Mount Royal University and Frances Widdowson

What does the judgement tell us about the future of the university?

A judgement has been rendered regarding Frances Widdowson’s dismissal from Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada.  9 of 10 counts went against her, but the the most important count went her way. The arbitrator judged MRU was wrong to have fired her, saying: “dismissal was not the appropriate disciplinary penalty.” He judged the employment relationship to have become too poisoned to be resumed, so she will not be re-instated but compensated. My understanding is that negotiations about a settlement to be paid by MRU to Widdowson are ongoing.

The judgement is a long one, and an emotional read.  I don’t say this just as a person who is a fellow “canceled academic”.  Anyone who has ever been treated unfairly at work – which is to say, everybody – will re-experience their own frustrated indignation turning its many pages.  The dark transformation undergone by Colin Robinson when he gets promoted to supervisor at work, the way everyone has known a Bill Lumbergh or six in their working lives, the smiley menace of Dolores Umbridge: doppelgängers troop through its pages under other names.  Let all beware.

Many plots and subplots could be tugged at, written up, commented upon. The tome has a novelistic quality, with recurring characters, some whose sprawling depravity takes startling turns even for the hardened reader, others who show reserves of decency that come like soothing interludes. One experiences those sections like the parts of the Lord of the Rings where the hobbits are cozily eating something yummy in a warm inn.  Otherwise it makes a grim read.  It is possible to get some laughs by looking beyond its pages, for example by tracking how many of its worst characters list “kindness” as one of their professional virtues:  something they research, or at least give talks about. 

Those discoveries are darkly comic because Widdowson was fired five days before Christmas.  The news that she was dismissed, effective immediately, was delivered when a phalanx of administrators ambushed her after an evening class.  One of them, a man much larger than Widdowson, barricaded her exit from a classroom when she realized what was happening and tried to run past him while shaking and sobbing.

I expect a large secondary literature to grow up around the Widdowson case in years to come, because it touches on so many of the issues that characterize our era.  I will address two here. These are the academy as a total institution, and the making and sustaining of institutional reputations. 

The academy as a total institution

By volume, much of the decision deals with the fallout from spats various Mount Royal University faculty members had with Widdowson on Twitter.  There was no reason for Mount Royal administration to be dragged into these conflicts.  MRU does not require faculty to maintain a social media presence as a condition of employment.  Twitter is essentially a bar faculty choose to hang out in after work:  a place where they get into bruising fights and put on embarrassing displays, as a result of which they greet each new day with crashing hangovers, recriminations, and regrets.  Then they go again that night.  MRU does not ask them to do this and one has the very strong sense that many administrators at MRU wish they would stop.

MRU cannot ask them to stop because they are grownups.  Grownups are allowed to go to bars that leave them feeling worthless and empty.  Grownups are allowed to be on Twitter.  It’s not the workplace and it’s not a workplace matter what goes on there.  If something reaches the level of civil or criminal liability, one may call upon the police (who might not see things in the light one wishes) or lawyers (whom one would have to hire and pay for out of pocket). 

Or one could do what MRU faculty chose to do:  figure oneself as an absolute and abject dependent, in every respect, of the employer, such that it is the employer’s duty to wade even into problems one has fomented for oneself outside of work.  MRU administrators, quite reasonably, did not at first want this responsibility.  But MRU faculty through their faculty association insisted that MRU had to investigate and adjudicate these fights because, somehow, once MRU hired adult faculty members they were also agreeing to take on all the extramural interpersonal problems of these faculty members.  It is clear that MRU administrators intensely resented the hassle and expense involved. 

Anyone would.  The hassle and expense involved was completely bonkers.  It is also clear that the administrators concluded that there would be no more AGGGGGHHHHH if they could just get rid of Professor Widdowson. 

They were wrong.  MRU has now been dragged through a long and expensive legal case. They lost on the most important issue. They are going to have pay a settlement to Frances. Their discreditable conduct and that of the faculty members with whom they sided is now exposed in a long, humiliating, and publicly available document.

Tant pis. What is striking is that what these twenty-first century professors wanted was something faculty members once had in spades:  institutional fosterage, with accompanying scrutiny of their private lives.  For example, until the late nineteenth century the all pale all male faculties of Oxford and Cambridge were not permitted to marry.  They lived on campus, ate on campus, and led cossetted but extraordinarily restricted lives.  Being a professor was not just a job, it was a total social fact. 

