REMEMBRANCE OF THOUGHTS PAST Canadian Thinkers Victorian, Tory and Grumpy

April 1, 2002,  Books in Canada

A Disciplined Intelligence:
Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era
A. B. McKillop
McGill-Queen's University Press
ISBN: 0-7735-2141-0

Canadian Intellectuals, the Tory Tradition,
and the Challenge of Modernity, 1939-1970
Philip Massolin
University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0-8020-3509-4

Intellectual history demands a precise grasp of the ideas under study and their development and a judicious assessment of the extent to which they reflect or influence their times. A clear focus is essential or intellectual history becomes a blur.

Ideas can have a history of their own. The deepest and most important thinking may be eccentric and marginal in its time. Its influence may come generations later. Its importance may be its truth rather than its representativeness. The ideas that hold sway at any particular time may be commonplaces best found in the popular media or political speeches. What intellectuals write may be of secondary importance. In Canada intellectuals have seldom been a major influence. Even when they were famous - perhaps Marshall McLuhan was the most famous - their significance was more as objects of national pride than in any impact on the life of the country.

These two books open doors onto Canadian thinking in two periods in the past. They fail to shed much light on it.

Brian McKillop's A Disciplined Intelligence is a seminal work. First published in 1979 it is now reissued with a new introduction and an updated bibliography. At the time McKillop was working on the thesis that became the book Carl Berger's The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism 1867-1914 (University of Toronto Press, 1970) was practically the only book on the Canadian intellectual history shelf. It is still perhaps the best. In his new introduction and bibliography McKillop is able to note upwards of a dozen later books in the field, many directly influenced by him.

McKillop deals with little more than a handful of thinkers in Protestant English Canada from roughly 1850 to 1920. Most were philosophy professors. They were often also clergymen or scientists or both. By the 1860's they were wrestling with the impact of Darwin. Before that they seemed to have found a happy orthodoxy combining Protestant theology, Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and William Paley's argument from design, under which every new scientific discovery could be taken as fresh evidence of God's ingenuity and benevolence.

It is well to be reminded, when all public education is atheist, that English Canada's universities at their foundation were all Christian establishments. Their faculty were practically all British educated, if not British born, and very often Scottish. Scottish Common Sense Philosophy, though now reduced in the history of philosophy to a minor school, was big in Britain.

McKillop disparages it as little more than an ideology convenient for its compatibility with Christian theology. He finds it guilty of dualism, as if this were an elementary error now behind us. Dualism is a perennial problem of philosophy. Many philosophers who claim to overcome it have been accused of lapsing into it. Others who are expressly dualist accommodate it in ways that seem to transcend it.

McKillop gives the impression that universities were in the grip of a stifling dogmatism like that of dialectical materialism in the old Soviet Bloc. One would not suspect from McKillop that undergraduates at King's College in Toronto in the 1840's were required to study Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, condemned by the Common Sense school as a wrong turning.

19th century students were not free to pick and choose their courses as students do now. They got prescribed doses of Christianity and philosophy. Philosophy was probably more important to the tiny minority of young people who went to university then than it is to the host of young people who go to university now, among whom an even tinier minority study philosophy. But 19th century students also studied Classics, English and European literature, history, mathematics and the sciences. Compared to today's conventional mix of political correctness, trendy reading and lip service to critical thinking it was probably quite a broadening curriculum.

McKillop never studied philosophy, put off he says by a University of Manitoba department interested only in Wittgenstein and A. J. Ayer. For a book catalogued under "philosophy" this might be a bit of a handicap. But A Disciplined Intelligence is not a work of philosophy even if most of its subjects taught philosophy. Its treatment of Common Sense Philosophy and Hegelian idealism as transmitted by Edward Caird of Glasgow University to John Watson and expounded by him for fifty years at Queen's University is superficial. A little training in the precision and clarity of analytic philosophy might have helped McKillop to bring the thought of his subjects into better focus.

In a long review in Canadian Historical Review (June 1999) McKillop was harshly critical of Jack Granatstein's Who Killed Canadian History? (Harper-Collins, 1998). He fairly argued that there is more to Canadian history than politics and war. But if history is to include conditions of domestic service and academic writing in Victorian Canada it must still make the connection between these fields and the life of the country. Rather obscurely the thought McKillop chronicles finally issued in the Social Gospel, whose impact on the life of Canadians in the early 20th century was important. But until that development the place of Victorian thought in the life of the country is not explained.

In neither of these books is it supposed that the ideas treated might have any value in themselves. They are simply expressions of attitudes and interests that rise up and fade away and can have now only a kind of archaeological interest. For McKillop the ideas of his subjects are simply the period attire of a continuing struggle to "to reach a modus vivendi between intellectual inquiry and conventional wisdom, between individual autonomy and the social good, between the myth of freedom and the myth of concern.". The last antithesis is a patriotic borrowing of language of Northrop Frye, which may have been useful in his own writing but only adds to the vagueness of McKillop's.

A source frequently relied on by McKillop is university addresses consisting of edifying platitudes. Anyone who tried to understand what goes on in universities today by reading the addresses of university presidents would be in deep trouble.

