The University and the Impending Crisis

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

FOUNDERS7 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.