For most of the the twentieth century, faculty members insisted on changing their relationship to the modern university from one of status to one of contract.  Here I am using terms famously associated with the work of jurist Henry Sumner Maine. Specifically, his proposition that modern societies generally evolve from status-oriented to contract-oriented organization.

Until recently, this pattern was clearly followed on university campuses.  Status considerations came under sustained fire:  sex, race, religion, national origin, marital status, or sexual orientation should be no bar to faculty hiring (nor to receiving an education).  Formally enumerated contractual considerations were hammered out and jealously defended, tenure among them. New professsional organizations like the AAUP and the CAUT patrolled contractual boundaries.  Faculty and employer came together contractually; the limits on the relationship were clear on both sides.  Faculty were liberated, but then again, so were university administrations:  they could start to pursue other kinds of contracts on the side, less binding ones, involving adjunct faculty on bare-bones contractual agreements.  Administrators found that, on the whole, they preferred these to the tenured kinds:  cheaper, easier to end, delightfully flexible.

Meanwhile, faculty, who had fought so hard for this liberty, were finding they wanted some of the old closeness to the university back.  Maybe it should pay attention to status considerations after all:  hire on the basis of sex, race, sexual orientation, or neo-religious observance on questions of genderism or EDI.  Maybe it should more closely supervise extramural faculty behavior, and pay for expensive legal wrangling about mud-slinging between faculty.  Maybe it should care more about faculty amour-propre and not stick to the cold letter of contractual law after all.

I’ve written, elsewhere and at length, about this flight from contract back to status being a very general trend in contemporary society.  Once you see it, you see it everywhere:  from Calgary to remotest Paraguay.  It’s interesting that some of the faculty members most critical of the university as a poisoned institution born of the European tradition simultaneously cling to it wailing when they demand it act as their sword, shield, and mother hen against all the ills to which modern subjects are heir.  It’s a great evil beast that damn well better offer comprehensive health coverage, a fantastic pension, and readiness to swoop in every time somebody is rude on the playground. 

“Wokeness” is but a tiny corner of this phenomenon.  Its larger context is a situation in which security itself is in diminishing supply.  What happened to Frances Widdowson – its desperate, nasty, grasping nature, the zeal to push her OUT of the shrinking nest whilst also insisting more cushioning feathers be added for the benefit of everyone remaining – is not motivated by a fight about ideas.  It is symptomatic of an ecumene in which the battle over who gets to be safe is an existential one.

Up until the late nineteenth century, very very few people got to be existentially safe.  Those who managed it had to mind their onions or else.  The twentieth century, in the West anyway, was unusual in its sustained expansion of security.  That’s all in retreat now.  Clambering into some safe berth – a tenured job, for example – really does require qualities other than merit these days.  It takes a sharp pair of elbows and an eye for the main chance. 

This is not happening because people have read too much Herbert Marcuse.  It’s happening because an entire way of life is tanking.  I personally prefer to look on the bright side about it, and hope things getting worse and worse will begin to motivate solidarity in academic and everyday life, and with it revulsion at spectacles of squalid scrambling.  I’m a paleolefty like that. Lots of institutions are going to collapse, not out of excessive “wokeness”, but just because there won’t be any resources to sustain them.  When that starts to unfold, which universities will survive — and why? 

The making and sustaining of academic reputations

 Something that comes through very clearly in the documentation for the Widdowson case is the deeply pathetic intellectual insecurity of Mount Royal University.  I am not making fun of MRU when I say this. I mean it quite sincerely in the old-fashioned sense of evoking pity and sadness in a gripping way.  The Widdowson debacle is an engrossing drama with many moral lessons for an interested contemporary audience. 

 Widdowson was hired at Mount Royal in 2008. A recent PhD from York University who had that year published a widely-reviewed book from an excellent university press, she was at the time a good “get” for Mount Royal’s ambitions for self-transformation. Until 2009, MRU was Mount Royal College.  It was founded in 1910 to serve rural Albertans. For much of its existence it was what is known in the Canadian system as a “junior college”.  Probably its most famous alumnus is Bruce McCulloch of the Kids in the Hall.  Since 2017 it has taken to promoting itself as a “changemaker” campus:  a designation awarded by an American non-profit that “finds and fosters social entrepreneurs worldwide”.  This video is explanatory, though what explanation you take from it will depend a lot on your priors.

