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.

VANCOUVER—Everything is wet here. Richard Florida came to campus. Hundreds of rain-soaked academics crowded into a large UBC lecture hall to hear what he had to say. But they were also there just to see him in the flesh. That’s what you do when someone famous comes to town. Florida possesses that aura of royal jelly some people get when they are constantly under a spotlight or microphone. He’s become the go-to guy for evidence of the economic benefits of the arts. No one has quite managed to put together an argument, backed up with evidence, of how cities thrive as magnets for what he has coined the “creative class.” That’s me and you, yuppies, and gays and lesbians, designers, artists of all kinds—educated people who have acquired a taste of urban cool. It’s not about suburbs and strip malls and the ugly, numbing tedium of sameness. It’s about the aesthetics of hipness.

Of course, Florida is admired but he also reviled because he has emerged not only as a public intellectual, but also as a popular one, and a lot of academics are uncomfortable with that sort of rock-star status. I think his lecture helped them get over it. He’s one of the smoothest presenters I’ve ever seen or heard, highly conscious of the criticisms of his work and quick to admit his flaws, apologize for the weakness of his research, and then move on to a defense of what he has managed to accomplish. It’s a pretty disarming strategy and it worked—on this listener, anyway.

It helps when you begin by telling your audience you’re basically an Italian working-class kid from New Jersey. A big charge against Florida is that he promotes an elitist view of society, that his creative class is a self-entitling one. So when he offers up his own working-class childhood as the springboard for thinking about the benefits of being smart and rooted in family, place, and culture, even the most hardened skeptic has to grant him a little credit. And, man, is he ever sharp about building credit.

It occurred to me that male academics might just be jealous of Florida’s charismatic power. It’s not every day a guy with a Ph.D walks into a party like he was walking onto a yacht, to borrow from Carly Simon. There’s a lot of bad dressing in the academy. Like monks, we’re not supposed to be calling too much attention to our physical bodies.

Florida is the living emblem of the creative class, all about brains and fashion. He wore an expensive black suit jacket with lapels just wide enough to suggest his Italian rat-pack roots. It was buttoned over a gorgeous white shirt with French cuffs, open collar, no tie. His jeans were rich and dark, could almost pass for trousers, and his hair was perfect. He had one eye in the mirror as he watched himself gavotte, sure, but he played to the audience’s belief in the power of the creative life and ultimately validated our attempts to prove the value of the life of the mind. How can you argue with that?

VANCOUVER—Rain is keeping everyone indoors and so the sessions are well attended. When it’s sunny it’s easier to avoid that paper on the metaphysics of milk, or whatever. Margaret Somerville drew several hundred people to her “Research in Society” lecture. It’s not surprising that the woman who has argued the case against same-sex marriage to the Supreme Court of Canada would be described as controversial. The Globe and Mail quoted my designation of her as such, and so she mockingly riffed a bit on that at the start of her lecture. I’m not sure if she enjoys being called controversial or not. Maybe she’s not sure either, although there is very little she isn’t sure about.

Somerville discussed the culture of political correctness on our campuses, and how it has silenced debate and discouraged a democratic exchange of ideas, ostensibly what universities are designed to be about. The ideas she has been discouraged from speaking about, even at McGill, her own campus, have everything to do with an argument for the fundamental right of a child to know who its natural biological parents are. It’s hard not to agree that it’s probably a good thing for a child to know where it came from. It’s easy to feel that there is something alarming for a child to have been produced from some recombinant molecules nourished in a test tube, the way animals are being created in some experimental labs in 2008. But it’s a hard sell to say that a child is better off being raised by a man and a woman than by a woman and a woman or a man and a man. (more…)

VANCOUVER—Congress is now in full swing. Humanities scholars dominate the first half of the week-long event. Besides catching passing references to Nietzsche or Michel Houellebecq in the pizza line, you hear a lot of scholars speaking different languages–Italian, Spanish, French, Danish, Russian, German. These and other languages continue to be taught across this country in small departments. Yesterday an Italian professor dared me to explain why the teaching of languages was given so little attention in our universities. He was disgusted. No one seemed to be doing anything about this erosion of civilization. Surely students are not as well educated as they used to be, he asked. I know. It’s a recurring dirge. It’s hard not to lament the academy’s lack of enthusiasm for its own language programs. True, one often wishes that our students—that we—were, well, more European. But I can’t agree that they are any less educated. A lot of our discussions here are about a new language entirely—Web 2.0 or even Office 2007.

Speaking of language, André Pratte, prominent Quebec author and editorial writer for La Presse, delivered the first campus breakfast address yesterday. The Federation hosts this series every year, inviting congress participants to eat their eggs and bacon while listening to a prominent writer present his or her take on whatever path they are pursing. The French-based breakfasts are usually thinly attended. Most academics find it a bit too hard on the head to listen to a talk in a language not their own, especially at 7:30 in the morning. Frankly, many of us have a hard time finding the right buildings for our talks and sessions on this gorgeously sprawling campus, let alone eat and translate at the same time. (more…)

VANCOUVER—The 77th Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences kicks off today on the beautiful UBC campus. Up to 10,000 academics from across the country, as well as many from the wider world, are expected to invade this lush garden, armed with 100 percent recycled-material tote bags and a strong sense of purpose. After more than a year of planning it’s finally coming together—the directional signs, the registration desk, the book fare stalls, and arguably the most important symbol of this scholarly happening: the beer tent. I’ve been here a little less than twenty-four hours and the whole experience reminds me of those moments in the Molson Stadium or the Air Canada Centre before the first face off. It’s minutes before the game and the stands are half empty, but by the time someone starts belting out the national anthem the whole place is miraculously blocked to the rafters. (more…)