Thuggery in the Upper Administration

The Student Federation University of Ottawa (SFUO) has just released a public letter addressed to U of O President Allan Rock. The letter is entitled “Flagrant Mistreatment of Students and Disregard of SFUO Nomination Rights”.
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The letter demands that Rock redress two recent and most blatant abuses of power practiced by the university against its students. The letter describes the cases of international student Ting Ting Wang and physics student Marc Kelly.
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The SFUO also demands that the U of O administration accept the SFUO’s nomination of Mark Kelly to the Senate Appeals Committee.
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The Senate Appeals Committee is the committee whose members refused to identify themselves to grieving students, until the SFUO pressured the University administration by public exposure.
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The SFUO letter makes public that VP-Academic Robert Major illegitimately interfered with Kelly’s nomination to the Senate Appeal’s Committee. The letter states that Major practiced a defamatory character assessment of Kelly, which Major is alleged to have communicated to an SFUO representative in an effort to discredit Kelly’s nomination.
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VP-Academic Major is alleged to have advanced that student Kelly is mentally unstable, in supporting the VP’s rejection of Kelly’s nomination to the Senate Appeals Committee. This is the same VP-Academic Major whose views on gender equity and representative democracy are well known.
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On a sane campus, in a sane world, and on any other campus in North America I would advance, the Board of Governors (BOG) would (would have already) promptly extract(ed) Robert Major’s resignation.
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Is Canada’s university sane? Will it be fixed? The answer is in the hands of the BOG, while the President appears to be watching from the sidelines of international development.
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President Allan Rock was repeatedly questioned by students and professors about the Kelly nomination at his October 24, 2008, address in the Agora, but he did not budge from his position that “we are entitled to have concerns”.
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In addressing the students, Rock appeared to be oblivious to the asymmetry in the fact that students are not entitled to have concerns regarding the nominations of professors and executives to the Senate Appeals Committee.
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[Photo credits: University of Ottawa; Allan Rock, Robert Major.]

Thuggery in Physics

Physics undergraduate student Marc Kelly was expelled by the U of O Faculty of Science from his B.Sc. project course (PHY 4006) before the official student drop date for the course on the basis of behind-closed-door decisions by enlightened physics professors (members of the Departmental Teaching Personnel Committee and the physics chairman) who judged the project to not be physics, in the absence of any investigation beyond reading an announcement for the project topic.
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PRESS CONFERENCE TODAY
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Details are given HERE.
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A first draft report of the student’s PHY 4006 project is given HERE.
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It appears the high priests of the physics department are protecting the purity of physics, while refusing to give a definition of physics. Hooray for disciplinal divisions and professionalism!

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[Photo credit: University of Ottawa; Dr. Bela Joos, Chairman of Physics]

For all and more recent posts about student Marc Kelly CLICK HERE.

