THE FRETTED CEILINGS and solemn masonry, the broad pillared walkways, the charming, dishevelled rosebushes, the abundant signposts directing students to this or that department across the West’s ancient universities, this is the stage for some of the most comic proceedings and foolish goings-on in our modern era.
According to the contemporary stereotype, university professors, in particular, are supposed to be disarmingly polite intellectuals, some quirky, some effete, many poorly attired, most obdurately self-involved. And, across today’s Western campuses, a vast number have become utterly tendentious, championing a suite of increasingly absurd and esoteric beliefs that bump up against reality. This comes as little surprise to the average ‘normie’ whose confirmation bias has long been to perceive academics through this lens, in any case. And, inevitably, this perception is accompanied by well-deserved and accurately placed suspicion.
The Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich (1808-10). Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
What many might not realise is the wealth of opportunity that exists in this rarefied environment for near endless comic hilarity. The logic might suggest that we should not question those who have demonstrated preeminent intellectual capacity, since presumably they are in possession of a more profound understanding from which their beliefs have emerged. But you would be dead wrong. The writer Saul Bellow famously remarked, “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.” Stephen Pinker, the renowned cognitive psychologist, has spoken extensively, for example on The Free Press podcast, about the willingness of clever people to think stupid things. And, of course, if you concede that unintentional absurdity is embedded in much of the academic discourse across a wide swathe of subjects, then risible behaviours and lunatic antics cannot be very far behind.
In my own department, Chemical & Physical Sciences at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM), the penchant for unforced errors and unintentional buffoonery has become such a commonplace among the faculty and administrative staff that it barely deserves mention. Barely. But once every so often some delicious comic confection surfaces that it is hardly possible not to leap for the laptop keyboard to record all of the particulars before any memory of the events fades into the wider cavalcade of nonsense. So, permit me to amuse you.
During the summer months each year, I teach a laboratory course for our professional graduate students in the Master of Biotechnology Program. We call it MBiotech. Since there are multiple activities going on at once in the same laboratory space—different modules where groups of students are acquainted with distinct techniques—I am afforded the blessed relief of three teaching assistants (TAs), grudgingly financed by our higher-ups at the Institute for Management & Innovation (IMI), that often self-contradictory enterprise presiding over all of UTM’s professional graduate programs.
Typically, this being a graduate-level offering, these TAs hold doctoral degrees themselves to ensure that a suitable hierarchy of skills and knowledge is preserved. The thinking goes that a student paying many thousands of dollars for the privilege of jumping aboard the smooth academic escalator to career success will be understandably non-plussed when they discover that the credentials of their appointed mentors are lesser than their own.
In the middle of the semester this year, I received an email out of the blue from our laboratory manager—a unionised bureaucrat affiliated with that behemoth among workers’ unions, the United Steelworkers—who, it transpires, happened at that time to be on their well-deserved and doubtless preauthorised vacation. This seemingly urgent missive-on-furlough went on to raise concerns about one of my TAs, Dr. David Prosser, who it was alleged had accessed the laboratories during a long August weekend here in Canada, and which he later confirmed was for the purpose of preparing samples for the incoming MBiotech students the following week. He was, at least from my vantage point, engaged in unpaid overtime: a voluntary commitment of his own time to better pave the way for our students’ success in the laboratory sessions. Though he wasn’t supervised, he is a qualified scientist. He holds a degree that is senior to the person raising the ‘concerns.’ He had been given universal access privileges to the laboratory by means of a keycard access system that was not delimited to regular business hours. From my understanding, he had already completed the necessary workplace health and safety training. Furthermore, his contract appeared to be silent about the performance of voluntary overtime without supervision.
