Excellent analysis. As a McGill graduate (engineering 1988) I was disgusted by this. I have been in the education buildings on Peel many times. The faculty is increasingly crazed, evidenced by their employment of Joe Kincheloe, to their forever shame.
The statement was authoritarian and ridiculous, and also, incredibly patronizing towards indigenous persons.
McGill may not be as bad as U of T on DEI, but its bad.
I did my graduate studies—MA and PhD—at McGill, finishing in 2017 and nothing about this situation surprised me. The mentality it exemplifies was, when I started my time there, one perspective among many, but it became increasingly dominant throughout my studies. Thankfully, my supervisors weren’t ideologues, so I got through without too much push back, but I can imagine how worse it has become. I would be extremely reticent to recommend anyone do what I did.
McGill is in trouble, but its not unique, its every post secondary institution. Personally I don't like criticizing McGill, because as an Anglo Quebecker with family roots going back to 1820 and being a born and raised Montrealer McGill is part of my heritage and DNA. I love the place, yet, it has serious problems, and they need to be called out. The issue is that McGill lives in the wider academic ecosystem and gets staff from all over the world, so bad ideas and incompetent people can readily enter the place.
I agree and certainly don’t mean to pick on McGill or want anyone to think that it is worse than other comparable universities. I don’t think it is. I had many wonderful professors and great experiences for which I am grateful. But, as you say, the Higher-Ed ecosystem is deeply sick, filled with awful ideas that undermine the very purpose for why these institutions exist. I want them to survive, even to thrive, but I don’t know how they can or why working people’s taxes should go to support them when the highly privileged people within them seem so intent on tearing down the ideas and values that built them and give them legitimacy.
Yep. Its remarkable how so many faculties now are set on destroying our society, as if this is scholarship. There is deep corruption all over. The fact they hired Joe Kincheloe, honestly, that says it all. Kincheloe and his buddy Henry Giroux are genuine Marxist revolutionaries who want to tear apart our society. They don't try to hide it, and you need to believe what they say. McGill should be rejecting people like this, because once they get hired, due to 'academic freedom' they can do and say whatever they want. Which was why the Leftist radicals of the 60/70s went into education, because they knew, per Gramsci, it was a long march and they had to start in education. There Critical Pedagogy poison is slowly destroying western civilization, which is their goal.
By the way, your comments about Burgess/Philby are very astute. I don't know if they are based in fact or speculation, but either way, it is consistent with human psychology, their actions later in life were driven by old resentments. Very good.
So much of what is happening with the woke/cultural Marxists of the 21st century, although framed as 'empathy' towards the 'oppressed' is ACTUALLY driven by resentment.
You put your finger on one of the most annoying parts of all this performance (not just this dean, but everyone who performs outrage)--the patronizing of indigenous peoples. As if they are incapable of self control, as if they couldn't be aware that their actions affect other around them, as if they are incapable of consideration towards those people, as if they can't defend themselves. Some individuals play that up to lord themselves over the supposed oppressors; most, in my experience, are embarrassed by this kind of display of outrage on their behalf. I would have been willing to bet that, if the people who needed more quiet in order to do their work had asked directly, the indigenous persons would have been happy to tone it down, having been unaware that others were in the building close to their classroom.
And the fundamental problem here is that McGill Education has embraced 'Critical Pedagogy' (a la Joe Kincheloe and others - originating from Paulo Friere) that literally generates and propagates resentment. People get confused, they somehow think 'Critical Pedagogy' means 'Critical Thinking', but it is NOT - it is a running Marxist criticism of western liberalism and propagates the notion of inter group conflict and power as the defining element of the world. It is deeply socially poisonous. McGill should be deeply ashamed of itself for promoting this social poison, especially to new teachers. Its not just McGill of course (the worst in OISE in Toronto), its in all Canadian teacher colleges and its the main reason why so many teachers, especially younger ones, are basically Marxist activists and wanna be revolutionaries. Its out of control.
Yes, all correct. These 'progressive' types absolutely view the 'oppressed' as lesser, and the tell is their patronizing behavior. They are probably unconscious of it, but that doesn't make it better.
Totally agree… surely the idea that indigenous people are not to be expected to meet non-indigenous behavioural standards is just, well… racist?
Living in Australia, i’ve always believed that indigenous people were fundamentally no different to the rest of us, and that we should aspire to live in a world where they’re treated no differently to the next person.
In 1998, this viewpoint made me a progressive lefty. In 2025, i’m a fascist!
As a person of some autochthonous ancestry, I find this entire affair fairly insulting.
So we have someone from Minority X (privileged in many ways), scolding presumed Majority Y (but soon possibly to be a minority, as the Left desperately hopes) about offending Minority Z. So X wants to shut Y up, and Y only wanted Z to keep it down. So X wants out of Y, what Y wanted out of Z. But X was far ruder and more obnoxious about it than Y was. But X has cloaked himself in the virtue de jours.
