www.universityaffairs.caDecember 2006
Meet the contrarians
Risking their reputations, these three academics buck the general consensus on three contentious current issues
by Léo Charbonneau
To be “contrary” can connote a certain willful or perverse stubbornness. And indeed, contrariness for its own sake can be tiresome, even futile. However, if driven by reason and fact, contrarians can sometimes break from the pack of conventional thinking to uncover difficult or inconvenient truths.
Universities, with their culture of academic freedom, civil debate and the open exchange of ideas, should celebrate the mavericks, the dissenters, the iconoclasts and the naysayers. But some in academe argue that universities today tend more towards group think, political correctness and intolerance of unconventional views.
To explore this issue, we introduce you to three academic contrarians: the global-warming denier, the gun booster and the feminist critic. All three hold views that arguably place them outside the mainstream of academe. The reactions they’ve received from their peers have ranged from polite acceptance to near ostracism. Despite this, all three feel grateful for the opportunities academia has provided them to pursue their ideas – whether others wish to follow or not. Here are their stories.
The global-warming denier
This past spring the little magnolia tree in Tim Patterson’s front yard produced an abundance of flowers. Ottawa is well north of the typical range for magnolias, but if the winter is relatively mild, as it was this past year, the tree does well. A harsh winter and the little tree struggles.
With the advent of global warming, you’d think Dr. Patterson’s magnolia has a secure future. But Dr. Patterson, a geology professor at Carleton University, doesn’t believe the Earth’s climate is warming. The theory of manmade climate change due to greenhouse gases is incorrect and outdated, he says. “I don’t get excited about what climate modelers are saying.”
Dr. Patterson, whose specialty is paleoclimatology, is well aware that his views on climate change place him in a minority within the scientific community. But if he’s feeling the heat, he doesn’t show it. “As a scientist I can only go where the science takes me, and not where someone like David Suzuki wants me to go.” When he does get criticized, it’s rarely about the science, he says, but rather is an “ad hominem attack of some sort, like ‘Patterson’s in the pocket of Big Oil.’ Well I wish!”
In any event, science is not a popularity contest, he points out, and the general consensus is not always right. He cites the example of continental drift, a concept laughed at by most scientists until distinguished Canadian geophysicist J. Tuzo Wilson championed the cause in the 1960s. A more recent example from the 1980s was the theory, considered preposterous by the medical establishment at the time, that bacteria might be the cause of peptic ulcers. Australian physician Barry Marshall, who proposed the idea, was eventually proven right, and he and colleague Robin Warren last year won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their efforts.
Of course, there are many other examples of scientists who bucked the trend and turned out to be wrong. Asked if he has any doubts, Dr. Patterson replies, “Sure I could be wrong … but I don’t think so.”
Dr. Patterson may take comfort in the fact he’s not entirely alone in his views. A number of colleagues share his position, including Fred Michel at Carleton, and Jan Veizer and Ian Clark at the University of Ottawa, among others. “At these [two] institutions, climate researchers who agree with my perspective on climate change actually outnumber the alarmists,” he says.
What these scientists essentially agree on is that the Kyoto Protocol is pointless because carbon dioxide emissions are not driving climate change. The computer models are simply wrong and do not match actual observations. Instead, Dr. Patterson points to solar variability – changes in the sun’s solar cycle – as the likely culprit. The sun experiences an 11-year sunspot cycle as well as much longer cycles of solar activity, and these trends in the sun’s output correlate well with temperature records dating back hundreds of years, he says.
Asked how the scientific community, the media and Al Gore could get the story so wrong, Dr. Patterson says it’s mainly because the debate has become so politicized. Environmental activists have taken what should be rational scientific debates and turned them into occasions for “evangelizing and antagonizing,” even though “they don’t really know what they’re talking about.”
Some climate skeptics, fearing the public backlash or damage to their scientific reputations, decide to keep their views to themselves, says Dr. Patterson. Others, notably scientists working for federal agencies, were effectively muzzled under “previous regimes,” he says. “I’m glad I don’t work for government. Where I am in the university environment, I can pretty much say what I want. … I don’t worry about political correctness too much.”
Dr. Patterson does do the occasional media interview, but somewhat reluctantly. After each one, “the phone starts ringing off the hook” with additional interview requests that he doesn’t have time for. Environmental advocacy groups, on the other hand, “have all the time. It’s their jobs.”
Nevertheless, Dr. Patterson thinks the message is starting to change. The theory of manmade global warming is “a house of cards. It’s going to collapse.” He also thinks the fear mongers will look a bit foolish once we enter the next cooling phase. This will happen likely around 2020 when the next solar cycle begins, he predicts. The fear of global warming will then “go out the window … and I’ll lose my magnolia.”
The gun booster
Two or three times a year, Gary Mauser invites a handful of people to the gun range to do some shooting. That wouldn’t seem too exceptional, except for the fact that Dr. Mauser is a professor at an urban university and his guests are curious students and colleagues – not your typical gun fanciers. That is precisely the point.
Dr. Mauser, a marketing professor at Simon Fraser University, says the aim of these gatherings is partly to teach firearms safety but mainly to demystify guns for individuals who likely have never held one. His larger purpose is to sensitize folks about the wider issues of gun control. He believes guns and gun owners have been unfairly demonized in society, mainly by urban elites.
He also thinks Canadians need to be disabused of a few cherished myths: namely, that access to guns increases crime and that strict gun laws reduce it. And don’t even get him started about the “failed experiment” of the federal gun registry.
Most of those who accompany him to the gun range learn a lot and enjoy the experience, says Dr. Mauser. But he’s not had as easy a time convincing fellow academics about his conclusions on gun control. “There are some people who have supported me, but by and large I meet with this kind of liberal intolerance,” he says. “Many academics will go to great lengths not to let really strong disproof change their basic beliefs.”
