The Classroom Conservative

Pierrepoint, The Last Executioner – Or Timothy Spall, Unlikely Movie Star

I watched last weekend Pierrepoint, The Last Executioner.  It was a “new release” rental; I am not sure it ever played at the wonderful Globe or Uptown theatres in Calgary, so there was never any chance of it playing at our unimaginative multiplex in Lethbridge.  The Adrian Shergold film gives us another example of excellent British storytelling as we follow the adult life of Albert Pierrepoint, a grocery deliveryman who became the most trusted executioner in England.  I was fascinated to see how one might have become a hangman, “learned the ropes” quite literally; I was fascinated to see how capital punishment might have been handled in the British justice system.  It seems as though Pierrepoint was able to compartmentalize his feelings on overnight trips to various prisons, maintaining a steely determination until called upon to hang an acquaintance.  By emphasizing Pierrepoint’s cold-bloodedness, The Last Executioner sets out a potent argument against capital publishment, but it is never dogmatic in its politics.  After executing the most vile Nazi war criminals, Pierrepoint is treated as a celebrity, for example, though his renown turns to infamy as public opinion turns against executions in England.

   

Here, Timothy Spall is brilliant once more in the role of Albert Pierrepoint.  He is nothing less than a legend in British cinema, distinguishing himself in Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies (1996), Topsy-Turvy (1999), and All or Nothing (2002).  If you are unfamiliar with these excellent films, you might know Mr. Spall from his work as Peter Pettigrew in the Harry Potter movies.  A plain and stout man, he is an unlikely matinee idol.  But Albert Pierrepoint did not look like Matt Damon, and so there is little use in casting, say, Jude Law or Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the role.  Indeed, Pierrepoint appears to have been a fairly unassuming man whose fame and later notoriety demanded some accommodation on his part.  One must wonder if Mr. Spall ever feels this way.  There is no obvious equivalent to Mr. Spall’s popularity in England amongst North American actors.  If Paul Giamatti, who parlayed his unlikely success in Sideways (2004) into meaty parts in Cinderella Man (2005), The Illusionist (2006), and The Lady in the Water (2006), attained a position of affection akin to Jimmy Stewart, he might get close.

   

I do not want to suggest that there is no celebrity culture in Great Britain.  They have a ferocious tabloid press, and everyone reading these words will remember how Princess Diana was fed to it.  London has a legitimate claim to being the most glamorous city in the world.  But England also has interesting remnants of its age-old class system, perhaps best summed up by the phrase “a place for everything and everything in its place.”  Britain has regular folks who aspire to being regular folks, and you can even see some of them on television and in magazines.  With our celebrity obsession in North America, does it ever seem like all our regular folks aspire to be celebrities?  Thanks to our plastic surgery epidemic, we can all look like celebrities, at the very least.  The “American Dream” promises us all that we can accomplish anything if we put our minds to it, and so any failure to be rich and beautiful must be our own.  No wonder we are uncomfortable with any role model who hasn’t walked off the pages of GQ.

Research And Teaching

I was asked to give the Plenary Address on the connection between research and teaching to this year's graduate students' conference at the University of Lethbridge.  Here is "Scholarly Competence and Pedagogic Effectiveness: Bridging the Gap Between Research and Teaching."

 

The generous invitation to make this address on research and teaching to you today came late last spring, just two weeks after I received the 2007 Distinguished Teaching Award.  Let me begin by confessing that the teaching medal was put around my neck only after five nominations: that should be a lesson in persistence to you as you continue your graduate work.  If you are ever bored while reading and rereading your thesis, just imagine how it feels to review again and again your teaching evaluations before they are scrutinized by an awards committee of colleagues and strangers.

