The Excommunication of Susan Crockford

An accomplished scientist and role model for young women has been expelled from the academic community.

Dr. Susan Crockford at the University of Toronto in 2012.Dave Thomas/Toronto Sun/QMI Agency files

Like geologist Bob Carter before her, Susan Crockford has been stripped of her Adjunct Professor status by a university with which she has a long history. Why? Because she promotes facts and eschews climate activism.

In May, Canada’s University of Victoria (UVic) advised Crockford that an internal committee had voted to end her 15-year stint as an Adjunct Professor. Having undergone hip surgery in the interim, only now is she going public.

When the matter was last considered, the committee voted unanimously in her favour. What changed? Talks she was invited to give to schools apparently “generated concern among parents regarding balance.” That concern was “shared with various levels of the university,” according to an April 2017 e-mail from Ann Stahl, then chair of the Anthropology Department.

These vague accusations, leveled by an unknown number of unknown individuals who may or may not have been garden variety climate activists, were first used to expel Crockford from the UVic Speakers Bureau. They then became the impetus to expel her from the UVic academic community altogether.

I’ve written about this scandalous development in today’s Financial Post, the business section of Canada’s daily newspaper, the National Post: click here.

On the subject of balanced presentations, please see my recent commentary, U of Victoria’s Speakers Bureau. Many of the talks it promotes are one-sided, activist, and controversial. Someone with no science background has, for years, been giving lectures about ocean chemistry. Yet the eminently qualified Crockford was purged.

While UVic has deprived its students of her expertise, this weekend Crockford begins a European speaking tour. Audiences in Oslo, London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Munich will have the opportunity to hear her firsthand.