Critique of Academic Reason ^[1] — a review by Marc Chevrier

With contributions from Olivier Beaud (Paris II), Arnaud Bernadet (McGill University), François Charbonneau (University of Ottawa), Yannick Lacroix (Collège de Maisonneuve), Patrick Moreau (Collège Ahuntsic), Chantal Pouliot (Laval University), Maxime Prévost (University of Ottawa), Stéphane Sérafin (University of Ottawa) and Jean-Philippe Warren (Concordia University).

Let's say it from the outset, this high-quality collective work has one small flaw: its title. Is it yet another critique of academic science or of the idea of ​​reason? No. Literature professor Arnaud Bernadet specifies in his introduction that the book aims rather to scrutinize those theories that devalue science and reason within higher education itself and work to undermine its freedoms. In short, it is about proposing "a critique of critique," academic reason having two meanings for Bernadet. On the one hand, it questions the foundations of knowledge to uncover the underlying injustices and power relations, and on the other, it reexamines this first critique on the epistemological and ethical levels, with a horizon that Bernadet describes as Kantian, because it returns to the "foundations of scholarly and teaching activity."

It is to this second meaning that the contributions of the nine professors, primarily from Quebec and Ontario, but also from France, are linked, with Olivier Beaud's article on academic freedom. Faced with the rise of discourses that promote the transcendence of Western science and that translate into conference cancellations, book censorship, acts of ostracism, and quotas for hiring and grants, it is worth asking whether the North American, and perhaps French, university is on the verge of fostering "a form of irrationalism," as Bernadet suggests, even though several contributors to the collection speak of mysticism, esoteric quests, and neo-religious sectarianism. Bernadet situates the project of this collection between two unproductive attitudes: one that sees criticism of militant radicalism plaguing universities as a case of "moral panic," a lazy thesis that seeks instead to "degrade or discredit its opponent," and the other that, conversely, accuses universities of harboring new psychiatric asylums. Rejecting this alternative, Bernadet defends academic freedom as a modern parrhesia , which combines scientific and ethical truths, as a requirement of truth-telling . Three main themes—freedom, knowledge, and justice—thus unite the articles in the collection.

Freedoms under threat

In the area of ​​academic freedom, the initial contributions echo the debates that have raged, particularly in Quebec and Ontario, surrounding cases that have shaken the university system. One thinks of the media vendetta that, in September 2020, targeted a professor at the bilingual University of Ottawa. In a literature course taught online in English, the professor had the misfortune of using the word "nigger" to explain its militant meaning and was denounced by a student. This sparked a veritable firestorm that pitted Francophone and Anglophone professors against each other. The university, which suspended lecturer Lieutenant-Duval for three weeks, then attempted to calm the situation by commissioning a retired judge to conduct an investigation and prepare a report. This case, and several similar ones from English Canada or the United States, prompted the Quebec government to form a committee of experts to reflect on academic freedom in universities and to have a law on this issue adopted by the National Assembly of Quebec in June 2022.

The book opens with an interview with Chantal Pouliot, a professor of science education, who participated in this expert committee. The latter concluded that academic freedom, however accepted it may be as a principle of higher education, deserved to be better recognized and therefore to access legislative enshrinement that requires university institutions to adopt their own academic freedom policy. Although this solution did not receive unanimous support from academics, the attacks on this freedom and the concerns they raised were numerous enough to reject the status quo. The educationalist nevertheless sees several threats that still hang over the university, such as the excessive social engagement of professors, which would lead them to confuse "research" with "public speaking." "Similarly, the pressures on universities, particularly their administrations, to take a position on sociopolitical issues would erode the institutional neutrality required for true pluralism of thought among academics. Despite legislative intervention, further challenges await academic freedom.