The title of Philip Massolin's Canadian Intellectuals, the Tory Tradition, and the Challenge of Modernity, 1939-1970 promises a more precise subject and a more carefully circumscribed period. There is a particular Canadian Tory tradition and it has had some significant intellectual exponents. Unfortunately it is a poor book, reworking a particularly pedestrian thesis. It is largely clumsy paraphrases of a disparate selection of writers who are united not in being Tory but in being grumpy. The platitudinous moaning about the decline of culture and civilisation is tediously repetitive. The same quotations recur in different chapters. Massolin writes badly and pretentiously. He is almost comically fond of the verb "aver". There is quite a lot of mundane university history, the amounts of government grants, the political troubles of Frank Underhill, no Tory he.

Of the writers dealt with only Donald Creighton, W. L. Morton and George P. Grant can surely be called Tory. Harold Innis shared some of his great friend Creighton's ideas but his important writings are too idiosyncratic to bear any label. Northrop Frye was occasionally grumpy about developments in the university but never a Tory. Marshall McLuhan still less. He ended up a kind of post-modern guru. And what are Walter Lippman and Malcolm Muggeridge doing in a book about the Tory tradition in Canada?

Massolin advances only two doubtful ideas of his own and then simply pronounces the Tory Tradition dead. He suggests that the grumpiness he reports was simply an interested reaction of arts professors to declining relative salaries and prestige in the period he covers. He does not make out the case that there was such a decline. He could not explain by it anything specifically Tory when liberal and left-wing academics were in the same boat. Moreover, declining salaries and prestige hardly affected Vincent Massey, who is extensively quoted.

He is on to something when he describes the co-option of the Tory nationalist tradition by the left in the 1960's and after. But he misses a key part of the phenomenon. It is itself an American influence, the overflow of young America's reaction against its country in the 1960's. Often American immigrants were the carriers of the new nationalism.

The Tories Massolin describes are all dead. The Tory Tradition is not dead. It is simply obscured, as it has been for eighty years, under the Liberal hegemony.

The productivity of Canada's university presses is a mixed blessing. Massolin's book will be an obstacle in the way of graduate students required to read the literature. McKillop's book succeeds in exposing some of the forgotten thinking of Victorian Canada. But McKillop's best service has probably been in republishing some of the writings of William Dawson LeSueur in A Critical Spirit: The Thought of William Dawson LeSueur (McLelland And Stewart, 1972). We should do best to dig out what these people wrote and read them ourselves with an open mind, believing their ideas still have something to teach us. History is not progress. Dusty tomes from the 19th century have far better to offer us than John Ralston Saul and Michael Ignatieff, both commended by McKillop in his introduction.

Peter Emberley's very modest proposals for universities under siege in 1997

THE EMBERLEY PRESCRIPTION

April 1, 1997 GRAVITAS



Zero Tolerance:
Hot Button Politics in Canada's Universities

Peter C. Emberley

Penguin Books



Peter Emberley has acquired a reputation as a trenchant critic of education policy with Bankrupt Education: The Decline of Liberal Education in Canada and other writings. His regard for George Grant, Michael Oakeshott and other ambiguously conservative writers and his advocacy of traditional liberal education has been sympathetic to many conservatives. But Emberley is not the kind of man who can happily accept a political label. He is at once too high brow and too combative. Zero Tolerance is largely a polemic against the pressures besetting universities in the 90's. He dishes it out with equal vehemence against what he calls the corporate right and the cultural left. His prescriptions might be called moderate, though they are more truly lame: better management.



Emberley proceeds through a series of issues denouncing what he calls hot button or predictable responses to each. He attacks the attack on tenure and the defence of tenure, Maclean's survey of universities and the universities' defensiveness before rating, the promotion of the Income Contingent Loan Program and students' expectations of free education. What he is for is obscure and there is an element of suspense as the reader slowly proceeds to the last chapter and its recommendations.



The treatment of the controversy over the zero tolerance "Framework Regarding Harassment and Discrimination in Ontario Universities and Colleges" proposed by Ontario's late NDP government in 1993 is a particularly frustrating case of his damning both sides on a quite straightforward issue. The Framework envisaged a truly Orwellian ideological restraint on the life of universities and colleges. Emberley is himself vigorous in his denunciation of it. The most noted protest against the framework was a "Statement on Free Inquiry and Expression" signed by 40% of the faculty at Trent University, in which the professors claimed a "right to offend". Emberley, with about equal vigour, denounces the professors' initiative, as if they were vicious boors intent on driving their students and colleagues to tears. The Trent professors, who include old lefties, conservatives and apolitical scholars are, when not in their union mode, a mild mannered lot and clearly all they intended to say was that in their writing and teaching they could not pursue the truth as they might see it if they had to worry whether someone might be offended by what they had to say.

No useful discourse is possible on the Framework's terms. No doubt some people will be offended by Emberley's book. Robert Fulford might be. Perhaps Emberley will be offended by this review. The Trent professors intended and implied no worse. But in calling down a plague on both houses Emberley leaves room for qualified oppression from revised frameworks. Happily he makes no such recommendation in his conclusion. Even without his encouragement and the lead of an NDP government, forces within universities will do their worst.



