For those of us intent on alerting those who’ve yet to be disabused of the positive effects of wokeism on the university, the Widdowson affair is the gift that keeps on giving. The latest, which came to my attention only a week ago, is that on January 30th, a certain Kathleen Massey, the Vice-Provost Students at the University of Lethbridge, sent an email to the students in all three of my classes – apparently she found a way to delete the instructor (me) from the list-serve, so I was deliberately kept in the dark about this – in which she advised that, “If attending Widdowson’s potential in-class talk(s) will cause you harm, you may excuse yourself from attending the talk(s).”

Some of my fellow-travellers are pressing me to file yet another grievance over this. And I probably will, though to what avail escapes me. They argue – and it’s hard to naysay them – that Massey had grievously overstepped her authority here. But I want to argue that, on the contrary, she may have grievously under-met her responsibilities. To wit:

Surely our students are adult enough not to knowingly put themselves in harm’s way. So if they know that exposing themselves to whatever ideas Widdowson will be sharing with them will harm them, would they need Massey to tell them not to expose themselves to those ideas? And if they don’t know, because – well, how could they? – wouldn’t they have to attend the talk first to find out? And then wouldn’t it be too late?

Okay, so maybe Massey isn’t the sharpest pencil in the box at expressing herself. Maybe what she meant to say is that she had some kind of privileged access to what Widdowson was going to say – though how, I suppose, will just have to remain a mystery – and that she knew it was going to be harmful. Why? Well, because having accessed it by means of her “special ways of knowing”, she‘d been harmed by it, so she thought it likely a student would be too. I guess that kind of prescience is just one of those “special ways of knowing” unavailable to men. Or maybe just not to white settler male colonialists.

But if so, surely she must know that whatever irreparable harm Widdowson was going to inflict, it would pale compared to the harm I inflict over 3 hours and 45 minutes every Monday and Wednesday. As Massey must know – because of her special prescient ways of knowing – I tell my students that 1) none of them would be here were it not for rape. That 2) the Blackfoot are no more the indigenous people of Southern Alberta than are the Normans the indigenous people of England. That 3) slavery was not introduced into this continent in 1619. That 4) the native Americans who were dumped at the Oklahoma end of the Trail of Tears, bought black slaves to work their cotton fields. And those are the least hateful things I tell them.

I also tell them that 5) the use of pronouns without a clear and unambiguous antecedent is the single most common source of unintelligible writing. But no doubt this settler colonialist grammar lesson is hate speech too. And that 6) the smart money goes to learning a second language, so they can colonise yet another subaltern people, like the French, or the Spanish, or the Italians. So why isn’t Massey trigger-warning students about all my lectures?

The problem is that if students may, on her authority alone, excuse themselves from attending all my lectures, I’m left to wonder – and I imagine they’re wondering too – how they’re to pass the class. As it happens I told my students that, if they thought they’d be ‘harmed’ by, but only by, their peers‘ disapproval of their attending Widdowson’s lectures, I wouldn’t be holding them responsible for any of the material she’d be offering in those lectures. I thought that was pretty generous of me. But thanks to Ms. Massey, I won’t be in the future. Students might want to have a word with her about that.

Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Why My Colleagues Are Idiots

Tags: Frances Widdowson, Kathleen Massey, University of Lethbridge, wokeism