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Frank Cunningham was a professor of political philosophy at the University of Toronto, where many students found the direction of their lives through his mentorship. He died last month at the age of 81.Courtesy of the Family

He was an inspired teacher, agile thinker, gifted administrator as chair of his university’s philosophy department and later as principal of Innis College, as well as an enduring optimist about the future of a more democratic world. He impressed on his students that democratic engagement requires collective action, not merely casting your ballot once every few years. At the University of Toronto, where Frank Cunningham was professor of political philosophy, many students found the direction of their lives through his mentorship. After his death last month in Vancouver, his wife, Justice Maryka Omatsu, heard from hundreds of colleagues and former students whose thinking he shaped.

“I was fortunate to have been taught by Frank as an undergraduate and as a graduate student at U of T,” Igor Shoikhedbrod wrote her. “To him I owe my current academic interests and research in political theory. … I still remember his political philosophy course with great fondness.”

Wrote another former student, Thilo Schaefer: “Frank, together with Patricia McCarney and George Baird, taught ‘Cities’ – the best course I have taken during my time in graduate school. Frank’s thoughtful approach to teaching and his ability to link philosophical ideas to concrete real-world issues have had an enormous impact on me.”

Bob Rae, Canada’s permanent ambassador at the United Nations, while not a former student, knew Prof. Cunningham and recalled in an e-mail: “He was a gentle and thoughtful man, consistently on the left but not dogmatic in his approach to discussion. He was revered by his students and colleagues and was a beloved figure on campus.”

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Prof. Cunningham in 2014.Aaron Tan

Remarkably for someone who did not settle in Canada until his mid-20s, he transformed completely into a Canadian, even learning French so he could communicate with Québécois academics. And he stepped into the shoes of C.B. Macpherson, the most famous – if still contested – political theorist at U of T of an earlier era. He continued to teach Prof. Macpherson’s course after his death in 1987 and in 2019 published The Political Thought of C.B. Macpherson: Contemporary Applications.

After retiring from U of T, Frank Cunningham had moved to Vancouver where he was diagnosed with leukemia in July, 2020. A tough regime of chemotherapy failed to arrest the disease. He died with medical assistance on Feb. 4, aged 81.

Frank Cunningham was born Aug. 5, 1940, into a staunchly Republican family in Evanston, Ill., a Chicago suburb, the eldest of three children of Art Cunningham, an accountant, and Mary (née Gaskins) Cunningham, a homemaker.

A bookish teen, Frank was at odds with his parents from an early age. “He had to read under the covers with a flashlight because his mother didn’t think it was healthy for a boy to read so much when he should be out playing football,” his wife recalled.

In his last book, Ideas in Context – an essay collection available online that is also a memoir of his intellectual development – Prof. Cunningham described his parents’ incomprehension when he campaigned for the Democratic presidential candidate Lyndon Johnson in 1964 against the Republican Barry Goldwater, who was prepared to use nuclear weapons “in the defence of liberty.” “They already thought me abnormal due to my reading habits,” he wrote.

He studied philosophy at Indiana University as an undergrad, where he met a student radical, Charnie Guettel, who became his first wife. When he enrolled in the master’s program at the University of Chicago, he fell in with a group of Jewish students who opened his eyes to the existence of prejudice, which eventually led him to embrace a Marxist perspective.

In 1965, he and Ms. Guettel moved north to the University of Toronto, attracted by its large and varied philosophy department as the place to acquire his doctorate. His parents, he wrote, could not understand how anyone could voluntarily leave the United States.

While still completing his doctorate in 1967, he was hired as a lecturer in philosophy. The same year a son, Will, was born to the young couple but their marriage did not last. Prof. Cunningham met Maryka Omatsu in 1970 when she took his course in political philosophy: “We didn’t date until I was no longer his student, and moved in together in 1972. We raised Will together,” Justice Omatsu recalled.

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Prof. Cunningham and his wife, Justice Maryka Omatsu.Courtesy of the Family

His thesis was published as Objectivity in Social Science (1973), the first of his seven books. He argued that objectivity is possible and desirable – a position rejected by both the extreme left and right. Meanwhile, he had joined the campus club of the Communist Party of Canada, and in 1977 published a primer, Understanding Marxism: A Canadian Introduction.

A decade later Toronto Sun columnist Barbara Amiel called on the university to remove this “crypto-communist” from his teaching position. Prof. Cunningham wanted to sue to force her to retract the word crypto (meaning secret), but was deterred by the cost of legal action. He had never hidden his methods or beliefs. In any event, from the early ′80s on, he abandoned the effort to put socialism and democracy in a Marxist context.

As chair of philosophy from 1982 to 1988, he helped to revitalize the department at U of T, which had not made new hires for some time. He was president of the Canadian Philosophical Association and travelled widely to speak at academic conferences as well as to research conflicts within democracies. After his first book, he wrote only about democratic theory, building bridges between philosophy and political science, a faculty to which he was cross-appointed. He argued that “democracy should be thought of as a matter of degree.”

He supervised 19 doctoral dissertations at U of T, including that of the political philosopher Charles Mills, who died last year – perhaps Prof. Cunningham’s most remarkable student and his close friend. Dr. Mills, who had grown up in Jamaica and became a professor at Northwestern University then at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, was the author of The Racial Contract (1997), the foundational text of Critical Race Theory, which has created a new way to understand the origins of racism.

While principal of Innis College, Prof. Cunningham developed a program to teach philosophy in Regent Park, a public housing development where many residents had never had a chance to go to university. He also conceived a two-year introductory program in philosophy for Ontario high-school students.

His commitment to democracy went beyond the theoretical. He walked the walk, engaging with community organizations whether he lived in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood or later in Vancouver’s crowded West End.

His last position at U of T was teaching in the multidisciplinary Cities Centre, which shut down in 2013. In Vancouver he became adjunct professor of Urban Studies at Simon Fraser University. He formed a community organization, DAWN (an acronym for Denman and West Neighbours), with the author Cynthia Flood to establish communications with the Park Board and with city hall to find out what changes are being planned for the local community centre and library, and make sure area residents would have input.

The writer John Ralston Saul had lived next door to Prof. Cunningham in Toronto, and recalled in an interview: “Frank was a model of what a philosopher should be. He was filled with ideas, which he shared freely, in our case over the fence. He was in the marketplace, in the street, dealing with daily issues.”

His touchstone remained C.B. Macpherson, though he paid a price for it.

In 2012 he participated in a conference on Prof. Macpherson’s key concept of “possessive individualism,” the assumption that the individual owns him or herself and is entirely self-created, rather than shaped by the surrounding society. Held at the University of London, the conference was dominated by the eminent English philosopher Quentin Skinner, one of the noted critics of Prof. Macpherson, and by Prof. Skinner’s acolytes. “Never before or since have I felt so alone, as I presented the only paper taking a positive view of Macpherson’s views,” Prof. Cunningham later wrote. “All the other papers began with cavalier dismissals of Macpherson’s scholarship. My presentation is the only one that did not receive even polite applause.”

Prof. Cunningham leaves his wife, Justice Omatsu; son, Will Cunningham who lives in Texas; sister, Candice David; and brother, Larry Cunningham.

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