YUFA
News
by John Bell
YUFA sent two delegates to the February 1-3, 2002 CAUT conference on academic freedom: Monica Mulvihill, YUFA staff; and me, co-Chief Steward of YUFA’s Contract and Grievance Committee. Also present from York was Kathy Bischoping, but in her capacity as a member of CAUT’s Collective Bargaining and Economics Benefits Committee.
On Friday afternoon there was a general workshop on grievances, run by two of CAUT’s legal officers. Participants represented a wide range of experience in academic grievances. On the whole this was a useful session, but the main business of the conference began with the evening session.
On Friday evening, the conference’s keynote speaker, Jon Thompson of the University of New Brunswick, traced the history of academic freedom from the nineteenth century to the present. He noted how high-profile, period-defining struggles for academic freedom had changed from the earlier cases of socially or politically controversial or “offensive” speech and opinions to cases like that of Dr. Nancy Olivieri, where the speech and opinions of a scholar had offended a business which was in partnership with a scholar and/ or an academic institution. Professor Thompson did note that, in recent months, Lynne Cheney’s Association of Alumni & Trustees has been publicly targeting academics in America who have been politically offensive to the ilk of the Cheneys by not being sufficiently supportive of George W. Bush’s response to the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S.A. However, it was Dr. Olivieri’s case which was to be the leitmotif of the conference.
The Saturday morning and afternoon sessions returned to the Olivieri case, and also brought up the case of a business prof who dared to question a computer company’s rep who was making claims at a university presentation which the prof thought were inflated. The company rep took umbrage, and (perhaps) because this company was providing funding to the university, the university administration, seemingly in a fit of fiduciary sympathy with the thoroughly grilled rep, took active umbrage too against the professor. The professor and his faculty association lost the subsequent arbitration on the grounds that the professor’s tone of inquiry had been rude, not polite. How Canadian a decision, I thought. I also thought that the faculty association could have pleaded the professor’s creative rights of satirical expression. To paraphrase Dickens on satire, “What is rudeness to one class of minds and perceptions, is plain truth to another.”
Another case discussed on Saturday involved a University of Waterloo case where the Dean had unilaterally raised almost all the grades in a course. This was done without re-evaluating the students’ work and even though the grades submitted by the professor showed a wide range of achievement. Finally, it seems that not a single student in the course had complained about her or his original final grade.
On Saturday afternoon we did a role-playing small group exercise on a fictional grievance involving academic freedom in the classroom and in grading. In my small group, I drew the role of the fictional university’s fictional Human Resources Officer. I tried to convey a tincture of York’s own Barry Miller into my performance. I would like to say that it was to the credit of Barry Miller that my group was able to reach a resolution of our case; but, alas for that claim, all the groups, all working on the same case, all arrived at a resolution.
Kathy Bischoping moderated the Sunday morning session. The first speaker discussed the case of Professor Ann Clark in Science at Guelph. Professor Clark received frosty treatment from the Administration there when she criticized issues around genetically modified produced, criticism which did not sit well with some corporate funders of agricultural research at Guelph.
So, what did I learn (aside from the fact that all the qualified CAUT spokespersons on the issue of academic freedom are apparently white and able bodied and that almost all of them are men)? Well, first, certified faculty associations are in a better position than uncertified associations to gather information and fight for the legal rights of scholars whose academic freedom in under attack. Also, the decrease in government funding and the concomitant increase in corporate funding is increasing pressure to restrict academic freedom in relation to statements that concern corporate partners of universities. Therefore, university administrators, faculty associations, and individual academics should make sure that the right to publish and disseminate be included in all research contracts.
Finally, I came tentatively to this thought: Earlier predominant threats to academic freedom involved perhaps some sense of honour on the would-be suppressors’ part, in that they were trying to suppress speech that they thought was false and therefore maybe dangerous to society. Such threats to academic freedom continue; however the newer corporate threats are particularly debasing. The desire for money can lead people in power at our institutions to thwart the search for truth—or if that last phrase is too corny for you, the desire for money can lead people in power at our institutions to sanction lies.