October 17, 2016

University of Lethbridge Suspension of Tenured Professor Lacks Due Diligence

No one should be under the illusion that University of Lethbridge president Dr. Mike Mahon is giving the case of suspended professor Dr. Anthony Hall proper legal procedure and due diligence.

In case anyone wonders what “due diligence” actually means, it’s about impartially following the rules set out in the university’s Board-Faculty Association Collective Agreement, not just calling a meeting or two to air opinions.

A tenured professor cannot be suspended as a precautionary measure, “just in case” something went wrong. One doesn’t need a lawyer to understand this. One does need conscience, ethical principles and the ability to actually read and interpret the articles of a collective agreement.

Accusations by special-interest groups are levelled against academics all the time, not only concerning their research – which may upset prevailing biases and mindsets – but also to cast aspersions on their character. In a democratic society such accusations don’t form a legitimate basis for even starting an investigation.

In the case of a professor supposedly teaching falsehoods in class, the basis for factually determining truth or lies must be scrutinized at ground level. University presidents have no business interfering with the process, and for good reason.

How on earth can the president of an academic institution know if a professor’s course material is false? Unless the president happens to be a specialist in the same discipline as the professor being criticized (and such is not the case with the University of Lethbridge situation), that individual is at a distant arm’s length of the lecture-hall.

It is the community of professors themselves, not top-down administrators, who are vocationally mandated to seek and define truth. That’s the whole point of having a tenure process. Allowing administrators such as Dr. Mike Mahon to take unilateral punitive action due to subjectively-driven external complaints is akin to allowing a Parliament Hill custodian dictate House of Commons protocol.   

A little history is in order when considering the value and necessity of due process.

When Phillippe Rushton, a former University of Western Ontario professor whose theories on race and genetics raised heated controversy in 1989, was discovered to have benefited in his research from the financial support of white supremacist groups, the court of public opinion wanted him fired on the spot. That was not allowed to happen.

Although Rushton (who died in 2012) had few influential defenders, “due process” meant that he was subjected to the same annual academic evaluation as anyone else on faculty, where the protocol would be to suspend a professor after a series of failing scores on criteria covering a wide range of academic and pedagogical criteria.

Despite the hue and cry around Rushton’s case, people were decent back then; they understood he was being targeted for a reason other than “academic failure.” Rushton left active teaching of his own volition and continued on in his research for nearly a quarter-century without any further controversy. His published opinions and findings on racial and gender issues were no more palatable to most of us than before, but we’d entered the “new normal” of post-9/11 society by then and the paradigm had changed.

So, what happened after 9/11? The old days had a code of conduct, embodied in formal terms such as “due process.” Judge R.D. Fratkin wrote regarding the criminal case of once high-profile activist and MP Svend Robinson, “As I say, the public, at least in Canada, I think, has always lived by the sort of guiding principle [that] you don't kick somebody when they're down.” In our post-9/11 world of continual electronic downloading and instant media reaction, the new way of dealing with people and things we dislike, or don’t understand, is reactive paranoia.

Unfortunately, Zionist groups, traditionally defensive and hyper-reactive, are thriving on a climate where everything and everyone is fair game to be judged via social media before informed and impartial “due process” can ever take place. The new mantra: Kick a person only when s/he is down, and just keep on kicking … truth is irrelevant.

Another historical example of uninformed public censure over-riding and even hijacking due process is the case of once high-profile activist MP Svend Robinson – perhaps the first victim of compromised due process in Canadian political history. He is the man that proposed that September 11 be designated as "Chile Day", to mark the overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende's democratically elected government on September 11, 1973.

Among a number of gaffes committed during his turbulent career, Robinson made the tactical error in 2002 of attempting to bypass Israeli security to visit Nobel Peace Prize winner Yasser Arafat. Zionist groups – including the one now trying to destroy the career of Dr. Anthony Hall – had a field day raising vitriolic protest against the NDP MP when the international controversy broke in the media.  

How did then NDP federal leader Alexa McDonough react to what Zionists called the “travesty” of Robinson’s action? She stripped him of his prestigious Foreign Relations portfolio, and shortly thereafter resigned the party leadership. Alexa McDonough had been known in Halifax to be sympathetic to the Palestinian cause until that time. Two for two in favour of the Zionist fear-mongers … and no due process.  

Which brings us full circle back to 2016 and the Zionist hijacking of due process at the University of Lethbridge.

I have always believed that a university president with an iota of self-respect would resist tooth and nail such a blatant assault on academic freedom and professional ethics as is occurring right now at his institution. Unfortunately, Canadian law cannot compel Dr. Mahon to disclose the real reasons behind his actions.  It is no small irony that Dr. Mahon cannot be brought to justice with the charge of misfeasance in public office, similar to the one brought against York University’s Lorna Marsden by Freeman-Maloy, because there is another due process, called Arbitration that was specially designed to protect tenured professors and was supposedly speedier than the lengthy court battle.

To make matters worse, notice the deafening silence of CAUT (Canadian Association of University Teachers) about the case of Dr. Anthony Hall. No wonder some university presidents went on record dismissing CAUT as “a bunch of losers.” Sadly, a group that could have raised a loud and legitimate collective voice in support of due process has lived up to its “loser” label and stayed in the shadows.

And one can only expect similar cowardice from the University of Lethbridge’s own Faculty Association. There will be initial cries of indignation, but soon enough they will decrease to furtive whispers. You see, they will have been “consulted,” making it then acceptable to watch one of their peers left by the roadside with no fair or impartial evaluation.

The experienced, well-orchestrated and politically influential Zionist group is making sure all the legal and ethical loopholes are closed and that the guillotine is firmly in place to chop off Dr. Hall’s career with no chance of appeal.

And that’s what is so manifestly wrong with this picture. As Einstein famously pointed out, “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Others have aptly added that the result of doing so is insanity.

Dr. M.R. Islam is a retired Dalhousie University professor and former Killam Chair of petroleum engineering. The opinions expressed in the foregoing editorial are his own.