In a letter to Duty published on January 31, our colleague Patrice Garant questions the opposition to the government’s decision not to proceed with the appointment of Denise Helly to the INRS board of directors. Professor Garant insists on the discretionary nature of this power and on the fact that the government has, under the Act respecting the University of Quebec (UQ), complete freedom to exercise it as it sees fit and that it would not be held accountable in this matter. The argument deployed poses significant problems and leads to conclusions that seem untenable to us. Given the importance of what is at stake and since colleague Garant calls us directly in his letter, we cannot help but react to it.
Mr. Garant first insists on the distinction between the power of recommendation vested in different authorities, in this case the INRS faculty, which appointed Professor Helly, and the discretionary power of appointment of the government, which does not would not be required to follow the recommendation thus made to him and who would be perfectly free to ignore it to appoint whoever he wishes.
Mr. Garant is right: the UQ Act, to which INRS falls, effectively provides that the government enjoys such power. But it seems essential to me in turn to recall here another fundamental distinction which Mr. Garant ignores, namely that which must be made between a power and its exercise. Enjoying power is one thing, exercising it in an arbitrary, ideological or partisan manner is another.
However, until now, this power has usually been exercised in compliance with certain principles, notably that of the collegial management of universities and, with all due respect to Mr. Garant, their relative autonomy. By ignoring these principles, the CAQ government is pushing us into a situation where we may have serious reasons to worry about the university institution and its public interest mission.
Let us remember that the pursuit of this mission — the production and dissemination of critical knowledge which is necessary for the advancement of knowledge and the democratic functioning of our societies — is only possible if we respect the autonomy of universities, without which there can be no real academic freedom.
Contrary to what Mr. Garant asserts, not only does the Academic Freedom Act speak of the autonomy of universities, but this autonomy appears, black and white, at the heart of the principles on which the law is based. Indeed, the third of these principles takes up verbatim the 1997 UNESCO recommendation and recognizes that “the full exercise of academic freedom presupposes the autonomy of higher education establishments”. The next affirms that this autonomy is an essential condition for the mission of universities, and the fifth and last principle affirms “that it is necessary to ensure that these educational establishments can accomplish their mission without doctrinal, ideological or moral “.
Our colleague ends his text by explaining that he does not see how the government’s refusal to appoint Professor Helly constitutes an attack on academic freedom since it does not prevent her from continuing her research. This argument has been raised by several commentators on this affair, Mr. Garant clearly not being the only one to make this kind of restrictive reading of academic freedom. However, it seems obvious to us that the government’s decision in this matter infringes on this freedom, because we have every reason to believe that the refusal to ratify the appointment of colleague Helly is linked to the research work that she led.
In context, this decision is, at a minimum, likely to have an inhibiting effect not only on Denise Helly, but also, more broadly, on all colleagues in the University of Quebec network who would have good reasons to want to carry out the same kind of research as her and who now risk being seriously concerned about the consequences this could have on their careers. In doing so, this intervention limits the possibility for colleagues to freely exercise their activity “without doctrinal, ideological or moral constraint” as provided for by law.
We could expect the government that passed this law to respect its principles, particularly when the time comes to exercise the power of appointment conferred on it by the UQ Act. I would hope that Mr. Garant would not go so far as to tell us that not only is the government free to exercise its power as it wishes, but also that it can act in complete disregard of the principles which are on the basis of a law that he himself had adopted.
Moreover, if we wanted to push the argument of what the power provided by the UQ Act allows in isolation to the end, we could, following my colleague’s perspective, come to the conclusion that, if the government wished, it would also have the power to transform all establishments governed by the UQ Act into propaganda organs in the service of the party in power. Such a reading would obviously be absurd.
Retracing with him the history of the UQ Act, we can wonder what had in mind, by giving the government this power of appointment, those who wrote the UQ Act in 1968, then that we were mainly concerned with establishing a secular university, distinguishing itself from charter universities in which religious authorities exercised significant powers of appointment.
To better understand the symbolic nature of the power then entrusted to the government, we can refer to the words of Prime Minister Bertrand, who said, at the time of the first reading of the bill, on December 5, 1968, the following: “The University of Quebec is therefore a public corporation distinct from the State and no more subject to it than are current universities. It is not in the government’s supervision of the University of Quebec that we should look for proof of its public character. »
The perspective was taken up and deepened by Deputy Goldbloom, in the debates of December 9, 1968, when, speaking of the role of the State, he insisted on the importance of academic freedom and the autonomy of administrators of the UQ as well as on the need to “make particular efforts to preserve the freedom of teaching which our universities have always enjoyed and which they must be able to continue to enjoy”.
As our colleague suggests, in the discussions surrounding the adoption of the Academic Freedom Act in 2022, there was no question of modifying the UQ Act to ensure greater autonomy. But it is perhaps because we then considered as perfectly unthinkable the kind of exercise of power that the Legault government today seems to consider as legitimate. Perhaps at this point it will become relevant to have discussions that have not been relevant until now. Because Mr. Garant is absolutely right on one point: nothing is going right with the exercise of the government’s power of appointment!