Kevin Kee

Letter to the Editor graphic

“Academic freedom, which protects professors and researchers from sanctions when they dissent from prevailing opinions, has been seriously undermined by the authoritarian left. This was confirmed recently in a controversy concerning a University of Ottawa professor who spoke the ‘N-word’ in class,” writes Stuart Chambers, a professor at the school of sociology and anthropology at the University of Ottawa.

After the faculties of social sciences and engineering at the University of Ottawa both implemented similar measures, the faculty of arts will give undergraduate students the choice, after receiving their final course mark, of having ‘satisfactory’ or ‘not satisfactory’ appear on their transcript rather than an alphanumeric grade.

The Faculty of Arts, then, doesn’t seem to be in a hopeless situation after all. Though enrolment numbers have fallen sharply, there are ground-breaking initiatives and promising partnerships in the works to grow the faculty and make it a leader in the humanities in Canada.