April 2009
Last week we came to the section on academic freedom
in my course on the law of higher education and I posed this hypothetical to the
students: Suppose you were a member of a law firm or a mid-level executive in a
corporation and you skipped meetings or came late, blew off assignments or
altered them according to your whims, abused your colleagues and were habitually
rude to clients. What would happen to you?
The chorus of answers cascaded immediately: “I’d be
fired.” Now, I continued, imagine the same scenario and the same set of
behaviors, but this time you’re a tenured professor in a North American
university. What then?
I answered this one myself: “You’d be celebrated as
a brave nonconformist, a tilter against orthodoxies, a pedagogical visionary and
an exemplar of academic freedom.”
My assessment of the way in which some academics
contrive to turn serial irresponsibility into a form of heroism under the banner
of academic freedom has now been at once confirmed and challenged by events at
the University of Ottawa, where the administration announced on Feb. 6 that it
has “recommended to the Board of Governors the dismissal with cause of Professor
Denis Rancourt from his faculty position.” Earlier, Rancourt, a tenured
professor of physics, had been suspended from teaching and banned from campus.
When he defied the ban he was taken away in handcuffs and charged with
trespassing.
What had Rancourt done to merit such treatment?
According to the Globe and Mail, Rancourt’s sin was to have informed his
students on the first day of class that “he had already decided their marks:
Everybody was getting an A+.”
But that, as the saying goes, is only the tip
of the iceberg. Underneath it is the mass of reasons Rancourt gives for his
grading policy and for many of the other actions that have infuriated his dean,
distressed his colleagues (a third of whom signed a petition against him) and
delighted his partisans.
Rancourt is a self-described anarchist and an
advocate of “critical pedagogy,” a style of teaching derived from the assumption
(these are Rancourt’s words) “that our societal structures . . . represent the
most formidable instrument of oppression and exploitation ever to occupy the
planet” (Activist Teacher.blogspot.com, April 13, 2007).
Among those structures is the university in which
Rancourt works and by which he is paid. But the fact of his position and
compensation does not insulate the institution from his strictures and assaults;
for, he insists, “schools and universities supply the obedient workers and
managers and professionals that adopt and apply [the] system’s doctrine —
knowingly or unknowingly.”
It is this belief that higher education as we know
it is simply a delivery system for a regime of oppressors and exploiters that
underlies Rancourt’s refusal to grade his students. Grading, he says, “is a tool
of coercion in order to make obedient people” (rabble.ca., Jan. 12, 2009).
It turns out that another tool of coercion is the
requirement that professors actually teach the course described in the college
catalogue, the course students think they are signing up for. Rancourt battles
against this form of coercion by employing a strategy he calls “squatting” –
“where one openly takes an existing course and does with it something
different.” That is, you take a currently unoccupied structure, move in and make
it the home for whatever activities you wish to engage in. “Academic squatting
is needed,” he says, “because universities are dictatorships . . . run by
self-appointed executives who serve capital interests.”
Rancourt first practiced squatting when he decided
that he “had to do something more than give a ‘better’ physics course.”
Accordingly, he took the Physics and Environment course that had been assigned
to him and transformed it into a course on political activism, not a course
about political activism, but a course in which political activism is urged —
“an activism course about confronting authority and hierarchical structures
directly or through defiant or non-subordinate assertion in order to democratize
power in the workplace, at school, and in society.”
Clearly squatting itself is just such a “defiant or
non-subordinate assertion.” Rancourt does not merely preach his philosophy. He
practices it.
This sounds vaguely admirable until you
remember what Rancourt is, in effect, saying to those who employ him: I
refuse to do what I have contracted to do, but I will do everything in my power
to subvert the enterprise you administer. Besides, you’re just dictators, and it
is my obligation to undermine you even as I demand that you pay me and confer on
me the honorific title of professor. And, by the way, I am entitled to do so by
the doctrine of academic freedom, which I define as “the ideal under which
professors and students are autonomous and design their own development and
interactions.”
Of course, as Rancourt recognizes, if this is how
academic freedom is defined, its scope is infinite and one can’t stop with
squatting: “The next step is academic hijacking, where students tell a professor
that she can stay or leave but that this is what they are going to do and these
are the speakers they are going to invite.” O, brave new world!
The record shows exchanges of letters between
Rancourt and Dean Andre E. Lalonde and letters from each of them to Marc
Jolicoeur, chairman of the Board of Governors. There is something comical about
some of these exchanges when the dean asks Rancourt to tell him why he is not
guilty of insubordination and Rancourt replies that insubordination is his job,
and that, rather than ceasing his insubordinate activities, he plans to expand
them. Lalonde complains that Rancourt “does not acknowledge any impropriety
regarding his conduct.” Rancourt tells Jolicoeur that “Socrates did not give
grades to students,” and boasts that everything he has done was done “with the
purpose of making the University of Ottawa a better place,” a place “of greater
democracy.” In other words, I am the bearer of a saving message and those who
need it most will not hear it and respond by persecuting me. It is the cry of
every would-be messiah.
Rancourt’s views are the opposite of those announced
by a court in an Arizona case where the issue was also whether a teaching method
could be the basis of dismissal. Noting that the university had concluded that
the plaintiff’s “methodology was not successful,” the court declared “Academic
freedom is not a doctrine to insulate a teacher from evaluation by the
institution that employs him” (Carley v. Arizona, 1987).
The Arizona court thinks of academic freedom as a
doctrine whose scope is defined by the purposes and protocols of the institution
and its limited purposes. Rancourt thinks of academic freedom as a local
instance of a global project whose goal is nothing less than the freeing of
revolutionary energies, not only in the schools but everywhere.
It is the difference between being concerned with
the establishing and implementing of workplace-specific procedures and being
concerned with the wholesale transformation of society. It is the difference
between wanting to teach a better physics course and wanting to save the world.
Given such divergent views, not only is reconciliation between the parties
impossible; conversation itself is impossible. The dispute can only be resolved
by an essentially political decision, and in this case the narrower concept of
academic freedom has won. But only till next time.
The New York Times, February 8, 2009.
Help us maintain freedom in teaching, research and scholarship by joining SAFS or making a donation.
