In the investigation of Renae Watchman’s complaint (see Episode One) – a copy of which can be found here – Widdowson’s satirical letter (see Episode Six) and eight Tweets were found to be harassing and to have created a toxic workplace.  However, in MRU’s final submission on January 16, 2024, MRU changed its case to claim that only six Tweets (and not the satirical letter and two of the Tweets) had been found to be harassing (the document with Hope’s reasoning for just the six Tweets can be accessed here).  The satirical letter and these eight Tweets are posted in the first PDF viewer below.  In the second PDF viewer, the commentary of the investigator, who was hired by MRU to investigate the Watchman complaint, is provided.  Widdowson’s eight Tweets that were found to be harassing and creating a toxic workplace are highlighted in the investigator’s commentary.

The complete copy of the Hope Investigation Report (Renae Watchman Complainant) is available here.

The investigator argues that “Watchman’s perspective” is essentially to say that “You are a racist and an opponent of BIPOC people” when “diversity-related matters” are questioned.

The investigator reported that Watchman “felt it was inappropriate for MRU to ‘make place for Dr. Widdowson’s voice’ on matters of Indigenization at all”.  She explained that “white people can be too fragile to learn some of the tough lessons” Indigenization provides.  According to the investigator, Watchman’s assertion that Widdowson was critically analyzing Indigenization was equated with being complicit in racism.

The investigator noted that Dr. Watchman suggested that arguing strongly against indigenization “automatically involves complicity in racism”.  He maintained that this amounted to an “intellectually lazy false equivalence exercise to protect one’s viewpoint as some sort of sacred cow”.

The investigator contended that Dr. Watchman asserts that objecting to “a territorial acknowledgement that is unilaterally undertaken on behalf of the group” equates to belittling a group or a person.

The investigator noted that Widdowson “asks hard, uncomfortable questions” to have indigenous spokespeople “account for how something like ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ can align with the academic and scientific rigour required at a University”.

Although the investigator reported that “Dr. Watchman felt that Dr. Widdowson was not ‘qualified'” to criticize Indigenization, Watchman “ultimately admitted that she had not read Dr. Widdowson’s academic ‘stuff'”.  The investigator concluded that this “was an obvious reason why Dr. Watchman could not articulate in any substantive way” why Widdowson’s ideas were invalid.

The investigator noted that “Dr. Watchman could not provide any detail as to exactly how Dr. Widdowson was being belittling or otherwise demeaning or inappropriate to Dr. Curley…”.  Dr. Watchman also complained that Frances Widdowson did an interview with the Times Higher Education that was critical of Indigenization.

The investigator notes that Dr. Watchman complained about Widdowson proposing a policy that would involve “committing the university to freedom of expression and uninhibited debate”.

Dr. Watchman asserted in 2016 that Widdowson’s participation in an academic event on Indigenization involved including a perspective that was “problematic, hateful, [and] ignorant…”.  This, according to the investigator, involved a “direct implication…that Dr. Widdowson was a racist”.  Watchman argued that Widdowson demanding that evidence be provided for this assertion and “pushing [Watchman] to justify her viewpoints” had the effect of  “hinder[ing Watchman] from essentially existing in the institution [MRU] in a healthy manner”.

The investigator noted that Watchman had a “general complaint…that academic freedom can even notionally be relied upon by Dr. Widdowson in speaking against Indigenization and about Aboriginal issues as she does”.  He characterized “Dr. Watchman’s mindset as resenting Dr. Widdowson’s ongoing existence as an employed academic at MRU, or at least her abilityto speak against Indigenization at all”.

Dr. Watchman argued that “Widdowson is engaging in harassment and compromising the ‘personal safety’ of Dr. Watchman and others by attending events open to faculty and ‘targeting’ the speaker by ‘questioning their methods and scholarship, claiming that their work was not scientific.'”  For one event, Dr. Watchman “did not have a specific recollection of precisely what is is that Dr. Widdowson said in allegedly ‘targeting’ the speaker”.