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Monday, February 9, 2015

Two Calgary academics won't be invited back to Thompson Rivers University after their speech makes students "uncomfortable"

...Howard felt the presentation was mischaracterized. He said it looked at how lawyers take advantage of funding put aside for aboriginal people.

"We were trying to convey the existence of an aboriginal industry that has developed around the huge amounts of money that are being transferred in the interests of native people and are intercepted by a whole layer of people, the largest component of which is the legal element," he said.

"Aboriginal people today are living in poverty…lawyers are making a fortune in keeping them there — keeping them in need of their services and the services of other people in the industry."

Howard said he was approached by some students who appreciated his perspective, but the law students that spoke to the CBC felt differently.

"The language they used and a lot of topics they said and addressed and a lot of things they had up on the projector screens were certainly a lot more shocking and dramatic than that," said second year law student Blake Tancock.

Howard said he feels he is being censored because his views don't line up with those of the TRU faculty. He said he plans to "expose" the university's approach by bringing his concerns to the Society of Academic Freedom and Scholarship.

"I found that one rather strange thing was that we kept being assured of how accepting they were of a wide range of views, open discussion — how they welcomed a range of opinions and freedom of speech and so on, and I thought, I take that for granted at any Canadian university contemporarily," he said...

h/t Bob O

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