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• Whither the campus radical? 

If you planned to attend the Conference on Academic Freedom and Research Integrity on Monday at Edmonton's Shaw Convention Centre, take note: It has been cancelled. The reason? Several academics, apparently, did not approve of the subject matter.

The forum was organized by Carl Phillips, a University of Alberta professor with a deeply personal interest in the issue. That's because he studies something many of his colleagues hate: tobacco -- specifically, the health benefits of smokers switching to smokeless tobacco. And he's suffering for it.

In June, his faculty voted to cut off his industry research funding, though the university long ago cleared the funding as ethically clean. Shortly after, Prof. Phillips says he received a letter. Since he no longer had funding, his department said, he was being terminated. . . .

So, he and a handful of sympathetic colleagues arranged to air the issue of exactly how much freedom scientists have on campus these days. The conference would feature several professors who had faced similar problems. And it was planned for the Edmonton conference centre, at the same time and just down the hall from an international anti-tobacco conference "so that we could have sessions where we invited people from that conference over to make the case for their attempts to suppress academic freedom," Prof. Phillips explains. But organizers of the National Conference on Tobacco or Health, he says, threatened to break their contract with the centre after they caught wind of his plan.

"The conference facility came to me and begged us to let them out of their contract because they were being put in the middle and they were convinced that this obviously much larger, much richer conference was going to pull out if they hosted us."

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