He wrote a controversial piece while in a leadership role at McGill. What the universitys response means for free speech on campus even years after…

In 2017 Suzanne Fortier made headlines as the Principal of McGill University during the Andrew Potter affair. Potter, a former editor of the Ottawa Citizen, was hired in 2016 to direct the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (MISC), the mandate of which includes hosting annual conferences and other public events. In March of 2017, Potter published a column in Macleans that portrayed Quebec as an almost pathologically alienated and low-trust society. Two days after the article appeared, Potter, although he remained a professor at McGill, stepped down as director of MISC, triggering widespread concern that Fortier had pressured him to do so.

Fortiers retirement last week as McGills Principal is a fitting occasion to revisit the Potter affair and through it her legacy as it concerns academic freedom. Fortier is one of the countrys most distinguished university administrators. Prior to coming to McGill, she was president of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and chair of the World Economic Forums Global University Leaders Forum, to name but two of her many honours. Her handling of the Potter case suggests she holds an alarming view of academic freedom, one that, given Fortiers prominence, risks fostering an academic ethos in which the ability of scholars to speak out on matters of public concern is undermined. Credible sources suggest that Fortier not only violated Potters academic freedom but did so in a way that highlights deeper structural problems with academic employment in Canada.

Potters Macleans piece appeared on a Monday. The next day, McGill administrators woke up to waves of angry emails. Some came from faculty and other members of the campus community, but a greater number were from the wider public, including alumni, mainly Francophone, who are upset, as one of many internal McGill emails obtained by the news site Canadaland noted. The emails, running to over 600 pages, were obtained through an Access to Information request. They reveal that alumni and others were threatening to cut off donations and demanding Potter be fired.

The uproar saw the schools administrators go into crisis mode; a flurry of messages were sent to and from Fortiers office. After a meeting with his dean to discuss the fallout from his article, Potter wrote to his institutes board of trustees, apologizing profusely for its unwarranted generalizations and other shortcomings. In that email, also among the cache released to Canadaland, Potter noted how much he valued his job: being Director of the MISC is an enormous privilege and responsibility, the dream job of a lifetime, he wrote. This description matches the impression I had formed of Potter when he invited me to present at MISCs annual conference the previous month (I also knew Potter slightly 20 years ago, when we were both Toronto journalists). He clearly took pride in running the institute and was brimming over with ambitious plans for the future.

According to Fortier, however, Potter asked to meet with her the day after he apologized and during that meeting volunteered his resignation. As she put it in a letter to the Canadian Association of University Teachers three months after the affair, he had, on his own, come to the conclusion that what he had done was incompatible with his role as Director, prior to meeting with me. (Potter and Fortier both declined to provide comment for this article, Fortier through a spokesperson.)

In addition to offering a version of events in which she did not retaliate against Potter, Fortier was at pains to make a second claim. It was that because Potter was not just a professor but the director of a McGill institute, he did not enjoy the same level of academic freedom as rank-and-file faculty.

We have an institute that is there to promote discussions between people who come to the table with very different perspectives, Fortier said in a 2017 interview with the Globe and Mail. It is not a role to provoke, but to promote good discussion. Remarks that embroiled the institute in controversy would interfere with the institutes ability to uphold its mission. If an institute director was too outspoken or provocative, therefore, while it would not be right to fire them, it would be acceptable to remove them from their managerial position. As Fortier put it in a meeting of McGills Senate addressing the Potter controversy, the University may, through the relevant institutional procedures appropriate for each case, replace academic administrators who are no longer able to discharge their responsibilities effectively.

Fortiers defence, in sum, was two-pronged. She did not demand that Potter resign his directorship. But if she had, it would have been fine anyway. Neither claim withstands scrutiny.

Problems with Fortiers cramped view of academic freedom were noted in a report on the Potter Affair written by University of Manitoba professor Mark Gabbert. Gabberts report, which was commissioned by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), relied on a review of public documents as well as further materials obtained by the CAUTs own Access to Information request. Gabbert observed that a widespread view of academic freedom is that it protects the ability of all academics to speak out on controversial subjects, including in the media, regardless of their administrative duties. As a CAUT policy statement cited by Gabbert puts it, [faculty] who continue as members of the academic staff of their institutions while fulfilling administrative roles enjoy the full protection of academic freedom. A letter to Fortier signed by 10 directors of different McGill institutes, also cited by Gabbert, expressed a similar view.

