John Ulan, National Post The University of Alberta is investigating Louis Pagliaro, an educational psychologist, after comments he made about a drug epidemic at Edmonton high schools.

The revelations were enough to make any caring parent shudder: children buying crack cocaine in high school parking lots; stashes of the drug in lockers and gym bags; a spiral of drug-related crime plaguing the school system.

Louis Pagliaro, an educational psychologist at the University of Alberta, issued the findings last March with scholarly gravitas, saying they were based on 250 interviews with students, teachers, police officers and drug counsellors. His conclusion? Drug use has reached "epidemic" proportions in Edmonton schools and further study is urgently needed if authorities wish to get a handle on the situation.

"We found a distinct pattern and indication that cocaine is not only widely available among the young adults at the club scene," Mr. Pagliaro told reporters at the time, "but is also readily available and is used on a daily basis in high schools within our cities." It is difficult to say whether "1%, 15% or 45%" of students are using, he said, without a wider sampling.

It is not the first time Mr. Pagliaro, a greying social scientist of 1970s vintage, has rung alarm bells in the Alberta media over substance abuse. His clipping file chronicles a long list of wild assertions, ranging from warnings about cocaine-snorting airline pilots to claims prostitutes as young as nine are working the streets of downtown Edmonton.

In almost every case, his accuracy has come into question: In 1990, pilots' unions and transport experts pointed to their own data to dispute the professor's claim that an average of two pilots a day were taking off from Edmonton International Airport with cocaine in their blood. And police later determined the supposed nine-year-old prostitute was a 14-year-old who lied about her age during an interview with officers in 1992. Perhaps, it was suggested gently, rumours that a pre-adolescent girl was working as a prostitute had somehow reached the professor's ears.

Whatever their accuracy, Mr. Pagliaro's most recent statements have taken his reputation for controversy to a new level. In addition to angering everyone from teachers to foot patrol officers, they have landed him in a bitter dispute with his university over a professor's freedom to speak his mind -- a dispute that is now threatening his academic future.

Far from defending their scholar, University of Alberta administrators ordered Mr. Pagliaro to stop talking to the media last March, following complaints by police and school boards that his claims were based on inadequate research. Citing an article in the university's collective agreement with its staff, Douglas Owram, the vice-president and provost, told Mr. Pagliaro he was under investigation for allegedly performing his interviews on unsuspecting participants.

Moreover, his "interviews" do not appear to have been approved under the university's mandatory ethics review process, Mr. Owram wrote.

Fran Trehearne, the school's associate vice-president in charge of human resources, denies the university is caving to outside pressure, or that the issue is even freedom of speech. The rules on research exist because staff and administration agree on the need to protect the university's credibility, he says. If Mr. Pagliaro had expressed his views as opinion based on experience rather than findings based on research, the university would probably have left him alone.

"You can appreciate why [such cases] would be important to universities, where the institution's reputation in terms of integrity and reporting findings is the coin of the realm," Mr. Trehearne says. "If a person driving a bus said there was a lot of crack in Edmonton schools, I don't think the media would pick up the story. If that person says 'I'm a professor at the University of Alberta,' then it carries a lot more weight."

Mr. Pagliaro, for his part, has refused to comply with the gag order, and has repeated his findings in numerous media interviews. And in a move that has further aggravated his bosses at the university, he has painted himself as a martyr for academic liberty: As a fully tenured professor and head of the university's substance-abuse research unit, he says he should be able to say what he wants when he wants and how he wants.

"I think the university's response has been patently against academic freedom, as well as freedom of speech in general," he says in an interview from his home in Mulhurst Bay, about an hour's drive south of Edmonton. "If every source you spoke to as a newsperson had to have his words cleared by someone else, well, it seems to me we'd be heading to a totalitarian, fascist state of things.

"I could lose my job over this, but I'm willing to put my reputation and my job on the line."

Mr. Pagliaro bristles at questions about the quality of his research, though he admits it consists largely of anecdotes collected while researching a new edition for one of his textbooks. "I have a responsibility once I've collected data and drawn inferences to share this with the public," he says. "If they choose to reject it, and the administration chooses to reject it, that's fine. They've done so in the past."

The entire case might have passed unnoticed were it not for the fact that -- as well as generating headlines -- Mr. Pagliaro has at times functioned as something of a canary in the coal mine of justice and social policy.

With more than 300 published articles and a dozen textbooks to his credit, he is often called as an expert witness in court cases and is unafraid to challenge the received wisdom of institutions such as police and Parliament. Long before police forces would allow the word "gang" to cross their officers' lips, for example, Mr. Pagliaro was warning that native and Asian teenagers were staking out territory in Edmonton, Winnipeg and other Prairie cities. Homicides, arrests and widely publicized court cases would bear him out. By the mid-1990s, police in both Edmonton and Winnipeg had formed special anti-gang units.

The psychologist was also instrumental in taking the Alberta government to task over its sterilization of institutionalized children during the 1950s and 1960s.

However, none of these accomplishments appears to be swaying the university. In July, an independent investigator recommended Mr. Owram drop the case against Mr. Pagliaro, but the provost remained unmoved. Last month, he asked the investigator, a psychology professor named Peter Dixon, to look into the case again under a special provision of the collective agreement, meaning Mr. Pagliaro's career remains in jeopardy.

"It's been stressful for me, I won't deny that," Mr. Pagliaro admits. "But I feel very strongly about this. I'm old enough to remember the fights for free speech by academia in the '60s and '70s, and to treasure it. But because I am many years tenured and I have a clean record, I am able to fight back. A younger professor might not be able to do that."