Newsletter

January 2013

Report vindicates Queen’s prof, calls for apology

In a report released last month, a CAUT
investigatory committee fully vindicated history professor Michael Mason against
actions taken by the Queen’s University administration.

In October 2011 his history class (HIST 283, Making of the Third World) was
cancelled and the course subsequently reassigned to another faculty member after
Mason was accused of racism for quotes he included in his lectures from
historical documents he felt showed the persistence of colonial attitudes in
contemporary times.

The committee unambiguously supported Mason’s teaching and specifically noted
that: “Mason discharged his duties diligently and in keeping with both
disci­plinary conventions and professional standards,” the Sept. 20 report says.

The committee also found the administration violated the academic freedom of
Mason and acted “callously and irresponsibly” in how it handled complaints about
his teaching. “It is our conclusion that administrative employees and officers
of Queen’s University abused their power and acted in disregard of the wellbeing
of one of their teaching employees. We find further, that Professor Mason was
denied basic rights, and that academic freedom, both as commonly understood and
as defined in the collective agreement between Queen’s University Faculty
Association and Queen’s University, was seriously violated.”

The committee has called on the university to issue a letter of apology to Mason
and that the letter be placed in his file and published in the university
newspaper. The committee has also recommended that, to offset damage to Mason’s
four-decade career as a historian, Queen’s history department establish a $4,000
bursary in his name.

“The report vindicates professor Mason and makes
useful recommendations to remedy the situation,” said CAUT executive director
James Turk. “We urge the university administrators to implement the
recommendations out of a sense of fairness to Mason and in order to prevent a
similar situation befalling any other faculty member at Queen’s.”

CAUT Bulletin, October, 2012.