The Educated Imagination

I have previously written about the University of Toronto’s commitment to academic freedom and the influence of benefactors.  According to the Memorandum of Agreement between the Peter and Melanie Munk Charitable Foundation and the University of Toronto, there will be a policy of implicit segregation at the University of Toronto.  The agreement reads, in part:

The main entrance of the Heritage Mansion will be a formal entrance reserved only for senior staff and visitors to the School and the CIC. Usual and customary traffic for any occupants of any future developments adjoining the Heritage Mansion will be through one or more entrances on Devonshire Place.

In other words, the main entrance will be reserved for dignitaries and visitors to the school, as well as “senior staff.”  Undergraduates, graduate students, post-doctoral students, regular faculty, sessional lecturers, administrative assistants, custodial staff, the general public, and taxpayers (who have contributed some 16 million of the 35 million dollar donation by the Munk Charitable Foundation) will all be required to use the back door to the Munk School of Global Affairs.  This is not in the spirit of intellectual progress and public engagement.

The requirement of the Memorandum of Agreement also contradicts the University of Toronto’s Statement on Prohibited Discrimination and Harassment.  Point 3 of the Statement reads: “In its Statement of Institutional Purpose the University affirms its dedication ‘to fostering an academic community in which the learning and scholarship of every member may flourish, with vigilant protection for individual human rights, and a resolute commitment to the principle of equal opportunity, equity and justice.’”  It seems therefore that the Memorandum violates the Statement of Institutional Purpose insofar as not all members of the university community are afforded the same “opportunity” to enter through the “formal entrance reserved only for senior staff and visitors to the School and the CIC.”

Likewise, the Memorandum violates the university’s Human Rights Code, which “requires that employees of the University be accorded equal treatment without discrimination.”  This “formal entrance” requires that all employees not be treated equally.  Instead, the Memorandum states: “only senior staff and visitors to the School and CIC” will be permitted to enter this “formal entrance”; the rest of the academic community will have to use “one or more entrances on Devonshire Place.”

Will the university choose to violate the Statement of Institutional Purpose, the Human Rights Code, and the Statement on Prohibited Discrimination and Harassment, or will it revisit this part of the agreement?  Whatever else the university hopes to accomplish here, it cannot allow blatant discrimination that amounts to segregation.

Ovi Magazine has a post, “In Praise of Northrop Frye: A Giant of Literary Criticism,” here.

“A man who is clearly an idiot”

On this date in 1582 William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway put up a bond for their pending marriage.

Frye in The Educated Imagination reminds us once again not to indulge in biographical fallacy:

We know nothing about Shakespeare except a signature or two, a few addresses, a will, a baptismal register, and the picture of a man who is clearly an idiot.  We relate the poems and plays and novels we read and see, not to the men who wrote them, nor even directly to ourselves; we relate them to each other.  Literature is the world that we try to build up and enter at the same time.  (42)

It’s been an especially good week for the super-rich.  They’ve seen record corporate profits while Republicans continue to lobby tirelessly to prevent the Bush tax cuts from expiring for the top percentile of earners.  And all the while these happy few have been on the receiving end of hundreds of billions of bailout dollars to sustain the financial market they collapsed two years ago by way of a greed so rapacious that the market did not (as all true believers believe it must) “self-correct.”  There’s also the trillions of dollars worth of “quantitative easing” now working its way through the system in a last ditch effort to keep the whole crazy scheme ricketing along like the Rube Goldberg contraption it really is.  As economist Nouriel Roubini and others have noted, we now have socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.

The consequence is that tens of millions of people are chronically unemployed, stripped both of income and their remaining wealth:  Ireland, Greece, and maybe Portugal are poised to go under, and perhaps take the rest of the world’s economy with them.

Don’t worry about the super-rich, however.  In the U.S. alone, prior to the 2008 crash, they owned about 34% of the nation’s wealth; they now own about 38%.  And while many millions of people must do without any income at all, the top 1% take in 25% of it.  One assumes that they are doing so while curing cancer, resolving the suicidal impulses that drive global warming, and selflessly developing a free-of-charge vaccine for avian flu.

Tonight we’re running a restored version of Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis. Poetry, Auden says, changes nothing.  And yet it still might serve as a reminder just how much everything can change because it ought to be changed.

Here’s Frye in conversation with David Cayley on being a “bourgeois liberal”:

Cayley: You’ve described yourself as a bourgeois liberal and even said that people who aren’t bourgeois liberals are still “in the trees.”

Frye: Or would be if they could.

Cayley: I don’t quite understand what you mean by that.  This seems on the face of it a strange statement for a social democrat and a Methodist and a populist to make.

Frye: Well, the bourgeois liberal to me is the nearest analogy I can think of to a man who is sufficiently left alone by the structure of authority in his society to develop his individuality.  Because he’s a liberal, he doesn’t become an anarchist, that is, he doesn’t grab all the money and corner all the property in sight.  He’s a person who can relate to other people. He doesn’t withdraw from society or become a mass man.

Cayley: So the emphasis is not the same as Marx gives the term “bourgeoisie” when he uses it to signify the hegemony of a certain class?

Frye: The bourgeois liberal is capable of seeing himself as having a certain position in society.  He’s also capable of seeing something that that situation puts him into.  You can’t avoid being conditioned, but you can to some extent become aware of your conditioning.  (CW 24, 971)

The rest of the movie after the jump.

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A lovely 1967 performance of “The Wind Cries Mary”

Today is Jimi Hendrix‘ birthday (1942-1970).