HOW DID WE ALLOW OUR CENTRES OF HIGHER LEARNING TO DEGENERATE INTO THESE THEATRES OF THE ABSURD.

climb-down from them, and that they were no paragons of contrition, makes it clear how little principle, as opposed to tactical manoeuvre, was involved. Nothing in this case, as the well-spoken and brave Shepherd told the inquiry, is what universities are supposed to be or how they should act.

The last time Wilfrid Laurier University was tested publicly on a controversy anything like this was when a project to commission and unveil statues of all of Canada’s 23 prime ministers was cancelled and the initial statue, of the country’s principal Great Britain and the United States, and a great statesman even in the time of Lincoln, Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone and Bismarck, was irrelevant.)

Macdonald (inevitably) was portrayed by the complaining native militants as a Hitler also, as if Macdonald would have approved anything Hitler did after he was mustered out of the German army as a decorated corporal. (Surely, if he had had a chance to reflect upon it, the last thing Adolf Hitler would have expected, just before he discharged a bullet into his head as his wife of one day took poison, in their bunker with the Red Army only a few hundred yards away, was that his name would be invoked to discredit liberalminded democrats and believers in free elections and academic exchange in ostensibly free countries 70 years later. The Fuehrer thought the democracies degenerate then; he would likely find nonsense like this a flattering vindication of that judgment.)

Fiascos like this raise the question of how this society allowed its education system to become steadily poorer the more money it stuffed into it. And how did we allow our centres of higher learning to degenerate into these theatres of the absurd where stupefying sums are squandered to enable questionably qualified people to teach largely irrelevant material in life-assured sinecures of sixhour work weeks with three months annual holidays, while thoughtful discussion is suppressed, all to produce masses of under-educated people largely unqualified to get or hold a serious job? Obviously, the answer is complicated, and some of it was touched upon a few weeks ago when I excerpted from the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation publication that the solution to deteriorating school testing results was to eliminate the tests.

I take advantage of Shepherd’s persecution to propose the outline of a radical plan for the resuscitation of Western education. In addition to deunionizing the schools, testing all the teachers and students for objective competence levels each year and rewarding them all meritocratically, (i.e. those who fail do not proceed farther until they pass), we must get over our collective snobbery about skilled work and trades and produce people who can do the work society needs and will pay for, even if we have to call plumbers bachelors of sanitary engineering. Much of undergraduate university could be put online and the personnel could be thinned out accordingly. The untouchability of tenured professors must be revoked in cases of egregious abuse, just as the protection of incompetent or indolent teachers must be ended. Any strikes should be interpreted as acts of resignation. Abstruse university courses, which will include propagandistic examinations of very absurd and faddish subjects, should be cut back somewhat, and possibly made more expensive than more productive disciplines and curriculum. Any university that fails to maintain normal freedom of expression and encourage civilized exchange should have its charter revoked.

The immense financial savings from ending this culturally suicidal indulgence of mediocrity and self-induced public ignorance would enable generous rewards for the best teachers and professors, and the balance of the savings could be rebated to lower and middle income taxpayers; they could spend and invest the money they have earned more wisely and productively than our governments can, and they don’t have to skim the profits from the alcoholic beverage, gambling and marijuana businesses to do it. The retiring chief justice of Canada has falsely accused Canada of attempting cultural genocide on native people; in fact we are inadvertently trying to practise it on ourselves.