ABOUT FACE | Big Man On Compus
Big Man On Campus
Patrick Deane
By James Tennant
Shiny new buildings stand proudly on the McMaster University campus, the fresh facades suggesting that the 125-year-old institution has never had a brighter future.
In some ways, this is true; McMaster continues to receive generous community support, much-needed research grants and a strong academic ranking. If they’re erecting new buildings, it stands to reason that the future must be as bright as the sun that glints off the immaculate surfaces of steel and glass.
If these structures house optimism, though, they shield it from the harsh realities outside. At universities across the country, classrooms continue to overflow and faculties continue to shrink. Generous donations flow into some parts of the university and hard-won grants into others, while other departments are under threat of atrophy. Funding for the fundamental mission – the education of students – continues to dwindle. New resources and new ideas are more crucial than ever. McMaster is no more immune to these realities than any other school in the province.
Universities elsewhere have looked outside the proverbial box for new leadership. Former politicians helm the Universities of Winnipeg and Ottawa (Lloyd Axworthy and Alan Rock, respectively), while Laurentian’s president is former civil servant Dominic Giroux. Sheldon Levy, at Ryerson, does not have a PhD – which may not speak to his abilities, but speaks to a major change in approach. PhDs and strong academic credentials were once considered a non-negotiable on the resumé.
By these brave new standards, McMaster’s new president, Patrick Deane, seems a somewhat staid, old-fashioned selection. Yet the affable English professor, currently the Vice-Principal (Academic) at Queen’s, is not an old-fashioned thinker. His reasoned and well-considered understanding of postsecondary education is balanced between the interest of students and the realities of our economic climate.
Hopes and expectations are high, especially amongst those who have met Deane in person. Sharp, thoughtful, friendly and willing to listen, Deane appears to endear himself to most who meet him. Some Queen’s staff were said to have wept when they found out about his departure. Members of the McMaster Students Union executive board were more than satisfied with their first meeting with Deane, saying not only were they looking forward to working with him, but that he made them want to go have a beer with him some time.
If it happens, Deane might make it a Castle Lager – a brew native to his homeland of South Africa. Deane’s father, a fourth-generation South African whose family worked in the steel importation business, met his Canadian wife while visiting here in 1946. Deane was born in Johannesburg in 1956. He describes his family as perfectly ordinary, middle class folk with a keen interest in sports – his grandfather was the South African cricket captain in the 1920s when they beat the English. Deane shared that interest, but was inclined more towards culture, engaging in theatre and music in school.
“Like all white South African lives at that time, it was a peculiarly isolated, privileged life,” Deane says of his youth. “It was sort of an artificial world you lived in, partly by virtue of the nature of apartheid. It kept you from knowing – or tried to keep you from knowing – the things that would cause you to question the system.”
Deane himself began questioning the system at the University of Witwatersrand, where he enrolled in English and Law. He was a student during a tumultuous period of his nation’s history, and was at Wits during the Soweto riots in the mid-1970s. “You could stand on the front steps of the Central Block and see Soweto in flames,” he recalls. “Then you could look towards the north suburbs, the white areas, which were these havens of tranquility.”
Witwatersrand taught him more than English and Law; it taught him the importance of universities to the maintenance of a civil and just society. Wits administration took a hard line against apartheid, refusing to enforce the laws of petty apartheid on the campus. They struggled against the laws that forbade black students to register (except in medicine) and ultimately risked being closed by the government.
“I guess I’m an academic rather than a person employed in the private sector because of what I learned about the importance of universities,” he says. “I’m an administrator because I’ve seen why it’s important that they be led in a particular kind of way.”
Deane eventually left Law behind and went on to do graduate work in English. In 1978, he came to Canada, where he received his MA, was named a Queen Elizabeth II Scholar, and was awarded his PhD in 1985. He was appointed to the faculty of the University of Toronto in 1986, but invited to Western in 1988. That same year, he was awarded the first John Charles Polanyi Prize for Literature. Deane took up a position in the Department of English, teaching Twentieth Century British Literature, and was appointed Vice-Chair of the Department in 1993 and Chair in 1997.
