J.E. “Ted” Hodgetts (1917 – 2009)
J.S. “Steve” Dupre
If I am writing an intensely personal memoir of our late emeritus colleague, Ted Hodgetts, this is because I cannot do otherwise. To begin with our names, the Hobbesian dynamics of / the schoolyard long ago guaranteed that J. Edwin must be Ted and J. Stefan, Steve. Well after our respective schoolyards, Ted first touched my life more than half a century ago. His Democratic Government and Politics, co-authored with the iconic J. Alex Corry, was already a staple of undergraduate instruction when I was attending the University of Ottawa in the early 1950’s. I later viewed his Pioneer Public Service: An Administrative History of the United Canada’s as an extraordinary scholarly achievement.
As I was joining our Department in 1963, I took due note of the fact that Ted has been “holding the pen” for the federal Glassco Commission on Government Organization with the title of Editorial Director. This being so, I chose that tide to describe my own role with the Smith Committee on Taxation in Ontario.
I have always believed that departmental excellence rests on predatory behaviour in making professorial appointments. Ted gave every appearance of being a Queen’s man to the core, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. As I prepared to play my own role in enticing him to leave Kingston, I discovered to my delight that he had graduated from the University of Toronto as a Gold Medalist in the Class of 3T9. Armed with this juicy morsel, I could tell Ted that far from deserting Queen’s, he would be coming home.
In 1965 his homecoming was consummated and our Department for the next seventeen years enjoyed a superb colleague with whom I had the privilege of co-teaching graduate courses and who places us at centre stage in Ottawa as a member of the Lambert Royal Commission on Financial Management and Accountability. Here too was a Colleague who devotedly promoted our federated University’s grand tradition of the liberal arts by serving as Principal (1967-1970) then President (1970-1972) of Victoria College and University.
To my consternation, I discovered when Ted retired in 1982 that he was leaving Toronto. His darling wife Ruth, who predeceased him in 1992, had remained steadfastly attached to Kingston. So Ted returned to his erstwhile Queen’s colleagues and acquired a Queen’s e-mail address. There would of course be no holding him back from writing, teaching (Dalhousie), or remaining the consummate academic practitioner of public administration. In the latter capacity he was involved as recently as 2005-2006 in tendering advice to the Gomery Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship Program and Related Activities.
Ted’s many honours included the Order of Canada, fellowship in the Royal Society of Canada, the Vanier Medal of the Institute of Public Administration of Canada and five honorary degrees. The fifth of these degrees was described in Ted’s death Notice in the Globe and Mail as the one that “was perhaps the most meaningful to him.” It was from the University of Toronto, and is the one I consider profoundly questionable. Why did our very own University wait until last spring to give him the honour he so richly deserved? Whatever the answer, Ted addressed our 2008 Convocation, in his 91st year with his usual verve.
As for our personal interaction, it continued to flourish thanks to my current role as the Book Review Editor of Canadian Public Administration. We were chatting on the phone as recently as the end of last February. Other than to mention that he was not feeling particularly well, Ted said nothing about the condition that took his life a scant ten weeks later. We were discussing his review of Defending A Contested Ideal: Merit and the Public Service Commission. This is the centennial history of the PSC for which Ted, as the co-author of the volume celebrating the Commission’s 60th anniversary, was the ideal reviewer.