Academic freedom for students – is the question ‘academic’?

The issue of academic freedom has acquired an increasingly prominent role in both on campus, political and public life in the past few years, especially in the current context of Palestine solidarity movements across university campuses. Academic freedom is most frequently seen as a faculty right, most often ensured through tenured status and union or faculty association agreements with the employer. However, the question of students exercising their academic freedom rights across all domains of their campus student lives, be it as TA or student representative, is also fraught especially as these rights tend not to be enshrined in union or faculty association agreements and thereby more easily subject to the will of university administration. The original Humboldtian concept of academic freedom included academic freedom for students to learn, Lernfreiheit, but with the exception of a brief mention in the 2011 Universities Canada statement, there has been little focus on academic freedom for students in Canada (Horn, 1999a). As well, students’ academic freedoms are deeply enmeshed in some situations with the practicable exercise of academic freedom for faculty members despite their union/faculty association protections. Freedom of speech issues also become more salient, no matter their political positions, as students inhabit their various roles on campus, be it inviting speakers to campus or taking positions in their campus roles, pointing to the complicated relationship between freedom of expression issues and the exercise of academic freedom, particularly when these issues go public and viral through social media. Most important, all these complexities of exercising student academic freedom are frequently enmeshed with equity issues raised around racism, Indigenous solidarity and gender expression (Haque, 2016)