Big, bald, bespectacled Robert Buckingham cuts an imposing
figure. When University of Saskatchewan security officers waltzed him off
campus and out of his job, I would have paid good money to see him shake them
off.
It’s unlikely he did so, having behaved with aplomb and
integrity throughout the debacle that saw him stripped of tenure, pension,
position and his executive directorship of the School of Public Health earlier
this week.
It was a bold and dangerous move for Buckingham to publicly
question the university’s administrators on the TransformUS process of
cost-cutting and college amalgamation. After considerable deliberation among
lawyers, academic leaders and others – according to president Ilene
Busch-Vishniac – Buckingham was removed from his role. But far from an act of
resolute managing, firing Buckingham and frogmarching him off campus was the
act of petulant, arrogant and short-sighted administrators.
The resulting firestorm over public speech in academia has partly
changed their minds. It wasn’t because they did the wrong thing and tried to
right it. It was, like Nixon, because their mistake was caught – by a diligent
media and international public opinion.
Buckingham has been partly reinstated, but it’s too late for
that to mitigate public fury. Busch-Vishniac, who does not appear to have taken
any personal responsibility for the fiasco, will not back down from firing Buckingham
as executive director, which is where this issue really rests. Buckingham will
not back down from his anti-muzzling essay, The Silence of the Deans, which started
the whole thing. We have stalemate, to that extent.
But in the court of public opinion, the knives are out for U
of S management, while Buckingham’s freedom of speech stance is garnering
enormous support from students, academics, commentators, and apparently the
provincial government.
What’s fascinating about this mess is how the U of S has in
one mad act compromised the brand it was obsessively trying to defend, by
insisting its leadership could not speak out about TransformUS and firing the
first manager to do so.
Their actions may have long-reaching repercussions. They could
certainly affect the future recruitment of qualified professors – including
Buckingham’s replacement -- and international and Canadian students. Even as
the U of S tries to cut costs, such a public relations disaster may also affect
the future funding it will increasingly need. These are issues the
administration should have evaluated before attacking Buckingham.
Perhaps the entire event is unsurprising in an environment
where speaking out, speaking up, or just speaking at all is becoming an
increasingly rare act due to fears of reprisal. The federal government, for
example, has also taken the approach of managing the message from all of its
bureaucrats, and that includes scientists. Heaven help the journalist seeking
information from a researcher, who must wade through layers of communications
officials before saying anything – or nothing.
The right of the public to know what is going on at all
levels of government and at tax-funded institutions is being trampled -- or at
least, the effort is being made. If there is a positive outcome to this case,
it will be that it shows muzzling policies can come back to bite the organizations
that instituted them.
Busch-Vishniac needs to take a page out of Michael McCain’s
communications playbook, and quickly. McCain, head of his family’s eponymous meat
firm, was abject in his apology over his company’s listeriosis crisis a few
years ago. His approach essentially saved his company. The buck stops at the
president’s office, and she needs to apologize, personally and absolutely, to
even have a hope that this will go away.
The U of S has done much more damage to its reputation than the
brave and outspoken Buckingham could possibly have done himself. In the
process, it has created a hero.
