From Canada.com, via Brian Ferguson, is an article about how a researcher at the University of Alberta had his funding cut off and then was terminated because people did not like the topic of his research: the substitutability between smokeless and regular tobacco. His story helps explain one of the reasons I am a paid-up lifetime member of SAFS (The Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship).
If you planned to attend the Conference on Academic Freedom and Research Integrity on Monday at Edmonton's Shaw Convention Centre, take note: It has been cancelled. The reason? Several academics, apparently, did not approve of the subject matter.Even if I disagree with some scholars (e.g. most socionomologists), I staunchly believe that universities, of all places, are where we should thresh out controversial ideas. To avoid groupthink, it is imperative that academic freedom be defended in such instances.
The forum was organized by Carl Phillips, a University of Alberta professor with a deeply personal interest in the issue. That's because he studies something many of his colleagues hate: tobacco - specifically, the health benefits of smokers switching to smokeless tobacco. And he's suffering for it.
In June, his faculty voted to cut off his industry research funding, though the university long ago cleared the funding as ethically clean. Shortly after, Prof. Phillips says he received a letter. Since he no longer had funding, his department said, he was being terminated.
"Despite the fact there was no actual evidence the money was running out," he says, noting that the vote was unofficial and probably non-binding without administration's consent. "Not to mention there are all kinds of other sources I could have gotten money from."
Since then, the Harvard PhD says he's been subject to repeated and intrusive audits, been charged by colleagues with ethical violations and has had research projects cancelled for what he says are the flimsiest of excuses. "Even with Holocaust deniers, or when someone says the Taliban are wonderful, even in those cases, they get the sufficient respect that somebody stands up and points out that these people don't know what they're talking about. But nobody's ever said I'm wrong. Nobody has actually challenged the premise of my research. They basically just tried to shut the whole thing down without having to address the substance of it."
So, he and a handful of sympathetic colleagues arranged to air the issue of exactly how much freedom scientists have on campus these days. The conference would feature several professors who had faced similar problems. And it was planned for the Edmonton conference centre, at the same time and just down the hall from an international anti-tobacco conference "so that we could have sessions where we invited people from that conference over to make case for their attempts to suppress academic freedom," Prof. Phillips explains. But organizers of the National Conference on Tobacco or Health, he says, threatened to break their contract with the centre after they caught wind of his plan.
"The conference facility came to me and begged us to let them out of their contract because they were being put in the middle and they were convinced that this obviously much larger, much richer conference was going to pull out if they hosted us." Since not having the anti-tobacco attendees nearby defeated the purpose anyway, Prof. Phillips regretfully obliged.
Stifling tobacco research may not be something that most Canadians would get worked up about. But it is of a piece with a broader suffocation of university research or discussion of things considered politically incorrect, argues Peter Suedfeld, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia.