At U of O there is no free expression – Current cost: $1,038.19 per slogan

Will the Rock administration stop its ridiculous charade?

Or, will it continue to burden the police and the legal system with campus politics? (LINK)

This is the story of a physics graduate student criminally charged by the Rock administration for allegedly messaging an empty cement display backing wall…

This is the story of aggressive corporate protectionism of the visual campus environment against student free expression and spontaneous messaging…

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The outdoor walkway between the University Center and the Morisset Library is a perfect controlled environment for targeted visual messaging, with high student traffic in proximity to large poster boards.

The U of O Corporation recognized this early on and installed large cement lighted display cases for its propaganda. This is what it looked like in 2006:

Avatar eat your heart out.

The U of O administration extensively uses the services of marketing and branding “experts.” It appreciates the “practical advantages” of creating the mental environment versus actually enabling personal exploration and development.

In this spirit of social engineering, in the true spirit of control, the university administration has been very protective of the cement display case backing walls that temporarily free up between installations of corporate posters.

This has not stopped some creative (and bilingual) culture jamming:

Oh oui…

Good one…

Time to take this one down:


And this is what a liberated backing wall looks like:


Some serious damage huh? Just think where this could lead. Let this go and soon you have TOTAL CHAOS and murder in the streets… It could spark independent thinking!

It will survive only long enough for the next corporate poster to be put up over it. If allowed to live its natural life...

Recently, the Rock administration of Canada’s university has gone as far as to characterize these ephemeral student messages on the cement backing walls as "damage to property" and has had one of its own students arrested and criminally charged.

At an organized student event designed to liberate the backing walls and encourage their use by students, the campus police decided to covertly gather “evidence” rather than intervene to stop the much feared “damage to property”. In a coordinated operation, more than five campus police agents gathered “evidence” rather than simply intervene in the name of protecting property. (The U of O loooves covert surveillance: LINK.)

The Rock administration then laid criminal charges and a blanket trespass notice against scholarship graduate physics student Joseph Hickey. The trespass notice was short lived because the administration was forced to back down given firm protests from the graduate student association (GSAED) and from the union of teacher assistants (CUPE-2626). (media LINK-1, media LINK-2, media LINK-3)

But now Mr. Hickey has been told by the Crown Prosecutor (who surely has other more important matters to attend to?) that the damage for which he is alleged to be responsible is valued at $1038.19, the cost of a recent cement backing wall cleanup operation.

$1038.19

Will the Rock administration stop its ridiculous charade?

And stop spending tuition money on controlling the message?

Judging from a developing pattern, expect Mr. Rock to answer from the short end of more criminal charges and more cops on campus and more Liberal speakers for a better Canada... Unless February 3rd Chalking Day makes a mark?

U of O Branding War Spills onto YouTube

The Allan Rock administration's new corporate video (actually called that in the University's own Gazette Magazine) has frightened many students and community members.

One emotional response of self-defence was for students to attempt to message the temporarily empty poster installations on the outside South wall of the Morisset Library. In response, the bare cement posting frames were aggressively guarded against student expression using campus police, surveillance cameras, Ottawa Police arrests, and arbitrary applications of the Trespass to Property Act against registered students. Quite a show of maturity.

Now the students are fighting fire with fire and appear to have launched a branding self-defence campaign on YouTube. Can they compete with the University of Ottawa's publicly funded multi-million dollar branding propaganda? Will truth trump pomp? You be the judge.

U of O Rock Administration has Competition in UK

When it comes to using the police and the courts to suppress academic freedom the Allan Rock administration at the University of Ottawa is a leader.

It strives to make U of O “Canada’s university”:
EXAMPLE-1, EXAMPLE-2, EXAMPLE-3 (go to Jan-23-2009 video), …

Here (below) is evidence from across the pond of some stiff competition. The Gee-Geez are going to have to keep it up.


Thu, January 7, 2010
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Lecturer 'intended to harass' V-C, court finds

An academic is wanted by police after being found guilty of harassing the vice-chancellor of Kingston University.

Howard Fredrics, who worked at the university as senior lecturer of music between 2003 and 2006, was convicted at Kingston Magistrates' Court of harassing Sir Peter Scott via postings on a website, www.sirpeterscott.com.

