Lessons from a Teachers-College Battle Over Free Speech and ‘Decolonization’
University of Western Ontario instructors spent months denouncing an outspoken education student who’d asked awkward questions about Indigenous reconciliation—until a UWO tribunal concluded they’d violated her rights.
On Friday, 4 November 2022, the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) committee of the University of Western Ontario (UWO)’s education department convened an “emergency” meeting. UWO’s teacher-training program had become an “unsafe” space, the assembled members were told, due to the “hate speech” being disseminated by a newly enrolled middle-aged student named Margaret Munn.
It’s uncertain who led the discussion. But whoever it was apparently spoke persuasively, as the committee resolved that Munn should be expelled from the London, Ontario-based university—a demand that was summarily communicated to Kathryn Hibbert (widely known among colleagues as “Kathy”), who then served as the Associate Dean for Teacher Education.
Hibbert, in turn, immediately emailed Munn—then a first-year Teacher Candidate in the faculty’s Junior/Intermediate program (which provides training for students preparing to teach grades four through 10)—summoning her to an “urgent meeting” on the following Monday.
The Associate Dean provided Munn with no details about the agenda. But it was clearly something serious, as Hibbert instructed the student “not [to] attend any of your classes Monday before we meet.”
That 7 November meeting lasted two hours. And it would prove to be just the first of several that Munn was required to attend in late 2022.
While Hibbert assured Munn that the EDI committee had no independent authority to order disciplinary measures against individual students, the Associate Dean clearly took the committee’s recommendation seriously. Internal UWO documents and voice recordings obtained by Quillette indicate that over the following two months, Hibbert repeatedly pressed Munn about her beliefs, pushed her to acknowledge that she’d expressed offensive viewpoints, and, ultimately, threatened her with expulsion.
The Associate Dean also told Munn that she’d be initiating an investigation, and sharing her findings about Munn with “central”—Hibbert’s shorthand term for the university’s centralised EDI department, its Office of Indigenous Initiatives, and its administrative units charged with implementing UWO’s Code of Conduct and Policy on Gender-Based and Sexual Violence.
Munn remembers feeling blindsided. Yes, she’d aired a handful of mildly heterodox opinions about controversial topics during classroom discussions. As the evidence would later show, however, she’d said nothing that even remotely resembled the “hate speech” alleged by the EDI committee.
By the time Hibbert’s investigation wrapped up on 11 January 2023, the Associate Dean had heard from committee members and other informants who denounced Munn as a “transphobe”; an ideologically “obstinate” enemy of social justice; an ungrateful white “settler” who exhibited an attitude of “absolute denial” regarding her prejudices; and a mouthpiece for “deeply colonial views” so vile that—according to UWO Indigenous Education specialist Robyn Michaud—they “lead to [Indigenous] women getting treated like property, then going missing, and then being murdered.”
The Equity committee’s allegations were expressed in such apocalyptic language that Hibbert came to refer to them as “hate crime charges.” Taken on its face, the phrase would suggest that Munn’s statements fell under the ambit of Section 319 of the Canadian Criminal Code—a statutory provision that prohibits holocaust denial and incitement to genocide.
And there was more: Several weeks into Hibbert’s investigation, one of Munn’s accusers told the Associate Dean that she’d discovered evidence demonstrating that Munn had plagiarized an assignment. All told, Hibbert said, the teachers college now possessed no fewer than four separate rationales to expel her from the program.
Munn knew that such a blow would not only end her academic tenure at UWO, but likely terminate her teaching career entirely—as the attendant disgrace would follow her beyond UWO’s campus.
But in the end, Munn was never expelled. She graduated this past June after successfully appealing the results of Hibbert’s investigation to UWO’s Senate Review Board Academic (SRBA), the university’s highest tribunal for matters relating to academic discipline.
In a lengthy 5 September 2023 judgment—a copy of which was obtained by Quillette, along with the evidentiary exhibits reviewed by the tribunal—SRBA Chair Lina Dagnino and three panel members unanimously sided with Munn, nullifying Hibbert’s disciplinary measures in the process.
