Canadian University of Grievance

Leigh Revers is associate professor at the University of Toronto in the department of Chemical and Physical Sciences, cross-appointed to the Institute for Management & Innovation. He was the target of a cancellation in 2023 and has since been described by Jordan B. Peterson as “an eloquent new voice on the side of meritocracy and the tradition of truth”.

When Josef K. awakens to a call at the door from a stranger and, to his disappointment, no breakfast in Franz Kafka’s dystopian nightmare, The Trial, he embarks on a year-long odyssey that culminates in his paying the ultimate price for a crime that is never declared.

It is no exaggeration to compare my own ignoble Canadian university cancellation to the fate of Kafka’s protagonist. Or, at the very least, his lived experience. Well, except that K. is a fictional character; and my fall from grace was entirely real. Let this be a warning, then, to how the educational institution we call a “university” now operates in North America in 2025, and how that behaviour has propagated across the Atlantic to infect the wider Anglosphere.

Everywhere at universities in Britain there is, surely, a nagging feeling among academics that all is not well with the enterprise of higher education. From my observations, such foreboding has been especially felt among the ranks of scientists, who have grounded their entire careers in empiricism and evidence-based research. Indeed, when these lab-coated truthseekers look up from their microscopes and test tubes, they perceive that a strange malaise has crept unbidden up to the ivory towers, cast a long shadow across the campus lawns, and much like J.K. Rowling’s disturbing semi-corporeal dementors, seeped into the very foundations of their institutions, bringing with it a kind of ideological putrefaction that is eroding the pillars of Western civilization.

This is the story of the fall of an academic at the University of Toronto. It could have happened at any university in the modern West, but it happens to have been here in Toronto, Canada’s leading metropolis, and the home of its greatest university.

The same requiem could be sung across any campus in Britain. Eric Kaufmann and Matt Goodwin are just two notable scholars who have sensibly chosen to side-step career-limiting ideological harassment pursued by pitchfork-wielding academic peers who have succumbed to what I characterize as Postmodernist Derangement Syndrome, PDS.

So it was on a snowy day in February of 2023 when I was escorted into a meeting with the dean at the University of Toronto’s satellite campus in Mississauga; a sacrificial lamb to be slain on the altar of social justice.

I was completely hoodwinked, taken unawares by the gathering powers that sought to depose me swiftly and with all the bonhomie and calculated malice of today’s modern authoritarian do-gooders, who I was soon to realize have long since usurped the entire hierarchy of Canadian higher education.

It is notable to point out that by virtue of a shared colonial past, Canada’s universities, whether operationally in terms of the delivery of teaching, or philosophically through the inheritance of scholarly tropes and traditions, parallel the great English-speaking seats of learning in both the United States and Britain. No doubt very soon, my university will feel it necessary to jettison these lingering totems that recall the privileges of a host of genocidal Europeans settling on stolen land, but inexplicably they have yet to do so.

Though the literal letter of that meeting with the Dean, Amrita Daniere, accused me of a quartet of sundry misdemeanors in my own classroom, the penalty imposed upon me was to be summarily dismissed from an administrative post that I held directing a prominent professional graduate program. Ironically, my teaching appointment with the university remained wholly intact, and I was quickly and unceremoniously packed off back to the classroom, presumably under the paradoxical assumption that despite my misdeeds being terrible and unforgivable — at least in the eyes of my fine-fettled faculty peers — I’d do just fine when released back into the wild of the university’s lecture circuit.

As for the other operational role – a job which comprised perhaps two-thirds of my daily routine – in the dissembling language of the administration, I was to be placed on paid leave until someone, anyone, could work out how to legitimate my dismissal in the wake of some kind of cobbled-together tribunal, presided over by a church of the ideologically captive.

The nature of the true crime, as for Josef K., was left unspoken. It soon became evident that I had poked the bear one time too many. The litany of accusations brought against me were, without exception, comically feeble. It is my legal burden, perhaps unsurprisingly, never to speak openly of the details of the case as they were presented to me for fear of further opprobrium and legal wrangling. But it matters not at all. The very existence of such a gagging order speaks whole volumes. You could easily substitute any number of concocted charges and reach the same endgame, which manifest itself very predictably as the funeral pyre of an academic career. Mine.

It was a career long in the making. In the early 1990s, I fell in love with Canada and the Mighty White North; and I can say with some vehemence today – accumulated over three decades – that I now thoroughly deplore what this once fine country has become. I came here from Britain in search of a career. Following a high-stakes stint in the private sector, I came to envy the seemingly quiet security of academia; and by some tactical maneuvers I scored a tenure-track post at the University of Toronto.

But the same university that welcomed me under its capacious skirts was in recent years to become a Kafkaesque nightmare, one where academic values have been corrupted and subverted to the point that everything I held to be true about such institutions has been utterly obliterated. The blackboard of behavioral formulae had been wiped clean and the rules of classroom engagement had been rewritten in a foreign language.

This is not hyperbole. The pillars upon which our systems of higher education have been built across past centuries have been assailed with a fervor that many won’t acknowledge, and most find hard to believe. But the evidence is everywhere, and it is incontrovertible. Look, for instance, at the decline in academic standards. Today, from my own analysis of classes I teach, more than 16% of students receive “accommodations” (academic concessions, and hence extra time) when it comes to examinations. That’s an eight-fold increase over ten years. You need only to declare some form of intolerable anxiety to claim a benefit, according to students who have spoken about this openly to me. At Queen’s University, another prominent Canadian institution of higher learning, almost a quarter of students were granted similar concessions.

