The Long and Winding Road toward degrees Ordinary and Beyond: ‘Rise, Master of Arts’

My longtime friend, Paul Mason, from my first round of undergraduate days and nights at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario from 1976 to 1979, wrote earlier today:

“If I had the power to re-order university education in Ontario – and it’s probably just as well I haven’t – I would bring back university entrance exams. They would not measure whether students had mastered bodies of information, however, so much as whether they could read, write and reason: I’d confront them with four pieces of writing of some substance, and set them questions which sought to determine whether they had understood them, and whether they could say something intelligent about them. (And, yes, the pieces of writing could be delivered via audio file for those with learning disabilities, and their responses could be dictated.)

“Students would then embark on a two-year program designed to equip them with an Associate Degree. Each year would require them to take four courses: five is too many if students can reasonably be expected to do all the required readings. So in a Liberal Arts program, the first year course line-up might be, say, History, Politics, French and Biology; or English, Religious Studies, Geography and Astronomy; or Psychology, Sociology, Philosophy and Art History; or Music Theory, Calculus, Italian and Freshwater Ecosystems … But there would be strenuous encouragement for students to plunge into the extracurricular life of the university – singing in choirs, participating in theatrical productions, volunteering for after school childcare programs, playing a sport, attending public lectures in subjects outside their own disciplines.

“Second year would permit greater specialization. And then – graduation! With an Associate Degree! And the university would say, go! Go out into the world! Work! Because now you’ve gained some independence from your families – or so one hopes – but you need to gain some life experience so that you have something to bring back, something to offer, when you convert your Associate Degree into an Honours BA. We’ll see you when you’re 25, 26, 27 – 30, even. We’ll see you when you have a better sense of who you are, and when you are able to better understand the value of what we’re offering you … and to have something to offer yourselves.”

“Yeah, I’m just thinking aloud. Interested, as always, to see what other folk have to say.”

It took me almost 17 years to complete my Honours B.A. in History from Trent University between September 1976 and June 1993. When I arrived at Trent in 1976, I lived in Champlain College D-17, an upper floor single room on the staircase. There were co-ed washrooms on the winding staircase floors, and the sauna was co-ed. Colour me 19 years old in paradise. Did I say how much I came to like saunas? In deference to parental comfort, the dons helpfully made sure there were temporary paper signs designating “Mens” and “Womens” washrooms on the staircase for the September Sunday mom and dad delivered their first-year progeny to residence.

It was a very different time. To paraphrase the British writer, L.P. Hartley, the past is a foreign country and we did things differently there. The AIDS epidemic was still almost five years away and officially began on June 5, 1981, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report newsletter reported unusual clusters of Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) caused by a form of Pneumocystis carinii in five homosexual men in Los Angeles. Cecil County, Maryland bluegrass singer Zane Campbell’s haunting song Post-Mortem Bar in 1990, in the movie Longtime Companion, captured the poignancy of those days in the early 1980s when Campbell Scott, son of the legendary actor George C. Scott, and then a 28-year-old actor at the time, playing the character “Willy,” observed in the movie’s final scene, “It seems inconceivable, doesn’t it, that there was ever a time before this, when we didn’t wake up every day wondering who’s sick now, who else is gone?” as Post-Mortem Bar is heard in the background. If you read the comments from viewers on a YouTube clip linked to here you get some idea of the power of the ending and how some 25 years on it resonates with people still as the moment that AIDS was brought home for them and was no longer just a problem for some queers in San Francisco. You can listen to it and watch it on YouTube here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dukIb4UU094

But the 80s were still in the future when I arrived at university as an undergraduate. There was a time before all this. In 1976, Bacchus ruled at Trent University. 

As I finally walked across University Court in front of the Thomas J. Bata Library that convocation day in June 1993 to receive my four-year Honours B.A., and then Registrar Alf (A.O.C.) Cole was handing me my degree, then President and Vice-Chancellor John Stubbs, an historian by trade, grinned, shook my hand, and said to me, “Nice to see you finally take the walk.” Queen’s University in Kingston was a tad more formal in October 1995 when I received my master’s degree at the hands of Chancellor Agnes McCausland Benidickson. I had to kneel in front of her until she tapped me on the right shoulder, and spoke the words, “Rise, master of arts.” Fortunately, as a cradle Catholic, I had a deeply instilled love of ritual and tradition, which served me well that fall day.

