I have been thinking about those years long ago in recent days, no doubt prompted by my participation in an event last week which marked the 40^th anniversary of my B.A. graduation.  And yesterday morning – Thursday September 26^th – The Globe and Mail’s historical vignette at the top of page 2 marked the 44^th anniversary of the release of the last album ever recorded by The Beatles: Abbey Road.

Aha, some of you may be saying.  He clearly has a fixation with that album, or at least Side Two, since he has used it as a continual source of blog titles over the years.  And indeed you would be correct.  I have often used Abbey Road as a source of meaningful words, and hence of inspiration, both the titles and the actual lyrics. 

And thus you may not be entirely shocked to learn that a hot Saturday last July found me in London, long suffering partner in tow, riding the Bakerloo line tube up to St John’s Wood, and then making the short trek over to what may be London’s most famous pedestrian crosswalk – or ‘zebra crossing’, as they say in Britain. 

I was not alone!  The street was thronged with tourists, most of them very much younger than me … and one enterprising individual was making some serious coin by taking pictures of groups crossing the street in emulation of the fab four.  There is even a webcam trained on the crossing in question, running 24/7, and while I haven’t checked it out, I have been told that it is a busy spot both day and all night.  A few years ago I had the pleasure of teaching a seminar course on the theme of ‘Saints and Pilgrims’, and one of the themes we explored was the concept of meaningful travel.  I can assure you that this visit to Abbey Road was very much a ‘pilgrimage’.

What is it about 22 minutes of music (the approximate length of Side Two) that still attracts thousands of visitors to an otherwise unremarkable London street some 44 years later, including many who were not even born when the record was released?  I won’t even begin to try to explain it, but clearly the words and music resonate with others, as they do for me – including 15 of the truest words ever written.  And that’s the amazing thing about music.  It helps create meaning out of chaos, sanity out of madness.  It turns despair into hope.  It becomes part of who and what we are.

One of the things that occupies the time of Chief Development Officers is visiting alumni who have been successful, and Nancy Broden has certainly done that.  It turns out that she was one of the first employees of a small firm, based in San Francisco, which went on to achieve some success.  Indeed its net worth was estimated last week to be somewhere in the area of $10 billion.  Its name is Twitter, and Nancy holds the position of Design Lead on the Revenue Team.  All I could say was “Wow!”, and I took the initiative to contact Nancy myself, to ask if she would be willing to contribute some thoughts to the alumni page on the art history website.  She was most happy to do so, and here is part of what she wrote: “I could not have segued between careers without the solid liberal arts training I received from the Art History faculty at Carleton. While I rarely – OK never – have the opportunity to discuss the architectural plans of Byzantine churches with my colleagues, every day I synthesize seemingly disparate facts and data points in order to come up with coherent design directions. Curiosity and persistence got me pretty far, but I got much farther with the critical thinking skills I honed at Carleton.”

This year FASS has adopted as its theme “The Power of the Arts”, and that includes celebrating the power of the B.A. degree to prepare students for whatever life brings, including in this particular instance a career at Twitter.  I am delighted to report that Nancy will be back on campus on Friday September 20^th, as part of “Throwback” weekend, and she and I will be engaging in a public conversation based on the thoughts expressed in her website posting.  Anyone who may be interested in hearing her speak is most welcome to attend – the River Building second floor Theatre at 7:30, followed by a reception.

I hold firmly to the view that the last thing you should think about when you choose your major is what job it will lead to.  Frankly, at age 18 none of us have any real idea of what our future will hold.  Not a clue! The best advice I can offer to undergraduate students is to find one’s passion, and in pursuing that passion hone one’s “critical thinking skills”.  Much the same point was made by Tony Chambers, a faculty member at OISE, speaking on Steve Paikin’s The Agenda show on September 10^th.  The theme of the episode was whether the B.A. degree offers sufficient return on the investment of time and money, from a purely financial outlook; but Prof. Chambers countered that this was really the “wrong conversation”.  Education is not about economic outcomes, and most of its many benefits simply lack a dollar value.  To paraphrase a commercial that we all know well: Learning skills that will last a lifetime … priceless!

And for those who remain unconvinced of that, those for whom money really is the #1 concern, perhaps it is worth remembering what the Stats Can National Household Survey reported last week:  two thirds of the top 1% of wealthy Canadians possess university degrees.

