Documenting Carleton’s Institutional Impartiality Policy

By Maxwell Heroux & Maheeshan Sivanesan

H

ow can a singular policy that initially upset functionally every student group and faculty member, still manage to pass? That is the question that prompted this article.

From Leaked Drafts to Final Policy

The first public inklings of the Institutional Impartiality Policy came on Oct. 13, when Carleton4Palestine (C4P) reached out to student groups with a leaked copy of the proposal. By Oct. 17, The Charlatan had published an article, and the university had begun to publicize consultation on the policy before being voted on by Carleton’s Board of Governors (BoG).

Editor’s Note: The Institutional Impartiality Policy caused a lot of controversy amongst many groups at Carleton University. The Leveller made a list of organization names, acronyms and descriptions.

The initial draft, due to its broad language, was set to impact the freedom of speech of all faculty, contract instructors, student groups, and effectively anyone representing Carleton or its students. While the university told The Charlatan that the policy “clarifies the distinction between personal views and institutional representation,” the original wording stated that it applied to “all faculty and staff of academic and administrative units,” as well as “officially recognized student organizations.”

“I wish the University would have given us more time to… digest the policy that had been put forth.” – Sean Joe-Ezigbo, CUSA

At the time this vague draft circulated, Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA), the Graduate Students’ Association (GSA), as well as over 20 other groups endorsed the “Reject Carleton’s Gag Order” Carleton4Palestine statement against the initial version of the policy. This signalled the beginning of the campus-wide discourse about the proposed Impartiality Policy.

Sean Joe-Ezigbo, CUSA President, stated in an interview with The Leveller, that when they first spoke to the university “the draft hadn’t even been released, so when we had spoken to them, there was a lot of vagueness in the language.” CUSA worked with the university to ensure amendments clarified that the policy would not impact student groups.

Carleton University’s Senate met Nov. 28 for its regular meeting, and one of the items on the agenda was the Impartiality Policy. A formal motion to recommend the BoG withdraw the Impartiality Policy failed by a mere two votes. Joe-Ezigbo, representing CUSA and by extension the student body, was seen as a key vote that abstained in the meeting.

While CUSA had endorsed the C4P statement condemning the policy, Joe-Ezigbo stated his reason for abstention to be that “CUSA Council hadn’t taken an official stance” and that “backing the statement is not the same as releasing an official position.”

In an interview with The Leveller, Joe-Ezigbo stated that it was “chaotic” and that “I wish the university would have given us more time to… digest the policy that had been put forth.” Clearly this was a sentiment shared by many, with the final draft only being released Nov. 27, one day before the Senate meeting and five days before the BoG meeting.

“85% of consultation responses oppose a policy, and it passes anyway, it raises serious questions about whose voices actually matter in university governance.” – Nir Hagigi, C4P

Additional time could have allowed groups to better consult on their own. Joe-Ezigbo stated that more time could have allowed him to have a “conversation and discourse with CUSA Council, the executive team, and other people advocating.”

The Carleton Academic Student Government (CASG) had a meeting on Oct. 17 that started with a motion against the Impartiality Policy. By the Nov. 18 meeting of CASG Council, the motion was whittled down to merely reaffirming its commitment to academic freedom and freedom of expression. CASG followed through with this sentiment in its messaging on Instagram.

To understand the perspective of the union, The Leveller interviewed CUPE Local 4600 President Ryan Conrad, who is also a Contract Instructor in the Human Rights and Women’s and Gender Studies programs. CUPE 4600’s biggest concern — reiterated by Conrad to the Ottawa Citizen and in the interview with The Leveller — has been that it is “a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.”

“The administration will use [the policy] to avoid answering for its investments, its partnerships, and its complicity” – Aviya Doikayt, IJV

While the campus consultation resulted in amendments to the policy, the overall feedback remained 85% negative, according to the statistics quoted at the BoG meeting. This was highlighted by Nir Hagigi of C4P, saying in an interview that, “when 85% of consultation responses oppose a policy, and it passes anyway, it raises serious questions about whose voices actually matter in university governance.”

With limited time, organizations at Carleton attempted to respond in some capacity. CUSA sought a decision from their council on the finalized policy. CASG held two council meetings across a month to determine what exactly needed fixing. The university, however, did not wait.

The final version of the policy, presented Nov. 27, limited its scope to departments, deans, chairs, and directors. This final version thus completely bans departmental statements, directly going against the Departmental Statements and Academic Freedom policy statement of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT).

Further, this would ban statements like the one from the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation speaking out against gender-based violence after an attack at Waterloo University, as well as the one from the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The BoG Meets; The Campus Protests

The discussion of the Policy at the Dec. 2 BoG meeting, that would end up being its final reading, started with President and Vice-Chancellor Wisdom Tettey speaking about the attempts to mitigate concerns. These attempts include faculty and librarians being permitted the right to continue to speak and teach political matters, and how it is now simply limited to departmental statements.

Meanwhile, outside of Richcraft Hall where the meeting took place, student groups and union representatives were gathered to protest the policy. C4P posted an Instagram story calling attention to the increased security around the meeting place, allegedly including private security.

