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A Legacy of Canadian Philosophical Thought, Beyond Egerton Ryerson and into the Twenty-first Century: An Interview with American Philosopher Robert Timko by Peter Chiaramonte
Information about authors
Dr. Robert Timko is Professor Emeritus, Mansfield University of Pennsylvania. He's held Visiting Teaching and Research Professorships at universities in Canada, Russia, and the United States, and was the Co-Executive Editor of the journal, Representations of Canada for eight years. E-mail: robertimko@comcast.net
Dr. Peter Chiaramonte is a Canadian academic and a former professor who has taught in several different disciplines and faculties at universities all across Canada, the U.S., and Europe. He has worked as a consultant in leadership studies and curriculum development in higher education. E-mail: razorsedge@me.com
In this interview, Professor Timko discusses a broad range of topics relevant to the idea of a Canadian philosophy. Philosophically, Russians and Canadians have shared a longstanding interest in the idea of a recognized sense of history moving itself through civilizations all over the world. Also discussed is the history and philosophy of higher education and the strange interactions of teaching and learning, curricu-
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lum development, government and politics. Included is a critique of what some have come to see as the more recent "cor-poratization of higher education" in both Canada and the United States. The interview concludes with a suggestion for a more inclusive plurality of critical perspectives in the governance of universities, as well as between boundary-spanning disciplines.
Key words: Canadian Philosophy, higher education, liberal education, balanced education, liberal arts, business, political partyism, corporate interests, government
Наследие канадской философской мысли, после Эгертона Райерсона и в ХХ! столетии: интервью доктора Питера Чиарамонте с американским философом Робертом Тимко
Информация об авторах
Роберт Тимко - почетный профессор Мэнсфилдского университета (Пенсильвания, США). Он неоднократно работал в качестве приглашенного профессора и исследователя в различных университетах Канады, России и Соединенных Штатов. Р. Тимко также был соредактором международного сборника «Представления о Канаде (1-8 выпуски).
E-mail: robertimko@comcast.net
Питер Чиарамонте - известный канадский журналист и бывший преподаватель в ряде канадских университетов, а также в ряде университетов Европы и США. Он также работал консультантов в области изучения проблем
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лидерства и в программах по улучшению содержания
высшего образования. E-mail: razorsedge@me.com
В интервью, предлагаемом читателю, профессор Р. Тимко затрагивает широкий круг вопросов, связанных с развитием канадской философии и высшего образования. В философском плане, по мнению Р. Тимко, русские и канадцы на протяжении долгого времени разделяли идею о движущей роли истории в осмыслении теории цивилизаций в глобальном аспекте. Также обсуждаются проблемы истории и философии высшего образования в Канаде и противоречивые связи между преподаванием и познанием, проблемы эволюции содержания учебных планов, политика правительства Канады и политическая деятельность внутри университетов в настоящее время. Высказывается критическое отношение к очевидным процессам «корпоративизации» университетов, как в Канаде, так и в Соединенных Штатах. В интервью формулируется вывод о необходимости развития и внедрения большего плюрализма и критического отношения к управлению университетами и необходимости совершенствования междисциплинарных (пограничных) подходов в теории и практике высшего образования.
Ключевые слова: канадская философия, высшее образование, либеральное образование, сбалансированное образование, свободные искусства, бизнес, партийная политики, корпоративные интересы, политическое управление
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Beginning with nineteenth century Methodist minister and Canadian politician Adolphus Egerton Ryerson (for whom Ryerson University in Toronto is named), Professor Timko traces the lineage of a uniquely Canadian "objective idealism"—from the 1800's through to the present. In this interview, Professor Timko discusses a broad range of topics relevant to "this whole idea of a Canadian philosophy."
Ironically, the idea of a distinct Canadian philosophy is something very few people—especially Canadians—seem to know much about. However, as Dr. Timko points out early on the conversation, "the Russians always knew about Canadian philosophers." As it turns out, Russians and Canadians have shared a long standing interest in the idea of recognized sense of history moving itself through civilizations all over the world. As if "with some kind of absolute force behind it." Also discussed: the history and philosophy of higher educa-tion-and the strange workings of teaching and learning, curriculum development, government and politics, and "political partyism"-including a critique of what some have come to see as the more recent "corporatiztion of higher education" in
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both Canada and the United States. In a creative tension with these notions, Dr. Timko advocates for a more inclusive plurality of critical perspectives in the governance of universities as well as between boundary-spanning disciplines (most notably, philosophy and education), and in international U.S.-Canadian relations in general.
This is an interview, Dr. Robert Timko, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Mansfield University of Pennsylvania, gave to Dr. Peter Chiaramonte, host of the "Razor's Edge" talk show on the Artist First Radio Network. The interview was broadcast live on May 19th 2017. The occasion for the publication of this edited and updated transcript is for the Canadian Yearbook of the Russian Association for Canadian Studies. The original audio was transcribed by Carolynne McMullen Timko.
Chiaramonte: Professor Timko you were born and raised in the United States, but you have a lifelong Canadian connection. What explains this inner Canadian?
Timko: Well, the Canadian story and my story in particular, are evolutionary, not revolutionary. It wasn't a certain "aha " experience, but it was a gradual series of events. I originally went off to do my graduate studies at University of Guelph in Ontario, and I never thought much about Canada while I was there.
It wasn't until years later when I was pursuing a tenure track position at Mansfield University, after holding a few positions at other universities, I was sitting in a meeting—my first appointment was a joint appointment in both English and Phi-losophy—and they were talking about doing regional studies in the English department. They were saying, "Oh well we're
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going to do Africa, we're going to do China, we're going to do South America..." And I just timidly raised my hand and said, "How much do we do we know about Canada?"
