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  • Through a Glass, Darkly:An English Scholar's Vision of University Transition
  • Lynn Wells (bio)

In their invitation to participate in the annual English Studies in Canada Congress roundtable, the journal's editors asked contributors to consider the statement that "some of the most critical intellectual commitments of the academy are predicated on the matter of change." As someone who has spent her career with one foot in the world of the literary scholar and teacher and the other in the sometimes murky land of university administration, I have had the advantage of dual positions from which to observe the changes that have defined the Canadian academy over the past decade, and I continue to do so today. Many of the transitional aspects of current academic life in Canada see us returning to the contemplation of ideas that have fascinated humankind for centuries: the nature of truth, the value of critical thinking and free expression, the intersections of culture and identity. These ideas are at the heart of some of the most quickly moving debates in the contemporary university: the needful defense of facts, scientific and historical, in a climate seemingly determined to render them powerless; the increasingly troubled conflicts around who can speak and what gets spoken on our campuses; and the complex negotiation of inter-cultural understanding in an era of indigenization and urgently needed national reconciliation. While I have had the opportunity to respond to [End Page 167] these issues in my various roles as a university leader, I have found that my formation as a scholar of contemporary fiction has provided me with a distinct way of seeing that helps to make sense of the rapid and often incomprehensible changes manifesting themselves in the academy today.

Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we have all been consumed with the contemporary moment in which we are living, trying to understand its significance. Some literary writers take on the role of interpreters of the present, reflecting the world as it happens. There are necessary blind spots, however, in writing about the "now," since novelists are limited in their perspectives and must operate without the benefit of hindsight or retroactive meaning. In his essay "On the Present in Literature," Ernst Bloch writes, "For without distance, right within, you cannot even experience something: not to speak of representing it, to present it in a right way which simultaneously has to provide a general view. In general, it is like this: all nearness makes matters difficult, and if it is too close, then one is blinded, at least made mute" (2). In his 2016 novel Nutshell, Ian McEwan literalizes Bloch's argument through a parodic retelling of Hamlet from the point of view of a fetus who must try to secure his own survival by blindly deciphering the actions of his murderous mother and the mores of the rotten state in which she lives. This intrauterine narrator, who receives all of his information by eavesdropping on his mother's conversations and the podcasts to which she listens, symbolizes the limited and necessarily distorted perspective of our efforts to understand the contemporary world, including the constant changes in the academy.

McEwan's improbable conceit gives us a model for how to think about the public assault on truth that has unfolded over the past year and the role that universities can play in serving as a bulwark against it. While the transition to the world of fake news and alternative facts has happened swiftly before our mostly uncomprehending eyes, the academy, like McEwan's fetal narrator, should survive the swirl of confusing developments by sticking to the first principles that define its being: the creation and dissemination of knowledge, which should be objectively obtained, freely shared, and openly debated. As Peter B. Kaufman argues in The Chronicle of Higher Education, we are "descending into a post-truth age" in which "information is being weaponized" (2 April 2017). Universities have the power to resist this dangerous devolution by serving as the inviolable space in which truth, however contested and threatened, still matters.

In recent days, the defense of truth has become complicated by highly fraught discussions of freedom of expression on...

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