Based on the trials this freedom has already undergone in France, Olivier Beaud offers a penetrating reflection on its theoretical foundations and the system of its protection. The university, argues the eminent jurist, constitutes the "weak and 'inferior' sector of higher education and research ^[2] "; a professor's status is determined by a simple decree, not by law. Academic freedom certainly exists, as a customary right that has guaranteed French academics considerable intellectual independence despite the tenacious control of public authorities over the university. Beaud distinguishes between university freedom, which includes "academic privileges," and academic freedom, which more strictly concerns the freedom of teaching and research. French universities enjoy long-standing privileges regarding internal policing and justice, some of which were reaffirmed by law in 2019. Rereading Paul Ricœur's writings on the purpose of the university, Beaud defines academic freedom as a "responsibility towards knowledge," this institution being the place where the right to pursue "truth without constraint" can be exercised. It entails not only rights but also duties, and is neither a corporatist privilege nor a human right. It is an individual freedom, derived from freedom of thought, granted to professors by virtue of their status. In this respect, academic freedom differs from the institutional guarantees offered to a de facto illusory university autonomy. Beaud shows that both freedoms, university and academic, nevertheless run up against a meticulous administrative state in France that curtails them to such an extent that it interferes in the organization of research. Furthermore, French universities, like their American counterparts, suffer from the overzealousness of university administrators who have become "all-encompassing," particularly since the 2007 expansion of the powers of university administrators. Moreover, academic freedom is threatened by censorship and legal gag orders from civil society. On the one hand, corporations and lobby groups file defamation lawsuits to silence and intimidate French academics whose scholarly pronouncements have harmed some powerful private interest. On the other hand, the activism of student minorities embracing "identity causes" with "quasi-religious" fervor has made its way to France, to the point, as Beaud writes, of being "pervasive throughout society." Whatever one thinks of the irruption of " cancel culture and woke ideology " in France, "one would have to be either blind or acting in bad faith not to see the existence of the phenomenon in France and the attacks it inflicts on academic freedom." France may even be on the cusp of "a broader process of hysteria surrounding speech," which is worrying.

In addition to the attacks on academic freedoms inflicted by this strident activism, the COVID-19 health crisis has also revealed, observes literature professor Maxime Prévost, the fragility of these freedoms. Far from exercising their critical thinking against a health narrative propagated by society and public authorities, academics have allegedly become the relay of false scientific consensus that has condemned dissidents. Prévost unequivocally asserts the right of non-specialist academics to address subjects outside their discipline. Drawing in particular on the work of Victor Klemperer and Hannah Arendt on totalitarian regimes, the author sees disturbing similarities between the apathy of intellectuals, the manipulation of language, and the social atomization that became widespread during these bygone regimes and the episodes of intellectual conformism, severe restrictions on freedoms, and control of language by the media and public authorities that accompanied the management of the health crisis. One case, according to Prévost, highlighted the corruption of scientific ethics caused by this management: the dismissal in March 2024 of microbiologist Patrick Provost, a professor at Laval University, who questioned the advisability of vaccinating young children, given the foreseeable risks, which, in his judgment, were higher than the expected benefits. Prévost deplores the fact that in this case, so few academics came to the forefront to defend him and that the media, eager to circulate complacent "mediocrities," covered it so little. If the scientist had been wrong, instead of dismissing him, it would have been better to organize a debate comparing his recommendations with those of other members of his discipline. This proves, in Prévost's eyes, that the tenure of professors, supposed to guarantee their independence, does little to encourage them to use their free speech and that in a crisis, they will prefer to serve those in power.

Alleged knowledge

Beyond their desire for censorship, identity doctrines foment a radical project of knowledge renewal. Thus, the Indigenous movement in Canada aims to establish an Indigenous science that would fill the supposed gaps in Western science. Professors, researchers, doctoral students, activists, educational advisors, and state and educational administrators have embraced this goal. However, according to sociologist Jean-Philippe Warren, this project follows a false path, devoid of serious epistemic foundations. Warren does not deny that paradigms of Indigenous culture can, in accordance with science, generate valid knowledge. However, the activist version of this plan outright disputes that objectivity, observation, demonstration, and critical intersubjectivity are constitutive of science, and further claims to substitute other norms, drawn from Indigenous traditions. The defenders of an indigenous science free from any Western borrowings are making the same mistake as those who realized that Einstein, being Jewish, could only produce Jewish science. The projects to found Catholic, Marxist or Nazi sciences, according to Warren, have produced nothing worthwhile, and therefore conditioning the development of science on the promotion of a culture, as the project of indigenous science demands, is a doomed enterprise. Moreover, the acclaimed advocates of indigenous knowledge have a simplistic and ill-informed representation of Western science and indigenous traditions that makes their program problematic.

