Category Archives: University of Toronto

Remembrance Day

Leave a reply

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq3a_7242Lc

“Sgt. MacKenzie” by Joseph Kilna MacKenzie

Here’s Frye in “Hart House Rededicated,” delivered on the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of Hart House, University of Toronto, November 11th, 1969.  As often happens with Frye on public occasions, somehow everything comes together with a resonance that is immediately recognizable.  In this instance, the elements are the anniversary of Hart House, Remembrance Day, and our hard won, and too easily lost, sense of community.

Since 1919, a memorial service at the tower, along with an editorial in the Varsity attacking its hypocrisy and crypto-militarism, has been an annual event of campus life.  Certainly I would not myself participate in such a service if I thought that its purpose was to strengthen our wills to fight another war, instead of to fight against the coming of another war.  That being understood, I think there is a place for the memorial service, apart from the personal reason that many students of mine have their names inscribed on the tower.  It reminds us of something inescapable in the human situation.  Man is a creature of communities, and communities enrich themselves by what they include: the university enriches itself by breaking down the middle-class fences and reaching out to less privileged social areas; the city enriches itself by the variety of ethnical groups it has taken in.  But while communities enrich themselves by what they include, they define themselves by what they exclude.  The more intensely a community feels its identity as a community, the more intensely it feels its difference from what is across its boundary.  In a strong sense of community there is thus always an element that may become hostile and aggressive.

It is significant that our memorial service commemorates two wars, both fought against the same country.  In all wars, including all revolutions, the enemy becomes an imaginary abstraction of evil. Some German who never heard of us becomes a “Hun”; some demonstrator who is really protesting against his mother becomes a “Communist”; some policeman with a wife and a family to support becomes a “fascist pig.”  We know that we are lying when we do this sort of thing, but we say it is tactically necessary and go on doing it.  But because it is lying, it cannot create or accomplish anything, and so all wars, including all revolutions, take us back to square one of frustrated aggression in which they began.  (CW 7, 397)

Quote of the Day

Leave a reply

“Victoria’s distinctive tradition, then, has three aspects, religious, humanistic, and residential, and removing any of these would destroy, for both staff and students, the double identity of a distinguished college and a great university which they possess now. If all the colleges were weakened beyond effectiveness, the arts and science faculty would still be big and impressive, but no longer great. Such a disaster could occur, not through spiritual wickedness in high places, but simply through the heavy inert pressure of restricted budgets that in time will wear down any university into an academic processing factory. (“Installation Address as Chancellor,” CW 7, 521)

How Student Activism Saved the Centre for Comparative Literature

Leave a reply

Here’s the article from rabble.ca.

A sample:

Some key components of the students’ and faculty’s campaigns included petitions, letter-writing campaigns, protests and discussions at town hall meetings with the Dean. As time went on, the chances of the programs’ survival gradually increased.

“I think that one of the first key moments in our fight was when our story was reported on [the front page of The Globe and Mail], Stapleton says. “That was the first moment when it became clear people outside of the university cared about this situation — to see any issue on the front page really gives support to what we’re doing.”

Varsity: “Profs allege donor influence”

1 Reply

Further to my earlier post, here’s an article in Monday’s U of T Varsity, “Profs allege donor influence.”

The lede:

Two U of T professors say philanthropists are determining the university’s priorities, and not the faculty and students. Professors Paul Hamel and John Valleau believe there is a possibility that university benefactors could even shape academic work.

“We’re finding that philanthropy is driving the priorities of the university,” said Hamel. “They’re being set by administration, independent of what the faculty or the academy determines should be the priorities.”