As reported by me on my “Activist Teacher” blog, and by arbitrator William Kaplan on his website, all the matters in dispute between the University of Ottawa and me have been amicably resolved, through voluntary mediation that occurred on January 16, 2019.
The terms of the agreement are confidential. All outstanding matters from all litigations and arbitrations have been resolved.
The protracted conflict started before my full professorship was terminated on March 31, 2009. The most current aspects were described by me in the article “Why Did The University Of Ottawa Secretly Destroy My Large Collection Of Unique Scientific Samples?” in the January 2019 issue of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship’s SAFS Newsletter, and links therein.
(References available in the web version.)
I am happy with this development of settlement. I am thankful to my union, the Association of Professors of the University of Ottawa (APUO), for its continuous support, and for the many students and friends who, over the years, signed petitions, wrote letters, attended hearings, followed the events, and publicly expressed their opinions. Thank you all very much!
I will now more fully devote myself to my volunteer work as a researcher at the Ontario Civil Liberties Association (ocla.ca), to helping folks that way; and to my social theory explorations, often published at Dissident Voice; plus some basic and environmental science, mostly posted to my page at Research Gate, and on my Google Scholar profile. I agitate on current issues on Facebook.
In the end, my generic conclusion is that there is sometimes justice regarding legal claims, but there is no academic freedom or professional independence in universities.
The best historical analysis of the absence of actual academic freedom, which I have found, is in the Introduction and Chapter I of Ellen W. Schrecker’s 1986 book No Ivory Tower.
I think the lack of freedom and independence does great harm to society, by the mechanism that I described in my 2017 article “Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights”.
Endnotes
“Why Did The University Of Ottawa Secretly Destroy My Large Collection Of Unique Scientific Samples?”, by Denis Rancourt, SAFS Newsletter, January 2019. https://www.safs.ca/newsletters/article.php?article=994
“Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, 7 September 2017. https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/09/cause-of-usa-meltdown-and-collapse-of-civil-rights/