A couple of weeks ago, a philosophy professor at the University of Lethbridge named Paul Viminitz invited Frances Widdowson to speak.  Widdowson, a historian, was fired from Mount Royal University a little over a year ago mainly, I gather, because of her determination to air in class her view that Residential Schools were actually kind of good.  The invitation was not just for her to expand on these views (as well as, more generally, her odious idea that Indigenous knowledge is not deserving of respect because it’s not rooted in the Enlightenment) in class, but also, it seems, to give a “public lecture”.  It’s not clear from the coverage what this term means at Lethbridge: the impression I get is that someone – presumably Viminitz – simply reserved a public space for a speaker, as people do universities every day with no one asking institutional permission.  

As you might expect, many people at Lethbridge felt pretty strongly that this was a bad idea, reasonably likening her views on residential schools to Holocaust denial and demanding that university should prevent Widdowson from speaking.  To be clear, this was not a “university event” in the sense that no one in a position of authority at the university issued the invitation.  At first, the University of Lethbridge took the position that while Widdowson’s views were disagreeable, the event should be allowed to proceed because the university’s own Statement of Freedom of Expression policy extends the principle of free speech to invited guests (though, in fact, the Statement says nothing whatsoever about guests).  A few days later, the university eventually decided that Widdowson would not be allowed to use any public areas for speaking.  However, it made no attempt to stop Widdowson speaking in at least one classroom – transcript here – about the nature of Indigenous ways of knowing.  Nor did it appear to try very hard to stop Widdowson from trying – without official sanction – to speak in a public area, though students were apparently pretty effective in shutting down this attempt.    

Let’s go over that again.  The University of Lethbridge made no attempt to stop Widdowson from speaking to Viminitz’s class.  This, I assume, was considered to be a matter of “academic freedom” because it happened within the bounds of a classroom taught by a tenured faculty member.  Once outside the classroom, however, the university refused to give her an official place to speak.  She was free, as a citizen of Alberta, to roam the halls of this publicly-funded institution and to try to speak to people, but she was given no protection when she was angrily confronted by people who disagreed with her.

The Alberta government, predictably, made a big show about Widdowson’s treatment, talking – as it has since it was elected – about the need for institutions to adhere to “the University of Chicago Statement on Freedom of Expression”, which for Conservatives is the Gold Standard on such things.  However, if you read the Chicago Statement you realize very quickly that while it is very strong on the rights and responsibilities of members of the University Community (i.e., students and faculty), it isn’t exactly clear about how it should be applied to people who are not part of that community, such as Widdowson.  While it does say that members of the community may contest but not obstruct speakers invited onto campus, it is not in any way clear who gets to do the inviting.  The university?  A faculty department or centre?  Any individual professor or student?  The Statement is silent.  Which is rather inconvenient for free speech ultras because it is precisely these kind of campus invitations/disinvitations which make up about 90% of the flashpoints in the interminably boring campus free speech wars. 

 (A few years ago, when an invitation from one professor was extended to Steve Bannon to take part in a debate on populism, the President of the University of Chicago said that any member of the community could extend such an invitation.  But given the backlash from students and faculty, and the fact that Bannon accepted the invitation but the event was never held, one suspects that the President might in fact have re-thought this commitment at some point.  In any event, Chicago practice and Chicago Statement are two different things.)

The upshot of this was that while the Government of Alberta might have wanted to lash out at Lethbridge, it did not really have any leg on which to stand: Widdowson’s status as an outsider and her lack of an “official” invitation meant that Lethbridge had not obviously violated the Chicago Statement.  So, it decided to engage in political theatre, and announced that it was going to strengthen free speech on campuses by requiring universities and colleges to…file annual reports on free speech.  Ontario already does this of course, and said reports are maybe the most unintentionally hilarious ones in the history of higher education reporting because if there is one thing they fail to demonstrate it is that there is any kind of free speech problem on campuses.   

It’s genuinely unclear what this move is meant to demonstrate other than that Government Is Doing Something on an Issue which plays well with its base.  It certainly doesn’t change the calculus for any similar future Widdowson-like event.  And jokes about increasing Red Tape aside, it doesn’t even really impose that much of a burden on institutions (take a look at Queen’s submission for 2022: it’s practically in comic sans font and can’t have taken more than 20 minutes to draft).   

In short: as a story, it’s not a nothingburger.  But I also think there is a lot less at work here than meets the eye.