Northrop Frye entered Victoria College on probation in September 1929. He had achieved a measure of acclaim as New Brunswickʹs typing champion, but, as a grade 11 graduate of Aberdeen High School in Moncton, he was enrolled in the Pass Course.¹ A year later he was admitted to the Honour Course in Philosophy and English, from which he graduated with the highest standing in 1933.² In 1936 Frye completed his theological training in Emmanuel College and was ordained as a minister in The United Church of Canada. Three years later he secured a first in English Literature from Oxford University...

The chief credit for the fifty-ninth working of that annual miracle known as the Victoria College Bob rests this year on the diminutive shoulders of John Arnup, who wrote, directed, and staged the performance. The dialogue was well written and comprised a very comprehensive satire, though, as usual, the parts were too small to call for especial mention. But, again as usual, the dialogue and play itself was crowded into the background by the musical numbers. Stan St. John and his orchestra were in fine form, and their rendition of the St. Louis Blues suggested hitherto undreamed-of possibilities in 1933...

The second debate was held in Wymilwood on December 7. Subject, ʺThat at the present time a general disarmament would be the best move in the interests of world peace.ʺ A heavy subject, by reason of its breadth, with plenty of room for the sloppy optimism and foreshortened idealism so dear to the heart of Victoria College when it begins to reflect deeply on the ʺhigher things of life.ʺ

I do not see a particularly strong case for the negative in that wording—obviously nations fight with armaments, and keep peace perforce if they are disarmed. There are three possible...

ʺResolved, that this house deplores all restraint of free speech.ʺ Rather redundant: how can you restrain speech that is free? This obvious quibble was luckily ignored, but there were plenty of others, and no lack of complaints about the purely verbal nature of much of the argument. On the whole, however, the discussion impressed us as being a sketch of a good debate. There were indications of wit, indications of brilliance, indications of fluency, indications even of the general lines of logical attack. We really feel that most of the important factors bearing on the problem were discussed. There was,...

The periodic warping and twisting of life brought about by the May examinations has long been accepted both by faculty and students as a necessary evil, but the students at least have never succeeded in becoming thoroughly accustomed to it. The sheer magnitude of the injustice involved in asking the hopes of our civilization to stake their most valuable years on the fortunes of a few hours at the end of each is sufficiently appalling in itself to dismay the stoutest, and when this is backed up by the mob psychology of a small college centred in residences, in which...

When Art ran last year for the position of president of the Victoria College Union it was obvious enough to thecognoscentithat anyone in Victoria College attempting to oppose him would lose his deposit. The strength of the conviction that he wastheman for the job was so intense and widespread that it implies a deep affinity between Artʹs personality and the inward characteristics of hisalma mater. For Art is not a popular hero and he is not aposeur. Were he the former, he would be wildly applauded for his reassuring shallowness and vulgarity; were he...

It is probably obvious to the incoming year that the freshman is regarded as a redeemer expressly come to revitalize the college, and all the terrifying pictures formed by his high school imagination must surely vanish at the first touch of the reality. Juniors fondle him and encourage him to insubordination against the sophomore; seniors carefully shepherd his arrival and blanket him with an integument of unctuous platitudes. No announcement of an athletic team practice or the opening meeting of a society is complete without the tail line ʺFreshmen especially invited.ʺ As for the freshette, the very mention of her...

Well,Actais out at last, and most of the editorial life-blood has gone out with it. The inordinate delay is occasioned, first, by a hiatus in tradition—always a stunning blow to an orthodox Victorian. The magazine is being printed this year by the University of Toronto Press, not, as formerly, by Ryerson. Secondly, this is not an easy year to collect advertisements, and, prosaic as it sounds, we must have those. This is an explanation, not an apology—it is nobodyʹs fault in particular. There will be one more issue before Christmas, and an extra one next term....

When the author of this sketch was the room-mate of its subject, which was about four years ago, he nominated the latter as president of his year. As has frequently been the case, however, the said authorʹs extraordinary keenness of perception and discriminating taste was not shared by more than an enlightened minority of that year, whereupon he retired and vowed in silence that a day of reckoning would come in the senior year—the right time for it. It did, of course.

So Del is now the president of the senior year, and a victim of prophecy, or rather...

ʺThe students are less mature than they used to be,ʺ stated a well-known and popular professor recently. Now the average undergraduate, who sees students of bygone days in the dignified officialdom of their post-prime, or who views the venerable-looking faces peering out of fogs of nimbus clouds in Alumni Hall, is likely to accept that statement as something self-evident. The fallacy that the ʺold boyʺ always was old is an easy one to fall into. But he who has accessible oldActasgets a different critical bias.

Here, for instance, is the opening issue of a year in the closing...

The opening article in this issue is by Dr. Brown, principal of Victoria College, who thus makes his appearance through these columns for the first time since his inauguration. Dr. Brown, as every sentient undergraduate knows, has come to us from Yale, though he received his training here, and therefore is peculiarly qualified to write on this topic. The moral appears to be that the greater the population, the more adolescent the college. Hence if in Canada we are able, as our population increases, to keep our college registration evenly distributed, so much the better; if not—and it seems...