When the position of Vice-President (Academic) at The University of Winnipeg opened, Deane finally stepped firmly into the world of administration. He still considers himself an academic, though. “People talk about being an administrator as if it’s not being an academic anymore, which is not true,” he says. “You can’t really do these jobs well if you aren’t serious about the academy and about being an academic.”
Deane is indeed an academic – an academic, English professor and, curiously perhaps, a hobby farmer, a passion that began with his daughter’s interest in horses and grew to encompass a large part of his lifestyle.
Depending on which angle you choose to observe, he is either quite like, or entirely unlike, outgoing President Peter George. Either way, Deane is about to inherit Dr. George’s heady host of challenges.
In the 15 years that George has led McMaster, universities have changed dramatically. The academic world he inherited in 1985 has come and gone. The McMaster Silhouette has reported that, according to the President’s Advisory Committee on the Impact of the Current Economic Situation interim report, the university has projected annual deficits of anywhere between $42 and $86 million for the 2011, 2012 and 2013 fiscal years.
It’s understandable, then, that students fear they will wind up even farther down on the priority list, or that a desperate financial situation will lead to more emphasis on research and corporate partnerships, with less attention paid to academic principles and the students themselves.
“Universities have grown enormously in the 15 years of Peter’s tenure,” Deane says. “The tendency for universities to be run like businesses is one of the results of that growth. Link that to the decline in public support and the complex socio-economic factors that surround attendance at universities, and these institutions become something different. They aren’t just teaching institutions.”
While heavily funded by the federal government in terms of research, universities are underfunded for the day-to-day work of educating undergraduate students. Inevitably, if you are in charge of one of these institutions, you have to lead it accordingly. Deane, however, believes you can do so without losing sight of why that entity exists; a university is not just a business in and of itself.
“When the universities don’t have a sound core of funding related to their basic mission, they are prey to opportunistic development,” says Deane. “That is something to be worried about. If the only money coming from the federal government is research money targeting science and technology, you’ve got to attend to that and compensate for that.”
McMaster’s ranking as a research university is a huge enhancement to its academic profile and to its standing as an institution of intellectual advancement. Deane hopes to nurture strengths while re-establishing a kind of internal balance, and thinks other schools should do the same. “Otherwise,” he says of the sobering stakes, “in 20 years we will end up with institutions that are very asymmetrical.”
As an English professor, Deane is especially sensitive to the asymmetry that befalls the arts and social sciences. In his opinion, the dichotomy between the arts and the thriving science and technology disciplines is not only false, it is damaging to our culture. The situation for the arts is not likely to change – the bulk of resources tend to be generated in particular fields and then fed back into particular fields – but he is loath to “resign ourselves to a fate of oppression and neglect.”
He has never forgotten the purpose of teaching, and speaks of students with great admiration. “I’m more engaged with the students now than I was even when I was teaching,” he says, noting that when the students are engaged with the universities, they can transform the institution. He also encourages students to engage with the community at large.
Much is often made of the tension between Mac students and Westdale residents (something Deane calls “not just a behaviour problem, but an urban design and planning issue”), but less is made of their interconnection to the city in positive ways. “The university isn’t about putting people in a bubble and then magically releasing them after four years,” he says. “You learn about art not just in the McMaster Museum, but on the streets in the city where the local culture is created.”
Still, the biggest challenge for McMaster is the one felt around the province – underfunding. Ontario universities face similar shortfalls, all proportionately alike, suggesting not a local pathology but a systemic issue. Deane says that, while he admits it sounds trite, this is also McMaster’s biggest opportunity.
“I’d rather have a differently configured opportunity,” he laughs, “but if it is a stimulus to thinking creatively, and getting out of some of those habits that contribute to that hardening of the arteries, that’s okay.”
Whatever the fiscal realities may be, McMaster can continue to build on its reputation for high quality standards of education, innovation and its community – even if we are facing a kind of a civilizational crisis.
“It sounds a little too grand, but that’s what it is,” Deane says. “Our particular brand of socio-economic and cultural system has hit a difficult stage. Last year everybody thought the whole thing was going to unravel. It’s probably not going to unravel, but it’s going to tie itself up again in a different manner. McMaster’s got a lot to contribute, and in partnership with the city, we can do a lot for the community. McMaster can emerge from this a Canadian institution with an even greater profile and importance.”
