I am a faculty member at a Canadian University. I can tell you from first-hand experience that post-secondary institutions in Canada are rotten to the core. This became blatantly obvious throughout the past two-plus years of the declared pandemic. Censorship, judgmental attitudes, segregation, and crushing of critical, independent thinking are rampant.
This is not the way to train our future workforce. And things are only going to get worse as countless years of budget cuts are on the horizon as we face the consequences of spending half-a-billion dollars per day to finance misguided COVID-19 policies. This comes on the heels of many years of consecutive budget cuts prior to the declared pandemic; a time that saw the double-cohort of students enter colleges and universities in Ontario. Student populations have approximately doubled while faculty members have been reduced to 60-75% of their peak numbers. Simultaneously, technical and support staff have dropped as much as 50% in some academic units.
I don’t know how our traditional post-secondary education system is going to be able to weather the coming years of economic turmoil. They are far from being healthy now.
However, a bright light is rising from these ashes. I am super-excited to announce the upcoming launch of a transformative educational initiative. It is called the Canadian Centre for Learning. This was started by faculty members from across Canada who have seen the need to restore post-secondary education to what it should be. Many of them were also treated horribly by their academic institutions for practicing critical thinking and attempting to maintain the concept of open scientific and medical discussions.
The Canadian Centre for Learning will be a unique and life-empowering post-secondary educational experience for students who want to develop critical thinking and who will appreciate having opportunities to openly discuss concepts, including controversial topics, without being judged and censored. This new approach to education will also build up resistance in individuals to the type of harmful groupthink that has paralyzed our society for more than two years.
The Canadian Centre for Learning is hosting a launch party on April 27th at 1:00 pm EDT. More information can be found here.
In parallel, several colleagues and I are establishing a new lab consortium. We plan to get it up and running this summer. I will let you know when we are ready to officially launch. The goal is for us to interface in the relatively near future with the Canadian Centre for Learning by offering a place where some students can gain hands-on research training (our lab will likely require a couple of years of growth before this can be offered). At some point we also hope to offer courses in the fields of immunology, cancer biology, virology, and maybe others, through the Canadian Centre for Learning.
Many faculty members in Canada are working hard to ensure that young adults can have an opportunity to experience transformative education beyond high school that will equip them with the intellectual skills to be tomorrow’s leaders and problem-solvers.
Thank you thank you thank you! As the parent of a young adult who should be studying engineering at the university you are faculty of, but who is not able to attend said university, this is fabulous news!
That's great news! It makes me feel like going back to university, to be surrounded by intelligent and like-minded academics!