Manifesto of a Med-School Reject

For four years, Tony has been studying like a slave of the Ancient World to get into medical school at the University of Ottawa.  While taking a full slate of pre-med courses and doing numerous rounds of MCAT prep and testing, he also minored in Classical Greek and Greek and Roman history.

Despite that the Faculty of Medicine is now known to be racist and criminal in its treatment of students, hundreds of undergraduates yearn to be accepted and trained as doctors there every year.  Tony was rejected (for the second year in a row) from the uOttawa med school in May 2011 after running the gauntlet of qualifying tests and completing the final, in-person interview stage.

This is what he posted on his Facebook wall the morning after he received his rejection letter:

Athena, you fake!
Where were you when my determination died?!
Where were you when the many applicants were scattered and destroyed?!
Where were you when university degrees became a joke told by old men on admissions committees?!

I was once your subject.

Now, I’m your equal — and your enemy!

* * *

How will Tony face the Old Gods of the Faculty of Medicine?  Will he accept being thrown back into their rigged games, finally get accepted, and allow himself to be relegated to the purgatory of professional servitude?  Or will he indeed become the equal and the enemy of fake Athena and her cult of academics?

Start Being Awesome

“When I get sad I stop being sad, and be awesome instead!” – ­Barney Stinson, How I Met Your Mother.

I’m gonna start being awesome.

I’m gonna get bold and push the boundaries.  I’m gonna take the centre stage of my life.  There’s a reason that work is draining, that school is deadly, and that mainstream play is a practice of numbing out my mind for the scraps of time that have been left over for me.

It’s because I’m a slave that I get fucked over.  Day in, day out.

I’m gonna go for exhilaration instead.  I’m gonna grow a big soul.  There will always be bosses who will oppose my vocation of being more fully human [1], but the bosses can be pushed back, and the pushing feels good.  I have the power to push.  I’m gonna be propelled by my motivation and face the barriers to my Self – find them, expose them, face them, take over my life.  I’m gonna be awesome.

“Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man [woman]; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.” – Paulo Freire

I’m taking on my own liberation.  I am a slave, but I’m being awesome instead!

[1] “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paulo Freire

Certified

Squashed, trimmed and chopped down, framed, locked in glass, sterilized, collected, caged, pinned like a butterfly on a board, catalogued, scanned, itemized, standardized, compartmentalized, stamped, integrated into the machine, had the life sucked out of, embalmed, replicated, turned into a drone, captured, chained, imprisoned, owned.

Student Power: another anecdote

Under the pedestrian bridge, the Rideau Canal slowly writhed.  Past the gleam of its winter skateway but still too grey for spring, it reminded the students trudging across the bridge above of the long weeks of midterms, tests, and exams still waiting for them before their release into summer.

A teaching assistant from the University of Ottawa descended from the bridge and crossed at the lights on Colonel By Drive.  Walking through the tunnel beneath the bus station, he passed other students and university employees making their way to or from the campus.  His thoughts were on the undergraduates’ marks in the course sections he was instructing.  More than halfway through the term, the lab supervisor had suddenly told him to mark harder, so that his grades would fall into a predetermined range.  As he reached the top of the stairs near the BioSciences building he happened to cross paths with the Dean of Science.

“Hello Dean Lalonde!” the student called, pleased to meet the dean, whom he’d been trying to reach, “did you have a chance to read my reply to your e-mail?”

The dean, a hulking man with a grizzly beard and eyebrows, stopped and turned his brown eyes on the student.  The eyes glowed, and he said,

“I’m not interested to talk to you right now because I have no assurance that you’re not recording me.”

The Dean of the Faculty of Science turned around and moved off in the opposite direction, toward the entrance of the BioSciences Department.  The student followed after him, asking if he could drop by the dean’s office for an appointment to discuss the grading issue that he was having with his supervisor.

“No!” the dean replied, and he spun around again.  He knocked the student off balance as he pushed past.  Dean Lalonde hustled away from the BioSciences Department, looking back over his shoulder with every couple of steps.

The student stood stunned on the sidewalk, watching the head of his Faculty retreat toward the campus security offices.  The day before he’d received an e-mail from the dean in response to his request that a downward normalization of marks must not occur in his laboratory sections:

“Thank you for bringing this situation to my attention.  I am looking into the matter now.”

By the beginning of May, the Rideau Canal was fat and lazy once again, filled to the brim for summer.  Students from the physics lab got their final marks back just as they had earned them and then they fled into the heavenly months of heat and light.

This true story occurred in the Winter of 2010.  Read more about the dean’s intervention in the normalization of grades in a first-year physics laboratory course at the University of Ottawa, here.

An instructional video on how to make an appointment with the dean can be viewed here.