Emberley's chief concern is with the protection of what he calls scholarly culture from demands that university education show economic returns in acquired skills and from ideological restraint and discord. He insists on the commonplace distinction between education and vocational training. On this basis, the role of the university is the education of scholars. Training for a job belongs elsewhere. The distinction is difficult. Arguably, scholarship in a discipline like philosophy or physics is as much a vocation as law or medicine. In any event the greater part of university education has always been vocational. Universities were preparing lawyers, doctors and clergy for work in the middle ages.

The whole basis of modern government funding of universities has been the expectation of an economic return from the preparation of graduates for work. Without law, engineering, medicine, commerce, journalism, forestry and other professional schools established long before the hot button 90's the universities would be greatly reduced and exposed. Emberley bravely recommends that the professional schools should be ejected from universities and merged with community colleges to form polytechnics. He then fantasises that the professional training would be run on a full cost recovery basis involving the Income Contingent Loan Program and the resulting savings devoted to the purified universities. Rather inconsistently he says that the polytechnics should be given the financial support to acquire the lustre of an M. I. T.



But such a purification could not be complete. Much of what would be left in the faculties of arts and science is and always has been intended as job preparation. Science graduates will work in industry, economics graduates in finance, English and history graduates will teach. If they did not expect this, few students would spend the time and what money they might have to on a university education and governments would not support them.

 Perhaps the scholarly culture that Emberley seeks to defend and promote should be given generous financial support. But what exactly scholarly culture is and how and why it should be fostered and for whom would have to be clarified before this could be counted on. Emberley lards his book with high flown but obscure passages on his idea of a university:


The university is an institution formed to cultivate intellectual and spiritual passion, discerning moral judgment, imagination and the methodic discipline associated with scientific research. In its capacity to question prevailing social practices and to stimulate intellectual knowing and moral doing that transcend the immediate practicalities of the world, the university serves society by offering it a higher idea of itself and endowing it with decency and grace.

Repeatedly he argues that university education should make good citizens.

Two key words almost never occur in the book: accessibility and discipline. The quotation above is an almost unique use of the latter term. In the politics of post-secondary education accessibility has always been seen as a good thing. A secondary impetus behind the explosive growth of government funding for universities was the appeal to politicians of offering a college education to the masses, who had seen it as an upper class privilege, though universities had always been channels of social mobility. But politics has never gone so far as to aim at everyone going to university. Some selection on the basis of academic standards has always been assumed, even though standards have become highly elastic.

Any good idea of a university must entail that it is not simply impractical or unaffordable that everyone should go to university but undesirable. It must be sufficiently specific that some rough principle of selection will be implied. Emberley's ideas are so vague, his talk of making good citizens so broad, that it seems everyone should go to his ideal university. Only if scholarship is understood as a special vocation can principles of selection be developed. Emberley seems to understand and accept that only a small minority of each generation should go to university. After he had ejected the professional schools it would be less than 10% of any age group. But he cannot explain why this should be. The explanation can be found in concepts of scholarly vocation and scholarly discipline.

Emberley's idea of scholarly culture comes across as a rather juvenile adventure in ideas. He has a rosy view of the wide-eyed enthusiasm of youth, in contrast to Allan Bloom's pessimistic view of his students' complacency and ignorance. Zero Tolerance is sprinkled with the names of thinkers, or at least writers of thoughts, invoked perhaps to lend an air of authority to his arguments or to suggest the excitement of scholarly conversation. Plato cannot be too ancient or Derrida too post-modern, De Sade too transgressive or St. Thomas too orthodox, Siger of Brabant too obscure or John Ralston Saul too popular for Emberley. What is striking about these references is not the show of erudition but the lack of discrimination.

Plato was a philosopher and Derrida, to the extent he has any substance, was a philosopher too. Neither can be studied to any great purpose outside the discipline of philosophy. They cannot be understood without long hours of solitary study. The achievement of understanding, whether in writing or seminar discussion, must be rigorous argument and not an exercise in self-expression. Emberley is too fond of Oakeshott's pretty and overused image of conversation. Scholarship is serious stuff. It is not for everybody.

The contribution of scholarship to society is like that of pure science. It is indirect and unpredictable. It is no more necessary that we should all study philosophy than that we should all study cosmology. The test of scholarly vocation must be high academic standards. High enough that for the relatively small numbers who meet it full scholarships might be justifiable and affordable. The rest will have to be good citizens without being good scholars. It is for the high schools to make them such.  A scholarly culture based on scholarly vocations will survive in universities where most are pursuing other vocations. That is as it has always been.

Scholarship is best seen as a kind of by-product of practical education. While the mass of students seek to acquire useful knowledge and skills to permit them to follow a career, some will feel called to acquire a special mastery of their subjects. They will want to understand the foundations of their subjects and to go beyond what is received to new knowledge and understanding. Their mastery will qualify them to teach and to pursue research. Scholarship thereby becomes an independent vocation. But it cannot completely cut itself off from its roots in practical learning without risking Alexandrian triviality or irresponsible fantasy.

