Education, Freedom and Regulation

BRIG. GEN. LEWIS:

Members and friends of The Empire Club of Canada: Listen to these words--"A stimulus of students, a prickle of professors, a dither of deans, a panic of presidents." With such forthrightness, with such humour, and with such insight did our guest speaker characterize his audience at his installation address. This was when Professor James Ham was installed last year as the tenth President of the University of Toronto. He has also succinctly defined the office of President as "one who shakes the hand of one-third of those present and the confidence of the other two-thirds." In these days when it is no rare thing for a public figure to be professionally packaged and marketed, the inherent humility in our speaker's quotable quotes is beguiling and imparts a reality that inspires confidence.

Professor Ham is a native of Coboconk, Ontario. He graduated from the University of Toronto in 1943 with a degree in Electrical Engineering, and then he went to war as an officer in the Royal Canadian Navy. After the war he obtained his master's and doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute Technology, where he was also an assistant professor.

Our guest joined the Department of Electrical Engineering of the University of Toronto in 1953 as an associate professor and during the succeeding twenty-five years he has held increasingly important positions in his university, such as Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, Dean of Graduate Studies, and then in 1978, the Presidency.

Professor Ham takes on the Presidency of his university, not only in a time of financial constraint and falling enrolment--however slight--but also at a time when the general public is questioning the whole process of education and its meaning in and for our society. Professor Ham addressed these concerns in his installation address, as well as, amongst other matters, the needs of the mature student, the demographic decline in the number of students, and the shifting away from a liberal education in the arts and sciences to the professions and training for occupations where the prospect of immediate employment is good.

Obviously, to be President of our largest university, one's personal and academic credentials should be impressive and impeccable--and so they are in our guest's case. I have touched upon our speaker's academic qualifications, but for those broader and less definable personal qualifications, let me borrow the words of one of the official guests to Professor Ham's installation.

Professor Donald Forster, President of Guelph University, said, "I knew him in the past not only as a formidable and successful dean of a major faculty, but also as a sensitive, tolerant, compassionate man, a scholar with incredibly wide-ranging interests and skills. He will fight resourcefully and well all attempts to divert us from our essential purposes and functions."

Professor Ham now follows his many presidential predecessors who have come to the Empire Club and spoken to us. Ladies and gentlemen, I am honoured at this time to present to you Professor James M. Ham, President of the University of Toronto, who will speak to us on the subject, "Education, Freedom, and Regulation."

PROFESSOR HAM:

As a new university president, who has been characterized as being one who shakes the hands of a few of those present and the confidence of the remainder, I recognize the importance of proceeding with some caution before the Empire Club. Perhaps I should be guided by Lord Acton who admonished as follows:

If ever you make the mistake of entering upon a discussion of an educational problem, remember to begin with a platitude, because then the clever people in your audience will go to sleep and you will have no criticism from them, and all the stupid people will say "This is a sound man," and you will have their support.

In the presence of this distinguished audience I should wish to judge my success by the extent of the somnolence I induce. Let me first cast out my guiding image for the University of Toronto. It is not simply a large and complex place, for it is that. It is an academic city that has developed over 150 years a diversity of intellectual neighbourhoods unmatched in Canada. It is for example one of few universities that has for years sustained studies of Japan and China and of the Islamic world. I am personally grateful for the public confidence in the university so tangibly expressed in the highly successful campaign to raise twenty-five million dollars in private support, superbly led by St. Clair Balfour and my predecessor, John Evans.

I would like to discuss in oversimplified terms the paradox of freedom and of regulation in our society and relate this to what I consider to be a tragic loss of faith in the virtues of liberal education. The literacy we have forsaken is not only of the elemental kind. The paradox I refer to is that between the freedom of individual life style and the growing collective propensity to establish regulations to limit risks perceived to be imposed on the individual by the institutions of our society, regulations which are providing an increasingly litigious ground for grievance and further elaboration while the clarity of our shared vision of the human adventure weakens.

Let me first identify three facets of freedom; material, per- sonal and social. The material basis for freedom to have choice in our society comes about because the sum of human activity can, where ordered creatively, generate more goods and services than are necessary for survival. The excess in our technologically based society may be called a technological surplus or in simple terms a profit, the essence of which is a situation in which a whole can be materially valued as being greater than the sum of the parts. Profitable human enterprise is essential to social investment in health care to limit the risks of illness and in education to limit the risks of ignorance. The medieval world achieved a remarkable technological surplus in agriculture through the use of the heavy iron plough and the introduction of crop rotation. Out of its surplus, which found its way into castles, courts and crusades, that society also built the great cathedrals and founded the first universities--Padua, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge.

Personal freedom within the material basis of our society manifests itself in the range of available opportunities for the application of one's talents and in the variety of life styles that can be chosen. Its basis lies in competence and what I choose to call perspective. Competence is an instrumental quality associated with a capacity to do particular tasks well. It has strong associations with occupations. Perspective involves the grounds of meaning and significance that each of us attaches to the venture of living and determines the images we hold of our world and of the kind of personal relations we choose to sustain.

