This article originally appeared in the National Post. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Peter MacKinnon, April 30, 2026
Two University of Regina education professors have edited a new volume: Knowledge Under Siege: Charting a Future for Universities (University of Regina Press, 2026) in which fascism, settler colonialism and other right-wing influences are identified as threats to higher education.
The editors and their contributors fill more than 300 pages on an important subject — the future of our universities — and their essays proclaim that universities are besieged from the political right, including strong attacks on DEI, academic freedom and tenure, and that they must reaffirm their raison d’être as “autonomous and self-reflective institutions.”
The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), the national voice of faculty unions, quickly weighed in to support this narrative, calling it “an important milestone in the fight for higher education in a neoliberal age that seems hell-bent on eviscerating it.”
