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So my feeling about this particular incident was one of special discouragement. The protesting alumni hadn’t been indoctrinated or cowed into submission by social justice warriors at Berkeley. They were graduates of a program dedicated to inculcating a commitment to free academic inquiry. Yet their solid education in the classical liberal tradition was no prophylactic against an illiberal zeitgeist. Cancel culture can, it seems, be taken in by osmosis.

Cancel culture can, it seems, be taken in by osmosis

• My second example is the University of Victoria’s recent decision to not renew the contract of adjunct professor Susan Crockford, a zoologist with an expertise in polar bears. Crockford was also on UVic’s Speakers Bureau list, and would regularly give talks to schools and community groups, but was removed from that role as well. What was her crime? Apparently wrongthink on climate change. Crockford shattered a popular climate-change myth by reporting that polar bear populations are not plummeting as a result of shrinking Arctic ice. In fact, polar bear numbers are stable and even rising.

The polar bears are there, masses of them, and in fact the federal government, if you’ve noticed, has stopped public grieving about their disappearance, because the Inuit gave them an earful on the subject. They were angry that their own testimony — they are the ones who actually live with the polar bears — was being ignored.

So Crockford was not disseminating false news, but reporting actual news that didn’t reinforce the received wisdom on climate change. Which is why I found the polar bear story especially disturbing. It’s one thing to fire a teacher who promotes theories or hypotheses the university disagrees with, though that would be wrong as well. This isn’t the case with Crockford’s non-renewal. After all, polar bear numbers have nothing to do with racism, sexism or transphobia, the usual grounds for cancel culture.