Conducted December 1968
From “An Interview,” Random, January 1969, 18–22; dated by internal evidence. Random was a publication of the Student Administrative Council at the University of Toronto. This interview is the first to reflect the student unrest of the late 1960s and early 1970s with its questioning of university purpose and organization; the interviewer was SAC commissioner Bob Bossin, a musician who at university was one of the milder student radicals.
BOSSIN: I can always tell that I am reading a Frye speech when I see within the first four pages a reference to Marx and within the last three pages a quotation from Blake.
FRYE: That’s because I like to look back to my student days when I was interested in Blake and everyone else was interested in Marx.
[Victoria College professor Northrop Frye is not only renowned for his literary criticism, but also for his writings on education, universities, and scholarship. Random sent SAC education consultant Bob Bossin to interview Professor Frye; in a discussion ranging from the structure of the modern university to the role of the student in society, they found several areas of disagreement.]
BOSSIN: Professor Frye, I often feel a dichotomy of sorts present in your writing. You say on one hand, “Life won’t stay to be prepared for,” and yet on the other hand, you have described the student as withdrawing for four years in order to learn how to think.1
FRYE: I accept the general premise that the university is a part of society. It is strongly imbedded in society and it is subject to a normal kind of inertia. It is pulled toward accepting more and more unconsciously the axioms and assumptions of society. As regards the student in university, I would distinguish between detachment and withdrawal. If the student is in a protected place where he is withdrawn from society as a whole, he is in what I have called a fresh air camp for the overprivileged. On the other hand, the university does foster the kind of detachment from society which makes an examining and re-examining of society’s assumptions possible.
BOSSIN: What was your reaction to Jerry Farber’s article “The Student as Nigger”?2
FRYE: My snap reaction to it was that it was a piece of interested polemic. It took a conception that I understand, that is, the conception of the students as a proletariat in a Marxist sense. It is a very foolish and unnecessary kind of proletariat. But the writer’s eye here seemed to be on the horizon and I didn’t feel that he was talking directly towards the students or that he was primarily concerned with their interest.
BOSSIN: How do you respond to the idea of the students as a proletariat? Farber’s solution was to give the students complete freedom immediately. Would you agree, or should students be a proletariat?
FRYE: No, students should not be a proletariat. An analogy I have made, whether it is a sound one or not, is with the feminist movement, giving the women the vote, fifty years ago. I think that society is always trying to create proletariats: but they’re unnecessary, they always create unnecessarily difficult situations. But, of course, there were a great many things said during the feminist movement besides the question of giving women the vote. There was a great deal said about the participation of women in society and politics, and the immense effects that this would have on politics. I am not sure that the student movement as a student movement will become a major revolutionary force without becoming modulated or modified into rather a different kind of development.
BOSSIN: How do you see this?
FRYE: It seems to me that radicalism in the university has been moving out from the university towards other social goals and has been trying to involve itself more and more with the community around itself: so that the university is no longer the main target of political questioning. What seems to be taking shape is a radicalism that deals with society as a whole and with the university only to the extent that it is part of society.
BOSSIN: Do you find this a happy eventuality?
FRYE: I think at that point one must learn to say with Shaw’s Caesar, that “One must learn to do without happiness.”3
BOSSIN: I recall that in one of your speeches early this year, you lambasted the Varsity editor for wanting simply a system of unrestricted electives.4Elsewhere, you have written that the present Honour system was about the best that could be developed.5 Do you still feel that this is the case?
FRYE: I don’t remember saying that about the Honour system. I do think that the Honour Course presents a pretty original and unique contribution to North American education. I’m not too happy to see it destroyed with such speed and hysteria as it is being destroyed in the present Faculty of Arts meetings.6
BOSSIN: You have said that the university cannot be first-rate unless “intellect, passion for ideas, long hours of work, and devotion to one’s course are socially acceptable to the student body.” You have also said, “The impact of the university arouses all the powers of the mind to fullest activity, and stirs up as much mental conflict as possible” [WE, 92, 95]. Do you really think this is happening today in Victoria College and the University of Toronto?
FRYE: I think it is always happening. But every college and every university is subject to a great many dampening factors, such as the competence and the interest of the instructor and the immense differences there are among students. Students are, after all, just the human race: and anybody teaching them has to remember the parable of the sower [Matthew 13:1–23]: that you will always get in any class a spectrum of concern which extends from the profoundest to the trivial and shallow.
BOSSIN: Yet one reads increasingly in the student press and hears increasingly from student leaders that the working goals of university are not real learning and real questioning. Every year we see increasing numbers of intelligent, creative, and questioning students dropping out.
FRYE: Yes, but every classroom is going to present this kind of thing. The students who want a really lively university where there is a passion for ideas and a life lived with the intellect in the fullest sense are going to find themselves in the same classroom with people who have very different social assumptions and goals.
BOSSIN: Is the classroom a necessary and logical approach to learning?
FRYE: Well, it’s a very convenient one in the way that it encloses space and enables a subject of study to be set up within it.