And this also holds true more generally for “news”.  The “dog days of summer” are usually bereft of meaningful fodder for the cranium, but recent weeks have produced many stories which belie that norm, fascinating those of us who till in the pastures of the human sciences: from the ethics of intervening to protect innocent lives in Syria, to the current debate on religious accommodation in Quebec; from the need to balance economic and environmental issues, dramatically brought into the realm of public discourse by the tragedy at Lac Mégantic, to the value to both individuals and the larger society of a liberal arts education.

That last issue, in particular, seems to have engaged columnists of all persuasions in both Canada and the United States, reflecting a much larger debate within North American society, and surely one in which universities have a very large interest … which makes our comparative and collective silence all the more puzzling.  To be frank, it was chilling to read about the closure last month of so many humanities programs at the University of Alberta, with barely a peep of regret.  Are we undertaking a form of self-censorship, one wonders, because we realize only too well the precariousness of our finances and the necessity of not biting the proverbial hand that feeds us?  And if so, where is the line between pragmatism and complicity?  Do we meekly accept the argument that the value of a university degree is measured by how much one will earn afterwards?  Jim Sleeper of Yale University sounded the alarm in an op-ed piece published in the Sunday August 31st edition of the New York Times: “At its best, a liberal education imbues future citizen-leaders with the values and skills that are necessary to question, not merely serve, concentrations of power and profit. Universities that abandon this ideal are lending their good names to the decline of liberal education; turning themselves into career-networking centers for a global managerial work force that answers to no republican polity or moral code; and cheapening the value of the diplomas they hand out, at home and abroad.” His specific target was universities which compromise the principles of academic freedom in order to open new campuses in countries, such as Singapore, where there is no tradition or practice of anything resembling “freedom of expression”. But I think the statement can be applied much more broadly.

In the coming year, I propose that we be guided by two fundamental meta-narratives.  The first is to combat more directly those who scorn the “liberal arts”, with the aim of rebuilding public confidence … and perhaps also our own self-confidence … in the value of what we do, and more specifically in the value of the BA degree.  We need to challenge the argument that the primary purpose of a post-secondary education is to secure a well-paid job afterwards.  It is not … although that may well turn out to be a collateral outcome.  And with that in mind FASS has adopted “The Power of the Arts” as its “theme” for the coming academic year.  You will hear that phrase often in the weeks and months ahead.

And the second overarching thrust of our activities will be “sustainability”: economic, intellectual, administrative.  In order to ensure that our voices will continue be heard, not only in the coming year but for many more to come, we need to plan for survival in a world that no longer takes for granted the value of our continued presence, and hence questions the “return on investment”.  On the home front, we need to take a long and hard look at our curriculum and our organizational structures.  Do they foster or inhibit the increasing breakdown of disciplinary boundaries, and the continued advancement of knowledge and understanding?  Are we maximizing the use of those precious resources which are granted to us? And is a 20th-century model best suited to the challenges of the 21st century, or does it require some new thinking?  It is perhaps telling that the second biggest “major” for incoming first-year BA students, after Psychology, is “undeclared” … and it is not that far behind!

There is much to ponder, and much to be done, as the new academic year surges out of the starting blocks.  But it is certainly a race worth running, so it is with both determination and enthusiasm that I say “Bring it on!”.

Professor Abella was the lunchtime speaker last Thursday at the conference entitled “If Not Now, When?  Responsibility and Memory After the Holocaust”, one of a number of memorable speakers over the two-day event.  But the paper from which I learned most was entitled “Distress Across Generations”, delivered by our own professor of Neuroscience and Canada Research Chair, Hymie Anisman.  His research has documented the effects of stress on the human body, and specifically the physical damage done by certain hormones released at times of stress.  What I hadn’t previously appreciated, however, is that exposure to stress over a long period – for example by Aboriginal peoples subjected to the attempted destruction of their language and culture in residential schools, or the European Jews who were persecuted, incarcerated, and murdered in such massive numbers in Nazi death camps – can cause permanent neurological damage which can in turn be passed on genetically to subsequent generations.

