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University Affairs 2007, February 2007

Conformity and Evaluation

It is encouraging that, in general, the three contrarians profiled in "Meet the contrarians" (December 2006) reported that they were happy with the way in which the administrations of their universities did not abuse their academic freedom. A critical component of that freedom is the right of any member of the academic community – faculty or student – to be evaluated in terms of fairly applied academic criteria as judged by experts in her or his discipline.

The degree of conformity with some prevailing ideology should be of no relevance. Academic freedom, however, does not protect individual faculty members from the slings and arrows of individual experts in their discipline who may well be biased in the way that they judge the contrarians’ articles, grant proposals, or even eligibility for awards.

On the other hand, administrations are responsible for ensuring that the same criteria are applied to all faculty when they are evaluated for such decisions as promotion and merit pay. One of the contrarians, Dr. Mauser, reports that some members of his faculty of business management suggested that, in evaluating his merit increase, articles in criminology and political science should not be counted on the grounds that he is a professor of marketing. In these interdisciplinary times, this suggestion looks irrational and unfair, particularly if the same restrictions were not to be applied to his colleagues.

The suggestion is palely reminiscent of the blatantly unfair treatment accorded to a more visible contrarian two decades ago by University of Western Ontario’s department of psychology. The victim was Philippe Rushton, whose race-based theories so offended the premier of Ontario that he demanded that Western fire this tenured full professor. Western’s administration, to its credit, refused the premier. However, for the yearly merit-pay evaluation, the department appointed a special committee to evaluate this contrarian. Instead of employing the usual criteria of the number of citations and publications in refereed journals, the committee read Dr. Rushton’s recent articles. Based on their reading, the committee awarded a zero merit increase in contrast to the consistently above-average merit increases awarded to Dr. Rushton in previous years. Worse, three successive such evaluations were sufficient for firing tenured faculty on the basis of incompetence. 

Dr. Rushton’s appeals to the department, faculty and university administrators were rejected until 100 internationally eminent faculty wrote in support of his general status as a scholar. Only then did Western’s administration overturn the committee’s procedurally unfair negative evaluation.

How many other Canadian faculty contrarians – those less visible than Dr. Rushton and who cannot muster such strong international support – have suffered milder, but still significant, abuses of their academic freedom?

Web Reference: http://www.universityaffairs.ca/issues/2007/feb/letters_02.html

John Furedy
Dr. Furedy is a professor emeritus of psychology, University of Toronto.