BOSSIN: But there has been a great deal of criticism, especially in the last decade, of the classroom as a learning situation. You have the Hall-Dennis Report urging broad open spaces where students can pursue a number of different interests;7 and in many other experiments, students are moving from the classroom into many areas of field work.
FRYE: I think that knowledge is a structure. To gain knowledge means entering into the structure. The university is at a level of education sufficiently mature for something of the pluralism which is always inherent in scholarship to begin to show itself. For that reason, the large room with its multifarious activities does not seem as appropriate to the university as to the public school.
BOSSIN: But given this multiplicity of interests and concerns, the concept of a course that says, in effect, you will learn the principles of literary symbolization from September to February, at which time you will be examined, seems to be less tolerant of the pluralism of scholarship than the open-ended system.
FRYE: I think that what is actually produced is always going to be a working compromise among a number of disparate ambitions and aims: and perhaps the ordinary classroom is as practicable a working compromise as one can get.
BOSSIN: In university today, does not the authority of the discipline become effectively the authority of Northrop Frye at the front of the class? I, as a student, know who I have to please to get marks on my union card. And this deference can make me pretty passive: I merely wait for the word from Northrop Frye. What you get is, in effect, almost a tyranny.
FRYE: Anybody who has ever faced a classroom knows how terribly easy it is to become a kind of opaque substitute for the subject that one is teaching. This could, I suppose, present a temptation to the teacher; but more often, for an honest teacher, it represents simply an obstacle to his teaching. He is very well aware of the fact that people have all kinds of ways of resisting the educational process and that docility is perhaps the most subtle kind of resistance there is. The tendency to accept the teacher’s authority as a substitute for the authority of the subject is of course something that is always there; all the teacher can do is to try to make himself, as far as it is humanly possible, the transparent medium for his subject. I think it is clear to the student in my own class that he doesn’t have to agree with me to get his marks, that I am not interested in myself primarily at all. To accept the teacher’s authority as the authority of the subject is simply a means of failing as a student, whatever your marks are.
One cannot think at random; one cannot just start to think. The ability to think is like the ability to play the piano: it depends on previous practice. The original thinker in physics or chemistry or literary criticism is the person who has entered into the structure of thought and has hitched it onto himself and has added to it. This is something very different from wisdom: I think that the way toward wisdom is through knowledge: knowledge is in itself essentially continuous in structure. The authority of the subject is something supreme over both teacher and student. It represents something by which both teacher and student can escape the tyranny of having to be teachers and students, and pursue this knowledge for itself.
BOSSIN: Don McCulloch, a psychiatrist at this university, has written that when a person is constantly subjected to the authority of others, I suppose even if they are acting as a transparent medium for the authority of a subject, he will begin to doubt his own worth and become even more docile.8 What checks do you see to halt the further development of this docility?
FRYE: I don’t know if I have any patented formulas for escaping from this. I think that the picture drawn there is probably accurate as far as some students are concerned. But I would raise the question, whether it is really an inevitable product of their educational system if the students go in this direction, or whether it is simply a working out of feelings within themselves. The description does not account for all the students who have been coming into my office for the last thirty years: people who have just caught an idea of their own and say they want to work it out and nobody is going to stop them from doing it: they have obviously taken fire at some point or another. I have had that kind of experience just as frequently as I have of students who have tended to distrust their own creative power.
BOSSIN: I’ve certainly felt that spark of interest. But at those times, the structure of the university, which has mapped out all my courses and essays in advance, militates against my being able to follow up my thoughts creatively.
FRYE: Well, there is always a collision and conflict in life. Wherever one is living it and no matter what one is doing, what one wants to do is continually interrupted by other kinds of commitments. This would happen to a student’s life no matter what his pattern of study was like.
The structuring of courses in a university is perhaps the result of the fact that these courses are not gone into to a depth beyond which the student can handle his own creative response to them within a relatively limited time. I don’t know whether there are any patented formulas to remedy such situations. One can deal with them sympathetically as they arise.
BOSSIN: And yet there are radically different models for educational institutions; such as, for example, Rochdale College, where learning follows not a curriculum, but the interests of the students themselves.9
FRYE: Well, I’d like to see what happens. I view Rochdale with a very sympathetic eye. Then again, if this is fair for the student, it ought to be fair for the instructor as well; and if the student is set free in this way, then the instructor should be also. You would then really get a course of study only when the orbits of the student and instructor happened to coincide. I don’t know just how that would work. Rochdale seems to me to be the kind of thing that would work best geared to an adult education program.
People come straight from high school into university. There is in elementary education an element of compulsory learning, simply because it is hardly possible to take a role as a responsible citizen in a modern democracy without the kind of elementary knowledge of literature, history, arithmetic, and geography one needs to live in the twentieth century. As one goes on, this kind of compulsory conspectus of information begins to break down and become a little more flexible; but at the undergraduate level, it has not really disappeared for the majority of students. The kind of short-term haul which has the undergraduate taking four or five interrelated subjects has some advantages in that it gives him some sense of perspective, and of the interrelationships of the different disciplines; it leads him to realize that creativity is a very versatile thing in a very strong way.
