Foreward to Memoirs of JA Corry
In the spring of 1970 J. Alex Corry published Farewell the Ivory Tower, a selection of addresses ‘spoken to university audiences’ between 1961 and 1969 – very much the period of his office as principal of Queen’s University. Some readers, not having an ear for the arresting quality of his voice and the fascinating deliberation of his almost hesitant delivery, did not recognize the unobtrusive irony of the title. A detail in the elaborately prepared farewell party held for him in Grant Hall two years earlier provides a gloss: a large blow-up of W.C. Fields in top-hat and white gloves, wearing the disarming expression of the card-sharper and confidence-trickster. Drawing attention in this way to certain alleged similarities of voice and deportment, his colleagues and admirers by affectionate connivance celebrated his sense of fun, his love of a good anecdote, his taste for self-mockery, the puckish undercurrent of irony that gives his aphorisms the pungent savour that matches the strength of his convictions. For it is well-known that he stands at the farthest possible remove from a gambler, and that he has never had any truck with calculated risks, with prophesyings, or with sleight-of-hand.
In Farewell the Ivory Tower there is nothing wistful or elegiac; the word ‘farewell’ occurs in Dr. Corry’s vocabulary about as often as ‘irregardless’ or ‘gadzooks.’ Here his hand is raised in laconic dismissal of a fantasy that he has never given houseroom to: the notion that a university, by necessarily interposing a reflective and sceptical gap between the world of power and the world of value, turns its back upon what is popularly called ‘the real world.’ ‘We can forget about the ivory towers but we must at all costs preserve the dreaming spires, which I take to be the symbol of high, unhurried, contemplative thought.’ ‘The highest service of the universities is to reason and truth, on which no compromise is possible. It is their service, within their proper sphere, to aim at the ideal and approach the perfect.’ ‘This is the rock from which we are hewn.’
He has spent almost the whole of his life in universities, most of it in Queen’s University. Early on, by chance, he was drawn away from his intended practice of the law to develop his contemplative powers and to discover his gifts as a teacher. His talents were such that he was not to be allowed indefinitely to follow a quiet and patient destiny. Yet as his life became more and more impressively engaged in practicality and public duty it never lost its contemplative integrity. His dedication to ‘the tradition of teaching, fearless inquiry, and loyal service to Canada’ – the Queen’s tradition as he affirmed it – was so intense and comprehensive that the university became for him the potent symbol of the liberated spirit and of that ceremony of mutual respect that is the mark of a civilized community. The highest values that traditionally inform the university became the guiding principle of his life, unifying his various gifts in a diversity of duties that in most men would have involved conflict or division.
This unifying energy must have taken root very early on in his home life in which he discovered the dignity and cost of self-reliance and the need for independent fellow-feeling in a harsh setting. But these positive aspects of life did not blur or mask his recognition that human purpose can be fallible and human wishes vain, not only when confronted with the pitiless demands of an unbroken land but in any human circumstance whatsoever. A rather sombre vision of life, refined through time to philosophical consistency, declared itself in a forthright non-conformity, a quality of moral strength most readily discernible in the rare tone of his ironic merriment. Real life was too serious to be taken other than with light-hearted daring; too much was at stake to be treated casually, frivolously, or – in the way of pastmasters of the political craft – cynically. In all conditions people were to be persuaded, not manipulated. The art of writing, for example, had fascinated him from childhood; but he renounced adventitious graces of style and found his true voice in a grave, sure-footed manner in which he was no more given to rhetorical slanting than as an administrator he was given to loading a budget. In his style, intellectual power is matched to emotional precision. The boy who had found that he had a good head for heights in barnraising became by instinct a mountaineer endowed with the prime virtues of that art – courage, decision tempered by experience, a fine sense of rhythm, a disinterested concern for the other climbers on the rope.
When Dr. Corry retired as principal of Queen’s University in 1968 he had achieved a great deal, as much perhaps in public life and the reform of university government as in teaching and scholarship. Beginning as a young professor of law in the University of Saskatchewan he had come to Queen’s to establish almost single-handed among the two or three foremost fields of study in the university, the study of Political Science – ‘the unteachable subject.’ He was the first authoritative inquirer into the law of public administration as far as it affects the private citizen, and in founding the first Institute of Intergovernmental Relations he had defined a new and increasingly urgent field of political study. His Democratic Government and Politics (1946) in its several editions and revisions had left an indelible mark not only upon the undergraduates for whom it was first written but upon many whose business it was to try to unravel and nourish the delicate intricacies of the evolving Canadian democracy. As vice-principal he had formed the first School of Law to be authorized in Ontario outside Toronto and had shaped it to the distinctive pattern of his well-tried educational ideals and practice. During the testing and tempting period of university expansion he had consistently affirmed for his peers values other than the politics of power, the pleasures of expediency, or the delights of opportunism; he did not hesitate to challenge sacred cows or plausible policies of self-justification when he saw them; he declared the prime responsibility of teaching undergraduates at a time when undergraduate teaching was being fashionably considered a chore for the unanointed; he insisted that a university modelled on society would be a self-betrayal; he even wondered aloud whether students were by divine providence the best qualified to govern universities. His services were sought by government and by crown agencies, as commissioner of inquiry, as wise counsellor, as a model of disinterested negotiating skill; he also lent a steadying hand to two of Canada’s earliest attempts at civilization on a national scale – the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Canada Council.
