Arts and Science at Toronto: A History, 1827-1990 9781442662117

Citation preview

ARTS AND SCIENCE AT TORONTO A History, 1827–1990

This page intentionally left blank

ROBERT CRAIG BROWN

Arts and Science at Toronto A History, 1827–1990

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2013 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4513-4

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Brown, Robert Craig, 1935– Arts and science at Toronto: a history, 1827–1990 / Robert Craig Brown. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4513-4 1. University of Toronto. Faculty of Arts and Science – History. 2. Arts – Study and teaching (Higher) – Ontario – Toronto – History. 3. Science – Study and teaching (Higher) – Ontario – Toronto – History. I. Title. LE3.T52B76 2013

378.713'541

C2012-907217-6

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities. All images courtesy of University of Toronto Archives.

Contents

Preface vii 1 A Provincial University 2 The Faculty of Arts 3 New Beginnings

22 39

4 The Great War

57

5 Between Wars

73

6 A University at War 7 New Realities

94

116

8 The Sixties

133

9 Transformation

157

10 Unfinished Business 11 More Change 12 Renewal Appendices

3

176

205

225 255

A Deans of the Faculty of Arts / Arts and Science B Enrolment in Arts and Science, 1906–71

258

C Enrolment in Arts and Science, 1965–90

260

257

vi

Contents

D Teaching staff in Arts and Science, 1907–8 to 1989–90 for selected years 263 Notes 267 Bibliography

309

Index 315

Preface

The Faculty of Arts and Science – known as the Faculty of Arts until 1960 – is older than the University of Toronto. Its origin is found in the first provincial university in Ontario, King’s College, chartered in 1827 and opened in June 1843 in the Legislative Building at the corner of King and John Streets. The college had four professors in its Faculty of Arts and twenty-seven students. One of the professors, James Beaven, professor of divinity, was elected dean of the Faculty of Arts in 1844. Six years later, in January 1850, the secular University of Toronto became the provincial university, succeeding King’s College, and Beaven was again elected the dean of arts. Yet another University Act in 1853 established a new institution, University College, to teach the students while the university became solely an examining body. The faculty’s professors now taught under the banner of University College. That arrangement lasted until 1890 when, following the Federation Act of 1887, Victoria University joined the University of Toronto in a federal arrangement. The teaching function remained for University College but was also restored for the university. Instruction in the arts was now available at both University College and Victoria in the ‘college subjects’ and at the university, primarily in the sciences and emerging social sciences. Then, in 1901, the eminent biologist Robert Ramsay Wright was named the first dean of the ‘restored’ Faculty of Arts. The University of Toronto was the official provincial university. But from its earliest days as King’s College and then as University of Toronto, it was never intended to be a university for all the people of Ontario. Rather, it was expected that only a small minority of Ontarians would be admitted under carefully supervised criteria for admission. In the early years Ontario residents seeking admission to the provincial

viii

Preface

university had to be graduates of Upper Canada College. As the decades went on, rigorous admissions requirements were maintained. More than that, the university and, of course, the Faculty of Arts, admitted only men. In 1883 five women applied to be admitted to University College. They were promptly turned down by Sir Daniel Wilson, the college president. In March 1884, much to Wilson’s dismay, the provincial legislature passed legislation allowing the admission of women to its university. Wilson was not opposed to admitting women to post-secondary education, but he wanted them to enrol in a separate institution for women. But the will of the legislature prevailed. Three women were admitted to University College and then three more. By the end of the year nine were enrolled. Though the women might have to attend the same lectures as their male fellow students, they were, as much as possible, kept in separate space; compelled to have separate library, dining, and residence facilities and so on. More than a generation later, when Hart House was opened, it too was ‘off limits’ for women, except, of course, for when it was convenient for male students to have women with them at balls and other social events. It was only in 1972 that women enjoyed full and unrestricted access to Hart House. Moreover, the sense of the university – and the faculty – the way it described itself, was male dominant for generations. As late as the 1960s Claude Bissell, perhaps the university’s most innovative president, would speak to large student gatherings, much as had all his predecessors, depicting the student body as the ‘men of the university.’ By the last years of the twentieth century most of those defining traits of the university and its largest faculty, Arts and Science, had passed. Some had even been forgotten. Toronto remained the provincial university, but the presumed exclusivity of its student body had given way to thousands, then tens of thousands, of students in arts and science, young secondary school graduates and senior citizens, with women frequently outnumbering men in some departments and increasing numbers of students from other provinces and other nations, speaking multiple first languages, from dozens of cultural heritages. It has been my desire to tell the story of the growth, the development, and the changes that have taken place in the Faculty of Arts and Science, within the university, in a way that interests the readers of this book. For most of the story I have had access to a large and rich store of resources. My colleague Martin Friedland’s outstanding The University of Toronto: A History had been a constant guide and resource. The student newspapers, especially The

Preface

ix

Varsity, are a treasure of information on student life through the generations and, often, offer a student perspective on significant developments in the Faculty of Arts and Science and the university. The work of other researchers, their theses, articles, and books that touch on the history of Arts and Science has been very important and is noted in the bibliography of this book. But this history begins, and ends, with the University of Toronto Archives. It is the official repository for the records of the university, its faculties, divisions, departments, and other units. And it is also the place where the private records, interviews, photographs, and other documents of former students, supporters, past and present faculty, and friends of the University have recorded their relationships with the University of Toronto. This book ends at the end of the 1980s and the conclusion of the deanship of Professor Robin L. Armstrong. Some of the resource base I have used continues on: The Varsity and other student newspapers; the university’s official paper, The Bulletin; and some other public sources. But much of the key material that provides context, circumstance, and character, expressed in the records of the university’s governing structures, the records of Arts and Science, and those of the faculty’s many departments, centres, and other units, on deposit at the archives, stops in the 1980s. More recent records of these units remain in their current, operating files or are otherwise yet to be deposited in the archives. So it seemed appropriate to me to end my history just a few years short of 150 years after four professors and twenty some students began the work of the Faculty of Arts (and Science) at King’s College in 1843. I was asked to write this history in the Fall of 2005 by Dean Pekka Sinervo of the Faculty of Arts and Science. His support and encouragement, and that of his successor, Dean Meric Gertler, have been of great importance to me. Just as I was about to begin my work, in 2006, new provincial legislation regarding the protection of privacy and access to the official records of the university, closed all such records for 100 years preceding the date of request for access – in my case, all the official records back to the beginning of Sir Robert Falconer’s presidency in 1907. Under strict conditions, with official support, an exception could be granted, and with the support of Dean Sinervo and Ms. Garron Wells, the university archivist, I was given permission to use the resources of official records of the university which are deposited at the archives. Ms. Wells and her staff are a researcher’s treasure. This small and very talented group of people are helpful, friendly, and encouraging beyond

x

Preface

measure, constantly calling my attention to a hard-to-find document here, a group of photos there, an interview I must listen to, a strip of microfilm I must read. Lisa Panayotidis and Paul Stortz of the University of Calgary, both accomplished scholars of the history of the Faculty of Arts and Science at Toronto, have been most generous in sharing portions of their work with me. Numerous other colleagues in the faculty and university have provided a helpful suggestion or answered a question for me over the years I have worked on this book. And four people, Mr Harold Averill at the archives, who knows more about the history of the University of Toronto than would seem possible, Mr Peter Harris, former secretary and assistant dean in the Faculty of Arts and Science, Professor Robert Greene of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and former dean of Arts and Science, and Professor Mark McGowan, principal of St  Michael’s College, have read my chapters, made corrections and comments, recommended changes, and added their several perspectives on the history of the faculty. I am deeply grateful to each of them. The merit in this work is theirs; the faults are mine. Finally, this book is dedicated to the students and faculty, past and present, of the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto. Robert Craig Brown, FRSC Emeritus Professor of History

ARTS AND SCIENCE AT TORONTO A History, 1827–1990

This page intentionally left blank

1 A Provincial University

The idea of a provincial university was as old as the province itself. Following the American Revolution and the movement of Imperial Loyalists into the western part of the old Province of Quebec at Kingston and the Niagara Peninsula, the Constitution Act of 1791 had divided Quebec into two new provinces, Lower and Upper Canada. In the same year the Imperial Government appointed Lieutenant Colonel John Graves Simcoe, a veteran of the revolutionary war, as Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada. An ambitious man, Simcoe arrived in Upper Canada in the summer of 1792 with a head full of plans for the rapid development of his new province, including one for a provincial university. Simcoe had even mooted the subject of ‘a college of a higher class’ before embarking from England for Upper Canada. He returned to the idea once in Upper Canada, writing that he could not foretell when a university could be established, but he was ‘daily confirmed in its necessity.’1 Simcoe’s university would not be to serve the tiny but growing general European population of Upper Canada. Rather, it would be for the ‘education of the superior classes of the country,’2 a notion that remained a centrepiece of post-secondary education in the province for decades to come. Like governors to follow, and the province’s minuscule commercial, political, and religious elite, Simcoe feared that without a provincial institution of higher learning their sons would slip away to colleges in the United States, where they would become indoctrinated with dangerous republican ideology which could subvert the loyal ties of British North America to the imperial Crown. He pleaded with the imperial government for £1000 a year to support preparatory schools at Kingston and Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake) and a university in the provincial

4 Arts and Science at Toronto

capital of York. He failed. His superiors in London, while sympathetic, thought the idea premature.3 Gradually the support system for a provincial university fell into place. In 1807 a Grammar School Act provided some public support for a tuition-based grammar school for boys ‘of the superior classes’ in each district of Upper Canada. Then, in 1816, the provincial legislature established district boards of education and provided annual funding to support one common (primary) school for each district.4 (Publicly supported secondary schools, high schools, only became part of the public system after passage of the Common Schools Act of 1871.)5 Then, in 1825, Lieutenant Governor Sir Peregrine Maitland made a new request for a university at York. The following Spring Maitland dispatched John Strachan, the archdeacon of York, to England to plead the case for several matters, with a provincial university and the funds to support it high on Strachan’s list. The timing was much better than in Simcoe’s day. The provincial capital had grown to perhaps more than 10,000 people – historical geographer Graeme Wynn has noted that there were 13,000 people at York in 1832, just half a decade later. Along King Street impressive public buildings were being built as well as mansions for the town’s affluent merchants. Hiding behind, just to the north and away from the view from the lakeshore, were the little cottages of the town’s immigrants and labourers. The beginnings of a system of roads to the east, west, and north from York was developing, most usable in winter, but crude, muddy, and nearly impassable in spring and summer. As early as 1817 a winter weekly stagecoach service ran between York and Kingston, a trip of two to four days; by the early 1830s there was somewhat faster daily service on the route, except for Saturdays and Sundays. In summer, also, regular steamship service connected York with other ports on Lake Ontario. Strachan’s mission was a success. What he wanted was a Church of England college that would be open to everyone and with no religious test except for divinity students and the professors serving on the university’s governing body. To support it Strachan pressed for a generous grant of Crown lands which could be sold to settlers to provide funds for the college. On 31 March 1827, Lord Bathurst announced the grant of a royal charter for King’s College to be established at York, Upper Canada. The college would have an endowment of more than 225,000 acres of Crown lands. The Anglican bishop of Quebec would be the college visitor and the lieutenant governor would be the chancellor. The

A Provincial University

5

archdeacon, Strachan, would be the college president. The college’s council would be made of up the chancellor, the president, and seven professors, all of whom would be adherents to the thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England. Strachan returned home to York, triumphant, later in 1827. Soon he and the other King’s College councillors were selling Crown lands to gather funds to purchase property for their college. In 1828 they acquired a 150-acre plot, the northern half of three ‘park lots’ that ran up from the lakeshore to the northwest of the town – now the site of the Government of Ontario and the University of Toronto – to establish King’s College. But from the day of Strachan’s arrival back in York there was trouble. Strachan’s fierce determination to have an established church with an established provincial university, in a province where the Church of England’s adherents were a distinct minority, was unwelcome to Upper Canada’s Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist inhabitants. Specifically, reserving the revenue from the sale of the Crown lands exclusively to the Anglican King’s College and explicitly excluding other denominations from funds for their own plans for institutions of higher learning, such as a Methodist Victoria in Cobourg and a Presbyterian Queen’s at Kingston, infuriated non-Anglicans. Stirred by a high-pitched campaign against the scheme by Egerton Ryerson, editor of the Methodist Christian Guardian and soon to be founder of the Methodist Victoria College at Cobourg, opposition to the privileged King’s College grew. It was not King’s that angered; Upper Canadians who cared about higher education supported the idea of a provincial university. It was the exclusive right to funding of Anglican King’s that set tempers aflame. And just at this time Maitland was appointed lieutenant governor of the Province of Nova Scotia, with Sir John Colborne succeeding him as lieutenant governor of Upper Canada. Colborne, to quell the outcry in his province and as chancellor of the new college, halted development of King’s College. In his mind the college was not only causing denominational discontent, but was also still a bit premature. He believed that in 1828 a good preparatory school, supported by the province, was more important, and he began to take steps to create Upper Canada College as the province’s stepping stone to the provincial university.6 There the matter rested for a decade and a half as sniping over the issues of establishment and access to the revenue from the sale of Crown lands continued. In 1840, in response to the rebellions of 1837 and to Lord Durham’s report on the state of affairs in British North America, the imperial

6 Arts and Science at Toronto

parliament passed an Act of Union which joined Lower and Upper Canada together in one province with one legislature and equal representation from Lower Canada with its 650,000 inhabitants and Upper Canada with a population of 450,000.7 The creation of the new province, with a temporary capital at Kingston, was overseen by its governor general, Lord Sydenham. He was soon replaced by Sir Charles Bagot, who arrived in Kingston in January 1842. Among Bagot’s responsibilities was his role in Upper Canada as chancellor of the yetto-be-established King’s College. He was anxious to put an end to the years of squabbling over the university issue and, together with his colleagues on the government-appointed council, drew up plans for the appointment of professors to the prospective college. And in April, just three months after his arrival, Bagot was in Toronto, formerly York, to lay the cornerstone for King’s College.8 The building was on the present site of the Ontario Legislature at Queen’s Park, at the top of what Charles Dickens, who visited the city a few days later, called a ‘long avenue, which is already planted and made available as a public walk.’9 Later that year the college council, guided by Bishop Strachan as president, appointed its first professors. Reverend John McCaul, principal of Upper Canada College, became the vice-president and professor of classics. Reverend James Beaven was professor of divinity, and in 1844 would be elected dean of the Faculty of Arts by the council. Richard Potter was the first professor of mathematics and Henry Holmes Croft was appointed professor of chemistry. There was also to be a faculty of law, and Hon. W.H. Draper was named its professor of civil and common law. He declined the appointment, which was then given to William Hume Blake. In addition, Dr Henry Sullivan was appointed curator of the anatomical and pathological museum and demonstrator in anatomy. Somewhat later five professors were appointed to the King’s Faculty of Medicine.10 King’s College officially opened on 8 June 1843 in the legislative buildings at Front and John Streets in the city of Toronto. For most of the remainder of the decade that was its location. The building at Queen’s Park, when finished, went unused for two years and then became the college’s residence until, in 1849, the provincial government returned to Toronto and the college had to move. Twenty-seven students attended the first class when instruction began in August 1843. Admission standards were rigorous. Each applicant had to be examined personally by the president or vice-president in Greek and Latin, one prose and one poetry author in each language, and in mathematics

A Provincial University

7

on the first two books of Euclid’s Elements and simple and quadratic equations. Each applicant had to be sixteen years of age, and only young men who had attended Upper Canada College qualified for admission. They were enrolled in a three-year program modelled on Trinity College, Dublin: no fourth year was offered for some years to come. A typical program of study was like that at Victoria College in Cobourg and included classes in ancient sciences or classics, mathematical and physical science, moral science or philosophy, rhetoric and belles lettres, and theology. In the King’s College years there were no options offered to the students.11 Only the professors and divinity students had to meet a religious test, though most of the professors and students were, in fact, adherents of the Church of England.12 In 1848 a provincial election resulted in the formation of a new reform ministry headed by Robert Baldwin from Canada West and LouisHippolyte La Fontaine from Canada East. Long a champion of university reform, Baldwin in 1843 had brought in a bill to create a new non-sectarian ‘University of Toronto,’ with which denominational colleges such as Queen’s or Victoria could affiliate as divinity schools and receive minor grants from the public purse. The bill died on the Order Paper. Back in office in 1849, Baldwin tried again. His new bill called for abrupt change. Provincial higher education would be centralized and secularized in a new University of Toronto which, together with Upper Canada College, would have exclusive access to the university endowments. The university would be controlled by the government of the day and be internally governed by a university senate. Upper Canada’s denominational colleges, including Queen’s, Victoria, and Catholic Regiopolis at Kingston, as in the 1843 bill, could affiliate with the new provincial university and have a seat on the university senate. They could confer degrees in divinity, but conferring degrees in all other fields would be the exclusive prerogative of the provincial university. The university could not impose religious tests on either its professors or students and it could not offer divinity courses. Baldwin’s bill passed and on 1 January 1850, the University of Toronto was born.13 The University Act created a storm: all the major denominations – Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics – protested against the new legislation. The Anglicans, loyal supporters of King’s College, were especially angered, believing they had been betrayed by the Baldwin–La Fontaine government. They filled the public and church press with charges that the Province had created a ‘Godless’ institution.

8 Arts and Science at Toronto

‘The desecrated and creedless precincts of Toronto University,’ The Church, an Anglican paper, cried, were steeped in ‘the moral degradation of what might have been an illustrious and heaven-blessed seat of learning, but which now, alas, can only be regarded as an ulcer-spot upon [this] misgoverned land.’14 Chief spokesman of the opponents was Bishop Strachan, who had resigned the presidency of King’s just a year before. Strachan set out to avenge the betrayal. In 1851 he founded another new denominational university, the University of Trinity College on land on Queen Street, west of the city on the present site of Trinity-Bellwoods Park.15 Trinity opened its doors in 1852. Strachan fondly hoped that Trinity would force the University of Toronto to fail by attracting most of the city’s Anglican students. Initially it seemed to be so; apparently there were no new students admitted to the university in 1852–3, and hence there was no graduating class of 1855. But gradually the students came. Twenty-eight matriculating students enrolled in 1854 and by the end of its first decade, in 1860–1, the University of Toronto had 129 students.16 The University Act of 1849 gave the University of Toronto three faculties, Arts, Law, and Medicine, and transferred the professors of the former King’s College to the new university. Among them, James McCaul, professor of classics, became the first president of the University of Toronto, and served the university loyally as an administrator and scholar for another three decades. Another was the former professor of divinity at King’s, James Beaven. Because the university was forbidden to teach theology, Beaven needed a new title, and became professor of metaphysics and ethics. Beaven abhorred his association with the university and initially resigned. But the Governor General, Lord Elgin, refused to accept his resignation. Because of strained relations with Strachan, Beaven had no chance of going to Trinity and, with nowhere else to go, stayed on at Toronto. The act also provided that each of Toronto’s faculties be presided over by a dean who was to be elected annually by the professors in that faculty. Despite his animosity to the university, which lessened only slightly in the two decades before his retirement, Beaven, as previously at King’s, was elected dean of arts at Toronto.17 The university also had the benefit of inheriting the former King’s library of some 4500 books. Robert Blackburn, long-time librarian at Toronto, estimated that some 2000 of these were in arts, an equal number in science and medicine, and the remainder in theology.18 The University of Toronto had just begun to function when the province imposed yet another major change. Sir Francis Hincks’s government, in an attempt to dampen the continuing controversy over the

A Provincial University

9

‘Godless’ university, vested all of the endowment and property of the university in the provincial government. The government also took the teaching responsibilities away from the university and gave them to another new institution, University College. Using the University of London as a model, the Act of 1853, which Egerton Ryerson had helped to draft, made the University of Toronto ‘solely an examining body.’ The university could determine which subjects would be taught by its constituent parts, it could confer degrees, and it would conduct and supervise examinations. In effect, the Act of 1853 abolished the Faculty of Arts and replaced it with University College as the instructional unit of the university responsible for all arts and science subjects. The act also established a senate to be presided over by the chancellor. The senate’s membership was appointed by the government and included representatives from the province’s denominational colleges. It was the governing body of the university and all its statutes had to be approved by the government. The act also abolished the faculties of medicine and law. University College was to be administered by a president (McCaul, who was no longer president of the university) and a council. Independent of the senate, the college council’s statutes also had to be approved by the government. In short, the Government of Ontario appointed the members of the senate, had a veto power over all the legislation of both the university and the college, and made all the university’s professional and administrative appointments.19 In 1851 a commission of visitation, established by the Act of 1849, reported that in the Faculty of Arts there were professors in only four subjects, classics, chemistry, mathematics, and philosophy. It recommended new appointments in natural philosophy (physics), natural history (biology), modern languages, and agriculture and the establishment of a school of engineering. By 1853 there were chairs of agriculture, natural history, and modern languages. Physics remained a responsibility of the chair of mathematics, J.B. Cherriman, for several more years. Edward J. Chapman, chair of geology and mineralogy, was also charged with responsibility for engineering. Daniel Wilson, who had studied at Edinburgh and written authoritatively in archeology, was appointed professor of history and English literature and the chair of modern languages was given to James Forneri. An applicant for the chair in natural history was Thomas Henry Huxley, but Premier Hincks had other plans. His brother, Reverend William Hincks, was given the appointment.20 One of the first acts of the senate in the new regime was to establish a four-year honour bachelor of arts degree to complement the three-year

10 Arts and Science at Toronto

degree that had been offered since 1843. In the first year students took Greek, Latin, mathematics, chemistry, botany, zoology, English, French, history, natural theology, and Evidences of Christianity. Second year required lectures in Greek, Latin, chemistry, mineralogy and geology, English, history, French or German or Hebrew, logic, ethics, and metaphysics. A student who sought the new four-year degree did Greek and Latin or English, French and German, mineralogy, geology and physical geography, astronomy, and more of the same in third year, and acoustics or chemistry or meteorology, history, and geography in his final year.21 The calendar of University College in 1857–8, among the earliest of the university, classified the students into three categories. ‘Undergraduates’ were students who had passed matriculation examinations in the college (the first year of studies at University College was a student’s ‘senior matriculation’ year) or in any university in the British Empire. ‘Students’ were those who wished to attend two or more courses of lectures, while ‘Occasional Students’ were those who desired to attend one course of lectures. Examinations were formal affairs. Sir Daniel Wilson once described the setting of the two-day matriculation examination at the college. ‘These are managed with all becoming pomp and formality, and at the same time with a degree of strictness such as would frighten some of our Scottish students … The examining professor enters in full costume preceded by the College beadle bearing the mace, and is received by all the students standing uncovered.’22 A course of lectures might be offered for five or six times in a week, for three or four times, or for one or two times. Fees for attendance were respectively six dollars, four dollars, or three dollars for an academic year depending on the number of times a course met in a week. If a student enrolled in all courses of lectures for a full year the fee was twenty dollars. Ten dollars was charged for the Michaelmas (today’s winter) term and twelve dollars for the Easter (today’s spring) term. All fees had to be paid in advance.23 Student life in the period was carefully regulated by the college and university. The college gates were opened and closed at regular hours each day and there were specified times when visitors might enter the college residence. The young men of University College were expected to wear academic gowns and took their meals in college at appointed times. Historian Brian McKillop observes that the ‘university student was regarded less as a young adult than as an older child; the university itself acted as a parental body.’ At University College the students’ parents were assured, ‘The council will afford every facility for carrying

A Provincial University

11

out your intentions, and with this view, will exercise such control over your son during his residence, as may be best calculated to effect your wishes.’ The ‘Godless’ university’s students had religious obligations which included morning and evening prayers, Sunday services, and regular reading of the Scriptures, all in the Church of England tradition. Canadian universities, McKillop adds, ‘intended to nurture an environment in which the student would assimilate knowledge within the framework of Christian assumptions, for in the Christian Logos was seen to lie the source of all academic truth.’24 But not all non-academic life was rigidly controlled. Between 1850 and 1890 the number of student-run or oriented activities steadily grew. In 1854 the newly arrived Daniel Wilson started the first student organization at Toronto, a literary and debating society, the origin of the University College Literary and Scientific Society. The society had its own reading room supplied with periodicals and became known for its Friday evening meetings and occasional public debates.25 In athletics the University Cricket Club began in 1869 and a University College Football Club following Rugby rules started in 1877. Two years later a UC Football Association was formed. The first student newspaper, The Maple Leaf, appeared at King’s College in 1846. At the university the students organized a newspaper, The Blue and White, in 1879, superseded the following year by the Varsity. The year 1879 also witnessed the birth of the University Glee Club and the formation of a chapter of an American fraternity, Zeta Psi. Echoing interests in the larger Toronto community, the University College YMCA started in 1873, and a decade later the college’s students formed their own Temperance League. At University College the students organized a Natural Science Club in 1867. By the 1880s there were student organizations in many of the ‘honour courses’: the Natural Science Association in 1880, Modern Languages Club in 1881, and Historical and Political Science Association in 1885. Throughout the 1850s the college and university moved from place to place. In 1853 the provincial legislature returned to Toronto and the university went back to the old legislative building on Front Street. In 1854 it was back at Queen’s Park, but in 1856 that building was appropriated by the government for a mental asylum and the university moved to a small building named Moss Hall, formerly the home of the Faculty of Medicine, on the east side of Tattle Creek. That same year, in October, the cornerstone of the elaborate new University College building was laid. In October 1859 University College opened and the college and university had a grand new home.26

12 Arts and Science at Toronto

Premier Hinck’s University Act of 1853 did not resolve the university question in Canada West. As the number of denominational colleges continued to grow, with each entitled to a seat on the university senate but no access to financial support from the province, the tensions and differences remained. Not least was this true at the university itself, where its own two seats on the senate were dwarfed by both the government and denominational college members. There was more change to come. In 1867 the new Province of Ontario addressed the funding issue in one of its first acts. No longer would the University of Toronto and Upper Canada College have exclusive access to the university endowment. Instead, a portion of the annual funding went to several of the province’s denominational colleges: $5000 to Queen’s and to Victoria; $4000 to Trinity; $3000 to Regiopolis; $2000 to St Michael’s, which had started in Toronto in 1852; $1400 to the University of Ottawa and $1000 to Assumption College. In 1873, Premier Oliver Mowat’s government passed another university act that edged towards a second, more fundamental, change. It amended the representation on the senate. Henceforth, only institutions formally affiliated with the University of Toronto would have a seat. The others, such as Queen’s, Trinity, and Victoria, would not. And, instead of a significant number of seats occupied by government appointees, the act gave fifteen places to members who were to be elected by the convocation of the University of Toronto. St Michael’s affiliated in 1881, and in 1884 Knox College, the Toronto Baptist College, and Wycliffe College followed.27 Now some senior officials at the university, led by William Mulock, the vice chancellor, began to take an interest in the possibilities of federation. At the same time, denominational institutions like Victoria found it harder and harder to keep up with evolving changes in curriculum spurred by a rapidly expanding base of knowledge, especially in the sciences. President Samuel Nelles of Victoria voiced the dilemma: one professor of natural history would no longer do and his college simply could not afford to hire new professors or equip new laboratories to offer an acceptable program in the sciences. A correspondence initiated by Mulock led to a meeting of representatives of all provincial institutions in the office of the minister of education, George W. Ross, in July 1884. In December more meetings took place between Nelles, Principal Nathanael Burwash of Victoria, and Mulock. University College president Daniel Wilson, Professor James Loudon, and Principal Caven of Knox represented the Toronto senate. Burwash sketched out a

A Provincial University

13

scheme of federation which might enable the denominational colleges to join with the university. In essence, Burwash’s plan was straightforward: have all the colleges, University College and the potential federated colleges, secular or sectarian, teach the arts, restore the teaching role of the university, and have it offer the more expensive science and professional programs. There, in its simplest form, was the core of a scheme that could work.28 The idea was presented to the various Ontario institutions. At Toronto it passed through the University College council and university senate without amendment. But neither Queen’s nor Trinity were interested. Principal Grant, in Kingston, was blunt: ‘There is nothing in it for Queen’s.’29 Knox and Wycliffe, their ambitions confined to training in theology, opted to continue their existing affiliation agreements with the university. Another denominational institution, the Toronto Baptist College on Bloor Street (now the site of the Royal Conservatory of Music), took the occasion to assert its independence and move towards becoming a separate arts and divinity institution, McMaster University, in 1887. And St Michael’s continued the special arrangement it had had since 1881 with the university. Its students could take their degrees through the university and much of their course work at University College. But the Roman Catholic college would teach and conduct examinations in some arts subjects such as philosophy where the University College curriculum was not deemed to be appropriate for its students. At Victoria the decision, which could involve moving the college from Cobourg to Toronto, was first supported and then opposed by Nelles and Burwash. A decision was left to the Methodist Church Conference which, in 1886, finally approved federation by a narrow margin, but only after several days of debate.30 Premier Mowat was sympathetic to the concept of federation. In April 1887 the provincial legislature passed the University Federation Act, which again restructured the university and defined the parameters of federation. The former regained its mandate to teach, together with University College. University College and the university would each have a council to deal with such matters as ‘student societies and discipline.’ When the act came into force, the president of University College, Daniel Wilson, would also become the president of the Council of the University of Toronto.31 The University’s senate remained its supreme legislative body, dealing with academic matters. Ten members of the senate, including the provincial minister of education, would represent the government of Ontario, which, in addition to retaining its role

14 Arts and Science at Toronto

as the appointing body for the university’s president and professors, would also have to approve all senate statutes. The potential federated colleges and affiliates, St Michael’s, Wycliffe, and Knox, could teach divinity. The university could not.32 The act would come into place only when Victoria agreed to move to Toronto. That college and its Methodist sponsors again dawdled as the town of Cobourg offered money to stay. Then, in 1889, when William Gooderham’s estate offered $200,000 to Victoria on condition it move to Toronto, the college senate and the Methodist conference finally approved the move. At last, the Federation Act was proclaimed on 12 November 1890. Victoria University in the University of Toronto opened its new building on campus two years later, in October 1892.33 Deciding which subjects would be taught by the colleges, Victoria and University, and which by the university was not the straightforward task that President Nelles had envisaged in 1884. It was clear that the university would teach the sciences – through University College – because it was already doing so, and Victoria did not have the capacity to do so. It was the division and assignment of arts subjects that complicated matters. University College and Victoria would not teach all the arts subjects. Instead, they – and eventually St Michael’s and Trinity – taught English, French, German, Semitics, Latin, and Greek. Victoria had no capacity and little student interest in Italian and Spanish, so these disciplines became, like the sciences, university subjects. University College and Victoria taught ancient history, but, no doubt because of the influence of Wilson, medieval and modern history became university subjects. Similarly, the colleges taught ethics, but philosophy was given to the university.34 The Federation Act also mandated the teaching of ‘Political Science (including Economics, Jurisprudence, and Constitutional Law)’.35 Political science, or political economy as it would later be styled,36 was yet another reflection of the changing base of knowledge and of the interests of the emerging commercial and business forces in Ontario. Social science, itself, was in a nascent state of development, but as early as 1882 a senate committee had recommended the university initiate new programs in political science, constitutional law, and physiology. The recommendation also asked for more professors or lecturers in several subjects and additional demonstrators, tutors, and fellows to assist with the teaching loads of the university and University College.37 In 1884 the senate accepted a proposal from Chancellor Edward Blake and Vice Chancellor Mulock that a course in political science be taught. But

A Provincial University

15

the University College council baulked, fearing that this would open the door to ‘party politics’ in the institution and believing that no Canadian could possibly teach such a sensitive subject without political bias. The Federation Act settled the issue. Political science became a university subject, and it was decided that the only way to ensure bias-free instruction would be to appoint a non-Canadian to teach it. As so often in the nineteenth century, under provincial government rule, Premier Oliver Mowat, accompanied to England by Chancellor Blake, turned to Oxford to find the right person: economist William James Ashley, who had been trained in the emerging school of empirical economic analysis. Ashley took up his post as professor of political economy and law in 1888 and stayed until 1892, when he took an appointment at Harvard. In due time political economy, the senior discipline in the social sciences, became the departmental parent of several other social science disciplines including economics, commerce with its separate course and degree program, sociology, and some aspects of the Faculty of Law.38 The implementation of federation and the division of teaching responsibilities between the university and the colleges put in place the foundation structures, administrative and academic, of the University of Toronto. Both were a melange of compromises, compromises that would become a continuing feature of the university and characteristic of the relations between the university and the colleges. The challenge in the last decade of the old century was to make these compromises work. In 1880, just before the movement to federation began, there were 349 students enrolled in University College. The graduating class of that year had 54 students, eight of whom were from the city of Toronto.39 Of the remaining forty-five, forty had grown up on farms.40 Students in the 1880s proceeded to their degrees in a much different fashion than had the few dozens of young men who were enrolled in University College in the 1850s. Vestiges of the traditional educational goals of the mid-century remained in the curriculum, not the least being the required studies in the classical languages. But training a tiny portion of a small Christian-oriented elite, many adhering to the doctrines of the Church of England, to lead a rural colonial society was no longer a mission of the university. And, as early as the 1860s, Presbyterians were nearly as numerous as Anglicans in the student body. By the 1880s, on the brink of Canada’s industrial age, the small but growing enrolment at the provincial university needed more diversity, more access to  new approaches and knowledge bases, more training for practical

16 Arts and Science at Toronto

living in a rapidly transforming city and province. The redefining of the university mirrored the changing ambitions of the city of Toronto. At 80,000 people it was double the size it had been in the early 1850s, and by 1890 it would be bigger still. Toronto had become the hub of a growing network of railways that connected the provincial capital with Montreal and the Maritime provinces, with south-western Ontario, and the American midwestern heartland and, by the end of the decade, with faraway Vancouver. It boasted a growing industrial economy with families like the Masseys, later benefactors of the university, who controlled a large portion of agricultural-implement manufacturing in Canada.41 Beyond that, Toronto was the undisputed commercial and financial centre of Ontario. It remained a city of churches and churchgoers, but more and more the wonders of science and technology captured the imagination of the public. The public, in turn, looked to a new cadre of professors of the sciences and arts at ‘its’ university to explain the possibilities and the consequences of a profusion of new innovations and discoveries across the spectrum of knowledge. Beginning in the 1870s this new group of professors, many with an earned senior degree and some with doctorates from German universities or a handful of American institutions like Johns Hopkins University or Princeton, took appointments at Toronto. In 1871 the professor of natural history, Reverend Hincks, died and was replaced by H.A. Nicholson, a Scots scientist who stayed only two years before taking an appointment at Durham in England. Robert Ramsay Wright, a twentytwo-year-old Edinburgh-trained scientist, was then appointed professor of natural history and curator of the Museum of Natural History. Wright was a Darwinian, itself a major sign of change, and a scientist whose superior teaching skills were equalled by his productive research career. In 1875, when J.B. Cherriman retired from the professorship of mathematics and physics, his replacement was James Loudon, the first Canadian-born, Canadian-educated appointment as professor in the university. Loudon, in turn, appointed another Toronto graduate, Alfred Baker, as tutor in mathematics while he concentrated on physics. Loudon also played a major role in persuading the Ontario government to establish a school of practical science. The SPS affiliated with the university, and in 1878 opened a building (on the present site of the Medical Sciences Building) which shared its laboratory space with the university’s chemistry, biology, and mineralogy and geology departments. In his space in University College physicist Loudon created the first laboratory in Canada to instruct students from both UC and the SPS in

A Provincial University

17

James Loudon’s physical science laboratory (A1965-0004/031 [1.91])

physical science.42 Then, in 1888, the mathematics and physics professorship was divided. Loudon again retained the physics appointment and Baker was appointed professor of mathematics. And in 1880, when Croft retired, his successor in chemistry was William H. Pike, from England. Like his contemporaries, Pike was beginning to interpret experimental phenomena by using mathematical and physical principles. Chemistry, departmental historians Brook and McBryde explain, ‘was slowly transforming itself from an art, based mainly on experience and intuition, to a science, which could explain or interpret events by a limited set of principles.’43 Parallel changes were taking place in the arts. The chair of modern languages was abolished in 1866 and its incumbent, Forneri, took up a lectureship in Italian. Similar appointments were made in French and German. When James Beaven died, George Paxton Young, a theologian sympathetic to Darwinism, was appointed professor of metaphysics and logic. And when the professorship of English and history was split, Wilson retained the appointment in history. Two Canadians, W.J. Alexander, at Dalhousie, and Charles G.D. Roberts, at King’s College in Windsor, Nova Scotia, vied for the new professorship of English. Each

18 Arts and Science at Toronto

had champions at Toronto. Alexander recalled his visit to Toronto at the end of Michaelmas term in 1888 to make his case. ‘I remember scarcely anything about that visit,’ he wrote, except my calls in the interest of my candidacy on various persons – especially Sir Daniel Wilson [the president of University College], Sir Oliver Mowat [the premier] … and G.W. Ross [the minister of education]. In those days the appointment was in the hands of the government. I got along excellently with Sir Daniel; he told me, before I left, that all his influence would be in my favour. Upon Mowat I conjecture that I made a favourable impression. With regard to Ross’s support I was very doubtful.44

Alexander need not have been worried: his appointment was announced by the government in January 1889. Wilson was relieved. ‘So the agony is over and I am contented.’ he wrote in his diary.45 In the arts, then, during these years the traditional authority of classics and the classical languages gradually gave way to the vernacular, to the modern languages, and most especially to English.46 Since 1854 the university had offered both a three-year and a fouryear ‘course.’ Gradually the distinctions between the two were defined. In the four-year course there were ‘fixed’ and ‘variable’ courses of study, the latter offering limited choice. The calendar for 1877 was the first to clearly designate the three-year program as the ‘Pass Course.’47 That same year honour courses were introduced for four-year students, each of which belonged to a ‘graduating’ department like chemistry, natural history, English, or history. Students taking the ‘pass course’ could expect a broad range of required subjects with few options if any. ‘Honour course’ students also had few options, but studied a particular subject or set of related subjects intensively to gain a more specialized base of knowledge. The unique feature of the Toronto ‘honour course’ was that each student had to earn honour standing (equivalent to B standing or above) in each year of study. Failure to do so meant failure in the honour course, with the only recourse being reverting to the pass course to earn a Toronto degree.48 The most dramatic change at the University of Toronto before 1890 was the admission of women to the student body. This too was a reflection of changing trends in Toronto and Ontario society. During the decades after 1850 the public school system expanded rapidly across the province, especially at the primary school level. That, in turn, created an

A Provincial University

19

Scene from the 11–12 April 1882 production of Antigone, put on in University College, by the students of the college (B1965-1149 [01])

ever-growing demand for trained teachers, which led to increasing interest by women in gaining access to higher education. That interest was strongly supported by George W. Ross, the minister of education. In 1881 the university senate opened university scholarships to women applicants. This ignited a major controversy at University College, where President Wilson was resolutely opposed to the admission of women to his college. It was not that Wilson was opposed to women gaining access to university education; he was opposed to co-education in the same institution. As historian Carl Berger writes, Wilson believed that ‘mixing young men and women in their most excitable years would only distract their attention from their studies.’ Thus, in 1883, when five women applied for admission to University College, Wilson summarily rejected their applications.49 Instead, he argued, women should have a separate women’s college though he, himself, had no interest in seeing one established. His role, he said, was to provide ‘steady passive resistance’ to the admission of women to his College.50 Over the years of debate the Varsity vacillated on the issue. Initially it was an advocate for co-education, but by 1883 it supported Wilson. Coeducation, the paper argued, was just one of a number of new social

20 Arts and Science at Toronto

movements, like temperance a decade earlier, that swept though Canada’s growing middle class in society. ‘Many of our modern movements,’ the editor wrote, ‘are based on over-wrought sentimentality. We believe Co-education to be just one of those movements, and therefore dangerous, and to be resisted. Perhaps it is the more dangerous because it appeals to some extent to chivalry, but we believe that however pretty it may be in theory, it will not stand the test of the realities of life.’51 ‘Steady passive resistance’ did not work. In March 1884, a motion in the provincial legislature to admit women to University College was passed after a brief debate. Now Wilson had no choice: the provincial government was, after all, the master of all matters at the University of Toronto. Still, Wilson doggedly pursued his delaying tactics a while longer, holding up the passage of the necessary Order in Council by the government until October 1884. It included a Wilson-inspired provision that a ‘Lady Superintendent’ be appointed to supervise the female students.52 Three students attended lectures on 6 October and three more a week later. By the end of the year nine women were taking classes at University College.53 Wilson still would not surrender. The men and a growing number of women attended lectures together, but otherwise Wilson arranged separate, improvised space for the female students, including a separate study room near the College Library to prevent, as much as possible, direct contact between the men and women.54 And, in 1890, Wilson intervened to prevent Kate Taunsett, a Boston suffragette, from speaking to the women undergraduates.55 Not Wilson’s last word perhaps, but his last faint whisper on the subject of women in his college. Between the early 1840s and the late 1880s the provincial university underwent a series of startling changes. Within its first decade a small religious-based college became a secular university and quickly transformed itself into a model of the University of London, with the university being an examining body and a new institution, University College, being its teaching part. The changes instituted by the provincial government were less inspired by academic need than by political advantage. For the remaining three decades the provincial university grew, slowly but surely, and its constituency changed, also slowly but surely. The changes echoed changes in the province itself: towns were becoming cities, commercial agriculture supplanted subsistence agriculture, crafts and trades were becoming industries, trails became roads, and railways changed nearly everything. Denominational and interdenominational

A Provincial University

21

quarrels over access to the university endowment never ceased, but the provincial government in the new confederation paid less and less heed as it turned its attention to development and growth. In the end it was a denominational college in Cobourg, Victoria, which opened the door to a new relationship between the religious colleges and the secular university. Federation was beginning to work in the dominion and the province saw it could work in the university too. The Federation Act, curious as it was, returning a teaching function to the university and dividing disciplines into university and college subjects, would serve the provincial university well. Its principles lasted for nearly a century.

2 The Faculty of Arts

The Faculty of Arts was in limbo in 1887. It would remain there for almost a decade more. Tiny King’s College, limping along with a handful of students in the 1840s,1 had had a dean and a Faculty of Arts. So too did the University of Toronto in 1850. But the 1853 University Act swept the faculty, de jure, away, putting University College in its place. In the simplest terms, the president of the college took the place of the dean, the college professoriate, the faculty. The Federation Act of 1887 complicated matters. For now there were two teaching entities, University College and the university itself, each with a professoriate and a council. University College had a president; the university a chancellor (Edward Blake), a vice chancellor (William Mulock), and a president of the university council (who happened to also be the University College president). As before 1887, the university senate presided over all academic matters. But though not recognized in law or as an academic unit within the university, ‘Arts’ existed de facto and was recognized as such throughout the university and University College. Similarly, Victoria College had a de jure faculty of arts in the University of Toronto after 1890. Outsiders might be pardoned their confusion: the historical record suggests that the leaders of the university seemed to revel in the byzantine politics and befuddling concessions and compromises occasioned by the 1887 act. To most of the students, professors, lecturers, demonstrators, assistants, and fellows in the de facto Faculty of Arts, the machinery of the university mattered not. Their minds were on more immediate matters. One of those matters was a devastating fire. Valentine’s Day, 1890, was a very special day at University College. The building was full of activity that Friday because, in addition to classes,

The Faculty of Arts

23

dozens of staff and students were making preparations for the UC Lit’s annual conversazione. Almost 3000 people were expected to attend that evening’s literary readings and concerts, to view the scientific exhibits and demonstrations, and to ‘promenade’ (dancing was strictly forbidden at the college) to two different bands. As darkness fell, two staff members carried a tray of lit kerosene lanterns – there was no electricity in the college at the time – up the broad wooden southeast staircase to illuminate the upper library (now East Hall). James McLean, a college student, picks up the story in a letter to his sister the following Sunday. Goodwin [one of the staff members] is lame and stumbled on the stairs leading to the library. One of the lamps slipped, fell, and ignited. Then Goodwin dropped the tray. The oil ran down the stairs and the whole stairway was aflame in a moment. … Once lighted the big stairway burned furiously. All the rooms were decorated for the evening and the bunting on the walls caused the fire to spread so rapidly that the library was half destroyed before the firemen came. When they did come they could do not a thing. The pressure was so low that they could not throw a stream 15 ft. high while the flames were up from 40 to 120 ft. … but nothing was done that should have been done and everything was left undone that could have been done and the result is that little has been saved that might have been saved and almost all lost that could be.2

Within minutes the east end of the building was in flames, flames that could not be reached by the firemen’s hoses from the single hydrant on campus. ‘We all, in evening dress, driven out pell-mell, watched the magnificent spectacle – the great tower outlined against a background of glowing smoke and flame,’ recently appointed psychologist James Baldwin later recalled.3 McLean and other students rushed to the west wing of the college, where great displays had been set up in the museum, to save as much as possible. ‘A great many things were saved from the museum, everybody seized big things, bears, deer, ostriches, etc. and left what was smaller, and probably more valuable. Still it is wonderful that so much was saved, and in such good condition. About half the contents of the museum I think has been saved uninjured. The room was entirely burned.’4 A stiff northwest wind that evening at once fanned the fire and contributed to saving much of the west end of the college and residence, including the old chemistry laboratory in the

24 Arts and Science at Toronto

roundhouse (now Croft Chapter House). Before midnight the fire was nearly out, but the east side of the building, including Convocation Hall in the northeast corner, professors’ offices and lecture rooms, and the central tower, had largely been gutted and lost. For the students the loss of their college was devastating. ‘I do not know what in the world we will do,’ McLean wrote in despair to his sister. ‘All the library is gone, except probably 500 books that the students happened to have out for the night.’5 President Wilson, now Sir Daniel since being awarded a knighthood by the queen in 1888, seventy-four years old and in rapidly failing health, was unbowed. On Saturday he began to secure rooms and halls where classes could resume the following Monday. The Biology Building, which had opened just a year before on Queen’s Park Crescent (now the site of the Faculty of Medicine), and the two theological affiliates, Knox and Wycliffe Colleges, all provided space and on Monday nearly every class met as scheduled. Also, on Saturday Wilson met with the university’s board of trustees, and the university architect, David Dick. Engineer Casimir Gzowski, a trustee, after a hasty but informed look around, pronounced the walls of the building sound. Restoring the interior and roof could begin. And so it was, a quickly arranged grant by the legislature of $160,000 was added to the college’s insurance to cover the cost. By early 1892 University College was fully back in business, modernized to the best standards of the day, and, in Wilson’s eyes, even more handsome than before.6 In planning the college’s restoration, an important decision was made not to include the college library, where more than 30,000 volumes were lost. Instead, a new library would be built southeast of the college on King’s College Circle (now the Gerstein Science Information Centre site). Construction began in April 1892, and as early as the following October, the historian of the library reports, the building was open for use as finishing touches were being made. The Students’ Book Department, an 1880s forerunner of the university bookstore, had begun in the UC library and was included in the new building. The main reading room was divided down the middle: 100 places for men on one side and 100 places for women on the other.7 Especially important, the new building was equipped with electricity. For the first time in its history, the university library would be open in the evenings, from 7:00 to 10:30. But the ‘heart’ of the library was its books, not the shell that surrounded them. Recreating the collection was an enormous task, to which members of the Imperial Federation League in Britain and

The Faculty of Arts

25

The new university library, taken at the time of completion, 1892 (A1965-0004 /007 [3.1])

Canada and influential politicians lent their support. An interested group in Germany was formed, and by December 1891 more than 30,000 volumes had been donated. Fourteen thousand came from United Kingdom supporters, 10,000 from Germany, and more than 5000 from other donors. Donors in the United States sent another 10,000 and Toronto staff went to Columbia University in New York City to select some 3000 duplicate copies from its collection.8 Because of the interest and generosity of donors abroad, the provincial university not only had a new building but a new and much bigger collection than before. The new library, designed to hold 120,000 volumes, was just short of half full from the beginning. More space would be needed: already, in 1893, the first step in decentralization of the library system had begun when Professor Ramsay Wright established a branch library for journals and reference works in the Biology Building. Another tier of stacks was added as early as 1898 and in 1910 a five-storey addition on the east side of the building was completed to meet increasing needs. The demand came from a growing student population in arts and other faculties.9 By 1896–7 there were a few more than 900 students in arts at the university and just short of 400 in the faculties of medicine and applied

26 Arts and Science at Toronto

science and engineering. A decade later Arts enrolled 1301 students, Medicine had jumped from 295 to 723, and Applied Science from 135 to 627. Two-thirds of the students in the university in 1905–6, 3038, came from outside Toronto and 220 of them came from outside Ontario, including twenty-eight from the United States and fifty-three from ‘foreign’ jurisdictions.10 The arts student body of 1903–4 was typical of arts enrolment in the earliest years of the twentieth century. There were just over 1000 students, including a few dozen graduate students in the university and at Victoria College and over 100 ‘occasional students.’ In the university there were 574 degree candidates, 145 of whom were women. One hundred fifty-four, 26.8 per cent, gave home addresses in Toronto, the remainder were from all over the settled portions of Ontario, except for a handful from other provinces, especially British Columbia. At Victoria there were 243 degree candidates, sixty-eight (27.9 per cent) of whom were women. As at the university, just over 26 per cent of the students were from Toronto.11 The need for more library space in the 1890s and early 1900s was also driven by continuing specialization of knowledge in both the arts and the pure and applied sciences. The School of Practical Science affiliated with the university in 1889, and in 1900 the university designated it as its Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering.12 And there were new disciplines in the arts and pure sciences. One, which spanned both branches of learning, was the emerging field of psychology. The longtime professor of metaphysics and ethics, George Paxton Young, died in February 1889. The Ontario government asked for applications for the chair and more than twenty people applied. Among them two quickly attracted significant support. James Mark Baldwin was championed by President Wilson. James Gibson Hume had strong support from James Loudon, other members of the ‘nativist’ group in University College, and several government members on the senate or board of trustees. Hume, a Canadian and recent graduate of the college, who had spent a year at Johns Hopkins and was then at Harvard, was vigorously promoted by the Canadianists. Baldwin, an American who had a doctorate from Leipzig, where he had studied with the renowned psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, had teaching experience and publications, and was favoured by Wilson and others who wanted a scholar with some teaching and research experience to fill the prestigious post Young had long occupied. The premier, Oliver Mowat, agreed; he believed Baldwin to be a stronger applicant. Hume had potential, but was still some years

The Faculty of Arts

27

away from achieving his senior degree. But some of Mowat’s colleagues, including Ross, his minister of education, just as firmly sponsored Hume. In the end Mowat decided to appoint both to satisfy both camps at the university and to keep peace within his own government and party. Baldwin took up his appointment as professor of metaphysics and logic in the fall of 1889. For Hume Mowat imposed a condition: he had to spend two more years of advanced study before he could occupy his position teaching ethics and the history of philosophy.13 Baldwin was an instant success. In the fall of his arrival he persuaded the senate to approve courses in the ‘new psychology’ and a psychological laboratory for honour students and faculty. In 1890–1, when the new courses began, enrolled honour students were required to spend time each week in the new laboratory. Baldwin also introduced what he called ‘seminary’ courses for final-year honour students and graduates who were candidates for the master of arts degree. But all too quickly Baldwin’s Toronto career was over. He was offered a professorship at Princeton and left the university in the summer of 1893. August Kirschmann, another PhD from Leipzig who had been Baldwin’s demonstrator, took over all Baldwin’s teaching duties and began what became a widely recognized, successful career of teaching and research in psychology at Toronto. And shortly before Baldwin left, Hume returned to take up his post as professor of ethics and the history of philosophy. Hume remained in Toronto long after his retirement in 1926, ending what the philosophy department’s historian, John Slater, has described as a remarkably undistinguished career.14 Just as Baldwin was beginning his brief appointment, the senate received a petition from the long-time lecturers in modern languages, all of whom had long sought but been denied promotion to professorships by Wilson. The senate recommended the promotions, but its Board of Arts Committee, chaired by Wilson, refused and instead recommended no new appointments until an evaluation of all the needs of the arts faculty had taken place. In January 1891 a joint committee of the senate and the board of trustees began its work. Its report, released in April, became what Averill and Keith call ‘the blueprint for the university for the next decade.’ The report provided a guide to the order of future appointments and the ranks to which faculty members could be appointed. These included all the ranks that had been in use – fellow, demonstrator, lecturer, and professor – and a new rank, associate professor.15 The committee explained that it believed the associate professorship would introduce a measure of flexibility into the rank system.

