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….