If we go by privilege or status, X has the highest status. Y is accused of being oppressors. And Z are the supposedly terminally downtrodden who are always victims to be pitied and babied.
Interestingly, X has historically exhibited one of the most vile records in world history of discrimination against the downtrodden. And previously Y had to make efforts to get X to behave in a more civilized manner.
So now X is returning the favor, by telling Y to allow Z behave in a less civilized manner.
I think of it more as The White Woman's Emotional Burden—modern white women feel the same need that 19th-century European men did to uplift the poor and brown, but instead of "civilizing" them now they want to be their therapists and heal all their psychic and emotional wounds. We've gone from strict papas to nurturing mamas.
You mean. The patronizing of almost anyone who isn't a white. Years ago Terri Gross of NPR started parading through "marginalized" people of color, cajoling stories of their struggles against discrimination and harassment. Witness every other commercial that now features blacks, ironically playing comfortable middle class roles white university women are comfortable with, but rarely any true potrayal of African Americans.
Rather than just this vague grumpy moaning you could have given some context or attempted to understand what was going on. But you just wanted to be right wing , didn’t you?
I have seen similar bullying by pre-Columbian Immigrants of Northeast Asian ancestry myself. They should be happy that the note did not characterize the noise accurately
Sounds like you really need to add some soundproofing to your dorm room, professor Revers! But, seriously, relieved, beyond words, that McGill found a "competent white woman" to hire. Here in the US, we've been fortunate to hire a bunch of competent white people in our federal bureaucracy. We got Dan Bongino for the FBI, Tulsi Gabbard for Intelligence, and -- above all, for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who is so skilled with an ax that he can almost kill someone on fifth avenue and can juggle phone calls so good he scores points with Putin. Maybe if Canada tries to keep up, you can even better at improving your Dunning-Kreuger score.
I skimmed this but, to be honest, I'm done now with these stories about totalitarian over-reach at institutions of higher learning. There's no point reading them anymore.
For a long time, university was something people took seriously. Not anymore. They're finished.
Whether or not you take them seriously, these people are still in control of the schools that indoctrinate Canada's children. Universities may be finished as serious academic institutions, but how many millions of our tax dollars do they receive? Our taxes are still serious, right?
I bet they were all so upset. They forgot to do the indigenous land appreciation statement. You know, the one where they recognize they are standing on stolen land and do everything except give it back.
The above is another facet of this mindset and I truly don’t get it. Quiet is neutral. Quiet makes room for everyone. I will never understand why I should be subjected to someone else’s music, or tik tok videos, or loud conversation.
This public display by McGill’s Dean of Education, Vivek Venkatesh, exemplifies the kind of people in charge of education in Canada. Let us not forget that faculties of education train teachers, education administrators, and (probably) accreditors. So the minds of Canada's children and Canada's future is in the hands of these people. If that is not shocking and frightening enough, consider the "success" of Canadian education, given the decline of basic achievement in K12, and the falling international rank of Canadian children. But, don't worry, because Canada's children are fully introduced to changing their sex, to judging which sexes, races, and which ethnicities are good and bad, and which terrorist groups to cheer for.
"Ed Dante" was a leader in pseudo-educational attainment of the last generation. Based on my examination of Claudine Gay's doctoral thesis problems, I believe she is a pseudo-doctorate and her thesis was written on a typewriter by a shadow scholar of the generation before Ed Dante. Today things are much worse I think.
Given the penetration of shadow scholarship into the academy, and it's probable tilt toward what one could call "babble prone fields" of the academy, descent into farce is to be expected. The infection of shadow scholarship will tend to produce imitators that are distinguished by their ability to deliver theses that emulate and please "pure" shadow scholars.
I fear that with AI becoming the shadow scholar for almost everyone, complete meltdown, a la Douglas Adams is looming in our future. A Golgafrinchan invasion of sorts is ramming through the academy, utterly destroying it. You see, in tests, when AI loops on itself, the result is a kind of feedback scream into ... chaotic blank.
I've never known academics to be particularly upset about Christian church burning. If anything they probably don't mind them, or think it's a step in the right direction.
The only people who think noise ordinances are racist would be, paradoxically enough, the racists themselves (including black racists, white racists, and everything in between).
So kind of you.
Holy cow!!!! This was superbly written! Thank you.
And also apparently “flowery and obnoxious” according to one commentator. Ha!
Excellent analysis. As a McGill graduate (engineering 1988) I was disgusted by this. I have been in the education buildings on Peel many times. The faculty is increasingly crazed, evidenced by their employment of Joe Kincheloe, to their forever shame.
The statement was authoritarian and ridiculous, and also, incredibly patronizing towards indigenous persons.
