What follows are notes from an 18 March 2025 speech delivered to the University of Western Ontario law-school chapter of the Runnymede Society, a membership-based organisation that promotes the rule of law, constitutionalism, and individual liberty.

Since this is a law school and many of you are aspiring lawyers, I’d like to start by telling you a little bit about my brief and extremely unsuccessful legal career—which I think explains why I got into journalism.

There are a variety of reasons why I wasn’t much good at being a lawyer—but I think the single biggest reason was that I had a lot of trouble internalising the moral logic of a client’s case if I didn’t believe in it. I resented the idea that I was required to look at the facts of a case and side with my client. Maybe he or she was wrong?

And this is a huge problem, of course, because legal ethics require that your client receives zealous legal representation. But in my case, it wasn’t really zealous. It was more like intellectually conflicted.

For two years, I worked as a tax lawyer in New York City, focusing on cross-border mergers, acquisitions, and asset transfers. Clients would come to us with some complicated transaction, and it was our job to craft arguments as to why these deals shouldn’t be taxed.

The people around me at my law firm were great at this, which is why they were successful. But in my case, I’d often look at the details and say to the client, “Oh come on. Who are we fooling here? Why don’t you just pay your taxes? I mean, how do you think public roads get built?”

It turns out that most clients don’t like getting that kind of response.

But it turned out that the same intellectual qualities that made me wholly unsuited to law-firm work were useful when it came to investigative journalism, which is what I spend a lot of my time doing at Quillette.

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QuilletteJonathan Kay

One of the great things about my job is that the stories I work on often surprise me as I learn new facts. I’ve done numerous investigative stories about universities, in particular. It’s become my specialty. And in pretty much all cases, the story I ended up publishing was different from the story that I thought I was going to publish when I set out investigating it.

And that was the case with my November 2024 article about the University of Western Ontario (UWO) teachers college, entitled “Lessons from a Teachers-College Battle Over Free Speech and ‘Decolonization.’”

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.

QuilletteJonathan Kay

As with a lot of the investigative stories I work on, the source who brought me the story seemed to have a clear idea of who the victim in this story was, and who the villain was.

And this, of course, is completely normal. The reason people bring these kinds of stories to investigative journalists in the first place is almost invariably that they think some wrong was committed to someone, and they want the world to know about it.

But usually, the rights and wrongs of the tale are a little bit more complicated than your sources know—or, at least, than they are willing to admit. Which is to say that the victims aren’t quite as sympathetic as they originally seem, and the villains aren’t quite as nefarious as they originally seem.

Usually, in fact, the more interesting story isn’t really about the moral qualities of the people involved, but the larger institutional forces that drove them into conflict. And that was very much the case with this particular article.

I’m sure a lot of you have read the article. But as I’ve mentioned, I was a law student once. And I didn’t always do the assigned reading before class. So let me just take a moment to summarise it.

The tale centres on a woman named Margaret Munn, a middle-aged educator, someone roughly my age, who was born in Scotland, but who’s lived in Canada for most of her adult life.

Munn enrolled in UWO’s teachers college in Fall 2022 because she wanted to improve her professional credentials, and get more full-time work in the Ontario public-school system. But, as you can imagine, she was a little bit of a fish out of water among her classmates—most of whom who were half her age. 

What’s more, Munn doesn’t do social media. She’s not into politics, or activism, or hashtags. So when she arrived on campus in late 2022, she didn’t really know where the landmines are when it comes to discussing issues surrounding social justice and identity politics.

And this became a problem for her when she started participating in classroom discussions—particularly, as you might imagine, in a required first-year course called Indigenous Education: Towards a Decolonizing Pedagogy.

Now, at this point, I’d like to emphasise that I believe there is value in educating Canadian teachers about issues surrounding Indigenous students, many of whom face special challenges. As I mentioned in the article, the high-school dropout rate for Indigenous students is something like four times the rate for non-Indigenous students. And teaching on remote Indigenous reserves comes with its own special set of difficulties and special skill requirements.

And so it absolutely makes sense that aspiring Canadian teachers should have at least some grounding in the circumstances and history of Indigenous communities.

But, as anyone who’s been around a Canadian university in the last decade or so will know, most of the material contained in courses such as Towards a Decolonizing Pedagogy doesn’t actually consist of practical insights into how to go about the day-to-day job of working in Indigenous communities.

Instead, there’s an enormous focus on academic jargon and faddish abstract concepts lifted from American campuses—such as intersectionality, privilege hierarchies, critical studies, anti-capitalism, and, yes, decolonisation.

By Munn’s account, in fact, Towards a Decolonizing Pedagogy isn’t really an academic class, but rather a consciousness-raising session in which students are relentlessly instructed to probe their personal thinking and family histories for mental contaminants linked to racism and white supremacy. The written class materials that she shared with me very much supported that description.

