Apolitical spaces

[ataxi]

The australian_left community has a post up today about a professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada being fired for consistently introducing anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian commentary and guest speakers into cross-disciplinary courses he delivered

Comments

[alias_sqbr]

I have nothing much to add but am inclined to agree, there are times when it's inappropriate to bring politics to class, even if it's politics I personally like (I certainly wouldn't have brought it up when I taught pure maths! Well, apart from the tutorial we had at 9am on September 12th 2001, and even that wasn't so much political as WTF)

[ataxi]

What happened in that tutorial? Did you put the chalk and talk aside and discuss the possible flow-on consequences of 4000 US citizens getting mass-murdered?

[alias_sqbr]

Well, this was 8ish years ago but I think we mainly just tried to grip on the facts of what had happened and how we felt about it, what we were doing when we heard etc. I think there was some discussion of possible future effects but speaking for myself I tried not to get into the politics of it since it would cause an argument. It wasn't a very long discussion.

[currente_calamo]

consistently introducing anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian commentary and guest speakers into cross-disciplinary courses he delivered
Sounds like bias to me, regardless of which side he's on. What about the other sides to the story? (Note: I haven't read the article.)

[ataxi]

Yeah, he sounded like a bit of a nutjob to me, and so did the administrators, which probably explained why things escalated to the stage that they did.

[kristian]

You might reasonably ask what the Gaza Strip has to do with a physics course, even one called "Science in Society".

Firing Rockets!

Having just popped over to Australian_Left I get the feeling this is one those cases where "both sides" of the story are full of shit. I think I'm all forconcluding that the Professor probably hates Jews and the University fired him for his political views.

[ataxi]

Yeah, agreed. I was wondering how far I'd get saying "*cough* maybe this guy's a bit of a crank" over there.

[melberon]

This guy was mentioned a couple of times on Pharyngula recently. He has somewhat loopy views on other issues too - e.g. apparently runs courses with no assessment at all and just gives everyone an A+. The impression that I got is that it's not as simple as any one particular complaint against him, which might be forgiveable individually, but that he's a troublemaker who enjoys pissing people off and eventually did it a bit too much. Perhaps one court argue that Rancourt should have been nudged into a research-only position rather than fired, though.

As a general principle, unrelated political views really belong nowhere near maths and physics lectures. Mike Alder at UWA is known for his long diatribes which have nothing to do witht he maths courses he teaches - and on a couple of occasions told me I wasting my time doing a philosophy degree, which I think is also a bit out of line.

[ataxi]

Since this is an unlocked post, you might not want to give your views on UWA academics by name too freely ...

I remember an incident involving Mike Alder a few years ago. There was a stink when someone who did Honours way back when on automatically detecting "certain" photography (i.e. porn) with Alder as supervisor, actually showed porn images in his thesis seminar, and seriously offended an important visiting academic. I think the prevailing perception was that Mike Alder had sort of egged him on.

Personally I never had much of a problem with him, and I enjoyed the fact that he could write well (his printed lecture notes were always entertaining).

[kadeton]

I would (perhaps ambitiously) hope that most university students would be able to differentiate between actual course content and political ranting, so I don't think there's any particular issue there. If the university chooses to take the position that the professor's behaviour needs to be curtailed, that's their prerogative, though he would have to have received numerous warnings before being sacked and clearly knew that what he was doing was pissing off the people who paid his wages. At that point, continuing that behaviour is surely done with the expectation of being sacked.

I'm not sure you can really call the double-standard 'unspoken'; the blog is called australian_left, after all.

[ataxi]

There's no hard and fast alignment between general left wing, and pro-Palestinian politics, as far as I've found. So it's somewhat unspoken ... but australian_left is certainly a venue that's expected to be sympathetic to anti-Israel sentiment (see earlier this year during the Israeli "intervention" in Gaza), not that everyone is.

Not sure I really follow your first point: are you saying there's no issue with political speech in university lectures provided it's obviously signposted as such?

[kadeton]

I'm saying there's no issue with lecturers expressing their own opinions in unrelated subject areas. It might be annoying, but I don't see any inherent problem with it. If it causes disputes, the university can make a decision one way or the other as to its propriety.

Australian_left is a directly labelled statement of bias, so I would expect double-standards. The exact form would depend on the individuals responsible.

[alias_sqbr]

Well, and I think this isn't what you mean, but any overly extended detours into non-course-content is bad teaching. If I ran a maths class and spent the whole time talking about jewelry making the class would have cause to complain, and not just the ones who don't like jewelry :) So signposting your political content is basically saying "I'm going to stop doing what you're paying me for and talk about something unrelated I personally find interesting", and taken too far that's still bad.