Professor Profiles: some of UofT's finest dish on life beyond the lecture
Issue date: 11/10/09 Section: Features
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Ronald J. Deibert is a popular and distinguished Political Science professor at the University of Toronto. In 2002, he won both the University of Toronto Outstanding Teacher Award as well as the Northrop Frye Teaching and Research Award. In 2007, his name appeared on Esquire's Best and Brightest list.
Oh, and he is also a spy.
Well, that is not entirely true. His work is considered espionage in some countries and research in others; luckily, in Canada it is research. He is also the Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies.
In an interview with The Strand he explains what exactly the Citizen Lab does.
"We are presently focused on the domain of cybersecurity, and I am particularly interested in investigating cyber wars, and promoting the notion of cyber arms control. I believe that cyberspace is a valuable global commons that should be protected and preserved as an open public forum for citizens of all the world. Presently, there is a very real and destructive arms race in cyberspace that we need to counter with norms of mutual restraint. Knowledge is power, and the domain of knowledge is cyberspace. It is being rapidly degraded with censorship, surveillance and militarization."
Although Deibert, to my knowledge, does not gallivant around the world drinking martinis that are shaken and not stirred, he does possess what could be perhaps described as a modern James Bond aura. The work he and his team are doing at the Citizen Lab is both groundbreaking and risky. At this year's Keith Davey lecture, Deibert admitted that his work poses a risk, but that he isn't particularly afraid.
Before the teaching accolades and creation of the Citizen Lab, Deibert did an undergraduate degree in International Relations at the University of British Columbia. It was here that he was introduced to philosophy and the arts. He took mainly philosophy, political sciences, and political theory courses.
When asked about his life as an undergraduate student, he fondly recounts several tidbits. "I spent a lot of productive study time in the PITT Pub, and remember vividly watching the 87 Canada Cup on the big screen there. I loved taking naps in the Law Library, and waking up with big creases in my face and drool on my Nietzsche. I saw a lot of great concerts at the War Memorial Gym-including Black Uhuru, King Sunny Ade, Burning Spear, DOA-and I actually met Johnny Rotten there while working as 'security' for the Public Image Ltd. concert."
In regards to music, he has a particularly precise idea about what he enjoys. When asked the cliché (but still wonderfully revealing) question concerning his favourite song of all time, he answers not one song, but specific parts of particular recordings.
"Let me answer that this way. I love the opening to the 1968 studio version of Jumpin' Jack Flash by the Rolling Stones, and I love the opening few bars to London Calling by the Clash. Both make my spine tingle when I hear them and I always crank it. My favourite bass player of all time is Aston "Family Man" Barrett from the Wailers, and I love the way Miles Davis plays trumpet."
In a generation that has people walking around with forty Gs (and for all you big spenders, I am talking about Gigabits, not cash money) of music in their pockets, someone referring to particular sections of a song is astonishing. It is surely no coincidence that Deibert is the Director of a group of people that scour the world wide web for traces of cyber warfare, which is about as precise as looking for a floating bottle in the sea.
As is custom for all my interviews, I ask him what kind of animal he'd be if he were in the type of hypothetical world that allowed people to change from human to beast. Like the distinguished intellectual that he is, he cleverly wrangles his way out of a straight answer by replying with "A Political Animal, of course!, " referring to Aristotle's claim that a human is a Zoön Politikon, a city-dwelling creature.
-Chance McAllister
If you pass by the Isabel Bader theatre at around 3 on a Friday afternoon, you'll likely see Professor Nick Mount out on the front steps, puffing a cigarette, surrounded by his students, some smoking, some out there simply to share in a casual conversation with their professor. This has been the mid-lecture break ritual for Mount's Literature for Our Time class for years, and even the most militant anti-smoking activist must concede that having a smoke with your students is a great way to interact with them in a friendly and informal manner.
Professor Mount is undeniably personable, as is immediately apparent when he greets me in his office on the seventh floor of the Jackman Humanities Building. When detailing his life and academic career he speaks with sincerity and an affable modesty one would not necessarily expect from the recipient of the 2009 President's Teaching Award and two-time finalist in TVO's Best Lecturer competition.
