Monthly Archives: October 2010

Advancement versus Academic Freedom


The University of Toronto has many claims to fame.  It has a stellar academic reputation, one of the best libraries in the country, some of Canada’s finest faculty, and Maclean’s consistently ranks it as one of the best universities, if not the best, in the country.  That being said, the University of Toronto has adopted dubious practices when it comes to advancement and academic freedom.

What are the questions that a university must ask itself when it receives donations?  Among them are, What is the purpose of the donation?  What are the conditions attached to the donation?  How important is academic freedom to the success of the University’s researchers, professors, and students in relation to the donation?

The University of Toronto’s Vice-President of Advancement, David Palmer, claims that all donor agreements are subject to the following clause:

The parties affirm their mutual commitment to the University’s Statement of Institutional Purpose which includes a commitment to foster an academic community in which the learning and scholarship of every member may flourish, with vigilant protection for the rights of freedom of speech, academic freedom and freedom of research.

In two recent donations to the University of Toronto, this clause never appeared, nor did any that remotely resembles such a clause.  Moreover, when I Google-searched this clause, I realised that it appears nowhere except in a letter to the editor of the Toronto Star on September 19, 2010, written by the Vice-President of Advancement, and subsequently published in the Varsity, a student run newspaper at the University of Toronto.  The reason for the letter in the Star is that an excerpt from The Trouble With Billionaires by Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks claims that the recent $35 million dollar agreement between Peter Munk and the University of Toronto “stipulates that the school will also house the Canadian International Council — a right-leaning think-tank that has been pushing to replace Canada’s earlier role as a leading UN peacekeeping nation with a more prominent role in U.S.-led war efforts.”  The University of Toronto, through its Vice-President of Advancement, has assured us that this is not the case and that no donor has influence over the academic freedom of researchers, students, or professors at the University of Toronto.

In his chapter “Academic Freedom or Commercial License?” (which appeared in The Corporate Campus, edited by James Turk), William Graham highlights a few agreements between the University of Toronto and its donors.  When, for exammple, Joseph Rotman donated $15 million to the University of Toronto, the agreement required “the unqualified support for and commitment to the principles and values underlying the vision by the members of the faculty of management as well as the central administration upon the continuing ongoing support demonstrated by members of the faculty” (23).  In other words, for the donation to continue, Rotman required that faculty adhere to “the vision.”  Indeed, as Graham notes, the acting provost at the time “stated with pride” that “given the magnitude and importance of the gift, the University is prepared to make a number of undertakings that in a number of ways involve new commitments or variances from previously approved allocations or from University policy” (24).

Rotman’s donation is not unique.  Graham writes: “Even more scandalous in many ways was the agreement between the University of Toronto and Mr. Peter Munk, together with his corporations, Horsham and Barrick Gold” (24). In this agreement, the university will establish a “business-academic relationship,” and that “In return, the University promised Munk’s project would ‘rank with the University’s highest priorities for the allocation of its other funding, including its own internal resources.’ No mention wass made of the need to protect academic freedom or any other basic University policy” (24).

Graham is right to note that “Since Munk, like Rotman, could withdraw funding at any time over the 10 years if dissatisfied with the progress of the Centre, he was in a position to exert enormous influence over the teaching and research activities of the Centre. What, for example, might happen to an untenured faculty member of the Centre who spoke out in ways perceived as contrary to the interests of Horsham or Barrick Gold Corporations?”

The question that Graham asks is, of course, an important one.  What happens when benefactors who donate money to a university disagrees with an untenured faculty member?  What happens when benefactors can pull their donations to the University when they are not satisfied with the direction or “vision” of the program?  In many regards, we already have answers to some of these questions. Virginia Ashby Sharpe in “Oversight, Disclosure, and Integrity in Science” writes:

We have also seen cases of institutional retaliation against researchers who have gone up against pharmaceutical manufacturers when their research indicated harmful effects.  One case involves the University of Toronto.  When Nancy Oliveri broke her confidentiality agreement and published unfavorable results regarding the drug deferiprone (used to treat the hereditary blood disease thalassemia), the university attempted to dismiss her.  The same institution, which received a $1.5-million gift from the Eli Lilly company, rescinded its job offer to David Healy when he was publicly critical of the Eli Lilly drug Prozac.