28 Arts and Science at Toronto It provided means to meet a case in which a professor, through increasing years, becomes, though still capable of good work and not ripe for retirement, less able for full duty. It affords an opportunity for appointing or promoting to an intermediate grade, in cases in which the interests of the University would be served by such promotion; but when, either from financial or other concerns, it is not thought an appointment should be made to the office of professor. It provides a greater measure of elasticity, which may from time to time be found very useful in working out the details of management.16

In 1892 a number of lecturers were promoted to associate professor, including the very popular lecturer in Latin and Roman history, William Dale, who became associate professor of Latin and retained his lectureship in Roman history at University College.17 Dale did not have long to enjoy his belated promotion. Within three years he had left the university. The circumstances were complex, but had their origin in other developments in 1892. In August Sir Daniel Wilson, in failing health for some time, died. Two important positions, the presidency of the university and the professorship of history, were suddenly vacant. Physicist James Loudon was soon named as Wilson’s successor as president of the University of Toronto. The minister of education, with the beginning of classes just around the corner, called for applicants for a lectureship in history. Among the applicants was George M. Wrong, a graduate of University College and Wycliffe and, since 1883, professor of church history and dean at Wycliffe. Wrong worried about giving up his professorship for a lecturer’s appointment in the university, but he had already published his first book and was deeply interested in historical scholarship. In late September the acting minister of education, William Harcourt, offered the position to Wrong, apparently on the understanding that he could apply for a professorship soon. Working under the administrative supervision of the new professor of political economy, James Mavor, Wrong began lecturing in Wilson’s former courses in the fall of 1892. Two years later he applied for the professorship. Again a hasty call for applications was made by the ministry, but Wrong was quickly appointed.18 Wrong’s appointments had been controversial from the start. His initial salary, $1500, well above the $800 established floor salary for a beginning lecturer, was soon revealed amid much criticism from members of the faculty. And attention sharpened when the ever-vigilant Varsity,

The Faculty of Arts

29

in October 1894, shortly after Wrong’s appointment as professor of history, suggested that there was, in fact, no real competition; that the promotion was made less on academic merit than on the influence of family connections. After all, Wrong was the son-in-law of Edward Blake, head of one of the most important families in Toronto society, former premier of Ontario, former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, member of the British House of Commons, and, most significantly, chancellor of the University of Toronto.19 Soon thereafter the paper widened its critique, charging that a number of professors, including Hume in philosophy, Mavor in political economy, and Alexander in English were unfit to hold their positions. ‘If the University is intended to be a Home for the Helpless let the fact be known,’ the editor wrote.20 Shortly after this, in January 1895, the university council cancelled a debate organized by the students’ Political Science Association to which Alfred Jury and Phillips Thompson, supporters of labour, had been invited. On the 16th the Varsity attacked the council for stifling freedom of speech. Council demanded an apology. The paper refused and, on the 29th, James Tucker, the editor, was suspended. Associate Professor Dale was outraged. He sent a letter to the Globe, which appeared on the front page on 9 February, protesting the character of professorial appointments by the government and focusing on the alleged nepotism of Wrong’s appointment. Ramsay Wright, professor of zoology, and William Pike, professor of chemistry, demanded that President Loudon take some action against Dale. On 11 February Loudon was called to meet the cabinet at Queen’s Park and told that Dale was going to be dismissed. Dale himself appeared before cabinet on the 14th and was asked to resign. He refused and was fired by the Ontario government.21 The announcement of Dale’s dismissal was made on the 15 February. William Lyon Mackenzie King, a student in political science and future prime minister of Canada, ‘was that excited that I could not keep still, my blood fairly boiled.’ King ‘hurried up to the college,’ called on Prof. Dale, Delury and others went to see Tucker [James Tucker, editor of the Varsity]. At 3 was held the largest mass meeting I have ever seen, in Wardell’s Hall, Spadina Ave. I moved the resolution ‘to strike’ until we were granted an investigation. Carried unanimously (except 4). The meeting was very enthusiastic.’22

That was Friday afternoon. On Monday King went from his lodgings to ‘Varsity and found that there had been only 5 persons at lectures today.

30 Arts and Science at Toronto

The boycott has worked perfectly.’ On Tuesday he recorded that ‘the boycott was still in excellent form.’ Then, on Wednesday, 20 February, another large meeting assembled, again at Wardell’s Hall. A petition to the senate was approved. Many motions were put, among them one by Tom Greenwood, another political science student and the future Lord Greenwood of the British House of Lords. King ‘seconded Greenwood’s motion to return to lectures pending negotiations. This motion caused a great tumult,’ King wrote.23 The motion passed and a committee of fourteen students, including three women, negotiated with the administration about a commission of inquiry. Two days later the Ontario government accepted a recommendation from President Loudon to appoint a commission. In April the commission, headed by the chief justice of Manitoba, flatly rejected any notion that Wrong’s appointments had been influenced by nepotism or that the students had any right to invite outsiders to give lectures and addresses within the university. Moreover, the commission found that the several Varsity articles had overstepped the boundary of fair comment. The administration and its supporters thought themselves vindicated. King called the inquiry a whitewash.24 While controversy raged over the quality of faculty appointments, the often impetuous and headstrong responses to crises great and small by President Loudon, the rights and responsibilities of students, and other issues in the mid-1890s, the senate was increasingly worried about the state of the university’s revenues. There just wasn’t enough money to finance the ever-growing needs of an expanding provincial university. A senate committee examining the university’s assets and endowments asked for the support of its academic colleagues to impress upon the government the need for more funds. ‘The available resources of the university,’ it argued, ‘are altogether inadequate to meet the modern Educational and Scientific demands of the age.’25 Specifically, it asked the government for a share of resources from land grants to support the physical and social sciences and mechanical arts. The province responded in 1897 with lands in northern Ontario from which annual revenue could be generated, but the returns were hardly noticeable – $895 in 1898 and $820 the next year.26 In June 1900, Samuel Blake, younger brother of Edward Blake and university senator, discussed the funding issue directly with Premier Ross. Blake was particularly interested in the fees the university charged its students – an increase in the fees could be a source of new revenue – and how they compared to those of universities in the United States.

The Faculty of Arts

31

Officers of the Women’s Literary Society, University College, 1894–5 (B1967-1000 [02])

At the time the University of Toronto’s annual fee for undergraduate students was fifty dollars and an additional ten dollars was charged for the degree the student earned. Ross told Blake that at Harvard and Yale the fees were much higher. But Blake regarded these institutions as ‘the Universities of the wealthy’ and wondered about other American institutions like the University of Michigan, Leland Stanford University, the University of California, or the University of Chicago. He turned to Hugh Langton, the university librarian, for assistance in getting the information.27 Langton replied quickly. His survey generally concurred with the premier’s impression. The annual fee at Harvard was $150, $155 plus $18 for the degree at Yale, $100–125 and $5–10 for the degree at Cornell, and $120 plus $10 at Chicago. The dramatic exception among the private universities was Stanford in California at $20 per annum and no charge for the degree. McGill in Montreal charged $60 per annum. But among the small number of public institutions Langton surveyed, Toronto stood out for its comparatively high fees. Michigan charged $30 for state residents and $40 plus a $10 degree fee for outof-state students. Wisconsin charged no fees for in-state students and

32 Arts and Science at Toronto

$30  for out-of-staters. Minnesota and California charged no fees, but California did require $10 for a degree.28 Raising fees, then, was not the answer to the university’s funding problems. Nor were the skimpy revenues from the northern land grants. But Samuel Blake was a persistent man. Earlier in the year he had sent another memorandum to the premier urging change at the university. At the heart of his argument was his belief, shared by fellow members of the senate and the Toronto business community, that the university could and should contribute more to Ontario’s growing interest in northern development, industrialization, and tapping the hydroelectric potential of the province. The most urgent needs of the university, Blake said, included making the departments of mineralogy, geology, and engineering, especially mining and hydraulic engineering, and electrical development ‘more efficient.’ These departments, among others, required funding for ‘adequate equipment’ and additional staffing.29 That struck a responsive chord with the Ross government. In 1901 it took up the challenge in a new University Act. At an estimated initial cost of $25,000 per year it agreed to pay the salaries and other costs of all the science departments except biology. The government also gave the university $200,000 for a new building on the north side of College Street to house the university departments of mineralogy and geology and a part of SPS/Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering. Also included in the 1901 act was a partial separation of University College from the university, giving the college its own principal, registrar, and council and representation on the senate. The division of subjects between the university and the colleges was again restated. Theology, Greek, Latin, ancient history, English, French, German, Oriental languages, and ethics were affirmed as college subjects. The university would be responsible for mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology, geology, mineralogy, physiology, ethnology, history, philology, Italian, Spanish, philosophy, logic, metaphysics, education, political science, jurisprudence, constitutional law and constitutional history.30 There was more. Blake had urged that there be ‘a separate head for the University,’ distinct from University College, and that ‘all the Faculties, – Arts, Medicine, and Law, should be adequately represented on the Senate.’ While the government was drafting the new 1901 act, Richard Harcourt, the minister of education, asked Loudon about sentiment in the university to renewing legal recognition of the Faculty of Arts and a dean of arts. ‘As to the Deanship in Arts,’ Loudon answered, ‘the only objection I have heard of was that it would involve an

The Faculty of Arts

33

additional member of the Senate. This objection would be answered by providing in #26 (2) 3 members instead of 4 to represent the Professors in Arts and Law.’ Then, in brief compass, the new act provided for appointment by the lieutenant governor of a president of the university and of a dean of arts. Both new officers were to be members of a reconstructed university senate.31 Before the year was out James Loudon ceased to be president of the university council and became president of the University of Toronto. Loudon, in turn, appointed the distinguished chair of the department of biology, Robert Ramsay Wright, the university’s second dean of arts.32 The act also took notice of on-going negotiations between the province and the University of Trinity College about Trinity joining the federation. If the talks were successful, the province promised a site in or near Queen’s Park for Trinity and, until that was ready, gave the university additional resources to finance, where necessary, duplication of university lectures at Trinity’s Queen Street campus.33 The negotiations had been started in May of 1900, shortly after Reverend T.C.S. Macklem had accepted the provostship at Trinity. He approached the province about federation and set out a number of items Trinity would like in an agreement. The talks with George Ross, now the premier, went well, and several of Trinity’s wishes were recognized in the 1901 act. But not without some hesitation and compromise. Negotiations then moved to  talks between Macklem and the trustees of the university, and by mid-1903 the outline of an agreement was in place. In July the graduates and friends of Trinity approved a resolution to federate by a vote of 121 to 73. The province proclaimed the federation on 18 November 1903, calling for it to take place on 1 October 1904. The agreement provided for some movement of faculty members. Trinity professors Michael Alexander Mackenzie of mathematics and Henry Montgomery of natural science moved to the university, along with George Oswald Smith of classics in 1907.34 The act of 1901 and the federation with Trinity in 1904 were a prelude to even more dramatic change between 1905 and 1907. The more the university grew, the more the potential for disagreement with the provincial government increased. Every aspect of the institution’s life, its finances, its curriculum, its entrance and degree requirements, its appointments, promotions, and dismissals were controlled by the Ministry of Education and, ultimately, by the premier of the day. President Wilson had had a full measure of problems with the government and government decisions, and his successor, James Loudon, experienced

34 Arts and Science at Toronto

even more during his tempestuous term of office.35 More and more, government control became an unwanted vestige of the past, an impediment to the work of a modern university. Goldwin Smith, former Regius Professor of History at Oxford, professor of history at Cornell, husband of the wealthy widow of the former mayor of Toronto and proprietress of the Grange, and Toronto’s resident intellectual, had recommended the provincial government surrender its control of the university when serving on the 1895 commission of inquiry.36 Sir William Ralph Meredith, who was appointed to the senate in 1895 and became chancellor in 1900, was another who was convinced of the need for reform. A former leader of the provincial Conservative Party, he was the mentor of the current leader, James Pliny Whitney, whom he persuaded of the urgency of reform. In 1901 Whitney, as opposition leader, called for change. Most especially, he told the legislature, the university needed more money and a dependable form of financing, perhaps from the province’s succession duties.37 On 25 January 1905 the Liberals were ousted from power at Queen’s Park and Whitney became the new premier. He moved quickly on the university issue. In response to pleas from Loudon, funds were provided for the final construction costs of the new Convocation Hall and a new Physics Building (now the Sandford Fleming Building), which opened in 1907.38 The operating expenses of the university would be covered for a year and consideration given to regular funding from the provincial succession duties. An additional $30,000 was provided annually for the next thirty years to assist with future construction needs of the university. Assistance was also given for the construction of a new men’s residence, Devonshire House (now the Munk School of Global Affairs and John W. Graham Library), and an expansion of the newly opened women’s residence, Queen’s Hall, on the east side of Queen’s Park.39 In time Queen’s Hall would become three adjacent houses for University College’s female students. Three other buildings for the women of University College were acquired during and after the First World War. For many women Queen’s Hall was a special place: the food was good and cost but $9.50 per week. Physicist Elizabeth Allin, who was there in the early twenties as an undergraduate, had pleasant memories of the Hall’s emphasis on manners and decorum, of the common room piano, and of singing and dancing.40 Until the beginning of the 1930s, when Whitney Hall was opened, Queen’s Hall and the other buildings provided some residence space, never enough, for the University College women.

The Faculty of Arts

35

Whitney’s 1905 support was just the beginning. He knew there was much more to do, most especially to reform the governance of the university. And he wanted advice on how to do it. In the summer of 1905 he established a royal commission to review nearly every aspect of the work of the provincial university. It was chaired by Joseph Flavelle, a prominent Methodist businessman and member of Victoria’s board of regents. Goldwin Smith, who had turned down an initial request to be chairman, was a member, as was Byron Edward Walker, member of the board of trustees, former senator, and soon to be president of the Bank of Commerce.41 They were joined by Chancellor Meredith, Canon Henry Cody, a theologian at Wycliffe, and Reverend Bruce Macdonald, the headmaster of St Andrew’s boys’ school. Friedland notes that the commission met seventy-seven times at Smith’s home over the next several months, and members also visited a number of major public and private universities in the United States.42 By April 1906 their work was finished, and Whitney tabled their report in the legislature at the beginning of May. The commission recommended that the control and management of the university should be vested in a board of governors, appointed by the lieutenant governor of Ontario. The university senate, with representation from all faculties, federated and affiliated institutions, as well as university graduates, would direct the university’s academic affairs. And following up on Ramsay Wright’s appointment as dean of arts in 1901, the commission recommended formation of a faculty of arts to be composed of all the faculties of all the arts colleges and representatives of the federated colleges. Subject to the approval of the senate, the academic affairs of the faculty would be run by a new faculty council. University College would continue to have a principal, council, and registrar as it had in the 1901 act, and would be subject to the control of the board of governors. Its appointments would be made on the recommendation of the university president. The commissioners recommended that the School of Practical Science, which the university had long claimed as its Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, cease its direct connection with the provincial government and become fully united with the university. The Caput, which dealt with discipline matters, and had in the 1850s been a committee of the senate, should be recast with the president, the heads of federated institutions, and the deans of the university faculties as its members. The commissioners also recommended that the office of vice chancellor be abolished and that the chancellor, elected by the university graduates, not have executive powers

36 Arts and Science at Toronto

but preside over convocation and the conferral of degrees. Most important, the office of the president should have the necessary powers to be in fact and in law the chief executive officer of the university.43 The recommendations were warmly welcomed by Whitney’s government, which moved quickly to implement them with a new University Act. One recommendation not accepted called for an endowment of a million acres of land in Northern Ontario. And another was changed: the government increased the size of the board of governors from the recommended fifteen to twenty. Underpinning the whole new arrangement was stable funding for the university. The commission was convinced that the province had a responsibility to provide it. ‘It is in the interest of the state,’ it wrote, to devote a generous share of the public funds to the development of an institution so intimately associated with the material interests of the country. Canada must train her own sons to be captains of industry. [The province’s resources] call for a practical capacity and a specialized knowledge which only a modern university can supply, not only to sustain the moral influence that comes from higher education but to contribute to national prosperity by adequate votes of money for the training of youth.44

Most commission members favoured Whitney’s suggestion of using succession duties, but Smith was adamantly opposed. In the end the government overrode his objections and gave the university annually one-half of the succession duties it collected, averaged over the previous three years.45 The government’s majority rushed the act through the legislature and it received royal assent on 14 May 1906. There was one last piece of business for the commissioners and the premier. James Loudon had had a contentious career as president and members of the commission believed, as did Whitney, that he should step down. Loudon agreed to resign, but the new board of governors asked him to stay on until his successor was appointed. Loudon had conditions, including the dismissal of James Brebner, the long-time university registrar, with whom Loudon had had numerous battles. The board refused and accepted Loudon’s resignation. Principal Maurice Hutton of University College, a popular and distinguished classicist, agreed to serve as acting president until a new president could be appointed. Edmund Walker, former commissioner and member of the new board of governors, chaired a search committee that announced, in  April 1907, that Robert Falconer, the young principal of Pine Hill

The Faculty of Arts

37

Presbyterian College in Halifax, had been chosen as the new president of the University of Toronto.46 There had always been a faculty of arts at the University of Toronto. But between 1853 and 1901, nearly half a century, it was not a legally constituted part of the university. The act of 1901 and the appointment of Ramsay Wright as dean of arts set the stage for full restoration. At the beginning, however, Ramsay Wright had no faculty to lead. The 1906 act corrected that with the creation of a faculty of arts council presided over by the university president and with the principal of University College, the presidents of each of the federated universities, the dean of arts and the teaching staffs of the faculty, University College, and the federated colleges as members.47 By then the faculty, and the university it was a part of, was a very different place from Dean Beaven’s Faculty of Arts at King’s College in the 1840s. There were eighteen students in the graduating class of 1845 and only nine in 1853, the final year of the first Faculty of Arts. In 1905–6 there were 152. The four or five professors in arts in the early 1840s had become almost six times as many in 1905–6, together with associate professors, lecturers, demonstrators, assistants, and fellows. Fewer than a dozen traditional subjects, with an emphasis on classical languages and literatures, had evolved into an ever-growing array of disciplines, especially in the sciences and the emerging social sciences, including, after 1901, a new program in commerce and finance.48 In the 1840s the Faculty of Arts had no home. King’s College moved from location to location throughout the decade, as did the University of Toronto for much of the 1850s. University College became its home in 1859 and remained the main faculty building in the magnificently restored college after the fire. But by 1906 there was a university library about to have a new multi-storeyed extension, buildings for chemistry and biology, a new Physics Building nearly completed, a building for geology and mineralogy shared with SPS, a grand new Convocation Hall, a recently opened residence for women, and more. The arts enrolment in 1905–6 was but a minute fraction – 0.056 per cent – of the more than two million people in Ontario. The fees were high at fifty dollars a year, which constituted 6 per cent of the annual wages of supervisory and office workers in 1905, and a hefty 13.3 per cent of the earnings of production workers and roughly the same for farmers. A university degree in arts at Toronto was and would long remain the preserve, in the usage of the time, of ‘the better elements of society.’ For those who attended university at the beginning of

38 Arts and Science at Toronto

the new century Greek and Latin were still required subjects, but few graduated in classics, while increasing numbers did so in the sciences and social sciences. That was a reflection of the reality that the commissioners of 1906 had highlighted in their report and that was anticipated in the 1906 act. The university needed a practical faculty of arts for the practical world of modern Ontario.

3 New Beginnings

The 1906 University of Toronto Act recast the university. The board of governors was new. The Office of the President was given new duties and responsibilities. And so was the president. The revived Faculty of Arts had a new faculty council. And several faculties, including household science and forestry, were new. Each of the new governing structures and the president had to learn what to do, how to do it, and how to work with each other. For Robert Falconer, the governors, the members of a restructured senate, and the new faculty councils, the years between 1907 and the First World War were times of experimentation, trial, and sometimes error. At first sight, young Robert Falconer – he was only forty years old – might have seemed an odd choice to lead the university’s modernization. Born in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, son of a Presbyterian clergyman, he was educated at Queen’s Royal College in Trinidad, the University of London, Edinburgh University, and Marburg University in Germany as a clergyman and biblical scholar. At Pine Hill in Halifax he had risen to the position of principal in 1904 and had earned recognition as a leading theologian and academic in the Maritime provinces. It was these very qualities, his scholarly attainments and his leadership abilities, that attracted the members of the board of governors. Though the royal commission had underlined the necessity of recognizing the potential of science and the aspirations of the business community in the university, board members were leery of appointing of another scientist as president. The experience of Loudon’s presidency was a caution. But there was much more to it than that. Conservative men that they were, they were not ready to radically change the University of Toronto from its classical and traditional roots into a shiny new

40 Arts and Science at Toronto

technical school. Flavelle and Walker, the two prominent businessmen on the presidential search committee, were especially concerned. Flavelle told Goldwin Smith that he was anxious about ‘the struggle for the culture subjects (in this commercial and practical community) to hold their own in the University.’ He wanted ‘a president whose interests have been on the culture rather than the scientific side, and whose sympathies for such subjects will be one of the important standards for holding true to the standards of sound education.’1 Falconer responded to these concerns in September 1907 in his inaugural address. ‘No true university,’ Falconer said, ‘can afford to yield to the superficial demand for what is so often erroneously called the practical,’ adding that ‘a university is not a technical school.’ The Faculty of Arts, he emphasized, would always be the heart of the university ‘because in it mental discipline and intellectual culture are found in purer quality.’ In Falconer’s view, throughout his long tenure as president, the humanities were especially important for all university education, including that for the professions.2 But it was the whole of the Faculty of Arts that the president had in mind, including its science and social science disciplines, which were steadily rising in importance in earlytwentieth-century Ontario, as well as the humanities. Falconer’s ambitious agenda went further. He underlined the importance of expanding graduate programs and research and argued the provincial university’s destiny was to ‘occupy more and more a national position,’ attracting students and graduates from ‘every part of Canada.’3 The beginning of Falconer’s presidency was marked by a major increase in the university enrolment,4 in part the result of the introduction of new faculties such as forestry and household science, but also because more young people were going to university. In 1891, Chancellor Edward Blake had recommended that no honour class in arts should have more than twelve students, no pass class more than thirty. Although Falconer found class sizes ‘unwieldy,’ he reported that it was impossible to meet Blake’s standard. His report to the board of governors for the year 1910–11 observed that 1624 students had been registered in the university in 1901, while 4112 students were enrolled in 1910. At the beginning of the following year there were 1895 students in the Faculty of Arts of whom 653, or 34.4 per cent, were women.5 Part of the solution to the growing enrolment problem was to make new teaching appointments, an initiative supported by the Whitney government at Queen’s Park. Between 1907–8 and the beginning of the First World War in the fall of 1914 the teaching staff in arts doubled in

New Beginnings

41

size. In 1907–8 the university, University College, and the federated colleges employed thirty-nine full professors and nineteen associate professors. By 1914–15 the number had grown to eighty-five professors and associates, an increase of 68 per cent. There were no assistant professors in 1907–8 and eight in 1914–15. Larger still were the increases in the junior ranks. The number of lecturers increased from twenty-four to forty-two, demonstrators from two to nineteen, instructors from one to seven, and fellows from none to seven, a total increase in the junior ranks of seventy-five appointments.6 The new appointments were distributed across the arts disciplines, but the larger number of the new appointments, especially the new lecturers, demonstrators, and instructors, went to the rapidly expanding science departments. Another part of Falconer’s solution was to raise admission requirements. Between 1908 and 1912 several first-year classes for students entering with junior matriculation (grade 12) standing were eliminated. In courses of study where Greek, German, or French was required, that is, most of the honour and pass courses in arts, entering students now had to have secondary school instruction in those languages to qualify for admittance. Falconer wanted to go further, much further. In his 1911 presidential report he raised the issue of transferring the responsibility for the first year of arts – the senior matriculation year for students admitted with only junior matriculation – to the province’s secondary school system. The idea provoked intense debate for the next few years. Initially, the federated colleges were opposed and soon they were joined by Queen’s and then other Ontario universities. The proposal was dead. The change to senior matriculation as an admission requirement at Toronto was only achieved in 1931, the final year of Falconer’s presidency.7 In 1909 another change raised the standard for passing in both the pass and honours courses. Before 1909 the passing grade in both was 33 per cent for each examination and for the aggregate of term and examination marks. In 1909 a new pass/general course in arts was established which raised the passing mark in junior matriculation and for passing in the pass/general course to 40 per cent. The aggregate mark for second-class standing in the new course was 50 per cent and it was 66 per cent for first-class standing. In senior matriculation and in honour courses in all years first-class standing required 75 per cent, while 66 per cent was sufficient for second-class and 50 per cent for third-class standing.8 Yet another change that influenced enrolment in arts was a revision of the curriculum in the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering. First-year students in that faculty were required to take

42 Arts and Science at Toronto

one hour per week of English instruction and an additional hour per week of either German or French in either their first or second year.9 ‘Service teaching,’ as it was called in later times, was not new to the Faculty of Arts: both Medicine and the School of Practical Science had sent students to Arts for instruction in some disciplines since the restoration of Medicine and the beginning of SPS in the 1880s. The new requirement expanded the responsibilities of the arts faculty while using its resources. But to Falconer, and many others, it again underlined the role of the Faculty of Arts as the ‘core’ of the university. Since the earliest days of federation an informal arrangement allowed St Michael’s College students to take courses at University College in subjects not offered at the Catholic college. In practice, however, nearly all St Michael’s students were in theology and only a handful, nine B.A. candidates, had used the arrangement. With rising undergraduate enrolment overall and potentially larger numbers of bachelor’s candidates entering St Michael’s, that situation was bound to change. And shortly after Falconer’s inauguration, in November 1907, University College informed St Michael’s that its students could remain members of St Michael’s and continue to take the arts courses not offered there at University College. Then in 1910 the board of governors recognized the status of St Michael’s as an autonomous arts college, and the college decided that the only honour course it would offer would be philosophy. Beyond that St Michael’s would offer some other courses in college subjects, but its Bachelor of Arts candidates, a small number, would take most of their honour-course requirements at University College.10 There was a problem, however: St Michael’s did not admit female students. In 1911 the two Roman Catholic colleges that did, St Joseph’s and Loretto, petitioned President Falconer for admission into the university as separate federated partners. Falconer suggested instead that St Michael’s admit female students and employ religious sisters to teach them. In October 1911 a solution was found. St Michael’s agreed to admit female students and it, together with St Joseph’s and Loretto, would offer lectures in college subjects. Lectures in religious knowledge, ethics, logic, and psychology would be given by St Michael’s faculty members, and university subjects could be taken at University College. Graduating arts students, male and female, would be granted their degrees by St Michael’s. It was also agreed that women and men would be taught in separate classes; women would be taught by religious sisters and men by the staff at St Michael’s. In 1912, the year the agreement

New Beginnings

43

went into effect, John Slater notes, only eight women were involved. A decade later, in 1922, there were 113 women taking courses (together with 129 men). The arrangement, Slater adds, lasted for forty years.11 The new governing structure at Toronto had a board of governors with 22 members and a reconstructed senate with 101 members, 44 of whom were members of the Faculty of Arts. The professors in arts, but not the associate professors, were voting members of the senate, as were twelve graduates of University College, elected by their peers, and three elected graduates each of University, Victoria, and Trinity Colleges. They and their other university colleagues were ultimately responsible for the academic management of the university, the granting of degrees, establishment of faculties, departments, chairs, and courses of instruction. The senate was guided in these matters by reports and recommendations from its faculty councils. The new council for the Faculty of Arts had eighty-seven members including the university president, who served as its chair, the heads of University, Victoria, and Trinity Colleges and the dean of arts, Ramsay Wright. They were joined by fifty-four members of the university and University College teaching staff, thirteen members from Victoria, nine from Trinity, and five from the Department of Religious Knowledge plus the university librarian.12 All professors and associate professors were voting members of the arts council, while lecturers on the permanent staff were members without a vote. Each of the colleges also had its own council. These were the deliberative bodies that dealt with the normal academic responsibilities of the Faculty of Arts, its curriculum, its teaching staff, its timetable of instruction, and the like. In disciplinary matters responsibility rested with the university CAPUT, a committee including the president, the principal of University College, the heads of the federated colleges, and the deans of the university faculties. The university library was presided over by Mr Hugh Langton, a well-known university figure and sometime confidant of several members of the board and the senate. Langton’s domain (now the Gerstein Science Information Centre) had fireproof storage space capable of holding 100,000 volumes. In the 1906–7 academic year it housed some 87,000. The main reading room had 200 seats divided evenly between men’s and women’s sections. It was a circulating library for faculty and a reference library for students. Senior students engaged in special projects might be admitted to the stacks to work if they had a recommendation

44 Arts and Science at Toronto

from their instructor and the approval of the librarian. In the building there were departmental libraries for the departments of philosophy, political science, and history, and most of the Arts science departments had libraries in their departmental facilities. Science students also had access to a number of laboratories and museums, some in the main building, University College, and others in the departments’ buildings. Since 1893 students also had access to the university gymnasium for both instructional and recreational use, always in separate times or locations for men and women. The university residence had been closed by President Loudon in 1899, some thought in retribution for the 1895 student strike, but male students might find accommodation in residences at Trinity, St  Michael’s, Wycliffe, and Knox Colleges. There was residence space for  women at Queen’s Hall, Annesley Hall (Victoria, after 1903), and St Hilda’s College. But the majority of male students had to find lodging elsewhere. The Young Men’s Christian Associations at University and Victoria had lists of accredited boarding houses near the university. In 1907–8 the university advised that room and board was available in these and other locations at a cost of three dollars and up per week. A room without board would cost one dollar and up per week.13 And for those living in rooms without board, regular ads in the Varsity advised that Shredded Wheat, the ‘best source of brain, muscle and nerve nourishment,’ would help ‘meet the increased cost of living.’ Highly recommended was cutting the biscuit in half so that it formed a hollow shell to be filled with small pieces of butter, salt and pepper and ‘drained, pickled and washed oysters.’14 Students wishing to attend the University of Toronto could enter by achieving junior or senior matriculation standing. Junior matriculation examinations were held in July in Ontario and a month earlier in centres outside Ontario. Required subjects included Latin, English, history, mathematics, and any two of Greek, French, German, or elementary experimental science. The senior matriculation examination was held in May and June. Required subjects included English, Latin, any two of Greek, French, German, Hebrew, and Spanish, ancient history, mathematics, and physics or biology. Supplemental examinations in both standings were held in September. Junior matriculation candidates paid five dollars to sit the examinations and senior matriculation candidates fifteen dollars. If a candidate was admitted following junior matriculation, he or she took a first-year program leading to senior matriculation. Beyond that, such students, and those admitted with senior matriculation, could pursue either a general or honour course program. In the

New Beginnings

45

general course, for example, a first-year student took lectures in Latin, English, any two of Greek, German, French, or Spanish, Greek and Roman history, two sets of mathematics lectures, religious knowledge, mechanics, and physics or biology. In the final year the subjects were Latin, English, any two of Greek, religious knowledge, Hebrew, German, French, or Spanish, history or another religious knowledge, economics, constitutional law and history, ethics, mathematics, and two alternative sets of religious knowledge lectures. A student in the physics and mathematics honour course began with Greek or Latin, English, a second set  of English lectures or religious knowledge or German or French, Mathematics, Physics, Mechanics, and Chemistry. In fourth year the student took world history or religious knowledge, three different mathematics subjects, two mechanics subjects, physics, astronomy and physics, or another aspect of physics with all of the appropriate laboratories required for the senior science disciplines. Though no tuition was charged to Toronto students, various fees did apply, including laboratory and equipment fees for science students.15 The Faculty of Arts Council held its first meeting on 6 June 1906. James Loudon, the outgoing president, asked that the vice president and dean, Ramsay Wright, take the chair. The main business of the day was to organize the council, begin the adoption of rules and procedures, and set up committees of council. Among them the most important was the Committee on Arts Studies where the president, the dean (as chairman), the principals and provost of University College and the federated colleges, representatives of affiliates Knox, Wycliffe, and St Michael’s, and nine senior professors were members. Eight additional members representing the disciplines taught in the various colleges were to be elected to the council by their disciplinary peers. Committees on examinations and on applications and memorials, both smaller, were also set up at the initial meeting.16 A second meeting quickly followed to hear a report from the council’s board of examiners on the recent examination period. Each student was assigned a code name like ‘Inspire,’ ‘Achieve,’ or ‘Diligence’ by the registrar to preserve the anonymity of the student’s exam papers. Results were reported to council with the student’s code name, name, and result. Sixty-five students had written the senior matriculation papers, twenty-four junior matriculation, forty-seven the first year examinations, fifty-four second year, nine third year, and only eight fourth year. The three grades assigned were pass, star, and fail. Of 217 candidates writing in this examination period,

46 Arts and Science at Toronto

there were very few outright failures, five in the senior-matriculation examination, and two in first year. But there were a significant number of ‘starred’ students, that is to say, students who had failed one or more of their papers but had the opportunity to write a supplemental exam in that subject. One young man ‘starred’ in Latin, Greek, and Spanish, another in botany, several others in Latin.17 Robert Falconer’s first meeting of Faculty Council as president was on 6 July 1907, when council’s attention was devoted almost solely the results of the spring 1907 round of examinations. A bit later, on 7 October, shortly after his inauguration, council received a report from its committee on the summer session. The committee was concerned about the small number of students being served by the summer session and by the scanty enrolment in many of the courses. Three, in fact, a first-year course in Greek and two courses in Spanish attracted no students. In all only sixty-eight people had enrolled. Four courses had one student, six had two, three had three students each, eight had more than five, and the largest course had enrolled thirteen students. Together the sixtyeight students had paid $1201 in fees. Instructors in most of the courses were paid $250 for the session and some in science were paid $400 or $500. All in all, the cost of the 1907 summer session was $7250, leaving the university a debt of just over $6000. It was a losing proposition financially and some council members discussed withdrawing courses that attracted no or very few students. But Falconer and other committee members balked. The summer course circular, Falconer observed, had contained no notice that a course might be withdrawn if enrolment was insufficient, and the university could not ‘honourably’ close a course unless students were warned of the possibility. Despite the cost, no one proposed abandoning the summer session altogether. A more positive response came from a ‘Committee of Students,’ who advised that the session needed much better publicity and, among other items, that the University might provide a ‘general advisor’ to prospective students to help them with the application and enrolment process. Falconer reminded council that the summer session was especially important to the province’s schoolteachers, who could not enrol in courses in the winter session. The student group added that it was also very important for ‘starred’ students, who could retake a course they had failed to prepare for supplemental examinations. And so it went. The Faculty of Arts Council had begun its work; the second Monday of every month of the year it would advise and be advised by the president

New Beginnings

47

and would review, and recommend on matters great and small. Most of its work concentrated on degree and program requirements, supervising examinations, and reviewing the individual results of every arts candidate who wrote one or more examinations. But every once in a while the Faculty of Arts had a larger issue to help resolve. In 1906–7 and for a century to follow, the Faculty Council was there to help.18 Commenting on the impact of the abrupt change from running a small theological college to being the chief executive officer of Canada’s largest university, Robert Greenlee, Falconer’s biographer, writes that the new president was initially ‘engulfed in a morass of administrative detail.’19 There were several faculties, each with its own council and committees, a senate, a board of governors, large budget demands, recommendations for new appointments, and hundreds of other matters to look after. But the essence of one very early challenge was all too familiar to the liberally minded Christian theologian: the increasingly intense debate within the Protestant Christian community between the advocates of the ‘higher criticism’ and the determined clergymen and parish members who cherished a strictly literal reading of the Bible. Falconer himself was sympathetic to the champions of higher criticism, the applying of historical and literary techniques to understanding the Bible, an intellectual movement that grew out of nineteenth-century German scholarly analysis. Opponents believed that higher criticism ‘fundamentally challenged the reliability of the Scriptures.’20 Higher criticism had been taught in the university at Victoria College since the 1880s without public complaint or controversy.21 But just weeks after Falconer began his presidency he received a deputation arguing that there had been a major breach in the 1887 terms of federation. It charged that Thomas Eakin, who had received his PhD in oriental languages at Toronto in 1897 and was assistant pastor at St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church and a lecturer at University College, was giving a course on the English Bible in the oriental studies program. Employing the techniques of higher criticism, Eakin was deliberately misinterpreting the sacred texts to his students. The larger concern, said the deputation, was that University College, without a mandate to teach religious knowledge and under the guise of teaching oriental languages, had violated that 1887 act. Falconer suggested the remedy was to seek an amendment to the University Act to permit the oriental languages program to offer a ‘Religious Knowledge Option.’ When his suggestion was rebuffed by the deputation, Falconer sternly announced that he

48 Arts and Science at Toronto

was quite satisfied with the status quo and believed that no selfrespecting arts program could ignore the study of biblical literature. And he refused to raise the issue with the board of governors. But that is just what Reverend John Warner, pastor of Walmer Road Baptist Church, did, in alliance with board member Samuel Blake, a devout evangelical Christian. Towards the end of the year the chairman of the board replied to a November letter from Blake that the charges against Eakin and University College were unfounded. Blake, angered, now turned to President Burwash of Victoria, seeking support. But Burwash, the originator of federation, was himself engaged in a battle with Dr Albert Carmen, the general superintendent of the Methodist Church, a staunch traditionalist, defending his own staff member, Professor George Workman. Burwash, receptive to non-traditional approaches, urged restraint and refused to support Blake’s appeal.22 The dispute would not die. At Victoria, in 1909, Carman found another target in Reverend George Jackman. And at Toronto the board of governors established an investigation which heard the views of both parties as well as Falconer and University College officials in the late winter of 1909. Zebulon Lash, board member and law partner of Blake, wrote the investigation report. It said that the charge against University College was not founded, but urged the teachers at UC to avoid discussing theological issues with their students. Falconer and his University of Toronto colleagues fully believed that the University College teachers who would continue to teach religious knowledge courses were wholly capable of distinguishing between theological issues and disputes and literary/historical analysis of religious texts like the Bible.23 Another challenge for the new president was funding the university. Initially it appeared that the 50 per cent share of succession duties initiated by the Whitney government would relieve the university of annual cost overruns and deficits for several years. It was not to be. A part of the problem was falling revenue to the province from succession duties. Another was a decline in registration – and hence in income from fees of various kinds – as stiffer requirements for admission and continuing study began to take hold. The decrease in arts registration between 1908 and 1909, for instance, was dramatic. First year enrolment dropped from 482 to 355 and second year from 416 to 275. Overall there had been 1391 arts students in the fall of 1908, but only 1028 a year later.24 While the university had a small surplus in 1909, by 1910–11 Falconer reported

New Beginnings

49

to the board of governors that the decline in both succession-duties revenue and other income, plus inflation in the costs of goods and services required by the university, had forced it into deficit. ‘We have just got our estimates through, after a great deal of thought and effort,’ Falconer told University College principal Maurice Hutton at the end of June 1911. ‘There is a deficit of over $30,000 for which we shall have to draw on our reserve of $90,000. This has made the situation difficult, and so far I have not been able to get all the promotions made that I asked for.’25 A year later the head of the history department, George Wrong, asked for a small increase in the salaries of two of his colleagues, G.M. Smith and Ralph Hodder Williams. Falconer replied that he had been unable to get ‘anything extra.’ ‘There has been the greatest difficulty,’ he added, ‘in getting the estimates through this year.’26 In the last year before the war the funding situation looked especially bleak. Falconer wrote a special statement for the provincial government stressing the need for more dollars. The university, he observed, had tried to keep down costs by ‘constantly’ raising admission requirements, but it still was going to run an $82 thousand deficit for 1913–14. Succession duties, which the university anticipated would yield $500 thousand each year, had shrunk to $428 thousand. ‘Do the people of Ontario,’ Falconer asked, ‘desire a University of the same grade as those of the United States, or shall we have to send our students to the United States if they are to get the most advanced education? To my mind there is no alternative … We do ask for sufficient support to enable us gradually so to develop this University as to make it possible for any boy or girl of this Province, who has the ability, to be able to secure within the Province a collegiate, university or professional education of the highest quality at a reasonable cost.’27 At last, in the spring of 1914, the legislature came to the rescue with a special grant of $80,000 to cover the accumulating deficit at the university. A year later the government set a limit of $500,000 on its annual grant to the University of Toronto.28 Despite his funding worries, Falconer remained determined to continue to build the university’s faculty, especially with high-quality junior appointments. In 1911 the head of political science, James Mavor, was searching for a junior appointment. A search in Britain identified three candidates who were not interested in moving to Canada. There were two others, however, Gilbert Jackson and L. Bernstein Naymier, a brilliant prospect from Poland at Oxford. Jackson only had second-class standing at Cambridge. Mavor’s colleague Godfrey Lloyd, who was doing the recruiting in Britain, reported that some worried about

50 Arts and Science at Toronto

Naymier’s spoken English and Mavor seemed to agree, telling Falconer that he had ‘the misfortune to have the Jewish characteristic of indistinct articulation strongly developed.’29 Falconer appointed Jackson, who proved to be a wholly capable member of the political science department. Then a colleague of Wrong’s in history, Kenneth Bell, in Britain for the summer, decided not to return to Toronto and a hurried search for a replacement was made. Again Naymier’s name and outstanding record came up. Bell wrote that ‘he is the man for the place,’ but Hodder Williams received the appointment. Naymier would have been the first Jew to be appointed to the Faculty of Arts. Having been rejected twice by the University of Toronto, and later known as Lewis Namier, he became one of the outstanding English historians of the twentieth century.30 In November 1906, a contributor to The Varsity, ‘The Stroller,’ alluded to another challenge that would face President Falconer. ‘Co-education in theory,’ he observed, ‘is a very different thing from co-education in actual practice.’ In theory males and females would meet on ‘a plane of absolute equality.’ That was not the case at Toronto: the men ‘feel and act’ as if ‘ours is a men’s university, with a by-law attachment allowing women to attend lectures.’ The writer pled for change that would make both male and female students scholars who had learned ‘their highest manhood and womanhood.’ But how to do this with enrolment increasing ‘by leaps and bounds’? The Arts Building (University College) was rapidly becoming inadequate, and one way to cure the space problem and assure better treatment of women was to have a separate college for women.31 Doubtless by coincidence, the professor of history, George Wrong, following in the path earlier trod by his predecessor, Sir Daniel Wilson, had a similar idea. In November 1907, Wrong made a motion in the senate, presided over by Falconer, that a committee be struck to study the feasibility of a separate college for women at the university. In due course a senate committee, chaired by Wrong, reported in March 1909. The question of higher education for women, Wrong asserted, was not considered, nor was co-education at Toronto. And the fear that women were not getting instruction of equal quality as men was ‘groundless.’ What did concern the senators was that the female students tended to cluster in the modern languages and history and shun disciplines like political science. In the class of 1908 fully half of the women graduates were in those disciplines and another quarter and more were in the general course, causing uneven patterns of discipline enrolment. More

New Beginnings

51

important, University College had more than one thousand students and was already overcrowded. The ‘natural solution,’ the senators reported, was to establish a separate college for women. In April a large majority of the senate made that recommendation.32 The report received a very cold, if restrained and polite, reception from the female alumni of University College, Victoria, and St Hilda’s colleges and the Faculty of Medicine. They prepared their own petition to the all-male senate, arguing that women were not dissatisfied with existing co-education at Toronto nor did they believe that female students were deliberately avoiding classes and courses with a predominance of men. They were not aware of any present ‘lack of justice in the educational facilities’ at Toronto, and argued that more female instructors should be appointed in arts. They feared a curtailment of female library and laboratory privileges if women were segregated into a separate college. And it would not be practical to have senior professors forced to duplicate their lectures for separate classes in a separate college. If a change was absolutely necessary, it would be better to have the province build another unsegregated public university. Finally, the petitioners asserted that all the female and many of the male alumni of the university were stoutly opposed to the senate’s proposal.33 In May the female alumni met with Falconer, Principal Hutton, and Wrong. The historian conceded that if the women were opposed the issue was finished. As university historian Martin Friedland puts it, ‘The question of a separate college for women was now effectively dead.’34 But the notion that the provincial university was a place primarily for men prevailed during Falconer’s tenure and beyond. Falconer, himself, underlined it in his first address to the students on 1 October 1907. Convocation Hall was packed as the new president spoke about what Toronto offered to students, be they entering freshmen and ‘freshies’ or men and women in their final year looking to graduation. It was ‘the university spirit,’ the values and the cultural norms of university life that prepared all for responsible adulthood. But in Falconer’s mind, and the minds of the almost exclusively male faculty, the university’s governors, and the students’ parents, ‘Varsity’ was largely a place for men. Listen to Falconer’s words: ‘All university men can look back to some great teachers’ or ‘Every student should regard himself’ or ‘Are you gentlemen?’ ‘What is the prevailing tone of “Varsity,”’ he asked in conclusion. ‘Surely honour in all things and the gentlemanly instinct that is the surest remedy against cowardice, brutality or unfair treatment.’ And ‘if this academic spirit is to be maintained the finer side of your manhood must assert itself.’35

52 Arts and Science at Toronto

The Student’s Union and Gymnasium before the First World War on the future site of Hart House (A1965-0004/005 [2.16])

At the beginning of Falconer’s term there were a host of organizations and activities available to Toronto students including the student’s newspaper of record, The Varsity, the aforementioned YMCA, numerous discipline-oriented groups like the Mathematical and Physical Society, the Philosophical Society, the Science Association, and the Political Science Club that had played a role in the 1895 student strike. Men’s and women’s athletic groups included the Gymnasium Club and clubs for track, golf, cricket, rugby football, association football, lacrosse, hockey, basketball, lawn tennis, and fencing. A Student’s Parliament was organized in 1905–6 and became the Undergraduate’s Parliament two years later. Meeting every month, its mission was ‘the furtherance of University interests.’ Similar organizations in the colleges, like the UC Lit, Women’s Literary Society, and football club were open to University College and federated colleges students.36 In the colleges male freshmen were introduced to chasing ‘the greasy pig,’ three-legged races, and ‘pick-a-back’ wrestling in which the combatants were carried on the backs of the freshmen. New female students, ‘freshies,’ were also initiated, but with much more decorous activities! In October 1909, for example, the Women’s Literary Society’s

New Beginnings

53

Executive of the University of Toronto student parliament, 1905/6 (B1987-0039)

Autumn Tea was a reception for the ‘freshettes’ from 4:30 to 7:00 o’clock in the East Hall of University College. Faculty wives and female graduates would be there and all other regularly enrolled women students were expected to be there ‘to help make the Autumn Tea as great a success as possible.’37 A few months later, in December, as the ‘navy question’ caught public attention across Canada, the women of Victoria and University College debated the proposition that Canada should contribute to the Royal Navy (the position of many Ontario Tories) rather than develop and control a navy of its own (the position of the reigning Liberal government in Ottawa). The judges considered the merits of both sides as Miss Lang played a piano solo. The women of Victoria, arguing the negative, won. The president of the Women’s Lit made several announcements and the evening concluded with college songs. Debating was also very popular with the male students. ‘One of the prettiest debates ever heard in the Inter-University series,’ The Varsity eagerly reported, took place in Montreal, where Toronto men took the negative against McGill in February 1913 in a debate proposing conscription within the Empire.