 

Article 11 in the Faculty Handbook at the University of Lethbridge charges all teaching members of academic staff to “maintain a scholarly competence and pedagogic effectiveness.”  This seems to me as direct a connection as one might like between the classroom and the library, between the classroom and the laboratory.  What is it we are supposed to be teaching, anyway?  If we hope to distinguish the experience our students have in our classrooms from the experience they might have elsewhere, it is important for us to deliver to our students the results of our own research.  Most of us have “one offs” as our first teaching experiences: one of my first classes was a course at the University of Reading in the Victorian novel, lecturing on some impenetrable doorstop-sized tomes that were a struggle to read, let alone teach.  When we start out, we are given a class on, sometimes, short notice, and we do our best in these situations to prepare a set of lectures that will carry us from the beginning to the end of the semester; this may be a set of lectures to which we never return, even if we have been assigned a course in our research area.  The truth is that once you secure a permanent teaching position of any kind, however, you will come back again and again to the courses you have been assigned, and you will read and reread the notes you prepared last time.  One of our most solemn duties is to revise these notes.  Under the pressures of time, it is a terrible temptation to simply deliver the same lectures time and time again.  You trust that the few people repeating your class did not get enough from it the first time to remember; you pray that some student is not simultaneously reading your presentations from notes supplied from a relative long ago graduated.  But the fact remains that we may be reticent to alter older material, especially if we know it to have been effective.  The best incentive to revise our courses is to supplement what we have known with that we have just learned, ourselves.  By opening our classroom preparation to our research experiences, we effectively create a classroom environment that better reflects us and our fields of study at any given moment, and the result in the end is a more honest interaction with our students.

 

During my second year at the University of Lethbridge, I was challenged by a particularly precocious student – it seems to me, as I look back over the past decade, that I have often been challenged by particularly precocious students – who wanted to know how professors could teach the same texts year after year.  A little defensively, perhaps, I explained to him the necessity of surveying as wide a collection of secondary material as possible before embarking on the instruction of any book.  As a matter of practicality, it is difficult to change things frequently and retain mastery over the material.  Besides, as you know, some things are unquestionably central to a subject area, and they cannot be abandoned no matter how may times you teach them.  But, over a longer period of time, if your research program is active, you will discover other material that can, legitimately, take the place of older things on your courses.  It is quite likely, in fact, that things first placed on your syllabi can find their way into your research.

 

In the late 1990s, I was wandering through the book fair of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, and there I came upon a new edition of a book by Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle entitled Being Geniuses Together.  The book is, essentially, the autobiography of McAlmon, a book his friend Boyle edited years after his death, adding her stories.  Both McAlmon and Boyle were important expatriate American writers in the 1920s, members of the so-called “Lost Generation,” and the information Being Geniuses Together holds was valuable to me as a graduate student researching the work of writers from the United States who lived abroad in the first half of the twentieth century.  I bought the book – unlike the book fair at the Modern Language Association, there are no freebies at the Congress – and when rereading it, I was struck anew by the way in which Boyle’s contributions, written nearly thirty years after McAlmon’s, framed and answered what he had said.  I was able to get our library here to borrow from somewhere else the original edition of McAlmon’s book, and I soon discovered that Boyle had, in fact, cut McAlmon’s story in half when editing the new edition.  Surely, I thought, there was an article in this, and by 2001 I had, in fact, published on Being Geniuses Together, arguing that our understanding of the “Lost Generation” was shaped by what its artists wanted us to understand about that time, even as this image shifted and changed over the ensuing decades.  In the meantime, however, I had offered for the first time in our English Department a senior undergraduate course on Modern American Autobiography, combining McAlmon and Boyle with five other texts I chose.  I had used some of these in my doctoral work at Oxford University, but some of them I uncovered specifically for the class.  In terms of student evaluation, this Fall 2000 course was amongst the best-received I have ever taught.  My experiences preparing my lectures made up the substance of a standard research grant application successfully funded by SSRHC, and over the next four years I taught two more versions of the course, one in 2002 and one in 2005, in which I mixed and matched new texts with those tried and true.  By 2006, I had completed an 85,000-word manuscript on expatriate autobiography, discussing more than a dozen books, almost all of which had come up in these courses.  I am happy to tell you now that Writing the Lost Generation will be published in September 2008 by the University of Iowa Press.  I can think of no better example of how in my career my teaching has thus been shaped by my research, how my research has, in turned, been influenced by the things my students and I have discovered in the classroom.

