Academic freedom and college education

College allows you to come into a different learning environment out of high school. You have more freedom, both in your personal life and academically. Your schedule isn’t as structured, you can choose your classes — for the most part — and you experience the different teaching styles of professors. Now imagine you sign up for a class that you assume to be physics. Your professors comes in, asks you what you want to learn, then tells you that everyone will be getting an A+. This is what happened to the students in Professor Denis Rancourt’s fourth-year physics class at the University of Ottawa. His belief is that “grades poison the educational environment, and that we’re just training students to be obedient and try to read our minds rather than be a catalyst for learning.” It was this radical way of thinking that got Rancourt fired and banned from the University, even though he had tenure. To make the situation worse, he was removed from the campus in handcuffs and charged with trespassing when he tried to go on campus later in the week to hold a film society meeting. The firing of this professor makes you think about what exactly the meaning of academic freedom is and whether there should be guidelines within that freedom. It also questions what kind of education students expect when going off to college.
This professor was extremely outrageous in his ways of treating education even in the years before he was fired. He had been in trouble before for completely eliminating letter grades and steering away from any type of curriculum. Students tended to really like him and faculty were always annoyed by him, so much so that they created a petition of complaint against him in 2007. He is a self-proclaimed anarchist and was always finding ways to challenge the system. He helped a mother with a set of 10-year-old twins pursue a civil case claiming ageism when the University wouldn’t let the twins enroll in his class. Rancourt is an extreme example of someone “sticking it to the man” and challenging rules. If he was causing trouble to the University, it would be easy to say that they were right in letting him go. The whole problem with escorting him off campus in handcuffs was ridiculous and should have been handled differently.
The fact that the man got tenure at the University has to have meant something though. Even after his firing, students still went to meet with him to go over their thesis papers and for guidance in general. He obviously had a passion for teaching and trying to get students to think outside the box, which grabbed students to take his classes. Isn’t that what makes a good teacher? Students should be encouraged to learn and offered a different point of view from what they are always given. That’s what Rancourt was trying to give his students. Grades aren’t always the best representation of intelligence, and although the context of how he was giving all these students A+s is unknown, it is possible that he wanted the students to think more about the material than the grade.
When many students take a class they are thinking about the grade. Even in college sometimes it’s only about getting those three credits or keeping up that grade point average. When we have all this pressure on us to do well and get a degree, the actual idea of learning something and appreciating what education is really supposed to be about is totally overlooked. Some students even get uncomfortable when the A-F grading system that they are so very used to is altered. Others live for the curve in a class and most of the time it’s just about passing. This can be especially true when you are taking those annoying requirement classes. A lot of the time when someone is an English major, he is not so worried about how he will do in his required science class. They know what they want to concentrate on and learn, but when put in something like meteorology it can be hard to appreciate the material being taught, and doing the bare minimum of just passing is all they encourage themselves to do. A time when students can make an exception is if they have a professor that loves his or her job, a professor that makes everything interesting and really encourages students to absorb the material and actually learn by caring about the methods they use to teach. This is what Rancourt was trying to do in an extreme, unconventional way.
Academic freedom should mean having the freedom to teach and learn in any way that you choose. It is important when experiencing education, especially in a university. Rancourt took things too far, but people should be inspired by his desire to educate the students in his classes. He encouraged students to learn and think differently, which is what students should be able to do when they are in college. It’s not always about grades, subjects, classes and credits. It’s about being challenged and offered points of view they’ve never thought of, and that is when they can truly get an education.

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3 comments

Margaret

Sun Feb 15 2009 23:22

This is an absolutely ridiculous situation. Of course, leading him off in handcuffs off the campus was clearly out of line, but firing him was undoubtably the correct course of action, I believe. I would have to agree with Lila, such a teaching method would only be successful in an indeal, hypothetical situation of perfect learning, where all students are equally capable of learning the material, and all are as highly motivated as one person possibly can be. I would be inclined to believe that if his main focus was to really take away the pressure of grades, then the correct thing to do would be to resort to a pass fail system. Handing out A's to everyone who takes the course is just a blatant display of his own inability to run a course properly, and his difficulty of getting students to like him any other way. Students taking 4th year physics would most definitely be able to pass such a course were it on the pass-fail system, so I see no reason why that was not implemented if his agenda was true.

lila

Thu Feb 12 2009 18:47

Rancourt's method only works in ideal teaching situations where all students are highly motivated and have a very keen desire to learn the material. I assume that someone taking a fourth year Physics course would be highly motivated to learn the material. However, I have a feeling that Rancourt's attitude toward teaching had less to do with academic freedom and more to do with desperately trying to be a popular professor amongst his students. It is not a very good sign when a professor has hundreds of students who love him and not many colleagues who support him. It's kind of like when a 19 year old college student tries to pick up 14 year old high school girls at the mall.

Sam the Man

Wed Feb 11 2009 09:59

There's a logical confusion here. Academic freedom doesn't cover matters that belong to the structural framework of teaching and learning. Example: suppose a professor were to never show up to teach his or her classes and, when challenged, said that he or she meant that non-appearance to "get students to think about what it means to attend class in a regimented fashion on a rigidly imposed schedule." You could look at that two ways: (a) as an invitation to radically rethink the nature of teaching and learning or (b) as a neat excuse to get paid for doing nothing and going to Europe for a free semester.

Many Rutgers professors use "academic freedom" to justify doing very little work in class preparation or in actual teaching. They will talk about being a "guide at the side" of their students rather than "the sage on the stage." They'll assign little or no work because doing so allows students to "think creatively" outside the limits of a set curriculum. They'll run classroom sessions as bull sessions where nobody has to know anything and everyone talks and students come out the other end as ignorant about the subject as they were going in. They'll give wildly inflated grades because they know that doing so minimizes complaints from students -- an semi-literate student who's done no work for a course will never complain if an "A" shows up on his or her transcript -- and gives them (the teacher) maximum time to spend on other interests. None of this is "academic freedom" in the true sense of the term. On the other hand, some professors will claim that certain parts of the current structure -- "teaching evaluations," for instance, as they've been challenged by professors across the country, as undermining real teaching and learning -- are harmful to their students' education. It's a very vexed question, and one that has to be thought through case by case. There's no abstract principle that covers everything.

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