Howard Doughty, Steward, King Campus
It’s been over 60 years since my first brush with “academic freedom.” It occurred in 1959. I was in high school. My English teacher, the late Dorothy Sharp, started a chapter of the Canadian Student Committee for Nuclear Disarmament. Since I didn’t favour the extermination of our species (then or now), I joined. When they got wind of it, the authorities shut it down. There was no visible protest. After all, it was high school. It was the 1950s. We submitted quietly.
Next, in 1965, when I was an undergraduate at Glendon College, Canadian border authorities refused entry to “publicity-prone pacifist professor” Mulford Q. Sibley of the University of Minnesota. He’d been invited to address the Canadian Voice of Women for Peace in Winnipeg and some University of Manitoba student groups. Border authorities deemed him a “subversive” with possible “communist” associations. He was denied entry to Canada. The event caught my attention. I protested. Prime Minister Pearson apologised (admittedly, he had other reasons).
Then, in 1968, when I was a teaching assistant at the University of Hawai’i, a colleague in the Department of Political Science was denied tenure because he was “faculty advisor” to a student group that publicized its view that young men should enlist in the armed forces, volunteer for duty in Vietnam, and promptly “frag” (assassinate) their officers. This annoyed the authorities on and off campus. It resulted in an 11-day occupation of the administration building supporting the professor’s academic freedom. (I played a modest “leadership” role). Over 150 faculty and students were arrested. All charges were quickly dropped, the professor was eventually granted tenure, and the president of the university resigned.
Those were the days.
Things have changed. Back then, it was the political “right” that could reliably be counted on to stifle “free speech,” not only regarding war and peace, but also “pornography,” “homosexuality,” and sundry threats to “civilization as we [knew] it.” As we know from the efforts to criminalize talk of “critical race theory” and “transgender” issues, the “conservative” side of the “culture wars” remains forceful.
What’s different is that, at least in the USA, the “left” has now joined in demands for suppression of academic freedom. In this regard, Canadian colleges and universities are less strident, but far from exempt.
We have not yet faced the degree of angry intolerance—sometimes involving threats and violence including everything from near-riots at public school board meetings to silencing speakers at sanctioned on-campus postsecondary events and demands to fire or cancel appointments to even prestigious positions in our better schools. We are, however, not exempt from such turmoil.
Ontario colleges have also not generally risen (or, perhaps, fallen) to the level at which religious, political, and cultural disagreements become subjects of vituperative controversy. We should not, however, be either overly grateful or at all sanctimonious. There are reasons for our relative docility that undermine academic freedom even more foundationally.
Curriculum control should be exercised by faculty. Increasingly, however, management is-imposing curriculum content, technological innovation, pedagogical micromanagement, standardized student evaluation, etc.—all in the interest of dominant, homogenized corporate ideologies and practices.
Academic freedom, which was finally won as a result of the strike of 2017 (in theory) after a half-century of contumacious resistance by the employer, is still being ignored in Seneca’s policies and processes. We may not have the fiery debates and violent outbursts that are apparent in the USA, but the issues are no less real. They demand attention, discussion, and action—sooner than later.