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Academic Frozen Peaches
1.1k Plays1 year ago
Shama Rangwala joins Duncan Kinney to discuss the students of Uleth owning Frances Widdowson, the UCP reaction and the historical context of academic free speech and how it's been weaponized by the right.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey folks, Duncan Kinney here, host of the Progress Report. Today we're speaking with fellow Harbinger Media Podcaster, Shama Rangwala. She does the Replay Pod with Desmond Cole, a podcast on the inescapable politics of popular culture, and I do recommend subscribing if you haven't already.
00:00:16
Speaker
And I'm really excited to get to our chat with Shama. She's a returning guest. In fact, she's my very first guest on this podcast and such a smart and welcome voice when it comes to the big picture and political theory and tying everything together and getting away kind of from the individualized liberal bullshit that we are so immersed in. And this week, Shama and I are discussing the UCP government's recent announcements that are supposed to protect free speech on campus. Really a protection for edgelords who think that residential schools were actually good.
00:00:44
Speaker
But folks, if you regularly listen to this podcast, if you like the work we do here, if you like the investigative reporting we do, like our newsletter, please consider becoming a regular monthly donor. We've lost a few people over the past month just because financial times are hard. So if you can afford it, please go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, putting your credit card, become a monthly donor. Jim and I would really, really appreciate it. And now onto the show.
Academic Free Speech and Racial Capitalism
00:01:20
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Doug Gagini, recording today here in Muscogee, Wisconsin, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty 6 territory on the banks of the mighty Kaskasaw, the North Saskatchewan River. Join us today as a returning guest, Shama Rongwala, actually the very first guest we had on this podcast, now an assistant professor at York University. And Shama is here in order to have a very fun
00:01:49
Speaker
zesty, interesting discussion about, I don't know, academic free speech is probably like the large banner thing that we would have it. But really, I don't think I could have brought a better guess because when I go to your York University bio page, Shama, it says your teaching interests include theories of racial capitalist formations, feminist theory, and critiques of imperialism and colonialism.
Francis Woodson and UCP's Free Speech Policies
00:02:14
Speaker
You, Shama,
00:02:16
Speaker
our patient zero for the woke mind virus that is attacking our university students. So thank you for coming out today. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, patient zero or first against the wall when the fashions take over. That's true. Well, let's not think about that. Let's think about it. Yeah. Yes. It's, it's a, but you've left Edmonton for Ontario. How is your, your new job at your university treating you?
00:02:41
Speaker
You know what? I actually, I love my job and being in Toronto. So York is, you know, it's, it's great. Like the students are really smart and it's actually majority students of color. So like that's a different kind of vibe than I've had at other places I've taught. So yeah, it's been really interesting for me. Great colleagues. It's not cool to like talk about liking your job, but I did, you know, get a good one. So I'm very lucky.
00:03:12
Speaker
I mean, there was, uh, I remember I read a lot of, um, Oh, what the fuck is this guy's name? Graham Ferguson, the Canadian author, the guy who wrote why I hate Canadians. I wrote that as a teenager. And I remember him saying that like the most ideal Canadian job is like associate professor was like, you got job security. You can say what you want. You're not like in charge of a lot of people. You make decent money. Like at the end of the day, it's like, sounds like a good job to me. You're in a union.
00:03:40
Speaker
York has a very very good union so yeah that's that's I mean you know what we always like can do better but just you know I feel like I came from places that were not very good on on labor so then York looks really great for me now so the reason we're all here today is you know academic freeze-peach
00:04:06
Speaker
And that's the overarching term we're going to use. But it's really because a widely reviled former professor got owned at Lethbridge University. And then the UCP government kind of pissed its pants and is using what happened at the University of Lethbridge to kind of clamp down on enemies in the university system. But before we get into what happened at Lethbridge, I think it's useful to take a few minutes to talk about Francis Woodson.
00:04:34
Speaker
She is a former associate professor at Mount Royal University, my alma mater where I went to school, and she was, yeah, invited to speak by a philosophy professor at the University of Lethbridge and again had her show
Controversies Surrounding Megan Murphy's Invitation
00:04:50
Speaker
run. But she became somewhat infamous for a book she wrote in 2008, which was actually the same year that she became a tenured university at Mount Royal,
00:04:59
Speaker
which was titled, Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry, the deception behind indigenous cultural preservation.
00:05:05
Speaker
In a 2009 Maclean's piece titled Tough Critique or Hate Speech, Calgary's profs paper on the Aboriginal Industry Starts a War, the following was written about Woodison, about her speaking at a Canadian political science association meeting. It says, Woodison, a policy studies professor at Mount Royal College, argued, our Aboriginal reserve system isn't working. It encourages unemployment and alcoholism since there are so few jobs in reserves.