Born in Sault Ste. Marie, Mount spent his childhood in Scarborough and small town Nova Scotia. During his adolescence and early adult years he lived in British Columbia where he would eventually complete his bachelor's degree in English at the University of Victoria. What separates Mount from most academics is that he did not enter university until he was 28; in fact, he did not even graduate from high school.
"My career path is somewhat unorthodox for professors," he lightheartedly admits.
"I didn't finish grade twelve and ended up working as an assistant manager at a Kentucky Fried Chicken and then for Woolco Department Stores for a decade as a division manager. I was making a decent salary, but I was working insane hours and generally wasn't happy with the job, so I enrolled in a literature night course at a college in Kamloops. After writing an essay on Heart of Darkness, the professor told me that I should go to university."
Mount took the advice to heart, quitting his job and enrolling at the University of Victoria. Upon completing his undergrad he moved back to the east coast to earn his master's degree and Ph.D at Dalhousie University in Halifax. After teaching at King's College in Halifax, Mount was hired at the University of Toronto in 2001 as a specialist in early Canadian literature.
In the decade that followed, he began to teach the now immensely popular first year English course, Literature for Our Time.
"When I took over the course six years ago the reading list was all books by dead white men - Joyce, Beckett, Eliot, almost exclusively Anglo-American modernism from the early to mid-twentieth century," Mount explains.
"I decided to keep a great number of those works on the list because I happen to like them a great deal, but I only taught them during the first term. During the second term I teach newer material that has been published within at least the last ten years by writers born after 1960."
There are several instances throughout the second term when Mount will invite a contemporary writer he has included on the reading list to join him for a discussion during his class as part of the "Literature for Our Time Series." In the past, his guests have included acclaimed Canadian author Camilla Gibb (The Petty Details of So-and-So's Life), comic book artist and cartoonist Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth) and Toronto-based poet Ken Babstock (Mean). These discussions are not exclusively held for his students but are instead open to anyone who wishes to attend.
The professor believes that the lecture series will enhance his students' connection with the material that they study in the course.
"I think that it will help them realize that this isn't just study; literature is something people do. A book is not a dead object but something that a person just like you wrote," he says.
However, finding worthwhile contemporary literature and then assembling an engaging lecture that is pertinent to the work can be challenging.
"Once I made the decision to invite guests to my lectures, I needed to begin changing three of the spring term books every year because obviously I couldn't repeat guests. This means I read, on average, fifty to sixty new books every year trying to find three books," he explains.
"Coming up with four hours worth of lectures on a book on which there is absolutely no literary criticism is a hell of a lot of work. When you're teaching T.S. Eliot, there's a huge library of support to draw on, but when you're teaching Hedwig and the Angry Inch, there's been very little scholarly writing about it. It's exciting but also tremendously difficult."
Among Mount's favoured concepts to discuss in his Literature for Our Time class is the notion of "post post-modernism," a paradigm still in its infantile stage of development that he admits "sounds awful to say" but is certainly present in a number of the works that he teaches.
"I've been trained in post-modernism just like all my colleagues, and I'm looking for all the right ironic moments in contemporary literature but there seems to be, in essence, a shift away from irony and towards sincerity," he says
Post post-modernism is still difficult to define and has not been widely acknowledged by academics but as Mount puts it, "As always, artists are ahead of our understanding of art."
He elaborates further on his understanding of the post post-modern paradigm.
"There's a general exhaustion with the very clever, ironic moves of the post-modern. Post-modernism may have exposed some political injustices but didn't leave anything in their place. It was only good for tearing things down and not any good at building things back up."
Mount cites "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," an essay by the widely revered and recently deceased American author David Foster Wallace as complimenting his view that irony is not as relevant in contemporary literature as it once was.
"His point was how can you be ironic as a writer when television is already ironic?" Mount explains.
"How can you make fun of something that is already making fun of itself? For him the rebels, the Young Turks of his generation, might turn out to be "anti-ironic."
