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paper was prepared for presentation at the Council of
Ontario Universities Colloquium on Research and Teaching
at the University of Western Ontario in May 1994 and
subsequently delivered to a delegation from the Ontario
Council of University Affairs. It has been augmented
with materials very kindly supplied by Susan Mann and
David F. Strong. My thanks also to Susan Bentley, T.J.
Collins, Paul Davenport, William C. Leggett, Kenneth
L. Ozmon, Pierre Reid, R.J. Shroyer, A.M. Young, J.M.
Zezulka, the 1994 3M Fellows, and the numerous others
who have given me the benefit of their ideas and support.
The paper was first published in the March 1995 number
of the Newsletter of the Association of Canadian University
Teachers of English. D.M.R.B.
If
not before, then certainly since the publication in
1992 of Jaroslav Pelikan's The Idea of the University:
a Reexamination, most people with a strong interest
in the current condition and future prospects of the
university will have encountered John Henry Newman's
famous, false, and almost fatuous distinction between
teachers and researchers. "To discover and to teach
are distinct functions" and "distinct gifts"
asserts Newman in the Preface to the original Idea
of a University;
He...who spends his day in dispensing his existing
knowledge to all comers is unlikely to have either
leisure or energy to acquire new. The common sense
of mankind has associated the search after truth with
seclusion and quiet. The greatest thinkers have been
too intent on their subject to admit interruption;
they have been men of absent minds and idiosyncratic
habits, and have, more or less, shunned the lecture
room and the public school. (8; and qtd. in Pelikan
80-81)
Informing the perceptions and judgements of this passage
are two caricatures that contain just enough truth or
"common sense" to keep them alive and influential
in the popular and even the academic imagination. The
first is the figure of the indefatigable and under-appreciated
teacher who spends all his days instructing vast numbers
of voraciously demanding students, usually at the undergraduate
level. The second is the figure of the eccentric and
distracted researcher who has an abundance of "leisure"
to pursue disinterested scholarship in the company of
an élite cabal of colleagues and students, usually
at the graduate level. Since he envisages them as such
radically different types, it is scarcely surprising
that Newman relegates teachers and researchers to separate
institutions in his Idea of the University,
the former to "Universities" and the latter
to "Academies" (8).
The fact that Newman's caricatures do, occasionally,
hold true in reality as well as in movies, "television
[and] popular literature" (Giamatti 198),1
must not be allowed to blind us to their gross inaccuracy
as representations of the vast majority of faculty members
in late-twentieth-century Canadian universities. It
is a moot and debatable point whether any of this country's
institutions of higher learning have ever successfully
emulated Newman's Oxford, let alone the Socratic schools
upon which he based his pedagogical ideals (and, of
course, another vexed issue is whether they should have
attempted to do so in the first place). Less open to
debate because obvious to anyone with eyes to see is
that Canadian universities today are for a variety of
historical and sociological reasons both "Universities"
and "Academies"—institutions in which
faculty members are motivated "[t]o discover"
as well as "to teach" by the disciplinary
and professional ideals that they themselves have established
in their university's Appointments, Promotion, and Tenure
documents. No less in Canada than in Britain, the United
States, and elsewhere have university faculty members
accepted the responsibility and challenge of "combining
the advancement of knowledge through research with the
extension of knowledge through teaching" (Pelikan
80).2 That
a small and often vocal minority of faculty resents
the system of rewards and punishments, the proverbial
sticks and carrots, that accompanies this quest for
balance is a natural, inevitable, and sometimes justified
consequence of the incompatibility between high ideals
and human nature which should no more be allowed to
compromise the ideal than to breed indifference to excellence
in one or other of the areas that it seeks to bring
into creative conjunction.
Despite the fantasies of many of their founders and
architects, the roots of Canada's universities lie less
in Britain or France than in the United States and Germany—in
the American idea of a liberal or humanistic education
and, more to the present point, in the German understanding
of the interdependence of teaching and research (see
Giametti 41, 129-37). It is because the roots of the
Canadian university system lie deep in nineteenth-century
German soil that Adolf Von Harnack's famous "statement
of faith" at Münster in 1929 can so easily
be expanded to include Canada:
Never must our German [and Canadian] universities
and institutions of higher learning change their character
of being devoted both to instruction and to research.