54 Arts and Science at Toronto

Initiations, debates, and intramural and intercollegiate sports were just a few of the highlights of student activity in any year before the Great War. On an early January 1911 road trip the Varsity basketball team trounced the YMCA of Niagara Falls, New York, one night and then lost to the University of Rochester in Varsity’s first-ever intercollegiate game against a non-Canadian team. It seemed that the ‘United States rules’ bothered the Varsity men. ‘The game is played in the States with much more roughness than it is here, and as our team has been trained to play the ball only, they naturally suffered with the rough handling,’ The Varsity duly reported.38 In October 1912, the ‘Ladies Inter-collegiate Tennis Tournament’ took place on the 22nd and 24th, opening with Victoria playing University College and closing with Victoria playing St Hilda’s. It was but one of the ‘coming events’ for the last two weeks of the month. Others included organ recitals on the 16th and 30th, student elections at University College, meetings of the Women’s Lit and Victoria Literary Society, the university sermon on the 20th, the Queen’s football game on the 26th, and the Ottawa game on the 2nd of November.39 Before and after the holidays in 1911, the dance season was in full swing: Queen’s Hall, the Trinity Fall Dance, the Rugby Dance, the Western Club Dance, and the Arts Dance were all on the schedule of extracurricular activities. Later, in the early spring of 1912, University College’s graduating class and Victoria’s senior class held formal dinners, both the University and Trinity Oratorical Contests were held, an indoor track meet was scheduled, and the Modern Language Club presented Italian and Spanish comedies, while the Women’s Dramatic Club staged ‘Much Ado about Nothing.’40 Perhaps the most prestigious student activity was work on the Varsity. Its editor was an important figure on campus and one that on occasion, as President Loudon believed in 1895, warranted interference from the senior officers of the university. But those occasions were rare. The paper was only published during session, with the first issue usually appearing in October and the last in March. It was made up of four pages. The first page carried news of the major student events and activities of the week and frequently a column of university and college announcements, occasionally a photograph or a cartoon. Pages two, three, and four carried lesser items and the week’s news from the colleges and schools. These inner pages gave first place to advertisements addressed to the students. Simpson’s had ‘our famous $4.00 shoe for men,’ while rival Eaton’s implored students, ‘Don’t Go Home’ without visiting the

New Beginnings

55

store for ‘your list of many needs.’ J. Botherton on Yonge Street had hockey boots for $2.00 to $4.00, pants for $1.00, and toques for 35 cents.41 Should Canada have its own navy? Should it contribute ships, perhaps Dreadnaughts, to the Royal Navy? Should there be conscription for imperial service in Canada? These were not just debating propositions among students at Toronto and other campuses; they were issues of great political importance in the province and across Canada. And there was more than talk. Early in the fall term of 1911 the Varsity announced the inauguration of a course of lectures for male students on military leadership. The first lecture was going to be given by Major L.F. Phillips of the Canadian general staff. And two of the university staff, Lt. Colonel J.T. Fotheringham, associate professor of medicine, and W. R. Lang, head of the Department of Chemistry, captain in the Imperial Reserve Army, and major in the Second Field Company of the Canadian Engineers, would lecture on the Canadian Army’s medical and engineering units. As early as 1901, when he first arrived in Canada, Lang had formed a voluntary militia unit of university engineers. Now he was scheduled to finish the fall term lectures. And another set of lectures was being planned for the Easter (spring) term. The course sufficiently impressed the Ontario Division of the Canadian Defence League that it gave President Falconer one hundred dollars for prizes for the best students in the course. The top three who had been regular attendees at the lectures would receive prizes of fifty, thirty, and twenty dollars each for standing highest in an examination and prescribed essay on a military topic.42 The course announcement followed shortly after Robert Borden’s Conservatives, out of power for a decade and a half, defeated Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal Party in the 1911 general election. There were two dominant issues in the election, trade reciprocity with the United States and, especially in Quebec, the navy question. Laurier’s Naval Service Act, recently passed, would establish an autonomous Canadian navy while Borden’s Conservatives campaigned earnestly on a platform of Canadian contributions to the Royal Navy. Once in power, Borden’s government stopped preparations for a Canadian naval force, and in 1912 got legislation to contribute to the Royal Navy through the House of Commons. The Liberal majority in the Senate quashed the bill and in 1913 Borden’s government refused to introduce new contributory legislation, leaving the bitterly contested naval question unresolved. Slowly throughout these years, as tensions in Europe continued to rise,

56 Arts and Science at Toronto

the prospect of war, of Canadian involvement in a European war, and of Canada’s role in support of the mother country, became issues of concern in Ontario and at its provincial university. During the summer of 1914, at the end of July, the prime minister was suddenly called away from his Muskoka vacation and rushed by train to Ottawa. Just before nine o’clock on the evening of 4 August a secretary handed Borden a cable from London. The colonial secretary told the prime minister that the German kaiser had refused an ultimatum from the United Kingdom to withdraw his soldiers from Belgium. The empire was at war.43 In September, when Toronto students returned to campus for the fall term, the lead item in the Varsity had a bold headline: ‘University of Toronto Will Do Its Share.’44

4 The Great War

President Falconer’s inaugural war address to students was on Tuesday, 29 September 1914. Already nearly 200 Toronto men were enrolled in the First Contingent at Valcartier, making final preparations to sail to England for further training. The solders, Falconer said, were not going overseas to fight against the German people. Rather, their fight was ‘against a nation which was dangerous to the world because infected with the disease of Prussian Militarism.’ It would be a daunting task. ‘This war is a clash of two views of life, and one or the other must go. It must be a fight to the finish,’ he continued. And a solemn task for soldiers and students alike. ‘Live a life of sacrifice this winter,’ he concluded. ‘Do not be light-hearted this session. You cannot be merry as yesterday; nor as blithe as we hope you will be in the world’s tomorrow. The world is in agony, let this agony touch the depths of your nature, also so that it may purge our selfishness.’1 Days later, in the first university sermon of the year, Falconer again dwelt upon the war. What had happened, why was Canada at war? It was a case of the modern world, of Europe and America, having lost their way. On both sides of the Atlantic nations had too easily embraced the modern philosophy of human pride, represented most notably by ‘Nietsche [sic] and his followers.’ The ‘weakening of the moral foundations of society,’ Falconer said, had allowed ‘the ascendency of the materialist statesman in Germany and the war spirit in Europe.’ War was ‘the spirit of distrust in society. Society is broken, economic conditions changed.’2 The challenge to the soldiers and to the students back home in the coming session was to seek, discover, and help to restore the moral foundations of society. The Varsity brought the reality of the European war home to Toronto students in a more immediate way. The university organist, fellow

58 Arts and Science at Toronto

student Ernest MacMillan of the class of 1915, was detained in a prison in Nuremburg. MacMillan, an honour student in modern history, had been in Europe for the summer studying music and had been arrested and jailed as a British subject after he had attended the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth. The paper reported that by all accounts he was being well treated and was spending his time composing. MacMillan, who remained a prisoner throughout the war and in due course was transferred to a prison camp near Berlin, led a camp orchestra playing concerts and musicals for fellow prisoners. Because MacMillan had successfully completed three years’ study in modern history before going to Europe in the summer of 1914, the university, in 1915, awarded him a bachelor of arts degree. He finally returned to Canada in 1919.3 Throughout the fall of 1914, war-related events on campus were reported in the Varsity. In early October a group of professors, some of whom had had considerable military experience, passed examinations by officers of the Canadian Army that allowed them to become instructors in a newly launched Canadian Officers Training Corps unit at Toronto under the command of Colonel W.F. Lang, head of the Department of Chemistry. Lang’s military experience led to his appointment to the Canadian general staff and to head of military instruction for Military District 2 (Central Canada). Until 1917 he also directed the Provisional School of Infantry at Niagara-on-the-Lake and then Camp Borden. And after the Halifax explosion Lang was transferred to command of Military District 6, based in Halifax.4 Other arts faculty members who became part of the COTC program included classicist Charles Cochrane, English scholar Malcolm Wallace, philosopher George Brett, historians Stewart Wallace and Edward Kylie, and physicist H.A. McTaggart. COTC units sprang up quickly across campus: Wallace and F.C.A. Jeanneret of French headed the unit at University College, Kylie took charge of a unit of Trinity, St Michaels, and Wycliffe students, and historian Vincent Massey commanded the unit that Lester Pearson joined at Victoria.5 ‘Drill Precedes Play’ ran one Varsity headline, and throughout the war the paper printed posed photographs of various recruiting units parading in front of University College.6 The O.T.C. men had their own marching song: Lectures and groups and labs and all the rest of it These are very well, but there’s better work to do,

The Great War

59

Some like plugging, but we vow we have the best of it, We who drill before we fight and look for fighting too. Left, Right, Left, Right, Marching on the campus, Left, Right, Left, Right, Marching along the Don, Frost may chill and Fall rains damp us, But Canada wants fighting men, Fifty thousand fighting men Canada needs fighting men And boys, we’re coming on.7

In February 1915 a farewell dinner at the university honoured 136 more men who had enlisted in the Second Division, and two days later, at a special convocation, degrees were awarded to the absent MacMillan and to a number of men in service who would not finish their final year. It was announced at that event that all Toronto students going overseas on active service would receive a credit of up to one year of academic standing on their university record.8 Intramural athletic contests, and those with clubs within the city, continued during the war, but some intercollegiate events, especially football and hockey, were curtailed. Amateur theatre at the university, which began in 1879 and flourished in the pre-war years, was cut back. It was not shut down, nor did it disband, but the only elaborate work staged during the war was Shakespeare’s As You Like It, in January 1916.9 New columns in the Varsity featured ‘War Reading’ and ‘Killed in Action,’ the former with lists of books supplied by professors to help the students understand the conflict in Europe. Whenever possible the paper carried ‘eye witness’ reports from the front, and no donation or contribution from a student group went unpublicized. Many came from new clubs and activities on campus. The Overseas Club, organized by Professor McKenzie at Trinity, aimed to send tobacco directly to the men at the front lines: a 25 cent subscription guaranteed a quarter of a pound of tobacco went overseas. The International Polity Club began a subscription for ‘such drugs as iodine, chloroform and ether,’ and the monies were dispatched to New York City, where the drugs were purchased and shipped to France. Skating carnivals, glee club concerts, and dances donated their proceeds to war-related agencies and prominent international speakers like former US president Taft came to campus to speak on war-related topics.10 And annually, from 1915 through

60 Arts and Science at Toronto

1919, the Varsity published a ‘War Supplement,’ sponsored by the Students’ Council, giving detailed lists of the university’s soldiers and featuring patriotic articles by President Falconer, engineering dean Ellis, history professor Wrong, and others. Sold for twenty-five cents apiece, they were a popular item that earned a total of almost $40,000 in profits. More than seven thousand dollars went to the university’s Base Hospital, as No. 4 General Hospital of the Canadian Army Medical Corps (CAMC) was called. Other monies went to purchase motor ambulances for the Canadian Red Cross, and to funds for the Canadian Patriotic Fund and the Canadian and British Red Cross, the Belgian Relief Fund, the Hart House retraining program for disabled soldiers, and the university training units.11 By the spring of 1915 more than five hundred underclassmen, seventy faculty members, and seven hundred graduates of the University of Toronto were on active service.12 The 1915–16 year began with more than 650 fewer men enrolled than the previous year. In the Faculty of Arts enrolment dropped from just above 2100 to about 1400 students. More students left again at the beginning of 1916–17, and yet more after the first term. A registration of all students, male and female, in January 1917 surveyed the fitness of students for war work on the home front the following summer. It revealed that very few of the men left on campus could meet the physical qualifications for overseas service. ‘After the physical examination of all the men students of the University there were only a few over one hundred who are liable for the draft,’ Falconer wrote to John McLennan, the professor of physics.13 In the fall of 1918, when the Military Service Act came into force conscripting single males aged twenty to twenty-four, 220 University of Toronto men took the option of volunteering at the last minute for military service. All were rejected as physically unfit. University College registered 1300 students in the year before the war. In 1918–19, the year of the armistice, there were 738 students at the college. University historian Martin Friedland records that more than 600 University of Toronto people, including one nursing sister, Lilly Denton Keys of the CAMC, died on active service.14 Training soldiers in the COTC and sending young men and women to war were but two aspects of the university’s war service. At the unfinished Hart House, made available to the university by the Massey family, which was contributing the building, rifle ranges (later the Hart House Theatre) served as a district school of musketry and training facilities were established for massage. By the winter of 1916–17, Dr E.A. Bott of Psychology and other volunteers in arts established a clinic for the ‘functional re-education’ of disabled soldiers. In May of 1917 the

The Great War

61

No. 4 General Hospital, University of Toronto Expeditionary Force, ca. 1916 (B1970-0002)

clinic came under the control of the Military Hospitals Commission and classes in massage technique were given to many disabled soldiers. In 1918 control of the program was transferred to the CAMC and it was established as the Hart House School of Physiotherapy.15 One of the solders who learned to be a masseur there was Donald McDougall, a young soldier from Northern Ontario who was blinded at the Battle of FlersCourcelette (the Somme) in September 1916. McDougall would later enrol in the Faculty of Arts, graduate in modern history in 1925, win a Rhodes Scholarship, and take a first at Oxford. In 1929 McDougall joined the Department of History and began a long career as teacher and scholar.16 In the spring of 1917 the university also became a training centre for the Royal Flying Corps, with classes given at Hart House, the Engineering Building, and Convocation Hall. The nascent flyers were housed at Wycliffe College, at Burwash Hall at Victoria, and in the university mens’ residence, Devonshire House, which had opened in 1907. Flight training took place in season at Long Branch, North Toronto, and Camp Borden and in winter, by arrangement with the US Air Force, in Texas.17 That was also when the United States entered the Great War, and several colleges in the United States asked Toronto to lend them trained military officers who had been overseas to give military instruction to American students. Among the arts faculty who went were

62 Arts and Science at Toronto

Royal Flying Corps, tents on back campus with airplane overhead, ca. 1918 (A1980-0030/002 [21])

Lt.  Ralph Hodder Williams of History at Columbia, Lt. W.H. King at City College of New York and Johns Hopkins, Lt. Raymond Massey of Victoria at Princeton, and Lt. A. Bland of Physics at MIT and Yale.18 In the summer of 1917, following on the January student registration for war-related service, many women from the university assisted in the fruit harvest in the Niagara peninsula. That was but one of many services women students and staff performed in the war effort. In January 1915 the Varsity reported on the work of the women in University College’s committee for Red Cross work during the preceding term: 450 bandages, 32 pairs of bed socks, 6 pairs of hand-knit socks, half a dozen Balaclava caps, and a dozen scarves were among the goods and supplies that were destined for Canada’s soldiers.19 Similar contributions were organized among the women at the federated colleges in support of the Red Cross and the Women’s Patriotic League, both organizations leading the civilian effort to produce and collect supplies to be dispatched to both wounded and able soldiers at the front. Falconer’s wife believed there was even more to do. She led an effort to establish a ‘League of Patriotic Service of Women Students of the University of Toronto’ whose members would abide by the following promises:

The Great War

63

1 To do the work of my course faithfully regarding this as my first and chief means of serving the State; 2 To strive through study and observation to learn the meaning and responsibility of my citizenship; 3 To give a definite portion of my time to Red Cross work or other work for the war; 4 To practice economy in personal matters to devote the money thus saved to war or relief purposes; and 5 To adopt such habits of life as will make me physically fit for service.20 After Canadian troops went to the front in 1915, there had been a small but steady stream of soldiers returning to Canada, most of whom had been wounded or taken seriously ill in Britain or at the front. Then, in the spring of 1919, the slow process of bringing more than 400,000 soldiers home began, hampered by lack of ships and inadequate organization of the repatriation. Since 1918 Falconer and other Canadian university presidents had tried to convince the government of Canada to support university training for returned soldiers. They failed, largely because of the strong opposition of Senator Sir James Lougheed, the minister of soldiers’ civilian re-establishment in Sir Robert Borden’s Union government. But by 1919 some 400 soldiers had already returned to the university. Falconer turned to the Alumni War Memorial Fund, donated to honour the university’s fallen soldiers, for funds not being used to build the Soldiers’ Tower adjacent to Hart House. The money was used to provide interest-free loans to the soldiers studying at Toronto between 1919 and 1922. For some, special classes were established in the spring of 1919 to run to July to enable the men to complete unfinished work and graduate. Others, who had enlisted after high school, were given other special classes to enable them to qualify for first-year admission in the fall. In all, 1200 ex-soldiers attended the university. Like the undergraduates who had enlisted from 1915 on during the war, the returned men were given a year of credit towards advanced standing.21 The City of Toronto was swept by waves of patriotic sentiment in the early months of the war, stimulated by the presence of groups of men volunteering for service, by patriotic displays by all sorts of national and imperial-oriented organizations, and by the highly competitive and fervent Toronto newspapers vying with each other for the latest, biggest, most dramatic story of any kind relating to the war. On 8  September 1914, the principal of Harbord Street Collegiate Institute reportedly gave

64 Arts and Science at Toronto

a stirring, patriotic address to his students. Two of them were the sons of associate professor of German at the university P.W. Mueller, and they were offended by some of the principal’s remarks. Taking exception, the two boys were suspended. To this high-handed behaviour Mueller and several colleagues, including Professor Squair and associate professors of French Cameron and Will, professor of physiology A.B. Macallum, and associate professor of chemistry Allen, among others, strongly protested in a letter to the Toronto Board of Education. On 24 September the management committee of the board replied in a unanimous resolution. It commended the principal for ‘endeavouring to impress loyalty and devotion to the interest of the Empire upon the children and we resent the criticism contained in the [professors’] communication.’22 The dispute continued into October, with each incident broadcast in the press. Particularly eager were the Telegram and the World, each of which had already been campaigning for the dismissal of all German professors from the provincial university. Public funds should not be used to pay German subjects in time of war, they argued. More ominously, it seemed obvious that the professors’ teachings could not be patriotic and ‘beneficial’ and they might even pass information to the enemy through contacts in New York. There were several professors of German origin at the university, no surprise given the admiration for German scholarship and science in academic circles throughout North America at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. August Kirschman was the highly regarded professor of philosophy. Bernard Fernow had come from Cornell in 1907 as the university’s first dean of forestry and was very distinguished in his field. He too was of German origin, but had been a citizen of the United States. Peter Toews, absent on sick leave, was a promising assistant professor of German. But the press campaign singled out Paul Mueller, his colleague in German instructor Bonno Tapper, and the highly regarded professor of oriental languages, Immanuel Benzinger. In mid-November Falconer wrote to the press saying that, after a full investigation, ‘I am of the opinion that they have done nothing that should arouse any suspicion that they are injurious alien enemies.’23 The campaign to fire the three German professors continued. A special meeting of the senate on 9 November set up a special committee to investigate ‘which persons, if any, who are members of the University staff, are of German birth, and … are alien enemies.’ At another meeting on the 22nd the committee reported on its findings and on a meeting it  had had with members of the board of governors.24 The board

The Great War

65

assembled in a special meeting on Thursday afternoon December 3rd to consider ‘the question of the employment of native German professors on the staff of the University.’ Falconer briefly summarized the nature of the appointments of Beringer, Mueller, and Tapper and their ‘attitude and conduct in the present crisis.’ ‘Taking account of their previous service to the University,’ Falconer added, the satisfactory performance of their present duties, which constitutes a real benefit to the University, their conduct in a difficult situation, the fact that there are no grounds for suspicion that they are in any way misusing their position, and their promises for the future, I believe that it is only just and right that these gentlemen should be kept in their present positions.

He concluded by reminding the board members that to do so would be in accord with the proclamation of the governor general on 15 August 1914 that ‘all persons in Canada of German or Austro-Hungarian nationality, so long as they quietly pursue their ordinary avocations, be allowed to continue to enjoy the protection of the law, and be accorded the respect and consideration due to peaceful and law abiding citizens; and that they be not arrested, detained or interfered with.’25 But the senate’s committee had recommended that the three be dismissed. Sir Edmund B. Osler and some other board members agreed. ‘I cannot see why we should be paying German salaries here,’ Osler told the press, ‘when thousands of young men of Britain are being killed by the Germans at the front.’26 The problem was that the board could not dismiss any staff member without Falconer’s recommendation and Falconer refused to give it. The board and the president were at an impasse on a matter which raised intense feelings and excitement among some faculty members and in the community. The meeting adjourned. Osler resigned. The board reconvened the following afternoon and Sir  Joseph Flavelle crafted a compromise that kept Tapper, Mueller, and Benzinger on staff but put them on fully paid leave of absence until the end of the academic year. It was accepted and a solution to the problem of the German professors had been found.27 Falconer opposed the plan. He told Ramsay Wright, in retirement in England, that the solution came at a cost to the university. We have been having great trouble because of the presence of Germans on our staff. It began with a visit paid by Mueller to Hagarty in September, when Mueller blamed Hagarty for stirring up the school by his patriotic address and not qualifying it to prevent an attack on his boys. Then some

66 Arts and Science at Toronto of our staff injudiciously went to the defence of Mueller in the newspapers. Ever since there has been a good deal of slumbering discontent over that fact that Mueller and others are teaching in the University. Benzinger, who has succeeded McCurdy in Orientals, a very distinguished scholar, has had to bear the brunt because he has only been with us three years and has a son serving in the German army. But these men were doing their work and are harmless, and I reported to the Board against their dismissal. The majority wanted to dismiss them, and because the will of the majority was not carried out Sir Edmund Osler has unfortunately resigned. The compromise, against which I dissented, was carried granting them leave of absence with full pay until the end of the present academic year. I am trying to effect an exchange for Benzinger in some American university or College, but I have been unsuccessful so far, though Harvard, Yale and Columbia are all very sympathetic with my endeavours. It is a worrying situation, but I hope we shall by and by come through it without discredit to the University.28

Before the academic year was out all three were gone. Benzinger found a place at a small college. Mueller, who was doing graduate work at Chicago, also went to the United States. And Tapper, who had come to Toronto on a temporary appointment to replace Professor Toews, returned to McMaster, his former university, on Bloor Street. Throughout the affair the students and their newspaper supported Falconer and the three beleaguered professors. The Varsity became especially incensed when the Toronto World attacked its support of Benzinger, Mueller, and Tapper in an editorial headed ‘Alien Enemies in Toronto University.’ The World and its readers, the Varsity charged on the day the board compromise became public (4 December 1914), had ‘become infected with undiscriminating, flag-waving, traitor-denouncing hysteria.’29 Falconer also received support from the faculty members who had publicly supported Mueller and several others. One of them, George Wrong, professor of history, told the students at the beginning of December that the whole affair was ‘absolute bosh.’30 But other faculty members disagreed. The Globe reported that in a November speech the chair of Philosophy, James Gibson Hume, denounced the war and those who were defending the German professors with ‘passion and almost fiery zeal.’ Later, in June 1915, Hume told Falconer that he had cancelled his two courses where students were required to read German texts and was deciding what to use in replacement courses.31 And there were those who agreed with the senate committee. The record suggests,

The Great War

67

however, that despite all the public clamour, all the harsh denunciations of the university in the community, most of the faculty were silent. They had neither defended their colleagues nor argued for their dismissal. Among the silent was their titular leader, Alfred Baker, the dean of the Faculty of Arts. Canada’s universities were an important resource for men for the everexpanding Canadian Expeditionary Force – the name of the Canadian army overseas that grew to more than 400,000 men – and for some of the nursing sisters in the Canadian Army Medical Corps. The universities produced most of the army’s rapidly expanding cadre of young officers. Beyond that the Borden government paid little heed to the potential contribution that university faculties could make to the war effort. Not without reason. Archie Macallum, professor of physiology, noted the paucity of major research talent in the university system – ‘not many more than 50 pure research men all told.’32 Even they were largely ignored. The ‘pure research men’ who did exist got little research support, if any, from the national government before the war. Still, at Toronto there was the capacity to offer more support in several faculties. Especially prominent was the Faculty of Medicine, which organized No. 4 General Hospital. It served in Salonika and England, treating thousands of imperial and Canadian soldiers during the war. Falconer told a colleague that the hospital was nearly ready to leave for the front at the end of April 1915, ‘and is to consist of 40 members of the medical staff, 75 nurses, and about 200 rank and file, of whom there are about thirty students.’ In addition, he added, ‘we are raising $80,000 for equipment.’33 Also, two other members of the Faculty of Medicine, John Fitzgerald, Associate Professor of Hygiene, and John Amyot, Professor of Hygiene, played leading roles in the C.E.F. in developing programs to control the spread of contagious diseases and Bruce Robertson, a talented young surgeon, pioneered a new technique for blood transfusion that saved the lives of hundreds of severely wounded soldiers while serving at a Casualty Clearing Station in France.34 Dean W.H. Ellis of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, together with President Falconer, John McLennan, chair of Physics, and Archie Macallum were founding members of the group of advisers who assisted Sir George Foster, minister of trade and commerce to inaugurate, in 1917, the Honorary Scientific Advisory Council on Industrial Research – a forerunner to the National Research Council and a pet project of Foster’s for years.35 A number of Ellis’s colleagues

68 Arts and Science at Toronto

in engineering worked on the development of munitions, testing both shell casings and explosives made by Canada’s large munitions industry under the leadership of Sir Joseph Flavelle, chairman of the Imperial Munitions Board.36 Dean Clara Benson of the Faculty of Household Science also contributed to the research on chemical explosives.37 In 1918, Lt. Col. Vincent Massey of the Faculty of Arts was summoned to Ottawa to become associate secretary to the War Committee of Borden’s Union government which dealt with a host of war-related issues like shortage of labour, allocation of materials to the munitions industry, food production, prohibition of alcohol, fuel and power shortages occasioned by the 1918 coal-mining strike in the United States, and Canadian representation at Washington.38 But the arts faculty member who made the most visible and prolonged contribution was McLennan of Physics. The initiative came not from Ottawa but from London, where McLennan had carefully cultivated relationships with several prominent British scientists who were leading Britain’s extensive research program to support the war. While in Britain in July 1915, McLennan was asked to join the advisory council of a newly established Department of Scientific and Industrial Research to provide the best available scientific advice to Britain’s industrial war effort. Then, at the end of the year, back in Canada, another British war research group, the Board of Inventions and Research, asked McLennan to do a survey of the helium resources of the empire. McLennan quickly built a team, including Eli Burton and John Satterly of his department and H.F. Dawes of McMaster University, to collect samples of helium extracted from gas wells in south-western Ontario and, later, in the Bow Island Field in Alberta. The group found that the Canadian gas contained 36 per cent helium, the richest source in the empire. Soon, under the direction of John Patterson, a Canadian engineer, a plant was running and extracting small amounts of helium from Ontario wells. In due course some 60,000 cubic feet of gas was shipped to the Admiralty from Canadian sources by April of 1920. But after the 1917 entry of the United States into the war the enormous gas resources of Texas made the Canadian operation insignificant.39 Long before that McLennan had moved on. Back in Britain in the summer of 1917, he was now asked to stay and continue the work he had explored in Toronto on anti-submarine warfare research. Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare campaign against allied shipping was at its height. Falconer, himself an ardent imperialist and champion of the war effort, got the board of governors to approve a leave with full

The Great War

69

pay for McLennan to stay on in England.40 McLennan needed help, quickly. ‘Scientific men’ in Britain were already fully engaged in war research work and unavailable. But there was another potential source: former students who were in the CEF and potential recruits who were just finishing their physics studies in Toronto. ‘It will be a necessity for me to have Satterly [member of the department] and about a dozen men of 1st class honour type in Physics,’ he told Falconer.41 McLennan appealed to Sir Edward Kemp, Canada’s minister for overseas forces, for help, and soon a group of former students and senior students from his department was assembled. One of them was Robert Cooley, dispatched from his officers training company at Toronto. Two others were McLennan’s former students serving in the CEF. Roger Self was released from the Corps of Signals, and Horace Holmes, who McLennan said was ‘brilliant,’ from the 12th Field Ambulance of the Medical Corps. The three went to work at the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, which was manufacturing mines. Then they were sent to Portsmouth to test the magnetic effects of ships going near mines. Just before the armistice they went to Scapa Flow to set up a loop device and a half-dozen mines at different depths to destroy any intruding enemy submarines. Cooley recalled, in the 1980s, that the loop was ‘pretty successful.’42 But the problem of manufacturing a reliable contact mine or magnetic mine remained unresolved. ‘That never came to a proper success,’ Horace Holmes recalled. ‘They never got past the problem of these things firing when the weather got rotten.’43 McLennan, never one to minimize his accomplishments, had a more expansive view of his group’s achievements. ‘With a particular mine I developed,’ he wrote in  December 1918, ‘we got one cruiser, three destroyers, three minesweepers, two subs and a launch. By another electro-magnetic device [the loop] we closed the Straits of Dover and with it got two subs. The last one was caught and blown to pieces at the entrance to Scapa Flow after it had negotiated all the ordinary anti-submarine devices.’44 There is no evidence to substantiate this, and in that same month, the Admiralty closed the Bureau of Inventions and Research. McLennan was then asked to head a new department of Scientific Research and Experiment and also to be director of a new Admiralty Central Research Institution and Scientific Advisor to the Admiralty. J.J. Thompson, Rutherford, Richard Threlfell, ‘the Scientists of Britain,’ McLennan told Falconer, ‘as well as such men as Lord Fisher, Sir Charles Parsons, Sir George Bielby, Sir Southern Holland, and Sir Ross Skinner,’ as well as the ‘Heads of the Navy Departments, too, seem to have confidence in

70 Arts and Science at Toronto

me and my work.’45 In the end the whole scheme came to naught. As eager as the Admiralty and the ‘scientists of Britain’ were to see a new research centre established, Treasury Board was unimpressed. The costs of winding down the war establishment and beginning the transformation to peace were going to be staggering and, McLennan reported in August 1919, the ‘Treasury certainly seems to be in no hurry.’46 It wasn’t. McLennan came home and resumed the headship of the Department of Physics. There were many changes when McLennan returned to campus in the fall of 1919. A temporary but important one was the appearance of more mature men, returned soldiers, in many classes. They were a continuing reminder, especially to first-year students, of the university’s important commitment to the war effort. A year earlier, during the flu epidemic of 1918, the usual patterns of life for both students and faculty were disrupted when the university closed its doors from 18 October to 5 November.47 McLennan found other changes. In 1915 Archie Macallum, who had moved from the Faculty of Arts to assume the headship of the Department of Biochemistry in the Faculty of Medicine, had created a Board of Graduate Studies, the forerunner to the later creation of the School of Graduate Studies. Then, in 1917, Macallum, like McLennan a strong advocate of the Honorary Advisory Committee on Scientific and Industrial Research, accepted a call from Ottawa to chair the new committee. Two years later, just as McLennan returned to campus, J. P. Murrich, professor of anatomy in the Faculty of Medicine, succeeded Macallum as chair of the Graduate Board.48 In the Faculty of Arts, in 1916–17, the botanists in the Department of Biology, who had long since shared separate quarters with the Faculty of Forestry in a house on Queen’s Park Crescent, split away to form a separate department. Though teaching only the animal life sciences after the break, the Department of Biology did not change its name to the Department of Zoology until 1940. Separation was also at work in the physics department. In 1917 the astronomers split away to form a separate department led by C.A. Chant. In 1918, the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering closed its course in Applied and Analytical Chemistry. Henceforth, all chemistry instruction for engineering undergraduates, except for those enrolled in chemical engineering, was provided by the Faculty of Arts chemistry department.49 The Department of Military Studies, headed by Lang, was established in 1919 and lasted until 1951. And the psychologists who had been in the Department of Philosophy

The Great War

71

since the subject was introduced at Toronto were given a separate budget line by the president in 1919. In 1927 psychology achieved full departmental status.50 Also in 1919, compulsory physical education classes for students were begun. Finally, McLennan had a new dean, Arthur Coleman, head of Geology and of the geology museum at the Royal Ontario Museum, who replaced the mathematician Alfred Baker.51 And yet, as the university hurried to return to pre-war days and, like the rest of Ontario and Canada, forget the grim reality of the Great War, little changed in the immediate post-war years. The total student enrolment in 1919–20, 5060 men and women, was almost the same as in 1914– 15. Nor did the proportions of men and women, which had altered significantly during the war, change from pre-war days. In 1919–20 68 per cent of the students were men and 32 per cent were women, just as in the last days before the war. Over those years the teaching staff in the Faculty of Arts increased by just one member, from 168 to 169. There had been shifts in the distribution of staff members by rank. The number of full professors increased from fifty-eight to seventy-one and the number of associates fell from twenty-seven to nineteen. During the war a number of assistant professors had been hired, increasing that group from eight to twenty, while the lecturers remained just about the same and the number of demonstrators dropped from nineteen to just five.52 On Armistice Day, 1919, the governor general, the Duke of Devonshire, laid the cornerstone of the Soldier’s Tower, the memorial gift of the Alumni Association.53 When completed in 1924, the long lists in the tower walkway of the university’s soldiers who had lost their lives became a permanent reminder that the University of Toronto had done ‘its share’ in the Great War. And more than its share: 613 university people had been killed or died in service and a total of 5651 had gone to war, including 149 staff members and 1881 undergraduates. Nearly 5000 had been in the army, of which the largest group were the men and women in the Canadian Army Medical Corps. A thousand more had served in the infantry and almost 800 in the artillery.54 It was time to move on: to return to the established routines of university life, to lecture halls and laboratories, library reading rooms and study halls, athletic fields and club meeting rooms, dinners and balls. It was time to be undisturbed by recruits drilling late in the afternoon on the front and back campuses, time to worry no more about the columns of names of casualties that had peppered the pages of the Varsity for half a decade. Many hoped and some perhaps believed that the Great War was ‘the war to end war.’ Many hoped and some perhaps believed

72 Arts and Science at Toronto

that Canada, now a voting member of the new League of Nations, would share in ushering in an era of peace. And at the University of Toronto many believed that the comfortable ways of pre-war days and the traditional goals of a university education could be resumed, undisturbed by the changes of the turbulent war years. Bruce Taylor, the principal of Queen’s University, echoed these sentiments when he visited the campus earlier in 1919. The university, he told the students in a packed Convocation Hall, was ‘a place where men see things and dream dreams – it exists to make you cultured men and women.’55

5 Between Wars

The interwar years have been easy to characterize. They were the ‘decades of discord.’1 The 1920s were the ‘decade of illusions,’ ‘the prosperous twenties,’ or ‘the roaring twenties,’ and the 1930s the ‘dirty thirties.’2 In the immediate aftermath of the war the adjustment to a peacetime economy seemed effortless. Canadians on the home front rushed to buy goods and services denied them during the years of conflict. The hint of good times didn’t last, however. Wheat prices collapsed and overseas markets for Canadian goods didn’t materialize. There was a sharp slump in 1921. Only in the mid-twenties did better times return, triggered in Ontario by the revival of markets in the United States and the flood of American investment capital into Canada; by exploitation of northern Ontario, its forests and mines, its lumber and pulpwood, its nickel, gold, and silver; by the expansion of hydro electricity to towns and cities across the province and the electrification of rural Ontario; by the construction of new railroads and highways; and by the influx of thousands of immigrants from afar filling jobs in the factories of the Great Lakes basin from Ontario to Superior. In the twenties Ontarians listened to radio broadcasts from a rapidly growing number of local stations and, increasingly, from the more powerful emerging American networks, Columbia Broadcasting and National Broadcasting. They and other Canadians used more and more telephones in business and especially in their homes: between 1919 and 1939 the number of telephones in use in Canada almost doubled.3 Between 1920 and 1939 the number of Canadian homes using electricity more than doubled, from 764 thousand to 1.6 million.4 During the war Ontario factories had turned out military vehicles in the thousands. In peacetime the war manufacturers quickly turned to passenger cars

74 Arts and Science at Toronto

and trucks for the domestic market. At first the brands were Canadian, but by the mid-twenties the ascendancy of American car makers to dominance of the Ontario and Canadian markets had begun. There were 145,000 vehicles registered in Ontario in 1919. A decade later the number was 540,000.5 Another technological legacy of the war was the production and use of aircraft. Sturdily built bush planes and the adventurous pilots who flew them played an essential role in the opening and development of northern Ontario. And across Canada civil aviation increased twenty-five-fold in the interwar years; the numbers of passengers, pounds of mail, and goods transported through the skies grew exponentially.6 The provincial capital grew apace with all this development. There were more than 110,000 more people in Toronto at the end of the twenties than there had been on 11 November 1918. As the city grew it stretched out along the lakeshore and gradually moved north towards the farmlands above Eglinton Avenue. More than three-quarters of Toronto’s 606,000 people were of British heritage, but Jews, Italians, Poles, Ukrainians, and Chinese peoples were growing groups in the city. The largest religious group was Roman Catholic. Among Protestants over fifty per cent were Methodists, who, at mid-decade, had joined with Congregationalists and some Presbyterians to form the United Church of Canada. The leadership of the provincial university viewed all of this change with a degree of detachment and reserve. A gift to the university of an airplane and nine engines from the Royal Air Force training unit as it departed the campus at the beginning of 1919 was welcomed, especially by the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering. Together with a small wind tunnel that had been built during the war, the plane and the engines could be used for both teaching and research in the new field of aeronautical engineering.7 For President Falconer, who had been a strong champion of advanced studies and research since his earliest days at Toronto, this was good news. But he also constantly reminded his students in the twenties that the University of Toronto was much more than a purveyor of knowledge and the mastery of professional skills. ‘You will understand,’ he remarked to the entering class in the fall of 1922, ‘that this is a great school of character as well as of learning and science, also that your education consists in acquiring, not merely knowledge, nor even the habit of investigation, but also such control of your moral powers as will make you better members of society. A genius in intellect, or a prodigy in science with an arrested character is not

Between Wars

75

the type which the University delights to honour.’8 This was the age of ragtime, of flappers and jazz, of women smoking in public. The president returned to his theme a year later, again cautioning his university about the heady delights of the ‘roaring ’20s.’ He underlined the values of a ‘liberal education.’ ‘The modern student,’ he said, ‘has advantages his predecessors never had due to the comparatively recent impetus that the sciences have received. Yet always, throughout the ages, the ancient purpose of the University has always remained unchanged, “to free man from material things and provide him with judgment and an appreciation of values which will enable him to go through life and get full worth out of the experience he accumulates.”’9 Exhortation and moral suasion were useful. But on occasion sterner messages were required. In June 1923, the Conservative party, which had lost the 1919 Ontario election to a farmer-labour coalition led by E.C. Drury, was returned to power under the leadership of Howard Ferguson, one-time minister of education. Ferguson’s government was anxious to do away with the prohibition of the sale of alcohol, which had been imposed by the national government as a war measure in 1916, and was considering a referendum on the issue. Leading up to the referendum in 1924, Falconer, fully aware that the students were as susceptible to the lure of a flourishing illicit alcohol trade as anyone, had the editor of the Varsity publish a warning from Caput, the university disciplinary authority. A box at the top of page one of the 11 December issue bluntly stated that ‘any person found to have been drinking intoxicating liquors in the buildings or on the grounds of the University, or to have introduced intoxicating liquors into any of the buildings or on the grounds of the University, renders himself liable to expulsion from the University.’10 There were more distractions and Falconer worried about them. ‘Radios and Autos: Hindrance to Study’ read a Varsity headline of 28 September 1928. Falconer told the fall convocation that ‘far more failures come from dissipation of faculties on a multitude of lesser interests that befog the mind and will, than from lack of brain power.’ The life of an undergraduate was like that of a ‘canoesman guiding his vessel up a narrow stream,’ a challenge where ‘courage’ and ‘tenacity of purpose’ were the ‘two great essentials of a successful University career.’11 But he was not going the follow the example of the University of Oregon. There, the Varsity noted a few weeks later, an alarmed administration had forbidden students to operate or ride in autos during the academic year because ‘automobiles have a deleterious effect on the health of students of

76 Arts and Science at Toronto

both sexes as they are an inducement for the student to keep late hours and neglect his work.’ The Toronto student, it seemed, was of stronger character and would not be so easily enticed by automobiles. As the dean of University College put it, ‘He realizes his responsibility both to his university and his family, and is sufficiently interested in his work to control car-riding so as not to interfere with his health or studies.’12 However mindful students were of their ‘responsibilities’ in the twenties, they were as anxious as their parents to put the war years behind them. It was time to resume the wide range of activities and interests that characterized student life beyond the classroom before the war. An early indication was the issue of the Varsity immediately following the first Armistice Day in November 1919. There were nearly a dozen and a half items on the front page, but only one, ‘Important Meeting of Veterans on Tuesday,’ dealt with a wartime issue. Instead, space was given to ‘Theatre Night,’ Guy Fawkes celebrations, public lectures in chemistry, scholarship announcements, and the like.13 Dramatic clubs and debates, and intercollegiate and intramural athletic contests, for women and men alike, thrived in the 1920s. Dances and dinners, staples of extracurricular activity in the pre-war days, were as popular as ever. In the fall of 1922 the hottest ticket on campus was for the Masquerade Ball at Hart House. Demand was so great that it was rumoured the ball would be held on two nights. ‘In Every Faculty Students Are Very Eager for Precious Pasteboards,’ the Varsity reported.14 For those who needed them, dancing lessons were available at the Wellesley, ‘A better class Studio of Modern Dancing’: all the latest steps could be had in six private lessons for five dollars.15 In February 1925, the Varsity women defended their title in an annual weekend basketball tourney with Queen’s and McGill at Hart House, a rare opportunity for women to enter that male sanctuary.16 Later, in intercollegiate football, the Blues had a comfortable lead over McGill on Saturday afternoon, 14 November, at Varsity Stadium. But a fifty-yard run from midfield gave the Redmen a touchdown, conversion and an 11–10 win to tie Varsity for second place.17 Two years later, in October 1927, students, alumni, and faculty were all swept up in the centenary celebrations of the founding of the university. There was a grand parade, parties at Casa Loma, gala ball after gala ball, class reunions, and more, concluding with a divine service attended by 5000 people in the newly opened Varsity Arena on Sunday afternoon, 9 October 1927.18 The following March the university planned a festive banquet for the Varsity Grads ice-hockey team when it arrived home with the gold medal from the 1928 Winter Olympics in St Moritz, Switzerland.19

Between Wars

77

University of Toronto senior women’s basketball team, intercollegiate champions, 1925 (Torontonensis, 1925, p. 284)

Centenary Parade, 6 October 1927 – ‘University College’ (A1965-0004/031 [0.166])

78 Arts and Science at Toronto

The students of the 1920s were as interested in their non-academic activities, in their clubs and the very popular fraternities and sororities,20 as their brothers and sisters of pre-war days. But these children of wartime seemed more interested in national and international affairs than their predecessors. The League of Nations, Canada’s membership in the league, and the league’s heady prospects in its early years captured the imagination of some students. Others, on a more personal level, took advantage of the Overseas Education League to visit Europe more cheaply than had been possible before the war.21 At home, political events caught the attention of many students: not least the battle of two alumni in the election of 1921, when former political science student William Lyon Mackenzie King, Liberal, defeated former mathematics student Arthur Meighen, leader of the Conservative party. So too did the election of Calvin Coolidge in the United States in 1924, the 1925 announcement by the chief electoral officer of Canada that Toronto students meeting a residence requirement could vote in the forthcoming general election, and the election of Herbert Hoover in November 1928 in the United States.22 A continuing stream of important visitors could always be guaranteed a capacity audience on the campus, whether it be the French Canadian statesman Senator Napoléon Belcourt speaking on bilingualism at the University College Literary Society, Rudyard Kipling visiting the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering in 1927, French diplomat and poet Paul Claudel at Convocation Hall the following year, the meeting of the Canadian Authors Association (Sir Charles G.D. Roberts, Lucy Maude Montgomery, and B.K. Sandwell among many others) meeting on campus in 1929, or the presentation of an honorary degree to General Jan Christian Smuts, soldier, statesman, and former prime minister of South Africa, in 1930.23 University affairs were especially important to the student newspaper. In the fall of 1922 the Varsity headlined the news that university registration, without counting the School of Graduate Studies or the Ontario Agricultural College at Guelph (a university affiliate), had reached nearly 5000 students. The same October issue also announced the appointment of a special commission on university affairs, chaired by Premier E.C. Drury, to investigate university financing and how appointments were made to the teaching staff and the board of governors.24 There was startling news in the 25 February 1925 edition. A report from the board of governors revealed that only 45 to 50 per cent of arts students entering first year graduated from the university.

