Front Burner - Should universities have opinions?

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

Our guest today has taken a long look at an out-of-fashion principle in higher learning – institutional neutrality. Basically it’s the importance of letting students and faculty say what they want, and not have the administration put its thumb on the scale. In that he sees a whole world of problems facing post-secondary education today, from public and political support to an ongoing court case.Simon Lewsen is a magazine journalist who teaches part-time at the University of Toronto. His new story in Maclean’s is called “The Battle for the Soul of the University”. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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Okay, here's the show. Well, much fanfare has been made of Donald Trump's attack on elite U.S. colleges. Here in Canada, a serious crisis also threatens to engulf higher education. universities face financial pressures and a palpable dip in public confidence. My guest today has taken a long look at the out-of-fashioned principle of institutional neutrality. Basically, the importance of letting students and faculty say what they want and not have the administration put his thumb on the scale. And in that, he sees a whole world of problems facing higher learning today,

from public and political support to an ongoing court case. Simon Luson is a magazine journalist who teaches part-time at the University of Toronto. His new story in McLean's is called The Battle for the Soul of the University. Simon, hey, it's great to have you back on to the podcast. It's great to be back on. I'm really so pleased you're here. I've been wanting to bring you on to talk about this piece that you wrote for a while now. So before we get into the legal fight, let's start with this guy named Andrew Irvine,

a philosophy professor at the University of British Columbia's Okinawagon campus, and just paint me a picture of what kind of academic he is. I would describe Irving as a sort of traditional, classical, liberal, very principles-based in his way of thinking and very drawn to sort of renegade thinkers. He's written about Socrates, who was famously executed for speaking his mind. He's fascinated by the UCLA physicist David Saxon, who was fired from his job for refusing to sign an anti-communist loyalty pledge. I think Irvine is often drawn to people who take perhaps contentious or controversial stances for principled reasons. And he argues that provocative ideas should be permitted on campus almost unconditionally, right?

And that something bad essentially happens when university administration issues and opinion. And what he's talking about here is this idea of institutional neutrality that's going to thread through our entire conversation today. And so what exactly is that? We all know what academic freedom is. It's the idea that at a university, professors and students should feel liberated to pursue knowledge without being worried about being censored or being worried about what trouble they might get into for the ideas that they pursue. I think that's a pretty uncontroversial idea. I think we all kind of know what academic freedom is. and we all kind of believe in it.

Institutional neutrality is a very closely related concept. And what it basically says is the people that run the university, the deans, the vice deans, the principals, they're like the big bosses. They determine who gets hired, who gets tenure, who gets promoted. And of course, everybody wants to please their bosses. It's always in your interest to please your bosses. But if the big bosses are going around taking political stances,

you are going to feel pressure to align your research in your argument with whatever they are saying. because it's just human to want to be on the right side of your bosses. So institutional neutrality says that the people who run the university should be outwardly politically neutral because if they're constantly taking stances, it could undermine academic freedom. Okay. And we'll come back to that. But let's talk about this lawsuit first. So Professor Irvine files this lawsuit in April against UBC. and it alleges that the university has violated BC's University Act, a provincial statute from 1890, actually, that requires the school to be, quote, non-sectarian and non-political and principal.

And what kind of examples are cited in the lawsuit? So the lawsuit, and it's Irving and four other academics at the University of British Columbia, and they're concerned with three things. The first one is land acknowledgments. They say that when members of the administration give land acknowledgments, they are taking a political stance. And the university should be politically neutral. The second one is statements on Israel, Palestine. Certain sub-academic bodies, departments at the university have made statements condemning what they describe as a genocide or scholasticide in Gaza. And again, Irving and his peers say that is political statement making that a university administration shouldn't be doing. And then the last one

involves, for lack of a better word, sort of mandatory DEI statements. This involves hiring. When the university advertises for a job. They put up a hiring call. The hiring call does, if you want to apply for this job to be a professor, you know, submit your resume and your CV and your reference letters and also submit a statement affirming your belief in DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion. And Irving and his peers say that that, too, is a violation of institutional neutrality. And let's go through some of the responses to the lawsuit. Let's start with UBC. We reached out to them this week, and according to a spokesperson, the university is not commenting since the matters before the courts. But have they filed a response to the lawsuit yet? we don't know what UBC's response is going to be, but almost certainly it's going to have to do with interpretation of the University Act.

