Politically Correct Indoctrination and Censorship at York University

University education is supposed to be about exploring and discussing ideas. At York University, it's about suppressing them if they don't conform to their hypocritical concepts of political correctness:

Sex! Scandals! Worldviews Conference shows academics don't understand news media

The ostensive purpose of the Worldviews Conference held in Toronto this past weekend was to discuss the convergence of media and "higher learning." Attending the conference, one thing that became readily apparent is that the academics who had gathered there from across North America and the world to pronounce on how the media should work have virtually no understanding of how the media does work.

Nothing illustrates that better than the fact that a conference on how to shape media coverage of Academia couldn't even manage to shape media coverage of itself. The only significant media attention the Worldviews Conference received was about Bill Ayers, Barack Obama's Weather Underground terrorist friend, being barred entry to Canada to attend it.

It was almost startling to watch the assembled eggheads who purport to have some knowledge of the subject appear perplexed about why the press isn't more anxious to effectively act as a public relations arm of academia. Particularly, some of the worst examples of academia like conference sponsors OISE and York University, both notorious for being institutes where activist ideology trumps education.

Want media atention?  Try this!

The media, while an integral component of a free society, is also a business, and increasingly a highly competitive, entertainment-focused business. As such it has to give people a measure of what they want to see. And it's no secret people want to see scandals, sex, celebrity news and developments that have an immediate and direct effect on their lives.

The media gives university affairs coverage when it satisfies one or more of those categories. As an ironic example of that, Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper, another conference sponsor, devoted most of its sparse coverage of the conference to ruminating on a recent scandal at The University of Alberta where the Medical School Dean was accused of plagiarizing a convocation speech.

The tone of undeserved self-congratulation that pervaded the conference was exemplified in one seminar where a professor from the Ontario College of Art and Design discussed how she and a team had developed, with grant money, an application for people with brain injuries resulting in amnesia and memory loss. These people often cannot remember people they have met, nor can they recall their emotional response to those people, and have to relearn it on each encounter. Her team developed an application that allows amnesia victims to create a diagram with squiggles and colors of the sort the Jackson Pollack would have painted while hung-over. These diagrams are supposed to convey the emotional response they have to different people that they can refer to during encounters where their memory fails them.

At the end of the seminar, I asked the professor if the amnesiacs for whom she created the application also lost the ability to read English. She shook her head and said no. So I asked the first thing that popped in my head when she mentioned her invention. Wouldn't it make more sense to write down a note like "Bob Smith - hate him, tells boring stories, but throws good parties" rather than have to rely on some vague and hard to interpret abstract design to convey less precise information?

She then commenced an articulate, intelligent and lengthy response, from whose first sentence it was obvious I was being fed a line of BS. Not that it matters; the grant cheque cleared and was spent a long time ago.

The conference wrap-up was more evidence that the relationship between the media and universities will be a relationship on terms that neither can dictate nor seem to appreciate. Titled The role of media and higher education in promoting democratic culture, it was evident that academics think the media should be a tool for promoting the Academy's particular notions of democratic culture. Given the heavy Marxist influence in universities, that might not be such a good thing.

I suggested to the panelists that universities take public funds, yet remain almost unique in the way they hold themselves unaccountable for it. One of the critical aspects of a democracy is the right of the public to know how their resources and taxes are being used. No other publicly funded institutions (with the possible exception of the CBC) could take tax money, and when confronted with a scandal, refuse comment and not provide transparency. Yet universities do that regularly, and all the while lecturing everyone else about how democracy should work.

The panelists response fell back on the lazy, staple argument of "academic freedom," without seeming to appreciate that transparency and academic freedom are not necessarily incompatible. But they do have reason not to be entirely forthcoming. Academics understand that if the public had better knowledge of what was being taught in some programs, universities' decision-making processes and how public funds were used, public outrage would lead to irresistible pressure for major reforms in the university system.

The Worldview Conference's goal of finding a way for universities to better exploit the media to spread their message is unlikely to be achieved any time soon. Until academics and university administrations appreciate that hypocrisy, secretiveness and self-indulgence are poor platforms to stand on to pontificate about democratic reform, the relationship between the media and the academy will continue to be as adversarial as it is cooperative.

