What Went Wrong with Universities and Free Speech?

With UBCO Associate Vice President of University Relations Marten Youssef

Universities are supposed to be places where truth is pursued — where ideas get tested, evidence matters, and people can disagree without fear. They’re meant to be arenas where society’s hardest questions can be asked out loud, not just whispered in private.

But something has shifted.

More and more Canadians look at universities and don’t see neutral arenas for inquiry. They see institutions that pick sides, police language, and create incentives for people to stay quiet rather than speak honestly.

In my conversation with Marten Youssef, Associate Vice President of University Relations at UBC Okanagan, we tried to name what happened — and what it would take to reverse it.

The Real Problem: Trust Collapse and Self-Censorship

Marten’s starting point was that this isn’t only about universities. Campuses are reflecting a broader institutional crisis. As he put it, “trust across so many different institutions is at an all-time… low.” When that happens, it’s not just that people disagree — it’s that they stop believing the referees are fair. And then every institution becomes a target.

Marten described it clearly: “the same mechanisms that once helped… cool the conflicts in our society are now the same ones… being blamed for exacerbating it.” That line stuck with me because it captures the feeling of the moment. We used to lean on institutions to help sort things out. Now we blame those same institutions for making things worse.

And as trust falls, communication breaks down. Marten framed polarization as, at its root, a communications failure — not just between “left” and “right,” but between neighbors, colleagues, and communities. If you can’t talk, you can’t correct. If you can’t correct, small fractures turn into permanent fault lines.

But what really drives this moment isn’t only distrust. It’s self-censorship.

Marten made an important distinction: the biggest threat to free expression today isn’t always a formal ban or a clear policy. It’s internal. In his words, “the worst kind of all… is the kind that we impose on ourselves.” And it doesn’t just change what we say in public. “It doesn’t just alter what we say, it affects and warps the way we think.”

That’s the part people don’t want to admit: self-censorship becomes a habit. And once it becomes a habit, a society loses the ability to deal with reality honestly.

You get private truth and public performance.

Where Universities Went Off Track: Pressure to Take Sides

Marten also offered a useful diagnosis of Canadian culture itself. Canada is proud of tolerance — and for good reason. But he argued we quietly confused tolerance with avoidance. He described the classic Canadian rule: “don’t talk politics and don’t talk religion.”

That approach works when times are stable. But over time, it delays the hard conversations that keep society healthy. Disagreement doesn’t disappear — it accumulates. It moves into group chats. It gets outsourced to online outrage. It turns into tribal identity.

And then universities, like everything else, face pressure to declare where they stand.

Marten noted that institutions — universities, banks, even coffee shops — experienced “immense pressure… to articulate their position on any given topic.” At first glance, that can feel like responsiveness. It can feel like leadership. But the cost is real: once a university is perceived as taking a stance on contested issues, it stops being trusted as a forum for disagreement — especially by people who don’t share the stance.

And that’s where a lot of the resentment comes from. It’s not only “I disagree.” It’s “I don’t trust you to host the disagreement fairly.”

This is why Marten kept returning to the concept of neutrality. He argued that universities need it because “institutional neutrality… allows genuine intellectual disagreement to exist.” And he clarified what neutrality is not: “neutrality doesn’t mean having no values.” It means the institution shouldn’t impose one set of values as official truth. As he put it, “it convenes, it doesn’t necessarily decide what right and wrong is.”

That distinction matters.

A university doesn’t have to be morally empty to be neutral. But it should be humble enough to recognize that on many contested questions, its job isn’t to announce the answer — it’s to host the process of testing ideas.

When universities forget that role, they start joining the argument instead of facilitating it. And when that happens, speech narrows even if no rule changes on paper.

The Fix: Debate, Courage, and Civil Discourse

So what restores trust?

Marten’s answer wasn’t “more statements” or “more training” or “more committees.” It was something more basic: rebuild the mechanisms that allow a society to disagree without rupture.

That’s why he believes structured debate matters. “Debates… are the antidote to our polarization,” he said — not debate as entertainment, but debate that forces ideas to meet their strongest opposition in a serious setting. Done properly, “they subject ideas to scrutiny,” and “test our convictions against evidence.”

That matters because most people don’t actually encounter opposing arguments in full form anymore. They encounter caricatures. They encounter slogans. They encounter the most extreme version of the other side — curated by algorithms.

Debate — real debate — interrupts that cycle.

It’s also a signal: this institution is confident enough to host disagreement. It trusts adults to hear arguments they don’t like. It trusts citizens to wrestle with complexity.

But debate requires something else that we’ve been losing: courage.

I asked Marten directly about courage, because universities often fold under pressure — protests, petitions, outrage cycles, internal risk aversion. He didn’t hesitate: “courage has a lot to do with it.” And then he named the temptation that explains so many recent failures: “there is a tendency to stop hosting the conversation and to start joining it.”

Once a university joins the contest, it stops being the arena. And once it stops being the arena, it loses the very function that makes it valuable to society in the first place.

The way back isn’t slogans or silence. It’s rebuilding the space for principled disagreement — and creating platforms where Canadians can argue in good faith, in public, on the hardest issues.

As Marten put it, “the alternative to us actually talking to each other is not pretty.”