 

That said, we must be vigilant and never impose our narrowest research interests on young minds opened wide in their trust of our judgment.  I will acknowledge that it is important to our emotional well-being as scholars that we remind (or perhaps just convince) ourselves of the centrality of our research interests.  If I did not think that autobiography makes up the most important rhetorical strategy I could now be studying, it would have been difficult to have devoted five years to preparing a manuscript on the subject.  Similarly, if I did not think modern literature published in small magazines was understudied, I could not have spent my first ten years in this profession working on it.  But it would be unfair of me to include autobiographies in every course I teach; it would be equally unfair of me to restrict my classes to reading modernist periodical literature.  It requires a certain kind of discipline to judge where and when our most specialized knowledge fits our courses.  I would like to be able to say that our students have a way of telling us when we are obviously riding our hobbyhorses, but the truth is that this is a burden we must bear alone. We cannot cut corners.

 

Many of us began our research careers with the goal of saving the world or, at least, of changing it, leaving a mark through our academic labors.  But I would suggest to you that many of us also began our research careers with the goal of being teachers, whether we knew this or not at the time.  What I mean is that we understood that the value of our research is always connected to our ability to share our research with other people.  We all recognize in ourselves the curiosity that led us to ask embarrassing questions, to pull the backs off household appliances, to dig in our back yards.  But having discovered our friends’ secrets, having disemboweled the electric can opener, having collected a mayonnaise jar full of bugs, what was then likely your next instinct?  That instinct was to show and tell someone else.  Perhaps it was to show and tell everyone else.  That is the soul of the teacher.  Indeed, Article 11 of our Faculty Handbook also sets out that one of our primary responsibilities as scholars is to maintain “scholarly competence as teachers.”  This is not to suggest that we should not allow our intellectual curiosity to lead us into interesting new areas unrelated to our courses.  Although I was hired at the University of Lethbridge to teach British and American modernism, I have also published on eighteenth-century magazines, French poetry, and Canadian drama.  My current work is devoted to representations of Jack-the-Ripper.  When understood and arranged properly, our fundamental research interests provide us the anchor that permits us to wander safely, and our teaching responsibilities hold us fast to what we are sure we know.

 

I would encourage you today, as you sample the kind of activities that define scholarship in the academy, to maintain a child-like enthusiasm for both discovery and dissemination.  And while it is okay to aspire to a poster at a prestigious conference, an article in the journal of record in your field, and – as in the case of my own discipline – a monograph with a university press, remember that you can derive great satisfaction by disseminating your research to the generation of scholars that will follow you.  Eager minds that do not know what you sometimes assume your readers will know provide a valuable sounding board for your ideas.  Presenting an early version of a paper to undergraduate students provides an excellent opportunity to expunge unnecessary jargon from your writing, for example.  While specialized language is the argot that can gain you admission to an exclusive circle of scholars, the looks on the faces of your students will tell you when you have gone too far.  Never believe that a teaching task is beneath you, no matter how remedial.  And as you continue to tutor and begin teaching your own classes, I would encourage you first to teach your students as you have best been taught.  Teach them better than you were taught, if you can.  You may well find, as I have done, that your best teaching mentors remain utter mysteries to you, that the things that make them wonderful instructors are somehow beyond your understanding, no matter how closely you consider what makes them successful.  Professor Shane O’Dea, 3M Teaching Award winner at Memorial University of Newfoundland, is the best professor I ever had.  He is the kind of man who might first intimidate you; you might even begin his class by chafing against his demands, questioning his approach.  But before long, you will come to organize your day around attending his class, and you’ll be an enthusiastic cheerleader for what he says and how he says it.  This was my experience, and it bears some similarity to legions of students over more than thirty years.  How can you describe such an experience as anything short of magical?  Indeed, such an experience might lead you to conclude, in fact, that great teachers simply are.  There are many days when, with regret, I return to this conclusion, frustrated with my own shortcoming, but this never erodes my resolve to pierce the core of such mysteries. Because the brilliant remain just beyond our grasp, I also encourage everyone here to resolve to learn from your worst professors.  Strive to correct their mistakes once you are in their shoes, promise yourself never to do the things that drove you to distraction.  I hated vague outlines in courses that seemed to drift from one apparently random topic to another.  My syllabi spell out learning goals and organize topics around defined due dates.  You must always steal from the good and nearly great.  This, in part, will guide you towards your own greatness as a teacher.

