Power and the University: The Denis Rancourt Case
Alroy Fonseca
(Cult)ure Magazine, March 2009
Over the last six weeks, I've been shirking my duties as Politics Editor for this magazine as I've been building a new website to track academic freedom and governance at the University of Ottawa. The immediate reason for the site, academicfreedom.ca, is the current situation faced by Professor Denis Rancourt, a tenured professor of physics with 22 years of teaching experience, who is in the process of being dismissed for giving an A+ to each of his students in a fourth year physics course last year.
From a longer view, the site is the outcome of a reflective process that began when I attended the first class of Rancourt’s SCI 1101 – better known as the Activism Course – in the Fall of 2006 at the University of Ottawa. I’ve spent five years as an undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo and then another year getting a graduate degree in Political Studies at Queen’s University. In all those years, encompassing some 50 courses, I never experienced a course as refreshing, intellectually stimulating, and challenging as Rancourt’s SCI 1101. Rancourt’s doing away with grades, engagement with the surrounding community (which led me, a ‘non-student’, to participate in the course), anti-disciplinarity, and student-directed learning all combined to create an overall learning environment that was unprecedented in its effectiveness.
It is difficult for those who have not participated in the course to get a sense of what it was like. You kind of had to be there. The traditional classroom is so unexciting, sterile, and controlled (by the professor) that most of us haven’t a clue what a flatly structured classroom could feel like. In fact, the vast majority of those who have experienced the Activism Course – or Rancourt’s other offerings such as PHY 1703 in the Fall of 2005 and the weekly Cinema Academica film and discussion series – are in agreement that Rancourt’s unconventional approach is something to be encouraged, and aggressively defended against the ignorant and unscrupulous attacks of the University of Ottawa's high administrators, currently led by Allan Rock, who are behaving like a bunch of goons.
Since my time in the Activism Course, I’ve followed Rancourt’s work closely, have at times strongly disputed his positions, and then often, after lengthy periods of reflection, come to understand that he’s on to something – something very profound, that challenges the basic premise of education as we know it, from the way it is implemented to the way it is managed, and thus something that inevitably challenges the entrenched interests of the professorial class and university administrators.
Two elements in particular are worth noting. First, doing away with grades. While at Queen’s in 2005-06, like most graduate students, I was hired as a teaching assistant (TA) for two undergraduate courses, namely a second-year International Relations course and a second-year International Political Economy course. And as the TA, I was responsible for assigning the full course grade – including participation, the term paper, and final exam – to each of the students in my sections.
It was no doubt an interesting experience, but looking back, I regret the whole exercise. I remember how my students tried to guess my mind during our tutorials, trying to make arguments that they knew I would agree with. Much the same with term papers, which more often than not offered tortured arguments that the student evidently didn’t really believe. There was also the predictable sucking up; students would drop by my office or send e-mails to compliment me on something I did in class. To be sure, it’s not that I’m opposed to praise, but such praise is only worth something more than nothing when it is exchanged amongst equals.
In the context of my role as a TA, we were not equals. I gave them very good grades, very bad grades, or just average grades, depending on my judgement of their work and performance. And sometimes, I wasn’t even allowed to give grades based on my own judgement. I recall the professor for the IR course instructing all five TAs assigned to him that only one or two students per section could be assigned grades of 85% or higher on their term papers. I protested, arguing that there were more than two papers that warranted a grade in that range, but was promptly told that the Political Studies department at Queen’s needs to maintain a standard grade distribution.
As Rancourt has said, “the instrument of power” must be removed from the classroom in order to achieve authentic education. Only when students are free from having to guess the professor’s (or TA’s) mind will they be able to pursue whatever train of thought they want to. And who am I – and who are you – to judge their thinking in any official evaluation capacity? Debate them, challenge them, explain to them why they’re right or wrong – with passion, if necessary – but don’t do so behind the veneer of your superiority to them in the classroom.
The second fundamental element highlighted by Rancourt’s politics is the unjustifiable hierarchy inherent in university administration. Just a few weeks ago, some forty students shut down the University of Ottawa’s senate meeting for the second time in as many months. It’s not that they wanted to shut it down. They simply wanted to film it, just like the proceedings in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill, a few blocks away from the school, are filmed. The university’s own academic strategic plan, Vision 2010, states that “[c]ollegiality, transparency and accountability are the principles that guide our university governance.” But apparently this is all too much for university administrators, led by Mr. Rock, who would rather run away from public scrutiny. And so one can’t help but ask: what exactly are senate members – who work for this public institution, ostensibly devoted to the advancement of knowledge – saying at these meetings that is so embarrassing that it must not be recorded on film? There is, of course, no answer to such questions from the administration, only evasion: Mr. Rock has now moved senate discussions to a closed online forum to further undermine transparency.
The whole episode is shameful and extremely concerning. It began in December 2008, when undergraduate student Marc Kelly arrived at the senate room with his video camera to record the proceedings. He was soon told to leave, and when he refused, citing Vision 2010 and the lack of a written policy on the matter, the university’s “Protection” Services called in the Ottawa police. The latter dragged Kelly out and arrested him, and he was subsequently banned from campus, except under certain conditions.
These two battles for critical pedagogy and more transparent and democratic university governance are closely related. They are both intrinsically linked to the high administration and its obsessive, unjustifiable hold on institutional power. And they offer observers a rare and illuminating insight into the inner workings of the university.
The developments that are being tracked on AcademicFreedom.ca are most interesting. They constitute history in the making, so to speak. Indeed, they are reminiscent of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and Mario Savio, both expunged from our collective memories, and the broader emancipation movements of the 1960s on North American university campuses.
(Cult)ure Magazine will continue to follow this story, and many others pertaining to freedom on Ottawa's university campuses, over the next few months. For now, please follow developments on http://www.academicfreedom.ca...and join the battle for democratic control of our universities!