“The last draft version of Policy J-500: Academic Freedom was presented to the Senates for information in May 2025. At that time, a number of concerns were raised, including those related to institutional critique and cautions regarding the inclusion of a formal mechanism for adjudicating academic freedom disputes.”
That’s the first paragraph of the Academic Policy Committee’s recent memo to senators. The phrase “a number of concerns were raised” is a solemn reference to an open letter which argued the last version was unworkable. Then, nine objections were mentioned — endorsed by hundreds of faculty from UBC and around the world who signed their name. Further questions about how compatible the draft was with collective bargaining protections for academic freedom were also raised at Senate.
This May — a year later — the Committee’s memo is procedural context for the latest version of the proposed Academic Freedom Policy, which is up for approval tonight. The memo also noted that it has taken seven years to get to this point.
But even if the policy passes, the issues that originally precipitated its development — controversial speakers at UBC who are not from UBC — now have to share the stage with fears about how to handle a hypothetical domestic government that might follow some European or American moves to interfere with academics. These issues, critics say, aren’t addressed by what’s being put forward.
Academic freedom is generally understood as the set of rights afforded to members of a university to pursue scholarly endeavours free from interferences which are not related to those pursuits. The Canadian Association of University Teachers says it "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.”
The proposed Academic Freedom Policy would be UBC’s first formal policy on the issue. Since 1977, academic freedom has been governed by a statement in the Academic Calendar. In 2004, the statement also made its way into the collective agreement between the university and the Faculty Association (FA).
40 years in, two threads stressed the statement’s validity. The first was in 2015, when former President Arvind Gupta curtly resigned less than a year into his term. When he did, Professor Jennifer Berdahl, a social psychologist who studies gender in the workplace, wrote a blog post interrogating the role of race and masculinity in defining Gupta’s presidency. The Chair of the Board of Governors at the time, John Montalbano — who funded Berdahl’s professorship — called Berdahl and expressed dissatisfaction with her post, claiming it would damage the university’s reputation.
The affair culminated in a report conducted by former BC Supreme Court Judge and UBC Dean of Law Lynn Smith, which found “UBC as an institution” had failed to protect Berdahl’s academic freedom. Montalbano resigned, despite being cleared of individual wrongdoing by Smith’s report.
The second thread developed between 2017 and 2019, when campus was rocked by a series of provocative non-academic speakers. Debates about free speech boosted the profile of several students who invited speakers, including one Angelo Isidorou — now the executive director of the B.C. Conservatives.
In October 2019, a working group was formed to explore the future of the academic freedom statement. A draft standardizing the statement into the Senate’s regular policy format was developed, and consultations began in 2022. Both the Vancouver and Okanagan Senates received a second draft in December 2024, before a third draft was brought forward last May. The version being presented tonight is the fourth.
The major difference between what’s in the Calendar now and what’s being proposed is that the policy contains formal means of addressing alleged breaches of academic freedom within the university. According to the proposal, the Agenda Committee will strike an Ad Hoc Academic Freedom Committee if a member of the university alleges their academic freedom was violated. That committee will then conduct an investigation (which may include retaining an investigator to conduct a fact-finding process) and issue a decision within 90 days of receiving an application.
Beyond that, most changes are highly technical, germane to collegial discourse about who gets academic freedom, when and why. The Ubyssey spoke to several faculty members — many of whom have been closely involved in university politics or administration — about their thoughts on the proposed policy.
Philosophy Professor Alan Richardson, former president of the FA, said the draft fails to meet the moment. He said the investigative process is unlikely to be of real use in the most pressing situations academics are facing worldwide. He asked what good an investigation would do, for instance, if a Canadian government moved as Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary did to ban gender studies. “Or suppose, like in Texas, the BC Premier decides that the provincial government will vet all courses for DEI content — what value does this investigation process have for anyone teaching material in which gender identity or race relations is a relevant consideration?”
“What the University needs to do is to defy any such moves, not write an investigative report about them,” Richardson said. “Here, as elsewhere, UBC is taking the opportunity for leadership and converting it into a morass of legalisms.”
Math Professor Mark Mac Lean, another former FA president — and a now re-elected member of the Board of Governors — had similar thoughts. He told The Ubyssey the draft misses out on protecting faculty members’ use of their constitutional rights. “Faculty members should not be subject to institutional penalties because they exercise their fundamental legal rights as citizens,” he said.
To demonstrate the kind of situations he’s concerned about, Mac Lean pointed to an incident reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education Monday where a biology professor was locked out of his Indiana University lab after speaking out against the Trump administration’s move to order the deportation of his post-doctoral student, who is Chinese.