Emberley ignores intellectual issues that are perhaps more important than the political and financial issues he treats at length. He deplores the influence of post-modernism on the politics of universities but in one of his wackier passages celebrates Foucault and Derrida:

A seminar, in particular, can be intensely erotic....Every conversation is a seduction, every search for meaning is a longing for reconciliation and completion. Students love to seek the extreme:...They take naturally to the postmodernists Foucault and Derrida for their iconoclasm, for their dissolution of boundaries, for their celebration of ambiguity.

How far, it should be asked, are the minds of the thousands of students of cultural studies improved and who is there to judge whether the millions of dollars of public funds spent on this are well spent? Would we do better to spend more money on medieval philosophy and less on post-modernism? These questions cannot be answered without making serious intellectual judgements on what has value and what does not. Such judgments will be contested. But they must be made. It will not do simply to be excited by big names from Baudrillard to Bonaventure.

Academic politesse and a compulsion of the university community to band together to defend their rather agreeable jobs stifles an intellectual conflict that is necessary for the defence of scholarship. Academics are too afraid of tarnishing the prestige of universities and the possibility of philistine political interference to call into question the value of much contemporary scholarship. Students meanwhile, though they are supposed to be taught to think critically, if nothing else, are either dully impervious to their professors' attempts to indoctrinate them or all too ready to adopt the latest fashionable discourse as the assured means to academic success and a post-modern career.

Who determines what is taught in universities? Certainly the governments who largely pay the bills have little understanding of what they pay for and exercise control only at the level of gross funding. They grudgingly pay for whatever it is that people do in universities because it is a 'good thing' and because the affluent and articulate university community will kick up a fuss if they are squeezed too hard. In professional schools market forces have some influence. But as professional education is heavily subsidised, the supply of professionals often exceeds demand. Too many doctors and lawyers are being produced. Legal education, moreover, is at least one year too long, but no one would think of crossing the articulate and influential law professors, by whom and for whom the three year LL.B. course was designed.

Outside the professional schools the curricula are the incoherent product of tradition, fashion, politics, academic careerism and students' whims. The disinterested pursuit of truth, true scholarly vocation, is overwhelmed by it all. The universities' assumption of the role of centres of social criticism has politicised scholarship, compromising its quality while shielding it from criticism on the ground that criticism would be political interference. But why should governments subsidize academics some of whom are expressly out to subvert them?

If universities cannot assert and pursue academic standards based on an ideal of the disinterested pursuit of the truth, they cannot expect forever to protect themselves from the imposition of government standards. As it is, an important constituency within universities has rejected any standards of truth, seeing only discourses competing for power. And while universities raise the alarm at the prospect of political interference, they are keen to influence public policy and to act as social, sc. political, critics. Emberley himself argues for the importance of this role, descending into what is for him a rather unseemly pragmatic justification for universities. It is time for people both inside and outside universities to question the intellectual value of much that goes on in them and to reject the presumption that we can look to them for authoritative guidance on social issues. An intellectually critical attitude to universities can only be good for them. Only on that basis can they hope for financial and political security.

Emberley is a fluent, lively writer, but his book is poorly organised and repetitive. The chapter headings only partly describe their contents. The index is a bad joke. He has a weakness for rhetorical questions, which he should answer, and list rhetoric:

Amidst this battle there is misguided zeal, silly idealism, shrewd pragmatism, paralyzing cynicism and intractability....
We have an abundance of mission statements, talking-head conferences and fervent manifestos, but many of these are little more than smoke and mirrors.

He seems to have tried to put everything he ever thought about universities into his book without settling down to exact and concrete argument on anything. Where he descends to deal with facts, government financing for instance, he covers the ground too quickly before taking rhetorical flight again. Given Emberley's prominence in educational debate, it is all very disappointing.

THE MYTHS OF UPPER CANADA COLLEGE Old Boys: The Powerful Legacy of Upper Canada College

February 1, 1995,  The Literary Review of Canada

Old Boys:
The Powerful Legacy of Upper Canada College
compiled and edited by James FitzGerald
Macfarlane Walter & Ross


I went to Upper Canada College from 1956-1967. I was never caned, never bullied (and never bullied anyone), never fought (except for tame little boxing matches), was uninterested in and hopeless at sports and got a good education. James FitzGerald was a year behind me for nine years. I struggle to remember him. Had he interviewed me for this book he would not have used the interview. My unexceptional experience would not have suited his agenda or his publishers. Maclean's entertainment writer Brian Johnson in a kind reference in the book calls me an eccentric. That is putting it a bit strong, but I do not think my contentment was unusual for either conventional or eccentric boys.

Old Boys is a compilation of edited transcripts of interviews. FitzGerald interviewed three hundred old boys of Upper Canada College and chose seventy one to include in the book. He chose whom to interview. The interviews are presented as monologues varying from about a page to about eleven pages in length. They have obviously been heavily cut. We are not told what questions were asked. Interview subjects did not approve the entries as printed; though at least one was actually submitted in writing. In a brief introduction FitzGerald traces his ancestors at the school back to the 1830's and recites clichés about the school's importance and character and briefly describes how he compiled the book. He does not explain why he undertook the massive labour.