In her 70-page decision, Dagnino concluded that the UWO education department had seemed to presume Munn’s guilt from the outset; undermined Munn’s efforts to defend herself by interrupting her aggressively during meetings; relied excessively on hearsay (or, in some cases, double hearsay); and withheld details of accusations until Munn could be confronted with them in face-to-face meetings.
At key junctures, the SRBA panel determined, the school failed to properly inform Munn in regard to what rules she’d been accused of violating. Instead, Munn was simply provided with a point-form laundry list of laws, behavioural codes, and public statements (not all of which the department even possessed the authority to enforce)—ranging from UWO’s “policies related to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion,” to the Ontario Teaching Profession Act, to what Hibbert referred to vaguely as “strategic initiatives of the Indigenous Implementation policies.” It was left to Munn to comb through these lengthy documents to determine which provisions (if any) were applicable.
While the SRBA panel focused on the procedural errors that vitiated Hibbert’s investigation, the facts reported in Dagnino’s judgment also plainly indicate that the EDI committee’s underlying accusations against Munn were extremely weak on their merits. As the Associate Dean reported during oral arguments before the SRBA panel, none of the allegedly hateful statements attributed to Munn were ultimately deemed worthy of investigation (let alone reprimand or discipline) by any of the “central” authorities to whom they’d been reported—which is saying rather a lot, given the hair-trigger evidentiary standards commonly applied by EDI officials at Canadian universities. As for the plagiarism charge against Munn, it was dropped even before the case got to the SRBA.
Hibbert, who was recently honoured by UWO with a prestigious Distinguished University Professorship, remains listed as a member of the UWO education faculty. But she’s no longer an Associate Dean, having stepped down earlier this year for reasons unconnected to her investigation of Munn. (In a mass email sent in April 2024, she announced that she’d be spending a year in Cambodia on administrative leave.) Donna Kotsopoulos, the Dean of UWO’s education faculty, praised the outgoing Associate Dean effusively upon her exit, and ticked off Hibbert’s many academic accolades. Five months later, Kotsopoulos herself was reappointed as Dean.
One question Margaret Munn got asked a lot during her first semester at teachers college was, “Where are you from?” Such inquiries are considered impolite in modern professional environments—especially progressive milieus such as UWO, where they’re sometimes cast as “microaggressions” against immigrants. Yet it’s a question that arises naturally as soon as one first hears Munn speak. While she’s been a citizen of Canada for most of her adult life, Munn grew up in Glasgow, and never lost her unmistakable Scottish brogue.
By the time Munn enrolled at UWO in 2022, she’d earned an undergraduate degree in French Language and Literature, obtained a teaching certificate in Japan, and worked as a continuing-education instructor in Canada. But her recent work had been limited to short-term contract assignments. Munn’s hope was that by adding a Canadian teachers-college diploma to her credentials, she’d manage to land a permanent job with an Ontario school board.
In an academic program where most students are young Canadian-born women, Munn brought a different perspective, thanks to her classroom experience and international background. She also happened to be at least twice as old as most of her classmates. By all accounts, Munn was not shy about speaking up if anyone said anything she believed was contradicted by lessons learned during her many years in the education sector.
Hibbert didn’t respond to Quillette’s invitation to provide comment for this story. Nor did UWO’s central communications office, except to indicate that “all processes of the Senate Review Board Academic are confidential.” But a well-placed source within UWO’s education department, who interacted often with Hibbert, Munn, and the department’s EDI committee in regard to the events described in this article, was more forthcoming.
In a series of interviews with Quillette, this source argued that the real reason Munn originally attracted negative attention was her argumentative personality and defensive communication style—not anything especially outrageous she’d said. When Munn disagreed with something said in class, she had difficulty simply registering her objections and then “agreeing to disagree” so that everyone could move on with the lessons. Compared to her classmates, her contributions to discussions were more frequent, more pointed, and more lengthy.
Munn’s troubles began during her first session of Indigenous Education: Towards a Decolonizing Pedagogy—a first-year course taught by Michaud, the above-referenced Indigenous Education expert who would later accuse Munn of hate speech.
Sentinel-Review staff
Michaud’s course is described as offering an examination of “the social, political, and historical contexts in which Indigenous students receive schooling”—an important topic for Canadian teachers, given the low average educational outcomes among Canada’s Indigenous population. According to federal statistics published in 2023, 37 percent of all First Nations youth fail to complete high school, a figure four times higher than the corresponding statistic for non-Indigenous Canadian students.
