Recorded 27 July–4 October 1982
From original sound recordings in the University of Toronto Archives, accession no. B1986-0046, transcribed by L. Barnes (of the Collected Works). Dated on some of the seven tapes themselves, and also by Jane Widdicombe’s list. This series of interviews between Frye and researcher Valerie Schatzker was recorded between 27 July and 4 October 1982 in Frye’s office at Victoria as part of the University of Toronto Oral History project, initiated by former president Jack Sword and funded by the University of Toronto in the 1970s and 1980s.
SCHATZKER: You were born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, in 1912, Dr. Frye.
FRYE: That’s right.
SCHATZKER: And your full name, I should mention, is Herman Northrop Frye.
FRYE: Yes.
SCHATZKER: Of Canadian parents?
FRYE: Yes.
SCHATZKER: What were their full names?
FRYE: My father’s name was Herman Edward Frye and mother’s name was Catharine Howard Frye.
SCHATZKER: I gather you spent your early childhood there and also in Moncton, New Brunswick.
FRYE: I spent the first five years of my life in Sherbrooke, the next three in Lennoxville (a town next to it), and then we moved to Moncton, New Brunswick, where I had my primary and secondary education, such as it was.
SCHATZKER: “Such as it was” indicates that you weren’t too pleased with it?
FRYE: I really meant that I got as far as grade 11 and was admitted to the University of Toronto on the basis of the old Pass Course, an alternative to grade 13 which they abolished the year after I took it.1
SCHATZKER: I see. Do you have any comments about your early education, what it might have instilled in you, and how it might have sparked you to study what you studied later?
FRYE: I was one of those children who were taught a good deal at home. I was eight years old before I started school. I also was brought up to be a reading person, partly because of a blue Sunday and a Protestant environment. The result was that in some respects I was very far ahead when I went to school and in other respects, of course, totally illiterate. The result was that I was bored to death with school, as most children are who have a good deal of home background training.
SCHATZKER: What kind of education did you receive at home? Was it heavy on the classics of English literature?
FRYE: There was a full set of Scott which I remember reading around the age of eight or nine and there were two full bookcases; it had been a fairly literate home. My mother had acquired a good many books from her father, who was a Methodist circuit rider, and so there was never any lack of books in the house.
SCHATZKER: Any other particular interests that you pursued with your mother at home?
FRYE: It was she who taught me to read at the age of three. Of course there was a strong religious environment, some of which I would have been better without, I think. There was a good deal of the kind of cultural background that was available in the days before radio, and before television.
SCHATZKER: Any languages?
FRYE: No. I’ve always had a block about languages for that reason. The English and French populations in the towns where I grew up, Sherbrooke and Moncton, were segregated from each other, partly on religious grounds and partly because of the language. While I don’t remember any conflicts, particularly, we did keep apart and I didn’t acquire much speaking knowledge of French—in fact I didn’t acquire any.
SCHATZKER: Did you study French?
FRYE: I studied French but it was book French.
SCHATZKER: Latin as well at high school?
FRYE: I started Latin at grade 7, so that I could say that I had five years of Latin by the time got out of grade 11. But actually the first two years of Latin only got you about as far as the present indicative passive. It wasn’t really a training in the language.
SCHATZKER: Greek at all?
FRYE: No. There was a question of my studying Greek with my Latin teacher in high school—she was the only person probably in the city who knew any Greek. But I found that the time schedule, what with my music lessons and the cadet corps, made it impossible. But Greek was an option against French and what was called natural history.
SCHATZKER: What about the teachers in the system in the Maritimes? I imagine most of them in the high school would have had a university education. Did they inspire you to study further? Were they enthusiastic?
FRYE: I don’t know that I would say that. My elementary teachers, I think I can safely say, were rather ignorant. That is, they’d had grade 11 and then they had a year of normal school and that is not a liberal education. I knew at the time that they were mispronouncing words and that they were teaching things of which they really had no background knowledge whatever. The high-school teachers were people who had university degrees, mainly from the University of New Brunswick or Mount Allison. Some of them had a genuine interest in their subjects. But I think the only person who really influenced me was my music teacher, who was a FRCO graduate and who cared more about music than about putting on recitals or showing off his students.2 That was the one sense that I got of what scholarship might be.
SCHATZKER: Did you ever consider studying music?
FRYE: Yes, but I realized that I had come in contact with so very little of it that it was really out of the question.
SCHATZKER: When you decided to come to Toronto to study, did you have a clear idea of what you wanted to do? Was theology your first consideration at the time as your eventual vocation?
FRYE: I signed up as a church student. That was largely because in the town in which I grew up there was at that time no university. It never occurred to me that I would become a professor at a university, even though my schoolmates gave me the nickname of professor. That was just because I wore glasses and was always myopic. I was attracted to the ministry because it was the cultural symbol for a small town of that kind. Also, the clergyman who finally came to the church I attended was a very intelligent, sympathetic, and understanding person. He had a daughter who went to the ballet and wrote a book on the Follies Bergières, which she eventually joined.3
SCHATZKER: That’s a wonderful story. What drew you to Toronto and Victoria? You could have gone to UNB or Mount Allison.
FRYE: Yes, but I wanted to get out of the Maritimes very badly. It was the Depression, you remember, and the feeling of being culturally isolated was very intense. Moncton had only acquired a public library in 1927. I think it was partly a homing instinct of which I was very largely unconscious at the time. My grandfather had attended Victoria in the old Cobourg days and somehow or other that seemed to me to be the centre.
SCHATZKER: Were your parents encouraging this? Because it was a tradition in the family, did they encourage your leaving Moncton?
FRYE: They didn’t oppose it, but they were rather timid about it because of the very slender financial resources.
SCHATZKER: That was another question I was going to ask. The life of a student who didn’t have financial backing from home in any great degree must have been quite difficult.
FRYE: I went to business college for the year following my graduation from high school and I did various odd jobs as a public stenographer recording meetings and out-of-court hearings and that kind of thing. So I saved up enough to struggle through my first year and after that I made do with scholarship money.
SCHATZKER: Were you able to work in the summer time?
FRYE: The first summer I was.4 After that I tended more to work on things that brought in awards, like the scholarship for a prize essay, for example, which was a hundred dollars and which in those days was a lot of money.5
SCHATZKER: When you arrived in Toronto which type of accommodation was it normal to choose: residence at Victoria or off-campus residence?
FRYE: For a person coming as I did the only possibility was residence. There was also a special reduction for church students in residence if you got that scholarship, which I did in my second year.6
SCHATZKER: I see, so there was no choice at all. And residence life must have given you a feeling of closeness to the college—a sense of belonging.
FRYE: Oh, yes. I’d had a very introverted adolescence so I went to the other extreme and plunged into everything that was plungeable into, including a lot of things that I had no qualifications for whatever, such as being treasurer of the year. The honorary president of ’32 tells that story at every reunion of the class of ’32 about how incompetent I was as class treasurer.
SCHATZKER: Did you take part in sports, dramatic activities?
FRYE: Not sports. I was always very badly coordinated and rather a scrawny ectomorph. If I were reincarnated I would want another physical incarnation.
SCHATZKER: Well, it might have deterred you from other things. What about dramatic activities?
FRYE: Yes, I went into the dramatic society which actually dissolved that year and I had to reconstitute it. I had to pick the new executive myself, in my third year.
SCHATZKER: What kind of atmosphere would you describe as existing in Victoria at that time? Was its connection with the church much more apparent than it was later on when you became a professor?
FRYE: The connection with the church was fairly obvious, more particularly in the kind of social taboos that have a very peripheral relation to religion. I remember some years later a girl in residence ordering a case of beer, which there were no regulations about, because while there were signs up everywhere about not smoking, it had never occurred to anybody that anybody would want beer [chuckles]. So she wasn’t really breaking a written regulation, although I think they hastily added one after that. It was that kind of thing. Originally Victoria had banned dances. We still had the odd “promenade,” as they were called—which, after all, was a much better stimulus to conversation than dancing was.7 There was skating in the winter. In spite of all that it was not a hidebound place at all and intellectually it was, I think, extraordinarily tolerant.
SCHATZKER: Was it intellectually stimulating on many levels? Did you find that a good part of your undergraduate education took place outside of the classroom, in conversation with your peers?
FRYE: Conversation was certainly a very strong element, but for a person brought up in a small town, coming to Toronto itself was a part of one’s college education. In those days there were lecturing circuits and one went to Massey Hall to hear people like G.K. Chesterton and Bertrand Russell. There were also concerts. Of course my love of music was still strong and there were still people like Paderewski whom I’m very glad to have heard—I don’t think he could play for nuts, but his reputation was certainly legendary. All that kind of atmosphere, the university sitting in the middle of a larger city than I’d been accustomed to, was very important.
SCHATZKER: What about student interest in politics? I ask that question because later on it assumed such an important role in the history of this university. Was it normal for students to be involved in the political issues of the day?
FRYE: It was a little later, not in my early undergraduate years. But when the Depression began to sharpen, and after the CCF had come to birth with the Regina Manifesto, and with two Communist groups—the Stalinist group and a Trotskyist group—there was quite a bit of student activity. Earl Birney’s novel Down the Long Table is about that.
SCHATZKER: How did Victoria fit into that?
FRYE: Victoria was middle-class but it also had a very strong Social Gospel bias.8 We had people like Havelock in Classics and John Line in Philosophy of Religion who were very active in what was called the League for Social Reconstruction, a kind of social-democrat organization.
SCHATZKER: Were a good number of the students inspired by these new ideas or did they tend to be generally complacent?
FRYE: There was the same mixture that there always is. There is always a minority, sometimes quite a sizable minority, that are concerned, and there’s always a majority that are apathetic. I’ve never known a time in the university where that was not true.
SCHATZKER: I suppose in the ’60s the minority who were concerned about things like the Vietnamese war became a little larger and more vocal.
FRYE: They became noisier. That meant that the more apathetic ones didn’t get into the news because the whole activist movement of the ’60s was entirely an adventure of the media. The majority were still people who were pursuing their normal interests at university without much regard for the political situation.
SCHATZKER: Another aspect of college life at that time that has totally disappeared now was the idea that the college was acting in loco parentis to the students. Did you feel that you were in a sheltered atmosphere, that people cared about you? I think probably it was small enough that students knew the professors and certainly knew the dons in residence. I wondered if you could compare your experience in any way to what students might experience now.
FRYE: I think it’s very different. There was a good deal of the in loco parentis situation. I think it affected women much more than men. Women’s leaves in the evening were very rigidly rationed and certainly there’s no question that the dean of women regarded herself as an official in loco parentis. That was Margaret Addison, and she was actually a person of great zeal. She wasn’t stuffy at all, but there were certain rules which it was her job to enforce. There are things which are before my time which indicate how much of an interest in students such people did take. During the 1918 flu epidemic for example, about half to two-thirds of the girls of Annesley Hall were laid out, and Miss Addison brought their meals to them. She worked night and day, twenty-four hours a day, practically with no sleep, as long as that epidemic was on, looking after her girls.9 That kind of thing, while it was considerably relaxed in my day, was still to some extent there. The college was about eight hundred students, and that made for a kind of supervision, but even so it was extremely relaxed, for the men particularly, in comparison to, say, St. Michael’s College. If you look up the calendars of the University of Toronto of that period and look under St. Michael’s and what it proposed to do to its students once it got them, you can see that Victoria was pretty broad-minded.
SCHATZKER: As broad-minded as UC?
FRYE: Well, of course we tended to think in Victoria that UC didn’t have a mind: that it was mostly a nonresident college and that it drew from too miscellaneous a group to have an ethos of its own. That, of course, was very largely nonsense. [Victoria] was more broad-minded in a sense which affected me as a student of literature. I was taught by Pelham Edgar who was an extremely civilized man. Under him were Ned Pratt, the poet, and John Robins. The professors of English at University College were still, some of them, telling their students that D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce were degenerates wallowing in filth. Consequently, the really bright students, like E.K. Brown from UC, would come over to Victoria. One has to remember, of course, that any reference to a twentieth-century writer had to be bootlegged at that time because there were no courses in contemporary literature. Pelham would discuss contemporary writers with some sympathy and impartiality. It’s true he didn’t like them much but that was a matter of temperament and taste.
SCHATZKER: That’s something I haven’t really encountered in my interviews yet. The atmosphere of the study of English at University College has been overshadowed completely by the Woodhouse era.10 I haven’t talked to that many people who studied before Woodhouse arrived and I’m left only with a few legends about people like Alexander and people outside of English like Hutton. I didn’t realize that they were less liberal than the people at Victoria.
FRYE: On the whole they were less liberal. They were closer to Matthew Arnold and felt that literature ought to be possessed of high seriousness. Even Woodhouse—his views of literature were extremely sanitized: that is, he tended to assimilate literature to what was called then the history of ideas. By that time, of course, you couldn’t avoid teaching certain types of twentieth-century literature. I was already on the staff before there was a course in American literature. I think I taught the first course in Canadian literature at the university myself.11
SCHATZKER: Do you remember any of the people well? Did you have any contact with some of the English professors outside of Victoria? Did you sneak into lectures just to see what they were like?
FRYE: No, I didn’t as an undergraduate. That may have been just sheer indolence, I don’t know. I didn’t really get to know the personnel of University College until I was on the teaching staff. Or rather when I was a graduate student.
SCHATZKER: What about Trinity?
FRYE: Trinity was much the same, I think.
SCHATZKER: And I don’t think St. Michaels had the same reputation for literature.
FRYE: Well, in English it didn’t have the same close contact with Victoria that it had in other fields, in German for example. I don’t think they even had anybody in German when I was a freshman. I think they sent their people over to Surerus here at Victoria.
SCHATZKER: Did you study German at all?
FRYE: I began a course when I was an undergraduate with a man named Holt who had a degree in music.12 I liked him very much but I can’t say I learned a great deal of German because I found it very difficult to work into my schedule. So whatever knowledge I have of other languages is a reading knowledge only, and was acquired largely by myself after I had graduated.
SCHATZKER: With much effort I’m sure.
FRYE: Yes.