They just turned and stared at me. That eventually led to setting up an exchange programme in the State System of Higher Education in Pennsylvania. Every summer they they'd run an honours programme for a select group of students. And so, Mansfield University, with me and two other faculty members on board, decided to look into Canadian culture and see if we could start creating some academic connections.
Through those summer programmes, and a subsequent return to some of my old mentors and tutors at Guelph, I began to become more and more fascinated by things I had left behind. As I learned more and dug deeper into things, I began to establish connections over the years. I started to pursue this whole idea of a Canadian phoilosophy, wondering why, when I was studying graduate philosophy at a Canadian university, they never mentioned Canadian thinkers at either the graduate or undergraduate level. And who exactly were the Canadian philosophers?
Years later, I met up with a Russian colleague who filled in for me while I was away on sabbatical. He told me the Russians always knew about Canadian philosophers, which was rather interesting. By philosophers, we understood that we were not talking about individuals who occupied positions in university philosophy departments, but about those individuals who examined the world and human society from a uniquely Canadian perspective. As it turns out, the Canadians and the Russians shared an interest in objective idealism. This sort of Hegelian and post-Hegelian idea of history
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moving itself through civilizations and throughout the world, with some kind of absolute force behind it.
And so I began to read, and the more I read the more I found out. And then I began to believe in the idea that a people—an identity of a people—is shaped by their basic philosophy and that Canadians were actually formed in a different way than their neighbors to the south.
Chiaramonte: As you know, most Canadians grow up well aware of American culture and politics, if not its philosophy. But why is it that so few Americans seem to know, or care very much, about their closest neighbor and most significant trading partner?
Timko: Well, I think it actually goes in both directions for different reasons. Americans began to believe that they were the centre of the universe. I don't mean that in the harshest way, but in a sort of friendly critical way. They held fast to an idea that nothing existed beyond the American point of view. When you went to universities in the United States and studied regions and cultures in other parts of the world, they always taught you about that region or about those people from the point of view of American foreign policy. Which is hardly justifiable in the long run because it's just satisfying American interests.
Americans grew up with this idea that, "Well, Canada is really just the fifty-first state." And you do find it referenced in your history how some prime ministers were sympathetic to joining up with the United States in very close ways.
But there was always this strain of ideas that we're different in Canada. We think a little bit differently, and it was the philosophers beginning with Egerton Ryerson that pointed this
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out. It really began with Ryerson. There were some literary artists prior to Ryerson who thought that Canada was slightly different in its culture and its perspective, but it was Ryerson who really began to think about the whole idea of how Canada should become a country.
When he was first writing and doing things, it was still Upper Canada and Lower Canada, and he was Minister of Education for Upper Canada. As he traveled the world and then came back to Canada, he thought about the fact that a Canadian education should be a Canadian education. Much as he thought that Methodism as a religion should be Canadian, and not British or American. He became very suspicious of American textbooks, which he believed pushed an American ideal that was not entirely consistent with the Canadian perspective.
Chiaramonte: Yet, the American ideal is the one we Canadians grew up with as children. And the most of our textbooks—even today—are authored by Americans, published by Americans, and deal mainly with American issues that we modify, somewhat, to match or mimic on our own.
Timko: One of things that struck me as I pursued these studies while I was at Guelph was when the Canadian universities began to expand in the mid-sixties, and later on move forward into the nineties, much of the hiring came from American or British universities.
Canadians for some reasons were very reluctant to hire their own. Whether it was a sense of inferiority or deference it's hard to describe. So you had history departments, philosophy departments, and sociology departments—everything dominated by U.S. and British scholars, who would naturally teach
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what they were interested in from their own home perspective.
And if you read Canadians like Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, George Grantand some others—you get the idea: "Why aren't we teaching Canadians to Canadians? Why are we teaching American thinkers and American pragmatism rather than Canadian idealism?" The whole idea of a Canadian philosophy is deeply embedded.
There was a Canadian philosopher named George Paxton Young who taught at the University of Toronto. Very popular with his students. And when he retired, they were going to offer his job to an American, and the students didn't think very much of that. It eventually became a protest on the floors of the Provincial Parliament—about whether or not a Canadian or an American should be hired to teach Ethics at a Canadian university. This is a significant historical event.
You don't find much interest in universities today. I can't imagine somewhere there would be a debate on the floor of Parliament or a debate in the U.S. Senate, on whether or not we should hire Americans or Canadians or British or whomever it should be. As George Grant reminded us, the curriculum is integral to what the university is, and what the community is, and who they will become. That perspective is needed.
Chiaramonte: When I was a child living in downtown Toronto, on my way to and from St. Michael's Choir School every day, I used to walk past the twenty-foot statue of the famous Canadian educator, politician, and philosopher you've been talking about Egerton Ryerson. In that statue he has a Bible clutches in one hand and his right arm is extended, palm up, with his hand open. As a kid I remember feeling kind of nervous and uncertain as to whether he was
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inviting me into Ryerson University or just taking my lunch money. What, in your view, makes Ryerson such a national treasure?
Timko: Well, in the short answer format, I can tell you that he really did believe first of all that he was a servant of the people of Upper Canada. And he set his actions and his choices according to that belief. That was something right there. He also believed that people should oppose tyranny in whatever guise it may come, and that would include political theory as formulated by indigenous political parties. He also believes that education belonged to the whole public.
