The Dalhousie Faculty Association (DFA) presented “Silencing the Academy; Academic Freedom and the future of University Governance” on March 24.
The panel was made up of James L. Turk, the former executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), Letita Meynell, associate professor of the Dalhousie Department of Philosophy, and Victor Catano, a former president of CAUT and the Saint Mary’s Faculty Union, and was moderated by Catrina Brown, the current DFA president.
To an audience of about 40 people, the Turk began the presentation by focusing on how recent changes to the nature of the university have fundamentally challenged the nature of academic freedom. Turk said these changes have, by extension, challenged the nature of the university as an entity for the transmission and exploration of knowledge.
Academic freedom, as Turk recognized it, has four core aspects
• The right to teaching, as a professor finds appropriate
• The right to research and scholarship
• The right to intramural criticism (being critical of the institution)
• The right to extramural criticism (that exercising their rights as a citizen to public discourse won’t result in action from the university
“The Corporate University and the Silencing of the Lambs” was presented by Victor Catano, the final speaker of the evening, regarding his recent experiences with the Presidential Search Committee at Saint Mary’s University (SMU).
Catano focused on the corporatization of the university, a subject touched upon by the other panellists. Catano’s experience involved the St. Mary’s Going Forward Review in 2014, where metrics used for businesses were used to evaluate the school. Units were made to compete with each other as a part of program prioritization, a system that he felt to be incompatible with the nature of the university.
Catano viewed the process undergone in the SMU Presidential Search Committee as similar in practice, due to administrators and the Board of Governors wanting “a president who thinks as a manager, not as an academic.” Catano viewed this process as the antithesis of a collegial process, citing meetings that were rigidly controlled by the administration in terms of agenda and content, with little to no opportunity to discuss the process or candidate beforehand.
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