Hang on to Your Tenure, Stanley

Stanley Fish channels Brian Wilson in today's NYT, hanging on to his ego in the face of reason, public disapprobation and I can only presume his own conscience.

His original target was a University of Ottawa professor who is alleged to have turned his physics class into a primer on political activism. Apart from the usual complaints, which Fish caricatures but never really addresses (Fish takes one example of excess to damn a group; Fish doesn't believe in freedom of thought; Academics don't have normal, mortals' jobs), let's remind everyone first that this is Canada, where the whole point of going to college is to become politically active. Insisting that academics act in line with "professional norms and standards," is not only repressive, but totally beside the point. Whose norms? Applied how? Where will we hold the conclave, Stanley?

More to the point, it turns out there are no "academic excesses" present for Fish to complain about, nor any for proto-Romantic critics of Fish to defend. There is no titanic struggle between liberal idealists and revanchist conservatives. Freedom, it turns out, is about careful, diligent, daily work.

Denis Rancourt, tenured professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, and avowed gadfly to the Institution, asked to change one of his classes from A-F grading to Pass/Fail. There are entire universities that do this in the states, in part to treat the perceived ill of grade inflation, but also to disassemble the edifice of classification/tracking in education, whereby, as Jacques Ranciere has explained, everyone has someone to look down on, A thru F. "We are creating obedient employees, but not people who think," says the prof.

The University denied the request, whereupon Rancourt gave out straight A's. The University then banned him from campus. He broke the ban to host a film screening on campus about political organizing tactics (forgive me if this is an oversimplification) and was arrested. Here he is, in a show of solidarity with one of his students, arrested for trying to film the University Senate.

So, in short answer to Stanley Fish, the facts you start with greatly influence the conclusions you draw. Surely Mr. Pop-PoMo knows this. Denis Rancourt does not see his freedom as anything other than, and certainly not better than, ours. Grading is a form of stultification. Even the idea that professors exist to "create" better thinkers -- a phrase Rancourt, I hope, was using as shorthand -- is pretty orthodox. Rancourt's whole point is to guarantee that the University is a functioning democracy, which is what the University itself avows. Academic freedom is a misnomer. Freedom is indivisible; we all have it by nature.

Now can we talk about responsibility? Fish argues that employees of the University are duty-bound to adhere to its rules and regulations. Let's leave aside the frequently proffered saw about "higher obligations." All Rancourt has done is throw UofO's regulations back at it.

Professors, to take one example, have to be permitted to grade independently; for the institution to lean on a professor, for instance, by banning him from issuing all A's, to "grade appropriately" renders grading meaningless. The institution could just as easily pick out students in advance, look at the normal curve, and parcel out grades irrespective of coursework. This is, again, to say nothing of the rank hypocrisy of an institution devoted to creativity, independent thought, etc., enforcing outcomes from above.

Rancourt goes to speak to his union rep. Having done that UofO police escort him off campus. This, in the States, would be a violation of NLRA; you can't punish workers for any speech related to collective agreements. Rancourt merely links to the standards and norms ratified 50 years ago by the American Association of University Professors. Police escort is to protect professors from possible violence, not to protect the University from its professors.

Rancourt self-evidently respects the responsibility he owes the University better than the University does. Academe is a calling, as all the proto-Romantics on Stanley's blog have said; it is also, for most of us, contract work. Rancourt is the only person in this whole debacle upholding the terms of his contract.

Finally, it's easy for Fish to paint Rancourt as some Bolshevik banging down the gates of the University, bent on nationalizing the "A-plus." Fish is at the pinnacle of a system that distributes greater rewards for seniority than for brilliance; that forces young professors into a period of indentured servitude known as tenure-track; that forces everyone else into a frantic competition for wage-slave adjunct jobs; that reinforces the stultification we all receive from our decade-plus of grade school, bringing the dictatorial power of the Great Master that we've all internalized back out into the open.

The inequity of the system is in-built. Young ones know this. You can either be for us, or against us. Hang on to your tenure, Stanley...
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