… the fool deserves, and now that he’s been dismissed from teaching, she’s finished with him. Read her posts about him here.
Stanley Fish, in his New York Times column, reviews this case – Rancourt’s a political fanatic who refused to teach what he was assigned, or to grade his students – with care, which is fine.
Fish, however, tries to make Rancourt paradigmatic of academic freedom gone bad. He claims that some academics see Rancourt as “a brave nonconformist, a tilter against orthodoxies…”
No one feels this way about him. He’s a jerk, and everyone, as far as UD can tell, has been clear about that from the start.
Especially his university colleagues, who were the first to call attention to him.
Fish is wrong to suggest, David Horowitz-style, that Denis Rancourt tells us academic freedom isn’t working. The lesson of Rancourt is that professors and administrators typically have little trouble discerning the difference between dissent and dysentery.
February 9th, 2009 at 6:46AM
My freshmen all know that you can’t present a bold thesis like this without *some* evidence. What a dreadful hack Fish is sometimes!
February 9th, 2009 at 9:21PM
sometimes?
February 10th, 2009 at 6:39PM
I don’t think Fish is making Rancourt case paradigmatic of anything. Fish writes about how "some academics contrive to turn serial irresponsibility into a form of heroism under the banner of academic freedom".
Fish also doesn’t claim that academic freedom doesn’t work. He just says that the term is sometimes misused.
February 10th, 2009 at 9:38PM
I’d say the term is so seldom misused in the way Fish claims as to rob his argument of any weight.
The crucial distinction here is between academic freedom and institutional irresponsibility. That there are some irresponsible academics who use the language of academic freedom to justify their irresponsibility is true. It’s also true that virtually all of them are correctly identified as irresponsible and dealt with (sometimes more slowly than one would like). Rancourt is Exhibit A.
I know of no academics who think the term academic freedom means freedom not to grade your students and not to teach your subject matter.
February 16th, 2009 at 11:59AM
[...] blog post about the abuse of academic freedom. While you can read it here, I think Margaret Soltan took care of it quickly and well: Stanley Fish, in his New York Times column, reviews this case – Rancourt’s a political [...]
July 2nd, 2009 at 8:40PM
Good point; Denis Rancourt is a jerk. He’s also engaged in some very strange things. Google rockourt if you want the facts about this case that Fish didn’t mention.