Do citizens have an interest in discussing the politicization and radicalization of publicly funded academia?

The academic supervisor of the OISE Hate Thesis gave an interview to the radical  leftist website rabble.ca that was published today. In it, Sheryl Nestel makes the predictable accusation that criticism of the paper that alleges a Jewish conspiracy to "obscure Jewish privilege, deny Jewish racism and promote the interests of the Israeli nation-state" is part of a larger "neo-con" conspiracy.

Ms Nestel told rabble:

"The National Post is Canada's premier neo-conservative newspaper and it's pretty clear that neo-con politics demand unconditional support of Israel as a key ally in the "Clash of Civilizations." I think the attack on OISE is simply an attack on progressive academia and on burgeoning student activism against Israeli human rights violations."

The larger issue that escapes Ms Nestel's analysis is the right of the public to be aware of and have input into issues that directly affect them.

One may legitimately ask, 'how does a radicalized program in some obscure area of study affect me?" The answer is:  more than you may think.

The University of Toronto, of which the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education's Sociology and Equity Studies in Education is a part is, in large measure, publicly funded.

Its graduates go on to teach and influence generations of impressionable students in high schools and universities throughout Canada.

Universities are supposed to foster critical thought; the ability to hold, balance and reason among many competing ideas and ideologies. Sociology and Equity Studies in Education department at OISE appears to foster a very narrow approach to the acceptance of ideas.

Ms Nestel's mentoring, which is typical of the overall philosophy of her program, has recently produced theses which allege the collective accountability of Jews, a Jewish conspiracy to manipulate Holocaust education in order to allay Jewish racism, and most recently, one that alleges western feminists who oppose female circumcision are motivated by racism and genital obsession.

Is there no public interest in questioning whether Canadian students should be taught and influenced by teachers who advance those types of ideas? Or if we should be collectively funding a program that blindly accepts such assertions without providing alternatives from more mainstream perspectives?

In her interview, Ms Nestel stated:

The scholarship of all the students and faculty of the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies has been deemed to be tainted because much of it is seen as somehow less than "objective." 

..The demonization of work that has contributed in innumerable ways to efforts to eliminate gender, racial and class inequality in Canada is ignorant and unconscionable.

While asserting her "academic freedom," to which she of course has a right, Ms Nestel ignores some other democratic principles. What of the right of the public as a whole to intellectual freedom? Is it "ignorant and unconscionable" for the public to express concern about how their children may be influenced and how public funds are being spent and to what end?

The failure to recognize those larger issues says a great deal about academic freedom and the level of intellectual discourse at OISE.

Barbara Kay invents the word for dimwitted Israel bashers: Peto-philes

"To understand birthright-bashing Jews such as Peto and company, you have to understand the leftist contribution to modern anti-Semitism, a contribution that would be anathema to the grandparents of any living Jew, including Peto’s. That is the bogus notion that Zionism produces anti-Semitism; rather than the truth, which is that Zionism is a response to anti-Semitism.

The Left is a conduit for the self-pitying Arabist narrative, and that is what the credulous Peto has internalized. If you have been brainwashed to believe that Zionism causes anti-Semitism and Zionism is oppressive, then you may even believe anti-Semitism is justified if it hastens Israel’s redemption (read: dissolution).

I disagree with other commentators on one score: Peto is not a self-hating Jew. She is full of admiration for herself. She is unaware that her thoughts are unoriginal, that she speaks in predictable clichés, and that she is lending herself to anti-Semitism laundering on a grand scale. You’ll find ample evidence of her intellectual vacuity in a YouTube Israel-bashing address to her small audience of Peto-philes. It’s particularly sad to witness her excitement that al-Jazeera gave her thesis its stamp of approval. (Bubbie! You didn’t fight the Nazis in vain! They love me in Saudi Arabia!).

Of course, Peto herself is a sideshow in the educational scheme of things. The larger issue surrounding Peto’s unworthy thesis is the obvious flight from integrity in her degree-bestowing institution. An embarrassed OISE administration is spinning Peto’s rant as “academic freedom.” But academic freedom is only credible when bounded by academic standards, here demonstrably absent."

