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The University of Saskatchewan changed my life.

From a good education to role models who became friends, the faculty members I admired had academic rigour, a tolerance for the exchange of ideas and a love of learning. It didn’t hurt that they were terrific people, too.

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There are still good people doing strong academic work and creditable research at this university, but somehow the place feels different — more bureaucratic, less accountable and the voices of the political left are louder, more strident and less tolerant than in the past.

The furor in recent days enveloping Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario is a symptom of a deeper rot within modern academia.

At Laurier, three staff took 22-year-old teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd into a room for a Maoist thought re-education session because she had “exposed students to violence” by showing them a four-minute excerpt of both sides in a debate on transgender pronouns which had aired on Ontario’s educational TV network.

The inquisition featured comparisons to Hitler and the suggestion that Lindsay had spread hate and transphobia … by exposing adults to a debate.

Fortunately, Lindsay had the good sense to record the shakedown, which was not just an assault on free speech but a denigration by ideologues of the most basic principles of higher education and critical thought.