Younger Canadians most divided on academic freedom protecting political views: poll

Political advocacy in a post-secondary classroom where it does not relate to the subject matter could become a “threat to academic freedom” if left unchecked, warns Association for Canadian Studies president Jack Jedwab.

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While new polling for the organization indicates the majority (60 per cent) of Canadians firmly feel academic freedom shouldn’t protect a professor who uses class time to push personal political views unrelated to the curriculum, the 18-24-year-old cohort was the most conflicted, with only 38 per cent sharing that opinion, 32 per cent in support of protection and 30 per cent unsure.

Generation Xers between 55-64 (70 per cent) and boomers 65 and over (73 per cent ) were most likely to disagree.

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Jedwab isn’t surprised most respondents feel “there’s a line” for academic freedom protection and reasoned the youngest cohort, predominantly students, are divided due to their exposure.

“It’s hard to contend when your professor advocates a particular cause,” he told National Post in an interview. “It can be very challenging to reflect on whether this is crossing a line or not.”

He highlighted the recent Campus Anti-Semitism Student Experiences report commissioned by Heritage Canada, which he co-authored, which found that 34 per cent said a professor brought up Jews, Judaism, Israel, or Zionism when unrelated to the course subject.

“In a course that had nothing to do with Israel, my professor spent three weeks talking about Gaza and the creation of the State of Israel,” one Jewish student told researchers. “He never mentioned the Holocaust as a precursor to its founding, repeatedly calling the state a ‘Zionist political project.’”

Jedwab, a Ph.D. himself, stopped here to stress the critical importance of academic freedom, but said it’s also critical to have a frank conversation about the checks and balances “when it comes to the roles and responsibilities of academics around controversial issues that are not within the purview of what they’re being asked to teach.”

“The risk is that academic freedom is being abused by some parties in pursuit of a particular cause,” he added.

Polling also identified that among those who support academic freedom protection in those instances, “are also considerably more likely to regard the justification of terrorism, the denial of documented atrocities and the minimization of their victims as acceptable.”

Almost four in 10 (39.6 per cent) think it’s very or somewhat acceptable to say that a well-documented historical atrocity might not have occurred. More than a third (36.5 per cent) felt it was acceptable, to some degree, to exaggerate or minimize the number of victims of historical atrocities and more still (37.4 per cent) think it’s to some degree acceptable to say that members of a religious group are collectively responsible for the actions of a foreign government.

Jedwab said that adds to the need “to reflect on the extent to which these types of freedoms are indeed detrimental to the well-being of individual Canadians.”

Perhaps more alarming, nearly one in four (24 per cent) believe acts of terrorism can sometimes be justified. (67.3 per cent said it cannot and 8.7 per cent were unsure.)

“It’s showing you that there’s a risk when we don’t have this conversation,” Jedwab said, “that ideas that we consider very worrisome to public safety can manifest themselves in certain situations, and the academy is not outside that altogether, as we can see.”

Part of the challenge with the youngest demographic group is addressing their distrust of historical atrocities, which is partially fuelled, Jedwab said, by mass exposure to misinformation via social media continually blurring the line between what’s real and isn’t.

“We do need to give a lot more reflection about the way in which information is being conveyed to people,” he said.

The poll of 1,538 respondents, conducted by Leger on behalf of the Association for Canadian Studies, was conducted Sept. 4-6. A margin of error cannot be associated with a non-probability sample in a panel survey for comparison purposes. However, a probability sample of this size would have a margin of error of 2.5 per cent, 19 times out of 20.​

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