In yet another talk, my friend and former colleague, Jean-Jacques Van Vlasselaer, had quoted the remark by Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel to the effect that the only thing worse than death is forgetting.  Loss of memory is a terrible thing, whether that memory be individual or collective, because it leads in turn to loss of identity, and thence to lives devoid of any significant meaning.  I still remember our former Governor-General, Michaëlle Jean, speaking eloquently on that topic on our campus.  And it occurs to me that herein lies one of the primary purposes of universities, yet one that is almost never mentioned by governments, or even by universities themselves: namely to serve as repositories of memory, the collective memory of the human species on our planet.  Yes, we have a duty to push back the frontiers of knowledge and understanding, and to prepare our students for their future lives, but we also have a duty to preserve the memory of the past: of the literature, the art, the music, and also of the language, the thoughts and the deeds of those who came before us.  Because if we don’t, who will?

In the famous words of George Santayana, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.  And when it comes to genocide, once is already too often.

Note to readers:  This is the last of these weekly musings for the current academic year, and I plan to take a short “sabbatical” over the coming summer.  See you in September!

The annual gathering is also an opportunity to hear some interesting and provocative speakers, and this year’s meeting included one of my favourite academic bloggers, Alex Usher.  His “One Thought To Start Your Day” lands in my E-mail “in” box every weekday morning very precisely at 7:00, and it is invariably a good read.  I don’t always agree with Alex, but most of the time I do, and I love the way he has the freedom to say things that I can’t.

As expected, his presentation was provocative, and the subsequent discussion might have continued all day had we not had to move on to other agenda items.  One of his remarks that will cause some consternation was that faculty in the humanities and social sciences need to teach more, and spend less time on research.  The argument is complex, and I don’t have space here to do it justice … but in essence he argues, as indeed do many of us, that the primary value to society of educating students in the “liberal arts” is to develop their critical skills, not to impart specific bits of knowledge which lead to a specific job.  And his point is that we don’t do this effectively by having large classes, nor by having such a large percentage of them taught by sessional instructors.  Given that the financial outlook indicates that the resources available to universities will never again exceed in real terms what they were in about 2009, the only way to do this is for each faculty member to devote more time to teaching.  Indeed, he made a plea for some serious re-thinking of the current system in which we teach small upper-level classes at the expense of our first-year students … and had he known about our First-Year seminars and ArtsOne “learning community” programs, I am sure that he would have approved.  In the ensuing discussion I was interested to learn from a decanal colleague in British Columbia that faculty members at the University of the Fraser Valley teach seven courses per year, but that classes have a maximum of 38 students.  An interesting concept!

Alex Usher’s main message was that circumstances are changing in ways that universities need to be thinking about – for example, declining demographics, and the inability of governments to increase funding, regardless of their political stripe – yet no one is having these necessary conversations on our campuses.  Instead we are all attempting to muddle along, burying our heads in the sand and pretending that nothing needs to change.  The conversation may be exceptionally difficult, but it does need to happen before we all rush, lemming-like, off the cliff.  But will it happen?  I can very confidently predict that it won’t, at least until such time as institutions begin to hit the wall and declare a state of “financial exigency”.

 I am reminded of the old joke about how many professors it takes to change a light bulb.  Change?

Over the last twelve months I have initiated a series of luncheon meetings with groups of FASS alumni in Toronto, intended to update them on what is happening on our campus and to explain the concept of the “Signature B.A.”; and it seemed like a good idea to combine some of these events with a personally guided tour of the Florence exhibition.  The Director of the AGO, Matthew Teitelbaum, is also a Carleton grad, and the plan quickly obtained his enthusiastic support.  I met with two such groups at the beginning of this month, making for a rather long and exhausting day, and there is one more to follow on April 29th.  It is always a pleasure to meet with gatherings of Carleton alumni – something that I have also now done in Montreal, Winnipeg, Victoria, and New York – because, like me, they harbour a very warm affection for this place.  There is always much reminiscing about particular occasions and events, or professors who showed a special interest and went out of their way to help.  But there is also a universal understanding that the “transferable skills” learned as an undergraduate – the skills in critical reading, in analysis and synthesis, and in writing and speaking – have served them exceptionally well in their subsequent careers.  Most have gone on to travel paths which they never could have envisaged as undergraduates. And I believe that this is the most important message that we can convey to our students today.  At this time they can have no accurate idea of what they will end up doing with their lives – and indeed I have heard it said that most of the jobs that will exist in 10 years time have not even been invented yet.  What they need from their education is not training for any one specific job, but the general ability to know how to tackle in an intelligent fashion whatever particular challenge happens to come their way; in other words, they need to acquire the basic skills for survival in an increasingly complex world.  And at the same time they need to discover their particular passions: what it is that they value, what it is that will make their lives worth living.  By no coincidence, it was precisely these same needs that led the citizens of Florence in the early 1300s to create a market for books in the genre that we would today define as “educational”.  And of course it is this period of the late Middle Ages that witnessed the establishment of universities in many parts of Europe, in response to the burgeoning need for educated citizens now extending well beyond the traditional professions of the church and the law.

