It is done. The long-awaited Law on academic freedom in the university environment was adopted by the National Assembly on June 3rd. This law, which follows the report of the Cloutier commission, defines academic freedom and ensures that universities will adopt a policy by which it will be recognized, promoted and protected.
I wanted to talk about it with Yves Gingras, professor at UQAM and member of the Cloutier commission, to whom I feel close on all these issues.
On the law and the debates it has generated
The report’s first recommendation to the government was “to pass a law stating the mission of the university as well as the conditions for its accomplishment and defining academic freedom and its beneficiaries”. Is Yves Gingras satisfied with what the new law proposes and imposes?
He is.
The law, he says, defines, and this is the first time it has done so, “the mission of the university and recalls that two conditions are necessary to achieve it: the autonomy of institutions and the academic freedom of teachers”.
I remind him that the law has nevertheless aroused criticism and negative reactions. Were some legitimate, according to him?
Yves Gingras thinks that if “the first version of the bill was open to criticism by some of its formulations, the amended version no longer poses any problems, even if we could have, as requested by the Cloutier report, include the fact of taking action and cause for a professor attacked in the exercise of his functions, that is to say for public interventions justified and argued in a rational way”.
He adds that it is also up to the unions to negotiate collective agreements that include this and underlines that no MP voted against the law, which shows a strong consensus on this subject. (Recall that the eight Québec solidaire MNAs present abstained from voting.)
A case of moral panic?
Some have argued that this debate over academic freedom is a case of “moral panic”. I don’t agree with them. Especially since the Cloutier report included an appendix listing recent events involving academic freedom in Quebec, an appendix that we can think invalidates this hypothesis. Is that also his opinion?
Yves Gingras replies that these criticisms are unfounded. They are, according to him, a desire to “minimize the facts, to impute hidden motives or to make psycho pop”.
The notion of moral panic, he continues, “functions here not as a neutral and symmetrical concept in its application, but as a tautology: becomes ‘panic’ everything with which one disagrees. It is a form of pathologizing the debate and not of argumentation. As for the number of cases, I have always considered that, when a problem is identified, we should not wait for the multiplication of cases to intervene. Saying “it’s marginal” is typical of this rhetoric often repeated by certain rectors”.
The responsibility of universities
Some maintain that the universities have a share of the responsibility in the fact that the State had to intervene by law in this file. What does Mr. Gingras think?
His answer is unambiguous. “It is abundantly clear that if universities had truly understood the importance of defending and promoting academic freedom in practice, and not through mere ‘statements’, they would not have taken the side of incompatible student demands every time with this freedom of teaching, research and creation. »
What could and should they have done?
According to him, they should have explained to people who complained what a university is, that it is par excellence the place for reasoned debates on all subjects. Instead, he laments, the cases listed show a tendency to want to not make waves, to “flatter the students in the direction of the hair and to tell the teachers to shut up, to adapt, when they are not summoned to explain themselves as if they were already guilty”.
Exactly. Some, and I am one, also see serious threats to academic freedom in a certain ideological domination akin in the worst cases to propaganda or indoctrination. Should we take these threats seriously, according to him?
Yves Gingras recalls that the defense of academic freedom must be exercised in the face of all attempts at censorship, “whether they come from the State, religions, industry or ideological pressure groups of any kind”.
A concrete example of these ideological pressures?
He recalls this recent tendency to “ask researchers to say what they are going to do to advance the EDI cause [équité, diversité, inclusion] or students how they get involved socially”. All of this, he says, “goes against freedom in the university and even contravenes the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which not only defends the right to express oneself on a subject, but also the right to not speak on a subject. A researcher has the right to limit his work to the search for exoplanets without having to give his opinion on morally fashionable subjects.
Finally, I wanted to know what had led him to agree to be part of this commission – it is not so common for an academic.
“I have the principle that, as a teacher, I have a certain expertise,” he replies. That my training and my salary have essentially been paid for with public funds and that I have a kind of obligation not to refuse without good reason a legitimate request from an elected government. »