The students are back at university. First-year undergrads wander around searching for classes. Frat pledges block traffic and try to look like they’re having fun. Here’s a question: Did anyone ever use the term “ivory tower” in a non-pejorative way?

Yes. Here’s Harold Innis, one of Canada’s academic superstars of the 20th century, in 1946: “The university is essentially an ivory tower in which courage can be mustered to attack any concept which threatens to be a monopoly.” How refreshing. It gives ivory towers a heroic makeover.

That was a crisis time for Canadian universities, just after the Second World War. We’re in another now. You can tell by the many studies: Bob Rae’s; Frank Iacobucci’s. The University of Toronto has several, agonizing over its own role. It’s a ripple and echo of that postwar moment.

From 1939 to 1945, our universities were conscripted into the war effort. They were assigned tasks and produced solutions. Afterward, they were expected to continue functioning on behalf of social needs defined elsewhere, mainly by business or government. The autonomy they had claimed since the middle ages&#0151the ivory tower thing—was in danger.

Canada’s academic elite rose up: historian Donald Creighton, philosopher George Grant, critic Northrop Frye, economist Harold Innis. They decried the “utilitarian emphasis” coming out of the war and insisted on the university’s “historic function as the central spiritual and critical institution of society,” whose task was to “convey to each … generation a clear conception of the meaning of life.”

They failed totally. Today, you could say TV plays that central role far more than universities do. They occupy a large space but chiefly to supply demands from the political, commercial and technological marketplaces—not as critical counterweights to those sectors in advocating for basic social and moral values.

Big universities finance themselves through “partnerships” (wink wink) with industry. When the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council argues for more money, it stresses “results” in dealing with “current societal issues”—the way artists will argue for funding because of the multiplier effect they have on local economies through tourism etc. It may or may not be effective, but, in both cases, a certain self-respect is lacking.

But that battle is done; the Innis side was routed. There are many who’d say, No great loss, and a part of me is one of them. The people in the ivory towers (with tenure, too) often served power anyway, and will continue to. Yet, what I still find intriguing is their notion that universities should defend the values of Western civilization, or what Vincent Massey called “the humane Christian tradition.” Today, it would be the Judeo-Christian tradition.

It sounds similar to post-9/11 “clash of civilizations” theories. “Our” West versus Islam and the rest. But that’s not what our Canadian intellectual forebears had in mind. They were concerned with protecting what they called Western civilization against deterioration from within, especially, back then, in the form of fascism and totalitarianism. Those values had been hard won and required constant care and renewal, less from external menace than from the laggard tendencies in any society.

Today’s clash of civs advocates avoid such self-scrutiny and project the danger onto “others,” elsewhere or in our midst. In that respect, those ivory tower academics were ahead of us. They were self-critical rather than self-congratulatory, and we could use their insight now.

In the spirit of that insight, Harold Innis once recalled a question put by a prof during his own first university year, 1913: “Why do we attend to the things to which we attend?” It’s a great question and represents the kind of thinking universities could still encourage even if, like most good things in our time, it can probably emerge only in a fragmentary, occasional way.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.