Now, the average Canadian university student in his or her late teens or early twenties is used to all of this. You know the drill. You keep your mouth shut, nod your head, promise to interrogate your internalised white supremacy or whatever, and read back to the instructor the preferred form of social-justice confession.

All of this has become a cynical, well-established ritual of Canadian academic life. I’m guessing most of the people in this room have been through this drill multiple times. 

It’s like when I went to a largely Christian school in Montreal when I was a teenager, and they said grace before meals, and sang God Save the Queen. I said the words because everyone else did.

But Munn hadn’t been to a university since the 1990s. And so all of this was like a foreign language to her. She kept raising her hand in class, and asking questions such as, What does it even mean to ‘decolonise’ a school system?

And this was a very good question, even if it was a breach of Canadian political etiquette to ask it. The whole idea of formal, structured schooling is inherently linked to the European intellectual tradition. It has no basis in traditional Indigenous societies, where knowledge was passed from one generation to the next by immersive experience and copying your parents when it came to, say, fabricating useful objects or hunting for animals.

So, yes, you can try to make schools more welcoming to Indigenous students. You can add things to the curriculum that they might find pertinent to their lives. You can rename buildings and tear down statues. But the idea of decolonising a school system makes as much sense as decolonising a stock exchange, or a semiconductor factory, or a subway system.

Now, of course, everyone knows this. But in Canada, these are things you’re supposed to think but not say. Universities such as UWO have been given lots of money from the federal government—through avenues such as the Canada Research Chairs program—to “decolonise” themselves. So talking out loud about how this intellectual project makes no sense isn’t just seen as rude: It’s unprofitable. It’s off brand.

This was a top-down corporate-style exercise aimed at destroying dissent to the dominant ideological paradigm at UWO’s teachers college. It was basically an elite-driven exercise in corporate brand protection, not social justice.

And I mention these corporate aspects of the campaign against Margaret Munn because I want to emphasise that the group of people that went after her wasn’t some young student mob engaged in so-called “cancel culture.” The people who went after Munn were well-paid, highly privileged professors and administrators (almost all of whom are white, by the way).

This was a top-down corporate-style exercise aimed at destroying dissent to the dominant ideological paradigm at UWO’s teachers college. It was basically an elite-driven exercise in corporate brand protection, not social justice.

Poor Margaret Munn made for an easy target. In her naïveté, she thought Towards a Decolonizing Pedagogy was like any other class: If you don’t understand something, or the teacher uses undefined terminology, or the material is incoherent, or the syllabus seems more like a religious sermon than a scholastic course, you say something.

Now, if you read the article, you know what happens next:

1. The course instructor, an Indigenous woman named Robyn Michaud, became extremely angry—and reported Munn to the teachers college’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) committee.
2. The EDI committee went ballistic and voted to expel Margaret Munn for ideological crimes against decolonisation. But since the committee had no independent authority to expel Munn (thankfully), they did the next best thing, which was to report their demand to the Associate Dean, Teacher Education, who was then a veteran educator and administrator named Katherine Hibbert.
3. Hibbert dragged Munn in for a series of inquisitions, and launched a two-months long investigation featuring all sorts of anonymous informants, following which Hibbert laid down various rules that Munn would have to abide by if she wanted to avoid expulsion. Most infamously, this included a rule that Munn wasn’t allowed to scrutinise Indigenous people on their claims about anything related to Indigenous issues.
4. Then, in a major plot twist, Hibbert’s attempt to censor Munn was struck down as a violation of the university’s procedural rules and free-speech standards by the UWO Senate Review Board Academic, your university’s highest tribunal for matters relating to academic discipline. The result was that Hibbert was rebuked, while Munn was free to continue her studies—which she did, graduating in 2024 with the rest of her classmates.

From the shotgun summary I just gave you, it’s easy to conclude that this is a simple narrative of a victim (Munn) and a villain (Hibbert, both in her own capacity and as a stand-in for the rest of her colleagues). And there are certainly readers who read my story that way. But personally, I don’t think it’s that simple.

In general, in fact, I don’t think it’s journalistically useful to focus on the personal morality of the characters involved in this sort of story. Both in my professional and personal lives, I’ve rarely met inherently “bad” people.

What’s more interesting to me are the institutional pressures acting on these people, which pushed them to act the way they did.

Once you focus on institutional pressures, you can start thinking about what kind of changes we can make to university culture to prevent things like this from happening again.

In analysing those institutional pressures, one thing I did in the article was take the time and space to educate readers about the political context at play, which is critical to the motivations of the actors involved.