I’m especially fond, however, of my 1992 three-year B.A. (Ordinary). What better reminder could one hope for in the academic world for instilling humility than a degree that has the word “ordinary” written on it? I think the three-year B.A. went from being an “Ordinary” at Trent to “General.” How prosaic. I’m not sure if a three-year B.A. by any name even exists any longer at Trent.

Technically you were supposed to “surrender” your three-year Ordinary B.A. to receive your four-year Honours B.A. If you’re looking down from the Great Registrar’s Office In-The-Sky, Alf, my apologies. I seem to have overlooked that at the time.

I really love some of the quirks of academic life. Marion Fry, in the Summer of 1978, when she was serving as acting president, had me in her office one morning to explain to me the finer distinctions between “rustication” and “debarment” (one year in academic exile, versus three for repeat offenders). The Committee on Undergraduate Standings and Petitions (CUSP) thought I was a worthy candidate for the former. Professor Fry, who just turned 90, and moved back to Peterborough after retiring as president and vice-chancellor of the University of King’s College in Halifax, the city where she was born, said to me at the time, “It’s not like we’d literally send you off in the wilderness for a year to be a rustic, John.”

I appealed the CUSP decision and the Special Appeals Committee, the impartial adjudicative appeal body of last resort for students on academic matters at Trent, overturned the CUSP decision and I carried on with my studies . My appeal, I thought, was based on a novel, albeit lame-sounding then and even now almost 44 years later argument: I had “failed” all five full-time courses for the 1977-78 academic year, true, but because I had not gone to almost any classes, and was then too busy with student politics and journalism to get myself over to the registrar’s office in time for the voluntary withdrawal deadline, I argued that my five Fs really said nothing about my academic ability in those particular circumstances, and shouldn’t be given too much weight. Certainly, not enough to rusticate me anyway. It is hard to imagine I delivered this argument before the committee in person with a straight face. Frankly, their more-than-generous verdict was a gift of unmerited grace, and I have been forever grateful. I was an indifferent student between 1976 and 1978, easily distracted from academics by student politics, the ARTHUR, Trent Radio, girls, parties, bootleg Molson Brador malt liquor from Hull, Québec, and Canadian Club rye whisky.

To this day, I believe, my Trent University permanent transcript notes I have five F’s from 1978 and an Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS) from 1993.

The role of the Special Appeals Committee “is to judge whether the application of university regulations, policies or practices has caused undue hardship on any student who appeals. Where undue hardship is found to have occurred, the committee has the authority to prescribe appropriate relief.” Jim Jury, a professor in the Physics Department, chaired the Special Appeals Committee at the time.

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Empathy and compassion are the gifts of our shared human experience

A stranger smiled at me as we came around a corner and met at the end of an aisle in Wal-Mart yesterday at City Centre Mall. I smiled back. As I carried on just a few steps beyond, I heard him say, “Excuse me, can you help me?” I turned back thinking that maybe in spite of my cart, he thought I was an employee and he was looking for help finding merchandise. He wasn’t. He was simply a man hoping I could spare him some change. I did. Whatever change I had in my pocket became his. “Merry New Year,” he said, which made me smile again, thinking how he had blended the Christmas and New Year’s greetings. The whole encounter took less than a minute. But it left me thinking. What kind of world would we live in if our default position was always (or even usually) to simply do the right thing? Ask if we need, give if we can without mentally applying some means or character test to instantly determine for ourselves  the worthiness of the recipient. Not to give out of guilt. Not to give, but give begrudgingly because we all know we have to mind our nickels and dimes. But just do what we know is intuitively the right thing to do. I certainly don’t pretend I do this all the time. I don’t. And I know if the same man had approached me not in the store, but perhaps aggressively panhandled me in the parking lot just outside the doors of Wal-Mart, quite likely even intoxicated, I’d have been far less likely to give him anything. I know that’s true because I’ve done it.