This is going to be a lecture, because this is an immense issue, a literary one, besides, and consequently represents the art as well as the thought of the college. After some consideration, the judges awarded the short-story prize to Miss OramʹsA Vacant Room. Miss Oram is now in her final year, and her story shows remarkable promise—a hideous but useful word. Mr. BeattieʹsThrough Threehad a decided edge in power and imagery, losing out a little, perhaps, in unity of design and balance. To Mr. Beattie we must extend our apologies for cutting out some excellent...

It is a well-known fact that in a public or high school class the centre of gravity lies in the densest areas. I mean by that simply the commonplace that a schoolteacher cannot proceed without assuring herself that the stupidest member of her audience has taken in what she has to say. There is probably not one of us who has not sat tense and strained, driving our nails through our palms and our teeth through our lips, while a public school teacher patiently went over an obvious point six times or so for the benefit of some borderline case...

During the recent elections in Canada and Ontario I heard a good deal about professors from politicians speaking over the radio. This interested me, as I am a professor myself, and I was still more interested to observe that the remarks made about them were all hostile and all came from Tories. I was told that the CCF party was politically immature because it was full of professors, otherwise described as crackpot theorists; clergymen and schoolteachers being occasionally bracketed with them. Their argument, if that is the word, seemed to be that we donʹt want educated people trying to run...

There has always been a broad distinction in educational theory between the ʺhumanities,ʺ the literatures and the arts, on the one hand, and the ʺsciencesʺ on the other. The distinction is real, though often badly expressed. It is, for instance, mere nonsense to say that science is ʺintellectualʺ and the humanities ʺemotionalʺ; no one can chop up the mind in that way. Nor can we say that science pursues truth and the humanities beauty, for poetry is true and mathematics is beautiful. The difference between them is really the difference in kinds of authority.

If we study, for instance, physics,...

I started my year off full of convictions of unworthiness. Just slinking off to Harvard didnʹt sound very glamorous compared to the kind of thing my friends saidtheywould do. ʺWhat do you want to go to the States for? Itʹs just the same as here. Now if you went to Rio....ʺ Then, writing back home, there was the feeling that I ought to be making shrewd, piercing insights into the American scene, analyzing the political situation and the trends in domestic and foreign policy. But I never know anything about that except what I read in the papers,...

The recent announcement by President Smith of the University of Toronto that remedial classes in English are now to be held in the university was given the sort of publicity that goes with a specific political manoeuvre. It was deliberately designed to point up the fact that the Ontario school system has landed itself in what may be called either a Slough of Despond or a schemozzle, depending on how much remedial reading one has had. Evidently the university, as the only still independent part of the educational system, is prepared to fight. Granted that all our educational reformers are...

It would be unrealistic as well as ungrateful not to count our blessings, and one blessing of living in Canada is that we can always discuss the question, ʺHave we a Canadian culture?ʺ If it is not clear to the reader why this is a blessing, we may point out that in a country with a strong national feeling and a relatively small population, what culture there is can get a certain amount of ready-made publicity. Many creative people in Canada, painters especially, get what is in proportion to their abilities an unusually high degree of recognition. The same conditions...

I suppose the most obvious reason for forming a society of Canadian English teachers is the need of keeping up with new techniques in literary criticism. The variety of these, and the speed with which they develop, make it extremely likely that a scholar, no matter how central his situation, may be for a long time unaware of new advances in fields relevant to his own, without the help of the kind of association that it is here proposed to establish. I think, as a useful analogy, of the English Institute, founded at the beginning of the war and still...

Thereʹs an advertisement that I see on the subway every morning coming to the college. It advertises a bakery; it depicts a maudlin urchin in the act of saying his prayers, and the caption reads, ʺNot by Bread Alone.ʺ Now it seems clear that when ʺNot by Bread Aloneʺ is the message of a bakery, it means something different from what it says. In the first place, it suggests that if bread isnʹt the whole of life, at least bread is a pretty good start. There may be other values in the world than those represented by bread, but still...

The installing of a young president is a natural time for a university to take stock of itself and speculate about its immediate future. It is quite possible, of course, that it has no future apart from the approaching extermination of the human race. But there is clearly no point in my going on to a third sentence unless I can assume at least a chance that this nightmare, like other nightmares, may come to overreach itself through the very intensity of its horror. If there is that chance, the immediate future seems inviting enough, and not only by contrast....

The editor of theStrandhas been good enough to suggest that I might use his column to address an open letter to students. This is primarily for the first year, but the other years can eavesdrop.

Now that youʹve got started, I trust, to work, there are a few pointers to keep in mind:

1. The university is not primarily a teaching institution. Your instructors will do all they can for you, and they like you: theyʹve had from five to fifty years of experience with students, and if they sound cynical occasionally, theyʹve actually acquired a good deal of...

I am deeply grateful for the good will, the friendliness, and the courtesy shown me tonight, and expect to remember them as long as I live. Apart from that, however, I am a little startled to find myself being installed: I should have thought that an honour reserved for more massive pieces of equipment, like presidents and refrigerators.

At Toronto the difference between the desk and the lectern has never been a dramatic one. There has always been a pleasant confusion between labour and management, and a total absence of managerial mystique. Our administrators do not dwell in dreamlike marble...

The Senior Dinner is one of the events in the college that have not changed much, since the time when they were held in the front hall of the college building, and went on until half-past one in the morning, because it was felt that everyone who was not actually suffering from lockjaw ought to be required to make a speech. And in thinking over the Senior Dinners I have attended, I am impressed by the amount of gloom and foreboding that has been mixed up with all the pleasantness. My own Senior Dinner was held in the middle of...