Patrick Moreau arrives at similar conclusions, but from a different perspective. He sought to map out this global project that the indigenization of higher education has become, a project advocated with gusto in a profusion of articles, statements, and press releases by universities, pre-university colleges, businesses, and numerous government agencies. This proliferating term— indigenization in English—has given rise to a jumble of divergent definitions, and through Moreau's text, the reader embarks on a kind of initiatory journey that leads them through four degrees of bliss, that is, four stages of metamorphosis that the indigenization of education is supposed to produce in minds and behaviors: inclusion, reconciliation, decolonization, and then, the ultimate stage, revolution. Inclusion is achieved through the imposition of quotas in the hiring of professors, in the name of affirmative action supposedly intended to correct the underrepresentation of Indigenous people (4,9% of the Canadian population) in the faculty, and other measures to encourage the recruitment of Indigenous students. However, this system of inclusion promotes a radical subjectivism, based on self-identification as Indigenous and on a protean notion, "cultural security," according to which any reality that is disturbing to Indigenous identity—place or building names, statues, books, words—must be eliminated. Inclusion also morphs into acts of collective contrition, such as declarations made at the beginning of a speech or lecture that the institution occupies unceded Indigenous territory. Reconciliation encompasses the entire society and pursues an undeniably expiatory goal. Moreau believes that a whole program of re-educating minds then emerges through the reform of educational curricula and the introduction of penitential or memorial rituals aimed at converting non-indigenous people, who are invited to curse the guilty West and be reborn through contact with the "magico-spiritual" practices of the indigenous world. Decolonization aspires to renew knowledge, now defined by the requirement of equality between indigenous epistemologies and those with which Western science has wrongly been content. Like Warren, Moreau sees in this project a return to the naive idea that science proceeds from ethnocultural characteristics or a doctrine. Moreover, such a vision harks back to the old German Romanticism, for which the Volksgeist , the spirit of the people, is rooted in ancestral soil. The literature on Indigenous decolonization is replete with lexical incantations and rejects Western science by emphasizing the invisible world and spirituality that science has supposedly discredited. This, Moreau argues, flirts with mysticism and an irrationalism that embraces the relativistic and communitarian anti-rationalism of the anti-Enlightenment. Finally, after this ascent toward purification and equalization, comes the revolution . Everything is thrown into disarray: capitalism, the electoral system—everything must be overturned, so much so that the Indigenous person ends up embodying, in the eyes of a small elite of non-Indigenous people educated in a hothouse environment, the noble savage savior under whose patronage Canada, thoroughly re-educated, will enter a "state of grace."

Another world, no less astonishing, is that of EDI, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (DEI in France) measures, applied almost systematically in higher education in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada, often without prior examination of their moral and scientific foundations. Philosophy professor Yannick Lacroix conducts this examination in a text that x-rays the flaws on which these shaky edifices rest. EDI measures, observes Lacroix, set out a moral injunction according to which society must achieve "proportional representation" of groups in all spheres of activity, so that any numerical deviation from this representation will be presumed to be the effect of prejudice, discrimination, and unfair obstacles and will have to be corrected by radical means, contrary to the liberal vision of justice. However, this injunction wrongly assumes that any underrepresentation of a group is automatically caused by discrimination, obscuring other explanatory factors, often unrelated to discrimination, which play a role in the condition of a social group. Next, EDI measures rely on the indiscernible notion of "implicit bias," which several researchers claim to be able to detect using the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which has produced inconclusive and overinterpreted results, to the point that the test designer had to backtrack. Many even admit that we do not know what this test measures exactly. It would record, at best, artificially induced mental "biases," but causally inert on the behavior of subjects subjected to this type of experiment. The fact remains that the promoters of EDI programs try to cover up these deficiencies with unfalsifiable approximations and incantations.

