Academic Freedom

As a public facing academic I get a lot of heat from people who feel I should automatically agree with them. When I don't some folks shrug, other get mean. The mean ones draw from a quiver of tactics designed to disrupt, upset, and silence. Depending upon the issue, a person's perspective, and their degree of engagement some people think targeting another person is an acceptable practice. They work to undermine their target with the intensity of a religious zealot. I am likely naïve.  I think it is possible to disagree without threatening and attempting to disturb one's adversary.

Academic freedom should be able to protect faculty from such attacks.

Academic Freedom

“The members of the University enjoy certain rights and privileges essential to the fulfilment of its primary functions: instruction and the pursuit of knowledge. Central among these rights is the freedom, within the law, to pursue what seems to them as fruitful avenues of inquiry, to teach and to learn unhindered by external or non-academic constraints, and to engage in full and unrestricted consideration of any opinion.” From UBC statement on academic freedom.

“Academic freedom includes the right, without restriction by prescribed doctrine, to freedom to teach and discuss; freedom to carry out research and disseminate and publish the results thereof; freedom to produce and perform creative works; freedom to engage in service to the institution and the community; freedom to express one’s opinion about the institution, its administration, and the system in which one works; freedom to acquire, preserve, and provide access to documentary material in all formats; and freedom to participate in professional and representative academic bodies. Academic freedom always entails freedom from institutional censorship.” From CAUT academic freedom policy statement.

All members of the university community, enjoy a degree of academic freedom and the freedom of expression. Faculty, given our role in research and teaching have a particular attachment to, and reliance upon, the concept of academic freedom. It is what allows us to test the boundaries of thought, it allows us to consider ideas that may be uncomfortable even distasteful or offensive. It may not be a perfect concept, but it has been the best way to ensure freedom of thought and action within liberal democratic societies. Its a hedge against tyranny.

There are all manner of attacks against academic freedom. No one, left, right, or otherwise is untainted by efforts to shut down someone else’s ability to speak or act. An accuser will claim the accused is causing some one or some group harm. As a consequence the accused has no right to continue as they were. Sometimes accusers want an apology, sometimes they want a penalty, often they want retribution. Social media is filled with performatively violent accusers. Far more subtle are the accusers who mask the disruption within the discourse of civility and use institutional processes to undermine and threaten those they accuse.

I am a university faculty member with a long record of speaking publicly to news media and on social media. I am not immune to arrows of complaint. Several times in my career I have had to file police reports on anonymous threats sent by mail, emailed to me, or left on my office voice message machine. It is chilling to know  there are ‘normal’ folks out there who find it acceptable to threaten bodily harm against a person they disagree with. 

Throughout my teaching career, like many colleagues in First Nations teaching and research, I have been the recipient of complaints filed with my department head. These complainants have targeted the peer reviewed readings assigned (too political), methods of instruction (not rigorous, thus biased and unfit), and even research projects on public education my students had been assigned to do (again, too political). Each time this happens the institutional wheels kick into play. Thank goodness we have a faculty union as they help with information and support, especially when facing spurious complaints.

These kinds of interventions are about trying to reach in and interfere with how one presents and engages publicly and professionally. They are not attempts at debate and dialogue - they’re about control and silencing. They are often framed as technical complaints, ie calling into question the suitability of readings, assignments, projects, or perspective of instructor. From the right, from the left, from whomever, it all boils down to the same thing - an attempt to bend the outcome to the wishes of the intervenor through intimidation.

There is a need to have processes in place to mange complaints. They need to be clear, consistent, and designed to prevent vexatious acts. I appreciate that it is hard to set criteria to prevent those using process to score points, as these processes require good faith engagement.  

Having the courage to act from one’s principles is a value I strive to follow everyday.

“Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”

Settler, Settler Colonialism, and the Indigenous

As bombs descend on Gaza and the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) slowly infiltrates the urban spaces of Gaza protesters around the world have taken to the streets.

Pro-Israeli demonstrators demand the return of hostages taken during the brutal attacks of October 7th, 2023. Reeling from the emotional impact of the barbarity of the attacks they have allowed no compromise in their support of Israel. The violent attacks of October 7th are placed in a long history of anti-Jewish discrimination in Europe and North America. Israel is presented as a birthright and a needed bulwark against anti-Jewish violence.

Pro-Gaza supporters have focussed on the developing humanitarian crisis caused by the IDF and the history of Palestinian expulsions from the formation of the State of Israel in 1948 to the present. They highlight the long history of occupation and the ongoing economic marginalization of Palestinians. Central to this focus has been the deployment of the conceptual apparatus called 'settler colonialism.'

There is a long history of academic research into the economic marginalization and containment of Palestinians under the control of the State of Israel. A former classmate of mine, Avi Bornstein, conducted his doctoral research in the occupied West Bank in the 1990s.

"With a strong focus on labor and production processes, often missing from anthropological accounts, Crossing the Green Line looks at how shifting border practices have produced an apartheid system through which Israelis control and subordinate Palestinians. Bornstein details the patterns of openings, closures, tightenings, bypasses, and changes in procedure and staff, particularly those that accompanied the political transformations of the 1990s. He traces these patterns along the Green Line but also within the West Bank, along the border with Jordan, and in access to countries of the Gulf" (Rhoda Kanaaneh, 2001)

Bornstein uses a political economic framing that highlights how the control of labour power is facilitated by the creation and maintenance of borders that define who has rights and what those rights might be. His detailed historical chapter very carefully outlines the processes leading the creation of the occupied West Bank. The idea that Palestinians of either Jewish or Muslim or Christian faiths were 'Indigenous' [in the sense of the UNDRIP] was not part of Bornstein's analysis or something found within the mainstream discourse at the time. However, this was to change.