The book has an obvious market in eight thousand living old boys, nine hundred present boys, present, past and prospective parents, staff and past staff, friends of old boys wondering what their experiences were, people interested in celebrities like Conrad Black and Robertson Davies, social critics and gossips. But shelves could be filled with warm recollections of proud and loyal old boys, if anyone could be bothered to compile them. Even to attract the interest of its ready made market this book required both celebrities and hints of scandal. As reward for his labours FitzGerald is able to offer on the dust jacket, Black and Davies, Ted Rogers and Michael Snow and a boy who endured violent sexual abuse and is now a gay priest dying of AIDS, a bisexual student working as a part-time male stripper while at the school and football played while high on LSD. The book has been widely and rather melodramatically reviewed. The Globe & Mail gave it two reviews. John Allemang, evidently a loyal and highly prejudiced old boy of University of Toronto Schools, proclaimed it a "masterful oral history" and claimed that "anger, fear, humiliation and despair" filled the book. As U. T. S. faces full independence and the loss of its three million dollar a year provincial subsidy it may hope that its lower profile will spare it the attentions of a James FitzGerald amongst its old boys, or, since the 1970's, girls. Two weeks before Allemang's review Robert Fulford devoted his Globe column to Old Boys characterising it as "a kind of Little Book of Horror, a 369 page scream of pain".

Allemang and Fulford's reaction may be a common one and must be largely what FitzGerald intended. Many tales of canings and incompetent, sarcastic or uncomprehending teachers and bullying, delinquent or unhappy students support it. If FitzGerald had interviewed himself his story would likely have confirmed the impression, though even taking the book at face value it is false. But FitzGerald's labours on the book mark an ambivalent obsession. He had already written an unpublished book on his experience of the school. Ambivalence is reflected in many of what may be read as the most critical entries.

The last entry, from Daniel Borins (at the school from 1984 to 1993), complains of injustices but ends:

I think I got an excellent education at UCC. I was allowed to excel in anything that interested me. There were almost limitless possibilities. But paradoxically, at some point, you always had to give in and conform to the ideology of the school. All the time I was there, it was like, I hate this school, but I love it. I want to stay, because I want to see if it can change.

Avi Lewis, son of former Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis and Michele Landsberg, whose sending him to the Prep in 1976 led to their being predictably teased, shows a more self-conscious ambivalence. His entry ends:

I learned a lot about the world in my three and a half years at UCC - a world which I lament, and which I will spend my life trying to change.

Good socialist dynast, he sounds like one of his mother's columns describing

a place where there was an absolute intolerance for any variation from a norm which is mythological and destructive in the extreme.

But he went to the school because his public school seemed so inadequate that he "was going slowly insane". And the move was successful.

Academically, the school was an absolute flowering for me. The teachers were, with only a couple of exceptions, committed, creative, and supportive. They were joyful about learning and communicated it without barriers. It was really a revolution for me to be in a place where intellectual achievement and commitment were praised, regarded, and encouraged.

He made the politic decision to go to Jarvis Collegiate for high school.

My learning more or less stopped after UCC and resumed at university. Jarvis has a good reputation, but there's just no comparison with UCC.

II.

About half the entries are on balance critical; perhaps ten have nothing good to say about the school. One or two simply simply tell a story like Alan "Monk" Marr's highly successful prank of turning up at the premiere of Richard Burton's Hamlet in 1964 as a "famous satirist and rock singer from New York". For the most part the entries from the most prominent old boys are complimentary. Conrad Black (1951-1959), who was expelled for stealing and selling exam papers in 1959 is a predictable exception. But he is not as hard on the school as he was in his autobiography A Life in Progress: "I think it's a good school and I wish it well." He develops such a careful and detailed special pleading in extenuation of his theft that despite his disclaimers it for the first time occurred to me that he regrets having had to leave. But such a precocious ego would not likely have been happy at any school.

Much criticism simply reflects the left wing or politically correct ideologies of some old boys demonstrating the varied and unpredictable intellectual development of boys who pass through the school. A few years after leaving the school in 1963 Wally Seccombe took a "classic New Left" turning becoming at one stage a comrade of the young Judy Rebick in a revolutionary Marxist group. I remember reading at the time his formulaic article on "Housework under Capitalism" in the January/February 1974 number of the New Left Review. I decided me not to renew my subscription. Now a sociology professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Seccombe gives the school a standard post-Marxist treatment. But he too is ambivalent. Going back very reluctantly for a twenty five year reunion in 1988 he was effusively greeted by retired principal, Patrick Johnson, who died in December 1994: "The school was meant to produce more Wally Seccombes. We have produced too many stockbrokers". His entry ends:

It is a cliché that we repress painful and unpleasant experiences. But I was amazed to discover at the reunion how deeply I had forgotten, repressed or excluded the warm, deep, friend-for-life boyhood experiences that I had at UCC because of my own hardening ideological opposition to the school and all that it stood for. I had repressed the very best of what Upper Canada College meant to me. I had become so vigorous in my opposition to the school as a ruling-class institution that I had completely forgotten how happy I was there.

