(This is Part I of my Pot Smoking Prof Gone Mad series. Other installments:
Part II: Guardian Blog on Hutchinson
Part III: Another young life destroyed by pot smoking prof gone mad
Part IV: Pot smoking prof gone mad accomplishes nothing since 1997)
It had to happen some time. I’ve finally found a subject about which I’m actually qualified to write.
Anne tipped me off to this Boing Boing post about a pot smoking professor at the University of Florida. It sounds as if the guy was funny, but basically wasting everyone’s time. The post is updated with a reader reaction from a certain Alanna relating her experience with a pot smoking professor at the University of Toronto:
I had another baked professor for first-year philosophy: Link. From the Toronto Star’s article, I now understand why he was so hard to follow in lectures; he smokes pot with a medical clearance from the government. I’m not sure how it can be that he’s just allowed to lecture whilst high. One of the questions on our term test involved correlating Plato with an excerpt of lyrics from one of the prof’s favourite reggae songs.
I expect better from Boing Boing. No prof is going to satisfy everyone, and it sounds as if Alanna didn’t benefit from her class with Doug Hutchinson, but she has no good reason to think that pot has anything to do with it. Since when is baseless speculation about the effect of someone’s medication on his teaching worth mentioning? The answer is: only when the medication in question is pot, in which case we apparently have a license to be grossly insensitive and careless. At the very least Boing Boing might also publish Hutchinson’s own words on the subject, which I quote in their entirety at the end of this post in case the link rots.
I want to say something about Doug Hutchinson, so that at least inquiring googlers will have some point of comparison with Alanna’s. I am a former student of Doug’s. I took his first year philosophy class too, a long time ago. I loved it. It confirmed for me that I wanted to go on to study philosophy, and helped move me toward Ancient philosophy specifically. Later on, I took a fourth year seminar on Socrates, which I still remember fondly. I also undertook a semester long study with Doug the next year (which turned into an informal paper we wrote, and I delivered, later on at a conference in Padua and Venice dedicated to our project). He gave me careful, considered, and thoughtful advice about graduate school, and a lot of valuable assistance getting in. We have kept in touch, off and on, in the years since then.
Doug Hutchinson is without question the most gifted teacher I have ever encountered in my life. Rather than stretch out an account with anecdotes, let me just say that I have met other professors who care very much about teaching, but never someone as thoughtful about pedagogy. Doug has an uncommonly clear idea not just of the philosophical material he’s teaching, but also of the more general intellectual skills he is teaching his students to bring to bear on the material. I learned more from him than anyone else about how to attack an intellectual problem in general, how to think though it clearly and from the ground up. When I’m stuck with something, I really do still sometimes step back and try to imagine how he would approach it.
As for his research, it’s also solid. In addition to a book, a number of papers, and an important role in putting together the complete edition of Plato’s works (as well as translating some of the works in it), he has recently published, with Monte Ransome Johnson, an extremely important paper on Aristotle’s Protrepticus which is the most important thing to appear on the work in the last 50 years, and which I expect to be a real spur to further research on this area of Aristotle’s thought. (I’ve mentioned this before.) In the past year, I have also seen two papers in draft which Doug asked me to comment on. They’re both serious and important contributions to scholarship.
All of this – the excellence in teaching and the solid record of scholarship – are in spite of a serious medical condition, and, if we are willing to listen to him, partly thanks to marijuana. Doug does what a professor should do, and he does it very well.
Anyway, here’s what Doug has to say for himself:
Greetings, philosophers. I thought I should let you know that as of this week our university has a professor who smokes marijuana openly on campus, legally, and with workplace accommodation for his need to use this remedy.I am that professor.
I feel it falls to me to let you know this state of affairs in the proper terms so that the inevitable rumours and possible slanders that arise can be ignored or challenged by you, my peers and fellow philosophers.
I have used marijuana for a serious and chronic health condition for over 10 years, in varying amounts for the varying condition.
Currently, the use is heavy and the condition is stable or improving. As for what this condition is, I would ask you please not to speculate or spread rumours or half-truths. Canada has laws that are meant to protect the privacy of personal health information.
If you know me well, you will feel free to ask.
How did I manage this transition from clandestine smoker to officially accommodated one? It was an ugly process that started when college and university authorities, acting on policies to repress the use of marijuana among students, decided that they needed to enforce those laws and policies against me as well.
Over the course of months of sometimes angry discussions, the other side learned better what the facts of my case and the laws on marijuana actually are.
The outcome is that I have been provided with a ventilated basement smoking room in Trinity College, and the provost of the college and the provost of the university have both written me letters in which they “acknowledge” and “respect” my choice of therapy.
