The University and the Impending Crisis: Difference between revisions

THE UNIVERSITY

AND THE

IMPENDING CRISIS

by

ROY DANIELLS
Head, Department of English
University of British Columbia

FOUNDERS' DAY ADDRESS
Thursday, March 2nd, 1961

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK
Fredericton, N.B

This is one in a series of distinguished addresses given at the University of New Brunswick and published by the University

FOUNDERS' DAY
AT U.N.B.
1961

May I express at the outset my appreciation of the honour you do me, and my University, in permitting me to address you on this occasion. It is a very great pleasure to be with you, and especially to see some old friends, now pillars of state. This institution of Founders' Day has the effect of recalling each year the whole history of your University. A hundred and seventy-five years have passed since the lamp of learning was lighted here and its light has shone more widely with each succeeding generation. Your academic story is a long one, compared with the time span of education west of the Rockies and it is replete with events of historic and cultural interest. It is only on this side of Canada that such a ceremony as the rendering Quit Rent to the Crown reminds us that the British monarchy played a direct role in the founding of Canadian education. One brought up in the far West grasps with some difficulty the fact that the province of New Brunswick grasps with some difficulty the fact that the province of New Brunswick enjoyed for over eighty years an independent existence. He realizes only gradually the implications of the history of the Loyalists, of the men and women who, in spite of the severities of pioneer labour and the hardship of re-establishing lives disrupted by the American rebellion, found the will and the means to erect their plans for education into enduring institutional form. Much that is to be admired in the history of New Brunswick - in particular the strong and abiding loyalty to the family tradition - will seem strange, and no less admirable for being unfamiliar, to dwellers on the Pacific slope.

Now I hesitate to believe that I can tell you or remind you of anything you need to know. With this doubt in mind, I approached the president of my University, who was once the president of your University and be assured me that the inhabitants of this campus and this city are kindly and tolerant people, willing like the Athenians, to listen to strangers. In this confidence I venture to pass on to you a few thoughts, concerning your past and your possible future as an institution of learning, which our critical times suggest.

It is customary to regard education as a perpetuation of tradition. It passes on the knowledge and the beliefs, the habits and the skills, of one generation to the next and the curriculum in Canadian universities broadens slowly down from president to president. We need to know, as Matthew Arnold said, the best that has been thought and known.

That there is a body of knowledge, a heritage of belief and a set of skills which the rising generation must be taught if they are to survive in society and which society requires them to be taught if society itself is to survive, - this seems self-evident and its sufficiency as an educational ideal may seem self-evident too. As Auden has said, "The purpose of all educational institutions, public or private, is utilitarian and can never be anything else; their duty is to prepare young persons for that station in life to which it shall please society to call them". Every new generation must learn what previous generations have found it necessary to remember: how to read and write and calculate; how to organize research and criticism, and armies and factories and transport and the getting of meals. How to do one's hair so beautifully that some young man will build a roof and walls to protect it from the elements.

But the more closely we look at this web of continuity, the more we shall discover the inequalities of its weaving. It is interesting to reflect that if, about the turn of the eighteenth century, Julius Caesar had been able by some telescoping of time to talk to Napoleon, he would have found little to surprise him. He would have seen the Gauls invading Italy, horse and foot; the infantry would be carrying their swords on the end of gun barrels and the catapults would be replaced by cannon, but the armies would be marching on the old roads, the haymakers would be pausing to watch them pass, the Mediterranean waters would be dotted with white sails, and Napoleon explaining his strategy to Caesar in bad Latin would find a knowledgeable listener.

It was at the turn of that century that King's College was established in Fredericton. The Loyalists had been here for upwards of fifteen years and their efforts and struggles may well have seemed to them, as to historians later on, to be struggles to re-establish themselves, efforts to achieve continuity. And this is in a very real sense true.

But if we are not careful, this truth can turn into a half-truth, can be a basis for quite wrong conclusions. We can easily slip into regarding education as adjustment to society. And this is in a sense true but we must at once ask, What society? Let us take the case of the martyr. (We tend now to regard martyrdom in the cause of truth as exceptional, unpredictable and most regrettable. In some other times and places it has been regarded as normal, forseeable and glorious). When we consider a Roman convert to Christianity, or a Jesuit going out to old Japan or a Plymouth Brother taking off for central Brazil, let us ask to what society is he adjusting himself? Surely the societies that Milton sees in heaven receiving his lost friend Lycidas:

There entertain him all the Saints above,
In solemn troops, the sweet Societies
That sing, and singing in their glory move,
And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.