SCHATZKER: It’s hard to do on your own. The question I just asked about knowing professors at the other colleges brings up the whole idea of the college student’s relationship to the rest of the university. You were enrolled in Philosophy and English, which meant that you did take a university subject, and would have had contact with the university through the philosophy department. Before we get into that particular strand, how did the student at Victoria feel towards the whole U of T? Was there a sense of belonging to the greater federation?
FRYE: It was true then, as it’s true now, that the majority of Victoria students were not in college subjects as I was. They were in courses like mathematics and physics, which meant that they took nothing at Victoria. What really held the college together, I think, was the residence and the social life. There were many more undergraduate parties than there came to be later on when the high schools got more sophisticated. When I started philosophy, I studied with Brett, whose erudition was immense, and I did know him, and Fulton Anderson; also somebody—well, I don’t know if you want this in or not, but they made some unfortunate appointments and one of my teachers in philosophy had an alcoholic problem. He was supposed to teach me two major philosophers but he never got beyond page two of the first one. That was a gap I also had to fill in after I was graduated.
SCHATZKER: That’s not the first time such things have happened on campuses. Ethics was taught at Victoria, as it was in all the other colleges, with that strange division of philosophy versus ethics.
FRYE: Yes, I took ethics at Victoria with a man named Wilmot B. Lane. The in loco parentis principle was at its best in regard to Lane because he really did take a strong personal interest in his students. Actually, after I had graduated and was back in the Maritimes with no prospects, facing a fairly bleak future, it was Lane who noticed that I was no longer around and got a bursary for me so that I managed to get back into the college system as a graduate student.
SCHATZKER: Those kinds of relationships I think are important. Many students often single out one person who has taken that kind of an interest in their careers or helped them get over a particular hurdle. I wonder sometimes whether it’s possible in the university that we know today, which is so large.
FRYE: I think that there was more possibility of this happening [when I was a student]. Today, of course, I walk into classes of two hundred and I realize the sheer impossibility of a personal relationship developing there. When I was principal of the college and used to meet with the registrar on bursaries, I realized how many students were struggling along at the subsistence level, and were facing, sometimes, parental opposition. People in my days as an undergraduate might very well have been helped personally by somebody like Lane. It was true all over the country. We have a Canada Council now, but Pelham Edgar spent a great deal of his time and energy trying to organize societies for the relief of others: people like Frederick Phillip Grove who couldn’t make a living by their writing and yet were serious writers.
SCHATZKER: What about other relationships with faculty members at Victoria? Do you remember any others with particular affection or interest?
FRYE: I remember particularly the courses with John Robins. I’ve always felt that I unconsciously took a lead from Robins because Robins—though this wasn’t generally known—was descended from one of the black families that came across the Detroit River in the Uncle Tom’s Cabin days. He had quit school at the age of twelve to help support the family and it was from there that he set out to earn the qualifications for a university teaching position. He finally got a Ph.D. at Chicago. At the same time his background had conditioned him to an interest in the ballad and popular literature. He was interested in Paul Bunyan stories and in Uncle Remus stories. He was a superb storyteller, a raconteur. It wasn’t until I was well advanced in my own career that I realized that what I was doing was applying to literature as a whole the kind of principles which every student of folklore adopts as a matter of course. That is, questions of convention and genre and type and that sort of thing.
SCHATZKER: That’s most interesting. I didn’t know that about Robins myself; it certainly adds a dimension to the man that I’m sure few know.
SCHATZKER: We were talking about Professor Robins and the influence that you felt he had upon you as an undergraduate student. Did you have him as a graduate student? Did you take courses with him?
FRYE: Yes. One of the first courses I had in the first term of my first year was with Robins. It was a general course in literature, but it began with a ballad. I’d never heard of the ballad before and had no idea that that dimension of literature existed. It was an amazing discovery. All through my contact with Robins I realized what a really great man he was. Although he put on a front of joviality which made a lot of people think that there was nothing behind it, in fact there was a tremendous amount behind it. One of my most vivid memories was during the war when the casualty lists of my students kept coming in week after week. At the very bottom of the war when the Japanese had just attacked Pearl Harbor, we were still going on with our series of public lectures and Robins gave a lecture on Alfred the Great. It was about how Alfred’s land was nearly all lost by the Danish invasion. He was beaten into a corner of the country and then slowly he began to win back his kingdom. But at the same time he never let down his standards of scholarship: he saw to it that all the great classics of Western Europe were translated into Anglo-Saxon and he devoted a great part of his life to learning. I remember coming out of that lecture thinking, “Well, this is what the university is.”
SCHATZKER: That’s interesting. Were these people interested in teaching? Was teaching the main reason for their being professors?
FRYE: Yes, that was true of Robins. I’m not so sure about Ned. Ned was interested in people and of course in students, he was most kind to students, but his interest in the actual teaching operation I don’t think was as great. But Robins was a passionate teacher. The passion didn’t show in his lecturing manner but it was obvious that he had vocation for teaching.
SCHATZKER: Pelham Edgar?
FRYE: Pelham Edgar was a curious mixture of things. He really was a fine teacher. His technique was a very unusual one: he would come into a rather noisy class and sit down at his desk and start to mutter. And nobody could hear a word of what he was saying so naturally they had to shut up to listen. Eventually he got complete control of his class. He was, I think, an excellent teacher when he was teaching something that interested him. He was the only English professor I’ve ever known who—well, no, there have been two or three others, but one of the few—who honestly disliked Shakespeare. So guess who got the Shakespeare course to teach? [laughter]
SCHATZKER: Why? Did he have good reasons?
FRYE: Well, he was brought up on the Romantics and for him poetic expression meant [Shelley’s] Ode to the West Wind and the five odes of Keats, that kind of thing. It did not mean a stage play. It was rather strange in that way. But of course the theatre was so rudimentary at that time. We had nothing like Stratford.
SCHATZKER: Oh, no. Just a few travelling companies.
FRYE: We had a stock company at a place called the Empire Theatre that used to put on third- or fourth-rate plays. Apart from the big names that used to come and visit, there was really almost nothing. And there you went to see the actors rather than to see the play.
SCHATZKER: What about Hart House? It was in operation at that time.
FRYE: Hart House was in operation and there had been a very lively dramatic movement from within the student body during the ’20s, but I don’t think there was a great deal of that left in the ’30s. That’s something that somebody like Robertson Davies could tell you more about.
SCHATZKER: The pressure to publish, of course, wasn’t the same for the people who taught you. Some of them did publish. But there certainly wasn’t this tremendous pressure to add lists of articles and books to your curriculum vitae for promotion.
FRYE: No. The general esprit de corps at the college was rather like Oxford and Cambridge around the same time. Brett, for example, was a man who had no degree except an M.A. (Oxon.). That was true of many of the people of that generation. Kathleen Coburn and Woodhouse and myself never got Ph.D.s. There was enough anglophile feeling for there not to be the requirement for the doctor’s degree. It was assumed that what you published was the distillation of a life’s work. Brett, for example, wrote a history of psychology, which I think is still a standard text after sixty years.13 That kind of publication was assumed to be the kind of thing a scholar would do. But I think that by the time I was a graduate student we had already begun to move into the publish-or-perish syndrome.
SCHATZKER: There were still, even in the late ’50s and early ’60s, a few of the older professors who had hardly published at all.
FRYE: They wouldn’t get tenure, now.
SCHATZKER: No. And yet some of them were very fine teachers and inspiring, not only to their students but their colleagues because of their wide reading and tremendous knowledge; I’m thinking of somebody like Norman Endicott.
FRYE: That’s right. Norman Endicott is a typical example and I’m not sure whether he had a doctor’s degree or not. I think he got a Rhodes scholarship and went to Oxford and read Medieval History, but whether he got a D.Phil. or not I don’t remember.14 He had no impulse to write and, in fact, I don’t see why everybody teaching on a university staff should be the same kind of person, really. In many respects this system is extremely beneficial. Pelham Edgar wrote a book on Henry James, published in 1927, which was an extraordinarily early date for a book on Henry James, who died in 1915.15 That was again the distillation of his interest. He wasn’t under any pressure to write it. Two of his students, Kathleen Coburn and myself, were allowed to undertake vast projects, the editing of the Coleridge notebooks and the deciphering of Blake’s prophetic books, without anybody breathing down our necks and saying, “It’s about time you had a number of articles in print.”
SCHATZKER: Another famous figure of this university, Barker Fairley, I believe did the bulk of his writing after retirement. Close to the end of his career, certainly.
FRYE: Close to the end, yes. He always took a quite detached view of scholarship and had an extraordinary faculty for backing losing causes. He’s the only person to my knowledge that has written a book on Charles Doughty, and he also wrote a book on a German writer named Raabe who has quite a reputation in Germany but none outside it.16 Of course I don’t think he was ever deeply committed to teaching, and as soon as he could he went into portrait and landscape painting.
SCHATZKER: Do you want to enter the fray, while we’re on the subject, and say what you think of this present system which forces everyone to follow the same course, be in the same role, do the same things, and get the right degrees; and of the system of promotion which forces people to observe certain rules and achieve certain things before they can rise in the academic world? Do you think this is an improvement upon the past? I wonder if there were people in your time as an undergraduate who really were deadwood—or do you think that this produces just as much if not more deadwood?
FRYE: I think there’s a great spread. Your question about Barker Fairley reminds me of a note that I wrote to him after his second book on Goethe appeared. I can still remember saying that most secondary sources on most authors that I was interested in were pretty unrewarding, so as a rule I didn’t read them or didn’t read beyond the first ten pages; and that his was the first book I had read in years that I had actually gone through with a pencil making marginal notes as I went along.17 Now that is scholarship as the distillation of what you know at its best and that was what Pelham, I think, did have. It’s true that he got a doctoral thesis through Johns Hopkins on a subject that would now be done by a computer, namely a thesis on the imagery of Shelley, but still that was his scholarly ideal and it was the one that Kathleen and I inherited from him. I think that there would be the same spread now that there was then. Then you would get everything from people who would write profound and erudite books at the top, to lazy bastards at the other end who would be doing nothing at all and would be lecturing from the same yellowed set of lecture notes for years and years. Now you get people with considerable ability writing genuine contributions to knowledge at the top, and other people just covering paper with type at the bottom.
SCHATZKER: Filling the libraries and making the effort for graduate students of the future more difficult as they try to get their bibliographies done.
FRYE: That’s right. There’s no way of preventing a bad and useless and totally unnecessary book on somebody from becoming a bibliographical item and consequently an obstacle in the next student’s research.
SCHATZKER: Yes, I remember well. What about other personalities? There was obviously the president and the principal at Victoria and of course there was the president of the U of T, Falconer—he was probably a remote figure.
FRYE: Falconer was very remote to me, but of course he was only there in the early part of my undergraduate period. Canon Cody I did know because he stayed on when I was a graduate student and had become more a member of the university.18 Bowles I hardly knew at all. He once remarked that if he’d known how long he was going to live he wouldn’t have retired so soon.19 He quit around 1930 and was succeeded by Wallace.20 He was a very decent person but his background had been a missionary compound in China, and missionaries of course were accustomed to having a large flow of cash funnelled in at one end and converting the heathen at the other. It was under him that Emmanuel College was built in 1931 at the very bottom of the Depression. The college really was tottering at that point. Teaching staff staged a rebellion and insisted on an inquiry into the finances, which of course had been unheard of before. Eventually we got Brown as principal of Victoria College; it was when that post was established.21 And Emmanuel College had its own principal, Richard Davidson. We staggered through the Depression with salary cuts and that kind of thing.
SCHATZKER: Like everyone else on the campus.
FRYE: Yes. I’m not suggesting that there was mismanagement. Merely that the building of the Emmanuel residences and Emmanuel College on a fairly lavish scale was realistic at the time it was mooted in 1929 but very different in 1931 when it was done.
SCHATZKER: Of course, Victoria had always had a good relationship with some of the prominent members of the United Church in Toronto and they did well from bequests and gifts from some of these families.
FRYE: I think the United Church [1925] rather attenuated that. It was most prosperous when it was a Methodist college.
SCHATZKER: I suppose the difficulties of [church] union dissipated the interest somewhat. You graduated in 1933 from the Honours Course in Philosophy and English. Now I must get something straight. You entered in the Pass Arts Course and you did your first year in Pass Arts, and then you went into the Honour Course?
FRYE: Yes. As I remarked earlier, I came in on the last year that they had the old first-year Pass Course, which was a substitute for grade 13. Other students from Ontario went into either the first year of an Honour Course or the second year of the Pass Course.
SCHATZKER: I see. Was that a course in which you had to take subjects from all over the calendar?
FRYE: Yes, and my admit-to-lectures card was stamped “on probation,” which was what they did with everybody who came from the Maritimes. Fifty years later or thereabouts, I as chancellor conferred an honorary degree on a student to whom the same thing had happened, Wallace Gerber, who was a few years ahead of me but came from Halifax.22
SCHATZKER: Was this just the prejudice of Ontario education?
FRYE: It was partly prejudice and partly bureaucratic imbecility.
SCHATZKER: Not because they had a true conception of the education there being far below what was available in Ontario.
FRYE: There was a good deal of that, and of course a total lack of imagination as to what the words “on probation” on a student’s card would actually mean to the student.
SCHATZKER: So after doing that first general year you entered the first year of the Honours Course …
FRYE: No, I entered the second year of the Philosophy and English course, a course that had been designed by Brett. You had Honour Philosophy but you had an option either in English or in History and I took the option in English.
SCHATZKER: Those Honour Courses were remarkable. I know from my own experience that one of the wonderful things about them was that when you took the options—whether you were in Honours English or History and took French or German options or whatever—you would be able to compare the work going on in each of those subjects. The years were so planned that if you took seventeenth-century English you took seventeenth-century French; or if you took seventeenth-century German you could take philosophy of the same period that would influence the literature. Did you find that?
FRYE: You’ve put your finger on exactly what was eighty to ninety per cent of the benefit I got from my undergraduate education. It was studying the Renaissance from the point of view of philosophy and English and certain Pass options, and the eighteenth century in the third year, and the Romantics and nineteenth century in the fourth year.
