Panel debates limits of academic freedom
MONTREAL — He wasn’t 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. And if things appear to have calmed down, it’s deceptive, said Terry Hebert, president of the 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 article.
“I’m 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-in-chief of the Ottawa Citizen, apologized for the article’s tone. 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’s 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.”