BOSSIN: I wonder if this process is not self-defeating. You have written that students are eager to be directed to maturity with the least loss of time. Could not doing this deny the student the necessary learning space to feel that excitement you speak of?
FRYE: Yes, but I think that the disadvantage of a self-educated person is that it takes so long to find out things which other people already know. I think that the process of facilitating contact with a subject which is part of the teaching process is really a means of, or should ideally be a means of, freeing a student’s energies so that he can find out things for himself with the least possible amount of frustration. The scholar learns from experience to make things as little frustrating as possible for his students.
BOSSIN: This sounds fine to me in the ideal; but, to quote a phrase from Northrop Frye, the one thing we can know for certain is that we are damaging the present.10 Surely the violence and inhumanity that we see daily in the Year of the Tiger that you describe in The Modern Century is connected to an educational system that has not really changed in a thousand years. This suggests to me that a major overhaul or radical change is certainly not a bad thing.
FRYE: Well, I wouldn’t suggest that it was a bad thing.
BOSSIN: And yet you do not seem to be in any particular rush to have the university overhauled.
FRYE: When I spoke of damaging the present, I was talking about the philosophy of progressivism, that is, that there are certain desirable goals to be reached in the future and that we should make any kind of sacrifice in the present in order to attain them. I was making the point that the philosophy of progress can be the most morally callous of all the philosophies. The present generation has some rights and the present moment has some rights. It seems to be an essential part of the educational process to increase the significance of the present moment for the student and the teacher and everyone else. For that reason, I am willing to work within any kind of system so long as it’s here. I don’t object to the overhaul of the educational system; I would object only to the draining out of all vitality in the present system in order to reach something in an undefined future.
BOSSIN: The system we’re studying under now seems to have very little to do with the present moment. A friend of mine complains that she is tired of students because they are always thinking in the past and cannot come into the present moment in any creative way.
FRYE: All I mean is, I am engaged at the present moment in the teaching function. I have classes to meet and I am willing to accept the situation I am in as a means of getting whatever creative power can be released as a result. In my experience as a teacher, I have found that an astonishing amount of it is released, in spite of all the frustration and competition and all the rest of it. This doesn’t mean that I don’t want to see the whole thing overhauled, or wouldn’t welcome very deep-seated and radical changes; but only that the present process has to keep on going with the present generation of students so that they can get as much out of their education as they possibly can. I do not want to sacrifice them to the future.
BOSSIN: What deep-seated and radical changes would you make in the structure of Victoria College if they were yours to make?
FRYE: I can only work along the lines I know. I think that I would have to work from the direction of my own interest in literary criticism, mythology, and so on. The trouble is that any new model, once it is worked on by teachers and students, tends to shake down into the old model very quickly. The human material of students and teachers has always been the same in my thirty years of teaching. The question is, to what degree can that material be transformed?
BOSSIN: If you feel that changes are necessary, are you gearing your activities to this in any way? What has Northrop Frye done for the revolution?
FRYE: Well, I understand what Dennis Lee means when he says he doesn’t know where he is going.11 What I am trying to do is get my own mind clear, because I wouldn’t trust any direction I would move in.
BOSSIN: You and Matthew Arnold.
FRYE: Yes.
BOSSIN: Do you consider the in loco parentis a rather silly fetish for university students?
FRYE: The way it is usually applied, it often is. On the other hand, I am not sure whether I would want to see the student’s relationship to the university replaced by a completely impersonal or contractual relationship, where the university took no responsibility for protecting the students from the result of their own inexperience, from the draft, and from various other things.
BOSSIN: Do you think that he should have more protection than, say, the young average shopworker?
FRYE: I’m of two minds about that. The student is, in a sense, taking bigger chances than the shopworker. When I spoke of protecting him from the results of his own inexperience, I didn’t mean so much drinking as, say, the taking of LSD to transcend his ego, or, something much more normal in university life, engaging in radical political activity. This seems to be something that is part of a student’s life in a way that it is not part of the shopworker’s life.
BOSSIN: Many critics of the university say that the examinations are really counterindicated to learning. What do you think of that?
FRYE: I don’t know what I think about the examination system. I approached it myself as an undergraduate in a pretty cynical frame of mind.12 That hasn’t changed. I realize that examinations are like a piano recital: they have to be done quickly, and if you make a mistake, you have to cover it up fast. I knew that I had to stand first in first class honours in order to stay at college (I didn’t have the money to stay otherwise), and I figured out very quickly the way to beat the examinations. It’s not all that difficult, and it certainly didn’t stop my desire to learn.
BOSSIN: Do you want to tell us what that system was?
FRYE: No.
BOSSIN: One final question: Would a guaranteed annual income for students and everyone else help the situation?
FRYE: Yes, it would.