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I worked for T. H. B (Tom) Symons as a research assistant for two years 20 years ago. He was by a wide margin the most interesting person I've worked for. His death at 91 feels like the loss of not just a person but a portal to another world.
He had been Trent's *former* president for almost 30 years when he hired me, so he was perceived then as ancient, but he was only just 70 - less than a decade older than my dad. But Tom had always seemed regal, and when he was approached to found Trent he was in his 20s!
As a young man at U of T, he had been Harold Innis's research assistant. (Innis died in 1952, for reference.) As a young history lecturer, he had sat around the table with Creighton and Underhill, both of whom he said were really unpleasant people.
But Symons was not that keen on hard research or what he characterized as unnecessary growth and specialization at U of T. What interested him was students. So he planned Trent, along with a handful of other U of T exiles, as an anti-U of T, small and slow.
Symons perfectly encapsulated with Gad Horowitz tried to describe in the term Red Tory: someone whose love of tradition expressed itself as humanism and as an opposition to post-war technocracy.
His Trent was in a lot of ways a product of its time, but also an against-the-current institution, one that embodied Symons's gentleness and sense of humour as much as his traditionalism and nationalism.
Officially he left Trent to work on the Commission on Canadian Studies, but he also left because the Board of Governors wanted budget cuts and budget cuts weren't his style. After a few corners were cut, but not many, it was agreed that he'd leave.
Now I worked for him almost thirty years later, starting in the summer of 1999, and reader, I was officially an employee of the Commission on Canadian Studies, which had ended in the 70s. As I said at the top, a very interesting boss.
Ostensibly I was working on transferring his papers to the Trent archives, but work on that was slow. He had masses of files folders stacked high in various places in his office at Trent and in his house - much more than the archives would take.
The archives had rules about what kind of material they accept - no duplication, no photocopies - but Symons's way of working and keeping track of his various interests and projects flew in the face of these edicts, and the principle of 'respect des fonds' was at stake. Anyway.
Very little happened on that front. I did some other things, I once made a spreadsheet that he thought was humorous for some reason. The upshot is, I was not of much assistance, and if he hadn't had an actual assistant (Lynda Cardwell), I would likely have been a detriment.
Mostly what happened when we worked together was talk politics, specifically Trent politics. I became his employee in the summer of 1999, and in the fall of 1999, Bonnie Patterson announced that the university would close down its two downtown colleges.
I'm pretty sure that if that hadn't happened, and I had existed for him solely as the clever graduate student who couldn't compose a coherent spreadsheet, he would have stopped working with me, or stopped paying me. He kept me on as a kind of sinecure or fellowship.
Symons followed protocol. He had never publicly criticized any of his successors, and never aligned himself with any dissident faction of the university. But Patterson's proposal was so wrong that he felt he had to speak out against it.
When Patterson ignored his public criticism, and even ignored a vote by Senate against closing the colleges, he was deeply offended. He was also disinvited from a number of ceremonial events during the Patterson regime in retaliation. It was unprecedented stuff.
A huge part of what had made Symons such a success was his privilege and pedigree (an old Conservative party family), but what made him unique was his personal warmth and his love of absurdity and silliness. He was fun, and he led with kindness.
For him, that was the job. Others who came after were not as good at it, bu7t none had ever been so sneering and meaning-spirited and narrow-minded as the Patterson-era apparatchiks. He loathed them, but more in a grieving way than with malice.
He wasn't always a big fan of the kind of things the students got up to in our opposition to Patterson's managerialism. He was impressed with our coordination and the coherence of our message, but I think it made him sad to see such fighting.
Like a lot of people, I think he hoped that people like Derrick MacIntosh, the TCSA President, or some of the faculty with admin experience, like John Syrrett, would be able to reach the administration with words, with a clear expression of values.
Those of us who worked outside official channels used words - and Symons definitely appreciated what I and Anup Grewal wrote, what Sarah Lamble or @niitics said - but we saw the admin purely as an enemy. Symons understood that that was necessary, but it wasn't at all his style.
John Syrrett died in 2002 or 2003, and we lost Derrick in 2020 and Tom Symons in 2021. I don't believe in an afterlife, but it would be nice to think of the three of them in dusty a common room enjoying a good joke and some sherry. FIN
