Persistence of Vision

Indoctrinate U screens tonight at Ottawa's National Archives -- and lest it seem odd that a film about American higher education is attracting attention in Canada, rest assured that Evan Coyne Maloney's film resonates strongly there.

Here's an excerpt from an op-ed in Canada's National Post:

Early 20th-century American novelist Thomas Wolfe, the subject of my grad thesis, is most famously remembered for his book, or rather its title, You Can't Go Home Again. The phrase entered the language as shorthand for the disappointment one feels in later life when revisiting the greatly changed scene of one's youthful bliss.

My youthful bliss was studying the great writers of Western civilization at the University of Toronto. I didn't know then I was witnessing a "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar": the outgoing tide of a classically liberal education.

I don't suffer from the "in-my-day" syndrome, whereby the institutions of one's formative years seem in retrospect superior to those of the next generations. I haven't lost my objectivity; academia has. In my day, the university's mission was to open minds; today it is to close them.

[...]

I often wonder where in Canada I could "go home again" in the 21st century. I have one simple, symbolic criterion: a learning centre that would still hold up for critical admiration the greatness in the writings of Thomas Wolfe, a hard-drinking, aggressively heterosexual white male from a racist background, whose creative inspiration was Western civilization's literary treasure trove and whose overriding theme was his passion for America.

That's a tall order nowadays. I only know one three-year arts program in Canada today I'd be glad to call my intellectual home, and I fear for its survival.