00:05:31
Speaker
policies that encourage First Nations to live separate lives merely prop up a broken system. The best way to help Natives achieve health and prosperity is assimilation. Her paper also criticized Aboriginal traditional knowledge, arguing that some claims didn't hold up to scientific analysis and discussed a development gap between Natives and settlers, implying that Europeans were more advanced. So just based on that whole introduction to Francis Woodison,
00:06:02
Speaker
I think we can kind of see where she's coming from here. She has started out her career as an edgelord, and she continued her career as an edgelord. You think that's fair to say, Shama?
00:06:15
Speaker
Yeah, I mean this, what she's saying was actually like quite normative like decades ago, right? Like you've probably seen like people will like dig up an old Canadian history textbook or something from the 1950s. And it'll say like, yeah, white people are more advanced. So like she is actually saying something that's like very normative to the Canadian settler colonial project. But
00:06:40
Speaker
This is not how we think about this today. I guess it passed peer review. I'm not even sure what the press is for this. But it's not something that's going to be taught in classes. I had never even heard of it. So when you say, is she just an edgelord? I mean, that's kind of the point. But it's also the point that what she's saying is actually normative to the settler colonial state.
00:07:08
Speaker
Yeah, she has set herself up as this brave truth teller where really she's just kind of repeating well-worn white supremacist rostrums from again 30, 40, 50 years ago. But again, repackaged as brave truth telling, which is really her kind of academic
00:07:24
Speaker
a calling card. And you said, yeah, this book does not seem to have made a mark in the academic world. And it was widely criticized at the time. Peter Kolchinski in 2009 for Canadian Dimension wrote about the book.
00:07:40
Speaker
The agenda of this book is to attack the notion of Aboriginal rights in favor of a notion of universal human rights. The book dismisses Aboriginal culture as primitive and outdated and relies on the evolutionary anthropology of a century ago. Its particular target is traditional knowledge, especially traditional ecological knowledge, which Whittison and her co-author argues does not exist, except as forms of local knowledge that people from any culture can have.
00:08:03
Speaker
The book is based on intellectual dishonesty, and the authors can barely cite a living anthropologist who will agree with them. So the anthropologists they do cite favorably almost all come from before the 1950s, when the now totally discredited doctrine of social evolution still left traces of its pernicious influence. And I will link to this Peter Kolchinsky kind of review of Francis Wooderson's book in the show notes, but again, that's a pretty good
00:08:28
Speaker
encapsulation of like, pretty good criticism of Whittleson and where she's coming from. And she kind of became this minor figure in kind of conservative academia, you know, based on this book. And, you know, this was in 2008, 2009, this came out, she had a, you know, a career at Mount Royal College at the time now University. And she really popped back into the eye back in March 2019.
00:08:56
Speaker
When Woodison invited well-known turf, Megan Murphy to Mount Royal University to discuss, should trans people exist? No, sorry, the talk was titled, does trans activism negatively impact women's rights?
Lethbridge Incident and Government Response
00:09:10
Speaker
As you might expect, students and faculty at Mount Royal University pushed back against this talk with petitions and protests. And notably, Woodison believes that this was kind of the beginning of the end for her at Mount Royal. She was eventually fired in 2021 for reasons that have not been disclosed.
00:09:26
Speaker
and are still actually in arbitration. Woodson claims that she was fired for questioning woke ideas while media reporting has mentioned things like allegations of intimidation and harassment. And we won't know until an arbitrator sits down and makes a call on this. But even just to take a minute, Shama, you're not a tenured professor yet. You said you're a tenured track professor, right? And that's different from Francis Woodson who had tenure. And as a tenured professor,
00:09:56
Speaker
How hard would it be for Francis Woodison to get fired? So yeah, before you get tenure, the way that they do it is just to like deny you tenure. But once you have tenure, it's really hard to get fired. You have to have done something like really egregious. And we know actually lots of people who are doing all kinds of things and not getting fired. So, um, you know,
00:10:19
Speaker
It needs to be an ethical breach, some kind of like fraud or harassment. And even then, like, you know, that there's like, you know, harassers and academia who don't get fired. So it is it is actually pretty difficult to get fired. Yeah.
00:10:36
Speaker
And that is actually good. There are reasons that we need to have these kinds of tenure protections historically, because how can you be critical of the state at a publicly funded university? If you want to have that thing that we're calling academic freedom, which I think is a much more complicated term,
00:10:56
Speaker
than, you know, it usually gets represented as. But in order to have that, you have to have some kind of job security, right? But they're also getting rid of that job security, like tenure is being gutted. You know, the academy is mostly like precarious labor. So yeah, it is hard to get fired if you have tenure, but the academy is doing all kinds of other things.
