Podcast #261: Lessons from a Teachers-College Battle Over Free Speech and ‘Decolonization’
Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay discusses recent events at the University of Western Ontario, where instructors spent months denouncing an outspoken education student who’d asked awkward questions about Indigenous reconciliation—until a tribunal concluded they’d violated her rights.
Welcome to the Quillette podcast where, this week, I have something different for you.
Instead of an interview, I’ll be narrating my latest Quillette investigative piece from November 28, titled Lessons from a Teachers-College Battle Over Free Speech and ‘Decolonization.’
Jonathan Kay
As you’ll hear, it’s a story about a social panic at the teachers college of the University of Western Ontario (UWO), located in the Canadian city of London, about two hours west of my home in Toronto.
As I report in the story, instructors at the UWO teachers college spent months denouncing an outspoken student as a peddler of hate speech, even though she’d done little more than annoy people in class by talking a fair bit, and asking awkward questions about Indigenous reconciliation.
But unlike a lot of these campus investigations I’ve done for Quillette, this one, as you’ll see, has a happy ending—of sorts.
The next time you hear from me, I’ll be back to my usual interview format. But I wanted to give you a taste of what our Quillette narrations are like. And if you like it, there’s a whole other podcast channel called Quillette Narrated, where my podcast co-host Iona Italia—who has a much better narrator’s voice than me, I’ve been told, regularly narrates some of our most popular articles.
