“The Situation” for Academic Freedom in Canada: Not Great.

(apologies to the Jersey Shore but.... well, you'll see)

          Sitting down to write this has prompted me to reflect on the fact that I have no idea how many other cases out there are like mine – cancellations that happened at the absolute peak of the frenzy around 2020 that are still quietly dragging out in one way or another.  In part because I am not on Twitter, and in part because I’ve relied upon my faculty union for legal representation and they have enjoined me to not circulate materials along the way, the stage of my case that will have the most long-lasting and widespread negative impact has just unfolded to no fanfare whatsoever. 

          In 2020, I was dismissed from a service role at the University of Alberta – undergraduate programs chair in the department of anthropology – following student complaints about my expression of “gender critical” views.  I remain a faculty member.  The position from which I was dismissed is one of the many service roles faculty regularly fill as a condition of their jobs.  Contractually, it did not shift me over from faculty to administration.  It came with a $3500 annual stipend and a course release, the latter of which I forewent – in fact taking on an extra course to my regular load in order to help with teaching shortages in the department that year.  The reason I was appointed to the role is because I was the only person in the department to volunteer myself for it when the previous occupant stepped down.  Our department is rather small – 15 faculty members, give or take– and so there is rarely a competitive scramble for anything that needs doing.  Ordinarily, I would have held the position for a three year term but instead was dismissed 8 months in to my appointment.

          My dismissal attracted a fair amount of attention at the time.  My faculty union, the Association of Academic Staff at the University of Alberta (AASUA) was at first reluctant to grieve my case, but I managed to convince them that it set a worrisome precedent for academic freedom and that they should take it up.  It therefore went before an arbitrator from the Alberta Labor Relations Board (ALRB) in a series of hearings held during fall 2022 and winter 2023.  The first days were in a huge and underheated reception room at a conference center, the final few in a blessedly snug and warm room on the lower floor of the same building. 

In spring 2023, we received word that the ALRB arbitrator had ruled against AASUA and in favor of the University.  The arbitrator found, first, that my dismissal had not violated my academic freedom because it was not undertaken in response to my “views” but instead to the “situation” in the department that developed around my holding those views.  Second, the arbitrator ruled my dismissal had not been “disciplinary” in nature.  This is a significant distinction, because the collective agreement for faculty members specifies (in Article 7 – relevant below) how disciplinary cases must be handled.  The University did not follow any of those procedures in dismissing me:  I was never provided with an opportunity to respond to the allegations made against me by students and fellow faculty members, many of which were flatly untrue.  The arbitrator wrote that my dismissal was not “disciplinary” because it was not made in reaction to anything I had said or done.  It was carried out only in response to the departmental “situation” that had arisen around me.

          This is not a prejudicial interpretation of the arbitrator’s ruling.  You can see a journalist’s take here or you can read the ruling yourself if you have a lot of time on your hands – it’s a public document – here. At first, my faculty union indicated to me that they would not appeal this outcome.  AASUA’s bylaws, however, gave me the right to attempt to convince a three-person union committee to reverse the internal decision not to appeal.  With the expert assistance of fellow Substacker and Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship board member Kirsten Kramar, I succeeded in this attempt in July 2023.

          The association, therefore, prepared an appeal in fall 2023.  We have just received the fourteen page ruling of the Alberta Labor Relations Board Chair upholding the original decision of the ALRB arbitrator.  This is also a public document, which you can find here; I excerpt several key passages below.

p. 8

(29)

does not reflect a watering down of academic freedom vis-à-vis the Associate Chair role, but rather a nuanced, balanced, transparent and ultimately reasonable approach to academic freedom when it comes to the removal of an individual from the role of Associate Chair

(31)

an exercise of broad discretion that was driven by situational factors

p. 12

(41)

the decision to remove the Grievor from the position was based on the growing groundswell of controversy and the concern that she was “ill placed in that environment to achieve what they expected of an Associate Chair” which included the ability “to help and coach students with concerns, particularly over gender issues as the students expressed them”: Decision, at pages 34-35. There can be no suggestion of unreasonableness on this point.

p. 13

(45)

I view the Arbitrator’s reference to Article 7 in the above passage as merely an attempt to address the Grievor’s desire throughout to have been able to respond to what she perceived to be the case against her. However, as the Arbitrator was at pains to point out, the University’s decision to remove the Grievor as Associate Chair was not made in response to anything she had said or done. Rather, it was a response to a very difficult situation that had developed – one concerning the administrative health and leadership of the Department. As he noted in the next paragraph: “Not every such assertion [under Article 7] should, as a matter of fairness be investigated and pursued. At times, general observations about the state of a department’s overall academic health can be made without formal investigation”: Decision, at page 52.

