Much has changed in the 35 years since I drove along the dirt country road that was Steeles Avenue for my first visit to the then new and muddy main campus of York University. The changes have occurred in the world at large, more specifically in the world of higher education, and, more specifically still, at York University. Lester Pearson was Prime Minister of Canada then, and high technology for many of us teaching at the university consisted of "duplicating" our class assignments on a messy mimeograph machine that left blue ink on our fingers.

Yes, the technological changes that have affected the business and professional worlds and in particular the academic world are well known, so well known that most of our undergraduates, I surmise, would have difficulty imagining or remembering a world before computers, faxes, scanners, and automatic telephone answering machines. Even the neo-Luddites among us cheerfully accept and use many of these technological wonders while still being a little nervous about trying others.

The most interesting and significant change on the York campus, though, has been, not the technology, but the demography. There are many more older students in our classes today. This has important ramifications for class discussions, particularly in academic fields like mine, which is English literature; for such subjects are, willy-nilly, value-charged, and charged too with descriptions and interpretations of human experience. It stands to reason that a man or woman who has lived 45 years and is perhaps the parent of a teenager, who has been out in the work force in the so-called real world, who has been dealing with full-time jobs, mortgages, car payments, adolescent children, older parents, and so forth, may have a different view of the world from that of a bright, nineteen-year old straight out of high school; not a better or worse view, just a different one. The mix of both kinds of students in the same classroom is exhilarating.

Similarly over the past several decades the populations of Canada, Ontario, and Greater Toronto have expanded excitingly. Many different people from many different parts of the world have immigrated to Toronto. We are all so much the richer for that. Our classes reflect this dramatic change in demography. The educational effects of such change are important. They are perhaps most obvious in the requests for curricular expansion, the desire to meet our new populations with courses that suit their backgrounds, experiences, and interests, which could be quite different from those of the much narrower ethnic and racial community who had heretofore determined the curriculum.

With due respect to these great changes there is another one which seems to me to be equal to the others in its importance to our professional work. It is a subtle change, but one that affects us and our students daily in our work here at York. It is difficult to describe accurately and fully what that change is, but the change is no less important for that fact. I am referring to changes in attitude toward, and techniques in, teaching. I know that these changes have affected my work significantly; I suspect they have had similar impact on many of you.

Who has not thought a good deal about the issue of authority in our culture, moral authority, intellectual authority, professional authority? The questioning of authority is, I believe, one of the hallmarks of our times. Many of us of a certain age grew up when there was a rather distant relationship between university student and teacher. That distance coincided with and indeed derived from and in turn supported an assumption of professorial authority. My thinking has gradually evolved to the point where I now believe that the very notion of "classroom authority" may in some instances be a red herring. The crucial question for teachers, I have learned, should not be, who has intellectual authority in the classroom, but rather, how can my students best learn?

As Dickens reminded us vividly 150 years ago in Hard Times, students, from kindergarten through graduate school, are not so many dead or static or passive vessels to be filled with facts, facts, facts. Instead all of us human beings are potentially thoughtful and creative. So I have come to believe that a good part of my job is to get students to do their own thinking about the subjects of our courses.

This view of mine does not translate into some weak, sentimental, namby-pamby surrender to student opinions. On the contrary, I believe that learning how to think critically while reading, writing, or engaging in discussion with others, is a very hard skill to master, one that can never be taken for granted, but rather must always be maintained vigilantly. I therefore try to get my students to ask questions, of me and of each other. I try to get them into the habit of debating issues, even when, or rather especially when they have very strong views on those subjects.

Along with the healthy challenge to authority, the easy expression of passion seems to be another characteristic of our time. People in our democracy have opinions about many matters, most of them, I suspect, unexamined opinions. I try to get my students to think critically about issues and their and others' opinions of issues such as the relevance of past literature, the value of a liberal arts education, the role of trade unions, the oppression of the class system, the meaning of elitism, and so forth. Long after students have forgotten almost every detail of the content of any particular undergraduate course they will have to be using their critical skills to the utmost in their jobs, their families, in the discharge of their professional and personal and civic responsibilities.

Perhaps the ultimate show of authority in the university is the professorial lecture. I confess that I still have great respect for that very old-fashioned form of teaching, a respect born perhaps out of a nostalgic memory of some of the great lecturers I heard when I was an undergraduate and graduate student, such as Walter Jackson Bate and Northrop Frye. But I have changed insofar as I have come round to believing that most lectures will benefit from the students' opportunity to interrupt, to interject, to talk among themselves in a suitable pause in the lecture created for that purpose. Let them discuss what the lecturer has been saying. Let them talk over with each other their responses, approving, disapproving, bewildered, to the lecturer's words. Let them above all respectfully challenge and question the lecturer. From a vigorous and courteous exchange in the lecture hall and in the classroom, all should profit.

The shifts in my thinking about teaching have been generated over the past several years by many different sources: formal talks and informal chats at professional conferences, the published literature on university teaching, and, above all, the resources of York's own remarkable Centre for the Support of Teaching. I urge all of us to consult all of these sources, for they are wellsprings of professional stimulation, growth, and support.

In sum, I believe now, much more confidently than when I began the adventure of teaching over 35 years ago, that the principal job of the university teacher today is to get the students to think actively, intelligently, and responsibly about a particular subject and then to learn how to apply those skills to other problems, intellectual, moral, political, and personal. I am still "traditional" enough to believe that that good thinking has to be based on knowledge, and that knowledge itself is acquired from many different sources, sometimes from mom and dad, sometimes from your buddy at work or in the locker room, sometimes from a startling, unexpected encounter with strangers, at a bus stop or in a hospital emergency room. Insofar as we are university teachers many of us still believe, and particularly those of us in traditional subjects like mine, that important knowledge is acquired from studious reading of books, sometimes very difficult books. That kind of knowledge is, in the beginning, hard slogging. But the payoff is immense and unending. The recognition that you are using your mind energetically and creatively has to be one of the best feelings in the world.