The Queen’s Stakes

The University’s Five Year Transformational Plan is a window on a battle lost and a war to come

Photo by Piron Guillaume on Unsplash

By Anonymed (an anonymous Canadian Doctor)

To those who have followed the cultural takeover of our institutions these last ten years or so, nothing I’m about to discuss will be particularly shocking. We know the empty jargon. We know the bureaucratic rigidity (and the formation of committees to form committees to oversee committees). We know the lead pipe cruelty of those involved. And we know that the revolution will not stop until every institution is consumed.

Historically it’s a good rule of thumb that the more stifled and clinical the language of an authoritarian regime becomes, the more entrenched its precepts. Whereas two years ago people were screaming about racism and phobias of all kinds, and organizations large and small were issuing greengrocer-like statements of fealty, the language used by such institutions nowadays is, well, institutional. It is bland. It is banal. They speak in a manner that suggests their assumptions are self-evident truths.

Since 2020, I’ve been sent many examples of medicine’s current rot. The University of British Columbia medical school teaches future doctors about the “western colonial concept” of the “gender binary.” The University of Toronto declares its commitment to rooting out anti-Muslim bigotry (well and good) and Islamophobia (less so), which sounds an awful lot like an injunction against blasphemy. The union representing medical residents in the province of Newfoundland openly solicits funds for the Black Lives Matter organization while its foot soldiers are burning buildings and assaulting police officers. And, of course, every medical school, hospital, journal and regulatory body in the country issues declarations of DEI deference more in keeping with Saddam’s court than the institutions of a free society.

One becomes immune to this kind of thing after a while. So when a healthcare provider at Queen’s University recently forwarded me an email from the Associate Dean, Equity and Social Accountability, I didn’t expect to read anything particularly novel or shocking. And I didn’t. But it was precisely its vacuousness that made it so terrifying. This wasn’t some emotional declaration or shriek of fealty. It was calm, measured, and menacing.

The email began:

Our vision is a more equitable, diverse and inclusive faculty that is contributing in meaningful ways to decolonization, Indigenization, anti-oppression and justice. 

A Course for Action, our new EDIIA Action Plan, creates a transformational path for Queen’s Health Sciences over the next five years. 

I invite you to read the full plan, visit our new QHS EDIIA Action Plan webpage, or read the launch announcement. 

The Action Plan is the culmination of two years and hundreds of volunteer hours building relationships, undertaking consultations, conducting research and sustaining momentum in areas critical to equity, diversity, inclusion, Indigeneity and accessibility (EDIIA).  

But the hard work is only beginning, and we all have a part to play. Under the Office of Equity and Social Accountability, six QHS action committees have been formed to oversee the implementation and tracking of EDIIA goals and actions.  

It’s all there. The fusion of revolutionary fervor and bureaucratic inanity. The jargon, the vacancy, and the certainty. The mercenary sensibility. Link to the full plan and you will find more jargon. You will see that the full five-year plan is actually an arm of yet another five-year plan, whose actual tagline is, “It’s Time for a Revolution” (don’t worry, they just mean in the “Academic Health Sciences”). This is a plan for a top down restructuring of the values and systems of a medical institution, without caveat and without waver. 

How do you counter something like that? This entire email says nothing at all. It is empty. The associated documents, meant to flesh out these revolutionary ideas, are little better. The whole thing is (surely) a multimillion dollar make-work exercise in intersectional flowcharting. It is mindless. And yet, it is difficult to refute on its own terms. Within the confines of their worldview, it makes perfect sense - it is pure righteousness. And if they have forsaken reason, objectivity, free inquiry, and the pursuit of Truth, on what grounds might they be argued down? We are past the point where people who devise plans like this, and write emails in this way, are open to argument. To them, there is no argument (and maybe never was). It is only a question of implementation.

Philosopher Sam Harris used to note that all inquiry, scientific and otherwise, is ultimately values based. “What logical argument can you use to convince someone who doesn’t believe in logic?” “What reasoning can you use to persuade someone who doesn’t believe in reason?” Quite. Without a shared understanding of what reality looks like and, more importantly, how to test it, we might as well be from another galaxy (though if they managed to make it here, the aliens would have to have known 2+2=4). This is where we are with institutionalized wokery. We might recognize the alphabet and even be able to sound out some of the words, but the language is fundamentally foreign.

The enemies of civilization knew all too well that control starts with language, and they went about making it so. Neologisms abound (microinsult, racialized, white adjacency, diaper-clad adult man-phobia) and the plain meaning of actual words has been altered if not inverted (truth, racism, brave, stunning). The takeover was linguistic before it was institutional. As such, any resistance to this madness must always keep language at the forefront of its mind. The only solution to corrupt and subversive language games is their categorical rejection. Until a modicum of sanity returns to society, the entire premise behind the woke lexicon must be dispensed with, coldly and without qualification.

The same Sam Harris once suggested that for reason to prevail over faith, there would necessarily need to be a kind of “conversational intolerance” from atheists toward their believing brethren. In Harris’ world, this meant a refusal to accept the casual resort to faith claims whenever believers were confronted with the untenability of particular religious precepts. In my world, this doesn’t just mean resisting email pronouns or eye-rolling at the ever-proliferating alphabet soup of the BIPOC-LGBTQIA alliance (this should have been automatic). It doesn’t just mean mocking the blue-haired misanthropes screaming into the ether about the injustice of BEDMAS. It means no more tolerance for terms like “marginalized,” “people of colour,” or “equity”; no more caveats about the importance of “diversity” or, sorry to say, “inclusion”; and no more preemptive denunciation of any “isms”, racial or otherwise. Even those words (like racism and genocide) with real importance have been laundered in the service of a grotesque ideology and, to the woke, caveats are not magnanimity, they are signs of surrender. 

As for documents like those above, sure, treat them like the single-ply digital toilet paper they are. But it must also be acknowledged that their omnipresence is a symptom of defeat. Make no mistake, those of us opposed to the woke takeover of medicine are losing…badly. The profession succumbed with barely a whimper and seems to be embracing its newfound principles with glee. We are where we are, but it’s not quite over. Reality is a stubborn thing. The revolution started with the language, and so shall its downfall. But in order for this to happen, we can no longer acquiesce to even a single syllable of this puritanical robot-speak. 

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Hating and grating: The Nili Kaplan-Myrth effect

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