Dr. Mauser grew up in California. But, unlike the stereotype of Americans, he had almost no experience with guns while growing up. His first real exposure to gun culture was when one of his students took him to a gun club. “It was such a bizarre world. I figured, hey, I’m going to study these guys.”
A survey researcher with a PhD in social psychology, Dr. Mauser was interested in how policy is developed from a political and marketing perspective. He discovered that the National Rifle Association offered research grants, applied almost as a lark, and got one.
What he found through this and subsequent studies over the years is that there is virtually no empirical evidence to support the notion that restrictive firearms legislation reduces criminal violence. In fact, guns could even be considered a “social good,” he says, citing data which suggest that laws encouraging the use of concealed weapons may actually reduce crime. (Much of Dr. Mauser’s research can be found at
www.sfu.ca/~mauser/.)
Studies that reached the opposite conclusion, showing the danger of guns, either had faulty methodology or were not reproducible, he says. “These are folk tales, and the empirical support for them tends to disappear when you get close.”
As for the example, held up by gun opponents, of our southern neighbour awash in guns and crime, Dr. Mauser responds that this is more a socioeconomic issue than an issue of “access to one or another kind of weapon.”
His conclusions have not endeared him to many legal reformers, politicians and special interest groups, nor to other researchers. “It’s not easy telling the emperor he has no clothes,” he says. Conversely, he’s wary when some groups attempt to use his research as justification for their own political agendas.
One acclaim he’s received for his work, awarded in 2001, was the Nora and Ted Sterling Prize in Support of Controversy. The prize promotes “creative, unconventional” work at SFU which “provokes, and/or contributes to the understanding of controversy.”
Overall, “the university has been tolerant,” says Dr. Mauser. However, within his faculty of business administration, the situation is somewhat more complicated. There are those who applaud him for being a bit of an iconoclast, but others have questioned whether the articles he’s published in criminology and political science journals should count for review when he’s a marketing professor.
The feminist critic
It’s a man’s world, goes the old adage. But is it? Katherine Young, a professor of religion at McGill University, doesn’t think so. In fact, she thinks men are pretty hard done by, and the culprit is ideological feminism.
Her unconventional views have been heralded by the fledgling men’s movement, but the response from academia has been less than enthusiastic. Reactions to her work have ranged from cries of “shame” to doubts about her sanity “for even bringing this up.”
But bring it up she has, first in Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture, published in 2001, and most recently in Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination Against Men, released this past spring. (Misandry is the hatred of men, the counterpart of misogyny).
A third book, Transcending Misandry, is planned to complete the trilogy. All three are co-authored by Paul Nathanson, a researcher at McGill and one of Dr. Young’s former graduate students.
Publishing the books wasn’t easy, says Dr. Young. She credits Philip Cercone, executive director of McGill-Queen’s University Press, “who thinks that an academic press should go after unconventional views.” The opportunity to publish, she adds, “is key to whether academics will risk doing research that is different and not politically correct.”
In the first book, Spreading Misandry, the authors describe how contempt and hatred of men have become deeply embedded in recent popular culture, from movies to TV shows to greeting cards, and so on. The authors say this phenomenon was initiated and is still promoted by “a segment of the academic elite” affiliated with what they call ideological feminism.
In the 1960s, Dr. Young explains, feminism had a strong egalitarian streak, “and we’re fully supportive of that.” However, by the 1970s and especially into the ’80 and ’90s, “there was another development in feminism that began to see women as superior to men,” she says. That particular strand of feminism “became extremely popular” and took root in many of the women’s studies departments.
This worldview spread through the universities into “the whole range of professions, which carry these values at a professional level into society,” says Dr. Young. “They have become pervasive enough in academic, legal and political circles to pass for conventional wisdom.”
The authors expand on this in their second volume, describing how discrimination against men has now become so institutionalized that “it is best described as systemic.” Nowhere is this more evident, they argue, than in the legal system, where a double standard reigns with regard to such things as child custody and support, and accusations of sexual harassment and domestic violence.
The first book generated a smattering of interest in the media, although some journalists didn’t seem to take it very seriously, says Dr. Young. Their goal was to sensationalize the issue, “not to explore a social problem with profound moral implications.” It’s still too early to tell how the second volume will be greeted, but so far the response has been muted, she notes.
As a tenured professor with a strong publishing record, Dr. Young need not be too concerned about how her views may affect her academic standing, yet the process has not been easy. “I find that speaking out on unpopular topics, even in academia, even with its supposed freedom of speech, is a very difficult and potentially detrimental route to take,” she says.
Freedom of speech “is very vulnerable in the universities,” she adds, referring to the recent controversy over the awarding of an honorary degree by Ryerson University to McGill colleague Margaret Somerville, because the ethicist had spoken out against gay marriage. “The attempt to squash public debate is enormous, and the intimidation is enormous.”
Dr. Young hasn’t experienced any overt hostility at McGill, where she says a “culture of politeness” reigns. Nevertheless, she finds “there are very few academics who speak out on unpopular topics, maybe especially in the humanities.”
Challenging established orthodoxy could be particularly difficult for young professors. If her students were to follow her line of research, “I’d be worried for them,” she says. “Ultimately, I want to see people gainfully employed. When you’re secure and older and have nothing to lose, you’ve got more freedom to do these things.”
It’s a paradox at the heart of universities. Tenure gives academics the freedom to speak their minds, she says. Yet, “there is enough pressure to be conformist, to gain your success within a career, that . . . most people will not speak out.”
http://www.universityaffairs.ca/issues/2006/december/_print/contrarians.html