All of this raises a further question:  Would the University ever consider disbanding or disestablishing an entire program if the values and instruction of that program ran counter to the values or expectations of a benefactor?  These seem to be important questions that need to be asked these days, especially in light of an Academic Plan which calls for the closure of several language programs to form a “School of Languages and Literatures” (now in search of a benefactor) and the complete destruction of other programs, such as Comparative Literature, Diaspora and Transnational Studies, and, of course, the Centre for Ethics.

Frye in his “Commencement Address at Carlton University,” delivered on May 17th, 1957, observes:

As John Stuart Mill proved a century ago, the basis of all freedom is academic freedom of thought and discussion.  You have had that here, because you are responsible for carrying it into society.  I know the staff of Carlton fairly well, and I know that none of them would try to adjust you or integrate you with your society.  They have done all they could do to detach you from it, to wean you from the maternal bosom of Good Housekeeping and the Reader’s Digest, the pneumatic bliss of the North American way of life.  They have tried to teach you to compare your society’s ideas with Plato’s, its language with Shakespeare’s, its calculations with Newton’s, its love with the love of the saints.  Being dissatisfied with society is the price we pay for being free men and women.

That price we pay, of course, is something we choose for ourselves as scholars.  It is not something to be negotiated because scholars are not to be bought or sold.

Pamela Sidney: Reading “Last Letter”

Pamela Sidney last week in Melbourne, Australia read aloud Ted Hughes’s recently discovered poem about Sylvia Plath’s suicide.  She kindly sent us an email about the occasion, below:

I found the poem a dense one, complex when considering the relationships mentioned.

But soon sorted it out by referring to ’18 Rugby Street’ in particular, which was a great help.

I speak as one who has now read the poem in public – with the help of a male poet – Patrick Boyle – who read alternate pages 2 & 4.

Not having a lot of time to familiarise myself with the poem, I found it a hard read, in that it is emotionally dense.

In performing it I opted for a straightforward voice – keeping in mind Hughes and his down to earth manner.

I was surprised that all the poets in the room, some 40 plus, were unaware of the existence of the poem, and of course the time span of 30 years that it took to surface.

The audience clapped the reading warmly, but at the same time I could sense a silence, their minds still with the poem and its very stark ending.

I suspect many will want to get their own copy, for a first reading/ hearing it is almost impossible to take in the chaos and complexity of the situation as it was running through the mind of Ted Hughes – plus how he was processing his emotions and memories.

“Forensics of a Straw Man Pharmakos in Northrop Frye’s ‘Theory of Modes'”

That’s the title of an article by Rickard Goranowski published in The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management.

You can purchase it here.

The abstract:

Jacques Derrida in 1981, in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’ confronted the inveterate Northrop Frye over the 1971 Critical Path as a “pharmakos” or ‘rascal traducer’: Frye’s ‘straw man’ misprision of the Sidney-Peacock-Shelley controversy belittling Peacock and Shelley was obliquely identified by Derrida, in Pharmacy’s first paragraphs, prosecuting Frye’s undue influence on university publishing and tenure management.

Quote of the Day: “Nothing was undeniably out of the window”

We’re being spammed pretty heavily these days with solicitations like these two from Poland.  It’s like found poetry:

Allowable while!
Do You hunger on descry recent job? Do you after more monay? Find a contemporary, refurbish livelihood and exchange your world. It’s remarkably tranquilly with our grate site. Repress it!
P.S. Yahoo – the inviolate shooting apt wry be area! Google: nothing was undeniably out of the window…
Effect a confab with you.

And effect a confab with you too!

Hi every at one
I’ve recently set up
a marvelous search vehicle –
P.S. Yahoo – all when a established pleases be found! Google: nothing was categorically astray…
Bye to dick!

Thank you Google Translate for your remarkable linguistic prowess.  Or rather (from English to Yiddish to Hindi to Finnish to English): “Thanks to Google’s translation of their language skills are important.”

Jonathan Swift

On this date Jonathan Swift died (1667-1745).

Frye in “On Special Occasions”:

A profoundly Christian writer, Jonathan Swift, remarked that men have just enough religion to make them hate, but not enough to make them love one another.  To which we may add that those who have no religion at all don’t seem to hate any less on that account.  (CW 4, 324)

How Many Canadians Use American Health Care?

