Barry Cooper: Empire of Fear: How the Pandemic Made a Canadian University Lose Its Mind

Entrance to the University of Calgary campus in a file photo. (Jeff Whyte/Shutterstock)

Commentary

Universities have traditionally been the home and sponsor of critics and commentators, but as institutions they are neither critics nor commentators. Like the Governor General, the university has no official position on controversial social and political policies. Nor does the institution pick one such policy and impose it on its members. As for university professors, traditionally they have sought to bring logic and evidence to illuminate obscure problems and to speak the truth about what they see.

The COVID-19 policies developed at my university, the University of Calgary, starting in the early spring of 2020, and the public justification for them, have violated these traditions. Consequently, the university has contributed to, rather than detracted from, the moral panic that has been the most obvious attribute of the two-and-a-half-year COVID event.

A central role in any moral panic is played by the mainstream media. They provide a megaphone. The media, however, cannot act alone. Regarding COVID-19, they relied on “experts,” especially those credentialled by medical schools. From the start, my colleagues in the med school have provided the media with alarming soundbites. They have been outspoken advocates of non-pharmaceutical interventions—enforced agoraphobia by way of lockdowns, distancing, and masking. They were oblivious of the evidence, available from the late spring of 2020, that the cost of lockdowns was exorbitant and that masking—“hygiene theatre”—was medically useless.

Yet, as late as the end of June 2022, alarmists in the med school (identified in a university publication as “experts”) declared that the pandemic was not over so masks should still be worn. Doing so “shows you are looking out for others,” a combination of virtue signalling and theatre.

The explanation of university policy offered by the “senior leadership team,” as they style themselves, changed enormously over the course of the pandemic. Remote learning was introduced early in March 2020. A few days later the president said no one should “unduly fear” entering a campus building. The next day, March 22, 2020, he issued a “directive” that, “effective immediately,” all faculty were to work from home.

After assuring members of the arts faculty that “we are well led,” the dean advised us to take care of ourselves, “even take a nap.” Later he suggested taking part in “digital Earth-Day activities,” and share pictures of our “work-at-home pets.” We were also reminded to take a shower, brush our teeth, and “phone your mom.” Human Resources later suggested we “consider bringing a small plant to the office,” but only “if it is permitted.”

These administrators were seemingly unaware that they were infantilizing their academic colleagues who otherwise would likely remember to brush their teeth and get enough sleep.

By the late spring of 2020, and despite the early messages from the president about not panicking, the administration was poised to take advantage of a scared university population. The so-called crisis provided the occasion for additional masking restrictions, which became a dress rehearsal for even more draconian restrictions on vaccination.

By September 2020, compliance with the masking directive was the sole focus. Nothing was ever said about its (in)effectiveness, though the evidence was steadily accumulating.

In the spring of 2021, the vaccination campaign began in response to the Alberta government’s statement that in-person classes would resume that fall. Vaccination was presented as “practicing compassion,” a sentimentalism that soon solidified into a strategy: Getting rid of non-pharmaceutical measures—distancing and masking—depended on compliance with pharmaceutical ones—vaccination.

By the summer of 2021, the dean lamented that vaccine mandates were unavailable to the administration, though testing the unvaccinated became mandatory. Then, as by magic, mandatory vaccination became possible. In mid-September, exhortation to get a jab was replaced by a new directive: everyone on campus was to be vaccinated by New Year’s Day, 2022. Unvaxxed professors would not be paid. This new measure, the president helpfully explained, was part of a “logical progression.”

There was no discussion of any evidence regarding adverse reactions to the vaccine, though by the fall of 2021, similar to the situation with masking, considerable evidence against them was available. Moreover, the rapid development of mRNA vaccines meant that no one had sufficient information to declare that they were safe. That is, nobody could give informed consent to receive the shot. The university policy therefore violated the Nuremberg Code, drafted after the post-World War II trials of the major war criminals—to say nothing of common law and the Charter.

The U of C administration was hardly alone in this violation of informed consent as an ethical imperative. Nor were they alone among Canadian universities in nurturing a climate of fear among all members of the university “community.” By moving from lockdowns to remote learning, from exhortation regarding masking and vaxxing to compulsory mandates—all the while ignoring evidence that indicated such policies were useless and evil—the university became complicit in an avoidable moral panic.

Whether or not the result down the road is the creation of an authoritarian biosecurity state, the university abandoned one of its most important historical tasks: skepticism regarding official science.

A longer version of this story first appeared at C2CJournal.ca

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.