Academics and their jobs

Since September 2016, I have been a regular contributor, as the token conservative on otherwise liberal panels, to CBC radio’s comedy news trivia program, Because News. I was let go last week for my indigenously incorrect views (not expressed on CBC). I can now empathize rather than merely sympathize with those individuals who have paid an infinitely higher material and psychological price for the same reason.

Thankfully, there are a few independent thinkers on this hot-button issue protected by academic tenure from excommunication. They may experience collegial hostility, and meet obstruction by their administration or professional associations, but they cannot (yet) be fired or utterly silenced. One such is Frances Widdowson, associate professor in the Department of Economics, Justice and Policy Studies at Mount Royal College in Calgary. On June 1, Widdowson will present a politically incorrect paper on the aboriginal file at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA) at Ryerson University. It will be yet another of this courageous scholar’s sticks poking her groupthink intelligentsia hive.

Widdowson was already wearing her metaphorical beekeeper suit when I interviewed her recently by telephone. She has been dealing with the rage of the “culturalists,” as she calls them, for many years. In 2008 she published a book, co-written with independent researcher Albert Howard, Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation, whose title gives you the drift of her position. Speaking at that year’s CPSA annual meeting, Widdowson argued, amongst other controversial themes, that the reserves system, and all policies that encourage First Nations to live lives separate from mainstream society, enable dysfunction; assimilation, she said, would close the “development gap” between natives and settlers. Out came the angry bees. Some members called her talk “hate speech” worthy of a Criminal Code investigation; one colleague asked if she’d “like to take it outside.”

The CPSA, aghast at the meltdown, formed a committee to consider “ethics in research” to monitor what papers got published and who was fit to present. They tried to exclude Widdowson one year, but, she said, she convinced them not to. Instead, the CPSA started a new section: Indigenous Peoples and Colonized Peoples, on whose panels Widdowson is unwelcome, and where all speakers toe the politically correct line. Her Ryerson presentation will therefore fall under the aegis of the “Political Economy” section, where she is the only speaker on aboriginal issues. She will attend the indigenous and colonized panel but, she told me, she expected everyone from that quarter would boycott her presentation.

Widdowson’s paper is provocatively entitled, “The Political Economy of ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ (TRC): Neotribal Rentierism and the creation of the victim/perpetrator dichotomy.” Rentierism, in lay terms, is the dispersal of compensation to address conflicts between aboriginal peoples and the Canadian state. There are three basic forms: money from commodities, like minerals, water or oil, on aboriginal territories; government transfers for services; and the most problematic, compensation through “brokerage” for past wrongs. The residential schools have become a cash cow for lawyers (most famously the Merchant Law Group, estimated to have raised $100 million in lawsuits and infamous for aggressively marketing their services by dangling boasts like “we just took a case to the SCOC and got in excess of $300,000 for a Survivor who had been fondled three times”).

Widdowson’s unease with processes not based strictly in evidence and which encourage grievance inflation put her at a critical distance from the emotion-saturated TRC, which she sees as a purely therapeutic enterprise, often at odds with objective truths. Her detachment from what she perceives as “profoundly irrational” themes – in particular the highly inflammatory and intellectually untenable concept of “cultural genocide” — will resonate positively with those Canadians who, like me, were educated in an era where dispassionate research and vigorous debate were the norm. But those norms are long fled, and challenges to the accepted narrative, evidence-based or not, are seen as “revictimizing the victims.”

Widdowson is aware her scholarly approach to this subject is passé. She told me 2008 was the last time she was taken seriously as a valid authority. “Mobbing,” she said, “is the new discussion.” At a panel she organized in debate format last year at the University of Calgary, which she described to me as “the most disruptive event of my life,” she was told by aboriginals she had no right to speak her truth because she was a guest on their territory. This shocked and disturbed her. If a university campus is indigenous territory where aboriginals are the “hosts” and non-aboriginals are the “guests,” then this corrupts the fundamental concept of the university as public space.

I was struck in my conversation with Widdowson by her eagerness to understand the grounds for her adversaries’ position. She’s willing to engage in debate, and wishes they were too. As she put it, “I’m not trying to win the argument, I’m trying to have the argument.” That is increasingly less possible in today’s climate of insouciant speech suppression. Widdowson has the stomach for her scapegoat role, but what university today will hire anyone who upholds the principles she emblemizes? (Mount Royal, Widdowson emphasized, has been “stalwart in their defence of academic freedom.”) My fear is that the lonely academic furrow Widdowson plows will be immediately buried when she retires, and though her writings may endure in “samizdat” form, she will be remembered – cultural appropriation intended — as the last of the Mohicans in her field.