Dr Fredrics was found guilty in his absence, having failed to appear for the hearing last month, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. He will be sentenced later this month.

At the trial, Sir Peter said the site was "intended to embarrass and humiliate" him and that some of its material, such as an allegation that he was a friend of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, was inaccurate. He added that he had met Dr Fredrics only five times.

Finding Dr Fredrics guilty, Judith Jewell, chairman of the bench, said: "We believe the course of conduct he pursued in setting up this website was intended to harass Sir Peter Scott ... he ought to have known that such actions would amount to harassment."

Dr Fredrics has used the site to expose controversial practices at Kingston in recent years. In 2008, he posted a recording of lecturers pressurising students to inflate their National Student Survey responses.

Sir Peter complained to the World Intellectual Property Organisation that Dr Fredrics was infringing his right to the domain name www.sirpeterscott.com. In May 2009, it ruled that the vice-chancellor had no rights to the name.

In a statement issued after the trial, Dr Fredrics says the conviction had been handed down despite a "compelling police report that indicated there was no evidence that the site contained anything that could lead to such a charge".

The report, seen by Times Higher Education, says the "sites listed do not contain content that is consistent with any harassment".

A second charge against Dr Fredrics of threatening and abusive behaviour following an encounter with Sir Peter in Kingston last year was put on hold.

melanie.newman [at] tsleducation.com
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[UofOWatch thanks Pierre-Joseph Proudhon for bringing this UK competition to its attention.]

[Photo: U of O President Allan Rock in Gee-Geez workout mode.]

On Rock's corporatization of campus governance

The University's President Allan Rock has boasted to student media about his role as CEO of the corporation that is the University of Ottawa. He stated that this was his first posting as CEO of a corporation and that he took setting up his new executive team as an important challenge...

The following is a letter to the editor that appeared in the October 28, 2009, issue of the student newspaper The Fulcrum.


On the important question of corporatization

THE ROCK ADMINISTRATION has initiated and is hosting panel discussions on corporatization of the university, in view of presenting a policy on corporate donors in the coming weeks (HERE!). Free world bosses and their propagandists have learned that it is more effective to give the illusion of an open discussion than to disallow discussion.

What is important about Rock’s corporatization panels is what is not said. The best way to control discussion is to define its terms, by de facto excluding the real questions. What is not said is that the overarching problem of campus corporatization is a university executive that adopts a corporate-style management ethos in which the president is the CEO of Corporate U, the VPs are his executive officers, and the Senate and BOG are manipulated and directed by executive committees that make the meeting agendas, pre-determine priorities, and delimitate the discussions.

The latter is opposite to the text and spirit of the University of Ottawa Act, 1965, in which the executive officers are servants of the Senate (for academic matters) and BOG (for financial and resource matters), named only to provide efficient administration, not direction. Corporate executive takeover is a hijacking – whether it is in a profit-defined corporation which serves its executive class rather than its shareholders or on a campus in a public-service corporation where collegial governance is decapitated.

All the other problems of campus corporatization follow from the latter takeover: Ego service to other corporate executives, using the institution for broader projects (corporate collaborations) than its original mission to serve citizens and community, integration into a corporate-run economy, legitimization of external corporate and geopolitical projects, etc.

Today’s corporatization under the Rock era at U of O is exactly the corporatization that Mario Savio denounced on the Sproul Hall steps at Berkely on December 2, 1964 (Google “Mario Savio YouTube”). This Berkely Free Speech Movement (denounced by the student union of the time) and many movements like it were followed by decades of activism and legal precedents that established the legal principle of collegial governance on North American campuses and led to the United Nations UNESCO Recommendation Concerning the Status of Higher-Education Teaching Personnel, 1997, adopted by Canada.

Now the pendulum is swinging back towards a corporate management world in which students sell their freedom and their souls for a place on the management team. Go team go.

Denis Rancourt
Former U of O physics professor

[photo credit: University of Ottawa; CEO Allan Rock]

Related LINKS:
March 2011 update: "Donor policy" a Rock farce
All UofOWatch articles about corporatization
John McMurtry on university corporatization