I take this opportunity to thank the college and the university for this good solution and for these necessary affirmations of the legitimacy of my conduct.
Colleagues and other U of T employees who may need adapted working conditions due to a health condition should know that since 2003 our university has had an Office of Health and Well-being Programs and Services, whose function is to support the work of afflicted employees.
The staff in this office recommend the appropriate accommodation while holding health information confidential from all other university parties. I found this process worked fairly well, and I feel that others should know about it and trust in its integrity.
Colleagues and others who use marijuana wholly or partly for medical reasons should be using medical-grade marijuana, with a good selection of strains, of which there are currently two sources of supply in Toronto.
I know these compassion clubs well and will be glad to offer informed advice. Colleagues and others who wonder whether their use of marijuana is medical, or whether they should try some preparation of marijuana for their health condition, should feel free to apply to me for guidance and further information.
Professors who become known as heavy users of marijuana risk a great loss of credibility, and I wish I had been able to remain discreet; but I was “outed” by college authorities from where I was hiding in my “dope closet.”
Under these circumstances, I decided to come out fully into the open, on my own terms. This is the reason I am writing this letter to you; and this is the reason I explained the situation to my undergraduate class on Tuesday, before they could be shocked (or not) at the sight of me puffing during the break (outside the building, of course).
It would be realistic of me to expect a higher than usual degree of scrutiny of my performance at this time; but rather than resent this scrutiny, the better plan is to invite it. There are 10 spare seats in my third-year class on Seneca, which meets from 10 am to 1 pm on Tuesdays, and I invite visits to my class from graduate students, colleagues and higher university officials to see for themselves whether the pot-head professor is teaching well.
Please get in touch with me if you intend to visit; and if you wish I will send you the Seneca readings for the day.
It is not a satisfactory defence of my Charter rights to have my grudging authorization from Health Canada while students and others are hounded as criminals for doing what looks like the very same thing; this casts dark shadows of opprobrium on the blameless sick.
My experience in coming out into the open has rekindled my activism on the marijuana front, and I am now building, with other Canadian activists, fresh legal challenges to our Charter-defective and previously invalidated prohibition, which seems to have been miraculously resurrected in October 2003 .
I invite colleagues and others to join me in this liberal struggle.
DC | 30-Sep-06 at 2:21 pm | Permalink
Gosh though, what a superb use of a university’s time and resources “repress[ing] the use of marijuana among students”. None of their fucking business.
anne | 01-Oct-06 at 1:46 am | Permalink
Thanks, Chris; I’m glad you posted this.
Backword Dave | 01-Oct-06 at 3:38 pm | Permalink
Good post; generous and informative.
Bobby | 04-Oct-06 at 1:23 pm | Permalink
Note: I realize that this may be rather long, but I didn’t write it only for this venue, but for others. Thanks, Chris, Doug deserves all the support out there.
We assume that institutions of higher learning are places of openness, not simply of tolerance, where one tolerates another, bears or is willing to ‘put up’ with the others difference. Openness requires much more than the condescension and hostility of tolerance, which always entails a hostile prejudgment, it requires an attempt to understand, to allow for possibilities and to retain this openness to the possibility of something or someone being other than what one is or knows. The problem is of course that we assume this, and in our assumption we fail to realize that institutions of higher learning began as and still are places of indoctrination, where ideology rules. This is itself a narrow reading, but is also the structure within which certain teachers and certain students are able to move beyond, to transcend such narrowness and to create a genuine space for thinking.
The past several months a professor at the University of Toronto, Doug Hutchinson, has publicly undergone an oppressive and repressive violence which arises from the narrowness of such institutions. He uses marijuana for a medical condition which he does not wish to disclose – after all, in Canada we believe that a person’s medical information is private, between that person and his or her doctor. Let us not forget this.
Doug Hutchinson is one of those rare individuals who has for years not only transcended the narrowness of the institution within the walls of the institution itself, but has taken his students with him for the ride – for him it could not be otherwise, since there is no professor who is not also a teacher and no teacher without students. These words or categories of being mean something to him, they are not simply empty signifiers to be uttered, artificially filled and sustained out of necessity and inauthenticity.
As a student at the Universtiy of Toronto I have seen how careless, inhumane and despicable an institution can be. Having spent 6 years at the university, I have seen a few things and have earned the right to speak about them. I met many of my closest and most beloved friends and professors within its walls, or perhaps without them, since many of the professor were ‘contract’ faculty, underpaid and ill treated gems. This says much of the nature of the permanent faculty of this university. As for the administration of the university, which I tried to avoid whenever I could, is an entirely different matter. The University of Toronto is indeed a great institution wherein there are the greatest resources available to students, but with the severest inhumanity one can imagine. Unfortunately, this is so common a feeling, an experience, among former students that the university is not among those universities who survey their recent graduates for ‘satisfaction’ with their education.
