Last week, the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario issued a news release stating that post-secondary institutions must roll out policies that adhere to the University of Chicago Statement on Principles of Free Expression or face funding cuts.
The Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities intends to direct HEQCO to undertake research on campus free speech, and to monitor and evaluate system-level progress on the free speech policy.
Compliance will be monitored by the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities which is led by Merriee Fullerton. Fullterton has a history of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric.
This move by the Conservatives is in response to transphobic, islamaphobic, and racist speeches being cancelled or disrupted at universities as a result of the protests of students targeted by that prejudice. The choice of the Chicago Statement is symbolic: it too was drafted in reaction to student protests across campuses.
What conservatives perceive as a loss of free speech is in fact a shift from a homogeneous view on campuses to a heterogeneous one that now also includes the voices of minorities.
These voices have helped institutions recognize that when they give resources to individuals that perpetuate harmful stereotypes and misinformation on minorities, they are fuelling prejudicial attitudes that in turn make acts of prejudice more commonplace. It is a dynamic exemplified by the pyramid below:
The transphobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, etc. speech being contested is hardly facing extinction. As I noted in a previous article on free speech, it is regularly expressed in streets, newspapers, television and politics. What is threatened is its dominance in every space.
It is the loss of that supremacy of that single perspective, that which only concerns itself with straight white men, which so scares conservatives.
This is why John Ellison, the Dean of Students at the University of Chicago, spoke out against safe spaces quoting the Chicago Statement. The idea that gay students or black students could have a room on campus where they wouldn’t be exposed to dehumanizing speech is threatening.
The Chicago Statement was popularized when John Ellison’s statements went viral. This is the context that the Progressive Conservatives have chosen to adopt by going with this particular document. Given the party’s embrace of homophobia and transphobia, and that this led by a member of Parliament that is openly Islamophobic and xenophobic, I do not have any faith that this about ensuring that a multiplicity of voices are heard, but rather that this is about finding a return to a historical norm where only one narrow perspective was elevated.