A lot of the criticism comes from old boys who had family troubles that would have made their childhoods unhappy in any event. FitzGerald would be among them. The first critic, the third old boy in the book, is Guy Purser (1919-1927). An only child, his mother "ran away with another man" when he was two. His father abandoned him to go to war in 1914 when he was six. Engagingly he says: "My father was a nut and my mother was a nut. You're looking at the son of a nut." His maternal grandfather paid to send him to Upper Canada. The ambition of the school to be "A Family Writ Large", the title of 1950's principal Cedric Sowby's memoirs, gives it a responsibility to boys from unhappy families, particularly when it takes them into boarding, and on much of the evidence of this book it often failed. But equally often it is blamed for unhappiness no school could have overcome.

Some of the more recent boys seem to have had altogether too good a time. Lincoln Caylor (1980-1987) claims to have spent much of his time drinking with a set that included John Turner's son David.

I was sleeping through half my classes. It didn't matter because I seemed always to get about 65 per cent in my sleep. It bothered my dad that I wasn't putting out any effort, but we were having so much damn fun.

As he says "UCC wasn't that strict in my time."

The entries regularly contradict each other. Tom Godwin, a British Columbia (1947-1955) cardiologist, says "I was better than the French teacher, I. K. Shearer, in French. That's how crappy his French was." Conrad Black, who should be a better judge of French, says "Shearer was an amusing guy in a way and he certainly knew French well." On issues like whether or not the school was repressive or authoritarian their are conflicting accounts. Chris Gilmour and his brother David, the novelist and CBC arts commentator, seem to be at odds on this. Chris (1957-1965) says "My basic grievance about the place is that it socialized me against my will as opposed to just letting me develop into whatever I am." David Gilmour, who was three years behind his brother, in FitzGerald's year as it happens, ran away from boarding, but after two months "wanted to go back to Upper Canada so badly that I could taste it..." He was let back and despite further delinquencies was allowed to finish his year. In his experience the school was "not afraid to endorse rebellious behaviour".

III.

Who knows what to believe? FitzGerald makes a preemptive comment at the end of his introduction:

The highly subjective nature of this book is based on the belief that human memory is fallible yet indispensable to understanding ourselves. My modus operandi rests on the premise that because an interview subject has chosen to remember an event in a certain way, the recollection is the truth for him. The fact that, ten years later, he may choose to remember it differently, or fail to remember it at all, is an unalterable fact of human psychology. While it was obviously impossible to verify the objective truth of every vignette or anecdote related in this book, every effort has been made to verify the authenticity of the salient historical events.

As the truth of most of what is said is generally known, if at all, only to the interview subjects, it could not be checked. But some errors that could have been checked and corrected have not been. Harry Wilson (1919-1922), father of Michael Wilson (1949-1955) and chairman of the board of governors of the school from 1962 to 1967, thinks his "awful portrait" by Alan Collier does not hang at the school. His grandson Geoffrey (1984-1986) says is does. It does. I checked. It's quite a good portrait. Guy Purser is recorded talking of studying piano with Ernest "Sykes". Could that be Seitz? Shortly afterwards Purser complains that Toronto Symphony ladies thought Ravel was a detergent. Peter B. Gooderham, before rambling on about how much money his grandfather gave away and how he was his favourite grandson, talks of a rifle company inspection by the governor general, Lord Beaverbrook. It was presumably Bessborough.

Accepted as a limited, subjective and biased presentation of school experience Old Boys has some value. That many people have been persuaded to talk so candidly is interesting. It is sometimes difficult to gauge the exact spirit in which they talk. Some entries read like prepared remarks. Other are more like something overheard in a bar. The entries are often rambling, confused and tedious and must seem particularly so to readers who do not know the people who are talking or who they are talking about.

As a basis for assessing the school and the experience of those who went there, however, the book is inadequate. There is no argument or, rather, there are dozens of contradictory and undeveloped arguments. As a measure of customer satisfaction it is highly misleading, though not so negative as reviewers claim, if read thoughtfully. In my second year at Trent University, Paul Weinzweig, a sociology lecturer, had his office next to my room at Champlain College. He was working on his Toronto doctoral thesis on Upper Canada. In January 1968 he was able to administer a 144 question survey to the whole upper (high) school. Five of the interview subjects in Old Boys and FitzGerald himself were there at the time and presumably answered the questionnaire. Of 462 responses 70% said Upper Canada was a "very good school for me", 25% said it was "a fairly good school for me" and 5% said it was "not the school for me".

Assessments may change with experience of life after school. But thousands of old boys have given money to the school. In 1994 1403 old boys gave the school $357,274. Thousands have sent their sons to the school. More would if they could afford it or their sons could get in. The common theory that being an old boy with money guarantees places for your sons at the school has never been true when competition for places was strong, as it has been now for decades. In any event, old boys rich and powerful enough to have influence to exert do not need the school to establish their sons.

A large block of old boys is simply indifferent to the school. The resentful, whom FitzGerald sought out, are a decided minority. Their experience cannot be dismissed, but it has to be placed in context. The majority who do not share their resentment cannot be dismissed on the basis that only unenlightened, incomplete human beings could have been content, a common implication in Old Boys.

