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| Few people know that he was actually defending Bertrand Russell. |
I am writing this post mostly for myself as a reference to be used later when I write a much more exhaustive memoir documenting these experiences.
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collecting a second set of data,
after ratifying a second set of amendments to my Ethics Protocol,
upon conducting a secondary analysis,
and despite offering to consolidate two dissertations worth of data and analyses into one oversized manuscript,
my thesis committee seems to be stonewalling my progress. Despite paying tuition out of pocket without working full time while living in downtown Toronto, I submitted a revised proposal (about the 6th or 7th version) with highlighted sections for review early November 2023, and no one on my thesis committee has yet gotten back to me as of this writing with feedback or suggestions for revision. For some of the folks on my thesis committee, this is not a first-time offense. One might ask,
I am not interested in flaming my thesis committee and departmental administration, even if I were convinced that such whistleblowing may assist other current and future colleagues experiencing abuse at UofT; there are other fora for that. Moreover, I am a pacifist who researches and teaches pacifistic pedagogy. Yet, I think it's still worthwhile to revisit the basic facts of my situation.
I first applied for my program in 2015 from China while teaching math and science just outside Shanghai. Unfortunately, I was not accepted to OISE's Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning program's fully-funded PhD cohort on the grounds that the department could not find someone to supervise my research. Upon receiving the decline, I was convinced that the only way to do my research justice was to leave China and to spend at least a year developing contacts and building my application in-person in Toronto. So, during a year of massive turnover of staff at my school, I elected to pass over an opportunity to serve as vice-principal in order to pursue the PhD program in the Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning department at UofT.
What followed was one of the craziest years of my life; it was essentially fully-funded cohort or bust. My close friend and confidant in China insisted that I could not accomplish what I set out to accomplish in a single year. He insisted that I could not learn French while securing a teaching job in Toronto while also gaining admission into the fully funded cohort at UofT. Not only did I nearly achieve B2 level French with Alliance Française in about 8 months (as a backup to teach FSL if I didn't get into the PhD program), but I also landed a job at Olympiads School to build and teach their Advanced Placement US History Course after publishing my Masters thesis research in a journal article to convince my current supervisor to give me a recommendation for the program at OISE. I know my work ethic.
Yet, I should have paid more attention to the red flags. After admission into the program, I developed a permanent scar in my eye (from a "peripheral corneal ulcer" in the words of my optometrist) from the additional stress of a two week stint supporting my supervisor in writing a grant proposal for over 300 thousand dollars (which they won). I needed to support a close friend and colleague who had their work plagiarized by a member of my committee after I had recommended them to this individual. I imagine my growing reputation as a whistleblower (or, you know, someone who cares about the pursuit of truth in a university) merely exacerbated my thesis committee's willingness to attempt to stonewall my completion and my departmental administration's unwillingness to intervene.
The most common advice I receive is to either escalate to the School of Graduate Studies or to lawyer-up. Feeding other UofT departments additional ammunition to fire at OISE betrays my own commitments as an educator and as an education researcher.
And, I refuse to earn my degree at gun-point (through coercion via "hired gun"). It betrays not only what I believe, but what I research and teach to my students. If the only thing standing between me and a doctorate is my willingness to retain legal counsel, I'm better off just going straight to law school.
Fundamentally, a doctorate is premised upon the recognition of the value of an original contribution to an existing body of knowledge by the doctoral candidate's moral, ethical, or at least intellectual superiors. On these grounds alone, the degree has lost most of its meaning to me. I will likely never redeem my image of my department or of UofT, partly because of the over-idealizing I engaged in prior to and near the beginning of my program. I pursued this path based on a mythology.
These intuitions allege to support and foster intellectual specialization. But, if your research is truly speci-al (and thereby essentially original in keeping with the etymological roots of that word), then arguably no one in any of these institutions should be able to support your work directly, and, therefore, there would be a real need for other specialists to trust you to conduct your research rigorously and ethically because you're making a tangible but original contribution beyond existing knowledge, including the existing knowledge of your doctoral committee.
Empathizing with my departmental administrators and thesis committee, it's entirely possible that the University of Toronto's Faculty of Education was never actually equipped to support my work in the first place, despite the relevancy of my teaching and the research study's content to both the work of my colleagues and the interests of student participants. Hence, I fully plan to finish the research study and to publish my research. My last goal at UofT is to seek approval of the second set of amendments to my ethics protocol to conduct my second set of data collection.
I will finish this research project, conducting the additional data collection and analysis for a second write-up that honestly could undergird a second PhD dissertation. I care about this research; I didn't give up vice-principal and leave China for a degree; I returned to Canada to finish the project that I began with my Master's thesis. I will see this through to the end, with or without UofT, and with or without their increasingly irrelevant institutional recognition.
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When a colleague asked me why I submitted a manuscript for journal publication under pseudonym, I commented on the importance of practicing "a measure of humility in an ocean of unexamined arrogance." These experiences have not shaken my resolve. If anything, I'm more certain of my position now than I've ever been before. From my work as a volunteer domestic violence counselor, to my role in the classroom as a professional high school teacher, to my role as a leader in the UTGSU Resistance, to the work that I continue to conduct as a researcher, we normalize the abuse that we're unwilling to contend.
Moreover, I keep letting other people set my win conditions. For me to finish my research project despite the neglect, misdirection, and sacrifices necessary to persist in my program is a greater accomplishment from my perspective than if I jumped into an existing research project and finished my doctorate in under four years. It'd be a far greater loss if I abandoned my research completely and betrayed the promises that I made to students, parents, colleagues, administrators, and to myself. My department may have failed me, but I won't fail them. I know what I promised to do.
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People familiar with this blog likely know about my effusive appreciation for Bertrand Russell. He's been a tag on here since I launched this blog over a decade ago. In the early 20th century, he was arguably the closest thing folks had to Socrates in the English-speaking parts of the world. Yet, as I've insisted elsewhere, he would not have survived in some of the departments currently operating in North American universities.
As I was editing this post, I kept revisiting Einstein's quotation because I kept that same poster in my office, directly above my desk, at OISE; (I bought the poster among a couple others with the $60 my brother handed me when I began undergrad at Western University). Turns out, my supervisor also kept a copy of this exact same poster, framed, in their office.
I'm too empiricist and agnostic to argue or to believe that everything happens for a reason, but I do believe in generalizable correlations as a researcher and someone committed to the development of knowledge. If I were smarter, I would have recognized sooner the implications of most of the intellectuals I appreciate subsisting in exile from the academy.
As my close friends and colleagues could confirm, I did not plan to use the honorific even if I "earned it". My students call me "Mr." from conventional courtesy; "Adam" is still just fine.
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Post script: I've only just begun writing "thank you" letters to the faculty, staff, and administrators who have supported me throughout this journey. A lot of great people do a lot of great work at OISE. I will never forget their support.