 

Like many complex structures, a university career can best be understood when divided into its constituent parts.  To assess professional development, we regularly divide research and teaching, developing separate measures to assess each.  Our peer teaching reviews and student evaluations seem unrelated to our lists of publications and presentations.  But our own experiences will bear out that our best teachers are great researchers, and our best researchers are great teachers.  I can tell you, personally, that winning the Distinguished Teaching Award has only sharpened my resolve to use the years ahead of me to pursue the Ingrid Speaker Medal for Research.  As you too move forward, I hope I have today encouraged you to strive always to connect these two vital activities, to consider the teaching applications of the research in which you immerse yourselves.  While we want to ensure that academic staff pursue both activities, these activities really only make sense when they nurture each other.  It would be okay today, flush with the excitement of an important research presentation, if you were feeling a little less secure about your prospects as teachers.  But whether or not you pursue teaching as a formal vocation, you have illustrated here that you are interested at least in explaining things to other people.  Whether it is in front of a class of two hundred and fifty or whether it is simply tonight for the benefits of your loved ones, never forget to explain yourselves.

The Darker Side of the Computer’s Sickly Glow

I have had occasion to walk around the upper perimeter of a large university lecture theatre while class is in session, peering at the screens of the open laptops.  Many of them reveal the pale faces of word processing programs; many of them also reveal solitaire, minesweeper, Facebook, and even pornography.  The ability to bring a portable computer into the classroom has proven a great benefit to many students, allowing them to take and revise notes quickly. But recent discussions in the National Post and University Affairs concern themselves with this darker side of the computer’s sickly glow.  When I was a student, I had a cumbersome desktop with a tape drive, and the process of transcribing my notes was one of my study aids.  The idea of having this monstrosity on my desk or at my side was foreign to me.  Today, professors who have banned laptops argue that their students are more engaged, that classrooms of stenographers are not the most vibrant learning environments, anyway.

 

I have been thinking a lot about the rules at our university, rules that concern themselves more with the perpetrators than with the vehicles of their malfeasance.  Our regulations set out that no student is permitted to “misappropriate any University… service,” and one could argue that the use of the campus wireless network to access a gambling site during, say, a Political Science lecture would count as such a misappropriation.  On these grounds alone, a student could be excluded from the classroom.  But I hang my hat on the related clause that prohibits “conduct which unduly interferes with instruction.”  I believe that a student playing hearts on her or his laptop could, conceivably, be in violation of this rule.  Why?  After fifteen years of reading evaluations of my classes written by my students, I am aware of how aware they are of the behavior of people around them.  I have been thanked both for separating two talking friends and for preventing latecomers from causing a commotion ten minutes into my lecture.  The things that drive instructors crazy also irritate fellow students, and, as any student newspaper will illustrate, peers can be less patient than professors.  Your tap-tap-tapping away at a podcasting dowload is sure to drive someone around you to distraction.

 

Still, I do not prohibit laptops in my classroom; I simply tell my students that they represent a privilege that cannot be abused.  The first time I catch a student surfing the net when s/he should be taking notes, that student will no longer be allowed to bring a computer.  When they realize this may put them at a disadvantage, they are more careful to use technology responsibly.  After all, they never know who might be lurking in the back of the classroom ready to shop them for the greater good – or perhaps just to settle a video game grudge.

Robert Dziekanski, Less Than A Number

You need not be a relative of Robert Dziekanski, the Polish man who died in mid-October at Vancouver International Airport, to be angry when you see the amateur film footage of his interaction with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and hear the story of his demise.  Expecting to see his waiting mother at the luggage carousel inside security at the airport, Mr. Dziekanski went without food and water for hours before his agitation led to his tasering and, almost immediately, his death.  In the days ahead, you will read an awful lot about the possible perils of taser guns, and you will also read an awful lot about how police confront people they believe to be a threat.  The cellphone footage captures Mr. Dziekanski’s screams after being tasered, and it also establishes that the RCMP waited little time before zapping him and immobilizing him by kneeling on his neck.  Months and perhaps years will be spent analyzing these actions.

