Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir by William B. Davis Read Free Book Online Page B

to be a formal affair with a high table, the saying of grace, and waiter service. The students all arrived at 6:15 wearing the prescribed academic gowns and ties and entered the hall together. But what actually is a tie? Does a shoelace around the neck count as a tie? We followed the letter of that rule far more than the spirit. And sad to say, the quality of the food seldom matched the pretension of the occasion. It was not unusual to finish dinner, return to the house, ditch the gown and tie, and head across the road to the local greasy spoon for an edible meal. This was in the days before McDonald’s and Burger King, when you could still buy a decent meal at a low price in a family run local restaurant. Paradoxically the local greasy spoon was named McDonald’s.
    The students from the old 5 Wilcox residence had all moved into Jeanneret House, one of the six houses of the Sir Daniel Wilson Residence. They brought with them a sense of community and an intellectual curiosity that I was fortunate to share. Each student had a small private room. It was the common room on the ground floor that provided a focus for the house. I think I learned almost as much in the common room as I did in the college next door. If you had to watch television there was one in the basement. No one did, except during the World Series.
    I remember our don, Ian MacDonald (who later became president of York University, which did not then exist), saying that if he were starting a university the first thing he would do is provide a library. The second thing would be a common room. And only after that would he add classrooms and teachers. Of course, we young men talked about sex a lot, but we also discussed philosophy, religion, politics, and science. Senior students mixed with freshmen. It was a lively time.
    Many years later, in the heyday of The X-Files , I did speaking tours of North American universities. I was astonished and distressed to see how universities and university life had changed. For one thing, no one studied what we studied: English, philosophy, history, mathematics, science. I would ask students what subjects they were taking. Communications, women’s studies, air conditioning — subjects that didn’t exist in our day. One business school I spoke at even had a course in golf. Apparently the golf course is where business is really done nowadays. No wonder I stayed in the arts. The last time I played golf I shot 120 — for nine holes. Recently at a convention in London, the lovely PA who was assisting me mentioned that she had two university degrees. Wow, she didn’t seem like the academic type, so I asked her what her degrees were. Public relations and cultural management. Good for her. She will probably find work in the new economy, but her university life must have been very different from mine. We couldn’t care less about preparing for a job market; we were there to learn, to think, to be “better people.” It’s not for me to say whether universities have improved over the intervening decades, but they certainly have changed. Does anyone still say, “They were the best years of my life”?
    The common room, that focus of my student world, seems to have disappeared altogether. And residences are generally limited to first or sometimes first and second year students. But my education came from the senior students I lived with. Well, I guess the job training is better now.
    The Christians in Jeanneret house had the hardest time. At least, the serious ones. We were, after all, a group of high-minded intellectuals with no room for faith. As I had discovered in Aurora High School, agnostics and atheists were a rare and suspect breed in Ontario in the mid fifties. It would be a long time before Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett made nonbelief respectable. We became a support group for our questioning minds. Christians were wimps. Heck, they didn’t even smoke.
    Imagine my shock to discover that John Woods — who would one