Old Boys was only possible because the size, distinctiveness, independence and history of Upper Canada College make it a sufficiently definite community that people can attempt to talk about it at all. Public schools without corporate independence, with shorter histories, much larger and often more fluid student bodies and larger staff and administration are too amorphous to get the kind of treatment Upper Canada gets in Old Boys. Many people have hated their high schools and found incompetent or nasty teachers and unjust administration there. Corporal punishment survived longer in some public systems than it did at Upper Canada. Private school education is so marginal in Canada that anyone unhappy in it is always conscious that there is an alternative in a public high school and can blame his private school for his unhappiness. Anyone unhappy in a public high school is more likely to blame "the system" and react in a generalised generational rebellion in which his school is not specifically targeted. Many of the critics in Old Boys, whether because of family problems or simple adolescence would likely have been unhappy wherever they had gone to school. But they blame the school because that was the one thing that could have been changed. They had to have a family, for good or ill, they had to be young, they had to go to school, but they did not have to go to Upper Canada College.

IV.

Upper Canada's fame makes it a target, but its being a target adds to its fame. It it not quite a case of "any publicity is good publicity", but Old Boys and its reviews flatter the importance of the school and will add to its mystique. Upper Canada is not "Canada's most prestigious academic institution" as the dust jacket ludicrously claims. It does not produce the leaders of Canada. From two ministers in Mulroney's cabinet it is down to one M. P., John Godfrey, who defeated fellow old boy John Bosley. In 1957 John Porter in work for The Vertical Mosaic found twenty nine (sometimes misquoted as 29%) of the six hundred and eleven members of his Canadian born economic elite were old boys. Under 5 % is not, however, an overwhelming presence and in the larger and more fluid business world of the 1990's Upper Canada's representation is probably down to about 2%.

More interesting but more difficult to assess are the cultural or intellectual leaders. Other Losses author James Bacque (1936-1947) says "Certainly Upper Canada has produced a number of writers and artists out of all proportion to the general population. On the other hand, there are fewer than one might expect, given the advantages." The comments of such figures are as mixed as the whole book but on balance more complimentary. Robertson Davies (1928-1932) is a "whole hearted supporter of the UCC system." The communist historian Stanley Ryerson (1919-29), though naturally critical of such an establishment institution in itself, was a happy boarder. He traces his development into a communist to friends at the school and a French master, Owen Classey, who had been H. G. Wells' childrens' tutor and "conveyed an element of the Fabian socialist approach which questioned the old established fiats." Michael Snow (1942-1948) was not happy at the school but does not blame it. He won the art prize and went to the Ontario College of Art because of it. It might have happened at any school. But it did happen at Upper Canada College, sometimes condemned as philistine.

Upper Canada has not played a major role in national life. It is no Eton. Canada has no aristocracy and consequently no school for them. Upper Canada always was and remains a school for affluent middle class Toronto. When that constituted a community Upper Canada had the virtue of being a community school when there was some consensus on common values. Today middle class Toronto is much bigger than it was and the school's natural community has broken down. It draws its boys from a much wider and more diverse market.

The school has always had to compete with the free public schools and other fee paying schools and the number of the latter has increased with the widespread disenchantment with public education. It has been through serious drops in enrolment. By 1916, under the unsatisfactory principalship of H. W. Auden, upper school enrolment had sunk to 113. Under W. L. Grant's historic principalship beginning in 1919 enrolment soared to over 400. Day boy fees could be raised from $120 to $200. When Sowby became principal in 1949 there were eighty vacancies out of 465 places in the upper school. When he left in 1965 there were over 500 in the upper school with strong competition for places and fees had risen from $400 to $1100 on their way to $12,500 now. The slumps were also periods of academic decline when admission standards all but disappeared and good teachers were hard to pay and keep. Entries for old boys from the 1940's reflect such a decline.

V.

In the last twenty years the widening of its market, the intrusion of parents, and relentless fundraising have in complex relation changed the school. Fundraising was intermittent through most of the school's history. A few munificent gifts from the Massey Foundation and rich old boys came without organised effort. The "emergency" in 1958 when the 1891 building was condemned and had to be evacuated overnight changed all that. A campaign was organised and the three million dollars required for a new building successfully raised. Most old boys were then asked for money for the first time since they had left the school. The structure then established was continued for a modest programme of annual giving but fundraising gradually became fully professionalised and relentless. In 1992 the school managed to raise a further fifteen million dollars for various additions.

Historically the school had often paid its teachers less than public schools. Its grounds had always been extensive and its buildings imposing but by the 1960's it risked falling behind the lavishly outfitted public high schools of a time when government deficits were not a problem. The reaction of the school was to make itself the best school money could by. Fees continued their escalation to an historic high in constant dollars. Fundraising became an essential part of what is now a fourteen million dollar a year business. Gradually the idea developed that in addition to selling its education for whatever the market could bear and drawing on the good will of old boys the prestige of the school could be sold to parents. From negligible amounts, giving by parents rose from the late 1970's until it now exceeds giving by old boys. In 1994 320 parents gave $535,749 and 192 past parents $76,547. Even a few grandparents have started giving money to the school. To encourage the others the names of parents who give are listed by grade in the school's annual reports.

