Alberta’s conservative government has been accused of engineering the eviction of the leadership of Canada’s premier online university, headlining a campaign of political intrusion into higher education that is scaring local academics and potentially leaving the nation without robust remote teaching alternatives.

The United Conservative Party, now led by premier Danielle Smith, has been waging a running battle to force the leadership and staff of Athabasca University to live in the institution’s far-flung hometown, nearly two hours north of Edmonton, as a way of demonstrating its commitment to rural voters.

That fight came to a head with the government overhauling and expanding the university’s formerly 17-member board of governors, which then fired the institution’s president, Peter Scott, a vocal opponent of the relocation mandate.

Athabasca University was created in 1970 and quickly became a pioneer in distance education and online instruction. It now has more than 43,000 students across all Canadian provinces and territories. The overwhelming number of those students live in urban environments, and the university has become an especially valuable option for those whose personal circumstances or physical conditions don’t allow them to attend classes in person, said Karen Fletcher, the president of Athabasca’s students’ union.

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The back-country town of Athabasca, meanwhile, has fewer than 3,000 residents, and the requirement for leadership and staff to live there makes no sense and is probably illegal, said one of the displaced Athabasca board members, Sir John Daniel, an online education veteran who previously led Laurentian University and the UK’s Open University.

The conservative party campaign against Professor Scott was carried out “in the most brutal way”, Sir John said. The then-president’s wife died over the Christmas holiday while the newly installed board leadership was secretly working to replace him. “He was actually in Australia, at her funeral, when he got a one-minute call from the chair of the Athabasca board” telling him he was fired, Sir John said.

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The new Athabasca board hired Professor Scott’s replacement, Alex Clark, without even consulting some of its own members, including Ms Fletcher, a student representative. “This is also concerning, because if you don’t do things right, what else is going on?” she said. “When you start cutting corners, in terms of honesty and openness and accountability, that opens the door for a variety of other abuses.”

Alongside its overhaul of Athabasca University, the minister responsible for higher education, Demetrios Nicolaides, has ordered all of Alberta’s universities to give his government annual reports on their efforts to “protect free speech” on campus, mirroring conservative tactics in the US aimed at subsidising right-wing viewpoints in academia. In explaining the mandate, the minister cited a recent incident in which the University of Lethbridge allowed Frances Widdowson – a former associate professor at Mount Royal University fired after criticising concepts of racial equity – to address a class, but then resisted providing her a wider public forum on campus.

The government also seems to have been improperly interfering in labour negotiations, with contract talks across Alberta marked by multiple incidents of institutional negotiators apparently receiving direct guidance from provincial officials, said Davina Bhandar, an assistant professor of political science at Athabasca University who serves in the leadership of the Athabasca University Faculty Association.

“Alberta is by far the most controlling province in Canada, as far as higher education is concerned,” Sir John said.

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And nationwide, he said, Canada has other universities with online teaching operations, but none with large-scale open-access formats that aim to serve lower-income and disadvantaged students. “I don’t think there’s anyone really seriously thinking about that yet,” Sir John said.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com