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 While Martin’s home life was in order, his colleagues at work had had enough of his talk of organizing communities and empowering students. Two years after he took his post, they charged him with incompetence. The university established an Internal review committee, which concluded that the criticism was unjustified. Regardless, the administration had lost confidence in Martin and relieved him of his responsibilities as acting chair.
His departmental colleagues, however, wanted to be rid of him entirely. Unfortunately, Martin had tenure. In the absence of just cause, the only ways to get rid of someone who has tenure is to make things so unpleasant that he or she chooses to leave. That became the strategy. In early 1970, Martin was shifted out of his office and into a windowless, narrow cubbyhole.
Stripped of administrative duties, Martin turned all of his attention to his research and the classroom. He loved teaching. His approach, like his approach to community development, was deeply rooted in his democratic and Quaker beliefs. Learning, to be meaningful, had to be a broad and shared experience. What Martin and his students might choose to read and discuss and work with could never be described a priori in a traditional course outline. Sometimes it reached into the community or turned on the particular background or personal experience of individual students. Martin encouraged one student, John Ferguson, a teacher with an interest in adult education, to meet the language requirement for his BA in Cree rather than, say, French or German. This was groundbreaking. And it raised some eyebrows.
Martin feuded with the new chair of the sociology department about his approach to teaching. Terse memos flew between their offices. At issue was whether Martin was fulfilling his obligations to the university. In February 1971, in a fresh attempt to oust him from the university, Martin was suspended from teaching.
Although he remained on salary, the university continued to treat him as a non-person. He was shunned by colleagues. Martin applied for a Leave Fellowship from the Canada Council to do community research. In a letter to an academic friend in Maryland, asking him to support the application, he wrote, “I have been kept busy with local troubles. These tribulations have been made bearable by our becoming the parents of three lovable children — all in nine months time. Robert (10) and Dolores (8) walked into our home in October 1970....We did not know then that we were pregnant with our 16 month old youngest...Lina Nicolette (Nicci).” Martin didn’t explain what he meant by “local troubles” — it wasn’t his nature — or that Robert and Dolores, the children they’d taken in, were Métis children who had already been shunted from foster home to foster home.
Another professional colleague, Herbert Blumer, of the University of California at Berkeley, supported Martin’s Canada Council application, but added, “The only significant shortcoming in the candidate...is a deficiency in his ability to express clearly the nature of some of his more original thought. He can be obscure, sometimes at crucial points. In no way do I regard this shortcoming in exposition as implying a fuzzy mind. Instead, I think it is a case of dealing with an uncharted area in which one has to grope for new ways of formulation and presentation.” Martin’s application was unsuccessful.
Another review committee was appointed, this one outside the university. It advised the university that Martin had been treated unfairly and should not be dismissed. not to seek Martin’s dismissal. As a result, Martin and the university signed an agreement which entitled him to continue as a member of the sociology department until July 1, 1974, when he might be assigned to another department. He would continue to teach. In exchange, Martin agreed to apply for early retirement when he turned sixty at the end of the 1977-78 academic year.
But Martin wasn’t assigned teaching responsibilities in 1972 or 1973, nor was he assigned to another department in 1974. He simply continued doing his community development work with non-status Indian and Métis peoples in northern Saskatchewan. A grant from the Kellogg Foundation enabled him to hire two community organizers he’d worked with in the U.S., Miles Horton and Tom Ludwig. Martin’s goal was to help the leadership of the native communities take control of their own living conditions; it included helping them organize opposition to uranium mining.
While the trials at work continued, Joy and Martin acquired a second, neighbouring house — just as rundown as the first — and shared it with people in need. At various times it was used to house a graduate student and his wife; as part of “green relief” program, which provided vegetables to low income families in Regina; and as home to an immigrant Vietnamese family sponsored by the town. They also had a large garden of their own. “Every year they gardened with such bounty,” says Nicci, their younger daughter, now twenty-nine, “that by the end of the fall harvest, I was standing on street corners trying to give produce away.”
Martin’s Room, continued >
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