Or if we do not wish to be transcendal, then at least we can ask that the society which the student is preparing to serve and to which he must in some sense adjust be not simply the group of persons among whom be is to earn his living, but rather the successive generations, reaching far into the past and the future, which carry the long development of his history and! his culture. The long view, the view taken in depth, the contemplative view of totality, this we must achieve.

There can have been few societies in which the mere ability to cope with immediate problems, the mere possession of know-how to make one's way in the community, have been most palpably insufficient than in our society. For reasons which gather speed to assault us on every hand, repetition of familiar pattern is not enough. We are faced, not only with change but with an acceleration in the rate of change for which no historical parallel exists. The successive shifts, within the memory of the present generation, from horse traffic to internal combustion engines on road and rail, to airplanes and now to jet flight as a normal means of travel, - these are only straws in the wind, outward signals of profound inner changes in our thinking. Education must not only give us far more facts than our grandfathers needed, it must not only organize and package facts in more manageable containers, it must also have regard to the blueprint of the universe which hangs invisibly upon the wall of every classroom, - the assumptions, often unspoken, about the very nature of things, which determine the course taken by instruction or discussion. This blueprint is changing rapidly and no longer themselves provides us with concepts of stability like those which deduced so readily from the laws of Newton. And let us not suppose that the change from one tentative blueprint of the universe to another will leave our concept of the nature of man unchanged. On the contrary, as we develop our view of the great world, the macrocosm, so inevitably we develop our view of the microcosm, the small but complete world of man himself. If the Ptolemaic conception of the universe had persisted, what Christian would have ventured to emigrate to New Zealand?

It is now a commonplace that matter is inseparable from motion, that but for the electrical energy that keeps the particles within an atom in their orbits, matter would disappear. And man himself seems more and more a function of divine or cosmic energy moving toward its teleological goal. Classical man with fix attributes and immemorial rounds of action, fades into the past.

The course of human history now shows as a continuous series of superimposed developments and I would like to suggest to you - in all humility and with no pretentions of special insight - that all signs point to the approach of a crisis. From many latitudes these distant early warnings come to us and the nearest is perhaps the world of the newspaper whose little mirror, found each morning at our door, reflects back to us what we are thinking. Children bring it in and wisely go first for the comics, where fantasy moves a trifle faster than fact. The comics give us pictures of compulsive violence but also of worlds to conquer, great voyages in time or space and the foiling of cruel tyrants by intrepid heroes. The world we see reflected in the papers is a world that cannot be stabilized. The walls that at one time protected the citadels of various fields of knowledge are everywhere being breached. Space yields up secrets that Milton's angel Raphael warned Adam to regard as beyond his province. The nature of matter loses some of its mystery as the transmutations sought by the old alchemists prove perfectly possible. Dogma and doctrine of orthodox religion, looked at through the refracting media of myth and symbol, seem less like obiter dicta from another world and more like the pervasive wisdom of the universe, the cosmic secrets of regeneration.

As these shrines that housed the mysteries open to disclose that their mysteries are not many but one, and that one the nature of God, it becomes evident that we move toward some enormous and imminent crisis, some act of cosmic self realization, or divine revelation, or coming to birth of the psyche of mankind. It can be conceived, as a time of menace or one of promise, and never perhaps in the world's history has the visible iconography of these things been so manifest. Men are in possession of atomic power with the concomitant ability to annihilate mankind, and not only the latent power but the organized apparatus to do so. At the same moment and in the same hands there resides the power to explore space and perhaps soon to move at will through its vastness. The threat of total extinction and the promise of boundless expansion of the mind co-exist at this moment in our midst. And in the realm of values the contrasts are no less striking. We see a spirit of nihilism of which Hitler's implemented philosophy is a recent and overwhelming example. We see everywhere among students a profound and serious interest in ultimate spiritual truth which not even the deep suspicion I have of doctrine and of dogma can convince me is other than genuine, fruitful and filled with hope.

Many of you will have read that extraordinary book which became available in English rather more than a year ago. The Phenomenon of Man, by a scientist who is also a humanist and at the same time priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. It is a book of great difficulty but of great beauty and of stimulating impact. De Chardin conceives mankind as moving toward a crisis which may take the form of a collective and unified effort of self-realization and realization of God or may alternatively take shape as a clash between forces favouring this release and forces dragging mankind back, so that after a decisive struggle, only a portion as it were of the collective psyche is released. A few years ago such expressions would have seemed strained, vague and obscurantist. Read beside the daily newspaper today, de Chardin appears lucid, rational, and timely.