I have asked my union to pursue a judicial review of this decision, and have not yet learned whether they will do so.  AASUA’s decision in this regard will be final.

I.        “The Situation”

For reasons that seem to me hardly to need explaining, this decision and its secondary confirmation are fatal to academic freedom:  not just in Alberta, but in Canada as a whole.  This is because going forward, this decision will certainly be relied upon elsewhere in the country.  Multiple cases relating to academic freedom from around Canada were cited in the arbitrator’s original ruling about my case and in the dossiers prepared by AASUA and the University leading up to the several days of hearings.  Decisions made in one province go on to have a real impact across the nation.

However, I am clearly incorrect that the danger to academic freedom posed by the original decision and backstopped by this latest ruling is obvious.  Two undoubtedly well intentioned mediators in sequence have failed to grasp it.  It is worth noting here that the ALRB is an entity created to resolve challenges over the proper interpretation of employment contracts generally; they describe their “vision” as: “The fair and equitable application of Alberta’s collective bargaining laws”. The ALRB is as likely to rule on a grievance from an oil sands worker as one from a professor.  When they are interpreting what contractual guarantees of academic freedom are intended to protect, what do they understand to be at stake?

They are certainly correct that controversial viewpoints exist which do not generate ferocious controversy when expressed publicly; views, that is, that do not lead to “situations”.  Imagine an undergraduate programs chair in an English department who is an Oxfordian on the Shakespeare question:  someone who thinks, and says out loud, and publishes writings asserting that the real author of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare is Edward DeVere.  This is a view around which there is considerable controversy, but that would be far less likely to generate student complaints in the current ecumene than expressing the firm conviction that humans are a sexually dimorphic, sexually reproducing species.  Alternatively, take an undergraduate programs chair in a physics department who believes aliens exist and have already visited Earth many times.  This is a controversial viewpoint, but again, one that would be unlikely to generate a “situation” in any physics department.  The ALRB mediators are quite correct that academic freedom is intended to protect professors from – for example – administrators who are vengeful Stratfordians or indignant pooh-pooh-ers of UFOlogy.

But of course, academic freedom is intended to provide much more extensive protections than that.  While academic freedom is sometimes threatened in instances like those, far more commonly it is violated when professors hold views that do in fact generate “situations”.  This ruling not only destroys any possibility of academic freedom protections in that far more common scenario, it incentivizes the creating of “situations” around anyone students, colleagues, or administrators (who have phalanxes of lawyers on staff to closely watch developing case law) would like to see shunted aside.

I must say I don’t believe the people involved in my 2020 dismissal were thinking strategically in this way.  It is my decided opinion that the students and colleagues baying for my head had a tremendous amount of vicious fun with the high drama and intrigue involved while the administrators who hopped on the “get the terf” train were delighted by the chance to hype their own commitments to keeping the campus a “safe space”.  One of my departmental colleagues, Kisha Supernant, wrote a letter to the administration in 2020 denouncing me and also used her Twitter account to circulate a second such letter penned by student activists.  For whatever reason, however, by 2023 she declined the opportunity proffered by the University for her to expand upon her concerns in the in-person format of the arbitration.  Julie Rak also wrote a vituperative letter to administration in 2020 about me.  Rak was only too delighted to testify for the employer against a fellow union member at the arbitration in winter 2023.  The arbitrator had this to say about Dr. Rak’s testimony:

“Professor Rak’s evidence was at times highly partisan; she clearly had no respect for Professor Lowrey’s views. However, at points her testimony verged on the hyperbolic and sarcastic. However, when pressed, she agreed Professor Lowrey did not shout and was articulate in her expression of her views. She accepted that there was nothing expressly threatening or violent in the conversation. There was nothing sufficient to prompt her to make any formal complaint.”

Dr. Rak is now Chair of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta.  In 2020, the Dean of Students at the University of Alberta was Dr. Andre Costopoulos.  He urged students to submit formal complaints about me in 2020, without success.  He is now my department chair.  I have requested of the University that someone else act as my direct supervisor given his central role in my 2020 dismissal.  The University has refused my request.