McGill may not be as bad as U of T on DEI, but its bad.
I did my graduate studies—MA and PhD—at McGill, finishing in 2017 and nothing about this situation surprised me. The mentality it exemplifies was, when I started my time there, one perspective among many, but it became increasingly dominant throughout my studies. Thankfully, my supervisors weren’t ideologues, so I got through without too much push back, but I can imagine how worse it has become. I would be extremely reticent to recommend anyone do what I did.
McGill is in trouble, but its not unique, its every post secondary institution. Personally I don't like criticizing McGill, because as an Anglo Quebecker with family roots going back to 1820 and being a born and raised Montrealer McGill is part of my heritage and DNA. I love the place, yet, it has serious problems, and they need to be called out. The issue is that McGill lives in the wider academic ecosystem and gets staff from all over the world, so bad ideas and incompetent people can readily enter the place.
I agree and certainly don’t mean to pick on McGill or want anyone to think that it is worse than other comparable universities. I don’t think it is. I had many wonderful professors and great experiences for which I am grateful. But, as you say, the Higher-Ed ecosystem is deeply sick, filled with awful ideas that undermine the very purpose for why these institutions exist. I want them to survive, even to thrive, but I don’t know how they can or why working people’s taxes should go to support them when the highly privileged people within them seem so intent on tearing down the ideas and values that built them and give them legitimacy.
Yep. Its remarkable how so many faculties now are set on destroying our society, as if this is scholarship. There is deep corruption all over. The fact they hired Joe Kincheloe, honestly, that says it all. Kincheloe and his buddy Henry Giroux are genuine Marxist revolutionaries who want to tear apart our society. They don't try to hide it, and you need to believe what they say. McGill should be rejecting people like this, because once they get hired, due to 'academic freedom' they can do and say whatever they want. Which was why the Leftist radicals of the 60/70s went into education, because they knew, per Gramsci, it was a long march and they had to start in education. There Critical Pedagogy poison is slowly destroying western civilization, which is their goal.
By the way, your comments about Burgess/Philby are very astute. I don't know if they are based in fact or speculation, but either way, it is consistent with human psychology, their actions later in life were driven by old resentments. Very good.
So much of what is happening with the woke/cultural Marxists of the 21st century, although framed as 'empathy' towards the 'oppressed' is ACTUALLY driven by resentment.
You put your finger on one of the most annoying parts of all this performance (not just this dean, but everyone who performs outrage)--the patronizing of indigenous peoples. As if they are incapable of self control, as if they couldn't be aware that their actions affect other around them, as if they are incapable of consideration towards those people, as if they can't defend themselves. Some individuals play that up to lord themselves over the supposed oppressors; most, in my experience, are embarrassed by this kind of display of outrage on their behalf. I would have been willing to bet that, if the people who needed more quiet in order to do their work had asked directly, the indigenous persons would have been happy to tone it down, having been unaware that others were in the building close to their classroom.
And the fundamental problem here is that McGill Education has embraced 'Critical Pedagogy' (a la Joe Kincheloe and others - originating from Paulo Friere) that literally generates and propagates resentment. People get confused, they somehow think 'Critical Pedagogy' means 'Critical Thinking', but it is NOT - it is a running Marxist criticism of western liberalism and propagates the notion of inter group conflict and power as the defining element of the world. It is deeply socially poisonous. McGill should be deeply ashamed of itself for promoting this social poison, especially to new teachers. Its not just McGill of course (the worst in OISE in Toronto), its in all Canadian teacher colleges and its the main reason why so many teachers, especially younger ones, are basically Marxist activists and wanna be revolutionaries. Its out of control.
Yes, all correct. These 'progressive' types absolutely view the 'oppressed' as lesser, and the tell is their patronizing behavior. They are probably unconscious of it, but that doesn't make it better.
Totally agree… surely the idea that indigenous people are not to be expected to meet non-indigenous behavioural standards is just, well… racist?
Living in Australia, i’ve always believed that indigenous people were fundamentally no different to the rest of us, and that we should aspire to live in a world where they’re treated no differently to the next person.
In 1998, this viewpoint made me a progressive lefty. In 2025, i’m a fascist!
As a person of some autochthonous ancestry, I find this entire affair fairly insulting.
So we have someone from Minority X (privileged in many ways), scolding presumed Majority Y (but soon possibly to be a minority, as the Left desperately hopes) about offending Minority Z. So X wants to shut Y up, and Y only wanted Z to keep it down. So X wants out of Y, what Y wanted out of Z. But X was far ruder and more obnoxious about it than Y was. But X has cloaked himself in the virtue de jours.
If we go by privilege or status, X has the highest status. Y is accused of being oppressors. And Z are the supposedly terminally downtrodden who are always victims to be pitied and babied.
Interestingly, X has historically exhibited one of the most vile records in world history of discrimination against the downtrodden. And previously Y had to make efforts to get X to behave in a more civilized manner.