By chance I had an opportunity this past week to take in a wonderful production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, part of a drama workshop course in the Dept. of English.  And consequently I was reminded of the lines “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.  They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.”  Our “task eternal” at a university is not to train students for a single role, but for that life of many parts.  And according to our graduates, we do so rather well.

I would love to find a way to connect our alumni with our graduating students – and also perhaps with certain columnists who write for national newspapers!  In the end it is not the specific knowledge acquired in the process of completing a Bachelor of Arts degree that is important in life, but rather the understanding of the process of acquiring knowledge, and of knowing how both to undertake research and then how to bring it to bear on any specific problem that requires resolution.  As is so often the case, it is the journey that is of primary importance, rather than the short-term destination. 

There was a time when I had some aspirations in that direction myself, and in my undergraduate years I also wrote poetry.  But academic writing soon displaced all other forms … and I can indeed remember the pride I felt when my first scholarly article appeared in print.  It still feels very good when a new book or journal arrives with my name on or in it, and I know I am not alone in that feeling.  I can see it in the faces of those colleagues who appear at my office door with a copy of their latest publication in hand, and I rejoice for them and with them.  In recent years I have once again turned my hand to a bit of non-academic writing, in the form of these weekly blogs.  Admittedly, some of these are better than others, with much depending on how much time is available, usually on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning.  And I do love it when someone stops me in the tunnels to say how much they enjoyed the latest offering.

In his editorial opening the second issue, Mr. Davis gets it absolutely right when he says that “Writing is alive”; but we part company when he goes on to lament that our literature courses often teach “dead writing” that is “dry, and dusty, and best left alone”.  The human species has produced a lot of exceptional writing over the years, in many genres, both fiction and non-fiction, and I have thoroughly relished exploring it.  Authors from the past have both taught me much and provided great pleasure.  My favourite literature courses in both English and French were those that surveyed a broad range of writing, and I still take delight in the work of many poets, from Joachim Du Bellay to Guillaume Apollinaire, from Robert Browning and T.S. Eliot to John Lennon and Paul McCartney … and faithful readers of these weekly musings will know that I often find meaning in their lines.  The authors may or may not be still with us, but their words are very much “alive”, still resonating after all these years.  Indeed, therein lies the greatest gift that writing bestows on us: a measure of immortality.

Little darling, it’s been a long cold lonely winter

Little darling, it feels like years since it’s been here

Here comes the sun

 Over the weekend it was with considerable pleasure that I watched the snow cover in full retreat from sidewalks and lawns in my Old Ottawa South neighbourhood as temperatures finally climbed north of zero for a prolonged spell.  It has been a long cold and not particularly easy winter, and walking across the campus you can feel the palpable sense of relief that it may finally be over.  Soon the earth will be blooming with new life, “breeding lilacs out of the dead land”.

It is of course no coincidence that many cultures find special significance in this time of year, often associated with the vernal equinox.  For Persians, March 21^st marks the New Year festival of Nowruz, an ancient celebration that pre-dates the arrival of Islam; and many medieval European cities also began their calendar years with the formal arrival of spring. Christians of course celebrate Easter – a festival focused entirely on the concepts of death and rebirth – on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the equinox, although few may know that the actual English word ‘Easter’ is derived from the name of the pagan Saxon goddess of the spring, Eostre.  And there is nothing specifically Christian about the cultural traditions of bunnies and eggs!  Many of our beliefs and rituals transcend specific religions, as was explored a century ago by writers such as James Frazer and Jessie Weston.  I can remember devouring the books of both those authors as a student.

