Read on Twitter
I see CP Champion is in the news, having been appointed a social studies advisor to . @jkenney’s gov - in their quest to provide curriculum “w/o political bias.” Much of the discussion has focused on his pub, the . @DorchesterRev, so I want to share my experience THREAD /1
Back in 2017, when I was a PhD candidate at Queen’s, I got an invitation to submit an article to symposium entitled “How We Can Strengthen Our Traditions” (later retitled - I like to think bc of my article - “Safe-Guarding Traditions”) /2
Champion had apparently quickly read my departmental profile, saw I was working on Watson Kirkconnell, and assumed that I was as much an Anglophile as he. /3
(Champion had written about WK in his book, The Strange Demise of British Canada, where he had praised WK for having “anticipated” multiculturalism. He must not have known my work was critical in nature; here's an ex of what I was working on @ the time https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2201473X.2020.1726148?journalCode=rset20#.XzX9Xs9UUZt.twitter) /4
My supervisor suggested that I accept & subtly challenge the forum's underlying notion. I submitted a piece, though I didn’t do so well with the “subtly." But after all, the publication invites readers to, “when necessary, disagree with us enthusiastically and intelligently!” /5
But I then found myself in a protracted struggle to get the piece accepted, submitting rev after rev. Nearly every point I made was contested, so a lot of the arguments I made had to be drawn out, crowding out many other, more central points. /6
And it didn’t help that, midway through the process, the original maximum word-count of 800 was reduced to 600, with Champion giving me the patronizing non-explanation that I could write as long as I wanted in a graduate paper or dissertation but not in his "magazine" /7
I was also informed that the proposed edits to my piece were only intended to introduce "nuance" where I had been “overly influenced by the university / activist group think [sic].” /8
Similarly, one idea – that those who benefit from society being structured a certain way naturally seek to protect that structuring – was dismissed from one draft on the grounds that it was “Marxist claptrap.” Enthusiastic disagreement, I’ll say! /9
When at last a final version was agreed to, I opened the publication to find that a sentence and a half had been cut without my consent. Strangely, the offending quote was from the publication’s own manifesto. /10
Unsurprisingly, I have never received another invitation to write for the DR. Given the apparent lack of actual blinded peer review, and the heavy-handed editorial intervention, I consider it to be a magazine and not an academic journal. /11
But more to the point, I find the recent news concerning, mainly bc Champion publishes articles almost exclusively in his own publication (and a quick glance at the DR’s Wiki page tells me that he has since published a book with a “press” that he founded as well). /12
The willingness to submit one’s work to blind peer review, where it might - and hopefully *will* - be read by those with different ideas and ideologies, is essential for academic scholarship. /13
Avoiding disagreement by hiding within an echo chamber of your own making is not “avoiding political bias,” it’s a refusal to confront that very bias. /14
And what of the publication's bias? The stated agenda of the Dorchester Review is to correct a perceived centre-left bias, and it is premised on two main ideas. 1) that a singular “civilization” should “progress and advance,” /15
& 2) that Canada’s “strength and advantage…would be void if polemically separated from its European, Judeo-Christian and Classical traditions”
Apparently FNMI traditions, non-European traditions, and non-Judeo-Christian faiths are not equal sources of strength or advantage /16
Apparently FNMI traditions, non-European traditions, and non-Judeo-Christian faiths are not equal sources of strength or advantage /16
Far from being politically neutral, this is a flawed, exclusionary, and deeply harmful philosophy of history, one that should not be foisted upon students of any age /17 #ableg