After I ask my final question, "What would you say to an undergraduate student who may want to pursue an academic career in English?," Mount pauses before he answers, taking a moment to articulate a response. Perhaps because his own academic career has been so unorthodox he has difficulty answering.
"Don't go unless someone is paying you to go," he begins. "If you're thinking about turning this into some kind of career, the market is so intensely competitive at the moment that if you're not getting a scholarship to do the MA or especially the PhD, stop, because it's a sign. The PhD lasts longer than most marriages so you have to be sure that it's what you want to be doing. I guess the other standard piece of advice I can offer is join something: it doesn't matter if it's the society for creative acronyms or the curling league. It's a rare person who can just do their courses and go home and still feel good about the four years. You need something to belong to that's smaller than this university."
-Sean MacKay
Mark Gerald Kingwell is a professor you have probably heard about, since he is renowned for being an excellent teacher and has a long list of achievements. To name a few, he has been a contributing editor to Harper's Magazine, a columnist for the National Post, and made an appearance in the documentary The Corporation. He has also published several books. Oh, and he is a philosophy professor.
Kingwell did his undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto and is an alumnus of St. Michael`s College. The Strand asked him what his undergraduate life was like and what drew him to philosophy.
"I was very young-just 17 at a time most UofT undergraduates were 19 because of grade 13. I spent a lot of time alone, listening to music, reading, thinking what I imagined were deep thoughts. Then I got involved with campus journalism and that changed my life. I edited The Varsity in 1983-84 and became interested in writing as a career. But philosophy is addictive. I started by worrying about God's existence and whether the world was just. I ended by concluding that there is no God, and whatever justice means, it is a human responsibility, not a divine one. So we'd better think clearly about it."
When I learned he was a former editor of The Varsity, I considered discarding the interview, but after quick thought, it just didn't seem right.
Next, I ask him how he ended up teaching at the same university he studied at.
"I finished my Ph.D when the academic job market was a disaster. I came to Toronto mainly because my then-wife was here, and turned down a tenure-track job at the University of Idaho to do so-now there's a counterfactual alt-reality for you! I had a post-doctoral fellowship for a couple of years, and that allowed me to get some articles and books published. Then I got a contract job-"a folding chair"-at UTSC and hung on there for a few years. Outside offers, one from Carleton and another from McGill, gave me some leverage. I was able to move downtown and start living the dream."
His reputation among students is excellent. His is one of the first names that comes up when I ask people to name their favourite professors. Unfortunately, I have not had the opportunity to have him as a professor, but I do intend to audit his first year philosophy class to find out what many friends have told me I missed in PHL100.
In addition to his highly regarded lectures, he has written many books, so I asked him if he was working on anything and why one should care.
"I just published a philosophical biography of the pianist Glenn Gould, but now I'm turning back to my home area, political theory, and trying to advance a project I'm calling 'democracy's gift.' It's about the justificatory hollowness at the heart of politics, and will likely end up being a call for more self-organization and gift economies. Crisis-and-control politics has outlived its possibilities; it's time for new models."
His answers to my last three questions left me with an image of Kingwell as a raccoon who adores a good ancient Chinese philosophical text and squeaks along to Billie Holiday. The last three questions of the interview went like this:
The Strand: What is your favourite book? (any type, genre, etc.)
Kingwell: Some days, Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching. Other days, Kierkegaard, Either/Or.
TS: Favourite song of all time?
K: I'm going to cheat and pick a whole record, because the theme-and-variation structure could make it count as one song: Bach's Goldberg Variations, 1981 Glenn Gould version. If it really has to be just one song, then the Gershwins' "They Can't Take That Away From Me," Billie Holiday version.
TS: If you could be any animal, which would you be and why?
K: I'd like to be a raccoon. Colonizing a city that the humans believe they built for themselves, making them scramble to improve garbage-can technology-I admire those sneaky ring-tailed bastards.
I have asked over a hundred people that question, and he is the first to want to be a raccoon. Most people hate raccoons for the very reason he would be one.
If that is not a sign of a philosopher, then clouds are made of gold.
-Chance McAllister
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posted 11/26/09 @ 12:18 AM EST
It is a very informative article.
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