Every year my parents winter in Florida, and every year they are buttonholed by Americans who insist on telling them how bad Canadian health care is, and then get sniffy when assured that, no, no, it’s fine, the service is reliable and comprehensive and safe; no long waits, no preventable deaths caused by waiting.  Like universal health care everywhere else in the developed world, Canadian Medicare is vastly superior to the American system when it comes to access and cost of delivery (about half what it costs the Americans).  The Republicans are of course responsible for the canard that Canadian health care is all about nightmarish waiting lists, and that as a result desperate Canadian patients flood the U.S. border in search of relief (Republicans also insist on calling our system “socialized medicine,” which it is not).  Over the years they’ve successfully twisted the reality to fit their propagandized version of it for cynical, self-serving reasons.

But the quantifiable reality of the situation may startle even Canadians.  You can see it at a glance after the jump.

Continue reading

Moby Dick

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryIK9TLAoAs

The finale of the film adaptation of the novel.  Pardon the occasionally laughable special effects: it was 1956.

On this date in 1851 Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was first published.

Frye makes a fair number of references to the novel, but this one in Anatomy is particularly resonant because it relates the archetype to its entire mythical family and suggests what this might mean both to the reader and to the writer who engages it:

If we do not accept the archetypal or conventional element in the imagery that links one poem to another, it is impossible to get any systematic mental training out of the reading of literature alone.  But if we add to our desire to know literature a desire to know how we know it, we shall find that expanding images into conventional archetypes of literature is a process that takes place unconsciously in all our reading.  A symbol of the sea or heath cannot remain within Conrad or Hardy: it is bound to expand over many works into an archetypal symbol of literature as a whole.  Moby Dick cannot remain in Melville’s novel: he is absorbed into our imaginative experience of leviathans and dragons of the deep from the Old Testament onward.  And what is true for the reader is a fortiori true of the poet, who learns very quickly that there is no singing school for his soul except the study of the monuments of its own magnificent.  (CW 22, 93)

Frye in Chinese

Cross-posted in the Denham Library here.

Frye’s books continue to be translated into Chinese.  The most recent is a translation of The Secular Scripture (Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2010).  Trans. Xiang-Chun Meng.  The other Chinese translations are:

 

Anatomy of Criticism

Piping de Pouxi.  Trans. Chen Hui, Yuan Xianjun, and Wu Weiren.  Tianjin: Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House, 1998.

Piping de Jiepou.  Trans. Chen Hui, Yuan Xianjun, and Wu Weiren; revised by Wu Chizhe and annotated by Wu Chizhe and Robert D. Denham.  Tianjin: Hundred-Flower Literary Press, 2000.

The Educated Imagination, Creation and Recreation, and The Well‑Tempered Critic

Fulai Wenlun Sanzhong [Three of Frye’s Critical Monographs]: Xiangxiangli de Xiuyang, Chuangzhao yu Zai Chuangzhao, Wenlian de Pipingjai (Trans. Xu Kun et al., rev. with a preface and annotations by Wu Chizhe.  Hoh‑Hot: University of Inner Mongolia Press, 2003.

The Modern Century

Xian dai bai nian.  Trans. Sheng Ning.  Shenyang: Liaoning Educational Press; Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1998.

The Critical Path

P’i ping chih lu: Lo-ssu-lo pu Fu-lai chu.  Trans. Wang Fengzhen and Min-li Chin.  Beijing: Peking University Press, 1998.

The Great Code

Wei da de dai ma: Shengjing yu wen xue. Trans. Hao Zhengyi, Fan Zhenguo, and He Chengzhou.  Beijing: Peking University Press, 1998.

Words with Power

Shenlide Yuyan: Shengjin yu Wenxue Yanjiu xubian.  Trans. Wu Chizhe.  Preface by Ye Shuxian. Beijing: Social Sciences Documentation Publishing House, 2004.

Selected Essays

Nuosiluopu Fulai Wen lun xuan ji [Northrop Frye: Selected Essays].  Ed. Wu Chizhe.  Beijing: China Press of Social Sciences, 1997.

Contents: “The Responsibilities of the Critic” / “Criticism, Visible and Invisible” / “The Search for Acceptable Words” / “Literature as Therapy” / “The Archetypes of Literature” / “Forming Fours” / “Myth, Fiction, and Displacement” / “Design as a Creative Principle in the Arts” / “Expanding Eyes” / “Literature as a Critique of Pure Reason” / “The Koine of Myth: Myth as a Universally Intelligible Language” / “The Symbol as a Medium of Exchange” / “The Mythical Approach to Creation” / “Conclusion” to Literary History of  Canada” (1965), / “Criticism and Environment” / “The Cultural Development of Canada” / “The Stage Is All the World” / “Literature as Context: Milton’s Lycidas” / “Blake after Two Centuries” / “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism”