Senator Wells' Thesis: Activism as a Career
Professor, now Senator, Kristopher Wells wrote a PhD thesis about his own identity, and is an activist rather than an intellectual. I took the trouble of reading it. (3,000 words, 15 minutes)
Prime Minister Trudeau has appointed Professor Kristopher Wells, who holds a Canada Research Chair in “the Public Understanding of Sexual and Gender Minority Youth” at MacEwan University in Edmonton, to be Senator from Alberta. The Professor is an advocate of gender ideology, and a sulphurous critic of Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and her child protection policies. This is of course why he was appointed.
The Professor’s doctoral thesis, entitled “Sex, Sexual, and Gender Differences in Canadian K-12 Schools: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives on Identity, Policy, and Practice” (2011) is online here. It unintentionally tells us much about the character of intellectual activity in this country, and also about the nature of power in a bureaucratic society where authority speaks in forbidding and often rapidly mutating initialisms, even as it claims to give voice to the powerless.
Prof. Wells seems to have published no books, so his doctoral dissertation is the most substantial work of his that we have. It is a pastiche of cultural Marxist ideology (on which more below) and personal anecdote: it is intellectually derivative, and cannot even be called a workmanlike addition to empirical knowledge. It is the text of an activist, not an intellectual. On the bright side, he’ll be at home in the Senate.
Gender Ideology
Professor Wells is an enthusiastic advocate of gender ideology, which is to say the idea that people have an internal gender identity that may not match their sex, and he is a keen supporter of “gender-affirming care,” meaning hormones and sex-change operations intended to make the body conform to the psyche. He is also an indignant critic of Premier Danielle Smith’s move to end sex-change operations on minors, to keep gender ideology out of schools, and to empower parents.
The mainstream media cannot get enough of Professor Wells. Danielle Smith makes the learned Professor’s head explode, and he has become the go-to source for spittle-flecked outrage. Here he is a couple of weeks ago, judicious as always, and very on-message with “weird”, in The Globe and Mail via the Canadian Press:1
Those who see transgenderism as a civil rights issue rather than a psychological and medical question find in transgendered people the oppressed minority required by progressive ideology. The supporting stereotype of the enlightened activist confronting conservative prejudice is as flattering to Trudeau as it is to the mainstream media, and indeed to the new Senator. Those who only read the mainstream papers will find no disturbing information about the damage to vulnerable and confused young people, and will rest easy in their self-regard.
Prof. Wells met with Trudeau last February and there was no nonsense about speaking truth to power. The future Senator was smitten:2
The Scholarship of (one’s own) Identity
The professor’s doctoral thesis is dedicated to the people he studies. He writes that he was once a teacher himself, has worked on “gay-straight alliances” and related projects in the schools for some years, and wrote a master’s thesis on a similar topic (as is not unusual, to be fair). His resumé, on the Prime Minister’s Office website, reinforces the theme.3 Activism has been not merely a career but an identity. Like many in the ever-multiplying branches of academic identity studies, Prof. Wells studies his own identity.
The Professor holds a Canada Research Chair in “The Public Understanding of Sexual and Gender Minority Youth,” a suspiciously specific field; one wonders if it was created bespoke. The Professor doesn’t just study his identity, he makes a career of it.
Scholarship should be broadening, creating an awareness that there are (or were) other ways of looking at the world and that some of those alternate ways of thinking might have been (or even still be) valid, even true. One’s own identity is always a tempting topic, but it will be understood better by a scholar who knows of something else as well. “He who knows only England, of England knows little”: I think that was Kipling. It certainly is not Wells.
The institution of the Canada Research Chair itself serves (intentionally) to associate the name of a state with knowledge, just as at one time Regius Professorships associated the King (Regius in Latin) with learning, and just as the Trudeau Foundation attempts to associate intellect with the present dynasty.
