Wilbur Grasham (1916 – 2008)

Donald Forbes

Wilbur Grasham, who died January 16th in his 92nd year, was for many years a leading member of the Department and an outstanding representative of the old University of Toronto. I did not know him well, but I remember him fondly from the early 1980’s when he was Director of Graduate Studies and I was responsible for the M.A. program, which meant that we worked together closely for three years. I saw that he was scrupulously fair with students and colleagues and unfailingly patient and good humoured when there were complaints about the difficult decisions that had to be made about admissions, awards, and appeals – all of which were left a generation ago to individual judgement rather than hidden behind the anonymity of committees.

“Grash”, as he was known to his older colleagues (Wilbur to me), had first come to the University of Toronto in 1935 to study engineering. He was a brilliant student, especially in mathematics, and he opted for the most demanding program, Engineering Physics, from which he graduated in 1939. He spent the wartime years in Newfoundland and Greenland in geophysical surveying connected with securing cryolite, a rare mineral needed in the production of aluminum. After the war he joined the National Research Council, where he was involved in research on radar. When I knew him in the 1980’s, at the end of his teaching career in the Department, he liked to tell anecdotes about his early years as a scientist, particularly his experiences in Greenland and the characters he had encountered there.

Wilbur had returned to Toronto in 1948 or 1949 to begin graduate studies in political economy. The Department, then headed by Harold Innis, embraced sociology and commerce as well as economics and political science. Mel Watkins remembers Wilbur as a helpful and entertaining TA in an introductory course on European economic history in 1949-1950. ‘He understood the technology. He could show us how things like steam engines worked.’ On the politics side of the Department, the dominant figure was Brough Macpherson, and Wilbur became his student and a lifelong friend. In the early 1950’s he attended the London School of Economics, where he began a doctoral thesis, later abandoned, on school reform in Britain. In those years, however, a good M.A. was sufficient qualification for academic employment, and when he returned to Canada, he taught for a year at the University of Alberta and two or three years at Carleton before coming back to Toronto in 1959.

Wilbur’s academic specialty was public administration. He became a leading member of the Institute of Public Administration of Canada; he maintained close connections with the Ontario and federal civil services; and he edited various publications in the field, including a number of case studies collected from his ‘Cases’ graduate course. But he taught a much wider range of subjects. Tone Careless, who was in the Honours program in the mid 1960’s, praises Wilbur’s ability to make unpopular courses (in statistics and economic history) engaging and enjoyable. Tone has warm memories of him as a genuinely humble man “who never blew his own horn or made you feel that it was a privilege to be in his presence, and he never hit you full-bore with his own political opinions. He didn’t pontificate. He said he was basically an engineer.” Like Paul Fox, Tone says, Wilbur was able to put insecure or discouraged students at their ease and to give them the confidence to carry on. “Meeting him in his office, he was skilled at turning the tables and making you feel that you were the expert.”

I remember him as a friendly, easy-going man of diverse interests and a pleasantly practical orientation. I sympathized with his distaste for narrow professionalism and I was impressed by the variety of books in his office. They covered mathematics and statistics, which was a particular interest of mine, but also physics, history, economics, Canadian and British politics, political theory, public administration, and no doubt a variety of other topics. He handled his administrative tasks easily, which did not surprise me, given his academic specialty and his previous experience. In the early 1960’s, when the joint Department was growing rapidly, he had served as Graduate Supervisor for both economics and political science. In 1965, he had become the first Associate Chair for Political Science, under the overall chairmanship of Tom Easterbrook. Still, his relaxed good humour about the drudgery and deadlines was impressive.

In retrospect, I am startled by my insensitivity to his politics and my lack of interest in his reasons for switching from applied science to political science in the late 1940’s. He had real experience on both sides of the divide between science and politics that has been one of the themes of my own studies. Yet so absorbed was I then by my own reading and our immediate responsibilities, I did not question him closely about his reasons for his change of direction. Perhaps it seemed to me then an obvious choice – the most natural thing in the world to prefer the softer, broader, more bookish science to one that was harder and more strictly scientific.

His daughter Cleone, who is a neighbour, recalls his explaining that he felt confined by the narrowness of his research work but she is intrigued by a possibility suggested by his departmental colleague Peter Russell, that his decision may have been influenced by the climate created by the Gouzenko affair. The applied science for which Wilbur had been trained in the 1930’s, and whose political significance had been dramatically shown during the war, had become more politicized after the war. The defection of Igor Gouzenko in 1946 revealed not just the interest of our Soviet ally in quickly acquiring the atomic weapons that the United States had developed with assistance from British scientists and Canadian uranium processors, but also the willingness of various communist sympathizers in the scientific community to help them do so by passing important technical details to their secret agents. The political significance of applied science was suddenly clear for all to see, and panicky politicians began suspiciously scrutinizing the political leanings of their scientists. As an undergraduate, Wilbur had had communist friends and had collected some Marxist literature. He may have thought that the tolerance of the academy was preferable to boredom combined with the risk of persecution.

Wilbur’s career as a political scientist spanned years of dramatic change in the academic world and in our discipline. When he was a graduate student, the University of Toronto was still essentially an undergraduate school for students living in Toronto. In the whole decade of the 1950’s, it awarded only about half as many doctorates in political science as we now produce in a year. In 1950, public administration was still the most scientific branch of political science, since multivariate statistical analysis (the hard core of the behavioural movement) and rational choice theory were still in their infancy. A graduate student could enter with an engineering degree, and a professor could be promoted with an M.A. The discipline was part of a combined department that split into its then remaining elements – economics, politics, and commerce – only a year before Wilbur retired in 1983. Maclean’s and other publishing empires had not yet discovered that money can be made by averaging library holdings, faculty degrees and publications, alumni recollections, class sizes, residence beds, gender ratios, student clubs and cafeterias, athletic facilities, and psychiatric services for the guidance of those seeking the best possible university experience. The underlying rivalry with other post-secondary institutions, never absent, had not previously been brought into such clear focus, and its implications for academic life had not yet been worked out in detail. The university could still appear to provide a secure shelter from the demands of the larger society for conformity to its values and purposes. Wilbur, “a bit of an eccentric,” as Meyer Brownstone put it, watched the drift away from the older kind of university and his own specialty with rare equanimity.

All testify to his wry sense of humour, illustrated by an incident recalled by a colleague. Sometime around 1980, when Arthur Kruger was Dean, a new rule was propounded to deal with the growing question of sexual harassment. Henceforth the relations between faculty and students were to be “arms length plus an inch.” This decanal decree was presented to a meeting of the full Department – one of those ritual affairs followed by a cocktail party that annually brought together enough faculty in dark suits to staff a small university – and it evoked Wilbur’s spontaneous comment, “ there goes our last fringe benefit!”