There was a famous fight he had with Bishop Strachan over what education should be and who should control the universities. He believed that it wasn't just property of the wealthy, but belonged to all people.
He became very much the public intellectual. He began to believe that Canada had to develop on its own. It had to seek its own roots, its own identity, and it had look into its history and its ideas and where it was going. So he was trying to promote a social evolution or a social transformation or Canadian society—away from British elitist traditions. He became very tolerant. He actually supported the idea that Catholics should have their own schools, even though he was a stalwart Methodist minister.
When he was a circuit rider it wasn't unusual for him to take off his frock get out in the fields, and work hand-in-hand with the indigenous farmers who were clearing the land because he thought it was part of the process. He also strongly believed that education should be balanced; it shouldn't just be about the professions, and it shouldn't just serve those pecuniary or financial interests of the business community. There
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had to be a balance. You had to teach history and philosophy, especially ethics. Otherwise you would end up with a morally bankrupt and debauched people.
Chiaramonte: I've read in your analysis of Ryerson's vision and principles for a holistic liberal education in Canada. As a former dean and department chair yourself, have you ever been involved with, or witnessed, a system of higher education that truly reflected this vision? One of maintaining a balance and symmetry between different branches of literature and science, for example?
Timko: Have I ever experienced it personally? I may have as an undergraduate. I went to a small Catholic university and they really did preserve a liberal arts tradition, where you had to have a general education before you went on to any professional school.
Chiaramonte: And then what happened?
Timko: Later in life, when I was Chair of Philosophy and then Interim Dean, I became very much involved in an American association called COPLAC, or the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges. A very select group of state schools who dedicated themselves to maintaining a liberal arts tradition as a way of preparing people for life. Ryerson strongly believed that if you had a very narrow education you neither served business, nor government, nor the community very well.
Actually you would serve it very badly because if you didn't have the balance provided by a liberal arts education, you might easily be drawn into acting out of self-interest, and promoting one's own self-interest and movement up the social and political ladder. Ryerson saw that as an inherent dan-
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ger in society, and that's why he eventually opposed the ideas of political parties.
Today the big thing in university education is this whole idea of promoting S.T.E.M. subjects, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. But there's a new interest that has arisen recently called S.T.E.A.M. The A stands for the reassertion of the Arts, because it's the arts that have been pushed aside, even though they add a diverse perspective and creative thinking into the mix.
My own experience lately in the States is that public universities have been closing down Philosophy departments, downsizing History departments, and eliminating art, language and culture programmes—all in favour of starting or expanding more narrowly defined professional programmes.
Chiaramonte: Well, I've been teaching in one public university very recently, very temporarily, in another business school again, where I was actually forbidden to integrate philosophy, literature, cinema, sociology, and psychology into the previously, narrowly set curriculum—which was just a bunch of promotions and pointless bromides and indoctrinations, in my view. But I wasn't allowed to be critical either. I was ordered to present this to the students as if it was carved into tablets made of stones.
You're more realistic Bob, and not as pessimistic as I might sound. Do you have any hope for the future in terms of STEAM versus STEM? Are we likely to reintegrate the arts, science, and humanities? I mean even business administration is, after all one of the humanities, though not often taught that way. People dealing with people. But it's not treated that way in any of the business schools I've encountered lately.
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Timko: There's a culture of business that's very different from the culture of the people. Following a suggestion from a colleague, I actually thought an interesting course to offer would be "The Business of Culture and the Culture of Business." There is an interesting perspective that could come from of such a view. When it comes to what's going on in the course, I know one of the things that I was attracted—when I attended your paper on "The Rhetoric of Leadership" at the Conference on Teaching Philosophy at the University of Guelph—was the idea that you were interdisciplinary. You were bringing in different perspectives and different voices. One thing that Ryerson was well aware of was that if you only have a single focus—one voice alone—you are not going to get a well-developed person. You are not going to get a well-developed leader.
As a consequence, you are not going to get a well-governed community, because it will always be protecting that narrowly defined interest. There has to be a way of having more perspectives and more voices brought into the whole situation.
I think right now we are facing a cultural crisis in which we are looking at a government, or perhaps governments around the world that are looking at things from the prism of one, or maybe, at most two points of view, excluding all other perspectives.
The danger here is that people will forget you can never take the observer out of the observations. You can never take the narrative of the person making the choice out of the choice. That's if we get ourselves into a situation where we elect or appoint leaders that are coming from one, and only one, pers-
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pective. From the realist point of view, for example, in business the bottom line is business. That's all it's about.
There are many Canadian thinkers like Rupert Lodge and Wilfred Keirstead, who worried about that point of view at the universities where they were teaching. They were worried that these institutions would only be interested in maximizing profits rather than serving the larger needs of the communities.
The whole point of view of bringing the liberal arts in is to make us continually aware of the fact there are other benefits out there. Benefits that are not just consumer benefits on a business or economic level, but benefits for the well being of the citizens of the community. Being able to grow; being able to self-realize. And that's where the liberal arts come in. We can't move forward unless we see the effect of our past history in our present. We got to this point because of a specific narrative. That narrative inhabits everything we see and do. And we have to be able to stand back and look in the mirror and say, "That's what's going on."
Chiaramonte: I read in your paper on Egerton Ryerson where you argue that the history of English-Canadian educational institutions has, for centuries, remained distinct from the more pragmatic approaches you mentioned of our American counterparts. Is this still the case today? What, if any, are the key remaining distinctions between our two solitudes? I'd like to know what your experience has been.
