Reg Whitaker

Successful use of intelligence has been an important resource for states in the making of grand diplomatic and military policy. In the Second World War, the ULTRA secret permitted the Allies to decrypt German military communications, thus providing them with a strategic leg-up. Intelligence failures, like Air India or 9/11, have caused massive political embarrassment. Yet day-to-day intelligence activities often serve less exalted…

Once upon a simpler time the world was divided between the Children of Light (us, of course) and the Children of Darkness (them). It was called the Cold War. Before it was over, the Cold War did teach us a few lessons. Certainly it was important to stand up for principles of freedom and human dignity and see these through to eventual…

I admit, right off the top, to approaching a book on diversity hiring in the university with more than a little trepidation. This is a field so pitted with the academic equivalent of improvised explosive devices as to make the ivory tower look like an outpost in Afghanistan. Negotiating that field is made even more delicate by the fact that I am a retired white academic and Anthony Stewart is a young black academic who points critically at a near white monopoly in university…

In the summer of 2001, I took early retirement from Toronto’s York University. After a 29-year career as an academic, I walked out the door from a senior position in one of Canada’s leading departments of political science in Canada’s leading metropolis. The immediate cause of my departure was the poisonous effect on university life of two prolonged and bitter strikes at York—a two-month faculty strike in 1997 and a three-and-a-half–month strike by graduate student teaching assistants in the winter of…