00:11:19
Speaker
And Frances, you know, around this time that she invited Megan Murphy, she said other things that got people's attention. She kind of continued her career as a professional edgelord where she said in 2020 that like the Black Lives Matter movement had destroyed the university and also that residential schools gave indigenous children education that normally they wouldn't have received. And, you know, this is,
00:11:45
Speaker
again, par for the course for kind of what widows and the kind of person that widows and is the kind of statements that she likes to make the kind of academic discussions that she likes to have, but you personally had a run in with widows and did you gamma
00:11:56
Speaker
Yeah, so this was actually the first that I'd ever heard of her. So when the UCP mandated the adoption of the Chicago principles, I wrote an article on my website, Piracence, about the Chicago principles and kind of complicating that. Like, what are they actually? So people can look that up.
00:12:18
Speaker
It's titled, Free Speech in the University, a Closer Look at the Chicago Principles. And that circulated quite a lot. And I wrote an op-ed in the Globe and Mail, and I was doing TV and stuff. And so somehow she heard of me, I guess, and wrote me this email and said, would you come to
00:12:38
Speaker
come to Calgary to MRU to uh give a talk or like be on this panel and like we would pay your expenses etc etc um and it was kind of like a normal invitation in some ways but then I sort of looked up what like she was about and then um yeah so then I wrote I wrote back and I
00:13:02
Speaker
put my response kind of public, or like I put it on Facebook, where I was just kind of like, I want to kind of respond to this publicly. So I said, thanks for the invitation. I must decline. And I said, I've written publicly about how debate can be a useful pedagogical tool. And discomfort can be an important part of learning. But I said, I have also made it clear I do not believe it is pedagogically sound to debate.
00:13:29
Speaker
Basic rights such as the Rational Space Network debating, that's her group, debating whether trans rights hurt feminism or conjuring the spectre of a quote unquote aboriginal industry,
UCP's Free Speech Justifications and Academic Freedom
00:13:40
Speaker
which ignores the material realities of colonial capitalism in Canada. I stand with indigenous peoples and people of all genders as a first principle, not as a position to be debated. Our foundations are incommensurate and no amount of debate
00:13:56
Speaker
will resolve that. And I also said I've written extensively about how the free speech issue is a red herring for the delegitimization of the Academy as a force for critique and having three people with institutional power. So this was before I had my job to be a precarious faculty member might be a good spectacle, but I will not participate in it. Okay. So then she screenshotted my email, which whatever fair and tweeted it and put like red lines around it.
00:14:23
Speaker
and things like that. But I really made myself, I think, as clear as I could as to why this kind of debate is not generative. In fact, it kind of, you know, when you debate things, you make it seem as if it's just like a marketplace of ideas and you can just like win a position as if there are no like material circumstances that exist, right? So, yeah.
00:14:52
Speaker
to the concept of debating that I am. Yeah, I mean, debate can sharpen a position, right? But this is not about sharpening a position. This is, it's actual just like a circus show, you know, that, that, yeah. Most public debates, I would argue, are
00:15:12
Speaker
bad and not useful. I would absolutely agree with that. I actually think it's pretty rare to see a debate stage that actually is attuned to at least let's agree that some material conditions exist. Is capitalism good or bad? Well, I mean, we actually have answers to that. We have history.
00:15:42
Speaker
I mean, I would go even further. I would say that debate clubs in high schools and universities are also bad. I think they encourage things that I don't think are very useful for society. It's funny because, yeah, I remember the debate club in high school being framed as like, it's actually really good for you to learn how to debate a position you don't actually believe because it makes you such a good debater. And it's like, this is like,
00:16:10
Speaker
broken the brains of generations. So many libs have just been like, actually, yeah, I should be able to do this. And everything gets reduced to rhetoric and spectacle instead of what is actually happening. So yeah. That's just my own personal animus towards debate as a form of public education. But let's get back to the University of Lethbridge, which was,
00:16:39
Speaker
you know, the site of, you know, witnesses owning, and is actually a place that doesn't really Brooke bullshit like this. If you remember about a decade ago, it was University of Lethbridge students that baited Tom Flanagan, another like right wing edgelord shithead into discussing his views on child pornography, which led to the temporary exile of Tom Flanagan from polite society. Don't worry, though, he did make his way back in after not apologizing and just saying people were mean to me.
00:17:07
Speaker
But Whittleson was invited to speak at the UofL campus by a philosophy professor about her views that like a mob mentality and woke pilot policies increasingly threaten academic freedom. And I should point out that she was able to give two separate speeches to this philosophy class.
00:17:24
Speaker
But it was the public facing talk that people were mad about. So petitions were circulated, people organized themselves and made the administration quickly aware of the fact that this person was not welcome. And the UofL uninvited her to speak. Woodlson, just even though this happened, she was like, I'm still going to come speak anyways.
