Feminist and Queer Explorations in Troublemaking

Stanley Fish

February 8, 2009, 10:00 pm
The Two Languages of Academic Freedom

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 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090206.PROF06/TPStory/?query=rancourt>,
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.