Recorded 1 June 1972
From CBC audiotape no. 863, transcribed by Robert D. Denham. This was an interview with Frye by David McPherson at the meeting of the Learned Societies of Canada, Montreal, May–June 1972, where Frye had presented his talks “The Critic and the Writer” and “Pistis and Mythos.” His interview was broadcast on the CBC’s Ideas on 30 June 1972, at the end of a week-long series on the Learned Societies’ meetings produced by Earl Pennington. This last program used interviews with four scholars to address criticisms of the university in an era of student unrest, and the pressures universities are facing from the public.
NARRATOR: We asked Northrop Frye whether he thought the quality of university education today was being eroded by social pressures.
FRYE: The university is after all a special purpose institution, and the decline in undergraduate registration in the last year or so indicates that the students are beginning to realize that. A university education does not guarantee a comfortable middle-class living. Further, it is not something that one really has to have or can demand as a right. I think that what is really the problem is the old hierarchical system—that the university is the first-rate education that the gentleman got and that technical colleges and so forth represent a second-rate consolation prize for the people who (a) may not be quite so intelligent or (b) may not be quite so high in social status. Now those, of course, are pestiferous notions, and the sooner we get rid of them the better.
MCPHERSON: Are too many people going to university?
FRYE: I think too many people will always go to university as long as it has this kind of artificial and unreal social status attached to it. As a result you’re bound to get, human nature being what it is, a certain number of spoiled middle-class brats who regard their teachers as their nursemaids. When the values of the university are generally questioned, this kind of thing goes up very steeply.
MCPHERSON: Many of the traditional Honours programs, for example, at the university, are being broken down in the name of flexibility and greater chance to give the student initiatives. What do you think of this line of development?
FRYE: I think it is a definite erosion of quality. The old Honour Course in the University of Toronto gave the undergraduate about as good a training as he could have got anywhere on the continent. I am very sorry that the undergraduate Honours program was thrown over for that reason.1I think that perhaps the Honour Course did demand more maturity and a higher degree of commitment from the student than the student was always capable of giving it. So I’m glad that more flexibility has been brought in for that reason. But you get into a cycle with these things. You scrap one program in the name of flexibility and variety and you introduce another kind, and after a few years the more intelligent students begin to realize they’re getting gypped, and so the cycle has to start over again.
MCPHERSON: Is there any sign at this point that the cycle is beginning to move the other way?
FRYE: I think that there are signs, yes. I’m thinking of a story of a couple of years ago of an instructor who drafted a course in English literature simply bulging with relevance. He started with things like Kerouac’s Dharma Bums just to provide the historical background, and then he filled it full of black revolutionary literature and anything that had been published the day before yesterday. And the students said, “To hell with this stuff. We want Joseph Conrad or something we can get our teeth into.” I think you’ll find that increasingly the type of student response. They want an education; they don’t want a finishing school.
MCPHERSON: I think that one of the arguments for a more general undergraduate education is that if a student specializes fairly early, he’s not able to bring to the social problems that face us all a kind of informed intelligence about many issues.
FRYE: It’s true that the student has the difficulty of the fact that there are always two contexts of education. In scholarship, the world is very pluralistic and specialized. That is, the humanist can’t speak to the scientist. In fact, he can hardly speak even to the humanist who is working in a neighbouring discipline. And there’s no way around that: that’s the way scholarship is. But the humanist and the scientist are still united by the fact that they’re both citizens in the same society, and they’re both committed to that. I think that that is something which always has to be kept in the foreground of any educational process.
MCPHERSON: I’m wondering if we could persuade you to be a prophet for a few minutes and talk about the kinds of direction you see the university moving in.
FRYE: The university is, of course, hitched to its economy. Certain things happen when there’s a boom cycle. There are more universities established, usually far too many universities. Then there’s a bust cycle, and everybody gets hysterical and panicky and starts cutting budgets. As long as we’re hitched to that kind of roller coaster, the future of universities is in considerable doubt. I feel myself that the principle of federation at Toronto—which, I think, although it’s unique in Toronto, was really quite a good principle—was that the humanities are best taught when they’re decentralized and the sciences when they’re centralized.2That means, I think, that in any community there ought to be one university which has far more money spent on it than other universities. I don’t care if that’s elitism. It just seems to me to be educational good sense. You have to have one research library which is big enough for any kind of work and certain types of research facilities and laboratory equipment for the sciences. A country like Canada cannot afford more than at most two such universities. Consequently, the decision where to put them ought to be a federal one and not a provincial one. Then, along with that, I would think, could go a number of decentralized, rather smaller liberal arts colleges, which do an honest, conscientious job of teaching the arts and the sciences at an undergraduate level. I would like to see the university situation work itself out along those lines.