It is in the combination of research and instruction
that the[ir] distinctiveness...is expressed; [and]
this distinctiveness, in which research and instruction
mutually fructify each other, would be completely
destroyed if this combination were dissolved.... [In
some countries] the chief emphasis lies on introducing
students to the results of scholarship. But at our
universities we want to introduce them to scholarship
itself, and to teach them how one arrives at the reality
and truth of things and how one can advance the progress
of scholarship. (qtd. in Pelikan 84-85)3
So how does one "introduce [students] to scholarship
itself"? How does one involve them in the process
through which new knowledge and fresh perspectives are
developed? How does a faculty member combine "the
advancement of knowledge through research with the extension
of knowledge through teaching"? No doubt, there
are as many answers to these questions as there are
students and faculty members. What follows, then, can
only be a personal view based on my own limited but,
I hope, not entirely idiosyncratic experience as an
instructor and researcher in English at Western, a university
which for many years has conceived of itself as an institution
"devoted both to instruction and research":
To quote the relevant section of The University
of Western Ontario: Conditions of Appointment:
"[t]he criteria for evaluating the candidate's
record shall be: (a) Performance in teaching and associated
activities.... (b) Performance in research, performance
in scholarly activity, and..., where appropriate, performance
in the fine and performing arts...[and] (c) Performance
in general contributions to the University, the academic
profession, and the community... Each candidate for
promotion and/or tenure is expected to establish a record
of performance in (a), and (b) and in (c). Normally,
the significance accorded to (a) and (b) relative to
each other should be approximately equal and individually
greater than that for (c) (6).4
When I came to Western in 1975, it was made abundantly
clear to me that research and scholarship should occupy
large quantities of what Newman calls my "leisure"
time. But it was also made very clear that the English
Department viewed itself as a place in which teaching
and learning were to be vigorously fostered among both
students and faculty. During my early years as an Assistant
Professor, I was assigned an honours course in one of
my areas of specialization (Canadian literature) but
I was also apprenticed, as it were, to some of the Department's
finest teacher-scholars in a variety of general and
first-year courses. This was as pedagogically inspiring
as it was bracingly intimidating, and I have no doubt
whatsoever that the few skills that I now have in communicating
ideas to students and colleagues in oral and written
form were shaped in the crucible of my early and continued
exposure to undergraduate teaching in teams composed
of experienced instructors and, later, enthusiastic
graduate students. I am sure that I am not alone in
noticing how frequently new perspectives and fresh ideas
take shape under the pressure of preparing lectures,
tutorials, and assignments for honours, general, and
first-year courses. There is nothing better than the
puzzled look of a first-year student to tell you that
an idea is unconvincing or poorly stated. By the same
token, there is nothing more exciting than seeing the
light go on in an undergraduate's eyes as the result
of what you know to be a new idea or a fresh perspective.
"The scholar can have no better practice for...writing...books
than a continued exposure to undergraduate teaching,"
observes Pelikan with only a modicum of hyperbole, for
the task of "organizing the material of an undergraduate
course into discrete units, like the task of dividing
the results of an investigation into an outline and
individual chapters," requires a great deal of
"critical reflection about...hypotheses and generalizations"
(94-95). As a Japanese proverb has it: "[t]o teach
is to learn."
Of course it would be disingenuous to suggest that undergraduate
teaching is the only, or even the richest, source of
the sorts of new ideas and fresh perspectives that characterize
the most engaging and enduring scholarship in the humanities.
In my experience, the most reliable sources of these
insights are colleagues, the library, and those chance
discoveries that theologians and psychologists attribute
to the workings of Providence and syncronicity. "I
am a great believer in luck," Stephen Leacock is
supposed to have said, "and I find the harder I
work the more I have of it." While my own sense
of the origin of good fortune is both providential and
Leacockian, it also involves a recognition that, thanks
to the support of the SSHRCC and Western's Academic
Development Fund, I have been able to work intensively
and extensively in an area of research—early Canadian
writing—that has proved to be fabulously rich
in the raw material from which new ideas and fresh perspectives
can be minted. To date, the research project with which
I am involved—a series of scholarly editions and
studies of early Canadian long poems—has produced
fifteen monographs and numerous related articles and
projects, including several by scholars at other Canadian
universities. A critical history of early Canadian long
poems entitled Mimic Fires has recently been
published by McGill-Queen's University Press, and a
seven-hundred page classroom anthology of the same materials—Early
Long Poems on Canada—has recently appeared
through the Canadian Poetry Press.
In many ways, Early Long Poems on Canada illustrates
the interaction between teaching and research that the
Canadian university system mandates and encourages.
A trial version of the anthology was assembled for a
graduate course in Canadian literature in 1989-90; a
selection of the poems contained in it was gradually
added to the anthology of Early Writing in Canada
that has been used in our honours Canadian literature
course since the early eighties; and the introductions
and annotations to these and other poems in the Canadian
Poetry Press Series were developed in response to the
views and needs of undergraduate students; that is,
the undergraduate students working as research and computing
assistants on the Canadian Poetry Project were asked
to go carefully through the poems, marking words and
phrases whose meaning they found opaque or obscure.
As a result of this exercise, the level of annotation
in the Canadian Poetry Press Series has seemed too high
for some traditional scholars (see Bentley viii), but
it nevertheless reflects the established needs of contemporary
students for whom classical and Christian materials
are much less familiar than they were to previous generations.
Without the clarifying interaction between students
and faculty that is created by an emphasis on "both...
instruction...and...research" the products
of the Canadian Poetry Project would unquestionably
have been other and lesser than they are.
It scarcely needs to be said that projects such as the
one I have been describing have also been productive
at the level of graduate research and community service.
Since 1987, five M.A. theses at Western have taken the
form of scholarly editions of early Canadian long poems,
thus providing their authors with an opportunity to
place on permanent record their mastery of all the skills
traditionally associated with English literary studies,
from critical analysis to descriptive bibliography.
