A code to save universities from themselves

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This article was published 11/12/2023 (695 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Hamas-Israeli conflict has unleashed the campus dogs of war. The spectacle has become as familiar as it is ghastly.

Universities have left themselves vulnerable to ridicule and contempt, often undeserved, but sadly, sometimes warranted.

They have the privilege of self-governance; to keep it they must govern.

Below we propose the broad outline of a code that distinguishes what is permissible from what is not.

Academic freedom is both an essential principle and an implicit contract. Universities must vigorously defend the right to think, speak, and write about unpopular themes and challenge societal norms.

Some heretical ideas go out with a whimper, while others over time become conventional. No historical case is permanently closed. Flights of fancy, intellectual cul-de-sacs and riotous discourse go with the territory, ingredients of the fermentation process that creates lasting contributions to civilization. Attempts to change the recipe ruin the brew.

But while universities should be outward-looking, curious, and pluralistic, they are not public squares.

They are institutions with identities and a particular culture. The academic licence is largely unrestricted. But it is an academic licence, and it is academic freedom that must be championed.

Only some expression is academic; the challenge is to codify what constitutes legitimate academic discourse. A useful code is neither too general and vague, nor too specific and exhaustive. It is like the preamble to a constitution that defines foundational values and ambitions. Crucially, it has the gravitas to guide and justify what to do in tough cases.

We can’t create the code here, but it should incorporate at least these tenets:

1. The university is a place of reason and scholarship. Any event that bears the university imprimatur is expected to live and breathe these precepts.

2. The university has a unique obligation to subject ideas and perspectives to rigorous analysis and debate. The more contentious and potentially inflammatory the subject matter, the greater the duty to invite multiple perspectives and critiques.

3. Civil discourse is non-negotiable. Interfering with legitimate academic expression is a cardinal sin.

4. Members of the university community are — and are entitled to be — political actors. The university as an institution is not. Academics publish non-academic works and engage in non-academic activities. In so doing they do not represent the university. Sometimes it is prudent to pursue them off-campus.

5. The university has a duty of care to its students that obliges them to proscribe activities that can credibly be judged to discriminate against or demonize an identifiable group.

6. The classroom is a place of academic inquiry, not a soapbox from which to proselytize or impose orthodoxies. Faculty may have strong and widely known views, but in the classroom they must welcome dissent, and judge students not on their beliefs or conclusions, but the knowledge, reason, and literacy marshalled to support them.

On Nov. 24, the University of Winnipeg hosted a teach-in titled “Palestine and Genocide: Reflections on Imperialism, Settler-Colonialism, and Decolonization.” It posed no question; it was an assertion of truth. The term “genocide” was a deliberate provocation confirming the guilt of its alleged perpetrators. Israelis are by definition imperialists and settler-colonialists, which justifies all actions to combat the oppression. There were no “reflections” on what Hamas teaches Palestinian children about Jews, or its declared commitment to wipe Israel off the map.

There was nothing academic about the teach-in. It was purely a polemic that invited no dissent.

A university committed to seeking rather than declaring truth would have had the organizers explain how the event complied with the tenets of the code, and where it could not, to effect a remedy.

If disinclined, the organizers could have moved the event off-campus — by order if necessary — and removed any indication that this was a University of Winnipeg sponsored event.

A great deal is at stake.

As society becomes less reflective, more tribal, inundated with misinformation and distrustful of institutions, universities are even more critical to preserving and expanding the Enlightenment. Whatever they do will be contested and messy.

But if they continue to stumble from one fiasco to another, their fitness to self-regulate will be questioned, the temptation to meddle will grow, and the result will be infinitely worse.

A responsibly enforced code would limit universities’ self-inflicted damage. But formal codes, like formal constitutions, are impotent if they are mere words rather than the expression of an ethos that all faculty take seriously.

Many don’t, which is why university leaders must.

Steven Lewis is adjunct professor, Simon Fraser University; Neil Besner is former provost at the University of Winnipeg.