That day in 1972 recently came into focus again when I became aware of what at first seemed like a raging tempest in a teapot, but which turned out to be a fundamental debate regarding the liberal arts and their relationship to the university and the world. Rodney Dangerfield might have characterized it as a controversy over the issue of liberal arts respect. In particular, it was about the public reaction to a series of ads. I first saw the ads myself last fall in an issue of this magazine, but a lot of others had already seen them in the Globe and Mail, where they had been running earlier. The joint brainchild of Carl Amrhein, dean of arts and science, and Kim Luke, the faculty’s public relations director, the ads (designed by the TAXI agency in Toronto) had the understated, quirky cleverness of the early Volkswagen ads. If you are reading this, you are probably familiar with them. The first one I saw, and my favourite, consisted of hand-printed block text on a sheet in a looseleaf notebook, reading: “You have an English degree. Now what? A) Correct other people’s grammar; B) Run Bank of Montreal.” Below was the student card of one Tony Comper, U of T English grad and the actual chairman and CEO of Bank of Montreal. Subsequent ads, equally funny, featured (among others) Gordon Cheesbrough, philosophy graduate and president and CEO of Altamira Investment Services Inc., and Maureen Kempston Darkes, political science grad and president and general manager of General Motors of Canada Ltd. All were smart deflations of the myth of the impracticality of a liberal arts degree. They were terrific. They were also accurate.

A few months before the ads appeared, coincidentally, Mike Harris, premier of Ontario, had insinuated that there were too many philosophers and sociologists being graduated, and by inference that they lacked the required practical skills necessary for the job market. The bald truth, however, is that a remarkable 90 per cent of liberal arts graduates have jobs within six months of graduation, 97 per cent two years after graduation. Here, at last, was a non-whiny, ironic, hip justification of a field of study and a way of life that most of us who had sat in the UC refectory knew instinctively was of great value, but who hadn’t had the “facts” till now to lobby effectively against “practical” studies proponents like Premier Mike.

So it was a bit of a surprise to read a letter to the editor in the winter issue of University of Toronto Magazine railing against the ads, from one Leyland Gordon (BA 1995 Trinity). Gordon found the idea of “applauding the [business] ’success’ of past liberal arts grads to be offensive and entirely at odds with the mandate of a liberal arts education.” The strategy was just a “further reflection of the growing corporatization of the university system,” he wrote. “Can’t we applaud these disciplines for their own sake?… Please stop promoting U of T liberal arts programs as buy-in-now, sell-out-later venues.”

And Gordon was far from alone. A significant number of students, faculty and alumni at the university opposed the ads for similarly purist reasons. Dean Amrhein quickly became familiar with the complaint. “The criticism went like this: the core value of a liberal arts degree has everything to do with personal achievement and not utility; it is not meant to be sold, because that’s not why people take these courses,” he says. University presidents across the country could not get enough of U of T’s ads, but a vocal proportion of the university’s community thought they demeaned the pursuit of the arts by characterizing them as a means to an end. Hyping the study of literature because it might make you a bank president was seen as slander; selling the humanities was a kind of monumental con job.

My immediate response, besides a split second of disbelief, was, so what? In the first place, the ads weren’t a con job in the purest sense of the term, because the con was in the means, not the end. A true con job would have meant that an arts degree didn’t confer the possibilities it obviously did, that more than 90 per cent of the faculty’s graduates did not end up employed within six months of graduation (the same percentage as science students). And Tony Comper wasn’t the chairman of Bank of Montreal. But even if the ads were a con job, process-wise because in our heart of hearts we would rather have people studying Milton because of the rush of epiphany it delivers as opposed to the thrill of the opening stock-market quotes – so what again? If you have something good to sell, sell it. The first rule of selling is to get the product to the consumer, or the product into the consumer, at which point the virtues of the product take over. Once you get someone to open As I Lay Dying, the magic of Addie Bundren’s weird post-mortem journey is sufficient to keep him or her there. Have great work transmitted by a good and passionate teacher, and the most diehard Philistine doesn’t have a chance. The ads were to get people into classes that needed no ads, to the place where Art sold itself.

But the “so what?” went deeper than that, to what, after a quarter-century of writing journalism and fiction and screenplays in the “real” world, I had come to regard as two of the more insidious illusions of the ivory tower complex when it came to the humanities and their selling. The first illusion is the “tower” half of the complex, what you might call the Illusion of the Fragmentation of Experience. This is the notion that the humanities, like the university itself, can somehow divorce themselves successfully from the real world, the world of logic and reason, in the same way an Orthodox Jew tries to separate his cerebral upper half from his carnal lower half by wearing a garment called a gartel around his waist. In both cases, it turns out, the separation is an illusion (the rebbes knew this if the university didn’t), an attempt to convince ourselves that “arts” and “science,” and “cerebral” and “carnal” were natural divisions handed down by God at a cocktail party after the Big Bang, and not constructs as artificial as a Beanie Baby. But constructs they are, a sometimes helpful, sometimes misleading way of taxonomizing our experience of the world. In reality, arts and science can’t be divided any more than passion and reason can.

This becomes manifestly evident when you talk to people like Michael Dixon. Dixon (BA 1965 UC, MA 1967) is the graduate director of English; he is also a fascinating mirror image of the ads in question. His own educational history is instructive: a gifted science student in the late ’50s, when “it was the Sputnik era and if you did well in high school science, the assumption was you would go into science in university,” Dixon did study math and physics at U of T. He then left to work for IBM, then just branching tentatively into something called the computer. However, Dixon was also concurrently writing poetry and taking philosophy and linguistics courses on the side, stimulated by an interest in the relationship “between English and the artificial languages being developed for computers.” He ended up taking a leave from IBM (although he kept returning in the summers to make money), earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English and philosophy at U of T, and a PhD in English at Harvard University, at which point he left IBM for good and apparently entered the enemy camp, a teaching career in the liberal arts.

