Deane to students: ‘Without you, the academy will have little impact’

I have many vivid memories of this time, including one of Dr. Philip Tobias, the
eminent professor of anatomy and world renowned authority on human evolution,
deftly slipping away through a cloud of tear gas, his billowing robe asserting in very
stark contrast to the uniforms of rampaging riot police the elusive yet indomitable
value of humane learning and scientific enquiry.

Another memory from the same year is of the annual academic freedom lecture, given
by Ronald Dworkin, soon to be famous as a philosopher of law and a constitutional
scholar, teaching at Yale, New York University, and the University of London. In 1969,
at the age of 38, Dworkin had been appointed to the Chair of Jurisprudence at Oxford,
and when I heard him speak in Johannesburg he was a passionate man in his mid-forties. This was a transformational experience for me, although I do not think I
realized it at the time.

Dworkin established his reputation as a critic of legal positivism, a doctrine-derived
from the work of Jeremy Bentham – that asserts there is no inherent or necessary
connection between the validity of law, on the one hand, and ethics or morality on the
other. In 1977 he was to publish a book called Taking Rights Seriously, which expanded
upon the notion of what he called “law as integrity” – which as an undergraduate listener
I took to mean that there is a necessary, epistemic, connection between law and ethics
or morality.

This way of thinking blew away the clouds of confusion for me. The notion that an
unethical or immoral law must be opposed, and could be opposed without necessarily
vitiating one's allegiance to one's country, made it possible for the Vice-Chancellor to
engage in protest against the enforcement of apartheid in the academy without
necessarily abnegating his authority – without being required, figuratively as well as
literally, to cast off his gown of office.

The fundamental question was this: in whose name did he wear that gown? At one level
this was easy to answer, for as the presence of the ceremonial mace at convocation
made clear, the right of the university to grant degrees came from the state. From what
source, however, did he derive his authority to critique the state itself, and did all of
us – students, faculty and staff alike – derive our right to demur at injustice? If that
authority depended upon the government of the day, it was obvious that he and we
had no serious right to protest, and our activities were illegitimate. But they did not
feel illegitimate, and Dworkin's insistence on “law as integrity” showed us why: the
authority upon which the university was built derived not from the monolithic state as
temporarily constituted by partisan politicians, but from society as the constantly
shifting sum of human experiences, aspirations and contradictions.

The triumph of reason and justice which was the release of Nelson Mandela and the
advent of democracy in South Africa is known to you all, but had we not – had the
country not during those dark years – maintained its allegiance to “law as integrity,” the
outcome most certainly would have been disastrous. Law had to be understood as
enjoying an epistemic, even if in practice inconsistently realized, relation to ethics.
Furthermore – and this is simply an extension of that last point – the authority asserted
by the Vice-Chancellor in my anecdote was nothing if not derived from values that
transcended the state itself. “Law as integrity” was a theory that made not society itself
but social idealism – the valorization of a just society – the foundation, justification, and
raison d'etre for the law.

That, at least, was what I understood in the 1970s to be the import and application – in
South Africa, at that time – of Ronald Dworkin's thinking. The notion has remained with
me ever since, surviving my decisions to leave the study of law, subsequently to
become a scholar and teacher of English literature, and eventually to commit myself to
the service of higher education in the kind of administrative role into which I have been
inducted today. The story of the Vice-Chancellor's presence at protest meetings is
worth telling because it helps make sense of those decisions which, cumulatively, have
brought me here to McMaster. The issue of the Vice-Chancellor and his authority, his
responsibility to social and human values beyond the immediate and contingent, bears
directly upon this ceremony and the significance of the gown that has just been placed
on my shoulders.

The gown is a gift of the McMaster University Alumni Association, and I am very proud
and grateful to receive it. I am even more proud when I reflect on what the gift means:
that our graduates now at work in the world maintain their investment in their
university, that they have an interest in its leadership, and that they understand the
extent to which the work of the university must be integrated with, or at least
responsive to, their hopes and the constructive aspirations of our society at large. I use
that word “integrated” to trigger in your minds a recollection of Dworkin and the idea
of law as integrity, for insofar as the academic vestments of my Vice-Chancellor in
Johannesburg in some way symbolized the dependence of law on ethics and morality,
on positive civil aspirations, I invite you to think of this garment as a symbol of
“education as integrity,” by which I mean quite simply the obligation we in the
university must acknowledge to work constantly towards the betterment of our
immediate community and broader society. In this province and in this country those
goals are frequently shared with government, but this is not always or necessarily the
case, as the South African example attests, and for that reason it is critical to be clear
at all times about the source of university authority, and about the different forms of
that authority.

