By “The Social Sciences and Public Administration,” the title assigned me by Professor Clokie, I am assuming he meant “Special Teaching in the Social Science Departments of Canadian Universities for Students Contemplating the Civil Service as a Career,” which is both more definitive and (being of eight words or over) even long enough for copyright. It is to “lead off” a symposium on “Training for Public Administration,” a vasty frame of reference indeed, taking in (some might go so far as to think) a course in the great school of Practical Politics itself.
Insinuating this role upon me, Professor Clokie pointed out that I had been a long time in the Public Service, and was now a teacher in a university. It is the logic of the redoubtable Pott, Mr. Pickwick's editor-friend, on Chinese metaphysics—an impregnable logic, says Mr. Bernard Shaw. In my case, however, whilst I was undoubtedly in the Service a long time indeed, at Toronto I am only what is called a “Visiting Professor,” i.e., one who lectures merely on what he knows, and can be let out at any time. Moreover, that new flower, the Course in Public Administration, which (again in the search for the particular) seems to represent a fortiori the “special teaching” aforesaid, was unknown in my generation as a student, and late-blooming in my generation as a civil servant. But one must not let one's style be cramped, and today therefore I take it as a sort of text, if only in the grand manner to which educationally speaking so old-fashioned a civil servant is accustomed.