Awareness of the value of academic freedom will prevent future abuse, strengthen university

COURTNEY BOWMAN

Ask any university student about the importance of academic freedom and tenure for faculty and they likely won’t be able to give you an answer. Yet it’s something that has been blatantly abused at our institution and has potential to occur again.

Academic freedom is the belief that faculty members should be free to inquire, teach and communicate ideas without fear of repercussions, such as losing their job. It provides protection against abuses of bureaucratic power which can have a trickle-down effect on the student population.

On Oct. 20, Andrew Coyne, a national affairs columnist for Postmedia Network, delivered a lecture in Convocation Hall as part of the McKercher LLP Lecture Series titled “Our Broken Democracy: And How to Fix It.”

A 30-minute question period followed Coyne’s lecture, with the award for most awkward question of the night going to a particular rabble-rouser who commented on the irony of Coyne’s speaking about the importance of democracy at an institution that has in some ways, trampled democracy. In addition, the individual pointed out the further irony of Coyne speaking in the building where the offices of the administration that was responsible for said trampling are located.

Unless you live under a rock, you likely have at least minimal knowledge of the events to which the rabble-rouser was referring. In May, Robert Buckingham, then executive director of the School of Public Health, sent a letter to both the Saskatchewan Party and the provincial New Democratic Party titled “The Silence of the Deans,” which criticized the ill-advised merger of the School of Public Health with the College of Medicine.

Buckingham was then punished with the removal of his tenure, fired from his job and escorted off campus. Days later, backlash in the media and organizations such as the Canadian Association of University Teachers resulted in the restoration of his tenure as well as the opportunity to take up a teaching position at the university.

When tenured professors or deans attempt to present information that is inconvenient to administrative powers, it is an inappropriate reaction for said administrators — such as former university president Ilene Busch-Vishniac and former provost and vice-president academic Brett Fairbairn — to allow the principles of academic freedom to be violated by inflicting repercussions.

Buckingham’s removal was in contravention of the Statement of Academic Freedom, a document that university presidents unanimously accepted at the centennial meeting of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada in 2011.

For example, clause two states that academic freedom shouldn’t be constrained by appeals to such notions as loyalty to administrative leadership. Moreover, clause four states that decisions which have been conceived by consensus or even through the exercise of legitimate authority don’t constrain members of the academic staff from exercising their academic freedom by criticizing the decision.

In light of this fact, it seems problematic that current University of Saskatchewan president Gordon Barnhart did nothing to address the mistakes made in the Buckingham incident; an incident that one might call — to use all too familiar educational buzzwords — a learning opportunity.

A May 23 communications release on the U of S news site that welcomed Barnhart to his position quoted him as saying, “I believe academic freedom is a mark of pride at this university… The right to think your thoughts and express them, I believe that is alive and well on our campus.”

The inherent implication of Barnhart’s statement is unclear: is he saying that under the Busch-Vishniac regime, the integrity of academic freedom was maintained? Or is he saying that he defends Buckingham’s right to speak out in opposition to administration?

Incidentally, Buckingham was never restored as director of the School of Public Health. In an interview with Barnhart from CBC’s As It Happens on May 22, interviewer Carol Off stated: “If you’re not restoring him as the dean, then you are saying he was not entitled to make the remarks that he made.”

Barnhart had little to offer in reply, instead relying on rhetoric regarding the importance of assigning those actions to the old regime and focusing on “the start of a whole new positive era at the University of Saskatchewan.” It appears as though Barnhart does not support Buckingham’s right to speak his mind without fear of job loss.

Towards the end of the interview, Off asked Barnhart how it was possible to turn the page if no one at the university had identified what it is the university did wrong, who did it, or why it happened. To which Barnhart responded: “It’s negative or not productive to just keep going back and keep saying who did what and who said what. It’s happened, it’s there, and we’re moving on.”

Acknowledging past mistakes does not necessitate or equate with dwelling pessimistically on the past. Rather, it’s about embracing reality. A simple communications release, much like the one in which they welcomed Barnhart as president, would have sufficed in acknowledging the university’s wrong-doing without requiring further self-flagellation in the media.

As it is, however, the underlying issue is not that Barnhart is fearful of dwelling on the past, thereby obscuring the positive things happening at the U of S. It’s that he’s concerned about the institution losing face and endeavored to “hide the body” by sweeping the school’s problems under the rug as quickly as possible in the hopes that the media would forget about it, preventing what would be perceived as further damage to the school’s reputation. As far as band-aids go, this one is of poor quality.

To quote Coyne in his lecture on democracy, “Each abuse [of democracy] weakens our resistance to the next.” If the abuses that took place before were never acknowledged or fully corrected, what foundation does that lay for potential abuses of academic freedom and administrative power in the future? You can’t build on a foundation that is structurally unsound.