Beal Book Purge, Part II – Nothing to See Here

I wrote about the Beal Secondary School library’s 10,000 book purge here last week. Since then there was a second article in the LFP noting that the provincial Minister of Education had finally spoken up and said this sort of library culling of books must stop. Fine, Mr. Minister, but the books at Beal are already long gone.

Today’s Freeps has a third story on this, with the headline:

Expert downplays censorship fears after Beal 10,000-book cull

Well, an expert has spoken, so I am greatly reassured.

Who is this expert? Well, it is none other than James Turk, a director of the Centre for Free Expression at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Clearly, that’s the guy you want to hear from, eh? A quote from him from the Freeps article:

“I have gone through the list of the 10,000 books removed and checked the current online database of the items remaining in the collection and am satisfied that this case was not about censorship.”

There you have it. Oh, and the article also mentions that  “Officials with the Thames Valley District School Board declined to comment”.

Turk does have more to say.

“It is normal practice in all libraries to make space for new books by removing those, for example, that have been damaged or that no one has taken out for a period of years or to meet new curriculum needs.”

Well, they certainly made a lot of space, eh? 10,000 damaged and seldom checked out books.

Turk is critical of the Minister for pausing all those book culls, though. Another quote from Turk from the Freeps.

“The provincial government’s role is to make sure that all boards have appropriate selection and de-selection policies but leave the selection and de-selection to the teacher-librarians within the board” he said.

That’s interesting, as it was Beal’s teacher-librarian who raised a stink about this cull (else none of us would even know about it), was disciplined by his superiors for doing so (for ‘insubordination’) and then resigned when he felt his job became untenable.

This all made me very interested in Turk’s credentials, and so I looked him up at this Centre at TMU.

Now, in my discipline every serious economist working at a University has a website where the public can go to see what courses we teach, maybe even some sample course outlines, a copy of our CV indicating what we have published and the positions we have held, and usually a list of the projects we are working on currently, with maybe some working papers available to download.

For Turk – nada. I found the website for this ‘Centre’ he directs, and he is listed as being its Director, indeed, but there is no info that I could find about his work as an academic. He appears in some of the podcasts listed on the Centre’s site, but no serious research that I could find. No CV, either. I looked at the TMU School of Journalism site, too, and he is not listed as a faculty member there, so no help.

I was left to the device of putting his name into Google Scholar to see if any research with his name attached came up. Sadly, as academics know, GS has become enshittified along with the rest of the web. All one can do is put the name in and then, since Turk is not exactly an odd name, up comes a million papers having nothing to do with him. It is impossible to pare this pile down by being very specific about his exact name, because GS wants to throw as much shit at you as possible.

On the first page of results I got these papers:

High sensitivite flow cytometry of membrane vesicles

Measuring power in families

Uterin neuroplasia in 13 cats.

All fascinating reads, I am sure, but listed only because somebody named Turk was one of many authors. I did find a book chapter he wrote which of course I could not read, titled ‘Protecting the integrity of academic work in corporate collaborations’.

And, I found one paper he co-authored, published in the Canadian School Libraries Journal in 2025, titled ‘Censors Are Targeting Schools: Hardly New but Deeply Troubling’.

It is not actual research, just a brief piece laying out his idea of what is going on regarding attempts to influence what books are stocked by libraries, both public and school.

There are some curious things in this little article.

Near the end the authors provide a list of historical attempts to get books removed that failed. They write:

Barbara Smucker’s Underground to Canada, recipient of numerous awards, is an historical novel for Grades 5 to 8 describing the underground railway that brought slaves escaping from the American South to Canada during the 1850s and 1860s. It has been challenged actively in both Winnipeg and in Nova Scotia’s Tri-County school district because of its use of the N-word. That has been the basis of demands for removal in various school boards across Canada of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and just this year of eminent Canadian author, Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes.

Yet Turk sees no problem with the removal of Steinbeck from the Beal Library?

Later, they write:

“This makes the schools vulnerable to individuals and groups who invoke phraseology such as “age appropriate”, aim to deprofessionalize librarians and educators, and press for removal of a challenged item without a transparent and fair review by those with the necessary education and training.”

Yes. Those with the education and training. Like Beal’s teacher-librarian Larry Farquharson, perhaps. or – no?

And the term “age-appropriate’ is  ‘phraseology’? Hm.

The Beal policy document says of their purge “The project will focus on deselecting texts with harmful images, messaging, slurs, and racial epithets to facilitate the safety and well-being of all students.”

So, is that ‘phraseology’? Perhaps not. I suppose phraseology, like censorship, is in the eye of the beholder.

I learned a lot about what people at Turk’s Centre think about censorship through researching him, so I will be writing more on that in the future. For now I will just say that Mr. Turk (I have no idea whether he merits the term ‘professor’ given the paucity of info available on him at TMU) has not re-assured me in the least.

Those 10,000 books were destroyed (not passed on to others) mostly because the people who run Beal did not like what was in them. And they did not pass those books on to others because that would have made it too obvious what they were about to do, and a stink might have been raised before the books were gone.