The present paper deals with the relation of the liberal arts to education as a whole and to the conditions of life in Canadian society. This sounds like very familiar territory, and it is; but I am still not sure that the objectives of undergraduate teaching in this country are generally understood. I do not believe in conflicts between science and the humanities, or between religion and science; but we do have conflict when different theories attempt to explain the same set of facts. The theory of education, like other theories, should be based on the whole of its practice....

InCulture and Anarchy, published in 1869, Matthew Arnold deals with the Liberal and Nonconformist proposal to ʺopen the Universities to everybody, and let there be no establishment of religion at all.ʺ In resisting the latter part of this proposal, he remarks ʺthat the Nonconformists have got provincialism and lost totality by the want of a religious establishment,ʺ and that their example, ʺAmerica without religious establishments,ʺ only shows us a whole nation given over to provincialism.¹

When Arnold wrote this, Egerton Ryerson had already won his fight to break up the Anglican monopoly on higher education in Upper Canada, and...

There is a good deal of discussion in the educational world today about ʺteaching machines.ʺ The name is semantically wrong, and has caused a good deal of unnecessary confusion. No machine can do any actual teaching: these machines are learning machines, or, more accurately, learning aids. A partially deafened person may wear a mechanical hearing aid, not because any machine can ever hear anything, not because the ear is obsolete in modern life, but because there is a hearing mechanism in the body, and if it is defective it is logical to construct another mechanism to supplement it. Teachers have...

Dr. Harold Taylor, the retired president of Sarah Lawrence College, attacks in this article ʺthe temptation of the educatorʺ ʺto organize a body of knowledge for the student, leaving the student with nothing to do.ʺ Students are compelled to read ʺtoo little of too many thingsʺ ʺfor purposes of taking examinationsʺ; ʺwe are asking not to know our students by what they say in writing or in speech, but to know whether or not they possess correct informationʺ; we ʺtake the young through an educational tour of the museums of literature, to inspire a dutiful and pious attitude to authors.ʺ...

Near the beginning of 1960, some trustees and officials of the Toronto Board of Education approached a number of professors and administrators in the University of Toronto, including the present writer, to discuss problems of common interest. A loosely organizedad hoccommittee began to meet during the summer, talking somewhat at random in the hope of defining a central question. There were several things that caused us some concern: the number of students not finishing high school; the number of able students not reaching university; the number of secondary school graduates unable to adjust to university methods of work;...

I am not, like my friend Mr. MacKinnon, an expert in the field with which my lecture is concerned. My own preparatory education I regarded, rightly or wrongly, as one of the milder forms of penal servitude, and it was fortunate for me that in my easygoing days I could enter school at grade 4 and the University of Toronto from grade 11. So I probably owe my present interest in education to the fact that I had so little of it. However, I have acquired the seniority which is the natural reward of survival, and I now find myself...

One should always say what goes without saying, so I shall say at once, speaking for my colleagues too, how sensible we are of the great honour that Queenʹs University has done us, and how delighted we are to be included in its distinguished list of graduates. Among my colleagues is a member of the sister college in Victoria University, Dr. Boyce of Emmanuel College,¹ and this double courtesy to Victoria reminds me in particular how close the traditions of Victoria and Queenʹs are, both in history and in standards and ideals. We even share the same song, as I...

The reward of surviving in universities is to become an educator, and the more technical and administrative problems of education have been forcing themselves on me in the last four years or so involuntarily. One thus finds oneself in the constant position of having to make pronouncements on liberal education and related topics. These are easy enough to make, being like sermons except that they have no text and no context. But it is curious that there are so many pronouncements of this kind, and yet that there should be relatively little attempt to define the function of the university...

When Jessie Macpherson became dean of women in 1934, there was no great fanfare. Nobody in fact knew much about her: she was a graduate of University College and had had some experience in girlsʹ work, but Victoria was more aware of the hole Miss Addison had left than of her replacement by this unobtrusive newcomer. But it was not very long before Victoria began to understand something of the dimensions of what it had acquired. In a few years its dean of women took an M.A. in philosophy and had joined the Ethics Department as a lecturer. A few...

I am of course most grateful to the University of British Columbia for the great honour it has done me, though at the moment I feel less gratitude than simple pleasure—pleasure at being admitted to a community where I have so many close and old friends. My only regret is that Miss Agnew, whom it was intended to honour at the same time, was prevented by ill health from taking her place on the platform with me. I have just come from similar ceremonies at my own university, and no matter how many of them I see, I am...

Victoria was never planned from a blueprint. It grew, like Topsy, and it holds together by vitality, not by logic.

It started out as a small liberal arts college in Cobourg. The advantage of a small college is that everybody feels as though they belonged to it, and the process of education is personal, as education always should be. The disadvantage of a small college is that itʹs not a great university.

Victoria is now part of a great university. Its problem now, with 1,700 students and going up, is how to remain a small arts college which will be...

This is the second year that you have come together to express your interest in and support for the Ontario Curriculum Institute. The institute is committed to a good deal of long-term and unspectacular work, without exciting headlines or astonishing discoveries to report very often. Your interest is a tribute to the importance of the institute; it is also a considerable, if unconscious, tribute to yourselves. If you had been people of limited imaginations and illiberal views, you would have said: ʺSurely education has enough of a genius now for making unnecessary surveys and writing up unreadable reports. Why set...