I am speaking this morning in commitment to the idea of service as an underlying value
of the academy. Today, at United Nations Headquarters in New York City, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is being joined by representatives from academic institutions in
more than thirty-five countries formally to launch UNAI, or United Nations Academic
Impact, an initiative intended to promote the direct engagement of institutions of
higher education in programs and projects relevant to the United Nations mandate, and
in particular to the realization of that organization's Millennium Development Goals:
the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, achievement of universal primary
education, the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women, the
reduction of child mortality, improvement of maternal health, progress in combating
HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, and the achievement of environmental
sustainability.

McMaster University joined UN Academic Impact soon after its establishment, and is
one of a relatively small number of Canadian institutions to be signatories, so it is
appropriate that today, while sister institutions around the world are gathered in New
York City to reaffirm their determination to improve the human condition through
higher education, that we should pause to reflect on the way in which McMaster
University contributes to that effort.

“Education as integrity”: a somewhat mundane though nevertheless profound
interpretation of the phrase is that the practice of learning and teaching is nothing less
than the embodiment of honesty and sound ethics. My faculty colleagues on the
platform and in the audience would no doubt expatiate at length on the idea of an
ethical pedagogy, and it is obvious that a powerful connection exists between the
dominion of honesty and ethics in the classroom, and the rule of those same values in
society.

Because the university derives its authority from higher human values and a committed
civility, it furthermore goes without saying that the day-to-day activities of the
institution need to reflect that commitment. Hence, collegiality and the principle of
academic self-governance must be respected and reinforced, as must fairness,
openness and transparency, as well as the fundamental principle of academic freedom,
which not only allows but encourages dissent and disagreement. It remains astonishing
to me – and an odd sort of consolation – that the apartheid regime in those difficult days
in South Africa could never quite bring itself entirely to eliminate academic freedom.
Even though you had to do so under supervision of a stern and disapproving librarian,
you could read Marx's Kapital or the Communist Manifesto; and the Vice-Chancellor
could put on his robe of office and tell the student body why detention without trial
was indefensible in a civilized society, and why the doctrine of habeas corpus had to be
defended. Barbarism, evidently, is only rarely absolute.

There are also less obvious resonances for the phrase “Education as integrity.” The
language suggests wholeness: education as a gathering-in or reconciliation of diverse
elements, and we are reminded that this is an activity of the highest order, that it
should be available to all and should act for the betterment of all, and that education is
diminished in value and effect when it falls out of touch with the full gestalt of human
concerns.

What is going on in New York at this moment is an attempt to take such an
understanding of education beyond sanctimonious generalization, to make the work of
the university more meaningful – and the learning process more successful – through a
dynamic and interactive engagement with the very human problems which it seeks to
address. Over the last decade universities, especially in the English-speaking world,
have participated increasingly in a bloodless marketing discourse, focused on “global
citizenship” as the goal towards which they and their students should aspire. But for all
this time they have failed effectively to re-negotiate the relationship upon which such
aspirations might successfully be built, the link between institutions of higher
education and the world which purportedly they seek to serve. To require that students
acquire an “international experience” at some point in their degree is admirable
enough, but also minimal in what it is likely to contribute either to the student's
development or to the nation visited. What kind of education is it that relegates
experience of the broader world to an optional add-on available only in the senior
years, or – worse – assumes that experience of the world is unworthy of academic credit
and must be postponed until after graduation? What kind of education assumes that
“the world” begins – or at least demands to be reckoned with – only once you leave our
national borders? And what kind of education leads students to believe that the world
exists to provide an arena and a resource for their personal improvement?

In New York today the emphasis is on impact. What appears to be yet another
conference on academic internationalization is in fact a significant departure from the
discourse so far. The sponsorship of the United Nations at this event is misleading:
although many nations are represented, nationhood itself is not directly relevant. The
intention is to rally the universities of the world to focus on their obligation to address
humanity and its most urgent needs. In certain cases, this obligation and the discharge
of it will be transnational, while in other cases it will not. McMaster University, as a
signatory to Academic Impact, could certainly boast about our contributions to nursing
in Pakistan, or to the treatment of diabetes and related disorders in the Indian and
Indo-Canadian population, but we could just as easily focus on the work of our
researchers in addressing aging or poverty in Hamilton.