Of course, what is comic about this scenario is the authoritarian way that, inevitably, it was handled. I was quickly notified of David’s immediate suspension of his access privileges to the laboratory on the grounds of risk and potential liability. He’s a white man, as it happens, so the glee with which this mandate was handed down was palpable. In the second act of the soap opera that had begun to unfold in that oh-so predictable fashion that all of today’s academic institutions appear uniquely and unwittingly to encourage, David could be found sidling around the restricted entrance to the laboratory and quipping ironically about his fall from grace. When I saw him, I felt instantly ashamed, knowing full well that the collective idiocy of a coterie of tiresome reprobates, many of demonstrably lower academic standing and achievement, had conspired to bring about this nonsense, to impose upon him a summary ‘justice’ that betrayed a slavish fealty by second-class minds to a series of irksome rules and bureaucratic albatrosses. Safe to say, I was not impressed.
What followed, though, was an unforeseen third act that promises to rank among the year’s leading contenders for Schadenfreude in my own beautiful, private and wholly irreproducible lived experience. And, boy, oh boy, I would be remiss if I did not share that with you.
First and foremost, though, I feel I should point out that the agent provocateur who happened upon David’s activities that sultry August weekend—they remain unnamed, but I know who it was—decided to hand over a photograph depicting his alleged misdemeanours. For colour, I will elaborate by saying that our laboratory manager holds a Master’s in Cellular & Molecular Biology from a well-known university and used to work for the Canadian government. This person is unlikely to know their way around chemical glassware, nor the correct way to assemble a sintered funnel. Now, even I do not purport to be an expert on practical organic chemistry etiquette—despite holding a degree in the subject—but to my eyes, the surreptitious snapshot of my TA’s fume hood that landed in my inbox merely went to demonstrate David’s consummate professionalism. The glassware is impeccably arrayed; small glass beakers are cunningly deployed to cover test tubes, minimising solvent evaporation; waste containers are conveniently placed for the rapid disposal of unwanted residue; even the steel spatula and latex pipette bulb are sensibly ranged within easy reach.
This, then, is hardly the chemistry crime that was alleged. In fact, the complaint merits absolutely no attention whatsoever. There is nothing on display that is even faintly life-threatening, even in the magical realm of Narnia, unless, of course, David suddenly were to be overcome by some manic rapture, and were to start purposefully stabbing himself in the eyeball with one of those glass pipettes.
And then came the reveal. I was told that the laboratory manager was to be let go. The circumstances surrounding the departure remain unclear, but I can’t pretend I’m even faintly upset to hear of the loss of a self-important pen-pusher who issues diktats left and right to those who have discharged their dues in the academic hierarchy. More amusingly, and entirely in line with the shoot-from-the-hip administrative hysteria accompanying this incident, the person in question, a molecular biologist, smoothly transitioned into a new role with the UofT’s Department of—wait for it—History. The person is well qualified, then.
What is especially intriguing about this abrupt exit are the inevitable rumours circulating the coffee rooms on various departmental floors. My personal favourite was the wholly believable, but entirely uncorroborated allegation that the incumbent’s union had overturned their appointment because our former departmental chair had passed over a more qualified male candidate in a characteristic fit of fourth-wave feminism and ‘you go girl’ hysteria. I recall hearing that ‘investigations’ are underway in the department—they nearly always are these days—and I for my part hope that they all weather the storm. Cancellation, I can attest, can be so cruel.
But where does this leave me, a mere passive observer banished to the margins of both of my departments for my vociferously naysaying the prevailing orthodoxies of diversity, equity and inclusion? I will tell you. It leaves me free. Before this year ends, I will announce my departure, my premature trebuchet-ride into early retirement at the sanguine age of 55. I will draw a modest pension. I have a property awaiting me in the village of Broad Campden, one of England’s most beautiful and unspoiled Cotswolds villages. There are oak trees that stand under fleecy clouds in a careless cerulean sky. Yes, I know, it rains. It rains a lot. But even under sodden skies, the immiseration imposed on my former life by a corrupt university and its ideological monotheism will fade into the grass and be forgotten. And they cannot reach me. Farewell, Canada! The indigenous Canadians can sing your praises all they wish, but you were never my home and native land.
