The strange case of Prof. Robert Buckingham — proof that universities live in a bubble

COLUMN — Any doubt that universities live in a bubble should be removed with the case of University of Saskatchewan dean Robert Buckingham.

Buckingham was fired as the dean of the school of public health and relieved of his tenure as a professor and banned from campus.

The situation created such an uproar that university president Illene Busch-Vishnica issued a public apology and gave him back his tenure (but not his job as dean) but not before it got all political in the provincial legislature.

I don’t pretend to understand why universities are the way they are, but this one seems relatively simple to sort out.

Buckingham’s problem is that he wrote a public letter criticizing cost-cutting at the university. It didn’t go over well within administrative circles.

In universities, tenure is something that is given to instructors when they’re deemed worthy of full professorships. Though defenders of the system argue otherwise, outsiders tend to understand tenure as employment for life. You have to do something really out there to lose it.

The idea is that it relieves the professor of interference in his or her choices of research — research being held in high importance at institutions that want to be considered deserving of the name university.

It’s hard for a lunch-bucket slogger to imagine anything so lofty.

Not only are faculty eligible for such a fine thing as freedom to research whatever they want (and some do, such as alien abduction experiences and whether the ark would actually have floated) but they hold sacrosanct the freedom to express whatever they choose, including criticizing the hell out of their employer.

The latter, however, ends when you are appointed to be a dean and head up a department. Then you are, more or less, part of administration.

In other lines of work, when you sign on as a manager you are expected to toe the management line. You can argue and criticize all you like within the management team, but you’re expected to put up a united front to the outside world.

There were times, as a newspaper editor, that I disagreed strongly with what the bosses or other managers decided but never let on that I would have done it differently. If you can’t stomach that, don’t go into management.

There’s good reason for this, of course — it’s bad for business when the leadership of the business disagrees in public.

Buckingham thought he should be exempt. “… I have the right to disagree, even as dean, to university policies,” he told CBC. “I may not win, and I accept to lose, but at least I have the right to say publicly.”

The issue of what deans are allowed to say was raised briefly at Thompson Rivers University several weeks ago in the case of Lindsay Langill, the dean of trades and technology. Langill is a professor as well as dean.

Some faculty were critical of him for appearing in an Ajax mine promotional video. They said that as a dean he might be perceived to be speaking on behalf of TRU, which is officially neutral on Ajax.

It never amounted to much, but what’s interesting is that in Buckingham’s case, faculty at the University of Saskatchewan, and academics elsewhere, are expressing much consternation that Buckingham was punished for exercising his freedom of speech.

See, in Saskatchewan faculty are critical that a dean wasn’t allowed to speak his mind; at TRU faculty were critical that a dean did speak his mind. The two cases are very different, of course, as Langill wasn’t criticizing his employers, and even said he wasn’t actually taking a stand on Ajax, and it fizzled out in a few days.

The Buckingham schmozzle promises to be debated for awhile. It’s complicated by the fact that he was fired both as dean and as a professor, then reinstated as the latter.

Busch-Vishnica continues to take flack, and there’s even speculation her own job might be in danger but, from this outsider’s viewpoint, her decision to let him keep teaching but hold him accountable for what he did as a dean was ultimately the right one.

Of course, in the real world, things are often viewed differently than in the world of academia. Universities are wonderful places.

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