From the beginning, however, Munn was critical of Michaud’s approach to the topic—which, the student complained, focused on politicised claims about Canadian society that seemed unrelated to the day-to-day hurdles faced by Indigenous students.
Overall, Towards a Decolonizing Pedagogy struck Munn more as a series of consciousness-raising sermons about racism than a conventional academic course—a claim that appears well-supported by the course materials she shared with Quillette. In one session that Munn found particularly unsettling, students were asked to comb through their family histories in a bid to impugn those elements responsible for their (presumed) anti-Indigenous beliefs.
Overall, ‘Towards a Decolonizing Pedagogy’ struck Munn more as a series of consciousness-raising sermons about racism than a conventional academic course.
Michaud’s announced mission was to “decolonize” her students’ minds. But Munn had difficulty grasping what the instructor meant by this. What would, say, a “decolonized” school board, high-school chemistry laboratory, or mathematics exam look like? In an interview with Quillette, Munn said she still doesn’t know.
This was the first time Towards a Decolonizing Pedagogy had been offered at UWO’s teachers college. And by Munn’s account, Michaud (who declined Quillette’s request for comment) didn’t seem prepared for skeptical feedback. When Munn raised her hand and asked for a definition of “decolonization,” the instructor reportedly grew impatient, later claiming that Munn was “challeng[ing] the whole notion of decolonization” (which, to be fair, is what Munn appears to have been doing).
Michaud reportedly told Munn that the definition would reveal itself gradually over the course of the semester, but suggested that this would happen only if students engaged in a process of self-reflection informed by anti-colonial precepts.
Neil Gray
The Michaud–Munn relationship spiralled downward from there. During a discussion of cultural appropriation, Munn outraged Michaud by arguing that people “appropriated” kilts and other Scottish cultural symbols all the time; and that, regardless of what one thought of the issue, there was no need to publicly shame individuals for picking the wrong kind of Halloween costume.
This was evidently the moment when Michaud decided that Munn was abetting the rape and murder of Indigenous women: In an email she sent to Hibbert, Michaud argued that Munn’s laissez-faire attitude toward cultural appropriation could be extrapolated to the specific example of a white woman wearing a racy “Pocahontas costume” (a subject Munn claims no one in class ever mentioned). Michaud further reasoned that since such outfits serve to “sexualize” Indigenous women, thereby indirectly encouraging deadly sexual predation, this made Munn an ideological accessory to such crimes.
At one point, Michaud reportedly took Munn into the corridor outside their classroom for a private conversation, so that the pair could tamp down their conflict out of earshot of other students. Instead, Munn became further agitated (and allegedly began yelling) when Michaud reportedly listed the many slights she endured in society due to her Indigenous heritage—a category of abuse into which she slotted Munn’s classroom interjections.
Munn claims that such personal digressions were a regular theme in Michaud’s lectures—a tendency that Munn interpreted as inappropriate and passive aggressive.
Michaud and Hibbert would both later suggest that Munn’s skepticism toward decolonization was rooted in the student’s identity as an immigrant—on the theory that she hadn’t yet internalised her Canadian duty to advance Indigenous reconciliation (even though Munn had, by this point, been a Canadian citizen for 33 years). A set of 16 November 2022 meeting notes written up by a UWO staff member indicate that Hibbert told Munn to stop “rely[ing] on examples from Scotland” when classroom discussions touched on Canadian policies surrounding education.
According to the UWO source who spoke to Quillette, however, Hibbert did not believe she was censoring Munn per se. As the Associate Dean saw things, rather, she was merely reminding Munn that teaching is a regulated profession in Canada, governed by specific codes and policies that should not be confused with those in other jurisdictions.
To properly explain why the EDI committee chose to denounce Munn in such a viciously overwrought manner, it’s necessary to explore the broader political context in which the student’s mobbing played out—including the “anti-colonial” fervor that swept Canada’s progressive academic and activist subcultures in the late 2010s and early 2020s.