Timko: Well, here's where I'll be a little pessimistic. Although I try to remain somewhat optimistic about Canada in relation to the United States, I do see the Canadian side trying to emulate what is happening in the United States. Let's face it, in the United States; programmes go up and down in the
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university curriculum by whether or not they generate a significant profit, or whether they generate a significant loss.
The interesting thing is that programmes like philosophy don't cost very much to run. Not as much as an engineering programme or a nursing programme or even a business programme. But they don't look at that. Nor do they look at the economy of scale when they make decisions on program curricula in universities.
Let me give you an example. I once got myself into an interesting set of conversations with the provincial and federal governments in Canada: the Ontario Provincial Government and the federal Government in Ottawa, and the Department of Heritage in particular. When the University of Guelph canceled their Canadian Studies programme—because it wasn't generating enough bodies to come into the pro-gramme—they replaced it with a Criminal Justice programme. They thought it would generate more people coming in and paying, and thus more revenue. So they were looking at the bottom line.
I can remember sitting in the Vice President of Academic Affairs' office and accusing him, who was a Brit, of trying to reinstitute colonialism in Canada. But the point was that they were sacrificing part of Canada's and the university's natural heritage and national identity for what they thought was the bottom line. Not realizing that bottom line targets cannot be achieved unless you are moving forward by allowing everybody to grow in distinct and varied ways.
If you look across Canada universities, they are slowly and gradually adopting a perspective that they have to bring in more of these marketing programmes, security programmes, and other very narrowly defined professional programmes.
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Chiaramonte: And you're not sanctioned to additionally bring in a critical theory perspective. I've had students studying international business who are not being exposed to any liberal arts/humanities or historical antecedents in terms of understanding global business. They're not been given the counterpoints. There's no foil to any of it, just introduction: "This is the powerpoint information you need to know to be an international business person." They're never taught to think critically about what they're being asked to swallow and regurgitate on examinations. Just in order to get their tickets stamped. I've no idea what universities are about any more.
Timko: This might be somewhat controversial from a Canadian perspective. I think Canada's hope in maintaining its national identity, and its distinctness from the United States, lies almost squarely in the hands of Québec right now. Québec has traditionally and historically been resistant to homogenizing and assimilating. And that is a very good thing. They stayed with Canada because the British had given them ways of protecting their language and their culture. Because the British realized that this would be in the interest of the British Empire. The emerging American government did not believe in such protections.
All the Americans wanted to do in the early days was assimilate, assimilate, and assimilate. And that carries over in to the universities to this day. We are driven by the idea that what we have to do is find those programmes which produce jobs here and now. Not realizing that, in the long run, those jobs might disappear and we might have to retain people all over again for other employment.
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Chiaramonte: Or it could be fraudulent training, or creden-tialing to begin with. There was a study here in Canada— a book I reviewed for Education Review by James Coté and Anton Allahar, a couple of sociologists out of the University of Western Ontario. The book is titled, Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and The Fall of Liberal Education. I mention fraud because of certain cases they pointed out involving sociology departments' advertising and marketing practices. Because of popularity of certain television crime shows—like CSI Miami and others— sociology departments began organizing and advertising "specialization" programmes and courses in these types of subjects. Suggesting this type of training could lead to a career in forensics or criminology.
But it's all a fraud. Sociologists are not generally the employees hired for crime scene investigation. Yes, there are CSI divisions in all major cities, of course, but the people that are hired to those positions tend to come out of Chemistry and Psychology almost exclusively. Not from Sociology programmes. And yet, this was what some university departments were advertising in order to get their numbers up.
It's fraudulent when the goal.... When the purpose is no longer to educate, but primarily aimed at making money first and foremost. Putting bums in seats and leaving the rest of the body and mind untouched. Just looking instead at nothing, but student numbers and profitability. I'm pessimistic, I know. I want to throw up my hands and walk away from the whole damn thing, except in the role of social critic. Restore my faith, Bob, please.
Timko: Okay, let me give you a couple of examples to illustrate. One example was outside of the whole Canadian thing
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when I was Dean and I had to confront a number of the State Legislature and Board of Governors. He asked about why we had fourteen state universities with fourteen philosophy programmes and fourteen literature programmes and so on. And he said, "Why can't we just have one school be specialized in one thing and then just farm it out by technology to the other schools?"
And I said, "Well the problem with that is we lose the plurality of perspectives, we lose the whole story just to gain, perhaps, a little bit more technical skill in handling one part of the story."
I tried to convince him, and I don't think successfully. For example, in philosophy we're concerned more with the teaching of critical thinking skills, and we use various topics and issues to move that forward. People have different interests and trained differently, so perhaps we don't look at the content of the course as the be all and end all. We look at what skills come out of a course or curriculum, enabling the person to use those skills to be able to retool and retain themselves as it becomes necessary.
Study after study for the last three decades has shown that people who come out of philosophy and the liberal arts traditions turn out to be more successful and move up the ladder much more quickly. They can readjust to challenges in the economy and to changes in government more readily than people who are narrowly trained in a specific business perspective or specific political perspective. I would hate to have to face a situation in which all of economic theory was taught from the point of view of somebody who was opposed free trade, as an example.
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Chiaramonte: Every subject in the curriculum, even on the STEM side, has a history and literature to it. It has characters, has biography. There is so much natural integration and crossover. Why are they so insistent on this introduction: "This is what you need to know—march in this rank and form?" It seems to me that somebody, at some level—whether in among governmental officials or one of the ever increasing crowds amid the administration of our universities—is really at wrong here.
