On the Road

A slightly crisp September Sunday morning found me exploring the spectacular Chinese and Japanese gardens that form part of the sprawling oasis of greenery and blossoms known as the Montreal Botanical Garden.  On one level, the Japanese garden presents an opportunity to leave the cares of the material world behind, and lose oneself in a thoughtfully constructed landscape in which every plant and every stone has been carefully selected and placed in order to conjure up an enveloping atmosphere of pure serenity.  And on another, the entire Botanical Garden constitutes an important centre of scientific research, of education, and of preservation of some 21,000 species of flowers, shrubs and trees which constitute the birthright of the human race.  In another area of the garden, I was particularly fascinated to see plants which I had previously known only by name, including some, like woad and madder, that were used in the Middle Ages as dyes to colour cloth and other materials.  We owe this amazing place to the vision of one man, Brother Marie-Victorin, born Conrad Kirouac, a Université de Montréal botanist who at the height of the Great Depression persuaded the city’s mayor, Camillien Houde, to initiate this enormous undertaking, a perfect mix of “town” and “gown”.

Much of the hype that we hear these days about the role of universities is focused on concepts such as innovation, entrepreneurship, and the ability to solve the problems of the future.  But we rarely seem to recall that another very important function of universities is to serve as repositories of the past, places where our knowledge and understanding of both the natural and human worlds, whether that be the preservation of botanical species or aspects of human culture, for example art or language, are preserved for future generations.  And plants and languages are both aspects of the diversity of life on this planet which happen to be disappearing at an alarming rate.

This was a point that I attempted to make last week at a SSHRC consultation event, entitled “Imagining Canada’s Future”, one of six regional panels being held across the country as part of an exercise to determine the strategic research priorities to be adopted for the next decade or so.  In a similar fashion to universities, SSHRC all too frequently tends to trumpet the importance of the research they fund for improving our collective future, for solving “real world” problems, and thus with an emphasis on the “social sciences” side of their mandate.  As an historian of the Middle Ages, I invariably feel left out of such a scenario, as too, I am sure, do many of my colleagues in the humanities.  Our particular role is less about changing the future, and more about understanding our past, the legacy of the human species that has brought us to this particular point in history.  To take but one example, I worry that the legacy of the Greco-Roman world – in fields as varied as philosophy, mathematics, natural sciences, medicine, literature, history, engineering, and art and architecture – will someday soon be endangered because we won’t have passed on an ability to read and understand the languages in which those texts are written.  And that day may come even sooner for languages such as ancient Egyptian or Syriac, which rarely now appear in a university curriculum.  

As we enter a new debate about the function of post-secondary education, and thrash out new “mandate agreements” with our funders, let’s pause to remember that universities also serve as the primary repositories of human knowledge, and indeed this has been one of their most important roles since the concept of a “university” emerged almost a millennium ago.  I hope we won’t forget that purpose in the decades ahead.  For once lost, knowledge of human history is rarely recoverable, just as is true of botanical species – and with each loss humanity becomes a little more impoverished.