This was 2022. Canadians had just been told by the media that all sorts of unmarked graves had been discovered in Kamloops, British Columbia. And Canadians believed these reports. In academia, especially, the call went out to “decolonise” campuses. Affirmative action programs were initiated to recruit Indigenous students and faculty. Sweat lodges were built. Land acknowledgments became part of committee meetings, university web pages, and course syllabi. And courses such as Towards a Decolonizing Pedagogy were rushed onto the curriculum, often taught by hastily recruited instructors without much experience teaching at the university level.

And this was the case with Robyn Michaud, the rookie instructor of Towards a Decolonizing Pedagogy who reportedly became angry and flustered when Munn asked her to define decolonisation.

Now, again, it’s tempting to turn Michaud into a villain figure. But as I try to emphasise in my article, it’s also possible to see Michaud as a victim, as well.

When she was recruited by the UWO teachers college to teach Towards a Decolonizing Pedagogy, Canada was still in the midst of its unmarked-graves social panic. Indigenous academics such as Michaud were being treated not as normal scholars, but as priestly luminaries who were delivering unfalsifiable moral lessons that would help heal Canada and end its legacy of racism.

Back in 2022, this was the message she was getting from all of her white colleagues—including Hibbert, her old masters degree supervisor. In that atmosphere, Michaud had every reason to expect that her lessons would be received uncritically by students. So you can understand why Michaud was surprised and upset when Munn started asking questions. It must have felt like an ambush.

It was the equivalent of someone getting up in church and asking the priest how transubstantiation works. It just isn’t done. 

As I wrote in the article, it’s also possible to feel some degree of sympathy for the Associate Dean, Katherine Hibbert, who no doubt felt some responsibility for Michaud’s distressed reaction to Munn’s questions.

Hibbert had spent years loudly and publicly trumpeting her own personal commitment to decolonisation, appearing in photo-ops with Indigenous educators, describing her office as sitting on “stolen land,” and pledging her faculty’s unending commitment to Indigenous reconciliation. The UWO teachers college website is littered with her testimonials to the need to listen unquestioningly to Indigenous people, and for non-Indigenous people to obey their lessons.

No doubt, Hibbert believed that most of these soaring announcements she was making were simply decorous and polite—the sorts of slogans that white educators were supposed to say in the modern era. She didn’t foresee a day when she’d be asked to deal with the epistemological contradiction that this sort of religious-style statement of faith creates.

As I’ve noted, a lot of money coming from the federal government is now tied to DEI benchmarks, and the central UWO administration has gone all in on this profitable line of messaging. It’s not like Hibbert was freelancing. She was singing from the same hymn book. And so the most charitable interpretation of Hibbert’s behaviour was that she wasn’t persecuting a hapless student. Rather, she was simply trying to make good on the mantras she’d uttered at a time when such mantras were seen as fashionable.

It’s absolutely true that Hibbert, as an experienced academic, should have been expected to know that her efforts to protect an Indigenous-led decolonisation course from normal forms of scholarly questioning and analysis were absolutely inconsistent with UWO’s larger truth-seeking mission—not to mention baseline standards of free speech and academic freedom. On the other hand, it’s not like any of her administrative superiors at UWO had given her any indication that they were troubled by this fundamental conflict embedded in the university’s institutional values.

Just the opposite: All over Canada, academics were winning awards and fawning media profiles by loudly and publicly putting down stakes with the decolonisation movement.

Now I realise that none of this shines a particularly flattering light on Hibbert. But it does offer an alternative explanation to the idea that she was on any sort of gratuitous power trip—much less that she enjoyed putting the screws to Munn.

As I took pains to note in my article, Hibbert and her deputy, a woman named Clare Tattersall, reacted humanely when Munn displayed signs of psychic distress due to the ongoing investigation.

As I also noted, I’m not convinced that Hibbert was altogether serious about her threats to expel Munn. Rather, she likely just wanted Munn to shut up and stop calling attention to the intellectually incoherent message the university was promoting in regard to decolonisation.

I’m projecting here, because Hibbert didn’t speak to me for the article, but it seems that she was betting that Munn would be quickly intimidated by the initial inquisition sessions, and so would start playing ball. The reason the story ended up on my desk is that Hibbert misjudged her target: Munn is a tough nut. She never gave up.

One thing that really stuck with me from the sources I spoke to is that they generally described Hibbert as a nice person who wanted to make everyone happy. And here again, we get to the institutional forces at play: you can see how someone who has that nice collegial disposition can get seduced by some of the language around decolonisation—which is worded in the mother’s milk of inclusion, social justice, reconciliation, healing, anti-racism, and so forth. It’s all about “listening” and “decentring yourself”—the kind of thing they tell you when you go on one of those consciousness-raising weekend retreats or therapy sessions.

