Michael W. Higgins is Basilian Distinguished Fellow in Contemporary Catholic Thought at St. Michael’s College, and a distinguished professor emeritus and senior fellow at Massey College.
I started my life in the academy as an undergraduate in 1966, and entered the professoriate with the humbling title of special lecturer in 1977. But this past Labour Day weekend was the first in several decades in which I wasn’t toiling in the groves of academe – or at least in those groves that house senior administration. Retiring from those responsibilities provides me with the luxury of taking a macro rather than micro view of higher education in the country, and seeing how things are very different now.
The poet, essayist and scholar Eli Mandel once remarked in a graduate course on Browning and Tennyson that although both nostalgia and metaphor lie, the latter is an inventive construct that suggests imaginative connections where there are none; nostalgia, on the other hand, sifts the past of reality and restructures in a golden haze. Metaphor feeds intellectual curiosity; nostalgia deadens it with the weight of false memory.
It is easy then to look at university life as a withering scene. To many, it is no longer the sanctuary for freedom-mad 1960s adventurers, but a factory churning out workers for the diverse industries that drive our economy and our success. But such a perspective is reductionist, unhelpful and misleading.
Certainly, the postsecondary landscape has changed, and irreversibly so. The citizenry expects different things from universities than was once the case; tuition fees and residential costs have increased considerably; expectations around the deplorably dubbed “deliverables” cast universities in a different role from the one they had in the not-too-distant past; the notion of collegiality has undergone profound mutations; and what was once considered an elite entry for the privileged has since become a necessary portal for survival.
And that is sad. But what is not sad are the many instances of accommodation and creative adjustment that define the university world in Canada today. Where once the exclusive mode of delivery was magisterial, and where once the professor was the premier embodiment of knowledge to whom deference (even when cynical or sardonic) was expected – that has all been replaced, for the better, by the Socratic method of shared discovery.
The university is the quintessential generator of new and fresh thinking; it is the place where ideas collide and ferment, and where contestation of view is the critical engine that expands knowledge. In a time when truth is regularly upended, when facts are eviscerated, when the pulsations of unreason destabilize us, and when polarizing rhetoric becomes normative, the university is existentially indispensable.
This is not to suggest that the university is an Edenic enclave – the locale where the bien-pensants hang out, while the rest of society writhes in turmoil. The university itself is a fraught institution, where conflict is endemic and ferocious opposition is tolerated. And those are good things as they constitute the nature of the university as a laboratory of ideas, and not as a mausoleum of settled thinking.
Whereas some see the university in decline, viewing its dumbing-down as the inevitable result of deteriorating literacy as marketing and commodification become the driving force of university growth, I see these as serious challenges to a vibrant university life, rather than as defining ones. After all, the university’s plasticity is greater than its stolidity. And key to that plasticity are its faculties of humanities and social sciences, those arenas wherein new models of thinking are constructed and deconstructed, where tradition and revolution play off each other, and where intellectual daring is applauded rather than feared. That is why they need to flourish; they keep the university true to itself.
I have been a part of the university for nearly half a century now. I know firsthand that it is a shape-shifter, making alliances both political and economic, while struggling to balance continuity with substantive and evanescent trends.
Whatever new contortions and threats await it, the university will rise to them precisely because it has done so in the past. For me, the university environment retains something of those qualities that fuel young and old minds: intellectual curiosity for its own sake, the spirited testing of unexplored ideas, the fruitful playfulness that comes with doing something you love. They are not as much in evidence now as I think they should be, with the needless burdening of our students with high seriousness too early in their lives. The university can be as much an oasis as a cauldron; its genius lies in securing that balance.
What I relish are memories of savouring the words of Oscar Wilde, trying to figure out what Nicolas Malebranche was all about, visualizing the Venice of John Ruskin.
That may well be nostalgia on my part. But the old can also dream afresh and wish the same for the young.
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