00:17:44
Speaker
And she showed up at the UofL to the public space, to the atrium there, where she was met by 700 to 1,000 people who told her in varying ways to fuck off, that they didn't want to listen to her. And it fucking ripped. Liddosyn was the recipient of the rare but awesome in real life ratio, not just the Twitter ratio, and essentially had to leave with her tail between her legs.
00:18:09
Speaker
Yeah, so I will say it's really great that the students organized and that's like one thing that happened. But to say that she left with her tail between her legs, I mean, there is a consequence of this and that, you know, you can expand on this. But that's the that the UCP is strengthening their, you know, obsession.
00:18:30
Speaker
with this quote unquote free speech panic. And so actually it kind of benefits them. And I don't mean that in the sense that it would have been better to let her talk. I actually think it's really a great show of student
00:18:46
Speaker
activism and agency to boot her off campus. But we need to be like really careful about, you know, is this like, where, like, where's the bigger fight? Like, it's like the battle and the war, right? That's a battle. But it actually like what the UCP because they have state power, they're able to do something like quite material, which is, you know, in line with everything else they've been doing to just gut Alberta post secondary.
00:19:15
Speaker
You're absolutely correct. Wooderson getting owned so publicly by so many people meant that the UCP essentially had to step in on her behalf and protect her. And a couple of days later after this, they put out a release saying, quote, Alberta's government will require post-secondary institutions to provide annual free speech reporting to the Minister of Advanced Education.
00:19:37
Speaker
And, you know, details were pretty scarce and like these actual rules haven't come out yet. But essentially you've got the Minister of Advanced Education, this little scumbag, Demetrius Nicolaitis, talking about how he wants to ensure that freedom is made stronger and that the voices of all Albertans deserve to be heard and respected. And this is why the UCP is working to protect free speech and academic freedom on post-secondary campuses.
00:20:02
Speaker
and justifying this why he's making post-secondary institutions have to report annually to the government on their efforts to protect free speech on campus.
00:20:15
Speaker
part of the information that was used to kind of like justify. This was a 2022 McDonald Laurier Institute study, which talked to a bunch of university professors in Canada. And it said, regardless of political leaning, 34% self-censored because
Power Dynamics in Free Speech Debates
00:20:30
Speaker
they are concerned about negative consequences if their true opinions on certain topics became known. Shama, you're a university professor, do you self-censored because you are concerned about consequences if your true opinions on certain topics became known?
00:20:42
Speaker
So I think that it's probably fair to say that I don't self-censor in general. And maybe that's why I have been invited onto this podcast. Yeah, I don't personally self-censor. Again, I think I was just exceedingly lucky. I don't believe in meritocracy. Just the right job came up at the right time for me, and I somehow got it. And so I do have a job at an institution that
00:21:11
Speaker
My department is one of the best departments in Canada for Black studies. It's very critical. There's lots of great work going on there. But so I don't self-censor in general. But I do want to bring up that there is a real issue around academic freedom. And this is the big example, I think, is around Palestine. And so the organization Palestine Legal did a study
00:21:40
Speaker
with lots of citations and data and wrote a report called The Palestine Exception to Free Speech. There is actually a lot of evidence that people who work on Palestine or support Palestinian rights have to self-censor. That's just one example, but there are actually ways that people do need to self-censor. I really want to emphasize here that this issue of self-censorship is a labor issue.
00:22:07
Speaker
because as academic labor becomes more precarious, it's been precarious for a long time, but now it's like the number of tenure-track positions that come up are so few that like most people if you graduate with a PhD, you just take some like contract labor if you want to keep teaching at a university.
00:22:25
Speaker
So it's easy for an institution to say, okay, we're not renewing your contract, rather than saying, oh, you said something critical of the state, or you said something critical of the institution, or critical of the allies of the state. So they don't even have to name it as such.
00:22:43
Speaker
that they are regulating speech in this way. They're like, oh, no, no, we just have a bunch of precarious laborers. And sometimes their contracts will be renewed. And sometimes they aren't renewed instead of like who's gets renewed and who doesn't. And are there like issues of speech around that? That is not the kind of free speech issue that the
00:23:06
Speaker
that's like the right wing fascists care about. So when they talk about wanting to protect free speech, I want to be really clear that they are not protecting any kind of speech by like defunding the universities. You know, like U of A is so defunded, like my colleague found like a mount or like my former colleague found like a mouse in her office and it's like just the infrastructure is falling apart. They don't have staff.
00:23:35
Speaker
working to like process forms and stuff, like HR is like not processing. I'm not blaming the staff for this, I'm blaming the UCP for this. And so when you have like defunded this university to the extent that it's not able to function, what does that mean for like protecting free speech? When you're raising tuition so students don't have access to education, what does that mean for free speech? What does it mean for academic freedom?
