McLeod, Jack: Vincent Bladen's Hiring Practices

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MEMOIR:

Memoir pages are intended to provide a personal recollection of life at the University of Toronto or events in the author's life which he or she deemed significant. For this reason, these entries are entirely the work of the authors and are not subject to the normal fact-checking or editing of Encyclopedia entries. The editors request that the pages be approached accordingly.

Nat Wolfe.jpg

Professor, and later Dean, Vincent Bladen B.A., M.A. (Oxon.) was in many ways a gentleman. When he succeeded Harold Innis as Chairman of the Department of Political Economy in October 1952, he immediately boosted Karl Heleiner from assistant professor to full; Innis had not been keen to over-pay “D.P.s”, however distinguished.

And Bladen was a remarkable judge of talent. He hired many faculty members without Ph.D.s, including some of the best, like Peter Russell andMel Watkins; also H. Ian McDonald, later President of York University, and Donald Forester, later (if only briefly) President of UofT.

But Bladen was not usually lavish in rewarding talent. He seemed serenely certain that to be on the staff of Canada’s biggest and best university was reward enough in itself. When the outstanding young economist Harry Johnson said he was leaving St. Francis Xavier University and open to appointment, Bladen offered him a post at the rank of assistant professor. Harry was offended, and instead accepted a full professorship at the University of Chicago, to teach graduate students only, with the first year as a research leave. (From there Harry also commuted for several months of each year to England, where he taught at Cambridge.)

The case of James Nathan Wolfe was not dissimilar. “Nat” Wolfe was another brilliant economist who taught at the UofT from the early ‘50s till 1960. I regarded him as a witty and irreverent iconoclast and the most lovable of colleagues. He was proud, he told me, of never having missed a deadline in his life, from undergraduate days at McGill till the end of his career in 1984. What made this remarkable was that he was almost totally blind.

Between 1960 and 1963 he moved from Toronto to California where he was appointed visiting full professor at U.C. Berkely and Chairman of Economics at Santa Barbara. When he considered coming back to Canada in 1963 he wrote to Bladen asking at what rank he might return. He was told he could come back at the same rank he held before, assistant professor. Nat declined indignantly. As he cast about for other positions there suddenly came an unexpected offer from Edinburgh University and he accepted. He became the Adam Smith Professor Economics, one of the most prestigious chairs in the English-speaking world, and the only chair in the U.K. that requires an Act of Parliament to fill.

Nat remained the Adam Smith Professor from 1964 to 1984, when illness forced his early retirement. Until he died in 1988, he often joked with his Canadian friends that Vincent Bladen had inadvertently done him a huge favour in 1963 in turning him down.

Photo of Nat Wolfe, Edinburgh 1986, courtesy of Jack McLeod.