Janice Stein wants your opinion

"You don't always find answers, but you get much better questions."

Janice Stein is, to say the least, busy. It’s been quite a year for the 58-year-old Harrowston Chair of Conflict Management, founding Director of the Munk Centre for International Studies, and advisor to governments around the world. She delivered the Massey Lecture on Nov. 6, her book The Cult of Efficiency has been published to glowing reviews, and the popular television series she developed, Going Global, is into a second season on TVOntario.

Then came Sept. 11. Stein, in addition to her regular weekly political panel spots on TVO’s Studio Two and Diplomatic Immunity, has been an almost nightly fixture on CBC’s The National, bringing more than 30 years of scholarship in international affairs to the daily puzzles created by the terrorist attacks on the United States.

And on this sunny, crisp Nov. 12, as happy as she is to have had “the first eight hours of sleep in months last night,” her busyness is the byproduct of her own way of being. “I get bored easily,” she says, trying to explain her crammed schedule and multiple projects.

In her Munk Centre office, she keeps the television on as the CBC interrupts regular programming with news of American Airlines Flight 587, which has crashed into a Queens, N.Y. neighbourhood. At this point, no one knows if the crash is an accident or more terrorist activity. Stein watches the coverage intently with a look that is a mix of both concern and analysis. After all, it has become her job to study the ongoing events related to the Sept. 11 attacks. Then, she turns the sound off, sits down for 45 minutes that she really can’t spare, and is talkative and focused.

As she explains how she feels about the role of an academic at a university, her attentiveness isn’t surprising, for Stein feels that communicating is exactly what she should be doing.

“Telling the public what we know is how social scientists make an impact through research. Our product is years and years of study about problems that are important to the world. That’s what the community invests in and rightly so – so that when there is a crisis and important decisions have to be made there are Canadians who can contribute so that all of our expertise is not concentrated in government.”

She points to “The Security of Freedom” conference organized by U of T’s Faculty of Law in November that examined the then-proposed Bill C-36 anti-terrorism legislation as a “perfect example” of this impact. “(Dean) Ron Daniels put that conference together in two weeks. The U of T Press published a book of its conference papers within a week and then it was put on the desks of every MP before the vote on Bill C-36. That’s exactly what a university should be doing – disseminating independent thinking that is the result of years of research and scholarly preparation.”

Stein, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and one of only 28 current U of T faculty with the title University Professor, has been building her expertise officially since earning degrees at McGill and Yale in the 1960s. But her real interest in the goings-on of the world began much earlier.

“As a child, one of my earliest memories was seeing the newspaper headlines about the war in Korea and before that, in 1948, in the Middle East. I remember not understanding what was happening but also thinking, ‘There must be a better way.’ So as soon as I could, I began taking courses in high school in world history. I knew that was what I was going to do for life.”

She began her teaching career in 1966 at Carleton University, moving to McGill in 1968 and to U of T in 1983. While her focus has always been on political science – and, specifically, the Middle East and security issues – Stein embellishes her knowledge by consistently delving into other disciplines. “One discipline can shed important light on another. So I’ve also worked in history and psychology to bridge the insights, as well as sociology and organizational theory, with rudimentary work in economics and management. You ask a different set of questions that way, as opposed to working only in one discipline.”

She is also passionate about bringing the public into her scholarship. “We underestimate the receptivity of the public. One of the real challenges is finding ways to bring the public back into the university. We shouldn’t think of a university education as something that takes four years or eight years. We need to create opportunities for the public to move in and out, because people understand in a deep way that what they learn at a particular moment in time needs to be renewed as the research changes.”

This need to have the public and the university interact was the inspiration for Stein to create the Going Global television series. Each program is broadcast live from the Munk Centre and features discussion of international affairs with policy experts, university professors and first-year students, as well as a live call-in and e-mail segment. With 450,000 viewers in the first season, Going Global is a bonafide hit.

“The philosophy in starting it was that we have many people in the university who think deeply about global issues and that we need to share that knowledge with the public. People are genuinely interested in world affairs. They can get information easily enough, but the university can provide analysis that helps them understand the information. For example, we know what happened on Sept. 11. But why did it happen? That’s what Going Global does. I think we’ve really struck a chord, and I’m thrilled about that.”

She is striking a similar chord with her new book, The Cult of Efficiency, parts of which she presented at the prestigious Massey Lecture (which has included, over its 40-year history, lectures by Martin Luther King and John Kenneth Galbraith). The book examines what Stein calls “the growing emphasis on efficiency, or cost-effectiveness, in this era of globalization and how the language of efficiency shapes what citizens think about their most important shared values.” Focusing on public education and health care, she interviewed parents and patients across Canada, comparing government’s drive to use resources more efficiently with how this drive affects the education and health care provided to the public.

The author, co-author or editor of well over 100 scholarly works, Stein always intended the book to be read by a broad audience, and she found the experience of writing for the public as well as policy and academic communities exhilarating. “If you can’t express what you think in language that is understandable to a non-specialist, then you have not yet, for yourself, clarified what you think. I struggle to do this all the time, so writing this book was a wonderful discipline for me.”

In the end, Stein’s many roles centre on two areas – research and teaching. Even after 35 years in the classroom, she still enjoys teaching first-year students “because, for many of them, this will be their only course in global politics. We need to educate specialists, but we also have an obligation to help all young people to think about the world. I’ll often meet someone who took that course many years ago and they’ll tell me that it changed the way they thought about the world. That’s a very important part of what the university does.”

She emphasizes that research and scholarship are “fundamental. You can’t be a really good teacher if you’re not breaking your own brain around issues that drive you nuts and problems that wake you up at two in the morning.”
And for Stein, the university is the perfect place to do this brain-breaking. “The book is about a subject that is not my area of expertise. But, being here, I could just pick up the phone and ask a number of experts in other areas for comment. I got wonderful critical feedback from people who are struggling with these issues. You don’t always find answers, but you get much better questions.”

Stein is taking a sabbatical in the 2002-2003 academic year. “I’ll be spending time with people in public institutions to examine their views on the accountability of those institutions to the public. I think very few people today are satisfied with saying, ‘We’ll go to the polls every four years and that’s enough to hold public institutions accountable.’ People are engaged. They have strongly held views. Citizens’ views are an important part of constructing better systems of accountability.”

Telling the public what we know is how social scientists make an impact through research.