Tom Symons: A Canadian Life

Annex 1: Remarks on the Occasion of the Retirement of Professor T. H. B. Symons as President and Vice-Chancellor of Trent University at the Seventy-fourth Meeting of the Trent University Senate, 24 May 1972

Remarks on the Occasion of the Retirement of Professor T. H. B. Symons as President and Vice-Chancellor of Trent University at the Seventy-fourth Meeting of the Trent University Senate 24 May 1972 STUART ROBSON T here is a custom in polite society whereby institutions demonstrate the virtue of retiring leaders by offering themselves as the incontrovertible evidence of greatness. “A measure of the man,” it is said, “has been his wise choice of colleagues, . . . if you seek his monument, look around—at us!” This sort of harmless self-promotion might be appropriate in polite society, or even in academic society, but it would be a presumptuous way for the Senate of Trent to salute our retiring president. Our excellence is still too putative to serve as an unambiguous testimonial. In the wider world, we are known as Tom Symons’s university. Such a public opinion reflects in part the nature of the office which the president of any university must serve. He must, in some way or other, speak for the whole institution, and never more so than when a university is new and is establishing itself through the process one might call “emergency.” The identification of Tom Symons and Trent, however, arises as much from the nature of the man as from the nature of his office. It would be a disservice to him and to his associates to think that he alone created Trent, but it is a matter of record that, without him, Trent would not have been created. In conception, A N N E X 1 412 TOM SYMONS: A CAnAdiAn Life in planning, and in patient administration, his was the mind and character which gave unity to the parts. The coherence ties our name to his. Each of us could describe a different Tom Symons. That is not because the man is evasive or his qualities difficult to perceive. Rather it follows from our being relatively so small and intimate an institution, with less of the precision which roles in large institutions confer upon those who occupy them. For good or ill, we stand close enough to see each other in the round, and so we must naturally have a distinct personal view of the one man whom we have all met. Some of us know Tom Symons as an academic who acts upon the novel belief that students are interesting adult human beings. Some of us know him as a fellow teacher. And, although I am being arbitrarily selective, the Tom Symons I would salute is the graceful, civil man who has presided over the Senate. Let it be understood that grace and civility are not his only virtues; rather, they merit attention if only because there is a persistent notion in the land that they are not virtues at all. To the cynical, civility is an anachronism obscuring what is thought to be the “real” nature of affairs; to the romantic, it is a cousin to hypocrisy and the enemy of inner truth. To care for exact meaning, to treasure form because it is inseparable from content, to pause until implications are clearer, to worry not only that one be protected against the error of others but that others be protected against one’s own truth, to act on the premise of fallibility—in sum, to be civil—means that one must swim to some extent against the current. But that current may not be serving universities, and if civility restrains spontaneous impulse, it may do so in a higher cause. Cathedrals were not built by heaving blocks around until they lodged in a pile, nor should the free play of intellect be confused with group therapy. Whatever else the university may be, it must first be a place where care is taken, care for words, care for implications, care for others. If this Senate has been competent, if it has been at all effective as a parliament of academic change, credit must go above all to its chairman, who has shown us that we must take care. Ideas have competed here, but not men, for the chairman has gently and consistently turned us away from ad hominem debate. The tolerance which has guided the Senate has shaped the university. To build what might be called the House of Second ANNEX 1 413 Thoughts is a painstaking labour, and Tom Symons has not had the chance to forget about...