Jonathan Kay
During this period, Canada’s intellectual class was rocked by not one but two separate social panics regarding Indigenous issues. The first, which took place in 2017, centred on the issue of cultural appropriation. Four years later, a larger and more sustained eruption occurred following (subsequently controverted) claims that hundreds, or even thousands, of Indigenous residential-school students had been killed and thrown into unmarked graves. Taken together, these furors altered the way many Canadian academics imagined their professional mission. It was now no longer enough to be an effective educator and well-regarded subject-matter expert. One also had to be a politically engaged campus actor who injected anti-colonial themes into his or her teaching and research.
The Canadian government launched a slew of new programs aimed at subsidising initiatives advancing these themes. And much of UWO’s public funding, including the salaries paid to itsCanada Research Chairs, is now directly tied to government-imposed “equity targets.” Like their counterparts at other universities across Canada, UWO administrators found themselves pressured to fast-track the hiring of Indigenous faculty; recite land acknowledgments at every opportunity; and impose mandatory Indigenous-themed course requirements—of which Towards a Decolonizing Pedagogy is a representative specimen. Special Indigenous-themed buildings also began to pop up on campuses. At UWO, by coincidence, the grand opening of the university’s new “Indigenous Learning Space” took place on 7 November 2022, the same day Hibbert was conducting her first meeting with Munn.
During this period, it became common for Canadian scholars to presume that Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians are separated by some deep moral and epistemological gulf—with Indigenous peoples exhibiting unique (and often mystically exalted) “ways of knowing” that operate at variance to the more rigid and impersonal mental habits of white settlers. On its web site, for instance, the UWO education faculty declares Indigenous Education to be “sui generis (a thing of its own kind), and [so] requires pathways that may not be consistent with existing organizational structures and administrative approaches.” And a 2022 UWO press release theorised that the “transformative potential” of Indigenous “ways of knowing” is so powerful that it offers a gateway to “deep epistemological and paradigmatic shifts” in our consciousness. By the use of such language, decolonization and related doctrines are now often presented as something closer to an officially sanctioned spiritual movement (or new-age self-improvement cult) than a coherent academic doctrine.
Josh Dehaas
This is to say that by the time L’affaire Munn landed on Hibbert’s desk in late 2022, it had already become received wisdom that Indigenous educators such as Michaud were to be treated as something more than mere academics: They were to be venerated as oracles who would guide non-Indigenous students and colleagues through the process of shedding their toxic settler mindsets and embracing the “transformative potential” of Indigenous worldviews.
This is why Munn’s classroom behaviour wasn’t taken to be merely annoying or disrespectful by members of the EDI committee, but rather was escalated (on an “emergency” basis, no less) into a species of secular blasphemy—a capital academic crime that called for nothing less than expulsion.
“The whole thing with Munn could have easily been dealt with informally—through conversations,” the UWO source told me. “Instead, the [EDI] committee acted like a ‘vigilante justice committee,’ and demanded that we expel her. That really wasn’t helpful to anybody. But that’s the direction the whole thing went.”
From reading the SRBA decision, it’s easy to conclude that Hibbert and her department’s EDI committee effectively co-operated in the campaign to investigate and discipline Munn. But the UWO source who spoke with Quillette takes a more nuanced view: In the EDI meetings she observed, members styled themselves as disruptive social-justice insurgents fighting to compel supposedly conservative institutional actors—Hibbert and Kotsopoulos, specifically—to take a decisive stand against racism and other forms of hate.
“I was kind of shocked just by their language—even the way they referred to [Hibbert and Kotsopoulos] in that meeting,” the source said. “They were talking about two women they see and work with all the time. In the hallway, it’s just Kathy and Donna…But in the meeting, they refused to even use their names. It was like, ‘The Dean must do this!’ and ‘The Associate Dean must do that!’”
On this theory, the committee members’ maximalist demand that Munn be expelled from UWO was a power play directed as much against the department’s leadership as against Munn herself (an apparent case study for those who argue that heavy-handed EDI policies are more likely to exacerbate differences than to bridge them). And given Hibbert’s decision to launch an investigation, and interrogate Munn as if she really had uttered hate speech, it would seem their pressure campaign was successful—even if it ultimately backfired somewhat spectacularly, thanks to the SRBA judgment in Munn’s favour.