II.       What is service and why does it need the protection of academic freedom?

That academic freedom protections apply not just to research and teaching but also to service is specified contractually.  Service is one of the three parts of the job of professor and its quality and quantity is evaluated in tenure and promotion cases. Higher administrative roles (department chair and above) come with restrictions on academic freedom:  in these positions, employees are expected to toe various institutional lines.  This distinction is drawn at different places in different universities.  Which roles should be treated in this manner is contentious.  My own view is that departmental chairs should also receive full protection as it is important to have “real” academics in this role rather than people who have shifted (even on paper) over to the administrative side of the university.  Be that as it may, “associate chair for undergraduate programs” is not even close to that line at the University of Alberta.  It involves academic grunt work of a sort that is essential to the proper functioning of a university.  Much of the ordinary running of the university requires academic judgment:  the full exercise of which is only possible under conditions of academic freedom.  For many everyday internal decisions, making sure only “management material” take on these roles would corrosively warp the direction of decision-making.

The view of the arbitrator was that although as a faculty member I am obliged to perform “service”, the University is within its managerial rights to summarily decide it doesn’t want me performing one or another particular kind of service.  As the arbitrator put it, “not everyone is a diplomat”.  The ALRB chair liked this line enough to repeat it in her decision confirming the judgement of the arbitrator.  They agree that it is the place of University administration to decide for which kinds of service different faculty members are best suited.  Being shown the door in one role is no big deal:  there is always plenty of work to do across the institution, after all.  In point of fact, finding a way to fulfill the service obligations of my job was rather difficult for me for a year or two as I found myself informally blacklisted whenever I applied for committee work outside my department.  Once this issue was raised at the first arbitration sessions in fall 2022 I found things magically loosened up for me and I was appointed to almost anything for which I put my name forward.

The larger point, however, is that this decision hands university administrations everywhere in Canada carte blanche to push faculty around in, and out of, collegial governance on the basis of “fit” to “situations”.  As long as faculty are doing something servicey, it doesn’t matter what it is, really.  You do not have to have spent any of your life as a professor to understand how shortsighted this is.  You just have to have worked in any large organization.  Sure, chairing the sandwich committee is formally akin to chairing the internal bylaw committee… but in terms of power and impact, which one actually matters?  Thanks to the ALRB and its very finite wisdom, university administrations can now cite (or gin up) a “situation” around any inconveniently pesky faculty member working in a sensitive part of collegial governance and off that proffie must go to pack up his things!  Byeeeeee!

III.      Surveying the Wreckage

          Specifically regarding “the situation” around gender issues, some of the tidal wave of madness is beginning to recede.  With the release of the WPATH files and the Cass Review, the hideous damage wrought during the era of “no debate” over gender ideology is emerging ever more clearly.  Part of the resultant reckoning involves asking why it took so long for anyone to effectively intervene in a field of medicine and policy practice before it ran so disastrously off the rails.

          It was not for lack of trying.  I was a very late arrival to the crowd of women who had been waving and shouting desperately for many years that the gender bridge was out.  In January 2018, when I made my public terf debut with an essay in Feminist Current, little did I realize that six years later I’d still be making myself hoarse on the topic.  How could this be, when Janice Raymond said most of what needed to be said as early as 1979?  When Sheila Jeffreys documented so powerfully the damage being done back in 2014? 

          The fact is, “situations” have been created around women academics raising these alarms for a long time, and in many places around the world.  Not just around women, of course – but mostly around women.  These sorts of campaigns to extirpate idolaters during eras of high ideological frenzy are not merely “academic”.  They don’t have consequences only within universities but for the quality of life and capacity to flourish of everyone in society.  Universities aren’t worth funding or supporting if they can’t cope with such “situations” as they arise.  Not just in the aftermath, when the dust settles, and everyone sighs and agrees that mistakes were made.  No:  they have to be places where you can point at the mistakes while they are happening.  They have to be places where you are allowed to notice *and even join the ranks* of a growing social movement like the one cobbled together by lesbian radical feminists, detransitioners, gay male campaigners, trans widows, fed up adult human females, worried clinicians, concerned scientists, and all the people who’ve been willing to hear them out.  Otherwise, really, what is the point?  Managerial efficiency?  Dislike of hassle?  Gym, tan, laundry?  It’s an ethos, I guess… just not one around which to organize a university.