Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on April 24, 2025. The Observatory translated it into English from French. I have edited it, to the best of my ability, to align with Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. It is crossposted here with permission.
With contributions from Olivier Beaud (Paris II), Arnaud Bernadet (McGill University), François Charbonneau (University of Ottawa), Yannick Lacroix (Collège de Maisonneuve), Patrick Moreau (Collège Ahuntsic), Chantal Pouliot (Laval University), Maxime Prévost (University of Ottawa), Stéphane Sérafin (University of Ottawa) and Jean-Philippe Warren (Concordia University).
Let’s say it from the outset, this high-quality collective work has one small flaw: its title. Is it yet another critique of academic science or of the idea of reason? No. Literature professor Arnaud Bernadet specifies in his introduction that the book aims rather to scrutinize those theories that devalue science and reason within higher education itself and work to undermine its freedoms. In short, it is about proposing “a critique of critique,” academic reason having two meanings for Bernadet. On the one hand, it questions the foundations of knowledge to uncover the underlying injustices and power relations, and on the other, it reexamines this first critique on the epistemological and ethical levels, with a horizon that Bernadet describes as Kantian, because it returns to the “foundations of scholarly and teaching activity.”
It is therefore to this second meaning that the contributions of the nine professors, mainly from Quebec and Ontario, but also from France, are linked, with Olivier Beaud’s article on academic freedom. Faced with the rise of discourses that promote the surpassing of Western science and translate into conference cancellations, book censorship, acts of ostracism and quotas for hiring and grants, it is worth wondering whether the North American university, and perhaps the French university, is on the verge of nurturing “a form of irrationalism,” as Bernadet suggests, although several contributors to the collective speak of mysticism, esoteric quest and neo-religious sectarianism. Bernadet situates the project of the collection between two unproductive attitudes, one which sees in the criticism of militant radicalisms striking universities a case of “moral panic,” a lazy thesis which seeks rather to “downgrade or discredit its adversary,” and the other which on the contrary accuses universities of sheltering new psychiatric asylums. Refusing this alternative, Bernadet defends academic freedom as parrhesia modern, which combines scientific and ethical truths, as a requirement of telling the truth. Three major themes, freedom, knowledge, and justice, thus bring together the articles of the collective.
Freedoms Under Threat
On the subject of academic freedom, the first contributions echo the debates that have raged, particularly in Quebec and Ontario, around cases that have shaken the university institution. One thinks of the media vendetta that, in September 2020, struck a professor at the bilingual University of Ottawa. In a literature course taught in English and online, the professor had the misfortune of using the word “negro” to explain its militant meaning and was denounced by a student. This provoked a veritable storm that pitted French- and English-speaking professors against each other. The university, which suspended the lecturer, Lieutenant-Duval, for three weeks, then attempted to calm things down by entrusting a retired judge with the task of preparing a report after an investigation. This case, and several similar ones from English Canada and the United States, prompted the Quebec government to form a committee of experts to reflect on academic freedom in the university environment and to have the Quebec National Assembly adopt, in June 2022, a law on this issue.
The book opens with an interview with Chantal Pouliot, a professor of science education, who participated in this expert committee. The latter concluded that academic freedom, however accepted it may be as a principle of higher education, deserved to be better recognized and therefore to access legislative enshrinement that requires university institutions to adopt their own academic freedom policy. Although this solution did not receive unanimous support from academics, the attacks on this freedom and the concerns they raised were numerous enough to reject the status quo. The educationalist, nevertheless, sees several threats that still hang over the university, such as the excessive social engagement of professors, which would lead them to confuse “research” with “public speaking.” “Similarly, the pressures on universities, particularly their administrations, to take a position on sociopolitical issues would erode the institutional neutrality required for true pluralism of thought among academics. Despite legislative intervention, further challenges await academic freedom.
