A collection of 62 posts
I did not enjoy the protection of tenure (I was, however, tenure-track), but we should not rely upon tenure to uphold free inquiry.
One young man said to me, “How did you get tenure?” When I said that I didn’t have tenure he said, “Good! Because you’re not going to get it.”
David Gibson has not lived to see the end of this distressing saga. In late 2018, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and, on November 16 of this year, he passed away aged 65.
No one at Wilfrid Laurier University would give me a straight answer about anything. It was a climate of evasiveness and secrecy.
The need for bridge-building and constructive dialogue has been overtaken by the belief that everyone in Israeli society is complicit in that nation’s uniquely deplorable sins.
The school’s decision to suspend, smear and then fire Galloway on the basis of false allegations has snowballed into one of the greatest scandals in the history of Canadian education.
The authors have pulled off a modern Sokal hoax. The sequel is rarely as good as the original, but in this case it was more comprehensive and more fun than Sokal’s mockery of postmodernist scholarship.
Visionaries may be moody, obsessive loners but without them to provide a good idea in the first place, implementers end up working diligently to implement a faulty vision, like clockwork toys set off in the wrong direction.
We have probably done more to encourage business crises and immoral managerial behaviours than prevent them, a fairly insane outcome considering how often we speak of corporate social responsibility.
When speakers need police escort on and off college campuses, an alarm bell should be going off that something has gone seriously awry.
In the prevailing academic climate, those who offer dissenting analyses of the problems afflicting black communities, or who support unpopular social policies designed to alleviate those problems, risk censorship, ostracization, and even the loss of employment.
If a formally refereed and published paper can later be erased from the scientific record and replaced by a completely different article, without any discussion with the author or any announcement in the journal, what will this mean for the future of electronic journals?
Pursuing unorthodox scholarship can lead to frustration and failure, to exciting breakthroughs, or anything in between.
We have forgotten that the privileges granted to us by society, in tenure and our intellectual freedoms and academic lifestyle, come in exchange for the value we are expectedly to produce.
My cardinal sin was to publish a book three years ago called The Welfare Trait that summarised data linking personality and welfare dependency.