“I think the spectre of government interference in universities has manifested into reality in the U.S. in ways that mean any serious academic freedom policy should anticipate how we, as an institution, would defend against such interference were a B.C. or federal government choose to try to dismantle institutional autonomy in this way,” Mac Lean said.
Among the more subtle differences between the draft and earlier versions is what qualifies as “academic.”
In an op-ed in this newspaper last May, History Professor Pheroze Unwalla said UBC’s administration (separate from the Senate) has developed a faulty conception of academic freedom that separates “academic” from “political” activity. The mutual exclusivity of that distinction, he said, created the conditions for the ongoing lawsuit alleging UBC’s land acknowledgments are political and thus violate the BC University Act. A provision of that statute requires institutions to be “non-sectarian and non-political in principle.” Unwalla argued that this was meant to constrain religious and partisan intrusions into the university’s mission, not to erase everything political in character from it.
According to the draft being considered tonight, academic freedom belongs to “members … while they are engaged in academic pursuits.” Unwalla told The Ubyssey that while this draft addresses what he takes issue with better than the last, the ambiguity surrounding what may or may not qualify as an “academic pursuit” still poses a problem. “As my previous op-ed noted, this delimiting of the ‘academic' from the ‘political’ is not just subjective; it is disingenuous and deeply damaging to the mission of the university,” he said.
In 2025, the Academic Policy Committee said the absence of a definition for “academic pursuits” was intentional. A definition would be “impractical and unnecessary,” they wrote in a memo presented last May. “The range of academic activities at UBC (and institutions of higher learning in general) are many, varied, and changing, and any definition faces a high risk of omitting the academic activities of some members now or in future.”
The 2025 draft also included a provision requiring members of the university be prepared to “demonstrate” that their work is “supported by a body of established knowledge or arise[s] from scholarly activity.” This obligation wasn’t carried forward into the new draft explicitly — but the definition of academic freedom in section 4 was amended to add that scholarly activities need to be “grounded in disciplinary knowledge and standards.”
Signatories to the open letter said the last draft created an “unprecedented and ill-defined evidentiary burden” by including this demonstrative obligation. They said it would be a “form of compelled speech,” discouraging unpopular views and discriminating against newer disciplines. Philosophy Professor Margaret Schabas, though, had a different view.
Schabas served as the provost’s senior adviser on academic freedom from 2020 to 2021. She said the original obligation was sensible. “The freedoms granted by academic freedom must be seen as situated … and thus always in the context of established knowledge and methodological norms, codes of conduct and acceptable disciplinary practices,” Schabas said. Such an obligation would enable, for example, actions to be taken against a professor who endorses divine creation over evolution, or who opposes vaccination programs supported by medical practice, she said.
Schabas also endorsed the idea in the draft that the university needs to self-determine academic policies and standards. The University Act gave UBC personhood; personhood entails both a mind and a body, and minds “hold beliefs that in turn motivate actions,” she said.
“In this respect, UBC might be motivated to adopt policies regarding the vexed history and current relations with the First Nations, if only because it is situated on the unceded and ancestral lands of several such Nations.” Though, the same could not be said (“except by a very convoluted argument”) for a proposal to adopt similar positions on the war in Iran or the conflict between India and Pakistan, Schabas said. Those issues do not affront UBC’s self-determination in the same way reconciliation and the climate crisis do, she said.
In this way, she said, "UBC was right to adopt a policy on the climate emergency, and to promote the teaching and understanding of Indigenous history and culture."
Anthropology Professor and Senator Charles Menzies (hagwil hayetsk) picked up on a slight word change about who gets to claim academic freedom. The former policy says academic freedom extends “not only to the regular members of the University, but to all who are invited to participate in its forum.” The latter, however, now qualifies a restated version of that same idea by adding that individuals need to be invited “by members.”
For Menzies, the change implies that a faculty member or student could invite a speaker with transphobic views or an advocate of a militant group. Under this draft, that speaker could claim academic freedom because they’ve been invited by a member of the university, he said.
“I'm a bit concerned about that,” Menzies said — adding that it is difficult to anticipate what the implications of the change might be at this stage.
Ultimately, as a senator, Menzies’s disposition toward the draft is one of tolerance — but not endorsement. Asked which way he’ll land when it's time to vote, he said, “I don't know if I strenuously object enough to vote against it.”
Disclosure: Spencer Izen took SOCI 381 with Prof. Berdahl during the 2023-24 academic year.
