“Crawling with Atheists”: Unbelief at Canadian Universities during the Sixties
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian universities were regularly held to be seedbeds of atheism in the long sixties. This article interrogates that claim through an analysis of campus life at a selection of universities across Canada, with special attention given to the University of British Columbia. Drawing on campus publications, secular media sources, religious and humanist writings, and oral histories, this article shows that unbelief was openly discussed and addressed in neutral, sometimes positive, tones on a number of university campuses in Canada during that era. While university life contributed to the gradual erosion of the stigma against unbelief, the persistence of that stigma is evident in the lingering discomfort and periodic controversies associated with atheism on campus. The universities examined here were not crawling with atheists, but they did widen platforms and possibilities for challenging religious belief and helped to un-silence atheism during a period of significant religious change in Canada.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".