Mount Allison breaks into the big league of loopy professors
The poor profs at Mount Allison University must have felt they were being left out of the fast lane on academic humiliation.Mount Allison is a small university, with a tiny student body, out there in Sackville New Brunswick, which even Prince Edward Island considers out of the way.
Bigger universities were getting all the attention with silly campaigns fired by perverse notions of justice and rights. The University of Ottawa hitched itself to a campaign to prevent a right-wing author from being allowed to speak there, the banning of authors being a well-known means of protecting the right to free speech. And a collection of cuckoos at the University of Regina announced their horror that the university would show sympathy and support for students left without a father or mother because they'd given their lives in the military.
Why should those profs get all the derision? Luckily, along came Heather Reisman, who sponsors a charity that provides educational opportunities to non-Israelis who have served in the Israel Defence Forces and want to stay in the country.
Hmmm, thought the profs. Israel. Defence. Must have something to do with oppressing Palestinians. Doesn't everything related to Israel have to do with oppressing Palestinians? For example, Israel grows oranges. Israel is in conflict with Palestinians. Therefore, oranges hate Palestinians.
That's about the level of reasoning the profs put into it. Ill-conceived justification in hand, they started bellyaching about a plan to award Ms. Reisman an honorary degree.
Luckily, the university didn't listen. You can always tell a smart university when it refuses to listen to its loopier profs. But the profs got what they must have wanted: Everyone knows there are some pretty dubious academics in Sackville, just as there are in Ottawa and Saskatoon.
Way to go, Mount Allison. Welcome to the big leagues.
National Post
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