The thing is this. On a macro scale, I have penned many editorials and columns over the years where I quoted U.S. Civil War Republican president Abraham Lincoln famously saying, “It is a sin to remain silent when it is your duty to protest.” Or a century later, Martin Luther King: “From every mountainside, let freedom ring.” And also another former U.S. president, a Democrat, Bill Clinton, in his first inaugural address in 1993: “By the words we speak and the faces we show the world, we force the spring … now, we must do the work the season demands. In serving, we recognize a simple but powerful truth – we need each other. And we must care for one another … but for fate, we – the fortunate and the unfortunate – might have been each other.”  Or even, “Hell no, we won’t go” Massachusetts Institute of Technology  (MIT) emeritus profess of linguistics Noam Chomsky’s famous Vietnam War era dedication in his first book in 1967, American Power and the New Mandarins: “To the brave young men who refused to serve in a criminal war.”

Writing in 1978 in his book, Robert Kennedy and His Times, the American historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, commenting in the foreword, just a decade after the New York senator’s assassination in Los Angeles, said Kennedy “possessed to an exceptional degree what T. S. Eliot called an ‘experiencing nature.’ History changed him, and, had time permitted, he might have changed history. His relationship to his age makes him, I believe, a ‘representative man’ in Emerson’s phrase – one who embodies the consciousness of an epoch, who perceives things in fresh lights and new connections, who exhibits unsuspected possibilities of purpose and action to his contemporaries.”

The thing is this also. On a micro scale in day-to-life, those very large ideals of the likes of Kennedy, Chomsky, Clinton and Lincoln for most of us can be best lived when we feel real empathy and compassion for someone who is no longer the “other.” It’s something a man like Jean Vanier, son of Canadian governor general Georges Vanier, has spent his life living.

Take AIDS for instance.

The AIDS epidemic officially began on June 5, 1981, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report newsletter reported unusual clusters of Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) caused by a form of Pneumocystis carinii in five homosexual men in Los Angeles.

I wrote about AIDS some in the 1980s. And I remember the climate of fear in 1986 that reporters were not untouched by when we were assigned stories that meant going inside provincial reformatories and federal penitentiaries to interview HIV-positive prisoners in Ontario. The high callings of journalism are to speak truth to power, as well as comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But exactly how AIDS was transmitted in terms of morbidity and mortality was not completely understood 30 years ago. So I watched with surprise and unexpected admiration as C. Everett Koop, an evangelical Christian, who served as surgeon general under U.S. Republican president Ronald Reagan from 1982 to 1989, and was well known for wearing his uniform as a vice admiral of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, had the singular political courage to speak the truth about the science of AIDS as our knowledge increased. According to the Washington Post, “Koop was the only surgeon general to become a household name.”

I also read San Francisco Chronicle reporter Randy Shilt’s landmark book on the early years of the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On, published in 1987. Three years later in 1990, Campbell Scott, son of the legendary actor George C. Scott, a 28-year-old actor at the time, playing the character “Willy” in the movie Longtime Companion, captured the poignancy of those days in the early 1980s when he observed in the movie’s final scene, “it seems inconceivable, doesn’t it, that there was ever a time before this, when we didn’t wake up every day wondering whose sick now, who else is gone?” as Cecil County, Maryland bluegrass singer Zane Campbell’s haunting Post-Mortem Bar is heard in the background. If you read the comments from viewers on a YouTube clip linked to here you get some idea of the power of the ending and how some 25 years on it resonates with people still as the moment that AIDS was brought home for them and was no longer just a problem for some queers in San Francisco. You can listen to it and watch it on YouTube here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dukIb4UU094

By the time Jonathan Demme, Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington and Bruce Springsteen brought Philadelphia to the screen in 1993, with Hanks’ haunting performance as AIDS-infected lawyer Andrew Beckett, which netted him the Academy Award for Best Actor, along with Springsteen, whose song Streets of Philadelphia won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, AIDS was no longer an abstraction to many of us. We knew people who had Hepatitis C. We knew people who were HIV positive or had full-blown AIDS.

And that’s when empathy and compassion arrive. At the same time Philadelphia was being released in December 1993, I remember the main Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) outlet on Sherbrooke Street in Peterborough letting the Peterborough AIDS Resource Network (PARN) collect donations alongside the Salvation Army bell ringers with their kettles that Christmas of 1993. While I was a graduate student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario at the time, I remember being back in Peterborough one December Saturday morning before Christmas and working the PARN donation time slot with a friend who was a member of PARN.

Changes come.

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