UBC’s Karen Pinder, a member of its faculty of medicine, recently posted on her X account, in response to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump: “Damn, so close. Too bad.” That was followed by: “What a glorious day this could have been.” Her comments, for obvious reasons, have since been deleted.
I hate to see someone fired for expressing their honest opinion, but is celebrating the murder of another human being behavior worthy of a supposed academic? As a student of English Literature at Hamilton’s McMaster U. in the Seventies, I was blessed with two wonderful Indian professors who clearly loved the literature the British had introduced to their Asian homeland. They taught their subject with joy and no mention whatsoever that it had been imposed on them by an oppressive, colonialist invasion. But of course they were teaching long before the Left decided to remove Intellectual Substance from its narrative in favor of the Neo-Marxist delusion that History is about Power and nothing more. However Drs. Aziz and Juneja may have felt about the British, they never once allowed their political views to intrude upon their teaching. Indeed in my B.A., M.A., and P.H.D. studies, I saw no evidence whatsoever of the political biases of any professor. Sadly, this is no longer true. A significant percent of Western “academics,” embracing the Neo-Marxism of the contemporary Left with a kind of religious fanaticism, feel no reluctance whatsoever in making it part of the educational experience. One wonders at the kind of ideological poison to which Karen Pinder has exposed her students. One wonders how many young Americans have come to see the presidency of Joe Biden as a time of epic accomplishment simply because of the bias of their “educators.”