Andrew Potter’s spectre loomed over McGill debate on limits of academic freedom.
MONTREAL• He was not present and his name was hardly uttered, but Andrew Potter cast a shadow over a McGill University lecture hall Monday afternoon as a panel debated the limits of academic freedom.
Three weeks after Potter published a Maclean’s article that saw him pilloried in Quebec and disavowed by the university, leading to his resignation as director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, unease lingers among faculty here.
If things appear to have calmed down, it is deceptive, said Terry He bert, president of t he McGill Association of University Teachers. “I think it’s the calm before the next eruption,” he said.
Dietlind Stolle, director of McGill’s Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship, decided the time was right to invite political scientists from four Quebec universities — “not to talk about the Potter affair per se,” she said — but to explore whether freedom of academic speech should be absolute.
All the speakers were academics with a vested interest in defending their freedom, yet some on the panel accepted that sanctions from a university administration are justified in a case like Potter’s.
Éric Montpetit, a professor of political science at Université de Montréal, said academic freedom should not be absolute. “It should apply especially to ideas that have merit,” he said. He said his definition of what has merit is broad, but not broad enough to include Potter’s Maclean’s article.
“I am just talking about outrageous cases in which I think it would be legitimate for the administration to say something – not ideas that are controversial, but outrageous stuff, so it shouldn’t happen very often.”
He said afterwards that Potter’s article was one such case.
In the March 20 article, “How a snowstorm exposed Quebec’s real problem: social malaise,” Potter called Quebec “an almost pathologically alienated and low-trust society.” It immediately drew fire from Quebec politicians, and the McGill administration used its Twitter account to declare that Potter’s views “do not represent those of McGill.”
Potter, former editor- inchief of the Ottawa Citizen, apologized for the article’s tone and its “sloppy use of anecdotes.” He said he had concluded “the credibility of the institute will be best served by my resignation.” He remains an associate professor in the faculty of arts, part of his original three-year appointment.
There has been speculation that Potter was pushed out as director, and the Canadian Association of University Teachers called his resignation potentially “one of the most significant academic freedom cases in recent decades.”
Marc André Bodet, associate professor of political science at Université Laval, said Potter paid a price for signing the article using his title as institute director. It was not just his credibility on the line, but the institute’s, Bodet said. “If they are dragging with them other scholars, then there’s a bigger problem,” he said.
That appears to have been the reasoning followed by the McGill administration. Suzanne Fortier, the university principal, told t he Globe and Mail l ast month that “nothing would have happened” if Potter had simply signed the article in his own name. “He wrote it as director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada,” she said.
Jacob Levy, a professor of political science at McGill, said universities increasingly see high- profile professors as their “advertising face” and encourage them to get out in the media.
“If universities want to actively encourage this public participation, then they can’t turn around and say, ‘But by the way, you are now speaking for the university, or speaking for your institute in a way that implicates your colleagues,’ ” he said. “However you are identified as a scholar, making a public contribution, you speak for yourself.”
McGill has dozens of institutes and research centres, and in the wake of the Potter case, there is concern among directors that they could suffer consequences for voicing an unpopular opinion.
Allison Harell, associate professor of political science at the Université du Québec à Montréal, said the university administration should not be policing public declarations any more than it does research conclusions. In an academic setting, the best protection against bad research or shaky opinions is the criticism of peers. “You should be evaluated poorly by your colleagues,” she said.