SCHATZKER: We had the same in the Honours English course that I took much later and it was a great benefit. The departments were considered to be very rigid and before the ’60s there was a certain discouragement placed upon students from doing comparative work. But this was one way in which you did do some valuable comparative work.
FRYE: Yes.
SCHATZKER: So having been graduated in 1933, you entered the theological course in Emmanuel College and were ordained in the United Church of Canada in 1936. When you finished your B.A. were you not convinced you wanted to go into that field [English]?
FRYE: Completely convinced, yes. But at the same time I had got so much scholarship money from being a church student that I felt obligated to complete the theological course. The question of whether I should be ordained or not was another matter and I did consult various people on that. I don’t regret having chosen ordination but it wasn’t a thing I had to do, in view of the United Church doctrine of the priesthood of believers.
SCHATZKER: You never intended to …
FRYE: I never seriously intended to do parish work, no.
SCHATZKER: What about the course at Emmanuel? How long did it last? Was it three years?
FRYE: It was a three-year course, but I took graduate courses in English along with it and I’m afraid I spent rather more time on them.
SCHATZKER: Did you find your theological studies valuable, though?
FRYE: They have become valuable since, though again with me, and I suspect with most people, my effective education has been self-education.
SCHATZKER: What about the atmosphere at Emmanuel as compared with the undergraduate atmosphere in Victoria?
FRYE: Of course, there’s always an anticlimax when you go into graduate training, which is always a professional training. I think there was less anticlimax at Emmanuel than there was for the people who went to OCE [the Ontario College of Education] because they used to come and complain to me that they practically had a jail sentence. I quite enjoyed my Emmanuel years although I was by no means a model student. That was partly because my interest was growing so rapidly in English that I could hardly put my mind on it.
SCHATZKER: One of the thrusts of people presently on campus in theological education is to separate the vocational training from the academic work. I wondered if, during the time that you were at Emmanuel, that was at all considered, or whether certain professors had a more academic attitude to theology?
FRYE: It’s hard to say. In retrospect it seems to me that it was mostly a professional vocational training. The person who stands out in my memory as having a strong academic interest in the subject was John Line in the Philosophy of Religion. I felt that there was a disinterested scholarship that was to my mind much more effective in that area than a more committed one would have been.
SCHATZKER: What about your fellow students? Were they mainly interested in becoming pastors and less interested in the scholarship?
FRYE: They knew they were going to be pastors and I would say that most of them were pretty well pastorate-oriented with one or two exceptions: Art Cragg, George Birtch, Kingsley Joblin—they were people who had a genuine scholarly interest.
SCHATZKER: So you had some colleagues with whom you could relate.
FRYE: Oh, yes.
SCHATZKER: Having completed that course and having been ordained you decided finally to pursue university teaching as your career. Perhaps before we go on to the decision to go to Merton College in Oxford we should talk about what you were doing in the graduate courses, which I suppose helped you make your decision. You mentioned that Robins gave you and Kathleen Coburn scope to do work on your own. Was it at this time …?
FRYE: It was Edgar who was an influence on Kathleen; I don’t know that Robins was. One person I got to know very intimately as a graduate student was Roy Daniells, who died a few years ago. He was the head of the English department at UBC [the University of British Columbia]. He was at Victoria at that time.23 He was about ten years older than I was and he was working on his doctorate in Milton. I got a great deal out of conversations with him. Also Wilson Knight was at Trinity College at that time and I got a great deal out of discussions with him. I used to go over there in the evenings and talk to him. He had no subject but Shakespeare at that time; he hadn’t developed the interest in the Romantic poets that he did later. Those two stand out as people who more or less nourished an academic feeling in me.
SCHATZKER: Nobody at UC?
FRYE: I don’t remember that so much. People like Norman Endicott and Jim MacGillivray I knew very well. But though their conversation moved on a very high level of cultivation, it didn’t actually mesh with the particular kinds of ideas that I was developing. I think it’s fair to say that Norman never had the slightest use for what I was getting at in criticism.
SCHATZKER: What about Herbert Davis?
FRYE: Davis was very important to me because I signed up for a course on Blake. My interest in Blake had been awakened by an undergraduate essay I’d done on him which had been assigned by Pelham Edgar. I always used to claim that Pelham had ESP with students. He looked at Kathleen Coburn and said “Coleridge,” and he looked at me and said, “Blake.” So as soon as I learned that there was actually a graduate course on Blake being offered I snatched at it. I took it twice: once as a M.A. course in English and once as a theological elective.
SCHATZKER: The same course?
FRYE: Yes.
SCHATZKER: With the same person?
FRYE: Not quite—well, with the same instructor, but with different people.
SCHATZKER: That’s an interesting idea. The instructor must have been broad enough to allow you to benefit from both times.
FRYE: Yes, he was.
SCHATZKER: Because that could be a stultifying experience.
FRYE: Davis was a receptive teacher. He wouldn’t have people around who weren’t ready to contribute to a discussion because he couldn’t function if he just had puddings in front of him. So it was a pretty lively group: Mary Winspear, who became a head mistress, Peg Stobie (who’s still teaching I think in Manitoba),24 her husband Bill, John Creighton (Donald Creighton’s older brother) …
SCHATZKER: What about his ideas about Blake? Did they stimulate you?
FRYE: That was a point: he didn’t have ideas about Blake. That so very civilized a person whose interests are mainly eighteenth-century—anything of Swift—could have this kind of interest in Blake was quite a revelation to me. I was looking over Foster Damon’s reminiscences the other day and he was still feeling bitter about the way in which Harvard had practically ostracized him because he was interested in a nut.25 That was a common academic attitude. Davis just did not have it. He also had a considerable interest in D.H. Lawrence.
SCHATZKER: It was all right at UC, I suppose, at that time. Was this the period that you mentioned before in which you and Kathleen Coburn were able to go ahead and work on your subjects without anybody hampering you or breathing down your necks?
FRYE: We were given time to do what we liked in our own way. You can find out something of Kay’s timetable from her autobiography In Pursuit of Coleridge. With me the book on Blake took something like fifteen years and five complete rewritings; but after all it was a hell of a difficult subject for one’s first book.
SCHATZKER: Did you do any teaching before you went to Oxford, as an assistant or …?
FRYE: Yes.26
SCHATZKER: How did that appeal to you?
FRYE: I knew that I wanted to be a teacher. I remember I made the change in the fall of ’37.27 There was a giant reunion of the alumni of ’36 and ’37 once; this when I was principal, back in the 1960s. First of all I was approached by a man from ’36 who insisted on buying me a drink on the grounds that I had saved his year by writing an essay for him in the spring of ’36 when I was still a graduate student. The second person who approached me was a woman who complained bitterly … [unfortunately the tape breaks off here]
SCHATZKER: We have been talking about your career around the time of 1936 when you were in the graduate school at University of Toronto and teaching. You had just begun to tell me about the Student Christian Movement of those days, its interest in social activism and the political ideas of the time.
FRYE: I didn’t come in contact with a great deal of that. I attended various conferences in Couchiching. Then there was something called a Hazen conference financed by some well-to-do philanthropist28 which met in the early 1940s and I went to that. It [the SCM] was the main channel of student activism in those days. Some of the leaders in it were people like Ken Woodsworth, people who had come from missionary families and consequently had seen a good deal of radical activity in the Orient and thought it was the answer here as well, as a lot of people did.29
SCHATZKER: Could you give me an idea of what political interests you felt were operating on campus in the late ’30s, before you went to Oxford, and whether there was much interest in what was going on in Europe, the looming threat.
FRYE: There was a good deal. I mentioned the SCM and the League for Social Reconstruction—they were the more bourgeois ones—and the Regina manifesto of the CCF, and the great deal of social-democratic activity in the country. Apart from that there were also two Communist organizations: one Stalinist, the other Trotskyite. They made quite a bit of noise. I think I mentioned Earl Birney’s Down the Long Table as something which deals with that kind of activity in the ’30s.
SCHATZKER: Campus life has always been divided among the few students who are really interested in politics and the greater mass that doesn’t particularly care. But was the greater mass of students at this time beginning to be aware of the political currents in the world?
FRYE: Well, I would say they were beginning to be aware of it, yes. They could hardly avoid it with the kind of news there was in the paper. But there still wasn’t a mass activism.
SCHATZKER: No. Not the kind that I experienced as a student over the Vietnamese war.
FRYE: I don’t think there was, no. I think that Depression conditions in the economy tend to throw a wet blanket over student activism and it was still the Depression at that time.
SCHATZKER: There were two notes that I made about some things that you said in the last tape. Firstly, you mentioned that the two courses you took from Herbert Davis on Blake were taught by the same instructor but didn’t have the same people in them. It reminded me to ask you how much you felt that learning, especially on the graduate level, but also on the undergraduate level, was determined by the students you came in contact with as opposed to the professor who instructed the course. How important that is in the teaching and learning process?
FRYE: That’s rather hard to say. I think we had a graduate program in which certain courses loomed up as more or less compulsory for those who were going on to Ph.D. work, like the courses of Woodhouse. Davis’s courses were rather more, well, refuges for graduate students because he himself didn’t push the teaching element in it. The students did their own work and cultivated their own interests.
SCHATZKER: He ran more of a seminar type of class.
FRYE: Yes, much more.
SCHATZKER: Do you think that that is more valuable in the long run for a graduate student?
FRYE: I wouldn’t want to generalize. I think it is very valuable for graduate students. There are certain things that you can do in lectures that you can’t do in seminars. I have always rather disliked graduate teaching and I’ve only come to terms with it by treating my graduate students exactly as though they were undergraduates. In other words, I do lecture to them. In many ways I think there are theoretical objections to that, but on the other hand what I have to do I think I can communicate only in that way, and it seems to be useful to them.
SCHATZKER: In other words there’s a place for many different styles of teaching.
FRYE: Many different styles. Davis was before anything else a civilized man and contact with him was really where the education was. He was a bit like Pelham Edgar at Victoria, who was not a critic in the sense of making critical evaluations or judgments on the texts he read, but nevertheless managed to convey the impression that a scholar’s life was a good life.
SCHATZKER: You’re telling me then that the teacher in the university is important as a role model; that’s an awful phrase, but he sets a pattern as a scholar and an educated, well-read person and that’s almost as important as the learning of the student.
FRYE: Yes, I would accept that. I don’t think the student knows what he’s learning unless he does have some such personal model.
SCHATZKER: The other question I had, arising out of the last tape, was the one of accepted areas for study in these times. I imagine that the atmosphere that we’ll talk about in the ’30s must have pervaded the ’40s and perhaps the early ’50s as well. You mentioned that Damon in his reminiscences talked about his estrangement from Harvard College because of his interest in Blake; Blake was considered a nut and the student who studied him would be similarly judged. I would like to know if that atmosphere was really pervasive. Was there a sense that certain things were worthy of study and others weren’t? I think that atmosphere has disappeared now because almost everything is open to study.
FRYE: Well, Blake is still regarded as a nut at Harvard, but that’s because Harvard has gone in for a civil-service mentality which has pretty well knocked it out of the really top league as far as a humanist education is concerned.
SCHATZKER: And here at Toronto, was there the same sense of rigidity in applying your interest to the great authors or could you apply it to anyone and be accepted?
FRYE: If I can say this about a person whom I personally liked and admired immensely, I think it would have been just as rigid if Wood-house had had more control of the department than he in fact did have. But the federation system prevented him from having that. As long as Davis was here, of course, there was a more urbane interest in varieties of people. I’ve mentioned his interest in D.H. Lawrence as well as in Blake. The variety of interests which the different colleges all developed I think was of immense importance. That’s why it has been a mortal blow to the colleges to lose their power of appointment.
SCHATZKER: That’s something we’ll discuss further at another point. Do you think that, as compared with the atmosphere of the late ’30s, scholarly attitudes have changed, all over the continent and perhaps in the English-speaking world, about the subjects considered worthy of study?
FRYE: Oh, yes. They’ve changed in the same way that the sciences have changed. A student studying, say, biology in the 1980s with the DNA molecule and so on isn’t in the same world as a student studying it in the 1930s. A student of the humanities today has to get into realms of critical theory and linguistics and hermeneutics and so on that simply did not exist in the ’30s.
SCHATZKER: Has the pendulum perhaps swung too far in the other direction; are graduate students pursuing topics that are not really worthy of their study?
FRYE: Well, that happens wherever the pendulum is. That’s going to happen in graduate school: you’re going to have some people chasing up blind alleys and supervisors not really in a position to do much about it.
SCHATZKER: You went to Oxford in 1939, was it?
FRYE: Yes …. It was actually in 1936–37 that I had my first year there but I came back and taught for a year and then I went back for my second year in 1938–39.
SCHATZKER: I have that now. And you received your Oxford M.A. in 1940.
FRYE: Yes.
SCHATZKER: Why did you decide to go abroad to study? Why did you choose Oxford and Merton College?
FRYE: In the first place, I’d been in Toronto long enough. In the second place it was Herbert Davis who got me to Oxford, his connections were with Oxford. Merton College, because Merton College, at that time, was the big centre of English. It isn’t now, but then again, colleges go through cycles.
SCHATZKER: At this time you had decided that your vocation was in university teaching and that’s why you went on.
FRYE: Yes.
SCHATZKER: You must have received some financial assistance.
FRYE: I got a fellowship offered by the Royal Society. I got that largely through Pelham’s efforts.30
SCHATZKER: Was it adequate?
FRYE: I struggled through. In second year I got a scholarship administered by Currelly, or at least through Currelly and the Trick family that had married into the Masseys, I think.31
SCHATZKER: There are so many questions I have to ask about Oxford. But if you could tell me first of all how your studies were organized and who were the professors that you came into contact with most, that would be a good place to begin.
FRYE: The Oxford system was very like the Honour Course here. It was an intensified version of it. The reason why I read the undergraduate school in English was that after three years of theology I was getting a little rusty in my English, in spite of the English courses I’d taken from Davis. I knew by that time I wanted to teach English, so that seemed to me the best thing to do. In those days, as I’ve explained earlier, it was possible to get a tenure stream appointment without getting a Ph.D.: that was the sort of anglophile tradition at Toronto. Of course Oxford very much wanted everybody to take the undergraduate school because it was the only thing they knew how to teach. They had very unwillingly put in a B.Litt. course in order to discourage Rhodes scholars from going on to do a doctorate; but the Rhodes scholars went on to do it anyway, so that eventually they had to change around. But I skipped all that and simply did the undergraduate school.