I start with the obvious starting point: the gap between teaching and scholarship. For the most part, the conceptions of the arts and sciences which are presented to children in school are not those that contemporary scholars regard as being in fact the elementary principles of those subjects as now conceived. I think it was the mathematicians who first realized that the elementary mathematics taught in schools reflected conceptions of the subject that were centuries out of date. They have begun to do something about this, and to try to develop a curriculum for mathematics which will present, in a...

Like the other contributors to this book, I knew Stefan, and will always remember him because I knew him. I knew him first as an undergraduate, when he was active in so many of the student doings around Victoria College. He was particularly interested in the debating society, a significant interest in itself. Debating was the main nonathletic student activity in most universities down to the early years of the century: then it declined sharply to a minor activity, as something managerial, something with presidents and secretary-treasurers, took over the structure of student life. This change had occurred at Victoria...

On an occasion like this there are always two things to be said which it is both a duty and pleasure to say. One is to express, on behalf of my colleagues as well as myself, our sense of privilege at becoming honorary graduates of this university, and our deep obligation to your Senate for the distinction it has conferred on us. I feel a close sympathy with a man I met in England who was moving out to a job at Port Credit, which is a dozen miles southwest of Toronto. He was particularly pleased because he had heard...

1. What influence have the Greek and Latin classics had upon your creative and/or critical work? Has that influence been good or bad, extensive or insignificant? Has it grown or declined in the course of your career?

The day after I wrote my last examination I went and got some Loeb Library texts and started reading at them, with the feeling that I had ended the compulsory time-waste period and was at last able to educate myself properly. The influence of the Classics has grown steadily since that time, and if my work is any good, the influence has been good....

Charles Bruce Sissons, B.A., LL.D., F.R.S.C., professor emeritus of Ancient History in Victoria College, University of Toronto, died suddenly on May 27, 1965.

He was born at Crown Hill, Ontario, on September 4, 1879, was educated there and at Barrie, and entered the University of Toronto, registering in Victoria College, in the class of 1901, where he was graduated with the Gold Medal in Classics. A brief career in public and high school teaching followed, and he was principal of Revelstoke High School from 1904 to 1908. He joined the Classics staff at Victoria College in 1909 as lecturer in...

In every graduate school some subjects are better covered than others, and sometimes important subjects are underdeveloped or not dealt with at all. This committee has already made reference (in chapter 1) to certain gaps in graduate offerings at the University of Toronto. The submissions to the committee have included proposals for new Masterʹs programmes, one in nursing and one in hygiene or public health. Other possibilities occur; for example, dramatic studies is not offered as a degree programme anywhere in Canada. For the most part it is beyond the competence of this committee to make recommendations about gaps or...

There are two kinds of mythology that education has to deal with. One is cultural mythology, or literature proper. This presents the human situation, not as it appears, as a dissolving flux, but as it really is, in its permanent forms. To reach this kind of reality its rhythms have to be more concentrated, its imagery bolder, and its conventions at once more stylized and more varied, than anything we can use for ordinary experience. But society also produces a social mythology, the purpose of which is to persuade its citizens to be docile and obedient, and accept certain values...

As I understand it, I am being asked to discuss the question, What do the humanities provide for human culture that the sciences do not provide? My own field is literature, and literature seems to belong to two groups: the creative arts, including music and painting, and the verbal disciplines, including history and philosophy. Both may be regarded as humanities, but we have to distinguish them even when we associate them. The question itself is, I suppose, legitimate enough: it is, I take it, simply a matter of trying to indicate the different functions of different things. It is difficult,...

The year opened with the admission of approximately 800 to the first year, bringing the undergraduate total to nearly 2,400. From the outside this may look as though more and more money were being poured into Victoriaʹs coffers, with more and more students paying fees to the college. The actual picture, as most of our alumni know, is exactly the reverse of this. Student fees are a small percentage of the income a college needs to meet its essential expenditures: the Bladen Report puts it at 27 per cent.¹ More students mean great increases in appointments to the staff, as...

The question assigned is, ʺWhat Knowledge Is Most Worth Having?ʺ but I want to quarrel with assumptions in that question. In the first place, the knowledge of most worth, whatever it may be, is not something one has: it is something one is, and the correct response to such a question, if a student were to ask it, would be another question—ʺWith what body of knowledge do you wish to identify yourself?ʺ In the second place, the phrase ʺmost worthʺ is apt to introduce comparative value judgments into areas where they are irrelevant. Whenever students ask me if I...

This is an exhilarating and buoyant time to be coming to university, which for us is a pleasant change from years of war, depression, McCarthyism and other hysterias, and a feeling that the university was fighting a hostile world. Now that society wants the university, coming to college is participating in history, and what with automation and the increase of leisure, you may well be among the shock troops of a cultural revolution.

The distance between pupil and teacher diminishes as the former gets older: by the end of high school the teacher should be a fellow student. Here you...

