August 2007: We began with high hopes, but our Canada dream ended in
disappointment. In September, Chaya, Julia and I will be moving to the UK,
to Oxford.
Those interested in the details of that move are encouraged to read the
sequel there. Here,
I will sum up the Kingston experience.
Disappointments with Queen's University
I recognized from the beginning a certain amount of cognitive
dissonance in my approach to the university and the city. Determined to
be pleased and proud of my new physical and intellectual home, I sought
out supporting evidence and avoided contradictions. Queen's certainly
has the reputation of an elite institution in Canada, even if hardly
anyone outside of Canada has heard of it. Queen's is considered to be
the most competitive university for students to get into, even if the
reasons are sometimes obscure, and may be summarised by the comment of
a Toronto colleague who said of his high school cohort, "If you were
rich and white, Queen's was the place to go". Queen's is regularly
ranked near the top among Canadian research universities by Maclean's
(the
relentlessly bland universal magazine of all things Canadian), with a
noble history
and
great potential strengths. There is a strong medical school and
epidemiology program, internationally respected mathematical
biologists, and apparent eagerness to hire me and Julia, suggesting a
support for further growth in our areas of mathematics and statistics.
And yet... On the Canadian scene there's McGill, Toronto, UBC (in no
particular order) and then everyone else.
Still, cognitive dissonance is powerful, and is supported at Queen's by
the many very smart faculty members who have been seduced by the
exceptionally
low housing prices (and commuting times to the aristocratic manse with
the private duck pond in a
small fraction of the time you would need to get to a corresponding
sized spread in the GTA),
as well as those, amiable or embittered, who were tenured back when the
main criterion was possession of a Y chromosome*, and can't go anywhere
else. (Since unionisation of the faculty this criterion has since been
relaxed.) I won't try to estimate relative proportions, but there are
enough of both these groups would be enough to maintain anyone who is
willing in a warm social bath of self-satisfaction. We were willing,
two years ago, but were driven out. I won't comment in this public
forum on the specific reasons for our leaving, except to say that it
did not seem possible that we would be supported in building up a
high-level statistics program at Queen's. In any case, the price for
getting basic support -- in particular, a permanent job for Julia --
was that we had to first find jobs elsewhere, and once we had done so
we had no motivation to stay at Queen's. In addition (and this is
important information for anyone who might have come upon this text
before negotiating employment with Queen's), the university has a
policy of allowing department heads to negotiate hiring conditions
autonomously, with no interference or direct participation by the dean
or higher-level administrators, but in the end the university does not
consider itself bound by any agreements made in these negotiations,
whether oral or written. Months after you've agreed what you thought
were the terms of your hiring, the university will send you an official
letter, with perhaps completely different terms (in my case the change
was in the time to tenure), and you're only choice is to sign the
contract or not.
While there is considerable
good will in some quarters directed at the principle of
building up the statistics program, in practice the broad majority view
statisticians as did Musil's Man
Without Qualities, as 'bad mathematicians'.
I had numerous conversations which ended with the punchline, "But the
good statisticians all get better-paying jobs elsewhere," or "Their
work is mathematically shallow." This is rather like a music professor
complaining that a bit of mathematics is not sufficiently tuneful.
Still, I have some hope that the department, under new leadership, will
be
taking the statistics half of its mission more seriously.
The peculiar Queen's mixture of green eyeshades and megalomaniac
self-satisfaction, particularly as embodied by the university's
somewhat self-dramatising principal Karen Hitchcock has been the
subject of a satirical pamphlet.
Kingston
Good things
Mulberry School
in Kingston seems to be one of the very few Waldorf (or, at least,
"Waldorf-inspired") schools within walking distance of a city centre --
about fifteen minutes at a brisk walk from our house. (Waldorf parents
tend to range from skeptical toward Luddite in their regard of
information technologies introduced since the Reformation, but they do
seem to love driving cars.) Chaya was in their kindergarten program,
and found it delightful. We have high hopes for her new school in
Oxford, but leaving Mulberry School is one of our greatest regrets from
Kingston.
Other to-be-missed Kingston institutions are the Sleepless Goat Cafe,
where I spent many of my days working, eating, and drinking tea; the
reform Jewish congregation Iyr
HaMelech, with whom we celebrated many a Kabbalat Shabbat (at
our own home; while Jewish reform may have history on its side, it's
the soi disant
orthodox who own the property, and the real-estate moguls all belong to
Congregation
Beth Israel).
Kingston actually has quite pleasant weather. The winters can be quite
chill, a problem for those who don't like that sort of thing, but
surprisingly sunny. It's a pleasure to be able to look up any side
street and see Lake Ontario. Wolfe
Island is anything but sensational, but it's nice to have it
there, and we've had some pleasant family excursions there. There is a
plethora of festivals in the summer, a special favourite being the Dusk Dances, which
coincide (more or less) with Chaya's birthday.