At the very same time, the intellectual handholding has been exacerbated further by what has become a discriminatory and unfair gender bias as universities’ bureaucracies have been inexorably – some would claim intolerably – feminized, leading to a culture that has tended towards prioritizing emotional well-being and the privileging of feelings as arbiters of moral righteousness when it comes to disputes over academic performance. Such systemic reprogramming has affected the students and faculty alike.

Two thirds of administrators in North American universities in 2021 were female, and any number of mechanisms are in place to curtail access by men to positions of seniority. It is blatant discrimination of the crassest variety and in plain sight. When it comes to the disposition of coveted Canada Research Chairs, for instance, a recent departmental circular declared that “Until 2029, all nominations are are [sic] open only to those who self-identify as women or gender minorities, racialized individuals, persons with disabilities, and/or Indigenous Peoples.”

If you’re a white man pursuing a career in research, then, you might as well abandon any hope at all of ascending to such heady academic heights. It’s utterly irrelevant how excellent your research happens to be, or how many grants you score, because in the name of social justice and the necessity to correct for the patriarchal dominion of your forebears, the seats have been reserved for others with more valued characteristics, such as ownership of female sex organs or higher skin melanin levels. So sorry to disappoint you. Better luck in 2030.

To make matters worse, governmental agencies such as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research have lately implemented new sleights of hand that pre-emptively hobble dissent from academics challenging their granting decisions. Assessment scores that were once routinely passed down to inform unsuccessful applicants how close to the finishing tape they came are now withheld, permitting committees motivated by DEI quotas to substitute desirable candidates unnoticed behind the curtain.

Even a white man such as me who does not engage in grant applications and merely focuses on university teaching might be quickly shown the door. According to a report by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), it has become an established fact that men, despite comprising only 48% of appointed faculty, are nearly two-and-a-half times more likely than their female counterparts to face sanction attempts; and white men, who account for 20% of the faculty, represent more than a third of all cancellation attempts.

On that cold February morning, I was soon to discover, a tenured professor who has successfully navigated a five-year trial period and accumulated scholarly plaudits and publications to assure a favorable tenure decision is only one short step away from the plank walk. But why?

To make sense of this conundrum you must recognize that our universities have, almost without exception, elected to map a new and misguided course across the existential landscape of intellectual discovery and advancement, a tortuous path paved by modern Marxism and illumined with endless virtual signals. This is Rudi Dutschke’s Long March through the institutions. I will summarize the philosophy in one sentence. Our universities have decided unilaterally to privilege immutable human traits and group belonging – race, gender, sexuality, disability – over aptitude, diligence, and merit. It’s as straightforward as that.

On a personal level, how did things come to end this way? For the simple reason that I triggered one of a growing array of bear traps that had been laid so very carefully by the ideologically captive zealots of the social justice movement. These snares might materialize in any number of manifestations: an amusing and accurate biological comparison between reacting chemicals and a hermaphroditic species, for instance; an unqualified left-field political remark to an audience in the fever of a technical malfunction during a public seminar; or merely the act of exerting a modicum of discipline in the classroom to prepare graduates for the challenges of the private-sector workplace. And so they did, and the bombs went off, and the limbs were splintered, and the emergency crews were called.

My advice to anyone in academic life in the English-speaking world, then, is to be properly forewarned, because these lessons are hard-won and should serve as beacons to the unwary; and because the venom that has poisoned our institutions is now widespread and ignores national frontiers.

If you are a faculty member, your employer has chosen prima facie to employ you in part for your skills as an educator or as a researcher, but also under the unspoken assumption that you hold certain political views. To be clear, those would be the views on the left of the political spectrum. If your views depart from theirs – and, no, there is no rubric that defines the acceptable suite of beliefs because it is fluid and subject to frequent software updates – then woe betide, because there are any number of administrative apparatchiks sitting in wait to wrong-foot even the most politically well-heeled professors.

Don’t believe me? Then look around and cringe. How many non-academics are now involved in the day-to-day running of your department, your division, your university? In my own department at the Institute for Management and Innovation, we can count forty bureaucrats against twenty-two faculty, half of whom are cross-appointed to other departments and so are not always in the same building even if they are on the payroll. It’s all there in black and white. I’m put in mind of the remarks of author and commentator, Douglas Murray. When reflecting on the prevalence of these administrators he quipped, “I’d rather have two butlers.”

In reality, these ubiquitous administrators are merely patient sentinels waiting for an opportunity to pounce on the unsuspecting, and gleeful in the knowledge that cancellation of uncompliant professors is one effective avenue towards hitting their diversity targets among the faculty.

Already, there is revolt. The talented are beginning to stir in their growing discomfiture. One senior academic I spoke to told me that he was considering taking up a position outside of Canada, one where presumably the collegial atmosphere is less oppressive, less overtly discriminatory. I don’t blame him in the slightest. But even across the Atlantic in Britain, I gather there are uncounted email circulars from the DEI sprinkler, as the universities’ privilege police continue to fight the imaginary fires of social injustice. I remain hopeful it is all performative nonsense and merely window dressing, though some on the English side of the Pond might disagree.

British universities might well benefit from a reverse brain drain if only they can restrain their new-found instincts for anti-Enlightenment thinking and illiberal woke authoritarianism.

For my own part, I chose early retirement, rather less grim than K.’s fate to be executed “like a dog”. There is plenty of ground to cover writing about these matters, and many who might revel in the carnival of absurdities. What’s so unexpectedly delightful about the madness that now passes for university life in Canada, and elsewhere, is that the woke have a consummate talent for erecting their own follies. And I have cannon.