In the eighteenth century there was some confidence that, in Samuel Johnsonʹs words, no new discoveries were to be made in the field of morality.¹ But new discoveries continued to be made elsewhere, most remarkably in science, and these have had their effect on our conceptions of morality as well. The development of science emphasized the value of the ʺscientific method,ʺ but most expositions of that method turn out to be not so much methodologies as statements of a moral attitude. To achieve anything in the sciences, one needs the virtue of detachment or objectivity. One starts out with a...

The principal of Victoria College will hold that position only until the end of the calendar year of 1966. At present he is also acting president, during the six monthsʹ leave that President Moore was granted by the Board of Regents last spring, the first leave he has had since becoming president in 1950. I shall (now that I have announced my resignation I can slide into the first person) continue as acting president until April, but on January 1 I shall be succeeded in the principalship by Professor J.E. Hodgetts.

Professor Hodgetts is a graduate of Victoria College, and,...

The title of this lecture is not mine, and I have the same reservations about the assumptions in that title, and the same sense of the ambiguity of words like ʺsuccess,ʺ that Rabbi Rosenberg has already expressed so eloquently. I think, in the first place, it would be nonsense to speak of a man as a success. For one thing it would be bad grammar. You can only succeed in extremely limited and specific things. If you are shooting on a rifle range and aim at a bullʹs-eye and hit it, you succeed, but that is the point at which...

Every university has a tendency to develop its departments by subdividing like the amoeba. The scholar, who is naturally a specialist, tends to develop out of his subject a speciality that separates him even from his own colleagues. The farther he advances along his path, the more he is inclined to isolate himself. As this natural tendency of scholarship does not lead to any great progressive enlightenment of the students, subjects and departments occasionally need to be shaken up and regrouped in new ways.

The colloquium is one treatment sometimes applied when symptoms of cultural disintegration reach a depressing stage,...

Inadequacy of phrases like ʺdedication to the pursuit of truth.ʺ Truth often means only truth of correspondence: i.e., the relation of the structure of words A to the body of phenomena B, as perceived by the student C.

This criterion of truth is also the scientific one, which attempts to escape from controversy, in the sense that it appeals to incontrovertible evidence. At the same time, all truth of correspondence, including scientific truth, is produced by a society, and the extent to which it is not Reason but rationalization of certain social attitudes may still be discussable.

Certain other subjects...

My memories of Saskatchewan go back a long way, and are not confined to the university. It was a very important part of my education when the United Church assigned me to a mission field in this province, where I rode around to three charges on top of a horse named Katy, who was slightly older than I was, and whose trot made my progress over the field resemble the emotional graph of a manic-depressive. I think most Canadians realize that Saskatchewan is not a province like other provinces. It has been, at least since the Regina manifesto of the...

I am deeply grateful to Franklin and Marshall College for the great honour it has done me. I am also very pleased to be in a position to extend congratulations and good wishes to the graduating class of Franklin and Marshall College. It is true, of course, that that position is not so easy a one to be in, in 1968. As a literary critic, I am much concerned with symbols and with conventions, and a graduation ceremony like this one is both symbolic and conventional. We spend a lot of time playing games, where certain rules are set up...

I think the present wave of student unrest is the result ultimately of the public reaction to the 1957 Sputnik. Before that, everybody in university teaching complained about student apathy. A new sense of the social importance of education grew up, and university students, not being fools, drew an obvious inference from it. Clearly, they were fully participating in society by being students. Why, then, were they being treated like children, and shut out of all decision-making, both inside and outside the universities? We had unconsciously been making a proletariat, in the strictest Marxist sense of a group denied the...

I will be talking about the university because the university is what I know, and I shall leave it to your many years of professional experience to translate what I say into the context of your immediate professional concern. I think that the difference in contexts gets less all the time, and that in particular at the present moment we are turning a corner in therapprochementbetween the different groups of people concerned with the educational process.

I should like to start with a fairly concrete situation, and one which is being exploitedad nauseamin the news: that...

The humanities used to be regarded by administrators with a good deal of favour as low-budget departments. It was not long ago that when a dean of humanities presented his needs to his president, he would be met with a glazed eye and a reference to Mark Hopkins and his log.¹ Of course, there are aspects of the humanities which are extremely expensive, one obvious example being archaeology, on which some types of humanist scholarship are heavily dependent. But, for the most part, the expenses of supporting research in the humanities consist of a paradoxical development: first, building up the...

I begin, as I should, with congratulations and best wishes to the principal-elect of Queenʹs University. I do not know whether Queenʹs and Toronto will ever come to be called or thought of as different branches of a University of Ontario. But I do know that the well-being of Toronto is heavily dependent on the well-being of the university in Ontario whose traditions it has shared for the longest time and through the greatest number of vicissitudes. It is now ten years since I was privileged to speak at a similar occasion, the inaugurating of President Bissell of Toronto. During...

The first half of the twentieth century saw two world wars, each of which was started by a reactionary military autocracy operating mainly in Germany and ended in a major Communist revolution, first in Russia, then in China. The second half of the century is seeing the beginning of a new revolutionary development that seems to have more in common with anarchism than with Communism. The anarchist nature of the ʺNew Leftʺ is often recognized, but usually without much sense of the traditions or context of anarchism.

In my own student days, during the Depression of the thirties, anarchism was...