SCHATZKER: How did it compare with what you remembered from the Honour Course?
FRYE: It was very largely a repetition of what I’d done. I read more intensively, but, as I said, my real reason for taking it was that I wanted to become fresher in the whole English area. If you ask about instruction: of course it was tutorial, and my tutor was Edmund Blunden, who was a rather shy, diffident man. For some bloody reason, which I’ve never figured out, he was pro-Nazi. I didn’t know who to blame for that. But in any case, I seemed to meet fascists everywhere I turned at Oxford, so I was politically and socially extremely unhappy for that time that I was there. England’s morale seemed to be the lowest in its history. If you read Howard K. Smith’s Last Train from Berlin (he’s a CBS announcer, and he was a classmate of mine at Oxford), the first chapter is about his experiences at Merton College and it will give you some idea of what I myself found extremely uncongenial about the place.32
SCHATZKER: That’s interesting. I’ve interviewed people who were in England at Oxford or Cambridge around this time (not necessarily at Merton College and not studying English), and I had the feeling that there were many left-wing groups. Was it your particular area of study or the people that you met through your English studies that were more …
FRYE: It may have been just pure accident. But if I found myself just meeting people casually, I seemed to keep running into the fascist groups all the time. I know that the Labour group was the largest single group in Oxford, but the general feeling at Merton, certainly, and I think at several other colleges as well, was very much not to my liking.
SCHATZKER: Was it more politically active than Toronto—perhaps from being closer to the continent?
FRYE: I wouldn’t say that it was more politically active, but the undercurrents were beginning to swirl around and they were very ugly ones. There was one man who had gone up to Merton on a scholarship which had been donated by Oswald Mosley and his job was to recruit people as far as he could.33 I felt that if England had not been forced into an antiHitler position it would have gone in a very sinister direction or at least the intellectual leadership would have done so.
SCHATZKER: Did you find yourself ostracized?
FRYE: No, I didn’t. That’s too strong a word, I didn’t find myself ostracized. And of course there were very intense left-wing people both in Merton College and elsewhere. Howard Smith was one, and another was a tough egg from Yorkshire who came home drunk to his room and found about four or five Fascists roughing it up. So his head cleared and he went into action and pretty soon the air was thick with Fascists flying out the windows.
SCHATZKER: It sounds very lively.
FRYE: Well, it wasn’t lively in the right way.
SCHATZKER: How did you feel as a “colonial”—I put that in quotation marks—at Oxford? Were you made to feel colonial?
FRYE: In my second year I tended to make my friends mainly among the Americans and the colonials simply because of the age gap. My best friends were a New Zealander, Mike Joseph, who died recently, and a Rhodes scholar from Mississippi, Rodney Baine, whom I visited a few months ago because his son had set up a lectureship in his honour at the University of Georgia and I went and opened it. There were some English friends as well, such as Bernie Mellor, who was the registrar at the University of Hong Kong for many years.34 But just because of that age gap I tended to find myself with Canadians and colonials.
SCHATZKER: You mentioned Blunt.
FRYE: Blunden: Edmund Blunden the poet.
SCHATZKER: I see, I had not heard you correctly.
FRYE: Blunt was my wife’s teacher at the Courtauld Institute in London.35
SCHATZKER: Any other tutors in your first or second year that impressed you or influenced you?
FRYE: Not particularly. There was Bryson in Balliol, who is dead now, who was our tutor in Anglo-Saxon.
SCHATZKER: What would you say was the greatest benefit which you received from these two years at Oxford?
FRYE: Simply the time to read English literature.
SCHATZKER: Did you work on anything in particular, continue your work?
FRYE: Yes, I got interested in Blake. I knew by that time I was going to write a book on Blake. So I kept working on that to the extent that I could. The lectures, I avoided. In those days it was considered playing to the gallery if you were a decent lecturer. The only Oxford lecturer who tried to make himself worth listening to was C.S. Lewis, who of course later went to Cambridge. His lectures were published after his death in a book called The Discarded Image.36
SCHATZKER: Did you find yourself influenced by his literary ideas to a great extent?
FRYE: To some degree I did. That is, there was real information in them, and real ideas.
SCHATZKER: What about your student life in relationship to students studying other subjects? Was Oxford isolated in that way or did you have openings to meet students who were studying in other fields?
FRYE: There were openings. Not being athletic I missed the main area of contact with other students, but I did talk to other people—though not in a way which I remember as particularly memorable.
SCHATZKER: You returned to Toronto and taught for a year, then went back. By the time you went back the war had already broken out.
FRYE: No, the year I went back was 1938–39. I wrote my exams in the spring of 1939. What I had done was get married in that intervening year. My wife came over in the Spring of ’39 and we had a trip to Italy—a very unpleasant time to be travelling in Italy—and got back to Toronto the day that the Soviet-Nazi pact was signed.
SCHATZKER: Oh, I see. You weren’t abroad, then, when the hostilities really broke out. Do you have anything to say about your trip to Italy?
FRYE: Just that Mussolini and his epigrams were plastered all over the place. People were unfriendly when they heard that I was actually a part of the British Empire. I was spat at in Ravenna, but I was rather pleased about that because people usually took me to be a German. I noticed that the Italian people, whatever the officials and police said, did not care for the Germans, who of course came in huge busloads with their little pittance of Nazi money to spend and were an extremely arrogant lot.
SCHATZKER: You returned to a position in Toronto. I wondered, did you ever consider going anywhere else?
FRYE: Well, when offers began to come from the United States …
SCHATZKER: No, I mean at this point.
FRYE: Oh, not at this point, no.
SCHATZKER: It was just the normal natural thing to return to Toronto.
FRYE: I came back because Pelham Edgar and Ned Pratt and John Robins and so on knew me personally; it was the obvious place to come.
SCHATZKER: What situation did you encounter here in Toronto during the war years? Was there any threat that you would have to go into the service or anything like that?
FRYE: Actually my class, a married man born in 1912, was never called.
SCHATZKER: The student population must have been decimated to a certain extent.
FRYE: It was indeed, yes.
SCHATZKER: Much smaller classes, and I think women seemed to predominate.
FRYE: Women naturally predominated—they were left; but the casualty lists coming in every week is something I don’t like to think about too much.
SCHATZKER: And I’m sure you knew most of them. Most of the people that I interview were students in the late ’20s and ’30s and became members of the staff in the ’40s. They were difficult years for the university. The ’30s was a time of financial constraint; nothing really expanded or moved ahead in a material sense. And the war years must have been the same. I’m sure there was a good morale in the sense that everybody was supporting the country’s cause, but there must have been some damage to the intellectual life of the university because so many promising young men were not returning.
FRYE: Oh God, yes.
SCHATZKER: Did you ever have a feeling that the university had really not been progressing, or did that just never affect the student and the young staff member?
FRYE: Progressing is of course a term that you can give a great many meanings to. At that point we felt that if we could only hold together until the war was over we’d have done a good deal. I remember some rather timid people saying that they wouldn’t bet two cents on the university’s chances of opening in the fall. That kind of thing was said from time to time. But the university did keep opening in the fall and it struggled through until the end of the war.
SCHATZKER: I think interesting things happened during the war from the information I’ve received from interviewees: women who had really very little chance of teaching before found positions, and the female student became a little more important just because she was for a short time predominant in the class.
FRYE: That may have been true. Victoria of course never had any hangups about having women on the staff—at least Pelham didn’t and he was the head of the English department. In other colleges it was very different.
SCHATZKER: And in the science departments: some of the first women that taught there taught because of the war. You were really still very much a part of Victoria and the happenings in the rest of the university I suppose really didn’t affect you and your colleagues as much.
FRYE: I suppose that is true. I was too small [sic] to be in the advisory circles of the university. I didn’t really know what was going on in general policy, but I certainly got the impression that it was a kind of holding operation.
SCHATZKER: The postwar period brought in the veteran students and tremendous financial activity on the part of the federal government and the university to educate them. Many people have pointed out that these students were very interesting and changed the face of the university to a certain extent because of their maturity and drive.
FRYE: That couldn’t be more true. It was the golden age of teaching. I remember Arthur Barker saying to me some years later, “Well, we’re back to teaching children again.”
SCHATZKER: That’s interesting. There is now sometimes a prejudice against older students. Not perhaps in the arts …
SCHATZKER: I’d like to talk a bit about the period from 1940 through to the end of the war, the period of the veteran students and the early ’50s. I suppose it ends in 1956, the date when the university decided that it had to expand because of the Plateau Committee, because of Professor Sheffield’s predictions about the large numbers of students that would be entering.37 Going back to this period, could you talk a bit about being a teacher at Victoria, the principals under whom you worked, the presidents if you had much contact with them, the atmosphere, the type of students that you encountered. I’m particularly interested in whatever work you had to do on college councils or university committees: the Faculty of Arts council, for instance, or the Senate. But if we could just go back and talk about what it was like being a teacher during this period.
FRYE: First of all, I was rumoured to be rather good with Honour students, so I got the Honour Courses to teach: partly too because my elders, Ned Pratt and John Robins, preferred the Pass Course. My colleague Joe Fisher had signed up almost the first day of the war. So I came back in the fall of 1939 to discover that in addition to three major Honour Courses which I was slated to teach I would also have to teach the Restoration and eighteenth-century course which he had. So I tackled that. I got fairly close to my students because I think the students’ instinct is always to go for the youngest member on the staff. I remember the students of those days quite well and they became close personal friends later. I realized that when the holding operation was over and the returned men had come back there was much more of a teaching challenge to meet, but I enjoyed those years immensely. I don’t know if I’ve remarked that in the first summer course with the returned people I had Judy LaMarsh and Doug Fisher and Keith Davey in the same class.38 In the period 1945–50 I was working pretty well within the department, going to council meetings, but not very faithfully, not connected with the senate; in general fairly preoccupied with teaching and my relation to the students. In those days being honorary president of the year was more than just a formality;39 and I was [faculty] advisor to Acta Victoriana, the student magazine, that kind of thing.
Then Pratt and Robins reached retiring age around 1952. After the war, Fisher had come back and Principal Brown thought that he would be the head of the department and that I would be left for writing and scholarship. But Joe died of cancer that year, in the summer of 1952, and I carried on as chairman of the department with what advice I could get from John Robins, who died in the Christmas of that year. So 1952 is not a date I’m likely to forget. From then on until the mid-’50s I was pretty well preoccupied with that kind of activity. I had a Guggenheim year, a year off [at Harvard], in 1950–51. That was just before I came in as chairman. And then I had two spring terms, one at Princeton in 1954 and one at Harvard in 1957.
SCHATZKER: There’s much to discuss here. The first question is, For someone who was as devoted to teaching and scholarship as you were, was the burden of administration an unwelcome one, did it interfere very much? You’ve had much administration to do in your career; there’s a general saying in the academic world that it’s perhaps wrong to place administrative burdens on productive academics.
FRYE: I’ve always felt that the alternative was very much worse—that is, to have professional administrators come in. The whole university just goes rotten at the core when that happens. I think that academics have to take their turn at administrative jobs in their own sometimes very blundering and inefficient way. I don’t think the university ought to be an efficient organization in any case; it’s misconceived its whole aim and social function if it is.
SCHATZKER: In these days of being accountable to the man who pays the piper, which is the government, I think efficiency is demanded in certain areas.
FRYE: It’s demanded, yes, but it’s wrong. It’s just plain wrong.
SCHATZKER: That’s an extremely interesting comment because in this university there have been many fine academics who’ve held administrative posts. It’s an argument worth discussing, especially now when the short terms of appointment cause a tremendous turnover. In the sciences, people tell me that they would advise scholars not to accept administrative appointments because five or ten years out of the stream would be disastrous to their career.
FRYE: Yes, I think the pressure in science is very tough and I don’t know exactly what answer I would give if I were in the sciences. The humanities move fast but they don’t move as fast as all that.
SCHATZKER: In the old system, before terms were placed upon appointments, there were some career administrators who were scientists by training and inclination who decided at some point in their career to devote themselves to teaching and administration and the promotion of their fellow scientists. Some of them, such as Professor Wasteneys,40 had twenty-five-year terms in science departments. But that’s no longer possible. So there’s, I think, a problem that has to be addressed …
FRYE: Oh there is, yes. In Wasteneys’ generation, the university was smaller and the relationships were more personal; the chairman of the department was a father-figure who took an interest in your second mortgage. The whole relationship within the university as well as between the university and the community outside was quite different. I don’t know what all the answers are. I just feel that the university is a special-function institution and it cannot be treated like a business. Scholarship goes to pieces once you take out the sort of “wandering in a wilderness” aspect and the sense of hunch, the feeling of, “Well, let’s see if this will work out,” without any accountability to anybody whatever. That’s the atmosphere out of which creative scholarship grows, I think, in every field.
SCHATZKER: You said that you didn’t attend the council of the faculty of arts on a regular basis in these early days. Why was that—did you find that it was just a burden, a waste of time?
FRYE: It seemed to me a waste of time, but perhaps I was being rather remiss in that regard. I took as little interest in the actual operation of the university as I could. I’m not defending that; I’m not saying that I was doing the right thing by any means. I’m just saying I did what I did.
SCHATZKER: I was just interested because at that time, it seems to me, the colleges operated quite separately and functioned well on their own. There were all these little fingers [sic] that you could pursue into the university at large, and of course you must have had departmental responsibilities. Essentially, correct me if I’m wrong, I think the Faculty of Arts in those days was not a very powerful office. The colleges had so much control over their own staff and students—not the curriculum really, but the way they pursued it—that the Faculty of Arts really didn’t have much of an impact on them.
FRYE: I daresay that’s true. Although of course all the sciences and social sciences were in the Faculty of Arts and they were apart from the colleges. I remember when a friend of mine named Hazard Adams who was Dean of Arts at California [Irvine] wrote a book about being dean. He remarked in that book that it’s the instinct of every academic to be loyal to the smallest group that he could attach himself to.41 That certainly was true of me—that’s why I tended to hole up in Victoria.
SCHATZKER: What about relations with the Department of English?42Which as head of the department you must have …
FRYE: Yes, well, there was a great deal of that. That meant Woodhouse at UC and Arthur Barker at Trinity. Woodhouse, of course, was so dominating a figure; I tended to let him dominate because he always knew what he wanted.
SCHATZKER: Were you in agreement?
FRYE: I could usually go along with it. He was an aggressive person and could be arrogant but for the most part he really did have a genuine sense of the welfare of the standards of English. There was very seldom a reason for going to bat on a major issue.
SCHATZKER: Other people have complained about the dominance of Woodhouse and felt it was a stultifying dominance—that we didn’t progress during some of the time of his leadership. Yet you recognize it as basically positive.
FRYE: It seemed to me a positive thing. Of course I’m temperamentally rather conservative in academic matters and so was he. I quite see that Clifford Leech was right when he remarked a few years later that Wood-house could not have survived into the ’60s: he just wouldn’t have known what the hell to do. But the same thing was true of me: I felt out of it too.
SCHATZKER: The change was so radical between the scholars of the previous era and the ones of the ’60s. The period of change was so short that there was really no development time.
SCHATZKER: You just belonged to one age or another; there weren’t very many people in between. I guess Father Shook was head of the English department [at St. Mike’s] and Arthur Barker [at Trinity]. Did they chafe under Woodhouse’s domination?
FRYE: I think that Arthur Barker perhaps did to some extent, and that that was one of the reasons why he went to Illinois. I’m not certain of that; I believe there were tensions within his own college as well. I think he felt that being in Woodhouse’s field, which was Milton studies, he was better off with another university.43
SCHATZKER: What about the development of the teaching of English under Professor Woodhouse’s direction: did he change what had gone before to any great extent? While he was chairman of the department, were you constantly modifying and working things over, were you responding to criticism, or did it just stay the same?
FRYE: I don’t think there was a great deal of change. He and E.K. Brown between them brought in the Honour English course, which previously had been the English and History Course. Brown pressed hard, first for a course in American literature, and then for a course in modern literature; there was a bit more of the twentieth century by that time. I think that if Brown had (a) lived longer, and (b) stayed more in Toronto, he and Woodhouse—because of the great personal friendship between them plus the temperamental clashes—would have brought about much more change than Woodhouse by himself did.44 I can remember when Brown came back from Chicago and we had a meeting at Canon Cody’s. Brown had just discovered the New Criticism, the expository criticism. He said something about spending nineteen hours on Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn with his graduate students and Woodhouse said, “What did you say in the other eighteen?” [laughter] Which I thought was the absolutely perfect confrontation of two methods of teaching.
SCHATZKER: What about the staff of the Department of English at this time? You must have contributed to it as head of the [Victoria] department by hiring new people, and I imagine there were new faces coming in at the other colleges.
FRYE: I brought in Millar MacLure, to the great disgust of University College because Woodhouse felt he ought to spend a little more time in the boondocks. I also brought Jack Robson from Alberta.45 Those were the major appointments I made.
SCHATZKER: Was that Woodhouse’s pattern, to send them off to the provinces, so to speak?
FRYE: Sure, he’d heard that from Harvard, that’s what they do.
SCHATZKER: And then he would bring them back. You sort of stole Robson, I think, from under his nose.
FRYE: Well, I certainly stole Millar MacLure from under his nose, yes, because he had his eye on MacLure. But not for a few years yet.
SCHATZKER: What about your relationship to some of the new staff members in the rest of the department? Were there any particularly close ones?
FRYE: Well, it was about that time that Marshall McLuhan came to St. Michael’s from Windsor and Gordon Roper was at Trinity. I don’t remember many new people at UC, except for Douglas Grant who came and stayed for some years.
SCHATZKER: Priestley would have come in at this point, too.
FRYE: I think of him as a bit of an older generation, but perhaps he would have done.
SCHATZKER: Yes, he was brought in by Woodhouse, having spent a lot of time in the West.46 Then I suppose in the late ’50s there were quite a few new faces at UC: Hugo McPherson, Jess Bessinger …47 I imagine Victoria expanded in the same way around the end of the ’50s.
FRYE: In 1959 when I became principal, Ken MacLean took the department over.48 There were certainly a good many appointments that he was responsible for that I processed as principal.
SCHATZKER: As head of the department you didn’t have to make a great number of new appointments, and neither did your confrères at the other colleges. But at the beginning of the ’60s there was a tremendous amount of hiring to accommodate the large numbers of students who were going to come. The hiring happened very quickly and changed the face of the whole university; I think, from my interviews and from my own knowledge, that it changed the character of the Department of English drastically.
FRYE: Oh, yes, yes, I think that did happen. I think that Toronto had less of that than other places did, because in the smaller and the newer universities you would bring in somebody from a graduate school, say in Princeton, and his first move would be to hire all his pals from graduate school at Princeton, so that you get a department almost entirely staffed by Americans. And it happened to some extent here as well. I remember Millar MacLure remarking to me after a Department of English meeting of the early ’60s, “This is getting to be a terrible department, can’t pack it any more.”49
SCHATZKER: The ways things had been done for the past quarter of a century or more were just not acceptable to some of the younger staff members, who didn’t appreciate the traditional values or didn’t agree with the historical approach to English, etc. Was it disturbing for you?
FRYE: It was disturbing for me. I looked at it a little differently, you see. I thought of Toronto as a place that allowed great freedom to members of the staff to do what they wanted to do. I think Marshall felt that way, too. I remember his remarking that a man like Bill Blissett would be just unthinkable in a graduate school like Harvard or Yale.50 He would be processed—he would be put through the regular graduate-school mill—of the first-rate American institutions. Toronto seemed to be so much more relaxed.
SCHATZKER: You mentioned that you spent a term at Princeton and a term at Harvard, so you must have become acquainted with this mill at that time.
FRYE: To some degree, yes.
SCHATZKER: Can you describe what the differences would be between their approach to training a graduate student and ours? You said it’s more relaxed, but how do they actually put them through a mill?
FRYE: In the first place, the old, traditional method at Harvard was to put in people who were obviously given a vocation for teaching. In other words, you would frequently have to take a chance. Harvard took a chance and put in Livingstone Lowes, who was one of the great scholars and teachers of English.51 By the mid-century I think all the Ivy League places had been caught up in what I called a civil-service mentality [see p. 598], where the people chosen were the people who did the right thesis on the right topic and had shown a certain capacity for what was called productive scholarship. I have never forgotten how I was allowed to take my own time to finish my Blake book, which took a great many years. I’ve always been fanatically loyal to Victoria because of things like that.
SCHATZKER: That changed so much, though; we have become more of a mill.
FRYE: We’ve become much more of that, yes. But the way I looked at it was that we were tightening up and becoming more of an institutional, predictable academic assembly line.
SCHATZKER: You’d like to relax some of that, I suppose.
FRYE: Well, I regret that aspect of the change.
SCHATZKER: Do you think it’s possible to go back?
FRYE: You can’t go back but it’s possible that you may find out people who’ve been smothered by this kind of system—that is, genuinely creative people who take a long time to do what they have to do sort of coming up from under again.
SCHATZKER: Of course, so many present conditions militate against that. The fact that young people can’t even get a job at the university.
FRYE: The job situation now is just miserable. When I think of all these brilliant, dedicated young people and how little we can promise them in the way of careers, it makes me sick to my stomach.
SCHATZKER: Just to finish the tape, one of the other aspects of this particular period [1940–56]: it wasn’t a period of tremendous change in the history of the University of Toronto. It was kind of a sleepy period despite the fact that it was postwar and you’d think there might be a bit of a boom. There wasn’t much capital expenditure at the time; there wasn’t a great expansion of the physical plant. And there were some areas in which it was badly needed, especially in the sciences. The central administration was still run by a president who related to the board and then related to the rest of the university; he brought the decisions of the board through the senate or to the colleges through the principals in a way that had been done all along under Falconer and Cody.52 I’m sure that when you were on staff it was the way it was done and nobody ever thought that anything would be done any differently.
FRYE: Well, the university, and Victoria itself on a smaller scale, was set up in such a way that everything got funnelled through the president. I found when I became principal that I was in effect the assistant to the president. In the setup of Victoria there was nothing else I could be. Now of course it’s quite different.
SCHATZKER: Well, you had Dr. Moore as president, so I don’t suppose there were many difficulties.
FRYE: No, there weren’t difficulties and, besides, he was so conscientious a president that … it would be too much to say that there wasn’t much for me to do, but there wasn’t very much in the way of, well, creative administration, if there is such a thing, for me to do. It just wasn’t set up that way.
SCHATZKER: At Victoria it was agreeable to you because of the personalities involved. Do you think it could have been a destructive system?
FRYE: It could have been, sure. Any system could be destructive if you’ve got a man of very strong will. I think to some extent—I’m not speaking personally now, but as an administrator—I think it would have gone in that direction if Walter Brown had remained much longer at Victoria. A philosopher colleague of mine said that the trouble with Brown is that he’s a volunteeristic Hegelian, and I said, “What the hell does that mean?” And he said, “It means that he’s as stubborn as a hog on ice.”
SCHATZKER: There isn’t much more time but perhaps you could talk about any recollections you have of the two presidents of this era, President Cody and President Smith.
FRYE: I regard them both as extremely genial people who seemed to me to be quite genuinely committed to the values of the university. I had a great respect for both of them.
SCHATZKER: We’re coming to the great changes that occurred in the University of Toronto starting at end of the ’50s. Around 1956 the university assembled a committee which was later called the Plateau Committee to assess the implications of the Sheffield report. Professor Sheffield had predicted that the institutions of higher education would be flooded with students in a few years because of the increase in the population after the war. This proved to be true. Not only did that increase of population flood the campuses, but the Ontario government at the same time developed a policy that encouraged students to seek higher education. I think it was Premier Davis’s platform that assured the residents of Ontario that university education would be available to anyone who could manage to pass the entrance tests.53 This decision helped increase the moneys available for scholarships and aid and bursaries in every form. As a result the population of the established universities expanded and other universities were formed. Do you remember what your thoughts were around this time? You had become principal and you must have been faced with some of these problems.
FRYE: I was faced with them, certainly. I felt that along with the increased grants, which were very sensible, there was also a tendency to open more universities in local areas (on political grounds) than the province could possibly support, because boom times never last. Everybody regards them as normal times but of course the normal condition for a university is depression. That’s how it’s been since the thirteenth century. So when Leslie Frost [Ontario’s Premier], I remember, said, “OK, that’s enough universities,” then they opened four or five more and every one has been on the rocks financially ever since. However, that was not my business and I wasn’t on the Plateau Committee. The thing that I had to watch was that we made enough appointments so that there wasn’t a gradual squeeze of extra pressure on the staff. It’s one thing to meet an emergency situation like the returned men after the war, but it’s another thing to have suddenly twenty extra essays on your teaching schedule, or just one more class here and there. So we had to go in for an increase in staff, although we certainly didn’t get to anything like stockpiling.
SCHATZKER: When the Faculty of Medicine decided to increase its class by one hundred per year and to expand in many other directions, one of the faculty members noted that it would be easy to build the buildings and purchase the equipment, but the hardest thing would be to find qualified staff in a hurry. In some cases I think this has proved to be true. Were you able to add gradually and choose your staff carefully according to the same principles you had used before?
FRYE: At the time you are speaking of I was not personally the chairman of the English department here at Victoria. It was possible then for Toronto to do what Harvard and Yale and the other big private universities in the States are still trying to do; that is, they send their graduate students out for a few years to civilize the boondocks and then they recall them when they’re about fifty-nine. Well, I’m not interested in recalling a man at the time when he’s already produced everything he’s going to, but I did get some quite good younger people from our own graduate school, from other Canadian universities. Now of course that was an act of piracy because the other universities lost very good men. On the other hand the men were quite anxious to come to Toronto. In the departments like English there was still a bit of competition among the colleges here.
SCHATZKER: And when you became principal, that rush to expand staff continued. Did you find that there was difficulty in the departments at Victoria?
FRYE: The departments varied a good deal. There was very seldom any difficulty with making extra appointments in the two major ones, English and French, but in smaller departments like Near Eastern Studies, it was more touch and go.
SCHATZKER: What did you feel about the government’s attitude towards encouraging higher education for a larger percentage of the population?
FRYE: The encouragement of higher education for a larger proportion of the population is something I would always approve of. I don’t in the least believe that only a very small minority are capable of university experience. It seems to me that they will be a minority, but when the population of the country is something like twenty-two million that gives you quite a large university population, even within a minority. So that part of it was straightforward enough. It was the dispersal of our resources without anything to meet the future which bothered me.
SCHATZKER: You could see that at the time?
FRYE: Well, I could see a bit of it at the time. I may be talking from hindsight now, but I think I do remember feeling at the time that more community colleges and fewer universities would be a better idea, if we could only abolish the social snobbery that attaches to universities.
SCHATZKER: One of the effects of the increase in the number of universities in Ontario was that the University of Toronto, which had a little more political clout in the past, lost it because the competition for funds became so great. Many committees were set up: there was a Presidents’ Committee of all the Ontario universities and there were other decanal committees; these I gather ended up being matches to see who could claim the most money for his programs. I think the University of Toronto felt that it lost a great deal of prestige because of this competition. Some people, on the one hand, have said that we cannot jeopardize the excellence of our one established university by building up the others; then of course the opposite answer would be, “Why should Toronto have it all?”
FRYE: As I say, I felt that there were too many new universities opening—more than the country could really support—and some of them would never be anything more than a different kind of community college without as much relevance to the economy. On the other hand, when a university does start, it’s a well-known principle that the care and feeding of small infants is a more exacting operation than the care and feeding of healthy adolescents who can come in and grab their own food. I think the feeling in Toronto was that if these universities are starting they will naturally have very keen and ambitious people in them who are trying to make them larger and cover a wider variety of the academic spectrum, and as long as the funds are there they should be encouraged to do it.
SCHATZKER: Of course, that early boom time when funds were much more readily available than they ever had been did create a great deal of activity on this campus. Leaving out the construction of the medical building and other major buildings, there was the establishment of institutes and schools and centres in the School of Graduate Studies which expanded the whole graduate department …
FRYE: When it comes to graduate work, that is where I feel there’s a case to be made for centralizing, even at the price of thinking of Toronto as Hogtown. The small, undergraduate liberal arts college is still a conceivable unit, although it’s getting more and more out of date. But no province of the size and population and wealth of Ontario can really afford more than a very few graduate centres that are worth anything at all. I made some crack myself around that period about the university that opens its buildings with a shelf of books in the library, and a second shelf with an old copy of Time, and appoints a dean of graduate studies.
SCHATZKER: Of course the inevitable result of the rapid growth of something like the School of Graduate Studies is that, now funds have declined, some of these centres are drastically threatened and may even have to close. This is a terrible thing for everyone to face.
FRYE: Of course it is. I have every sympathy with it. But, as I say, depression is the university’s normal orbit, I don’t see how they could function in any other way.
SCHATZKER: It was, I think, one of Claude Bissell’s major ambitions to improve the graduate school, along with building a library which would strengthen both the undergraduate and graduate programs. I think that’s one thing that he did achieve along with the help of Dean Sirluck.54
FRYE: Yes, Claude and Ernest between them did a lot of very good and very hard work along that line. Of course the Robarts Library was intended to be a research centre for all the Ontario universities. Ontario’s a big place and there are difficulties with that too.
SCHATZKER: There have been criticisms made of that policy: some people have said that the emphasis placed on graduate studies caused a de-emphasis on teaching undergraduates. I don’t know whether one can ascribe the effect to Bissell’s and Sirluck’s desire to improve graduate studies, but a lot of people feel it was a very real happening of the ’60s.
FRYE: Well, yes, I certainly think it was. I can understand the drive towards undertaking graduate work in smaller universities, because they get people on the staff who are anxious to teach their own special subject, which they can very frequently do only in a graduate environment. It doesn’t always follow that that makes for a really first-class research program. There aren’t very many universities with the resources, physical and human, to build that up.
SCHATZKER: Did you notice an increasing lack of interest in teaching undergraduates among your staff?
FRYE: I can’t say that I did notice that, because there’s been a very powerful tradition of undergraduate teaching at Toronto, and it’s nowhere been more powerful than in the federated colleges. With one or two exceptions, I can’t think of people who ever did any complaining about their undergraduate teaching. They understood its place in the university program.
SCHATZKER: It’s difficult to sort out all the reasons why undergraduate teaching did have difficulties at this time. Part of it is the decline in standards in the high schools, so that many students came to the university inadequately prepared. Remedial English courses had to be established at a rate that we never knew before. Also there was a trend to dilute the undergraduate courses: the main effect of that was the abolishment of the Honour Course. All these things came together to create an atmosphere in the undergraduate world of the university that was quite different from what had gone on before.
FRYE: Yes, that’s quite true. Most of the improvements I disapproved of. I found my feet sinking deeper and deeper into the mud as I went on. I loved the Honour Course; I thought it gave the undergraduate at Toronto a better training than he could have gotten anywhere else on the continent. I recognize that it was due for a considerable overhaul, but I thought the Macpherson Report really went bananas on the extent to which this should happen.
SCHATZKER: Dr. Bissell told me in private conversation that when he established the committee his main aim was not to focus attention on the Honour Course’s problems, which he felt were minor, but to beef up the General Course. Many students were complaining that the teachers were not giving it the same attention that they were giving to the Honours students. Now I don’t know if that was true or not; perhaps it was in some areas and not in others.
FRYE: There was a lot of hysteria abroad in those days. People used to yell words like “elitist” and thought it meant something. The difference between an Honour Course and a General Course student is not one of intelligence, it’s a difference in motivation. I said myself at the time that this committee was holding its hearings that the General Course was fair game—you can experiment with that as much as you like—but that the Honour Courses were a rather fragile thing that, once destroyed, could never be replaced. While I was very open to certain reforms in the Honour Courses including my own subject of English, which I think were pretty rigid in some places, nevertheless their principle, that the centre of all knowledge is where you happen to be, was a sound one.
SCHATZKER: Many people agree with you, but I think it’s proved impossible to return to it, as you predicted.
FRYE: Oh, yes. Once an earthquake’s swallowed up a building, it’s had it. That architectural monument is gone.
SCHATZKER: The Kelly Report tried to address itself to some of these problems.55 What do you feel about its results?
FRYE: The Kelly Report in effect said that it was a mistake to abolish the Honour Course in such a terrific hurry without looking around to see what the consequences would be, and that we need a bit more structure put back into the curriculum. Because during the age of hysteria we assumed that we were doing this for the sake of the students. That this was their great boo hurroo war cry, this was how they got freedoms, by elective choices. Of course, as soon as they got it the students found that that wasn’t at all what they wanted, and began to agitate for more structure in the program and more guidance in the choice of courses. The Kelly report struggled with that but hardly wrestled it to the ground. The whole process had gone too far.
SCHATZKER: The comments about that report included one that expressed tremendous disappointment that they were unable to define the value of a humanities education, but felt that the views were too disparate to come to any conclusion.
FRYE: That’s always been a major difficulty. Nobody could ever define the humanities. Anybody who’s had any experience of them knows how valuable they are, but without that experience it’s very difficult to understand why they should be there.
SCHATZKER: The same person, a senior administrator in this university, felt that the arts faculty was in great danger of losing its position and prestige because of the tight financial situation and the increasing demands for money from the scientific and professional courses, and also because of the proclaimed attitude of the government and the rest of society that education must have a teleological result. It has to have a purpose within society.
FRYE: Yes. The public is always convinced that the social situation is just there, a solid thing that won’t change; you keep pouring a new generation of students in to it every year, and the thing is not to pour too many in or you’ll break the mould. Well, there isn’t any mould. Right now we’re going through a major technological revolution of which most people, including myself, haven’t the faintest notion. What you need for that is the mind power of people who’ve been trained to think in a larger perspective.
SCHATZKER: And the humanities, you feel, would do that better than professional training?
FRYE: Special training goes out of date as soon as you get a new model. You learn to work one kind of computer and that computer has gone the way of the dinosaurs in about two years.
SCHATZKER: The changes in the ’60s were so rapid that it’s difficult to sort through. But one of the other problems, which I’m sure must have affected you as principal, was the increasing dependence on government and the increasing power that government had within the university. Did you sense this during the time that you were principal?
FRYE: I sensed that, and I felt too that that was very likely to be one of the results of abolishing a bicameral system, of having a board of governors and a senate.56 God knows I was bored enough with Senate meetings: without much to do and rubber-stamping what there was. But at the same time the existence of the Board of Governors was extremely useful to the university because it acted as a kind of buffer between the university itself and bureaucrats in Queen’s Park. The decisive part of it was made up of men who took a real interest in the university, and were also prominent enough in business and the professions and so on to bring a certain kind of pressure to bear on the government. So it didn’t turn into a governmental dictatorship.
SCHATZKER: Do you feel that under the present system, the unicameral system, the university has been reduced to a position of going hat in hand to the government and asking, “Please, more?”
FRYE: Yes, it does seem to me that there’s a kind of unconscious dictatorship of bureaucracy in education in the province now. Given the way things have developed economically I suppose it was inevitable. But I think that the university did weaken itself in many respects.
SCHATZKER: The former Dean of Arts, Professor Kruger, made a statement during the difficulties he had in the last couple of years of getting enough money to run his faculty. He said that in California when Reagan was governor he was very stingy with the funds he allotted to the state University of California. But the fact that a private university, Stanford, existed, keeping its standards high, forced the government not to let standards in the state university drop too much. He said that in Canada we don’t have that at all, so that once government has total power the standards can continue to decline.
FRYE: I can’t do anything with that sentence except put a period after it. This is absolutely true and it is what happens. The absence of a well-endowed private university in Canada is our major weakness: I think there’s no question on that point.
SCHATZKER: It seems to be much more difficult in Canada to raise private funds for our universities. Our alumni programs don’t have great success.
FRYE: They don’t have the success that they should have, certainly. It’s partly the curious cultural diffusion in Toronto where there are so many different things to support. But certainly if you approach a number of people downtown with a request to help finance the university, you get a lot of answers of the “Well, we already pay for it through our taxes” variety. It’s difficult to explain to anybody that doesn’t want to be convinced on that point that in fact the taxes don’t begin to do it. On the other hand, John Leyerle does seem to have had some success in getting his research institute off the ground.57 While it still seems to be grouped around medical research, which is easier to get money for, still I think that does indicate a wider public interest than one might think.58
SCHATZKER: I think we probably have a great deal to learn from some of the American private universities about fundraising.
FRYE: Oh, yes. We’ll never get to that level.
SCHATZKER: Just to make sure we’ve covered the increase in staff in this period: there didn’t seem to be enough Canadian graduates to fill the ranks of expanding departments. A lot of American- and some British-trained professors came in and changed the atmosphere at the university, bringing different ideas, some of them fresh and valuable, and others somewhat hostile to Toronto.
FRYE: Yes, I think that that’s true. I also felt very apprehensive, particularly at a new university where you would have departments where there might be one isolated Canadian with the rest all American. The trouble with that is that Canadian students get very confused if they’re taught subjects like modern history or political theory and economics by Americans who know only the American situation and haven’t very much interest in what’s going on in Canada. In other words, there was a reinforcement of the colonial attitude which was originally British but has now turned American.
SCHATZKER: Do you think that had any effect on English studies or history, or any other studies? I think we did have a certain Canadian attitude to the study of literature, probably something in between Britain and the United States.
FRYE: Oh, yes, there’s no question of that. I wrote an article about that for the [University of Toronto] Quarterly describing an experience of my own on my Guggenheim year at Harvard in 1950, looking at the bookshops and realizing what a tremendous dent in the scholarship of the humanities Canadians had made,59 without benefit of major research funds for travel or secretarial assistants, and without major libraries too. The scholars had go to the British Museum or Washington to do the job.
SCHATZKER: I’m not sure that this is a correct impression, but I sometimes felt that with the large influx of young and enthusiastic American professors we got an overdose of their particular schools of criticism. Do you think that Canadian attitudes to literary criticism were lost for a while in the shuffle, or did they manage to survive?
FRYE: I think a lot of them have been lost and lost permanently. Take such a thing as the separation of the Department of Political Science from the Department of Economics: that is typical of an academic mode that wants economics to be as quantitative and mathematical as possible. The tradition of Toronto was a philosophical tradition which tended to unite subjects rather than make them hive off like cells reproducing by fissure. Certainly in the undergraduate school, I’ve always favoured a centralizing tendency, and the philosophical and historical approaches in Toronto I’ve always felt were immensely valuable. I don’t think we have those to the extent that we did have them, although there are still some very dedicated people here.
SCHATZKER: The Honour Courses reinforced that by their very constitution, demanding a historical approach in the study of English.
FRYE: There are inflexibilities about that, but in my second year I got the Renaissance from the point of view of philosophy, English, and history; in the third year the eighteenth century; in the fourth year the nineteenth. To me the element of the single greatest value of my entire educational experience was to study a single period in three or four different fields and see how they all came together.
SCHATZKER: I think the philosophical approach, too, was extremely powerful in the Honour Course in English especially, because we studied philosophers in the final two years extensively. They were writers but they were also philosophers.
FRYE: Oh, yes. There was never any attempt to draw a sharp boundary line between English literature and philosophy.
SCHATZKER: How did you feel about the separation of areas of study in the graduate school? Did you feel that was valuable, to establish a medieval centre, a Renaissance program, a Celtic program, various things?
FRYE: Yes, I think that those have justified their existence as they’ve developed. The disadvantage is that the comparative literature department has been rather left out in the cold. Toronto dragged its feet on comparative literature for so long that when Sirluck finally—I won’t say got around to organizing it because it was one of his priorities from the beginning—but when he did start to organize it, the medieval and Renaissance fields were already preempted by those institutes, so that all the comparative literature department could take was Romantics and moderns and the theory of criticism.
SCHATZKER: We have been discussing some of the many changes that happened to the university in the ’60s. I was just mentioning that I felt the change had gone on so rapidly that it made people feel very insecure.
FRYE: Certainly people felt insecure and there was an absence of leadership. When you get into one of these mock-revolutionary situations such as the one built up by the age of hysteria you find that academic people hesitate to take sides because a side commits them either to a radicalism or to a conservatism that they don’t really want. What’s the point in being an academic unless you can see both sides of the question? In listening to the Senate debates after the Macpherson Report I thought to myself, “Well, what is the use?” The people who felt that the traditions in Toronto were worth keeping were not mocked or ridiculed particularly, they were simply ignored. I submitted a brief myself, as principal, to the Macpherson Committee, but that was simply dismissed as, “Well, you know your own mind, but after all we have much bigger things in view.” And when I was inaugurated as Chancellor of Victoria I said there were two things that made Toronto a world-class university: one was the Honour Course and the other was the federated college system, and we’ve destroyed both. But that speech was never reprinted anywhere.60
SCHATZKER: It wasn’t?
FRYE: No.
SCHATZKER: This brings to mind the idea that something must have happened at the university to change it from an institution in which scholars listened to each other to one in which committees held sway. There weren’t as many committees, certainly, up until the late ’50s; principals and deans had more power; the unicameral system had not been put into place. I don’t suppose you’d like to start pinpointing where the blame may lie, and I’m sure it’s impossible, but can you speculate on what happened to this university?
FRYE: For one thing there was an increase in numbers. Marx says that a quantitative increase at a certain point will produce a qualitative change;61 he forgot to add that ninety-nine times out of a hundred the qualitative change is disastrous. More and more sections of the community began demanding representation on boards like the Council or the Senate. One can understand the justice of these claims and in a democratic environment one doesn’t want to argue against them, but what happens is that these bodies become so unwieldy that the actual work has to be left to committees. So that the responsibility becomes more and more hidden and the authority becomes increasingly anonymous.
SCHATZKER: Something similar is happening to our national parliament; at least, some of the politicians view it as a dinosaur and don’t have any respect for it. There seems to be a tendency in the entire society to govern by oligarchy.
FRYE: Well, bureaucracy. I think the only government of which the human race is capable is more or less efficient or corrupt bureaucracy. The degrees of efficiency and corruption are what make the difference.
SCHATZKER: Would you say that the central administration—which had to increase because of the increase in size and the amount of change that was going on—became too powerful?
FRYE: It isn’t so much that it was too powerful as that the individual qua individual began to lose a sense of participation. For any kind of participatory democracy you need a thorough-going decentralizing process breaking down into smaller units. That is why I’ve always supported the federated college system, and even they are too big. But of course that is expensive, so things tend to centralize; and as they centralize the administration becomes so complex that it passes into the hands of people who in effect do nothing else. Whereas traditionally in the university, the administrator was an academic who was simply stuck with an extra job.
SCHATZKER: I think we had some very fine administrators who took their onerous roles very seriously and tried very hard to satisfy all elements …
FRYE: So do I.
SCHATZKER: But I think they couldn’t possibly do it.
FRYE: That’s right.
SCHATZKER: Especially, as you say, during the age of hysteria, when the other pressures just became too much. Another major development during this time which continues to be problematic is the organization and demands of the staff. I was told by a member of the Board of Governors that Walter Gordon came into a board meeting—I think it was in the mid to late ’50s—and astounded them all by saying that his research on the salaries of the professors at the University of Toronto made him realize that we were underpaying them in a way that was dreadful—it bore no relationship to what was going on in the rest of society. That single courageous action of his caused a general salary increase. Up until then the staff had been rather sleepy and not terribly demanding. But things changed very rapidly and during the age of hysteria the Faculty Association became beset with factions; how did you survive that?
FRYE: It’s just a case of survival. I detest the thought of a unionized staff in a university. A university is a special-purpose organization where the whole labour–management setup doesn’t fit at all. I think that a unionized staff would bring something rather cancerous into university life. I know I’m defining my generation when I say that but I do believe it very, very strongly. I think that traditionally academics, like clergymen, have been regarded by society as already paid by the spiritual benefits of what they do. At present I understand what the CAUT is doing in demanding across-the-board increases and the like, but I also see that while those who have something get more, those who have nothing, that is graduate students struggling for TAs, are deprived of the hope of ever getting anything.62
SCHATZKER: Do you think that this has caused any decline in morale that affects the teaching and the attitude of the professors?
FRYE: To my mind it’s been a little short of miraculous that the morale has kept up as well as it has. Whatever you can say against a university teaching staff it is full of very deeply dedicated people, and as long as that goes on the teaching process will go on. But I suppose one can hardly expect it to last forever.
SCHATZKER: I don’t know whether you have any views at present about the Faculty Association? Is it, like so many organizations, composed of a small group who press for these kinds of changes and a majority of members who are really not too interested; or do you think that the full force of the faculty is behind these demands?
FRYE: I suppose that the faculty is in a state of more or less resigned agreement. That is, they know quite well that you can’t run a university on peanuts and good will. At the same time there was by no means unanimous approval of the last general increase. My own loyalties are divided because so much of my loyalty goes to what I just referred to, the graduate student trying out for his first job. The way in which departmental chairmen have had their wings clipped I regard with horror but …
SCHATZKER: What are you referring to?
FRYE: In their power to make new appointments.
SCHATZKER: Who has usurped that?
FRYE: Nobody’s usurped it, it’s just that they can’t make it any more, the money isn’t there.
SCHATZKER: Oh, I see. The latest development I’ve heard in that regard was that, because of the increase in salaries, positions that have become vacant by death or retirement will simply not be filled.
FRYE: I think that that’s true. If you’re talking of abolishing the college departments—I don’t have any great enthusiasm for that, but it has been done—then you could say that in some departments there is perhaps more specialized knowledge than is needed by the number of students. I think of courses like Classics and Near Eastern Studies where so many things are involved. In Classics there’s philosophy and there’s history and there’s literature and there are the two languages, Greek and Latin. You need a tremendous battery of people to do decent work in Classics but again, where’s the student body?
SCHATZKER: What do you feel about the changes in terms of promotion at this university? They’ve become, I gather, much more rigid and codified than they ever were.
FRYE: That again is part of the expansion of numbers, I don’t see any way out of that. I know that, as I think I remarked earlier, the reason for my fanatical loyalty to Victoria was that I was given what amounted to a tenure appointment from the start because my superiors in the department knew me. When you can’t have that kind of personal knowledge of people there have got to be more impersonal developments.
SCHATZKER: And just as admissions in so many of the competitive faculties must be based on something measurable like marks, then promotions must be based on something measurable like publications.
FRYE: That is almost bound to happen. Again I don’t see any cure except a radical decentralizing, which is prohibitively expensive. I certainly don’t see why everybody on a university staff should be the same kind of person, that is, a producer of articles.
SCHATZKER: The rules of appointment of heads of departments and other administrative positions changed as well during the ’60s with the Haist Committee’s report.63 I don’t think people have really considered the results of that work but it has changed the face of the university.
FRYE: Yes, it has. Yet it seemed to be at the time a very stabilizing measure. Everybody referred to the Haist rules as though they were the Ten Commandments.
SCHATZKER: The five-year term in some departments may mean that people are appointed who have no gift for the job; they resign after their five years, and another uninterested person is appointed. In some other departments the two terms will be filled by someone who has a gift for administration. But it doesn’t seem to affect the department as much as the other way would cause difficulties.
FRYE: Are you speaking of people taking administrative jobs from the department?
SCHATZKER: Yes. For becoming chairman and that sort of thing. It has abolished the possibility of a great career chairman of twenty-five years, like some of the great chairmen we can point to in the history of this university. And I think in the sciences it has become a great albatross for young researchers, because accepting a five-year appointment to administer a department really means kissing your research goodbye.
FRYE: Well, that again I don’t see. I haven’t any patented method for getting around that under present conditions. In the old decentralized days the departmental chairman was a father-figure, but under the present conditions, just the straight numerical ones, I don’t think that’s possible anymore.
SCHATZKER: I don’t know whether anybody would ever want to change it, but it seems that it may cause more problems as the staff becomes older and is not replenished by younger people to take on some of these duties. It would mean, in some of the smaller departments, a rotating system of chairmanship.
FRYE: Yes, it may become that. Mind you, there are other sides to it. The expansion days meant that a lot of people who were really of rather second-rate quality got tenure. I’m not sure that this is so true of Toronto, but I could certainly name universities that are just stuffed full of zombies from the days of the ’50s that haven’t an idea in their heads and never will have any. But they’ve got tenure so they can keep out anybody younger who has more ability. When I look at the amount of sheer genius, dedication (not just competence), among the young graduate students today, I think it’s a miracle to get such good people considering what we can promise them.
SCHATZKER: Society has a really difficult task in accepting professorial tenure because they say it doesn’t exist anywhere else in the competitive business world.
FRYE: Yes, and I think myself that the reason for tenure, which was to protect somebody who might be a critic of society from saying what he thought, has now become just job security.
SCHATZKER: Do you think that anyone will ever attack this principle successfully? I know that in some of the American universities, because of financial problems, they actually had to let some tenured professors go.
FRYE: I think it will erode, probably; to some extent it has to erode. The whole area then would be a question of discrimination. If a person opens his mouth on a social issue there are enough human rights organizations and so on to give him a certain amount of security even if he does not have tenure.
SCHATZKER: I would imagine that some kind of protective organization could be established within the university to oversee those rights.
FRYE: I think so; and I think that if a woman, for example, discovers that she’s doing the same work as a man and she’s getting paid five thousand dollars a year less, there are procedures that she can resort to which don’t involve the tenure question at all.
SCHATZKER: You’ve described that era of the ’60s and early ’70s as an age of hysteria. You were principal during much of this time and I wonder what comments you would have from your vantage point now on the student unrest and the demands of students?
FRYE: We actually got the minimum because Toronto was not as hard hit as the American universities were. As I used to tell my American friends at the time, Canadian activist students have an outlet that your students don’t have, namely the American Embassy. If all else fails they can go down and demonstrate there. Toronto certainly had its share of all that kind of hysteria but it never reached the proportions it did at Cornell or Harvard. Victoria has always been a fairly secure middle-class stronghold. I think the students kept one token resistor around for two or three years on a kind of salary; he was a rather pathetic creature but he was their representative of the fact that they were with it. They had no enthusiasm at all. I remember when Ted Hodgetts made his opening speech to the students and a heckler in the front row said, “How much do you make?”64 The other students just told him to shut up.
SCHATZKER: It was small enough that they knew him and wanted to protect him.
FRYE: Well, it wasn’t so much him as the feeling that this isn’t what goes on in a university.
SCHATZKER: Yes. And yet it did in other areas, and the small handful of activists caused changes that we’re still living with.
FRYE: Yes.
SCHATZKER: The administration itself seemed to be divided at the time of the old board. There were conservatives who felt that some actions could be considered criminal and should be prosecuted by the authorities, and then there were others who had an opposing view. This was an extension of the idea that the university was in loco parentis which said, “No, we will not call in outside forces, these are our students, we look after them, we punish them under our own code.” This proved to be hopelessly inefficient. What do you feel about that? Some of these actions I think were in the strict point of law and I think Justice Arthur Kelly resigned from the board because of this very debate.
FRYE: Resigned because the …?
SCHATZKER: He felt the police should have been brought in and the offenders should have been prosecuted.
FRYE: In some circumstances I would have agreed with that. I think that a lot of student protest, whatever it called itself, was actually a very ugly form of neo-fascism. If you bring somebody here whom they’ve decided to call a racist and they break up the meeting, then I think that is a case for the outside police force. The university is not in loco parentis, both parents are dead. And the alma mater is something else altogether.
SCHATZKER: I found it ironic that students were protesting against the idea of the university being in loco parentis and the university, in that very action of protecting them, was adopting this role. And many of the administrators who were faced with these questions were plagued by the problem of what to do, agonized over it. I think it was almost like serving a term in the penitentiary when you served a term in the administration in those days.
FRYE: Well it was almost a penal appointment in some places, yes.
SCHATZKER: Do you feel there has been any great change in the student population from the end of the ’50s to now? I just mentioned the inability of many of them to speak and write the language with any finesse, but is there anything else or do you have comments on that?
FRYE: I think that the next generation of students realized that the university was not the enemy, that the whole tendency to attack the university was part of the rationale of a military-political establishment and all that sort of thing was really nonsense. The particular thing that cut the ground from under the students’ feet was the stopping of the war in Vietnam. Of course, one reason why Canada remained so much cooler was that Canadian students were not eligible for the draft. I think that the student protest movement simply perished for the lack of any social roots.
SCHATZKER: What about the qualifications of entering students during the ’60s: do you feel there was a noticeable decline or do you think they’re the same as they always were?
FRYE: I think you get the same human material to work with that you always have. Of course, the high schools have been affected by the same squeezes that the university has. Teachers don’t have time to mark compositions as they used to. That is why you get students in university who have never written three hundred consecutive words in their lives. They are the people that all the language testings are about. Grade 13, when it stopped being a marked examination and became simply a principal’s report, meant that you were taking in people more or less blind.
SCHATZKER: Do you feel that re-establishment of the departmental examinations would be a useful gauge of students’ ability? Or do you feel that former Dean Kruger’s suggestion that the university conduct its own entrance exams is a better idea? Or none at all?
FRYE: I think in practice it’s very hard to get people to mark papers in the summer, whether they’re high-school teachers or university teachers.
SCHATZKER: Even for ready money?
FRYE: Yes, but you can’t have both that and the CAUT. If you keep pressuring for higher salaries in the faculty they are going to use their summers to go off to the British Museum or be masters of their own time. As soon as high-school teachers’ salaries went up the number of people who would stay around to mark grade 13 papers went down, even though they were quite well paid. It’s very tedious work. I think of what my colleague Marguerite Stobo and I do in a course we have on Biblical typology and Classical mythology: she sets a test for the students at the very opening of the term, and if they literally don’t know one end of the Bible from the other or can’t tell Hercules from Venus, then they are told, not that they will be refused admission to the course, but that they’re going to have to work like hell to get through it.
SCHATZKER: Does it seem to have any effect?
FRYE: Oh, yes.
SCHATZKER: Are students getting less than they did before of cultural background such as Classical mythlogy or the Bible or just general knowledge of the great figures in English literature?
FRYE: Oh, yes, I think there’s been a very considerable erosion of that. There are many reasons for it. You can’t blame it all on the imbecility of educators but a lot of it does go back to that. I’ve had enough experience on educational committees to know that “think as radically as possible” is usually a euphemism for “how much of the traditional stuff can they get away with not teaching?”
SCHATZKER: Once I had contact with a student in high school who studied as his novel of the year In Cold Blood. I found it appalling because it isn’t even a novel and there seemed to be a total disregard of the classical tradition in English literature.
FRYE: I think that that’s more the fault of the teachers than the students. Students discover very quickly when they’re being gypped. I remember somebody who was giving a course in Modern Literature; he was starting with Jack Kerouac to provide a sort of historical background, and was going on to all the latest bestsellers. The students said that they wouldn’t take this; that they wanted something like Joseph Conrad that they knew was worth reading.
SCHATZKER: The change in the high-school curriculum has promoted this kind of teaching. I think in truth far more choice has been given; the teachers do not have to follow any kind of set curriculum but can decide amongst themselves in the school which pieces of literature they will teach.
FRYE: The result of that of course is that they teach what interests them. One has to undergo the discipline if you’re teaching the same plays every year because although these plays are no longer new to the teacher they’re new to the students. It’s the students who come first in any questions of that kind.
SCHATZKER: The thing that I can’t quite grasp is why generations of teachers in the past did this with dedication and the new generation will not.
FRYE: That’s a complex question with, I suppose, many kinds of answers. I think again it’s the attenuating of the personal relationship between the teacher and student. It’s the difference between the small shop where you know the shopkeeper and the supermarket where you’re checked out.