It was during my third year that I first met Doug Hutchinson. He was teaching a senior level undergraduate seminar on Epicurus, something he had not done for some time when it was offered that year. I am very particular about my education, my courses, the professors teaching them, the reading material and requirements – all these must work to maximize my learning experience. A course was never for me something to be settled on out of necessity, when this could be helped. For one reason or other I didn’t think I could go through with the course Doug was teaching that year. When I mentioned this to a senior professor cross appointed to philosophy and classics, he made sure I knew that I was making a big mistake and that Doug was not only the best of teachers, but also a wonderful human being and someone to know, that I would be missing a wonderful opportunity. I took the advice from this person whom I respected and the course and fell under the spell of a wonderful teacher. There is really no one like Doug Hutchinson. In that course, now over three years ago, I also met some wonderful people, who are still friends of mine. By hand picking the students, Doug managed to build an actual community, something that is antithetical to the University of Toronto’s institutional atmosphere. His attention to detail, pedagogy and his students couple with his love of the material he was teaching made for an unforgettable experience. I have never taken a better course, one more satisfying.
Since then I have worked with Doug on various projects, taken other courses with him, including independent studies and even a wonderful graduate seminar this past summer, co-thought by Monte Johnson, on their groundbreaking discovery and study of Aristotle’s Protrepticus. Today he is not only the best teacher I have ever had the pleasure of knowing and studying under, but a valued and dear friend. He is truly unique and I have considered myself fortunate to have met this man.
The fact that his use of Marijuana has become an ‘issue’ testifies to the narrowness of the university’s administration and their immediate hostile re-action, and the despicable stigma attached to marijuana. Few people ever think, ‘philosophers’ including, or at least those who masquerade as philosophers, but simply regurgitate the thoughts of others. All this despite the famous Socratic dictum that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. For example, they do not think about how the fact that certain drugs are ‘illegal’ and others ‘legal’ is completely arbitrary, about how this arbitrariness is not at all arbitrary, but the result of complex political motives such as colonialism, imperialism and capitalism that have been at work for some time now. They have little memory of the history of such things. This is of course not at all surprising in our world, in our time, or perhaps in all times.
I have seen the development of this incident over the past while and followed every detail, given that Doug needed all the support he could get as he was being bullied by such a goliath. This is time and attention, mental power and concern that they have taken away from this man, their own professor, their own employee. Despite this he has organized a wonderful course for his students on the Roman philosopher Seneca. I have watched him prepare for this course for months. He spoke to me about it with such depth of concern and attention long before it even began, about its every detail, about its textures, tastes, and outlines. No one does for their students what this man, this teacher does.
The slanderous view that smoking marijuana has negatively influenced his teaching is nothing but slander. It is a human tendency to look outwards rather than inwards, to place blame on others rather than to look at oneself and to reflect, to meditate on one’s own role in creating a given context. Our world is the way it is, the political mess that it now is, because we re-act, because we fail to act. Students tend to blame others, thinkers, texts, or teachers for their own failings. This is not to say that the source of all problems and failings is to be found in oneself, but that there is not even the slightest thought that this is a possibility, not the hint of an attempt at self examination before violent outward force is exerted. Learning, like all other spaces of being, is a con-text, what is woven together, created in community with others; therefore, its failure or breakdown can never be caused by or blamed on a single element of the context, a single individual. Such a reading would simply be a failure to accept responsibility.
I could say much more, but I have already said enough, and yet so little, since what Doug Hutchinson means to me as a teacher and a friend is beyond language, and I have tried my best to give voice to what is beyond expression. He is not comfortable with praise and a modest man, but this is what makes him so wonderful. It is this quality that allows him to be open to otherness and to genuinely engage his students and allow them to think under, but also with him. The idea of the teacher’s authority over students has never really sat well with him. He does not believe that the learning process flows in one direction, from top to bottom, from teacher to student, but that, as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus believed, the path down is also the path up and that these two trajectories of movement interpenetrate to create multiple and infinite paths of action and interaction between student and teacher. Herein lies the richness of learning.
Bobby Bakhtiarynia
Nantes, France
03/10/06
anonymous | 06-Jan-08 at 8:06 pm | Permalink
this story was sensational when i first read it, but it’s getting old so quick.
and it really should be no surprise at all. it’s a large canadian university, and there’s all sorts of things going on right under the authorities noses, and they either don’t know, or don’t care, because it would be way to hard to stop it from happening.
anonymous | 06-Jan-08 at 8:29 pm | Permalink
i don’t need “authorization” from the government to use a plant that has been around on this earth long before this “government” even existed.