Are Canada’s universities heading towards an epochal crisis of relevance? Writing in The Hub, a university administrator in a “senior leadership position” at a “well-respected university” worries that they are. Her concerns are not directed at the rising costs of post-secondary education for students, the funding crisis plaguing the institutions of some provinces (especially Ontario), or budget models that tie resources to enrollments and enrollments to employment. She instead focuses on the purported weakening commitment to scholarly excellence and academic freedom. The culprit: woke obsession with the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion agenda, students who need coddling and are incapable of rising to the challenge of higher education, an expanding cohort of student support functionaries with no background in higher education, and the rule of group unthink amongst senior administrators. I think that she raises legitimate concerns, but also exaggerates the extent to which contentious debate has been suppressed within Canada’s universities.

There have been, to be sure, egregious exceptions to the principle of academic freedom. The most serious is the firing of Frances Widdowson from Mount Royal University. According to Widdowson, she was fired because of her criticisms of the school’s Indiginization initiatives. Her case is currently being argued in front of an arbitrator in Alberta. She has received the support of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, a group who traces its origins to the struggle for academic freedom. CAUT was also involved in protesting the decision of the administration at the University of Lethbridge to cave into student and faculty pressure to cancel a talk that Widdowson was supposed to give on campus. She had been invited by Philosophy professor (and my former colleague at McMaster University) Paul Viminitz to speak on her case and the surrounding issues of academic freedom.

The concerns that the administrator raises in her essay have some basis in reality. I have argued consistently and will continue to argue that any student or faculty member who is incapable of listening to and responding with cogent argument and criticism to positions that differ from their own because they assume that their position is necessarily true, just, and beyond rational dispute contradict the ethos of free inquiry upon which the university depends. Universities cannot exist without the free exchange and articulation of arguments. As the poet and University of Toronto English Professor George Eliot Clarke wrote in a recent edition of the CAUT Bulletin, the “cancellation” and “gangstalking,” i.e., bullying and harassment conducted to censure, censor, or silence academics (and other intellectuals, including writers) … are strictly heinous when backed by other members of the intelligentsia– citizens whose work relies upon free speech guarantees.” (CAUT Bulletin, 18 Vo. 70, No. 6, Sept-Oct, 2023, 18).) Clarke is correct to insist that no one group has the right to decide what positions are publicly articulated and defended. As I have said before, the truth will out, if and only if differing positions can be freely analyzed and criticized. There is no higher value in the university than free exchange, analysis, and criticism of ideas and arguments concerning all of the dimensions of human experience: the natural world upon which we depend, the social worlds that we construct, and the systems of thought and expression (science, philosophy, spirituality, artistic sensibility and practice) through which we try to understand and interpretet. The political value of universities is not determined by any party line. Their political value is that they educate people to think clearly and critically, to evaluate and marshal evidence in support of a position, to rationally convince others or be rationally convinced themselves. Self-righteous posturing and preaching to the choir supports an ethic of indoctrination to which the value and power of human thinking must always oppose itself.

Universities must reject, as Hegel said, “the conceit that refuses to argue.”

The question is: are DEI initiatives necessarily expressions of that conceit.

But are DEI initiatives opposed to academic freedom? Writing in the same issue of the CAUT Bulletin, Executive Director David Robinson acknowledged that there are real tensions between some interpretations of DEI initiatives and academic freedom. “We have … seen more prescriptive requirement that ask candidates to submit statements demonstrating how their work aligns with the institution’s specific EDI strategy. This can violate academic freedom.” Where there are grounds to worry about the transgressions of the principle of academic freedom, faculty unions need to do their job and have demands for such statements removed from application requirements. That is not to say, Robinson adds, that the mere existence of DEI requirements violates academic freedom. “CAUT policy has long stated that all hiring and promotion decisions should be based only on considerations relevant to .. effective performance .. Arguably, such professional responsibilities today include the ability to teach an increasingly diverse and inclusive student body.” (CAUT Bulletin, Vol 70, No. 6, 7). Agreed. Therefore, there is no necessary contradiction between institutional efforts to more fulsomely include historically marginalized voices and the right of academics to organize their courses according to their expertise and professional judgment.

In a related vein, the president of PEN America Suzanne Nossel argued in a recent essay that the university system in a pluralistic society has a responsibility to ensure that there is space for the expression of all socially relevant perspectives on the problems of human experience and knowledge. Both Robinson and Noessen bring to light what to my mind is the key to resolving the conflict between DEI and academic freedom: academics have a responsibility to teach the state of the art in their disciplines. This responsibility obligates them to revise their own curriculum in light of changes in the field. Academic disciplines cannot be determined solely by political forces outside the academy, but they do not float free of those forces either. Therefore, where pervasive social struggles, such as the renewed struggle against racism in the wake of the George Floyd murder steer academic work in new directions, everyone working in fields so affected have a responsibility to inform themselves of that work and incorporate it, where relevant, into their course designs, not because some bureaucracy, but because good teaching, demands it.

