Lost Innocence

In Lost Innocence: The Growth of an Academic's Mind, Roderick McGillis looks back on his many decades as student and teacher to consider the evolution of the modern university as well as his own work as a professor of English literature and specialist in children's literature. While regretting higher education's ever-increasing corporatization and unrelenting focus on making graduates "job ready," he also finds "little that can equal a liberal education in preparing a person for the slings and arrows that one must dodge getting through this earthly life.... Light shines from the Ivory Tower, a light that just might reach the world beyond in salutary and bracing ways-if we keep striving, striving, striving." McGillis writes evocatively of his childhood in eastern Ontario, his years as a student both in Canada and the UK, and his long career at the University of Calgary. His work afforded opportunities for travel to locales as varied as Scandinavia and the southern United States; those journeys are recounted in amusing and insightful detail, as are McGillis's encounters with the many idiosyncratic personalities found within academe's ivy-covered walls. The result is not only a good read but a stimulating reflection on the meaning of post-secondary education in the twenty-first century.