The entire column is in The National Post

UPDATE: An analysis that details the failure of the University of Toronto to maintain academic standards by accepting Peto's opinion piece as a "thesis."

You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to connect these dots..

"The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education," is Jenny Peto's infamous thesis in which she claims to "show how Jewish victimhood is instrumentalized in ways that obscure Jewish privilege, deny Jewish racism and promote the interests of the Israeli nation-state."

What's really behind it?

On the very first page, she wrote, "In the first grade, after having been told that I could not play the lead in our school play because I was a girl, I decided that god was either sexist or nonexistent. Either way, I wanted to have nothing to do with him."

If only little Grade 1 Jenny had known people in show business, they could have told her that rejection is part of the trade. You have to learn how to deal with it, get over it, and move on the the next audition. One of the reasons so many actors turn to Scientology is that it teaches confidence and how to overcome rejection.

Imagine how much happier a person she would be if Jenny's influences had been Scientologists such as John Travolta and not a Maoist fanatic like Norman Finkelstein.  Say what you will about Scientology, they haven't been responsible for a single suicide bomber, let alone the 10 million murders of the Cultural Revolution.

Would having been cast as a male in a school play been enough to have turned Jenny from the path she chose? It doesn't look like it.

Because being a girl didn't keep Jenny from playing male roles for long. As this picture shows, by Grade 5  Jenny is taking what appears to be a male role in a play. It was in 1992 and was put on by Associated Hebrew Schools, one of "the sexist, gender-normative and heterosexist educational institutions [she] was forced to attend."

Guess who the cute little thespian, 2nd from the left, is

But sadly, during those four years since Grade 1, it seems irreparable damage had been done.

Or maybe not!

Jenny wrote: "Despite all of my rebellion against the oppressive beliefs of my parents, teachers and religious leaders, the one aspect of my upbringing and education that I never questioned was Zionism – loyalty to the Israeli nation-state. In fact, Zionism fit within my childhood understanding of anti-oppression politics.."

Coily oppressing Q*bert with its racist,
hegemonic purple snake privilege

What a coincidence! Zionism fit within my childhood understanding of anti-oppression politics too! Wait. No it didn't. My mistake. I have to confess that as a child, I didn't spend much time considering anti-oppression politics. But I did manage to get the high score on a Q*bert machine once, if that counts. (Q*bert was frequently oppressed by Coily, a springy snake.) On the other side, I didn't give a lot of thought to Zionism either, unless watching The Ten Commandments on TV is an act of imperialist, colonialist, repressive Zionism.

But the hegemonic influence of Zionism was able to stay within Jenny Peto's psyche until a watershed event occurred, which she describes as follows:




Ancient oppressor with early Zionist propaganda



"I was having dinner with a friend who I thought was Lebanese – I later learned that his family were Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon. His brother, who had just arrived in Toronto from the United Arab Emirates joined us. He was wearing a necklace with Handala on it. I recognized it as Naj Al-Ali’s famous cartoon of a Palestinian child holding a rock behind his back and immediately demanded to know why he had a terrorist on his necklace. We then got into an argument about Israel and Palestine that lasted several hours. I pride myself on being able to win most arguments, but in this case I could not beat him – he had facts and history, but all I had was rhetoric and sound-bites."

All she had "was rhetoric and sound bites."  

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Intriguing, and leaving aside the narcissism of "I pride myself on being able to win most arguments," the most interesting and revealing part of the journey into Jenny Peto's rebirth as a Jew who wants to see the end of modern Israel comes from two of her statements:

"It is also significant that I had long seen the organized Jewish community as extremely oppressive. As someone who had experienced violence and oppression within my own Jewish community, it was not very difficult for me to accept that Jews could be oppressors and by extension, that the so-called ‘Jewish state’ could itself be oppressive and violent."

and

"I was already an outcast in the Jewish community, and estranged from my family for being atheist, queer, gender-queer, feminist and generally outspoken in a highly normative, Orthodox setting. I had less to lose in terms of family and community than many anti-Zionist Jews."

If what Jenny Peto says about her childhood experiences are true,  then it is sad and she deserves pity.
 
But it was hardly the fault of the "mainstream" or "organized Jewish community" nor is it the fault of Israel for trying to survive as a democratic state among totalitarian countries bent on its destruction.
 