Based on the trials that this freedom has already undergone in France, Olivier Beaud offers a penetrating reflection on the theoretical foundations of this freedom and on the regime of its protection. The university, argues the eminent jurist, constitutes the weak and inferior sector of higher education and research; a professor’s status is determined by a simple decree and not by law. Academic freedom certainly exists, as a customary achievement that has guaranteed French academics a great deal of intellectual independence despite a tenacious grip of public authorities on the university. Beaud distinguishes academic freedom, which includes “university franchises,” from academic freedom, which is more strictly concerned with the freedom of teaching and research. French universities enjoy long-standing privileges in matters of internal policing and justice, partly renewed by a law in 2019. Rereading the writings of Paul Ricœur on the purpose of the university, Beaud defines academic freedom as a “responsibility towards knowledge,” this institution being the place where the right to pursue the “truth without constraint” can be exercised. It includes, in addition to rights and duties, and constitutes neither a corporate privilege nor a human right. It is an individual freedom, derived from freedom of thought, devolved to professors because of their status. In this respect, academic freedom is distinguished from the institutional guarantees offered to a de facto illusory university autonomy. Beaud shows that both freedoms, university and academic, nevertheless come up against a fussy administrative state in France that curbs them, to the point of interfering in research organization. Moreover, French universities are said to be suffering, as in the United States, from the zeal of university leaders who have become “omni-administrative,” particularly since the 2007 increase in the powers of university administrators. Moreover, university and academic freedom are exposed to threats of censorship and judicial gag orders arising from civil society. On the one hand, companies and pressure groups are filing defamation lawsuits to silence and intimidate French academics whose scholarly statements have harmed some powerful private interests. On the other hand, the activism of student minorities embracing “identity causes” with a “quasi-religious” fervor has made its way to France, to the point, writes Beaud, of being “established in the whole of society.” Whatever one thinks of the emergence of “the cancel culture and ideology Woke ” in France, “one must either be blind or in bad faith not to see the existence of the phenomenon in France and the attacks it inflicts on academic freedom.” France would even be on the cusp of “a broader process of hysteria of speech,” which is worrying.
In addition to the attacks on academic freedoms inflicted by this strident activism, the COVID-19 health crisis has also revealed, observes literature professor Maxime Prévost, the fragility of these freedoms. Far from exercising their critical thinking against a health narrative propagated by society and public authorities, academics have allegedly become the relay of false scientific consensus that has condemned dissidents. Prévost unequivocally asserts the right of non-specialist academics to address subjects outside their discipline. Drawing in particular on the work of Victor Klemperer and Hannah Arendt on totalitarian regimes, the author sees disturbing similarities between the apathy of intellectuals, the manipulation of language, and the social atomization that became widespread during these bygone regimes and the episodes of intellectual conformism, severe restrictions on freedoms, and control of language by the media and public authorities that accompanied the management of the health crisis. One case, according to Prévost, highlighted the corruption of scientific ethics caused by this management: the dismissal in March 2024 of microbiologist Patrick Provost, a professor at Laval University, who questioned the advisability of vaccinating young children, given the foreseeable risks, which, in his judgment, were higher than the expected benefits. Prévost deplores the fact that, in this case, so few academics came to the forefront to defend him and that the media, eager to circulate complacent “mediocrities,” covered it so little. If the scientist had been wrong, instead of dismissing him, it would have been better to organize a debate comparing his recommendations with those of other members of his discipline. This proves, in Prévost’s eyes, that the tenure of professors, supposed to guarantee their independence, does little to encourage them to use their free speech and that in a crisis, they will prefer to serve those in power.
Alleged Knowledge
Beyond their desire for censorship, identity doctrines foment a radical project of knowledge renewal. Thus, the Indigenous movement in Canada aims to establish an Indigenous science that would fill the supposed gaps in Western science. Professors, researchers, doctoral students, activists, educational advisors, and state and educational administrators have embraced this goal. However, according to sociologist Jean-Philippe Warren, this project follows a false path, devoid of serious epistemic foundations. Warren does not deny that paradigms of Indigenous culture can, in accordance with science, generate valid knowledge. However, the activist version of this plan outright disputes that objectivity, observation, demonstration, and critical intersubjectivity are constitutive of science, and further claims to substitute other norms, drawn from Indigenous traditions. The defenders of an indigenous science free from any Western borrowings are making the same mistake as those who realized that Einstein, being Jewish, could only produce Jewish science. The projects to found Catholic, Marxist or Nazi sciences, according to Warren, have produced nothing worthwhile, and therefore conditioning the development of science on the promotion of a culture, as the project of indigenous science demands, is a doomed enterprise. Moreover, the acclaimed advocates of indigenous knowledge have a simplistic and ill-informed representation of Western science and indigenous traditions that makes their program problematic.
