From 2021:
Taking on “Repressive Tolerance” at Canada’s Universities
"After a Concordia University professor apologized for quoting the offensive title of a well-known political tract during a classroom discussion, Premier François Legault promised he would take action to protect free speech rights on la belle province’s campuses. In a February 13 Facebook post, Legault claimed that “more and more people are feeling intimidated” by radical activists “trying to censor certain words.” The scope for free speech was shrinking on campus and in Quebec society, the Coalition Avenir Québec Premier warned. He also called for better protection for victims of racism and for people who are bullied when they present facts and ideas.
Legault is following in the footsteps of the Ford and Kenney governments which, over the past two years, have forced their universities and colleges to adopt new campus free speech policies...
In 2010, American political provocateuse Ann Coulter cancelled a campus speech after a University of Ottawa vice-president warned her to watch her words. Pro-life students are often harassed by student associations and campus administrators. Professors and senior administrators have been hounded out of their jobs or come under intense pressure for expressing heterodox views on anything from race relations to climate change.
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) has amassed an impressive record in its court challenges to campus free speech oppression. It also compiles an annual Campus Freedom Index that gives each university a grade on its free speech policies and practices. When Ford issued his campus free speech policy, JCCF President John Carpay praised it: “It is a huge step forward for Ontario to require that universities incorporate into their own policies the University of Chicago Statement on Principles of Free Expression.”
HEQCO, the Ontario watchdog, has so far issued two annual reports on the issue, and if we take them at face value, the free speech problem has virtually disappeared from the province’s campuses. Its colleges and universities mount tens of thousands of public events each year. According to the HEQCO, they have received only a handful of complaints about free speech issues, and all have been easily resolved. But is it plausible to think that Ontario is immune to North American cancel culture and campus illiberalism? Did a simple ministerial order fix the free speech problem so easily?
Of course not. The threat to campus free speech is just as big a problem as we thought when Ford issued his policy. Ontario’s pro-life students report that they are still harassed when they speak out. Toronto-based pro-life advocate Blaise Alleyne reports that he and colleagues have even been physically assaulted for their displays at Ontario campuses. Ontario academic Debra Soh says she had to abandon her university career in sex research in order to continue speaking and writing freely about issues of gender. Jordan Peterson, a well-known refugee from the constrained atmosphere of Ontario campus life, is still on leave from the University of Toronto, while Cambridge University recently rescinded Peterson’s fellowship on that campus...
When a political movement has the upper hand in a society, it never sees the free speech problems it generates. The tyranny of the majority afflicts the minority. On campus, free speech problems are essentially invisible to the progressive majority. It could be a measure of what we might call “progressives’ privilege” that they find it so easy to dismiss campus free speech as a fake issue invented by right-wingers.
In reality, problems with free speech – that is to say, the limitations upon or entire absence of it – are better perceived by those in the minority. And on North American campuses, that minority might once have been conservative professors and students. But as illiberalism spreads it tentacles, free speech is becoming a problem for more and more non-conservatives, including apolitical scientists like Debra Soh. A recently released poll by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology of 40,000 academics in numerous fields across North America found that 70 percent of respondents who self-identified as right-leaning or conservative perceived a “hostile” work environment due to their political beliefs. Remarkably, 12 percent of the survey respondents admitted to discriminating against paper submissions and promotion applications they received from conservative academics...
According to Debra Soh’s cri de couer for freer inquiry into basic science, even tenured professors feel they cannot openly report research findings on gender and gender identity. As Soh wrote in the above-linked book, The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths about Sex and Identity in Our Society, the closing of the gender identity clinic at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in December 2016 showed sex researchers how easily they can lose access to labs, research opportunities and jobs if they express unfashionable views in the free-fire zone of North America’s culture wars.
The power structure on campus can make self-reporting even harder. Campus policies on diversity, inclusion and equity can easily be administered in ways that oppress free speech. When that happens, only a handful of victims will have the courage to self-report the problem. University professors have tenure and that should protect their academic freedom, but tenure didn’t help my University of Calgary colleague and friend Tom Flanagan...
