Universities have never been perfectly free, nor have they been entirely autonomous. In the late Middle Ages and the early Reformation, they looked over their shoulders, worried about royal or papal intervention. Even in the early nineteenth century, as universities became openly committed to advanced research in support of advanced teaching, universities in Europe and in North America knew the state would not be indifferent if they made "radical" curricular choices.

There has always been a creative tension, sometimes sharp and even violent, between universities and external authorities seeking to control teaching and research. In the thirteenth century that tension produced lengthy strikes (including one at the University of Paris lasting nearly a decade), or even lengthier legal proceedings.

Now in the late twentieth century, with the evolution of mass democratic institutions, the new creative tension is between the universities and various interpretations of the democratic interest.

The public now agree that a university needs freedom. They accept that a university is defined by the freedom of its professors and researchers, and particularly the freedom to carry research findings into the classroom. With the assurance of tenure, university teachers can be fearless in teaching on the basis of disciplined inquiry.

Academic freedom and autonomy ensure our universities will be the best they can be, and not the mediocre mouthpieces of bureaucrats or self-interested investors.

So why have things gone so wrong in British Columbia? How and why could a legislature create a "public university," the Technical University of British Columbia, whose objectives are explicitly tied to narrow economic development, defined by the government through its appointed board? Why would the government announce there will be no tenure or assured academic freedom in this new institution? And what makes them think there can be a university where there is no academic senate or equivalent, where there is no assured place for open and critical debate about teaching and research?

In creating TechBC -- and you'll notice I won't call it a "university"-- the government has moved away from participatory, open, and accountable university governance. The British Columbia Government discards the lessons of a hundred years, during which our society has learned that accountability requires open and free debate. They discard the lessons of post-War Canada in which the Canadian public and the Canadian academic community have reached a new consensus on the importance of participatory and equitable university governance in properly constituted academic senates.

In British Columbia, universities are looking over their shoulders once again. It is truly a return to the bad old days. This time we're not worried about "visitors" and "legates." Now we must deal with high civil servants and shadowy members of the business community and organized labour. The civil servants would like to tie public funding to performance indicators defined by them, thus taking control of the curriculum and research in order to improve "the numbers." Meanwhile, business and labour would like the universities uncritically to do whatever they say it takes to produce jobs, stimulating industrial activity through applied research, or training and re-training people to present themselves "job-ready."

Either way, whether it's performance indicators or economy-driven research, the idea is to reduce or even to eliminate the university's freedom to choose. The idea is to "restructure" higher education to follow shifts in the economy. This will not, cannot be a matter of discretion and choice: we shall be followers, not leaders.

However, if research is to flourish, it must be free. If research is to produce reliable and significant knowledge, it requires the condition of academic freedom. If Canada is to produce the best research in the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences, it must be communicated--in the classroom and by publication--freely and immediately. If our universities are to be among the world's best, our teaching must be freely fed by innumerable tributaries of knowledge and research.