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A vision for transforming education in the face of climate and ecological breakdown
My vision for this CEGEP is guided by one question: What do students need from higher education as a young human on this planet at this extraordinary time? If we base the answer to that question in scientific consensus, preparing students for their futures requires nothing short of transformative systemic change in all aspects of society.
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Israel lobby and its media enablers threatening academic freedom on campus
The next time the National Post comes calling with its accusatory “questions,” university spokespersons should take the opportunity to explain what academic freedom means, and why they will vigorously defend it. In the meantime, university leaders might do some thinking about how their own priorities and actions either reproduce or resist racial capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism.
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Collaboration a must to create ‘warrior schools’
In his 2021 memoir, Life in the City of Dirty Water, Indigenous activist Clayton Thomas-Muller defines a warrior as someone who is “not defined by fighting. They are defined by fighting for.” Imagine what could happen if we all fought for an education system laser focused on creating just, sustainable, and democratic societies.
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Believing women, believing Palestinians
Why is it so difficult for university administrators to express sympathy with all students, staff, and faculty who have been impacted by the events of October 7? To acknowledge that there are diverse Jewish views about Israel, Palestine, and what is unfolding now? Laurie Adkin writes on the tactics being used to silence critics of Israel and curtail free speech on campus and beyond.
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Western students must stand up for Palestine
My greatest wish—as a student and a human being—is to live in a world where all peoples, regardless of race, creed, or faith, can live in peace and dignity. A world where children can grow up free from the horrors of war. We must fight, when all seems dim, so that the world of our dreams can be born. We must fight on, for hope.
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On not teaching Palestine
How do you tell a student who earnestly feels that they are in danger that you think their fears are unfounded or exaggerated? That was the question that came to me in the classroom, and the one that animated this essay. Maybe it’s unnecessary. A group chat of fellow adjuncts and late-term PhDs who share my politics have advised me to keep my head down.
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Confronting racial (in)justice in the university and beyond
In this moment of global upheaval, and even as we acknowledge how much the political climate has been changed by anti-colonial and anti-racist movements, what would those who are bearing the brunt of our age’s most brutalizing forms of dispossession, disenfranchisement, wars, violence and ongoing genocides have to say of what we do in these institutions today?
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Ontario’s new education bill: Crushing what’s broken
Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce must really want to be a magician: making elephants disappear, then reappear behind you. Maybe that explains his tactic of making cuts to education, then announcing the addition of nearly 2,000 more educators all while introducing new legislation that will further centralize education and enable his Tories to make school properties available to their developer friends.
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Open letter: the Winnipeg Police Board should support equity-based research
We reject Smyth’s attack on the credibility of the Manitoba Research Alliance. Community-based and accountable research is essential for understanding social conditions from the lived experiences of minoritized communities. Community-based research is and should be the basis for setting policy in the interest of all communities—not only those in positions of power.
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COVID science and post-truth policy at Canadian universities
Universities are supposedly society’s proponents of evidence-based decision making. And yet, increasingly we’re seeing university administrators citing scholarship when it supports predetermined positions and ignoring that scholarship when it proves inconvenient to economic and political goals. Are university leaders undermining the credibility of the institutions they are charged with leading?