The CAUT Bulletin has already reported on the erosion of academic freedom—and higher education generally—in the United States, perhaps as a warning of what is to come if the rights of Canadian academics continue to be threatened by federal and provincial disinvestment and meddling in university activities, or if our own democratic principles were to be attacked. Yet little attention has been paid to the undoing of academic freedom through transnational relations with the United States.
Indeed, the assault on freedom of expression in the United States—particularly on those who quietly or loudly condemn Israel’s genocide in Gaza—has already severely impacted the work of many Canadian and international scholars.
As a case in point, we offer an account of events that have shaken the architecture community broadly, and architectural educators specifically. Our perspective is shaped by our former roles as Associate Editors (of Design and Reviews, respectively) of the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), the most widely circulated journal on architectural education, which was earlier this year censored by its parent organization, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA).
In March 2024, the JAE Editorial Board, composed of 18 faculty members from across Canada and the U.S., unanimously approved the journal’s forthcoming issue 79.2: Palestine, to be published in the fall of 2025. The Call for Papers (CFP) invited submissions for work that “challenges conventions of politics and forms” which could emerge from or comparatively engage with Palestine as an appositional and diasporic geography. ACSA delayed the announcement of the CFP for months.
In February 2025, nearing the end of the issue’s peer-review process, ACSA fired interim Executive Editor McLain Clutter for refusing to support the ACSA’s decision to cancel 79.2: Palestine and develop a replacement issue. The entire Editorial Board resigned after ACSA failed to respond to concerns over academic integrity, academic and editorial freedom, but also for not protecting precarious faculty and Board members, who were subject to an online harassment campaign.
In the immediate aftermath of the issue’s cancellation and the Editorial Board’s resignation, ACSA was heavily scrutinized in the international academic context as well as the larger world of architecture professionals. Finding the events deeply troubling, Editorial Board members from ACSA’s other journal (Technology | Architecture + Design) also resigned, as did some members of ACSA’s own Executive Board. Many architecture schools, including the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, announced that they would not renew their ACSA membership.
ACSA’s actions were uniquely damaging for Dalhousie University’s School of Architecture, which was scheduled to co-host, along with ACSA and the European Association of Architectural Educators, an international conference in Halifax this past June. Dalhousie’s School of Architecture voted in April to cancel the conference because a continued association with ACSA would have represented a condonement of ACSA’s censorship and its assault on Palestinian scholarship.
The reality—not unique to architecture—is that research in the university context and intellectual activities in general are shaped by international exchange. Scholars and educators push discipline-specific discourses toward new objectives and problems thanks to—and not despite—encounters with “foreign” ideas. This entanglement is heightened when, as in the case of architectural educators and students, organizations such as ACSA (based in Washington, D.C.) play an outsized role in creating those valued relationships among member schools, even among Canadian ones. In the absence of an alternative network as robust as ACSA, many architecture schools have kept their ACSA membership and were ultimately unwilling to condemn the organization for its breach of academic freedom.
The ultimate irony is that ACSA engaged an interim editorial team to replace the JAE Palestine issue, whose CFP titled “Educating Civic Architects” resonates with the January 2025 Presidential Executive Order on “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture.”
The intricacies of transnational modes of thought and research are further burdened by other considerations: U.S.-based scholars (many of whom are Canadian citizens) who are unable to fully express their research findings or opinions; Canada-based scholars who are similarly muzzled by fear of border-detainment if they were to travel—or at some point immigrate—to the U.S.; the general unwillingness to participate in a military-academic complex in conference presentations and other research activities.
Even some of the most committed activist and politically conscious academics have been muted since January 2024 out of fear of doxxing or government-initiated persecution. The economic, social, cultural and intellectual ties between Canada and the U.S. are simply too entrenched to believe that the Canadian university context is somehow insulated. If this architecture-specific debate offers a lesson for the larger academic community, it is that merely advocating for academic freedom is meaningless unless other forms of solidarity, networks and institutional frameworks are created, beyond the status quo organizations such as ACSA that are structurally too compromised to be “reformed.”
What does it mean to re-theorize academic freedom in an age of authoritarianism? The assault on higher education is not a hermetically sealed circumstance south of the 49th parallel. Our educational and pedagogical worlds are an entangled system. One only has to look at recent ideological questionnaires to Canadian researchers applying for (or already in receipt of) U.S. government grants, the “austerity” challenges at Canadian universities, the crackdowns on student dissent and encampments, or ideological arguments for institutional “neutrality” in light of a documented genocide.
The task is for educators themselves to forge new partnerships and collaborations that can resist the kinds of capitulations that have occurred at U.S. institutions. Might this mean looking further afield—to Central and South America, Africa, Asia, Oceania, Europe? What new platforms and solidarities might strengthen academic freedom, sustain researchers, faculty and student safety, and, indeed, help academics thrive?
Ozayr Saloojee is a Professor of Architecture at the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism at Carleton University. Michael Faciejew is an Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture at Dalhousie University.
