Bonjour chers collègues et amis. Je vous remercie vivement de vous être levés si tôt ce matin et de vous
intéresser à l’avenir des sciences sociales et des sciences humaines au Canada. Le travail que vous
accomplissez est d’une importance extrême. Je vous remercie de bien vouloir partager quelques
moments avec moi pour refléchir sur notre mission et sur l’avenir.
At Victoria University the memories, myths and legends of eminent literary scholar Northrop Frye haunt
conversations, popping up at the most unexpected moments to inspire and, at times, amuse. Faculty
were, and still are, wont to tarry a bit in the Senior Common Room before appearing at High Table for
lunch. One day, as a group lingered over a particularly difficult crossword, Norrie sat ensconced behind
his newspaper, giving only the occasional “harrumph” or the rustle of turning pages as a sign of life.
Once of the colleagues challenged him. “Norrie,” he said, “give us a four-letter word for bitter vetch.” A
silence ensued. The voice behind the newspaper intoned, “Dear Colleagues, I do not know any fourletter words.”
The story is à propos because I want to talk today about a four-letter word, the one which, uttered
frequently by Obama, won the last presidential election in the U.S. Hope. It was heralded across the
land as the cure for all ills, the solution for all problems. It was the title of the book President Obama
wrote before the election, The Audacity of Hope. It should not require courage to hope. Hope should
be ubiquitous, a common, daily gift, like the sun that rises each morning. Hope should be universal.
Some years ago, I was in Thailand, in the market place of a small town north of Bangkok. I saw a poor
woman walking around looking longingly at each display of fruits and vegetables. I gave a small boy
enough money to provide the woman and her family a meal and sent him over to deliver the gift. I
watched from the other side of the square. She took the money and looked at me, signaling me to wait.
She walked directly to a stall where they were selling small song birds in cages. She bought one and
proceeded to set it free. As it flew up into the sunlit sky, the young child ran back to me and pointed at
the bird and said one word, “hope.” I realized that releasing the bird was this woman’s offering, a
return gift, demonstrating that physical poverty is different from poverty of spirit. No matter our
circumstances, our minds and hearts can be rich with hope. She was the teacher that day and I am still a
student.
Growing up in New York State, we always spoke ironically about hope for we knew very well that the
light at the end of the tunnel was inevitably, not an approaching train, but New Jersey.
On a more serious note, where there is no hope, there is no future, no way to survive or to have the will
to survive. My ancestors put my great grandfather and great grandmother on a boat in the hope that
they would survive the potato famine. They succeeded and helped the rest of the family. This still
happens today but sometimes there is no boat. Families scrape together all their funds to send their
children to university because education offers the hope for a better way of life. Hope entails, however,
reciprocity. As one person is educated, he or she is obliged to help others. Hope is not solitary but a
community activity. When one person rises, all do. When someone discovers a new concept we all
benefit.
I know that faculty members and graduate students are not wealthy. I also know that they are
incredibly generous. When I think of the tens of thousands of dollars raised on the Carleton campus
alone for Haiti, Chile, Pakistan, and Japan in the last year alone, I am overwhelmed with pride and
gratitude. Some twenty-five or more years ago, Eva Kushner and I created a foundation with the goal of
supporting research in the humanities and social sciences. We made donations. We raised some funds.
We supported research. But perhaps the best thing we did was to demonstrate to members of the
business and political communities that we believed in what we represented, we believed so much we
would invest in it and our act was a positive message of hope to our colleagues. Some time afterwards,
the Humanities Federation set up a foundation and Eva and I were among the first, modest, but early
donors. That foundation has since been co-mingled with the social sciences. If you want a grant from
some large foundations, you have to demonstrate the support of all your members. I wonder what
would happen if every professor gave $100 and every student gave $10 each year to the granting council
or to the humanities and social sciences fund at his or her university each year? Would this not be an
impressive way to show to our government, when next we will have one, that we fully support the work
of our councils and that we find it essential to the promotion of good research in our fields? I think it
would be very powerful.