Apparently is the salient point. More interesting than the facts of Dixon’s background is what that background has meant for his pedagogy. “I have always thought,” he says, “that my English students should be as clear-thinking as physics students, and I suspect that the methods of thinking, the organization of thought and self-correcting processes, are very similar. A novel or a play is a kind of laboratory case of a paradoxically ideal type, the type you only dream about in science, where in order to test your ideas, all the evidence that needs to be used to test it – the text – is available. If you make a mistake you are in a unique position to find out why this disconnect exists between your impression and what’s on the page.”

What’s essential to note is that Dixon isn’t claiming that scientific methods are superior and should be grafted onto English, or that literature is a “super-science” improvement on the laboratory arts, but something more subtly radical: that the problem-solving processes, deductive and inductive, in both disciplines are the same. “If I had my way I would have a first-year course, common for every science and humanities undergraduate, in which students had to define a problem, design a way to examine that problem, set up a hypothesis and test it,” he says. “You’d have French literature and thermodynamic students side by side, and it would take them about 15 minutes to realize that their approach to problem-solving was the same.”

If your average arts purist would blanch at the notion that the best way to attack a Shakespeare sonnet is to try the same strategy you would use with a Werner Heisenberg thought experiment, then another of Dixon’s ideas regarding the beneficial impact of the humanities on the sciences might render a science purist even paler: this is the Platonic notion of aporia, or “pathlessness.” Or, in non-Platonic terms, the value of admitting that you don’t know. “Plato thought that wisdom always started with aporia, when you recognize you are off the well-worn path, you’re not following anyone else’s path, you’re not in a rut,” says Dixon. “Trying to create that state of aporia is the business of education. It doesn’t matter what field you are in, what you are after is that sense of wonderment and dilemma that is both hard to induce in students and hard to accept, because it makes you vulnerable and uncertain. It’s the opposite of good training or doing scales, both of which have their uses, but won’t carry you to the ultimate destination.”

And it’s precisely this aporia – or at least the lack of it – that Jeremy Carver, who is effectively Dixon’s own occupational mirror image, never tires of talking about. A kid from an acknowledged “artsy” family (he and his father were regular onstage extras when the opera came to town), Carver (BA 1961 UC) is professor emeritus of medical genetics and microbiology. He first became a renowned biochemistry researcher at U of T and then the renowned CEO of GLYCODesign Inc., a publicly traded biotech company in downtown Toronto with a working capital of $47 million. GLYCODesigns’ prize creation to date is a molecule named GD0039, which has a good chance one day of stopping cancer cells from metastasizing – and being one of the keys to understanding cancer. A staunch campaigner against what he regards as the destructive modern overspecialization of science and the inability of researchers from various disciplines to speak meaningfully to each other, Carver sees the divide between the artistic and scientific methods as equally artificial and frustrating – particularly because his work can’t be done without that certain liberal arts “thing.”

“I’ve said it a hundred times, in recruiting for our company the problem hasn’t been finding people with technical skills, but finding those with people skills,” says Carver. “This isn’t a dreamy New Age mantra, it’s a precise talent. Because we don’t know everything in science, the ability to admit to other people that you don’t know something is a priceless asset, in many ways more important than knowing mere content. The key ingredient in any kind of creative investigation is to be able to think about things synthetically, pull them together and find common threads.”

A few miles away from Carver’s lab, at AmGen Research Institute in Toronto, a scientist of another generation, U of T associate professor of medical biophysics and immunology Josef Penninger goes even further. Lauded recently as one of the most exciting young researchers in the world, Penninger, at the astonishing age of 36, has published more than 125 scientific articles and made major breakthroughs in four different medical fields in the past five years. Most recently he and his associates have isolated their own molecule, CD45, which appears to be instrumental in switching the immune system on and off, another molecular key to finding a cure for cancer. But Penninger’s high school education, in a special school run by monks in Austria, was heavy on Plato and Socrates and light on biology and chemistry. Later at the University of Innsbruck, where he earned an MD and PhD, he was “fairly bored with medicine” and so wrote articles about his passion, Spanish architecture in the Middle Ages. He remains convinced that if he had taken “only science for 10 years,” he wouldn’t be where he is now. And what he learned by educational fiat is what he considers to be sorely lacking in students of the “solid” disciplines today.

“I’m teaching immunology at the med school at U of T, and I asked my students how many of them had read Plato in their lives, and not a single one had. I thought it was very sad; I think it should be mandatory for students in high school or university to take Latin, Greek, to learn art, no choice,” he says. “I find the people who are really interesting are the people who can put things in context, the ones who don’t have a portfolio, who have to make decisions that are broad. If you have detailed knowledge and no idea about anything else, you’re in trouble. That’s why I would force kids to read Plato, to think and to come up with new solutions. And to learn art, which, if it’s good, involves putting novel things together that have never been put together before. Picasso takes the seat and handlebar of a bicycle and makes the head of a bull. Science does the same thing.”

Not only does Penninger (who is short odds to one day win a Nobel Prize) think science students should be compelled to study the humanities, he thinks they should study them rigorously, with no “bird courses” to accommodate any lurking non-artistic frailties. It was in something of the same spirit that U of T’s Governing Council recently took a stand for rigour and standards of its own, voting, in April 2000, to abolish the 15-credit bachelor of arts and bachelor of science degrees. An extra year of five credits is insurance against, for one thing, academic tunnel vision, and its attendant fallout. “I’m no more sympathetic toward arts students who are ignorant of science and proud of it than I am of an engineering student who boasts that he’s never read a novel,” says Dixon. “They are both impoverished.”

Or: to be informed on only one end of the human scale is to be uninformed. The urbs, when it comes to a rounded education, truly orbs. The laws of nature and the nature of laws – that is, what we think of as empirical on the one hand and intuitive on the other – ultimately curve around to meet each other. And the boundaries between disciplines too often end up being not just artificial, but sacrificial: when we heed them too closely we sacrifice the openness of our own minds.