Student Power: an anecdote

The straps of his backpack were secure, the buckled belt strap pulled the winter jacket in tight around his waist.  A group of three girls stepped out into the frigid air as he entered through the side doors of the Physics building.  The hallway was long and bare.  On one side, paint peeled from the walls in large patches, exposing the drywall underneath, and opposite were the professors’ offices.  The doors were closed on the neurophysics, photonics, and quantum optics experts inside.

He removed his gloves and toque, continuing down the hall past the water fountain, toward the building’s central lobby.   Close to the door, standing next to the wall, two professors who he knew were speaking casually.  As he passed the profs, the young man stopped and said hello.

“Hi Dr. Longtin, Dr. Harden, I’m curious what you think about your colleague being fired for giving out too many A+’s to his students?”

The two men sprung up, looking around wide-eyed at each other and their interlocutor.

“I’m not interested in that!” Dr. Longtin affirmed, as he sped toward his office at the far end of the hall.

“It’s a question of standards!” Dr. Harden emitted, past the glass door that was already closing off his escape route to the lobby.

The student, having studied conservation of momentum in detail during his undergraduate courses, had the image of a heat-generating explosion flash into his mind, and almost thought he’d see a puff of smoke hanging in the air where the two professors stood before taking off along their opposite trajectories.

The student scratched his hair and unzipped his winter jacket.  Pushing through the lobby door, he went upstairs to his office-space to work on an assignment for his Computational Methods in Materials Sciences course.

This true story occurred in the Winter of 2009.

Stop (thinking) in the Name of the Law!

Handcuffs and mind control at the University of Ottawa

uOttawa student Marc Kelly cuffed outside of a meeting of the Senate, after inviting all 36,000 students of the University to attend and hear President Allan Rock's speech on Freedom of Expression. (Click the picture for the video invite).

The University of Ottawa campus is dangerous territory.  In a setting filled with young people brought here under the pretext that they will grow intellectually in “an atmosphere of open dialogue” [1], extra precaution has to be taken to ensure that uncontrolled ideas don’t upset the institution’s overriding unstated missions of societal engineering, obedience training, and globalization [2,3].

Together with the legal system, including police and prosecutors for the Crown, the University administration has tightened its squeeze on free thought and cut off the air to public debate between members of the academic community over the issues that are most fundamental to their own control of their lives, work, and education on campus.  Beyond the professor’s marking pen and report card, the tools that are now being used to keep genuine and heartfelt ideas in check are the muscle, gun, and uniform of the cop along with the systemic weight of court conditions, criminal records, and jail time eagerly wielded by Ottawa’s Crown attorneys.  The enforcers of the law of mind control must keep a hard-head and know when to use force: arresting and handcuffing students, as well as campus-wide bans under the Ontario Trespass to Property Act are the order of the day [4].

As just one example out of many, I was arrested in December, 2009 following a student event promoting freedom of expression on campus.  Campus security (Protection Services) alleged that I participated in the painting of a message that read “These Walls Belong to Students” on a blank cement billboard wall that was temporarily empty between poster installations, and had Constable John Black of the Ottawa Police Service arrest me on charges of Mischief Under $5000 [5].  Prior to making the arrest, security secretly filmed and observed the event from several office windows in the University Centre, including the Women’s Resource Centre and the Teaching Assistant Union office.  When union president Sean Kelly, who was in the office at the time, asked a Protection Services agent why he did not approach the event, he responded that he “did not want to disturb the students.”

It is curious that security stood by and watched what they considered to be “property damage”, without intervening to protect the property.  Instead, they covertly observed and filmed the student event, waiting until it was over to approach the scene.

Why did University President Allan Rock approve that the painting of a political message on a campus backing wall for posters be pushed into the courts, despite requests from students that the charge be dropped and the debate over freedom of expression opened to the community [6]?  Wouldn’t it have been healthier to contemplate and discuss novel forms of student participation in deciding what ideas are portrayed on campus, rather than attack the students who raise these issues using the criminal system?

Not if the goal is for the administration to increase its control and ownership of the campus mental landscape and the formative activity that takes place there.  When students start to speak out and act out and claim the educational environment that is promised to them in the University’s highest-level policy statements and principles, it automatically threatens the administration-controlled marketing apparatus that is used to draw in a steady supply of raw resources (students) for the diploma factory [7].  It throws a wrench in the gears of the image control machine that takes power-serving intellectual work and produces political influence and further degradation of the status quo in Canada and around the globe, wherever Canada’s University is implanting its brand [2, 8].  The University has had to step up its efforts to make sure the critical thoughts that challenge this reality never escape from whatever distant recesses of the intellect they are confined to.

Immediately after arresting me, the University trespassed me from all campus lands and buildings including the first-year physics laboratory classrooms, where I worked as a Teaching Assistant, from my office, where I do graduate level research in physics, and from the office of my supervisor, with whom I meet weekly to discuss my research.  They arrested and handcuffed me again and charged me for trespassing when I went to President Allan Rock’s office to make an appointment to discuss removing the trespass notice [5].  Campus security even removed me from my departmental Christmas party in front of my research supervisor, my work supervisor, and my fellow students.  I didn’t have time to try a piece of the cake I’d brought for the gathering.

