Opinion: Thompson Rivers University administrators fiddling while their school burns
Credit to Author: Stephen Snelgrove| Date: Fri, 03 Jan 2020 02:00:36 +0000
Thompson Rivers University continues to be under a cloud regarding one of the two fundamental pillars of a modern university: Research standards. With the release of the Canadian Association of University Teacher’s (CAUT) report in November, it is now also under a cloud regarding the second of these two pillars: Academic freedom.
The research standards controversy was initiated by a paper published by professor Derek Pyne. This paper establishes a prima facie case that a significant portion of the research of faculty in TRU’s School of Business and Economics (SOBE) has been published in journals that have no proper refereeing process. Despite this, it appears that this research has been given considerable weight in decisions regarding promotion and salary.
It is difficult to imagine a more serious issue for a university. Respectable universities reward research that has been refereed by carefully chosen experts who certify both the originality and quality of the research. This refereeing of research by qualified experts is one of the two pillars on which Canadian universities are built.
If TRU is to establish a reputation as a serious research institution, the first thing that needs to be done is a careful examination of SOBE’s research standards by a panel of independent experts from reputable departments of economics and business schools elsewhere in Canada. If the panel finds that there is a problem, then it needs to be openly acknowledged and rectified. Until this is done, the cloud will remain. That this has not been done suggests that the administration fails to understand the gravity of the standards issue that Pyne’s research raises.
After Dr. Pyne’s research was published, TRU’s administration should have dealt with the research standards issue. Instead it tried to silence him. For a short period, he was suspended without pay. Various restrictions on what he could say and where he could go have been imposed on him, and this continues. These efforts reveal that the TRU administration has no real understanding of the second pillar of the modern research university: academic freedom.
The recently released CAUT report on the Pyne case is scathing. It establishes in great detail that “there were significant breaches of Dr. Pyne’s academic freedom” and that “these breaches arose from the failure to properly consider Dr. Pyne’s academic freedom, which is encoded in the collective agreement.” The report concludes that TRU “appears to suffer a broad institutional weakness when it come to academic freedom.”
Virtually the entire Canadian university community is now aware of these failures.
Until the research standards and academic freedom issues raised at TRU have been openly and publicly aired and resolved, the reputation of the university will remain under a dark cloud. This will have serious adverse impacts on students and faculty at TRU, particularly those in SOBE, and on the broader community which the university serves. Graduates of TRU will be disadvantaged in competitions with those from other universities for jobs and for admission to graduate programs. Faculty will find it more difficult to attract research funding and to find jobs elsewhere. The university will find it more difficult to attract good students and faculty, and its ability to compete with other universities for funding will be diminished. And the Kamloops area may find that it is more difficult to attract businesses that require access to a university and a well-educated workforce.
TRU’s administrators must be aware of these adverse impacts, but they are apparently unwilling to take the steps necessary to re-establish the university’s reputation. It’s not too far off to say that they are fiddling while TRU burns.
When a university administration has badly mishandled an important issue over a long period of time — the standards problem has been apparent for about four years now — the university’s board has a special responsibility to resolve matters. We urge them to do so. And we urge everyone else in the broad university community to do what they can to pressure the board and the senate to deal with these important issues.
Jeremiah M. Allen is an emeritus professor of economics at the University of Lethbridge, Curtis Eaton is an emeritus professor of economics at the University of Calgary and Andrew Irvine is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia
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