There was one person, one Commerce and Finance guy, in the UC refectory that afternoon in 1972 when I fluked the answer to the algebra problem, who was not sanguine about what I had done. In fact, he was truly offended by it. When my friend Allan and the rest of his buddies clapped me on the back and we went out for Chinese food and beer, this one fellow stayed sitting at the table in the flat, white basement light, obviously brooding. According to the philosopher Thomas Kuhn, one of the hardest things to do is respond to anomaly, to something that challenges your world view, and this particular undergraduate had run into a major anomaly: me.

Glancing back at him on my way up the little staircase to the quadrangle, I had the sense that he thought there was something wrong in the air, not just about my solution of the problem but also the too-easy melodramatic conclusion we drew about my solving it, like some ludicrous scene out of Good Will Hunting. And he was probably right. I didn’t fully believe the pats on my back either; I still don’t. I wouldn’t think of advocating the Zen method of algebra solutions today, any more than I would want a Poet Laureate performing my triple bypass surgery. What had seduced us all momentarily in the refectory was the story of the moment; the cunningness of the instant narrative. What the brooding guy sensed – what the people who objected to the ads in the Globe and Mail are probably subconsciously leery of bringing out into the open – was the crafty face of art itself. Art whose end justifies any means. Art the Slick Salesman. Art the Ultimate Con Game.

And this is the second piece of the ivory tower illusion when it comes to the arts and the selling of the arts, the “ivory” part of the illusion, the illusion that art is too pure to be sold. But since when has it been indelicate to sell something that is a dedicated selling tool itself? And what is art, if not the greatest selling job of all time?

The humanities are based on a larger story, the story of humanity, and whether that story has been told in a novel, or an opera, or a movie, or a rap video, it is at bottom a con – not a con in that it is a cheat, but a con in that it appears to be selling one thing but really is just trying to hook you so it can sell something else entirely: the moral or the still point of the turning world, take your pick. The whole aim of art is to get the consumer of it to a place the artist considers vital. Good artists, in both senses of the word, will do anything to get their audiences there: borrow, lie, steal and cheat.

It’s the same with the teaching of art. A great teacher of the humanities will entertain you first, teach you second. The inspiration comes from the click of the tumblers after the thrill of the roller-coaster ride is done. A master artist once she has you in her thrall will exalt your spirit; a master teacher will cajole it. But they’re both salespeople.

And what they’re selling is something that, in spite of what the technology-besotted politicians say about the surfeit of philosophers (and paucity of golfers) on the planet, is not going anywhere. In a world where finding multiple outlets for information is the battle cry, art is in a perfect position to lead the shock troops. People still take magazines, not Palm pilots, into the can to read, and chances are Bill Gates will buy Harry Potter for his children in book, not electronic, form. Ninety per cent of the younger generation in my extended family are actors and animators and playwrights, and most of them are finding work in their chosen or related fields, because the outlets for that work are exploding.

If that trend continues, is it outlandish to think that in 20 years ads may be appearing in technology journals on campus trumpeting the benefits of a science degree for landing a job in the film industry?

And who will be offended then?

Jay Teitel (BA 1973 UC) is a Toronto writer and editor.

And then I arrived at the University of Toronto and discovered Latin and Greek. My world was about to become much more complicated, and much more interesting.

From the perspective of 2001, when a restless and all-inclusive curriculum is the order of the day, when undergraduates think nothing of combining computer science with a minor in sexual diversity, the academic upheavals of my youth may look rather quaint. The notion that film could be taught in a university classroom seemed revolutionary back then. Religious-studies courses had only just stopped being compulsory. The English department was steadily moving forward with the idea of teaching Canadian literature.

Change was everywhere, and so I studied Classics. It was the most radical thing I could think of doing, a complete rejection of materialist culture in keeping with the spirit of the times, a statement of intellectual purity so complete and subversive that I’m still amazed by the boldness of my 18-year-old self.

People who don’t understand the academic mind – those who mistake the modern university for a delicate work of ivory – would label my passion for the ancient world as conservative and old-fashioned. They might assume that a Classics specialist from bygone days would resist the new wave of humanities programs. They would be wrong.

The genius of the university’s Faculty of Arts and Science, at least as applied to the humanities, lies in its gift for connecting the old with the new, for recognizing that ancient and modern can enjoy each other’s company. The study of Classics is richer for the challenges offered by marginalized groups ignored or overlooked a generation ago. Likewise a new, politically charged program such as Aboriginal Studies is also going to be more effective in its mission if it is grounded in native traditions that are substantial and enduring.

Making the connection, now as in the ’60s, isn’t always easy. Although the arts and science faculty is undeniably more sensitive to the impulse for change – note the growth in East Asian Studies courses, for example, or the global range of an English specialist degree – there is still plenty of good old-fashioned skepticism for anything that doesn’t meet the university’s academic standards. Keren Rice, director of the Aboriginal Studies Program, remembers the nervousness she felt when she had to defend a new and decidedly nontraditional course on native crafts before a faculty review panel. “I was sure they were going to look at this and say, ‘Basket weaving?’” There wasn’t even a joke, let alone a knee-jerk critique. The course clearly combined traditional learning with scholarly rigour, and so approval was granted, to Rice’s relief and delight. Such openness to a broadening definition of the humanities is what drives Rice in her work, and it’s also what has attracted the other faculty members profiled here: George Elliott Clarke, the multitalented poet, playwright, librettist and professor of modern Canadian poetry and world literature; the Spanish and Portuguese department’s recent addition, Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux, a Dominican Republic native who is developing courses for the university’s growing number of Hispanic students; and Derek Jonathan Penslar, the Samuel J. Zacks Chair of Jewish History and a man who knows as well as any Classics grad how persistently the past endures into the present, and why the old must necessarily mix with the new.

