Prairie Jacobin: Carlyle King and Saskatchewan English

L.M. FINDLAY Prairie Jacobin: Carlyle King and Saskatchewan English This essay is structured in four parts. In the first of these, I offer a brief historical sketch of the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan , and use the theme of teaching to bring out some of the problems this department currently faces. In the second part I consider more general questions of autonomy, identity, and accountability with which university professors in most disciplines are currently corning to terms. In the third section, I discuss the career of one particular professor of English, Carlyle King, who was enormously influential in intellectual and social developments in Saskatchewan. And in the final brief section of the essay I make a plea for further historicizing of English Studies in Canada in both inspirational and cautionary ways. I The University of Saskatchewan was founded in Saskatoon in 1907 and structured after the examples of the University of Toronto (as reformed in 1906), the University of Edinburgh, and land grant institutions in the United States like the University of Wisconsin (Hayden, 11££,26-7,36-7). From the outset, the University of Saskatchewan was committed to the humanities, as well as to agriculture ('the sheet anchor of the university' [Murray and Murray, 230]), teacher training, and a wide range of professions (with the exception of architecture) which still define the institution today as remarkably comprehensive, and hence expensive to maintain. The English Department was there from the beginning in the form of its first Chair, Reginald Bateman, who graduated from Trinity College Dublin with Highest Honours in Modern Literature and taught for a few years in Ireland before coming to Canada on a one-year contract , subsequently made permanent after President Walter Murray had tested the new man's mettle. Bateman was one of those four professors who, with President Murray, began teaching the first seventy students in 1909. Bateman enlisted in the 28th battalion in 1914 and was killed in action near the very end of the Great War in September 1918, following the breaching of the Hindenburg Line (Bateman, prefatory note). After his death, the English Department was chaired in succession by R.A. Wilson (1920-40), ].M. Lothian (1940-9), Carlyle King (1949-64), Clarence Tracy UNNERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 64, NUMBER 3, SUMMER 1995 418 L.M. FINDLAY (1964-5), D.R. Cherry (1965-9), ].K. Johnstone (1969-70), Herbert Berry (1970-1), Johnstone (1971-5), Berry (1975-7), Johnstone (1977-9), R.L. Calder (1979-81), C.A. Thompson (1981-5), D.C. Kerr (1985-6), P.T. Millard (1986-91), and R.N.G. Marken (1991-5), Over the years the English Department has grown to be the largest single department in the university, with thirty-two tenured or probationary faculty, and more than fifteen part-time appointees who do excellent work in conditions of recurrent insecurity and limited reward. Enrolment supplements and other forms of 'soft' money have in recent memory served to confirm the status of the department as a place where some four thousand students are effectively taught in regular session at fairly low cost, most of them in the introductory courses which provide a base for the senior courses; honours and graduate seminars which, in 1993, graduated 254 students with the BA (three- or four-year) in English, ten with the MA, and two with the PH D. Despite the persistently disappointing ratio of full-time to part-time teachers in the department the commitment to excellence in teaching continues. The current Chair was in 1985 one of the first recipients of the University Master Teacher Award, gained a national award from 3M Corporation for outstanding educators, helped pioneer university instruction in the Prince Albert Penitentiary, and has recently figured prominently in the teaching of English by satellite television to small groups and individuals scattered over the northern part of the province. Professor Marken helps set the tone for constructive thinking about teaching of all sorts at all levels in the department, the university, and the wider community (where he can be found regularly in high schools, at teachers' conferences, and in consultations with corporate executives and trainees who are required to...