The entire machinery of academic promotion and academic endorsement and of academic advancement has been taken over, and therefore heretics like me have to be routed out. It's very similar to what happened to German universities under Hitler. The group that is most vulnerable, I'm afraid, are intellectuals.
Right over the country, you have these kinds of implantations of Metropolitan wokeness. The universities are acting rather like Covid spreaders, these are the super spreaders.
These people wear a cloak of impenetrable virtue. We've been here before. This is Robespierre.

Covid-19 definitely threw a wrench in plans made for 2020. Nobody envisaged a pandemic of this magnitude when setting goals for the year. The need to limit all forms of physical contact has definitely shifted the perspective. We've had to adjust to the current reality and shift solely to virtual gatherings.

Believe me, most people resist change, even when it promises to be for the better. But change will come, and if you acknowledge this simple but indisputable fact of life, and understand that you must adjust to all change, then you will have a head start.

Many disabled people noted that the pandemic made for a “cripping of the world” — where for perhaps the first time in a while, the world, gripped by a global pandemic, dwelled in disabled reality. Remember how, for a minute, so many forms of access disabled people had long fought for were here because abled people needed them? Remember virtual work, pandemic pay for frontline workers, online school, online events with captioning and ASL, teaching people how to freaking wash their hands and stay home when they were sick, the ability to reschedule an appointment or a plane ticket when you got sick and not get yelled at or charged a fee, and immunocompromised shopping hours? These waves of access, mixed with mass resistance in the streets and at home against anti-Black, white supremacist violence, made for a powerful-ass two years. If that kind of mass access, resistance and mutual aid could happen, revolutionary change could happen too. The state wants us to forget that.

I've come to recognize that change is very upsetting for some people and it triggers that feeling that we don't know anything and that we're making mistakes, whereas it really is learning as we go about the virus

Our community of students got hit hard by COVID-19. Many of our students are now back home, some are homeless, and a lot have parents who lost their jobs. So, we decided to shift the roadmap and have been working incredibly hard to support our students during this difficult period.

Colleges have to convince students for the next year that a remote education is worth every bit as much as an in-person one, and then pivot back before students actually start believing it.

It’s like only being able to sell your competitor’s product for a year.

Accelerating change has become almost the first fact of life.

I find that a paradigm shift takes place in two ways. First, for all scientists to start working on the new paradigm like happened with Newtonian physics, it takes a long time. But there is another way where a group of people hang onto a model that they are all happy with and they are all finding new problems to work on within that model. For me that model has been that consciousness is the ground of being and now, lots of people are accepting that model. This is a great achievement. This change has happened in less than three generations. That's a tremendous achievement. Old paradigmers, like some of my colleagues from the U of O physics department, will take a long time to change.

People can resist change at times, but change is important if you want to go forward.

The idea that 'change is hard' is one of the biggest myths about human behavior.

The truth is, you change effortlessly and all the time. The primary job of the brain is to adjust your behavior based on the environment.

Design a better environment. Change will happen naturally.

I said, ‘I'll change tomorrow if that's okay, I just didn't even realize it today,’ but they said, ‘Well, you have to change now,’ and, well, at that point it became, you know, a bit of a matter of principle for me. [...] And yeah, so here we are.

It wasn't that people were antagonistic; it was more that they were accustomed to doing their work in a certain way, and change always causes some people to be uncomfortable.

I launched the Vice-Chancellor’s Programme for Classroom Modernisation and Learning Experience, One-Student; One-Laptop, and our hotspot comfort zone as part of the technology and humanity focus.