MARCH 22, 2024
Academic Freedom Under Erasure, a roundtable on Academic Freedom was held on March 22,2024, hosted by Dr. Eve Haque and The Harms of Language Project team in Toronto (and supported by the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies at York University).
The roundtable brought together scholars from across Canada for a day long event in order to consider a broad range of theoretical debates and disciplinary approaches related to academic freedom. Various contexts of academic freedom, from the historical to contemporary, were discussed.
This focus on academic freedom was not intended to preclude a more general interrogation of freedom of expression or free speech. Instead, we wanted to examine the particularity of the university campus for analyzing speech. This is especially pressing in the present moment where, for example, the alibi of academic expression is used to defend slurs and other forms of harmful language in the classroom including a push for platforming conservative enquiry on campuses, while protections for radical anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist scholarship and speech are being eroded.
“Who are the casualties of the current war over academic freedom and free expression on university campuses and what harms have been inflicted as a result of these struggles?”
Read our report from the roundtable:
The harms of language team presented a panel at CSLL 2023:
Academic freedom, speech, and equity in Canadian higher education
How does academic freedom intersect with freedom from discrimination in Canadian higher education?
This panel presented the preliminary analytical explorations from our project which investigates the debates around academic freedom and free speech in Canadian academic institutions in relation to specific faculty and student experiences of discrimination. The three presentations are our early forays into the harms of language of both intramural and extramural speech and the implications of legislation that seeks to regulate speech.
Read our abstracts here: