Denis Rancourt

Denis Rancourt
Rancourt in his office at the University of Ottawa in 2004
Born	(1957-03-23) March 23, 1957 North Bay, Ontario
Education	Bachelor's Degree from University of Ottawa (1980), Master's Degree from University of Toronto (1981), Ph.D from University of Toronto (1984)
Website	Department of Physics, U of O

Denis Rancourt is a professor of physics at the University of Ottawa. While a recognized expert in a number of scientific fields, he is particularly known for his unconventional pedagogical approach and activism directed at the hierarchical structure of universities. As a result of his many disputes with the administration at the university, he was removed from all teaching duties as of the fall of 2008. In November, moreover, he was barred from accessing his research laboratory on campus indefinitely.

Views

Political ideology

Rancourt's thinking has been influenced by the works of Paulo Freire, Noam Chomsky, Ward Churchill, Edward Said, Jeff Schmidt and Mikhail Bakunin. He identifies his political ideology as being anarchist.

Critical pedagogy

Heavily influenced by the works of Freire and Schmidt, Rancourt has strongly argued for critical pedagogy aimed at confronting all sources of oppression. The key components of his particular approach have included: no grades (pass/fail systems), student-directed learning (via breakout groups where students decide what to investigate), anti-disciplinarity (by ensuring diverse topics are linked to each other, such as the connection between physics and war), and community inclusion (to allow students to learn from those outside the university and vice versa). In a September 2007 open letter to University of Ottawa students, Rancourt observed that:

Most students agree to give up their independence of thought and enquiry and to serve the insane system of due dates and senseless assignments in exchange for the certificate (the degree). Most students give up four vital years of their lives in order to be certified persistently obedient. This certificate, in turn, gives students access to a privileged position in the wage hierarchy and professional social status.
It’s a trade. But the certificate is not just a certificate. It requires survival and that, in turn, requires both adopting the ideology of the profession (for professional, science, and engineering degrees) and self-indoctrination to drive out the natural impulse to learn (often called setting priorities or time management). Your soul for a place in the sun.

Consistent with this outlook, Rancourt has fought most aggressively for his right to implement a 'no grades' evaluation policy in all his courses. He believes that with such a system in place, students will focus on learning rather than on how to adapt their views to fit with what they believe the professor's views to be in order to get high grades.

Tenure

Rancourt has stated that the tenure-granting process is designed to produce obedient academics that question and challenge neither the fundamental sources of oppression in society nor the undemocratic governance structures of the universities they are employed in. He has argued that professors must use the unique privileges and protections offered by tenure to confront injustices and oppression, including within their universities, where they have the greatest influence and ability to effect change. Rancourt has written that:

One antidote to the university as boot camp in the service of capital is for tenured professors to use their tenure. This would turn tenure on its head, as it is free society’s coercive tool of choice for fabricating aligned and docile academics. Not the job security in itself, which should be available to all, but the filtering and moulding process known as the tenure track. But why not turn tenure on its head? Tenure is death, risk is life, and collaboration is criminal. Collaborating in an institutionalized system of resource looting, labour exploitation, and genocidal demographic engineering is criminal, especially when its ultimate weapon is the foremost crime known as war, such as the present Canadian war in Afghanistan.

Scientific research

Rancourt has published over 100 articles in peer reviewed scientific journals. His most cited works are in the area of Mössbauer spectroscopy where he developed a spectral lineshape analysis algorithm. This formed a basis for a now commercial spectral analysis software developed in his laboratory.

Work in his laboratory on the iron oxide hematite is well known and has been cited in the recent works on the remote measurements of the soil mineralogy on Mars.

He worked on the physics of Invar for twenty years and in his last papers on the subject he claims to have solved the 100-year-old Invar problem of identifying the mechanistic origin of the alloy’s thermal expansion anomaly. His work in this area is reviewed here.

Rancourt first described the phenomenon of polarized superparamagnetic fluctuations which he named superferromagnetism. Scientific author Steen Morup introduced the same name for a similar phenomenon. His work on small magnetic particles was reviewed in the monograph series Reviews in Mineralogy

In recent years, he has worked on reactive environmental Fe-oxyhydroxide nanoparticles. In 2008, his laboratory showed that the structure of ferrihydrite published in Science (journal) is incorrect.

Climate change essay

In February 2007, Rancourt published an essay, entitled "Global Warming: Truth or Dare?", arguing that science does not show that climate change is a threat to human beings and the planet, that environment activists have been co-opted by the corporate agenda, and that a focus on climate change activism distracts citizens from taking action against the fundamental source of environmental degradation, namely profit-driven corporations and financiers backed by military force. The publishing format was unusual as the article was posted on Rancourt's blog. In an interview with The Dominion, he explained that "[a]fter experiencing how editors wanted to censor parts [of the essay] that would frustrate their readers or that were not in line with their publication mandates, I decided to blog it – a very un-academic thing to do."

