In the 1960s and ’70s, we witnessed the spread of increasingly radical ideologies in North America.
In Canada and the United States, Marxist revolutionary visions were seldom embraced by working-class citizens. So, militant leftists shifted the idea of revolutionary “struggle” from class warfare to ethnic and racial conflict. They captured the imagination of impressionable young people by bombing buildings, kidnapping dignitaries, committing robberies, and murdering innocent people.
Positive Agents for Change
During the “Quiet Revolution” of the sixties, prominent intellectuals such as Pierre Elliot Trudeau and Quebec independence leader René Lévesque established powerful leftist political blocs in Canada. Quebecers and Eastern Canadians in particular were separated from their traditional roots, and democratic-socialist parties dominated the political culture for the next six decades.In 2018, two years after the election of the Trump administration in the United States, a relatively new party, Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), won a majority in the Quebec National Assembly. CAQ is generally regarded to be populist, nationalist, and conservative—a disruptive alternative to the last 60 years of failed socialist policies.
The CAQ leader, former Air Transat boss François Legault, is somewhat reminiscent of pre-Quiet Revolution Premier Maurice Duplessis, who throughout the 1940s and ’50s, guided Catholic Quebec’s gradual transition to modern democratic-capitalism.
A Rocky Road to University Reform
Moving to loosen the woke left’s ideological grip over our formative institutions, the CAQ government of Quebec recently introduced Bill 32. The proposed legislation is intended to protect academic freedom in the province’s universities. The bill calls for university instruction to be conducted free from “doctrinal, ideological or moral constraint.”Danielle McCann, Quebec’s Minister of Higher Education, told reporters that Bill 32 seeks to preserve a high-quality learning environment. She appears convinced that there’s a direct relationship between the ideas born in the sixties and the repressive intellectual climate in leftist-run schools, colleges, and universities.
The minister argued that, so long as they respect obvious ethical and scientific standards, university professors should be able to use any words required in a pedagogical or academic context. She said the bill is needed because academic freedom for university instructors must be better defined and protected.
McCann suggests that a legislative framework will help prevent free-thinking professors from being forced to censor themselves. Bill 32 is the kind of legislation that should interest open-minded scholars throughout North America.
Manfredi agreed that academic freedom should be a cornerstone of university life. “Over centuries,” he wrote, “it has allowed scholars to challenge received wisdom without fear of institutional censure. In this way, it has been fundamental to the advancement of learning.”
But, while clearly asserting that academic freedom deserves robust protection, Manfredi insists that “such protection cannot take the form of a law that foresees state intervention in university policy.”
Manfredi argues that Bill 32 represents a level of government reach into university governance that is “unprecedented” and “violates the most basic principles governing the relationship between governments and institutions of higher education.”
The McGill professor contends that a consensus of world authorities limit academic freedom to those who teach and research in higher education institutions. He says that McCann is “confusing freedom of speech, which is the right of every person in the public sphere, with the academic freedom of instructors and researchers within a scholarly community.”
Other academics, troubled by the loss of free intellectual discourse and dispassionate inquiry, have taken a different view. In April, a small group of Nova Scotia professors belonging to Canada’s Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS), petitioned their provincial government for help to defend academic freedom.
The professors’ appeal opened with a reminder that in the 2021 election campaign, Progressive Conservative Party leader Tim Houston had referred to university campuses as “sites of ideological repression.” Signatories to the professors’ letter generally agreed with that assessment.
The petitioning professors thought Houston was acknowledging problems in the universities that needed to be addressed. Like Quebec’s Minister of Higher Education, these Nova Scotia academics contended that “universities have abandoned their academic mission by restricting freedom of inquiry and expression with speech codes and ’safe spaces.'”
The professors’ letter raised issues like those dealt with by University of Toronto professor emeritus Jordon Peterson, who received widespread attention in the late 2010s for his forthright stand against “compelled speech.” Peterson’s arguments led to considerable public indignation over woke, political correctness and identity politics. He received enormous acclaim, attracting considerable public support for his stand against campus cancel culture. Peterson was predictably pilloried as an ultra-conservative by his progressive colleagues.
The Maritime scholars explained: “It is unmistakable that civility on Nova Scotia campuses has declined since the mid-2010s, to the exasperation of so many students and academics. There is general malaise that manifests itself in many symptoms.” Unlike Manfredi, these academics were seeking a government inquiry into university culture and the eventual adoption of principles that would protect free expression in academic contexts.
In the Nova Scotia case, the government reply was unsympathetic. The Minister for Advanced Education declared that his own experience had already led him to conclude that the Nova Scotia school system is “inherently white and colonial.” He insisted that there is evidence of “systemic racism in our institutions.”
“To redress this situation,” said the minister, “government and institutional initiatives and policies have been, and are being, developed to address racism and support equity, diversity and inclusion.”
So Little for the Mind
After some 60 years of the left’s “long march through the institutions,” the quest to restore academic freedom appears to be more elusive and uncertain than ever.In Quebec, a CAQ minister wants to help, but prominent academics say she must not act. In Nova Scotia, the PC government appears to support all of the destructive illusions that got us here in the first place.
Other provinces and states across North America are experiencing the same intellectual tergiversation. Human beings can be both cunning and stupid at the same time. So-called “educators” are just as likely to become herd animals as a pack of wolves. Their present commitment to a new form of apartheid that they disguise as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is guided by paranoia and self-interest. It’s anathema to the very idea of a university.
It’s unlikely that we can expect improvement in the near future. Today, the left is firmly in control of our schools and universities. Entrenched bureaucrats support a deeply flawed educational status-quo. With some notable exceptions, like Quebec’s Danielle McCann and our petitioning Nova Scotia professors, neither politicians nor academics are willing to risk speaking up.
The clear message to dissident traditional scholars or disaffected citizens is: “Stay quiet and move on! We don’t want to hear from you! If you disagree with us you are not just wrong; you are evil!”
It should come as no surprise that mid-20th century Canadian scholar Hilda Neatby dismissed the foundations of modern progressive education as “so little for the mind.”