00:24:04
Speaker
when most of the people who are teaching junior undergrad courses are on contracts. And if a tenured professor retires, that person is not replaced with another tenure line. What is the free speech issue with that? So there are all of these kinds of ways that academic freedom and free speech is regulated. But it's not named as such. And so really want to keep the focus on what are the kind of
00:24:34
Speaker
Material conditions, what are the struggles against fascism, how these are playing out in the academy?
00:24:41
Speaker
And the author of that, uh, McDonald Laurier Institute study was someone that the UCP also used as a validator, uh, professor at Canadian, a professor of Canadian history at Trent university named, uh, Christopher Dummett. And he also got a quote in the UCP press release that, uh, was pretty hilarious. I'm just going to read it for you now. Uh, Alberta universities face grave new threats from those who would turn universities away from their founding and most important goal, the search for truth, the upper government's initiative to bolster academic freedom and viewpoint of viewpoint diversity.
00:25:11
Speaker
are a powerful defense, not only of professors and universities, but of the very essence of higher education itself. Yeah, that's Christopher Dumit or Dumit. I don't know how to say his name. Just a note about Christopher Dumit. But brave new threats, like you cannot talk about this while you are dismantling the institution. In fact, OK, let me put this a different way because you can talk about it because they're part of the same thing.
00:25:39
Speaker
they're actually part of the same thing. This is where I should take my own advice of not pointing out hypocrisies, but instead looking at, you know, it's just like such an, it's such an instinct, right? To be like, oh, this is so hypocritical. When it's not, these are part of the same thing, right?
00:25:58
Speaker
Christopher Dumit guy doesn't believe that the systematic kidnapping of indigenous children and stripping them of their language and their culture and killing thousands of them was genocidal. He wrote in an October 2022 national post op-ed and of course was in the national post.
00:26:15
Speaker
quote, many will agree on the negative effects of the schools, he's talking about residential schools here, but to label them genocide, that kind of concept creep invites disagreement and could lead to political polarization about an issue on which agreement might otherwise be possible. So that's the guy, that's the guy that the UCP trotted out as like, actually this academic free speech reporting is good actually, that's the person.
00:26:40
Speaker
Yeah, the state surveillance of what people are doing in universities is good, actually. Yeah. And there's a final little bit in the UCP press release on this matter that I think is worth talking about as well. Quote, this action furthers previous work in 2019, which required all 26 publicly funded post-secondary institutions in Alberta to either endorse the Chicago principles on free expression or develop a policy that is consistent with the principles.
00:27:10
Speaker
all institutions complied and implemented their policies by the minister's deadline of December 15th, 2019, with an exception made for Berman University and the institution's religious value. Religious value is just a note. A Berman University is the publicly funded religious university that is run by the Seventh Day Adventists. So would this mean that at Berman University you couldn't say like,
00:27:35
Speaker
God doesn't exist or something. I don't know. There are other religious universities too in Alberta. So I don't know why the Seventh Day Adventist one got a free pass, but that's just that. But this little note at the end of this release does talk about the use of his previous work on this, which you've read about, which is the Chicago Principles. And so what the hell are they used to be talking about when it comes to the Chicago Principles? And what are the Chicago Principles designed to do?
00:28:04
Speaker
Yeah, so the Chicago principles from the University of Chicago are it's like a very vague document about how the university is founded on like a diversity of viewpoints and
00:28:17
Speaker
you know, allowing people to say whatever they want, even if it's like unwise or wrongheaded or offensive, et cetera. Like they, people should be still be able to say whatever they want within the terms of the law. So yeah, I have written about this and I would, you know, if the listeners want to like know more of my thoughts, I do kind of a more like closer analysis of it in
Labor Rights vs. Free Speech at Universities
00:28:40
Speaker
the piece in Piracence. So they can check that out. But the Chicago principles do this very,
00:28:45
Speaker
particular kind of work meant to reinforce the status quo, but in the guise of saying we're going to allow everything, right? So it's very ambiguous and it also has no like sense of power, right? It's power neutral.
00:29:01
Speaker
But we know when something is power neutral, it actually reinforces the status quo. So the definitions of what constitutes the limits of speech get to be decided by the institution or the legal system. And it doesn't address the consequences of that speech.
00:29:22
Speaker
And I would really like us to think about like how this plays out. So we don't say that there's censorship if a physics department doesn't allow somebody to give a talk that says like the earth is the center of the universe, right? We don't say that like they're being censored and they're being, you know my favorite thing is like rebel news, like the rebellion of rebel news, right?
