Horn 1999. Academic Freedom in Canada.
Horn, Michiel. 1999. Academic Freedom in Canada: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
This is the classic (only?) history of Academic Freedom in Canada. It covers the subject from its origins until the mid-1990s, and is based on a huge amount of work in archives and institutional histories.
The book is both strong and weak in its comprehensiveness. On the one hand, it is very useful to have what seems to be in essence a blow-by-blow account of every academic freedom case in every Canadian university since the establishment of its original institutions. On the other, this means that the work lacks a certain synthesising power that would allow the author to be explicit about the big picture. (One thing that becomes quite clear as the book progresses are the seams between individual episodes: the book is structured basically on the following format: introduce case, go through material, finish with editorial comment. It reads at times like an assembly of very large index cards).
Some notable things from the book as a whole:
- Academic Freedom as a uniquely Canadian set of problems and solutions begins quite late: prior to the 1950s, Canadian Academics largely relied on the AAUP definitions and statements — to the degree such statements mattered at all.
- Most academic freedom fights in Canada resulted from the over-reach of university presidents. In almost all cases before the 1930s, the issues arose through presidential concern that faculty speech would annoy provincial, private, and/or church hierarchies and hence reduce available funding. Even after that, until the 1960s, this seemed to be the main concern.
#The contemporary Canadian understanding of Academic Freedom as being primarily an employment matter has a very long history: Canadian courts understood academic employment as being at will throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and it was only with the shortage of faculty in the mid-to-late 1960s that employment contracts began to contain serious (and modern) language pertaining to Academic Freedom protections. - Canadian academic mythology about certain foundational cases — e.g. in particular the Harry Crowe case — may be wishful thinking. In the Crowe case, which I’d always understood as a victory, Crowe ended up resigning a second time after only he was reappointed following pressure from CAUT. Given that the case involved a president reading a redirected private letter that was critical of some colleagues and members of the administration, this is a very partial victory, at best.
- Horn emphasises throughout the — to my mind — fact that most academics are quite willing to go along with the status quo and self-censure, refrain from criticising universities and administration, and so on. Particularly interesting (and an artefact of when it was written) is Horn’s complete dismissal of the idea that differential impact (i.e. on racialised faculty or students, for example) can be considered when thinking through academic cases.
