This article originally appeared in the National Post. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Peter MacKinnon, May 21, 2025
On April 7, four professors at the University of British Columbia filed a petition in the B.C. Supreme Court seeking a determination that the university has become politicized and is in violation of Section 66(1) of the province’s University Act requiring it to be non-political. This petition, co-signed by a former graduate student, brings to mind the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report, which insisted that universities must remain neutral on political issues. This neutrality “arises out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a variety of viewpoints. And this neutrality as an institution has its complement in the fullest freedom for its faculty and students as individuals to participate in political action and social protest. It provides its complement, too, in the obligation of the university to provide a forum for the most searching and candid discussion of public issues.”
The issues here are clear and important. Broad support for our universities depends on their neutrality in the eyes of governments and citizens. Those who work in them as faculty, students or staff are free, as individuals or in groups, to be active in political causes, but they must do so in their own names without attributing their views to their universities. Senior university officers do not have the same freedom. When they publicly align with political causes, their endorsement is widely attributed to their universities thereby jeopardizing the non-partisan support on which they depend.
The UBC professors are petitioning the Supreme Court to find that their university is taking political positions and is thereby violating the requirement of neutrality: first, by repeatedly acknowledging that the university is on unceded land; second, by taking a “naked, political” position against Israel in its war with Hamas; and third, through requirements that job applicants pledge support for the political agenda of DEI.
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Peter MacKinnon is President Emeritus of the University of Saskatchewan and a senior fellow of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the Aristotle Foundation.
