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Supporters stand in front of a pro-Palestinian protest camp on the campus of McGill University in Montreal on June 17. Ryan Remiose/The Canadian Press
David H. Turpin is President Emeritus of the Universities of Alberta and Victoria and a former Vice-Chancellor of Queen's University. Ann Baillie is President of Ann Baillie Communications & Strategy and former Executive Communications Director at the University of Alberta.
Why can't universities escape the news?
We see images of protesters on campuses. We see news reports about the federal government restricting research funding for projects involving certain topics or foreign organizations. We hear about the potential for financial exploitation of international students. We see tensions arising from university equity, diversity and inclusion policies and read about controversial speakers being disinvited. We worry that the extreme polarization of American politics is spilling over onto Canadian campuses. These issues, and many more, have played out very publicly in recent months and years.
As former university presidents and executive communications directors, we have dealt with many of these issues. Addressing these issues is not easy. Why? Because, however controversial they may be, they stem from friction between the foundational values of the modern university. Understanding how these values align and clash more clearly can help answer the question of why universities are so often in the news.
What are those core values?
The first is freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression, which requires that universities have a certain degree of independence and autonomy that they grant to faculty and students.
The second is intellectual honesty: Faculty and students are free to explore their interests, but they also have a responsibility to be honest and transparent in their work and research.
Third, equal rights and dignity for all – a foundation of fundamental human rights and critical to attracting and retaining talented students and faculty to our community and enabling them to reach their full potential.
These three simple values are the foundational crust on which the University is built.
Plates collide with each other in the same way that the plates that make up the Earth's crust collide. This creates friction, which generates heat. Friction can also cause earthquakes. These earthquakes can cause so much destruction that they require radical reconstruction.
We argue that the friction points between these three values explain many of the contentious issues that arise in universities today. But to explain almost everything, we need to consider one more factor: money.
That money influences universities is not a new phenomenon: they have always had benevolent sponsors: churches and guilds have shaped universities for centuries.
Government funding of public universities is relatively new, having existed in Canada for just over 100 years. All Canadian provinces grant public universities varying degrees of autonomy and independence, but government funding comes with significant strings attached. Through tuition fees, domestic and international students and their families are also important funders of universities. Importantly, business, industry and philanthropists also make significant contributions.
These sponsors, along with critics and other stakeholders, want to have a say. They each want to determine not just how their own money is spent, but how all money is spent, and they each want to have a say in the future direction of the university. The tensions this creates cannot be ignored. Maintaining good relationships with stakeholders is essential to the success of any university.
Ultimately, however, universities must strive to preserve their independence and autonomy in order to fulfill their core mission, or else freedom of research and expression will be restricted.
Imagine a Venn diagram of three core values.
The first circle of the Venn diagram contains two separate but related concepts: freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression. Freedom of inquiry is at the core of academic freedom and is the right that institutions grant to faculty, allowing them to pursue any avenue of inquiry they choose, even when sponsors would prefer more control.
Complementing this institutional right is freedom of expression, which is a constitutional right in most democracies, recognized by the state and held by all citizens. In Canada, the right to freedom of expression is not absolute; under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, it is subject to reasonable restrictions that can be clearly justified in a free and democratic society. These restrictions include sections 318 and 319 of the Criminal Code, which prohibit promoting genocide and incitement to hatred.
When it comes to freedom of inquiry and expression, universities allow the pursuit and expression of unpopular, even abhorrent, ideas. In theory, most people support this view until someone on campus brings up an idea they find offensive. Then things start to heat up. A speaker or professor with a controversial idea can stoke anger and provoke conflict, calls for censorship, and debate about where the limits of freedom of expression should or shouldn't be drawn.
What complicates this diagram is the second circle on the diagram: intellectual honesty. This is about academic responsibility, the flip side of academic freedom. In theory, this value is easy to achieve: students and faculty must not cheat, must not fabricate results, must not plagiarize, and must be transparent in all interactions.
Unfortunately, from time to time, some people cheat, fabricate results, plagiarize, and, unsurprisingly, some turn out to be just plain wrong. Any of these actions can result in problems coming to light and your university finding itself in the news.
The third circle is about equal rights and dignity for all. Universities have made great efforts to focus on this value, first and foremost because it is the right thing to do. But to attract the best talent and discover the best ideas, universities must be open to all people, perspectives and ideas. The development of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and federal and state human rights laws has reinforced this focus on diversity, equity and inclusion.
Canadian universities have made great efforts to improve the participation and engagement of members of underrepresented but equally deserving groups, and to establish inclusive environments where everyone feels safe and respected.
Problems arise when safe spaces for people are confused with safe spaces for ideas. Individual ideas should not be protected from vigorous debate.
Let us be clear: verbal harassment, hate speech, threats of physical harm, violence, vandalism, and other illegal behavior will not be tolerated on any college campus. Questioning the ideas of others must be done respectfully (and lawfully). College should be a safe place for people, but not for ideas; rather, it should be a place where ideas can be repeatedly tested, debated, and refined or discarded.
The tragic events that began in Israel and Gaza on October 7 have caused upheaval on campuses at the intersection of freedom of expression, human rights and dignity, and intellectual honesty.
Decisions about how and when to restrict freedom of expression and the right to protest have been different on each campus. Governments at all levels have stepped in, some calling for and praising protests to stop, others encouraging tolerance. On some campuses, Palestinian and Jewish communities have responded to the war together, while on others, judgements are needed to determine whether protesters promoted hatred and genocide. Universities have been called upon to take a stand. Some students have filed lawsuits alleging that universities have not confronted anti-Semitism, while others have called for universities to publicly condemn the Israeli government's actions. And every university has major public and private sponsors who have made it clear that they have a stake in the issue and its solution, putting their support for the university, and in some cases, their students, at risk. The path to a solution is incredibly difficult and tough.
These campus disputes are powerful examples of conflicting core values, but there are many others. For example, concerns about researchers receiving funding from entities perceived to have a vested interest in research findings arise at the fault line between intellectual integrity, freedom of inquiry, and access to funding. Revelations that university researchers and leaders have unfairly claimed Indigenous identity arise at the confluence of intellectual integrity and the rights and dignity of all people. The recent controversy over university researchers receiving funding from foreign entities and the imposition of federal restrictions is an example of the inherent tension between freedom of inquiry and the limits of institutional autonomy.
The list goes on. The fault lines of university values, like the interests of sponsors, will never go away. There will always be friction, and sometimes it will cause earthquakes. To think otherwise is like believing that we can stop the Earth's tectonic plates from rubbing against each other, thereby preventing earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes.
In this climate of seemingly fierce conflict, we want to emphasize that universities are necessary and wonderful places where their core mission of research and learning continues to thrive. Universities endure these controversies in part because of their potential to lead to new knowledge and understanding. And because they are important to our communities. They attract the best minds from around the world. They spur the discoveries and innovations that seed economic, social and cultural progress. And they prepare the next generation of citizens and leaders.
Universities deliver these far-reaching societal benefits precisely because of the fundamental values on which they are based, and to maintain these benefits, they must tolerate and endure the conflict that inevitably arises when these values clash.