The fierce political tensions of that era weren’t the only barriers standing between her and the difficult languages she loved. There was also a creaky primeval computer, the centrepiece of an overly ambitious University of Michigan program that aimed to turn American teenagers like Rice into accomplished speakers of Mandarin. “We were guinea pigs,” she remembers, laughing at the misplaced faith in technology that put her in awkward conversations with a clunky machine years before ping-pong diplomacy made real Mandarin speakers more accessible. “Figuring out the Chinese tones was a real problem. It was well before e-mail, of course, and if we had questions, we had to send them to the university and wait weeks for an answer.”

Linguistic challenges clearly intrigue the 51-year-old. One of the most vivid memories of her undergraduate years at Cornell University is of meeting a doctoral student in anthropology from Peru who spoke Quechua (pronounced Ket-shwa), the language of the Incas that at that time had fallen to second-class status in modern Peru. But as open as she was to linguistic opportunities, it wasn’t until Rice (MA 1972, PhD 1976) came to the University of Toronto for graduate work in 1971 that she met the first North American languages close-up.

U of T’s seven-year-old Aboriginal Studies Program stresses the value of native knowledge that may outwardly lack academic credentials. So it’s entirely appropriate that Rice’s first teacher of the rare Dene languages was a speaker with no formal training. The Northwest Territories native was merely visiting a patient at a Toronto hospital when his talents were spotted by a nurse, who happened to be the wife of a U of T linguistics professor.

For Rice, who radiates an explorer’s passion for uncharted languages, the collaboration that followed was life-changing. For five hours each week, she was part of a small group from the linguistics department that met with the Dene teacher. As she listened to his stories and mapped out his grammar, her vocation began to take shape.

Equipped with her Dene nouns and verbs, she headed to the Arctic Circle in 1973 to work with the native community in Fort Good Hope, N.W.T. “It was my first time in a really different culture,” she says. “Superficially it seemed the same – a store called the Bay, young people in blue jeans, country music on the radio – but you didn’t have to scratch too deep to see that this was a completely different world.”

Rice embraced the differences, undertaking research that has led not just to Dene grammars and a learned book on word formation in Athapaskan verbs, but also to such community-building efforts as a training program for native teachers in the Dene languages. And in a fine example of applied scholarship, she found time to sit on an orthography-standardization committee that wrestled with the thorny question of how to give oral languages a consistent written form – a task not so far away from the conundrums presented by her high-school Chinese computer courses.

Can the Aboriginal Studies Program stimulate students in the same way that Rice was? Rice thinks so, and not just for non-native students who might be encountering aboriginal languages and culture for the first time. Rice is determined that native students also re-examine their fundamental assumptions. “This is not a program designed to make native students feel better about themselves,” she says. “Our methods are those in which the university prides itself – critical analysis, and logical and creative thinking. The aim is to help students, both native and non-native, find new ways of looking at their world.”

A voracious reader, he grew up in Halifax, N.S., in a household where his self-educated father and teacher mother were attuned to books, TV, current affairs and music of all sorts, from Broadway musicals to James Brown blues. He devoured everything from comic books (he remembers being inspired by one called Great Negroes) to the Bible, which he read right through three times. He figures he’s about ready for a fourth reading, particularly the lushly erotic Song of Solomon, his favourite part, he exclaims with that expansive laugh.

On Clarke’s mother’s side, his Canadian roots go back seven generations to a group of Chesapeake Bay slaves freed by the British during the War of 1812 and brought to Nova Scotia. Formerly at Duke University in North Carolina and at McGill University where he taught English and Canadian Studies, he joined the University of Toronto’s English department in 1999.

In contrast to his undergrad years, when he studied only three poems and three novels by black writers, Clarke, aged 41, teaches modern Canadian poetry and literature from Africa, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean and India. Our view of what constitutes literature has also become much more expansive, he says: now it can include slave narratives, the transcribed writings of native people, letters, essays by Pierre Elliott Trudeau, liner notes from record albums, historical documents and even movies. In his view, “the really good classes are where students are asking each other questions and sharply disagreeing.” He also encourages students to approach literature in a multimedia fashion, so that, for example, they might explore the Coen brothers recent O Brother, Where Art Thou as a fresh take on The Odyssey.

Outside the classroom, one of Clarke’s most noteworthy publications is the Archibald Lampman Award-winning book of poetry, Whylah Falls (Polestar Book Publishers, 1990). The book also won the first Portia White Prize for Excellence in Arts – a fitting achievement, as the award is named for Clarke’s great-aunt. White, a well-known Canadian contralto, sang mainly classical music and performed in North and Latin America during the 1940s.

Clarke has also written a play called Beatrice Chancy (Polestar Book Publishers, 1999). His writing style is dense, lush, poetic, imaginative, violent and not always easy to understand. In writing Beatrice Chancy, Clarke was inspired by the true story of a young Roman woman, Beatrice Cenci, beheaded in 1599 for killing her father. Imagine a Shakespearean tragedy set in an 1801 Nova Scotia apple orchard about the daughter of a black slave woman who is raped by her white father/master, and you get an inkling of the play. In the end, as with any tragedy, almost everyone dies, with lines like: “I pray your death tastes like acid to you/Because it’s like honey to me.” Recently, the story was reborn in another form: Clarke wrote a libretto and composer James Rolfe (BMus 1983) wrote the music to create an opera version of Beatrice Chancy. Mingling old spirituals with modern atonal music, the opera was filmed by CBC-TV and aired in February during Black History Month. Opera singer Measha Bruggergosman (BMus 1999), who impressed audiences at the Millennium Opera Gala in Toronto and the East Coast Music Awards, played the role of Beatrice with great emotional and operatic strength.

What lies ahead for Clarke? A new collection of poems, called Blue (Raincoast Books), will be out in May. He’s just completed the first draft of his first novel, and he’s writing a screenplay about two cousins of his mother’s who were hanged in New Brunswick in 1949 for robbing and killing a cab driver, a sad chapter in his family’s history that he belatedly learned about only in 1994 from his mother.