00:29:51
Speaker
when they're like the most status quo. So the point is, because residential school denial is part of that status quo, but in the guise of like being rebellious, that actually does get this issue of like speech, like, oh, we should let that person say that thing, right? But historically, like
00:30:11
Speaker
Physics shit was also threatening to like the dominant institution of the church, right? Like that was a life of like a matter of life and death, like historically. And so, but like now we're like, no, no, no, we're like so enlightened. Like we know that like the sun is whatever the earth goes around the sun. But with this residential school denial, what we're seeing is this is about the settler colonial state saying, well, you know, we should probably let
00:30:38
Speaker
let some ambiguity around this genocide that we did be public, because of course it benefits the state. So that's one thing. We really need to think about where power is located, state power, and what that means for the terms of debate.
00:31:00
Speaker
But also, the Chicago Principles talk about like, and this the discourse is very much about this, it's like, you should be exposed to things that are offensive. And I want us to think about how the term offensive is very like, liberal and individual, right? It's like this feeling, right? It's like, oh, like you should
00:31:21
Speaker
be exposed to this feeling of being offended. And I think you mentioned Megan Murphy and TERFs, right? So the persecution of trans people is a huge front for the fascists right now. So I want us to think about how
00:31:41
Speaker
The primary problem with transphobic speech in the university, it's not that it's offensive. It is offensive. But the primary problem is not that people's feelings get hurt.
00:31:57
Speaker
But it is that we actually need to keep this material analysis of what's going on with the fascists targeting trans people, that the targeting of trans people is connected to austerity. It's connected to white supremacy and all these systems of power. So it's not about hurting people's feelings. And so the Chicago principle by kind of
00:32:19
Speaker
centering the individual and individual speech and individual responses to speech actually like allows the university to do whatever like to decide however they want of what is like allowable or not. Yeah, I mean, the Chicago principles really do seem like someone taking that stupid Voltaire quote like way too seriously, like I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death you're right to say it like
00:32:46
Speaker
You know, when all of that came out, I tweeted, like, I blame Voltaire. So you brought that up. Yeah. I mean, that quote is, again, probably has done as much harm to liberals or just to society as, like, debate as, I would argue. But yeah, you make a very good point about, like, what are the, what is the harm being done? What is the, what is the point of these policies, right? Who, who benefits and who is harmed?
00:33:16
Speaker
And, you know, the Chicago principles to me seem designed to stop students and even like workers on campus from organizing protests and essentially making life potentially uncomfortable for university administrators and politicians. It seems more bent to stopping that than doing anything else.
00:33:38
Speaker
Yeah, and to reproduce this very capitalist normative idea of what freedom is, which is individual, which is you're free to exchange your labor for wages and free to dine and ditch, right? So all of this shit is connected.
00:33:59
Speaker
And so like, who actually has their free speech curtailed on university campuses, like most often? Yeah, so like I mentioned, you know, the example of the Palestine exception to free speech. And, you know, when we talk about who
00:34:17
Speaker
you know, who has anything curtailed in university campuses, I think we need to bring this back to the labor issue. So I don't think that students like students are not being censored. Students have a different relationship to knowledge production. But people, you know, who are precariously employed are not having their contracts renewed if they're teaching a course that is, you know, critical of the state or what if you were seen as like a troublemaker.
00:34:45
Speaker
you won't have your contracts renewed. And so, yeah, I mean, this is where, again, bringing back that they're talking about free speech, but what's really going on is that they're defunding the university and that, you know, the labor in the university is very precarious. Yeah, like last year, for instance, at the University of Alberta,
00:35:12
Speaker
NASA, I think the Non-Academic Staff Association and ASHWA, which I think is the, what's ASHWA stand for again? I can't remember. I think it's the PROPS, isn't it? Yeah, it is tenure track and tenured professors and faculty lecturers who are on like at least a 12 month contract. So those two are labor organizations like the collective bargaining agents for those two folks.
00:35:36
Speaker
They were in negotiations with the university and the university was being a fucking shithead. And they were stalling out negotiations. Negotiations weren't going anywhere. And so they did what labor organizations frequently do. They hold demonstrations. They hold information pickets.
00:35:49
Speaker
But they weren't allowed to do it on university property by administration. And their free speech rights were violated. They weren't violated. The government didn't use the Chicago principles to violate them. The U of A just said, and used a tactic that is actually quite frequent, which was just said that you couldn't do it because they didn't have security or insurance.
00:36:11
Speaker
Um, which happens quite frequently. And, and so like these principles, you know, the Chicago principles, these principles around academic free speech are not applied consistently for obvious reasons, right? Like if you want to organize a pro-Palestine, uh, demonstration at your university, I imagine you're going to have very high security and insurance costs foisted upon you. Right.
00:36:34
Speaker
Yeah. So this is again, where we have to say that instead of looking at the fine grand hypocrisies of this, we actually need to think about like how it's connected to, you know, larger issues and like larger struggles. And so you, you brought it up to like, is the state just using this, you know, free speech on campus as a way to just defund universities and reduce them to, I don't know, what do they, what does, what does the right wing even just want? They just want universities to be job training centers, I guess.