Between Wars

79

Among entering students nearly 15 per cent would fail in their first year of studies, with twice as many failing in the pass course as in the honour course.25 For years Falconer had been trying to persuade the Province that its secondary school system should be responsible for educating students through senior matriculation. His first attempt, in 1912, had been thwarted by opposition from the other universities in the province, which feared serious drops in their enrolment if the entrance requirement was stiffened from junior to senior matriculation. Even Falconer’s own Faculty of Arts Council had resisted the change through much of the 1920s. In the fall of 1929, Falconer presented a proposal to a sceptical arts council once more. Malcolm Wallace, principal of University College and head of the English Department, equivocated. There was, he told the Varsity, ‘much to be said for the abolishment of the first year of the pass course although there are most certainly arguments on the other side.’26 But Falconer argued that the change would benefit the province. First-year students would be ‘more mature’ and ‘at the end of first year there would be fewer disappointments which are often of serious consequence in the life of the student.’27 One student who entered the pass arts course in that September of 1929 was Sydney Hermant, who, years later, would become a prominent figure in university governance. Hermant had attended Upper Canada College and took the university’s entrance examination after Grade 12 at age sixteen. Many years later he recalled the easy passage from school to the university’s pass course. ‘You could go down to Examination Hall, write Grade XII, and if you managed to scrape through the minimum number of subjects with 50% on each subject, and could pay the entrance fee, or the required fee, you could automatically enter the first year of Pass Arts … You didn’t have to be recommended by your high school, you didn’t have to have parental consent, there was no such thing as a quota or a lineup because there were very few applicants,’ he wrote. In  fact, there seemed to be no restrictions at all. As Hermant put it, ‘The University said anybody could turn up and write those Grade XII examinations.’28 But at long last Falconer’s arguments prevailed in both the arts council and the university senate. Starting in the 1931–2 session, Toronto would admit only students with senior matriculation standing to its first-year programs in arts and the professional faculties.29 There were other changes. With particular attention to the need for adequately trained teachers for the ever-growing school system, it had become

80 Arts and Science at Toronto

apparent that the gap between Toronto’s honour course and its pass course was too large, that the honour course ‘had become too specialized for the average teacher even in the higher ranks.’ The university therefore introduced a new, four-year ‘general course,’ between pass and honours. Falconer explained that it would be based on ‘the pass work of the first two years.’ Students who attained a ‘good standing – say 60% at the end of second year,’ would be admitted in third year to the new general course, and in the final two years would not be bound by the required five subjects of the pass course. Instead, they would be allowed ‘a measure of specialisation to become versed in some one or more departments of study.’ That, the president hoped, if completed successfully, would give the students ‘specialist standing’ in their baccalaureate degree and qualify them for a master’s degree after a further year of study.30 The 1931–2 year also saw Falconer’s final report as president. He noted that the change in entrance requirement to senior matriculation had reduced the failure rate in the first year of the revised pass course and believed that ‘the quality of the pass degree at the end of the three years will be better than that of the former degree at the end of four years.’31 For students, changes in the classroom, especially in the teaching staff, could be as important as entrance requirements. In the 1920s a large number of the generation of professors who came to Toronto in the 1880s and 1890s were retiring.32 Among the most liked and respected was Maurice Hutton, who had joined University College as professor of classics in 1880 and served as principal of the college from 1901 until his retirement in 1928. That was the same year that another ‘fixture’ of the university, James Brebner, retired. James Mavor, an internationally recognized scholar and well-known celebrity in the city, known to students across campus as ‘Jimmy’ Mavor, and the head of the political science department for three decades, retired in 1923.33 Another fixture of the faculty, W.J. Alexander, chair of English for forty-two years, was ‘Varsity’s best beloved Professor.’ Together with John Home Cameron, chair of French, and James G. Hume, head of Philosophy, Alexander retired in June 1926.34 Their replacements were noticed in the Varsity. Robert MacIver led the political science department until 1927, when he became head of the Department of Economics and Sociology at Barnard College in New York, and was succeeded by E.J. Urwick.35 Malcolm Wallace became head of English, F.C.A. Jeanneret the head of French at University College, and George Brett the new head of the university

Between Wars

81

Department of Philosophy. Prominent scientists like Neils Bohr, the Danish theoretical physicist who twice visited the campus in the 1920s, attracted attention, as did other new senior appointments. T.J. Meek of the arts class of 1903 returned in 1923 to take the professorship of Semitic languages at University College after rising to international recognition while teaching at Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia. In the same year, Maurice DeWulf, professor of philosophy at the University of Louvain in France, took up a professorship at St Michael’s College.36 The number of professors, through appointments and promotions, grew from thirty-nine in 1920 to fifty-two in 1930. In the professorial ranks there were thirty more positions at the end of the decade than there had been in 1920. The growth in the university faculty was not matched in the federated colleges, where appointments were made to replace retirees, but the overall number in the professorial ranks remained nearly constant: thirty-nine in 1920 and one less in 1930. The growth in course enrolments in many arts departments in the twenties was significant. The first-year pass-course students in mathematics increased from 439 in 1919–20 to 597 in 1929–30, and first-year students in pass physics from 398 to 516. Honour-course physics for all years grew from 222 to 367. The four years of pass-course biology rose from 493 to 779. The same phenomenon was evident in political science: there were 233 students in honours political science in 1919–20 and 634 in 1929–30. History honours students increased only marginally, from 258 to 346. In the college subjects, English and French enrolments grew in the decade, but much less than in the science departments and political science.37 For English, however, ‘service teaching’ became an important aspect of the work of the University College department. Students in other faculties who had an English requirement in their programs grew in numbers, an example being medical students, who needed an English course in second year. Alexander, the head of English, asked his junior colleague, Mossie May Waddington, to take on the task. ‘He sent me down with trepidation, expecting that the men might make a row,’ she recalled. But ‘they were mild as milk. I never had the slightest trouble.’38 Psychology highlighted another aspect of the change taking place. In 1919–20 it was still a branch of the philosophy department with only forty students. Ten years later, as an autonomous department in the faculty, Psychology had 1165 enrolments in its pass course. Two hundred and fifty-nine were in the Faculty of Arts. The remainder were accounted for by a large expansion of the role of ‘service teaching’ for other faculties. Nearly 300 hundred were enrolled in the Department of

82 Arts and Science at Toronto

Extension, another two hundred in medicine, and 259 in nursing. Similarly, the Departments of Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, and Physics all had large commitments to students in other faculties from Medicine and Applied Science and Engineering to the Ontario Agricultural College at Guelph and the Ontario College of Pharmacy. A large amount of that new ‘service teaching’ could be done by men and women on annual or stipendiary appointments in the non-professorial ranks. But their supervision, and an ever-broadening range of course offerings in the sciences and political science, triggered the need for new appointments in the more senior ranks.39 Business leaders and politicians assured Canadians in October 1929 that the impact of the sudden stock-market crash was only ‘temporary.’ It was not. The collapse of export markets, especially the United States, precipitated the fall of the price of wheat, a key Canadian commodity, from $1.03 in 1928 to 29 cents in 1933.40 In 1929 116,000 working men and women were seeking work; in 1933 the number was 826,000.41 For those who had manufacturing jobs, the average annual wage for supervisory and office workers in 1930 was $2008 and $1608 in 1933, a 20 per cent drop; and for production workers average annual wages fell from $995 to $777, a 22 per cent loss of income.42 Shortly before he lost the 1930 election to Conservative R.B. Bennett, Prime Minister Mackenzie King told Canadians that relief for farmers, labourers, and the unemployed was not a national but a provincial or municipal responsibility. In Ontario relief work was distributed by the municipalities among the unemployed. In Windsor a man could earn an average of $157 for a season’s work, but in Toronto, after passing a means test the best a man could do was $54 for the season. And if that man was seen in a liquor store he was quickly laid off.43 Political protest went hand in hand with hard times. The Bennett regime in Ottawa responded to the growing Depression with hardy traditional measures, raising tariffs and implementing other protectionist policies. Their effect was to cut off Canadian goods, basic commodities and manufactured items alike, from the vital external markets that were the key to economic well-being. Labour unions and labour politics grew proportionately in popularity. Early in the 1930s a group of left-leaning political and intellectual figures gathered in Calgary to found the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the forerunner of the New Democratic Party. In 1935 over a thousand unemployed workers in western Canada set out on a ‘trek’ to Ottawa, only to be forcefully

Between Wars

83

stopped at Regina by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. By 1934 only two municipalities in the Toronto area were not bankrupt and under trusteeship, Forest Hill and Swansea.44 A year later a long-time member of the Trades and Labour Congress, James ‘Jimmy’ Simpson, was elected mayor.45 The university could hardly escape the growing impact of the Depression. In the mid-twenties the provincial government had increased the annual grant to $2 million, but the number shrank in the early Depression years. In 1935 the recently elected Liberal government of Mitchell Hepburn cut the grant to just $1.2 million.46 Much earlier, in 1931, the board of governors had imposed a salary cut upon the university staff of 10 or 20 per cent of their salaries. In the case of Richard Saunders, a newly appointed instructor in history who had come from Cornell, it was 10 per cent. ‘I had been promised $2,000,’ Saunders recalled. ‘My first experience was to get it cut to $1,800.’47 Falconer, in his final report as president, expressed his ‘admiration for the spirit in which the staff has accepted the temporary reduction in salary, and for the willing way in which members have, where it has been necessary, undertaken extra duties at a time when the work of the University was heavier than in normal years’ because ‘attendance was larger than ever before.’48 The ‘temporary’ reduction lasted until 1935–6, when an increase in the provincial grant enabled the university to reduce the cut by half. ‘We trust,’ President Cody remarked, ‘that the day will soon come when our encouraging exhortations and promises especially to the junior members of our staff will pass into realities, and salaries will be restored to their former level.’49 The Board also made another costsaving expenditure cut in 1931. It resolved that it was ‘undesirable to employ married women in the University unless the Board are satisfied in individual cases that such persons require to earn money for the support of their families.’50 Nonetheless, appointments to the teaching staff in Arts and other faculties continued throughout the 1930s. In 1930–1 appointments in Latin, English, French, and oriental languages, all at the lecturer level, were made in the colleges. In the university arts subjects there were a dozen appointments, ranging from J.L. Synge as professor of applied mathematics and Harold Innis as associate professor of economic geography to lecturers in botany, physics, political economy, and law. Jacob Finkelman, lecturer in law, joined the newly established Department of Law, a branch of the Department of Political Science. He was the first Jewish professor appointed to a full-time position at the University of

84 Arts and Science at Toronto

Toronto.51And so it continued: fourteen appointments in Arts in 1931–2, six in 1933–4, the two deepest years of the Depression, including C.A. Chant, the director of the new David Dunlop Observatory.52 Nine appointments were made in 1936–7 and seven the following year, including Leopold Infeld as lecturer in applied mathematics and Bertie Wilkinson, a distinguished scholar from the University of Manchester, as professor of medieval history.53 In 1939–40, with the university again on a war footing, there were no new permanent appointments in Arts, only Ivan Wright as a visiting professor in political economy.54 A portion of the growth was due to the development of full departmental status for disciplines in social science that had been growing parts of the Department of Political Economy. This was true of both anthropology, which gained departmental status in 1936–7, and sociology in 1937–8.55 Yet another ‘child’ of political economy was geography. It was one of the subject areas Falconer had desired for many years, and as he left the presidency he voiced his regret at his ‘inability to effect the establishment of departments of geography and fine arts’ and a ‘larger provision for the study of music by undergraduates.’56 By the end of the thirties all three had become departments in the Faculty of Arts. In 1935 the Carnegie Foundation underwrote the appointment of Griffith Taylor from the University of Chicago to be the chair of geography and head of the new department. The faculties of Arts and Music collaborated on instruction in the new honour course in music. And fine art, like geography, had the Carnegie Foundation as an external benefactor. The foundation’s support for the university and its federated partners was of long standing. It had funded the Carnegie Library at Victoria and in 1932–3 gave $15,000 each to University, Victoria, and Trinity Colleges to develop their undergraduate libraries. Then, in 1934–5 the foundation funded the appointment of a chair of fine art, Professor John Alford, and of Peter Brieger, who joined the new department in 1936.57 All in all, there was a remarkable expansion of the teaching staff in the thirties. The number in professorial ranks in the university’s arts departments rose by forty-two and in college departments by fourteen between 1929–30 and 1938–9, the last peacetime year of the interwar period.58 At the beginning of the twenties there had been an almost universal desire among Canadians to return to the tried and true ways of the pre-war years. At the beginning of the thirties a restlessness was abroad, a sense of uneasiness and concern about the future, and, among some Canadians, a growing interest in change. For a small number of Canadians the quest

Between Wars

85

for something better than the uncertainties of the time was reflected in a renewed interest in radical political movements on the left and the right, the Communist Party of Canada among some workers and intellectuals, and fascism in some quarters in Quebec. For other Canadians the sense that capitalism in the thirties was providing more for those with the most and less for those with the least led to interest in new political movements espousing democratic socialism, economic regulation, and planning or monetary reform. Each gave birth to a new political movement, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the Social Credit movement in Alberta, and the Reconstruction group within R.B. Bennett’s Conservative government in Ottawa. For yet others, as the decade went on, the uncertainty of the economy was intensified by increasing anxiety about international affairs. As early as 1931 the Japanese invasion of the northern Chinese province of Manchuria touched off the decade-long war between Japan and China. Two years later Japan and Nazi Germany withdrew from the League of Nations. In 1935 Italy invaded Ethiopia. The following year the Spanish Civil War began and several hundred Canadians volunteered to fight in the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion on the Republican side against Franco’s rebel fascists. Italy withdrew from the League in 1937 as Germany invaded and annexed Austria and precipitated the Czechoslovak crisis. Isolationism and anti-war sentiment grew stronger as one crisis followed another. None of these concerns, nor the social and political movements that sprang up to support them, captured the support of the majority of Canadians, as the Conservative majority in 1930 and the Liberal victory in 1935 testified. Bennett’s response to depressed times was traditional: as markets for Canada’s grains and natural resources abroad closed behind rising tariff barriers, his government replied in kind, attempting to isolate the country behind a wall of protection. A last-minute conversion, on the eve of a general election in 1935, to adopt a pale version of Roosevelt’s New Deal south of the border, was in vain. Mackenzie King’s Liberals were returned with the largest majority yet in Canadian history. No agents of dramatic change these people. But beside them in the House of Commons sat small groups from the CCF, Social Credit, and the Reconstruction party, a sign of the times. Slowly, ever so cautiously, Mackenzie King’s government confronted the economic crisis and deteriorating international situation. By the end of the decade his government had slowly moved towards Keynesian fiscal policy. With the hope that the League of Nations might preserve a peace in tatters, King worked steadily towards closer relations with the United States

86 Arts and Science at Toronto

and Canada’s partners in the Commonwealth. If war were to come, King told the Commons in March 1939, there would be no automatic ‘Ready, Aye Ready’ and declaration of war by the United Kingdom on Canada’s behalf, as there had been in 1914. Canada would decide. But, he added, if Britain were attacked, ‘with bombs reigning death on London, … we would regard it as an act of aggression, menacing freedom in all parts of the British Commonwealth.’59 That sentiment was to be strongly echoed in the university, but leading to it, in the thirties, a broad spectrum of political views found voice among outspoken students and professors alike. At the beginning of the decade a meeting of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation was stopped by order from the Toronto police commission, which feared that the fellowship was a communist front organization. Frank Underhill from the history department and Eric Havelock, a prominent classicist at Victoria, organized a letter of protest to the press, signed by nearly seventy of their colleagues and defending professors’ right to freedom of speech. George Grube, a distinguished classicist at Trinity, was one of the signers. Forty-two years later he recalled the incident. ‘Believe it or not, for six weeks, every newspaper in Toronto – and there were four of them – were discussing this awful thing of professors taking part in public affairs.’60 Falconer, urged by the chairman of the board of governors, Canon Cody, tried to persuade Underhill and his colleagues to desist from further public discussions of political matters, and the board dissociated itself from the views of the professors.61 But Underhill then criticized Prime Minister Bennett’s imperial policy in a British journal. The Mail and Empire protested and Falconer warned Underhill that political journalism might endanger ‘the autonomy of the University.’ The historian’s reply was sharp: If professors at Toronto must keep their mouths shut in order to preserve the autonomy of the University then that autonomy is already lost. A freedom that cannot be exercised without danger of disastrous consequences is not a real freedom at all. In the midst of all the intolerance which is rampant in the world at present a University plays a sorry part if it does not raise up its voice for freedom of speech.62

This was the first of a series of occasions when Falconer or his successor, Cody, intervened with their professors, who continued to venture into political affairs. Both Havelock and Grube incurred the wrath of Premier Hepburn in the latter years of the decade.63 But it was Underhill

Between Wars

87

who provoked authorities throughout the period. ‘If you agreed with him, it was great fun,’ Grube remembered. ‘But if you didn’t agree with him, it was infuriating … Actually, whenever a professor made some trouble, Underhill got dragged in.’64 In 1933 Underhill and Harry Cassidy of the Department of Social Service were among the drafters of the Regina Manifesto and co-founders of the new Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, a coalition of non-communist, democratic socialist political organizations.65 Underhill and Cassidy were also among the founders of the League for Social Reconstruction, and in that capacity arranged with radio station CRCT to broadcast a series of short Sunday afternoon lectures, entitled ‘The Depression and the Way Out,’ in the fall of 1933. Underhill led off the series on 5 November, followed by C.A. Ashley of Political Economy on the 12th and Cassidy the next week.66 That same fall Underhill gave a lecture in the Department of Extension arguing that Canada’s economic welfare depended more on the United States than the British Empire. Cody forbade any more lectures in Extension and assured the new chair of the board of governors that Underhill had ‘one more chance’ and that ‘if he does not restrain his tongue from insolent remarks the welfare of the University will require his removal.’67 Underhill would not be stilled. Throughout the decade his views were prominent in the Canadian Forum magazine. In the spring of 1939 the board of governors, amidst growing prospects of war, met to consider whether Underhill should be fired. Samuel Beatty, the dean of arts, and a large number of Underhill’s senior colleagues rallied to his support, as did a thousand student signatories to a petition. In June Cody, who was the only person who could fire the historian, recommended no action be taken ‘at present.’68 Then, at a Couchiching conference in the summer of 1940, with Canada at war again, Underhill, reflecting upon wartime relations between Canada and the United States, remarked that Canadians could ‘no longer put all our eggs in the British basket.’ Arthur Meighen urged Ernest LaPointe, Mackenzie King’s minister of justice, to intern Underhill. The board again wanted him dismissed. Cody wavered. In December he recommended to the board that Underhill’s ‘services be dispensed with.’ Again Dean Beatty and the senior professoriate supported Underhill. So did the students. One petition, initiated by Kenneth McNaught, rallied the honour students in history and another was signed by more than 250 former Underhill students. Still the matter dragged on and a number of senior officials and politicians in Ottawa came to Underhill’s defence. In June

88 Arts and Science at Toronto

1941 the board reiterated its desire to have Underhill fired, but now Cody’s position was changed. He did not carry out the board’s recommendation.69 It was not the first time that students had come to the defence of one of their professors during the troubled times of the Depression. In the winter of 1930–1 the Toronto Police Commission took action to prevent Toronto members of the Communist party and then members of labour groups from meeting. The police then shut down a meeting of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation. Professors L.T. Morgan of Political Economy and F.H. Walter of Trinity’s French department were among many who protested in the Varsity.70 The paper then quickly organized a poll asking how many people on campus supported the sixty-eight professors who had publicly supported Underhill and Havelock. On 22 January poll boxes were prominently placed at Hart House, in each of the colleges and in the faculties of medicine, engineering, and dentistry. In all, 1799 people filled out ballots. ‘Students by 5–1 Vote Uphold 68,’ the paper proclaimed the next day. When the spoiled ballots were eliminated and the votes of professors counted in, the paper’s editorial declared that ‘the letter of protest now has, not sixty-eight signatures, but 1720 from the keenest element among the staff and students of this University.’71 the board of governors, the paper added, had also held its longest meeting ever on the issue on polling day. At its conclusion Cody, then chairman of the board, told a Varsity reporter, ‘We have no statement to make.’72 Like their professors, Toronto students took a much more lively interest in political and economic affairs, domestic and international, than they had in the twenties. The opening editorial of the Varsity in January 1932 focused on ‘wars and rumors of wars,’ ‘jingoistic talk and militarist propaganda,’ and the doubtful ‘potency of the League of Nations.’ ‘Our factories are closing,’ it continued. ‘Our money is losing its prestige and favour in the world markets, evolutionary talk becomes more evident.’73 Fascism, especially in Germany, captured the attention of the students in 1933 as the warden of Hart House, J.B. Bickersteth, returning from an international student conference in Bavaria, reported that while some German undergraduates supported the socialists or the communists, ‘the student body is for the most part behind Hitler.’74 ‘News of the World in Brief’ began making a regular appearance on the Varsity’s front page in the middle of the decade, with brief notes of events at the League of Nations headquarters in Geneva or at Parliament in Ottawa.75

Between Wars

89

And a major story in 1936 was the death in January of King George V. ‘All social events were postponed indefinitely and the entire atmosphere of the campus reflected the great loss felt by everyone’ – the coronation of Edward VIII and, at year’s end, the abdication crisis.76 Of more immediate concern for Depression era students were rising tuition fees at Toronto. ‘Depression Causes Board to Raise Arts Tuition Fee’ was the headline on the front page of the 15 February 1932 edition of the student paper.77 Tuition had risen from $45 for senior matriculation and $30 to $40 for each degree year in 1920–1 to $75 in 1930–1. Now it was rising again to $100. By 1940–1 it was $150 for the Bachelor of Arts programs. There were two exceptions: in 1920, when the Bachelor of Commerce program began, there was no tuition differential between it and the B.A. program. But by 1930–1 students in the B.Comm. program paid $110 instead of $75; in 1935–6 their tuition fee was $135 and in 1940–1 it was $190. The other exception was for students enrolling in the federated colleges. At the beginning of the thirties their tuition was the same as at the university and University College. But by 1935–6 students enrolling for a Bachelor of Arts degree in the federated colleges paid a $85 tuition fee instead of $100 and in 1940–1 their tuition was $122 instead of $150. Nor was that the end of annual costs. Students paid library, laboratory supply, Hart House, student government, and examination fees ($10 for each subject exam or supplemental) to the university and other fees to the college one was enrolled in. In 1920–1 a student writing five subject examinations ($10 per exam) and no supplementals would pay an additional $75 in university and college fees each year, plus a $10 degree fee in the graduation year. By 1935–6 the additional annual fees, now including the cost of a medical examination ($5 for men and $4 for women) had increased to $85–90, and in 1940–1 to $100 per annum and $10 more in the graduating year for the degree.78 The board of governors recognized the hardship the increased costs might impose on some students. In response it announced a fund to provide loans and bursaries for ‘deserving students’ at University College.79 But speculation that tuition increases would harm enrolment proved unfounded. Neither the new $100 tuition nor the decision to no longer admit students with only junior matriculation80 had much impact on the size of the incoming 1932 class. By the end of September, with more than 900 arts students already enrolled and registration continuing, the university registrar, A.B. Fennell, told the Varsity that ‘it looks as if we will have as many as ever.’81 There was a slight drop in enrolment in 1933–4, in the depth of the Depression, which President

90 Arts and Science at Toronto

Cody attributed to the lesser ability of parents to help their children in university and the inability of students to find summer jobs, and ‘so the financial resources of some have been exhausted.’ ‘Many of our students are fighting a gallant battle against adverse financial conditions,’ he added in his annual report.82 Hart House tried to help out. At meal time, on the tables in the Great Hall, ‘there were huge mounds of raisin bread and great slabs of butter and jugs of milk … For 20 [cents] you could have soup, raisin bread and milk. If you paid 30 [cents] you could get an entree.’ ‘That used to keep you going,’ Sydney Hermant recalled, adding that for poorer male students ‘that 20 [cent] meal … would be it for the day.’83 Similarly, Mary Louise Northway, professor of psychology, recalled that women students ‘could get I believe, for twenty cents, a decent lunch.’ in the Women’s Union.84 In January 1934 the students announced their own loan fund, financed from the accumulated surplus of the joint executive of the university’s Student Administrative Councils. All undergraduates in the final two years of their university course were eligible to receive a maximum loan of $100, repayable at 5 per cent annual interest within one year of graduation.85 Looking back from the early years of the twenty-first century, the fees and fee increases, the student loans, and the prices of Hart House meals seem trivial. But to students of the time, from families struggling to make ends meet, they were not. In Ontario the annual wage for a working man in 1929 was $1200. By 1933 it had fallen to $800 and that assumed the man was engaged in full-time work.86 He had a family to shelter, feed, and clothe. There was no provision for either health care or retirement. The annual cost of sending a son or daughter to university, about $200 in fees plus room and board, books, and all, could easily amount to more than half of a male wage-earner’s family income. There were, of course, many students for whom financial limits were of little concern. ‘I didn’t have any financial problems because my father paid my tuition and I had no other demands,’ Sydney Hermant recalled. In summer Hermant played the tennis tournament circuit. ‘I’d work for let’s say from the time University would close – let’s say very early in May – I would work until probably the middle of June, then I’d go on the circuit and I’d play right through let’s say, until the middle of August. Go back for another month’s work and then go to University. I had no privation. I’ve never been hungry.’87 Another student, who entered Toronto in 1932, three years after Hermant, was Claude Bissell. The University of Toronto, he later wrote, was

Between Wars

91

like all Canadian universities, an elitist institution in the sense that admission was restricted to a few narrowly designated groups. The proportion of college-age young people going to university had not changed greatly since the turn of the century, and in 1932 did not exceed four percent. One could distinguish three principal groups of undergraduates; the first was made up of the children of families that had an established tradition of university attendance, although never for more than two previous generations; the second was made up of the children of families that had prospered conspicuously in the last twenty or thirty years, often immigrant families that had come to Canada only a short time before; the third group was made up of scholarship winners drawn mainly from middle class families of modest means with no previous university association.88

He was in the third group, the son of a family of ‘modest means’ who had a provincial scholarship for $50 and guaranteed tuition over four years, provided he maintained first-class standing. To Bissell that scholarship meant a great deal. Both Hermant and Bissell would go on to make outstanding contributions to the university, Hermant as member of the board of governors and vice-chair of the governing council and Bissell as university president, 1958–71. Throughout the thirties the normal extracurricular activities of undergraduates continued as usual. Balls, dinners, and parties, dozens of subject-oriented interest groups, drama, debates both intramural and inter-university, music, male and female athletic contests and tournaments, and much more filled the out-of-class schedules of Toronto students. A new venture, attracting the interest of many Toronto students, was the Dominion Drama Festival, organized in 1932.89 The number of pages of the Varsity rose from four per issue in the twenties to six, eight, or even twelve or more at Christmas in the thirties, all to accommodate an increasing plethora of advertisements for goods and services for the university’s more than 8000 students. The ads seemed to belie the economic reality of the time. At Christmas season in 1931 Underwood was promoting its new typewriter; students were encouraged to open accounts and begin an enduring relationship with the Bank of Montreal; and Pascoe’s had silk dressing gowns for Toronto men and handkerchiefs and stockings for their girlfriends. Six years later the Parker Vacumatic pen – ‘Guaranteed Mechanically Perfect’ – and Simpson’s fancy shoes for men and women to put ‘Christmas on a Happy Footing’ were seeking undergraduate buyers. And in January 1939 Canadian

92 Arts and Science at Toronto

National Railways promoted nineteen- to twenty-two-day cruises from Halifax and Boston to Jamaica, Bermuda, and Nassau, all expenses included, for only $195, a colossal sum for most men and women of university age in the last winter before the war.90 A student initiative in the fall of 1934, the Dating Bureau, was an instant success, doing a ‘rushing business for students who have not had the opportunity to make friends among the other sex.’ The bureau reported that men did not necessarily prefer blondes and that one optimistic young woman desired ‘an intellectual,’ but decided she was ‘asking too much’ and amended her request to a ‘plain, ordinary man.’ ‘Her request is in the process of fulfillment,’ the bureau assured Varsity readers. For ten cents the applicant could tell the bureau her/his home town, age, height, weight, faculty, year, colour of hair, what kind of person the applicant would like to meet, and whether she/he would be willing to share expenses on a first date.91 All of this was much as it had been in the twenties. Obviously not all Toronto students could afford silk dressing gowns or mechanically perfect pens, but enough could to justify the increased size of their newspaper throughout the Depression years. But in the latter half of the thirties attention on the Toronto campus turned more and more to issues of war and defence, of Canada’s military obligations to the Empire/ Commonwealth, and of its relations with the United States. A motion declaring that Canada ‘should prepare to take a more active part in Empire defence’ was the feature of a Hart House debate in October 1936. It was defeated by a two to one margin. A few weeks later a Varsity editorial argued that Canada could not afford a ‘large standing army’ and that, ‘having so much in common with the United States, it would be better to link up with a nation which is her real economic ally and which has always stood first and foremost for peace in the real sense of the word.’92 In February 1938 students read that ‘the steely fingers of war stretch out from the Far East and the Sino-Japanese conflict to the Pacific coast of this Dominion.’ The article reported that plans were being made to place large guns within a few hundred yards of the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver’s Stanley Park, and on Vancouver Island, and that ammunition dumps were being built safely away from the threatened coast at Kamloops in the provincial interior.93 Just a month later Hitler’s Germany invaded Austria and in the fall the Czech crisis over the German occupation of the Sudetenland was resolved by the appeasement of the Munich Agreement. ‘It is most painful to think that Great Britain has made peace with such barbarians,’ the

Between Wars

93

Varsity cried. ‘As students, as the supposed vanguard of light and truth and democracy, we must say, in no uncertain terms, that we protest.’94 Protests were to no avail. German aggression continued, climaxing in the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. King George declared war two days later. Mackenzie King’s Liberal government in Ottawa followed on the 9th.95 ‘This will be a strange year for us all,’ President Cody told the students when they returned to the campus at the end of the month. He announced seven precepts to follow in the ‘common cause.’ 1 Carry on your regular work with all the energy of mind and body of which you are capable. 2 Meanwhile take your course in the Officer’s Training Corps, with a view to gaining the Officers’ Certificate. 3 Keep in good physical condition. Give special attention to your physical training. 4 Carry on your regular recreations and amusements, but do it all on a moderate and inexpensive scale. 5 Eliminate all public pranks that might lead our fellow-citizens to think that the privileged students are frivolous in the face of agony and sacrifice and are not realizing the seriousness of this struggle for all those spiritual values that alone make life worth living. 6 For the women undergraduates there will probably be opportunities for Red Cross work as far as this is possible with the due regard to the primary obligation of academic studies. 7 There is a military advisory committee made up of representatives from all colleges and faculties. Consult your representative if you desire further information about your course in relation both to the University and to the military service demanded by our country.96

Once again the University of Toronto was at war.

6 A University at War

The Second World War was a war of regulations on the home front. Quickly the laissez-faire approach to the nation’s economy, its society, and way of life gave way to government intervention to allocate resources, to control production of goods, and to set prices and wages. In the fall of 1941, in an effort to head off inflationary pressures on the economy, the Wartime Prices and Trade Board, one of dozens of new institutions established in Ottawa to run the war effort, froze prices and wages for businesses and citizens alike. Even earlier, popular foodstuffs that had to be imported, like sugar, tea, and coffee, were strictly rationed. Butter and meat products soon followed, accompanied by individual ration cards for every Canadian, controlling their ability to purchase rationed goods. Gasoline coupons also became the norm, together with tight restrictions on how much fuel a person could have to drive the family car to work at the munitions factory (more) or to go on vacation (much less). Mothers saved edible fats, families saved their newspapers and other paper goods, families raised rabbits for meat and fur for flyers’ flying jackets, picked milkweed for life preservers, and guarded automobile tires as scarce, valuable objects. The news and radio broadcasts were censored. And early in the war, in 1940, the Mackenzie King government in Ottawa passed the National Resources Mobilization Act, imposing conscription on Canadian men eighteen years of age and older. Initially, it was only for home service. A national plebiscite in 1942 to lift the restriction to home service passed overwhelmingly in all the provinces except Quebec, where it failed overwhelmingly. The NRMA was amended accordingly, but King’s government withheld enforcement for overseas service until 1944 and avoided the deep discontent that had accompanied the imposition of conscription under the Military Service Act of 1917 in the Great War.

A University at War

95

In the First World War there had been at least tacit encouragement of male students to volunteer for military service. Toronto and other universities even hurried the effort by waiving some requirements towards completion of their degrees for its student soldiers. There was nothing of that sort in 1939–40. President Cody welcomed the returning students with the news that General MacNaughton, chairman of the Economic Advisory Council, had advised Canadian universities that the government needed ‘trained men.’ The message was clear: stay in school, ‘especially in the technical fields.’1 Cody urged all senior men to enrol in the Toronto unit of the Canadian Officers Training Corps, and by June 1940 he could report that nearly 1200 had been accepted.2 In September 1939 he warned, ‘We – yes we – here over the seas – are in very grave peril; and the organization to which we belong – the British Empire – is in very real peril.’ ‘Your studies,’ he added, ‘are part of your preparation to serve the state in this time of grave national crisis.’3 The Varsity reported that the University of Toronto, ‘springing to decisive action,’ had become ‘one of the most active military centres in the country’4 It was true. The Government of Canada had turned to Canadian universities to give it trained men to take up leadership roles in the war effort. And the university’s board, working with the Department of National War Service, had ordered that all male students over eighteen years of age who were British subjects would receive military training while in school, either in the COTC or in the university’s own Training Centre Battalion. At Toronto the new drill hall and lecture rooms at 119 St George Street (now Woodsworth College) became headquarters for military training, and Cody reported that they were ‘in constant use.’5 Gradually the various groups of students and their training programs were worked out. Applicants for COTC had to be in the final year of their course, or the final two years of their course in medicine or dentistry, and had to agree to accept a commission if it was offered to them. For the training battalion, it was decided that male students who were over twenty-five years of age would not be compelled to participate, but could volunteer to do so. In addition to their academic studies, men between twenty and twenty-four would receive a full course of military training and two weeks in camp. Younger students, men aged eighteen or nineteen, would be in another group which would receive physical training and ‘a measure of military drill – determined by the time and instructors available.’ To emphasize the seriousness of the commitment the university had taken on, the board of governors had gone further and established a court of discipline to deal with charges of violation of its regulations regarding compulsory military

96 Arts and Science at Toronto

training or infringements of discipline. The court was empowered to impose fines and could recommend to the president that any student found guilty by the court be subject to suspension or expulsion from the university.6 Opportunities for women students to participate quickly followed. In October the president announced that he had consulted with the Canadian Red Cross and was authorizing the establishment of a unit of the Women’s Voluntary Service Corps of the Red Cross on campus. It would be known as the Women’s Voluntary Service Detachment, and its purpose would be to train female students for future work in the Women’s Voluntary Service Corps or ‘other forms of national service in which they wish to participate.’ Applicants for the program had to be registered students between ages eighteen and forty-five and they had to present two ‘personal character references’ and a certificate of physical fitness from the university medical adviser for women. The Red Cross reserved the right to limit the detachment to 200 students and to select from among the applicants ‘those who will be best fitted for future service.’ Miss A.E.M. Parkes of the Students’ Administrative Council noted that though students enrolled had to promise to do volunteer work when they finished their studies, they would not be compelled to devote all of their time to the task. ‘They may do only as much as their time will permit,’ she explained. At the end of the month the Varsity announced that uniforms for the detachment were expected soon and proclaimed, ‘History will be made this afternoon’ (Thursday, 31 October 1940) when more than 150 of the students enrolled would gather on the Trinity back campus for the unit’s first military drill. ‘Despite the muddy field, the presence of several photographers and spectators of the opposite sex,’ the Varsity observed the next day, ‘the girls were most intent on their drill.’7 Mrs Cody, like Lady Falconer a generation earlier, organized the Women’s War Service Committee, with representatives from every women’s group on campus. It engaged in a large number of projects and worked closely with the Red Cross. Its most innovative contribution was to assist university people who had friends in British universities and were interested in the evacuation of mothers and the children of their friends from the bombing of Britain. Cables sent to Oxford, Cambridge, and the Universities of Manchester and Birmingham in June 1940 brought a prompt response. By March 1941 university women in the War Service Committee had organized matters of immigration, residence, clothing, equipment, and records for 147 children and

A University at War

University of Toronto, Remembrance Day Services, 1942 (A1968-0003 [313])

97

98 Arts and Science at Toronto

18 mothers under its care. It had also assisted in the movement of another 51 people to the United States. The president reported in June that on-going support for these women and children required an outlay of $1600 per month, which the committee sought to raise.8 Eventually the women’s group and a number of male staff members had 22 mothers and 150 children ‘as our war guests.’ They were there for the duration. ‘Now that the war is over,’ Cody reported in June 1945, ‘nearly all the mothers and children have returned to the Motherland.’9 In 1942, following the example of similar, successful programs implemented at other Canadian universities, female students and faculty in the Faculty of Arts recommended that the university establish a program of compulsory training for all female students.10 In the next session the university agreed to set up a ‘60 hour plan’ of compulsory training for female students. Once again the Red Cross was involved, along with the University Civilian Defence Committee and the University Women’s War Service Committee. By then women students in the professional faculties, where the plan would not be compulsory, were already signing up. Once it was going, about 800 women in arts were affected.11 There were also other options for females wishing to serve. The Army, Royal Canadian Air Force, and Royal Canadian Navy each had a unit on campus and each had established women’s corps for women to volunteer for active service. Together, the military units attracted only a small number of women. Martin Friedland has reported that just over 300 joined from among the many thousands of female students at Toronto in the war years.12 But some did. An early colour strip-film of the wartime university contains footage of a group of uniformed sailors, including two women, from the University Naval Training Division. The cadets were pictured in front of Hart House celebrating the completion of their training, probably in 1943.13 In February of that year, the First Canadian Corps was fighting in Italy and the Third Canadian Division was preparing for the Normandy invasion just months ahead. In Ottawa, the Department of National Selective Service issued an ‘Interpretative Letter’ which tightened the criteria for male students to remain in university. The letter listed the faculties and courses, from Architecture and Agriculture to Medicine, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Forestry, Education, Commerce, and Veterinary Medicine, in which male students 18 and a half or older were ‘considered to be pursuing a course contributing to the prosecution of the war or in the national interest.’ Also included were ‘specialized’ arts courses

A University at War

99

in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. The new regulations for science students required that before a student started or continued in a science course he had to complete a form ‘indicating whether he wishes to volunteer for service in the armed forces of Canada as a technical officer.’14 All other male students who remained subject to the National Mobilization of Resources Act and who were taking non-science courses in arts would also be considered to be pursuing a course essential to the national interest provided that ‘he is in the upper half of all students enrolled in the same academic year of his course as determined by the final examinations for the session.’ Similar requirements were made for male students 18 and a half and over who enrolled in such arts courses for the first time. But if a student ‘fails to do satisfactory academic work or fails to comply with the requirements of military training,’ he would be reported to the ‘appropriate mobilization authorities’ and would be liable to be mobilized for military service or to work in a war industry.15 Students in arts courses were not pleased. In early March 1944, a ‘Liberal Arts Petition’ appeared on the front page of the Varsity. It protested the ‘stigma attached to certain courses in the liberal arts’ created by the more stringent recent policy announcement, saying it was inconsistent with previous government policy and ‘inequitable.’ The petition proposed that the new regulations regarding students passing in the lower half of their courses be applied to ‘students in the lower grades in all courses,’ not just in the non-science courses in the Faculty of Arts. And it recommended that the government and university ‘make a more determined effort to utilize the capacities of graduates in the liberal arts courses, for immediate advantage in the prosecution of the war and for future advantage in the period of peace.’16 Then, on Thursday afternoon, 9 March, a ‘mass meeting’ organized and chaired by Paul Fox, later a highly regarded political scientist and university administrator at Toronto, supported the views in the petition. ‘The real problem,’ said Fox, ‘is one of essential students, rather than essential courses.’ He urged the National Selective Service to take students of lower standing for all courses rather than ‘a large percentage of students from the liberal arts courses alone.’17 It was all to no avail. The government’s policy remained. At the end of the academic year Cody reported that 294 men from first, second, and third year had been ‘debarred from proceeding to the next higher year.’ Of these, 158 had passed in the lower half of their courses in their final exams; the other 136 had simply failed their final examinations.18

100 Arts and Science at Toronto

From the early days of the war there were several non-student groups, principally men, resident on the university campus and taking various kinds of training. The Government of Canada took over three general university residences to house ‘hundreds of Air Force men who are being trained as radio technicians.’19 Another group were navy men being instructed in the techniques of anti-submarine warfare. Both were taught by members of the physics department under the supervision of its head, Eli Burton. W.J. Dunlop, the long-serving director of the Division of Extension, supervised a number of different programs for other trainees, including courses in mathematics and aerial navigation for the air force.20 One of the teachers in physics was Elizabeth Allin, who had earned her doctorate in physics with John McLennan and joined the department in 1934 as a demonstrator. Allin recalled her special courses for servicemen. Her first group comprised twenty naval officers, most of whom were graduate engineers or mathematics and physics graduates. The next had 500 enlisted airmen in a radio technicians’ course. Allin and her two female colleagues, Florence Quinlan and Kathleen Crossley, did most of the instruction under the supervision of Professors Anderson and Pitt. It was ‘not a particularly difficult task,’ Allin said, as the men ‘were very good students.’21 These courses for non-student groups continued throughout the war and became a very important source of revenue for the university. The first two physics assignments, in 1940–1, for the naval officers and the airmen brought in over $62,000. By 1942–3 two radio technicians’ courses earned just under $190,000, and in 1943–4, the peak year, the Government of Canada paid $180,000 for an aircrew training course and another $190,000 for two courses for the army. Altogether the ‘war revenues’ for services and war research earned just under $660,000 for the university in 1943–4, a very substantial sum.22 In the Great War John McLennan had had to use all of his carefully cultivated skills of self-promotion to make his contributions to war research, and nearly all of it had been done in Britain. In the Second World War, Toronto’s scientists and scholars were eagerly sought out by a Canadian government determined to utilize all the talents and skills the university could provide. In the sciences most of the research was sponsored by the National Research Council. This too was a change from the earlier war. The council had its origin near the end of the First World War, when the government established a committee to advise the government on developing a national research policy. By 1939–40

A University at War

101

the advisory committee had become the ‘NRC,’ an Ottawa-based national research institution charged with coordinating and conducting war-related scientific research. Its reach spread across all the scienceoriented faculties and departments in the University of Toronto. Cody reported in June 1941 that E.A. Bott, the head of Psychology, and his colleagues were working on intelligence testing and Burton and his colleagues and technical staff in physics were producing precision instrumentation and optical glass at Research Industries, Limited, a newly formed wartime Crown corporation.23 Fred Beamish, a chemist, worked on the Manhattan Project and subsequent development of nuclear science and weaponry, while George Wright, head of the department, helped in the development of a new explosive, RDX. The department’s historians, Brook and McBride, record that Wright ‘was running virtually a small explosives factory in the chemistry building.’ In 1944, while Frank Wetmore was giving a second-year lecture to chemistry and physics students an incident occurred: That day, the class heard running and some excitement in the corridor outside and then saw black smoke suddenly emerge from under the door at the front of the room. Wetmore immediately called for a rapid and orderly exit through the upper back doors. As students emerged, they observed a white-haired individual [Wright] dashing by through the upper laboratory towards the south side of the building. They learned later that, in an abandoned elevator shaft adjacent to the lecture room, Wright had installed a machine that was milling RDX with other compounds to make a ‘plastic explosive.’ This mixture had evidently overheated and ignited. The building contained a large quantity of explosives, and the white-haired Wright had dashed to address the crisis. The department cancelled lectures for several days until it had cleaned up the soot throughout the building.24

By 1943–4 there were sixty-six major research projects running at Toronto and bringing in tens of thousands of dollars in research support for faculty members and their graduate students. But that was only a part of the University of Toronto’s contribution to the war. Several members, especially in the Faculty of Medicine, served in the Canadian Army Medical Corps. An ever-growing list of others were drafted into war service in Canada or overseas as civilians. They came from departments across the broad scope of the Faculty of Arts. As Cody explained in 1942, ‘the Pure Sciences and Mathematics and Physics, English, History and Modern Languages are definitely making a war contribution; Economics

102 Arts and Science at Toronto

and Commerce are linked with the Home Front as well as with certain phases of overseas activities.’25 In that year Professors Embree in Anthropology, Glazebrook in History, Parkinson in Political Economy, and Chant and Line in Psychology were granted leave ‘for the duration of the war.’26 There were fourteen more in 1942–3 including A.E. Birney and Claude T. Bissell in English, Miss M.C.. Needler in Classics, F.P. Ide in Zoology, and C. Dana Rouillard in French as well as Professors Bott and Myers, who were dispatched to the Personnel Testing Department of the Royal Air Force in England.27 H. Boeschenstein in German, T.A. Goudge in philosophy, C. Brough Macpherson in political economy, H.L. Welsh in physics, and Gilbert deB. Robinson in mathematics were in the group called into service the following year, and Charles Comfort in fine art went for the second time in 1944–5 as other colleagues were beginning to return from war service.28 Dana Rouillard spent three years in Ottawa as a research officer for the National Research Council. When asked, many years later, what his duties were as a French literary scholar at the NRC he replied, ‘I can’t speak very freely about that because I had to sign an oath of secrecy.’ Pressed a bit, Rouillard said, laughingly, ‘I’m supposed to keep my oath of secrecy to my death bed, or maybe beyond.’ He added, however, that there were many others, like Bertie Wilkinson in History and Robinson in Mathematics and professors from universities across Canada as well as ‘mobs of office workers who had been uprooted from their studies to come to Ottawa.’29 Also years later John Surerus, professor of German at Victoria, recalled English professor Pelham Edgar’s major contribution to the war effort. Called to Ottawa, Edgar headed a section of intelligence work reading ‘German letters and German correspondence and so on, deciphering. And he was extremely happy.’30 In the fall of 1942 the government faced an impending crisis. Evergrowing enlistments for military service and demands for workers in the rapidly expanding industrial war effort caused a serious labour shortage on the farm that threatened the loss of the Saskatchewan wheat crop. Once again the government turned to the universities. In early October the call went out for men ‘in courses not essential to the war effort,’ in arts, commerce and law, to ‘help solve the critical prairie manpower problem.’31 The Saskatchewan government would pay for the men’s rail travel from eastern Canada to Regina or Saskatoon. On the farm they would receive free room and board and four dollars a day, ‘whether or not the weather permitted the students to work.’ By Friday, 9 October, nearly 350 Toronto students had applied. Official instructions had been issued to the volunteers and a special committee of