A New Perspective on the Activism Course

by Philippe Marchand
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To understand what some student journalists are now calling "the Rancourt saga", we need to remember where the whole debate started: the creation of the controversial "Science, activism and society" course (SCI1101) in 2006. The course was given once in Fall 2006, with prof. Denis Rancourt as a facilitator and coordinator. It was an elective course graded S/NS (satisfactory/non-satisfactory), not counting towards the specific requirements of any university program or towards the students' grade point average. Over 100 students were registered and some guest lectures attracted more than 400 participants.
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Having attended the various 2006 committee meetings dealing with the approval of SCI1101/1501, I have witnessed many objections to both the proposed content and pedagogy of the class. Many professors opposed the idea that students could decide the content of the class. Others pointed out that an "A+" student might be disadvantaged by an "S" grade on his/her report. Some used a slippery slope argument: "What would happen if all classes were like this?" On June 11, 2007, the University of Ottawa Senate ruled that only the Senate - rather than a professor, department or Faculty - could allow a class to be graded S/NS.
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I am now a first-year doctoral student at the University of California - Berkeley. As I learned more about my new campus, I found a completely different approach, on the issues discussed above, than the one prevailing at the University of Ottawa.
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In the early 1980s, Berkeley introduced the DeCal system ("De" stands for Democratic Education). DeCal courses are facilitated by undergraduate and graduate students. They allow students to go outside the bounds of traditional courses and offer more "practical" or "current" content. Of a total undergraduate population of 25 000, over 4000 students are enrolled in around 150 DeCal classes every semester. Current DeCals include: "Batman as American Mythology", "The Life and Legacy of Tupac Amaru Shakur", "Student Power: Organizing and Activism", and a journalism class offered by editors of the student newspaper.
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Any student can start a DeCal course. All they need is a professor to sponsor the course and the authorization of this professor's department. DeCal courses are worth 1 to 3 credits and undergraduate students are allowed to take up to 16 credits of DeCal as part of their electives. All the DeCal courses are graded pass / not pass (P/NP), which is exactly equivalent to S/NS at U of O. At Berkeley, undergraduate students have the option to take up to one-third of their total units as P/NP grades.
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After decades under that system, the catastrophe imagined by some University of Ottawa administrators did not happen. Berkeley has maintained a high reputation among public universities in North America and internationally. I am not arguing that any university should copy the DeCal model, but rather this shows that there is no contradiction between providing high quality education and giving flexibility for students to take a more active role in their education and go outside the traditional classroom box.
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Philippe Marchand

U of O alumni in Physics

Graduate student in Environmental Science, Policy and Management, UC Berkeley
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Editor’s note: In particular, Professor Tito Scaiano (Chemistry), in a letter to The Ottawa Citizen, mused that society would fall apart if we allowed the S/NS grading system. By contrast, labour law Arbitrator Michel G. Picher ruled that the choice of the S/NS grading system was within the purview of a professor’s academic freedom. The new U of O Senate rule on S/NS was passed in secret (under the pretext of clarifying an old text) while a policy grievance on the matter was being arbitrated. The professor’s union complained in writing about the underhanded passing of the new rule.
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[URL links were inserted by UofOWatch.]

[Photo credit: Pawel Dwulit; April 18, 2006, Faculty Council scenes and President’s closed door reception aftermath.]

Reparation is due at U of O - Grievance filed

October 7, 2008

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Louise Pagé-Valin

Associate Vice-President

Human Resources Services

University of Ottawa

Tabaret Hall

550 Cumberland Street

(delivered by hand)
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Re: Grievance G-19 (my code) – EBOG UofOWatch decision.

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Dear Mrs. Pagé-Valin:

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This is to grieve the September 11th decision of the Executive Committee of the Board of Governors (EBOG) regarding my UofOWatch.blogspot.com blog.
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The Dean admitted in writing that if my articles had not been critical of the University, then I would not have been punished. This is a blatant violation of academic freedom. It also represents undue interference with my work.

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In addition, in an email to Secretary of the University Pamela Harrod dated September 28, 2008, I expressed concerns about significant procedural anomalies in the EBOG’s September 11th decision. I have not yet received a response. I ask that you immediately provide written clarifications regarding my concerns expressed in my September 28, 2008, email to Pamela Harrod and immediately provide a copy of the (appropriately severed) minutes of the September 11th EBOG meeting, showing which EBOG members were present.
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I ask that the discipline be reversed and that reparation be made, with interest. I want a written apology co-signed by all members of the EBOG which were present at the September 11th EBOG meeting. I want a written apology from the Dean. I ask that a new text of the policy for University copyrighted images be adopted which explicitly permits criticism of and/or fair (legal) commentary about the University in the use of University web images by professors, media, and students in any academic or journalistic work.

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Sincerely,
Denis Rancourt

(Professor)
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Cc: Posted to UofOWatch blog, BOG, APUO, Dean of Science..

[Photo credit: University of Ottawa; Louise Page-Valin, Dean Andre E. Lalonde]