YUFA
External
Conference Report
CAUT Academic Freedom Conference:
“Academic Freedom and
the Plight of Our Universities: Fact or Fancy?”
A critical review of the Conference on Academic
Freedom
By Benjamin Lowinsky, Ph.D
The unfettered quest for the truth, the unconditional right to question and challenge prevailing norms, beliefs and established orthodoxies are often proclaimed as sacred and inviolable by our universities the world over. Yet, it is precisely the practice of questioning and defying the canons of our traditional faith, of our conventional ideas and routines, that lands our courageous, idealistic, and dissenting colleagues in trouble both in the sciences and in the liberal arts. History is replete with examples thereof in Canada, the US, and other countries in Europe and the developing world. Nowhere, however, is the litany of violations of academic freedom more egregious and hypocritical than in those so called “democratic” countries like the US, Canada, and Great Britain where the discrepancy between word and action is often more pronounced than elsewhere.
Cataclysmic crises such as World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Cold War, the War in Vietnam, 9/11, and the onset of the War on Terror are critical turning points in worsening the climate of repression within which academic freedom is curtailed. One such critical juncture has been the 9/11 crisis and its consequences for academic freedom in universities in the US, Canada, and Great Britain--the theme of a dynamic, critical, and informative conference that took place in Toronto in October of 2005, sponsored by the Harry Crowe Foundation.
The conference drew a host of academic speakers, faculty members, and faculty associations primarily from Canada, but also from the U.S. and Europe. The opening plenary set a framework and historical context for the current problems relating to academic freedom. The speaker, Howard Pawley, president of the Harry Crowe Foundation and former NDP Premier of Manitoba, reminded us of how indispensable academic freedom was and is to the very nature and composition of the university, calling it the glue that holds together our fragile institutions while tracing its history from Socrates to Harry Crowe and into the present. At the same time, he warned us of the university’s vulnerability, as governments in Canada, the US, and Great Britain pursue security through draconian measures which pose a threat to academic freedom everywhere.
Historical examples of the ravages on academic freedom abound, but among the most salient are those that took place during and after World War I and those that occurred especially during the Cold War, as was described in detail at two plenary sessions: “The Sacking of Bertrand Russell at Cambridge in 1916: Implications for Today” and “Lessons from the Cold War.” For it was during both World War I and the Cold War years that academics lost their jobs for doing no more than expressing their political opinions which were usually critical of the status quo. With respect to World War I, it was Bertrand Russell, indefatigable proponent and practitioner of academic freedom, who lost his position at Cambridge University in 1916 for his outspoken views on World War I and Britain’s role in it. Similarly, it was dissenting and defiant American academics like professors Lee Lorch and Chandler Davis, both distinguished mathematicians (who spent the lion’s share of their academic careers at York University and the University of Toronto respectively) who were persecuted, blacklisted, and virtually forced into exile for their contrarian views on issues ranging from the Cold War and their first amendment rights to civil rights, civil liberties, and the rights and dignity of Afro-Americans. In these and other celebrated cases, the universities made common cause with the forces of order and injustice and were often instrumental in making academic freedom anything but possible.
Clearly, there are differences between the past circumstances surrounding, and the threats to, academic freedom and those of today, just as there are differences between the university of yesteryear and that of today. A panel discussion dealing with American perspectives on anti-terrorism laws and academic freedom underscored some of the salient differences. Robert O’Neill, a law professor at, and past president of, the University of Virginia where he was also past founding director of the Jefferson Centre for the Protection of Free Expression, strongly contrasted the past and the present. A climate of hysterical fear and intimidation related to ideological and polemical excesses and a nation-wide series of witch hunts that characterized the Red Scare does not exist today the way it did then. Nor did US law protect freedom of expression in the 1950s the way it does today. But if O’Neill was sanguine about this comparison and today’s academic freedom, he had concerns about current political trends and priorities.
A brief glimpse at the political, anti-intellectual and indeed ominous landscape of today should be a sobering reminder of how far we still need to go to ensure academic freedom. At the same session, Jonathan Cole, a prominent sociologist at Columbia University and past senior administrator, deepened our awareness of the dangers that proliferate and that pose a serious threat to academic freedom: the political intrigue and manipulation of federal and state governments, the concessions to authorities on security related issues, the draconian restrictions on freedom of thought, inquiry, and research that masquerade as security protocol, and the variety of perverse efforts to repress independent and critical voices of intellectual discourse both in the classroom and in research activities of academics.
Even more critically oriented was the panel discussion dealing with Canadian perspectives on anti-terrorism laws and academic freedom. For, according to Allan Manson and Ken Roach, law professors at Queen’s University and the University of Toronto respectively, there can be no doubt about the fact that the new anti-terrorism legislation in Canada threatens the rights of citizens to due process of law and to legitimate forms of protest. Through their own experiences and those of their colleagues as well as their observations, participants lent personal testimony and further credence to the shaping of an environment in which systemic violations of academic freedom are taking place while the very principles and reality of academic freedom are being eroded.
Exacerbating these trends and reminding us of how fraught with tensions, dangers, and contradictions our political and international order is, the growth and refinement of mass surveillance techniques, increasingly employed by governments, pose a most disturbing threat to the civil liberties and academic freedom supposedly enjoyed by all of us. As the war on terrorism escalates both within and between countries, so the determination to root out suspicious activities and associations results in increasingly elaborate networks of surveillance, including national identity cards, the monitoring of personal emails and passenger lists, and biometric passports and visas. The consequences of these developments are not only grave and universal but also deleterious to innocent people, academics, and the very basis of our intellectual pursuits, as corroborated by the experts at this conference illuminating international perspectives on anti-terrorism and academic freedom.
And as our universities become increasingly part of a network of collaborative efforts directed at national security, military research and activity, scientific research, and mass surveillance, so they too reinforce the inextricable connection between the university and its corporate, commercializing environment, while detracting from the intellectual and theoretical soul of the university, so much a part of academic freedom. Thus it is that even in the sciences and medicine our top researchers like Dr. Nancy Olivieri, who told her moving story while illuminating the major issues at hand in the final session on secrecy in research, are prevented from fulfilling their own ethical obligations without being caught in a tragic trap created by the conflict between two sets of dialectical forces that epitomize the university--the theoretical and intellectual on the one hand, and the applied, pragmatic, and commercial, on the other. Often pressured by corporate sponsors and university departments to promote the pragmatic interests of their research, they are forced to choose between intellectual honesty and no job on the one hand, and pragmatic cooptation and a job, on the other.
In the end, the real victims are not just the courageous few unsung heroes of academic freedom who challenge and defy the norms of our ever growing politicized and commercialized universities, with increasing costs to their careers, reputation, and wellbeing, but also the entire university community and academic freedom itself in principle and practice. This does not have to be this way, despite the structural and technological forces that make it appear inexorable, for it is we as academics who want it that way, unwilling to dare to be different and to be part of a vigilant, critical culture which supports the rights of all those exercising academic freedom while embracing a new vision of the essence of our universities. But, as long as we are silent, complacent and complicit about the fate of our outspoken colleagues and that of our universities, we cannot expect our universities to be anything but pale reflections of what they were once meant to be and our academic freedom to be anything but moribund.
Other Reports from
this Conference:
John Blazina's Report
Hassan Qudrat-Ullah's
Report