You may remember in the fall of 2018, there was a bit of a brouhaha around a case at Thompson Rivers University concerning a professor named Derek Pyne. The upshot of the story is that Pyne, a professor of economics, published an article in 2017 (see here) which attracted wide attention, including from The Economist. Dr. Pyne’s article suggested that the majority of researchers at a small, unnamed Business School – quite transparently the one at TRU where he was employed – published in predatory journals, and that they were rewarded for doing so with promotions and research awards. A little while later, he was suspended from his duties, and was essentially banned from campus for a period of several months. Many connected the dots, and said he was being punished for his research.
Last week, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) published its investigation into the case. As CAUT investigations go, it’s a pretty measured document. It absolved the institution of interfering with Pyne’s research, and it made clear that the main area of controversy was Pyne’s behaviour during his sustained campaign of criticism against TRU’s business school. As it turns out, Pyne formally was suspended because of concerns about his mental health. However, CAUT suggested that the mental health rationale was a way of “pathologizing dissent” – that is, while the concerns were not entirely unfounded, it seemed to the investigators that the university reached for this rationale awfully quickly as Pyne’s criticisms created frictions with his colleagues. In addition, it concluded TRU had violated Pyne’s “wider” academic freedom by only protecting him while he was executing his research, and not when he was speaking his mind and criticizing the institution/faculty, or where he was seen to be operating outside his area of expertise.
Now CAUT investigations need to be read with a certain lens. Typically, universities do not participate in the investigation, so not all relevant evidence is always available. And to a certain extent, CAUT uses these investigations as “markers” about how it would like common definitions of academic freedom to be interpreted in practice. With that in mind, I think this is a pretty measured work: certainly the investigators could have gone to town on TRU on privacy issues related to whatever mental health condition Pyne may or may not have had. But I still think this report is a missed opportunity because there is a slightly more interesting story here than academic freedom during this prof vs. university stand-off. The real story here is balancing academic freedom during a prof vs. co-workers stand-off, and in particular, how much can academic freedom cover for the fact that someone is simply a toxic colleague?
I mean, look, maybe Pyne is completely right that his colleagues are a bunch of charlatans, but this seems like a stretch to me. Start with the fact that some of the data categorizations Pyne used in his article are controversial, to say the least. There is no universally accepted definition of “predatory journal”, because by design they look a lot like legitimate fee-charging open access journals. Attempts to compile lists of such journals therefore come up with wildly different numbers of offending journals (a helpful guide to the issues involved in identifying predatory journals is here). The list Pyne used to identify “predatory” journals was known as “Beall’s List”, after the UC-Denver librarian who compiled it. Beall’s blacklist – now suspended – was fairly aggressive in identifying journals as predatory, much to the anger of the open-access movement. From the perspective of the members of the TRU faculty Pyne accused of having published in predatory journals, there may have been quite a bit of misidentification.
Another problem, IMHO, is that while Pyne found a .714 correlation between publishing in so-called predatory journals and receiving a TRU research award – clear evidence that corruption pays! – he also found a .664 correlation with such publishing and receipt of teaching awards. Now, if it were me, the high correlation between two things which logically have nothing to do with one another might give me pause in putting too much weight on any other correlations in the analysis, particularly in an analysis where we are only looking at 52 individuals, of whom 16 are alleged to have published in predatory journals and who collectively received 9 awards. I am not saying the math is wrong, but it seems to me that it’s awfully easy for confounding unobserved variables to pop up in a sample like this. I suspect a weighty journal in the economics of education would not have published this article (if we want to get into the whole “quality of journals thing”, it’s worth noting that prior to the publication of this article, the journal in which this article was published an Impact Factor of 0.2, which means its total readership was adjacent to nil).
If I were one of Pyne’s colleagues, even if I weren’t teed off at having been tarred either directly or by association with being a shoddy researcher, I would be mostly unmoved by this article as a piece of evidence. And yes, sure, academic freedom protects the right to be wrong, but holy crap, if you’re going to use borderline evidence in a borderline journal to slam your colleagues, you need to accept that your colleagues may not accord you the respect you think you deserve.
But it went beyond simply publishing a paper. Pyne went to the media and to accreditors to slam his faculty and suggest the new degree programs they were developing were low-quality – measures which might reasonably have been seen to threaten many people’s livelihoods. I understand from people at TRU that he was not shy about individually identifying professors who he felt was guilty of publishing in the wrong journals. In fact, Pyne was such a pain in the derrière that his own shop steward basically declined to defend him at first, and the TRU Faculty Association (TRUFA) chose never to take up the “academic freedom” mantle on Pyne’s behalf (in fact, there is quite an extraordinary paragraph towards the end of the report in which the CAUT investigators blast their own member local for insufficient vigilance on this front). I can’t prove a direct link, but the strong impression one gets from all this is that the TRUFA didn’t like Pyne and thought his antics were annoying. Indeed, one suspects TRUFA was in a difficult place, with substantial numbers of their own members telling them to let Pyne face the music.