   

But here, without delay, I will assert that Mr. Dziekanski’s ordeal underlines our shameful indifference to other people.  I am an experienced traveler, and I find the international arrivals area of Vancouver International Airport to be very confusing.  Still, it is almost beyond belief that a man who obviously speaks no English can be allowed to wander around that airport for all that time without being confronted by officials.  Had he looked or exhibited other, more sinister behavior consistent with terrorist stereotypes, would he have been allowed, apparently, to “case” the facility?  I think not.  How is it that no employee or fellow traveler found an opportunity to intervene in the case of a disoriented man whose actions were, for a long time, decidedly benign?  Mr. Dziekanski came to understand one thing about our contemporary society in those panicked hours – the squeaky wheel gets the grease – though, tragically, he overplayed the only hand he had.  The fact remains that, in a day and age when everyone is a number, many of us do not want to encounter anyone whose circumstances may complicate our routines, even when our routines are organized around the complications of other people.  We know that repeated requests from Zofia Cisowski, Mr. Dziekanski’s mother, were treated nonchalantly by people in that airport charged with helping her.  One must assume that it was more desirable to put her back on the road to the British Columbian interior rather than searching YVR for her son.  You see, for many people who should today be ashamed, Mr. Dziekanski was less than a number.  Progressive or traditionalist, liberal or conservative, we should never that way treat those people who really need our help.

Power Down

It is almost treason in Alberta to concern oneself with resource management.  It is like the first time I bought vegetarian barbeque patties at the local supermarket and was reminded, sternly, that there are plenty of cows available here for slaughter.  (No, I am not a strident vegetarian; I simply have broad tastes!)  We are very fortunate out here in many things, and to not partake in the rich bounty is to be seen, sometimes, as not supporting the province’s industries.  It is but a slight exaggeration to make this connection with oil and gas: if heating your home to anything less than the temperature of a greenhouse is akin to pulling a well out of the ground, try reasoning with a young man in hopes of convincing him that he really does not need to drive a Hummer to the corner store.

 

Al Gore and David Suzuki try to terrify people into pausing before turning on their lights because the planet itself may rest in the balance.  Programs like “Flick Off” in Ontario attempt to make conservation politics trendy.  I think there is no doubt that our climate is changing, and it would be naïve to think that we could revolutionize the way we use energy over the past hundred and fifty years, organize our whole burgeoning civilization around fossil fuels, without having an impact on our environment.  But it is not clear to me that changing our habits will reverse or even slow a process that could be, to some degree, part of a natural cycle.  Cimate change has never been the issue for me: it has always been about responsible consumption.

 

One of the lessons of being an adult – one I learned very late, to my great shame and suffering – is that you need not do something just because you can.  I am fortunate to be able to afford a vehicle, and even at prices above a dollar a litre, I can probably drive anywhere I would like.  But should I?  Do I not have a responsibility to choose a vehicle no larger than one that meets my needs?  And do I not have a responsibility to combine my errands so that I use my vehicle efficiently?  When money was perhaps a little tighter, my mother preached to our family the good sense in making only one trip to “town” each day.  That seems to me, now, as eminently sensible, though I can see how it might also be reassuring to people to do whatever they like in an attempt to convince themselves that it might always be so.

 

It is clear to me that it will not be.  Western society shows no ability to curb its appetite, even if we talk a good game about recycling.  We are skilled at channeling efficiency into greater consumption.  If a ton of recycled cans saves enough energy to light ten houses for a year, ten of us will be happy to move into new houses twice the size of our old ones.  Technological advances in the internal combustion engine since the 1960s have not been used to make the most efficient vehicles; they have been used, in part, to make much, much bigger ones.  As China and India continue to develop, worldwide consumption of resources will be unprecedented, and there will be no combination of new technological wonders to meet this demand.

 

I am not talking about restricting anyone’s ability to make choices: I am talking about making responsible ones.  What a timeless value!  Perhaps you need that huge vehicle, that house with a cathedral lobby inside the front door, that weekly airplane trip.  But is it need? or is it want?  Of all the waste I see around me, the house on my street that has every light burning, even in the middle of night, is the one that drives me craziest.  Are they all afraid of the dark?  Are they all afraid of rampant crime in the suburbs of Lethbridge?  Or do they think that the energy source that lets them burn fifty bulbs 24/7 will always be there?  Power down, folks.  I can say this without fear of deportation to British Columbia – because every drop of oil will eventually be extracted from Alberta, and I am confident that we will continue to benefit from this wealth long after I am gone.  But I suspect that, before that time, many people in this country, even many people in this province, will have to make choices between heating their homes and eating dinner.  And we’ll have only our collective gluttony to blame.  That’s when we’ll need to keep the lights on to deter criminals, and that’s when keeping our houses lit like Christmas trees will be an unattainable luxury.

