The Ivory Tower Poltroons

How collegial behaviour died in the era of wokeism

Et tu, Brute? When I was studying Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar back in high school, my teacher Dr. Scott Wilson took great pains to impress upon us schoolchildren that the emphasis lay on the Latin word ‘tu’ because it conveyed the Roman dictator’s incredulity that his closest ally had counted himself among Caesar’s assassination squad. To put it in translation, “Even you, Brutus?”

Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 2, the Murder Scene by George Clint (1822). Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Today, much as in ancient Rome, the prevalence of a political orthodoxy across our university campuses is characterised in the modern era by the frequency and ease with which professors are routinely disciplined for speaking their minds. The concept of cancellation to the rarified academic mind seems, on the surface, like an affront to intellectual dignity, and a remote prospect for most.

Yet, over and again, the universities’ administrative powers-that-be have usurped control over the day-to-day operations of higher education, and, in recent years, have effectively weaponised long-established codes of conduct towards students, such that an ill-timed joke, an unqualified left-field political remark, or merely the act of exerting a modicum of discipline in the classroom is now met with such draconian measures that it is hard to comprehend how such efforts—universally couched as they are in the language of safetyism and the protection of young minds from offence—could yield anything other than a modern cultural revolution in the West, where dissenting voices are neutralised. The result is a dull, tedious academic landscape where everyone espouses the same, remorselessly progressive ideology by resorting to a New-Speak vocabulary built on neologisms and redefined words, such as racism, anti-racism, gender, transphobia, marginalisation, supremacy and much more. The advocates are perpetually ‘foregrounding’ and ‘navigating’ and ‘reframing’ such that wonderfully evocative, ancient words like ‘travesty,’ ‘balderdash’ and ‘poltroon’ are falling into obscurity.

When it came to my turn, and I was placed on leave from my administrative position as director of the Master of Biotechnology (MBiotech) program for a series of reasons that I will not discuss here—I’ll leave you to fill in the blanks—the fallout was both immediate and sustained. It happened just one day before my 53^rd birthday, which made for a curious, prevailing sense of doom as I dined with my partner of 25 years at Toronto’s refined Auberge du Pommier restaurant at York Mills and Yonge. In the days that followed, I found myself twiddling my thumbs, with little to do in my day-job, other than continue my legacy teaching of chemistry courses, whose tenaciously challenging subject material I already knew backwards, and sideways, and every which way.

Within a month, I had been referred over the telephone to a Mississauga emergency room by my family physician in reaction to my sudden complaints of persistent chest pains. Fortunately, my heart was fine, it transpired, and the diagnosis was stress, most likely the physical manifestation of stress; and the ironic twist came when the attending clinician asked, “Have you been experiencing any stressful life-changes, at work for instance?” In response to this remark, the grim notion soon arose in my mind that perhaps I was not, in fact, immortal, and that the pressures of my work-life, and the indisputable reality of my employer’s indifference and subservience to a remorseless bureaucratic procedure—some diabolical academic version of The Inquisition—were a major contributory factor to the decline in my mental and physical health.

No matter; I was soon sent away with Hippocratic blessings and told to take a holiday; and so I promptly flew home to England, there to seek respite in the pastoral surroundings of the Cotswold village of Chipping Campden, whence the Revers’s have hailed for long generations. There, beneath the boughs of creamy spring blossom, laying on a warm, well-tended grass lawn under a cerulean sky, I pondered my possible futures.

Upon my return, though, I was faced with a new and more insidious problem, a problem that anyone charting an unexpected course across the academic wilderness will inevitably encounter: namely the unreliability of one’s so-called friends in the face of career adversity.

Take for example, my former boss, the person who was my direct report on the day I was presented with the sudden news of my defenestration from MBiotech, and at once the chair of my home department, the Institute of Management for Innovation (IMI). This was—perhaps still is—a person of warmth and optimism whom I had naturally gravitated towards over the preceding couple of years, to the point where we had routinely begun to socialise, and had become—so I thought at the time—steadfast friends. I would soon find myself enjoying the bubbling warmth of her backyard hot-tub, whilst instructing her delightful, acquiescent husband in the art of shaking a perfect Paper Plane. She is one of those rare academics who seems to effuse positivity, yet, simultaneously, is all-too-capable of ironically, and accurately, characterising the comedic clown-house antics that permeate all aspects of administrative life at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM).

