Today’s Academic Cowardice Report

Prof. Rick Mehta

It seems that we can report on some academic outrage on a daily basis now. Today’s story comes from Canada, where Acadia University professor Rick Mehta has been fired. Mehta was a tenured professor of psychology, and since firing a tenured professor is not supposed to be easy, what could have been his offense?

Acadia University is not commenting, and won’t release any of the documents produced in an investigation into Mehta, but the National Post’s account of the matter gives us a pretty good hint:

Mehta was outspoken both on campus and online about a range of contentious issues including decolonization, immigration and gender politics, garnering both supporters and opposition.

He came under fire for saying multiculturalism is a scam, denying the wage gap between men and women, and dismissing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a vehicle for “endless apologies and compensation.”

Ah, so he’s politically incorrect, like Jordan Peterson. The Truth and Justice Reconciliation Commission he mentions here was a body Canada formed to express its collective guilt for its bad treatment of indigenous peoples of Canada in previous decades—deeds such as sending indigenous children off to government schools, ideas that were of course generated by the best “progressive” thought of a previous era. Naturally this process became a grievance-fest, in which every single person the Canadian government ever touched is presumed to have received a gross injustice, if not violent oppression. No doubt many did—this is “progressive” government at work again, keep in mind—but Mehta committed the sin of pointing out the excesses of this guilt-fest:

On Twitter, he retweeted a post that said it is “statistically impossible for all Native children to have had a negative experience with residential schools.”

You can’t say this. Certainly not on a Canadian university campus.

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