John Ralston Saul Addresses First Independent Scholars’ Symposium

More than 350 people turned out to hear Canadian author and essayist John Ralston Saul’s keynote address to the Canadian Academy of Independent Scholars Inaugural Symposium held at SFU’s Vancouver campus in May.

He spoke passionately about the role of the independent scholar and tenured intellectuals as sharing the ethical responsibility of questioning, speaking out and intellectual risk-taking. Issues included:

• An education system that focuses on the elite post secondary sector instead of the more important and larger K-12 sector
• Scholarship and intellectual resources that are based on only English and French studies, leaving out vast chunks of ideas and writings of other countries and civilizations.
• Our incapacity to build the importance of aboriginal peoples into our curriculum and our culture
• Our failure to end poverty and homelessness, a truly Canadian deficiency that is “an embarrassment beyond belief and a human tragedy”

Saul challenged both community and university scholars to find solutions to these problems. “It’s thinking and acting. The job of the scholar and the intellectual is to watch out for our society, to think, to be heard to think, to be seen to think and therefore to act in public.”

The Canadian Academy of Independent Scholars (CAIS) is an initiative of Interdisciplinary Programs, the home of the Philosophers’ Café program. John Ralston Saul and Claude Lévi- Strauss are the Distinguished Patrons of the CAIS.