The Canadian professor who made headlines in December for attending a controversial Holocaust conference in Iran is back in the news, this time by his own design. Shiraz Dossa, a professor of political science at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, has published an essay in the June issue of the Literary Review of Canada giving his account of the conference and hitting back at his critics in the media and in academic circles. Maclean's spoke to LRC editor Bronwyn Drainie about academic freedom and why the magazine chose to run the explanation.

In the essay, titled “The Explanation We Never Heard,” the Muslim Dossa accuses Jewish and Christian professors at his own university of having organized “a small Spanish Inquisition” to denounce him, and tries to clear up what he says are misconceptions about the Tehran conference and his attendance at it. He charges the media and the academic community with having misunderstood the goal of the conference, the extent of the Iranian government’s involvement in it, and the attention awarded the Holocaust deniers who attended. Most of all, though, Dossa takes issue with a perceived anti-Muslim bias among observers and his colleagues, and defends the notion of academic freedom.

Drainie thinks the subject is an important one. “I think we’re at a very sensitive stage in Canada right now regarding diversity, and the elephant in the room is Islam,” she says. “We can talk about diversity in a very general sense of how we’re all in this multicultural stew together, and isn’t that great, and Canada’s doing its best and all of that. But there is something about Islam and Muslims within our Canadian community that seems to be less susceptible to tolerance.

“Professor Dossa has put that right on everybody’s plate and asked them to take a very careful look at it, and to see if there is a difference in the way we judge and evaluate ideas and actions that come from our Muslim citizens, and the ones that come from all sorts of other groups, particularly the mainstream groups like the Christians and the nominal Christians, the Jews – the ones who’ve been here a much longer time.

“For that reason alone,” Drainie says, “quite apart from the philosophical question of academic freedom, this was an article that furthers the discussion.”

That question of academic freedom has been much debated with regards to Dossa’s situation. “Academic freedom is not conditional on the approval of the university or university colleagues,” he writes in the LRC essay. “Nor is the reputation of the university as an institution tied to the scholarly focus of its faculty or to the controversial subjects that faculty may pursue in their field of expertise.”

Dossa clearly feels aggrieved that, though he was not prevented from attending the conference, he was the victim of an “ignorant” assault on his academic freedom.

“You can have a right to do something, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have approval to do it,” says Drainie. “That was clearly his situation. He had the right to go and attend this conference in Tehran, and his university president said he had that right, and all these critics said, ‘Oh of course he has the right to do what he wants to do. But then we have the right to dump on him from a great height, and in large numbers.’

“So when the president of the university argues, as he has, that the 100 faculty members who signed the petition against Dossa have the same right to academic freedom that he has in going to the conference, it’s true - but they don’t really balance out.

“One is a single person going and pursuing something that he feels is important and interesting and germane to his work, and the other is 100 people or more getting together and basically ganging up on him,” Drainie says. “So yes, they all have that same right, but how that’s used, that’s all in the details.”

Dossa maintains that he is not a Holocaust denier, and calls those who deny the Holocaust fools. But in his work, which deals with the use of the Holocaust as propaganda and with the difficulties in trying to create a detached, critical academic conversation about the subject, he touches on very sensitive material, and it’s hardly surprising that the tenured professor has inflamed controversy beyond his simple attendance in Tehran.

“A couple of people have raised the parallel to Philippe Rushton, the professor at the University of Western Ontario, and the ostracism that took place around him,” Drainie says, citing Rushton’s controversial studies on race. “But he was working in a scientific area, and the rap I always heard against him was, ‘This is bad science.’

“Well, I think bad science is somewhat easier to demonstrate than the kind of thing that Dossa is involved with, which is politics and culture and interpretation. This is a very difficult and sticky area.”

But Drainie concedes that, fundamentally, and despite the controversy, Dossa’s academic freedoms have not been violated.

“He was allowed to go, he went, he did it, he came back, he still has his job, he has his tenure, all of that is still in place,” she confirms.

“But I would say he was definitely ganged up on, and that to me goes beyond what I would call healthy intellectual debate. Debates occur between individuals, maybe between groups, but when you have sort of 100 versus one, it’s a gang-up, and it went on not only at his university, but at the Globe and Mail.

And Drainie agrees that Dossa should have expected the controversy that his trip to Iran would generate.

“But I think no matter how much you expect something like this intellectually,” she says, “when it actually occurs, you can’t help but feeling, I don’t know… sideswiped, just absolutely bamboozled by it, because of how vociferous it is, and how heated it is. I mean, people have said really nasty things about him, and have impugned his scholarship, all that sort of thing. Even [St. Francis Xavier President Sean] Riley has suggested that some of those critics have gone too far in criticizing Dossa’s qualifications as an academic. There’s no reason to question any of that. The man’s been a full professor for eleven years, a professor at St FX for eighteen years – he’s the real goods as much as anybody is on that campus, or on any campus.”

Editor of the LRC since 2003, Drainie is glad she published Dossa’s essay.

“I feel like he deserved his chance to respond to everything that had been said about him back in December, and we were happy to give him that chance to respond. It furthers the discussion of multiculturalism in this country, and it furthers the discussion of the nature of academic freedom in this country.”

The June issue of the Literary Review of Canada, containing Professor Shiraz Dossa’s essay “The Explanation We Never Heard,” is on newsstands now.

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