During approximately the same period, knowledge and
experience gained from the project has directly and
indirectly enriched the work of several doctoral students
who now occupy tenured or tenurable positions at Alberta,
Ottawa, Queen's, McGill, Memorial, and other universities.
And for its principal investigator and principal student,
the Canadian Poetry Project has provided a seemingly
endless series of puzzles and opportunities, one of
the most productive of which was a reference to Native
land claims in an early Canadian long poem,The Rising
Village that led to the proceedings of the Supreme
Court of Canada, to the decisions of the Marshall court
in the nineteenth-century U.S., and, thence, to any
group or any journal that would entertain the results
of these researches: a motley company that included
Western's Senior Alumni Association, the Learning Unlimited
group at Woodstock, the Department of English at Dalhousie,
and the journals Canadian Literature, and Recherches
sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry. Of course,
one incentive for these research and teaching activities
is provided by the University's endorsement of scholarly
communication in the local, regional, national, and
international forums. More gratifying and motivating,
however, is the interest of colleagues and students
at all levels—graduate, honours, general, first-year,
and continuing—in the perception that early Canadian
poetry and today's Native land claims are both deeply
informed by ideas about property and social development
whose origins lie in the theories of John Locke, Adam
Smith, and other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
thinkers. This year I have added The Rising Village
to the list of texts to be studied by the three hundred
and fifty or so students in my section of first-year
English. With any luck, it will increase their awareness
and understanding, not only of Canadian literature,
but also of the cultural continuity of which it is a
part and a reflection.
One final aspect of the Canadian Poetry Project and
similar research endeavours needs to be mentioned in
the present context, and that is the opportunity they
provide for graduate and undergraduate research assistants
to acquire usable computing and publishing skills while
they are helping to "advance the progress of scholarship."
During the academic year and the summer term, the Canadian
Poetry Project employs several such research assistants,
who learn to perform all the tasks necessary to transform
raw documents into publishable books. All the Canadian
Poetry Press editions have been produced in this manner,
as for the last three years has the journal Canadian
Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews. As evidence
that it is possible, at least on a small scale, to combine
the scholarly aims of conserving and advancing knowledge
with the utilitarian goal of providing students with
usable—indeed, marketable—skills, I can
do no better than quote two letters from graduates of
the Canadian Poetry Project. The first is from Thérèse
Clohosey, who went on to do "freelance work in
writing, editing, and designing" after her stint
as a research assistant on the Canadian Poetry Project
in 1988-90 and now works in the Community Services department
at Georgian College in Barrie. "Due to my experience
with desktop publishing" [on the Canadian Poetry
Project], she writes, "I was responsible for the
design and layout of a Resource Kit" for "businesses
and industries that are downsizing.... I greatly enjoyed
my time with the Canadian Poetry Press and the experience
I gained has been invaluable to me. Thank you for providing
me with the opportunity to learn more about not only
the publishing process but also the rich legacy of Canadian
poetry." The second letter is from Donna Fitzpatrick,
who worked briefly on "computer software development
at Bell Canada" after leaving the Project in 1987
and now runs the office of a Senator in Ottawa. Ms.
Fitzpatrick writes that "[w]orking for [the Canadian
Poetry Project] was [her] introduction to computers,
and "taught [her] the skills [she] needed to compete
in the job market":
The time I spent on the Project...was a distinct advantage
when I applied for employment. University students
in the arts do not have the same opportunities to
gain experience in the workplace that science students
often do; this was, in effect, a co-op programme...which
enhanced the credibility of my time at the university....
I strongly encourage...continued support of projects
such as this which allow English students the opportunity
to identify particular skills on a résumé,
when too often employers cannot recognize the intangible
skills an English degree represents.
Ms.
Fitzpatrick also states her belief "that working
in the academic world helped distinguish [her] from
applicants who had only worked in the public sector,
or had spent their time at university entirely on their
studies." Taken together, the letters and experiences
of Thérèse Clohosey, Donna Fitzpatrick,
and others like them suggest that so long as Canadian
universities continue to foster both teaching and research
they will be able to accommodate the diverse and changing
needs of their students, their faculty, and the society
at large.
Grounded in history, tested by time, and perennially
capable of producing new branches, new leaves, and new
fruit, the Canadian university is a fertile hybrid of
teaching and research that must not be allowed to wither
away in the drought caused, in part, by anti-intellectuals
of the political left and right who either fail to see
its unique traditions and strengths or wish to bend
its structure and constituents to their own purposes.
Already the narrow and manipulative agendas of certain
provincial governments, educational theorists, and faculty
associations (or unions) have put enormous strain on
the universities' ability to fulfil their research-and-teaching
functions. Already these interdependent functions have
been split apart by those who equate research with release
time and attendance at smorgasbord conferences or teaching
with hand gestures and references to Star Trek. Already
the intellectual and social lives of present and future
generations of students and faculty have been distorted
and impoverished. But perhaps it is not too late to
repair existing and prevent future damage by affirming
once again with Von Harnack that the distinctiveness
and fertility of our universities resides in their simultaneous
devotion "both to instruction and to research."
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