SCHATZKER: Perhaps partly the greater tendency towards instant gratification as well. So many teachers in the past were dedicated to forming each mind. It didn’t matter what they were teaching, it was the formation of the student that interested them, and watching him progress. Now there isn’t the same general interest among teachers, perhaps because of size.
FRYE: One can understand causes of that kind. I think there’s also been a considerable decline in the ability to see things in time as well as space. The whole business of instant news rather wipes out the continuity which is the basis of all real education and all wisdom too.
SCHATZKER: [You have said that] people are not able to see things in terms of time as well as they can in terms of space. You related this to the fact that we are faced with instant news these days. I wonder if you think that people had more ability to see things in terms of time in the past; and if so, how has this affected the situation at the university?
FRYE: I suppose if you stay in one spot for a great many years you do notice certain changes taking place. One skyscraper after another thrusts its way into the sky and every one of those is a kind of intrusion on your memory of what is there. Over the years you build up a pattern of things disappearing and other things coming in. It’s not a complete phantasmagoria: if you have a long-range memory of a place you see it in an additional perspective. The same thing is true of being connected with the university where the tradition and ethos is actually a part of the community you’re working in.
SCHATZKER: Do you think that students have an inability to see things in time now, and that this affects their learning?
FRYE: I don’t think you begin to see things in time until you’ve had a fair stretch of it yourself. It’s not normal to a young person’s perspective. The time perspective of youth is naturally thrown into the future and nobody knows about that.
SCHATZKER: Things have changed in terms of background. We’ve talked so much about the changed background in learning literature. It’s also changed in history because, perhaps due to nationalism, Canadian history has become much more important in the high schools and other aspects of history have dwindled. We all used to study British history; now I don’t think that you can find a current high-school text for British history.
FRYE: I would be very sorry to feel that that was true but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised. Education in the sense of time is extraordinarily important for young people just because it doesn’t come from their experience. The liberating part of a liberal education has a great deal to do with discovering other areas in time. If you’re teaching Shakespeare, for example, there are the two poles: there’s the present pole where it’s relevant to our own experience and then there’s his own pole as a dramatist in 1600. It seems to me that knowing about the original audience and society and its standards and assumptions is the liberating part of learning about Shakespeare. Otherwise he just gets kidnapped into the orbit of our own cultural prejudices.
SCHATZKER: Perhaps the most important discussion for the purposes of this interview is the one concerning the colleges. I’m talking to you as a former principal of Victoria College and as one of the most illustrious members of it. You’ve said many times during this interview how important Victoria has been to you; you feel a part of the college as much as you are a part of the University of Toronto. The colleges had a tremendous strength in the past; we’ve talked about that and the various atmospheres that existed in the different colleges and how this affected student life. But this began to break down, I suppose, in the ’60s. I wondered if you had any thoughts about why that happened specifically?
FRYE: About why the breakdown of the college …?
SCHATZKER: College life. Was it was only a financial thing, because that was one of the major problems?
FRYE: It wasn’t just financial. I think that when I was an undergraduate the residences tended to dominate the social life of the college much more than they do now. And then again the social life of the undergraduate was much fuller. I think undergraduates are rather partied out by the time they get to college. It doesn’t become so much a part of their routine as it used to do. Because of the residences and the parties and games and that kind of thing, people who took mathematics and physics and had no lectures at all at Victoria nevertheless could feel very intensely a part of the college. I think it’s doubtful that you can recapture that because of the enormous increase in numbers for one thing. I know that young people are accustomed to living in much bigger social units than people of my generation were. Even so they seem to feel that even the college is a bit of a mass. I remember a friend of mine who was dean of arts at the University of California and wrote a book about it and he remarked in the course of the book that the academic instinct is to give the major part of your loyalty to the smallest practicable unit.65 That’s true certainly of my instinct. I tend to feel that a college of Victoria’s size, or Massey College, is a much more intelligible thing to feel a part of, than the University of Toronto, though of course I have a loyalty to that too.
SCHATZKER: So the financial strains that were placed upon the colleges you don’t think were the only contributing factor to their decline?
FRYE: That goes a way back in history. It wasn’t just the financial strains. The original division of humanities and science subjects made in 1884 made a certain amount of sense for 1884 but Victoria made some curious mistakes even then. They allowed philosophy to become a university subject because the teacher of it happened to be a very attractive person and they wanted Victoria students to get him.66 So they split that department into philosophy and ethics: ethics became the college subject; of course that’s nonsense. Then when the social sciences arose, that threw a tremendous weight on the side of the university. As new humanities subjects came along like Fine Art, Spanish, Italian, and Far Eastern Studies, they just automatically went to the university. The report of the committee that led up to the Act of 1906 recommended that the colleges take over philosophy and history. If they’d done that they would have been in a much better bargaining situation in the future, but they thought it would be too expensive and they just didn’t. So really the reasons why the college subjects become an utterly unworkable and unpractical idea were built into the history of federation from the beginning.
SCHATZKER: When it was apparent that the colleges were going broke, partly because of the split in subjects and the numbers of students who were only nominally registered at a college but actually took most of their courses outside of it, the university felt that it had to make some sense of this. In private comments to me Dr. Bissell said that it was an almost impossible task, one he didn’t want to involve himself in. The only time that he really faced the problem was when there was a proposal from the board to build a large undergraduate residence on St. George St.; he fought that because he thought it would undermine the strength of the colleges. But Dr. Bissell was a college man and understood the nature of the colleges to the very core. Perhaps Dr. Evans, coming from the medical faculty, didn’t have the same understanding and wasn’t hampered by it so he could go ahead with the Memorandum of Understanding more easily.67
FRYE: I think it was also Claude Bissell who felt that New College and Innis College, and other new colleges, should be teaching units and not just residences. They have become teaching units but rather circumscribed by this monolithic centralizing of things at the university headquarters.
SCHATZKER: Did you have any part in the discussions leading up to the Memorandum of Understanding?
FRYE: That came up later. The discussions were just beginning about the time that I felt that this was nothing I could contribute to and cleared out.
SCHATZKER: And that memorandum has been highly controversial. Each college seems to have taken it in a different spirit and applied it differently, because the results, after some years, at University College are quite different than they are at St. Michael’s or Victoria.
FRYE: Of course University College went through a somewhat premature evolution; Victoria and St. Michael’s didn’t. For one thing, Victoria had a Board of Regents to protect it.
SCHATZKER: Yes, and St. Michael’s too is an independent university.
FRYE: It also had some kind of autonomous authority that would prevent its library from being sacked, for example.
SCHATZKER: Is that what happened at University College?
FRYE: More or less, yes.68
SCHATZKER: Did you know President Evans very well?
FRYE: Not very well, but I did know him.
SCHATZKER: Did he ever discuss this problem with you?
FRYE: No, he didn’t particularly. I didn’t want to get on to problems of political infighting. I knew that he had a great interest in the university. But with his background at McMaster, where they had tried a similar experiment to ours and then given it up, I didn’t expect that he would feel the way I felt about the federated colleges.
SCHATZKER: Which experiment are you referring to at McMaster?
FRYE: My memory’s vague, but it seems to me that at McMaster they did divide things more or less along college lines. Then the lines were redrafted along the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences quadrant.
SCHATZKER: Did you maintain any interest after this period in the changes in administration and the exits having [unclear] on university life?
FRYE: For a time I was rather reacting against that sort of thing. I didn’t feel quite as strongly as the Biblical prophet who said that the prudent will keep silence at such a time because it’s an evil time [Amos 5:13]. But I did feel that a kind of hysteria was spreading across the campus which I couldn’t fight. I was just going to pull out till the dust settled.
SCHATZKER: As the colleges lost strength in the ’70s the power seemed to shift in two directions: to the central administration (because of the central financing of the university) and to the faculty of arts. How do you feel that this shift of power has affected the students and teachers in the university?
FRYE: I think it’s turned the University of Toronto campus into much more of a big Middle-Western state university. The more distinctive qualities that I remember in the Faculty of Arts have gone now. What really makes Toronto a first-rate university is the quality of the teaching staff. Of course that won’t stay forever either unless they start making appointments in the younger generation.
SCHATZKER: Do you feel that the student is in a difficult position? They have what some people have characterized as a cafeteria-style curriculum in the arts course. They don’t always have their college to rely on for that kind of small community and intellectual support that they had before. I wonder if they wander around not knowing who to talk to and what to decide on to study. Is it really that bad for the undergraduate or do you think they find places to …?
FRYE: I daresay they find places. They don’t know one another as well as they used to. It’s a thing that has taken me a long time to get used to. If a student misses a lecture of mine and wants to know what to do about it, my answer used to be, “Go get the notes from a classmate.” But when they don’t know any classmates that’s a problem which I hadn’t faced before. I think it’s partly the lifestyle of the ’70s and ’80s, that students are more accustomed to living anonymously. At the same time there are places like Ned’s here at Victoria for social gatherings.69 I think that a normal student can always find a certain personal, social niche to operate in among his classmates.
SCHATZKER: Do the professors get to know them as well as they did before?
FRYE: Some of them undoubtedly do. If you’re asking about me, the answer is no, because my classes are so huge. I do know there’s a great deal of good will and good feeling on the part of the students towards me and I just wish I could …. I’d give up that mob of two hundred and fifty students who turn up to my Shakespeare course but …
SCHATZKER: It’s impossible.
FRYE: It is impossible, really.
SCHATZKER: Talking in generalities now, the influence of government has become much more apparent within the university. And the attitude of government towards university education has changed as well, I think. It’s become perhaps more anti-humanistic, and the ministry of education has decreed that education must become more relevant to the market place. Job security and finding a job are of prime importance. I don’t know if this has begun to affect the university yet, but some people fear it so much that I gather there’s a presidential committee to make the university’s views felt in the general community about the importance of higher education and especially the humanities. Have you heard about this?
FRYE: Yes. I don’t know whether I said this before, but I think that the political attitude is the last stand of people who can’t see beyond their noses, because a politician isn’t trained to see beyond his nose or at least beyond the next election. Consequently he thinks of the labour market as a solid thing and students as a liquid mass poured into it. The reason our economy’s in a mess is that we’re in the throes of a major social revolution which politicians just haven’t a clue to. If there was ever a need for trained minds it’s now.
SCHATZKER: However, we’re moving away from that and students are not encouraged to train their minds, especially in the humanities, by either the economic facts or the people surrounding them.
FRYE: Again, that’s the last-stand mentality, I think. Students respond so readily to any kind of perspective that enables them to see over the head of the next year or so.
SCHATZKER: We’ve talked a bit before about continuing education. Perhaps that will provide the answers for students as they come back. So many of them will probably come back to the university at one time of their life or another.
FRYE: That to me is the only sensible solution: having adult education programs for people making a full-time commitment to the university in middle life. I think more and more that that is the social direction in which universities ought to be developing. But again that takes quite a major reconstruction of society.
SCHATZKER: Following directly from this discussion of government as opposed to the academic, in a convocation address at Carleton you said that academic freedom was the unrestricted pursuit of undiscovered truth and not the repeating of truths that certain pressure groups in society think they have. How would you relate that to some of the pressures that are coming from the federal government now in the area of research, encouraging certain types of research by providing more funds for Canadian Studies, Women’s Studies, Minority Studies?
FRYE: That kind of trend-education has always been a disaster. It’s always been utterly futile; the whole record of the history of education is strewn with the wreckage of those things. In the United States, I know, a first-rate private university like Harvard or Yale or Princeton would have nothing to do with government programs of that kind. They would set their own programs and they would see to it that they were founded in pure scientific research. If you concentrate on utterly useless and irrelevant scientific research, the benefits to the country are enormous, but if you concentrate on immediately relevant goals you just waste your time and your money.
SCHATZKER: Of course some of these goals of the federal government as set up in the SSHRC70 are very political goals.
FRYE: Oh, sure, yes, they’re vote-keeping goals.
SCHATZKER: I think we’ve covered all the major topics, unless there’s something that you have remembered that I’ve forgotten to ask. One of the things I wondered if you could talk about was some of the major personalities you think have affected the course of this university during the time that you’ve been associated with it.
FRYE: In my little corner both Victoria people and English people are the ones I know best. There’s been a very marked shift in academic attitude from the rather Anglophile setup that I walked into as an undergraduate and what I’ve called the “Middle-Western state university” feeling that I find now. What you get out of your teachers is more the ideas that come to you as a result of having known them than anything that they say, or even the way they teach. I remember taking philosophy from Brett—I don’t know if I’ve said this already—there’s no question of Brett’s enormous erudition but what I chiefly remember from him was his rather priestly attitude to the subject: that is, he would have given the same lecture if there were two students there as if there were two hundred. Somebody like Pelham Edgar, whom many people underestimated as a scholar: there’s still something in his manner, in his whole attitude to people, that convinced you that the scholar’s life was worth having. Haven’t I gone over some of this before?
SCHATZKER: Yes, but it’s interesting. In other words we won’t be able to replace teachers with video tapes and television.
FRYE: Any student who’s found himself facing a box instead of a human countenance could tell you about that.
SCHATZKER: Not too many people have put it as succinctly as you have. They will say that they were influenced by certain people but rarely separate the ideas from the force of the personality. And yet, for so many people that I’ve interviewed, the influence of personality on their decisions to study a certain field or pursue a certain career seems to be of paramount importance.
FRYE: I know that that is of major importance and I know that I’m quite an influence that way myself. It’s hard to pinpoint it from my point of view.
SCHATZKER: And of course that reflects even more disastrously upon the present situation because the inability of the students to relate to different generations of the teaching staff will make this kind of influence even more impossible.
FRYE: Yes, that’s quite true. There is such a generation gap, and a student’s instinct, at least a freshman’s instinct, is always to consult the faculty member who’s nearest to him in age. He doesn’t want to go to somebody old enough to be his grandfather and talk to him.
SCHATZKER: Well, it’s more difficult. You do eventually, in your final years, come to approach the older men.
FRYE: Yes, but I was speaking of freshmen and people who start again.
SCHATZKER: Yes, that’s right. Thank you very much, Dr. Frye, for participating in this program. I’m very grateful that you gave us some of your valuable time.