After more than two and a half hours of talking, I’ve long since run out of audio tape, but it’s clear that Clarke still has plenty of breath, imagination and genres to plumb. George Elliott Clarke will never run out of inventive ways to use words.

Derek Jonathan Penslar’s calm, scholarly demeanour remains decisively intact as he answers in a way that also explains why he got the job: “Actually, I would say rather the opposite. I see a chair like this as recognizing the coming of age of Jewish studies in academia. And it is precisely because I hold this chair in a major history department in a major university that I don’t have to feel that I’m representing a particular political or ethnic constituency,” he says. “It is the same as being a professor of Russian history, or a professor of American history. What the chair creates is a fully academic position that doesn’t in and of itself carry a public obligation that would somehow compromise my academic views. I teach about Judaism and the Jews, but I don’t teach as their advocate.”

All of which is not to suggest that the holder of the Samuel J. Zacks Chair of Jewish History is a holier-than-thou purist afraid to enter the marketplace of ideas. In fact, whenever the situation in the Middle East intensifies, Penslar is often interviewed as an expert on Israel. “I do not at all mind doing this,” says Penslar, his eyes brimming with mischief. “People don’t always agree with my comments, but if I am irritating people on all sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict, I’m probably doing something right.”

His insouciant take on the media does not temper his belief in the importance of sincere discourse. “The more knowledge we have about each other, the better chance we have of coming to an agreement,” says Penslar. “One thing that bothers me about the Palestinians and the Israelis is that they don’t understand each other. They feel only their own pain. That’s why I think there’s a need for so-called experts who try to be disinterested. And I do see myself doing that. That doesn’t mean I’m not biased. I am imperfect. But my job is not to advocate a particular kind of political or religious position, regardless of my personal views. My job is to disseminate knowledge, to get people to want to know.”

Jewish history is a relatively new discipline, says Penslar, 42, who came to U of T from Indiana University, where he taught for 11 years, seven of them as associate director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program. Although the first North American chair in the subject was at Columbia University in the 1930s, it was only after the Second World War and the Holocaust that it became widely studied. Penslar places its flowering in the ’60s and ’70s, when a breakdown in the Eurocentric, Christian-centric world view and the growth of feminism and ethnic awareness fostered many new disciplines. By 1979, when he entered graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, Jewish history had become mainstream. In the past 20 years, “it’s grown tremendously,” he says.

Penslar himself has contributed to the growth of written material in this area since he came to Toronto in 1998. This June, University of California Press is releasing his book, Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe. Next year, he will be finishing a book about the role of radio and television in shaping modern Israel.

“As we get farther and farther away from the Holocaust, the creation of the state of Israel and the Six-Day War, Jewish memory will become increasingly normalized.” But, he admits, there is still much work to be done. “It’s rather odd. You can have tremendous knowledge that is also buried in myth. Look at the Jewish history books on my shelves that were written in the prewar period. Tremendous erudition, but encased in a mythological framework so thick that it severely limits the works usefulness. Piles and piles of facts, but without sufficient understanding of the context in which the Jews live.”

It is essential that modern Jewish history be studied in a global context, says Penslar. “That’s why it’s very important that the kind of teaching I do has to be comparative. There is a famous line that is attributed to [German poet] Heinrich Heine: ‘The Jews are like everybody else only more so.’ And this is very much a pillar of what I teach. Yes, of course, every nationality has its own unique perspective. But with the Jews, there are so many aspects of modern Jewish culture that can be compared fruitfully with Arab culture, Russian culture, you name it. It is only through the comparative technique that the truly unique points emerge. And again, it is only through comparison that you can have some possibility for dialogue.

“I’m trying to create an atmosphere in which people truly understand not just their own history, but history as such.”

What was a hobby for Grandfather Pérez is a full-fledged passion for Pérez-Leroux. The Santo Domingo native, who came to U of T in 1999, teaches in the department of Spanish and Portuguese, and researches child and adult language development. Her fascination with language can be traced back to a first-grade geography lesson about China. “The thing that stuck in my head was that the children spoke Chinese,” she says. “So I went home and said to my dad, ‘I feel bad for Chinese children because they think in Spanish, but need to learn Chinese to talk to their family.’”

Her language theories have since grown more sophisticated. After earning a licenciatura in French from the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo in 1983, Pérez-Leroux headed to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she acquired an MA in Spanish and linguistics, and a doctorate in Hispanic linguistics. She has been an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University and has worked as a French teacher, court interpreter, translator and research assistant.

Pérez-Leroux, who speaks four languages fluently, is also committed to breaking down prejudices surrounding bilingualism. “In the United States there is a lot of mistrust and misconception about bilinguals, so some parents think it’s harmful for children to be bilingual,” she says, noting a sad tendency for American immigrants not to pass their native language on to their children. At Pennsylvania State, she taught a class on the psychology, linguistics and sociology of bilingualism, discussing such issues as the fear that those who are bilingual are semi-adept at two languages and master of neither. “The problem comes from the image of the mind as a container. If your mind is a container, and you pour in English and Spanish, you don’t have enough room for a lot of English and a lot of Spanish,” she says. “People don’t think of the mind as an organ.”

During our conversation, Pérez-Leroux shows me photos of her two brown-eyed, dark-haired sons: Michel, 14, and Paul, five. It was Michel, she notes, who cemented her interest in child language research. As a graduate student, she would come home and conduct language experiments with the enthusiastic preschooler. Her research is complex, but she breaks it down easily: “I’m interested in examining all the little mechanics of grammar that children need to know.” And one of Pérez-Leroux’s favourite elements of her research is visiting local preschools and playing language games with the children. She uses two pint-sized, nattily dressed assistants – Groovy Girl dolls she’s named Mary and Suzy – to help children act out their interpretation of complex sentences.

