The New Reign of Terror
With the deranged era of diversity, equity and inclusion drawing to a close, don't underestimate the power of markets, nor pity the victims of the financial guillotine.
Detractors of Elon Musk, one-time darling of the progressive left and, for a little while still, the boss of the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) would argue his mania for sweeping funding cuts across a swathe of government departments has evoked a modern-day Reign of Terror, repeating the grim history of Revolutionary France in a bygone era. It’s almost as though Musk had reinvented the guillotine—cutting through political opposition was never so efficient; and no one is safe, academics least of all.
Here is Canada, baskets now await the impending public demise of 18 academic programs at Toronto’s York University, and bear witness to the beginnings of a new revolution, the altogether less bloody but no less dramatic reform of Ontario’s seats of higher learning. It is tempting to ascribe the cull as a pre-emptive move by Canadian administrators conscious of DOGE’s efforts to divest from diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) across American colleges campuses. After all, 10 of the casualties are ‘studies’ programs (only one, biomedical physics, is from the hard sciences).
But the truth is not a maple-leaf-shaped backlash against wokery so much as a stiff dose of economic reality as Canada’s universities and their monomaniacal left-leaning elites now face a market downturn after years of frittering away tax and tuition dollars on frivolous and unprofitable programs.
With deans scrambling across the province to balance the books and shore up their precarious finances in an era where higher learning is co-opted into a commercial enterprise driven, paradoxically, by a swollen administrative class drunk on a toxic brew of neo-Marxism and social justice activism, the ‘pausing’ of academic programs should come as no surprise.
They have little choice. Many Ontario universities have racked up eye-watering multi-million dollar deficits in recent years, with predictions that the sector’s combined debt will reach one billion by mid-2026.
Ontario’s Confederation of University Faculty Associations, a lobby group, are predictably unappreciative, bemoaning the inadequacy of Doug Ford’s recent $1.3 billion top-up and laying the blame for the shortfall squarely on the universities’ reliance on inflated tuition receipts from international students, now hopelessly waylaid by the Liberal government’s decision last January to slash student visas by more than a third in 2024. But this argument is disingenuous, ignoring the reality that almost half of Ontario universities, York included, were already in a financial mess well before that about-turn, and have been slow to shed the fat.
Now caught in the economic meat-grinder are the champions of the pervasive Postmodernist value systems. After a decade running our universities and stuffing their deranged ideology down everyone’s throats, these self-proclaimed social engineers are facing the very same objective realities they long chose to deride and deny.
Translated into their own beguiling language, the ‘lived experience’ of every dean has, all-of-a-sudden, become very less diverse. And so, necessarily — and with unspeakably wicked Darwinian certitude — cuts are in the offing, and the catalogue of offerings to be axed at YorkU this September make for predictable reading.
Whilst it’s easy for scientists like me to dismiss the ‘studies’ programs as concocted nonsense that are impractical and invariably wear a frown of studied self-importance in the market of ideas, it’s important to recognise the inherent value of universities denominating a broad church across the knowledge economy.
But the absurd toils of love that have impassioned deans presiding over universities’ purse strings with blatantly political projects such as DEI and cultural decolonisation during the Trudeau era have paved a yellow-brick road to woke excess, a mythical realm where financial priorities have become inverted. It’s past time to review spending through the lens of realism.
In its efforts to reassure nervous professors, the University of Toronto circulated a balanced budget amounting to $3.62B for 2025-2026. Good news, then. But at my own Mississauga campus (UTM), documents I’ve seen confirm that UTM splurged in excess of one million dollars on an indulgent office refresh for the principal’s ballooning entourage of bureaucrats, while elsewhere senior academics cry out for much-needed and long overdue renovations to research and teaching facilities. An inside source alleges that’s over 25% of the typical annual budget allotted for campus renovations.
What’s just as disturbing as any number of glimpses behind the administrative curtain is the realisation that the ongoing turnstile management at UTM over the last half-decade has cost the university, and by extension the taxpayer, over $1.5 million in deans’ remuneration packages according to Ontario’s Sunshine List.
Yet, over that same period, a massive multi-million budgetary black hole has grown remorselessly, sucking the financial lifeblood out of academic departments. Meanwhile, my home department, and the office of the dean that presides over it, collectively employ more than 70 bureaucrats, most of whom neither teach nor conduct any academic research, and cost millions.
You might imagine university deans are appointed for their relevant fiduciary experience. That may or may not be true, but there’s little doubt that decanal longevity on my campus has not been impressive. Last November, UTM welcomed its fifth dean since 2019, Bill Gough. Bill himself is a fine climate champion for polar bears whereas his more dubious predecessors are a geographer who entrusts climate justice to marginalised groups, a communications specialist who introduced us to the world’s very first autistic glove puppet, and an international authority on social first impressions who ties earning capacity to facial cues.
Are universities in good hands, then? It hardly matters. Ultimately it is the market that will winnow the chaff, and we can expect a good deal more academic streamlining in the foreseeable future. Inevitably, the grievance subjects and DEI will go to the guillotine. Back in 1794, all hell broke loose. But in 2025, it’s legitimate to cheer along these academic executions and shake a common-sense fist at the imprudent diversicrats. The new Terror, let’s face it, is all theirs.