Substitute Teacher

Unfortunately, one of my colleagues in the English department has fallen ill, and a number of us have been called upon to pitch in and help deliver the two courses imperiled.  My colleague will be fine in time, and so our concern is with the students who must have an educational experience with as much value as that offered by their original instructor.  Nothing will be able to replicate that experience perfectly, but I hope that a series of guest speakers will offer some interesting variety.

   

In preparing for these classes, I must admit to remembering how, when I was a junior high school student, we took great pleasure in torturing our substitute teachers.  Often, young men and women fresh from the Faculty of Education at Memorial University were like Christians thrown to the lions; occasionally, retired educators were lured out of bed by an extra day’s pay and spent bewildered hours contemplating the shallowness of the youth of the early 1980s.

 

I am happy to report that the university students I have encountered over the past couple of weeks have been respectful and interested.  But that has not made substitute teaching any easier.  I still have to assume the syllabus of another educational professional, trying to determine its goals while proceeding along the lines of my own training.  There is no way to prepare for having to prepare, to the standard of university instruction, a difficult novel you have not read for fifteen years.  A substitute teacher can lose a lot of sleep.  This much I have learned.

 

My job is a great privilege, but it is difficult to be excited about such a daunting task.  I thought my first foray back into the classroom after winning the Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of Lethbridge would be a little more triumphant, but it is hard to be triumphant on too much caffeine.  Trust me: substitute teachers still have a difficult job.

American Gangster

I have given up going to evening films in Lethbridge.  After 7pm, the theatre auditorium always resembles a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), as there are no staff members to remind patrons that they are not watching the movie in their living rooms.  Honestly, people are so used to watching DVDs at home that they have no problem talking and getting up in the middle of the action, disrupting everyone around them.  I am surprised that they do not sometimes yell, “Hey, where’s the remote!  Pause it will you?”  I do not exaggerate: the staff shortage at the Empire in Park Place Mall is now critical.  I had to queue to buy tickets for the 2:30pm showing of American Gangster on Saturday from the pimply fellow who sells popcorn.  That’s right: the box office was closed in the middle of the afternoon.

 

Eventually, surrounded by other old fogies who have eschewed the later shows, I had a relatively uneventful two-and-a-half hours to watch Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington wind themselves ever-closer to each other in a tense pattern now familiar in crime dramas.  Think Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in Heat (1995).  Washington, here playing Frank Lucas, builds a drug empire on the back of one shrewd and daring move: importing a purer narcotic from southeast Asia during the Vietnam war.  Crowe is the rumpled and idealistic Richie Roberts, the flawed law enforcement official who refuses to bow to corruption while remaining incapable of staying out of bed with anyone and everyone in a short skirt.  Though Crowe does his best work in such understated roles where emotions bubble beneath the surface of his facade, the film belongs to Washington who excels again as the complex villain.  Honestly, I would watch him a hundred times as Alonzo in Training Day (2001) before I would sit through another screening of that awful 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate.  Just because he has a winning smile does not make him a boy scout.

   

Although I looked at my watch a couple of times, I have no quarrel with the pace of this current film.  Director Ridley Scott understands how to work at this length; compare American Gangster with the trolling mess of David Fincher’s Zodiac earlier this year, for example.  We are here engrossed by Frank’s progress, if not Richie’s, and after Frank’s single gesture of excess attracts Richie’s attention, we’re off to the races, so to speak.  But as is often the case with these longer films, the ending seems rushed.  The story turns on Frank’s epiphany, his search for a soul when confronted with the hopelessness of his final predicament.  Now, I am aware of the movie cliché of the whore with the golden heart, but I was unaware until now that it could also extend to sociopaths.  Make no mistake, Frank Lucas is a charming sociopath, but he’s a sociopath nonetheless, a ruthless character who must control everyone and everything, and someone who has no difficulty doing the most unspeakable things when cornered.  Now, by some code of ethics, you may say that he does exactly that when confronted by Richie’s truth, but I object to this being portrayed as some manner of transformational moment.  Is it possible that Frank Lucas finds a depth unknown to him while sharing coffees with Richie Roberts?  Sure, I suppose.  And you’ll tell me that this is all based on a true story?  Even better.  But if that is the case, the last ten minutes of this film is the real story, and all that came before is piled up for little more than its intrinsic drama.  It is fine to leave Denzel Washington to work out the complexity of his character’s motivations, but just because you have moved beyond 150 minutes does not mean that this can be done off-screen - unless you don't mind leaving your audience with a feeling of being slightly unfulfilled.