Several Canadian poets, including Douglas Le Pan and Earle Birney have said, “no man is an I land.”
None of us lives in a vacuum. Not even Schroeder’s cat! I always think of Shakespeare’s line in Hamlet:
“This above all, to thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be
false to any man.” To be true, to have value and to espouse values, we need to exist within a social
context—we need to serve others and all glimpse the possibility for a brighter future, hope is shared and
no task is too great.
In the last decade since Jacques Delors chaired the education commission’s report to UNESCO on the
future of education, entitled, Learning: the Treasure Within, much has changed. Delors perceptively
outlined a series of conflicts which needed to be resolved through education. Among them was the
conflict of tradition and modernity. This is something which young people around the world seem to be
solving themselves. I recently watched a dance performance by our students who began with Indian
classical music and dance but concluded with a Bollywood number and break dancing. The second clash
which Delors mentioned was among cultures. I return to the dancers and note that they were both
international and multicultural. This is not to say that problems do not exist in these areas, but that they
are being solved even as we speak. Another conflict mentioned by Delors was technology. He spoke
about technological haves and have-nots. When it was stated that knowledge is power, the meaning
was technological access to knowledge. Access to computers and cell phones was limited. Blackberries,
did not exist—at least not on the market. This problem too is resolving itself as cell phones are
ubiquitous the world over and if Dr. Sibal, Indian Minister of Education has his way, inexpensive
computers will make access to education universal.
The information technology issue has morphed into a new form which has three distinct parts. The first
is that while, power in terms of access to technology and knowledge will be shared, power in terms of
the creation of a hierarchy of knowledge will be all the more significant. If you search a term on your
computer, programs will quickly respond by giving you the most commonly associated term, the most
recent association, or the one someone has purchased. Let me provide an illustration. If you look up a
common word, say, “innovation”, you will find the most frequently cited site or location, the most
recent newspaper headlines and the name of the university that paid to be on the top ten pop-up list
when the word “innovation” is requested.
Thomas Friedman spoke of the “flat earth.” Production and assembly of machines may well be
distributed economically across the globe giving employment where people will work for less pay.
However, as soon as those populations gain the first level of economic stability, they will demand
education and costs will increase. Korea is a prime example as this nation is setting up factories in
China. The need for education and the appreciation for the value of education will increase the world
over. University professors may well consider the world their oyster and move more frequently and
internationally. But let us think about what we teach and how it is organized.
Back in the 18th century a group of philosophers, economists, historians, writers and scientists who were
also called philosophers in those days, got together to write the Encyclopédie, a huge series of volumes
containing and organizing all the information known to humankind, from articles on governments and
governance, beauty and makeup, art and music, machinery and its functioning, manufacturing processes
and chemical experiments…it was all there in alphabetical order with copious footnotes and clever sets
of references to throw censors off the trail. Encyclopedias were key reference works even when I was
young. Parents invested in sets of them, sold by itinerant salespersons in the hope that their children
would acquire wisdom and attend university. Today, our shelves are uncluttered by these works. We
look things up on tiny devices. A huge, international scholarly project would be to undertake a new
knowledge hierarchy which would be useful for advanced scholarship. It would require the
collaboration of computer software specialists and specialists in every field of knowledge. A few years
ago the largest data transmission ever was effected on a computer in the U.S. It was a complete threedimensional scan of the human body. This is very useful without doubt to future physicians. The
contents of our minds would be of greater use. In One Hundred Years of Solitude people lose their
memories and with them, their identity and meaning. If we could preserve memory faithfully, we could
prevent the loss of culture and language. If in Africa the death of a wise man is equivalent to the loss of
a library, we could save many libraries and compound knowledge and its impact if we possessed the
powerful key to its organization. Je ne voudrais plus voir de musées qui nous montrent notre passée.
J’aimerais mettre le passé, la science du passé et de tous les pays du monde à notre portée afin de
l’utiliser pour créer un avenir meilleur.