Thank you for your letter. You ask me for a dictionary definition of the university as I should like to see it, in other words of an ideal university, and what I am personally doing to bring about that ideal. You begin by saying, quite rightly, that people have different assumptions in mind when they speak of the university. Your assumptions appear to be (a) that one must have in oneʹs mind a definable ideal which could be realized in the future (b) that if one is honest and knows why he is here, one must be doing something definite...

For those who can remember Victoria through the whole of Jessie Macphersonʹs career here, it is almost bewildering to think back on the importance of her place in it. Thirty years ago Victoria was a small college, leaning heavily on its church and alumni connections, a somewhat sheltered community within what was still a provincial town. Today it is a large college in a highly contemporary university, taking a full and equal role in that universityʹs teaching, scholarship, and research. It had to make this change while still maintaining its ethos, its identity, and the continuity of its traditions. There...

May I say first how greatly honoured I feel at being made a graduate of Western, and I know that in saying this I am speaking for Colonel Weldon as well. Western is a university where I have so many close personal ties, and the memory of so many pleasant visits, that the university itself has become an old and familiar friend. I am also honoured by the degree in particular, because in conferring it the university is recognizing that a life devoted to scholarship and teaching represents its own commitment to society. Neither Western nor myself would want to...

I know that I speak for my colleagues as well as for myself when I say what an honour it is to have this association with York University. I have seen York growing from a tiny seedling on the Toronto campus into a great university, in one of the most dramatic and historically significant developments in Canadian education. It opened for business, as I remember, in the building at 84 Queenʹs Park, which when I was a student was a Victoria womenʹs residence. Like other womenʹs residences, it had its dark corners and its passion pits, along with a few...

I should like to offer my sincerest congratulations and best wishes to Dartmouth College on the occasion of its bicentennial celebration. Merely to have survived intact for two centuries, in a world like this, would be an impressive feat in itself. But to come out at the end of the second century with facilities and a reputation among the highest in the country is an achievement of a quite different dimension.

There are two things for which I am particularly grateful to Dartmouth College. One, symbolized by its refusal to embark on extensive graduate work when it could easily do...

My own memories of Hart House cover forty of its fifty years. I first entered it with the freshman class of Victoria in 1929, and recognized it at once as a place where I ought to be. For Hart House represented the university as a society; it dramatized the kind of life that the university encourages one to live: a life in which imagination and intelligence have a central and continuous function. There was never any question about student representation at Hart House: the committees from the beginning had consisted almost entirely of students. There was never any question of...

I am glad you are doing something about Horace, who in spite of the interest in him seems a somewhat neglected poet. When I was seventeen I was compelled to slog my way through the Odes and ever since I have realized that education has a great deal to do with compulsion and doing things that at the time one thinks one doesnʹt want to do. Horace has always seemed to me to represent the authority of the humanist tradition, the incorporating of all its values into a life style. His chief virtue is the virtue of urbanity, which means...

I am deeply grateful for the honour that the Senate of this university has done me, and I am proud and delighted to become one of your honorary graduates. It is also a genuine privilege to address this convocation. At the same time the role of a convocation speaker in these days is hard to define. A university convocation is a ritual, and a ritual is among other things an expression of concern, concern for the community, for oneʹs soul, or for certain emphases and values in society. The church, politics, business, all have rituals that we are well accustomed...

In a recent interview connected with this essay I was asked why I wanted to present a definition of the university to an audience that might not be profoundly interested in the subject. I suggested that there were two reasons. First, the superstitions and the pseudo-concepts of educational methodology have not made much impact on the university, at least so far, and consequently the university can still serve as a model of educational aims. The second and more important reason, I said, is that, being a voluntary enterprise, at least technically, the university does not have the penal quality which...

[Some time ago, I was browsing through the Senate Committeeʹs report on mass media¹ and came across the familiar question of why it is that newspapers report only the bad news. The important things such as the Quiet Revolution in Quebec² are either not reported at all or misreported and only crisis and disaster seem to make headlines. Now that is a familiar question. Itʹs even a tedious question, but it does raise a very much more fundamental question, which is, what is it that is really happening? What the news media cannot handle is mostly continuity and routine. As...

In every subject that can be taught there are certain rudiments to be learned first, and whatever is learned afterward has to have some kind of connection with those rudiments. For example, if we are teaching music, we can begin with the octave, the twelve semitones of the octave that make up the chromatic scale, the relation of the major and minor modes to that scale, and the way in which such musical elements are presented in notation. Knowing these rudiments will not enable us to compose like Beethoven, but it is a start in putting ourselves in command of...

In attempting to read the Draft Report of the Wright Commission, I found myself baffled so often by the prose of its Aims and Objectives section that I finally started reading it at the other end. There I discovered, on the last page, that for teaching in universities, one hour of contact with students would require two hours of preparation, hence a teaching schedule of thirteen hours a week would give one a thirty-nine-hour week. As this two hours of preparation is evidently intended to include marking and interviews as well, that leaves about one hour of preparation for each...

I should perhaps comment on J.E. Ortonʹs letter (March 25) about my views on the Wright Commission Report, because I should not have implied that I had not carefully read the entire report, and if I am misunderstood on this point it is my own fault.

Again, when I spoke of being baffled by the prose of its aims and objectives, I was not taking a narrow view of its style, but confused by what seemed to me very material inconsistencies in the argument, especially about the matter of ʺaccessibility.ʺ

The reason why I focused on the final page, and...