Huge new result:
— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) November 25, 2024
Anti-racism trainings probably lead people to accuse others of racism even when they're not racist.
That's exactly the result of a new study on DEI trainings, with a special focus on the impacts of the works of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo.
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For the UWO source, however, there’s another lesson at play that’s more basic: “This is what happens when people who think they know what’s best get involved in a complicated situation they don’t understand, and just start telling everyone else what to do.”
Hibbert’s own professional history is also germane. A white descendant of famed explorer Ernest Shackleton, she’d spent years grandiloquently extolling the same decolonization movement that Munn was accused of disparaging. And so, had she failed to investigate Munn aggressively, members of the EDI committee had the material they needed to cast her as a hypocrite.
In 2019, Hibbert proclaimed a personal commitment to transform UWO’s education faculty into a “critical site for Indigenous reconciliation.” As a step toward this goal, she extolled a practice by which non-Indigenous colleagues would submit course materials to an Indigenous scholar, so that he or she might pronounce upon whether they adequately “challeng[e] the dominant or privileged paradigm.” In an essay she published on the UWO education website, Hibbert lamented that her office sat on “stolen land,” and committed herself “to redress the multiple forms of violence embedded within settler colonialism.”
Approvingly quoting a visiting Indigenous academic, Hibbert also promised that she would help Indigenous students “further their journeys of resurgence and self-determination,” while encouraging their non-Indigenous peers—and here, the language sounds somewhat ominous when read back in the shadow of Munn’s tale—“understand their role in that journey.”
In fact, the evidence cited by the SRBA suggests Hibbert was something of a true believer when it came to the dogmas surrounding decolonization. At one meeting, for instance, Hibbert flat out forbade Munn from contradicting any statement made by an Indigenous faculty member in regard to matters connected to Indigenous culture or pedagogy: “The things you are being taught in these classes [are] non-negotiable. We don’t debate. We accept [that] the teaching we are getting from our Indigenous colleagues is to help us to create a culturally safe classroom.”
These ideological attestations may help explain Hibbert’s failure to independently fact-check the most serious allegations against Munn—a failing emphasized repeatedly in the SRBA decision. (Most notably, this included the claim that a software algorithm had flagged Munn for plagiarising an assignment—a claim that Munn successfully countered by arguing that she’d simply quoted elements of the text she’d been asked to analyse, and had plainly indicated as much in her submitted work.) After all, the Associate Dean had repeatedly declared that her job was to amplify Indigenous voices, not scrutinise them.
Progressive ideological manias are typically spearheaded by young zealots who present themselves in opposition to an older cohort that’s more moderate in its politics. And yet every protagonist in this messy UWO drama—except Munn herself—was a well-educated, socioeconomically privileged middle-aged woman whose career was shaped long before the so-called “Great Awokening” of the mid-2010s. The faculty’s EDI committee was founded less than a decade ago by “Critical Policy, Equity and Leadership Studies” specialist Goli M. Rezai-Rasht—a UWO professor who earns $175,000 per year for her work on “anti-racism, feminism, anticolonial, critical multicultural education, and the impact of globalization, internationalization, and neoliberal policy reform in education.” The few students who are mentioned in the case (again, aside from Munn) appear only as anonymous informants. And the only Indigenous player appears to have been Michaud, who earns a six-figure income as an educator and enjoys a prominent media profile thanks to her expertise on Indigenous issues.
Hibbert’s exhortation to challenge “the dominant or privileged paradigm” therefore reads as a strange inversion of the officially sanctioned ideological monoculture promoted by her department. In many ways, in fact, the campaign waged against Munn looks more like a corporate exercise in brand protection than any kind of organically expressed manifestation of progressive (or, if one prefers, “woke”) ideology.
For years, UWO had splashed the idea of Indigenous reconciliation across its web site and recruiting materials. Within the education department, the creation of Towards a Decolonizing Pedagogy was a highly visible component of this project, and Munn’s class was the first required to take it. There was a vested interest in ensuring that this inaugural project unfolded according to script—a script that definitely did not include a white settler needling the newly recruited Indigenous instructor with awkward questions.
(In Hibbert’s case, there may also have been a sense of personal loyalty at play: Though the SRBA decision failed to mention this fact, Hibbert served as Michaud’s master’s-degree thesis co-supervisor back in 2009—at a time when Michaud used a different surname.)