But not all rituals are linked to religion.  For most faculty and students at Canadian universities, there is a close relationship between the onset of spring and the end of the academic year.  Depending on when exactly it falls, the long Easter weekend can often mark the end of classes – classes both given and taken – and a time to look ahead to what will come after: exams and then summer jobs for some, and an intense period of grading followed by prolonged and uninterrupted time for research for others.  As a young assistant professor it was always the moment when I began to plan for my annual trip to my “lab” in Rome.  A third of a century later, and now a jaded curmudgeon – sorry, I mean administrator – my thoughts are focused instead on the looming end of the fiscal year, and planning for the new one soon to commence.  But for almost everyone on campus there is something of a sense of closure, and of looking ahead to some sort of change of pace, if not a new beginning.  Another academic year is “in the bank”, so to speak.

At a personal level, I know that spring has come not only when I can trade in my boots for shoes for the walk to and from work, but also when it becomes more pleasant to walk than to take the bus … as I did with great pleasure this morning.

Here comes the sun, and I say

It’s all right

Annual general meetings tend to be dull affairs, with lots of legally-required “administrivia”, motions to accept auditors’ reports, and so on; but this one perked up significantly in the afternoon … just about the time that my mental energy normally begins to fade.  First we had one of my favorite bloggers, Alex Usher, addressing the issue of “metrics” in the assessment of research achievement in the humanities.  Those who subscribe to his (free and often provocative) “One Thought To Start Your Day” will know that the analysis of data related to post-secondary education constitutes his consuming passion, so it was something of a shock to hear him state that no accurate comparative assessments of humanities research currently exist, primarily because such research is globally “fractured”.  In other words, while subjects like mathematics or chemistry are arguably universal, in the sense that there is a “global conversation” (his phrase) in which faculty members from many countries participate, subjects like history are not … for the simple reason that few outside Canada will be reading research on Canadian history, and few in Canada are working on, say, Australian history.  These conversations are usually national, or at best regional, but rarely engage the entire planet … and the same is true for many fields or sub-fields of the humanities, with a few obvious exceptions such as Greek and Roman Studies.  But perhaps more interestingly, he then lobbed what he himself deemed a “grenade”.  Given that it is a case of comparing apples to oranges, why would we ever bother to invest time and energy in collecting such data for the humanities in the first place?  What possible difference does it make, other than for institutional prestige?  And given that no one has yet found a way to do so accurately, at what cost?  Are you listening, HEQCO?

And so the table was set for John Ralston Saul, president of PEN International and arguably one of Canada’s foremost “public intellectuals”, who spoke for more than an hour, without notes and without ever once losing my attention even for a millisecond … a feat that precious few have ever managed.  I have had the pleasure of hearing Saul speak on a number of occasions, both formal and informal, including a memorable dinner party during Congress 2009, and I admire him primarily for the manner in which he can weave an intellectual narrative as he talks.  He shifts effortlessly between fascinating historical nuggets – (Q: Why do we place our napkins to the left of our plates? A: Because Queen Victoria was left-handed) – and deep reflections on the unique nature of our country.  It is always a sort of “master class” on how to engage and capture an audience.  And of course it doesn’t hurt that I usually concur completely with what he says.

His address covered many topics, but the one which resonated the most for me was what he called the unique “intercultural” (as opposed to “multicultural”) nature of Canada.  We are a country that follows neither the ‘Westphalian nation state” model of Europe, in which identity depends primarily on blood, nor the “melting pot” model of our neighbour to the south.  Furthermore, we are not “pods living side by side”, which is how Europeans understand the concept of multiculturalism, but rather “citizens with overlapping and multiple identities”.  All Canadians share the plethora of rich cultural legacies to be found on our soil.

I remember having a similar discussion, albeit on a much more prosaic level, with Italian colleagues who were puzzled why Canadians would have any possible interest in studying early medieval Italy.  I then attempted to explain to them that this was our heritage also; but they never really seemed to understand how this could be possible.  However, it is certainly true.  By blood I may be English (my family name is Anglo-Norman), but my understanding of who I am, my sense of identity, has numerous other components, including Italian, French, Québécois, and Aboriginal … to name but four.  Like Tennyson’s Ulysses, I am part of all that I have met.  Or as Saul put it, “We are all Métis!”