Rethinking Freedom: A Framework for the Implementation of Ethical Space in the Academy

Abstract

Knowledge making is a social act requiring people, texts, and resources besides the individual author, affecting both self and others. In knowing the world, we transform it. Thus, knowledge making bears a responsibility toward the lives, lands, and world shaped by it. As such, the authors question the ethics involved in the liberal value of freedom as a guiding principle for colleges and universities. We claim the liberal tradition of freedom is a Settler freedom, and its modes of practice enact and maintain Settler-colonial domination. Within the university, academic freedom and freedom of expression are neither intrinsically good nor universally extended to academe’s members. Privileging such freedoms over other values helps form and sustain inequities within and outside the academy. As the Truth and Reconciliation process underway in Canada tasks post-secondary institutions with decolonizing structural and systemic inequities in education and administration, we offer exemplification of Indigenous¹ epistemological concepts to shift a focus from exclusively on the rights of individuals in the academy to considering all our relations and what might be the ethics of responsibility and accountability that come into focus when we see and practice knowledge making within an ethical space of engagement.

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to acknowledge all the work and generative feedback provided by the reviewers and editors in bringing this manuscript to publication.

Notes

1 The term, Indigenous, refers to the peoples who have distinct identification with the land called Canada. Indigenous peoples are descendants of the first peoples of the land from pre-colonial times. In Canada, Indigenous and Aboriginal are often used interchangeably with the legal term, Aboriginal, referring specifically to First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples.

2 #63—We call upon the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada to maintain an annual commitment to Aboriginal education issues including:

iii. Building student capacity for intercultural understanding, empathy, and mutual respect.

3 The term, “Settler,” can be an unsettling word to use. It holds many interpretations. A helpful explanation comes from the work of Battell-Lowman & Barker (2015), who use this term to acknowledge non-Indigenous peoples as inherently bound up with Settler colonization of this land in Canada (p. 18). This perspective takes into consideration new immigrants, refugees, visitors on vacations, enslaved peoples and indentured workers. In addition, capital letters are used for the terms, Indigenous and Settler, as proper nouns are reflective of identities.

4 A quick caveat is in order here. Being a non-tenure track faculty member, as well as someone vehemently opposed to neoliberalism, it is not wholly true to say simply that the university works for me. It is true, however, to point out both that in so far as it does work for me, it does so according to my privilege of being its universal subject and that wherever it does not work for, or even works against me, it does so not on account of my racialized identity, but by way of my job status and beliefs.

5 While la paperson grants there are useful tools to be taken and repurposed from humanities disciplines, he is clear that “to humanize the world…is a more genteel way to colonize a world that is so much more than human.” (p. #)

6 While not the topic of this essay, it is important to note that freedom of expression and academic freedom are not the same, and while the university has historically been committed to the latter, it has no such obligation to the former. As philosopher Shannon Dea reminds us, “If expression really were the main purpose of universities—then we wouldn’t need laboratories and archives. It would be enough to provide megaphones. …Universities exist not merely to communicate, but to try to get the story right. To this end, they employ cutting-edge technology and a dizzying array of hard-won credentials” (Dea, 2018).

7 https://www.aaup.org/report/1940-statement-principles-academic-freedom-and-tenure.

8 While academic freedom entails important constraints (requisite qualifications for its attainment; limits to its scope and purpose) that distinguish it from freedom of expression or speech, it, too, indulges in the false universalist assumptions of the latter: those to whom academic freedom is granted are supposed to possess it equally, and the fruits of academic freedom are supposed to be universally beneficial.

9 Also known as the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy (Swamp & Lambe, 2001, p. 19).

10 Mohawk refers to the Indigenous peoples who are one of six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.