You sound like a leftist university administrator!
Just reading wikipedia on it makes it pretty clear that his outspoken, non-leftist politics were at the core of the challenge to him:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Rancourthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Rancourt
LOL!
Right….
No, I’m a believer in professors grading objectively based on the course syllabus, which in many ways is a contract between student and professor.
And regarding his positions? Let’s take a look at a course he was supposed to teach - PHY 1703 at uOttawa. Here is the course description at:
https://catalogue.uottawa.ca/en/courses/phy/
“PHY 1703 Physics and environment (3 credits)
Course designed for the environmental studies program. This course introduces the fundamental physical concepts useful for the study of the impact of human activity on the environment: conservation principles, notion of energy, energy sources; physical limit of the efficiency of energy transformations; transport of contaminants; noise pollution; nuclear energy, effects of radioactivity and radiation. This course cannot be credited to students enrolled in the Faculty of Science or the Faculty of Engineering.
Component: Lecture”
Rancourt took that course and turned it into “Activism: Power and its Contexts”. Unilaterally. And changed the grading scheme. I’m still trying to find the updated syllabus for Rencourt’s change.
You can read about Rencourt’s disciplinary issues here:
Eventually, Rencourt ended up being sued for libel after he referred to a fellow professor as a “house negro”:
“On his 2011 U of O Watch blog, he twice referred to St. Lewis, who is black, as then President Allan Rock’s “house negro”—someone who is a traitor to her race. After Rancourt refused to remove the offending posts, St. Lewis sued him for libel.”
- see https://thepostmillennial.com/campus-activism-off-the-rails-revisiting-st-lewis-v-rancourt/
Calling someone a “house negro” would seem to be the mark of a leftist vs. a non-leftist. But Rencourt is a complicated person - hence the advice to read his writings with a higher than normal dose of skepticism.