If far-left educators maintain control of their student-to-social-justice-warrior pipeline, they could be in for a nasty surprise.

Lucky for them, western education has a habit of curbing revolutionary movements before they get out of hand. Let’s hope this history repeats itself.

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