Jonathan Kay
In some ways, this understanding of Munn’s saga casts Hibbert’s actions in a more sympathetic (or, at least, less damning) light, as it suggests that she was merely trying to protect UWO’s interests (as she understood them), as opposed to waging any kind of ideologically motivated personal vendetta.
We are all aware of cases in which social-justice enforcers weaponize their movement against heretics in a manner that seems cruel, or even sadistic. But there is no hint that Hibbert, known as a friendly and even ebullient presence within her department, entertained any such malevolent personal motivations. Just the opposite: Hibbert and her well-regarded deputy, former Teacher Education Manager Clare Tattersall, repeatedly provided Munn with institutional supports once they’d observed the massive psychological toll that the school’s investigation was taking on the student. They also found alternative pathways for Munn to complete assignments she’d missed. And when Michaud despaired that Munn’s presence made her feel “culturally unsafe,” Hibbert and Tattersall arranged for Munn’s work to be marked by third parties.
In the same vein, it should be noted that even Michaud, who effectively kicked off the whole inquisition by coming to the EDI committee with her complaints in early November 2022, originally made efforts to resolve her conflict with Munn informally. When Munn submitted an assignment that aligned with Michaud’s expectations, for instance, Michaud thanked her for documenting “our [i.e., Indigenous] historical trauma… and collective resurgence.”
“One important thing to remember here is that Michaud herself is just a part-time contract instructor, not a full-time professor,” the UWO source told me. “Once she shared her story [about Munn] with the [EDI] committee, she didn’t have a lot of power over what they were going to do with it. She found herself surrounded by professors, a lot of them tenured, who see themselves as big [social-justice] experts. And they were telling her, ‘This is what we need to do. This is what we’re going to demand.’”
While the main allegations against Munn originally centred on her attitudes regarding decolonization, the case eventually drew in unrelated accusations from two vocal EDI committee members who, like Rezai-Rasht, are affiliated with UWO’s “Critical Policy, Equity and Leadership Studies” sub-specialty: (1) Jennifer Ingrey, whose research interests centre on “transgender studies” and “anti-homonormative, anti-racist, decolonizing, anti-classist, and disability studies”; and (2) Melanie Lawrence, who studies “forms of oppression that play out through the neoliberalization of higher education.”
Ingrey’s report was vague, indicating little more than that (by Hibbert’s summary), Munn was sowing “intolerance and hate.” Lawrence’s accusations, however, were more specific. In a 31 October 2022 email to Hibbert, she reported that a certain (unnamed) student informant indicated that Munn had been overheard opining that education should be “apolitical”—a viewpoint that Lawrence evidently regarded as a serious ideological offence.
Lawrence also cryptically reported that Munn had been heard communicating troubling “sentiments regarding gender,” indicating an underlying belief in a “biological determinism perspective.”
According to the departmental source who spoke to Quillette, as well as documentary evidence cited by the SRBA, Lawrence was referring to Munn’s use of the pronoun “he” in reference to an infamous male shop-room teacher at an Ontario school who regularly came to class brandishing oversized prosthetic breasts inspired by a paraphilic Japanese pornography subculture known as Bakunyū (爆乳—literally, “exploding milk/breasts”). As the shop teacher’s gender identity was ambiguous at this time, Lawrence and other EDI committee members apparently concluded that Munn’s use of the word “he” was “transphobic.”
Lawrence also reported receiving intelligence from an (again, unnamed) student to the effect that Munn had communicated an ideologically incorrect response to a hypothetical case study in which the adult male companion of a teenaged student’s mother was seen “ogling” an underage female student while on a visit to school premises. During the classroom discussion, Munn had noted that while such an act was inappropriate and offensive, it was not a form of assault, and should not necessarily be reported to police or other authorities. “This created quite some upset [among students],” Lawrence claimed. (Rezai-Rasht, Ingrey, and Lawrence were all contacted by Quillette. None chose to provide comment.)
There were a few other scattered accusations in this vein on Munn’s lengthy EDI-committee rap sheet. But as she concluded her investigation, Hibbert apparently realised that, even taken together, the claims against Munn weren’t sufficient to justify her expulsion.