Peto's "thesis" reads like a cry of anguish and revenge against personal circumstances that caused her to suffer in her youth. She comes across as someone trying to strike back at the values and beliefs of those who caused her pain.
 
That's a tragedy. The greater tragedy is that the Sociology and Equity Studies in Education Department at OISE appears to consider an unsubstantiated cry of anguish to be something that should be awarded a post-graduate degree.


UPDATE: The National Post published the following letter from Jenny Peto's brother, David, which sheds even more light on the unfortunate situation:

It is not my desire to get involved with the details of my sister Jenny Peto's thesis, which has recently generated tremendous controversy. There are people far more qualified than I to debate the merits of the thesis, or lack thereof. There is, however, one point that I would like to contest. My sister dedicated her thesis to our late grandmother, Jolan Peto. She asserted that if our grandmother "were alive today, she would be right there with me protesting against Israeli apartheid."   

Our grandmother was the youngest teacher at the Jewish orphanage in Budapest during the Second World War. She, along with my grandfather, saved countless children from death at the hands of the Nazis. After the war, she saw firsthand the brutality and baseness of the communist regime that came into power. She, along with our grandfather and father escaped to Canada, and celebrated the day of their arrival each and every year. Freedom was not an abstract idea to her; it was alive and tangible for her.   

Our grandmother was a soft-spoken woman, but she had an iron will. She taught us to abhor hatred, and to strive for excellence in everything we did. She was a woman of endless patience and generosity, and boundless love. She was uncompromising in her dedication to truth and honesty, and was also an ardent supporter of the state of Israel. My sister is simply wrong; our grandmother would have been entirely opposed to her anti-Israel protests.   

Our grandmother had a tremendous impact on my life, and her memory continues to be a source of strength and inspiration to my family. My daughter is named after her, and we pray that she will emulate her namesake. I cannot in good conscience allow my sister to misappropriate publicly our grandmother's memory to suit her political ideology.


David Peto, Houston.

Is OISE failing the test of academic standards and free speech?

“There’s hypocrisy at the University of Toronto bureaucracy that says it defends freedom of speech. There is no freedom of speech for dissenters. It’s a political cult without dissenters, and they’ve found a way for the public to finance it.”


More here from the Canadian Jewish News

From Macleans.ca: Academic Freedom is not freedom from standards

Artwork stolen from BlazingCatFur

Loosely translated, Peto’s thesis amounts to something in the realm of: “I’m onto you, you rich Jews. You’re using the Holocaust to deny your privileged status and pursue your Zionist exploits!” Actually, that language isn’t far from what Peto uses in her paper. But if Peto wants to spend her time typing foolishness at her laptop, that’s her choice. Academic freedom shouldn’t deny even the most nonsensical of pursuits. But academic freedom does not mean freedom from academic standards, and unfortunately, Peto’s paper seems to blur the line. After trudging through more than 100 pages of political hyperbole and unsubstantiated claims, it seems questions should be raised about the conception of academic standards at U of T’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) where Peto was awarded her master’s degree.

read the whole column here at Macleans.ca

UPDATE: Hey, it's a conspiracy convention!

Look who has rushed to defend the thesis alleging Jewish racism and conspiratorial exploitation of Holocaust guilt for nefarious racist and Zionist purposes - none other than 9-11 conspiracy theorist Joshua Blakeney! Blakeney is the sometime Canadian Charger correspondent who gloated about Christopher Hitchens getting cancer and who said that Michael Moore, yes, that Michael Moore, is complicit in the "9-11 cover-up."   Why does this all make sense?

OISE's Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education - scholarship subservient to radical ideology

University of British Colombia Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Werner Cohn, has done an analysis of the abstracts of 18 theses produced by the Ontario Studies in Education's Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education.  The results are in an open report submitted to David Naylor, the President of the University of Toronto.

From Werner Cohn's report:

Not only do these eighteen theses propound political agendas rather than detached scholarship, but the politics of all eighteen are of one sort and one sort only: radical leftism. I found no thesis that, for instance, urged a conservative viewpoint, or a Christian one, or, Heaven forbid, Zionism. This political uniformity of the theses contradicts the recent statements by U of T officials to the effect that OISE promotes freedom of speech and diversity of opinion. OISE, or at least SESE, does not seem to be a place where deviation from the left-wing orthodoxy is at all tolerated.

