On April 6, the Quebec government tabled a bill which, claiming to protect freedom of education, will in fact accomplish the exact opposite. The adoption of Bill 32 in its current form will allow the CAQ government (and those to come) to radically alter the relationship between the education sector and the provincial government.
Posted at 5:00 p.m.
If passed, Bill 32 will deprive universities and teachers of their autonomy not only in terms of the subject taught, but also in terms of how it is taught, thus giving the Ministry of Higher Education the unprecedented power to intervene in the management of our classes. We wonder: is this law intended to protect academic freedom, or does it rather signal the emergence of a new bureaucracy allowing the state to monitor what is happening in the classroom?
One of the most basic and universally accepted foundations of the notion of academic freedom is autonomy from state control. The proposed bill recognizes this fact, but nevertheless contains a heavy threat to it in section 6, which gives the minister responsible for higher education the right to “direct an educational institution to provide in its policy any element it indicates” as well as the power to “cause the necessary corrective measures to be taken” to an institution deemed non-compliant.
This clause would thus grant massive and unprecedented power to the minister, leaving him free to alter targeted university policies, thus flouting a fundamental value of academic freedom: freedom from political interference in research and teaching.
Under clauses 4 and 5 of the bill, universities would be required to create policies to be sent to the government – presumably to obtain the minister’s approval – as well as create boards and appoint trustees to “review complaints relating to an infringement of the right to university academic freedom”. Even more troubling, the bill requires universities to enact penalties for these breaches. Since the raison d’être of academic freedom is to protect professors from censorship aimed at intellectual activity that criticizes the government or challenges conventional knowledge, the introduction of a punitive approach to the “protection of academic freedom university” is itself a violation of this freedom.
If academic freedom is already a building block of higher education, why is the government proposing this project?
The government says the law is a response to the 2021 survey on academic freedom. As researchers, we ask: what is the scientific value of the claims arising from these results? Of the 33,000 members of the post-secondary sector who received the survey, only 1,079 responded – this represents approximately 3% of the total number of professors in the province1. The size of the sample alone raises the question of the statistical weight of the survey. In addition, the low response rate is possibly explained by the lack of ethics and the ambiguity that emerge from the questions formulated in the survey, and indicates the possibility that only people with strong opinions on the issue have chosen to ‘answer to. By basing itself on these results to propose Bill 32, the government suffers from what is called confirmation bias in research, which results in the use of data confirming preconceived opinions instead of trying to obtain results that provide an accurate picture of what is happening in the province.
Since the government survey did not respond to actual cases of academic censorship in Quebec, but rather to the public debate concerning events at the University of Ottawa, we find no tangible proof that academic freedom is really threatened in the province.
The bill contains a single formal prohibition; it is stipulated that it is forbidden to compel warnings when potentially offensive content or language is used in class or in university activities. We recognize that a requirement to use content warnings would constitute an infringement of the autonomy that academic freedom protects. That said, there is simply no evidence that Quebec universities consider imposing such a practice. The decision about whether, how, and when to allow students to emotionally prepare for potentially dehumanizing or violent content is already protected by academic freedom. Each teacher is, and should remain, free to determine if or when such disclaimers may be appropriate – often in consultation with students.
By specifically targeting the practice of content warnings, however, this bill seems to show that the government disapproves of this practice, suggesting worrying potential consequences.
We thus perceive a single probable motivation behind this bill: to grant the government greater power to intervene in the functioning of universities, and to authorize students and teaching staff to punish each other under the pretext that they open up discussion and debate on politically controversial issues. Academic freedom protects us from censorship, and this bill introduces new mechanisms that are far more dangerous than what currently exists. We can only ask: does the real threat to academic freedom actually come from Bill 32?
* Co-signatories: Francis Dupuis-Déri, permanent professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal/Tiohtià: ke (UQAM); Jean-Sébastien Fallu, associate professor at the University of Montreal; Catherine Flynn, associate professor at the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi; Judith Sribnai, assistant professor at the University of Montreal; Sarah Ghabrial, assistant professor at Concordia University; Genevieve Renard Painter, assistant professor at Concordia University