Denis Rancourt, a former tenured University of Ottawa professor who was fired last year after giving everyone in his fourth-year physics class an A+, wants his job back. Rancourt hopes to win a labour law arbitration case against the university so he can recover his job and laboratory.
“The truth is my dismissal was a political firing to remove a dissident professor,” Rancourt wrote in an email. “In the case of a devoted independent thinker and dissident committed to exposing the Lie of higher education, any conflict leading to dismissal will always be complex and involve many factors and incidents.”
Rancourt has accused Maureen Robinson, a U of O undergrad and student journalist, of being a “covert information gatherer” for the university between 2006 and 2008 and having collected information about him.
The University of Ottawa told The Varsity it could not comment on Rancourt and must respect confidentiality and its legal obligations in the case.
In an email to Maclean’s, Robinson said Rancourt’s allegations were “libellous” and that “there was no covert surveillance.” She said she worked for U of O in an assistant administrative role and declined to say whether she worked on Rancourt’s case, citing legal proceedings.
Rancourt, who taught physics at the university for 22 years, is a critic of the grading systems used by most universities. Instead, he advocates a non-conventional grading system that is meant to focus exclusively on discussion and independence, rather than marks.
“I chose to use a student-centred grading method based [on] individual progress and effort and I expected high grades from the approach based on my experience with student response to this non-competitive self-motivated learning,” wrote Rancourt. “In my professional opinion every student deserved their grade.
While Rancourt’s dismissal concerned only one of two fourth-year physics courses given to him in the winter 2008 semester, in which all students who did not drop these courses received A+, he has handed out very high grades on other occasions.
The class average in a large first-year physics course that Rancourt taught in 2007 was over 90 per cent.
Rancourt argues that his treatment at the university was unjust because the university’s Executive Committee of the Board of Governors made its decision to fire him in the early afternoon on March 31, 2009, hours before the midnight deadline to submit his final documents to the board to consider.
“The Committee minutes about the decision state and confirm that the final brief was NOT considered by the Committee,” said Rancourt. “This was noted as one of several significant breaches in my rights and of natural justice by the union lawyers assigned to the case.”
In November 2009, Rancourt filed a union grievance accusing the university of engaging in covert surveillance.
Rancourt said he remains active in university affairs despite his ongoing legal matters: “I continue to write, to co-host a campus radio show, to expose university malfeasance, and to give lectures and teach in my colleagues’ classes.”
