Education as integrity
- By Deborah Minors
Dr Patrick Deane was installed as President and Vice-Chancellor of McMaster University, Canada, in November 2010. He credits the influence of his Wits education as being the catalyst for his becoming an academic administrator in pursuit of “education as integrity”.
Born in Johannesburg on 12 December 1956, Patrick Deane (BA 1978, BA Hons 1979) matriculated from King Edward VII High School. He read English and Legal Theory and Institutions at Wits from 1975 to 1978. It was at Wits during this politically volatile period in South Africa that Deane’s sense of “the link between learning and social justice” emerged.
“No one at Wits between 1975 and 1978 could fail to grasp the magnitude and complexity of the relationship between education and the social good,” the Wits benefactor told WitsReview shortly after his installation at McMaster in 2010. “And no one privileged enough to be a student during those years should ever fail to discharge the responsibility settled upon them by the experience.”
In his inaugural speech at McMaster, Deane recounted his student years at Wits. He recalled the campus environment as “a hotbed for anti-apartheid activism” that was both exciting and confusing. His confusion stemmed from the fact that Wits was (apartheid) government-funded and existed under parliamentary statute, yet University academics – including the Vice-Chancellor, often in full academic regalia – were frequently a sympathetic presence at student protests.
“I have many vivid memories of this time, including one of Dr Phillip Tobias … deftly slipping away through a cloud of tear gas, his billowing robe asserting in very stark contrast to the uniforms of rampaging riot police the elusive yet indomitable value of humane learning and scientific enquiry,” Deane said in his installation speech at McMaster.
He wondered in whose name the Vice-Chancellor wore that gown: from what source did the Vice-Chancellor derive his authority to criticise the state? And students the right to object to prejudice? It was at the 1975 academic freedom lecture at Wits that the penny finally dropped for Deane.
Legal philosopher and constitutional scholar Ronald Dworkin delivered the address. The Chair of Jurisprudence at Oxford, Dworkin established his reputation as a critic of “legal positivism” - the doctrine that denies any inherent connection between the validity of law and ethics or morality. He proposed the notion of “law as integrity”, which an impressionable Deane interpreted as there absolutely being a connection between law and morality.
Deane reasoned that Dworkin’s “law as integrity” demonstrated that the University’s authority derived not from “the monolithic state as temporarily constituted by partisan politicians, but from society”. The Vice-Chancellor asserted an authority derived from values that transcended the state itself, Deane concluded.
“My Wits education, I often note, was profound in its effect on me, and is unquestionably the reason I became first an academic and subsequently an academic administrator,” he told WitsReview.
Deane took his concept of “education as integrity” with him when he emigrated to Canada in 1978. He earned a Masters (1980) and PhD (1985) in English literature at the University of Western Ontario and began his academic career at the University of Toronto. He returned to Western to join the English department in 1988, the year he won the John Charles Polanyi Prize for Literature. He took the Chair less than a decade later.
The turn of the century saw Deane at the University of Winnipeg, where he acted as President and Vice-Chancellor in 2003/4 and served as Vice-President (Academic) until 2005. He assumed the same post at Queen’s University prior to his appointment at McMaster in 2010.
“Education as integrity reminds us that this is an activity of the highest order, that it should be available to all and should act for the betterment of all,” Deane told graduates at his installation. Wearing his own academic regalia, he concluded:
“The gown is a gift of the McMaster University Alumni Association, and I am very proud and grateful to receive it. I am even more proud when I reflect on what the gift means: that our graduates now at work in the world maintain their investment in their university; that they have an interest in its leadership; and that they understand the extent to which the work of the university must be integrated with … their hopes and the constructive aspirations of our society at large.”