A Yank among the Loyalists: Review of Peter C. Kent’s Inventing Academic Freedom: The 1968 Strax Affair at the University of New Brunswick (Halifax: Formac, 2012)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For those of us in literary studies, Peter Kent’s Inventing Academic Freedom will strike a couple of familiar chords. First, it recollects the circumstances surrounding John Thompson’s tenure application at Mount Allison University in 1969. An American poet of considerable talent and influence, Thompson was denied tenure at Mount Allison because he had what was deemed to be an inadequate scholarly record, a conclusion that inflamed a large majority of students and faculty. (Supporting faculty cited his stellar teaching evaluations as well as his innovative poetry and translations, while students voted in record numbers to increase their own ancillary fees in order to keep him on campus as writer-in-residence.) Joining the senior administration against Thompson was a small cadre of English department members and “socially prominent” establishment types, their position expressed in the view that Thompson was “a subversive...[who] should not be permitted to stay in the peaceable kingdom of this small, respectable university with its proper Methodist background” (Sanger 28). The ensuing conflict between the two groups threw the small university into almost eighteen months of political turmoil, and the event became the fault line that divided the old from the new university. After the Thompson affair, the university would evolve in lockstep with the processes we know of today as collective agreements. For better or worse, the affair brought to a close the era of the (presumed) gentleman scholar and (presumed) benevolent patrician.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".