Connecting
Life at Massey College
Thank you, donors!
David Napier John Neale Sioban Nelson New Routes to The Future Ecological Foundation Anne Osler Sylvia Ostry Gilles Ouellette Mary Ann Parker Roger Parkinson James Parrish Louis Pauly Peter Pauly James Paupst Anthony Pawson Joseph Peckham Richard Peltier Derek Penslar Douglas Perovic Susan Perren Paul Perron David Peterson Heather Peterson Gaylanne Phelan Tony Pigott Peter Pokrupa
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From the Lodging
Photography by Brian Dench
Robert McMullan Roy McMurtry Joseph Medeiros Rosemary Meier Kelly Meighen Patricia Merivale Sarianna Metso David Miller Jane Millgate Arthur Millward David Mirvish John Monahan Peter Moon Carole Moore John Moore Joshua Morhart Brian Morrison Sue Mortimer Javad Mostaghimi David Mowbray Linda Munk Heather Munroe-Blum Jacqueline Murray
by Vivian Rakoff
by Elizabeth M ac Callum
T
he big change in the Master’s Lodging this year was the return of Clara Fraser, No. 3 daughter, who discovered that the cheapest digs happen to be with her parents while she does a two-year M.A. at Ryerson in Urban Planning. Being her father’s clone, only prettier and more organized, she livened up the place no end. It was a joy to the mother to hear the words, firmly articulated, “Focus, Dad. Just focus!” And sometimes, believe it or not, he actually did. Clara also was a huge help with the vast spreadsheet that is Life in the Lodging – the guest list. Together, she and Norma Briones, Clara’s second mother and the sine qua non of civilization in the place, kept things running. As one who does not joyfully greet the dawn, I am eternally grateful for Clara’s friendly cheer to the benighted Lodging guests trying to find their way around the house in the morning. In the fall term, Quadrangler and old friend Charlotte Gray spent several days with us while •
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Questioning the Stakes of Historical Reason,” which has just been held at Concordia University. Also, he will be editing the proceedings of the workshop, which will be published in a forthcoming anthology from Routledge Press and a special issue of the Journal of Historical Sociology. h joshua.nichols@utoronto.ca
Olivier Sorin was appointed
Liaison Adviser to the Master’s Office with the Governing Council of the University of Toronto. In this new position, he speaks directly with members of the Governing Council, of which he is an elected member, on
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researching her new book on the Klondike, and distinguished broadcaster David Halton stayed while he prepared for his Quadrangle Book Club presentation on David Remnick’s The Bridge about Barack Obama. Quadrangler and friend from Saturday Night days, Ernest Hillen, stayed over to enjoy a Massey event as well. With the fall also came the usual collection of dispossessed, injured, and between-stages Junior Fellows. Non-resident Jordan Guthrie stayed with us while he prepared to leave on his research/work year in Tanzania. Dylan Gordon used our ambulatory care services when he bunged his ankle and was having trouble commuting home. Alum and friend Andrea Paras camped out at the Lodging while her parents and grandparents took over her apartment on their trip to honour her convocation. And a notable reunion of Alum took place here with the visits of Myles Leslie and his wife, Sofie Pepermans – See FROM THE LODGING – page 14 ALUMNI
subjects of importance to the College, such as new special bursaries for foreign humanities students enrolled at the School of Graduate Studies, the construction project at the Martin Prosperity Centre, and the upcoming arrangements for the College’s 50th anniversary celebrations during 2012 and 2013.
2005 Ian Caines spent the last year
as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Toronto Law School after practising at Sullivan and Cromwell LLP in New York. h iancaines@me.com
To be happy, you must be wise. – George Santayana
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Amy Nugent welcomed her second daughter, Mairead, and is Senior Manager at the Ontario Ministry of Intergovernmental Affairs. h amy.nugent@gmail.com
Ruth Panofsky (Visiting Scholar) specializes in the history of the Macmillan Company of Canada. She is a Professor, English, Ryerson University and lives in Toronto. h panofsky@ryerson.ca
Scott Young is a biomedical
engineer and Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles. h scottjasonyoung@gmail.com
It hardly bears repeating that Massey College is a place – a state of mind, even – where connections are made, ones that bridge disciplines, town and gown, cultures of various kinds. As our 50th anniversary approaches, we thought it would be fitting to introduce a regular column devoted to exploring the various meanings of such connections. In this column, members of our community will share their thoughts with us about interdisciplinarity, links between the academy and the wider world, and about the very purpose of academic institutions. Massey College may not be specifically mentioned in these pieces, but its presence as a facilitating environment can always be assumed. Long-standing Senior Fellow Vivian Rakoff has kindly agreed to inaugurate our new column with his thoughts on “The University” in colonial and post-colonial times.