Fortier issued a one-sentence statement in response to the CAUT report. We disagree with the reports conclusions with respect to academic freedom at McGill University, she told Inside Higher Ed. Gabberts carefully researched report received no media attention in Canada, perhaps because the news cycle had moved on by the time it appeared in 2018.

This is unfortunate. Academics sometimes need to draw attention to problems at their own institutions. They therefore need the freedom, as Gabbert writes, to continue to criticize a given policy or practice even while being obliged to implement it. The Fortier doctrine, as Gabbert terms Fortiers narrow view of the freedom of academics who participate in university management, renders academic freedom a secondary value to managerial conformity. It would strip academics who perform administrative duties of the freedom to criticize their institutions, even though such freedom is necessary to prevent universities, with have a responsibility to sustain vigorous research and inquiry, from becoming just another business.

Potters hiring letter was among the documents released to Canadaland. It states nowhere that his academic freedom would be reduced by accepting a directorship. After his column attracted the attention of an angry public, the reaction of McGills administration must therefore have been a surprise to him. As Gabbert describes that reaction, over the course of several weeks, the University developed and promoted a theory of the conditional academic freedom of academic administrators. Fortier and her administration thus essentially free-styled a revised version of academic freedom, one that, conveniently, released them from standing up for a faculty member. Gabbert concludes that Fortiers doctrine is contrary to the academic freedom rights of the Universitys academic administrators and of all members of the McGill faculty.

Fortiers handling of the affair was problematic in a further way, unmentioned by Gabbert. Suppose we grant for the sake of argument that the Fortier doctrine is correct. Even if Potter should have faced repercussions, there are the separate questions of how quickly he should have faced them, and how severe they should have been.

Experienced institutional managers have ways of riding out a controversy. Fortier for example might have attempted to follow a 30-day rule, which says that employees who are mobbed online (or, as in Potters case, by email), should keep their jobs for 30 days, to give the controversy a chance to die down. (Its a rule that free-speech advocate Angel Eduardo says should be written into some employment contracts.) Potter lost his directorship with extraordinary haste, only two days after his article appeared. In addition, the consequences for his career were stark: unlike most people who go into academia primarily to become professors and only later drift into administration, Potter had come to McGill specifically to direct the institute.

The problem with the Fortier doctrine in other words is not merely that it represents a doubtful understanding of academic freedom, bad as that is. It is that Fortier appears to have invoked her doctrine to justify a high-stakes, one-strike-youre-out response, without even attempting to delay Potters crucifixion until a time when calmer discussion, and a less extreme resolution, might have been possible.

Fortier was the first francophone to lead McGill, a traditional bastion of Anglo Quebec. A week before her appointment was announced in 2013, a group of nationalist academics published an open letter calling for major cuts in provincial funding for McGill and other Anglophone universities. A cynic might wonder if the Fortier doctrine is a smokescreen, and the real reason Fortier advanced it was to protect the university budget in a challenging funding environment. If so, there is no evidence that Potters departure made a difference to McGills provincial funding. Moreover, preserving a university budget by disregarding academic freedom saves the village by setting it on fire.

The more disturbing possibility however is that Fortier actually believes her doctrine. James Turk, a Toronto Metropolitan University professor who now directs that universitys Centre for Free Expression, has suggested that Fortiers lukewarm support for academic freedom is a sign of the times. As he wrote in 2017, Fortiers view that academic administrative leadership and provocative intellectualism shouldnt mix is becoming more common among university presidents. Turk, a former executive director of CAUT, has criticized Universities Canada, a body representing university chief executives such as Fortier, for endorsing a minimalist view of academic freedom, one that, much like Fortiers, demotes it to second place after what Universities Canada calls institutional requirements.

If the Fortier doctrine is false then it matters a great deal whether she pushed Potter out. While she has claimed that her administration regretfully accepted Potters resignation, more than one media outlet ran stories at the time describing his decision to step down as involuntary. As an editorial in Macleans that drew on unnamed sources put it, The use of the word resignation here is spurious. In 2017 a source inside McGill with knowledge of the case wrote to me with a narrative of events closer to the Macleans version than to Fortiers. While there was no immediate threat of Potter losing his job as a professor, when it came to the separate matter of his directorship, according to my source (who requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions), Fortier in a meeting with Potter bluntly ordered him to resign from the position immediately, or she would tell the MISC board to strip it from him.