As part of the university’s effort to help the humanities grow with the times, Pérez-Leroux has developed a Spanish course for native and heritage speakers, which will start in September. The first course at the university expressly for Spanish speakers, rather than foreign-language students, it recognizes the growing proportion of Hispanic students enrolling in the department, as well as their unique educational needs. Classes will cover such topics as writing skills, since a student who speaks Spanish fluently at home may not have had as much instruction in the mechanics of writing and reading.

A follow-up course for Spanish speakers may be in the future for Pérez-Leroux. She is also finishing a fourth-year textbook on Spanish syntax. Her drive and prolific output seem anchored to a philosophy of gratitude. “I think it’s really lucky that one can devote so much time to living the world of ideas,” she says. “Having come from a very, very poor country where people live the life of the mind with lots of personal sacrifice, I know how lucky I am that I can just do it.”

DOE is voluminous because researchers keep uncovering texts and discovering new words and meanings. Each entry has 12 possible fields of information, including definitions, Latin equivalents, Old English references and modern English descendants, if they exist.

DOE is now working on the letters F to H, and will be publishing F together with the previous six letters (A, Æ, B, C, D, E) on CD-ROM later this year. This leaves 15 of the 22 letters in the Old English alphabet to complete, according to chief editor Antonette diPaolo Healey, Angus Cameron professor of Old English studies (an appointment honouring DOE’s founding editor).

The colourful characters of Canada
In its CD-ROM version (launched in December 2000), the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB) chronicles the lives of nearly 8,000 Canadians integral to the country’s development including business people, artists, politicians and scientists. Not solely devoted to famous Canadians, DCB, with Ramsay Cook serving as general editor, also contains brief articles on men and women previously not found in general reference books. The CD-ROM covers the period from 1000 (Volume 1) to 1920 (Volume 14). Volume 15 is in the works, covering 1921 to 1930, but is not expected out for at least two years.

DCB began in the late 1950s, and the University of Toronto Press published the first English volume in 1966. Dictionnaire biographique du Canada was published simultaneously by Les Presses de lUniversité Laval. The dictionary was founded with the financial aid of the late James Nicholson, who wanted his estate to help finance a Canadian biographical reference publication. The CD-ROM version was provided free to nearly 13,000 schools and public libraries across Canada. Any of the 14 volumes in print can be purchased through the University of Toronto Press at (416) 667-7791.

My dear Cézanne, …
The world’s most comprehensive collection of material on Émile Zola and naturalism is assembled in the Joseph Sablé Centre for 19th-century French Studies. The Émile Zola Archives expand awareness of Zola, his work and 19th-century France. Curious readers can scan personal exchanges between Zola and the likes of Gustave Flaubert, Georges Clemenceau and Paul Cézanne.

Organized by the Zola Research Program between 1975 and 1995, the collection comprises manuscripts and major French newspapers (from 1865 to 1902), correspondence by Zola and more than 15,000 letters to him, third-party letters written by friends, family and associates (translators and publishers, for example), and periodicals and books, including rare editions of Zola’s work. There are also photographs, portraits and caricatures of Zola and his contemporaries. For a sense of the scope of the collection, visit: www.chass.utoronto.ca/french/sable/collections/zola

A really dramatic REED
Records of Early English Drama (REED), an international scholarly project, was founded in 1975 to examine the great drama in the late Middle Ages and the Shakespearean era. Recently uncovered texts document drama, minstrelsy and public ceremonies in England prior to 1642, when the Puritans and the impending civil war between Charles I and Parliament shut down the London theatres. REED also sheds light on the society, music and language of the era.

To date, REED has published 20 collections. The first, York, was published in 1979, and Sussex in 2000. REED also produces an annual journal, Early Theatre, in conjunction with McMaster University. Editors are also working on early dramas of Scotland and Wales. Read more at: www.reed.utoronto.ca/index.html

From canon to comics
Mario Valdés of Spanish and Portuguese and Linda Hutcheon of English are the forces behind the extensive Comparative Literary History Project. Rethinking Literary History – Comparatively is the first of five volumes and will be published this year. Working over the past five years with 300 international researchers, as well as translators and bibliographers (most texts were in French, Spanish and Portuguese), Valdés and Hutcheon have masterminded a comprehensive 8,000-page literary history project.

Attempting to understand how culture develops and how people interpret the diverse influences in their world, three volumes will be devoted to Latin America’s past 500 years, and one volume will focus on eastern Central Europe, following the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. All four volumes are due out in 2002. The literature of these regions has not been studied in depth before, nor have oral, ritual and performance influences been explored. Instead of relying solely on the region’s literary canons, the project also examines popular culture, including comic strips and soap operas. Visit: www.chass.utoronto.ca/lithist/

It may seem like a small question, but as a staff writer at The New Yorker, Gladwell specializes in taking everyday matters and turning them into thought-provoking pieces. His research into topics as diverse as influenza, shopping, infant development and hair dye has formed the basis of a series of must-read articles. One such article, “The Tipping Point”, about the decline of New York’s crime rate, became the cornerstone of Gladwell’s book of the same name, published by Little, Brown in March 2000. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference examines how ideas gain momentum just as a medical epidemic does. “Behaviour and ideas can be contagious,” he explains. “Crime is contagious, smoking is contagious among teens, delinquency and teenage pregnancy are contagious. But good things are just as contagious, and they can spread just as quickly.”

Gladwell’s melding of science and sociology can perhaps be traced back to his parents: his father is a professor of civil engineering at the University of Waterloo and his mother is a family therapist. He grew up in Elmira, Ont., where, in his last year of high school, he and two friends started a magazine they called Ad Hominem. He brought the magazine with him when he came to Trinity College to study history. “It was filled with flamboyant, overheated essays on whatever,” he says. “The only rule was that you had to attack someone or something. Then we’d turn around and solicit attacks on the pieces we had run.” He also became involved in a student newspaper called Trinsight (which has since reverted to its original name of Salterrae). “It was a random collection of weird, brilliant rants,” he says. “It was truly inspired.”