What is the University Act saying when it says that universities should be non-sectarian and non-political? UBC is almost certainly going to argue that the courts should define that act narrowly. Non-sectarian and non-political just means not associated with a formal religious organization, not associated with a formal political party. but it doesn't say anything about land acknowledgments or DEI. When we're talking about reactions here, what about outside the university? This is where reactions have been strongest. The BCCLA, the BC Civil Liberties Association, has declined to support Irving and his peers. They actually think that this is a perverse interpretation of academic neutrality.

They say Irving and his peers claim that they are free speech warriors defending free speech, but actually what they're doing is they're effectively silencing university administrators and silencing people is the opposite of free speech, according to the BCCLA. The most impassioned responses have come from indigenous communities. The University of British Columbia is on the former territory of the Musqueam people. Its satellite Okanagan campus is on the former territory of the Silha Okanagan nation. So you can imagine that anything that seems to be critiquing were attacking land acknowledgments cuts pretty deep. And a lot of people within leaders within the indigenous community are, first of all, they're interpreting this lawsuit as an attack on land acknowledgments. And they're saying that an attack on land acknowledgments is an attack on the very notion of indigenous sovereignty. So as you can imagine, they're not very happy with this lawsuit. Okay. And just to ask you straight, have, have there been criticism that this lawsuit is politically motivated itself?

Absolutely, there have. Another criticism that's out there is that, you know, Irving and his peers, they talk a big game about neutrality, but when you actually look at the specific issues they're interested in, they all have a kind of conservative coded bent. So people are saying, is this really about neutrality or is this lawsuit sort of a Trojan horse for conservative politics? Putting this specific lawsuit aside, this idea at the center of it, institutional neutrality, certainly there's a lot of merit in interrogating and talking about that today. So let's do that. And I know that this idea really started to take hold in the 1960s, right, with a guy named Harry Calvin Jr., a law professor at the University of Chicago, and just tell me more about that. Yeah, this concept has a rich history, and it does go back to the 60s.

The University of Chicago is rocked by protests, and so the university president strikes the committee to decide how the university should respond to these protests. And chairing this committee is this law professor named Harry Calvin Jr. And to the question of how should the university respond to the protesters, Calvin says they shouldn't respond. In his words, the university is the home and sponsor of the critics. It is not itself the critic. And what he means is that a university is a place where people are empowered to think for themselves and speak for themselves.

And the university should support them by getting out of the way and not telling them what to think. You allow people to speak their mind. You don't speak your mind yourself. You have this really good anecdote in your piece that was helpful for me, at least, to wrap my head around this concept. And it was about dinosaurs and just do the dinosaurs for me. Absolutely. So about six years ago, I read a piece in the Atlantic about a debate in paleontology. Most of us, when we think about why the dinosaurs went extinct, we think about a meteorite that hit Earth somewhere near the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. That's sort of the popular

culture consensus as to what happened. But actually, there's a whole other theory out there within the world of paleontology that says, you know what? No, it wasn't a meteor. It wasn't some kind of bolt from the blue. It was a much slower process of volcanic eruptions that poisoned the atmosphere. didn't happen near Mexico. It happened in the deck and traps in what is now India. So this is a kind of minority viewpoint. And it's a really, really contentious debate within the world of paleontology. There are people who believe in the deck in volcanist theory. There are people who believe in the meteorite theory. These people absolutely hate each other. It is just rancorous, toxic world. That's fine. That's just inevitable. You're going to get that in academia.