I have recently said that at McMaster we will need to define and refine our
understanding of our place in the international context. I do believe, though, that we
must understand our international commitments as merely a subset of our
encompassing human obligation, and it is in attending to the latter that we will find a
firm and clear direction to follow. That obligation is not confined to the Milleniium
Goals of the United Nations, although they do provide a helpful hook on which to hang
a more defensible vision for higher education. Universities are comprehensive,
multifaceted organizations, and it is just as important to recognize the complexity of
the interface between the university and society as it is the simple requirement that we
derive at least one part of our authority from society, and from the human dream of
health, prosperity, civility, and cultural fulfillment.

The community in which McMaster is situated is no less complex and rich than the
university itself. The City of Hamilton and the university have grown up together, and
there is no doubt that we have contributed to each other's success. When I think about
McMaster's “academic impact,” as per the UN initiative, I do think of Pakistan, India and
the many places in the world where our teaching and research has brought benefit; but
I come back to Hamilton as the place where the university's engagement with the world
has to begin, always. Just as “education as integrity” presupposes collegiality, honesty
and fairness within our university community, so it also commits us as an institution to
work for the enrichment and development of a healthy, just and prosperous community
around us.

This is unproblematic, if not easy, so long as we understand that education, if it is to
have and to serve integrity, must be at least a two-way process. Notwithstanding the
nomenclature, the best teacher is the individual most open to learning, and any learner
fully seized of her subject will inevitably teach. The object of study is that from which
we learn, which observation opens a way to imagining the benefits that will accrue
equally to our students and to the community when we explore the potential of service
or experiential learning in the social sciences, medicine, engineering, humanities,
business or science.

To assert that global citizenship cannot be learned in a local context is simply wrong.
Poverty on our doorstep is like poverty four thousand miles away: while the cultural
and socio-economic determinants may differ, the nature of the human experience is
similar, and it is possible to extrapolate from analysis of the local to shed light on
problematic areas of the global. This is the gathering-in and interconnecting function
of education as integrity.

In closing, and to illustrate that last point, I have one further anecdote involving my
alma mater, the University of the Witwatersrand. This comes from a slightly later phase
than that with which I opened: the mid- to late-nineties, after the arrival of democracy
in South Africa, and at the beginning of what turned out to be a major transformation
in the system of higher education. The Vice-Chancellor of the time – by then a different
person from he with the penchant for wearing academic regalia while simultaneously
breathing tear gas – was faced with a dilemma not unrelated to that confronted by his
predecessor. After fifty years in which the majority of the population had been denied a
decent school education, should the university protect its distinguished international
reputation by insisting on entrance requirements so demanding that effectively the
majority would continue to be excluded? Or should the institution's global standing be
sacrificed, perhaps temporarily, in order to address the immediate needs of a hitherto
disenfranchised population?

This was a real and for many a painful predicament, particularly since it pitted
progressive social views against academic aspiration, sometimes within the same
individual, but ultimately the university acted as if Ronald Dworkin's argument from
1975 was still being heard. Integrity in education meant that international standing
bought by betraying local interest was unacceptable; advancement of the university that
directly or indirectly hobbled the community in its quest for prosperity, civility and
justice was reprehensible. So, for a decade the university concentrated its efforts on
undoing, through education, the legacy of apartheid, after which it emerged once again
into the international community of learning.

Today, in Ontario, we face pressure to internationalize and yet, as I have said earlier, it
is unclear what should be the proper relationship between that global thrust and our
local obligations. The universities daily face the challenge of accommodating the many
students who wish to attend and are qualified to attend, and in all of this the talk of
accountability and obligation looms large. To understand properly the question of the
universities' statutory commitment and authority, and the relation between that and
our moral and ethical obligations, will be fundamental to our prospects for success.
Although we do not find ourselves in immediate danger from teargas and other cruder
forms of interference and intimidation, the drift of the university sector is nevertheless
not entirely within our control. For that reason education as integrity remains worthy of
our vigorous advocacy and defense – how urgently you would only understand if you
have seen it under threat.

For today's graduating students, with whom I am very proud to share in this
celebration, my hope is that your time at McMaster has given you a great many
experiences as inspiring to you and as influential upon you as those I have recalled
today from my own student days. If you are anything like me, the real significance of
many of those experiences will disclose itself to you only over time. I leave you,
though, with the reminder that just as those who would teach must be open to
learning, those who have learned – like yourselves – have an obligation to teach or foster
enlightenment, in whatever form of work they find themselves, and in whatever
circumstances. Without you, the academy will have little impact. I wish you well and
commend to you a life of reflection, sound action, and integrity.