A University at War

103

the Faculty of Arts was planning three weeks of special instruction for the students to catch up on their studies when they returned from the harvest. The next evening President Cody was at Union Station with 284 Arts men boarding a Canadian Pacific train to Regina and a Canadian National train to Saskatoon. So too were ‘Co-eds En Mass’ who had brought special ‘lunches prepared … by college girls under the direction of Miss A.E.M. Parkes of the S.A.C.’ Crowded into pre– First World War ‘colonist cars,’ some chaperoned by senior faculty, such as Father Laurence Shook with the St Michael’s contingent, the Toronto men joined those from Laval, Sir George Williams, McGill, Queen’s, Western, and the Ontario Agricultural College in a rousing ride to Winnipeg and beyond. At Regina and Saskatoon the men fanned out across the province and set to work. By the beginning of November the weather had turned bad, harvesting had become difficult, and the students began returning home. The railways charged the men ten dollars from their earnings for a ticket to their eastern university.32 The wartime campus looked very much like a military centre and the Varsity took notice. ‘The proverbial professor of the tattered gown, patched coat and unpressed pants’ had become a ‘campus antique,’ it observed as the session opened in October 1942. He had been replaced by a ‘horde of sprightly-garbed professors, smart and trim in uniform’ who haunted ‘our cloistered halls with a view of invading the lectureroom.’33 In the early days of the war the officers of the university COTC unit had been younger men, but gradually they had left for active service. So the unit, still charged to produce its annual group of potential officers, turned to more venerable senior faculty for assistance. Among them Company Commander Bertie Wilkinson, the distinguished medievalist of the history department, became the object of the student newspaper’s curiosity. ‘Tuesday afternoon parades … Thursday afternoon parades … Saturday afternoon parades,’ such was his new military life, Wilkinson explained. ‘Besides all that,’ he added, ‘I have to be Father, Mother, Brother and Sister to all the youngsters in the company … They come to me with all their problems … and do they know it! … The trouble is, that being on the Faculty, everyone knows where they can get hold of me … even reporters!’ Asked by Varsity’s intrepid reporter for more information, Wilkinson shot back: ‘If you want any dope on me, just ask the boys … They’ll supply it.’34 It was not just the professors. Nearly all the male students, and eventually many of the female students, were also in uniform and at work in

104 Arts and Science at Toronto

afternoon drill several days a week. And they were joined by the hundreds of airmen and seamen on campus for special training courses. The changed and quickened pace of campus life was evident everywhere. To accommodate the increased numbers, Hart House abandoned its customary table service and adopted a cafeteria style more customary in a military mess hall. During class hours the campus seemed as of old; then, just after four o’clock, it was transformed. Companies of men in tight order drill appeared before University College or Hart House, women formed up behind Trinity, and other men and women, all in uniform, seemed to occupy every usable space on campus. The admonition of the Government of Canada to university students to stay in school meant that, unlike during the Great War, initially there was little change in the attendance of male students. There were just over 5000 men on campus in 1939–40 and 4700 two years later. But as the war effort intensified, the numbers of male students dropped, and were down to 3900 in 1943–4. Dean Beatty noted the change beginning a year earlier. He reported that while the number of students in the first and second years had increased 10 per cent from the previous year, the number in the upper years had dropped by 10 per cent, primarily because of shortfalls in male students in courses in third and fourth years.35 All male students, and by 1943–4 all female students, were required to have a physical examination each year. In 1942–3 the president reported that 78.4 per cent of the 3532 male students met the standard of fitness for any military branch of service and another 10.3 per cent would qualify for restricted service. And 11.3 per cent simply failed to meet the army standard. In the last war year, 1944–5, 3419 male students were examined and the number failing to meet army standard had dropped to 6.6 per cent. Some 2217 female students were examined; 95.9 per cent were declared fit, 3.1per cent were unfit for competitive sport, and 1 per cent had a marked disability.36 Despite the drills, the uniforms, the servicemen on campus, the war research going on in laboratories across the campus, faculty and students alike sought to preserve as much of traditional campus life as possible. The college and faculty dinners and balls continued, albeit less flamboyant in style and more subdued in tone than in peacetime. Club meetings convened regularly and student government took on additional responsibilities to assist students in need. But, inevitably, there were changes. Intramural athletics carried on as before, but intercollegiate matches were stopped by agreement among all the Ontario

A University at War

105

and Quebec universities. ‘It would be unseemly to hold university competitive matches before cheering crowds,’ Cody explained, ‘while other students were at drill.’ Besides, there would be no time for practices and training because of the demands of military training, and ‘no unnecessary expenditures should be made in war days.’ The competition was only restored ‘on a modified scale,’ in 1945–6.37 For a time, also, the closing of the Hart House theatre reduced student drama activity on campus. The Massey Foundation had made the closure on 1 January 1943. In 1944–5 it was reopened ‘for a short period of time,’ and Cody announced that control of the theatre might be passed from the foundation to the board of governors. He confirmed the change a year later, saying that a board of syndics, responsible to the board of governors, was reopening the theatre ‘to foster dramatic art in all its aspects, particularly among the undergraduates of the University.’38 In college classrooms the destructive campaign to dismiss professors of German that had happened in 1914 was not repeated. Nor did zealous, foolish professors ban the use of German texts or instruction in German in the Second World War. A wartime Toronto graduate and veteran of the Great War, John Surerus, professor of German at Victoria, explained that in the Second World War there was not nearly as much feeling against Germany and things German as there was in the First World War. In the First World War we were united in feeling that there was something rather diabolical about German and it reflected itself in the attitude of every stratum of society in the country. In the Second World War we realized that it was of some advantage to a nation to know the language and culture of its enemies so that there never was … that concerted effort to get rid of German that there was in the First World War … And we did maintain courses throughout the Second World War even though the numbers were in many cases rather smaller … than we had had during the period of the thirties.39

The circumstances were so different in the Second World War. The ascendency of Nazidom in 1933 and the reign of terror and torture that followed had been a long, dark prelude to the outbreak of war in September 1939. By then hundreds of thousands of persecuted people had sought refuge in other lands, including Canada. Discouraged from coming by a frightened Canadian government, only a few thousand

106 Arts and Science at Toronto

refugees had been allowed in. But among them were a handful of scholars, some who had arrived at the University of Toronto shortly before the war began. Peter Brieger was one of them. Brieger had fought in the German army in the First World War and been wounded. He was a scholar in the history of art who had fled Germany in 1933 and, after a sojourn in London, joined the Department of Fine Art in 1936. Richard Brauer had also fled Germany in 1933. A brilliant mathematician, he spent two years at the new Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton with Einstein and was appointed assistant professor in mathematics in 1935. Three years later Leopold Infeld came as a lecturer in applied mathematics. He too had been at the Institute with Einstein and they had published a book together. All three had distinguished careers at Toronto. In due course Brauer moved on to Harvard and Infeld to an institute in his Polish homeland.40 Why these three men and the dozen others in arts were appointed and others were not varied greatly from person to person, circumstance to circumstance, along with the scant ability to make appointments at Toronto during the 1930s. But in 1939 a British organization, the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, which was assisting refugee scholars in the United Kingdom, attracted the notice of Toronto’s university librarian, W.S. Wallace, himself a decorated veteran of the First World War. Wallace organized the Canadian society with initial strong support from many colleagues in the Faculty of Arts. Eli Burton in physics, A.G. Huntsman in biology, George Wrong in history, and Harold Innis in political economy were among them. Soon, with help from Innis and others, the Royal Society of Canada came to assist by raising donations for the society. And by the early summer of 1939, Wallace and his colleagues had found their first refugee to sponsor. It was a Roman Catholic historian from Austria, Karl Helleiner. In December 1939, Helleiner and his wife sailed for Canada, landing at Saint John, New Brunswick. They transferred immediately to a train for Toronto and were met at Union Station by Wallace and his daughter on New Year’s Eve. Wallace whisked them away to a rooming house on Walmer Road that he had arranged for the Helleiners’ first days in Toronto. For a short time Helleiner worked in the university library until Wallace and Innis believed his English was strong enough to take tutorial groups in the economic history course in Innis’s department in early 1940. Helleiner found himself under the watchful eye of the course instructor, Vincent Bladen – ‘Vincent was exceedingly nice and helpful all along.’ Bladen told him that, unlike in his native Austria, students in economic history

A University at War

107

in Canada had to have some background in economic theory and ‘inflicted a number of elementary economic theory books upon me.’ The following fall, now properly prepared, Bladen handed the first-year economics pass course over to Helleiner, together with ‘the famous green book of Vincent’ as its text.41 Helleiner went on to a highly productive scholarly career in the Department of Political Economy. The Canadian Society for the Protection of Science and Learning did not fare so well. Enthusiasm for supporting refugee scholars faded quickly amid concerns that foreign appointments could take away the few scarce opportunities there were for appointing Canadians, a more general anxiety that the newcomers would not quickly assimilate into the culture of their hosts and students and, for some, a long-standing attitude of anti-Semitism. At Toronto the Society had leant support to Helleiner and four others, not all of them in Arts, but by 1942 its own support and influence had passed.42 Late that fall another group of refugees caught the attention of the Varsity. ‘Governors Ban Eighteen Ex-Internees’ read the headline on Monday, 16 November. The preceding Friday the secretary of the board of governors announced that on the 12th, the preceding Thursday, the board had refused to permit the federated colleges to enrol eighteen ‘friendly aliens’ who had recently been released from internment camps in Canada. The story actually began two years earlier when, after the fall of France in June 1940, hundreds of aliens in England were interned. More than 2500 of them had then been sent to Canada as ‘enemy aliens’ and placed in internment camps in Quebec. Among them were many German Jews. Late in 1940 an official of the British Home Office and Canadian authorities began investigating individual cases and releasing men for war work in Canada or, for about 200 men, study in Canadian universities, including Acadia, Dalhousie, McGill, Montreal, Ottawa, Queen’s, McMaster, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. An initial group of twenty-three, each sponsored by a Canadian who guaranteed the student’s fees, expenses, and good conduct, were enrolled at Toronto in 1941–2. But before the next academic session began some members of the board raised objections about admitting another group in 1942–3.43 At the board meeting on the 12th, President Cody had presented a motion to allow the former internees to enter the University of Toronto. Cody’s motion was defeated with the board deadlocked at 7–7, with Cody, the chairman, and vice chairman of the board all voting to allow the prospective students, who wished to enrol in the federated colleges, to be admitted. The three federated colleges protested and Provost

108 Arts and Science at Toronto

Cosgrave of Trinity reminded all that the board had overstepped its authority. It was, after all, the senate, not the board of governors, that determined ‘the conditions under which students are to be admitted.’ ‘Unless the students are admitted,’ Cosgrave added, ‘I foresee a great deal of difficulty.’44 A large meeting of students at Convocation Hall passed a resolution asking that the students be admitted. A special meeting of the Engineering Society voted against admission into their faculty: ‘There is no place for them in the crowded faculties during the course of the present war,’ they announced. Student meetings at Victoria and Wycliffe passed resolutions favouring admission of the ‘friendly aliens.’ And the Varsity reported that at a meeting of the senate, which lasted until just before midnight, a recommendation was made to admit the students.45 The recommendation of the senate and resolutions from the Students’ Administrative Council were presented to the board at a three-hour evening meeting on Thursday, 27 November. There was no change on the part of the objecting board members. Finally, on Thursday, 10 December, the board agreed to allow the German students and two Japanese Canadian students who, with their families, had been taken from their West Coast homes and interned, to enrol. But it took the intervention of the minister of national defence to break the impasse: only when he advised that the ‘friendly aliens’ would be permitted to take the same military training as all other male students on campus did the objecting board members relent.46 During 1942 the university’s relationship with German aliens in Canada entered yet another phase. More than 35,000 German prisoners of war were interned in camps across Canada, and in that year the Young Men’s Christian Association of Canada asked assistant professor Hermann Boeschenstein of the Department of German to develop and establish an educational program for prisoners in the camps. It was the central activity of the YMCA’s War Prisoners’ Aid Program which was being chaired by Sir Ernest MacMillan, the university’s dean of music. The university did nothing directly to support Boeschenstein’s work, but in the Spring of 1943 he was given a leave of absence, without pay, for the duration of the war, to be ‘director’ of the program. In that capacity he set up educational programs in camps across Canada for the German prisoners of war, programs that ranged from high school to university to vocational and civil service courses. Most of the courses were replicas of what would have been offered in Germany and, with the help of the International Red Cross, textbooks were imported from Germany for use in the camps. The YMCA used its good offices to

A University at War

109

supply notebooks, blackboards, chalk, and other teaching accessories for the courses. The first set of examinations, at the high school or matriculation level, and ‘in accordance with German requirements,’ was held in the spring of 1944 and, Boeschenstein reported, ‘they will, from now on, be a periodically recurring event in the camps.’47 In addition, and independent of Boeschenstein’s work for the YMCA, W.J. Dunlop’s Division of Extension worked with the Canadian Legion’s educational services to supply correspondence courses and textbooks for prisoners of war in Canadian camps. Dunlop reported, ‘We have ninety-four enrolled, with the number increasing each week’ at the close of the 1943–4 session.48 So serious and so all-encompassing had the universities’ war effort become by 1942 that administrators at McGill, Queen’s, and Western were all considering closing their arts faculties. Cody would have none of it. It would be ‘fatal,’ he reported to the provincial government, ‘completely to suppress any faculty during the war. There would be a serious gap in our national culture. Our faculties are closely interlocked,’ he added. And that was true. At Toronto, at least, the students from professional faculties that the government required so badly all took significant parts of their course work in the Faculty of Arts. In addition, there were many hundreds of women students that studied in the arts faculty. Cody also reminded critics, including some zealous members of the board of governors, ‘We must maintain our organization to receive the men on active service who will gradually be returning to Canada.’49 Indeed, the Government of Canada was already making preliminary plans with the universities for dealing with returned soldiers. Students who had joined the military and had eight or more months of active service were going to be entitled to an equal amount of time back in academic training at the government’s expense.50 But maintaining work at traditional levels was difficult during the war. Very early in the war Malcolm Wallace, the principal of University College, became alarmed about the status of his college in the federation. For some time he had been concerned about what he called ‘the artificiality of the whole arrangement for instruction in college subjects.’ What had been happening was that the colleges were ‘integrating’ their staffs in college subjects, with the result that ‘in several departments the provincial College is no longer able to offer a complete programme of instruction.’ If this was to continue, he reported in 1941, ‘the further deterioration of the status of University College is

110 Arts and Science at Toronto

inevitable.’ And the war would only make matters worse. ‘Most of our young instructors will [next year] have gone, and in several departments the problem of retaining an adequate teaching staff will be serious,’ he noted in 1942.51 Wallace was not alone. T.F. McIlwraith, the head of the anthropology department, had been to see Cody, pleading for replacements for the members of his small department who were doing war-related work. None were forthcoming. It ‘will definitely lessen the efficiency of the teaching,’ he wrote to the president, ‘It is definitely regression instead of progress, and at any other time I would be strongly opposed. However, I realize that this is no time for increasing academic expenditure.’52 Still, there were exceptions. For some years Cody had been advocating work in Chinese studies, and he reported in 1941 that the board of governors had approved the establishment of a chair of Chinese studies with Bishop William C. White of the Royal Ontario Museum as its first incumbent. The senate passed the necessary statute in the 1942–3 session, and the first work was a summer session course in 1943 for nine students. That fall thirty students were enrolled, twenty-four of them as ‘occasional students.’ The remaining six took the full first-year course in Chinese studies; four passed and qualified for an Elementary Certificate in Chinese Studies. White’s program also offered a night-school course in language that attracted thirty-one students in 1943–4.53 Cody had other ambitious plans as well. In June 1941, German armies invaded the Soviet Union. ‘We now have another great ally,’ Cody reported a year later, ‘with whom our relations across the Pacific and through Europe are likely to become more extensive and intimate – Russia.’ The time had come, he added, to establish a department of Slavonic studies at Toronto.54 He returned to the theme a year later, and it remained a priority item on his agenda for the remainder of his presidency.55 Night courses in Russian language were begun towards the end of the war, but it was not until 1949, with a large grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, that the Department of Slavic Studies was established.56 There were other changes. In his 1942–3 presidential report Cody called attention to a new honour course, Modern History and Modern Languages. The following year, when Malcolm Wallace retired as head of English and principal of University College, A.S.P. Woodhouse began his distinguished career as head of the college’s English department and Sidney Smith, formerly president of the University of Manitoba, was appointed college principal. Also in 1943–4 Lachan Gilchrist, who had joined the physics department in 1906 as a demonstrator, was

A University at War

111

named head of a new subdepartment of geophysics, a post he held for  just a year until his retirement. And in 1945–6 the Departments of  Archaeology and Fine Art were combined in a single entity, the Department of Art and Archaeology.57 At the beginning of the war Cody had appointed a committee to study the arts curriculum with a view to making more pass courses available to students enrolled in honour courses and to consolidating instruction in some honour courses.58 That was followed during the war by a committee of the Faculty of Arts council which focused, in Cody’s words, on ‘the old debate between specialization and general education.’ It was a subject the president gave continuing attention to and on which he had strong views. ‘A general education,’ he wrote, ‘should include some knowledge of the humanities, the social sciences, and the physical sciences.’ ‘We are trying to combine specialization in our honour courses with general education in our pass courses,’ he continued. ‘We need both; but we must not make our honour courses too narrow in their undergraduate stage.’ To Cody the University of Toronto’s undergraduate mandate was clear: ‘We aim to improve the general intelligence of the average and to provide special training for the especially able.’59 It was Cody’s last pronouncement on the subject. Quite suddenly, in the fall of 1944, the 100-year-old chancellor, Sir William Mulock, died. Cody was named to succeed Mulock and retired from the presidency at the end of June 1945. Sidney Smith, who had been named executive assistant to the president with right of succession when he became principal of University College, became president of the University of Toronto on 1 July 1945.60 Smith was no stranger to Toronto. He had spent four years at the end of the twenties teaching at Osgoode Hall Law School before becoming dean of law at Dalhousie and then president at Manitoba. While at Manitoba he and Cody had worked together in the National Conference of Canadian Universities and Cody had hand-picked him to be his successor. Smith also shared some of Cody’s concerns about his largest faculty. In his first report he wondered about whether the degree of specialization in the honours course in the Faculty of Arts was ‘more fitting for the Graduate School.’ And, he asked, was the pass course ‘accomplishing as much as it could in providing a general yet liberal education?’61 There was more. ‘Departmentalism,’ Smith observed, was a ‘mixed blessing.’ It ‘promoted a disregard for programmes and attainments in cognate fields’ that worried him. Beyond that, the departments

112 Arts and Science at Toronto

in the Faculty of Arts, in both college and university subjects, were spread over many buildings. That also tended to ‘emphasize departmental boundaries.’ There was, apparently, no thought of attempting to consolidate the university subjects, at least, in one or more buildings. Instead Smith tried to address the issue in another, unprecedented way. A major portion of Smith’s presidential work, as it had been with his predecessors Falconer and Cody, was dealing with the minute financial and personnel affairs of the university departments. His file for 1945–6 for the Department of Chemistry, for example, included recommendations for approval of appointment of the department’s many demonstrators, the acceptance of the resignation of a sixty-five-year-old staff member, and approval of payment of $55 for Professor George Wright’s travel expenses to Atlantic City, where he had presented a paper to the American Chemical Society. Reid MacCallum, the head of the Department of Fine Art, sought approval of the appointment of Canadian artist Charles Comfort as associate professor and asked Smith to recommend to the board of governors an appropriation of $150 for departmental supplies.62 Unlike the professional faculties, this is the way it had been done for decades in the Faculty of Arts. But, Smith reasoned, there was a dual advantage in delegating this important but often tedious work to the dean of arts, Samuel Beatty. Not only would the president be relieved of a substantial burden, but the change would diminish ‘departmentalism’ and promote a more unified focus for the university departments upon the faculty. ‘Hereafter,’ Smith announced, ‘the Dean of Arts will be directly responsible for the administration of the University departments in the Faculty of Arts … just as his fellow deans … This action should serve to focus the need of the Faculty as a whole and to promote correlation and coordination in the academic as well as the administrative fields.’63 One of Beatty’s first tasks was to implement a new salary scale for his teaching staff. Cody had long advocated raising the floor salaries of the lecturers and professors in the university, and, at last, a new scale came into force in 1945–6. The floor for lecturers was now $2000. Assistant professors had to be paid at least $3500, associate professors $4500, and professors $5500. In fact, the new scale was not much of an improvement. It just met the cost-of-living increases since 1939 and did not take account of the much heavier taxation that had been imposed on Canadians during the war years. And there was no provision for automatic annual increases in salary, so that an assistant professor might

A University at War

113

receive the same salary in 1948–9 as he had gotten four years earlier. For lecturers there was an important change in appointment policy. Any lecturers appointed on 1 July 1946 or after could only continue to be reappointed at that rank for five successive years. So, after serving six years as a lecturer, if he ‘is not promoted to the rank of at least assistant professor, his employment by the university will then be terminated.’64 Smith became president as the first groups of returning soldiers were beginning to appear on campus. A special summer session just for the soldiers had been launched in April 1945, and about sixty veterans were enrolled in courses in accounting, economics, English, history, mathematics, and political science.65 It was but a whisper of the whirlwind to come. As that session drew to a close in August there were 7265 students enrolled at Toronto. Just weeks later, in the early fall of 1945, there were 13,157, more than 4700 of whom were ex-soldiers. Enrolment in arts jumped from 3150 to 5400, with over 3000 in first year, about 1700 in second year, and just hundreds in third and fourth years. The special summer session that had some 60 students in April 1945 attracted more than 700 in April 1946. In fact, over the next few years, nearly a quarter of all the servicemen and women who participated in veterans’ university education in Canada attended courses at Toronto.66 From their first appearance, the former service men and women made an forceful impression on Smith and his colleagues. The veterans, whose university education was being supported by the Government of Canada, were a demonstration, Smith remarked, ‘that first class talents for academic work are not to be found only in the children of homes where the parents are able to pay the costs of a university education.’ He proudly reported that examination failure rates dropped significantly and honours standing increased in courses where veterans were enrolled. ‘Never did Canadian colleges and universities,’ Smith wrote, ‘have such excellent material with which to work.’67 Historian Richard Saunders, who lectured to a class of 800 in Convocation Hall, echoed Smith’s enthusiasm. ‘Some of the best students I ever had in the university were veterans,’ he recalled. ‘And they changed the whole tone of the classes at that time. And the young students coming in were awed by them.’68 Former soldiers who had ‘the aptitude and inclination’ for university study and who had earlier academic studies interrupted by the war had a year and three months after discharge to resume their studies. Similarly, those who now wished to enrol in a university program or

114 Arts and Science at Toronto

Blue and White Society noon-hour pep rally, 4 October 1949 (B2003-0001/ 064-2)

who needed to make up matriculation requirements also had a year and three months to participate in the program. The Government of Canada would support the veterans for the amount of time that they had served in the armed forces. In certain cases where a veteran’s ‘progress and attainments’ were such that the minister deemed their continued study in ‘the public interest,’ the support could be extended to completion of the course of study. But if a veteran failed in more than two subjects in the same year or failed in one or two subjects and in both supplemental examinations, he would be denied further support. The amount of support was $44.20 per month for an unmarried veteran and $62.40 for a married one. In addition, there was support for the veteran’s dependents: $12.00 per month for a first and second child, lesser amounts for more children, and $15.00 per month for dependent parents.69 It was a generous program, but one that put even greater pressure on the universities than they experienced with loss of personnel during the war. At Toronto, for example, a whole new campus was created on the site of a huge wartime munitions plant at Ajax, east of Toronto, for the first and second years of instruction in the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering.70 And on the main campus, classes of the size Saunders

A University at War

115

and many others lectured to were unprecedented. For the Government of Canada the program averted a potentially serious problem. John Surerus was bluntly unromantic about the government’s intentions: We pat ourselves on the shoulders that we did a wonderful thing for education for those people. I smile when I think of it because it wasn’t an educational matter at all in its inception. T he Government at Ottawa, realizing that it would soon be faced with a large group of men who were going to be demobilized and who would enter the labour market, or expect to enter the labour market, realized that there would be a glut of labour and that they had to do something in order to ensure an orderly transfer from the military life to civilian life … It would be a capital idea if … these people would be enabled to enter the university at government expense, being paid not only their fees but their total living allowance and a living allowance for their families while they were educated. So, it purports to be an educational matter, but it was actually a way of avoiding a glut on the labour market of Canada.71

Registration peaked in 1947–8 with 17,723 students and began to drop, to 16,663 in 1948–9.72 Claude Bissell, then dean of residence at University College, reported that for the college’s two men’s residences ‘the academic year 1948–49 has meant the beginning of the change-over from extraordinary post-war conditions to a more normal life. The problem of finding accommodation for ex-service students was no longer so acute, and it became feasible to reduce the number of students at Holwood Hall [Flavelle House] from 75 to 55.’73 And then, almost as quickly as it began, the veteran’s presence drifted away. ‘The post-war chapter of the University,’ Smith wrote in 1950–1, ‘is now drawing to a close.’ There were a few less than 2500 veterans registered in that year, and Smith predicted the number would be down to 1000 in the next year. Of those, he added, ‘only 50 or 60 will be coming to the University for the first time.’74 The veterans left behind memories of achievement and purpose seldom matched in the history of the Faculty of Arts and, indeed, of the university. Leonard Smith, registrar of the university, whose long record of service stretched back to Falconer’s days, recorded that ‘there was never a time when the people who were enrolled as students were more dedicated and serious about the work they had to do than that group.’75 And among the professors who taught them, Surerus spoke for many: ‘It was, I think, the highlight of my teaching time in the university.’76

7 New Realities

At the end of the Second World War Canada had the third largest navy in the world, the fourth largest air force, and a formidable, wellequipped and battle-proven army. While not in league with the major powers that emerged from the war – the United States, Great Britain, France, China, and the Soviet Union – Canada had made a very significant contribution to the war, especially in Europe. It had played a role in the birth of the United Nations and was ready to make a meaningful contribution to securing the peace. Its diplomats took the ‘functional principle’ as their guideline, intervening in world affairs when and where Canadian support and expertise could be meaningful, beginning before the war was over with a leading role in the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. In time this selective activist role earned the country recognition as a leading ‘middle power.’ A 1947 initiative led to Canada’s part in the development in 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, joining Canada and the United States in formal alliance with the nations of western Europe. By then Canadian soldiers were involved in ‘peacekeeping’ operations on the IndiaPakistan and Arab-Israeli borders, and a year later Prime Minister Louis St Laurent’s Liberal government authorized sending a Canadian force to fight in the Korean War. Soon Canadian army and air force units were back in Germany in NATO partnership to secure western Europe from the threats of the Soviet Union in the Cold War. And in 1957 the wartime alliance with the United States during the world war was revived with NORAD, a new continental defence joint command against the perceived danger of attack ‘over the pole’ by Soviet bombers.1 At the end of the Great War many of the assets that had been created to produce war material in Canada were abandoned or sold off. At the

New Realities

117

end of the Second World War the much larger and more sophisticated industrial and scientific war machine, including Canada’s contribution to nuclear research and industry, but not nuclear weapons, was kept and converted to peacetime use and, by the 1950s, to renewed capacity to equip Canadian forces at home and in Korea and Europe. A huge stimulus to the 1950s economy came from the admission of hundreds of thousands of new immigrants, mostly from post-war Europe. Among them were tens of thousands of war brides in the early years, a steady flow of people from southern Europe, especially Italian construction workers who led the construction of the Toronto subway, which opened in 1954, and, following the crushing of the Hungarian revolution by the Soviets in 1956, a wave of Hungarian refugees, many of them young people of university age. Between 1949 and 1961 more than 1.7 million newcomers arrived in Canada. Fifty per cent of them came to live and work in Ontario, with large numbers in the extraction industries of the north, but many, many more in Ontario cities, especially Toronto. Demographic change transformed the nature and character of Toronto. By 1961 a century and more of Protestant ascendency was over; the census revealed that Protestants were in a minority in the provincial capital. Newcomers with good jobs and middle-class Canadians enjoying a prosperity that had not been seen since the ‘twenties’ triggered a boom in housing construction in new suburbs, of which Don Mills, on the northeast edge of Toronto, became the model. Newcomer and Canadian families in an expanding economy also produced ever-growing numbers of children. Between 1945 and 1961 enrolment in Canada’s elementary and secondary schools doubled.2 The impact of post-war growth and prosperity and, indeed, of Canada’s new stature and responsibilities in world affairs, on Ontario’s provincial university was profound. No sooner were the last of the veterans finishing their studies at the University of Toronto than the growing enrolment of matriculated students from the province’s secondary schools began. However fondly senior professors might have longed to return to the small classes and comfortable ways of pre-war days, there was no turning back. During the 1951–2 session the university senate, ‘after considerable study,’ had concluded that an enrolment of ‘about 10,000’ was ‘the best number’ for the university. That session 11,570 were taking credit courses, and more were to come. Sidney Smith had been counting the numbers and reported that ‘before 1970, even without taking new immigration into account, there will be almost twice as many 18 year-olds in the Province as there are now.’3 That did not mean,

118 Arts and Science at Toronto

St Michael’s College float in the homecoming parade, October 1950 (A1978-0050/004[05])

most certainly, that Smith and his colleagues were prepared for or would approve of doubling the enrolment at Toronto. Far from it. As Smith looked ahead he urged planning for alternative institutions such as technical schools and junior colleges. Three years later he suggested the province consider ‘the establishment of new colleges under, and cooperating with established universities in Ontario … before the creation of new universities.’4 University spokesmen in the pre-war years often celebrated the value of a university education. It was, they said, the bedrock of responsible citizenship. But times had changed and the threat of unassimilable numbers, of hordes of eager young men and women clamouring for space and identity in over-crowded lecture rooms and laboratories, loomed. Now the message from Toronto’s president was different. ‘A university degree,’ Smith wrote, ‘is not a prerequisite of useful citizenship.’ That was the introduction to a continuing theme of Smith’s presidency in the 1950s. The University of Toronto was not the place for all the aspiring secondary school graduates in Ontario, not for even a sizeable fraction of them. ‘Universities,’ he added, ‘should make sure that

New Realities

119

the energies of able teachers are not dissipated in the effort to stimulate and develop students who are unfitted for membership in the community of scholars. It is a waste of everyone’s time to try to educate the incompetent.’5 When King’s College was founded it was intended to be an institution for the province’s elite. Neither King’s nor later the University of Toronto had ever wavered from that view of its role in Ontario’s system of higher education. No matter how different circumstances were 120 years later, Smith was certain in 1951–2 that the University of Toronto would still seek out and admit the best of the province’s students. The key to doing that was selectivity. But on what basis? The lesson of the veterans’ years was that there were untold numbers of gifted young men and women whom Toronto, indeed all Ontario universities, had never before considered worthy of admission. ‘There are,’ Smith observed a year later, ‘many students now at universities who should not be there; there are many not at the universities who should be there.’ For the latter, once again drawing on the lessons of veterans’ education, there should be ‘a comprehensive and generous system of scholarships and bursaries that will break down the economic barriers against university education.’ And to solve the problem of students who should not be in university a possible solution was ‘a more intelligently conceived system of selection’ that included, in addition to matriculation examinations, ‘the aid of testing devices and of personal assessments.’6 ‘There can be no place in a democracy for an aristocracy founded on class and privilege,’ Smith proclaimed, ‘but there is a place for the aristocracy of talent – no better place than in the university.’7 But Smith’s projection of enrolment potential was too conservative. In June 1955, Dr Edward F. Sheffield, director of the Education Division of the Dominion Bureau of Statistics, forecast a faster and larger demand for admission in an address to the National Conference of Canadian Universities. That year there were just over 65,000 students in Canadian universities. By 1964–5, Sheffield predicted, there would be between 110,000 and 135,000 enrolments. They would be spread across the nation, but the greatest pressures would be in British Columbia and Ontario, the provinces that had had the largest population growth. Moreover, greater pressure still would be put on universities in rapidly growing urban centres. Those, led by the University of Toronto, would be what Smith called the ‘storm-centres’ of enrolment pressure. Toronto’s senate responded by establishing a ‘Plateau Committee’ to estimate the annual number of applicants for each of the next ten years, to consult

120 Arts and Science at Toronto

the university’s divisions about their capacity to educate larger numbers of students, to estimate the number of new staff, accommodation, and equipment that would be required, and to consider an ‘optimum registration’ for the whole university.8 Implicit in the committee’s terms of reference was expansion, major expansion. And that required very substantial increases in revenue. Fortunately, since 1951 the federal government had been providing support for research – another instance of the impact of the war. Tuition in arts had already increased from $150 in 1945–6 to $180 in 1950–1 for B.A. candidates and from $193 to $233 for B.Com. candidates.9 It would rise again. Fundraising campaigns were always helpful but, Smith observed, they ‘cannot be maintained year in and year out.’10 The Ontario government had been increasing its annual grant, and as revenues rose in the 1950s, the province’s commitment to higher education grew. ‘More Cash to UofT’ headed page one of the Varsity on 2 March 1956. Arts enrolment had increased steadily during the decade. By the next year it had grown another 8 per cent. With increases in most of the other faculties as well, yet another grant increase was announced in the government’s 1957 budget. ‘8,600,000 Bucks for UofT’ the Varsity announced at the end of February 1957.11 The president now predicted that by 1968 enrolment at Toronto would be 23,000 to 24,000 students. ‘Doubling of numbers is a frightening prospect,’ he said. But it was ‘merely our share of the growing population; it represents no increase in the proportion of university students in Ontario attending the University of Toronto.’ In other words, the 1968 University of Toronto would still be the elite institution of the province. And if still larger numbers in the region needed higher education? Smith hoped that ‘another university of college may be established within the metropolitan area.’12 In December 1956, the university purchased nearly all the land between College Street and Harbord and between St George Street and Spadina Avenue. The only exceptions were a small block at College and Spadina and the land occupied by the Toronto Public Library. A proud president called it the greatest decision in 100 years. Several months later, in his annual report, he noted that ‘the predominating consideration’ in planning the development on the new property ‘has been for the orderly development of the Faculty of Arts.’ The faculty’s ‘seniority and prestige’ determined it. Its ‘central role in University undertakings’ required it. ‘A central Arts Building will be a home for most of the departments now precariously lodged in various scattered localities, and new science buildings will be erected for Physics, Chemistry and

New Realities

121

Zoology.’ The arts centre, Smith believed, ‘will have the further effect of enhancing the integration and promoting the unity of the Arts departments, in a way that is not possible in the present widely scattered and inadequate quarters.’13 Sidney Smith often referred to the need for expansion as a ‘crisis in numbers,’ a crisis that, he believed, could more easily be solved by capital expenditures than by growth of the academic staff. But new staff, many new staff, were going to be needed to achieve a successful expansion. The ‘crisis’ that applied to students, he said, ‘applies, in reverse, to staff. We shall need a larger staff simply to provide the outlines of university courses; we shall need a much larger staff to give life and substance to those courses.’14 Attracting new staff was going to be difficult. Another salary-scale increase, effective in July 1953, might help. The critical ranks for attracting most of the new people were lecturer and assistant professor, and there the salary floors increased from $3100 to $4600 and $4800 to $5900. Equally vital was keeping existing staff at Toronto in the face of increasing competition from other universities in Canada and the United States. The truth was that even the new scale was often inadequate for that. Smith cited the example of a young scholar with a doctorate who was receiving $3800 a year. One company offered him $7000 with a promise of moving to $10,000 in the next two years.15 With more senior people the same problem loomed, even though the new salary ranges for associate professor rose from $6100 to $7000 and for professor, department head, or professor of distinction from $7200 to $8200 and up.16 So just a year after implementation of the new scales, Smith was already arguing that ‘members of university staffs are notoriously underpaid.’ They worked late hours and weekends, ‘but they know no overtime pay.’ They had to travel to conferences, for research, ‘but they know no company cars or expense accounts.’ Their books and papers brought them ‘great prestige and negligible royalties.’17 Yet another problem was ‘security of tenure.’ Acknowledging that appointment to a permanent position had ‘wide implications for the individual and the institution,’ the president reminded people that a young man or woman could hold the rank of lecturer for six years without promotion and the initial appointment as assistant professor was for only three years, with a possible renewal. That policy had been put in place for ‘trying out as many young persons as possible’ in a time of surplus, but ‘in a scarce market these measures may defeat their purpose.’ In short, in the competitive market for young talent that marked

122 Arts and Science at Toronto

the post-war years, the potential for having to serve up to nine years ‘before attaining security of tenure’ at Toronto was too onerous.18 To address these problems the board of governors authorized another salary-range increase in 1955 and still another the following year that would implement changes over three years to 1959–60. By then the floor salary for a lecturer was $5500, for an assistant professor $7000, for associate professors $9000, and for professors $12,000 and up annually.19 A new pension plan in 1954–5 would yield the equivalent of 2 per cent of the member’s annual salary for every year he/she was a member of the plan. The member was expected to contribute 5 per cent of gross annual salary and the university would pay whatever more was necessary to ensure the member received his/her pension entitlement. That same year changes were also made to group life insurance for male staff members to provide the equivalent of the member’s annual salary at death to a maximum of $15,000. Group life insurance for female staff members was unchanged; it remained $1000. And, finally, the normal retirement age was set at sixty-eight, although a staff member could retire as early as age sixty-five.20 Thus, by the later years of the 1950s there had been three increases in the salary ranges for faculty, a new pension plan, group life-insurance benefit improvements for male faculty members (though not for female faculty), and a revised age of retirement. Together that made the Toronto compensation package the best in Canada. The attractions of large salaries in the private sector or of prestigious appointments at other universities, particularly major universities in the United States, continued to lure some gifted faculty away from Toronto.21 But in the last three years of Smith’s tenure, 1954–5 to 1956–7, more than 130 new appointments were made at Toronto. Fiftyfour, or 40 per cent, were in the Faculty of Arts (the university and University College) and of those appointments just short of 90 per cent were at junior levels as lecturers or assistant professors.22 Would the improvements in compensation that were just coming into place be attractive to prospective appointees in the years ahead? Were there going to be enough more new staff members to quell the ‘crisis in numbers’ that was about to begin? In June 1956, the Plateau Committee, chaired by Gilbert deB. Robinson of the mathematics department, made its recommendations. The university, it said, should not grow larger than 24,000 students. New teaching staff were going to be needed, and the committee proposed that each department should add annually onetenth of the number of new appointments it would need for each of the

New Realities

123

next ten years. New buildings were also needed, but the campus should not grow indefinitely. Instead, the university should establish one or more new colleges on Toronto’s outskirts and those colleges should teach all years of the general arts course, a proposed general science course, and, perhaps, a select few honour courses.23 A year later an advisory planning committee for the board of governors approved the plan to build the new arts and sciences buildings west of St George Street, but ignored the proposal to create new colleges in the city’s suburbs.24 University officials noticed a change that accompanied the growing enrolment at Toronto. The new entering classes did not seem to be as well prepared for university as pre-war matriculants had been. As early as 1948–9, between 30 and 40 per cent of the entering class did not get through first year. It was clear that the returning veterans were not the problem: it was the newcomers from the secondary school system. The trouble centred on their command of English – a problem which the university shared, Smith believed, with the province’s secondary schools: ‘We are co-workers with the teachers in our schools.’ Two years later students in all three years of the pass course in arts who had elected English as one of their subjects were tested for punctuation, vocabulary range, and expository prose. Sixty-five per cent failed. The conclusion was inescapable: high school English was ‘no longer adequate equipment for work in the university,’ and so it was incumbent on the university to take immediate steps ‘to make sure that illiteracy no longer dwells in easy partnership with the possession of a degree.’ The solution was drastic: ‘The necessity of giving remedial courses in English – yes, remedial – is a sad commentary on the teaching of essential courses,’ Smith wrote. ‘We cannot regard ourselves in the university as the elite, the elect of the anointed of the educational system,’ he added, as long as Toronto granted degrees to students who did not have a functional command of English.25 By 1952 a remedial English examination was in place at University College. Scheduled for early October, at the beginning of the ‘winter session,’ it was required for all arts students and all students in professional faculties who were taking a pass course in English at the college. Of University College students enrolled in English 63 per cent passed, while only 50 per cent of college students not enrolled in English passed. In the professional faculties 45 per cent of the students passed. The failing students took a course in remedial English before a second examination. Then 93 per cent of the students taking the exam passed.26

124 Arts and Science at Toronto

As the university grew, and as enrolment increased in all the faculties and schools with the exception of medicine, so grew the demand for more ‘service’ teaching by the Faculty of Arts. Physics, chemistry, and the biological sciences all faced new pressures, but so too did the emerging social sciences, anthropology, history, philosophy, and especially English in the humanities. Smith and the recently appointed dean of arts, classicist Moffat St Andrew Woodside, were concerned. The problem was not that the professional faculties wanted their students to take arts subjects, including English, it was that increasingly those students were ‘taught in segregated groups’ for forestry, medicine, engineering, among others. ‘No aspect of the crisis in university education is more alarming than the prospect of the Faculty of Arts being submerged in the rising tide of professionalism,’ Smith proclaimed in 1956. ‘If in the next ten years they [the arts subjects] come to be treated merely as means to other ends, merely as useful background to professional training, the Faculty of Arts will lose its motive power and become a service station for the ambulances, the lorries and the bulldozers.’27 The ‘spirit of liberal learning’ embedded in the arts faculty would be lost, together with ‘the vital atmosphere of questioning and searching, the shaking up of preconceived ideas’ that characterized the teaching of philosophy, history, and English.28 To counter the trend towards specialization, professionalization, and the fragmentation of learning, Smith had a proposal. ‘I advocate the establishment of a basic pre-professional year or years within the Faculty of Arts.’29 He repeated the suggestion several times during the last years of his tenure. There was no response from Arts or the other faculties. The curricular changes required across the faculties to implement the proposal would have been great, more than a tradition-oriented university like Toronto would readily embrace. The pre-professional year(s) idea was dead. Another curricular reform was not. In 1948–9 the council of the Faculty of Arts reviewed its programs and concluded that its pass and general courses were out of date and proposed that both programs be scrapped and replaced with one new three-year general course. The aim was to give students who did not elect one of the honour courses a program with ‘a measure of specialization with a broad general program in the more important fields of human culture’ and to require a higher level of achievement than was currently required for entrance into the existing pass course. In the first year the student in the new course would take six subjects including English, a foreign language, a natural science, a social science, and a humanistic discipline. In years

New Realities

125

two and three the student would specialize to the extent of taking two courses each year in one subject and continue in three other subjects chosen from the broad categories specified in year one. Unlike the existing pass course, the council believed, the new general course would give the student ‘a coherent pattern and a genuine intellectual discipline.’30 Admission requirements were changed at the same time. To enter any University of Toronto program, including the new general course, senior matriculation graduates had to attain at least third-class standing in four of their secondary-school final examinations.31 On a related matter, in 1951–2 the faculty council firmly recommended that the ability of failing first-year honour-course students to easily transfer to the second year of the new general course be curbed. ‘The [new] General Course would suffer in personnel and reputation if it were to be a dumping ground for failures or near failures in the first year Honour Courses,’ the council reported. At the time the general course had been running for one year. Of the 456 students enrolled in it in the fall of 1950, 25 per cent, 113, had failed: three-quarters of them had failed three or more of their six subjects. The highest failure rates were in language and science papers, followed by examinations in social-science subjects and then humanities.32 That was not good, but it was a considerable improvement on the university-wide first-year failure rates recorded just a few years earlier.33 And there was curricular innovation. Perhaps the most dramatic change was the introduction of language laboratories. It occurred after Eugène Amié Joliat and his wife Pauline joined the French Department at University College in 1946. Joliat’s colleague Dana Rouillard recalled that he was ‘always interested in exploring new technologies, he pioneered the use of sound recording equipment in language training.’34 Soon the first language laboratory in Canada was set up in the basement of University College. It was an immediate and popular success which, in time, recast language teaching in arts faculties across the country. There were changes, amendments, and additions in course offerings as well. The Department of Military Studies, established in 1919, was closed at the end of June 1951.35 Two years later the Faculty of Arts added ‘Classics in English’ to its program, and in 1956–7 three long-standing honour courses in Hebrew and Greek, Hebrew, and Oriental Languages were ‘consolidated’ into one course – Ancient Near Eastern Studies. At the same time, a new honour course, Modern Near Eastern Studies, was established just as the Suez Crisis reminded Canadians, as Woodside

126 Arts and Science at Toronto

put it, of their ‘current lack of understanding of a vitally important area and its people.’ Arabic was added to the subjects of instruction in the recently introduced new general course. To highlight these changes the Department of Oriental Languages – reaching back to the earliest days and appointments in King’s College and the university – was renamed the Department of Near Eastern Studies.36 The correlation between curricular change and the Suez Crisis was coincidental. But an earlier instance of public reaction to international affairs and Canada’s place in the post-war world that intruded upon the Faculty of Arts was not. On 16 March 1950, the leader of the Conservative Opposition, George Drew, former premier of Ontario, told the House of Commons that ‘appropriate steps should be taken to ascertain the circumstances under which Dr. [Leopold] Infeld plans to return to Poland armed with certain atomic knowledge.’37 In the aftermath of the Gouzenko Affair in Ottawa, which many regard as the initiation of the  Cold War, the thought that Infeld, a highly regarded professor of applied mathematics in the Faculty of Arts and a friend and collaborator with Albert Einstein, was taking atomic secrets behind the Iron Curtain was alarming news flashed across Canada and picked up and broadcast across the United States by the New York Times. Leopold Infeld had been born and raised in Poland and educated there and, briefly, in 1920, in Germany. In 1933, Infeld, now a professor at a Polish university, received a Rockefeller fellowship to study at Cambridge with Max Born. Then, in 1936, he went to Princeton to work with Einstein. Together, they published an important book in theoretical physics. In 1938 J.L. Synge, head of applied mathematics in the Faculty of Arts, brought him to Toronto. And just over a decade later, in the spring of 1949, Infeld was given a half-year leave of absence to visit Poland. By then he had an enviable international reputation, like his friend Einstein was a pacifist, was very popular with students, and adored by his graduate students, and was well known for his vivacious character in the university and community alike.38 Infeld was deeply attached to his homeland. Celebrated there, early in 1950, while in Europe, he applied to stay for another year. ‘I find here excellent conditions for research and scientific work and for instructing the young Polish generation,’ he wrote to the Varsity.39 Initially, his department head, sixty-nine-year-old dean of arts Samuel Beatty, approved. President Smith was also inclined to approve Infeld’s request. But Drew’s intervention changed everything. There was no truth at all