Timko: I think what we have is a number of people who probably were improperly educated themselves. For example, no matter which great business school you look at in the United States, one problem is lack of diversity in the curriculum. If students were more deeply trained in how disciplines interact with each other, how narratives are built—they would more easily understand you couldn't go into the whole idea of negotiating trade agreements, unless you understand the history of why they were formed in the first place. How the opposition to it worked. How modifications were made and, more importantly, understanding the culture of all the trading partners.
Chiaramonte: Well, there you go. You've said this before, rather remorsefully, and I quote, "Would that those govern us actually had read history and philosophy." So my question is, with so many mutual concerns between our two countries, Canada and the United States—economically, culturally, mi-litarily—why is an understanding of our philosophical foundations, as you suggest, so important to matters of Canadian-American relations?
Timko: Well, first of all, the very basic line, and this gets back to my study of Egerton Ryerson and other Canadian
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philosophers who began to believe that you couldn't act ethically without understanding the metaphysics. Ethics arises from metaphysics, and by metaphysics what I mean is a deep understanding of how we are related to our world, to ourselves, to others in the world, to the environment.
We have to have that metaphysical grounding. And out of that metaphysical grounding arises a sense of duties and responsibilities. Part of the problem that we have in the United States has been the leadership in this; they want to talk about the primacy or the certainty of rights.
We have a leader right now who says, "Hey, I have an absolute right." Let me pause and say there is nobody alive on the face of the earth that has an absolute right to anything. All rights are contingent. All rights—as the Canadian constitution points out—are held within reasonable limits. And the whole idea is my rights end where my duties begin.
There's a sense of mutuality that we've lost. I have to understand that I have duties not only to myself bur also to others. But more importantly, I have duties to the community as a whole. I'm not talking about a utilitarian perspective—where I try to promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number—I'm talking about the whole, which is greater than the greatest number. It's something more.
One of the things that Ryerson and Lodge and Watson and Young and a number of Canadian thinkers always talked about—is that we need to talk more about our responsibilities. What are those responsibilities? What are those duties that we have?
The one optimism that I have about Canadian culture and Canadian society is that it still respect for responsibilities and the performance of duties. It hasn't abandoned itself to rights
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talk. Despite the 1982 Charter, which moved it in the direction of becoming more rights oriented, there's still this idea that there has to be a reasonable limit to the exercise of rights. And the culture's collective rights, as opposed to individual rights, need to be protected.
So that's my optimism in there, and I think that is sorely lacking in some of the things that are happening both in Canada and the United States. I can't speak for Europe, but I do suspect similar things are happening there. I have friends in Britain who are telling me that many of the traditional universities there are getting hammered and pushed into becoming more professionally oriented in their offerings.
There used to be a time, Peter, when, for example, a degree in PPE—the old philosophy, politics, and economics—was what prepared you for a life of leadership, whether it be in business or government. We don't have that perspective any more. There was a good reason why they believed that you had to integrate philosophy, politics, and economy—and it's that those things are related to each other.
You can't have a good economy without a sense of well-balanced political governing. And it has to go back to, "What is the metaphysics? Who are we as persons? What are my obligations to other persons? What are the needs of strangers in our world? In fact, we may be strangers to ourselves." Here I'm sort of paraphrasing what Michael Ignatieff wrote in one of his books. Perhaps he's one of the last in the line of true Canadian thinkers, although he began to slide and look a bit more American in some of his thinking.
Chiaramonte: Or so he's been accused. Bob, you mentioned the Canadian Constitution a moment ago and, related to everything else we've been discussing, it reminded me of what I
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wanted to ask you. It's about Ryerson's beliefs about political partyism. I'm reminded that the United States Constitution itself makes no mention of political parties at all. And yet political parties—such as the mainstream Republican and Democratic parties in the States and the Liberal, Conservative, and New Democratic parties in Canada—have become seemingly permanent fixtures of governmental politics on both sides of the fence. But it wasn't written into the U.S. Constitution, and, related to this, as you have demonstrated in your analysis of Ryerson—he believed political partyism to be an obstacle to the maintenance of good government.
The question is, given the wide partisan divide along party lines we see in both Canadian and American politics, do you see any connection between what Ryerson thought about political partyism in his day, and the governance of our nations and, say, institutions of higher education today?
Timko: Well, remember, Ryerson wrote his little essay on political partyism one hundred and fifty years ago. Right on the heels of Confederation—when he was looking at the British North America Act. And that's where he began to write in the vein of, "Let's be cautious here, and let's not jump into political parties."
His thinking there was rather interesting. № said, "I don't oppose political parties with moral goals, like the ending of slavery or unequal education. Those are good things." But he said that partyism—being associated with a political party— was different. Political partyism is an ideology in itself. Political partyism, said Ryerson, was in some ways responsible for the American Civil War.
You had these party loyalties that exceeded any interest in keeping the whole of the country moving forward. It became
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fracturing in a sense. People began to try to push their own agendas, their own interests. Partyism has to do with pushing ones' own perspective, despite whether or not it might have adverse effects on the country as a whole or on its people. We do see some of that in the Unites States today.
I don't think the Republican party has stopped to think about whether they want a more efficient health care system, but you have to go about that rationally and cautiously, otherwise you're going to hurt and harm a large part of your population, and that you don't want to do.
What Ryerson was saying is that when you get into that situation, you have people who become more concerned with being able to move up within the power structure of a political party. They get themselves assigned to a more and more powerful position, more and more powerful committees instantiating their own power, their own authority, and forgetting about why they were there.