M
y first idea of a university – “The University” – was formed by the University of Cape Town. That idea was not of a specific academic place or anything so quotidian, but of a mythical domain “up there.” And that particular university was, and is, indeed physically up there: hovering like an acropolis above Cape Town, cascading down from its apex, a Palladian temple flanked by symmetrical columned wings past a series of neo-classical parapets to a high ivy-covered wall just above heavily trafficked De Waal Drive, a very busy road crammed with speeding cars. When we drove by that university, my parents would gesture upward and say (I guess in awe), “There’s the university.” Leading up from the road is a flight of granite steps piercing the wall. At the top of the steps a larger-than-life-sized bronze monument to Cecil Rhodes used to sit (he’s been moved since), enthroned, staring across the deep valley below, a scroll of paper in his right hand. (Later, I would come to know the juvenile jokes. The last time a virgin walked by Rhodes stood up; he’ll do so again the next time one does. And see that paper in his hand? He’s run out of toilet paper. Ha! Ha! Ha!) When I was 16 going on 17, I was let in, and I duly climbed the endless steps ascending to the library and the student union again and again and again. Inevitably with each climb, the place became more ordinary. Before long, too, my new-found Marxist friends gave me a powerful and readymade set of intellectual instruments which would undermine my idealized notion of “The University.” As a consequence, Rhodes, on whose land grant the university was built, changed from being the presiding bronze demi-god reminiscent of Rodin’s thinker. In spite of his acquired patina of respectability – as the generator of the Rhodes scholarships, his patronage of the arts that resulted in the National Gallery in Cape Town – in spite of all that, he became in my circle the quintessential figure of the rot of colonial power and oppression.
The physical structure of the university, which had seemed a remote temple of learning, became, as I was alerted to the cultural semiotics of post-colonial theory, a concrete expression of cultural hegemony (though, I hasten to add, these labels were not yet attached to such ideas 60 years ago). It’s worth noting that Herbert Baker, who put his stamp on the final plans of the University of Cape Town, was Rhodes’s favourite architect. A creature of empire, the sun never set on Baker’s buildings. Their monumental symmetries became – in imperial buildings in New Delhi, Oxford, Cambridge, and the Union Buildings in Pretoria – the triumphal markers of British power. How redolent of empire as well was Jameson Hall, which sits at the very apex of the architectural symmetries of the University of Cape Town. This dominant Parthenon-like convocation hall is named for Rhodes’s sidekick, Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, whose provocative and disastrous raid into the independent Transvaal Republic was one of the sparks which set off the Boer War. He, too, like Rhodes, would be laundered into a statesman, and also like Rhodes he would become prime minister of the Cape Colony. But the very criticism of the university of my generation of undergraduates meant that the true function of a university ‒ engagement with ideas ‒ was nonetheless being fulfilled in the debates we had inside this colonial cocoon. Later I would read Newman’s The Idea of a University, and I was pleased to recognize in its lofty expectations my first modest university. Without realizing it at the time, I had found my “republic,” the place of my enduring belonging: first in South Africa, later in England, and eventually in Canada. In the late sixties, more powerful and sophisticated criticism of “The University” disrupted campuses throughout the West. But most universities emerged from the crisis of the times by accommodating themselves to the message of the student occupations of administrative offices, with their charges of irrelevancy and elitism. To me, these were echoes of the arguments I had heard long ago
Vivian Rakoff in Cape Town: that the university was a cover for the continuing authority of dead white males, Eurocentrism, and hegemonic capitalism. Curricula changed, as did governance to include students. In short, “The University” endured. Once again, though, I am troubled by threats to the idea of the university as the preserver, imparter, and maker of knowledge. The structure has become more bureaucratic, fundraisers seem to be more valued than scholars, and the “non-productive” disciplines of philosophy, language, and literature are constantly under threat of being closed down, their role as bearers of the civilization and guardians of complex histories dismissed. Of course, I recognize that no institution exists on the energy of its own myth making. It does need money, but when the money threatens to overtake the soul of the institution, a reconsideration of priorities is called for. Our own Massey College has some lessons to teach us here ‒ in the almost-always-perfect equilibrium it achieves among the magic of its myths, the vigour of the ideas that fill its welcoming spaces, and, yes, the impressive sums raised to keep it all afloat. Vivian Rakoff was born in Cape Town, South Africa. He attended the University of Cape Town and University College London, and taught at McGill and the University of Toronto, where he was Chair of the Department of Psychiatry. His other posts included those of Director and Psychiatrist-inChief at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry (now the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health) and Psychiatrist-in-Chief at Sunnybrook Medical Centre. He is now Professor Emeritus and, since 1997, has been a Senior Fellow at Massey College.
Happiness is impossible, and even inconceivable, to a mind without scope and without pause, a mind driven by craving, pleasure or fear.
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