Oh, My God - Thunberg and Henry to be given honorary degrees

If ever you wanted proof of how far our society has moved to political correctness, look no further that the University of British Columbia.

Greta Thunberg and Bonnie Henry are to be awarded honorary degrees. 

No problem?  Well yes. 

Thunburg, not a scientist, proclaims unscientific statements on the climate. 

Dr. Henry, Public Health Officer for the Province of British Columbia, recommended lockdown plans which discriminate and unjustifiably hurt people. 

The alarmism of Thunberg has been contradicted by hundreds of scientists, 913 of them signing the World Climate Declaration. 

The pandemic lockdowns have been contradicted by thousands of health professionals, 13,000 medical and health scientists of the Great Barrington Declaration. 

This is a University that is supposed to have as one of its main tenants to seek after truth and in both these cases the truth is yet to be determined with new information and research being released every day.

How can free inquiry flourish in an institution when the leaders of that institution have taken sides prejudicing the very tenants of why the institution exits? 

Of course I should not be surprised. Reading the UBC website one finds: “In 2016, UBC has 95 active agreements with 52 universities from mainland China. UBC has developed six joint degree programs with Chinese partner universities with another five under development. The university has also built six joint research centers with its Chinese partners.”

This, a communist country that prohibits free speech and a free press, has one party rule, that imprisons those who oppose them, and discriminates against minorities. And now recently prohibits international observers from free access to the Wuhan Virology Lab, likely home and birth of the present global pandemic. 

So one of Canada’s “leading” universities in the minds of many, is cozy with the Chinese, one of the world’s great polluters and then tries to celebrate a prejudiced climate spokesperson? 

The hypocrisy overwhelms. 

Alfred North Whitehead, one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century, wrote a book entitled the Aims Of Education in which he said, ”Knowledge does not keep any better than fish.”

The late Robert J Mulvaneym, Professor of Philosophy for 30 years at University of South Carolina, in writing about Whitehead and his works quotes Whitehead as saying: “There is a creative element to all university activity (and not merely to the fine arts), a creativity necessary to the survival of life in a world of adventurous change. 

“While universities have a calling to preserve the great cultural achievements of the past, this conservatism must not be allowed to degenerate into a passive and unreflective commitment to inert ideas. "

“The task of a university is the creation of the future" (Whitehead 1938, p. 233). Ironically perhaps, the modern university, even one containing a business school, should not be managed like a business organization. The necessary freedom and risk, so important to the inventive scholar, requires a polity "beyond all regulation" (Whitehead 1929, p. 99).

The people nominated do not fit free inquiry and creativity; rather fixed, and irrational reactions to the world’s issues. This is a negation of the University. 

Oh, how far we have strayed from the Whitehead ideal!