Not only did the college provide him with an outlet for his creative talent, it helped shape some of his ideas about community. In The Tipping Point, he writes about how communities can break down when they grow too large; by contrast, what he saw at U of T showed him how communities can coexist within a larger framework. “The fact is that the university is divided into communities through its colleges,” he says. “Trinity was a perfect community.”

After graduating with a BA in 1984, Gladwell headed south of the border to Bloomington, Ind., for a five-month stint interning at The American Spectator, a political journal. From there he headed to Washington, D.C., where he freelanced for two years before taking a job as a business reporter at The Washington Post; he soon switched over to a science beat. Six years later he was transferred to head up the Post’s New York City bureau. As if that weren’t enough to do, he started moonlighting, writing freelance pieces for The New Yorker. In 1996, he says, “I realized I was being unfair to my employer,” and he resigned from the Post to join The New Yorker full time.

Of course, The Tipping Point drew him back to moonlighting, not only in the writing of it, but also in promoting it. Gladwell says he never anticipated the tidal wave of interest that swelled around the book. “You expect only your mother to read it,” he says. “But it really has broadened my audience, especially in the business world.” And while he has relished the ability to speak to more readers, the trade-off has been his rising profile. “Magazine writing is anonymous in many ways, but when you write a book, you are strongly identified with it.” While he says that he is self-conscious about giving interviews, he managed to do a “Lunch with” Jan Wong, the Globe and Mail columnist. Things were going just fine until Wong asked him who made the suit he was wearing. “I didn’t want to tell her. Somehow it was going too far,” he says.

Which is not to say that Gladwell is shy about self-expression. Last January he created the Web site www.gladwell.com to warehouse his published essays. “I’m clearly someone who likes to put what I think into words, and I will create an outlet to do it,” he says. An idea for his next book is gestating at the moment. But he insists that he is caught up in the here and now. “I never think about the future. I am not a planner,” he says. “I write about what is the most interesting to me at that moment.” And today, that happens to be French fries.

Hilary Davidson (BA 1994 Victoria) is a writer who divides her time between Toronto and New York.

When the Montreal author comes to Toronto to do a fundraising reading for the Abelard School, we meet at the grand old mansion that houses the school, just north of Carson’s alma mater, the University of Toronto. Alas, the ethereal, reserved Carson seems to wear no perfume. Whatever the scent of her Carson-ness might be, it is lost amid this building’s odour of old wood polish.

But perhaps, like the protective scentlessness of a fawn, elusiveness is Carson’s essence. Although she has won many top prizes and honours in the United States a MacArthur “genius” grant; a Lannan Literary Award; a Guggenheim fellowship and her latest poetry collection, Men in the Off Hours (Knopf, 2000), was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, she is little known in her native Canada. Nor is she interested in providing autobiographical detail.

We know only that she was born in 1950 to a banker’s family and raised in various Ontario towns, from Timmins to Port Hope; attended U of T; married and then divorced; has no children; is a professor of classics at McGill University. Oh, yes, and we have Carson’s strong yet delicate writing: passionately learned, playfully coded. Just how autobiographical is her new fictional essay, The Beauty of the Husband (Knopf), in which a wife with a classical education quotes Homer even as she watches her husband leave for other women (“often turning to look back”)? Yet there is no one more direct at communicating the sorrow hidden at the heart of love.

The study of classics was not obvious at first for Carson (BA 1974 St. Michael’s, MA 1975, PhD 1981). She enrolled at the university in 1968, then changed her mind. The next year she found a job, and then tried graphic arts (“designing cereal boxes,” she says) at Toronto’s Humber College. Then she settled on the subject of Greek poetry and ultimately earned a PhD at U of T.

“Classics is kind of like a cult,” Carson observes with the mysterious smile of an initiate. Those who seek it out consciously set themselves apart, joining a community where people learn not in order to change the world but to preserve it; where the chatter of contemporary trend-spotters fades beside the power and relevance of ancient voices.

It’s a world where passionate erudition is honoured, a world of professors such as the opera-loving, myth-quoting Emmet Robbins. “I met Emmet in my first year,” says Carson. “He is the most civilized man I have ever known.” Professor Robbins has been her constant, the teacher and mentor who became a friend, and because he heads the Abelard School board, she is doing the fundraising reading for him.

There were other professors she recalls vividly, including Father James Sheridan, who smelled of Irish pipe tobacco. “So far as I can recall, Father Sheridan taught us Plato’s Apology by walking up and down and telling us stories about Ireland.” Revealing a flash of how her poet’s mind apprehends things, Carson adds, “Father Sheridan had a thickness of being; he let learning fall out of the folds of his cassock.”

By the early 1970s, right after the shootings at Kent State University in Ohio and the computer riot at Sir George Williams (now Concordia) in Montreal, studying Latin and Greek was almost counter-revolutionary. Like Carson’s fictional Geryon, the protagonist of her first novel, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (Geryon is winged, red-coloured and gay), classicists were freaks. Carson recalls how Leonard Woodbury, her thesis adviser, polarized his classes merely by wearing a waistcoat and tie – a red flag before the bulls of campus radicalism. What goaded them even more was Woodbury’s rigour and retrograde standards of excellence.

Although much of campus life seems to have been irrelevant to Carson, she was quickened by other aspects. Her Proustian madeleine may be the old Greek lexicon in the St. Michael’s library, where she went every night to do her homework; it smelled, she says, of ancient celery.

Carson did some of her MA at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and taught at Princeton for six years in the 1980s. But she still believes that U of T’s classics program remains one of the best anywhere. “Classics gives you complexity: the Greeks and Romans are so exemplary and so screwed up,” smiles Carson. She talks like one who is on intimate terms with them – particularly Sappho, the poetess of Lesbos, and Stesichoros, whose fragmented works concerning Herakles and Geryon inspired Autobiography of Red (Knopf, 1998). “I struggle in the dark with my Greeks. It’s a wrestling match.”

