Retirement doesn’t have to mean the end of your research

After I retired in 2013, I continued the sort of research on Indigenous issues that I had pursued for decades. Then came the bombshell announcement in May 2021 that 215 unmarked graves had been found near the Kamloops Indian Residential School. “Unmarked graves” quickly became a “mass grave” as the story ricocheted around the world. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and a host of other authorities quickly expressed their solidarity with the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation.

But the story didn’t seem right to me. The announcement was based on ground penetrating radar, which can pinpoint soil disturbances but cannot by itself identify a burial. Excavation is necessary for that. I had never done research on residential schools, so I got in touch with a group of scholars who had contributed to the book From Truth Comes Reconciliation published by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy earlier in 2021. Soon I was busy on an e-mail thread with a dozen other colleagues, researching the Kamloops story and other announcements about atrocities at residential schools that were starting to pop up.

When we went to publish our results, challenging the narrative that had formed about torture and murder in the schools and clandestine burial of the unfortunate child victims, we were shut out of the corporate media. This was a shock because for decades we had been publishing prolifically in university presses, peer reviewed journals and metropolitan daily newspapers. We turned, therefore, to alternative media — online websites and journals such as the Dorchester Review, Quillette, Unherd, True North, C2C, and several others.

After a couple of years of work, we published our most important articles in a book, Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools). Historian C.P. Champion and I did the editing, while the publication was done by the True North media company with the cooperation of the Dorchester Review. The book is sold only though Amazon, which has taken care of printing, marketing and distribution.

This new model of publishing by a media company working through Amazon is fast, efficient and more financially rewarding to authors than university presses or standard commercial publishers. Yet I probably wouldn’t have gone down this path if I hadn’t been retired. For 50 years of university employment, I had worried about publishing in the “right” places, namely peer reviewed journals and university presses. Now I only had to worry about producing a book that people would want to buy and read. No more gatekeepers! Goodbye acquisitions editors, referees and editorial committees.

All who have spent their careers in academic research know that the standard publishing model has many virtues. Acquisition editors and editorial committees are focused on quality as defined in the university world. Referees spot errors and make valuable suggestions. Copy editors clean up the manuscript.

But we also know that the standard model has serious problems. It produces far too many books that nobody wants to read. And the gatekeepers, valuable as they are, often end up imposing stifling intellectual conformity. The referees have usually published on related topics, and they are often reluctant to accept work that contradicts the research they have done. We all know that, if you don’t play the gatekeepers’ game, your research won’t thrive. You won’t get published and you might not get promoted and receive tenure.

At some point it hit me that I no longer had to care about all that. I could tackle a controversial topic without worrying about whether my livelihood was at stake.

This is not just a story about a retired professor with time on his hands and a taste for controversy. Democratic government in a free society depends crucially on open debate and freedom of speech. Sometimes in democracies consensus will form around a narrative that is simply not true. Without the ability to challenge the conventional wisdom, to point out that the emperor has no clothes, error can run rampant.

Sometimes the critics of the conventional wisdom are wrong. Maybe the contributors to Grave Error are wrong about some aspects of residential schools. Such is the nature of complex issues of public affairs. Truth and error are usually widely distributed, and no one is entirely right or entirely wrong. But it’s beneficial that those who espouse the dominant narrative be able and willing to defend it. As John Stuart Mill wrote, “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”

That’s why the winnowing process is so important. Opinions must be subjected to scrutiny so that truth can ultimately emerge. Retired professors can play an even more vital role here than when they were employed. With their relative immunity from reprisal, they can more readily afford to criticize widely accepted beliefs. And whether they are right or wrong, their challenge is beneficial to society.