But imagine if one day the president of, let's say, Stanford University, who is not a paleontology, just by the way, he's an economist. Imagine it's just out of the blue, he said, you know what, we are taking a stance with the meteorite people against the Deccan volcano people. If you were a Deccan volcanist at Stanford, how would you feel? If you had tenure, okay, that's nice. You don't have to worry about job security, but you're still worrying about promotions. You're still worrying about raises. If you don't have tenure, if you're one of a if you're one of a large number of vulnerable academics looking for one of a very vanishingly few number of full-time jobs. Are you really going to stick to your guns on deck and volcanism,

even if doing so is going to get you on the wrong side of your boss? Probably not. Probably you're going to want to keep your boss happy, which means you're going to feel an incentive to self-censor. And self-censorship is something that academics are never supposed to do. isn't for everyone you need grit to climb this high this often you've got to be an underdog that always over delivers you've got to be six thousand five hundred hospital staff one thousand doctors all doing so much with so little you've got to be scarborough defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights and you can help us keep climbing donate at lovescarbro Are your pipes ready for a deep freeze?

You can take action to help protect your home from extreme weather. Discover prevention tips that can help you be climate ready at keep it intact.ca. So this concept of institutional neutrality that Calvin so passionately advocated for, how do you think universities in Canada have deviated from this idea over the years? This idea was sort of a North Star, was a kind of guiding principle in the 70s and 80s. And I think it's really decayed over the last two decades. It's become sort of normal now for university administrations to make statements on all kinds of issues. Climate change, ending colonialism, support for Ukraine.

At some point over the last 10 or 20 years, we started really aggressively moving away from institutional neutrality towards a position that you might describe as kind of moral clarity or moral outspokenness. were position taking on a variety of issues that have nothing to do with the administration of the university just became the normal thing. And that all really comes to a head in 2023. How did the deadly October 7th Hamaslet attack on Israel bring the issue of institutional neutrality really to the forefront? So here's the thing with institutional position taking. It's easiest to do when you kind of know what the consensus position is. It's It's not terribly hard to make a statement, for instance, on Ukraine, if you have a sense that most people at your university probably agree with you.

That statement may be alienating to a small minority of people on campus, but by and large, you're articulating the majority viewpoint. So how much dysfunction is that really going to cause on campus? But what happens if an issue comes along where there simply isn't a consensus? Well, that happened. And it happened on October 7, 2023. We have the deadly attack. and immediately universities feel pressure to respond.

If you have made statements on a variety of different topics in the past 10 years, you can't suddenly remain silent about the mass murder of Jews. But of course, there's pressure not only to respond, but there's pressure to contextualize their response. And this raises the question, what is the correct context? And if you look on campus, you'll see that there was no consensus as to what the correct context is. One school of thought says, well, the correct contest is the larger geopolitical situation in Israel. people who hold this opinion, they don't necessarily condone the violence of October 7th,

but they see it as part of a larger legacy of violence in which Israel has been a participant. So if you're going to talk about Hamas, you should talk about Israel too. Other people say, yes, you have to talk about the context, but that's not the context. The correct context is the rise of murderous anti-Semitism around the world. French Jews slashed with machetes are thrown from balconies. American Jews gunned down at synagogue. So university presidents, when they're making their statements, they face an impossible choice. If they play down Israel's apparent complicity in the violence, they're going to be accused of ignoring and through their silence condoning colonialism itself.

If, on the other hand, they play up Israel's alleged complicity, they're going to be accused of rehashing an ancient anti-Semitic trope whereby Jews are held responsible for the violence perpetrated against them. Whatever choice they make, they're going to make some people on campus very, very angry. Simon, just to push back on what we've been discussing today, what do you say to those who argue that universities should be taking stances on these issues, that the administrations should be doing this? Because universities are inherently political. The pursuit of knowledge, they might argue, is progressive. in nature and that experts have a duty to speak truth to power to fight for justice. And so what is the strongest argument against institutional neutrality that you've come across in your reporting? I think there are two. One is that there is no such thing as neutrality, that there's no kind of perfect state of neutrality that human beings can just sort of naturally enter. And I'll