If we just stopped to think that we ought to appoint officials who have wisdom, historical understanding, intelligence, and ethical goals in mind, we'd be much better off. We can't have people trying to push one single agenda. And I think this applies to the right and the left. In the United States, Republicans and Democrats are probably equally guilty of trying to push a particular point of view, rather than provide a balanced perspective on political parties.
Ryerson was concerned that we should be looking at the character of our leaders. If we don't have character in our leaders we're not going to have character in our communities, we're not going to have character at all. We're going to lose it.
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That's one of the things he was worried about. He was worried about this kind of "radical partyism", if you want to call it that, that's his own term, but we need to move beyond that. He said it actually stands in the way of reforming and making ourselves better. I think that's his infinite wisdom. At this point, he was trying to warn people, and he was observing not only what was happening in the United States, he observed the same thing in England—in the Parliament there, when you had these partisan factions going back and forth.
One of the things that Ryerson's contemporaries found problematic about him was that they couldn't figure out whether he was a Tory or a Whig. (Historically, conservative Tories favoured royal authority over parliamentary rule; the Whigs origins lay in a constitutional monarchism as opposed to absolute monarchy). Here Ryerson sort of straddled. And he moved in the direction of principle, rather than according to an association with any particular, political ideology.
Chiaramonte: He was like an Independent, right? As we might term it today. But was he truly independent of those parties in his thinking?
Timko: He was both. Another thing he said, and I think this is really astounding when you think about it—what this whole idea of partyism lends itself to is on one hand dishonesty, and on the other hand truthlessness. You can never get to the truth. And we'll never have integrity if we cling to political partyism. All the essential elements of social progress will be brought to a halt. Now think about that. He said this a hundred and fifty years ago and I think it rings true today.
We can take it out of the context of the United States and look at the Conservative party leadership fight that has been going on in Canada. That has been ridded with political par-
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tyism. Who is the "authentic" Conservative? I can tell you, number one, that former Prime Minister Stephen Harper was never truly a Conservative. I doubt if he ever read Edmund Burke.
Chiaramonte: What would you consider him?
Timko: Ah... a transplanted American Republican.
Chiaramonte: That's it. I've never heard that before, but it's very suggestive.
Timko: He really didn't show interest in Canada as much as he showed interest in trying to get what he believed to be the proper agenda across, as he saw it. I think people finally realized he was beginning to represent something other than what the Canadian people were and that was his downfall. There's still enough integrity in the Canadian population as a whole that they can recognize when somebody's being un-Canadian in the way there're behaving. You mentioned what the outcome of the Conservative leadership race is going. You do have some very interesting and extreme candidates in the race.
Chiaramonte: Well, extreme certainly. I don't know how interesting they all are, but yeah, there are some real characters in that bunch for sure. The main character we needed to worry about dropped out recently, Mr. Kevin 'the Dragon' O'Leary, Canada's faux Donald Trump celebrity apprentice.
Timko: But he dropped out for a very interesting reason.
Chiaramonte: I'm sorry, what did he say?
Timko: He realized he couldn't win.
Chiaramonte: Exactly.
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Timko: And that in itself speaks volumes about what was going on there, because what I worry about and what political partyism lends itself to—it's no longer about doing right or wrong—its about winning and losing. And there's a vast difference between those two perspectives.
Chiaramonte: I want to put this in context of my own agenda a little bit, if I may. The sense that I get from you about Ryerson's vision and principles, and his concerns about partyism in general, it seems that there's a parallel with other institutions. In particular, my gripe about the universities, that's been so changed in my lifetime and yours. It's become so disparate and fragmented into such strict disciplinary silos, you know, this school versus that school, competing in race to the bottom. Too much specialization without any apparent, studied consideration of their complex, emergent relationships to one another.
Andrew Abbott, a University of Chicago sociologist, predicted the future of academic disciplines moving forward into the twenty-first century. He argues that although the current disciplinary silos don't have much regard for one another, they're not going to go away and disappear any time soon. Because of the vested interests of faculty, administrators, bankers, and politicians, in keeping their well paying jobs according to their particular specialties and affiliations.
So again, it has no readily apparent educative purpose or principle or vision to direct things. Granted, for interdisciplinary studies to have any meaning, we must presume meaningful disciplines to begin with. However, I'm not comfortable, myself, working in places where parochial fragmentations have been too rigidly or sharply drawn. Would you agree, or am I just being outrageous?
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Timko: Peter, you know me, I'm going to partially agree with you and partially disagree.
Chiaramonte: Good, that'll be healthy for both of us. Go ahead.
Timko: One of the things if you look at the way academic administrations work, scholars no longer get rewarded for actual scholarship, which takes them wherever it may lead. Good scholarship will often make you cross over disciplines. As a philosopher I still think people should read literature and the economic texts of a people to learn more about where that society should be going. I truly mean interdisciplinary. That is, they actually dialogue and talk to each other.
Look, for example, at a very base level, tenure and promotion. How do you get tenured and how do you get promoted? What they look at, if you are a philosopher—and happen to publish something in history—that doesn't really count. Because it's outside of your discipline.
If I am a philosopher and doing Canadian Studies, they ask me, "Why are you doing that? It's not a real discipline. It's a conglomeration of disciplines." So young scholars are learning the game—that in order to get that tenure, to get that next promotion, they have to play this game. Keeping very tightly bound to the ideology of that discipline. That's bad news for education in the future. Because you need to have a balance of perspectives and they are retreating from that balance of perspectives.
There are a couple of interesting features in Canadian philosophical thought with respect to education, beyond Ryerson, that probably address this more. I think of John Clarke Murray, who got into trouble at McGill as a philosopher.
