The Universities Art Association of Canada is a professional association of university and college academic faculty members, and independent practitioners engaged in scholarly discourse. Only members of UAAC-AAUC may present papers in conference sessions. Non-members who propose papers will be required to become members and register for the conference in the event that their proposals are accepted (though membership is not required in order to submit an abstract).

Title: Academic Freedom, Artistic Freedom and Academic Unions in Canada.

Session Chair: Charles Reeve

Email address: writingbyartistsgmail.com

Beneath Canadian academe’s placid surface lies a cauldron of controversy that occasionally boils over. And, while these eruptions affect all disciplines, they attract exceptional publicity when they concern visual art.

Sometimes—Capilano University destroying George Rammell’s Blathering on in Krisendom—the suppression affects artistic practice. Other times—OCAD suspending instructors after a student planted a fake bomb at the Royal Ontario Museum—the chill affects teaching. But two things persist: administrators assume that, because art can attract more publicity than other endeavours, it deserves less academic freedom; and the above incidents occurred in the last 15 years, as academic unionization exploded.

This convergence prompts many questions: does the growth of academic unions link causally to the stifling of artist freedom on campus? What is this relationship’s history? What is its future? This panel welcomes discussions of these issues pertaining to all forms of art and design practice in the academic context (e.g. including literature, film, theatre, architecture, etc.) across any or all three axes of academic freedom: freedom of creative practice/scholarship; freedom of teaching; freedom of institutional criticism.