In 2008, hiring Widdowson was part of MRU’s ambition. In 2021, firing her was too. In November 2021, a lawyer hired by MRU to investigate complaints filed by then-MRU professor Renae Watchman (now at McMaster University) included in his report that the situation around Widdowson meant MRU will “have a major reputational risk arising from the ongoing issues” and “is objectively inherently harmful to the reputation of an employer in MRU’s position circumstances”. The latter sentence is ungrammatical, but the “circumstances” to which he is referring are specified in an earlier passage about MRU’s Indigenization efforts. One must remember, reading this report filed on 18 November 2021, that other “circumstances” were very much in play at the time.

In May 2021, it had become international news that the remains of 215 children were discovered lying in unmarked graves on the grounds of what had been the Kamloops Indian Residential School.  Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered that Canadian flags be lowered to half-mast, where they stayed for nearly six months: even raising them briefly so that they could be re-lowered to mark Remembrance Day (11 November) was fiercely opposed by many. Kamloops Indian Residential School had been run by the Catholic Church, but over 60 Canadian churches of diverse Christian denomination were burned or vandalized in protest in the months following the announcement.

On July 10, 2021 Frances Widdowson participated in a panel discussion entitled “Can We Discuss Those Unmarked Graves?” hosted over zoom by the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship.  In her panel talk, Widdowson expressed concerns about taboos around asking questions about those unmarked graves; that one did so “at your peril”.  She displayed tweets reacting to the panel having been announced from Daniel Heath Justice and Sean Carleton denouncing her as a “residential school denialist”. It would be difficult to overstate the degree to which Widdowson was an outlier among Canadian academics in the latter half of 2021.

That was then. In January 2022, Jacques Rouillard published an article entitled “In Kamloops, Not One Body Has Been Found” in the Dorchester Review. I am a little bit of an academic outlier myself, but I was stunned when I read it. Like almost all Canadians, the news from Kamloops had brought me to tears. I hadn’t questioned it: why would anyone report something so horrible if it weren’t true?

In February 2022 — after she’d been summarily fired — Frances published “Billy Remembers” in the The American Conservative. Widdowson has worked in this field for many years. She knew, of course, all about Kevin Annett: a person of whom I’d never heard. In December 2023, the book Grave Error was published. Widdowson contributed a chapter to this collection of work by researchers who have worked in this field for many years. On Amazon, the book is now #1 in the categories “Native Issues”, “Discrimination and Racism”, and “History of First Nations in Canada”.

In May 2024, the National Post reported that the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation itself is now officially referring to 215 “anomalies” rather than “children” or “graves”.  This is because no bodies have been found at the site. Perhaps this is because no excavations of the anomalies have been permitted, or perhaps this because there are no bodies to be found there.

Certainly in the fervid atmosphere of the second half of 2021, when it was almost universally accepted that the bodies of 215 abused, neglected, and perhaps even murdered children lay in clandestine graves in Kamloops, Widdowson’s skeptical presence was bad for MRU’s academic reputation. At the time, everybody who wasn’t holding a teddy bear and looking sad about Kamloops was by general consensus a heartless piece of poo. 

Now that Widdowson’s skepticism is widely (if quietly) shared across Canada, whose reputational stock is falling and whose rising?  If one were to guess the direction of the trendlines over the next decade, which way do they look to be headed? I’ll call it: Widdowson’s is looking pretty good. MRU’s, not so much.

Academic reputations are built, in the long run, on being right.  That’s it.  In the short run, being right is a complicated and risky undertaking. It can require looking foolish, obstinate, even wicked.

In the long run, being right just is what it is.  Institutional reputations are built on consistent association, over time, with academics who turn out to be right.  That’s what justifies tenure and academic freedom from the institutional perspective:  long-term self interest.  If you throw it over at the first sign of trouble you cheat your institution of its reputational dividends. You also show that you don’t understand academia very well. If a persuasive guy in a nice suit scares you about getting a “bad reputation” and you decide to ignore the whole history of academic freedom in favour of listening to him because look at that cut of that suit! Well, maybe you are not ready for the big leagues just yet.

Under conditions of expansion it might not matter.  The academic party, however, is no longer in full swing. Most analysts predict a shrinking post-secondary sector in decades to come.  Harvard is probably going to be okay, although even Harvard is not looking as good as it was before the go-go years of admitting ninnies like Jared Kushner in exchange for multi-million dollar donations.  The more craven, panicky moves late arrivals like MRU make, the more they polish their own path off the cliff of NGMI. What is that thing with feathers again? The little bird that kept so many warm?