00:37:05
Speaker
Yeah, what does the right wing want? You know, I think it's kind of like death, like an immiseration. But I'm thinking here, you know,
00:37:19
Speaker
which is this idea of this free speech issue as part of the larger issues. I want people, if they are interested in reading more, to look at Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a famous abolitionist. She was the president of the American Studies Association in 2011 and gave a talk at the conference called What is to be Done? And she talks about all of these issues in the university and identifies
00:37:47
Speaker
three large trends that they're connected to. And one of them is structural adjustments. So we're talking like economics, like austerity. The second is the increase in securitization. So like policing and incarceration and even just surveillance, you know,
00:38:07
Speaker
all of this, you've done lots of podcasts on episodes on that kind of stuff. And the third is the rise of the anti-state state, which we can really see with the UCP. It is a government that wants to gut any kind of public service. So if we look at those three things and really think about how
00:38:32
Speaker
This weaponization of this idea of free speech is connected to the intensification of those three things like austerity,
Collective vs. Individual Academic Freedom
00:38:40
Speaker
securitization, and just any kind of sense of collectivity. Yeah, that's good. I want to crack that down. When we talk about academic freedom, when this term gets bandied about
00:38:56
Speaker
Let's, let's disregard, you know, the UCP frame on right wing freedom and what, what does it mean to you and what should it mean to kind of the broader public. Yeah. So, um, if I may suggest something that I've written, I wrote a piece for a Blackwood gallery called Pronouncing Unfreedom.
00:39:15
Speaker
which people can find online. And this connects this idea of academic freedom to the COVID freedom, to just kind of like racial capitalist conceptions of freedom. And I think we really need to get beyond this idea of thinking about freedom as something that is individual.
00:39:35
Speaker
like I do not like as a sovereign subject possess this thing called academic freedom that like that other person doesn't possess right like or at least that shouldn't be um how we conceive of it so you know if we think about academic freedom as something individual then how does it help us to understand or then it kind of
00:39:57
Speaker
brings up a problem when you have like so so U of A professor Kathleen Lowry had all of these like turf posters and stuff on her door right and she was like it's my freedom it's my freedom to have those turf things on my door right and that and you know she was invoking academ like to be a turf is like to exercise academic freedom
00:40:20
Speaker
But we have to think about what's the freedom of learning of a trans student who is in the undergraduate program of which she was the undergraduate director or something. How is that impinging on their freedom to have this kind of professor? So this is where it's like we get bogged down and these talks about freedom as if it's something individual.
00:40:47
Speaker
Does that make sense? There's the freedom of Kathleen Lowry to be a turf is actually predicated on the unfreedom of trans students, and not just trans students. Anybody who isn't a fucking turf, that actually is a limit on their freedom to move through the space of that hallway. And again, I want to bring this back to this idea that it's not just that it's offensive, that it is very material. It's a material.
00:41:17
Speaker
their material consequences to this. So, you know, just as like capitalist freedom, you know, is, you know, the freedom to make lots of like freedom to be a landlord, like what kind of unfreedoms is that predicated on? The freedom to be a billionaire, like what kind of unfreedoms is that predicated on? So I talk about this more in that Blackwood piece, but I would just say here to try to like move the analysis past
00:41:44
Speaker
this concept of some individual sovereign subject who possesses freedom. One of the things I admire about you is your ability to take me specifically out of the thinking of things in individual or liberal formats and broadening it out to a collective struggle. I always very much appreciate that. But coming back to the political exigencies of why this bullshit is happening,
00:42:14
Speaker
Does this argument really resonate? It feels like this argument isn't necessarily for university professors or university students. It feels like this argument is really for a broader audience of angry boomer Gen X types who are mad at elites.
00:42:38
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, let's say like, those like generational markers are a state of mind, not necessarily people, but yeah, this is absolutely not for people who work inside the Academy. So like, think about the caricature of the Academy as being like a bunch of Marxists, like I wish it was a bunch of Marxists, I would have like, more like comrades in the work.
