[Marxism] Academic Freedom: Always Smouldering, Often Burning

["Hunter Gray" <hunterbadbear@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

NOTE BY HUNTER BEAR: February 9 2009

This current piece from NYT, not especially noteworthy in its clarity, does 
illustrate what's all too frequently the " quasi-liberal" perspective on basic 
freedom of expression issues -- in this case, academic freedom. Taking the 
admittedly interesting and provocative -- and essentially atypical --case of a 
professed "anarchist" professor at the University of Ottawa, and drawing 
apples-and-oranges analogies with law firms and corporations, the writer edges 
rapidly toward the "responsible" interpretation of this fundamentally critical 
and necessary principle -- fundamentally critical and necessary for not only 
professors but certainly for students and society.

Academic institutions aren't law firms or corporations. They are, presumably, 
committed to opening all of the doors to Truth -- at least in the relative 
sense -- and letting the also presumably free minds of those within range draw 
their own individual conclusions, and go on from there with their lives and 
destiny.

I become extremely wary when I read of ostensibly "reasonable" efforts to limit 
freedom of expression [or any other basic freedoms as well.] Far, far more 
prevalent than "mad professors" in the academic groves are those administrators 
and their sycophants, generally conscious of open and shadowy economic and 
political power structure concerns, who display perennial distrust of free 
expression and who work, overtly and covertly, to curtail it.

Although I give my "vocation" the handle of Organizer, I have taught many years 
in the college and university setting -- many places -- while organizing 
usually controversial things on the side. I've certainly never been an 
"objective" professor.

And, frankly, if this has made, sooner or later, most academic administrators 
unhappy and downright uneasy, almost all students I've encountered [regardless 
of their own respective views] have liked this much [as I did when I was a 
student] and my classes were always notably quite large and characterized by 
very lively discussion indeed. 

Well, you can get flack from the time-serving bureaucrats. If non-tenured, 
one's contract might not be renewed [that's happened to me] and, if you have 
tenure, that may still hold fairly well to a point -- but petty harassment, 
often officially initiated and generally officially sanctioned, can make one's 
life outside the pleasant classroom and inside the unpleasant departmental 
offices, something of a trial. [And that's happened to me.] This can frequently 
be the case if the professor is involved in meaningful social justice work "out 
in the community."

I've been on all of those trails. And I certainly know other good souls who 
have as well -- though there are never nearly enough of them in academia.

A good friend and colleague, himself a professor at Winnipeg, recently summed 
up my eventual situation at the University of North Dakota:
"I was happy to have received a nice review from Hunter for my book. He was one 
of the old school Native Studies Professors who were as much or more activists 
than they were simply scholars. This included people like Art Solomon and 
others who were defining what Native Studies should be about in the late 60's 
and early 70's. A lot of them disassociated themselves from programs such 
these, not liking the direction they were heading in. People like Hunter were 
vilified by Anthropologists who believed Native Studies wasn't academic enough. 
In other words, they should be the ones teaching Native Studies. Many of these 
types such as at the University of North Dakota where Hunter taught, now run 
the programs. There are very few social activists left in the discipline who 
are involved in prison reform and such." [Brian Rice, Mohawk]

Keep fighting, keep talking, keep fighting. 

And swat the mosquitoes.

Hunter [Hunter Bear]

February 8, 2009, 10:00 pm NYT

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: "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.


HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
and Ohkwari'

Check out our Hunterbear website Directory http://hunterbear.org/directory.htm
[The site is dedicated to our one-half Bobcat, Cloudy Gray:
http://hunterbear.org/cloudy_gray.htm

I have always lived and worked in the Borderlands. 
http://hunterbear.org/outlaw_trail1.htm


In our Gray Hole, the ghosts often dance in the junipers and sage, on the
game trails, in the tributary canyons with the thick red maples, and on the
high windy ridges -- and they dance from within the very essence of our own
inner being. They do this especially when the bright night moon shines down
on the clean white snow that covers the valley and its surroundings.  Then
it is as bright as day -- but in an always soft and mysterious and
remembering way. [Hunter Bear]
 http://www.hunterbear.org/GRAY%20LANDS%20AND%20GRAY%20GHOSTS.htm
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