Patrick Moreau comes to similar conclusions, but differently. He wanted to map this global project that has become today‘s indigenization of higher education, which is advocated at will, in a profusion of articles, statements, and press releases, by universities, pre-university colleges, businesses, and many state organizations. However, this proliferating term—indigenization in English—has given rise to a hodgepodge of divergent definitions, and thanks to Moreau’s text, the reader continues a kind of initiatory journey that takes him up four degrees of beatitude, that is to say four stages of metamorphosis that the indigenization of education is supposed to produce in minds and behaviors: inclusion, reconciliation, decolonization, then the supreme stage, revolution. Inclusion involves the imposition of quotas in the hiring of professors, in the name of positive discrimination supposedly intended to correct the underrepresentation of Indigenous people—less than five percent of the Canadian population—in the teaching profession and other measures to encourage the recruitment of Indigenous students. However, this system of inclusion promotes a radical subjectivism, based on self-identification as Indigenous as well as on a protean notion, “cultural securitization,” by virtue of which any reality disturbing to Indigenous identity, place or building names, statues, books, words, must be eliminated. Inclusion also turns into acts of collective contrition, such as these declarations made at the beginning of a speech or a course, according to which the institution would occupy unceded Indigenous territory. Reconciliation encompasses the whole of society and pursues an unquestionably expiatory purpose. A whole program of re-education of minds is then emerging, according to Moreau, through the reform of educational curricula and the introduction of penitential or memorial rituals aimed at the conversion of non-natives, invited to curse the guilty West and to be reborn through contact with the “magico-spiritual” practices of the indigenous world. Decolonization aims to renew knowledge, now defined by the requirement of equality between indigenous epistemologies and those with which Western science has wrongly satisfied itself. Like Warren, Moreau sees in this project a return to the naive idea that science proceeds from ethnocultural characteristics or a doctrine. Moreover, such a vision reconnects with the old German romanticism, for which the Volksgeist, the spirit of the people, is rooted in ancestral soil. The literature on indigenous decolonization is full of lexical incantations and rejects Western science by emphasizing the invisible world and spirituality that it has allegedly discredited. We are therefore flirting, argues Moreau, with mysticism and an irrationalism that embraces the relativistic and communitarian anti-rationalism of the anti-Enlightenment. Finally, after this ascent towards purification and equalization, comes the revolution. Everything is involved, capitalism, the electoral system, everything must be turned upside down, so that the Native ends up embodying, in the eyes of a small elite of non-natives schooled in a hothouse, the good saving savage under whose patronage, Canada, reeducated from top to bottom, will enter a “state of grace.”
Another world, no less astonishing, is that of EDI, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion—DEI in France—measures, applied almost systematically in higher education in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada, often without prior examination of their moral and scientific foundations. Philosophy professor Yannick Lacroix conducts this examination in a text that x-rays the flaws on which these shaky edifices rest. EDI measures, observes Lacroix, set out a moral injunction according to which society must achieve “proportional representation” of groups in all spheres of activity, so that any numerical deviation from this representation will be presumed to be the effect of prejudice, discrimination, and unfair obstacles and will have to be corrected by radical means, contrary to the liberal vision of justice. However, this injunction wrongly assumes that any underrepresentation of a group is automatically caused by discrimination, obscuring other explanatory factors, often unrelated to discrimination, which play a role in the condition of a social group. Next, EDI measures rely on the indiscernible notion of “implicit bias,” which several researchers claim to be able to detect using the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which has produced inconclusive and overinterpreted results, to the point that the test designer had to backtrack. Many even admit that we do not know what this test measures exactly. It would record, at best, artificially induced mental “biases,” but causally inert on the behavior of subjects subjected to this type of experiment. The fact remains that the promoters of EDI programs try to cover up these deficiencies with unfalsifiable approximations and incantations.
