Academic freedom is sacrocent in institutions of higher learning. According to standards adopted by Canadian universities, academic freedom includes the right to freely communicate knowledge and the results of research. To do this, faculty must be free to take intellectual risks and tackle controversial subjects in their teaching, research and scholarship. The views expressed by faculty must be based on solid research, data and evidence. Thus, academic freedom must be based on reasoned discourse, rigorous extensive research and scholarship, and peer review.
Clearly, academic freedom does not mean that professors have the right to teach anything that strikes their fancy, and they certainly do not have the right to confuse facts with opinion and demand that students recite these opinions on tests lest they be penalized. Yet this is exactly what seems to be happening in a course called “Physical Determinants of Health” at Queens, one of Canada’s most prestigious universities.
The course is taught by a professor whose background is in sports sociology which hardly equips one to deal with the intricacies of vaccination, electromagnetic radiation, prescription drugs, toxic wastes, personal care items, artificial sweeteners and genetically modified organisms. All of these, according to Professor Melody Torcolacci contribute to our “toxic load,” whatever that may mean. As is clearly evident from student reports and her classroom slides, she strays far and wide from facts and exhibits a stunning ignorance of epidemiology, immunology and toxicology. She may once have been a nationally ranked shot putter, but that doesn’t qualify her for taking shots at vaccination.
Professor Torcolacci has a clear distrust of vaccines that she attempts to infuse into her students. Her scientific shortfall is demonstrated in one of the first slides with which she accosts the students in her lecture titled “Vaccines: Good or Bad.” Guess what conclusion she want them to come away with? “No scientific evidence exists showing vaccines are NOT contributing to increased incidence of chronic illness and disability in children,” her slide flagrantly declares. What an absurd statement this is. Science can never prove a negative. Could anyone ever prove that aliens do not kidnap people? Or that Professor Torcolacci is actually not an alien? Of course not. I think, however, we can prove that she is alien to science. Her comments that pregnant women should not be vaccinated against the flu goes against the documented evidence of a positive benefit-risk ratio.
Professors are free to express their opinions, but they are not free to make up facts. And when you teach students that vaccines are connected to AIDS and autism, you are making up facts. When you teach students that colloidal silver, oil of oregano and fresh garlic work like broad-spectrum antibiotics, you are making up facts. It seems that this professor has not come across a Google myth she hasn’t readily swallowed and then regurgitated in front of impressionable students. This isn’t academic freedom. It is an academic crime.