There have been chairs in arcane things for a long time, but Prof. Wells does not hold a chair in classical etymology or metaphysical poetry. A chair in a normal field may at least in theory be held by a Socialist or a Tory, however unlikely the latter case may now be. A chair in “The Public Understanding of Sexual and Gender Minority Youth,” institutionalizes the production of high-status academic discourse, and of a high-status academic personality, on one side of a politically-designated question. It sends a message that ambitious and sophisticated people will hold progressive attitudes toward anything within a parsec of gender, even as it more directly funds the creation of large quantities of credentialized but ostensibly independent discourse justificatory of bureaucratic power.
I pointed some of this out on X (Twitter) some time ago; shortly thereafter the Professor blocked me. There was a time when academics, especially on the left, and I have known a few, relished contradiction as an invitation to argue their point, and took argument as a compliment, necessarily implying that they could hold their own. That time is sadly past; academics have become fragile, almost like bureaucrats. The anti-intellectualism of the left now takes an instrumental view of academic and intellectual activity, seeing thought and study as tools of activism and instruments of politics. Disinterested research is seen as at best an irrelevance; argument as heresy.
The Structure and Style of a Thesis
Prof. Wells’ thesis recounts the experiences of seven (7) teachers chosen from a series of 53 interviews he did in combination with his thesis supervisor, funded by the Social Studies and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The 53 are all described as “sexual minority or gender variant”, or SMGV, educators: The alphabet always grows, driven by factors both bureaucratic and ideological, its obscurity functioning as a kind of outwork preventing adverse commentary from those not fluent in the latest acronymic jargon.
Seven interviews seem a thin basis for a doctoral thesis, but Prof. Wells turns them into 90,000 words. The interviews emerge in two of four essays, with a 30-page introduction and a similar wind-up. Even the two essays that do discuss the experiences of teachers are preoccupied with what might be called theory talk: the interviews provide the occasion for theory, rather than material for analysis.
Wells calls his methodology “queer criticality” — he claims the coinage — which is never clearly described. Here is his introduction to it:4
The queer criticality that I develop and explore as a theoretical construct seeks to bring together and investigate aspects of critical theory, critical pedagogy, poststructuralism, and queer theory. My aim is not to attempt to reconcile these competing theories to produce a grand narrative or proscriptive way of theorizing; rather, I intend to investigate the productive tensions that a notion of queer criticality can prompt for self-reflexive researchers when these theoretical perspectives are placed in dynamic relationship with one another (St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000). Judith Halberstam (1998) describes this queered approach to theorizing research practice as a “scavenger methodology” (p. 9) that refuses traditional loyalty to disciplinary methods (Plummer, 2005).The text is grammatical without being fluent or clear; it is thus representative. I have three points, concerning style, genealogy, and method.
Style
The above lengthy passage from page 5 reads like a rhetorical warm-up, and some such methodological preface, with the expected genuflections and disclaimers, is an almost obligatory part of any thesis. But any one of these sentences could be cut and pasted to pretty well any other page of this thesis. Wells is forever announcing theoretical constructs and innovative methods, without actually explaining let alone using them. The theory talk is an affectation, communicating an allegiance, as affectations often do, and also communicating a desire to sound sophisticated, but not telling us much beyond that.
The style is meretricious, its big words straining to disport its learning, even as this claim is refuted by its malapropisms: he really wants to abjure prescriptive theorizing, proscription being something the Romans did, and he means self-reflective, as reflexivity more normally refers to French verbs. The malapropisms go beyond spelling mistakes: are “tensions” in fact prompted by a “notion“, and are they really properties of the researcher, rather than a situation? The language is awkward and overwritten.
Genealogy
Prof. Wells announces in the passage above that he draws upon poststructuralism, critical pedagogy, critical theory, and queer theory (his text is full of lists). This list is more informative than he knows.
Poststructuralism was the intellectual movement sometimes called postmodernism and sometimes post-Marxism, exemplified by writers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes (some people get into angry dogmatic disputes about the precise meanings they think these terms should have, but they are often used as synonyms). Foucault is a particular favourite of Prof. Wells, and though the other two are not mentioned, Wells is also keen on deconstruction, a term originating with Derrida (whether Wells understands it is another question). All of these writers, like most poststructuralists, were within the Marxist tradition.
