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Last week, at a welcoming reception for Dalhousie’s incoming interim president, Peter Mackinnon, a contingent of Dalhousie and King’s student activists held a silent protest of Mackinnon’s hiring.

They claimed that Mackinnon threatens their safety, that his hiring had caused them harm, and that he must be fired. Among their list of demands includes mandatory anti-oppression training for all Dalhousie administrators and executives.

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What has Mackinnon done that could be so horrible as to provoke such a response from the 20 or 30 students who showed up to protest his inauguration? He wrote a book, University Commons Divided, last year about dissent and free expression on university campuses.

In it, he makes such outrageous claims as: the university should not police students’ Halloween costumes, even when they’re offensive; the university should not police its tenured professors’ speech or their opinions about gendered pronouns; the university should not enforce trigger warnings; and, central among them, that the pursuit of truth should prevail over the pursuit of social justice in the university.