Following on my post the other day I was reading Ben Britton’s post and it got me thinking more about one specific part of the petition about the university being “political”, and that is the question of who gets academic freedom. Now at a lot of universities in Canada full academic freedom, such as that laid out by CAUT, is restricted to faculty. Here’s CAUT’s definition:
Academic freedom includes the right, without restriction by prescribed doctrine, to freedom to teach and discuss; freedom to carry out research and disseminate and publish the results thereof; freedom to produce and perform creative works; freedom to engage in service to the institution and the community; freedom to express one’s opinion about the institution, its administration, and the system in which one works; freedom to acquire, preserve, and provide access to documentary material in all formats; and freedom to participate in professional and representative academic bodies. Academic freedom always entails freedom from institutional censorship.
But I’ve now been informed that UBC isn’t one of these, instead they grant academic freedom to all members of the community who engage at UBC:
The members of the University enjoy certain rights and privileges essential to the fulfilment of its primary functions: instruction and the pursuit of knowledge. Central among these rights is the freedom, within the law, to pursue what seems to them as fruitful avenues of inquiry, to teach and to learn unhindered by external or non-academic constraints, and to engage in full and unrestricted consideration of any opinion.
This freedom extends not only to the regular members of the University, but to all who are invited to participate in its forum. Suppression of this freedom, whether by institutions of the state, the officers of the University, or the actions of private individuals, would prevent the University from carrying out its primary functions.
All members of the University must recognize this fundamental principle and must share responsibility for supporting, safeguarding and preserving this central freedom. Behaviour that obstructs free and full discussion, not only of ideas that are safe and accepted, but of those which may be unpopular or even abhorrent, vitally threatens the integrity of the University’s forum. Such behaviour cannot be tolerated.
Back to my post on What is Political, one of the demands in the petition is that people who could be seen to speak for the university must not be political.
My main conclusions there were:
- That isn’t what the act means by ‘political’;
- The entire argument rests on asserting that someone means something different than their stated (and the standard dictionary) definition.
But another conclusion I had that I didn’t explore fully was “asking a judge to restrict the free expression of a group of faculty is a bad look from a faculty member.”
Who gets academic freedom?
In order to explore this argument properly I will consider this as if the university is supposed to not be political, and their definition of political is valid, but also that academic freedom is presupposed.
The petition asks that a judge restrict the ability for other members of the university from being able to, as the UBC academic freedom policy says, “engage in full and unrestricted consideration of any opinion” because doing so may limit the same right being exercised by the petitioners.
In fact, if the petition were to succeed and the University would need to prohibit people from being able to share something that was political, that would be the “suppression of this freedom… by… the officers of the University”.
Now as I identified, most of their concern was around university administrators exercising their academic freedom. I’m aware that UBC is in the process of revising their academic freedom policy, and so perhaps that may change in the future, but right now the policy seems to grant academic freedom to administrators at UBC.
The petition also requested that groups, including groups made up of predominantly or entirely of faculty, not be able to be political. This would mean that an individual faculty member can be political, but as soon as there is a group of them in a university approved grouping they are no longer allowed to be political.
I summarize these two things as (a) despite policy, administrators shouldn’t have academic freedom, and (b) academic freedom applies only to individuals and not to groups of individuals.
The reasons given for this is that an administrator or group of faculty exercising their academic freedom to do or say something limits the academic freedom of an individual who chooses not to.
How does this work? Here I want us to consider the difference between hard power and soft power. Hard power is a person being told that they must not say x, soft power is people choosing not to associate with a person because that person says x. In the first we have “the suppression of this freedom” quite clearly. But what about the second? I think we need to consider both the academic freedom of an individual, and that if they did not have academic freedom they still have freedom of expression (more limited as it is).
If an administrator makes a statement which is fully within their academic freedom and their freedom of expression, and by making that statement it makes someone else feel that they cannot express their own statement what we have is a belief by the second person that academic freedom will not protect them. That is a very different statement than was first proposed though. If academic freedom does protect them, then what is the concern? Is it the concern of ostracization such as John Stuart Mill discusses? Is not academic freedom the intended defence within academia? Why then call for the removal of academic freedom from those who you disagree with? The petition does not claim that they have been silenced, rather it seeks to silence others. I feel I must disagree here with the petitioners. For academics especially, “the best response to “bad” speech is more speech, not censorship“. Claiming instead that someone’s speech limits yours because they are an administrator implies that you lack academic freedom.
The second part is that a group of faculty members, who the petitioners would not claim individually lacked academic freedom, stating something together should not have the protection of academic freedom. I am aware that UBC’s academic freedom policy doesn’t explicitly list it, but it implies that CAUT’s line “freedom to participate in professional and representative academic bodies” applies when it says “to engage in full and unrestricted consideration of any opinion”. If you cannot make statements as part of a representative academic body, do you have true academic freedom to participate in it?
Conclusion
If the petitioners succeeded in their request then instead of upholding academic freedom, it would result in the violation of the academic freedom of a large number of faculty and administration at UBC. At most other institutions those administrators wouldn’t have academic freedom, but the faculty members most assuredly do. To be fair to the petitioners, the affidavits to be filed still may include specific incidents of their being forced to not speak, but as it stands, claiming that your words “are not welcome at UBC” is very different from being prevented from saying them. However, their request of the judge is to stop others from being able to speak specific words.
I want to finish off with a quote from the BC Civil Liberties Association “Freedom cannot exist alongside oppression.”
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