In 2016 Stephen Salaita published a book explicitly linking Indigenous North America with Palestine. While he wasn't the first, he was at the center of an intellectual debate that was normalizing the idea that Palestinians were more than just a marginalized nationality:

"Palestine scholars and activists increasingly use the language of Indigeneity and geocultural relationships to describe the political, economic, and legal positions of Palestinians. For instance, in referencing Natives and Palestinians, Sa’ed Adel Atshan speaks of “our shared history as Indigenous peoples who have faced ethnic cleansing by European colonists.” The adoption of such language is a rhetorical act meant to situate—rightly, based on considerable evidence—Palestinian dispossession in a special framework of colonial history rather than as an exceptional set of events brought forth by ahistorical circumstances. The language identifies a perceived sociohistorical familiarity with other dispossessed communities, in this case North American indigenes. The declaration that Palestinians are not merely native or original but indigenous to the land colonized by Israel, not a completely new phenomenon but one growing in frequency" (Salatia 2016:4).

Salatia does much to popularize and make relevant the idea that Palestinians are the 'Indians' of the mid-east. His analysis centers ideas of settler colonialism. This parallels a rising deployment of the idea of settler colonialism in Indigenous Studies (as it shifted into mainstream and became more heavily influenced by 'critical' theory). Yet, the term carries with it a fundamentally flawed analysis. A range of diverse experiences with particular histories are lumped together to imply a conceptual similarity that blurs important differences.

I have always been wary of the analytic value of settler colonialism. It groups together a wide range of experiences divided by geography, time frame and particularity. That isn't inherently problematic - many social models do just that, generalize via abstraction from the specific to the universal. In doing so, however, the historical particularities of specific locales are lost. That, I contend, undermines effective social resolution of intractable problems. At the same time I find the discursive and rhetorical use of the concepts of 'settler' and 'settler colonialism' potentially useful, even if I find them analytically weak.

The rhetorical utility of 'settler colonialism' lies in it's ability to draw a sharp line between right and wrong, good and bad. It lumps all those (new immigrant or old; white, asian, or black) who are not Indigenous into one category. It simplifies and it allows clarity in discourse. But its solution is muddled. How does one 'decolonize' a settler state? Send the settlers home? Adopt the settlers into the Indigenous world? Throw out the colonial state apparatus and replace it with 'the' Indigenous one?

Settler colonialism places the emphasis on displacement and repeopling. It ignores the historical moment in which an act of colonialism may have occurred. It posits the primary contradiction of struggle as between settler and displaced. It ignores the class formation within both the colonial state and the the society of the displaced. It is a recipe for perpetual conflict in which there is no practical resolution. It is, almost, a natural outgrowth of a state that deliberately constrains, marginalizes, and displaces one people in favour of another.

Even with the rhetorical utility of settler colonialism I am left staring at it's inability to bring us to any productive resolution. The idea of settler colonialism draws upon an experience in which the displaced feel the enmity of their displacers; but we need to act against this experience as it clouds our judgement.

When I think, for example, of the idea of settler colonialism in British Columbia I can recognize the trauma of colonial displacement and know it has had real effects. But was it because of settlement? Or was it something else? Yes newcomers came to laxyuup Gitxaała (where I am from), but they weren't initially overwhelming. They were disruptive, yes, but not due to their numbers. They disrupted with new technology, disease, and new economics. They were driven by an economic system based in capturing labour power and extracting value. The tactic may have been colonialism, but the underlying driving strategic force was capitalism, not settlement. Analytically this last point is important as it points toward a way to reconcile First Nations and British Columbians that is not reliant upon demonizing each other.

The history of Gaza and the wider region within which we now find Israel is complicated (but complication does not mean incomprehensible). As beguiling as presenting Palestinians as Indigenous and Israel as primarily colonial, a more robust analysis is needed. Stepping aside from the language of settler colonialism might be what is needed analytically.

Dialling the analytic clock back to works by people like Avi Bornstein is one place to begin. Bornstein's overview of the history of the region documents the complexities and the implications of local capitalism acting in a wider global framework. He doesn't shy away from criticism of Israel. At the same time his political economic analysis acknowledges the variety and heterogeneity within both Israeli and West Bank society - something that conceptually settler colonialism does not.

Analyses like Bornstein's leave a door open for reconciliation based on class alliance, not enmity. They lead us to ask what drives the particularities of history. Why this spot and not another. Who accommodated, who resisted, who provoked, who ignored? How did this happen? Conceptually settler colonialism preempts these questions from the start as a priori assumptions of the settler colonial model. Reconciling historically opposed parties will require truth and concessions, not retribution and continued violence.

Personal Transformation in the Settler Experience - a tall tale.

I've been to meetings were settler folks talk about how transformative their First Nation community visit is for them. They share these experiences as a kind of validation of their goodwill, as indicators of their capacity to hear and to care. 

I wonder what about our communities is so transformative for them.

Is it the welcome they receive upon arrival when they are feed and greeted warmly?

They almost sound surprised when they assure us they, and those with them, found their experience personally transformative, a kind of personal epiphany.

I wonder what about them transformed.

They seem the same to me. Perhaps they are bit relieved that they get to do what they had wanted to do all along. 

I sit there and wonder at it all. 

Is it that it is transformative to realize that Indigenous people are just people? Is it transformative to have one's guilt absolved by meeting generous hosts? I really don't know. 

I ask them what was transformative.

Their answer seem incoherent, half phrases and pauses. By asking I seem to call into question their experience, their gift they just shared with us. It is as though by asking I am taking back their transformation.

Another meeting, another sharing of personal transformation. 

This time I just listen.