Tom Symons: A Canadian Life

Chapter 8: “It’s All About Culture”: The Cultural Perspective of Tom Symons

“It’s All About Culture”: The Cultural Perspective of Tom Symons WALTER PITMAN M ichael Tait, a friend and colleague in my undergraduate years, remembers Tom Symons as a major figure in the life of Trinity College, the very Anglican institution on the University of Toronto campus. Though Tom was only a year ahead academically, it was from him that Michael received his introduction to the necessary information and expected undergraduate behaviour, along with an array of the many college myths and legends during the initiation week that dominated the early days of September 1948. He was impressed beyond measure by the contextual awareness of this second-year student who confronted him, a newly arrived secondaryschool graduate now faced with the mysteries of postsecondary living and learning that lay ahead in this handsome college in the centre of Toronto. Here there was before him a natural leader and he could only marvel at the ease, the charm, and the integrity of the figure consigned to the task of making him feel comfortable and at home in his new academic space.1 I too first met Tom Symons at that Trinity that was to be our academic home throughout our undergraduate years in the late 1940s and early 1950s, perhaps from a more distant perspective. In spite of my obvious non-conformist religious background, I had been convinced by a wise and sensitive high-school guidance teacher that I should apply to a small college like Trinity rather than to the larger Methodist institution, Victoria College, or even University College, a C H A P T E R 8 182 TOM SYMONS: A CAnAdiAn Life secular institution that would have been my more comfortable route to an undergraduate degree. Certainly for an active Baptist, fortunately resident in Toronto and thus able to reach the university by streetcar, that would have been a more fitting venue. But that guidance teacher, a graduate of Trinity herself, had realized that I would miss the most valuable elements of university life as a day student in a large college and she was determined that this for me would not be the case. She knew I was coming from a family of modest financial means. Though I might feel somewhat intimidated by the considerable number of student colleagues from Ontario Independent Schools, who were comfortably ensconced in Trinity’s residential accommodation, I could weather that first impression. With scholarship and bursary assistance and a part-time job, I would be able to enjoy my years at Trinity. I soon felt myself a part of the collegiate scene. However, during these days of first impressions there was one figure for whom social class or religious denominational predilection meant nothing and for whom I developed a distant but intense respect. It was Tom Symons who seemed a constant presence and a force for civility and decency—even to the extent of welcoming awkward and nervous first-year students. In the midst of events for which the college football exhortation, “damn the dissenters, hurrah for old Trinity,” seemed to be directed at my very person, I was encouraged by the attitude and warm welcome of Tom at any occasion we shared. I never came to regret that choice of learning, dining, and discussion at Trinity College. I was witness to the fact that even at this early age Tom exuded a comfort that I now realize was the blossoming of a world cultural view that affected both his own undergraduate learning and his warm relationships with his academic colleagues. My next encounter with Tom took place many years later. After graduation, extended graduate work abroad, and a meteoric rise in University of Toronto ranks, he had been presented with a unique opportunity—that of being the founding president of a new university in the conservative south-eastern Ontario city of Peterborough. By that time, I had achieved a significant level of notoriety, having moved in 1956 to that city as a high-school history teacher and, in 1960, been selected by a not-yet-founded political party to be a candidate “IT’S ALL ABOUT CULTURE” 183 in an unexpected federal by-election prompted by the death of Peterborough’s sitting MP. Surprisingly, I won the seat as a “New Party” candidate and became a member of Parliament in the fall of 1960. The victory had occurred in spite of the fact that the CCF, one of...