When McMaster University in Hamilton recently advertised for a dozen faculty positions that are only open to candidates of a certain race, no one on campus spoke up to condemn this blatant act of discrimination. Who would?...
Quoting Mill as if he is the end of the debate on free speech leads to certain defeat in the contemporary campus environment. Campus illiberals reject Mill in favour of Herbert Marcuse, a leading light of the 1960s “New Left”. In his 1965 essay Repressive Tolerance, Marcuse took dead aim at Mill’s argument. Even Mill, Marcuse noted, recognized that liberty can only be enjoyed as a social good by those who are “in the maturity of their faculties”. Liberty is not suitable for children or barbarians. Liberty only works in societies where free citizens are “capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.” And while Mill was certain that his nation had “long since” reached this point (as he wrote in pp 18-19 of On Liberty), Marcuse was not so sure.
“The function and value of tolerance,” Marcuse argued, “depend on the equality prevalent in the society in which tolerance is practiced.” Since capitalist societies are shot through with profound inequality and the – in Marcuse’s view – widespread ignorance, propaganda and social structures needed to perpetuate inequality, Marcuse called for replacing Mill’s regime of “pure” tolerance with a “liberating tolerance” that would mean “intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.” That would involve withdrawing tolerance from “regressive movements before they can become active; intolerance even toward thought, opinion, and word, and finally, intolerance in the opposite direction, that is, toward the self-styled conservatives, to the political Right.”
The Mill-Marcuse argument about liberty leads us to a deeper argument about the purpose of education. Is it the role of higher education to lead students through the contending arguments of our society’s traditions towards an appreciation of truth, beauty and justice? Or is the “educational enterprise” one of “counter-education”, to use Marcuse’s term, “the systematic withdrawal of tolerance toward regressive and repressive opinions and movements”?
Put another way, is education really about pursuing knowledge, or is it just the exercise of power in pursuit of a political agenda – albeit often cloaked in wordy intellectualism? Mill’s side is humble. Free speech advocates do not assume that any one group, no matter how enlightened, can be trusted to determine what is true and what is not. Marcuse’s side is arrogant. It assumes that one side has a monopoly on truth and right but, once the radicals have cleansed society of regressive structures and opinions, they will readily give up that power to police speech, debate and thought in favour of letting a thousand flowers bloom.
The North American mania for ever-newer forms of social justice has given campus administrators and many professors new reasons to adopt Marcuse’s thinking...
Marcuse’s repressive tolerance also shows us that political leaders who want to “impose” free speech on campuses are playing a losing game. After all, political careers are short and academic careers are long. A few politically appointed university governors may pretend to knuckle under to their political superiors on the campus free-speech issue, but leaving the illiberal argument of repressive tolerance unmet means the illiberals will win out as soon as the political winds shift direction. The only way for the friends of free speech to prevail on campus is by sidestepping the power game of “imposing” and taking Mill a bit more seriously...
Newcomers to university boards are often shocked at how little influence they and the institution’s leaders can exert over the research and teaching done on campus.
Premiers, ministers or political staff who think that a simple directive from Queen’s Park or Quebec City’s Colline parlementaire will fix the campus free speech problem are vastly overestimating their power and misapprehending how things work in those institutions. It is foolish to pretend that a board of governors with only a thin connection to an institution’s academic policies can enforce the “Chicago Principles”, given the decentralized nature of campus decision-making, the internal political skills of legions of academic administrators and over the objections of most academics and student groups. Changing campus life requires a bit more respect for academic ways...
Even Marcuse conceded that repressive tolerance has limits. A
broader-scope tolerance, he wrote, “Is justified in harmless debates, in
conversation, in academic discussion; [and] it is indispensable in the
scientific enterprise…” Insisting that academic communities confront
that caveat to Marcuse’s argument is the beginning of rolling back
campus oppression."
Left wingers love to misquote Popper, claiming that his Paradox of Tolerance means they not just can but need to censor those they disagree with, but really they are channeling Marcuse instead.
