The rector of the University of Montreal, Daniel Jutras, said this week that he was concerned about what was happening on the campuses of the universities of our neighbors to the South and that he did not want this kind of cultural war to be found here.
The specific reasons he gives to justify his concern are valid. The war between Israel and Palestine has indeed sparked heated controversies on American campuses, and the testimony before the congress of the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT made waves and even led the second, Elizabeth Magill, and the first, Claudine Gay, to resign — the latter also being accused of plagiarism.
Threats to academic freedom
But I think that the attacks on the university and on academic freedom, in the United States and to a lesser extent here, go beyond these recent events.
They sometimes take the form of censorship, exercised by a certain left, as is often reported, but also by a certain right, as recently in Florida. There, Governor Ron DeSantis passed laws that prohibit the teaching that theories like systemic racism and sexism, or realities like oppression and privilege, are inherent to the institutions of the United States and that they are there to maintain inequalities — social, political and economic.
I maintain, however, that what threatens universities and academic freedom there and mutatis mutandis here also comes from two other very important sources.
The first is a certain commercialization of its activities to which the university consents and participates through its transformation into an organization seeking income, a reality that we have been observing for too long already.
The second is the prevalence, especially in certain areas, but the evil is spreading, of ideological currents considered progressive and which often go hand in hand with this commercialization that I have just mentioned. They are one of the main causes of censorship, but also cause self-censorship.
These “internal enemies,” as I call them, are present in the United States, but also here, to a lesser extent.
I was recently very interested in a proposition put forward by Steven Pinker, a renowned Harvard psychologist. I think it deserves to be known and debated. Here, broken down into possible courses of action, are the five ideas he puts forward. They could inspire us.
Five courses of action
The first avenue is the reaffirmation, in a clear and strong policy, of the primacy of freedom of expression at the university. It implies that speech deemed hateful must be refuted, and not banned or criminalized, which would only encourage people to label as hateful everything they do not want to hear. But it also implies that, since universities have a research and education mission, they are also entitled “to controls over the conditions that are necessary to fulfill this mission.” These include standards of quality and relevance. You can’t teach just anything at Harvard.”
The second track is institutional neutrality. A university is a forum for debate, not a protagonist in it. If it pronounces itself on the issues of the day, for example on controversial foreign policy issues, “it puts words in the mouths of professors and students who can express themselves, or pits them unfairly against their own employers . It’s even worse when departments take individual stands, because it creates a conflict of interest with dissident students and faculty whose destiny they control.”
The third track is non-violence. At university, there are no acts of vandalism, intrusion and extortion: we defend our ideas through reason and persuasion, and not through propaganda. Otherwise, “parents and taxpayers will wonder why they should support, at great expense, students forced to listen to other students’ political propaganda when they should be learning math and history from their teachers.”
The fourth avenue is to promote the diversity of points of view. Pinker points out that 77% of professors at Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences describe themselves as liberal, and less than 3% as conservative. “Vast areas of the ideas landscape are no-go zones, and dissenting ideas are met with incomprehension, outrage, and censorship. »
Finally, on the fifth track, Pinker argues that many attacks on academic freedom come from a burgeoning bureaucracy called Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), which imposes uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups and the exclusion of free thinkers. He wants us to put an end to it, as well as to these sessions that it imposes. “Universities should stem the tide of EDI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal those that cannot be publicly justified. »
With the adjustments that are undoubtedly necessary, I think there is something here for us to meditate on.