EDI measures also defend a flawed conception of justice, according to Lacroix. Indeed, they assume that the right to compensation for discrimination suffered by a person is automatically transferable to another person, or even to a group of individuals, as long as they all belong to the same social category, even if they are from different eras. This way of thinking breaks with the liberal vision of justice, which is focused on individual and past reparations of injustices. Although John Rawls did not address such a subject in his work, Lacroix believes that she would not have endorsed such a vision of equity that “dilutes the individual in the group” and believes that it repairs past injustices through compensatory discrimination offered to groups defined solely by abstract belonging to a socio-ethnic characteristic. EDI measures thus disseminate “a deadly ‘critical’ ideology that sees the theory before reality and the specimen before the individual.” Woe to the refractory; they must be excluded or re-educated, as recommended in an action plan from Laval University cited by Lacroix.
However, the proven influence of identity ideologies on higher education cannot be understood without recognizing the fact that they have succeeded in colonizing a discipline without which their injunctions would remain a dead letter: law. The American political scientist Yascha Mounk had already observed, in The Identity Trap, that several American jurists had played a decisive role in articulating the key concepts and slogans of identity progressivism in his country. Law professor Stéphane Sérafin takes this reflection even further, showing how his discipline, at least in North America, has abandoned the transmission of classical legal knowledge to establish itself as an “instrument of social transformation.” In fact, for several decades, law has been going through “an epistemic crisis” that calls into question its autonomy as a field of knowledge and exposes it to militant doctrines, including recently the identity movement, which has contributed to dissolving certain fundamental notions of law.
This undermining work had begun with the current of legal realism, born in the United States and then spread to Canada up to the high judiciary, to then be continued by critical legal studies, which considers the law as a fabric of plastic and arbitrary constructions in the service of the dominant. CLS has largely penetrated American law schools—and those in English Canada—and has informed the work of Catharine MacKinnon on the sexual harassment of women in the workplace and that of Kimberlé Crenshaw, who forged the intersectional framework of analysis in law. The former has revolutionized the notion of civil recourse in court, which no longer aims to redress a wrong suffered by a civil party based on a fault attributed to a defendant. From now on, this recourse leads to social redress, undertaken by a litigant on behalf of a class of individuals—such as the female gender—without regard to personal fault, since it is a matter of correcting discrimination whose origin is “institutional,” “systemic.” If justice once consisted of “granting to each his right,” according to Ulpian’s formula, now it is important to assign each group its share of the pie. Crenshaw, Sérafin shows, took up the torch of the CLS and then focused her work on race. Thanks to the concept of intersectionality, the jurist makes it conceivable that a single individual could be at the center of several sources of oppression and could therefore accumulate several grievances around their person, as evidenced by their subjective experience. The theories of MacKinnon and Crenshaw combine to reduce justice to the sole perspective of the plaintiff—that of the defendant being obscured—and to index the harm and its reparation solely on belonging to an abstract “group.” The prevalence of these theories in North American law schools—to a lesser extent, those of Quebec—illustrates the depth of the intellectual crisis sweeping through these schools, where positivism, in decline, struggles to support a discipline distinct from the social sciences through its studied corpus and its method. Taking advantage of the weaknesses of an already disoriented discipline, the identity discourse was able to establish itself, providing researchers with new credentials and lawyers with additional outlets, notably the public service, NGOs, and universities whose law faculties, notes Sérafin, proclaim their mission to achieve “social justice.” In Canada, these faculties have endorsed and reflected the ideological framework of EDI imposed by Justin Trudeau’s government after his election in 2015 and endorsed projects of decolonization and indigenization of teachings.
