Denis Rancourt
Rancourt, D. G.
Journal for Activist Science and Technology Education
VOL 1 NO 2 (2009): JASTE 1.2
https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/jaste/article/view/21183
ABSTRACT
I review my more than 40 years experience with the educational system in (Ontario) Canada, from my days as student to my 2009 dismissal as a tenured physics professor at the University of Ottawa, and conclude that a transformation of the student persona has accompanied the imposed system reforms and that this persona reflects real psychological change towards an increased inability for independent thought and aninability to discern one’s own learning. I argue that both the system reforms and the individualtransformations of students are consistent with a pattern towards fascism occurring in a global disruptive and predatory economic hierarchy during rising economic power-coalescence. The nature of my politicaldismissal for attempting to resist the reforms – including an abrupt laboratory lockout, intimidations andfiring of graduate students and a junior researcher, forceful police arrests of students and of a professor forparticipating in a public campus event, disregarding due process, and the recently proven hiring of ajournalism student as “agent of University Legal Counsel” to perform extensive covert surveillance (from 2006 to 2008) – is also an indicator of emergent fascism.
