L'affaire Potter

You are all, I think, familiar with the details of L'Affaire Potter, so I need not enumerate them here. If you aren't already familiar with this story, you probably don't care what I have to say about it, so you can skip the rest of this post. But as a Quebec-based academic with a weekly column in a national newspaper, I feel obliged to say something.

I suppose I should start where everyone else does, with their connection to Andrew Potter. I've never met Andrew, but I'd like to: he recruited me long ago for my first forays into journalism at Canadian Business. This invitation was doubly flattering, since I was a great admirer of his work in The Rebel Sell and The Authenticity Hoax.  Since then, we've exchanged the occasional e-mail, and he provided my kids with a genuine belly-laugh by name-checking me as a "public intellectual" here. I was pleased for everyone concerned when he took that post at McGill and (not to put too fine a point on it) up until a week ago, I was wondering how I could plausibly leverage my thin acquaintance into an invitation to speak at one of the conferences his job it was to organise.

Which brings us to his Maclean's piece. Quite frankly, I didn't see a heck of a lot to be excited about, one way or the other. Certainly the bit about restaurant bills felt wrong to me. I'd never heard such a thing even as a second- or third-hand anecdote, but - I conjectured - maybe things were different in Montreal. (After 25 years in Quebec City, I've internalised much of the local tendency to believe the worst of what goes on in Montreal.) The StatsCan data he cited were suggestive, but I'm much too old a hand at social science data to accept them as conclusive.

It wasn't Andrew's best work, but - and this is the crucial bit - no-one hits home runs every time. Anyone who steps up to the public commentary plate is going to strike out at embarrassingly high rate; the best ones are those who can hit for the average. As someone (Felix Salmon?) once said, if you're never wrong, you're not interesting. And Andrew's batting average is such that I was willing to shrug this one off, in the almost certain expectation of more and better to come. His willingness to admit error is, in my view, yet another reason to cut him extra slack: lesser pundits would have succumbed to the temptation of doubling down. And as Colby Cosh notes, this is a field where getting things wrong can actually advance the debate.

This brings me to the delicate issue of university politics. In ten-plus years of blogging and column-writing, with an ever-increasing audience, I have never once incurred the wrath of Laval's administration. Or its approval, for that matter. I'm not entirely sure I show up on their radar (because I write in English?), and I'm not dissatisfied with this state of affairs. But not everyone benefits from this sort of benign neglect.

Certainly Andrew Potter did not. And it's not clear to me why he should pay so steep a price for an (admittedly lame) piece. As someone (sorry, I can't remember who) pointed out, being publicly corrected on a point of analysis is the appropriate punishment for getting things wrong. And there are far too many open questions about the affair to close the file at this point.

 

 

Comments

[Nick Rowe]

I thought his article was OK (I read it before the fuss blew up). I remember thinking I had never seen the double restaurant bill, but the rest of it seemed right, except that I wished he had distinguished between "personal" and "official" trust, and that I thought the former if not the latter seemed high in Quebec. (You can rely on individual people to help if you need it.)

But I agree with you "...there didn't seem a lot to be excited about, one way or the other". And I can think of a lot more controversial things for an academic to have written, and God help us if we extrapolate out from the reaction to Andrew Potter's piece.

We still don't really know to what extent he jumped or was pushed, however. But if he was pushed, he shouldn't have been, even if it was from a directorship position. Directors of university institutions, like department chairs, are supposed to be academics with views on their subject matter and not just bureaucrats.

I think I met him briefly about 10 years ago, IIRC.

I get unofficial positive responses to my blogging from Carleton's administration. But money/macro is "controversial" in a very different sense. And I tread carefully or steer around some topics. The whole Potter affair does increase my growing disenchantment with universities.

[Nick Rowe]

Oh, and as someone else said, the reaction to his article seems to support the thesis of the article.

[Gene Callahan]

"the best ones are those who can hit for the average. "

Wouldn't those be the average ones?

[Matthew]

I recall Andrew Coyne writing something to the effect that even if the article had been 100% accurate the reaction probably would have been the same. I think he's probably right.

I've been in a few taxis in Quebec City (recently, not before payment cards became widespread) and noticed they only accepted cash. I didn't realize why this might be until I read the Potter article. I'm not sure how representative my experience was though. And it could just be because they are trying to keep the price down.

[Jacques René Giguère]

Bizarre that the taxis I take have a credit card machine...

[Derek Pyne]

Somewhat related, Jeffery Beall told The New Yorker that the reason he discontinued his blog was pressure from his university: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/paging-dr-fraud-the-fake-publishers-that-are-ruining-science
I think he has hit the nail on the head when it comes to this stuff: “Universities don’t like negative things; they like happy, smiling people …”