The University, Between Management and Militant Racketeering
If, according to Sérafin, Canadian law faculties now live in symbiosis with the discourse of the “identitarian left,” we can also see at work, in the opinion of Arnaud Bernadet, a formidable managerial discourse relayed by university administrations, research funding organizations, and state ministries with which the radical academicisms recognizable by their now omnipresent newspeak seamlessly harmonize. In short, EDI newspeak embraces a clientelist “entrepreneurial referent” that is part of the dematerialized, service-oriented economy. The EDI programs and training sector has given rise to a lucrative industry—$9,2 billion in 2022 for the United States. This entrepreneurial reference was able to count both on the action of the State—of the Canadian federal State, which decided after the 1995 referendum on Quebec sovereignty to secure the ideological loyalty of universities through targeted subsidy programs—and on the demands for social change conveyed by the movements woke. Bernadet’s thesis is that however unstable the relationships between the State, the market, and social struggles may seem, it is through a managerial approach based on governance that universities reconcile the demands of each to put their organizations at the service of a cognitive capitalism hungry for results. Bernadet points out that management studies have integrated the notions of inclusion and identity-based belonging, to make them vectors of positive organizational change, piloted by expert consultants. According to the author, studies promoting affirmative action programs and inclusive management contain serious aporias: weak empirical confirmation, circular reasoning, essentialization of identities. The exaltation of ethnoracial difference, however, is achieved to the detriment of socioeconomic equality and most often benefits white elites and professional executives. Moreover, this managerial culture attacks the constitutive principles of the university. It diminishes the role of professorial collegiality in university governance in favor of a sprawling internal bureaucracy. It limits departmental autonomy, notably by lowering the requirements for hiring professors. Finally, the “neo-management of inclusion” has short-circuited the rational scientific debate around which the institution is supposed to form a community dedicated to research. It is to be feared that the inclusive excellence obsessively included in EDI policies does not serve an elitist and inefficient justice system.
Like Bernadet, political scientist François Charbonneau studies the reasons for the success of the EDI movement, which has taken over North American universities. This movement acts like a “pyromaniac firefighter,” parasitizing institutions by sparking fires that only it claims can extinguish. As a result, being both the poison and the antidote, it takes advantage of every crisis that shakes the educational world to strengthen its empire. Charbonneau first puts forward a dozen reasons why this movement should be fought. Broadly speaking, he accuses it of “operating like a sect” which, hostile to the achievements of liberal modernity and science, propagates a discourse that absolutizes the victim and subjective feelings. Devoid of any democratic legitimacy, this movement subjects the university to moral and censorial discipline, even if it means resorting to reprehensible means such as harassment, intimidation, discrimination, and the imposition of patronizing training. But how can we explain the movement’s dazzling success? According to Charbonneau, this success is paradoxically a sign that Western societies have ceased to be indifferent to the issues of racism and other forms of “exclusion,” and that the EDI movement quickly managed to stand out through its solutions to real social concerns. The EDI movement then spread through processes external to the university, notably thanks to social networks, which have given unprecedented scope to identity-based causes and encouraged “virtuous one-upmanship” among activists. The polarization of American political debates since Donald Trump’s first election and the mercantilist appropriation of EDI doctrines by big business have provided them with other impetus.
However, it is also necessary to examine the modus operandi of this movement, which drew its inspiration from the tactics of critical race theorists. The latter teach that one can better take control of an institution when it is in crisis, real or fabricated. Indeed, an affair breaks, and the institution is accused of being responsible, of having, for example, allowed a “racist” incident, and it is then demanded that the institution be reformed, in accordance with the militant canon. If the institution refuses to admit its wrongdoing, it is relentlessly assailed with reproaches until it gives in, targeting, if necessary, its leaders. In short, it is a form of institutional extortion, by moral blackmail, highly publicized. It is therefore by this method that the EDI movement has succeeded in phagocytizing universities and businesses, and in turning each new crisis to its advantage, to advance its solutions. However, in Charbonneau’s opinion, the Lieutenant-Duval affair “illustrates in an ideal-typical way the way” in which this movement takes an institution by storm. This crisis led the University of Ottawa not to suspend EDI measures, but, on the contrary, to strengthen them. The union and the administration even colluded to remove professors’ voting rights in their departmental assembly as soon as they refused to take training on employment equity. In the long term, Charbonneau does not see how universities, if they continue to be vampirized in this way, will be able to maintain the trust of the societies they are supposed to train intelligently. “And the backlash risks being painful,” he adds, referring to the anti-Woke applied to American universities.
In short, once you have read this necessary work, which frees up academic discourse, you should ask yourself a simple question: Have universities lost their minds?
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Image: “University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario” by Ken Lund on Wikimedia Commons
