Reply to Questionnaire

SYMPOSIUM ON PROFESSIONALIZATION 459 2 From an unpublished lecture. Text at English Department, University College of Hearst, Kapuskasing, ant. 3 Quoted in the Gazette, Montreal, 6 Feb 1989, p 1. JOHN FRASER Reply to Questionnaire I've read and reread your letter and questions but remain puzzled. Symposiums of this sort are normally geared to possible action - 'Is too much money being spent on high-tech medicine and not enough on preventitive medicine?', 'Should the UTQ devote more of its space to politics?', and so forth. Here I can't see what is being aimed at, not explicitly anyway, and facing your plethora of questions I feel as if I were trapped amid the labyrinthine options and permutations of a diet sheet. Moreover, when I read or dip into journals like the New York Review of Books, Commentary, and Scientific American, I see no lack of intelligent academics writing clearly for intelligent non-specialist readers without talking down to them and without losing sight of the fellow specialists waiting to pounce on them in the correspondence columns. Nor is the prose in high-tech journals like Critical Inquiry always hopelessly coruscated. However, reading between or below the lines, I can sense a pattern of sorts. Would it be a good thing if Canada had non-specialist journals of the calibre of the NYRB, Commentary, the New Criterion, the Village Voice? Obviously yes. They are not simply places in which ideas are mediated. They are forums in which no-holds-barred arguing about important public issues goes on, and on the face of things there is no reason why there couldn't be Canadian journals as lively and invigorating. However, some things can't simply be ordered from the Sears catalogue, and there's a chill-factor to be considered here. Writers like George Orwell, and Dwight Macdonald, and Mary McCarthy were intellectual free-lances, unafraid to challenge what Orwell called 'all those smelly little orthodoxies which are ... contending for our souls.' As are writers like Nat Hentoff and Joseph Epstein, and as were the contributors to Scrutiny in the 1930s, for me still the model of what a high-intensity professional journal in the humanities should be like. In Canadian universities, if I can judge from my own, orthodoxies are becoming increasingly entrenched. Latin America, South Africa, pornography, nuclear disarmament, affirmative action, and so on - by now, for a lot of people, there is obviously only one intellectually respectable position with regard to a number of issues. And to suggest that things may be more complicated than they seem - that if liberals, for UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1989 460 JOHN FRASER example, want to preserve their own freedom to read and look they must be prepared, along with Alan Borovoy and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, to put up legally with the existence of hate literature - is to riskimmediately having a whole nexus of unsavoury attitudes ascribed to one. So that if a younger faculty member were to venture significantly beyond the pale in these days of peer evaluation, grant-giving, and other control systems, it could have significant consequences for his or her career. An experienced and highly professional child psychologist of my acquaintance spoke to me recently of having been severely reprimanded by colleagues when she referred to a little girl as behaving 'seductively.' I don't doubt, either,. that one reason why that admirable Scrutiny-like journal Compass (1977-80) failed to obtain the modest funding that would have enabled it to carry on was that it didn't subscribe to a gung-ho literary Canadianism. A great deal of momentum is required if one is going to go seriously into a subject without safe preconceptions as to what one will find there. And the life of the mind - our collective thinking and arguing, with an eye, ultimately, to social action - becomes blurred and blunted when there can't be a free passage back and forth between theories and practices, a testing-out of each in the light of the other, and a refusal to ignore particulars when they fail to fit with what some theory tells one ought to be the...