| Readers
of “The City of the End of Things,” Archibald
Lampman’s dark vision of “The Issue of Things
that Are,” will recall that as the city crumbles
into “rust and dust” all that remains of
its builders are four “carved idols,” three
of which sit “face to face” in an “iron
tower” while the fourth—the one destined
to survive the rest—is a “grim Idiot”
without “mind or soul” that sits at the
city gate staring “toward the lightless north.”
Although the temptation to think so is sometimes very
strong, Lampman’s visionary city is not Ottawa
and the “grim Idiot” at the gate is not
the quintessential Canadian politician. Nor is Lampman’s
poem being advanced here either as a simulacrum of the
federal government or, heaven forfend the gloomy thought,
as a reflection of the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council; rather, I would like to think of Lampman’s
four “carved” figures in Baconian terms
as representations of the four classes of idols that
the SSHRC appears to be in the process of avoiding as
its transformation proceeds from consultation to policy—the
idols of scienceolatry, instrumentolatry, productolatry
and—perhaps more controversially—researcholatry.
It
seems like eons ago—actually, it was in 1940—that
the American educational theorist John Dewey (in)famously
argued that the “future of our civilization depends
on the widening spread and the deepening hold of the
scientific habit of mind.” Yet anyone who has
observed the changes even in the SSHRC’s application
forms over the last decade or more can scarcely doubt
that the “widening” and “deepening”
has continued almost unabated. So it must be with relief
and gratitude that we in the Arts greet the Council’s
abandonment of “Human Sciences” and the
retention of “Humanities” as the term for
what we do in our disciplines. The scientific method
was designed as an instrument for exploring physical
nature, and useful and fruitful as it is for examining
those aspects of human beings that belong to the physical
realm and for thinking and theorizing about how we approach
our subjects, it sits to one side of the realm of human
values and the world of human, often imaginative, artefacts
in which humanists live and work. The debate about the
relative educational and social importance of the Arts
and Sciences that so exercised Matthew Arnold, T.H.
Huxley, and others towards the end of the Victorian
period continued into the twentieth century, and echoes
of it can still be heard today in discussions of federal
and provincial funding for research. No less now than
in previous decades, the interests of both society and
the universities are surely best served by adequate
funding for research across the full spectrum of the
Arts and Sciences, a goal that is unlikely to be achieved
by papering over the contributions of the Humanities
and Social Sciences with graph paper to make them seem
other than what they are and, it must be said, other
than what a great many people readily recognize and
value as one of the university’s and society’s
most important components.
Just
as scienceolatry has been resisted during the SSHRC
transformation process, so too has instrumentolatry—which
is to say, the call for scholars and researchers in
the Humanities and Social Sciences to view their work
largely in terms of its value to users of knowledge
in the public and private sectors. Few have doubted
the value of emphasizing the pragmatic or utilitarian
aspects of work in the Humanities and Social Sciences
when it is possible and prudent to do so: the generosity
of benefactors is better encouraged by magnanimity than
aloofness. But time and again the point has been made
during consultations and in reports flowing from them
that under no circumstances should work in the Humanities
and Social Sciences be conceived or regarded as a tool
that must be engineered or adjusted to fit the screws
and nuts of the political and social machine, however
demanding and important that machine may be. In the
early nineteen sixties, Claude Bissell, who by then
was not merely a distinguished commentator on Canadian
culture (his Our Living Tradition was published
in 1957), but also the president of the University of
Toronto, spoke eloquently of the dangers inherent in
the “governmentalization” of Canada’s
universities. By resisting instrumentolatry, the SSHRC
and its constituent scholars and researchers have protected
the independence and resisted as far as is possible
and prudent the “governmentalization” of
research and scholarship in the Humanities and the Social
Sciences.
Closely
enough related to instrumentology to be easily mistaken
for its twin is the third idol that seems to have been
successfully resisted during the SSHRC transformation
process: productolatry—that is, the urge to define
scholars and researchers in the Humanities and Social
Sciences as producers of products that can and should
be marketed and consumed by the public at large. This
is not to say that the importance of making the public
as aware as possible of the ideas and findings of scholars
and researchers in the disciplines supported by the
public funds through the SSHRC has not been recognized
and accepted, but, rather, that the task of marketing
those ideas and findings has been properly understood
as best undertaken by the SSHRC itself with the assistance
of the scholar and researcher, possibly through easily
accessible statements that can be regularly collected
and circulated, as appropriate to local, national, and
international media. A division of responsibilities
along these or similar lines would, it has been suggested,
make good use of the media expertise available in the
SSHRC (and, perhaps, the Canadian Federation for the
Humanities and Social Sciences) and allow scholars and
researchers to maximize their capacity to generate material
of actual or potential interest to the general public.
As
intimated at the outset, the fourth and final of my
idols—researcholatry—is perhaps more controversial
than the others, the reason being the suggestion that
in the Humanities especially (but not exclusively) too
great an emphasis on research may be a danger, not merely
because it brings with it a whiff of scienceolatry,
but also because it has the potential to result in the
severance of research from teaching. It was partly to
preclude such a severance that the concept of “confederation
of learning” was proposed to the SSHRC as a means
of thinking about its place in Canadian society, for
learning brings with it the sense that scholars and
researchers in the Humanities and Social Sciences are
at once seekers of new knowledge about human life and
human creations and imparters of new and received knowledge
to others, be they students and peers within the educational
system or members of the general public. It is our task
as research-teachers and teacher-researchers both to
discover all that we can about our subjects and to share
our findings with our students and peers. Today we are
gathered together under the aegis of the Association
of Canadian College and University Teachers
of English to reflect upon the transformation of the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada: we are gathered as teachers and
researchers whose very identity as humanistic enquirers
and educators can be confirmed by an emphasis on our
place in the learning process.
Almost
needless to say, much hard work and mutual understanding
lies ahead if the SSHRC is to convince the federal government
of the need for more funding for research and scholarship
in the Humanities and Social Sciences. That funding
may not be forthcoming, at least not in the amount requested,
but even if it is not there is good reason to hope that,
thanks to an open and comprehensive process of—dare
it be said?—learning, the “mind [and] soul”
of the Humanities and Social Sciences have asserted
themselves, the “carved idols” recognized
and, so far as possible, resisted, and the great city
of which humanists and humanistic sciences are the rightful
custodians saved, at least for the time being, from
“rust and dust.”
(An earlier
form of this paper was presented at a session on the
transformation of the SSHRC at the ACCUTE conference
at the University of Manitoba in May 2004 and published
in the September 2004 number of the ACCUTE Newsletter.) |