The first argument of the article is that the scientific evidence does not show that the globe is warming. He argues that there are major inaccuracies involved in data measurement, error-correction, approximation and proper calibration of proxies, which, taken together, do not warrant assessments that the planet is warming and predictions that it will continue to do so. Rancourt also disputes the causes of other phenomena, such as regional warming. On this, he argues that “all the main easily observable and most cited regional warming effects are probably driven by radiative mechanisms having nothing to do with … global warming or increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration.” The second main argument offered by Rancourt is that the only reason that the environment and, specifically, global warming, have garnered so much attention (e.g., Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth) in the 2000s is because elites have succeeded to co-opt the environmentalist movement and no longer view it as a threat. He writes:

The media are allowed to talk global warming because it does not threaten power in any significant way. Indeed, it deflects attention away from real world issues. It’s perfect. The scientists can debate it. The environmental activists are largely neutralized. Everyone thinks it’s about CO2. The economists can work out the carbon credits. The politicians can talk environment without actually saying anything. Those who want to do something can change their consumer habits. The others can just ignore it and continue chatting about the weather.

The third major argument presented in the article is that the best way to tackle environmental problems is to direct activist work at confronting the system of oppression that allows ecological abuse to occur. Rancourt posits that:

It’s about exploitation, oppression, racism, power, and greed. Economic, human, and animal justice brings economic sustainability which in turn is always based on renewable practices. Recognizing the basic rights of native people automatically moderates resource extraction and preserves natural habitats. Not permitting imperialist wars and interventions automatically quenches nation-scale exploitation. True democratic control over monetary policy goes a long way in removing debt-based extortion.

Reaction

Rancourt’s article on climate change generated considerable controversy among left-wing intellectuals and activists. Justin Podur of ZNet responded by writing that "Rancourt's anti-science arguments suggest that there is no way to get at an objective understanding of the climate or, by extension, any other situation. Rancourt leaves readers to accept only his authority." A Seven Oaks article by Derrick O'Keefe also criticized Rancourt’s position and took particular issue with the latter’s assertion that the global warming myth is an "imaginary problem of the First World middle class", which "isolates us from the people of the Third World and from all exploited people outside of our class." O’Keefe countered this by noting that “[w]hile Rancourt would have us believe that global warming is a figment of the imagination of the West’s middle class, the more than 10 000 residents of the island state of Tuvalu have been facing the nightmare possibility of forced emigration and the real prospect of the end of their society."

A number of prominent left-wing intellectuals, however, expressed support for Rancourt’s arguments. Most notable in this group were journalist Alexander Cockburn and professor David Noble of York University. Cockburn claimed in The Nation that "[o]ne of the best essays on greenhouse myth-making from a left perspective comes from Denis Rancourt…[who is] a good scientist and also a political radical and the conflation is extremely stimulating though – alas – very rare." Noble, meanwhile, used Rancourt’s article as inspiration for his own essay on corporate cooptation of the climate change activist movement. Editors of The Dominion disagreed with Rancourt’s assessment of climate change science but nevertheless observed that "few prominent climate activists are advancing an analysis of the economic system that lies behind the constant consumption of resources, leading to […] humanitarian and environmental disasters", as Rancourt has.

The climate change essay also attracted attention from conservatives in the United States. On 26 October 2007, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), a Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, referred to Rancourt’s essay during a two-hour long floor speech aimed at disputing claims advanced by the environmental movement. He noted that "Rancourt – a committed left-wing activist and scientist – believes environmentalists have been duped into promoting global warming as a crisis," and then proceeded to quote several sections of the essay.

Academic Squatting of PHY 1703

Dean of Science, Christian Detellier, announces to students in PHY 1703 that the course will be allowed to continue, after he interrupted the course the previous week to shut it down.

In the fall of 2005, Rancourt decided to “squat” a first year course (Physics and the Environment - PHY 1703) that had been assigned to him. In his words: “This may have been the first example of overt academic squatting, where one openly takes an existing course and does with it something different.” Instead of following the standard curriculum for the course, Rancourt decided to use the course as an experiment for new pedagogical methods, including no grades and student-directed learning. He has stated that the decision to squat PHY 1703 was “[i]n response to twenty years of observing classes that both delivered soulless material and served mainly to prepare students to be obedient and indoctrinated employees...” He has characterized the course as not about:

...altruism, volunteerism, charity, international aid or civic duty and building community within the confines of the status quo. But 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.
As is often the case with effective activism, this course is itself direct, overt, and defiant.