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Chiaramonte: All the good ones get into trouble. To paraphrase Aristotle, great spirits will always encounter opposition from ordinary minds.
Timko: In Murray's case, it was because he thought that women were being treated very badly in terms of their education. That there was a lower level of education...
Chiaramonte: When was Murray again?
Timko: We're talking late nineteenth century. He actually defied the university at McGill, and began setting up classrooms for women the town where he would give them the same education. Then he went on and said, "Look it, there are wealthy people out here, but owning property has its obligations. People of wealth need to give back to the community because the community enabled them to gain that wealth to begin with. So they need to build public libraries, they need to be engaged in bringing better nutrition and sanitary public bathhouses to the community."
But another person who left Canada, but remained very much a Canadian was Jacob Gould Schurman who became president of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. When he arrived at Cornell, one of the things he found was there were different sets of education—whether you be male or female, whether you be white or black. It wasn't an equal education. That disturbed him and he began to look at the situation and he said, "We need to get out of this. We're going to have real freedom. It's not just about freedom in teaching or freedom in publishing things, but true freedom to investigate wherever our investigations might take us."
Schurman warned the Cornell community about a tyranny that derives its authority from some kind of political partyism. Again, this is after Ryerson, so he might have been
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familiar with that term. The idea was that political partyism in education was as dangerous as tyranny from a church or religious tradition, and you have to work to avoid that. Because we need to allow socialists to teach socialism. That's necessary for advancing towards the truth. I'm paraphrasing here. I'm trying to remember.
But Jacob Gould Schurman went on to have a distinguished career in the United States government. One of the interesting quirks of his career was when he once publicly declared that the United States would be better off if it followed the Canadian model in the British North America Act, rather than the American Constitution.
Chiaramonte: Ah, a man well ahead of his time.
Timko: Well, I think he was pondering about whether or not to have a parliamentary system. One of the things he looked at in the United States was how fragmented America had become; that they had done things almost backwards. The way The U.S. set up the government. And that has always been problematic.
I don't know that there're any hope to change that in the future. I think one of the few hopes we have here is, if someone has the courage to abolish the Electoral College, then there'd be hope for the future of the United States.
Chiaramonte: I wanted to ask you what are your impressions of our sophomore Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Pierre Trudeau, and how would you compare him to his father Pierre Elliott Trudeau, or current freshman American president, Donald John Trump?
Timko: Justin, from what I read in the newspapers, has a popular following. People overwhelmingly supported the
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Liberal Party and he emerged as the leader of the Party. But people have also been disappointed that he hasn't been moving forward with some of the things he envisioned, and so there is that kind of pull back from him.
I don't think he has quite the aggressiveness and charisma of his father. Pierre Trudeau, you have to remember, was well respected on the international stage, even though Canada was, at the time, what we would call a middle power, a sort of in-between kind of situation. Trudeau, from my perspective, learned a little too much toward this sort of Bill of Rights kind of stuff that was going on in the United States.
So was Pierre Trudeau a true Canadian? Yes and no. There were times when he really expressed the strengthening of the Canadian identity and tradition. He was one of the people instrumental in the whole multicultural/bicultural/bilingual traditions, and the whole idea of setting up centres in universities all around the world, to teach the world about Canada. Something that Harper destroyed overnight, by the way. Took away 100% of the funding in a flash, destroying academic programmes that had been promoting Canadian Studies around the world. People don't talk about that.
Chiaramonte: That's the first I've heard of that and I should've known better, because in several ways I feel I've been a victim of it. We all have.
Timko: And there's been some hope that Justin Trudeau would have restored that. The hope was really that Stéphane Dion would push for the restoration of those programmes and we're hoping that Chrystia Freeland might pick up the challenge. But I don't know if that will happen. So I don't know enough about Justin to say where he might go. But I've been encouraged.
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The reaction I get from my friends and colleagues in the United States is that he looks much more like a leader and sounds much like a leader than his American counterpart. He's somebody who's calm and focused and knows where he wants to go. I think in the recent softwood lumber fiasco we saw him stand up to the metal. He was there. He said don't try to push us around because we're going to push back a little harder.
Chiaramonte: See, he knows his history. Apparently, Mr. Trump doesn't. Not a drop. This softwood lumber dispute has historic roots in this country and what it amount to is really modest in terns of NAFTA. I think it's only one or two percent of all Canadian exports to the United States.
Timko: Two percent.
Chiaramonte: Two percent. There you go. talk about politics getting in the way of knowledge, or vice versa.
Timko: The only people it's going to hurt are average American consumers.
Chiaramonte: Sure, because you need to build all this new housing infrastructure, and you can't get housing starts without softwood lumber. The Unites States doesn't produce enough of it to meet the demand. That's why you get it from us. I mean, dear gods Donald, read a book or something for heaven's sake.
Timko: Did you know that House Depot is one of the largest importers of Canadian lumber?
Chiaramonte: Of course not. It's no surprise though.
Timko: In the world. And there was also the other thing. Trump didn't understand the history of the whole dairy sub-
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sidies either, so that was problematic. It was a case of dumping, but there's is protectionism. I will say there is protectionism in Canada on the dairy side, but not so much on the lumber side. So there was a necessary understanding of history there, so that's one of the things that we need to comprehend.
Chiaramonte: And have the courage to act on that understanding. As for Trudeau, I agree with you about his showing courage. We'll have to test him some more. I'm also critical, as you mentioned, so are many others who see he hasn't kept a lot of the promises he was making so stringently while campaigning. But that seems to be the norm in politics at the moment. It's not a new thing, but it is wearing thin.