New Realities

127

to the implication that Infeld was taking atomic secrets to Poland. His work with Einstein and elsewhere had nothing to do with atomic physics. But as Infeld was attacked in the conservative press, as his family in Toronto was subjected to increasing harassment, Beatty and the president, and most of the faculty in arts, refused to rise to his defence. Former graduate students and junior colleagues like A. John Coleman, a doctoral student of Infeld’s who became head of mathematics at Queen’s University, protested, but in vain. Then Infeld received another offer: to spend a half-year at Princeton. At the same time, a colleague in mathematics resigned, creating a teaching shortfall in the department. The younger mathematicians, together with the recently appointed new head of physics, worked out a way to cover the teaching shortfall. But Beatty and Smith refused to seize the opportunity. Finally, Beatty wrote to tell Infeld, ‘If on the opening of term he finds you not here, he [the president] will have no option but to assume that you are no longer on staff.’40 Infeld resigned. ‘We are well rid of him,’ Smith reported to Eric Phillips, the chairman of the board of governors.41 At the same time, Smith was preparing his annual report. ‘It is tragic that before we completed our work with the veterans of a “hot war” we found ourselves perplexed and worried by the strains and portents of a “cold war,”’ he observed. It was customary to take note of the resignations of professors in the annual report, but there was no mention of Leopold Infeld in the annual report for 1949–50. The Cold War had come to the Faculty of Arts. It was a shameful episode for the faculty. And for the university.42 The Infeld case was the big news on campus in the early weeks of the 1950–1 session. It was closely followed by the Varsity, where Infeld’s popularity among students was carefully noted. A second-year medical student, in a long letter to the paper, criticized the ‘hysteria and witchhunts of power politics’ that drove Infeld from Canada and expressed disappointment in Canada ‘for having a part in provoking Professor Infeld to leave our midst,’ ‘that some of our nation’s leading statesmen have also had a part in it,’ and that ‘the president of this institution had nothing to say in defence of a member of the university staff … who has been subjected to the most revolting defamation of character.’43 It was not until January 1951, when a letter by Infeld to the managing editor was published, that attention waned. ‘I should like to tell you how much I enjoyed my associations with the youth of Canada,’ he wrote. ‘Their attitude toward me forms my brightest memory of Canada.’44

128 Arts and Science at Toronto

It was one instance when the Cold War had a direct impact upon Toronto’s students. Another came late in 1956, when more than 800 students demonstrated in late October against the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian revolution. In November they formed a coordinating committee to organize relief efforts for the many thousands of student refugees from the Hungarian Revolution in Austria waiting for chances to enrol in other universities. A two-day campus campaign raised $1300 to support expected Hungarian students and the Students’ Administrative Council doubled the value of its entrance scholarship and offered it to one of the refugee students. By the end of the year more than two dozen had arrived, and more were on their way. By February there were at least sixty on campus and they had quickly organized themselves into the Hungarian Student’s Club. To celebrate their welcome to their new university home the club sponsored a great reception on Tuesday, 19 February in the Hart House Great Hall. All Toronto undergraduates, ‘including women,’ were invited.45 The House, of course, remained closed to women throughout the 1950s except for ‘dances and special occasions.’ That was not the case at a different Hart House–controlled institution. In December 1949, a 150acre working farm in the Caledon Hills with an apple orchard, sugar bush, and two ponds was purchased with student fees and placed under the management of Hart House. The inspiration had come from the warden, Nicholas Ignatieff, who had been intrigued by the experiences of outing clubs at universities in the United States and was looking for ‘a way for students to get away from the city.’ There was a nine-room brick house, a smaller frame house, and a barn and other buildings on the property. Students’ work parties would be organized to do necessary renovation work, while the former owner, seventy-two-year-old Walter Snider, would live on site and continue to work the farm. Announcing the purchase, the Varsity story noted there were ‘two catches.’ One was that a weekend at the farm was going to cost ‘as much as five dollars.’ The other: ‘You will be able to take along your best girl.’46 The grand opening, attended by several hundred people, was on Sunday, 15 October 1950. Return tickets from campus were $1.00.47 During the fall there was competition for ‘The Farm’ from the traditional Saturday afternoon football game, followed by a post-game party and dance. If the Blues were away, at McGill, Queen’s, or Western, for example, there was a special excursion train to the game. The first weekend in October 1957 the Blues were playing the Golden Gaels at Kingston. On Friday the call went out: ‘Wallflowers Unite’ for dancing,

New Realities

129

Hart House Farm 25th birthday celebrations (flying kites), 29 September 1974 (B1998-0033 [741240-41])

nine to one, with music by Ellis McClintock, Billy Lea, and Cy MacLean and entertainment at the Hart House Fall Hop by ‘The Four Doctors.’ The SAC’s special train for the game left the next morning at 7:45 a.m. and would return to Toronto Saturday evening. Train tickets were $5.75 and game tickets cost $1.75 and $2.00.48 Intercollegiate athletic contests, especially football and hockey, were as popular as ever and drew large student crowds. Participation in intramural athletics was even more popular. A soccer game, four lacrosse games, and six volleyball contests were played on Thursday, 16 November 1950. The following week eight lacrosse games were scheduled along with ten volleyball games and twenty-two hockey games, plus a full schedule of playoffs in intramural soccer.49 Holiday season was another time of intense extracurricular activity. In December 1953, Toronto women were invited to try out for the intercollegiate basketball team on the 15th. Two days later the Polish Student’s Club was presenting a ‘Santa Stomp,’ for fifty cents, complete with refreshments, dancing, and entertainment. On the 28th, for those not at home for the holidays, the International Student’s Organization was holding a Christmas dinner dance for $2.00. And if you were

130 Arts and Science at Toronto

planning ahead, SAC had organized a ski weekend at St-Sauveur, Quebec, at the end of January, via a special Canadian National train leaving Union Station at 8:15 p.m. Friday, 29 January. Rail fare, hotel, meals, free accident insurance and a Saturday night dance were all included for $29.50.50 All of this, plus the dozens and dozens of weekly groups and clubs that met, added up to a ‘proliferation … of extracurricular activities’ that worried Sidney Smith. ‘Certainly at this University,’ he commented, ‘the pressure of extraneous interests takes a heavy academic toll.’51 An activity not encouraged by university officials was a raid by several hundred engineering students on University College, Victoria, and Trinity on Thursday, 23 September 1953. At UC the students stormed through both side doors and towards the main rotunda. W.J. McAndrew, the college registrar, alerted by the noise, met the students there and found himself confronted by some students, who struck him. ‘His face was covered with blood and so was his coat and right hand,’ a witness, Bob Brown, the managing editor of the Varsity, reported. Sidney Smith, who had spoken to the students the day before, invoking ‘manners and morals,’ was furious. Claude Bissell, the college dean, called the rioters ‘moral morons.’ The incident was referred to the CAPUT for investigation and in October it decreed that the Engineering Society at F.A.S.E. ‘has been indifferent to, or incapable of discharging its responsibilities and duties of self-government, and has thus demonstrated that it is unworthy of the rights and privileges of self government.’ CAPUT fined the society $4000, suspended its constitution, and directed the council of the faculty to be responsible for ‘all powers of governance and direction of non-curricular affairs of the students of any kind whatsoever within the Faculty.’52 There was not a hint of the incident in the president’s year-end annual report. But it was on his mind as he suggested that extracurricular activities on campus had gotten out of hand. There were two student attitudes, he said, that ‘deserve attention and are harmful enough to demand some immediate counter-action.’ The first was a ‘studentcentred’ attitude that manifested itself in ‘a studied carelessness in dress and a deliberate obstreperousness in speech and manners’ together with an ‘aggressive trade-union attitude, as if students were a special class fighting for special privileges against an entrenched elite – the staff and the administration.’ Altogether, it added up to ‘shallow individualism.’ The other was a ‘preparation for life’ attitude in which the ‘university is something like a finishing school, where academic

New Realities

131

discipline is an irritating necessity, and the real worth is to be found in a set of peripheral activities.’ These attitudes, Smith recorded, ‘are no less than fatal to the survival of the idea of the university as a community of scholars.’53 The president was not amused. In June 1957, Canadians went to the polls for a general election. The Liberals, under the leadership of William Lyon Mackenzie King and, since 1948, Louis St Laurent, had been in power since 1935. They were expected to win again. They did not. By a narrow margin the Conservative Party came to power with 112 seats in a 265-seat House of Commons. The new prime minister, John George Diefenbaker, took the external affairs portfolio. Then, in the summer, he offered the post to Sidney Smith. Smith had never held public office, but was well known in Conservative circles. He had thought often about going into politics, and in 1942 had been prepared to stand for nomination for the party leadership at its Winnipeg convention. At the time he was president of the University of Manitoba. But when the Manitoba premier, John Bracken, stepped forward, Smith backed away.54 His long-time friend, Henry Borden, who was vice chairman of the university’s board of governors in 1957, described Smith as ‘a great extrovert, a very personable, likeable human being. One could not help liking him … He was bursting with vigor and full of life at all times.’55 And that, certainly, was the personality he had presented to colleagues and friends of the university during his twelve years as president. But university historian Friedland records that Smith, in his thirtieth year as a university president, was tiring of his job and had told the board chair, Eric Phillips, that he doubted he had the vigour for the expansionary challenges that awaited in the years ahead.56 Nineteen fifty-seven was also the year of the international geophysical meetings in Toronto at the end of the summer, chaired by Professor Tuzo Wilson. The new prime minister came to Toronto to address the delegates. A luncheon followed at the York Club in honour of Wilson and his colleagues, with Diefenbaker, Smith, and Borden in attendance. After the lunch Smith joined Borden in his downtown office and told him that Diefenbaker had asked him to join his government. As they discussed the offer, Borden recalled that he could see that Smith ‘was very positive in his view that he wished to do it.’ Borden told him ‘it was an opportunity he should not forego.’57 Smith resigned the presidency on 12 September. ‘Ten days ago,’ he wrote to his staff, ‘I had no thought, desire or intention to leave the

132 Arts and Science at Toronto

University.’ But then the invitation had come, and as he put finishing touches on his annual report, he ‘had the clear realization that the University of Toronto is beginning a new chapter.’ Though he had been looking forward to another five years as president, he added, the time had come that ‘a new and younger president should take over and assist in the preparation for the larger enrolment.’58 In Smith’s absence the dean of arts, Moffat Woodside, became acting president and the board of governors set about recommending a new president to the Ontario government. Smith had presided over the beginning of major change at the University of Toronto. For the Faculty of Arts he had initiated the devolution of authority and responsibility for administration of the faculty to its dean. For the university he had managed the immense challenge of educating the veterans of the Second World War with great success, but had begun to struggle with the continuing large enrolment and unfamiliar, and to him repugnant, outlooks and expectations of the students of the 1950s. Looking ahead, Sidney Smith, ever publicly upbeat, foresaw great opportunities for the university. But they were not going to be his opportunities: they would be those of a new president. In Ottawa Smith was asked what he considered to be his major accomplishments at Toronto. He named two that had a lasting impact on the Faculty of Arts: the introduction of the new general course and the increases in academic salaries that had taken place during his presidency.59

8 The Sixties

The Sixties. It was the decade of the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King. It was the decade of the Vietnam War, of draft-dodgers, of anti-war marches and protests. It was the decade of counterculture and social revolution, of feminism, of the New Left. It was the decade of assassinations: of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers and John F. Kennedy in 1963, of Malcolm X in 1965, and of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. In Canada it was the decade of the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, of a new national flag, of the Trans-Canada Highway, of the Centennial of Confederation and Expo 67, the Canada Pension Plan, a Royal Commission on the Status of Women, and the first Canadian bank credit cards. It was the decade of an explosion of numbers of university-aged young people and ever-growing enrolments in universities across the United States and Canada. In the Sixties Canadian students went south to join the civil rights marches in the South and young draft-dodgers from the United States became students in Canadian universities. In the Sixties Canadian and American students and faculty members marched in protests against the Vietnam War in Toronto and other Canadian cities, while the Royal Canadian Mounted Police infiltrated university campuses to report on suspected ‘subversives.’ And in Canada and the United States the Sixties generation of students transformed not just the campuses they attended but the culture, the style, and the essence of academic and social life. At the University of Toronto that transformation was presided over, and in significant measure led by, a new president. The Varsity broke the news: ‘It’s Bissell,’ it announced at the top of its 8 January 1959 edition. Claude Thomas Bissell, just forty-one years old and recently installed as president of Carleton University in Ottawa,

134 Arts and Science at Toronto

had been chosen by the board of governors to be the new president of the University of Toronto. He was no stranger. ‘In the early summer of this year,’ the news story began, ‘Dr. Claude T. Bissell comes home to Toronto.’1 Claude Bissell had been born in Meaford, Ontario, in 1916. He graduated bachelor of arts (English and history) from University College in 1936 and earned a master of arts degree in English in 1937. Three years later he was awarded a PhD in English by Cornell University, and taught there the following year. Bissell returned to Toronto in 1942 and enrolled in the Canadian army. He served in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in Europe and was mustered out in 1946. Back at University College he taught English and was, for several years, dean of men. In 1952 Bissell became assistant to the president. Soon he was Sidney Smith’s vice president, his ‘right arm,’ as Smith said when Bissell accepted the call to Carleton. Bissell was personally chosen as Smith’s successor by the chairman of the board of governors, Col. Eric Phillips. It was the age of ‘Sputnik and spaceships,’ the Varsity shrewdly noted. Yet the university had chosen ‘one of Canada’s most self-avowed and outspoken humanists,’ one of its own, trained in the deeply revered honour course system in the university’s own college, a man who knew the university’s nooks and crannies, its legends and its secrets. As dean of men Bissell had had something of a reputation as a champion of the university’s students. ‘I hope,’ Bissell told the paper during his first interview, ‘the time will never come when I will cease to be aware of student needs and attitudes.’2 The number of students the university had, and the number it was going to have, were a constant concern for of Bissell. He had returned from war service to a campus dominated by fellow veterans – mature, serious adults. As dean of men Bissell was in charge of University College’s men’s residence, and had been a close scrutineer of the earliest stages of the influx of young, post-war enrollees. As Sidney Smith’s ‘right arm’ he witnessed the work of Gilbert deB. Robinson’s Plateau Committee as it projected a maximum enrolment of 24,000 by the mid1960s. And now, as president, his own thoughts echoed some of Smith’s musings on the exploding demand for places in universities across the province of Ontario. Smith had talked about different kinds of postsecondary institutions: universities for those most suited to university education, institutes or colleges for others, perhaps even two levels of universities in the province. Just months into his term of office Bissell returned to this idea in a speech to alumni in London, Ontario. At the  beginning of the 1950s there were three provincially supported

The Sixties

135

universities. In February 1959 there were seven, and there would be more. The time was coming, Bissell said, for a ‘distinction between senior and junior universities’ in the province. Students at the senior universities would be offered concentrated undergraduate work leading to specialization, entrance to training for the ‘major professions,’ and ‘above all to post-graduate work.’ That, of course, would not be for everyone; not all wanted such a program, nor were all secondary school graduates qualified for it. For those matriculants the junior universities would provide a more general education that would usually have a fixed term.3 Smith had referred to the cities of the province, especially Toronto, as the ‘storm centres’ of the coming enrolment crush. Bissell began his first annual report noting that ‘Metropolitan Toronto is the real crisis point in the expansion of university enrolment.’ Between 1951 and 1956, he  explained, the city had grown by almost 25 per cent, and now, at decade’s end, it was growing still more. Projections pointed to 92,000 university-age students in Ontario by 1975, with half of them living in the Toronto area. Historically, he added, the University of Toronto had taken about half the area’s student population. But the university’s planning capped Toronto’s capacity at 23,000 in 1965, with no further growth after that. Some 20,000 area students would have to look elsewhere. ‘Our proportion will decline,’ Bissell predicted. ‘We shall become a highly selective university.’4 In December 1959 it seemed that the beginning of a solution to the enrolment problem in the Toronto area was at hand. Robert Winters, the chairman of the board of governors of the newly established York University, announced that Murray G. Ross, Bissell’s vice president, had been named the president of the new institution. For the first four to eight years York would be affiliated with and under the guidance of the University of Toronto: its curriculum would be the general course curriculum of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts, its examinations supervised by members of the Toronto faculty. And it would start out on the Toronto campus, occupying Falconer Hall, north of Flavelle House, during its first year before moving to Glendon Hall in north Toronto, the location of the Faculty of Law, in 1961. President Ross announced that York would specialize ‘in general education as opposed to early specialized education.’ York, it appeared, would become just what Bissell had prescribed, a new ‘junior’ university, affiliated with the province’s ‘senior’ university. As for Toronto, Bissell observed that the number of arts students in honour courses, which had hovered around 50 per cent of each class

136 Arts and Science at Toronto

through the 1950s, had suddenly begun to rise. He wondered if Toronto, ‘by virtue of tradition and academic structure, is not specially equipped to give honours work, and whether we should not think of restricting the number of students admitted to the General Course.’ Or, perhaps, go even further. ‘It may be,’ he added, ‘that general education in the sense of an education that attempts to give the student an introduction to all of the major areas of learning can be more effectively given in other institutions. This university is committed to a high degree of specialization.’5 But that would be for another day. For the moment Bissell reminded the board and senate that Toronto’s affiliation with York University was ‘in enlightened self-interest,’ because if York did not become an established institution with a campus of its own, a faculty, and a ‘substantial student body’ by 1965, ‘Toronto may find herself by the irresistible compulsion of social forces transformed into a kind of institution that is alien to all our traditions.’ That would ‘turn a great university into a demographic convenience.’ And that was unthinkable: We have in the University of Toronto an intellectual community that could never countenance such a development. … The main purpose of the university is not, for instance, to produce genial men of the world; or, for that matter, to produce engineers, doctors, dentists, teachers, preachers, business men and statesmen; it is rather to turn out men and women who believe in the power of the organized and disciplined mind, who are unashamed members of what Jacques Barzun has recently referred to as the House of Intellect.6

There was no hesitancy in Bissell’s vision: historically the provincial university had been, and in the future it would be, Ontario’s elite university. Guarding the University of Toronto against the tyranny of numbers had many facets. An early problem was the growth of part-time enrolments in the general course in arts. During the 1950s the percentage of part-time students had grown from 15 to 34 per cent, itself an indicator that growing numbers of those qualified for admission to Toronto did not share the same demographic characteristics of earlier generations of students. The trend troubled the president: perhaps in five or six years, he speculated, part-time students would make up fully half of the general course enrolment. ‘This is a situation that we are not willing to face,’ he announced. ‘The University exists primarily for the student

The Sixties

137

who is able to devote his full time to his studies, and we are determined to keep it so.’7 Even so, the numbers of students just kept growing, the projections always changing. In 1959–60 the projected enrolment at the end of the decade was 11,200; two years later the estimate for 1970 was 25,000. In fact, in 1969–70 the enrolment was 26,500.8 All of this meant that more faculty would be required. Bissell suggested that the full-time faculty would double in the 1960s from 571 to 1150, which called for an average of just under sixty new appointments each year. Halfway through the decade, in 1965–6, there already were 1200 full-time faculty members. The forecast now was for 2000 by decade’s end. One hundred new members had been hired in 1965–6; 160 more were authorized for 1966–7. At the end of the 1960s the full-time staff numbered 1800 on the university’s roster; there were more than 2000 when full-time members of the federated universities were included.9 During the decade the university had been the leader in the Canadian marketplace for new faculty, and it became increasingly so in the North American market. The university was attracting new members from the United States as well as from the British Isles and the Commonwealth, especially young scholars attracted to the university’s well-established undergraduate departments and its growing graduate programs. Bissell’s reports noted the senior scholars and scientists, many of them Canadian born, who left permanent positions in American universities to join the Toronto faculties. But three-quarters of the new appointments were in the junior ranks – instructors, lecturers, and assistant professors. The Department of Chemistry illustrated both the expansion of faculty and the concentration of new appointments in the junior ranks. In 1949 it had thirteen members: four professors, four associate professors, four assistant professors, and one lecturer. A generation later, in 1969, there were fifty-nine members of the department, thirty-four of them, 58 per cent, in junior positions.10 To assist the recruitment process the board of governors, in 1963, approved a new scale of minimum salaries that set the floor at $13,000 for professors, $9500 for associate professors, $7500 for assistant professors, and $6000 for lecturers.11 New faculty members had to have offices and classrooms in which to teach. For the Faculty of Arts, which became the Faculty of Arts and Science in 1960 at the beginning of Vincent Bladen’s appointment as dean,12 Sidney Smith Hall was under construction and three science buildings for physics, chemistry, and zoology were in the final planning/development stage. Sidney Smith Hall opened in 1960–1 to provide

138 Arts and Science at Toronto

accommodation for twelve departments in its north wing and four lecture halls and other classroom space in its south wing. No sooner had it opened than it was too small. As early as 1962–3 Bladen reported that three departments – Anthropology, and the new departments of Islamic Studies and Sociology – had moved to ‘temporary quarters’ in the former Borden Dairy Building on Spadina Avenue.13 By the middle of the decade it was clear that yet another academic building for Arts and Science was, as Bissell put it, ‘urgently needed.’ He called it a ‘composite Science Building’ for the departments of Botany, Geology, and Geography and for facilities for advanced work in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and the emerging field of computer science.14 Construction was years away. There was no relief. Chemist Albert (Bert) Allen, who had been an associate dean in the faculty, succeeded Bladen as dean of Arts and Science on 1 July 1966. His year-end report, written in the summer of 1967, observed that ‘parts or all of some of the departments are now located at the Borden Building, the old Sussex Court Apartments, houses on Spadina Avenue and St. George Street, and part of the Superintendent’s Building on Huron Street.’ The philosophy department already occupied part of the Superintendent’s Building at 215  Huron Street and was joined there in the fall of 1967 by East Asian Studies. At the same time, Islamic Studies was being moved from its ‘temporary’ accommodation at the Borden Building to offices in a building at the corner of Spadina and College. ‘Each year,’ Allen ruefully added, ‘brings a major reshuffle of the offices in Sidney Smith Hall, to the annoyance of many people who want only to be left alone to get on with their work.’15 Additional space for teaching and for student residence accommodation had been a major item on Bissell’s agenda from his first day in office. He estimated that in a decade’s time, in 1968, the Faculty of Arts would have an enrolment of 10,000 students. There simply was not going to be enough room for them in the four existing colleges. But every student in the faculty had to belong to a college. Residence space had already been planned during Smith’s presidency. But it was not college space. Instead, it was the four residence units that had been allocated to the west campus to border Spadina Avenue. Bissell dismissed them as a ‘huge apartment city on the outskirts of the campus.’ If they were developed as planned, he said, the university would develop ‘acute schizophrenic tendencies, with one division drawing its strength from tradition and precedent, and the other rejoicing in its rootlessness.’16 He would not

The Sixties

139

allow it. The buildings, he said, ‘must be converted into residential colleges and given a social and intellectual as well as a physical identity.’17 But there was more to the problem. In the years following the Second World War it had become clear that the expansion and diversification of subjects in the Faculty of Arts and the program choices students made had strayed far from the traditional concentration of study in the original college subjects. By 1959–60, for example, 16 per cent of University College students took no instruction in the college at all, another 30 per cent had one hour or less per week of work in the college, and more than three-quarters of the students took at least half of their courses outside the college. University College, Bissell worried, might soon be ‘bypassed, as a teaching unit, by the main army of students.’18 In 1960–1 he asked Dean Bladen, Principal Woodside, and the heads of the three federated universities to join him to seek a solution. The colleges were long established, proud, independent entities. The university departments had their own ‘lively sense of identity.’ So the challenge was to bridge the chasm between them. The group found the solution in a new system of cross-appointments which gave members of university departments office space in one of the colleges and allowed them to work with students in their subject in a tutorial form of instruction. Similarly, at least in theory, a member of a college teaching a college subject might be cross-appointed to a university department. ‘One of the happiest results’ of the scheme, Bissell wrote, ‘will be the extension of the practice of teaching in small groups.’19 The concept was quickly put in place, and by the summer of 1962 a chemist, a physicist, and a mathematician had taken up cross-appointments at University College, two political economists were offering tutorials and even some lectures at Trinity College, Victoria College had negotiated an agreement to appoint a historian who would teach in the history department, and senior graduate students in mathematics, physics, and chemistry were at New College to give tutorials in those subjects and in the general course science.20 The other conclusion of the group Bissell had called together was that the four planned residences would each be a four-storey building and each would become a ‘new kind of residential college,’ where cross-appointed faculty would have offices and give tutorials, especially in the sciences and mathematics; and each of the new colleges would admit students from both Arts and Science and other faculties. The first of these was New College. Chemist Frank Wetmore, formerly associate dean in Arts and Science, was appointed as its founding principal.21 New College opened for business in September 1962 in a house

140 Arts and Science at Toronto

at 65 St George Street (now the offices of the School of Graduate Studies). There were 257 students in its first class, 26 from the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, 19 from other faculties and divisions, and the large majority from Arts and Science. In the fall of 1964 its first building, Wilson Hall, on the northwest corner of Huron and Willcocks Streets, was ready for office occupancy. The residence part was ready in January 1965. There were 291 spaces available; 280 were immediately taken up by male students who did not live in the city of Toronto. That year there were 935 students enrolled in the college, the science tutors were in place, and cross-appointed members of University College in English and French began instruction in those subjects in the college. Initially it had been suggested that a second building replicating the serpentine character of Wilson Hall could become a second St George campus college. But by 1964–5 the rapid growth of New College, and the rising demand for residential space for female students, dictated a change of plan: the second building (now Wetmore Hall) would have teaching and other spaces as had the first, and its residence part would house 280 New College women.22 That same year the second St George campus new college, named in honour of political economist Harold Innis, was opened. Like its predecessor New College, it initially occupied temporary space on campus: a wartime building that had been the university bookstore became its first home. Robin Harris, a professor of English, was named the first principal of the college. Innis, like New, was also planned as a multi-faculty college, and so its initial council, appointed by Bissell, included faculty members from Arts and Science, Engineering, and Pharmacology. In time students from several faculties would come to Innis, but its initial class of 278 were all enrolled in Arts and Science. While Innis awaited permanent quarters on the St George campus, the plan to have four new St George colleges was abandoned. There were going to be two more colleges, but both would be located outside the core of the central city. One of these, on a spectacular site beside Highland Creek, was to become Scarborough College. The other, bordering the Credit River west of the city, would be Erindale College. Bissell reminded readers of his annual report that ‘colleges in outlying areas’ were not new to Toronto: the Ajax campus for the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science following the Second World War was one precedent. But Scarborough and Erindale were going to be ‘different from previous experiments.’ Like University, New, and Innis, they would be under the central governance of the senate and board of governors and would be

The Sixties

141

Students at the opening of Erindale College, 26 September 1973 (B1998-0033 [731232-11])

‘integral parts of the university.’ But they were being ‘planned to achieve a high degree of autonomy as quickly as possible.’ And both would report to Professor D.C. Williams, the person who had chaired the academic committee that had laid the foundation for the colleges. Each college would offer the general course and the general course science of the Faculty of Arts and Science and, perhaps, ‘some honour work in selected areas.’ Residence accommodation was not going to be a priority at either college in the initial stages. Scarborough was expected to open in 1965, with the possibility that it might begin extension division instruction even earlier, and Erindale, profiting ‘from the experience of Scarborough,’ would follow. By 1970, Bissell predicted, each suburban college would have a student population of 5000.23 The first academic appointments, in arts and science subjects, started in July 1963. All were cross-appointed to the departments in arts and science at St George, their assignments being to teach and assist in planning the academic program at Scarborough. Because the number of scholars in any given subject would be small, the college was organized on a divisional rather than a departmental basis, with a dean for each of the science, social science, and humanities divisions. A year later the

142 Arts and Science at Toronto

college’s first principal, A.F.W. Plumptre, was in place. Plumptre had been a member of the political economy department before the war and had then had a distinguished career in the federal civil service in Ottawa. Also during the 1964–5 year the college had attracted more than 300 students to highly successful extension courses in first- and second-year English, history, and psychology and first-year courses in French, philosophy, sociology, and mathematics at Birchmount Park Collegiate Institute. The most extensive closed-circuit television system in Canada was being installed in the architecturally unique college building being built on the Highland Creek site. Vice President Williams explained that ‘in the face of increasing difficulties in obtaining highly qualified staff, this system is expected to contribute greatly both to economy and efficiency.’24 The college opened in September 1965 on the St George campus with welcoming ceremonies viewed by the first-year students on television screens. The class of 191 included seventy-six enrolled in the general course and 115 in the general course science. Classes were held in the old Biology Building and the ‘little Red Schoolhouse,’ that is, the former School of Practical Science located on the site of the current Faculty of Medical Sciences Building.25 During the summer of 1966 three full lecture courses, one in each division, were taped for instructional television use. By then there were forty-one members of the faculty. The extension courses continued to prove very popular in the community with 444 student enrolled in 21 different courses.26 In 1966–7 Scarborough College began its program of televised instruction in earnest. First-year courses in English, sociology, zoology, and botany were offered using the new facilities for lecture hours, followed by an hour in groups of fifteen to twenty students. But the scheme was not successful. Just two years later Plumptre reported that ‘both our staff and our students have tended to react against television lectures.’ While the equipment proved to be an ‘invaluable part’ of instruction in laboratory courses in science, the attempt to provide economic and efficient lecture offerings met with increasing resistance and was dropped by the college.27 Bissell had expected the new college ‘to achieve a high degree of autonomy as quickly as possible.’ And the desire for autonomy at Scarborough did develop quickly, though not quite as the president had envisaged it. The problem was the relationship between the college and the Faculty of Arts and Science at St George Street. While Scarborough had its own council, on curricular issues at least, it was subordinate to the Arts and Science council. Scarborough faculty members with St George cross-appointments were also members

The Sixties

143

of the Arts and Science council, but were a tiny fraction of that council’s membership. As early as 1966–7, Principal Plumptre remarked that ‘one of the most persistent administrative problems’ the college faced was the ‘question of eventual autonomy.’28 The issue was fuelled by student discontent. In 1967–8 there were 1000 students at Scarborough, and they were expressing ‘increasing concern and resentment’ at the failure of the university to provide residence accommodation and recreational facilities at the college. More than that, there was a growing unease among the Scarborough students, who were, or perceived themselves to be, cast-offs from the main campus college system. For most of these young men and women Scarborough had not been their college of choice; they were there because they had been refused admission to any of the St George campus colleges. The year, Plumptre noted, was ‘clouded by our awareness that a not insubstantial number of our first-year class,’ he estimated twothirds, ‘were with us, if not under duress, at least faute de mieux. Staff as well as students were infected by the disquiet.’ While a new orientation program was being designed, the signs were ominous. The focus for action was the college’s council, which was increasingly ‘concerned with planning its own future.’ Being just another branch of the college system offering a local edition of the downtown campus’s general course programs was not good enough. Staff and students alike wanted, needed, something that set them apart, gave them an autonomous identity. By 1968–9 the council had received approval from Arts and Science to offer ‘a programme of courses that are distinctive to the College; many of them have no close counterpart on the St. George campus.’ Fully developed, this could be the base for ‘an alternative undergraduate programme within the university.’ And the following year the council changed its membership. It had followed the pattern of divisional councils on the main campus, that is, membership was made up of teaching staff with permanent appointments. But now Scarborough opened its council membership to teaching assistants and demonstrators as well as eighteen full-time and six part-time students. All of this led to President Bissell’s appointment of an advisory committee, headed by Professor F. Kenneth Hare, to report on the status and future of Scarborough College. It reported in April 1971, strongly supporting a host of recommendations that would yield a ‘substantial increase in autonomy’ for the college. Just two months later, in June 1971, the president told the university that he was recommending to the board of governors and the senate that the Hare committee’s recommendations

144 Arts and Science at Toronto

be implemented. It meant, Plumptre remarked, ‘neither separation nor segregation.’ He was right. Scarborough would continue to be an integral unit of the University of Toronto, one that would indeed create its own distinctive programs of study over time. And cross-appointments to the St George arts and science departments would continue. But the bond of the college to the downtown Faculty of Arts and Science had been broken.29 In the summer of 1965, as the first class of undergraduates was preparing to enter Scarborough College, the university made its first nine faculty appointments for Erindale College, but postponed the college opening from 1966 to 1967. In 1967 geophysicist J. Tuzo Wilson was appointed Erindale’s first principal and more new appointments were made. The college, in a preliminary building, opened for business that September.30 There were 151 first-year people enrolled, ninety-nine in general arts and fifty-two in general science. Following a Scarborough precedent, extension classes at Erindale had actually begun a year earlier, and in 1967–8 more than 250 part-time students were taking classes at the college. Erindale did not fully follow the Scarborough precedent of electing student members to its council. Instead, representatives of student organizations were invited to attend all Erindale council meetings.31 But by 1969–70 students were full participants in the council and all other college committees. There were now 900 students on campus and nearly 600 taking extension courses. The faculty had grown to ninety-one fulltime members and fourteen part-time people. From its earliest days the college had embraced the arts and artists as an attraction for both the college and the growing community around it. David Blackwood, a highly regarded Newfoundland painter, was a popular artist in residence, and plans were being made to have him be joined in 1970–1 by a musician and a writer-in-residence.32 Students at Erindale had a long wait for permanent facilities, but did not share the unease and resentment of their Scarborough colleagues. Nor did the rapidly growing faculty, all of whom were cross-appointed to St George departments and many of whom quickly developed graduate work at the college. As the faculty grew, undergraduate interdisciplinary courses were developed and a first-year program was introduced which allowed students to take up to three course credits for work on a subject they chose to study plus two regular courses to round out their program of study. At last, in 1970– 1, the first phase of permanent building on campus was completed, and by the end of the academic year contracts had been signed for more buildings: for offices, a library and gymnasium, and a meeting place.33

The Sixties

145

On the move. Innis College students moving furniture from 65 St George Street to their new college home, 9 January 1976 (A1978-0050/005[09])

‘Quiet efficiency has replaced slapdash verve,’ was the way Principal Robin Harris described the work at Innis College in its second year. After the trial and error, the excitement and ‘glamour’ of its first year, the principal, the staff, and the students almost felt themselves veterans as they welcomed a new class of 225 students in 1965–6. But the college was still very much in a fledgling state: it lacked permanent facilities (and would for a long time). It had but the barest bones of an academic program – ‘its students take all of their instruction elsewhere.’ An addition to the old bookstore had provided two offices and one large room, used for the college’s writing laboratory, but that was all that could be accommodated. As Harris put it, Innis was not involved in the ‘teaching process,’ but was heavily involved in the ‘learning process.’ A broad-based tutorial program supplemented the writing laboratory, both supporting the instruction of its students elsewhere.34 A year later there were great expectations when the board of governors approved architect Hart Massey’s plan for Innis. The new building would be on the north side of Sussex Avenue, between St George and Huron Streets. There would be an inner courtyard and two residential towers, one for

146 Arts and Science at Toronto

men and one for women, each with eight residential floors , dining rooms, a lecture hall, a library, classrooms and seminar rooms, and various other facilities. The plan called for completion of the building by the summer of 1970.35 But it was not to be. Just a year later the college council learned that because of an increasingly serious financial situation for the university the project was being postponed, perhaps for as long as five years.36 In 1968–9 the college accepted changes to the Massey plan to reduce its cost by 20 per cent, and again thought it would have a permanent home by 1971. But by March 1969 all hope was gone; neither provincial nor federal (Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation) funds were going to be available for several years, and it would be 1977 at the earliest, fourteen years after the college opened, before a building could be completed. Principal Harris despaired of the situation and believed the whole idea of developing a college for 1500 students with 500 or more in residence should be abandoned. Instead, he recommended that Innis’s population of about 700 students, with residence space in neighbouring houses for about 100, should be the limits for the college.37 Additional space found for the college at 63 St George Street in 1967–8 stimulated action by the college council to expand its academic program. It began offering tutorial or section groups in English, French, mathematics, political science, philosophy, and psychology in 1968–9. A year later a program of experimental courses was launched, one of which was directed at foreign students whose first language was not English. Its subject matter, Canadian society and culture, included work in the college’s writing laboratory to improve the students’ facility in English. Another course focused on ecology and yet another on cinema. All were under the Arts and Science banner, but it was hoped that Innis students from other faculties would also find room in their schedules to take one or more of them. By 1970–1 there were seven offerings in the program and another initiative was beginning. The college cooperated with the provincial Department of University Affairs and a private corporation headed by philosophy professor Charles Hanley to become the headquarters for a full-time transitional-year program for students who had not completed their high school matriculation. The students in the program were full members of the college and were expected to participate in its activities while taking a program of studies that would enable them to qualify for admission to the university. In due course the transitional-year program would grow into an autonomous university program, while the cinema and ecology

The Sixties

147

courses would evolve into full-scale academic programs co-sponsored by the college and the Faculty of Arts and Science. And, at long last, in 1973 President Evans, former principal Harris, Principal Peter Russell, and others witnessed the sod-turning for Innis College’s academic home at the corner of Sussex and St George Streets.38 Student interest in the physical growth of the university focused on changes that affected them and their academic work. The Varsity greeted the opening of Sidney Smith Hall with two predictions. Because of its size – ‘one of the largest University buildings in Canada’ – and the large number of arts departments quartered there, it would ‘eliminate a great deal of walking about campus’ for students. But the paper also expected it ‘to be the first step towards drifting away from the smaller, scattered type of college and may well start a trend toward one-stop supermarket schooling.’39 In 1961, in response to growing pressure from students, the library council took a major step to broadening access to the stacks of the university library (now the Gerstein Science Information Centre). Over the decades since 1890 the stacks had been open to the faculty, then graduate students, and later fourth-year students. Third-year students had gained access in the mid-1950s. Now, ‘as an experiment for the rest of this academic year,’ first- and second-year students were given limited access, after taking an orientation tour, from 5:30 p.m. to closing Monday to Friday and from 9:00 a.m. on Saturday. If the ‘experiment’ was successful, the council added, it could ‘probably be adopted’ as regular practice at the library. Not only did the ‘experiment’ work, it served as the background for a very contentious dispute between students and the university a decade later when plans for opening the new Robarts’ Research Library were being made. Bissell’s insistence that the growing numbers of students in the university be members of colleges, including the two new colleges on the St George campus and the suburban colleges, attracted some passing interest from the student press. But at Scarborough and Erindale the development of college facilities, or lack of them, was a major topic for each of the campus’s student newspapers. At Scarborough, as already noted, lack of residential and recreational facilities was a divisive and contentious issue that seemed to have no resolution. In the fall of 1968, for example, Scarborough’s student leaders met directly with the provincial minister of university affairs, William Davis, to seek his support for a 330-bed residence that would cost nearly $2 million. Student

148 Arts and Science at Toronto

council president Jim Debarbieri said that the college ‘is just a nine to five place with no corporate spirit,’ but the appeal to Davis got nowhere. Approving the students’ request, the minister said, would mean ‘reversing a four-year old policy that Scarborough and Erindale be commuter colleges only.’40 The contrast with Erindale was sharp. Just months after the Scarborough students’ visit to Minister Davis, the Varsity did a two-page feature story on Erindale, including pictures of the college’s modest first building and a house, with swimming pool and fireplaces, that had been purchased to be the college’s student centre. ‘We are all explorers building something new and without traditions,’ second-year student Nanci Wakeman enthusiastically reported. Both the student government president, Paul Kochberg, and Dean E.A. Robinson thought building ‘some form of accommodation is a top priority’ for the college, but there seemed to be little of the resentment and frustration so evident at Scarborough. Erindalians, 450 in early 1969 and expecting double that number in the fall, compared themselves to ‘the impersonal masses of the St. George campus’ and celebrated the close-knit, spirited community of students, faculty, administrators, and college staff that characterized Erindale.41 In 1959 Claude Bissell chose economist Vincent Wheeler Bladen to preside over the ‘impersonal masses of the St. George campus’ as dean of arts. Bladen had joined the Department of Political Economy in 1922 at age twenty-one. He was a recent graduate of Oxford who, as he put it in his memoir, learned his economics by teaching it.42 When Bladen accepted the deanship he was fifty-eight and had just finished his sixth year as chair of the Department of Political Economy.43 Bladen had been a member of the Plateau Committee and advised Sidney Smith on postwar enrolment growth. In the university senate Bladen was a vigorous champion of the honour course system and a strong advocate of both ‘satellite campuses’ and opening new colleges on the St George campus. These were, he said in 1956, ‘the only possible means by which the university could control to any degree its rapid expansion.’44 Three years later there were 4305 full-time students in arts,45 and the numbers were growing. Bladen’s predecessor, Moffat Woodside, who became principal of University College, reported that in 1958–9 first-year enrolment had grown by 10 per cent and second-year by 20 per cent. Among honour courses in the Faculty of Arts, Math, Physics and Chemistry was 35 per cent larger, Modern Languages and Literature 30 per cent, Modern History 70 per cent and Slavic Studies 200 per cent. A new

The Sixties

149

general course in science had attracted 150 students in its first year.46 In 1959–60 enrolment rose to 4650. Bladen predicted a full-time enrolment of 7500 by 1968. The apparently inevitable pattern of growth worried Bissell. Ominously he warned that if Arts continued to grow indiscriminately, ‘its authority would disappear, and it would become a mere service faculty looking after the incidental needs of the professional faculties, or even more disastrously, a convenient receptacle for students with no clear scholarly and professional calling.’47 But the students just kept coming. By Bladen’s last year as dean, 1965–6, York University was developing on its Glendon campus, New and Innis Colleges were in place on the St George campus, and just under 250 students were enrolled at Scarborough College. That year total full-time enrolment in Arts and Science was 8332, considerably more than Bladen had predicted for 1968.48 At the beginning of Bladen’s deanship Bissell recognized that Bladen was also ‘confronted in his faculty with the most complex and demanding of staff problems.’49 During his term, 1959–66, there were large numbers of new appointments, either to replace retiring members of the full-time staff or, in lesser numbers, to fill new positions. In fact, while student enrolment jumped nearly 80 per cent during that time, from 4305 to 8332, the net increase in new full-time faculty in the ranks from professor to instructor in the university and the federated colleges was just 147 or 30 per cent.50 Still, the influx of new appointments, both senior and junior, with varied fields and areas of scholarly and scientific interest, triggered several changes in the faculty. In recognition of the changes, in 1960–1 the faculty was renamed the Faculty of Arts and Science and the senate approved a new degree, bachelor of science, to acknowledge the rapidly evolving and ever more specialized curricula being offered by the faculty’s science departments. Also, senate approval of the formation of a Department of Islamic Studies was one of several indications of a growing interest in interdisciplinary approaches in the faculty. In 1961–2 Sociology, which had been a part of Political Economy for many years, was given full departmental status. A faculty committee recommended implementation of a facultywide instructional timetable. The long tradition of departments establishing their own timetables to suit the convenience of their own members stretched back for decades. But Bladen described the custom as ‘something verging on chaos’ that had to be replaced. Doing so, to the dismay of the faculty’s tradition- oriented departments, was a major step towards greater centralization of the faculty’s business in the

150 Arts and Science at Toronto

office of the dean. Changes in the office itself were yet another indicator of new beginnings. When Bladen assumed office he inherited an associate dean, chemist Frank Wetmore, from Moffat Woodside. A year later philosopher Robert McRae agreed to join Wetmore as associate dean and Bladen named William Foulds, the faculty secretary, as assistant dean to aid in the administration of the faculty’s seventeen departments.51 And parallel changes were happening in the faculty’s departments. In 1964–5, for example, no fewer than thirteen of the Arts and Science departments added associate chairmen to departmental bureaucratic structures.52 One of Associate Dean McRae’s first assignments, in 1960–1, was to chair a committee on revision of the faculty’s general course. The committee’s report was cautious, ‘not revolutionary,’ said Bladen. It recommended that the number of first-year courses be reduced from six to five, that a compulsory course in science in first year be eliminated, and that a new science sequence be developed that would be more attractive to students enrolled in humanities and social science subjects. The committee also recommended that a foreign language no longer be compulsory and that ‘concentration’ – a pale reflection of the specialization that highlighted the honour course – henceforth be voluntary. Bladen thought the recommendations ‘wise.’ The ‘new’ general course of 1949–50 was now twelve years old. It had been crafted for an earlier generation of students in the immediate post-war years. It needed to be changed to adapt to the rapid expansion of courses and subjects taking place in the Sixties. But others disagreed. ‘The Colleges didn’t like it,’ Bladen wrote. And the faculty council, after several debates over the year, passed McRae’s recommendations by a majority of one vote. It wasn’t enough and ‘I withdrew it,’ Bladen recalled. The ‘new’ general course of 1948–9 remained in place.53 The council itself was a concern for Bladen. Its membership included all faculty members holding professorial rank and it had become ‘too big.’ In 1910 there had been about 100 members. By 1930 there were 200 and by 1960–1 more than 400. During expansion there were going to be yet more. Bladen asked the council to appoint a committee to study and recommend reduction of its size. He was rebuffed. In 1962–3 council numbered nearly 500 members and he repeated his request. The following year a council committee recommended an idea suggested by James Conacher of the Department of History that an executive committee of about 100 members meet monthly and perform all the duties of the council and make recommendations to the full council in its

The Sixties

151

annual meeting. Council again refused. Resignedly, Bladen confessed that he was ‘well-nigh converted.’ His ‘first capacity,’ he said, was to be ‘the servant of the Council.’ ‘A Dean,’ Bladen quickly added, ‘who did not have strong views and provided no leadership, would not be a good Dean. But an obstinate Dean, a Dean who thought he could and should bully the Council, who thought that his view must prevail, who thought of the Faculty as his, would be a very bad Dean.’ Rather slyly he concluded: ‘In the atmosphere of this University, happily, such a Dean could not survive.’54 The consequences of growth and of changed patterns of career choice were as much a concern for the colleges as they were for the faculty. For several years the colleges had worried about their declining roles in the education of their students. It had been going on at least since the end of the Second World War. More and more students came to each college; and apart from English and French, fewer and fewer students chose to study the college subjects. The traditional college subjects had been the very heart of the arts curriculum for decades. But the young students of the Sixties flocked to increasingly popular social-science subjects, to the sciences, and, in the humanities, to university subjects like history and philosophy. The question was how to rejuvenate the role of the colleges in the education of their students. The 1961–2 agreement between the university and the federated universities to experiment with a scheme of cross-appointments from university subjects to the colleges and vice versa raised hopes. Bladen thought it a ‘most exciting development,’ a small step towards ‘the emergence of new relationships, suitable to the new world of the expanded University, relationships as yet impossible to define and, perhaps, inconceivable.’ But even this tiny innovation, Bladen confessed, raised ‘fear of fragmentation’ in several of the tradition-bound university departments. At best, they were reluctant to lose talented colleagues from the familial fold of departmental fellowship. Still the dean, and many in the colleges, looked to the day when, as at New College, university subject tutorials, perhaps even lecture sections where numbers warranted, would be taught by cross-appointed members.55 Another initiative started with a suggestion from the Students’ Administrative Council, which asked Bladen to introduce a lecture-free reading week in February. He was instantly enthusiastic. Bladen argued that because most courses ended in the first week in April and students could finish examinations and leave the university in early May, ‘the period of education is too short, the time devoted to examinations too

152 Arts and Science at Toronto

long, and the temptation to cram too great.’ In fact, he preferred having two two-week reading periods, one in February and the other in April, and then continuing lectures into the second week in May. Then, on a given day in the following week Bladen would have all third-year students write one or two three-hour comprehensive papers. The papers would not be to test the knowledge of their subjects but to show ‘their ability to talk sensibly about their subject.’ To that he would add more essay writing in term and insist on ‘significant term marks.’ Bladen added that he had received ‘almost unanimous approval’ for his sweeping proposal from the chairs and heads of the university departments.56 Once again council did not share the dean’s enthusiasm for change. A committee had examined his proposals and reported ‘some slight success’ in reducing the number of faculty examinations in the spring of 1965. But some departments merely replaced formal faculty examinations with in-course final exams in the last weeks of lectures, infuriating Bladen. ‘This reduces even more the time for education,’ he fumed, ‘and it threatens utter chaos in the time-table.’ In the end, the council did agree to an ‘experiment’ of a one-week reading week in the seventh week of spring term, mandatory for honour courses in groups A and B (humanities and social sciences) and permissive for honour courses in groups C and D (physical and life sciences).57 It would go no further. There would be no change and no relief for students in the general course and general course science. Bladen wishfully told the Varsity that he hoped the ‘experiment’ would ‘lead to further periods of time off from lectures’ in the years ahead.58 As an officer of the university, like his predecessors during the Sidney Smith regime, Bladen was responsible for preparing and administering a budget for his faculty. Prior to Smith’s presidency, departments in the Faculty of Arts had negotiated directly with the president. But now the dean asked each of his department heads or chairs to put together a budget of their requests. These were then considered by Bladen and his two associates – ‘the troika’ – which met with each department head or chair to hear the case for the department. Poring over the departmental details gave the dean the information he needed to prepare a facultywide budget to take to the president. Bladen recalled that ‘we had to restrain the more expansive’ of his departmental colleagues and to persuade some of the more retiring ‘to ask for more!’59 At first Bladen himself was hesitant about how to make a persuasive case to Bissell. He quickly learned that the president was looking for a carefully constructed budget, not a list of bargaining items. Bladen told Bissell that