First of all, I want to thank the Senate of the University of Waterloo and express my gratitude and appreciation to them for the honour that has been done me. Next, I want to congratulate the graduating students in front of me on having completed their course. It is customary to say these things, but I am saying them also because I want to say them. To complete a university course is not just an intellectual feat, but a moral one as well. Ever since I began teaching I have been impressed by the degree of courage and self-control that...

Some time ago when I was in Oxford, I thought that a place as old as this ought to have some particular kind ofgenius loci, that there should be something more or less in the key of Oxford which would indicate the quality of work that had been produced there. I soon realized that Oxford people are extremely proud of their record of eccentric bachelors, and that when one examines the great imaginative productions of Oxford, such works asThe Anatomy of MelancholyandAlice in Wonderland, one sees exactly this kind of thing, that is, a hyperlogical fantasy...

This book is an attempt to explain what the real place of literature is in primary education. Its place is to provide the verbal element in the training of the imagination. The imagination is not a self-indulgent, ornamental, or escapist faculty: it is the constructive power of the mind. Hence one should teach reading neither efficiently nor passively: reading has to be a continuously active and leisurely growth, as all genuine growth is. Because it is active, the teaching of writing is inseparably a part of the teaching of reading, and the aim of teaching a child to write poetry...

The problems dealt with in this special joint ADE/ADFLBulletinare built into our society, our educational system, and our universities. All are difficult, because humanists are too small a group for ʺaffirmative actionʺ to reach, because many educators and administrators do not understand the humanities, and because academics are better at continuing than at reforming. American society always seems just on the point of rejecting the humanities, this being partly an inheritance from its revolutionary and Utopian traditions. Revolutions break the continuity with the past, and Utopian visions segregate from the rest of the world. Language is inherently the...

Naturally I am very pleased to bring the greetings of the teaching staff to Gordon Keyes on this occasion. The principal of Victoria College is the academic head of the college, and he is the primary, originally the only, representative of the teaching staff on the Board of Regents, so he has a particular relationship to them. Principals of Victoria now have the additional responsibility of having to fight to retain a coherent departmental teaching programme in the college. A college which has no such teaching programme is not a college, but merely a residence or a place for available...

The presidency of the MLA is a short-term office, perhaps designed to represent the usual academic attitude to official positions. As president, I have had the honour of writing begging letters to some of you, but the title of PMLA, which I might assume on the analogy of the Royal Academy, is otherwise engaged, and chairing half a dozen meetings does not, even in these instant-administration days, leave much of an odour of charisma behind. I understand that in the recent election campaign President Fordʹs advisers tried to take advantage of the fact that the American system does not distinguish...

In my nearly half a century of association with Victoria College and the university, I think two memories stand out, both connected with the war, and both connected also with two very great men in the English department at Victoria who were my teachers, Ned Pratt and John Robins.

Some time in 1941 or 1942, I was present in Earle Birneyʹs apartment on Hazelton Avenue, along with Claude Bissell, Ernest Sirluck, A.J.M. Smith, and Ned Pratt. It was on that occasion that I first heardThe Truant. This is the poem of Prattʹs which I have always regarded as the...

I want to consider the question of authority in education more particularly in connection with my own subject, which is the humanities. In the sciences, which deal primarily with manʹs relation to nature, the question of authority is more or less taken care of by such things as repeatable experiment and the possibility of prediction. If an astronomer can predict an eclipse to within a second, the question of authority is inevitably bound up with his method, and there is no use arguing about the validity of observations which lead to a prediction as impressive as that. But the humanities...

I am deeply grateful to the Selection Committee for the honour they have done me, and to my hosts of the Royal Bank for their hospitality to as many of my friends as they could afford to invite. But I have also been asked to make an address, and I find that extremely difficult: perhaps the most difficult assignment of the kind I have ever had. For every address I have so far made, there has always been an occasion, some reason for the speech which prescribes the general subject and approach. But those who are here are here because...

A law in the Holiness Code of Leviticus prescribes that a trumpet should be blown on the Day of Atonement after the passing of forty-nine years, or seven sabbaths of years, and that the following year, the fiftieth, should be a jubilee year of rejoicing. Today was the Day of Atonement; this year is Emmanuel Collegeʹs fifty-year jubilee, and the chancellor you have just installed has been associated with Victoria for forty-nine years, or seven sabbaths of years. So this might well be an occasion for nostalgic recall, with the emphasis on superficial change. When I came to college, dancing...

A book on popular psychology of some years ago was calledWhat Do You Say After You Say Hello?¹ and your editor has put me in the rather difficult position of trying to answer the question. You are now a member of two independent universities, Toronto and Victoria. Victoria College is an arts college in both universities. If you survive until graduation, your degree will be a Toronto degree, but your academic home will be Victoria.

No other university, to my knowledge, has a set-up like this one: it grew up in response to special historical conditions in Ontario, a...

It is a great pleasure to be here and to inaugurate this series of lectures in honour of a distinguished educator. I was in some doubt in my mind as to just what path to take: true, I rather rashly joined a committee on childrenʹs literature, but I have not yet been able to attend a meeting of it, so I feel that I have not been properly instructed in the subject. On the other hand, I did not begin to believe in my own critical theories until I began to see ways of applying them to elementary education. In...