You can read Professor Cohn's entire report here.


This interview provides some interesting perspective:

9-11 Conspiracy Crackpot compares questions about public funding for his marginal theories to Salman Rushdie's death sentence

Blogger Blazing Cat Fur alerted us to the latest nuttiness from the always-crazy Canadian Charger.

Jonathan Kay over at The National Post wrote a column about a grant to a British graduate student,  Joshua Blakeney, to pursue his crackpot 9-11 conspiracy theories. Blakeney is also a sometime correspondent for Mohamed Elmasry's Canadian Charger, as shown in a post from this blog back in August. (Check out the video in the link where Blakeney says that Michael Moore, of all people, is complicit in the 9-11 cover up!)

Kay wrote that:

the University of Lethbridge has awarded Blakeney a $7,714 Queen Elizabeth II Graduate Scholarship to pursue his research. (The scholarship is listed as being funded through the “ongoing financial commitment of the Province of Alberta.”) ..  

In other words, the University of Lethbridge — and, through the province of Alberta’s funding arrangements, the taxpayers of Alberta — are paying a British graduate student $7,714 to pursue his conspiracy theory that the 9/11 attacks were staged by Washington.   

Does anyone else see a problem with that?

Well, Mohamed "Elmo" Elmasry's Charger not only doesn't see a problem with that, but is outraged; outraged to the point of grammatical and syntax errors, that Kay would challenge the academic freedom of having tax dollars subsidize theories put forward by people whose sanity could be questioned.

My favorite bit from the editorial in Elmo's Charger is the following, where he quotes Blakeney's thesis supervisor, University of Lethbridge Professor Anthony Hall, about Kay:

It seems to me that The National Post and Maclean’s are essentially trying to put a fatwa on higher level university studies on 9/11. Such a fatwa would clear aside empirically-based research so Jonathan can engage in his own spinning of public mythology posing as the psychoanthropologist who has penetrated the deepest cultural mores of the... ta daaaa... the conspiracy theorists. How pathetic!”   

Dr. Hall said the website advertising the book lauds Mr. Kay's success in “infiltrating” the “Truthers”, language Dr. Halls said is probably an accurate characterization of “Mr. Kay's mode of doing journalistic business as an agent of espionage and counterintelligence for those above him in the chain of command. He and the promoters at Maclean's of a privatized higher education system for Canada are good embodiments of the unfolding operations of the privatized terror economy.”

You know you have a credible, highly regarded academic when he uses phrases like "ta daaaa" in his interviews. But that's not nearly as fascinating as Hall's allegation that Kay is "doing journalistic business as an agent of espionage and counterintelligence for those above him in the chain of command."

This is what I'm having trouble understanding: Hall seems to be mocking Kay for characterizing him and his fellow travellers as 'conspiracy theorists'. And then in his next sentence, he alleges a conspiracy involving Jonathan Kay.

The extent to which a person making those remarks is completely unhinged is something people will have to determine for themselves.

But to give you another indication of the lack of intellectual rigour, or just plain lack of intelligence on the part of these people, Blakeney is quoted as saying, "Where are the Salman Rushdie defenders now? Or do such individuals only like free speech if it criticizes Islam rather than helps exculpate framed Muslims who probably didn’t plan or execute 9/11?"

Let's put this in terms that perhaps, just perhaps, Mr. Blakeney and Elmasry might be able to understand.

No one is denying Blakeney his right to speak his theories or to publish them. What is being questioned is whether crackpot theories should receive public funding. That is significantly different than Salman Rushdie being threatened with death for having written a satirical allegory about the founder of Islam.

In my opinion, only a person with a profound lack of intelligence and/or insight would seriously make that comparison.

And what is truly ironic is that the Canadian Charger's pretend defense of free speech is coming from someone who is so closely tied to attempts to repress free speech through the Canadian Human Rights Commission's notorious thought crimes provisions.
 
Of course, if it isn't yet apparent, irony is completely lost on the people at The Canadian Charger.

