Ryerson deserves some remembrance

Yes, maybe t he y should change the name of Ryerson University. Not so much because of Egerton Ryerson’s role in the creation of Aboriginal residential schools, mind you. From my personal standpoint, as a Westerner, Ryerson’s journalism school is a factory for eastern Canadian printmedia colonizers who gobble up all the soft local jobs. So I just think it would be a good joke on Ryerson’s graduates if the institution they graduated from suddenly changed its brand to something unfamiliar. The more unpronounceable and torturous, the better!

Kidding aside, I do not endorse the moderate position that the name of Ryerson University cannot be changed because it is History with a capital H. This seems to be the stock downtown-Toronto response to the idea, now being put forward by Aboriginal Ryerson students and radical allies, that a new name should be found for the school.

The kids say the university’s brand is one of a thousand irksome daily reminders of Canada’s colonial history and its subjugation of Aboriginal peoples. They perhaps cannot change the other 999, but as students they will damn well be heard when it comes to this one.

The paternalistic reply comes that the name of Ryerson University is a sort of permanent learning opportunity — a useful locus for discussion of Canada’s past. If “we” whitewash the history of North American colonization, “we” risk forgetting it.

This does not seem like a complete or airtight answer to the students’ demands, although those demands may not be very sincere or widespread. No Aboriginal attendee of Ryerson U who knows who Egerton Ryerson was, and who has a personal past influenced by the residential school legacy, is likely to “forget” his own account of the facts. To insist on the pedagogical importance of Ryerson’s name is to imply that Aboriginal students will just have to grin and bear it for the benefit of future Canadians, specifically non- Aboriginal ones.

Is this really the answer we would give to students of Hitler College if we had established one in some frenzy of international goodwill in 1935? I think it is important to insist that we CAN change the name of Ryerson University. That this is our right, in principle, as denizens of the year 2017.

And that, moreover, we can change it to meet the reasonable demand of a significant minority. ( It might be a different matter if Ryerson U were an institution that Egerton Ryerson himself had created. Maybe we can arrange a sort of trade: the educational institution that probably ought to be called “Ryerson” is the University of Toronto’s Victoria College, which he did found.)

The name of “Ryerson University” self- evidently exists to honour Egerton Ryerson, rather than merely to perpetuate the words or the sound of his name as a semantic object. Ontario, as a society, is free to reconsider this decision and, in a sense, put Ryerson on trial.

Which he might, after all, win. Egerton Ryerson was alive from 1803 to 1882; his place in the history of residential schools is based on activity he engaged in between 1837, when he was involved with Indian education as a member of the missionary Aborigines Protection Society, and 1847, when he wrote a report outlining future principles for Aboriginal “industrial education.” For most of his life these ideas were never implemented. In the 1880s, by which time Ryerson was recognized as a Canadian f ounder, he had become more influential — and so the younger Ryerson was a central posthumous author of a system he never lived to see.

As an influence, nearly anyone would now judge hi m very harmful. He thought it was important that education should be provided to Indian children through boarding schools, and by the churches, with a strong religious element. Like many theorists of the 19th century, he believed in frogmarching Aboriginal peoples through an accelerated agricultural- pastoral phase of cultural evolution, as part of their progress toward equality and their emergence from state “tutelage.”

The effects of these principles, once applied, were beyond disastrous. But Ryerson’s advice was not predicated on harming or punishing First Nations. He was opposed in his own time by malign quietists who preferred to plan for Canadian Indians to literally die off in out- ofsight places. He worked with Aboriginal colleagues in developing his ideas, spoke Ojibwe, and modelled his vision of Indian education on outstanding European schools for the ( European) poor.

This would be a strange approach if his goal had been genocide. Which is not to say that he or anyone else ought to be judged mostly on his intentions.

The Canadian state lies under remarkably heavy obligations to Egerton Ryerson for both its development and its current form. He is an important reason that religious tests for political participation never gained a foothold in our country.

He is the father of secular public schooling here, though he would hate to hear that. As a bureaucrat, he stood for a non- partisan public service when that was a weird new idea, and did as much as anybody to show it could work.

Canada might look very different today without Ryerson — more, perhaps, like one of the officially Lutheran states of northern Europe. How you feel about this is bound to depend a great deal on how you view Canada as a state or as a community. Ryerson certainly did things worth honouring, from almost any point of view. But we are quite free to talk about the form, the proper settings, and the degree of that honour.

DEFENCE (WOULD BE) AN UNWILLING PLAYER FOR THE CROWN TEAM. — BARBARA KAY