The Sixties

153

he ‘would no longer “submit budgets that were restrained by my view of what was politically possible.”’ Instead, ‘I would submit a realistic, not extravagant but imaginative, budget showing how much we needed to maintain and develop the quality of work of the Faculty.’ Bissell agreed. More than that. Even when the dean was away, the president expected the Faculty of Arts and Science to give him a well-prepared budget. Thus, when Bladen was away chairing a royal commission on financing higher education, the associate deans prepared the budget and McRae took it to the president. It was accepted as presented, just as Bissell had said it would be. At Simcoe Hall, Bladen recalled, there was ‘no bargaining to share a “kitty” as in Sidney Smith’s day. It was the Dean’s job to allocate the total among the Departments; one either accepted his budget or asked for his resignation.’60 The dean’s other major responsibility as a university officer was to recommend the appointment of departmental chairs to the president. In earlier days the president himself appointed heads of departments, often with, and sometimes without, consultation with the dean. Now primary responsibility rested with the dean, and that included whatever procedures the dean used to decide whom to recommend. In the past, members of the department concerned had not been consulted and that continued in the early Bissell years. In 1959, for example, when Donald Creighton resigned the chairmanship of the history department, members sent one of their number to Bissell to express their concern at not being consulted. The member, Maurice Careless, returned from the president’s office to tell his surprised colleagues that he was their new chairman.61 Again, in 1962, Bladen and Bissell agreed that Thomas Goudge should be appointed the new chair of the Department of Philosophy. By then a selection committee in the faculty ‘was becoming common,’ Bladen admitted to Goudge. But not in his case. ‘The President did not deem it necessary,’ Bladen explained.62 But rather quickly a selection committee became the normal practice in the faculty. Bladen would take the chair and the dean of the graduate school would be a member. Other members were at Bladen’s discretion and, as he later recalled, they usually included ‘just the Associate Deans.’ Department members still were not consulted. Nor would they be during Bladen’s deanship. Several years after he retired, Bladen observed that excluding departmental members from a chair selection committee ‘is shocking to most people now; but I believe it was very good in practice. I can think of several cases where this sort of a committee made a much better choice than would have been made if the Department had elected its Chairman.’63

154 Arts and Science at Toronto

Fewer and fewer colleagues shared Bladen’s view of proper faculty management as the Sixties progressed. Colleagues of his generation were retiring and the senior ranks in the departments were being occupied by scholars and scientists – nearly all of them men – who had joined the faculty as lecturers or assistant professors in the immediate post-war years. They were not accustomed to the old ways that had governed the faculty and the university for generations, and were increasingly restless under the ‘top down’ administration that Bissell had inherited and Bladen had grown up with. A poll taken by the university’s Association of the Teaching Staff in 1963 revealed that 90 per cent of the faculty supported faculty representation on the board of governors and 80 per cent favoured faculty participation in the selection of the president, deans, and departmental chairs.64 The ATS and its fellow organizations across Canada were becoming leaders in a slow process of change taking place in Canadian universities. Already the University of Western Ontario had added representatives of the faculty to its board of governors. Also in 1963, the national association of universities, chaired by Claude Bissell, and the association of university teachers, appointed the Duff-Berdahl commission to do a national survey of university governance with a view to recommending faculty participation in universities’ governing structures. A year later Bissell appointed a blue-ribbon committee, chaired by law professor Bora Laskin, to investigate the structure and governance of the School of Graduate Studies. Among its important recommendations, contrary to the long-standing prerogatives of department heads, Laskin’s committee proposed that the school should have much more control over appointments to graduate departments and have a greater role in the appointments of faculty members to senior ranks.65 In September of 1964 a member of the ATS, historian Jim Conacher, met with Bissell and urged him to examine the issue of faculty participation in appointments, tenure decisions, and the selection of senior administrative officers. Later that fall Bissell asked physiologist R.E. Haist to chair a committee, which included Conacher, to do just that. Haist’s committee, reporting in 1966, recommended that chairs be appointed by selection committees that included faculty members, that department members be invited to participate in the work of the committee, that chairs serve for fixed terms, and that departmental policy be developed by departmental committees. Similar procedures should be adopted for the selection of deans and directors of university divisions. In addition, department members should participate formally in the appointment of

The Sixties

155

new members and firm procedures be adopted for the granting of tenure to a faculty member.66 The Haist recommendations became the ‘Haist Rules’ in 1967, precipitating a revolutionary change in the administration and governance of departments and faculties. The Laskin report and Haist recommendations were released during 1965–6, Vincent Bladen’s last year as dean of Arts and Science. He was not pleased and bluntly said so in his final annual report. The assault on the traditional prerogatives of departmental chairs in both reports upset him deeply. They were ‘characterized by a dangerous distrust of chairmen and incidentally of deans,’ he wrote. Bladen admitted that changes in governance were inevitable, but many of those recommended ‘involve checks and balances, some of a democratic and some of a bureaucratic nature, which threaten the vitality of the departments and discourage the initiative and leadership of chairmen.’ The recommendations, he concluded, ‘seem to guarantee mediocrity rather than promise excellence.’67 A decade later Bladen looked back on his years as dean. It was, he said, ‘a generally happy period because it was a fairly expansive period and all the … new troubles of participation and so on … were in the future.’68 Vincent Bladen served for seven years as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science. By the time he left, in June 1966, the faculty had changed dramatically. On the west side of St George Street new buildings had opened and plans were being approved for a new humanities and social sciences library.69 There were new constituent colleges on the main campus and new colleges on two satellite campuses. The list of retirements of senior professors who had served the university for decades grew longer each year. Hundreds of young men, and some young women, from many countries as well as Canada,70 were joining the faculty and working their way towards promotion and tenure. Thousands more students, far more than anyone had predicted, and increasing numbers of young women, were flocking their way into already overcrowded classrooms and lecture halls. Outside the classrooms the Arts and Science students were increasingly asserting their own goals as the largest group in the university community. The faculty that Bladen left in 1966 was very different from the one he had joined two generations earlier, very different from the faculty and college that Claude Bissell had graduated from a few years before the Second World War, indeed very different from the faculty and university that Bladen and Bissell had assumed leadership of in 1959. The faculty and the university that

156 Arts and Science at Toronto

both men had known so well and admired so much, that had tried and tested its procedures for decades and found them good, that easily accepted sharp distinctions between the leaders and the led, that relied on the province’s secondary schools to send to the provincial university only their best students, was gone. A new university was being created in the Sixties. To help shape it Claude Bissell needed new leadership in Arts and Science, its largest and most powerful faculty. He chose a man from the emerging generation of senior scientists in the faculty, chemist Albert (Bert) Allen.71

9 Transformation

Bert Allen had been educated at the University of London and had worked for the Falconbridge mining company before joining the chemistry department in 1959. He became an associate dean in Arts and Science in 1963. A year before the end of Bladen’s term, in 1964–5, Bissell appointed a selection committee, chaired by Provost Moffat Woodside, to recommend a replacement for Bladen and the committee recommended Allen.1 Like Bissell who appointed him, Allen represented the new generation of leadership in the university. He had a very different outlook on university governance from Bladen. John Slater, the historian of the philosophy department, captured the contrast with precision. Bladen was ‘totally committed to top-down government.’ But Allen was convinced ‘the old governing structure was a spent force and that its replacement should allow for democratic institutions and practices.’ The problem was that the ‘spent force’ did not believe it was ‘spent.’ It presented a formidable challenge for Allen throughout his deanship. As Slater put it, Allen ‘had to do battle with a large and powerful and extremely vocal group of senior faculty who … were opposed to any change at all.’2 Still, change was irresistible, for it was supported by many colleagues recently appointed or promoted to the senior ranks, and by a rapidly growing contingent of young faculty. The latter dominated the lists of new appointments. For example, in 1967–8, Allen’s second year as dean, the Faculty of Arts and Science made 128 appointments, 84 per cent of which were junior appointments (sixty-nine assistant professors and thirty-eight lecturers). And at University College an additional eighteen assistant professors and lecturers were appointed.3 Several recently appointed senior people, many junior faculty, and a growing number of students did not share the Bladen generation’s

158 Arts and Science at Toronto

veneration of the Arts and Science curriculum. It had been developed generations earlier with clear and purposeful distinctions between the honour and the general courses that seemed increasingly arcane and irrelevant in the 1960s. The ever-growing numbers of ‘baby-boom’ offspring in the faculty meant larger classes and the division of some classes, especially in first and second year, into sections taught by different people. Many of the teachers were recently appointed lecturers and assistant professors with little teaching experience. In addition, the new appointees, both senior and junior, often found themselves bound to the rigid conformity of the long-standing honour subjects and denied the opportunity to develop their own fields of specialization. Even more important, the disparities between the close attention paid to students in the honour courses, including those who were barely surviving with third-class honour standing, and the general lack of attention to students enrolled in the general course and general science course became ever more apparent in the 1960s, attracting intensifying criticism.4 Curricular critiques were not unique to the University of Toronto. It was a burning issue, stimulating intense debate among faculty members, at many North American universities. Claude Bissell was worried about what the huge enrolments in Arts and Science were doing to undergraduate instruction. The often close relationships between instructor and student that he had known in his University College days no longer existed. The basic problem, he believed, was the ‘impersonality’ of undergraduate education at Toronto and elsewhere. ‘The current complaint,’ he wrote, was ‘that higher education is increasingly impersonal.’5 The question was how to restore some semblance of a relationship between students and their teachers in Arts and Science. At a Student’s Administrative Council awards dinner in March 1966, Bissell announced the appointment of a committee to investigate undergraduate education in the faculty. He added that Brough Macpherson, a distinguished political economist, would chair the committee and that it would begin its deliberations in the fall.6 Over the next year the Macpherson committee conducted its investigation. In the fall it received briefs from faculty and students and, at the committee’s request, former students who had graduated in the previous two years. In all several hundred submissions were received, a large percentage of which came from the students. During spring term the committee conducted numerous hearings.7 It was quickly apparent that support for the status quo, especially preservation of the honour course system, was strong among senior faculty members. But there were some

Transformation

159

important exceptions. Thomas Goudge, chair of the philosophy department, and a Toronto graduate, wrote that ‘many people are coming to think that the structure of these courses is far too rigid and circumscribed to meet the educational needs of the times.’ Goudge argued for ‘introducing far more flexibility and range of choice into the honours programmes.’8 Goudge’s colleague, Francis Sparshot, who had been trained at Oxford, went further. Honours was ‘an appalling course,’ he wrote. ‘The course was oppressive, with its vast amounts of just learning, and no depth, no reflection, no air in it. And all the courses were compulsory, or semi-compulsory.’9 Dana Rouillard, chair of French at University College, who had been trained and taught in the United States before his appointment at Toronto in 1937, agreed. The honour course in French was ‘so narrow’: students ‘had almost nothing in the way of courses except their work in French, literary and linguistic, and their work in another language, sometimes two other languages, with a smattering of perhaps a half-course in … a pass course in philosophy or economics or something of this sort.’ ‘From the start,’ Rouillard added, he had been interested in students ‘electing a general course, which was very much like the course in which I had been trained at Bowdoin, Harvard and Amherst.’ Rouillard worked for years on the General Course Committee in Arts and Science to improve the program – to no avail. ‘This is where the dismay came in even more strongly – that a lot of students who would have liked this kind of education were not electing it because the pass course [i.e., general course] was given very little consideration in the whole university. It was a poor relative.’10 In the committee, historian Ramsay Cook later recalled, the issue that caused the most debate was a proposal that all university appointees be cross-appointed to one of the colleges. It had little to do with the ‘impersonal’ problem, though the colleges could argue that professors and students could have more meaningful relationships in a small-class college setting than in the large lecture halls of the big buildings on the west side of St George Street. Rather, the problem for the colleges was that they had so little to do with the actual teaching of their own students, most of whom had drifted away from most college subjects. Cross-appointing social scientists and scientists in significant numbers might offer the opportunity for small group instruction in those subjects in the colleges. But ‘that simply was not sensible,’ Cook remembered. Still, the committee recognized that the colleges believed ‘their future was at stake.’ It concluded that the principle of cross-appointments from university departments to the colleges and vice versa be supported,

160 Arts and Science at Toronto

but that ‘there would be no requirement whatsoever that anyone be cross-appointed.’11 The committee’s other ‘great concern’ was the general course in arts and science and the ‘different treatment of general course students,’ which so troubled Rouillard and many others. In the end, with Macpherson’s leadership, the committee came to ‘general agreement on all of the proposals that affected the curriculum directly.’ Macpherson’s draft of the committee’s report – ‘Brough wrote every word’ – stimulated ‘quite a lot of discussion,’ but he ‘did his best to bring us all together and he succeeded in doing so.’12 Highlights of Macpherson’s report were published in the Varsity on 27 September 1967. ‘Fewer Lectures and Labs / No Exams in Second Year / Elected Students on Arts Council’ read the bold heads at the beginning of its story. The paper covered the main points of the forthcoming report and, in later editions, explored in depth some of its main issues. In addition, readers could find occasional other columns which dissected key issues with the critical eye of a student journalist: ‘a collection of recommendations that attack a wide range of problems in a scatter-gun approach’; ‘pretty mild stuff’; and ‘a rambling series of feeble recommendations for improvements’ set the tone.13 When the report was released a few days later it was an instant hit, and had to be reprinted to meet demand for copies later in the fall. It was a sweeping document. On lectures in the faculty it said it was ‘selfevident’ that fifty to seventy-five lectures a year were not needed and the ‘present reliance on lectures’ was ‘undesirable and stultifying.’ It recommended a major change: in two or three lecture-per-week courses the number of lectures per year be reduced to the equivalent of one a week and the reduced lecture load time be used to offer a weekly tutorial group. In general, apart from laboratories, the aim of arts and science courses should be to reduce the classroom hours ‘to a maximum two per week per course.’14 The committee also echoed some of Dean Bladen’s sentiments about examinations. The examination period was too long, the number of examinations needed to be reduced, and the procedure of failing a student on the basis solely of a final examination, which, in some cases, resulted in failure of the whole year’s work, should be eliminated. The committee recommended that in first-year courses at least 50 per cent of the mark be based on term work and that there should be a final examination in each course taken. In second year ‘there should be no final examinations of any kind.’ Third-year students should be examined in comprehensive or combined exams on the

Transformation

161

material they had learned in second and third year. And fourth-year students might continue the ‘present trend away from final exams in each numbered course’ and the exams be replaced by comprehensive exams ‘or a senior thesis.’15 Each student in humanities and/or social science subjects should have no more than five tutorial groups per week. If any of their courses were lecture-discussion group courses with more than twenty students, the group should be divided into same-size tutorials. And science students should have the number of laboratory periods per year reduced by half.16 The committee agreed that teaching in Arts and Science needed to change and be improved. It recommended adoption of systematic appraisal by students of teaching in the faculty and, for junior appointments, inspection of their teaching by faculty colleagues.17 The committee noted once again the long-standing concern of the colleges that most students got almost none or none of their instruction from their college. The division of teaching responsibility between college and university subjects, the committee noted, ‘made sense eighty years ago,’ but no longer. Now it was a ‘misallocation of the total intellectual resources of the faculty.’ To restore the influence of the colleges on their students, they had to do a significant amount of teaching of as many of their students as possible. The committee recommended that each college try to provide most of first-year tutorials in most subjects for its students and, where numbers warranted, a college section of a large lecture course. For upper-year students studying a college subject, a course should be given in whichever college the teacher belonged to and should be open to students from all the colleges.18 Each of these recommendations was of major concern to both faculty and students in Arts and Science, but the item that attracted the most attention was the complete separation and differing treatments of students in the honour and general courses. For decades honour course students had received favoured treatment with no apologies being offered to other students, nor any thought necessary. The honour course students were seen to be and assumed themselves to be the elite group of the university’s undergraduate contingent. The faculty and the university believed that it had the particular task of using the honour course to produce ‘well-educated persons.’ Indeed, President Bissell rhetorically asked in his first report ‘whether Toronto, by virtue of tradition and academic structure, is not specially equipped to have honours work.’19 But the Macpherson committee demurred. Increasingly ‘refined and specialized courses of study’ in the

162 Arts and Science at Toronto

honour programs no longer produced the time-honoured ‘well-educated persons.’ Instead, the system was producing ‘baby graduate students.’20 It was time for a change. The committee recommended that no student be compelled to commit to either a specialist or general program or to a particular speciality upon entering the university. If a student chose to specialize at the beginning of her or his work, the student could concentrate up to 80 per cent (i.e., four of five courses in first year) in one of three general areas, humanities, social sciences, or physical and life sciences. But, most important, the ‘inferiority of the General Course’ had to end. So the committee recommended that the separation of honour and general course students in first year be abolished and that the same admission and passing standards be applied to both groups. Each student could pursue either a three-year or a four-year general program of study or a specialist program of study. In either program a student would be required to have second- or first-class standing to advance from third year to a final year of study. At the end of three years of study the student would have earned an ‘ordinary’ bachelor’s degree. An ‘honour’ degree would be awarded for four years of successful study.21 Finally, in yet another indication of the changed times of the 1960s, the committee observed that ‘student participation in departmental and Faculty bodies will enhance the quality of undergraduate teaching and learning.’ It recommended that ‘in all departments where students request them’ joint committees be established to act as ‘decision-making bodies on such matters as curriculum and patterns of teaching.’22 And, as the Arts and Science Faculty council began its consideration of the report at its first meeting in October 1967, council approved in principle a recommendation that students representing general arts, general science, humanities, social science, physical and life sciences be given membership on the 853-member council.23 Looking back from his retirement years Bissell called the Macpherson report a ‘revolutionary document.’24 But he was cautious in his initial response to it, saying its recommendations had to be considered and accepted or rejected by Arts and Science before the university considered them. He did hint at university approval if the recommendations regarding teaching loads were adopted and faculty teaching time would be redistributed ‘to provide opportunities for close association between staff and students. We must do a great deal more to see that the time of staff is used more flexibly, and that we are not held to a tread-mill of formal “student-contact” hours.’25

Transformation

163

Dean Allen noted that the committee’s work had already generated much discussion in his faculty. He anticipated a ‘vigourous and informed discussion of the report,’26 but cautioned against quick, precipitate action. The report included recommendations on so many issues central to teaching, the curriculum, and related matters in Arts and Science that faculty members would need time to consider an appropriate response. Faculty council would need to hear from its own committees and from the twenty-four departments in its constituency. So Allen waited until the spring of 1968 before appointing a committee of faculty and students to begin drafting recommendations for council.27 On 30 September 1968, more than a year after Macpherson had reported, the Faculty council met to hear the Allen Committee’s recommendations for implementation in ‘the spirit of the MacPherson [sic] Recommendations.’ The dean was now anxious to act expeditiously. Council was not. ‘The debate was heated, and the Dean was accused of rushing the process,’ Gordon Watson, the historian of the Department of Religious Studies recalled. ‘He [Allen] agreed to allow ample time for debate and to present a revised plan at a further meeting in the very near future.’28 Thus began, Allen wrote in the fall of 1969, the year of the great debate. During the period between the opening of the fall term and the end of February the Council and many committees at the Faculty, College, and Department levels seemed at times to be in continuous session, struggling with the details of the most complex reform of the undergraduate programme ever attempted. Thanks to the tolerance, wisdom and hard work of both staff and student members of the Faculty we were able to bring our discussions to the point where we could introduce, in the fall of 1969, the first and second years of our new undergraduate programme.29

Not all accounts and recollections of the council deliberations were as serene as Allen’s. Early in the debate there were skirmishes over the role of students in dealing with the report. On Wednesday, 2 October students filled the upper galleries of Convocation Hall as council met. ‘Nothing happened,’ a relieved Bissell recorded in his diary later that day. He added that the there were a series of ‘anti speeches’ by staff members and an ‘emotional’ speech by SAC president Steven Langdon, who ‘described the physical arrangements as obscene.’30 On 8 October the front page of the Varsity featured a large picture of Bissell, Allen, and assistant dean Bill Foulds at a table on the rostrum of Convocation

164 Arts and Science at Toronto

Hall during another meeting of council. Sitting cross-legged underneath the table were four undergraduates chuckling away: ‘In case the meeting becomes too stuffy – my resource people from Harvard,’ Bissell quipped. But the meeting was deadly serious. Council rejected a student proposal that the report be referred to a smaller committee with equal student-faculty membership. Faculty members complained that they had ‘no rights.’ Steven Langdon said, ‘I have seldom been as angry as today.’ And, in the end, council accepted, by a bare majority, a suggestion that 100 more students be accorded full membership ‘for the rest of the current meetings.’ All the student members present voted against the suggestion or abstained. Council then adjourned to meet again a few days later. No action was taken on the addition of another hundred students, but at the end of the month Allen asked council to seat the twenty-five student members from his earlier committee as assessors ‘for the duration of the debate.’31 Years later Bissell vividly recalled the student activists, and the sharp divisions among the faculty over the report. ‘The council of the Faculty of Arts and Science had become the locus of student protest,’ he wrote, ‘and itself was bitterly divided over the recommendations of the Macpherson report on changes in the curriculum; I was ex officio chairman of the council, but I had lost touch with the current issues, and the council, once a relaxed and friendly body, easily dominated by old associates, had become a huge, unhappy concourse pushed into extreme positions by young turks or recalcitrant traditionalists.’32 When council was done, early in 1969, the result was not what the Macpherson committee had recommended, and not what its members had anticipated. Nor was it what large numbers of faculty members, especially in the senior ranks, had foreseen. After months of deliberation the Arts and Science council had approved a ‘New Programme.’ It was very new indeed, unlike anything that characterized the undergraduate program in the faculty’s history. The distinction between the honour and general courses was eliminated; in fact, neither existed any longer. Students who completed three years of study would be awarded a general bachelor of arts/science degree and those who completed four years were entitled to an honour degree. Required courses were removed from programs of study. Compulsory examinations could be eliminated in many courses. Each student was allowed, ‘within the limits imposed by our resources,’ to take any courses for which she/he was ‘academically prepared.’ Each student would decide whether to specialize or not and what the nature of any specialization would be.

Transformation

165

Historian Jill Conway explained the change concisely in her memoir: the ‘New Programme’ introduced an ‘elective undergraduate curriculum, which would lead to a three-year general B.A., or a four-year honours degree. Students could elect to specialize in a particular discipline, and departments might impose requirements on specialists; otherwise, all subjects were open to all comers.’ And progress through a student’s program of study, hitherto a shared responsibility between the student’s department and the faculty, became, in the ‘New Programme,’ ‘much more clearly than at present’ the role of the department in which the student was concentrating her/his course choices.33 The Varsity called it the ‘Self-service curriculum for 1969.’ Allen told the paper that ‘the basic premise of our new program is that each student should be free to determine his own program each year by choosing from among those courses for which he is adequately prepared.’34 The Arts and Science calendar for 1969–70, the year in which the first two years of the ‘New Programme’ were introduced, underlined the point. ‘Since the choice of courses and combinations of courses is largely left to the student,’ it announced, ‘each in effect may follow an individual academic program from year to year.’35 Allen believed that stripping away the curricular bonds that had fit students in both honour and general courses into neat disciplinary boxes that had existed for more than a century could work. Letting students choose freely, and learn their mistakes and successes from their own choices, would not necessarily lead to curricular chaos. But there was a codicil. Allen told a large meeting of Ontario secondary school principals and guidance counsellors that henceforth students coming to Toronto would require more guidance from both their high school and the university. ‘It seems to me,’ he said, ‘that what the student needs most of all is training in making academic decisions of this kind.’36 John Fleming of the Department of French was not convinced. The apparent freedom for any student to take any course anytime made no sense, with or without guidance counsellors. ‘In the language of the day it was “turn on, tune in, drop out” if you did not like what you saw and heard in the first several weeks of classes. Flexibility and freedom replaced the old values of structure, discipline, and coherence or, as some would have it, rigidity, authoritarianism and conventional thinking.’37 ‘The cry of elitism was beginning to be heard in the land,’ John (Jack) Robson, English professor at Victoria, recalled of the Macpherson– New Programme era, and ‘it was thought that too much time was spent on the people who were fortunate enough to be born with good minds

166 Arts and Science at Toronto

and not enough on the rest.’ Asked what he thought had been inadequate about the Macpherson report, Robson thought it ‘hardly worth recalling … because what came after was so much worse.’38 John Evans, who had been a student in Arts in the 1950s and would become president of the university, thought ‘the jewel in the crown disappeared.’ For him the honour course he had taken had the ‘tremendous effect of giving people a sense of belonging and being part of an academic group which was very hard to create once they moved out into the broader space of cafeteria education.’39 In truth, the ‘New Programme’ was less free than either its champions or its critics claimed. In 1969–70 when the first group of ‘New Programme’ students enrolled, in 1970–1 when the third and fourth years were introduced, and in subsequent years, there were few if any students in Arts and Science who were left by their college registrars, or the departments where they took their courses, to literally ‘follow an individual academic program from year to year.’ The student’s common sense dictated that enrolling in a fourth-year German literature course without any knowledge of German was not going to be a successful academic experience. Conway had hinted at the way most departments over time imposed some order on student choices by prescribing course prerequisites. The physical and life science departments were long accustomed to such practice and, as chemists Brook and McBryde explained, ‘demanded prerequisites for all advanced, specialist courses … For example, to enter a third-year specialist course in physical chemistry, candidates had to have an appropriate second-year course in physical chemistry, as well as prerequisites in mathematics and physics and possibly a co-requisite (taken simultaneously) of another third-year course in physical chemistry.’ Looking back, they concluded, ‘the Faculty and departments spent an incredible amount of time devising new curricula, courses, and sequences for the new system and working out specialist programs that approximated the former honours programs.’40 Some Arts and Science departments worked more assiduously than others to recreate as much as possible of their old honour courses. With all the changes and adjustments, by the faculty and departments alike, the 1970s became the curriculum decade. Curricular issues were seldom absent from departmental and faculty committee agendas. The great curricular debate had another consequence for Arts and Science. Vincent Bladen had twice tried and twice failed to reform the faculty council. Early in Allen’s term council again considered the issue. A committee worked for two years, this time in the midst of its

Transformation

167

drawn-out deliberation on curricular reform. Even if, as was almost always the case, only hardy veterans and occasional delegations from interested departments attended the monthly meetings, a council of nearly 900 members was not the ideal or efficient forum to conduct the faculty’s business. Instead, in 1969–70 a joint student-faculty committee recommended that elections be held in the fall of 1970 to establish a general committee of council with 169 people, ‘containing faculty and student representation from each Department and College in the Faculty.’ Most importantly, the powers and duties of the council would be delegated to this new general committee, and it would, in turn, report on the faculty’s business and responsibilities to the whole council in an annual plenary session. Finally, a ‘reform’ of the way the faculty conducted its affairs was passed by council. It would require approval by the senate and board of governors and, in due course, be written into a new or amended university act. In the meantime, council made provision for interim implementation of the scheme to begin in the 1970–1 academic year.41 ‘It is always better to lead and give direction to a revolution than nervously to consolidate the government troops for the defence of the ancien régime,’ Claude Bissell wrote in his annual report for 1966–7.42 Bissell saw himself as the leader of the revolution that encompassed the University of Toronto in the 1960s. He had presided over a physical transformation that changed the compact campus surrounding Queen’s Park of years past into a three-campus complex. There were huge new buildings west of St George Street on the main campus, an architecturally acclaimed growing campus at Scarborough to the east, and an emerging Mississauga campus to the west. The suburban colleges, together with New and Innis, were changing a college system that had been in place for nearly a century, creating new responsibilities for both University College and the Faculty of Arts and Science and new challenges for the colleges of the three federated universities. Bissell made that observation about leadership in the fall of 1967 while he was on leave of absence from his duties at Simcoe Hall. He was at Harvard as Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies. But it was his committee, the Macpherson committee, which was beginning the investigation that would eventually lead to revolutionary changes in the teaching and curriculum in the Faculty of Arts and Science. There was more. Bissell witnessed, but could not lead, a transformation in the undergraduates at Toronto. The student body, he observed in

168 Arts and Science at Toronto

1965, ‘bears little resemblance to the homogeneous group that made up the typical liberal arts college of only a few decades ago, with its predominantly upper-middle-class origins and its uniform level of academic achievement.’ The student body of the Sixties was ‘increasingly aware of its separate and distinctive nature.’ The students were ‘more representative of all social classes and all ethnic strains.’ A typical student in the 1960s was ‘clearly a more sophisticated person – exposed at an early age, for good or ill, to the values of the adult world, and accustomed, in the permissive atmosphere of home and school, to act on his own convictions.’ ‘Within the environment of the complex university,’ Bissell concluded, ‘university students tend to see themselves as a power group that must assert its position and resist sternly any attempt at assimilation, no matter how benevolent.’43 This had been evident long before Bissell went to Harvard. Toronto students were influenced by the civil rights movement in the United States in the early 1960s, by the Vietnam war, and by the 1964 Free Speech Movement and sit-in at the University of California, Berkeley, where more than 800 students were arrested. At Toronto in 1965 the first of three student-faculty organized ‘teach-ins’ was a huge success, especially with its session on the Vietnam war. Then, in November 1967, during Bissell’s absence, about eighty Toronto students and faculty united to protest against an employment recruiting session at the University Placement Service by Dow Chemical Corporation, a manufacturer of napalm.44 A second round of Dow protests in January 1968 led to ‘a descent on Simcoe Hall by the hard core radicals,’ but Bissell recorded there were ‘no incidents of violence, no disciplinary action.’ Later in the spring he closely followed the anti-war campaign and student protest at Columbia University where, on 30 April 1968, 150 people were injured and 700 arrested by the New York City police. ‘I was not prepared for this,’ Bissell wrote.45 Bissell returned to Toronto determined to find ways to deal with student activism on campus. Just as the 1968 fall term was beginning, the SAC initiated a protest against the lack of university residence accommodation by erecting a ‘tent city’ on the lawn in front of Hart House. (The Varsity dramatized the problem with much of the off-campus housing for students with a story of a landlady at a rooming house on Spadina Avenue who was charging $17 per week for a 10 foot by 10 foot basement room with desk, dressing table, and bed all attached to the wall.)46 Bissell, after consulting his close advisers, Vice Provost Donald Forster; Ernest Sirluck, the dean of the graduate school and university registrar

Transformation

169

Robin Ross, together with an informal ‘security group’ decided to ‘take a soft line on “tent city”’ and a ‘hard line (the calling in of the police) against action (e.g. sit-in at the President’s Office) that prevented the University from carrying on normally.’47 Use of the city police was a contentious issue and, when Bissell met with his division heads to discuss ‘the actions to be taken in the event of a violent takeover,’ he noted that ‘it became apparent that there would be no agreement on the use of police.’48 Planning was necessary, Bissell believed, but the police were not needed that fall, nor in the spring term of 1969. Instead, on a ‘warm, sunny day’ during the ‘tent city’ demonstration in early October, Bissell crossed the campus to the ‘city’ to debate ‘The Role of the University in Society’ with the president of SAC, Stephen Langdon.49 Preparation for possible disruptive incidents was only a part, indeed a small part, of Bissell’s approach to student activism at Toronto. More important were his efforts to engage student support for an emerging plan he had to reform the university’s governing structures. Faculty members were beginning to press for a voice in the governance of their university at Toronto and elsewhere. The days of easy compliance with decisions handed down by senior authorities that affected their livelihoods were on the wane. Early in his presidency, when Bissell was head of the national organization of Canadian university presidents, that organization joined with the Canadian Association of University Teachers to co-sponsor an investigation of Canadian university governance. Sir  James Duff from England and Professor Robert Berdahl from the United States were selected to lead the inquiry; their commission focused on what role faculty members ought to have in university governance. The Duff Berdahl report was not released until 1965–6. By then Bissell’s view had been sharpened by increasing pressure from faculty and emerging demands from students, especially in Arts and Science, for a voice in governance. ‘We clearly need a new theory and practice of academic government,’ he concluded in 1964–5.50 It was clear that both students and faculty had to have some role in the governing of the university. But the Duff Berdahl report fell short of that mark: it recommended faculty but not student participation in the governing bodies of Canadian universities. Bissell was disappointed. He wanted to go ‘beyond the Duff Berdahl Report … There are places in formal university government where student participation is valuable.’51 Bissell believed that the two-tier system of government that had served Toronto for a century had become clumsy, inefficient, and unresponsive to the needs of the ‘multi-university’ that Toronto had become. It was time for change.

170 Arts and Science at Toronto

Tent city in front of Hart House, 17 September 1968 (B1998-0033 [681150-29])

Bissell looked forward to ‘establishing one governing body.’52 To achieve it he would need the support of the whole university community from students, faculty, and staff to divisional councils, the senate and the board of governors, and the Government of Ontario. Ultimately it would mean changing significant portions of the 1906 University Act. Soon after returning from Harvard in June 1968, Bissell learned from a board member that Premier John Robarts and Minister of University Affairs William Davis ‘had reacted positively to the idea of a change in the structure of the University … I was immensely buoyed up by this news.’ Some days later he raised the subject with the chairman of the board, Henry Borden, and then outlined his ideas to his President’s Council. He argued that ‘the university had no authoritative centre, and must find one if it is to contain discontent and preserve autonomy. This means a body representative of the whole University community.’53 The President’s Council, a group of selected administrators and some elected faculty members that Bissell had established to bridge the gap between the government-appointed board and the university community, recommended to the board that a special committee, called the Commission on University Government be established to study the government of the university. The council suggested that the commission have two or three members each from the board, alumni, faculty,

Transformation

171

students, and administrative staff. Bissell presented the case for the commission to a board meeting on 9 August. ‘I insisted on full participation of Board, faculty and students from the beginning.’ The board approved such a committee with two representatives from each of the groups,54 but the students did not agree. They wanted four students and four faculty as voting members and two board members and the president ex officio as non-voting members. Bissell then met with the executive of the Association of the Teaching Staff (ATS) and the elected faculty members from the President’s Council. A compromise was worked out: four students, four faculty, two board members and the president, all voting, plus an alumni representative and a ‘outside chair.’55 A subsequent meeting with SAC president Stephen Langdon and SAC representative Bob Rae did not go well: ‘They were adamant.’ Then, at the beginning of October, Bissell took the compromise proposal to a general meeting of the ATS, ‘underplaying it, thinking there was no need for a pointed appeal.’ Langdon and Rae had been invited and they presented their case for four student and four faculty voting members plus the president and two board members ex officio ‘rather calmly & effectively.’ In the discussion that followed the compromise from the President’s Council was being debated when a member proposed an amendment that the representatives of the board of governors be non-voting members. It carried. Bissell was shocked and ‘suddenly became aware that the meeting was violently anti-Board … I really felt that the bottom had fallen out of my world, that my task of bringing the various parties of the U together was impossible,’ he wrote later that evening.56 In the weeks that followed there were more skirmishes, more negotiations, until, early in November 1968, the board informed the President’s Council that it agreed ‘to send at least two members of the Board as observers to the Commission on University Government.’57 In the end the commission had four elected faculty members, three elected undergraduates, one elected graduate student, two non-voting board members, and a non-voting alumni member of the senate.58 The commission began work in December 1968, and met nearly 150 times, often for several hours, to consider a new structure of governance for the university and the roles of the university’s various constituents in it. On occasion there were sharp differences of opinion: Bissell noted ‘some heated discussion on student-staff equality’ at a January1969 meeting.59 There was debate about maintaining or abandoning the bicameral governing system of board and senate. The commissioners knew that several board members strongly opposed any change, while a few thought that a reformed board, ‘shifting toward the

172 Arts and Science at Toronto

academic,’ might work.60 But what impressed one commission member, student Bob Rae, was ‘how discredited the old Board was among the vast majority of the faculty and students.’ It was ‘so upper crust and so geriatric it was really not a contemporary institution’ and ‘by the Fall of 1969 the future of the Board was not an issue: we wanted the Commission to talk about more important problems than how best to inter the defunct remains of the old regime.’61 Months later, in the fall of 1969, the commission reported with over 100 recommendations. Members agreed that the time had come to adopt a new unicameral structure with a single governing body, ‘to be named the Governing Council.’ They suggested it have sixty-six members: twenty elected faculty, twenty elected students, plus twenty lay persons and six others to replace the board of governors and the senate. Agreement on the role of students in university governance where decisions were made, as distinct from being ratified at the Governing Council, was harder to come by. The students pressed for a role in faculty personnel decisions, appointments, tenure, promotion, and dismissal. The faculty members firmly resisted. The commission settled on a compromise. Students who had a major commitment in a particular teaching unit could be on committees for appointments and also could make assessments of teaching staff in that unit, reporting separately to the department chair. But the final decision, in all cases of appointment, tenure, promotion, or dismissal, at the department level, would be the sole responsibility of the chair.62 On another issue, the principle of faculty-student parity was adopted by the commission’s recommendation on membership in the Governing Council. But the commission went farther, carrying the parity proposal over into its recommendations on student participation in faculty and department councils and committees, much to the dismay of most members of the university faculty.63 Both issues, the role of students in faculty personnel decisions and parity in faculty and departmental committees, dominated debate in the Arts and Science council in the months that followed. ‘For a time in the winter of 1969–70,’ historian William H. Nelson wrote in his history of the faculty association (ATS), ‘the Arts and Science Council was the central focus for debate on the University’s future, its meetings eagerly awaited, attended by hundreds of faculty and students, full of noise and occasionally passion.’ In the end the council rejected both the proposal of a role for students in personnel decisions and the concept of parity in the governing bodies of the faculty and its departments.64 Bissell made an attempt to resolve the differences between the commission and the

Transformation

173

Arts and Science council and other critics. He appointed a planning committee, chaired by law professor Martin Friedland, to try to reach a consensus on the issue of adopting a unicameral governing structure.65 Friedland’s committee proposed establishing a university constitutional assembly to meet at the end of the 1969–70 academic year to decide whether to adopt unicameralism. A follow-up questionnaire, sent to all constituents of the university, revealed wide endorsement of the assembly proposal. And on 10–12 June 1970, the University Wide Committee set about its work. Archie Hallett, a physicist and associate dean of Arts and Science, chaired the committee. There were 160 members: forty faculty, students, and academic and non-academic administrators plus forty others, including twenty alumni representatives and ten members of the board of governors. All except the board and ex officio members, were elected by their constituencies. The committee endorsed unicameralism by a large majority and narrowly rejected – 60 to 56 – faculty-student parity. It then turned to the essential question: what would be the membership of the new governing body?66 The committee decided that the new governing structure should have seventy-two members: fourteen students, twenty-one faculty, twenty-four lay people including ten alumni, and thirteen others – the president, three presidential appointees, three administrators, and six support staff. In addition, all academic and academic administrative appointments would be made by the new governing body on the recommendation of the president. In due course the recommendations were taken to the Government of Ontario to form the basis of a new University of Toronto Act. At the same time, Premier William Davis’s government had advice from the board of governors that a ‘majority of the members’ continued to favour a bicameral system of government for the university and that in the event there was to be a unicameral system, the majority of members of the governing structure be appointed by the Government of Ontario. The government paid some heed to the board’s convictions when it turned to drafting the university legislation in the spring of 1971. The number of members of a governing council for the university67 would be fifty, not seventy-two, and a majority would consist of lay members, sixteen government appointees, and eight elected alumni. There would also be twelve elected faculty members, eight elected students – four undergraduates, two graduates, and two part-time students – two academic administrators appointed by the president, two elected administrative staff, and the president and chancellor as ex officio members.

174 Arts and Science at Toronto

Last meeting of the university senate, 12 May 1972 (B1998-0033 [721122-2])

The legislative assembly passed the University of Toronto Act, 1971, on 23 July 1971. The framework for a new government for the university had been established. But a multitude of questions remained. How would the Governing Council work, what committees would report to it, what would be the membership of those committees, and what would be the mandates of the committees? What would be the relationships of the university divisions and their deans to the new governing structure and what would be the relationship between the Governing Council and the three federated universities and numerous affiliated colleges? Would the relations between the university divisions, especially the Faculty of Arts and Science, and University College and the constituent colleges and federated colleges change? Where would there be student representation in the divisions, the colleges, and the university departments? Would the parity principle prevail? And so on. By then Claude Bissell was no longer president. His resignation had been announced shortly before it took effect on 30 June 1970. He had been president for thirteen years. He had seen himself as the leader of the revolution that transformed the University of Toronto during his presidency. But the challenges of the decade and his own priorities had gradually shifted from physical expansion to, for him, the centrality of the issue of governance. As both faculty and then students pushed ever harder for a

Transformation

175

voice and representation in the university’s central governing bodies, and as relations between the senate and the board of governors and, even more, between himself and his board grew increasingly difficult, the jaunty confidence of the leader began slipping away. It was especially evident after his return from Harvard as he became ever more concerned about student activism and about differences in priorities between himself and the board. After a President’s Council meeting in September 1968 where board members and faculty members split on the issue of SAC membership on the council, Bissell wrote that he had ‘a sickening feeling that, for the first time, I was up against a sharp division between the Board and the faculty.’68 After the traumatic ATS meeting a month later, where the membership had rejected his proposal that board members have a vote on the commission on university government, he wrote that he ‘left convinced that there was no course now except resignation.’69 On 5 November 1968, at a meeting of the Canadian university presidents, Bissell told colleagues of his ‘present intention to leave my office at the end of the academic year 1969–70.’70 ‘Certainly in the later years of my tenure of office at Toronto,’ Bissell wrote some years after, ‘there were few opportunities for humour. In the long succession of confrontations, I was constantly urged to root out all evidence of humour from my remarks, all ironic glimpses, all colourful anecdotes, because in the Red Guard atmosphere that prevailed, such an approach would have been thought frivolous and contemptuous of the higher faith … The style of debate in the Council of the Faculty of Arts and Science, over which I presided, lost its political urbanity. This was no time for comedy.’71 When the university-wide committee had expressed its will, had opted for a unicameral system with representation from all the university’s estates, Bissell took his leave of office. There was, he believed, the potential for a ‘unified academic voice’ to protect the university. And as the Ontario government worked on the draft of the new University Act, Bissell expressed his vision of the Governing Council that he had been convinced was necessary and the government would create: ‘It will not be concerned so much with a detailed, managerial control as with the enunciation of policy. It will not be so much the wise and prudent guardian as the vital policy-making centre of the university.’72 How the Governing Council would relate to the dozens and dozens of separate units in the university, each long accustomed to protecting and promoting its own interests and autonomy, how and who would provide the ‘detailed, managerial control’ that the vast university complex required for its daily functions, would be among the challenges for a new administration at Simcoe Hall.

10 Unfinished Business

When Claude Bissell left the presidency on 30 June 1971, much of the business on his agenda was left unfinished. He had revolutionized the governing structure of the university but the University of Toronto Act, 1971, had merely established the power to create a governing council and an executive committee. The composition of the council had been settled, but its membership had not been determined. Nor had any decisions been made about how the council would govern. What would its relationship be to the president, the provost, and the other administrators at Simcoe Hall? To the deans and directors of the university’s many divisions? To the constituent and federated university colleges with whom the university shared responsibility for teaching most of its undergraduate students? And what was to become of the New Programme in Arts and Science? What would be the role of the students in the governance structure in the Governing Council and in divisional and departmental councils and committees? Would the student activism of the mid- and late 1960s continue into the 1970s? Might it escalate to new heights of tension? For many, perhaps most of these questions, no fault could be attributed to the out-going president. Instead, they were some of the leading items on the agenda of the new leadership, yet to be approved, beginning with the presidency, for which a new form of search committee was struck. The task of selecting a new president was left to the caretaker board of governors. In the fall of 1970, after Bissell had announced his retirement but months before it took effect, the board accepted a proposal from the president’s council that, instead of selecting a president solely on its own responsibility, it delegate the charge to a committee representing various university groups. And at the beginning of 1971 elections led to

Unfinished Business

177

the appointment of three faculty members, three students, three members of the board, and four others, one of whom, Omond Solandt, the chancellor, would chair the committee.1 The committee laboured long at its work, from February 1971 well into the fall of the year. As late as the end of October the Varsity told its readers that the committee was in ‘deadlock again,’ as negotiations with a committee nominee had ‘apparently bogged down amid bitter conflict.’2 That was an exaggeration, but it had a core of truth. In June 1971 the board approved a recommendation that A.W.R. Carrothers, former dean of law at the University of Western Ontario and the president of the University of Calgary, be offered the position. Negotiations between the university and Carrothers became difficult, and finally broke down, and the search process reopened. By October another candidate had been approved and in mid-November the selection of Dr John Evans, dean of the medical school at McMaster University, was announced. ‘Finally, a new president,’ the Varsity trumpeted. Gus Abols, a search committee member and former president of SAC, said that the students ‘couldn’t have somebody better than Evans,’ adding that the appointee had a ‘pretty broad-minded attitude towards education.’ In a follow-up story some weeks later a medical student at McMaster told the paper that Evans was ‘a good administrator with a lot of charisma – the type of person you can talk to, but who will end up convincing you of his own point of view.’ For his part, Evans told the paper that his first job was to ‘make the new University of Toronto Act work.’3 Evans, a graduate of the University of Toronto Schools, had enrolled as a pre-medical student at the university in 1946, studying both arts and science subjects in the Faculty of Arts before spending four years at the medical school. He was awarded his M.D. degree in 1952, then went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and completed a doctorate in 1956. After serving on the medical faculty at Toronto, Evans became founding dean of the McMaster medical school and, from 1965–72, vice president for health sciences at that university. Though he knew Toronto’s medical faculty well at the beginning of his presidency, the university-at-large was less familiar. Least of all was he familiar with the central issue that he, himself, had identified – making the new university act work. The governing structure had a Governing Council and an executive committee, but there were no members of either. It was, he recalled ‘a black box … you had no idea really what you were dealing with.’ It was a  transitional period and ‘without a governing structure,’ he said, ‘you  were hopelessly handicapped so you had to find a mode of

178 Arts and Science at Toronto

implementation of that governing structure and then the main issue that was dealt with was what kind of proposals could come forward to set in place a governing structure promptly as soon as the Governing Council met.’4 Soon enough the university constituencies would elect their representatives and the Government of Ontario would appoint its members to the Governing Council and an executive committee would be formed. But how would either conduct its business? How could the hundreds and hundreds of matters, ordinary and extraordinary, that constituted the work of the university on an everyday basis get organized for presentation to and action by the Governing Council? ‘I don’t see how these things can be brought to a 48 or 50 person governing body for any decisions,’ Evans observed. There had to be, he believed, ‘some kind of devolution of this [i.e., the administration of the university’s everyday affairs] to other levels,’ he said. And that realization led to his creation of ‘portfolios’ and a way to ‘link the Governing Council to the major portfolios’ of the university’s business.5 In retrospect it all looked quite straightforward. Elections were held for the university constituencies’ representatives. President Evans was among the people who made recommendations to the provincial government about potential appointees who could represent the external community the university served. Before his own appointment Evans joined with the chairman and vice-chairman of the board of governors, Malim Harding and William Harris, and with the board secretary David Claringbold, Jack Sword, and Provost Donald Forster in agreeing that the council should have five standing committees. Each of these – on business affairs, internal affairs, external affairs, planning and resources, and academic affairs – would be matched in Evans’s central administration with a vice-president responsible for that particular ‘portfolio.’ In the president’s mind the key standing committee of the council was going to be planning and resources, matched, initially, to Jack Sword’s ‘portfolio.’ It was the link between the academic work of the university and its financial implications. Evans believed that the university ‘hadn’t been very strong in the planning functions … In my opinion that was probably the most important single committee in the university … It took over what the Board had done.’6 Once he was in office, putting the governing structure in place took time. Getting it to work effectively took still more time, much more. But through it all the architect of the new government of the University of Toronto was John Evans. In July 1972, as Evans was beginning his presidency at Simcoe Hall, at Sidney Smith Hall on St George Street Robert Greene, professor of

Unfinished Business

179

International Festival of Poetry, Convocation Hall, 30 October 1975 (B1998-0033 [751265-43])

English, was beginning his term as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science. Greene, who had received his early education at a Jesuit school in Boston and earned his B.A. at Boston College, had done his doctoral studies at Harvard with Douglas Bush, a Canadian, who recommended him to A.S.P. Woodhouse, head of English at University College, in 1958.7 In 1971–2, as Bert Allen’s deanship was drawing to a close,8 Acting President Sword appointed a search committee for his successor. Greene was a young full professor who was active in both the affairs of the university and the Association of Teaching Staff, where he served as vice president for university government. He had been a member of the Haist committee some years earlier and also had been a member of the President’s Council and the budget committee. In the faculty he was known as a critic of the old curriculum, especially the honour course, and a champion of curricular reform. He also favoured student participation in faculty governance, beginning with student representation on a reformed faculty council. Perhaps most important in the eyes of the search committee, which was keenly aware of the growing concern of the colleges that their role in teaching their students was declining, Greene was a college person, only the second in the list of deans that stretched back to 1901.9 Many years later Greene recalled that the committee ‘wanted someone who knew the colleges.’10

180 Arts and Science at Toronto

Shortly after his selection was announced ‘almost Dean Greene’ was interviewed by the Varsity. His great concern, he said, was ‘demoralization’ within Arts and Science, which he attributed to the attributes – or lack thereof – of the New Programme, which was just beginning. Critic of the old curriculum that he was, he found the New Programme lacked any ‘common experience’ for students. There was, he said, ‘no rational direction to studies in the faculty’ and he hoped that ‘staff and students [would] give meaning to the program through their departmental efforts.’ Turning to an issue of great concern to undergraduates, Greene expressed his sympathies for giving undergraduate students access to the stacks of the soon-to-be-opened Humanities and Social Sciences Research Library (i.e., the Robarts Library), a privilege that was being stoutly resisted by the library administration and many senior members of the faculty.11 None of this, nor Greene’s reputation within the faculty as a proponent of reform and supporter of a student voice in faculty governance, endeared the dean designate to the many, many senior faculty members who remained stern defenders of old traditions and practices. One of them, James B. Conacher, soon to be chairman of the Department of History, sounded a strong note of concern in a letter to Greene just three days after the Varsity interview. ‘You will not be able to act effectively as a reforming Dean,’ Conacher wrote, unless you can persuade the Faculty Council or its General Committee to support you. In the course of the past week I have personally heard the opinions of a good range of Faculty members from at least ten departments and all but one (a member of the [Selection] Committee) appeared to be upset about your appointment. Indeed, one of them, a man who is widely respected, put it to me that faculty morale had been seriously lowered by the way in which faculty opinion was ignored in the making of the appointment.

