THE BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF THE UNIVERSITY

A group of University of British Columbia professors say their administration is taking too many political stances and should commit to institutional neutrality. They're going to court to prove it.

- BY SIMON LEWSEN

IN EARLY 2020, AS THE WORLD was shutting down, the Xwi7xwa Library at the University of British Columbia released a manual for instructors who were moving classes online. It mainly contained material you'd expect to see: links to digitized books and guides to remote-teaching strategies. It ended with suggestions for giving virtual land acknowledgments, which it defined as “respectful, yet political” declarations recognizing “the colonial context of the Indigenous territory/territories where a gathering is taking place.”

For years, land acknowledgements have been a part of the ceremonial architecture of campus life. And for many academics, they're uncontroversial. Their purpose is to highlight a discomfiting reality: Canada, the model liberal nation, was built on a legacy of violent dispossession. This fact feels especially salient at UBC, where the main Vancouver campus is on Musqueam territory and the satellite Okanagan campus is on the home of the Syilx people. But a smaller cohort of academics have long viewed land acknowledgements as virtue signalling, a cheap way for speakers to shore up their progressive bona fides without improving Indigenous people’s lives.