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It is not self-evident to most that we are full throttle in an era of State-sponsored tyranny passing
under the
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colour of the medicalization of everything. Where medical therapeutics are not imposed under
the prescribed doctrine that ‘vaccines’ are the royal road to optimal human health, other
doctrines, socio-psycho-political in nature, are weaponized by the governing and administrative
classes on behalf of a ‘moral community’ against the heretics who espouse wrong-think.
To question these deep and pervasive doctrines, to expose them as iatrogenic, is warrant in the
academy for the administrative vanguard of the moral community to adjudicate and pass
judgment on both scholastic and identity conflicts. The censure of Tomáš Hudlický stands as an
example. But, contrary to the Tri-Council Policy on Research Ethics, the administrative class is
not alone in its efforts to censor ideas. The Bruce Gilley case stands as an example that the effort
is now global. Editorial board members, journals and their publishers, and, incensed mobs who,
bearing figurative torches and pitchforks, add their names to letter campaigns against this or that
intellectual miscreant who questions the voices in the moral community’s echo chamber. Walter
Ullman’s account in The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages bears citation:
Publicly to hold opinions which ran counter to or attacked the faith determined and fixed
by law as heresy, and the real reason for making heresy a crime was…that the heretic
showed intellectual arrogance by preferring his own opinions to those who were specially
qualified to pronounce upon matters of faith.
Closer to my point, Thomas Hobbes, the quintessential rationalist and Statist who, like Plato,
despised any association that threatened the State is said by Robert Nisbett in The Quest for
Community to have been “…suspicious of the universities, for these teaching bodies, he declared,
have ever tended toward the support of ideas and actions that are not in the best interest of the
State’s unity”.
The university in this context is a fractal of the centralizing State. Statements in the Tri-Council
Policy on Research Ethics or by various universities about the sanctity and value of academic
freedom, especially when inquiry is contrary to preferred doctrines and ways of thought, are little
more than window dressing. We face a social context in academia where collegiality is
contingent on compelled performance, new speech norms and right-think. In a runaway DEI
context, where the only diversity not tolerated is opinions that vary from prescribed doctrines,
the contradiction inherent to its logic escapes none but the most heavily indoctrinated. Indeed, in
Propaganda: The formation of men’s attitudes Jacques Ellul cautions academics/intellectuals
that they are the most susceptible to indoctrination. Threatened by well-reasoned contrary ideas,

institutional cover is granted to character assassination, mobbing, and, ultimately
excommunication by loss of employment for those who defy the compelled doctrines of
government and dominant academic opinions. The likes of Byram Bridle, Julie Ponesse, Frances

Widdowson and Kenneth Westhues stand as ‘paradigmatic’ cases of the price paid for wrong-
think.

Unlike my colleagues, I have not been made to join the proverbial breadlines, though there are
many who wish that and worse for me. Over the course of my career my commitment to
academic freedom has not been totally defined by character assassination, backbiting, (very
public) defamation, threats to my life, and, more recently, considerable pressure from friends,
colleagues and administrators to rescind my invitation to Frances Widdowson to speak
at Brock University.
In fact, when I explained to a friend, a very high profile academic, that I was being mobbed at
Brock for inviting Frances Widdowson, he was hardly sympathetic: “That bitch! She’s a
Residential School Denier”. “So”, I said, “have you read her work”? The reply, which was
thankfully honest, “You know, I haven’t”. Case closed! How many more have never read
anything Dr. Widdowson has written or simply refused to attend a talk because of what
they heard about her? Another colleague and friend at Brock resisted being bullied out of not
attending Dr. Widdowsown’s talk on academic freedom delivered to one of my classes was
gratified she exercised her independence at bucking the in-crowd. While my colleague-friend did
not agree with Dr. Widdowson on many points, there were others that led her to question and
rethink her prior position. An academic not afraid of ideas! How novel! Another colleague who
watched the video of Dr. Widdowson’s address for the Annual Tomáš Hudlický Memorial
Lecture for Academic Freedom found her examination of the Kamloops case eminently sensible.
The other side to my struggle to defend academic freedom has found an ally in the BUFA
Executive, which has been steadfast in defence of my own right to academic freedom. Though I
am the face of academic freedom on its poster campaign, the Executive could have knuckled
under as it did in defining academic freedom so narrowly as to proscribe reasoned arguments by
colleagues who refused coerced medical therapy as per the (fraudulent) Tri-Council Policy on
Research Ethics. To the credit of the BUFA Executive, they have solidly defended my right to
present a well-documented criticism of Zionism-as-racism and analogizing the actions of the
nation-State of Israel with the Third Reich of German National Socialism. And, in face of a
serious pressure campaign by administrators to have me rescind my invitation to Frances
Widdowson to speak to one of my classes about, wait for it, academic freedom, the BUFA
Executive again stood firm.
Heir to the Republic of Letters, academic freedom is on life-support across Canada and the
Western world. Like an auto-immune disease, it is being attacked from within.
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It must be defended for it is a good worth defending. The consequence of its loss due to
cowardice, ignorance, satiety, submission to identity politics or whatever is not hard to predict:
easy management of the ‘herd’ by centralized authority, and, cultural ossification.

Powerful forces could not, or, maybe thought it unwise to stop Frances Widdowson from
delivering an outstanding address as the inaugural speaker for Annual Tomáš Hudlický
Memorial Lecture for Academic Freedom. In the fight against tyranny it is fool-hardy to
celebrate cheap victories given by happen stance or one’s opponent. Frances Widdowson is a
cautionary tale that, in facing the internal enemies of academic freedom, the prudent course is to
know one’s enemy and then meet them with determination greater than their love of power. In
my estimation, the best prophylactic against tyranny and corrosion from within academia is
more, not less, academic freedom.

Tamari Kitossa (tkitossa@brocku.ca) is Professor of Sociology at Brock University. He is a
staunch defender of academic freedom. His interests include anti-Black racism in Western and
global culture, race and racialization, demonization and sexualization of Black men and
anti-criminology.