B.C. university breached whistle-blowing prof’s academic freedom, says report
Credit to Author: Douglas Todd| Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2019 21:08:24 +0000
Thompson University officials contravened the academic freedom of an economics professor who blew the whistle on more than a dozen colleagues who published in questionable academic journals, says a national organization representing faculty.
The Canadian Association of University Teachers says administrators at the Kamloops university were in the wrong last summer when they suspended Derek Pyne and barred him from campus.
The CAUT particularly condemned the way TRU officials required Pyne to have a psychological assessment, which was then distributed widely. The report refers to this dangerous and increasingly common practice as “pathologizing dissent.”
Pyne gained international media attention for his peer-reviewed research into the way faculty in his own department were advancing their careers by publishing in deceptive academic journals, also known as “predatory” publications. There are now more than 10,000 such questionable academic journals, according to specialists. They don’t conduct peer reviews of articles and typically require a payment before publishing a scholar’s article.
Pyne was suspended without pay in July, 2018, by administrators at the Kamloops university. However, TRU restored his pay in August when The Vancouver Sun researched and wrote an article about his work. After the December arrival of TRU’s new president, Brett Fairbairn, Pyne was re-instated.
“I am very happy that CAUT considered the issue important enough to investigate. I believe that they bent over backwards to try to be procedurally fair to all parties,” Pyne said Tuesday in a brief email.
TRU officials refused to cooperate with the CAUT investigation. They could not be reached for comment.
The CAUT report, which also criticized the university’s faculty association, said TRU “appears to suffer a broad institutional weakness when it comes to understanding academic freedom.”
The 30-page report said TRU administrators and others repeatedly breached Pyne’s right to free speech and communication, and in some cases made employees who appeared to be in a conflict of interest responsible for reviewing his file.
The CAUT committee focussed on the way TRU failed to respect Pyne’s medical privacy in “the way in which Dr. Pyne’s dissent had been medicalized to the point of his employer requiring him to have a psychological examination, without any apparent reliable evidence.”
That psychologist’s report was then handed to “a large number of individuals … without permission from Dr. Pyne,” the report said, recommending that TRU and its faculty association provide Pyne with a list of all those who had access to his “private medical information.”
CAUT’s investigatory committee was made up of the chair, Mark Mac Lean, professor of mathematics at the University of B.C., and Carla Graebner, librarian for data services at Simon Fraser University.