April 2009
Over the past few weeks, CAUT has become aware of a
number of disturbing cases in which university administrations have limited or
suppressed debate on controversial issues. Whether it is banning posters or
noisy demonstrations, we believe such heavy-handed actions constitute a clear
threat to the purpose of post-secondary education.
Not surprisingly, the failures involve bitterly contentious issues. One is
Middle East politics. Last month Carleton University and the University of
Ottawa banned a student organization poster for Israeli Apartheid Week because
the universities felt it too provocative. The poster, by noted political
cartoonist Carlos Latuff, shows a stylized Israeli warplane firing a missile at
a child holding a teddy bear and standing on ground emblazoned with the word
“Gaza.” York University has gone even farther, invoking a noise policy to
justify handing club suspensions and fines to student organizations that held
counter-protests for and against Israeli government polices.
On the contentious issue of abortion, the University
of Calgary told a student pro-life group it could only set up its graphic images
of abortion, likening abortion to genocide, if it turned the images inward so
that passersby couldn’t see them unless they approached the display. The
students were threatened with suspension, expulsion, fines of up to $2,000 and
arrest for trespassing unless they complied. The university’s lawyer was quoted
as saying the Charter of Rights and Freedoms does not apply to universities
and freedom of expression protection does not extend to trespassers.
In invoking the need to be “respectful” and “civil” and to avoid “provocation,”
too many universities are suppressing free speech and freedom of expression.
Some universities are even stretching to invoke human rights’ codes to justify
suppression when these codes typically address the right to be free from
discrimination in employment and in access to services and accommodations and
are not meant to silence campus discussion and debate.
Our institutions must remember the integrity of their central mission, which is
so aptly described in the University of Toronto’s statement of institutional
purpose: that “within the unique university context, the most crucial of all
human rights are the rights of freedom of speech, academic freedom and freedom
of research,” and affirms that “these rights are meaningless unless they entail
the right to raise deeply disturbing questions and provocative challenges to the
cherished beliefs of society at large and of the university itself.”
The statement concludes: “It is this human right to radical, critical teaching
and research with which the University has a duty above all to be concerned; for
there is no one else, no other institution and no other office, in our modern
liberal democracy, which is the custodian of this most precious and vulnerable
right of the liberated human spirit.”
Our universities and colleges have occasionally lost sight of that vision in
periods of tension, as during the Cold War years. Regrettably we now appear to
be entering another era when many of our post-secondary institutions are failing
in their public responsibility to foster rather than suppress discussion of
deeply disturbing questions and controversial issues around which public
passions run high.
However intensely supporters of Israeli government
policy feel that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism or defenders of a woman’s
right to choose find pro-life imagery disgusting and offensive, universities and
colleges must rebuff their demands for suppression of their opponents. The
Criminal Code provides limits on advocacy that threatens or justifies violence
or other illegal harm. Our post-secondary educational institutions should look
for ways to extend legal limits to promote discussion and debate, not invoke
internal policies and narrow reading of the law to make discourse on campuses
more restrictive than what can occur in society at large.
As far as the importance of civility, our institutions could well remember John
Stuart Mill’s caution in On Liberty in which he decried as risky and
hypocritical the notion that “the free expression of all opinions should be
permitted on condition that the manner be temperate and do not pass
the bounds of fair discussion.”
As he noted, “Much might be said on the impossibility of fixing where these
supposed bounds are to be placed: for if the test be offense to those whose
opinion is attacked, I think experience testified that this offense is given
whenever the attack is telling and powerful, and that every opponent who pushes
them hard, and whom they find it difficult to answer, appears to them … an
intemperate opponent.”
Unless universities and colleges champion and defend faculty and student rights
to raise deeply disturbing questions and provocative challenges to cherished
beliefs, they have little reason to exist.
Editorial, CAUT Bulletin, Volume 56, No. 3, March 2009.
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