During the second class of the squatted PHY 1703, the Dean of Science, Christian Detellier, interrupted the class to announce that it had been shut down. One student had complained that the course's content did not match the official description given for the course. The dean's action immediately led to some 30 students writing letters of complaint to the the administration and local media coverage, which forced the Dean to reverse his decision and allow the course to continue the third week. Rancourt subsequently filed a grievance against the university for the dean's interruption.

Some professors criticized Rancourt's squatting exercise. The reaction from students who completed the course, however, was overwhelmingly positive.

Reprimand and arbitration

At the end of the term, on 19 December 2005, the university inserted a letter of reprimand in Rancourt’s file for having published information pertaining to PHY 1703 on his personal website that, the administration claimed, contained inaccuracies related the course’s language, level, format and content. Rancourt responded by filing a grievance through his union, the Association of Professors of the University of Ottawa, and the matter went to arbitration in November 2007. On 25 June 2008, arbitrator Michel G. Picher released his ruling, upholding the administration’s reprimand on the issues of language (agreeing that Rancourt should not have advertised the course as bilingual when it was only officially approved in French) and level (agreeing that Rancourt should not have characterized PHY 1703 as a graduate course). However, on the issues of format and content, which relate specifically to questions of pedagogical approach and academic freedom, the arbitrator sided with Rancourt. According to his decision:

…the course content remained relatively the same as it had been in years previous, the major change being with respect to the pedagogical innovation of independent group studies, the involvement of the students themselves in identifying areas of interest and the introduction of the satisfactory/not-satisfactory grading system. The Arbitrator is satisfied that those pedagogical initiatives were legitimately within the purview of the academic freedom enjoyed by Professor Rancourt…

The university was thus required to redraft the letter of reprimand to reflect the arbitrator’s ruling.

The "Activism Course"

More than 400 students and community members attended the first class of the Activism Course in September 2006.

Following the conclusion of PHY 1703 at the end of 2005, Rancourt and a large number of student supporters began a campaign to have the university approve a new Science faculty course that would be officially advertised as a pass/fail, student-directed course. The approval process – which spanned nine months and involved 16 committees - was significant both for its relative difficulty (i.e., length and number of committees involved) and the fact that it was heavily driven by undergraduate students. The course was officially approved in a special senate meeting in the summer of 2006 as SCI 1101, Science in Society. Although it would be offered by the Faculty of Science, the course would not count as a science credit for students.

SCI 1101

The first and only session of SCI 1101, popularly known as the Activism Course, was held during the fall term of 2006. The first three-hour long class – attended by more than 400 people – generated significant media coverage, both because of the course’s controversial history, as well as because it included a guest lecture by Malalai Joya, an outspoken Afghan politician who was then a member her country’s Wolesi Jirga. Over the term, a number of other notable guest speakers gave talks for the course, including Jeff Schmidt, Michel Chossudovsky and Sophie Harkat. As with PHY 1703, there was considerable support for the course from students and community members.

Deregistration of Foster twins

File:FosterTwins StudentCards.gif

Official student cards issued by the University of Ottawa to Sebastian and Douglas Foster, who participated in SCI 1101.

SCI 1101 was also attended by two ten year old twins – Sebastian and Douglas Foster – and their mother, Wendy Foster. All three were registered students and both twins had been issued official student cards containing photos. However, in October, the University wrote to the mother stating that the twins would be removed from the course because “staff failed to realize that your two sons are 10 years old...” In response, the twins' mother filed a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission, citing age discrimination, and Rancourt publicly supported the mother's initiative, arguing that: “The philosophy of the course is one based on education, which means that every person gets as much as they can out of it, starting from where they're at. So using that philosophy, I'm of the opinion that they were fully capable of benefiting from the course.” The university claimed that the expulsion was not in fact related to age, subsequently stating that: “They [the students] didn't have a high school diploma and weren't in the process of obtaining a high school diploma, which is required for admittance.” The human rights complaint continues to work its way through the established process as of December 2008.

Lawsuit over TAs

Five students in SCI 1101 sued the University of Ottawa, alleging that the high-intensity workshop-based class needed more teaching assistants (TA) which the university would not provide. Tammy Kovich, a student who lobbied for SCI 1101's approval, noted that "[i]t was clear in the design of this course ... that the pedagogical method was based on workgroups and required TAs." Rancourt publicly supported the students.