Parallel with their generosity the parents have been involving themselves more and more in the school. Parents' attendance at the school used to be confined to entrance interviews, parents nights, attendance at plays, concerts and games and occasions of trouble. Now there is a parents' organisation busy with sales and volunteer work (by mothers) in the libraries and elsewhere. Their most telling initiative has been the preparation of class directories for parents "to facilitate contact between parents of boys in the same grade". These have facilitated "social parent network evenings" organised by grade. In the past parents would only hope that their sons would benefit from an Upper Canada education. Now the networks and prestige of the school are available to parents. Much of this must be of no interest to parents who only wanted to buy their sons a good education or who are old boys anyway. It complicates the work of the school, which is always trying to satisfy parents looking for very different things.

Some parents are looking for standards and discipline they fear are lacking in the public schools. Others are more interested in the prestige or the standards without the discipline or tradition. Some parents would want a strict dress code, even a uniform. Other object to such requirements as there are, brooking no interference by the school with their sons' affectations. It is a common misconception that the school requires a uniform. While boys are required to have blazers for special occasions, it is a very long time since they regularly wore a uniform. A jacket and school tie has been all that has been required for most of the time covered by Old Boys and there is constant friction over issues like shoes, socks and hair length. Boys dress down at the end of each day, ostensibly for safety reasons, though private school girls and boys from the newer private schools in uniform can be seen all around town. Boys are now more indulged, not to say spoilt, by parents more likely to be rich than just affluent. Boys are more likely to be under pressure to get ahead, to seek admission to an American university, where a quarter of graduates now go.

The book will not hurt the school. It will hurt some of those living who are mentioned. It may hurt some of the interview subjects who may never be so public again and may live to regret their participation. They are caught forever like the subjects of Michael Apted's Seven Up film series. Most of the people who will actually read the book will be able to set their own experience and knowledge of the personalities against what they read and will only have their impressions of the school confirmed. People who only know the school as a big name will from reviews and seeking out the more exciting bits have their prejudices confirmed or merely be diverted. If some potential parents attracted by the school's prestige are put off, there will be no harm to the school or their boys from that. The book cannot change much at the school. Much that was objected to, caning, boxing and the cadet battalion, are now long gone. The arguments for coeducation are stale and inconclusive. The out of town private schools have generally turned to it as the tradition of sending sons to board died out and enrolments declined. For Upper Canada the question must remain closed for the moment because of the impact it would have on the private girls schools. Separate education for girls still has considerable support. For the rest the criticisms are too confused or contradictory to provide agenda. Judgement of Upper Canada is finally a political question. If elites and class must be destroyed institutions like Upper Canada must go down with them. If any cultural hegemony must be dissolved, so Upper Canada as it has been must disappear, even if there are to be multicultural, meritocratic elites.

Weinzweig assessed Upper Canada, by the techniques of conventional 1950's American sociology, for its effectiveness in socialising an existing elite and transmitting what he rather romantically called aristocratic values. He found that it was highly effective. But he identified two trends that might threaten its effectiveness. One was generational alienation, which, writing at the end of the sixties, he saw as having the potential to undermine all educational institutions. Twenty five years on that threat seems remote, though echoes of the sixties can be picked up in comments of some of the most recent old boys. The other trend he called "the strengthening of democratic sentiment". The effects of this could be complex and he detected "a move to a more meritocratic ideology" in moves to improve academic facilities and raise formal teaching credentials. He wondered whether "increments in technical and specialized facilities [would] erode the aristocratic values of elitism, tradition and humanistic education." He noted the irony that general democratic concern with standards of education had broadened awareness of the option of private education and led to "increasing numbers of applications from middle and lower middle class families".

There have always been families that made sacrifices to afford an Upper Canada education for their sons and there are probably more now than ever. Scholarships are too little to facilitate many admissions. On the other hand, the Upper Canada brand name, in an era when luxury brand names have had their strongest appeal, attracted an increasing number of boys from families that had little in common with the traditional private school constituency except money. To some extent these families may have been seeking integration into a traditional elite. But many will have bought an Upper Canada education much as they bought BMW's as the fruit and sign of their material success. The school has been prepared to deal with them in those terms. Disparities of wealth may remain or even increase. But the stable, bourgeois communities that Upper Canada and the other private schools served have been broken up in the more fluid and culturally various world of recent decades. Notwithstanding, Upper Canada's freedom to select its students and staff and relative freedom to control its curriculum make it possible for it to provide a traditional liberal education to the highest standards, to instil classic values and pass on Anglo-Canadian culture and to be a community in a way that most schools cannot. There is a demand for what the school can do and, with greater or lesser success from time to time, has done. But Upper Canada cannot appeal to everyone who can afford to pay and still be an effective integrating community. If it is not to become simply a posh educational supermarket, it will have to find its market niche. Such a strategy would involve some retrenchment. By now the momentum of the business may prevent such a repositioning.