VANCOUVER—Congress is over for another year. Plans are now well underway for Carleton in 2009, an exhausting thought. By all measures, this year’s event on the UBC campus was a success, even if the weather was lousy. Having visited learned societies for over a week I have a pretty good sense of the satisfaction levels of congress participants and I believe most were pretty happy with the level of the papers they heard and the service they received. You can’t beat that.

Still, I am always amazed to overhear academics grumbling: the campus is too far from downtown; the taxi lines are too long; food services are limited on the weekend, and so on. Human nature, the very thing these thousands of scholars spend a lifetime studying, will have its way, and even one of the most privileged groups in society will find reasons to complain. It’s not that everything is perfect. It’s that educated people somehow forget to connect their experience to the sheer facts of running an event of this size. The UBC caterer, who has to feed these thousand or so of scholarly souls, was responsible for well over 150 deliveries a day for eight days, scattered all over the vast campus and all designed for different needs. That’s not even counting the daily receptions with hot food, wines, chafing dishes, and other disasters waiting to happen. That everyone got fed their veggie wraps, salads, cookies, and juices on time, between bites of Keynes or Nietzsche, is pretty amazing in itself. But even big-brained scholars can occlude the network of labourers that hums along beside them, efficiently working to serve their higher-paid masters.

Speaking of complaining, there’s a lot of talk about the need to invest in science and technology these days, to build, you know, the knowledge economy. Everyone’s favourite Canadian philanthropist is Michael Lazaridis, who during Congress week donated $50 million to the Waterloo-based Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, topping up the $100 million he has already contributed. In this country, that’s big news, trumping reports of even the most dazzling scholarly papers. Lazaridis’s gift was rightly applauded by Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente last weekend, but in praising Lazaridis’s vision of an internationally competitive, innovative Canada, she typically tossed off a supercilious remark about education trends. “Too many of our kids (and I’m saying these things, because Mr. Lazaridis is far too polite),” she wrote, “drift into liberal arts and gender studies instead of engineering and math.”

Give me a break, Wente. Lazaridis is the last person who would agree with you. RIM employs hundreds of arts graduates, and Lazaridis is on record as saying that Canada needs highly educated personnel to take this country forward, not just techno geeks. Imagine a world without the liberal arts. What would scientists read to their children?

The annual Congress of Canadian learned societies brings together thousands of people who are using their heads to talk, take up, challenge, explore the very ideas Lazaridis is promoting. This country, like all others, needs to educate fully rounded citizens, those who can understand what is human and social about us as well as those who can build the CN Tower out of Lego. Stop complaining, Wente. Come visit us at Carleton next year. We’ll show you vision.

Tags: academia

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Posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 2:40 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.