Timko: It's difficult for politician to keep their campaign promises because of the global pressures. Governing in the global economy is not like running a hotel business. It's really doing something much more important and much more valuable. And it really has to take into account not only your own people but also the people of the world.
You have to have a sense of wisdom, reasonableness, integrity and so on. You have to understand that you just can't run a government as a business; you can't run a university as a business. These are different entities with different goals. You can't impose the model of one on the other without creating chaos.
Chiaramonte: It's not just the model; it's the marketing. I mean, universities are claiming they need to take on more corporate business-like attitudes, because that is the way to be more efficient.
We hear it from everyone: "more effective" and "more efficient" and, of course, they never prove to be more effective
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or more efficient. It's just the same old, lame excuses, and tired, innocuous remedies. This is only opinion.
Timko: One of the indicators, Peter, is going to be this: pay attention to how presidents, and vice presidents, provosts, deans, and principals are hired at universities. Who are they?
Chiaramonte: The most conservative, unlettered, quite possibly un-educatable people. People who've been sanctioned by the pezzonovante as "team players." And being a team player in this context means that you rarely, if ever, question, challenge, or resist the will, whim, or folly of your superiors. Those who know all the jargon, bromides, and platitudes that only hides in plain view that they've done no original thinking.
Timko: I'll leave the descriptives to current politicians who seem to like superlatives. I'll deal with the substance. What we have now, what we used to have, is that people became administrators after distinguished teaching and research, a scholarly career. They understood the culture of the university community. They were part of it, they grew up in it, understood the history of it, and they knew how you could take that history and move it forward.
Now we've getting very narrowly trained individuals who are schooled as managers - as "human resources managers" - oh, how I hate the term. There are programmes now in universities called, "Management of Human Capital." Those are the type of people who are moving into administrative positions, and that should spell a warning sign.
It's not so much about who they are personally. It's about what kind of programmes they are coming out of. There is this attempt to take on this sort of corporate look, by taking
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on these people trained as managers of capital, albeit human capital. In my eyes, when you use the words, "human capital," it's just a modern term for "slavery." But that's unfortunately the sort of thinking that's going on there. Pay attention to that. Look at the credentials of the people who are rising to administrative positions and you will discover the problem.
Chiaramonte: I'm wondering where the resistance is going to come from, Bob. I mean, we talk about democratic values so much of the time, but then I look at my students. Students, by far, make up the best of all university constituents, including staff and faculty. They represent the majority. Yet they have the least say in what's going on. In fact, the students and faculty at the heart of the action have the least power of all. From my perspective, it's the administration, the government, and corporate interests—those who are most remote from the classroom where most of everything happened—that have the greatest control over who gets what at what cost for how long.
Students and faculty don't get to elect their deans, provosts, vice presidents, and so on. These folks are appointed. Some people higher up the chain of command selects them, and then, when we start to see that we are not getting the type or quality of person we deserve or require, how do we resist the authority's mandates? How do we fight back anymore? Maybe I am just out of the loop. I'm sure there's a noble resistance emerging somewhere in the underground.
Timko: It'll be very disheartening if we see this millennial population coming up without any strong commitment. That's going to be telling. In a way, I blame what happened with some of our generation. We coddled our children too much; we didn't challenge them enough.
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We have parents who wanted to protect and only do positive things for their children. Sometimes a child has to meet adversity as adversity and that's a challenge, that's a learning process. But we too many lawn mower parents who are trying to mow down every obstacle in the child's path. "Helicopter parenting" - always hovering over their children - making sure nothing bad happens.
And so, students feel privileged today. They actually look at themselves as consumers with consumer rights, rather than as people trying to learn and become better. That's part of the problem. So I don't have much hope unless we can do something about changing the way students look at what their education is all about.
It's not that they have a right to have people agree with them always—agreeing only with the things that they want to hear. But, as John Stuart Mill sort of said, we have to talk to the Devil; we have to know what the opposition thinks in order to improve our own position. We have to listen to dissenting voices. We have to listen to offensive voices. Because offensive voices are not harmful voices. Offensive voices tell us where we need to get better.
Chiaramonte: I had no idea that Mill was thinking like that at all. I'm enlightened and delighted to hear this. And so, due to my unawareness, I think it's the best thing that he ever said.
Timko: Read On Liberty more deeply.
Chiaramonte: Listen, Bob, I'm afraid that is all we have time for; unfortunately. I really enjoyed this and I'm humbled by your knowledge and insight into my home and native land's history of exceptional philosophers. And so much more.
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Maybe we'll pick this up again another time, check in, delve deeper, and see how things continue unfolding.
Timko: We barely touched the surface, Peter, barely touched the surface.
Dr. Robert Timko is Professor Emeritus, Mansfield University of Pennsylvania— where he was Chair of Philosophy and Director of Canadian Studies. He served as President of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers and the Middle Atlantic and New England Council for Canadian Studies. He's held Visiting Teaching and Research Professorships at universities in Canada, Russia, and the United States, and was the Co-Executive Editor of the journal, Representations of Canada for eight years.
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Dr. Peter Chiaramonte is a Canadian academic and a former professor and graduate leadership studies program director at Mansfield U., who has taught in several different disciplines and faculties at universities all across Canada, the U.S., and Europe. In addition to his work as a consultant in contemporary leadership studies and faculty/curriculum development in higher education, he is also author of the recent 'creative nonfiction' novel, No Journey's End
Публикация подготовлена А. И. Кубышкиным Адаптация текста К. МакМаллен Тимко
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