Will Bill 32, introduced on April 6, really protect academic freedom, as Higher Education Minister Danielle McCann claims? This is what professors Martine Delvaux and Catherine Larochelle question in a letter published on these screens and signed by a hundred other academics. According to them, the project would give the government “increased power to intervene” in universities, by enshrining a new bureaucracy capable of “monitoring what is happening in the classroom”. Nothing less, please. What is this repressive reading of the law based on, stated in an alarmist tone, which can rightly be described as paradoxical?
Posted at 12:00 p.m.
It is obviously healthy and constructive to have a thorough debate on academic freedom. The fact remains that the “punitive” interpretation of the bill supported by Delvaux and Larochelle is essentially based on article 6 without regard for the other parts of the text that frame it. This article in fact gives the supervising minister the right to “order an educational institution to include in its policy” in terms of academic freedom “any element that it indicates” as well as the power to “have corrective measures taken necessary” to an institution found to be non-compliant. Except that the quotation is not only truncated, but distorted for the purposes of interpretation. Because this intervention of the representative of the State is explicitly subject to a double condition according to the bill that we restore exactly, and that everyone can verify: 1º when the minister considers it necessary “to protect university academic freedom” ; and 2º if “an establishment fails to adopt a policy in accordance with article 4”. Indeed, it is in the fourth section of the text that institutions are asked to set up a council that will oversee the implementation of a policy on academic freedom.
However, if Bill 32 obliges all establishments to adopt such a policy, in return, they remain free to give it the form they wish. The planned mechanism therefore respects the principle of institutional autonomy. It is also consistent with the balance sought by the Cloutier commission, which states in its report that the vast majority of professors feel that the means of protecting academic freedom are tied to a framework that is both local and national.
Thus, with this bill, we are far from state censorship or the “massive and unprecedented power” that Delvaux and Larochelle lend to the minister. Finally, the very idea of political interference in research and teaching is hardly compatible with Article 3, which guarantees the right of everyone to pursue their academic activities “without doctrinal, ideological or moral constraint”. .
The question remains, however: how can ministerial intervention be justified? Clearly, without the potential (but, let us recall, conditional) constraint set out in Article 6, it would be tempting for patronage administrators to propose a minimalist version of this policy on academic freedom.
And this risk is very real, as shown by a number of incidents that have occurred since 2011 on Canadian campuses and more recently in Quebec. Because these cases are not limited to the Verushka Lieutenant-Duval affair, as the signatories of the letter pretend to believe, who refrain from mentioning the inventory of incidents drawn up in the annexes to the reports of the Cloutier commission and the Bastarache commission.
Moreover, the pressures exerted on the university are not of a purely ideological nature. Just think of the hold that the business world is trying to establish over it, for example. Be that as it may, it seems impossible to us to affirm, as Delvaux and Larochelle do, that “academic freedom protects us from censorship” or other pressures if this same freedom is not defended by adequate institutional mechanisms. .
Who complained, for example, about the law passed in 2017 to prevent and combat sexual violence in higher establishments? Did we then see a formal attack on the principle of autonomy? Thus, a minimalist version of the policy on academic freedom would be fatally incapable of ensuring the mission of the institutions, recognized and defined for the first time in article 1 of the bill. Finally, it would have an immediate consequence for institutions that do not have unions (HEC or McGill, for example), leaving professors without real protection.
Does Bill 32 herald the end of academic freedom? This would not displease some directors who have also made themselves a scarecrow. However, nothing is less certain. We can be legitimately dissatisfied with the text in its current form and want improvements, this is the whole point of the discussions that will take place in the parliamentary committee. One thing is certain, however: the elementary observation of the text shows that the repressive interpretation of the bill has no basis. Instead of a rhetoric of insinuation and this catastrophist tone, were we not entitled to expect from academics a rigorous and methodical analysis of the entire bill?