Canadian post-secondary schools have made discrimination and ideological filtering a daily practice. It could be their downfall

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This fall, as kids and parents contemplate the piles of cash they are about to fork over for this thing called a “university education,” they might be wondering if universities are getting back to normal. The past several years saw a moral panic of wokeness erupt in higher education circles in the wake of American Black Lives Matter race politics, Donald Trump and our very own alleged mass graves controversy in Kamloops.

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In the wider culture, woke now seems to be receding somewhat. Certainly, in the offline world, when you turn your head away from the latest urgent crisis on X (formerly Twitter) that we will all have forgotten about by tomorrow, temperatures seem to be cooling. The Conservatives have been dominating the polls in Canada for the last year and the Democrats in the United States under Kamala Harris are attempting to present themselves as a moderate burst of sanity.

It would be tempting to think that everything is going back to normal. Maybe we’ve learned our lesson from the moral insanity of assuming that our public institutions should be loudspeakers booming out the latest and zaniest new fringe left concept of justice.

Unfortunately, many universities seem to have missed the lesson. It’s not entirely surprising given that Canadian universities are populated by those who come from a very narrow range of political viewpoints. So even as the larger culture is moderating, in the petri dish that is the world of Canadian academia, the contentious ideas that the rest of us are dropping are instead being institutionalized as a new normal.

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