Now, I am not saying the CAUT report is necessarily wrong in its conclusions. Maybe Pyne wasn’t quite as toxic as I’ve implied above, maybe TRU could have done more to protect him. But say he was that awful: what rights do the rest of the faculty have to work in a non-toxic environment? Might the quality (or lack thereof) of the research in question not reasonably affect the degree to which an institution should feel protective a faculty member’s views?
I suspect nearly all professors agree with the need to defend the right to criticize the institution; I also suspect many would draw a line when it comes to persistently attacking the integrity of one’s departmental colleagues. That’s a conversation that in the TRU case would have been very enlightening indeed.
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Thanks for highlighting this report. I realize you are tackling the report’s focus on the behaviour of the parties involved, but it is non-trivial to separate the personality of the subject from the situation he was in. The report notes: “Dr. Pyne’s article generated significant discussion within the University about the practice of publishing in predatory journals and how this should be viewed in processes such as tenure and promotion; presently, TRU has no policy related to such publications.” So while defining what is predatory is difficult (see timely article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03759-y ), the original issue remains: did TRU’s policies for promotions turn a blind eye to quality of publication over quantity?
Pyne complicated matters by choosing to seek and publish evidence for delinquent assessment by his employer where he would be a beneficiary if this was found to be the case – hence providing incentive and undermining objectivity but it seems that TRU has failed to properly address the initial research and has, instead, tried to stifle and penalize the author. The report notes: ” One effect of this approach has been to sweep aside the legitimate questions Dr. Pyne has raised about predatory journals and their role in the university’s tenure and promotion and rewards systems. The TRU Administration’s actions thus compromise the credibility of the university itself by bringing both the Administration’s understanding and management of academic freedom and TRU’s institutional academic peer review processes into question.” I’d question who is truly undermining the reputation of TRU: Pyne or the administration and/or colleagues who are failing to address whether the predatory journal problem is a TRU problem?
The conclusion is very clearly stated by the report: “It is the Committee’s opinion that the apparent failure of TRU’s Administration to consider seriously the issue of publishing in predatory journals and its potential impacts on TRU’s core academic decisions represents a profound failure of academic governance at the university.” Ouch. A case of shooting (or more accurately, impugning) the messenger.
The right to work in a non-toxic workplace is important, but it is important to state explicitly and repeatedly that mental illness is the scapegoat here, and actually mentally ill people will suffer as a result. (I too have no clue if Pyne is one and do not particularly want to know unless he were to freely choose to inform us himself, a principle that was not respected as part of this process). Mental illness is being strategically used as a scapegoat both rhetorically and in actual practice, e.g. when Pyne was banned from campus.
This is a common tactic in a society – of which highered is very much part – that claims to want to destigmatize mental illness without examining its own practices that promote the marginalization of mentally ill people (speaking as one of them). So even if we don’t see what Pyne did as dissent, or if we question whether it was, the fact is he was pathologized and power was abused — and that hurts mentally ill people throughout highered, as well as those perceived to be mentally ill . Students, faculty, staff, everyone.
I find it important to state all of this explicitly because mental illness does not cause one to be a toxic colleague (any more than it causes one to be violent, or abusive, or any other noxious stereotype). If anything, people with mental illness have a greater need for a non-toxic workplace and are less likely to be assured of one.
You make several good points, and this is one of the few really rounded bits of reportage on the issue as a whole. So thanks.
In particular, you’re right to note that “predatory journal” (like “fake news,” btw) is a fraught term, though I think we mostly know it when we see it (in both cases). One risk is a collapse into sheer subjectivity (i.e., your journal is predatory; “You are fake news”), but there’s an equal risk in the factitious objectivity of metrics, confusing what journals are most fashionable with which are most rigorous.
But this brings me to something you seem to miss, not about the case, but more generally. All metrics suffer from Goodhardt’s law, and they may very well be measuring fashion rather than rigour, importance, contribution to the discipline, etc.
I think this also shows why the correlation between publishing in lesser journals and teaching awards is actually valid: the non-observed variable that they have in common might be the teacher/scholar’s ambition or even meretriciousness. The same sort of person who hustles for publications — maybe cutting corners on quality — would also hustle for teaching awards. And do we really want to reward hustle?
You’ve put your finger on a second central issue, of what to do about toxic colleagues. There’s an inverse issue, however: any properly constituted polity ought to defend its members against the tyranny of the majority, even when the majority is right. How to go about this — while also defending faculty members against the bullying of a toxic colleague — would have been a very enlightening conversation, indeed.