Robyn Urback: U of S president needs a lesson in Free Speech 101
Usually when we hear stories about free speech being snuffed out on campus, the students are the ones doing the snuffing.
Acting as self-appointed “safe space” police, students have shut down lectures on everything from men’s issues to abortion; sexuality and politics. Some over-enthused students at Queen’s University — obviously naive to the nature paradox — even went so far as to shut down a “free speech” wall on campus last year. In many cases, the most university officials can be accused of is complacency; of allowing a rowdy few to hijack debates, or else of failing to adequately acquaint students with the fundamentals of free expressions and democratic rights. The administration at the University of Saskatchewan has taken things to an entirely new level.
Robert Buckingham, the executive director for the school of public health at U of S, was fired Wednesday after speaking out about the school’s restructuring plan — called TransformUS — which would see widespread cuts across the institution in a bid to save the university $25-million. On Tuesday, Buckingham published an open letter entitled, “The Silence of the Deans,” in which he detailed a December 2013 meeting at which he and others were told not to openly criticize the administration’s cost-cutting plan. In the letter, Buckingham writes that U of S president Ilene Busch-Vishniac told senior administrators not to “publicly disagree with the process or findings of TransformUS,” and that for those who did, their “tenure would be short.” Evidently, Busch-Vishniac was not bluffing.
On Wednesday morning, Buckingham was handed a memo telling him he had breached his employment contract, specifically in terms of confidentiality, and that his letter amounted to “egregious conduct and insubordination.” Buckingham’s employment was immediately terminated, his tenure and benefits revoked (his tenure was reinstated Thursday, following criticism from across the country), and perhaps just for a little extra colour, the professor was escorted from the campus by two security officers. In his letter of termination, Buckingham was told that, “By broadly distributing [‘The Silence of the Deans’], you have damaged the reputation of the university, the president, and the school.”
“BECAUSE WE HOLD TENURE IN HIGH REGARD, WE WILL IMMEDIATELY REVERSE THAT PART OF OUR INITIAL DECISION.”
ILENE BUSCH-VISHNIAC
Surely, the provost and president at the U of S have since come to realize that their response to Buckingham’s letter has inflicted much more profound damage on the reputation of the school. Indeed, someone really needs to create a workshop on “paradox” and ensure key university students and administrators are in attendance.
In “The Silence of the Deans,” Buckingham wrote, “Never in my 40 years of academic life have I seen academics being told that they could not speak out and debate issues.” Of course, he had only been at the university for the past five years and dealing with Busch-Vishniac since 2012.
Busch-Vishniac has a bit of a thorny reputation in terms of her tolerance of free speech, dating back to her time as provost at McMaster University in Hamilton. In 2008, Busch-Vishniac found herself in the midst of a widespread debate on censorship after she banned the use of the term “Israeli apartheid” by student clubs in response to a complaint. A couple of years later, she was sparring with senior administrators at McMaster’s DeGroote School of Business over the creation of a new facility in Burlington, Ont. At the time, one of the school’s chairs told Maclean’s magazine he was “brutally intimidated” into voting for the project. “Whenever I tried to blow a whistle, I was sidelined, bullied, everything,” he said.
The conflict in the latter example, and indeed, the case of Robert Buckingham, seems one of administrators trying to run their university like a corporation. The problem is that a university is not a corporation; or else, it ought not to be. While a case — feeble or otherwise — might be made for Buckingham losing his executive position with the school of public health for openly discussing and criticizing the TransformUS plan, the university had no grounds to strip him of his tenure, particularly without any attempt at fair process. Obviously, the university’s president realized the error and reversed on the move:
“Because we hold tenure in high regard,” Busch-Vishniac wrote in a statement Thursday, “we will immediately reverse that part of our initial decision.” She also added that the university, “has been on receiving end of inaccurate and undeserved criticisms.”
I can’t speak to inaccurate, but underserved criticism? Surely, not. A university should be about the free expression of ideas — including and especially contrarian concepts — openly conveyed without fear of reprisal. Tenure provides protection for the type of critical analysis that university is, or should be, all about. If the school’s administration can’t get the notion of free speech right, how much hope should we hold out for students?