Trump asked universities to change their policies or face refunds. Will Poilievre do the same thing?

U.S. President Donald Trump has been threatening to cancel some college funding, similar to the promise of post-campus schools in Canada unless they accept his request for ideological change.

But so far, the conservative leader’s details have scarce the actions he may have taken.

Trump’s demands sparked condemnation of interventions over academic freedom, which he made headlines this week after the White House said it would freeze more than $2.2 billion in U.S. grants and $60 million in contracts with Harvard.

This comes after Harvard President Alan Gerber refused to comply with the White House request, saying in a letter that the university “will not give up its independence or give up its constitutional rights.”

Meanwhile, Poilievre also threatens to see colleges as ideological tendencies. On Christmas Eve Tweets on X (formerly Twitter), Poilievre said he would “refund and fight anti-Semitism.”

“End awakening ideology”

The tweet is related to his telephone interview with Winnipegjewishreview.com, which he was cited that he would not tolerate and would return “all people with a wake-up anti-Semitic agenda,” including universities that receive federal funding and all federally funded museums.

He reiterated a similar commitment when he released the Quebec platform on March 26, saying the Conservative government would “end the imposition of awakening ideology in the federal civil service and allocate federal funds for university research.”

The commitment prompted the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) to issue a statement “expressing alerts” that promises Poilievre to intervene in allocating federal research funding.

“Worried that leaders of a Canadian party will try to decide how to grant research funding,” said David Robinson, executive director of CAUT. “We have seen the impact of this political intervention south of the border, with the Trump administration launching a full-scale attack on universities and the scientific community. This American-style cultural war has no place in Canada.”

Starting with Columbia University, the Trump administration has denounced the U.S. handling of the Prestin student protest movement, which in turn caused a handling of the campus last year after a Hamas-led attack within Israel and subsequent Israeli attacks.

Trump called the protests anti-American and anti-Semitic, accusing universities of peddling Marxism and a “radical left” ideology and pledging to end federal grants and contracts for universities that disagree with their administration’s request.

On April 3, the White House released a list of requirements for Harvard University, which included a ban on masks, restrictions on campus protests and a review of bias from academic departments. About a week later, these requirements expanded to include leadership reforms, changes in admissions policy, and university recognition of certain student organizations.

The school’s principal said Harvard had carried out extensive reforms to address anti-Semitism, but many of the government’s requirements had nothing to do with anti-Semitism, but instead attempted to regulate the “intellectual conditions” at Harvard.

The root of “wake up”

Patrick McCurdy, associate professor of communications at the University of Ottawa, said that while Poilievre has not released any details about its proposed plan, he still appears to be learning lessons from their grants from the United States.

“I’ll take him seriously in the way he doubles down and take his threat to CBC’s funding seriously,” McCarthy said. “This is something people should pay attention to.”

McCurdy is also part of a study that examines the evolution of anti-awakening discourse in the internal debate of the House of Commons from 2019 to 2023.

Their inspection of Hansard Records shows that in 2019, only two mentioned the term “Wake”. Their study found that by 2023, the use of the word has increased to 63 times, while Poilievre was responsible for 33 instances of the year.

As McCurdy pointed out in a recent article, the term “Woke” is rooted in African-American experiences of racial violence, initially meaning to be aware of racial injustice. Progressives then adopted it to cover wider social injustice related to feminists, LGBTQ+ and crossover issues, he said.

However, the term has since been used as a derogatory term to target some people promoting such social justice issues and has been accused of being fixed or authoritarian on issues including identity politics and equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) policies.

McCurdy’s article titled ” Pierre Poilievre“He believes that his policy commitments, such as funding for ideological funds, are only part of a exploitative strategy that aims to inspire fear and resentment, split internally and legitimize extreme positions in mainstream politics.”

“Threat to academic freedom”

“I’m interested in reading how he put this out… [and] “This is how it is armed against research by researchers, scholars and universities. It is undoubtedly a threat to academic freedom,” McCarthy told CBC News in a telephone interview.

In the past, conservatives talked about granting funds to colleges in campus policies. During his leadership campaign in 2017, Andrew Scheer said he would draw federal funds from universities that failed to maintain freedom of speech, “close debates and can’t stand a different perspective.”

This is a response to the refusal of opposition to abortion and anti-Israel incidents following the outbreak of protests.

Poilievre will then receive a similar commitment in his 2022 leadership campaign, saying that if universities want to retain their federal research grants, they will need to protect academic freedom and ensure free speech on campus. He also said he would appoint a “guardian of free speech” to ensure that the university follows these principles.

As for his current policy commitments, the Conservatives did not answer questions from CBC News, asking for more details.

Stéphane Sérafin, an assistant professor of law at the University of Ottawa, believes that awakening ideology is a problem for the university, saying that the free government has very positive ideological requirements for research, including the EDI program.

But he said he wasn’t sure what Poilievre was thinking about.

“I think at least they want to remove the EDI requirements that have been added to these research funds. Besides that, I can only speculate.”

Sérafin questioned whether the Conservative government would increase requirements that meet its ideological preferences or simply provide cuts for universities.

“He wants to refund all the funds, or just target specific procedures?” Sérafin asked Poilievre’s intentions.

“He never explicitly stipulated a plan for how to do that,” he said. “It’s like one of the problems with the devil in the details.”