EDI measures also defend a flawed conception of justice, according to Lacroix. Indeed, they assume that the right to redress for discrimination suffered by one person is automatically transferable to another person, or even to a group of individuals, as long as they all belong to the same social category, even if they are from different eras. This way of thinking breaks with the liberal vision of justice, which focuses on individual and past redress of injustices. Although John Rawls did not address such a subject in his work, Lacroix believes he would not have endorsed such a vision of fairness, which "dilutes the individual within the group" and believes it can redress past injustices through compensatory discrimination offered to groups defined solely by their abstract membership in a socio-ethnic category. EDI measures thus disseminate "a deadly 'critical' ideology that prioritizes theory over reality and the specimen over the individual." "Woe to the recalcitrant, they must be excluded or re-educated, as recommended by an action plan from Laval University cited by Lacroix.

However, the proven influence of identity-based ideologies on higher education cannot be understood without acknowledging that they have succeeded in colonizing a discipline without which their pronouncements would remain a dead letter: law. The American political scientist Yascha Mounk had already observed, in *The Identity Trap *, that several American legal scholars had played a decisive role in articulating the key concepts and slogans of identity-based progressivism in his country. Law professor Stéphane Sérafin takes this reflection even further, showing how his discipline, at least in North America, has abandoned the transmission of classical legal principles to establish itself as an "instrument of social transformation." In fact, for several decades, law has been undergoing an "epistemic crisis" that calls into question its autonomy as a field of knowledge and exposes it to militant doctrines, including, more recently, the identity movement, which has contributed to dissolving certain fundamental legal concepts.

This undermining process began with the legal realism movement , which originated in the United States and spread to Canada, reaching even the highest levels of the judiciary. It was subsequently continued by Critical Legal Studies (CLS), which views the law as a fabric of malleable and arbitrary constructs serving the dominant class. CLS has permeated American (and English Canadian) law schools and informed the work of Catharine MacKinnon on sexual harassment of women in the workplace and that of Kimberlé Crenshaw, who developed the intersectional framework for legal analysis. MacKinnon revolutionized the notion of civil litigation, which no longer aims to redress harm suffered by a plaintiff based on a fault attributed to a defendant. Instead, this recourse now results in social redress, undertaken by a litigant on behalf of a class of individuals—such as women—regardless of personal fault, since the goal is to correct discrimination whose origin is "institutional" or "systemic." If justice once consisted of "giving each their due," according to Ulpian's formula, now it is essential to allocate each group its share of the pie. Crenshaw, as Sérafin shows, took up the torch of the CLS (Critical Social Law) and then focused her work on race. Thanks to the concept of intersectionality, the legal scholar makes it conceivable that the same individual can be at the center of several sources of oppression and can therefore accumulate multiple grievances, as evidenced by their subjective experience. The theories of MacKinnon and Crenshaw combine to reduce justice to the sole perspective of the plaintiff—that of the defendant being obscured—and to index harm and its redress solely to membership in an abstract "group." The prevalence of these theories in North American law faculties (and to a lesser extent in Quebec) illustrates the depth of the intellectual crisis affecting these faculties, where positivism, in decline, struggles to maintain a discipline distinct from the social sciences in terms of its body of study and methodology. Capitalizing on the weaknesses of an already disoriented discipline, identity-based discourse has been able to establish itself, providing researchers with new credentials and lawyers with additional career opportunities, particularly in the civil service, NGOs, and universities whose law faculties, Sérafin notes, proclaim their mission to achieve “social justice.” In Canada, these faculties have endorsed and disseminated the ideological framework of Education, Diversity and Indigenization (EDI) imposed by Justin Trudeau’s government after its election in 2015 and have supported projects aimed at decolonizing and indigenizing legal education.

