Why Frances Widdowson Matters

Fired professor Francis Widdowson

A message to free subscribers and other readers

The following piece written by gifted Winnipeg freelance writer Michael Melanson deals with the need to support Dr. Frances Widdowson, a tenured faculty member unfairly fired by Calgary’s Mount Royal University for the “crime” of exercising her institution’s academic freedom — and Canada’s constitutional right — to openly express her views on controversial subjects. (I highlight the word “tenured” because the firing of professors with this earned privilege for “speech crimes” is nearly unheard of in Western universities, institutions that have codied the free and unfettered opinions, research, and publication of the professoriate as their highest value.)

In defense of Dr. Widdowson, prominent scholar Bruce Gilley, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Ph.D. Program in Public Affairs and Policy at the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University, and President of the Oregon Association of Scholars has written:

“Five days before Christmas, one of Canada’s most courageous scholars was fired by her university because she had consistently dissented from its rigid ideology on indigenous issues. I wish there were more to say about the shameful expulsion of Professor Frances Widdowson by administrative heavies at Mount Royal University (MRU) in Calgary. Alas, the story of her ouster will be so familiar to readers that only the details provide any interest. One wonders, however, if this will be the Stalinist purge that finally alerts citizens in Western countries to the mortal danger posed to their societies by out-of-control Woke movements in contemporary institutions of higher education. For Canada, the Widdowson liquidation could not be more germane to the drift of that once great country into guilt-wracked paralysis.

Widdowson is a political scientist who has spent her career investigating the politics and ideologies of Indian affairs in Canada. Her 2008 book with Albert Howard, Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation, took a critical look at the well-organized industry of indigenous activists and their lawyers whose efforts do such monumental harm to young Indians who might otherwise enjoy successful lives as part of Canadian society.

Her follow-up 2019 book, Separate But Unequal: How Parallelist Ideology Conceals Indigenous Dependency, centered on the intentional segregation and ghettoization of Indians in the name of “justice” that was anything but just.

Both books were published by university presses in Canada that have been doing penance ever since indigenous activists and their academic enablers marked them for roasting. In 2020, MRU’s first “Coordinator of Indigenization,” Liam Haggarty, promoted a social media post by a Ryerson University professor, Ian Mosby, that declared: “As academics we can make it clear to…whoever is going to publish her next book that they are making a choice: publish this racist nonsense again and we’ll stop publishing with or doing peer reviews for you.”

To these two books, Professor Widdowson added two important edited volumes—Approaches to Aboriginal Education in Canada: Searching for Solutions (2013) and Indigenizing the University: Diverse Perspectives (2021)—that documented the sorry depths to which indigenous activism has plunged education and research in Canada.

Given the deadening intellectual monoculture that pervades establishment thinking on native issues in Canada (as in the United States), one would think that a university would celebrate having a “critical theorist” who dissents from the dominant paradigm and “unmasks” the structure of knowledge production that empowers the oppression of marginalized groups. Of course, we all know that “critical theory” is only considered valuable when it targets unWoke ideologies.

I need not summarize what establishment scholars have said about Professor Widdowson. Perhaps just one quotation from a review of Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry written by a self-described indigenous scholar and writer Leanne Simpson (who has since renamed herself “Leanne Betasamosake Simpson”) will suffice: “It is simply stunning that a prominent so-called academic press…(which has lost all credibility as a result), would publish this book…The book is part of a racist colonial machine that still manages to find room to operate in Canada.”

Simpson’s clear declaration that her disagreement with this fellow scholar implied that the latter should not have “room to operate” and that her publisher had “lost all credibility” with the nabobs of academic gatekeeping in Canada speaks volumes about the very problems that Professor Widdowson sought to diagnose. Imagine if scholars who disagreed on the chemical composition of the sun or on the authorship theories of Shakespeare acted in such a censorious fashion.”

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Dr. Widdowson has this to say after recently attending an academic freedom conference at elite Stanford University in California.

Frances Widdowson sent you a new message
Nov 24

Hello everyone:

Thanks, once again, for taking an interest in my case.

There are a few things to report.  First of all, I attended the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference on November 4-5.  This was a great opportunity to meet other academics fighting for academic freedom and hearing the stories of the "cancelled".  A video of my panel can be found here - 

Arbitration is less than two months away (January 16-27, 2022).  We have received thousands of documents as part of disclosure, and they have revealed many interesting things.  I am working hard to make sure that the best possible case is put forward so that Mount Royal University can be held to account and we can make the university an academic space once more.

Click here to help Frances Widdowson.

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