Dr. George Stroumboulopoulos, Vital to Our Country?

At its November 13 convocation ceremony, the University of Calgary will bestow upon former MuchMusic VJ George Stroumboulopoulos, 35, an honorary doctorate for, in their words, his “connection with Canadian youth and his ability to provoke young peoples’ interest and capabilities in national and global events,” a skill they see as “unique and vital to our country.”  I am not sure that Dr. Stroumboulopoulos (if I may take this premature liberty) will be thrilled to be thus cited: it sounds to me like Elmo is being acknowledged for a Sesame Street special on global warming.  But according the UofC’s press release, the honorary degree is that institution’s “highest accolade, bestowed on those individuals who have made extraordinary achievements and done a great service to the community.”  That Dr. Stroumboulopoulos will ascend to this honor might be an encouragement for other thirtysomethings who have been laboring away at their actual doctorates for twice as long as he has been at the CBC.  Still, I doubt it.

   

In fact, the essence of Dr. Stroumboulopoulos’ success is the success of The Hour, his nightly magazine program that has run on the national network since January 2005.  This unbalanced broadcast has never been to my taste.  There are a number of different ways for a program and its news organization to achieve balance: a team can endeavor to represent a number of perspectives, and this is why I enjoy the “At Issue” panel on The National; an individual segment or whole program can go out of its way to counter the general perspective of its network’s coverage, and this is why I try not to miss Rex Murphy on The National.  But The Hour is not unlike most everything else on the CBC, delivered in a style designed to extend its demographic.  When I hear Dr. Stroumboulopoulos talk, I imagine this might be how pillow talk goes between Jack Layton and Olivia Chow.  All this preaching to the choir is pretty unremarkable, though I suppose it does identify choir members who did not even yet realize they belonged to it.  That might be a notable achievement, but does it really warrant the UofC’s “highest accolade”?  Even Chris Tait, editor of The Gauntlet student newspaper, a fellow who is supposed to have been touched deeply by Dr. Stroumboulopoulos, muses: “There have got to be more deserving candidates, though. Someone out there must have contributed to the culture of Canada and media sphere more than a relatively new CBC talk show host fresh off the VJ circuit.”

 

There are, normally, two avenues to the honorary degree at a university.  The academic side of the house will usually bring forward a scholar of national or international standing, and the administrative side of the house will bring forward a community member whose contribution to the university has been truly transformational.  Perhaps this is not the way business is done at the University of Calgary, but it is hard to see how Dr. Stroumboulopoulos qualifies in either category.  Most generously, we can credit him with a ten-year career, though the success of The Hour is relatively recent.  Are we acknowledging his work in sports radio? His ability to introduce music videos?  His failed foray into American gameshows with ABC’s The One?  Who is next at the UofC?  Bob Saget?  It is hard not to read this honor as a university’s sad attempt to appear “hip.”  I expect we shall soon see Nickelback made Chancellors for a day!

   

Now, I have no doubt that Dr. Stroumboulopoulos is a nice guy with whom to have a beer – though I read he does not drink, so strike that idea – but it sounds like his wonderful start in Canadian media warrants an Alumnus of the Year Award from Humber College, his alma mater.  Liam Lacey, in The Globe and Mail, uses Robert Mugabe and Mike Tyson as examples of honorary doctors whose later works have tarnished their citations.  I have little doubt that Dr. Stroumboulopoulos will resist the temptation to repress his people or even bite the ears of his guests.  In thirty years, we may well be looking back over one of the most distinguished careers at the CBC.  But to give this honor now, on the basis of a thin body of work, serves only to cheapen an accolade that might have meant something if only deferred a while longer.