Job candidates required to describe how they would advance “decolonization.” A video that suggests starting meetings by identifying oneself as a “settler” on unceded native lands. A political scientist who says he was instructed to teach game theory “from an Indigenous perspective.”

Each, a practice at the University of British Columbia, is now evidence in a lawsuit brought against the school by a group of professors who claim such social-justice efforts violate a provincial law requiring universities to stay out of politics.

The suit, filed last spring and currently under review by the Supreme Court of British Columbia, has set off a major legal and cultural battle at one of Canada’s top universities, in which each side accuses the other of trying to push an activist political agenda in the name of free speech.

The case underscores how Trump-era opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts has spread north to Canada. But more than a snow-covered battlefield in the culture war, the suit raises important questions about when public speech in a democratic society is political.

The professors who petitioned the court say the university’s measures promote a campus culture that punishes contrarian ideas and pressures academics to endorse progressive political positions with which they may disagree. They seek to ban the university from a broad range of actions that include requiring job applicants to commit to diversity principles; and the making of so-called land acknowledgments, ceremonial statements which often precede public events and that note Canada is the ancestral land of Indigenous people.

The professors’ case hinges on a decades-old provincial law, called the University Act, which mandates that universities be “nonsectarian and nonpolitical in principle.” But the law does little to clarify the bigger question before the court: What counts as political?

“In recent years, university administrators have given in to the calls to take political positions,” said Josh Dehaas, a lawyer for the Canadian Constitution Foundation, a libertarian organization, who is representing the professors suing the university. “In this particular era, the pressure they have given into is often progressive causes.” Before 2020, he added, an accomplished academic did not need “to commit to DEI principles to become a professor at UBC.”

The four professors who brought the lawsuit declined to speak on the record while the case is under review by the court.

In a brief submitted to the court, the university argued the professors have not shown proof of harm to their careers or liberties, and denied that either land acknowledgments or DEI policies constitute “political activity” under the law.

Land acknowledgments, the university says, reflect a “legal fact” rather than a political belief — the property occupied by the university was never ceded via treaty by the original Indigenous occupants. Furthermore, it says, no one on campus is mandated to make such pronouncements.

The university also says written statements by job applicants about their commitments to DEI are not used as “screening tools.” However, it adds, those statements can be used to disqualify a candidate who fails to uphold its principles.

The University of British Columbia and its lawyers declined requests for comment, referring The New York Times to its response filed with the court.

Several policy advocacy groups, including the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, have filed or plan to file opinions with the court, arguing the case ignores historical realities and is little more than an attempt to undermine diversity.

“It’s a perversion of free expression to say by limiting expression, you’re expanding it,” said Vibert Jack, the litigation director at the BCCLA.

The four professors bringing the suit have years of teaching experience at the university and include instructors of philosophy, political science and English. In hundreds of pages of affidavit material reviewed by the Times, the group portrays a university climate in which speaking out against left-wing positions risks professional consequences.

“When people in charge of the hiring, firing and promotions are taking any side, that infringes on academic freedom,” Dehaas said. “The pressures are so strong that they become de facto mandatory.”

The university has long been at the forefront of the movement to support the inherent rights of Canada’s Indigenous people. The Vancouver campus is home to the Xwi7xwa Library for Indigenous studies, which according to the school’s website is “located on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people.”

Of the university’s 72,692 students across two campuses in Vancouver and Okanagan, 2,500 identify as Indigenous, according to the academy’s latest enrollment report. And the leaders of another local tribe, the Sylix nation, condemned the lawsuit as regressive and insulting.

“The recognition of unceded Sylix Okanagan land is not a political maneuver; it is an acknowledgment of historical truths and legal realities. Attempts to silence these acknowledgments are attempts to erase Sylix Okanagan presence and rights,” wrote Chief Clarence Louie in an open letter.

Andrew Irvine, a philosophy professor at the university’s Okanagan campus, who is among those suing the school, has in his public writings about academic freedom taken positions that critics say trivializes the history of Indigenous people and racism.

In response to such criticism Irvine wrote in a National Post article that the response from Indigenous groups mischaracterized his position.

He said the professors take no view on land acknowledgments other than that they are political in nature, and that “our case in no way attempts to override or diminish Indigenous rights.”

—

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Pranav Baskar/Alana Paterson
c.2026 The New York Times Company