00:42:59
Speaker
right so it's not like that we have like the best funded faculties are the business schools in the university like the engineering yeah engineering like funded by the like U of A like gets all of this like funding from all companies for like they're like chemical engineering like do you know what I mean like it's just like the university is not like a bastion of leftist thought but if they can make it seem like that then there's like all
00:43:27
Speaker
all the more like preparing the ground for just being like maybe we don't need universities like as you said the kind of um turning them into job centers instead of a place that where like actual like critical analysis uh takes place so um yeah i don't like the ucp doing this is not uh is is signaling something to people who don't actually like know what's going on in the universe the university is
00:43:52
Speaker
like a very almost like a, you know, essentially fundamentally like conservative institution. Oh, very much so
Impact of Reporting Requirements on Academic Freedom
00:44:00
Speaker
very conservative. And and I think there's also an element of not not only is it a is it a is it a strike back at elites in a way to kind of like frame an ideological war against elites was always very funny for conservatives to do but you know is effective, obviously. But I also think that this broader academic free speech argument
00:44:17
Speaker
and free speech on campus argument is is also just a new and night novel way for older people to just say like, fuck them kids. And like, you know, like, kids these days are doing things I don't like and I don't approve of. And so I'm just gonna be mad at universities. Which again, we don't want to get into generational markers and that kind of conflict because we've had that discussion before where it's not necessarily very useful vector of struggle, or even define definitions. But
00:44:47
Speaker
But I think we're nearing the end of our conversation here, but there's just a couple more questions I want to ask. And it's like, OK, what do you think is actually going to fucking happen with this reporting policy that Alberta is now instituting? Yeah, it's unclear. I think that perhaps self-censorship could be one of the things that's happening. We do see a trajectory in the US, like Canada is often not that far behind, where there's actual
00:45:16
Speaker
parts of the curriculum, parts of the canon of like certain disciplines being banned in like hard and soft ways. So, you know, that is, you know, when they, that's like the future the fascists want, right? So like, that is one way that it could go. You know, you mentioned the students
00:45:36
Speaker
organizing to get Francis Woodson off campus, and I said, okay, there's limited things we can take from that, but one big thing we can take from that is just the fact of organizing. Ruth Wilson-Gilmore in that 2011 address repeatedly says, this is the diagnosis, but the prescription is organizing, organizing, organizing.
00:46:00
Speaker
You know, it's not hopeless. Certainly, like we see globally a lot of unionization of precarious academic laborers, which I think is really exciting. We see the backlash to that too. You know, it's like fucking dialectical, right? That's like the struggle. But yeah, like we can see lots of different ways that this is going to play out. And we have
00:46:29
Speaker
agency maybe not as individuals but as collectives and the university is a terrain of struggle like any other you know in its own particular ways and whatever will come to head in the academy is going to be connected to the things that are coming to head and organizing at I don't know Starbucks and like Walmart and you know farm you know agricultural workers and stuff like that right all of this shit is connected
00:46:56
Speaker
I think in the short term, we're just very likely to see like vice presidents or vice provosts of freedom of speech at universities. Making like 200 grand a year that no one reads or cares about.
00:47:14
Speaker
Um, I'm sorry for speaking it into existence, but I mean, if, if, if those people got all the way to the end of this podcast, listen to this, I mean, good, good for them. Um, but, uh, you're right. There is some really scary shit happening in the United States when it comes to like Ron DeSantis in Florida, like banning black studies essentially in high school and, uh, you know, banning books and like the restrictions on trans studies, um, which are again, like really.
00:47:40
Speaker
precursors to nasty fascist shit happening which as we have seen and so like I think it's important to pay attention to this issue. I don't think it's angels dancing on ahead of a pin. I think this issue is a vector of struggle.
00:47:55
Speaker
Yeah, and I guess I would say if we want to think about historicizing some of this, the struggle is fascist, they're liberal enablers, and the left, which is very loosely maybe undefined and heterogeneous and fighting amongst ourselves and things like that too. But think about a police station was burned down in Minneapolis, and the world saw during the protests
00:48:25
Speaker
after we like the world saw like a black man get publicly lynched and like murdered on on camera and we see the liberal response is putting light is like Kamala Harris as vice president and the fascist response is banning black studies right but these are like
00:48:44
Speaker
in continuity with each other. Like the left has to think about different response that could fight both of those things, which is abolition, like collective organizing for abolition. So yeah. Well, let's leave it there. Shama, thanks so much for coming on. How can people follow along with your public facing work?
00:49:05
Speaker
Yeah, so as long as Twitter exists, that's probably the best place to find me. So I'm at Fritz Lasha, F-R-I-T-Z-L-E-C-H-A-T. And yeah, that that's probably the best place to find me. And you're even you're an occasional podcaster as well.
00:49:22
Speaker
Yeah, so Desmond Cole and I have our pop culture podcast replay that we like to do when the fancy strikes us. So you can check that out as well. It's at replay the pod on Twitter.
00:49:36
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, follow it, it's great. When the stuff comes out, it's great to listen to it. That's it for the pod, folks. If you have any notes, thoughts, comments, I am very easy to get ahold of. I am on Twitter at at Duncan Kinney, and you can reach me by email at DuncanK at progressroberta.ca. Thank you to Jim for editing. Thank you to Cosmic Fam, you commonest for our theme. Thank you for listening, and goodbye.