It is gratifying to notice that such brilliant accomplishments have been widely recognized, with many honours and with the award of the highest class of the Order of Canada. But mere achievements, if reckoned as notches in the gun-stock, are not unusual in this country; and one would like to be sure that proper respect had been paid to a greater rarety – a man who achieved these things naturally and unassumingly, not as the fulfilment of personal desire or driving ambition but rather as the lyrical and hard-wrought matching of the actual to the real, the capacity to the occasion, the duty to the need. Perhaps genius is simply the mark of the most intimate relation between being and doing. In any case the integrity of his action was defined by the quality of his individual initiative; the contemplative starting-point made the action incorrigibly personal, unique. Consequently what he has written here by way of memoirs is not a self-justifying revision of past events, but a second hard look – not without a sense of wonder — from a longer perspective, a meditative recalling of how, in the first savour of discovery, certain events felt; how he began, how he became; how (in short) things happened through him as well as to him, and moved to their fulfilment with a certain rightness and inevitability. To use a phrase that he introduced in 1972 as a refinement of the blunderbus term ‘research’: this is a ‘reflective inquiry.’
A Happy Partnership, the central phrase in the title of this book, expresses exactly that mysterious and fortunate coming together of vision and occasion. Looking back, he can see how all things worked together for good, that chance and luck were acts of grace; and although grace is by definition a pure and unearned gift, chance seemed also to have come out of unremitting but disinterested effort, being the expression of a restless quizzicality more positive than doubt and more deeply committed than scepticism. (It was a mountaineer who said that ‘Luck is what happens when you exert your last reserves of strength.’) Very early he had discovered a firm belief that reason, order, justice, fairness, honesty exert an impressive authority – that they act as an ‘invisible hand,’ a ‘subtle and postponed power.’ (The first phrase comes from Adam Smith, the second from Mr. Justice Holmes.) Such authority is not addictive because its action is oblique and in a benign sense subversive; and it can flourish only when informed by humility and by that profound sense of proportion called humour. It is no accident that the two principal themes of his Democratic Government and Politics are: ‘First, the need for restraints on government .... Second, the problem of deciding, in a democracy, what the government is to do in the name of all, and the instruments through which the authentic voice of the electorate is to be heard and translated into action.’ Nor is it by accident that here, as elsewhere in his writings, we learn something about ‘the pathology of collective decisions.’
Thirty years ago he remarked that in public affairs ‘For practical purposes, reason does not clinch the matter. We all listen to many voices and there is no guarantee that we will follow the voice of reason.’ Much that he was able to affirm with confidence as recently as 1970 has not been clinched by reason, has not become part of our lives; and we could hardly deny that since then some promising currents of civilization have run underground or have even been reversed. Can it be that the vision and wisdom that for years as teacher and administrator he refined and declared were – like our early expectations for the United Nations – no more than ‘a fit and decent hope not yet proved illusory’? There is no sign that he thinks so. His confidence has never rested on a comfortable optimism; he has always been acutely aware of the way life is narrowed and darkened by arrogance, ambition, envy, ignorance, and aware too that these are part of our condition. He is not easily taken by surprise. He believes that in the end the right will prevail, but he would not be surprised to find that the end was not very close at hand; he does not suppose that in human affairs anything is ever established for good and all. As for the university, however, the end is always to be kept in view. ‘The aim is a civilizing mission: to liberate human minds, cultivate the imaginations and educate the sensibilities of individual human beings.’ ‘Even if it is said that much of our teaching lacks artistry and imagination, that there are not enough genuine chefs and too many hash-slingers, that is not a ground for concessions that will debase teaching.’
When you went to see Principal Corry – and even in those strenuous days he was more accessible than could have been imagined possible – he would not talk to you across his desk; he would get up and sit in a chair beside you. That this was a natural gesture of hospitality and not a studied mannerism is shown by something he said – incidentally at a time when student activists were not often guilty of cultivating good manners.
The chief service of universities to society and their chief glory is not the piling up of useful knowledge to support the material side of our lives. It is rather the protecting and nourishing of the traditions of civility on which all civilization in the end depends. University education should be, above all, a training in civility. And this requires of us always to get at the facts, to look them in the face, to look at all sides of the question, to credit those who oppose us with good-will and some glimmer of good sense until the contrary is proven. It requires us to give our minds as well as our feelings to the issues of life that are often clouded with contention and rancour.
To have worked for a time within his vision has been a great privilege. In trying to articulate on behalf of his friends, colleagues, and admirers our sense of respect and wonder, it has helped to remember that he may be a marvel but he is not a prodigy; that he is a solid and forthright person very present to us, a man memorable for his infectious laughter. Out of his quietness he has always called forth excellence in others; and he withholds dogma. Over and over again I hear in what he has said and written the assurance that if we are wise enough to recognize the fragility of our circumstances, and can discover in ourselves (as he has done) the endowment of moral strength that will serve us if we do not mismanage it, we have little cause to fear the dark.