They aren’t the only folk who inhabit Carson’s wondrous mind. Men in the Off Hours invaded the minds of not only Sappho but also Leo Tolstoy and Emily Dickinson; The Beauty of the Husband, her “novel in 29 tangos,” combines quotes from John Keats, accounts of Emperor Hirohito’s first radio speech and Nahum Tates rewrite of King Lear in 1681.

Whatever she does, as a classicist, the past is always intensely present for Anne Carson. Even walking around her old campus, she says, “There are so many footprints on these streets, I’m surprised they’re not really there.”

Val Ross (BA 1972 UC) is a Toronto writer and editor.

Belying its later importance, Hart House Theatre came about as an afterthought. The young Vincent Massey (BA 1910 UC), scion of Canada’s first family of farm machinery and the moving spirit behind the creation of Hart House, together with his wife, Alice, decided that the cavern beneath the quadrangle was the perfect fit for a theatre. With Hart House near completion the theatre was designed and built quickly to open in November 1919, the same month as the building itself.

Though physically part of the building, the theatre was not part of the Massey Foundation’s gift of Hart House to the university. Rather, it was administered independently by the Player’s Club and then until 1935 by the Board of Syndics with Massey as chairman. In 1945 the theatre was donated to the university; since 1986 it has been under the control of the Office of Space Management.

Productions were staged beginning in November 1919 and full seasons ensued. In short order, the small 500-seat space (since reduced to 454 seats) found itself at the forefront of amateur theatre in English-speaking Canada. Hart House Theatre played host to campus productions, the Canadian Little Theatre Movement, the Dominion Drama Festival and others. In 1966, the 20-year residency of U of T’s Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama began. Since the theatre’s inception, directors such as Edgar Stone, Robert Gill and Bertram Forsyth all integral to the development of U of T drama and the Canadian stage have guided students.

The “cast” of Hart House Theatre is immense: Dora Mavor Moore, Lloyd Bochner (BA 1947 UC), Johnny Wayne (BA 1940 UC), Frank Shuster (BA 1939 UC, LLD Hon. 1994), Kate Reid, Ted Follows, Rod Beattie, Charmion King (BA 1947 UC), R.H. Thomson (BSc 1969 Trin), Donald Sutherland (BA 1958 VIC, LLD Hon. 1998), Don Harron (BA 1948 VIC, DLitt Sac Hon. 1991), William Hutt (BA 1948 TRIN), Lorne Michaels (BA 1966 UC), Urjo Kareda (BA 1966 UC, MA 1967) and many others. All trod the boards in a myriad of productions, their words echoing off the thick walls.

Sutherland, as a young and greatly aspiring Maritimer, came to U of T in 1953 in order to become an actor at Hart House Theatre. “I came for that theatre. Expressly for that,” he recently wrote in a letter to longtime manager, Janet Bessey. Squirrelled away in her underground office, Bessey has worked at the theatre since 1968, as manager since 1977. Her love for the place is evident as she recounts the theatres storied history, including its recent travails. Funding, the eternal nemesis of small theatre, is at the root of the problem. However, in December it was announced happily that the theatre would be integrated into Hart Houses cultural programming. The theatre has set itself a five-year, six-million-dollar fundraising target in order to establish a permanent endowment. In the meantime, U of T will provide transitional funding.

The long history of Hart House Theatre; its sloped, gangway entrance, which gives the impression that it is about to swallow you whole; its submerged, intimate space; its substantial proscenium arch; and its old hemp ropes, rather than modern metal cables, hanging riotously above the stage all add up to a richness of experience rare in theatre anywhere. For more than 80 years, Hart House Theatre has been a place of lofty dreams, soaring imagination and artistic beauty. “It sings,” extols Sutherland. Clearly, it is a place that has proven itself well worthy of breaking a leg.

Others, in high school in the 1960s, had the opposite experience. If they were bright, they quickly got shunted onto the science track and found themselves waving languages, literature and the social sciences goodbye.

It is no wonder that there is a divide between the sciences and the humanities in our culture. In reality, the divide is an artificial one, a view that is supported in the cover story of this issue. The sciences and the humanities are all part of the human continuum. You cannot separate them and understand what it is to be fully human any more than you can remove the colour from a Tom Thomson painting and still call it great art.

Our fundamental purpose at the University of Toronto is to push the frontiers of knowledge on all fronts. Those frontiers are just as noble whether they involve an astrophysicist trying to explain the distribution of matter in the universe, a philosopher probing the meaning of justice in a democratic society or a playwright illuminating the intricacies of human relationships.

What’s more, the humanities play a special role in education for without them, we would merely be training students, not educating them. Typically in our high-tech age, engineers, for example, are no longer practising engineering 10 years after graduating. Therefore, instilling the ability to think about sociological, psychological and political issues is crucial in preparing them for the leadership roles they will play.

Likewise, it is critical for politicians, writers and artists to have some understanding from a scientific point of view about the world they inhabit. What are the fundamental constituents of the world? What role is the planet Earth playing in the universe as a whole?

The President’s Council on Undergraduate Education, led by Provost Adel Sedra and myself, has been charged with addressing the issue of what constitutes a proper education for our undergraduate students. The twist I am hoping to bring to U of T, and to undergraduate education in general, is to broaden the armoury of the educated person and incorporate science on an equal basis with the humanities. In my view, in the 21st century, if a person does not know what the genetic code is and has no idea what underlies DNA testing, then she cannot call herself an educated person. In the same way, if a person cannot communicate and write fluently, he is not an educated person. Of course, a deep appreciation of music, drama, film and the arts is also the hallmark of a well-educated person. The University of Toronto offers these experiences fully to its students.

If we widely exploit this scope, our graduates will be able to “read” the natural world. They will be able to navigate the boundary “where art and science meet,” as American scientist Stephen Jay Gould put it in a recent work. As Shakespeare expressed it for the ages in As You Like It, they will be able to live a life that “finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.”