On one occasion, one sunny evening last year during the long summer term, she regaled me with a tale of how her secretary—yes, yes, I know, it’s not politically correct terminology, but it’s a perfectly serviceable word—a generous-hearted, Black woman who, more often than not, wore a broad smile that split her face in two, had postponed a deadline, or declined a meeting, or some other triviality, by declaring that she was washing her hair that particular evening. I can’t quite recall what cheered me more, the vision of the woman’s arduous capillary obsessions, or the comic, face-twisting faux indignance expressed by my boss. In any case, we would laugh and empathise, and try to reframe any lingering doubts about the futility of our daily routines, applying a lens of positivity, always emerging spiritually refreshed and rejuvenated. But it was not to last.

Now, in the wake of my misadventures and the crossing of swords with UTM’s Dean, I had rapidly become a political liability, and whilst it was my understanding that the intimate details of my academic castration were confidential, it became abundantly clear that all and sundry had, in fact, somehow become well-apprised of my shortcomings.

“Leigh, take it from me, my impression is that the confidentiality surrounding your situation is compromised,” said a close friend and confidant of mine in the Department of Biology.

At this stage, I should draw closer attention to the Dean who presided over my fall from grace. Professor Amrita Daniere, now an emeritus of the University, and a noted author. I say ‘noted’ but I’m cognisant that she is a scholar of geography whose writings are imbued with an unmistakeable social justice flavour. Take for instance her rather scintillating foray in an issue of the journal, Environment & Urbanization, published in 2021, entitled “Rights, justice and climate resilience: Lessons from fieldwork in urban Southeast Asia.” There, in the introduction, Daniere and her two fellow female co-authors make the promising assertion that “this scholarship suggests that climate change adaptation should increase marginalised groups’ participation in governance.” What follows are 16 pages of claims and assertions. I was unable to find a single piece of empirical evidence, at least, not from my first reading. I am most certainly not reading it a second time. I’m reminded of Peter Boghossian’s sharp wit and accurate diagnosis, namely that these academic fields are hotbeds of what he calls ‘idea laundering’ where practitioners engage in wholesale deceit as they cite each other’s equally stultifying research in a desperate 100-metre dash to publishing stardom—at least in the eyes of their no-less deranged peers.

Daniere is also a fellow of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, which is especially galling to me because I am an enthusiastic devotee of the Munk Debates, and it chokes me that here is an academic—a woman diametrically opposed, it would seem, to everything the late, great Peter Munk stood for—being supported by his generous bequest to the University of Toronto.

But Providence has a wonderfully ambivalent way of turning the tables. At some point, during the spring of 2023, Daniere reportedly took a tumble down a flight of stairs in her posh Palmerston Street Toronto residence, and then spent several weeks recuperating, only to return, leaning heavily on a Zimmer walking stick, and going on to equivocate about the trajectory of my own very particular situation. I did my utmost to be empathetic towards the person who had summarily tossed me to the wolves, knowing that gravity, despite her Postmodernist beliefs prioritising subjective over objective truth—“Leigh, it is the intersection that matters,” she had knowingly opined in that dismissal meeting—is a hard taskmaster when you hit your sixties.

In the end, one week before her retirement on 1-July 2023, she wrote to me with seeming indifference, declining to pronounce my fate, and the whole matter was put in abeyance, thrown over the fence to the next decanal incumbent.

Linda Fiorentino in John Dahl’s The Last Seduction. Image courtesy of IMDB.

That was Amrita Daniere, a figure of unflinching dignity and compassion, to be sure. But I never counted her among my friends, and I expected no less in her treatment of me. Yet, I have not spoken at any length with my former boss since that first fateful day in February of career-shattering pronouncement. I recall, once, in passing, she greeted me with a bright “Hello!” as I alighted one morning from the elevator in IMI’s Innovation Complex. I can’t say I’m distraught. I am saddened, most definitely. But the reality is that here is yet another of what I refer to as the ‘ivory tower poltroons,’ an immiserated surfeit of professional academics who have, in fear for their careers, placed ideological conformity ahead of friendship, and the vicious and vacuous mantra of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion above the natural and very human instincts of loyalty and respect. I no longer have any sympathy for these people. They will, I trust, burn in the swirling ideological cauldron of their own making, clutching at the uncaring sky as the realisation of their demise dawns in their minds, even as they sink beneath the scorching surface.

There used to be a concept within the university’s quadrangles that was spoken of reverently among those of my many, charming colleagues in the faculty common rooms as they chattered across the teacups: the concept of collegiality, the notion that we academics were a force of collective minds joined in spirit, at once combative and adversarial in the intellectual arena, yet deeply bonded by a shared respect for each other and the unique knowledge we brought to our chosen fields. But such collegiality is dead. It has died on the operating table, under the surgical knife of both capitalism and social justice. And we cannot go back, and the tragedy is both banal and Shakespearean. Then fall Caesar!