Q & A

Rowland Smith, Dean of Humanities

OnCampus: You recently moved to Calgary after working as Vice-President, Academic at Wilfrid Laurier University. Prior to that, you were former chair of English and dean of Arts and Social Sciences at Dalhousie University in Halifax. How have your experiences differed thus far from university to university?

Rowland Smith: The three institutions are totally different. Dalhousie is an East Coast university that is one of the oldest in Canada, founded in 1818. I think it’s seen as an establishment university. Then I moved to a medium-sized Ontario university that prides itself on the quality of undergraduate education. The University of Calgary is a newer, western, large university with many professional faculties. These are very different universities. However, there are similarities in terms of experience. At Dalhousie, there were very strong faculties of law and medicine, and while they weren’t in any sense hostile towards other departments, those faculties carry tremendous prestige in the community and required others to keep pace. The Faculty of Humanities in Calgary is a very important faculty offering traditional, humanistic educational values in a city that is vibrant with economic growth and with professionalism of a technological nature. It’s a very similar kind of challenge.

On the day of your arrival, you were quoted saying you thought the role of dean of humanities at a large medical/doctoral university would be both challenging and exciting. Would you expand on your thoughts?

The excitement is to demonstrate the value of conventional, humanistic education and what we do in a faculty of humanities – teaching the powers of analysis, the powers of understanding, the powers of examining evidence, and the power of words. The challenge is to develop those values in students and demonstrate how important those qualities of mind are to the world, even to people heavily involved in professional or other activities.

What drew you to Calgary in the first place?

Well, the job was attractive. I’d finished 10 years as Vice-President, Academic at Wilfrid Laurier and I thought this would be an interesting, challenging job. I was also looking forward to returning more closely to my discipline, to being dean of a faculty rather than looking at the whole university. I enjoyed both, but I thought it would be interesting to focus on the faculty where I have spent most of my academic life.

You were born in South Africa. What role does your birth country play in who you are now?

I think one’s country of origin always plays a very important part. I grew up in apartheid South Africa as a white person. That clearly has an impact on the way I think. As an undergraduate, I was involved in student politics in opposition to the regime, which I think was an important part of my growing up. I went to a very conventional, private boys’ school in Johannesburg, and I think that has had a very significant effect on me, as anyone who has been to one of those schools would likely comment. I was a scholarship boy, which meant I saw the school from two perspectives. My parents were impoverished schoolteachers. I mingled with the strata of society that go to those schools, but my background was very different. I went to Oxford at the age of 22 (as a Rhodes Scholar) and then I began being educated out of my country. I went to Canada quite soon after returning to South Africa. I think that living in different cultures is an important part of who I am. I’m very strong on international education, on internationalization. That will be one of my goals here – to develop international exchanges more fully. I think what it does for students is really quite important. It develops the way that they look at themselves, the way they look at culture, the way they understand culture.

What inspired you to pursue your education and establish an academic career?

You know, I never took a decision. I just did what I was good at doing. And I think most young people do that. I was pretty well-immersed in the career before I said “Well, I’ve decided what I want to do.”

What are your academic areas of interest?

I have concentrated my research on 20th century British writing and what used to be called Commonwealth writing and is now called post-colonial writing. I write on authors in English from Commonwealth countries. I use the theory that’s called post-colonial writing, but I don’t actually consider myself a post-colonial theorist. My perspective is more conventional than that. The topics I’ve pursued as research topics have grown out of my teaching. Recently, I have been writing on topics related to post-secondary learning.

What are your goals as dean? What do you hope to achieve?

I think any dean has the primary function of persuading the faculty that they are recognized, that their special talents are acknowledged, that they are supported and their excellence is understood. That’s not just the role of the dean of humanities. That’s the role of any dean. At the same time, I think that any dean, but particularly one in a faculty of humanities, must constantly be striving to ensure that the way the faculty is looking at both teaching and researching is innovative and au courant, and that it is modern in the correct sense of the world. The faculty must know where we stand relative to the field at large and we must be confident that we are doing what a first-rate university should be doing. We also need to ensure that others recognize we are doing this. I think the undergraduate capacity is very important to humanities because what we are doing is so much more obviously education rather than training. It is very important that the educative excellence of our program at the undergraduate level is recognized and understood. We need to ensure we are changing the way young people think and that their understanding is significantly altered by being here.

How do you make the argument for liberal education in modern society?

I think you do it by example. If you don’t do what you claim you do, you can’t make the argument. If your students aren’t intelligent, aren’t exciting, aren’t moving to listen to, aren’t persuasive, aren’t incisively analytical, then you’ve failed. You can’t say we produce superior minds if you don’t.

Do you have hobbies?

I don’t have hobbies. That is one of my great failings. I read a lot, which isn’t a hobby if you are a professor of English. I like working. I like what I do. I like to keep fit. Hobbies, I’m not good at hobbies. I like opera and I like music, but again, that’s not a hobby. That’s an indulgence. I should grow up and get into a hobby.

Next week OnCampus offers a Q&A with Dean of Nursing Michael Clinton.