Suspension of course

In May 2007, the university effectively suspended the course indefinitely when Rancourt's course load for the fall of 2007 did not include SCI 1101. Rancourt responded on 18 May by filing a $10 million grievance against the university for not allowing him to teach the course, an act which, he argued, constituted a violation of his academic freedom.

Intensification of disputes in 2008

Suspension from teaching

In 2008, the University removed all teaching assignments from Rancourt after he had given an A+ to every student in a 4th-year physics course as a way to circumvent the science faculty's refusal to allow a pass/fail evaluation scheme for that course.

Blog controversy

Rancourt has used his U of O Watch blog to publish highly critical analyses of the University of Ottawa administration. He has also made use of university-copyrighted images (including those of high-administration officials) in his postings, which the university has demanded he remove. Additionally, Borden Ladner Gervais (BLG), Canada's third largest law firm, has threatened Rancourt with libel and defamation suits over the matter. Of significance, the chair of the university's Board of Governors, Marc Jolicoeur, is also a partner with BLG. Rancourt has refused to remove the images, however, arguing that existing regulations allow professors to use university-copyrighted images in works presenting the school positively. In his interpretation, using images to complement blog posts critical of the administration has the function of promoting the institution by showing that it is open to self-criticism, which Rancourt claims is positive and necessary for a university. For maintaining the images on his blog, a closed door Board of Governors meeting in September 2008 issued a one day administrative suspension for Rancourt. His Activist Teacher and Climate Guy blogs have not been the subjects of discipline.

Closure of lab

On November 22, 2008, Rancourt was blocked from entering his physics laboratory in the MacDonald Hall building after André Lalonde, the Dean of Science, reportedly ordered the locks to be changed. When Rancourt attempted to use his key to open the door, he found that it did not work, but heard voices coming from inside the lab. He knocked on the door and campus security officers inside opened the door just enough to allow Rancourt the opportunity to squeeze his foot in to jam it open. A team of University security guards and two Ottawa Police officers were subsequently called to the scene. Rancourt kept his foot there for four hours while union and university lawyers worked out an agreement to allow Rancourt and his students to retrieve their personal belongings. Rancourt complained that the administration “just does things and doesn’t feel it needs to justify it to anyone. It just decides to do things and does it, doesn’t explain in any way, doesn’t even respond to you when you ask...” The University's Director of Communications, Andrée Dumulon, stated that “[a]ccess was prohibited because we found that there were some unauthorized individuals in the lab.” She did not specify who these individuals were; however, physics student and activist Marc Kelly was seen exiting the lab the day before. Since this incident, Rancourt remains barred from accessing his laboratory.

CAUT review

In November 2008, the Canadian Association of University Teachers announced that it would establish an Independent Committee of Inquiry (ICOI) with terms of reference to: 1) “examine the series of ongoing disputes between Rancourt and the University of Ottawa”; 2) “to determine whether there were breaches or threats to academic freedom and other faculty rights”; and 3) “to make any appropriate recommendations.” The Committee consists of three professors from York University, Wilfrid Laurier University, and Rider University. The Committee does not have a fixed timeline to work with, but previous ICOI's have generally taken two years to complete their investigation and publish a final report.

Other campus activities

Rancourt's other notable engagements on campus include Cinema Academica (formerly Cinema Politica) and the Five O'Clock Train radio program on CHUO-FM. Rancourt was also active in supporting students opposed to the proposed Non-Academic Code of Conduct, and was the videographer for ACTivist Magazine's No Code short film documenting the riotous opposition to the Code on campus.

Cinema Academica

Rancourt has been hosting the Cinema Politica film series on campus since 2005. In 2008, however, the university denied use of university facilities for the film series. In the previous year, a deaf student had filed a human rights complaint against the University of Ottawa for refusing to pay the cost of sign language interpretation during Cinema Politica events. The University of Ottawa claimed that since the event is not a part of Rancourt's officially assigned workload, he should pay for the costs of the sign language interpreter. Rancourt has contested this position and appeared before the Ontario Human Rights Commission in September 2008 to make his case that Cinema Politica should be recognized as part of his official workload.

Despite the university ban, Rancourt is still hosting the Cinema Politica event - now renamed Cinema Academica - at MacDonald Hall at the University of Ottawa. Rancourt petitioned and received the help of another professor, Claude Lamontagne of the Department of Psychology, to help him with the event and book the room, which allowed the event to continue on campus.

External links

• Rancourt's webpage on the University of Ottawa
• Cinema Politica
• Rancourt's U of O Watch blog
• Rancourt's Activist Teacher blog
• Rancourt's Activist Climate Guy blog