So now X is returning the favor, by telling Y to allow Z behave in a less civilized manner.
This is ridiculous.
White saviors need black/brown victims—and the victims don't get a vote, as they're just props.
white man's burden 2.0
I think of it more as The White Woman's Emotional Burden—modern white women feel the same need that 19th-century European men did to uplift the poor and brown, but instead of "civilizing" them now they want to be their therapists and heal all their psychic and emotional wounds. We've gone from strict papas to nurturing mamas.
it was all downhill once women got the vote
lol
You mean. The patronizing of almost anyone who isn't a white. Years ago Terri Gross of NPR started parading through "marginalized" people of color, cajoling stories of their struggles against discrimination and harassment. Witness every other commercial that now features blacks, ironically playing comfortable middle class roles white university women are comfortable with, but rarely any true potrayal of African Americans.
Rather than just this vague grumpy moaning you could have given some context or attempted to understand what was going on. But you just wanted to be right wing , didn’t you?
I have seen similar bullying by pre-Columbian Immigrants of Northeast Asian ancestry myself. They should be happy that the note did not characterize the noise accurately
Sounds like you really need to add some soundproofing to your dorm room, professor Revers! But, seriously, relieved, beyond words, that McGill found a "competent white woman" to hire. Here in the US, we've been fortunate to hire a bunch of competent white people in our federal bureaucracy. We got Dan Bongino for the FBI, Tulsi Gabbard for Intelligence, and -- above all, for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who is so skilled with an ax that he can almost kill someone on fifth avenue and can juggle phone calls so good he scores points with Putin. Maybe if Canada tries to keep up, you can even better at improving your Dunning-Kreuger score.
I skimmed this but, to be honest, I'm done now with these stories about totalitarian over-reach at institutions of higher learning. There's no point reading them anymore.
For a long time, university was something people took seriously. Not anymore. They're finished.
Whether or not you take them seriously, these people are still in control of the schools that indoctrinate Canada's children. Universities may be finished as serious academic institutions, but how many millions of our tax dollars do they receive? Our taxes are still serious, right?
I bet they were all so upset. They forgot to do the indigenous land appreciation statement. You know, the one where they recognize they are standing on stolen land and do everything except give it back.
You don't get to hear that statement unless you pay admission (or tuition) first
agreed, all credentialling bodies have to be taken seriously
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/09/let-brooklyn-be-loud/670600/
The above is another facet of this mindset and I truly don’t get it. Quiet is neutral. Quiet makes room for everyone. I will never understand why I should be subjected to someone else’s music, or tik tok videos, or loud conversation.
This public display by McGill’s Dean of Education, Vivek Venkatesh, exemplifies the kind of people in charge of education in Canada. Let us not forget that faculties of education train teachers, education administrators, and (probably) accreditors. So the minds of Canada's children and Canada's future is in the hands of these people. If that is not shocking and frightening enough, consider the "success" of Canadian education, given the decline of basic achievement in K12, and the falling international rank of Canadian children. But, don't worry, because Canada's children are fully introduced to changing their sex, to judging which sexes, races, and which ethnicities are good and bad, and which terrorist groups to cheer for.
The utter irony that it's progressives screaming "resist" and "fascists!"
communists always scream "fascist" at their enemies
Utter irony, to be sure.
I am reminded that "The Shadow Scholar" said that his top two advanced degrees he obtained for his clients were:
- Doctorate of Education
- Doctor of Divinity
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-shadow-scholar/
"Ed Dante" was a leader in pseudo-educational attainment of the last generation. Based on my examination of Claudine Gay's doctoral thesis problems, I believe she is a pseudo-doctorate and her thesis was written on a typewriter by a shadow scholar of the generation before Ed Dante. Today things are much worse I think.
Given the penetration of shadow scholarship into the academy, and it's probable tilt toward what one could call "babble prone fields" of the academy, descent into farce is to be expected. The infection of shadow scholarship will tend to produce imitators that are distinguished by their ability to deliver theses that emulate and please "pure" shadow scholars.
I fear that with AI becoming the shadow scholar for almost everyone, complete meltdown, a la Douglas Adams is looming in our future. A Golgafrinchan invasion of sorts is ramming through the academy, utterly destroying it. You see, in tests, when AI loops on itself, the result is a kind of feedback scream into ... chaotic blank.
Along with showing up for class, doing the work, thinking instead of feeling, and getting passing grades.
I've never known academics to be particularly upset about Christian church burning. If anything they probably don't mind them, or think it's a step in the right direction.
How very embarrassing. I feel deeply ashamed of McGill and all Canadian universities that I have become so blind to basic civility.
The only people who think noise ordinances are racist would be, paradoxically enough, the racists themselves (including black racists, white racists, and everything in between).