The trespassing charge was dropped by the Crown six months later, after President Rock and his Vice-President were subpoenaed to testify at the trial [9].  But the damage was already done: the locks that the University installs on the minds of its students are made of intimidation and fear.  When other students see this kind of punishment happen or they hear about it from their place in the soul-battering wastes of academia, the reaction is instinctive and the lesson is learned immediately: obey or be crushed.  Stop being yourself, stop developing your own interpretations of University principles and what it means to be a student or face the courts, get slapped with a criminal record, and have the “privilege” of access to campus, job prospects, and the ability to travel suddenly removed from you.  The result is that students learn to kill that niggling part of the self that knows its humanity is being mutilated [10].

As it has always done, the University trains its students to not think.  Honesty and independence are bludgeoned out of the student’s brain.  These days the weapons are becoming more vicious and the harm they inflict on students is extending outside of the academic world into all of Canadian society via criminal punishments and onto the body in the form of muscular abuse.  The University of Ottawa has ramped up to the next level of mind control, and it’s not pretty.

For reference:

[1] The University of Ottawa’s Mission and Values: Vision 2010
[2] Disciplined Minds – book by Jeff Schmidt
[3] Canadian Education as an Impetus towards Fascism – essay by Denis Rancourt
[4] Saying ‘no’ to no trespassing – news article by Charlotte Bailey, The University of Ottawa’s Fulcrum
[5] U of O revokes no trespassing notice to banned student -news article by Kitty So,  The Carleton Charlatan
[6] SAC writes to U of O President Allan Rock… – news article by the SFUO Student Appeals Centre
[7] Digital Diploma Mills – book by David Noble
[8] Study Abroad in the Age of Global Empire – essay from the New York University Disorientation Guide 2009
[9] University of Ottawa student activist not guilty of trespassing – news article by Yamreot Taddese, The University of Toronto Varsity
[10] Need for and practice of student liberation – essay by Denis Rancourt

The Torturer’s Apprentice

T.A. doesn’t stand for what you think it does…

Teaching assistants at the University of Ottawa are apprentice slave drivers.  We are torturers in training, and this training involves doing the dirty work of rewarding or punishing students for their reproduction of the professor’s ideology.  This is achieved by grading papers, policing students at exams and incriminating “cheaters”, and patrolling lab courses to ensure that students don’t escape from the holding cells outlined in their instruction manuals.  All as part of an arduous quest to have ourselves certified as “masters” or “doctors” of the process we’ve put ourselves and our students through.  Will somebody sound the alarm?

You know that school is oppression and your undergrad students know it too.  There’s physical pain: knotted-up shoulders from marathon marking sessions, binge-eating of baneful food, sleep deprivation.  There’s the nagging frustration that the students aren’t interested in the material, and the papers keep showing that they “just don’t get it.”  Ever wonder why the students who demonstrate the most persistent creativity and curiosity in the material are the ones who sink toward the poor end of your grade profile?  In the first year physics lab course, students have a demanding set of instructions to follow for each experiment and a detailed marking scheme outlining where and in what quantity the marks will be awarded.  If the students finish all the steps by the end of the three-hour session and have a report written up according to the strict course standard, then they will earn a high grade.  They will also be stripped of an opportunity to experiment in the physics laboratory or to even think about what they are doing, except to ask the demonstrator questions like: “is this working right?” or “is this the right answer?” Whatever that might mean.

We, as teaching assistants, are needed to enforce this madness that takes free spirits and spits out brainless young professionals and intellectually castrated graduate students who will fill our jobs once we’ve moved on to the master torturer position.   That’s what we’re paid for.  But that’s not what our job is: the teacher’s role is to provide the best educational experience possible.  The Instructions and Advice for Demonstrators document, which is given to all first year physics lab T.A.’s at the beginning of term, explains that due to the large size of first-year courses, the demonstrator will be in a position to interact personally with a small group of students while the professor cannot, and therefore he “has a much larger influence over these few students.”  Demonstrators are thus entrusted with the bulk of the responsibility in helping new students “develop a liking for the subject”, according to the document.  It goes on to state that “your only objective should be to remove obstacles to the students’ learning.”

As honest T.A.’s we need to identify and eliminate the obstacles that interfere with creative and authentic learning: remove the needles and the electric clamps.  Drop the red hot iron and cut through the wires.  Act out against the grading system that is shredding your own mind and the minds of your students.  Transform from torturer into teacher.

For reference:

(1969) The Student as Nigger: Essays and Stories, by Jerry Farber.  (Original essay available here).

The University of Ottawa Department of Physics document Instructions and Advice for Demonstrators can be found under Joseph Hickey’s section at the AcademicFreedom.ca website here.