“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.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.076 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".