September 2001
The annual general meeting,
held at the University of Western Ontario, was attended by 31 people, including
a representative from the National Association of Scholars. Twenty-three
members stayed for the business meeting. We thank Daniella Chirila, our
SAFS secretary, for coordinating the conference, including arranging morning
coffee and lunch, and booking the meeting rooms.
A) In my opening remarks,
I noted that SAFS had a very good year. First, we received a grant from
the Donner Canadian Foundation for a legal defence fund. Subsequently,
we engaged Lerner and Associates, a London, Ontario law firm, to investigate
the legal issues in pursuing cases involving preferential hiring. We hope
that we will be able to bring a test case forward in the near future. We
are grateful to the Donner Canadian Foundation for their support.
Second, we took action in
six cases by writing to university presidents and other senior administrators,
when we believed that an individual’s academic freedom or the merit principle
was violated. Copies of our letters, and responses to them, are posted
on our website, and several of these have also been published in our Newsletters.
It’s always hard to gauge the effect of our involvement, but we do make
our concerns known to university administrators and publicize the (possible)
offenses on our website, Newsletter, and sometimes in the media.
Third, shortly before the
annual meeting, the Ontario Human Rights Commission turned down my final
appeal of their earlier decision not to hear my complaint against Wilfrid
Laurier University for sex discrimination against men in faculty hiring.
Recall that WLU’s psychology department had advertised in July 1999 for
a woman-only position. The Commission decided that I did not have legal
standing to make the complaint. Their ruling explicitly did not comment
on the substance of my complaint that WLU had acted illegally. Though the
WLU incident did not achieve the desired legal end, the publicity surrounding
the case led to extensive media coverage throughout Canada, and WLU’s psychology
department voted to end woman-only advertising.
Fourth, we have completely
revamped the SAFS website. Members are encouraged to examine the site for
the latest information on our activities. We welcome your comments. We
are considering developing the capability to allow new or renewing members
to pay their dues by credit card on the website.
B) The winner of this year’s
Furedy Award for Academic Freedom was Julie Bosman, editor-in-chief of
The Badger Herald, the student newspaper of the University of Wisconsin,
Madison. Because Julie was graduating from university on the same day as
our AGM, Doreen Kimura accepted the award for her. Christine Furedy made
the presentation of the award. (See her remarks while presenting the award
on page 6).
C) The formal morning session
was a lively panel discussion entitled “SAFS’ role in defending academic
freedom” consisting of brief presentations by John Furedy, Clive Seligman,
Murray Miles, and Chris Furedy, followed by comments and questions from
the audience. The purpose of the panel session was to highlight the factors
that board members consider (or ought to consider) in deciding whether
SAFS should intervene in particular cases. Given that SAFS’ resources of
people, time, and money are limited, how can we best defend our principles,
recognizing that we can’t get involved with every potentially appropriate
case?
In his presentation, John
Furedy tried to categorize the types of reasons that board members offered
when debating whether SAFS should intervene in a case. He suggested three
classes of criteria were frequently mentioned, varying in persuasiveness
and legitimacy: 1) Absolute criteria, e.g., violation of one of
SAFS’ principles, and institutional wrongdoing; 2) Continua of considerations,
e.g., clarity and understandability of the issue to laypeople, whether
the case is Canadian, generality of implications, gravity of harm, and
what other academic bodies are doing; 3) Irrelevant factors, e.g.,
validity of opinions being advanced, academic eminence of the individual
seeking help, and whether the individual is active in his/her own defence.
Clive Seligman approached
the problem from the opposite direction. Instead of setting out criteria
for involvement ahead of time, he tried to infer, from the characteristics
of the recent cases SAFS has taken on, what criteria seemed to be relevant.
Two dimensions seemed plausible to describe the cases. The first dimension
dealt with leadership. For some cases, SAFS was the first (or only) group
to defend the individual, but at other times SAFS added its voice to the
ongoing efforts of others. The second dimension dealt with justice. In
some cases, it seemed that SAFS’ actions could lead to a restoration of
justice. However, in other cases, it seemed unlikely that SAFS could affect
the individual’s outcome, but that our efforts to publicize the case could
have an educative function that might deter future abuses. Murray Miles
then focused on two cases that the board discussed at length, one that
was taken up and one that was not. The first case reviewed concerned Simon
Fraser University, which ultimately turned down a recommendation from its
Humanities Faculty to award a distinguished chair to David Noble. There
were charges that the appointment was denied because of Dr. Noble’s political
views. The university denied the charge and claimed there were serious
problems with the hiring process. The second case reviewed concerned Denise
Reaume, a law professor at the University of Toronto, who was publicly
named as a subject of an investigation by the Law School. The incident
involved the presentation of inflated grades by some first year law students
to law firms for potential summer employment. It was alleged that Professor
Reaume might have played a role in the students’ actions. Ultimately, the
university exonerated, compensated, and apol-ogized to her.
In both cases, opinion on
the board was split as to whether we had enough information to make an
informed decision on the main charges. In Reaume’s case, we decided to
wait for the outcome of the U of T investigation. However, we sent a letter
to SFU expressing concern that agents of the university were inquiring
of Noble’s referees whether he could be counted on to represent the university’s
views. Clearly this was wrong, regardless of the main allegations.
Chris Furedy commented briefly
on the panel discussion so far, and pointed out that SAFS does not involve
itself in curriculum issues as does the National Association of Scholars,
for example. We have tended to concern ourselves with abuses of scholarship
that involve preferential hiring or questionable learning disability programs,
but have not focused on the scholarly merit of particular courses or programs.
Though several members of the audience felt we should address these latter
issues, the position of the board has been that questions of academic content
should be decided by experts in the relevant discipline and that SAFS’
focus should remain on process. However, individuals with relevant expertise
who wanted to pursue projects relating to academic standards were encouraged
to do so.
D) Nancy Innis introduced
our featured speaker, Margaret Wente, columnist for the Globe and Mail.
Wente gave an interesting talk on the media’s role in fueling moral panics.
She demonstrated her points by providing blow by blow descriptions of two
specific incidents: The accusations of child abuse at the Shelbourne Boys
School in Nova Scotia, and the Chun case at the University of Toronto.
She was able to show how the media’s interest in a ‘good’ story took precedent
over critical examination of the truth of allegations. Though much of what
she had to say was not a credit to journalism, in general, she did show
that the media were also a force for good. For example, it was ultimately
a journalist in Nova Scotia who demonstrated that the Shelbourne child
abuse allegations were fiction, and it was Wente herself who first wrote
the Chun story from the perspective of members of the physics department.
E) The Annual Business Meeting
was held at the end of the day. The minutes are circulated to the members
with this issue.
Help us maintain freedom in teaching, research and scholarship by joining SAFS or making a donation.