The anonymous administrator invokes the Enlightenment in defence of her position, but the Enlightenment was contradictory, typically (but not always) invoking different standards for the judgement of European and non-European societies. The French Revolution proclaimed the universal rights of “man and citizen,” but executed Olympe de Gouges when she demanded that the rights of women be equally recognized. As great an anti-imperialist as the Marquis de Condorcet could, in the same work (Sketch for Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind) both denounce the violent racism of slavery-supporting tyrants and argue that the best fate for Indigenous people in the Americas was assimilation.

The political legacy of the Enlightenment is thus highly ambiguous. Methodologically, what was most valuable is the opposite of the good administrator’s assumption. The Enlightenment began the process of freeing thought from attachment to eternal natural kinds and fixed moral hierarchies. The key thinkers of the French, Scottish, and German Enlightenments began to ask crucial questions about how societies came to be organized the way that they are, who benefits from that organization, and how people came to be convinced that the way things are now is the way that they naturally should be? When we understand the Enlightenment as the origin of critical-historical thinking, feminism, critical race theory, and the critique of colonialism become continuations of its methodological heritage, not its opposite. “The Enlightenment” was a historical period, contradictory like all historical periods, and not a crystalline structure of truth floating free from social interests.

That said, everyone who teaches or studies at a university must treat their work as an argument and not as gospel truth to be preached and never questioned. Refusal to treat opponent’s positions as arguments but as anathema to be banned is a direct violation of academics’ and students’ duty to treat the institution as a space for open inquiry and free debate. That duty applies equally to everyone: again, the political function of universities is not to promote some undefined and therefore meaningless “social justice agenda” or to combat the deep structural inequalities of the world. Universities educate, that is all, but under the assumption that educated people can weigh evidence, detect contradictions between principle and practice or within principles, develop coherent arguments to justify the claim that there is a contradiction, suggest alternatives, all the while remaining open to counter-argument and to the incorporation of sound criticism into revised thinking.

That is the hope, in any case. And while I agree that there have been egregious examples of cowardly administrators caving in to some students and faculty’s misplaced political demands to regulate the free play of argument on campus, I do not see that this problem has reached a point where the very existence of the institution as a space for free inquiry has been threatened. The author of the piece lists a now familiar set of concerns: targeted hiring of historically underrepresented groups, Indigenization initiatives, and students more concerned with mental health support than intellectual growth.

But there is no detailed meat of analysis and evidence put on these bones of critique. She does not prove, for example, that targeted hiring of underrepresented groups compromises the quality of research and teaching or that there is a contradiction between such hiring initiatives and academic excellence and commitment to choosing the most qualified candidate. The author is a woman, and she would know better than me that exactly the same arguments were launched 40 years ago when institutions began making systematic efforts to increase the proportion of women academics. Does she regard herself and her female colleagues hired over the past 3 or 4 decades as as a mere “equity hires? I would guess not. So why does she think that black or Indigenous colleagues hired more recently are not equally fit for their positions? If, as she implies, she thinks that (at least some of them) are, she needs to provide some evidence.

As for students today, well, students today are who they are and they are different from the author and I when we were students 30 or 40 years ago. Her elders told her, I am sure, as mine told me when I was an adolescent, that I would grow old enough to be driven crazy by teenagers and young adults, and they were correct. The tone of the essay too often sounds like late middle age grousing about “kids these days.’ Now I admit, there is both necessity and pleasure in late middle age grousing about “kids these days’ (if it was so much better in our day, we can reconcile ourselves more easily to getting old) but grousing is not proof that there is a systematic problem. Before one condemns contemporary students, one must look at the social and economic context in which they are trying to study (high tuition, the consequent need for many to work and try to go to school, uncertain job prospects, to name only the most significant).

We oldsters must also remember that those of us who became professors were bookworms and lab rats: a very small proportion of our graduating classes. Now that we teach or administrate we have to keep in mind that the vast majority of students do not want to be scholars and intellectuals. To be effective teachers we have to come down to where most of our students are in order to encourage them to take a few steps up to where the ideas live. We also have to keep in mind that our study habits were forged before the internet, before people held the power of real time instant global communication in the palm of their hands. Our social identities were formed in a vastly different cultural-technological matrix.

As we were different from our parents, so too are today’s students different from us. They are not, I do not think, a catastrophe that will destroy the institution, but they will force the institution to change. As the Gang of Four sang in “I Found that Essence Rare,” “the worst thing in 1954 was the bikini.” I can imagine academics in “senior leadership positions” in the 60s fussing about the complete corruption of the nation’s morals in response to student demands for co-ed dorms.

Again, there are serious concerns raised in this essay and there are examples of institutions abdicating their responsibilities to protect academic freedom. However, I want to suggest– gently, and with respect– that if the problems really are as serious as she argues, she has a perfect duty, as a “senior leader’ to open her mouth in meetings and challenge her colleagues. And a further part of that duty is to sign her name to articles that call into question the academic integrity of the university institutions that have given her a career. If that which we depend upon not only for our paycheque but our existence as intellectuals is threatened, and we believe that the institution’s social value is in jeopardy, then we have a duty to protect it, or resign from a “leadership” position and go back to the faculty ranks. It is not only the communists of the world that should disdain to conceal their views, it is all concerned citizens. If one is afraid to sign one’s name, why should anyone believe what they say? After all, an essential part of the free exchange of ideas that the author claims to value is answering criticism of your arguments. But if one does not put name to paper, one cannot be held to critical account.