A tenured professor is fired for challenging woke ideologies

Start your free trial

Access exclusive members only RebelNews+ shows, event footage, and documentaries

Subscribe

Frances Widdowson, a former professor of economics, policy, and justice, was fired from Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta. She was fired after colleagues and activists called for her termination because she dared to challenge the groupthink on some apparently untouchable issues. 

Widdowson suggested that progressive activism and woke ideology were undermining academia and the capacity to engage in productive dialogue so fundamentally as to render it unrecognizable. 

Having spent much of her professional career studying indigenous issues, and co-authoring books critical of the current state of indigenous affairs, she often found herself facing significant opposition from her woke colleagues. 

Widdowson once made the self-evident claim that residential schools provided access to education that otherwise might not have been available, which is not an endorsement of the residential school system, but a mere statement of fact. Despite the factuality of the claim, she was vilified and called a “denialist." 

The terminated professor also made remarks critical of the unquestioning adoption of progressive activism, particularly the BLM movement, by academics and colleagues and the total surrender of critical thinking on subjects deemed out of bounds by woke culture. 

We are in a climate where professors are defending “minor-attracted persons” (pedophiles) and are encouraging children to take hormone suppressing drugs to change their genders. It is absolutely astounding that Widdowson, a tenured professor, was fired for making some historically accurate comments about residential schools and posing fair criticisms about how wokeism is compromising her colleagues and the university. 

Early in 2022, when Widdowson's firing originally took place, Rebel News was fortunate to speak with another former Mount Royal University professor, Marco Navarro-Génie, about the decline of universities and Widdowson’s termination. You can watch that interview here if you are interested. 

While many media outlets were quick to jump on the bandwagon and cast Widdowson as a person of ill repute, we knew something about the story wasn’t adding up. This was not a firing; it was cultural cancelation. 

Rebel News joined by Frances Widdowson for an in-depth chat about what happened to her and about her plans moving forward. 

Unlike mainstream media and academics who rely on government grants and bailouts to get by, we are able to ask questions and have tough evidence-based conversations because we aren’t fishing for handouts. To support our truly independent and unbeholden journalism, consider subscribing to RebelNews+.