Critical Pedagogy is a doctrine based upon the writings of the Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freire, holding that teachers should teach not skills but Marxist doctrine, aiming to create not citizens, but activists. Prof. Wells calls his interview subjects and those he intends to instruct alike “activist-educators.”5 The idea that teachers should teach math, reading, and other normal subjects beneficial to the child, is not broached in his thesis. In this environment, that would be regarded as irredeemably reactionary.
Critical Theory, which Prof. Wells claims to be practicing, is at its best theory aware of its premises and also of its social position. The term contains a distant allusion to Kant’s Critiques, and a more direct reference to Max Horkheimer’s famous essay of 1937 on “Traditional and Critical Theory.” The latter defined critical theory as theory with an emancipatory purpose grounded in a Marxist understanding of power. The economics of the Marxist understanding of power have receded from view — Horkheimer was an intelligent man, and abandoned them himself — but the focus on power, seen through Marxist or para-Marxist spectacles, remains central to the multifarious critical theories of today.
Queer Theory is a large body of academic writing, productive of many citations, growing out of gender theory and postmodernism, and associated with Judith Butler and with the idea that heterosexuality is only considered normal because societies make it so. In other words, heterosexuality is “socially constructed.” This is a bit like announcing that bipedalism is a social construct, though I suppose that with ingenuity and motivation the case could be made. Whether the SSHRC would pony up is another question.
Queer Criticality is therefore an identity-focused re-iteration of often stale cultural Marxist ideas widespread within the academy, if not obligatory. It is congenial to the Liberal Party of Canada, a point to which I shall return.
Method
Prof. Wells announces a “scavenger methodology,” of what he later calls a "critically queer ethnography,”6 but the self-deprecation fails: scavenging is in fact all he is doing, insofar as he moves beyond abstract generalities. Of his four essays, there is no discussion of the ostensible objects of research — the experiences of sexual minority teachers -- until the third of his four essays. There isn’t much flesh to scavenge.
Ethnography is a method of studying a culture, usually another culture, through interviews and observation. Structuralist and poststructuralist anthropology looks particularly for the oppositions that a culture uses to organize itself and its mental picture of the world. This is not happening here: Prof. Wells is celebrating rather than observing let alone analyzing his subjects, interviewing them as allies for motivational and tactical advice. A structuralist ethnography of Wells’ subjects would observe that, as with this dissertation, their discourse is structured around simple and overlapping binary oppositions between open and closed, tolerant and prejudiced, inclusive and oppressive, diverse and “heteronormative”. That last term and its cognates occur 101 times (it being one of the advantages of reading PDFs that one can easily quantify a writer’s tics.)
Quite unintentionally, Prof. Wells’ dissertation emphasizes with its frequent allusions to famous Frenchmen its own second-hand, derivative character. A doctoral thesis is supposed to be an original contribution to knowledge: there is little originality here, nor anything resembling a contribution to empirical knowledge.
The Professor of Power
Foucault is admired by Wells, and cited 27 times, as is Freire (PDFs again). Foucault is best known for his history of sexuality, which Wells quotes as canon, but his most formidable work was The Order of Things (1966), which argued (to summarize a bit) that academic disciplines were political projects, articulating the agendas of power. Any resemblance to queer theory or critical race theory is strictly coincidental.
Nor am I being entirely facetious: Foucault had a point that academic life was shaped by power. Whatever the absurdities of his Marxist politics, which began with a concern for oppressed people (homosexuals, lunatics, and prisoners most notably), and ended in support for the Ayatollah, Foucault was deeply learned and also had an insurgent spirit, questioning the premises and preconditions of existing ways of thinking. In his time, he was to some extent a rebel. I doubt that he would have been comfortable with canonization, or had much patience with the reduction of his doctrines to dogma, his once-novel diction to rote incantation.
This brings us to the central contradiction of Prof. Wells’ thesis: its terminology is that of resistance, but its social position that of bureaucratic power. It is a performative contradiction: the oppositional words are contradicted by the act of their articulation from a prestigious place within the state bureaucracy.
