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Pyne’s pioneering research has been cited by The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. On June 23, The Economist, in a piece on blacklisted journals, praised the B.C. scholar, remarking: “This is an area in which data are hard to come by. But one academic has been prepared to stick his neck out and investigate his own institution.”

His dedication to truth, however, has not gone well for Pyne, who might be turning into one of the most noted professors at Thompson Rivers University. He has been at the public Kamloops institution since 2010, specializing in economic and mathematical theory related to education, religion, trade and crime.

On July 17, however, Pyne was suspended without pay. That’s after being banned on May 17 from the picturesque campus on a Kamloops hillside.

Pyne, 54, has been in a grim dispute with university administrators, the human resources department and some faculty since he began working on a paper that was published in April 2017 in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, which is produced by the University of Toronto.

Pyne’s paper reported many administrators and faculty in the business and economics department at the university had articles in some of the 12,000 journals on a blacklist created by Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado. Beall tallied the journals that, among other things, generally demand fees and don’t bother with peer review, the traditional process through which independent experts scrutinize manuscripts.