Philosophy professor Talia Bettcher jumped at the chance to return to her homeland from the U.S. when Canada offered her $500,000 to study the prevention of gender-based violence.
“I was not feeling safe anymore,” said Bettcher, a transgender Canadian woman who lived in Los Angeles for more than 30 years. “I wanted to get to someplace safe. Waterloo was safe.”
The propaganda machine really started chugging along after Carney’s election. There’s a million AI-enhanced, “grass root”, hokey, folksy pro-federalist YouTube channels since the moment after the election. I haven’t dug into it yet but I bet this $500K is coming from Carney’s brain-drain war chest targeting American academics.
Actually a really great, nuanced example of privilege here. A member of a community at the center of genocide rhetoric in the US getting paid 500k a year to move somewhere safer (that was also about to elect a trans-genocidal party not two years ago). As important as it is to recognize what this represents, I can hardly feel good about this; especially as Canada implements international student caps and funding cuts both federally and provincially. This money would go much farther in allowing more vulnerable people to achieve some level of safety from this (a prof working in LA is hardly a high-risk situation).
Any grad students here can see that this is multiple cohorts of students in funding annually (we get about 15-20k max in funding for humanities or social sciences in Ontario). I hope she uses a substantial amount of that salary to establish some kind of grant or scholarship for trans students, because this can look a lot like pulling up the ladder (edit: or if it is indeed a research grant, that she’ll be open and transparent about how that money benefits vulnerable students on campus or in Canada beyond the topic itself).
If I’m being honest, I’d have a very tough time not considering a job in the US rn for that salary, and I’m sure many other vulnerable people she supposedly has solidarity with would be in similar positions. It’s already not safe here in Canada (the fact this is at Waterloo within a few years of a terrorist attack on a gender studies class should not be lost on any of you), and you’re saying I could make enough to retire within a decade and have wealth to spare for the sort of mutual aid I just discussed? Many of us would take that risk to get this as a resource for the community, let alone use it to secure our own safety.
It’s not a $500,000 salary. It’s $500,000 research grant for her to run her studies.
Could you quote from the article or source where you got that information (there is a chart of research funding budgets by institution, but no specifics on what the nature of her funding is from what I can see)? “Philosophy professor Talia Bettcher jumped at the chance to return to her homeland from the U.S. when Canada offered her $500,000 annually to study the prevention of gender-based violence.” Though she’d certainly have less control over what a grant is used for (which again emblemizes my criticism of how this money is allocated), it doesn’t change what I said about the offer and how it relates to Canada’s continued retraction of support for vulnerable scholars internationally.
And it’s worth noting the headline also somewhat tokenizes her to discuss Canada’s funding of research generally, along with some specifics about an optometry project “Health sciences professor James Wolffsohn jumped at the chance to leave his British homeland for Waterloo when Canada offered him $1 million annually to study how to help people preserve their vision for longer.”