University of Toronto offers weak response to concerns about institutional anti-Israel bias at OISE

The University of Toronto has responded, but not really responded, to concerns about a Master's Thesis submitted in the Sociology and Equity Studies in Education program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) by one Jenny Peto, that alleges "Jewish Racism" is part of "Hegemonic Holocaust Education" and suggests a Jewish/Zionist conspiracy to exploit Holocaust guilt.

According to the Canadian Jewish News:

Responding to a request for an interview, the University of Toronto issued a written statement by vice-president and provost Cheryl Misak: “Due to our privacy obligations to students, I cannot discuss an individual student’s academic work or his or her performance. What I can, say, however, is that freedom of expression issues are ever-present in our society, especially on a university campus. The University of Toronto’s Statement on Freedom of Speech makes it clear that freedom of inquiry lies at the very heart of our institution: ‘all members of the University must have as a prerequisite freedom of speech and expression, which means the right to examine, question, investigate, speculate and comment on any issue without reference to prescribed doctrine, as well as the right to criticize the University and society at large.’ 

“Of the thousands of MA theses written at the University of Toronto in partial fulfilment of degree requirements, it is inevitable that some will have elements that offend various individuals and groups."

It is commendable that the University of Toronto values free speech. But there are issues that remain unaddressed, like the perception that the culture at OISE has become so virulently anti-Israel and anti-Zionist that theses which have the appearance of anti-Semitism have become acceptable there.

And there is the question of whether the anti-Israel attitude at OISE has become so politically rancid that anti-Zionism has become more important there than basic scholarship.


Werner Cohn, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, and one of the first people to draw attention to the thesis, The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education" wrote of the author's scholarship:

"..she is an autodidact who knows how to quote from others, whenever that seems to serve the cause, and thus to give her thesis the sheen of formal scholarship.The only problem is that the footnotes and references to the literature in no way support her contentions, and that she does not muster facts or data of any kind to give her thesis the weight of an academic argument."

"..she makes assertions, but it can’t be called an advancement of knowledge as she doesn’t test it in any way."

Ms Peto's thesis characterized the March of the Living, a prestigious Holocaust education program, as an "abuse of Holocaust memory for Zionist and racist purposes" (pg 108).


An indictment of Ms Peto comes from March of the Living national director Eli Rubenstein. “She hasn’t been on a trip where you see a Holocaust survivor holding the hand of someone who survived the Rwandan genocide or the Sudanese genocide, that it’s comforting and helps them to heal.

“How can you write a master’s thesis and not speak to a single survivor, educator or student in the program, and how can the university accept that?” he asked.

“We have survivors who rebuilt their lives and want to share their stories of survival and make sure that it doesn’t happen to anybody, and here you have someone criticizing us for that… it’s very sad.”

In fact, the only first hand research on the March of the Living Ms Peto is able to cite in her 2010 Thesis comes from her viewing of the March of the Living website in 2006!

This addresses Professor Cohn's principle concern by critics of the thesis and by extension, the culture at OISE in the assertion that "the thesis was devoid of scholarship."

U of T Provost Misak said,  "the university is committed to allowing and encouraging a full range of debate. The best way for controversy to unfold is for members of our community to engage with the perspectives and arguments they dispute. It is intelligent argument, not censorship, that lies at the heart of our democratic society and its institutions.”

These are commendable sentiments. But the question remains, where is the debate at OISE?

At a meeting of the OISE Graduate Student Association to discuss whether they should involve themselves with  the bigoted "Israeli Apartheid Week," the minutes don't indicate any debate. They indicate a universal acceptance of the notion that the Zionist entity must be oppressive. The only expressed concern is about how to imply that they are not anti-Semitic.

And who is the person they had to address that concern?

None other than guest speaker Jenny Peto! Well, with expert advice like that, how could they go wrong?

Ms Peto's thesis advisor is Sheryl Nestel. Ms Nestel has made the conference presentation: "Mapping Jewish Dissent: Jewish Anti-occupation Activism in Toronto." The Department Chair, Rinaldo Walcott, is a signatory to at least two anti-Israel petitions.

Where is the debate at OISE?

For U of T Provost Misak to say that the “university is committed to allowing and encouraging a full range of debate” is most welcome. Perhaps she can let us know when that policy is put into practice at OISE.