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Tag: Academic Freedom

University of Saskatchewan Detritus

We all remember this spring’s controversy at the University of Saskatchewan over the firing of Robert Buckingham, which resulted in the resignation of the University’s Provost, Brett Fairbairn, and the firing of the President, Ilene Busch-Vishniac.  Despite all the coverage, a number of key questions were never answered, like “how could anyone possibly think firing a tenured professor was a good idea?”  And, “who’s idea was it to fire him anyway – the Provost’s or the President’s?” We now have more

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July 21, 2014 4 Comments

Deans and Multiple Personality Disorders

Imagine two scenarios.  In the first, an academic is threatened with termination if he/she speaks out publicly against the university’s proposed strategic plan.  In the second, a manager is fired for disobeying a direct order from a superior about running down the company he/she works for.  For most readers, I’d guess the first scenario is abhorrent, and the second quite understandable (if perhaps somewhat harsh).  Yet both scenarios describe precisely what happened to University of Saskatchewan’s Dean, Robert Buckingham. The

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May 16, 2014 12 Comments

Tenure and Academic Freedom

There’s a line you tend to hear in Canadian universities: that tenure “is essential to the defence of academic freedom”.  There’s no question that historically, in North America, the two concepts grew up together, and have been intertwined here for about a century.  But it’s demonstrably false that tenure is the only way to defend academic freedom. In Europe, tenure has an entirely different historical origin.  Civil servants in many countries have tenure, and since university professors in many places were (and

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January 27, 2014 10 Comments

“Academic Freedom” or “Freedom from Evaluation”?

So, you may have heard that the University of Manitoba Faculty Association (UMFA) is threatening a strike, starting tomorrow.  What you may not have grasped is just how thin the grounds for the strike are. You can see the university’s full bargaining position, here; UMFA, in contrast, has publicly issued only a single note (responding to a missive from the administration, which it felt was misleading) and an open letter to students published in the Free Press.  Frankly, for a

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October 21, 2013 23 Comments

Inventing Academic Freedom

If you’re a devotee of campus histories (and yes, I realize that’s a big “if”) you’ll know that they tend not to deal with many events in great detail.   Sadly, monograph-length treatments of specific events, or turning points, that define an institution are few and far between. This is why a recent book by Peter C. Kent called Inventing Academic Freedom: The 1968 Strax Affair at the University of New Brunswick is such a refreshing read.  Sure, it’s a parochial story

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April 9, 2013 1 Comment

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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