The second part of this problem is the incredible amount of information with which we are constantly
bombarded. How can we have the time to read and sift through it all? How can we, or our students,
determine what is valid or invalid? When there are no rules, publications are not bound by the ethical
codes which surround print. Recently, a student commented to me on my FaceBook page. I do not
have one. Someone made one up, probably on a Friday night after celebrating an exam. There was my
picture, my date of birth, my friends, my likes, dislikes. It was neither factual nor good literature—
although it was interesting to learn what this anonymous thought I liked. There were comments and
messages to which I had supposedly responded. Someone wrote “me” noting a spelling error and
thought it most inappropriate for a university president not to be able to spell. It took a month of trying
before I was able to get the page removed. This is a small example but it made me wonder if perhaps
there are pages for all our professors and our public figures? Students have submitted essays to me in
the last few years, quoting in good faith, sites from the internet which were fallacious or fraudulent.
When I was taught how to do research, we went to the library, looked in well known bibliographies, got
the articles and books, read them and lined up the opinions on a particular issue, using some to add to
our thesis and critiquing the others. Our professors steered us to reliable critics. Today, texts are self
published every day. Some of them are wonderful. We need to teach students how to sift through
information, find the good, and find ways to cross check and double check. We need to find ways to
determine when to end a search. We need to teach a new way of evaluating information. This is surely
an extension of what we have always done. For those reliable bibliographies were not always so. Quand
j’étais étudiante à Paris, le mythe du jour voulait que le célèbre critique, Lanson, payait ses étudiants un
franc par entrée pour sa bibliographie de la littérature française. Bon nombre des entrées étaient, selon la
rumeur la pure invention des étudiants affamés et créateurs.
The third part of the problem is that with people spending hundreds of hours glued to mechanical
devices, students will not acquire the socialization skills necessary to make their way in the world. The
humanities and social sciences have always excelled in this offering students the means to reflect and
communicate effectively.
Problems we have today which Delors did not note, are demographics, the urban/rural divide and
poverty. In some countries like India youth far outnumber the aging. In others, like Canada, the reverse
is true. On the one hand, this means that there are spaces for Indian students in Canada. But we must
not limit ourselves by thinking regionally or even nationally. What will happen to an aging population
not supported by sufficient numbers of youth? What will happen in nations where large numbers of
youth flood the employment market? We tend to define ourselves by our employment. Will people not
only find means to gain their livelihood but also to have meaning in their lives? If we cannot say we are
professors, scholars, writers, researchers, what are we? How will we provide for our aging population
and how will we make their lives more agreeable?
The rural/urban divide is resulting in large mega-cities like Mumbai whose population is equal to half the
entire population of Canada. A 18 million la plaisanterie locale est que le nombre est inexact car il aura
certainement augmenté depuis ce matin. Cities like New York extend to Philadelphia to Baltimore to
Washington, D.C. in a mixture of urban/suburban sprawl for which municipal planning involves re-design
and re-adjustment rather than utopian dreaming on a blank slate. Urban populations tend to be young,
multicultural and multilingual. When we educate our students in, for example journalism and
communications, we would do well to require them to be multi-lingual. I was just in Vancouver and was
interviewed by three Punjabi radio stations, thanks to the help of a translator. There are at least two
Chinese newspapers in Toronto. Bank branches in city centers are hiring multilingual tellers. At the
same time, we have to consider the different mentalities of rural and urban residents and, as the rural
residents become grey haired and less wealthy, how power will shift and then how overcrowding will
affect urban residents. Can we create attractive, alternate communities and breathe life into small
centres? The Carleton Batawa project offers an example which, if followed by every university in the
world, would make an enormous social and economic impact. The formula is simple. Take a declining
community and add bright, energetic students and brilliant faculty in architecture, business, science,
policy, sociology and arts. The result is renewal, new vision, energy and activity—all environmentally
friendly and sustainable to boot.