Hagigi opened his speech saying “we are here because the Board of Governors is preparing to vote on what may become the most restrictive institutional communications policy in this country.”

Hagigi continued, referencing the prior Senate meetings that, “when this was raised at Senate, President Tettey openly admitted Carleton would become the first university in the country to do this, and he framed that as something to be proud of.”

Hagigi explained how this policy is a risk to students even in its current form being limited to departments. He stated how the groups organizing the protest were met with emails threatening consequences for arranging the protest, and that professors were the ones emailing the administration to protect the students and their rights. With this policy, this could put these professors and departments at risk.

Conrad stated in the interview with The Leveller that “it is an embarrassment that the president of our university is not spending every waking hour trying to figure out how to solve the financial crisis.” He highlighted this in his speech the day of the BoG meeting, stating, “I want people to know that this [the Impartiality Policy] is a total, total distraction [from the financial situation].”

Aviya Doikayt, the representative for Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), argued that “the administration will use [the policy] to avoid answering for its investments, its partnerships, and its complicity.” She added, “When students demand that the university divest from companies enabling genocide — in Gaza, in Sudan, in the Congo — the administration will point to this policy and say: ‘We aren’t allowed to take a position.’”

Bessan Amer, a member of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), highlighted Carleton’s complicity, saying “over 30 million dollars are invested in companies that support the occupation of the Palestinian people [such as] Honeywell, BAE Systems, and Rolls-Royce.”

Amer described how, through the formation of a group called Students Against Israeli Apartheid, “the fight for divestment started in 2010, and the number of dollars invested by Carleton University within the occupation was much smaller at that time, adding up to 3 million dollars. Now, Carleton has multiplied that investment by 10.” The movement to boycott, divest and sanction (BDS) Israel was inspired by the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s, when Carleton was invested in South African apartheid. It was years of student activism that eventually made the university divest from South Africa.

“As scholars and thinkers, we can connect dots and make inferences, and it is quite clear” – Ryan Conrad, CUPE 4600 President

Sienna Scullion, the CUHRS representative, also made it clear that her organization stands against the policy: “Imagine telling a Human Rights department that it cannot speak about genocide because it is too political,” she said, emphasizing how academia and politics interact.

Scullion added that this policy “affects every student who comes to university not just to get a degree, but to figure out how to live ethically in a world full of injustice.”

Prior to the BoG vote, CUASA released a letter to Tettey requesting the withdrawal of the policy. At the Dec.2 protest, CUASA member Seyda Ipek read the speech by Dominique Marshall, the president of the staff association. This was the same speech that Marshall read at the General Faculty board meeting a week prior, chaired by Tettey.

“The very process by which this policy has been drafted and is now heading for the meeting of the board of governors runs against the principle of collegial decision-making on academic matters,” Ipek read.

“More largely, the policy represents an act of silencing on issues on which CUASA members have expertise,” she added, “it threatens them with discipline for actions that are ill defined and actions that are legitimate.”

Back inside the meeting, concerns continued to be raised from within the BoG as well. While the final policy had the recommendation of the BoG’s governance committee, it was referenced that there continued to be concerns raised even within the governance committee of “problematic wording” that had yet to be resolved.

Despite all of these concerns still unaddressed at the time, a motion to table discussions on the policy failed with only six votes for and 18 votes against. This would have delayed further discussions and a vote on the policy until the March BoG meeting.

During one of the speeches on the motion to table, its mover — undergraduate student representative Allan Buri — spoke to concerns of “ulterior motives” in the BoG pushing this policy through with such haste.

The motion for the Impartiality Policy itself passed with only three votes against.

Looking Back at The Policy, and Looking Forward to Next Steps

In a follow-up interview, Buri said, “after discussions with the Board Chair and the administration,” he could “confidently say there are no ulterior motives present.”

As a Carleton University professor, Ryan Conrad’s comment on if the impartiality policy was introduced as a result of the rise of on-campus activism was “as scholars and thinkers, we can connect dots and make inferences, and it is quite clear.”

With the university cracking down on protests, and the administration’s lack of clarity regarding the motivations behind the Policy, it raises valid concerns. These concerns were echoed by Conrad, stating, “even if this is about Gaza, its consequences are much more far-reaching… this is any political speech at this point now.”

Buri further stated that “Carleton reached the same conclusion as multiple other universities.” Despite this claim, in an article written by Josh Greenberg — a member of Carleton University’s Board and Senate who was in favour of the policy — the only university cited in this article with a current and equivalent impartiality policy was Laurentian University.

Statements in the same vein were made by the University of New Brunswick and the University of Waterloo among others, but no action was taken to rush it into formal policy. While other universities may share in the concerns that led to the Impartiality Policy, it is clear that few if any have been as eager to silence discourse without proper review as Carleton University.

Carleton University has become one of, if not the first, to institute such a strict policy, and student groups continue to have concerns that were not addressed before the BoG acted.

Hagigi stated later in an interview with The Leveller that “while the Board has not reversed course, the protests have exposed how decisions are made at Carleton and have brought unprecedented attention to issues of governance, academic freedom, and complicity.” He added that sustained pressure like this “makes maintaining the status quo more costly than changing it, whether reputationally, financially, or politically,” giving hope to possible change in the future.