Professor Wells bases his thesis on SSHRC (i.e. state)-supported research, and has since thrived in other state institutions, becoming a Professor and a Canada Research Chair, serving as a “diversity consultant” for the Edmonton Public Schools and on the Edmonton Police Board, and being awarded numerous baubles, including the Queen Elizabeth Platinum Jubilee Medal.7 He is now appointed for life to the Red Chamber. Power is not too upset with him, and yet he will bang on about the need to subvert hegemonic power and its discourses and so forth.
It is not just that he has been appointed to the Senate by Trudeau. He has spent the past twenty years prospering within bureaucratic institutions, quite independently of Trudeau. The Prime Minister will in all likelihood be gone shortly, but those institutions are permanent, and largely independent of elected politicians. For most of the last twenty years, the elected government of Alberta (the level of government responsible for educational policy) has been in Tory hands, and yet the autonomous bureaucracy hires and promotes men like Prof. Wells, who regards conservatism and certainly Christianity as standing human rights violations. His power, or more specifically that of the institutions and the class to which he belongs, is resilient, and largely independent of the elected government.
As I wrote some time ago in Theses on Gender Ideology, the creation of a proliferating mob of oppressed minorities justifies the accumulation of power by the bureaucratic state, and in the case of gender minorities by the educational and child welfare bureaucracies. The ideology of Prof. Wells exemplifies two specific usurpations by unelected permanent bureaucracies: power is taken away from traditional institutions such as the family and the Christian churches, and an attempt is made to prevent democratically elected leaders like Premier Smith from resisting this bureaucratic expansion.
Beneath the rhetoric of resistance to power, a rhetoric the Professor no doubt honestly believes, gender ideology is the ideology of a bureaucratic imperialism steadily expanding its empire into realms previously reserved to the family, the church, and the legislature. Prof. Well’s hostility to the family and also to Christianity is honest, and is reiterated throughout his thesis (repetition is a skill set). But he professes to admire an “audacious democracy,” a phrase borrowed (with attribution) from the critical race theorist Cornel West, and repeated no less than seven times. The Professor’s version of democracy wants to take power away not merely from families and churches, but even from the elected legislature: his audacity is unafraid of self-contradiction.
Legitimation by Expertise, without the Expertise
Professor Wells will not be the first academic to grace the Senate, but we are not getting the avuncular learning of Eugene Forsey. No one will look to Prof. Wells for learned anecdotes or good-humoured repartee. We are getting a cultural Marxist ideologue, and also a deliberate insult to the people of Alberta, whom the senatorial Professor roundly despises. He has, as I pointed out above, something in common with the Prime Minister.
Trudeau like Prof. Wells lives in a world of binary oppositions, a world where the left takes the side of enlightenment, of care for oppressed minorities, and of intellectual sophistication, all opposed to the backwardness, prejudice, and anti-intellectualism both men impute to conservatives. Professor Wells, with his advanced degrees, Canada Research Chair, and record of eleemosynary activism, exemplifies these claims.
But at bottom the Professor’s claim to intellectual authority rests on his doctoral thesis, supposedly a work of original scholarship, but really containing no originality beyond that required to turn the adjective “critical” into a noun, and nothing resembling new information. We have here an ideologue of bureaucratic power, whose writing communicates little interest in ideas except as tools of activism. He is a sad comment on the state of the academy, but will be a good fit for the Liberal Party of Canada.
Kristopher Wells, “Sex, Sexual, and Gender Differences in Canadian K-12 Schools: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives on Identity, Policy, and Practice,“ PhD Thesis, University of Alberta, 2011, p. 5. (link)
Wells, pp. 27, 168, and passim.
Wells, p. 171.
That feels like an act of masochism, requiring some heavy drinking at the very least.
Well argued, quite unlike senator Wells’ thesis. At first glance I understood his Phd thesis to be 3000 words and 15 minutes which confused me a bit.
I presume it’s more than 3000 words although it’s clearly not worth spending 15 minutes on.