Recently booklists are flooded with titles of works studying happiness: the economics of happiness, the
politics of happiness, the geography of bliss, the list is unending. It is partly because of economic
distress, partly because of a change in values. The current generation appears to value time more than
work. They ask if there is another purpose in life. Albert Hirschman in The Passions and the Interests
pointed out that the Enlightenment philosophers like Hume and Montesquieu believed that there was a
universal desire to improve our condition. This desire would bring reason and passion into balance.
Today that desire still exists but when it is thwarted, when there is no hope for the ability to alter one’s
condition, no exit from poverty, then there will be revolts. Populations with resources will encircle
themselves behind walls and live in the self-imposed imprisonment of a gated community. Maybe we
need to re-think the Enlightenment model, identifying other purposes and new passions.
Le philosophe américain Ralph Waldo Emerson a dit : if you build a better mousetrap they will beat a
path to your door. Mais si personne ne le sait et si vous demeurez trop loin du centre, le sentier menant
à votre porte risque de ne pas devenir très usé. En effet, dans l’état de Michigan ils sont en train
d’éliminer de nombreuses routes parce qu’ils manquent les fonds nécessaires pour les maintenir. Alors
sans des communications améliorées et des moyens de transport en commun augmentés, sans une
bonne éducation très accessible, nous diminuons la possibilité même qu’une meilleure invention soit
créée. Einstein prenait une fois le train. Le conducteur lui demande son billet afin de le poinçonner.
Einstein le cherche dans toutes ses poches. Il descend sa valise et commence à la vider sur la banquette.
Le conducteur lui dit, Monsieur Einstein, je vous reconnais. Ca va. Vous n’avez pas besoin de chercher
votre billet. Vous avez bien d’autres problèmes à résoudre pour le monde. Einstein a répondu, mais il
faut absolument que je retrouve mon billet autrement je ne saurai où, à quel arrêt, descendre. Tout le
monde peut perdre son billet. N’importe qui peut avoir un moment d’oubli. Quelqu’un dans cette salle
pourrait être le prochain prix Nobel.
To resolve the problems which confront us, we need what is missing in America. The people were
inspired by a message of hope. It was what they needed and wanted. Now they need an agenda for
hope. They need to have a path traced for them to follow, a program indicated that will lead them to
fulfill their dreams. People are willing to sacrifice, to invest in the future if they see themselves or their
children improving their lot.
In Canada we currently have the opportunity to dress our own agenda for hope. This agenda is
necessarily one which includes the humanities and social sciences in a greater and more meaningful way
than ever before. We have sometimes been marginalized. I think we have all spent countless hours
attempting to prove our utility. Will the ability to parse texts and write poetry make you live a longer
and happier life? Will sociology find a way to resolve the causes of violence and terrorism? Will the
study of philosophy reduce human despair? Will economics eliminate poverty? These are the questions
we have been asked over the years. And we have danced on the head of the pin attempting to
demonstrate that learning any of the many subjects we teach will make you a better, happier and yes,
more useful citizen.
While we were right then, we now need to create our own agenda. In a world where people need value
and meaning, we can offer them the ability to find solutions. In a world where people need to redefine
knowledge, to create a new hierarchy of information retrieval, to learn how to discover the truth, to
weigh evidence and determine the critically best solution to the philosophical issues of the day, social
scientists and humanists are absolutely essential. In a society where values are at conflict due to
geographical or other demographic distribution issues, the humanities and social sciences will flourish.
We need to put forward this agenda to declare our value. The agenda is a statement of our core values,
our best outcomes. The agenda can venture into new combinations of disciplines, new areas of inquiry.
It can include new ways of teaching and new methods of research. But it must be clear and strongly
articulated. I believe that this process is well begun here under the auspices of SSHRC.
It is said that without vision the people perish. But without hope, they cannot recognize vision and will
not be motivated to improve.
Thank you for being the purveyors of hope and vision. Thank you for your dedication to your research
and teaching. You are Canada’s reason for hope.