Academic (Un)Freedom in Nova Scotia: Signalling the Need for Dissent

Capital increasingly seeks to control what can be done or said on university campuses, and its coercive acts have been hard to miss recently, particularly in the United States. In Nova Scotia, the Progressive Conservatives’ antilabour legislation targetting workers within the university sector coerces compliance, and does not hide the fact that university teaching and research priorities, and the governance of all postsecondary institutions must align with the social and political-economic objectives of the state—and capital. Although passive compliance is expected, workers, and those in solidarity with them, always have the capacity for resistance and to transform their places of work into havens for dissent.