The university, between management and militant racketeering

If, according to Sérafin, Canadian law faculties now live in symbiosis with the discourse of the "identity left," one can also see at work, in Arnaud Bernadet's view, a formidable managerial discourse relayed by university administrations, research funding bodies, and government ministries, with which the radical academicisms recognizable by their now ubiquitous newspeak harmonize seamlessly. In short, the EDI newspeak adopts a clientelist "entrepreneurial framework" embedded in the dematerialized, service-oriented economy. The EDI programs and training sector has spawned a lucrative industry ($9,2 billion in 2022 for the United States). This entrepreneurial model was able to rely both on state action—specifically, the Canadian federal government, which, following the 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum, decided to secure the ideological loyalty of universities through targeted grant programs—and on the demands for social change championed by woke movements . Bernadet's thesis is that, however unstable the relationship between the state, the market, and social struggles may seem, it is through a managerial approach based on governance that universities reconcile the demands of each, aligning their organizations with a results-driven cognitive capitalism. Bernadet notes that management studies have incorporated the concepts of inclusion and identity-based belonging, transforming them into drivers of positive organizational change, guided by expert consultants. According to the author, studies promoting affirmative action programs and inclusive management contain serious shortcomings: weak empirical support, circular reasoning, and the essentialization of identities. The exaltation of ethnoracial difference, however, comes at the expense of socioeconomic equality and most often benefits white elites and professional managers. Furthermore, this managerial culture attacks the very principles that constitute the university. It diminishes the role of faculty collegiality in university governance in favor of a sprawling internal bureaucracy. It limits departmental autonomy, notably by lowering the requirements for hiring professors. Finally, the "neo-management of inclusion" has short-circuited the rational scientific debate around which the institution is supposed to foster a community dedicated to research. There is a real risk that the inclusive excellence obsessively enshrined in EDI policies will serve an elitist and inefficient form of justice.

Like Bernadet, political scientist François Charbonneau studies the reasons for the success of the EDI movement, which has taken over North American universities. This movement acts like a "pyromaniac firefighter," parasitizing institutions by sparking fires that only it claims can extinguish. As a result, being both the poison and the antidote, it takes advantage of every crisis that shakes the educational world to strengthen its empire. Charbonneau first puts forward a dozen reasons why this movement should be fought. Broadly speaking, he accuses it of "operating like a sect" which, hostile to the achievements of liberal modernity and science, propagates a discourse that absolutizes the victim and subjective feelings. Devoid of any democratic legitimacy, this movement subjects the university to moral and censorial discipline, even if it means resorting to reprehensible means such as harassment, intimidation, discrimination, and the imposition of patronizing training. But how can we explain the movement's dazzling success? According to Charbonneau, this success is paradoxically a sign that Western societies have ceased to be indifferent to the issues of racism and other forms of "exclusion," and that the EDI movement quickly managed to stand out through its solutions to real social concerns. The EDI movement then spread through processes external to the university, notably thanks to social networks, which have given unprecedented scope to identity-based causes and encouraged "virtuous one-upmanship" among activists. The polarization of American political debates since Donald Trump's first election and the mercantilist appropriation of EDI doctrines by big business have provided them with other impetus.

However, we must also examine the modus operandi of this movement, which draws on the tactics of critical race theorists. These theorists teach that control of an institution is all the more easily gained when it is in crisis, whether real or fabricated. Indeed, a scandal erupts, and the institution is accused of being responsible, of having, for example, allowed a "racist" incident. The institution is then demanded to be reformed, in accordance with the activist canon. If the institution refuses to admit its wrongdoing, it is relentlessly bombarded with reproaches until it capitulates, targeting its leaders if necessary. In short, it is a form of institutional extortion, a highly publicized form of moral blackmail. It is through this method that the EDI movement has managed to absorb universities and businesses, and to turn each new crisis to its advantage in order to promote its solutions. In Charbonneau's view, the Lieutenant-Duval affair "perfectly illustrates how" this movement can overwhelm an institution. This crisis led the University of Ottawa not to suspend its employment equity measures, but rather to strengthen them. The union and the administration even colluded to strip professors of their voting rights in their departmental assemblies if they refused to attend employment equity training. Ultimately, Charbonneau doesn't see how universities, if they continue to be exploited in this way, can maintain the trust of the societies they are supposed to educate intelligently. "And the backlash is likely to be painful," he adds, referring to the anti- woke legislation applied to American universities.

In short, once you have read this necessary work which frees up academic discourse, you ask yourself a simple question: have universities lost their minds?