YUFA
External
Conference Report
CAUT Academic Freedom Conference:
Academic Freedom and Civility
By John Blazina
24 Nov 2005 - The Harry Crowe Foundation sponsored a Conference on Academic Freedom in Toronto in October. We heard bad news and good news. We heard about Bertrand Russell’s dismissal, twice, in times of war, the second time because of religious moralism. We heard about the witch-hunting of the McCarthy era, perhaps noting with some pride that witch-hunting in Canada came first, inspired by the dubious revelations of Igor Gouzenko. We learned about Homeland Security and Bill 361, our home-grown Anti-Terrorist legislation. Lee Lorch and Chandler Davis told us about their dismissal and, for the latter, imprisonment, during the McCarthy era. What their stories made clear is the fragility of academic freedom in a wartime state, and in the fearful state of mind now made permanent, perhaps, by the treatment of terrorism as a matter for military rather than police action.
On the home front, a metaphor alarmingly close to becoming literal, we heard about academics delayed or even refused entry at the border, about CSIS quizzing academics returning from conferences in dubious countries. We heard about global cooling: the chill descending over universities in Europe and North America as ideology influences research and hiring. Jonathan Cole described the many crude efforts to enforce the Patriot Act and the tendency of universities to cave in to political pressure and the solicitations of funders. And we heard about students at American universities trying to limit discussion of ideas they find odious, by claiming violation of student rights.
In general, speakers worried that the idea of the university as a place which welcomes skepticism and dissent and a multiplicity of voices might be crushed by glaciers of anti-intellectualism, by new technologies of surveillance, by links between the university and business, industry, and government, and especially by self-censorship.
But there was also good news. Times have changed. Even those most outrageously outspoken in the weeks after 9/11 have escaped with reprimands only, protected by tenure and the principle of academic freedom. There have been very few occasions of unjust dismissal. The well-known cases, like Nancy Olivieri’s, are notable for their infrequency (though many more have been forestalled, according to Jim Turk, executive director of CAUT, by vigorous opposition).
The troubles at York were raised more than once, and I will expand here on a point I made briefly at the Conference, and previously on the Senate listserv, where I worried mainly about the speed of condemnation. We didn’t know enough, I thought, to condemn the Administration and to label what happened as an issue of academic freedom. It wasn’t clear that it was always wrong to summon police to the campus or to apply rules about noise to certain areas of the campus.
From the Conference I learned some points of relevance to these issues. Jim Turk made a good point about distinguishing intent and effect when academic freedom seems at risk. The intent to curtail academic freedom need not be present for this to be the possible effect of some actions. There is, for example, increasing regulation of the use of space on many campuses, whether because of excessive noise as at Brock or York or because of commercial interests – a coffee shop complaining about loss of business because of the presence nearby of invited speakers. Even so, we should be careful about reading intent into effect, when judging the Administration’s actions. Pointing out unintended consequences is more likely to achieve results than speaking injudiciously out of inferred intentions. On the other hand, Walter Whiteley tells me that there are good reasons to take new regulations on the use of space as a devious way of limiting academic freedom. And several other academics at the Conference raised this concern. Given a pattern of legislation over the past few years, it’s clear that administrators are trying to confine expressions of protest to less public areas of campus. But is this the same as trying to limit academic freedom?
Events at Vari Hall were quickly interpreted under the rubric of academic freedom. A very short time after the events, the YUFA Executive asked CAUT to hold an inquiry, a rush to judgement found also in student senators and a few faculty, who passed several inappropriate motions at a special meeting attended only by them. But it may be that the crucial principle to invoke in the case of the Vari Hall incident is that of civility (as in the recent contretemps between Nick Lary and the YUFA Executive, though once again academic freedom was invoked in his defense).
In both cases I thought the concept of academic freedom was used rhetorically, to dignify actions less grand. Does the principle of academic freedom include the right to be uncivil at the top of your voice? Two groups of students at Concordia expressed their mutual disgust so violently that the police asked the university to cancel a visiting speaker, saying they could not guarantee his safety. Students at York used a megaphone in a place where it was not allowed, disturbing classes not with what they said – no one denied their right to express their opinion – their right to freedom of speech – but with how loudly they expressed it. It appears they came intending to provoke York into action as uncivil as their own and in this they succeeded. I thought also that the demonizing of Lorna Marsden by her critics was reprehensible. How is this different from the witch-hunting several speakers saw as the great threat to the principle of academic freedom?
Academic freedom describes the right to speak, teach, and pursue knowledge without fear of reprisal. Is it appropriate for this principle to come into play over a breach of civility, perhaps by both sides. Civility makes free and thoughtful debate possible, but is not synonymous with academic freedom. Those who pursued knowledge in the Early Modern period insisted on the crucial importance of civility. Some were burned at the stake, some imprisoned, many driven into exile. Witch-hunts were literal before they became a useful metaphor.
When we talked about this at the Conference, Nick Lary invoked the Oxford Union as the model of a space essential for free debate, and as a place where the Administration of Oxford University has absolutely no powers, no presence. But as he also said, the Oxford Union has its own buildings. Had a demonstration at Oxford used megaphones or microphones near classrooms, the university would likely have exerted its responsibility to maintain a civil environment for the pursuit of knowledge. No one prevented those demonstrating at Vari Hall from the exercise of academic freedom, from saying whatever they wished to say, however outrageous. What the Administration tried to prevent was incivility that drowns out free and thoughtful debate. Was the administration wrong in calling in the police? Did the police use violent force without provocation? These are questions to be answered in Senate or in court. Was YUFA wrong or at least incautious, to invoke academic freedom as a name for what happened? The CAUT inquiry may usefully distinguish between civil liberties, freedom of speech, and academic freedom.
It does seem to me that the rush to judgement at the time was uncivil and had nothing to do with academic freedom. Crucial to the latter are skepticism and informed debate; I saw none of these in Vari Hall or in the Senate, where a few speakers assumed the Administration’s conspiratorial culpability and demonized both the police and the administration by making immoderate analogies and by drawing a direct line between the President and the actions of a single police officer. Students were injured, yes, but to accuse the Administration of complicity in their injuries, to accuse them of curtailing academic freedom by calling police to campus – these hasty judgements emerged too quickly to be any more than noise and certainly not the outcome of reasoned and informed consideration.
Freedom of speech and due process are components of the idea of civil liberty. Academic freedom has, for me the more limited scope of freedom of action in the pursuit of knowledge. I don't think it covers dissent, in the way that freedom of speech does. It enables dissent without endangering tenure. It enables teaching without fear of reprisals from fear-driven fantasies of religion and politics. But we have our own fantasies, and perfect freedom may be one of them.
We had fed the
heart on fantasies.
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.
More substance in our enmities
Than in our loves; O honey-bees
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
(W, B, Yeats, “In a Time of Civil War,” 1922)
Other Reports from
this Conference:
Ben Lowinsky's Report
Hassan Qudrat-Ullah's
Report