It all started in the fall of 2020 when a professor from the University of Ottawa pronounced the famous word beginning with “N” in class. This wanted to explain how communities reclaim insulting expressions. This part of his course emerges in the public square through social networks.
Posted at 12:00 p.m.
The teacher was unfairly suspended from her job by an overwhelmed rectorate. Having become a matter of state, the Premier of Quebec, François Legault, took it over politically, immediately taking up the cause of academic freedom.
History is made of improvisations. The Ontario academic anecdote of the word beginning with “N”, which should have remained in the classroom in Ontario, eventually gave rise to a bill on academic freedom in Quebec (bill no.oh 32) after taking a completely surreal detour.
Thank you to this professor who, pronouncing an unpronounceable word, has changed Quebec legislation. An expert couldn’t have done better. Because all this is going well, academic freedom is floundering in the Quebec university network.
Definitions
Bill 32 defines academic freedom as “the right of every person to freely exercise, without doctrinal, ideological or moral constraint, an activity by which he contributes, […] to the accomplishment of the mission” of his university.
The bill adds that this right includes: “The freedom to teach, to do research, to criticize society…” and to participate in community life. After forming an Academic Freedom Oversight Council, a university must appoint an officer responsible for implementing a profreedom policy.
Academic freedom is actualized internally or externally to the university. It must comply with the legal framework in force. A professor cannot, by his public statements, harm the business of his employer taking into account his obligation of loyalty (Article 2088 of the Civil Code).
He must also, in his criticism of society, businesses or citizens, avoid defamatory libel (Section 298 of the Criminal Code). If he is sued, then it is up to the management of his university to defend him. Will she? Normally yes.
Quebec reveals a certain language puritanism that goes back a long way in the past. On October 30, 1995, Jacques Parizeau, bitter at having lost the referendum on Quebec independence, provoked a national crisis by attributing part of the referendum result to the ethnic vote.
On December 14, 2000, under the government of Lucien Bouchard, the National Assembly of Quebec took a unanimous vote, condemning journalist Yves Michaud. The latter had mentioned in a private conversation taken up on the air that the Jews were not the only people in the world to have suffered. Yet nothing was illegal in the above. Parizeau as well as Michaud were within their rights.
In moderation
There are also taboo subjects. For example, no one would dare to show the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, of the high-profile affair Charlie Hebdo, for educational purposes, taking into account that a French professor who did so was beheaded in October 2020. Currently, the exhaustive enumeration of culturally constrained subjects would exceed the threshold of the most fertile imagination. Censorship has never been so present in a Quebec where the elites value politically correct language.
So it takes more than having rights. You have to be able to apply them. Despite the “go” of François Legault, university professors would be wise, in terms of academic freedom, to adopt the slogan of the Société des alcools du Québec: moderation tastes much better!
As for freedom of opinion as such, it is already clearly stated in the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms (section 3). But this freedom, in its academic component, deserves to be affirmed at a time when university professors have become too silent, in particular because of a hierarchical structure which does not sufficiently encourage freedom of opinion.
In addition to the freedom of verbal or non-verbal expression, university professors must be able to exercise greater decision-making freedom in the management of the course of students or in university life. So if the academic freedom bill helps make the university more of a faculty and student affair, it will be a remarkable contribution.