be honest, I actually agree with that. I don't think there's some kind of Zen light state of neutrality that I can just will myself into or that any of us can rule ourselves into. I would push back on that argument and say, even if neutrality isn't a perfect state, even if it's imperfect, it's still a worthwhile goal. If I was accused, falsely accused of a crime, I would want to be tried by a judge who strives however imperfectly for neutrality, as opposed to a judge who just openly embraces biases against me. So I don't think neutrality has to be perfect for it to be a worthwhile aspirational goal. The second argument against institutional neutrality is that universities are inherently political. And this comes down to a larger debate about what the purposes of a university

is. And some people will say, well, the purpose of a university is to pursue knowledge. Other people will say, well, the purpose of a university is to pursue social justice as well. And if you're trying to pursue social justice, doesn't that demand that university administrators speak out about important issues with a degree of moral clarity? Universities are inherently political, this argument says. They're inherently institutions of social justice. And on this, requires a sort of onus on presidents to speak out clearly. I think that argument misstates how social progress actually happens on campus. When a big news story breaks, and a university administrator consults with their PR team and comes

up with a lacquered, careful response, is that really social justice? I don't really think so. I think really social progress happens. It's downstream from other things that academics do. It's downstream from the research. the data collection, the painstaking efforts to try and understand things, untainted by partisan bias. So when we talk about social justice on campus, I think that's really downstream from other work that intellectuals do. And I think that if universities care about this work, the administrators,

the best thing they can do is get out of the way and let academics actually do it. You know, I think it's important for us to think about this debate over institutional neutrality in this larger context, right? In the context that universities are in many ways under attack right now, right? Yeah, I think universities are in crisis right now. One of the crises is just financial. The Canadian government has limited the number of international students who can come to Canada. international students were the main source of sort of swing money in the university system. Without them, the balance sheets in a lot of universities are in really bad shape. But bigger than that, I think there's a kind of crisis of public legitimacy. I think there is a growing sort of distrust of the academy.

And there is data on this. There is data showing that Canadians hold university in lower esteem than they used to. But where I think you really see this phenomenon is in the political arena. And I can think of so many different politicians who are pretty openly attacking the university system. Pierre Paulier, the leader of the opposition, has threatened to defund universities unless, and these are his words, they end the imposition of woke ideology. Daniel Smith, the premier of Alberta, has made very similar statements. Tim Houston, the premier of Nova Scotia, has said that he's threatening to defund schools in that province, unless they align the research priorities with the priorities of the provincial government. And you can say, well, well, the problem here is just that politicians have decided they want to attack universities.

Obviously, the problem is politicians, not universities, but the reality is that politics is always downstream from public opinions. And if politicians have decided that it's worthwhile to attack universities, it's because they think that voters want what they're selling. It's because they think there's a market for sort of anti-university policies. And I think you have to just face the fact that this is a crisis of public legitimacy. Politicians would not be going after universities if there wasn't some kind of larger crisis of public legitimacy. And part of that crisis, and public legitimacy, is this growing sense that universities are not really neutral arbiters anymore, but are much more sort of openly politicized institutions. Before we say goodbye today, I do want to circle back to the lawsuit against the University of British Columbia. And do you think that it will succeed? If I was betting on this, I would probably bet against this lawsuit succeeding. I think in general, judges are disinclined to micromanage the affairs of an independent university. UBC is going to make a strong argument for why the courts should interpret the university act narrowly. I think UBC and their arguments is going to give judges a way

out, a way out of doing something that they probably don't want to do, which is micromanage in university. There are other problems with the lawsuit, which I get into in my piece, but I'm broadly pessimistic about its odds in court, but I do appreciate the larger conversation that it is sparked because I think these issues of institutional neutrality are well worth thinking about and what we're talking about. Yeah, I'm really glad we got to do this today. Simon, thank you for this. Thank you so much, Jamie.

It's great to be on the show. All right. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.