Eric A. Havelock - Education and Early Academic Career

Education and Early Academic Career

Born in London, Havelock grew up in Scotland and enrolled at The Leys School in Cambridge at the age of 14. He studied there with W. H. Balgarnie, a classicist to whom Havelock gives considerable credit. In 1922, Havelock started at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University.

While studying under F. M. Cornford at Cambridge, Havelock began to question the received wisdom about the nature of pre-Socratic philosophy and, in particular, about its relationship with Socratic thought. In The Literate Revolution in Greece, his penultimate book, Havelock recalls being struck by a discrepancy between the language used by the philosophers he was studying and the heavily Platonic idiom with which it was interpreted in the standard texts. It was well known that some of these philosophical texts (Parmenides, Empedocles) were written not only in verse but in the meter of Homer, who had recently been identified (still controversially at the time) by Milman Parry as an oral poet, but Cornford and other scholars of these early philosophers saw the practice as a fairly insignificant convention leftover from Hesiod. Havelock eventually came to the conclusion that the poetic aspects of early philosophy "were matters not of style but of substance," and that such thinkers as Heraclitus and Empedocles actually have more in common even on an intellectual level with Homer than they do with Plato and Aristotle. However, he did not publicly break from Cornford until many years later.

In 1926 Havelock took his first academic job at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. He married Ellen Parkinson in 1927, and moved on to Victoria College at the University of Toronto in 1929. Havelock's scholarly work during this period focused on Latin poetry, particularly Catullus, far from the early Greek philosophy he had worked on at Cambridge. While in Canada Havelock became increasingly involved in politics. With his fellow academics Frank Underhill and Eugene Forsey, Havelock was a cofounder of the League for Social Reconstruction, an organization of politically active socialist intellectuals. He and Underhill were also the most outspoken of a group of dissident faculty members at the University.

Havelock's political engagement deepened rapidly. In 1931, after Toronto police had blocked a public meeting by an organization the police claimed was associated with communists, he and Underhill wrote a public letter of protest, calling the action "short-sighted, inexpedient, and intolerable." The letter led to considerable tension between the leadership of the university and the activist professors led by Havelock and Underhill, as well as a sharply critical public reaction. All of the major newspapers in Toronto, along with a number of prominent business leaders, denounced the professors as radical leftists and their behavior as unbecoming of academics.

Though the League for Social Reconstruction began as more of a discussion group than a political party, it became a force in Canadian politics by the mid-1930s. After Havelock joined the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, along with several other members of the League, he was pressured by his superiors at the University to curtail his political activity. He did not, continuing to act as an ally and occasional spokesman for Underhill and other leftist professors. He found himself in trouble again in 1937 after criticizing both the government's and industry's handling of an automotive workers' strike. Despite calls from Ontario officials for his ouster, he was able to remain at Victoria College, but his public reputation was badly damaged.

While at Toronto, Havelock began formulating his theory of orality and literacy, establishing the context of a later movement at the University interested in the critical study of communication, which Donald F. Theall has called the "Toronto School of Communications." Havelock's work was complemented by that of Harold Innis, who was working on the history of media. The work Havelock and Innis began in the 1930s was the preliminary basis for the influential theories of communication developed by Marshall McLuhan and Edmund Snow Carpenter in the 1950s.

During World War II, Havelock moved away from the socialist organizations he had been associated with, and in 1944 was elected founding president of the Ontario Classical Association. One of the association's first activities was organizing a relief effort for Greece, which had just been liberated from Nazi control. Havelock continued to write about politics, however, and his political and academic work came together in his ideas about education; he argued for the necessity of an understanding of rhetoric for the resistance to corporate persuasiveness.