Peter MacKinnon: Dissenting UBC professors offer hope for ending university politicization

National Post

21-05-2025

On April 7, four professors at the University of British Columbia filed a petition in the B.C. Supreme Court seeking a determination that the university has become politicized and is in violation of Section 66(1) of the province's University Act requiring it to be non-political. This petition, co-signed by a former graduate student, brings to mind the University of Chicago's 1967 Kalven Report, which insisted that universities must remain neutral on political issues. This neutrality 'arises out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a variety of viewpoints. And this neutrality as an institution has its complement in the fullest freedom for its faculty and students as individuals to participate in political action and social protest. It provides its complement, too, in the obligation of the university to provide a forum for the most searching and candid discussion of public issues.'
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The issues here are clear and important. Broad support for our universities depends on their neutrality in the eyes of governments and citizens. Those who work in them as faculty, students or staff are free, as individuals or in groups, to be active in political causes, but they must do so in their own names without attributing their views to their universities. Senior university officers do not have the same freedom. When they publicly align with political causes, their endorsement is widely attributed to their universities thereby jeopardizing the non-partisan support on which they depend.
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The UBC professors are petitioning the Supreme Court to find that their university is taking political positions and is thereby violating the requirement of neutrality: first, by repeatedly acknowledging that the university is on unceded land; second, by taking a 'naked, political' position against Israel in its war with Hamas; and third, through requirements that job applicants pledge support for the political agenda of DEI.
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In making the first and second claims, universities are entering contestable political space. With respect to the first, land acknowledgments have become incantations that have more than one potential meaning. On one level, they are acceptances of a connection between an Indigenous history and presence, and the lands on which a university sits, the nature of which is unspecified. On another level, they are sometimes the basis of claims that the land on which a university sits has been stolen from Indigenous peoples; because they are unceded the legitimacy of the university's presence on them is in doubt. Exploring the issues raises questions of a political nature.
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At first contact between Indigenous peoples and European newcomers, the Indigenous population of the 10 million square kilometres that are now Canada was estimated (as reported by Britannica) to be about 200,000. The estimate may be on the low side but, if close, the numbers mean that in what is now the second largest country on Earth, only small parts of this land were inhabited by humans. Numbers and locations have changed over the centuries since, but many of the claims routinely made by the 97 universities in Canada, that they are located on Indigenous lands, are potentially contentious. The issue here is not the adjudication of these claims; it is to recognize that some at least are challengeable, which brings us back to the UBC professors' claim that UBC is on political ground in its explicit and public acknowledgment that it is located on unceded Indigenous lands.