In early 2020, as the world was shutting down, the X̱wi7x̱wa Library at the University of British Columbia released a manual for instructors who were moving classes online. It mainly contained material you’d expect to see: links to digitized books and guides to remote-teaching strategies. It ended with suggestions for giving virtual land acknowledgments, which it defined as “respectful, yet political” declarations recognizing “the colonial context of the Indigenous territory/territories where a gathering is taking place.”

For years, land acknowledgements have been a part of the ceremonial architecture of campus life. And for many academics, they’re uncontroversial. Their purpose is to highlight a discomfiting reality: Canada, the model liberal nation, was built on a legacy of violent dispossession. This fact feels especially salient at UBC, where the main Vancouver campus is on Musqueam territory and the satellite Okanagan campus is on the home of the Syilx people. But a smaller cohort of academics have long viewed land acknowledgements as virtue signalling, a cheap way for speakers to shore up their progressive bona fides without improving Indigenous people’s lives.

For Andrew Irvine, a philosophy professor at the Okanagan campus, land acknowledgements represent something even worse: political declarations which, when delivered by the university, undermine the sacrosanct principle of institutional neutrality. This principle ensures that students and faculty members have the freedom to express their ideas and opinions—and that the university is an apolitical forum for that expression. When administrators at UBC give land acknowledgements, they often refer to Musqueam or Syilx territory as “unceded,” suggesting, to Irvine, that the Canadian state lacks legitimacy on the territory. The library guide contained more statements that seemed, to him, baldly political: “Don’t sugarcoat the past,” it read. “Use terms like genocide, ethnic cleansing, stolen land and forced removal.”

Irvine believes that provocative ideas—like the notion that Canada is an illegitimate, genocidal state—should be permitted on campus almost unconditionally when expressed by students or professors. But when the administration itself states an opinion, it signals which ideas will and will not be treated approvingly. He thinks that this kind of institutional favouritism should be anathema at a liberal university, where free debate is supposed to flourish.

Irvine is a greying, bespectacled man with a widow’s peak and a preference for tweedy suits. He looks like the stereotype of a philosophy professor, and he’s fascinated by renegade thinkers. He’s written a play about Socrates, who was executed for speaking his mind, and edited a monograph on Bertrand Russell, the British intellectual whose commitment to pacifism during the First World War got him dismissed from Cambridge University and later imprisoned. He’s also written admiringly of David Saxon, a University of California physicist who was fired during the McCarthy era for refusing to sign an anti-communist oath.

This spring, Irvine embarked on his own campaign against campus orthodoxy. In April, he filed a lawsuit against UBC, alleging that it had violated B.C.’s University Act, a provincial statute from 1890 that requires the school to be “non-sectarian and non-political in principle.” In preparation, he created a dossier of statements by the university that in his opinion lay outside the boundaries of acceptable speech for an academic institution. Irvine noted instances—including the library guide from 2020—in which administrators had given land acknowledgements or encouraged faculty to do so. He compiled statements on Israel-Palestine, like one by the Okanagan Senate, a board that manages academic affairs, condemning “the perpetration of genocide” by Israel. He pored over job descriptions for tenure-track positions. In many, he noted, the hiring committee seemed to indicate that it would evaluate candidates based on fealty to progressive ideals. One posting at the faculty of medicine required applicants to affirm belief in “anti-racism, equity, diversity, decolonization, Indigenization and inclusion.” This demand felt to him like a left-wing counterpart to anti-communist loyalty pledges in the ’50s.

Irvine enlisted like-minded colleagues to compile their own documents, including political scientists Christopher Kam and Brad Epperly; Michael Treschow, an English professor with a love of Tolkien; and Nathan Cockram, a philosophy graduate student. On April 7, the group filed their dossier at the Supreme Court of British Columbia along with a petition asking the court to prevent university administrators from giving or encouraging land acknowledgements, making statements on Israel-Palestine or requiring job applicants to support DEI.

As of this writing, the university has not filed its response, but it will likely argue that the petitioners have misrepresented the University Act—that the phrase “non-sectarian and non-political,” simply means unaffiliated with a church or political institution. By this logic, the act prevents the university from endorsing, for example, the Liberal Party or the Archdiocese of Vancouver. But it has nothing to do with land acknowledgements or DEI.

Other parties have already sharply criticized the petition. Don Tom, vice-president of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, argued that by questioning land acknowledgements, Irvine and his fellow petitioners were condemning the very notion of Indigenous sovereignty. “There is absolutely no academic value in debating the validity of First Nations’ basic human rights,” he stated in a press release.

The BC Civil Liberties Association pointedly declined to support the petition. Liza Hughes, chair of the organization, weighed in on the BCCLA’s website: “Acknowledging that you are on unceded land is no more political than refusing to do so. Muzzling faculty will not advance academic freedom.” Her message to the petitioners was clear: as free-speech advocates, they misunderstood the cause they claimed to champion.

The debate is a symptom of a bigger crisis in higher education, and in society at large. Academia once affected a degree of aloofness from daily political life. University administrations often refrained from taking positions on hot-button issues. Many believed that shaping public opinion wasn’t their job. Today, university presidents, deans and vice-deans routinely issue statements on whatever topics are dominating the headlines or trending on social media. Often, these statements have a progressive bent; that’s one reason why universities now have a reputation as incubators of leftist thought.

Whether you view this trend as laudable, defensible or embarrassing depends on your politics—and on your understanding of why universities exist in the first place. Should they serve as engines of social justice, or spaces of independent inquiry? Can they be both? And what does all of this mean for intellectual freedom, an increasingly fraught concept? Canada’s universities are facing multiple crises, including severe financial strain and freefalling public confidence. How they answer the urgent questions before them will determine a great deal about how—and if—they can recover.

I’ve been enmeshed in the university system my entire adult life, first as a literature student at McGill in the late 2000s and then as a writing instructor at the University of Toronto, where I’ve worked since 2012. I know that, even at the best of times, universities can be rancorous, dysfunctional places. Right now, though, things are messier than they’ve been in decades. The system is straining under multiple pressures.

First and foremost is a crisis of legitimacy. Data from the Canadian Association of University Teachers show that 60 per cent of Canadians believe post-secondary degrees are less valuable than they once were. Only 15 per cent have “a great deal” of confidence in the higher education system, compared to 28 per cent with little to no confidence. And as CBC journalists and Canada Post mail carriers already know, an unpopular public service is at high risk for political interference and overall turbulence. The crisis in confidence, in turn, is exacerbating other problems, including universities’ growing financial precarity. Over the past 10 years, many provincial governments froze both tuition fees and grants to post-secondary institutions. To make up the revenue shortfall, universities threw open their doors to international students, who pay inflated fees. This arrangement worked well until last year, when the federal government slashed student visas, first by 35 per cent and then by an additional 10 per cent. The sector is now in a financial tailspin. The University of Waterloo is shouldering a $95-million deficit. At York University, the deficit is $111 million. Hiring freezes are under way at the University of Winnipeg, Simon Fraser, McGill, Queen’s, Dalhousie and Memorial. Laurentian University is selling off properties to avoid insolvency and appease creditors.

The combination of declining public trust and financial strain has made universities easy political targets. During the 2025 election campaign, Pierre Poilievre pledged to reduce funding to universities unless they........

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