Precarious academic work

Universities and colleges in recent decades have increasingly employed academics on part-time and fixed-term teaching contracts. It is estimated that about one-third to one-half of academic staff in Canada today are on short-term and precarious contracts.

This shift in the status of employment has significant implications for academic freedom. The procedural protection for academic freedom traditionally has been the tenure system.  Tenure provides that an academic, following a lengthy and rigorous probationary period, can only be dismissed for just cause, such as bona fide financial exigency or grave misconduct. Tenure is intended to safeguard academic freedom by ensuring that academics can not lose their positions because of their speech, publications, or research findings even when their work risks offending powerful interests, including business or government interests.

Today, the more universities and colleges use non-tenured instructors the more academics there are who lack the procedural protection of tenure. Contract academic staff who pursue controversial topics that offend powerful interests need not be fired outright. Rather, they may find that their contracts are simply not renewed. Stronger procedural protections and job security provisions are needed for contract academic staff so that they fully exercise their academic freedom without fear of reprisal.

Donor and commercial pressures

Academic freedom can be at risk from pressures exerted by donors and the demands and incentives to commercialize research. While most donor-funded projects are handled appropriately, controversies have arisen around donor influence in the appointment process, in the design of programs, and in the content and timing of publications arising out of sponsored research.

Concerns about donor influence over academic research prompted CAUT in 2013 to analyze 12 agreements involving universities, donors, corporations, and governments. That investigation found that seven of the contracts provided “no specific protection for academic freedom” while others failed to provide academic researchers the right to publish work flowing from the projects beyond the normal 60-day delay allowing for corporate patent applications.

Political Interference

Across North America, some governments and politicians are interfering with how universities and colleges operate by enacting legislation that mandates or prohibits specific content in the classroom, banning equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives, and weakening or eliminating tenure.

The exercise of academic freedom requires that institutions are autonomous from outside pressures and political interference. Universities and colleges have a responsibility to resist such external influence, including any attempt by governments, politicians, donors or pressure groups to target academic staff for exercising their academic freedom rights.

Further Reading

• American Association of University Professors, Preliminary Report of the Special Committee on Academic Freedom and Florida. May 24, 2023.
• Jamie Brownlee. “Contract Faculty in Canada: using access to information requests to uncover hidden academics in Canadian universities.” Higher Education. Vol. 70, No. 5 (November 2015), pp. 787-805.
• Matthew W. Finkin. The Case for Tenure. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996.
• Karen Foster and Louise Birdsell Bauer. Out of the Shadows: Experiences of Contract Academic Staff. Ottawa: Canadian Association of University Teachers, September 2018.
• James L. Turk (ed.) Universities at Risk: How Politics, Special Interests and Corporatization Threaten Academic Integrity. Toronto: Lorimer, 2008.
• Ellen Schrecker. The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University. New York and London: New Press, 2010.