Academics aren’t just thinking machines. They’re human beings, which means they are social creatures who crave the acceptance and admiration of their peers. Women are stereotypically conditioned to seek out this kind of affirmation more than men, which is I think why—and this is admittedly speculation on my part—guilty white women so often end up being the ideological enforcers of the “decolonisation” movement.

And let’s face it: There’s careerism at play. Your actual academic research might not get much notice. But as soon as you start marketing yourself as your department’s loudest Indigenous “ally,” suddenly you can become a star.

There are other players in this drama, too; the members of the teachers college EDI committee who agitated for Munn’s expulsion. Now, on the surface, their actions do seem quite unpardonable. As I reported in my story, several of them not only agitated for Munn’s expulsion, but then went out of their way to solicit (extremely dubious) testimonies from anonymous students to the effect that Munn had uttered other ideological heresies. The whole thing was very creepy.

But again, this behaviour becomes easier to explain when you look at how these women built their academic careers.

Three of the anti-Munn ringleaders on the DEI committee are affiliated with a sub-unit within the teachers college known as “Critical Policy, Equity and Leadership Studies”—which appears to operate, in part, as a kind of in-house commissariat that monitors the ideological purity of other faculty members.

Field of Critical Policy, Equity, and Leadership Studies

Western University, in vibrant London, Ontario, delivers an academic and student experience second to none.

Western University Crest

One of them is Jennifer Ingrey, whose research interests centre on “transgender studies” and “anti-homonormative, anti-racist, decolonizing, anti-classist, and disability studies.” Another is Melanie Lawrence, who studies “forms of oppression that play out through the neoliberalization of higher education.” Then there’s the founder of the EDI committee, Goli M. Rezai-Rasht—a UWO professor who earns CA$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.”

Now, if you’re a conservative critic of the state of education in Canada, you will fume that our universities should not be bursting at the seams with this kind of academic. I mean, how many six-figure “anti-homonormative” scholars does one department actually need?

But whether or not you take that view, it can’t be disputed that these academics are employed by the university in good standing, and have even been put in charge of their faculty’s EDI committee. As much as their views may seem ideologically extreme, they aren’t exactly hiding their radicalised convictions: They boast about them on university web pages and social-media accounts.

Their entire careers were built around the apocalyptic idea that Canada is a seething den of racism and hate that must be extirpated through revolutionary acts of consciousness-raising. And so it’s hardly surprising that, when given the chance to exercise their fury against a student such as Munn, they reacted as viciously as possible. To ruin the life of Margaret Munn would be, for them, not a disgrace, but a badge of honour.

What I am saying here is that if you want to draw lessons from what happened to Margaret Munn, don’t focus on the moral worth of the individual actors who persecuted her. They are but representative specimens of a larger system that rewards careerists and ideological outliers who either wilfully ignore, or actively despise, the liberal values that should be at the heart of the university mission—such as viewpoint diversity, free speech, and unfettered intellectual inquiry.

Their actions are fully explainable by the normal tools of incentive-based institutional behaviour. And if you want to reform your university, you need to change those incentives.

Before closing, I would like to repeat something that I often tell my conservative friends—which is that for all the horror stories we hear about illiberal attitudes and DEI gone amok on campuses, the vast majority of Canadian academics want nothing to do with these witch hunts.

Their actions are fully explainable by the normal tools of incentive-based institutional behaviour. And if you want to reform your university, you need to change those incentives.

But this silent majority of academics is too distracted, or busy, or intimidated, to do anything about the tiny cliques of extremists who occupy the commanding heights of discourse when it comes to subjects such as decolonisation.

In some cases, however, brave academics do truly stick their necks out to protect liberal values as such. In this regard, I would like to close by discussing a UWO chemist named Lina Dagnino, who is a professor in your Department of Physiology and Pharmacology.

Her research focus is on skin biology and stem cells—a subject I confess I know nothing about. What I do know is that she took time away from her other professional duties to write the UWO Senate Review Board Academic decision, in her capacity as SRBA chair, that vindicated Margaret Munn’s claims that she’d been mistreated.

That decision was seventy pages long. I will end by quoting just one paragraph from it—the most important, I think, in which she and her fellow panellists passed judgment on Hibbert’s demand that Munn remain silent on the subject of decolonisation insofar as her interlocutors happened to be Indigenous:

The panel found that these conditions were designed to compel [Margaret Munn] 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… 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.

Her decision (and that of her fellow panellists) to stand up for traditional academic values is especially laudatory given that, as far as I can tell, they received no professional benefit from doing so. There’s no academic “allyship” award at UWO for safeguarding intellectual freedom.

Rather, they stood up for UWO’s core values because it was the right thing to do.

I believe this university, like all the others across the country, are full of such principled scholars. And I urge them to find their voice.