I wonder a what others think of the argument offered here by Rancourt. Imo, there is a truth embedded in what he says but i think hes carried it a lot too far. lol.
February 8, 2009, 10:00 pm
The Two Languages of Academic Freedom
Stanley Fish
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: Id be fired. Now, I continued, imagine the same scenario and the same set of behaviors, but this time youre a tenured professor in a North American university. What then?
I answered this one myself: Youd 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, Rancourts 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 Rancourts 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] systems 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 Rancourts 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, youre 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 cant 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.
Rancourts 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 plaintiffs 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 tim