Let me associate social freedom with the characteristics of the institutions of government, business, education and family which we have evolved to form the arena in which we both constrain and express our personal freedom.

It is my strong personal conviction that in our radically interdependent and troubled times, we have to a tragic degree lost faith in the central importance of perspective as an essential basis for the confident expression of personal and corporate initiative and therefore of freedom. I shall include the internal life of universities in my indictment. The most disturbing consequence is that we are in the process of constraining, with the litigious over-regulation of our institutions, the social ground of our freedom. Excessive regulation reflects a critical loss of trust in the likelihood of self-regulation exercised through self-restraint that is rooted in a shared perspective of what is to be humanely valued in our institutions and our society.

Many regulations are properly designed to prevent the imposition on individuals of unreasonable risks that derive from collective human activity, radiation risks from the mining of uranium, risks of defects in consumer products manufactured by industry. At the same time, as individuals, we claim freedom of life style based on open-ended expectations of the capacity of our wealth-generating institutions to enlarge the material basis of our freedom in a milieu we insist should be free of risks imposed by others than ourselves. There is an obvious paradox here which is destined to be intensified until the central importance of perspective on the human condition as an essential root of personal freedom is strengthened widely in our society. We need deepened perspective on the history that has brought us to where we are and on the ideas that have sustained the imagination of our forebears. We need to understand that there is no risk-free future at any level, personal, social or technological. The isolation of specific technological risks such as that of nuclear power systems from a perspective on the risks of being human simply sharpens the dichotomy between freedom and regulation. The risks of being human are illuminated by history, philosophy and literature as well as by highly specific evidence of biological and ecological insult that most assuredly results from human activity. The risks of the economy in an interdependent world are evident to most of us.

Let me illustrate what I mean by perspective in terms of the centrality I attach to liberal education of which the universities are the bastions, bastions that it is fair game to batter.

I do not suggest that all is well in our universities, for the social paradox I have been discussing is manifested within these institutions. Elective freedom for students to choose what subjects they will, when unencumbered by requirements for coherence and continuity leading to mastery within at least one perspective of human understanding, has in fact created the freedom to remain ignorant. In a society which thrives on packaging, the accumulation of a stipulated number of credit courses may be a poor approximation to good education. In our permissive and allegedly free times, the ancient tradition of academic freedom has for many professors become the right to espouse a narrow specialization without that responsible perspective so clearly defined by Northrop Frye when he said that knowledge has its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere. One can build a sustaining perspective on the human condition beginning at any point in the field of knowledge, provided those who teach understand their subject in such a perspective and can stimulate students to search for their own.

Associated with the foregoing false freedoms espoused by students and staff, there is a further tragically false view among students that the most important feature that a university education has to offer in a society troubled by massive unemployment is instrumental competence to support particular occupational objectives, be they of chartered accountant, engineer or business manager. This burgeoning view is supported by some narrow-minded representatives of the media, of business and government, who hold the view that far too many young people are in our universities. I agree that there are some who should not be, but equal numbers of those who should. Only about one in ten of our young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four currently completes a university education. In the University of Toronto, four in ten are in professional programs with a distinctive occupational orientation.

No university deserves the name if it offers instrumental competence to the exclusion of the achievement of a mastery of a distinctive perspective on the human condition derived from liberal studies. Business and industry need the skilled trades, technicians, technologists and professional specialists. And all sectors of society need young persons who bring to the dilemmas we face the capacity to develop a variety of perspectives on the human condition. Having a sustaining perspective on the human condition is not a fringe benefit of an otherwise productive society. It is crucial to the vision that sustains a productive society.

I was appalled recently in reviewing with a major corporation its scholarship program, to discover that it offers scholarships only to students studying engineering, commerce and finance, and business administration. Since the program is designed to attract outstanding young persons into opportunities for corporate leadership I am saddened that gifted students who have wrestled with and won a perspective on the human condition through the insights for example of history, the classics or literature, are ruled out as potential leaders. To have perspective is to be able with time and effort to see over the top of instrumental problems to the state of human affairs and human relations that forms the context in which the day-today problems that require attention derive their significance. What institution is there that does not need what Wilfred Cantwell Smith called corporate critical consciousness? Sheer competence in solving operational problems is essential but not sufficient. The will to dirty one's hands in the earthy realities of work comes in large measure from the perspective one holds on the whole human venture.

The puzzling paradox of individual freedom and collective regulation is one that all of us share and not least the universities as institutions. If there is any resolution it lies in bringing to the day-today problems of human affairs not only instrumental competence but a richness of perspective on the human condition that is rooted in wisdom and a shared vision of the human adventure.

Northrop Frye has said that knowledge is knowledge about something; wisdom is a sense of the potential rather than the actual, a practical knowledge ready to meet whatever eventualities may occur, rather than a specific knowledge of this or that subject. As to vision, I note that medieval merchants wrote at the top of their ledgers: To the Glory of God and to Profit.

In resolving the paradox of personal freedom and collective regulation perhaps the basic question is: What do we write at the top of our ledgers?

The appreciation of the audience was expressed by Reginald Stackhouse, M.A., B.D., L.Th., Ph.D., a Director of The Empire Club of Canada.