If I speak of myself to begin with, it is to make clear, so far as I can, the personal origin of my attitudes to the study and teaching of literature. They are attitudes that some of you may consider only the prejudices of my generation, as they may well be. I started teaching at Victoria when it was a small college, and recruits to the teaching staff were selected on what would now be the heretical basis of personal knowledge. My own chairman, Pelham Edgar, had previously appointed to the English staff a demonstrator in psychology in his late...

It is a privilege to bring greetings from the Learned Societies of Canada, and even more of a personal pleasure to extend them to a very old friend and former student, whose career I have followed with the greatest interest and admiration. Dr. Lee began a distinguished academic record as a first-class student in at least two major disciplines, English and religion, and continued as a teacher and scholar, with his main field of interest in Old English. Forty years ago a teacher of mine remarked that Old English was no field for an enterprising scholar any more, because all...

I suppose a certain amount of reminiscence is appropriate to this occasion, but I shall try not to overdo it. If one has remained for a long time in the same place, one gets some curious kinds of bifocal vision. It is disconcerting, or was at first, to find that the student in front of you is the grandchild of one of your classmates. There is also a confusing foldover in time, because at my age the classmate of the past is more vivid in the memory than the student of the present. I have kept going by putting together...

This year, 1984, seems to be the only year that has had a book written about it before it appeared, and discussions of Orwellʹs 1984 have become one of the most hackneyed themes in current journalism even before we are out of the January of that year. Nevertheless, I insist on beginning with one more reference to it, and for two reasons. In the first place, most of the discussions of the book I have read have failed to grasp its central thesis. Second, that thesis coincides with my own conviction as a student and teacher of English, which I...

I assume that in this programme my role is to try to speak for the part of the academic spectrum usually called the humanities, which has the study of languages and literatures at its centre. The title of my paper adapts a phrase from the philosopher Heidegger, who remarks that language is the dwelling-house of being.¹ We may notice two things about this phrase. First, ʺdwelling-houseʺ is a metaphor, and implies that even philosophers canʹt get along without the metaphorical picture-writing thatʹs the backbone of poetry. Second, ʺbeingʺ for Heidegger is the profoundest subject that man can think about, because,...

There are disadvantages in staying at the same place all oneʹs life, even though Iʹve tried to minimize them by occasional visits elsewhere. But there are advantages too, including a clearer sense of the continuity that a university can give, especially one like Victoria, which has its ethos on such a broad liberal base. That ethos remained placid, even in its early sectarian days, when Pratt included a most un-Methodist catalogue of whiskies in a poem [The Witchesʹ Brew]; it kept the hysteria of the late sixties within a solid boundary of common sense; it survived two world wars and...

It is with great regret that we are, in effect, saying goodbye to Goldwin French as president. But one has to remember his remarkable ability to make friends of everyone he works with, and no real friend would want him to carry on indefinitely.

I suppose the first and most striking impression one has of Goldwin French is the amount of work he gets through and the absence of fuss about getting through it. Attending Board or Senate meetings with him, one soon finds that there is no aspect among several hundred in Victorian life that he is not fully...

The history of English language and literature is a dramatic success story. After the Norman Conquest English became as submerged as the Celtic languages are now; at the Council of Constance in the fifteenth century it was classed as a minor dialect of German. Even on the threshold of the Elizabethan age Sir Philip Sidney complained that it was part of the curse of the tower of Babel that one should be sent to school to learn his mother tongue;¹ and in the age of Shakespeare and Milton no cultivated Continental would know anything about writers from the British Isles...

This book is a collection of essays and addresses on the general topic of education, written or delivered over a period of about thirty years. I have written similar essays that have been reprinted elsewhere, but I think this collection expresses as clearly as anything else I have written my own convictions on the subject, as transmitted to Canadian audiences (practically all of the essays have a Canadian setting). There is bound to be some repetition in a book of essays that were originally oral addresses: a listening audience, who hears only what is said to it, does not mind...

These essays speak very clearly for themselves, and need only the minimum of comment. They were delivered in Victoria University in the fall of 1986 in connection with Victoriaʹs sesquicentennial celebrations, and are therefore retrospective and historical. Victoriaʹs date of origin is that of the granting of the original charter to Upper Canada Academy in 1836, although the infant was not christened Victoria until 1841. The lectures follow in general the model of the centennial lectures of 1936, which are still very fresh and readable, though it is interesting to see what issues have moved into the front line since...

This remarkable collection of essays is concerned with uniting two areas of humanistic education. One is the theory of criticism, which has proliferated into a number of schools and sects during the last two or three decades. The other is the theory of reading, and of the relation of the readerʹs personal involvement in what he reads to the information he acquires. The two themes together reflect the growing shift from the writer to the reader as the ʺheroʺ or chief character in the humanist drama.

We start with what is called the ʺtransmissionʺ theory of teaching, where we have...

TheGlobe and Mailcarried a story of the appointment of Geraldine Kenney-Wallace as president of McMaster University. Congratulations are in order to president-elect Kenney-Wallace and McMaster University for an excellent appointment. Unfortunately, the news item added that she was the first woman president of a university in Ontario. Dr. Eva Kushner has been president of Victoria University in the University of Toronto for two years.

I am, as the saying goes, shocked and appalled by theGlobe and Mailʹs grotesque ignorance of the federated structure of the University of Toronto. I only wish I could also say that I...