Other sources, who are not anonymous, support this version of events. Ken Whyte, publisher of Sutherland House and founding editor of the National Post, was on the MISC board when the scandal broke (I have a book under contract with Whytes press). Whyte, who resigned from the board over Fortiers handling of the affair, was on the phone with Potter when he was walking to the meeting that marked the end of his directorship. My impression was that resignation was the furthest thing from his mind, Whyte told the National Post in 2017. That was not the outcome that he was going for. He was hoping to see if he could keep his job. Similarly, the evening after Fortiers meeting with Potter, Daniel Weinstock, a tenured McGill law professor and a friend of Potters, said on Facebook that Potter was asked to resign a few hours ago. (Weinstocks remark was quoted in the 2017 cache of McGill emails, in a message from one administrator to another that asked, Has Andrew already told everyone?)

Potter himself never publicly confirmed that he was pressured to give up his dream job. But the nature of his position would have made it risky for him to speak candidly. He was what at McGill is known as an associate professor (professional), a position which, as his appointment letter noted, does not confer eligibility for tenure. Potters initial term was for three years. The renewal of his professorial position after that would require approval from administrators who worked under Fortier. Upsetting her could thus result in his contract not being renewed, which would leave him unemployed.

Potters arrangement, that of not being eligible for tenure, is increasingly the norm in Canadian universities. According to a 2018 report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), a left-leaning think tank, just over 53 per cent of all faculty appointments in Canada are of this kind. As the reports authors write, reliance on contract faculty appears to be largely driven by choices made by university administrations, raising questions about the role of universities as employer and educator. Our findings lead us to the conclusion that the heavy reliance on contract faculty in Canadian universities is a structural issue, not a temporary approach to hiring.

Most of these contract positions, unlike Potters, are part-time, low-wage positions. (Potter enjoyed the further advantage that after six years, his professorship could become indefinite). But, like these precariously employed academics, as the CCPA report terms them, Potter lacked the protection of tenure, one of the purposes of which is to offer faculty a strong safeguard against ill-considered demands by administrators. There is now a large academic class in Canada that will never know that protection. Potter, as a former newspaper editor, had an unusually high profile for a contract academic. If an administrator could quietly extract a resignation from him, imagine what pressure can be brought to bear in lower profile cases, which are less likely to make news.

Potter is a talented journalist capable of raising hell in print when the occasion calls for it. But the nature of his employment was such that the one story he dared not publicize when it counted most was his own. This limited the ability of the McGill faculty association, CAUT and similar organizations to defend his academic freedom. Advocacy organizations are most effective when they advocate for someone who can confidently speak out on their own behalf, which Potter declined to do. Similarly, media defences of Potter, which did appear, were less effective than they would have been had they included testimony from Potter countering Fortiers narrative. Fortier, by contrast, faced no corresponding limitation on her ability to disseminate her version of events. Indeed, she enjoyed the benefit of the considerable resources McGill has invested in PR, as Gabbert put it.

When the Potter affair was unfolding, the Canadian Association of University Teachers wrote to Fortier to express its concern. If Professor Potter was pressured or coerced into resigning, this would represent one of the most significant academic freedom cases in recent decades, its letter said. I believe Potter was pressured, and the outcome was indeed significant, most obviously for Potter, who has been quietly working as a professor at McGill even since, but also one would guess for other contract academics at McGill.

As for Fortier, if she did not compel Potter to resign, nothing in her actions afterward suggests any concern about the damage done to academic freedom, or to Potters career, or for the chilling message his resignation sent to other academics. Andrew Potter the person and academic freedom the principle were both inconvenient to her, so she treated both in a callous way. If she panicked and made a mistake in her handling of the situation, she did not, as far as we know, face formal consequences for it, and she is unlikely to ever face such consequences now.

Andy Lamey teaches philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. His book, Against Canadian Literature, is under contract with Sutherland House.

View original post here:
He wrote a controversial piece while in a leadership role at McGill. What the universitys response means for free speech on campus even years after...