Corruption
One colleague, who used to live in New Jersey commented, "In New Jersey
you knew the mob was running things. And now and then a bunch of people
would go to prison, which gave you the feeling that at least someone
was keeping a lid on things. Here, you see all the same signs of
corruption, but no one ever goes to prison."
As with Queen's it's the Lucifer effect: The corruption of a
magnificent potential is particularly dismaying. It would be hard to
expect much of Edmonton or Hamilton, but Kingston has a marvelous
location, decent weather, fascinating history (even if the citation of
every hovel that Sir John A. ever signed a lease on can be a bit
trying), a wealthy and renowned university, and a well-preserved
historic city core. (This past winter I happened to be
Unfortunately, the city is dominated by real-estate interests, who have
privatized most of the waterfront, with the bizarre result that there
is no public beach near downtown Kingston, and what water access there
is within several kilometres of the city centre is rocky and
uninviting. Walking along the lake is possible only for short
stretches, as most of the waterfront is taken up by highrise apartment
buildings and hotels.
The current mayor, Harvey Rosen, has mastered the political subterfuge
of starting major construction projects, and only revealing the costs
after the city is already committed. He practiced with the Grand
Theatre, whose reconstruction was under way when we arrived in 2005,
and whose completion, it is believed by some, will herald the End of
Days. By mid-2006 the projected price had risen from $6.5 million to
$14.5. A city report then said,
in effect, mistakes were made, but it's too late to do anything about
that. Opponents of the far more costly new Large Venue Entertainment
Centre (LVEC), which was then still under debate, citedthis
financial fiasco in argument against trusting the Rosen
administration. "With the city on the
verge of beginning one of the largest construction projects a downtown
arena it
has ever undertaken, the consultants issued a series of recommendations
calling
for more oversight of costs and better communication between
departments to
identify and control costs before they become unmanageable." So what
happened? Wonder of wonders, Rosen went public after the election
(which he won by a few hundred with an auditor's report (completed
before the election, actually, but, you know, everyone was so busy...),
pointing out, among other things, that the $38 million LVEC cost
estimate neglected to include such amenities as furniture and lighting
fixtures,
Transportation
This may reflect above all my sheltered life, but I have never lived
(or even spent any significant amount of time) in a city that is so
miserably suited to bicycling, or so poorly served by public
transportation. The buses run only every half hour or so, when they run
at all (i.e., no evenings or Sundays for many routes). Even at that
they run nearly empty, so it's hard to say there's much unmet demand.
It's a cultural thing. While the great Canadian cities Montreal,
Toronto, and Vancouver are among the most liveable cities in the world,
with public transportation and pedestrian and cycling amenities ranging
from good to great, Canadians in small cities, towns, and the
countryside are wild for internal combustion. (Just for comparison,
over 80% of Kingstonians commute to work by private car, as compared
with about 55% in my old hometown of Berkeley, CA.) There are large
parts of Kingston that could not be reached in any way without
travelling on highways without even shoulders for a bicycle. And
without a private car you can forget about the much touted provincial
parks and outdoor recreation areas. There is not even a token public
transportation service to any of them.
(including Pedestrians are somewhat better served in Kingston. Where
we lived, in the centre of town ("Sydenham ward"), it was no more than
a fifteen minute walk to almost anywhere we wanted to go, and you could
mostly stay on pleasant side roads. On the other hand, downtown
Kingston is cut by a sequence four heavily travelled one-way parallel
roadsPrincess Avenue, the only significant shopping street in the
city). Only two or three times, in more than two years I lived there,
did an automobile ever stop to allow me to cross the street. The
Canadians are a busy people, and even if it's sleeting or 20 below and
you're carrying a child, you can be sure that every one of the drivers
needs to get across the road more urgently than you do.
Kingston is as well served as any place in Canada with intercity rail
service, which is to say, hardly at all. You can travel from Kingston
on Via Rail to Ottawa, Montreal or Toronto, and since all the trains
run through Toronto, there are actually about 8 trains a day -- though
with gaps of several hours in the middle of the day. The service is
passable, even if the trains are dingy and old. (Apparently
they were purchased at fire-sale prices when the French SNCF
modernised, without consideration for handicap access or the colder
Canadian winters.) Still, if you have a flight from the Montreal
airport, the earliest you can arrive is 11:32. Or you can fly to
Toronto from Kingston airport, in commuter airplanes so small and
apparently unstable that they (seriously) put the men in the rear,
apparently in an effort to balance the weight without resorting to the
embarrassing recourse of putting the passengers on a scale. (I'm
waiting with dread for the news of an Air Canada flight from Kingston
downed by the fortuitous overlapping itineraries of Kingston Women for
Fat Acceptance and the Canadian Jockeys' Association.)
*A slight exaggeration. The favoured means of teaching the fairer sex
their place at Queen's before the faculty unionised was to tenure them
-- thus avoiding a procedural review and potential lawsuits -- while
denying them promotion to associate professor.
Introduction
Next step: Britain