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I arrived at the symposium, as did others, unaware that the special issue had been cancelled. No formal announcement to the contrary was made. It was only in response to my question from the floor that the NRC reluctantly admitted that no special issue of CJP would be forthcoming. During the course of the symposium, at least three different reasons were given for the cancellation. First we were told that production problems had got in the way and it was now too late to proceed. Then we were told that there was no longer a need for a special issue since the symposium would deal with any outstanding questions. (Surely the purpose of a publication is the wider dissemination of the ideas contained therein.) Finally, we were told that there were potential legal problems--the NRC didn’t want to go to court and lose should Freeman decide to sue. “Therefore,” said Clive Willis, in explaining the latter reason, “we have to be extremely cautious.”
Given the way in which the NRC had dealt with the Freeman affair until this point and the way in which its decision to abandon the special issue was taken, it’s not surprising that many of those at the symposium were skeptical and suggested yet a fourth reason for the cancellation. Libel chill wasn’t the issue; political chill was. The NRC is a federal agency. The Conservatives, then in power, were in serious trouble at the polls; a federal election was looming. Pierre Perron, the president of the NRC, had been appointed by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. For a federal agency to take on a critic of feminism from a conservative province like Alberta at this particular time could cost the Conservatives votes. Freeman, after all, was a hero in conservative circles. It was in the interests of the Conservatives (and the NRC, if the Conservatives were re-elected) for the NRC to play things down. Research funds were drying up. Canada’s scientists needed all the friends in high places they could muster.
That might help explain why the NRC chose not to inform many of its critics that the symposium was even taking place. “I did this intentionally,” Joan Hill of the NRC subsequently admitted in a letter to Rose Sheinin, “because I wanted to use the Freeman issue as one example of the larger problem. Perhaps this was a mistake....” One of those the NRC chose not to inform was Robert Crease, who had written the Science on the Freeman affair. Crease had to piece together a follow-up report from audiotapes and interviews with some of those who had attended.
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Many of those who attended the symposium were surprised and disappointed by the NRC’s decision to cancel the special issue. After the symposium, Alan Andrews, the then president of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, wrote Clive Willis to express his disappointment. The NRC, he reminded him, had promised a complete dossier on the subject. “It was therefore a great surprise to me to discover as the symposium progressed that the dossier was not being published and that the clear desire of the NRC was that it not be published....This seems to me...a profound error. It is not only that the NRC appears to be breaking a promise....It is also a question of the way in which the academic community at large deals with matters of this kind. ...Unless the communities of scientists and scholars in this country, and the academic community at large...deal with such matters forthrightly and openly...we only have ourselves to blame if journalists misrepresent what we are thinking and doing....I therefore urge you again to reconsider the decision that was apparently made just before the symposium that publication of the supplement is not a good idea.”
The angry reaction of Andrews, and others, to the decision not to publish a special issue forced the NRC to backtrack yet again. The Council seemed to have no convictions that couldn’t be affected by the prevailing winds. On February 22, three weeks after the symposium, Clive Willis wrote Rose Sheinin that “there were many factors to consider, not the least of which was trying to do justice to those offended by our grievous error without, at the same time, fuelling public interest in Dr. Freeman’s irrational theories....While we felt it best to cancel the special edition, we have not tried to avoid publication.” The NRC was exploring other possibilities. The proceedings of the symposium, he reported, would appear in Scholarly Publishing. The sociological critiques of Freeman’s article that the NRC had commissioned “might” be published as an addendum to the proceedings in Scholarly Publishing or as a special section of a forthcoming regular issue of CJP. Willis didn’t say why returning to the original plan of publishing a special issue of CJP was still out of the question. But it wasn’t hard to guess. The special issue was to have been given wide distribution in the scientific community. Scholarly Publishing, on the other hand, has a circulation of 500; few of its readers, I suspect, are to be found in the scientific community.
The Sexist Science of Gordon Freeman, continued >
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