Indeed, it’s entirely possible that Hibbert never seriously considered expelling Munn, but had simply raised this prospect in a (seemingly misguided) effort to compel some kind of rapprochement between Munn and her critics.
“Kathy [Hibbert] really was just looking for ways to push people to get along,” the UWO source told me. “That was her way of doing things. It was never her idea to escalate this into formal procedures.”
Hibbert announced her findings at an 11 January 2023 meeting, and told Munn she was being placed on “conditional” status by the UWO education department. The Associate Dean then read out a list of conditions that Munn would be required to meet, two of which limited the range of viewpoints that the student would be permitted to express during her remaining time at the university:
You will demonstrate in your classrooms that you understand when you are learning about the need for Teacher Candidates to apply legislated laws and policies in the professional conduct [sic] (e.g., Duty to Report; Sexual Harassment) that these are not debatable. Academic discussion is welcome to furthering understanding about theories and practices but learning about laws and policies is learning about your responsibility to apply them in your professional practice as required by law.
You will demonstrate through your behavior, attitude and responses that when someone from a historically marginalized community is telling you what is culturally acceptable for their community, you will listen and learn, and not debate their cultural knowledge and experience.
In her SRBA decision, Dagnino, an Associate Professor of Physiology/Pharmacology and Paediatrics, declared these conditions to be invalid:
The panel found that these conditions were designed to compel the Appellant to think and speak in a prescribed way based on speculation that [Munn’s] beliefs and speech in the program would translate into unprofessional behavior in public schools (e.g., she would allegedly create culturally unsafe classrooms for youth). These conditions went too far, given their restriction on the Appellant’s ability to speak in class, and the risk of subjective and arbitrary determinations on whether the conditions have been met. As written, the conditions are placing the Appellant in the position of being afraid to participate in class discussions for fear of violating a condition and being withdrawn from the Teacher Education program.
Dagnino also concluded that Hibbert had been wrong to instruct Munn that it was forbidden for students to critique federal or provincial policies governing the teaching profession—such as those policies that, by Hibbert’s interpretation, would require teachers to formally report anyone accused of “ogling” a student:
In the panel’s view, the Appellant’s right to freedom of expression was a significant and relevant factor that should have been considered as part of the decision-making process. However, [Hibbert’s] decision is silent on [this point]. Furthermore… there was no evidence that the University’s Progression Requirements, the Faculty’s internal policies, or [the Ontario College of Teachers’] professional standards provided notice to the Appellant that a Teacher Candidate shall not exercise their right to freedom of expression when an instructor discusses existing law or shares cultural knowledge or experience and, if she did, it could result in withdrawal from the program or conditions. If anything, Teacher Candidates would expect that they would have an opportunity to ask questions and debate issues in a university setting.
In our Quillette reporting on the illiberalideological movements that have swept western campuses over the last decade, we’ve documented numerous case studies in which radicalised student cadres weaponised emergent progressive dogmas such as anti-racism, MeToo, gender ideology, and decolonization against older, less doctrinaire scholars. When conservative culture critics attack what they call “cancel culture” in higher education, this is typically the pattern they have in mind.
Jonathan Kay
But the case of Margaret Munn suggests this template has become outdated, now that those same dogmas have been formally encoded into university syllabi, policy statements, and promotional materials. Far from acting on the progressive ideal of grass-roots activists speaking “truth to power” against a large institution, Munn’s critics on the EDI committee were well-ensconced academics engaged in an authoritarian top-down campaign to compel a relatively helpless student to adhere to their own rigid, officially sanctioned system of beliefs about decolonization, Canadian laws governing education, and even a man who wears Bakunyū-themed fetish gear while teaching high school students how to use table saws and drill presses.
As Dagnino’s analysis demonstrates, these tendencies are incompatible with the broader liberal principles of free speech, viewpoint diversity, and academic freedom that lie at the core of a university’s mission, and which have properly been encoded in UWO’s formal operating guidelines for generations. Until university leaders acknowledge this fundamental policy contradiction, and take steps to walk back the ideological biases that have been allowed to permeate all levels of school administration, bitter campus battles such as this one will likely remain a regular feature of Canadian academic life.
