Freedom to peacefully disagree under attack, says UWI Cave Hill principal
Published:Wednesday | July 9, 2025 | 12:06 AMCarl Gilchrist/Gleaner Writer
Professor Clive Landis, pro vice-chancellor and principal of The University of the West Indies (UWI), Cave Hill, has warned that the freedom to disagree peacefully is under threat.
Speaking at the UWI Vice-Chancellor’s Forum on ‘Academic Freedom, Sustainable Development, and the Role of the University’, led by Professor Aldrie Henry-Lee, Landis emphasised academic freedom as a cornerstone of peace.
“I believe that academic freedom is actually the foundational pillar of peace within a country,” Landis asserted. “So there are certain freedoms that you need to have a peaceful society. You need to have, obviously, freedom from bondage of any kind, you need the freedom to express yourself, which, of course, includes the ballot box, but a very important freedom is the freedom to disagree with someone in a peaceful manner, and, really, there can be no peace without these three freedoms.
“So the freedom to disagree with someone in a peaceful manner is, perhaps, under greatest attack right now in the area of social media, where you have this sort of toxic mix of online hate speech, trolling, cyberbullying, fake news, and censorship, which is eroding this freedom,” Landis continued.
In clarifying, Landis said as a community of academic scholars, they were not averse to some disagreement as this remained a pillar of academia.
“Disagreement is, in fact, a central part of knowledge creation as scholars and students test the validity of each other’s assumptions and hypotheses. The freedom to disagree is a fundamental pillar of academia. So I think the university actually has a key role to play in society in promoting peace.”
Landis said the UWI needs to be able to show and demonstrate how critical discourse is conducted in a respectful manner for the advancement of knowledge and social enlightenment.
IMPORTANCE OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM
“It’s really hard to overstate how important academic freedom is,” the professor said.
The forum included global scholars, among them psychologist Dr Leahcim Semaj, who called for deeper efforts to achieve academic freedom in Jamaica. He highlighted the role of universities in community engagement, noting that academic pursuit must be grounded in lived experience.
He suggested that a university-community partnership should be a straightforward deal.
“You came out of the ground just like diamond and gold, so you have a responsibility to put something back in the ground first and foremost, so the partnership between the town and the ground was absolutely important. University and scholars provide technical, intellectual, academic pursuit with knowledge and truth, but it must be grounded in practical experience, lived reality,” he said.
Semaj explained his own shift from academia to community outreach. After leaving the university, he built a sound system called Judgment and started a regular Friday night dance at his home, using music to spark dialogue.
“We’d build the dance around one theme for the night. Let’s say the theme was ‘In Praise of Black Women’. Every song played was around the theme, and between 12 and 1 a.m., we would stop the music and we invite everybody, let’s discuss the topic, [and] people started coming to the dance for the reasoning,” he disclosed.
He emphasised that scholars, especially in post-colonial societies, have a duty beyond neutrality. “Neutrality means you’ve sided with the oppression of your people, so we have work to do. We’re not free yet.”
Professor Aldrie Henry-Lee called the discussion “critically timely”, citing the global decline in universities due to financial stress, falling enrolment, and the COVID-19 pandemic. She noted that while global university enrolment is around 264 million, many institutions have merged or shut down in the last five years.
She said that while statistics vary, the estimate was that there are about 25,000 to 50,000 universities worldwide.
The UWI, drawing students from over 80 countries, has approximately 50,000 students across its five Caribbean campuses located in Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, and Trinidad and Tobago.