Conacher added that ‘many members of the Faculty do not at present feel themselves to be in agreement with you,’ and hoped that in Greene’s meetings with the departments and the General Committee over the next year ‘you can reassure them and win them over to your views.’ Greene, who had talked to Conacher, had asked him if he should ‘withdraw now.’ No, Conacher replied, ‘it would be awkward, perhaps dangerous, to reverse it at this point.’ Instead, Conacher advised, ‘you should yourself regard the coming session as a trial year. If you make

Unfinished Business

181

progress, well and good, but if you cannot overcome existing suspicions and get the necessary support for the policies you promote, then I would think it wisest for you to resign in your own interests and those of the Faculty.’12 It was not an auspicious welcome to the Office of the Dean. The ‘New Programme’ in Arts and Science had been in place for just two years when Dean Greene and President Evans assumed office in July 1972. The program had been, and it remained, a contentious subject in the faculty, with fierce opponents, the continuing champions of the ‘old curriculum’ on one side, and ardent supporters, mostly among newer members of the faculty, on the other. For President Evans it became an important item on his early agenda. An early review of how the New Programme was working had been intended from its start. More important, in April 1972 the Council of the Faculty of Arts and Science had resolved that the president establish a committee to review the program ‘with respect both to academic and financial considerations’ that very summer. It asked that the committee report ‘with a factual analysis and recommendations as it sees fit.’ Evans, in consultation with Greene, established the membership of the committee, with Professor D.E. Berlyne as chair and six other university faculty members and five students.13 The Berlyne committee met for the first time on 14 September 1972. The committee was asked to report to the president by the end of February 1973. It had a broad and ambitious mandate: to gather student and faculty attitudes to the program; to consider organizational and administrative factors, including the role of the colleges; and to report on part-time and interdisciplinary studies; on specialization, generalization, the credit system, and related issues; and on methods of instruction and evaluation in the faculty. The committee reported a ‘consensus’ among students and faculty ‘on the basic soundness of the free-choice system’ and agreement that removing the distinction between honour and general students ‘greatly improved the educational opportunities of the latter.’ But departments complained that they were no longer able to identify the specialist students and students complained that they had lost ‘the sense of comradeship that existed within the old Honour programmes.’ Nonetheless, the committee believed that ‘the possible benefits of reintroducing the Old Programme would not justify the great harm that would be done.’ It recommended that the faculty recognize four distinct types of programs as ‘desirable norms’:

182 Arts and Science at Toronto

a single major program, a combined major program, a theme program of courses from multiple departments, and a ‘liberal-arts programme … to provide a broad exposure to the liberal arts and science.’14 The committee noted in particular the professional character of the bachelor of commerce program and degree and hinted that it might be better offered in the Faculty of Management Studies than in Arts and Science. It went on to recommend that an existing prohibition of part-time students enrolling in Commerce be eliminated. Beyond that, it asked that the faculty’s Social Sciences Curriculum Committee study the issue and report on how the B.Comm. program be structured to ‘best suit the interests of the students … and the Faculty.’15 In the old curriculum the students worked towards their degrees on a year-credit system. The ‘New Programme’ had significantly altered that, so that failure in a course did not mean loss of credit in other courses taken in the same year. The Berlyne committee went further. It simply recommended that the university offer a thirty- and a fortycredit degree with each one-term course counting for one credit. In addition, it argued that each student should be allowed to ‘complete the requirements for a degree at his or her own pace’ and, further, that students be allowed to take a course or courses that would not count for degree purposes but that would still be indicated on the student’s transcript.16 In addition, ‘wherever possible’ the committee recommended that fourth-year courses be offered as seminars and that departments be encouraged to divide large enrolment courses into smaller sections. Finally, it encouraged all Arts and Science departments to introduce course evaluations.17 In his inaugural address to the university John Evans had spoken about restructuring the relationship between the colleges and the university, and the Berlyne committee observed that a parallel committee was ‘exploring these matters with, we understand, a new sense of urgency.’ That did not discourage Berlyne and his colleagues from weighing in with their own views. The ‘distribution of authority and responsibility’ between the university and the colleges, it stated, had never in its history been ‘dictated simply by considerations of efficiency, economy or simplicity.’ The oft-cited ‘benefits’ of the relationship, it added, ‘have been dwindling for many years, as the collegiate divisions have continued their historic retreat from the centre of the University’s physical and academic life to the periphery.’ The ‘creation of new colleges … has only accentuated a growing sense of uncertainty and drift.’ But it did not follow that the colleges should be done away with.

Unfinished Business

183

Indeed, their ‘special benefits’ and the college system ‘should not only be maintained but greatly strengthened and expanded.’ The committee’s recommendations echoed talks and agreements of earlier years: limiting the enrolment of any college to 2000 students; enabling the colleges to teach as many of their students as often as possible; supporting college efforts to enhance their distinctive identities. The committee went further. It recommended that ‘intercollegiate departments’ be established, with the same status as existing university departments in each of the college subjects, and that the colleges work with university departments to develop their own distinctive programs ‘over a broad range of faculty disciplines.’ There was still more. A particular concern was the status and role of an ever-growing enrolment of part-time students in the university. To meet their needs, whether in Arts and Science or other undergraduate faculties, the Berlyne committee recommended that a ‘College X’ be established, that it be their normal college of registration, and that ‘College X’ work with the university and intercollegiate departments to provide the courses necessary for its students.18 Berlyne’s group concluded with a short, sharp critique of the Arts and Science council. It was in a ‘crisis’ because of its inability to make decisions. Indeed, the committee added, ‘the manner in which our Committee was formed reflected, at least in part, the inability of the Faculty Council to deal with the complex issues involved in the New Programme.’ The council was ‘far too large’; its size was ‘a deterrent to effective debate and the expeditious conduct of its business’; and the exclusion of students from its committees was both ‘resented’ and a hindrance to its work. The time had come for the council to ‘resolve the bitter disputes that have raged over several years’ and to ‘increase its effectiveness markedly.’ The committee called upon the General Committee of council to establish a subcommittee headed by the dean or his representative and composed of four faculty members and three students (two full-time and one part-time) from among the General Committee membership to make detailed recommendations for reform of the faculty council.19 The Berlyne report was discussed in the Arts and Science General Committee in May and June 1973. One of the committee’s recommendations, that the university create a ‘College X,’ was not on the agenda because it had already been approved by the Governing Council. And on another matter, the faculty’s program in commerce and finance, the General Committee decreed that it did not wish to take any action.20 But, for the most part, the General Committee reviewed each of the Berlyne

184 Arts and Science at Toronto

recommendations, commenting on those of particular concern to the General Committee and faculty council. Then Dean Greene appointed an implementation committee, chaired by Associate Dean Joan Foley, to meet over the summer of 1973 and report in the fall.21 The implementation committee again reviewed the Berlyne recommendations and the motions of the General Committee and made proposals to facilitate implementation of the Berlyne report. For example, it replaced the somewhat vague language of Berlyne’s four proposed program structures with three programs leading to the B.A. and B.Sc. The first would be a specialist program of nine or more courses over four years that would result in concentrated work in a single discipline, in two or more cognate disciplines or in a thematically organized set of courses over the four-year (twenty-course) period of study. A second would be a minor program of six to eight courses in a single discipline or thematically organized set of courses and a third would be a liberal arts program of study, the content of which would be determined by a subcommittee of the General Committee. In keeping with the general theme of the ‘New Programme,’ however, the implementation committee added that ‘no student be required to structure his degree programme in this way.’22 Foley’s implementation committee also recommended that a faculty curriculum committee replace the five curriculum committees (Humanities, Social Sciences, Physical Sciences, Life Sciences, and Interdisciplinary Studies) that currently handled all curricular matters. Foley’s group proposed that the new curriculum committee be chaired by the dean or his representative and have ‘up to ten members,’ of whom at least three should be faculty members and three be students, all elected from the membership of the General Committee.23 It also recommended the establishment of a committee on instruction and evaluation, whose tasks would include instituting a program of course evaluations for the faculty, making assistance available to faculty members who needed to improve their teaching skills, and remedial services for students who required them. The proposed membership was to include faculty members from each of the five discipline sets in Arts and Science and one member from Erindale College together with five student members elected from the student membership of the General Committee.24 But there was one central issue from the Berlyne report that Foley’s committee deliberately passed by without comment: the ‘Colleges.’ While it expressed sympathy with the notion of intercollegiate departments floated by Berlyne, it bluntly confessed that the subject of the

Unfinished Business

185

colleges and their relationship to the university raised ‘matters which we do not feel particularly competent to address.’ The subject also ‘raised issues of the institutional relationships between the federated universities’ which ‘are not matters which can be dealt with comprehensively at the Faculty level.’ And, Foley’s group added, it had been informed that these very issues were being considered by the ‘Heads of Colleges.’ Yet another complication in the relationship between the colleges and the faculty, the implementation committee noted, was the basis for financing the teaching in Arts and Science of the traditional college subjects, a matter on which the Berlyne committee itself had ‘refrained from attempting to formulate recommendations.’25 That, indeed, was the case. Berlyne and his colleagues and Foley and hers had correctly identified a core curricular issue. The Faculty of Arts and Science had a single curriculum which included the courses in both the university and college subjects. But there were four financial authorities which supported the Arts and Science curriculum: the university for university subjects and for the college subjects in University College, and the three federated colleges, Victoria, Trinity, and St Michael’s, for their teaching in the college subjects. It was not Arts and Science but University College and the federated universities which made appointments in the college subjects, awarded tenure and promotion to its appointees, and determined and paid their salaries. The arrangement was embedded in the University Act and stretched back for years and years, giving the colleges the authority to make all of the career decisions, apart from approval of the courses they taught, for their appointees. It was all a part of the complex university–colleges relationship where neither a presidentially appointed nor an Arts and Science appointed committee dared to tread. So both the Berlyne and Foley committees drew back from completion of their mandates in deference to other, parallel groups, representing the colleges and the university, who were simultaneously attempting to redefine the complex relationships that had evolved over the generations since 1887. Part of the college problem was social and academic: with the development of new disciplines in the post-war years, especially in the social sciences, and with dramatic changes in the choices of programs of study by students, the colleges faced ever-declining enrolments in most of the subjects they taught. More and more the colleges became places of registration and, for a few, of residence; less and less were they the

186 Arts and Science at Toronto

centres of their students’ academic life. Complicating the issue for the federated universities and their colleges was a major, harmful change in their fiscal support. In 1952 the federal government began a system of giving annual grants, administered by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, and based on full-time enrolment, to universities. At the University of Toronto that meant that both the university and its federated partners received the grants. But fifteen years later, in 1967, the Government of Canada changed the system and transferred the funds to the provinces in the expectation that they would continue the grants. In Ontario this was a problem. For generations the province had refused to give support to church-based institutions like Victoria, Trinity, and St Michael’s. In 1970 the province relented – partially. It agreed to support the church-based institutions at 50 per cent of the full-time undergraduate enrolment entitlement (minus theology students). But in order for the federated colleges to receive the full enrolment entitlement, their students would have to be students of the university, not Victoria, Trinity, or St Michael’s. And that, for practical purposes, would be the death knell of the federated universities’ role in undergraduate teaching, destroying the complex compromise that had bound the university to its federated partners for nearly a century.26 John Evans, himself a student at University College in his pre-medical days at Toronto, was quickly made aware of the problem at the beginning of his administration. He addressed the academic aspects of the issue in his inaugural address, saying that he wanted the colleges ‘to attempt to establish a distinctive educational flavour’ and acknowledging that some restructuring of the university–federated universities relationship would probably be necessary.27 But dealing with the problem raised other issues. The four original colleges on the St George campus had competed with each other in making appointments in their college subjects for decades, leading, particularly in classics, English, and French, to especially large contingents of faculty. And now New and Innis, University College’s recently created partners, were also in competition with the federated colleges for students. At the same time, the students in all the colleges were doing less than 20 per cent of their work in college-based instruction. As Evans later put it, the colleges ‘were really becoming postboxes for most of the students.’28 As he regarded the problem, there was ‘antagonism between colleges’ and all the colleges ‘bitterly resented any subordination of their authority to the University.’ That was especially true of University College, which saw itself as the university college, deserving of special treatment within

Unfinished Business

187

the university, including, it occasionally argued, having ‘its own board.’ For its part, the Faculty of Arts and Science did not want any arrangement with any or all of the colleges that was any more complicated that it already was.29 All these different points of view, different ambitions, and different goals became clear to the president through discussions in 1973–4 with two groups of people. The first were meetings to discuss the restructuring issue among the institutional presidents themselves. At the same time, parallel talks took place between the several college principals or their representatives and the deans of Arts and Science and the School of Graduate Studies in a group chaired by the provost, Donald Forster. The aim of both groups was to find a way to ‘strengthen the role of the colleges.’ But that raised the hackles of both departments in Arts and Science and college people, ‘who weren’t sure they wanted other departments in their roost; they had a nice humanities focus and they didn’t really want [change].’ Evans and his colleagues in Simcoe Hall were not deterred. ‘It seemed to me,’ he reflected some years later, ‘that in a very large university in a very large Faculty of Arts and Science, there was a real role for the colleges as far as the students were concerned and to give them a sense of belonging to something rather than [the] huge mass of [the] university. So the real aim of that reorganization was to create a pedagogic role, a real role for the colleges for undergraduate students in Arts and Science, particularly in their early years.’30 The way to resolve the issue, Evans believed, was to centralize all Arts and Science instruction in university departments, converting the separate departments in the four original colleges into one university department in each of the college subjects. In return, through the use of cross-appointments, all the colleges could have access to teaching in the whole broad range of undergraduate instruction offered by Arts and Science. In January George Ignatieff, the provost of Trinity College, Innis College principal Peter Russell, and Dean Greene became a drafting committee to correlate the results of the on-going meetings into a series of agreed-upon points.31 By April 1974 the job was done. The four universities had crafted a ‘Memorandum of Understanding Relating to the Role of the Colleges in the Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toronto.’ The memorandum began with a statement of objectives, emphasizing the need to have ‘most students’ in Arts and Science, ‘at least in their early years,’ spend the larger portion of their time in ‘courses and programmes taught in the College in which they have registered.’ Equally important

188 Arts and Science at Toronto

was the need to ‘foster in the Colleges the development of distinctive approaches to educational programmes and teaching within the Faculty of Arts and Science.’ More particularly, that meant ‘broadening the scope of college programming to include teaching in subjects corresponding to student needs and preferences, including the humanities and the social, physical and life sciences, as may be agreed between the Colleges and the University.’ To achieve all this the memorandum called for a single university department in each of the college subjects, that is, classics, English, French, German, Near Eastern studies, philosophy (ethics), and religious studies. In addition, any future appointment or cross-appointment made by the new university department to any college staff had to have the approval of the college. For their part, the federated colleges retained the right to make their own appointments to their staff using their own resources, but such appointees could only teach in university subjects if they had approval from the university. The colleges could initiate any proposals for cross-appointments and their councils could become the source of program planning and policy within the college. Provision was also made for creation of a collegiate board, and various principles were set out for developing the financial arrangements that would enable implementation of the agreement. Finally, the signatories recognized that the changes being made would, at some point, require changes to both the University Act and the internal legislation of the Faculty of Arts and Science. But all agreed that ‘it would be premature to codify such changes at the present time.’ The agreement we believe we have reached has been sought in vain for many decades; it involves very complex issues and sharing of resources in times of increasing financial stringency. It is an effort of persons of good will to try a new way of working together with shared objectives. Until there has been considerable experience with the proposed arrangements, we believe it unnecessary, and unwise, to propose changes in legislation.

A letter of transmittal, sending the memorandum to the regents of Victoria, the corporation at Trinity, the collegium at St Michael’s, and the Governing Council of the university, was dated 15 April 1974.32 Evans was concerned that the agreement, as transmitted, be approved at Governing Council. Two days after its transmittal, at a meeting of the president’s advisers in Simcoe Hall, the ‘Simcoe Circle,’ it was agreed that Dean Greene would make the main presentation, but that Evans would attend meetings of both the academic affairs and planning and resources

Unfinished Business

189

committees and ‘intervene if necessary.’ All agreed that ‘substantive amendments must be ruled out until after some experience has been gained under the new arrangement.’33 With the Memorandum of Understanding in place, in the fall of 1974 John Evans told the Varsity that of all his accomplishments in office this gave him ‘greatest satisfaction.’ He saw it as the ‘chance for each of the colleges to build some academic individuality to start to get [a] programme of education put into a more manageable-sized unit to try some innovation.’ ‘I felt that the federated colleges thing was so fundamental,’ he added, ‘that this was the thing that I had to address myself to in the largest way.’34 The Berlyne report had recommended a new college on the St George campus for part-time students. In 1973 Governing Council acted upon the recommendation, approving the establishment of ‘College X.’ Soon after, Arthur Kruger, a specialist on labour relations in the Department of Political Economy, was appointed its principal. Kruger, in turn, recommended the college be named after James S. Woodsworth, the social democratic leader of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (the forerunner of the New Democratic Party). The mandate of Woodsworth College was to provide a home for the university’s part-time students enrolled in its undergraduate faculties. Part-time studies had a long and distinguished history at Toronto, dating back to Falconer’s presidency at the beginning of the century. For a long time students taking courses for credit on a part-time basis and people enrolling in public interest programs or non-credit courses had been well served in the university’s Department of Extension, founded in 1920 with William J. Dunlop as its director. The largest constituency for Extension had been teachers taking courses to upgrade their credentials. But in the post-war years increasing numbers of students came from an ever-broadening base of society: workers, new immigrants, and mature men and women who were trying to complete degrees on a part-time basis. For many of these the rigidities of the old curriculum were increasingly confining and frustrating, and in 1968 leaders of the part-time students formed the Association of Part-time Undergraduates Students (APUS) to work for change and improvement. Two years later a university committee recommended that Toronto’s part-time degree candidates be integrated into the Faculty of Arts and Science and that a new college be established for them.35 Arthur Kruger was the son of immigrant parents who operated a store in Kensington Market. He was a graduate of Harbord Collegiate

190 Arts and Science at Toronto

Institute and University College, where he took the honour course in political economy. Kruger did his graduate work in industrial relations at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his first academic appointment from Vincent Bladen at Toronto in 1957–8. From 1959 to 1962 Kruger taught at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and then returned to the political economy department at Toronto. In the early years of its development Kruger was seconded to Scarborough College to lead its political economy group. When Stefan Dupré became chairman of the department in the early 1970s, he appointed Kruger as the department’s associate chairman. In the department Kruger had had extensive experience and enjoyed working with continuing-education students, whom he described as ‘not brilliant, but good, highly motivated hard working people with experience who challenged instructors.’36 Woodsworth College was housed in an old home on the east side of St George Street, south of Bloor Street. There was room for some administrative office space, a few small classrooms, and little more. And the clientele was very different from the undergraduates in the other colleges on the campus. Most students were mature adults, many of whom were people who put in a full day at work before hurrying to the university for an evening class. To provide some semblance of community for the students the college introduced a lecture series, featuring popular figures from both ‘town and gown,’ before evening lectures began and occasional wine and cheese parties as well as summer concert series. The college also took its courses off campus to downtown board rooms, to public libraries, to Queen’s Park, and, in a very successful venture for several hundred students, to the General Motors auto plant in Oshawa. Arrangements were made with the faculty departments to establish a rotation of courses to be taught in the evening, at first on an extra stipend basis for the instructors and, as financial stringency increased during the decade, as part of the regular teaching loads of faculty members.37 Many of Woodsworth’s students were pursuing baccalaureate degrees in Arts and Science. But others enrolled in certificate programs, including criminology and translation, during the college’s first decade of operation. Another part of the Woodsworth agenda was to offer a pre-university program of study for students who had not completed grade 13 requirements or otherwise did not have the credentials for regular admission to Arts and Science. Yet another was to assume responsibility for a program initiated at Innis College in 1970, the Transitional

Unfinished Business

191

Year Program, which offered a year of basic courses in English, history, mathematics, and chemistry to prepare prospective students for admission to undergraduate studies. Begun in collaboration with Toronto’s African-Canadian community, each year it enrolled about fifty people, predominantly Black, Aboriginal, and single-parent students. In addition, for all its students the college made a special effort to establish effective counselling services, a writing laboratory, and a mathematics assistance program.38 One important portion of the original mandate of the Department of Extension remained outside of Woodsworth College. The non-credit courses and lecture series that Extension had offered for decades were continued in a separate division of the university known as the School of Continuing Studies.39 Though never formally implemented by the university, the Berlyne report had played a role in the establishment of Woodsworth College. So too, some of Berlyne’s recommendations for programs of study in Arts and Science ever so gradually, and without over-all direction by the faculty, began to influence the ‘New Programme.’ In addition, the longestablished principle of prerequisites and set patterns of study in the science departments provided examples and models for the arts departments to emulate. None of the new programs of study were required of students: they were free to pursue whatever selection of courses they wished. But, like students studying zoology or chemistry, if they wished to study anthropology, classics, or Near Eastern studies, the departments offered patterned sequences of courses for them to follow. And as departments defined their programs of study, they were presented to and ultimately accepted by the faculty’s General Committee and became parts of the faculty curriculum. By the end of 1978 sixtyone four-year degree specialist programs (nine or more courses required) were in place on the St George and Erindale campuses. At St George 791 students were completing specialist programs, as were 160 more at Erindale. Similarly, 38 minor (3–6 courses) programs were offered on both campuses. At Erindale 28 third-year candidates and 8 fourth-year candidates had been certified as completing minor programs, as had 90 third-year and 106 fourth-year candidates at St George. Among specialist programs students could choose interdisciplinary ones like drama at University College, international relations at Trinity or environmental studies at Innis. The chemistry department offered chemistry, chemistry (with physics), and chemical physics. French had four options: French language and literature, French and Italian, French

192 Arts and Science at Toronto

and Latin, and French and Spanish; while geology, philosophy, and zoology, among many others, offered a single specialist program. Among the interdisciplinary groups neither international relations nor environmental studies offered a minor program, but Canadian studies at University College, cinema studies at Innis, and criminology at Woodsworth, which did not participate in specialist offerings, did have a minor program of study.40 While specialist and minor programs were being defined in the mid1970s, the academic standards committee of the General Committee began examining grade distribution in the several departments of Arts and Science. It discovered that since the initiation of the New Programme there had been a ‘tendency for a significant increase in the percentage of Bs and a concomitant decrease in Cs in a number of courses and departments.’ There were differences between departments and even differences between sections of many large courses in a single department. The committee found that the mean grade for 100- and 200-level courses in the faculty was a low B, between 70 and 71 per cent. It believed that the mean, instead, should be a C, between 62 and 67 per cent, and in the fall of 1974 recommended that mean for the 100- and 200-level courses. The C grade should be regarded as ‘acceptable and respectable.’ Dean Greene told the Varsity that he would refer the committee’s report to the Arts and Science departments for comment and advice.41 Not all the departments agreed with the recommendations of the academic standards committee. The ‘combined’ French departments looked carefully at the marks distribution in their courses for the last three years and found the average grade was 74, one point below an A grade and well above the recommended mid-range C.42 The departments protested that C was too severe a change: it was understood in French that a C meant that ‘something is lacking. The student is uneven, tends to stop at the obvious, to be careless, to lack subtlety. Mediocrity and mistakes which should not occur make this work acceptable or satisfactory in a negative sense.’ Instead, the ‘combined’ departments agreed to lower the average grade in French to a low B, 70–71, which, they contended, indicated average work in their specialist program, where a number of B grades was required for certification.43 For Arts and Science the change was a partial victory in a faculty where the long tradition of strong, and strongly defended, departmental autonomy persisted even as both the faculty and the central administration in the 1970s demanded more compliance with more generalized authority.

Unfinished Business

193

But another grade distribution case revealed that, at least on the contentious issue of grade distribution, there was no agreement between the Faculty of Arts and Science and the Governing Council. A large course with nearly 150 students in a social science department submitted final marks with a very high proportion of A grades. The grades were reviewed by the faculty’s social science committee, a normal annual procedure, and the committee chair, Dean Greene, refused to accept them. In due course Greene was supported by the General Committee of the faculty. But when the matter went to the Academic Affairs Committee of Governing Council, Greene’s decision not to accept the instructor’s marks was rejected.44 But in May 1977, just as Dean Greene’s term was drawing to a close, the Academic Affairs Committee of Governing Council approved a grading practices policy for all undergraduate divisions of the university. Its essence was matching numerical and letter grades to performance levels by students. A (80–100%) was ‘Excellent Performance’ and B (70–79%) was ‘Good. A grasp of subject matter and some critical capacity,’ while 60–69%, or C, was ‘Intellectually Adequate profiting from University and understanding subject matter.’ A mark in the fifties, or D, was ‘Minimally Acceptable.’ Below that a grade from 35–49% was evidence of ‘familiarity with some subject matter’ and any grade below that meant ‘little evidence of superficial understanding.’ In addition, a student’s transcript would now show both the student’s grade and the number of students in the course and the class average. The committee also specified that all written work had to be returned to each student with ‘appropriately detailed commentary’ and that the use of bell curves and similar quota systems in a course were prohibited. All of this was approved by the Governing Council in September for immediate implementation.45 The objects of all this attention and effort were, of course, the students in Arts and Science. They were the ones who were choosing to seek certification for a specialist or a minor program; they were the people who wrote the papers and examinations that were being evaluated for final grades. Their representatives sat on the faculty committees that approved programs of study and reviewed departments’ grade distributions. And in several Arts and Science departments students also had representation at the departmental meeting. At the beginning of the 1970s, parity remained a major issue for students and a concern for faculty. In October 1970 the 34 student members of the Arts and Science council, which had a total membership of 1300, moved in the General

194 Arts and Science at Toronto

Committee that a small parity committee be established to consider the issue of reforming the structure of the faculty’s governance. It was quickly quashed. The students resigned en masse. A few weeks later Arts and Science students held a referendum on restructuring the faculty council. Just a few fewer than half the students voted. More than 80 per cent supported the student boycott, while 88.5 per cent supported adoption of the principle of parity of representation with faculty on the Arts and Science Governing Council.46 It was not the end. In January a number of faculty signed a petition supporting parity. The president’s advisory committee held an emergency meeting. Students held a rally at Sidney Smith Hall, and on Monday and Tuesday, 25 and 26 January, the Students Administrative Council held a faculty-wide referendum on whether the Arts and Science students should strike. More than 66 per cent of the 13,000 Arts and Science students voted, but the strike vote failed by a mere 54 votes.47 The matter remained unresolved throughout the remainder of the 1970–1 session, as students more than once disrupted meetings of the faculty’s General Committee. Nor was there any resolution in the fall of 1971. After John Evans was designated as president-elect, he visited the offices of the Students’ Administrative Council in January 1972 and reportedly told SAC that ‘parity was much too simple a solution to provide an all-embracing answer to the internal problems of the university and that it was a distraction from other important changes that needed to be made in the university.’48 SAC continued to press for recognition of parity in the early years of Evan’s presidency: in the fall of 1973 a vice-president of SAC, attending a meeting of the Academic Affairs Committee of Governing Council, rose from the floor and declared that ‘the students will not allow the committee to meet further,’ disrupting proceedings.49 But by then the predominance of the parity issue among student concerns had faded as other, seemingly more immediate, topics had arisen. A year later, in October 1974, the Varsity editor had a long interview with President Evans that covered the main issues of the first years of his administration. Parity was never mentioned.50 For most undergraduates parity was an abstraction. But access to the university’s learning resources was not. And at the beginning of the 1970s who would have access to the soon-to-be-opened Humanities and Social Sciences Research Library (i.e., the Robarts Library), became a very contentious problem. When the library was being planned it was thought that stack access could be granted to faculty members, graduate students, and fourth-year undergraduate students. Other undergraduates, mainly

Unfinished Business

195

‘Parity Festival’ – Sit-in at Sid Smith, 20 January 1971 (B1998-0033 [711010-6])

in Arts and Science, would have access to a large collection (about 900,000 volumes), across campus, in the Sigmund Samuel wing (1954) of the building that had served as the university’s main library since the 1890s. But the students thought otherwise: restricting stack access at the new library solely to fourth-year students was not acceptable. In January 1972 the Students’ Administrative Council sent a recommendation to the library council that all undergraduate and graduate students have equal access to the new library. A month later Bob Spencer, president of SAC, told acting president Jack Sword that the students were ‘almost unanimous’ in their opposition to the proposed access policy; SAC organized a plebiscite to get more than 4000 signatures on a petition to the library council.51 The council rejected the recommendation and petition and appointed a committee chaired by Professor Peter Heyworth of the Department of English to deal with the issue.52 It essentially reconfirmed the original plan, recommended that stack access be upon application and be limited to faculty, graduate students and fourth-year students in the humanities and social sciences. Heyworth’s group did add that third-year students might apply for short-term access to the new library’s stacks. The recommendation was accepted by the library council and taken to a meeting of the university senate on

196 Arts and Science at Toronto

Friday, 10 March 1972. That morning the Varsity rallied its readers to seize the ‘last opportunity … to win access to the Robarts Library stacks through university channels.’53 Later in the day, the senate, meeting in the Medical Sciences Building, accepted the Heyworth committee recommendations in principle. Students in attendance disrupted the meeting and then rushed to Simcoe Hall, where they forced their way in and occupied the secondfloor senate chamber. There they stayed, in diminishing numbers, over the weekend. But on Sunday morning, authorized by President Sword, more than fifty Metropolitan Toronto and campus police cleared out the students and issued arrest warrants for nineteen of the occupants.54 The next day students gathered for a mass rally in Convocation Hall, and then, more than 500 strong, reoccupied the senate chamber. Calling in the police a second time to try to take hundreds of students out the building was out of the question. As Sword put it, it would have had the potential for ‘serious violence and damage, and we would have borne the responsibility of using overwhelming force against our own students.’55 The following Monday, 20 March, the senate reconvened and asked the Heyworth committee and library council to draw regulations that would allow library stack access, upon application, to all members of the university on the basis of academic need. Further jousting over details of the terms of access continued through the fall of 1972 and the early days of 1973.56 But when the library opened that spring all faculty and students were accorded equal access. It was a huge number of people: Chief Librarian Robert Blackburn reported that those eligible to apply included all faculty, more than 7500 graduate students, 35,000 undergraduates, and over 10,000 people enrolled in non-credit extension courses in the School of Continuing Studies, a total of just under 60,000 members of the University of Toronto community.57 As access to the library was being resolved, a storm suddenly blew up in the mathematics department. Early in 1973 students were dismayed to learn that three popular teachers in the department were being dismissed. More than a thousand signed a petition asking for student representation on the department’s staffing committee and reinstatatement of the dismissed instructors. They then demanded that the department chairman, George Duff, respond to their requests before 11 a.m. on Tuesday, 25 February, when a rally was being organized in the lobby of Sidney Smith Hall. Duff, a quiet, unassuming, and respected senior member of the faculty, held firm. SAC joined the cause, restating its belief that ‘teaching ability be a prime factor in matters of

Unfinished Business

197

promotion, granting of tenure, and hiring, and that students be represented on all teaching decision-making bodies.’ It was to no avail. The department was being run ‘like a monarchy,’ an officer of the MathPhysics Course Union charged.58 Students then occupied the department’s office space and conducted a prolonged ‘sit-in.’ Provost Forster was deeply concerned and sought Dean Greene’s advice about securing an injunction against the students. Greene, who had spent some late-afternoon hours with the students on a few occasions, was ‘very opposed’ and no coercive action was taken. As Greene recalled the ‘sitin’ many years later, the faculty was ‘allowing the energy to dissipate,’ as in time it did.59 In late March, as the term was drawing to a close, one of the three teachers met with Professor Duff and Dean Greene in an attempt to have his contract with the department renewed. The other two appealed their dismissals to President Evans. Neither meeting resulted in reversal of the original dismissal decisions.60 The controversy over the dismissals and the ‘sit-in’ had repercussions well beyond the Department of Mathematics. It again sharpened the focus on student demands in Arts and Science and other divisions that they be represented on committees making decisions about the careers of university teachers. The issue came before the Academic Affairs Committee of Governing Council at its September 1974 meeting, when a report from Provost Forster on procedures for making and evaluating academic appointments was discussed. A student representative on the committee, Peter Jarrett, asserted that students were as qualified to evaluate the teaching effectiveness of a tenure candidate as faculty members were to judge that person’s research and professional standing. If students were not included as voting members of tenure committees, he continued, there was no guarantee that students’ course evaluations, which had recently been introduced in Arts and Science, would be taken into account. Jarrett’s comments raised quick protests from the dean and associate dean of the School of Graduate Studies and the dean of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering that tenure committees did indeed take careful consideration of students’ course evaluations. A week later, at the next Academic Affairs meeting, briefs were presented by the Association of Part-time Undergraduate Students, the Students’ Administrative Council, and the University of Toronto Faculty Association. More than sixty observers, most of them students, were in attendance as the SAC president, Seymour Kanowich, again put the student case. He concluded a detailed argument by saying that teaching quality was not being given adequate consideration

198 Arts and Science at Toronto

in tenure committees and that students should be on such committees, in fact, should have parity representation with their faculty members. APUS president Norma Grindal’s brief reinforced the case made by Kanowich. Professor David Gauthier, president of UTFA, countered that only faculty members had the ‘maturity and judgment’ to evaluate all the evidence that would be presented to tenure committees.61 And so the argument continued. An advertisement in the 23 October 1974 edition of the Varsity urged students to turn out for that day’s Academic Affairs meeting, telling its readers that ‘some possible reasons why your teacher may be your teacher’ included that the teacher had friends in the department or on the appointment committee, that he ‘publishes a lot and thus attracts attention to the department,’ or that he had contacts in government and industry. In March Governing Council rejected a recommendation from the Academic Affairs Committee against student representation and by a vote of 19–15 approved a motion to have one student member of each six-member tenure committee in the university, with five votes required to approve tenure. ‘Faculty members of the council were visibly upset, especially during the thumping applause which greeted the decision from the 80  students in the Simcoe Hall Council chamber,’ the student paper stated, adding that student representatives had gotten the support from many of the government representatives on the council.62 The faculty members were not ready to give up the fight just yet. When Governing Council voted for student representation it sent the matter back to Academic Affairs to determine how student members of tenure committees were to be selected. That committee then met on 3 April and Professor Brough Macpherson presented a motion reaffirming support for all-faculty tenure committees. But the chair of the Governing Council, Malim Harding, and President Evans quashed that attempt, Harding labelling Macpherson’s motion as ‘counter-productive’ and ‘a backward step.’ When Academic Affairs did present a plan to Governing Council in June for choosing student representatives on tenure committees, the council rejected it, leaving the students, as the Varsity put it, in despair the following September, ‘right back where they started from.’63 At the university level the issue of student representation on tenure committees remained unresolved. In March 1974, as negotiations between the university and the federated universities over the Memorandum of Understanding were concluding, the ‘Banfield Affair’ pitted Students for a Democratic Society, a

Unfinished Business

199

radical student activist group, against the university administration. Edward Banfield, a political scientist at Harvard, had been invited by the American Studies Committee to give a series of lectures at Toronto. Banfield, who had been an adviser to the Richard Nixon government in the United States on urban affairs, was a well-known conservative critic of government aid to the urban poor. It was a view that drew sharp criticism from liberal activists in the United States and attracted notice at a University of Toronto ‘teach-in’ on racism just a week before Banfield’s visit. SDS issued a call to ‘Ban Banfield’ and threatened to ‘run him off campus’ when he appeared.64 Banfield’s first appearance was at Croft Chapter House on Tuesday, 12 March. Facing severe heckling, he abandoned his prepared remarks and answered questions from his audience until the meeting was terminated and Banfield was escorted from the room by a group of faculty members. The next day he was scheduled to give a lecture in West Hall at University College and Professor Stefan Dupré, the chairman of the political economy department, was hastily called back from Ottawa to chair the meeting. That morning the senior university administrators met and decided that university police would be stationed inside and outside West Hall with instructions to guard Banfield’s personal safety, ‘but not to attempt to enforce a quiet hearing (which would be beyond their capability anyway).’ In addition, President Evans was writing a letter of apology to Banfield for the disruption the previous day and stating ‘the University’s commitment to free expression of opinion.’65 When Dupré and Banfield approached the platform in West Hall that afternoon they found it occupied by members of SDS who were determined to prevent the visitor from speaking. Seeking to avoid conflict, Dupré adjourned the lecture before it had begun.66 Several faculty members went directly to the president’s office and demanded action from him. The following day, 14 March, the Faculty Association council unanimously endorsed a demand that the president make ‘an explicit statement of the right of free discussion in orderly assembly of any academic question on this campus’ and that he, in one week’s time, set out the steps that the university administration would take to ensure that right be observed.67 Evans told the Governing Council on 22 March that free speech had always been assumed by members of the university, but that ‘the denial of Professor Edward Banfield’s freedom to speak at the University has made it clear that there are some groups who do not accept that assumption. Therefore it is necessary now to reassert and defend it.’ He went on to outline steps

200 Arts and Science at Toronto

that would be taken in future by the chairmen of meetings to ensure the freedom to speak on campus. If, for example, a person or persons were to obstruct that right, the chairman should warn of possible disciplinary consequences. If the obstructors refused to leave a meeting and could not be removed ‘without risking violent resistance,’ the meeting should be adjourned, in general for not more than twenty-four hours. At a reconvened meeting the university would take steps to ‘ensure the meeting will take place,’ including providing ‘appropriate security for the meeting’ and considering ‘seeking an injunction against those who might prevent the second meeting from taking place.’68 Meanwhile, the day after the disruption in West Hall the executive committee of Governing Council met and decided to convene the Caput, the university’s long-standing disciplinary body composed of faculty deans and college principals plus the president of SAC as a non-voting member.69 Charges were laid against two graduate students who had taken prominent roles in the disruption of Banfield’s visit, William Schabas in History and Anthony Leah in Sociology. The Caput hearing, televised on a local station, took place in May 1974 and lasted nineteen days. The Caput suspended Schabas for four years and Leah for three. In the fall of 1974 Schabas and Leah appealed their convictions at Caput to the Governing Council. Their suspensions were reduced to two years each.70 President Evans was not pleased by the Banfield affair. It was a distraction. The invitation that initiated the whole affair – ‘inviting him to the campus’ – was itself, he believed, ‘an inflammatory act.’71 It had damaged relations between faculty and students and between both and the Governing Council and central administration. And that struck at the heart of what Evans considered his central challenge as president. ‘My greatest concern,’ he confessed some years after leaving office, ‘was that too much of the energy of the institution was going into fights over governance and structure and too little going into its basic mission, and that the administration’s job was to try and get this up and operating as fast as possible with the least possible fights so that the people could get back to the real business of the university.’72 By 1974 the creation of the basic governing structure – the Governing Council and its committees, with corresponding vice-presidencies in the Office of the President – had been done. But that was only the beginning. To make the structure work the president believed that, as he told the editor of the Varsity in an extended interview in October 1974, the most important change

Unfinished Business

201

was ‘beginning to assemble the sorts of information on which decisions can be made within the university.’73 That was a particular challenge because the structure of governance left the divisional leaders, the deans and principals, ‘out of the loop’ of the central administration. They had, at best, token representation, if any at all, on the key committees of the Governing Council. The Governing Council, Evans believed, ‘was something off by itself’; there was ‘no relationship between all those organisms and bodies.’ Even more damaging in the president’s view, the traditional established linkages and trust between divisional heads and the president of earlier times had been shattered by the Haist rules. ‘I think the Haist rules both for Departments and for Faculties has tended to further weaken the sense of academic leadership of the Dean and weaken the linkage – other than through financial instruments [i.e., the budget] – of the head of the faculty with the President,’ he said, adding that ‘there really wasn’t the authority structure,’ the ‘relationship that is necessary in organizational management.’74 Evans established a new forum, regular meetings of deans, program directors, and principals with him and the provost, to try to repair some of the broken relationships that he believed his predecessors had had with division heads, who had often been personally chosen by the president. But, regular meetings or not, divisional leaders still had no recognized representation in the university’s governance. The other relational link, as Evans had noted, was financial. Both the president and the Governing Council had to rely upon the divisional leaders, and they upon the departmental leaders, to provide the thousands of pieces of information needed to create a meaningful budget for the academic work of the university and then to implement the same. And, in the Evans years, this had to be done, year after year, with declining resources from the Government of Ontario. With a hint of desperation, Evans told the Canadian Club of Toronto in December 1974 that the province’s 7.5 per cent increase in its Basic Funding Unit for 1975–6 was still inadequate. Continued underfunding, he said, denied the university the opportunity to adapt to the changing interests of its students. It took away the capacity of the university to meet new teaching needs. More cutbacks in funding, he threatened, might force the university to ‘forsake our inheritance and phase out a large part of our work in the humanities.’75 Initially, the budget cuts seemed manageable to Dean Greene in Arts and Science. Looking back, he recalled that the faculty’s budget at the beginning of his term was ‘comfortable, even though none of the

202 Arts and Science at Toronto

[departmental] Chairs, of course, would ever believe that or say that … We were not starved for money and I could take five years of successive budget reductions, modest by some comparisons, I could do that without blood on the floor.’ The way to take the cuts was to stall or halt making replacements for retiring members of the faculty or, in the science departments, to cut back on supplies and equipment. But as time went on, the limitations of this approach became increasingly apparent. Cutting back on scientific equipment and supplies handicapped the ability of departments to maintain the essential laboratory components of undergraduate instruction. Similarly, in smaller Arts departments denial of replacements of faculty and cutting staff to the minimum required to offer a department’s courses was demoralizing and came all too quickly. In the end, Greene recalled, ‘the options for making real reductions were very limited.’76 In October 1975 Greene told his General Committee that the budget prospects for 1976–7 were ‘bleak and difficult’ and projected that a 5 per cent base cut – $1.5 million – in the faculty’s budget was a ‘virtually inevitable decision.’ It would be the sixth successive annual budget cut. Not filling any academic or staff vacancies in the faculty could absorb two-thirds of the required reduction but, Greene said, he ‘would not live with such a recommendation.’77 A year later, after the government announced a $100 increase in tuition fees, the first in five years, Greene took the unusual step of writing directly to the minister of colleges and universities, Harry Parrott, to voice his deep concern about the seemingly endless underfunding for his faculty: The size of classes in popular and central disciplines such as economics, political science, mathematics, psychology, biology and sociology has increased considerably. The ability of departments such as history and mathematics to provide tutorials for students has been strained to the breaking point. The science departments have had to face inflationary increases in the cost of equipment and supplies which has necessitated emergency measures and provision of second rate facilities for students. Science departments which use microscopes have had to introduce a student microscope fee of $15.00 in order to pay for the professional cleaning and repair of the instruments. Other science departments now see no alternative to increasing laboratory fees for students, not to improve conditions but to maintain the now less than adequate equipment and supplies.

‘The Province,’ Greene concluded, ‘has reduced the value of the product and increased its price.’78

Unfinished Business

203

Another Evans initiative was the introduction of university-wide financial planning to assist the annual budget exercise in all divisions. As one year of underfunding followed another the role of the resources and planning committee of Governing Council and its parallel vicepresidential office in the central administration became increasingly important. In Evans’s mind resources and planning was ‘the most important single committee in the university.’79 In 1976 the Governing Council initiated a university-wide planning process. At Simcoe Hall Evans strongly favoured a ‘top down’ approach. Greene thought Evans was ‘hard charging’ on the issue and that the president believed that ‘everything was a problem to which there was a solution.’80 Greene was much more sceptical. ‘Planning for a very large Faculty of Arts and Science in the space of a year with no assurance of funding [was] quite a different operation,’ from that, say, of a division like the Faculty of Medicine. Arts and Science throughout his term of office was going through ‘revolutionary changes.’ Unicameralism, the ‘New Progamme,’ and the Memorandum of Understanding focused largely or wholly on the university’s biggest, most diverse faculty. The faculty was trying to implement a program of cross-appointments between departments and the constituent and federated colleges; to collaborate with the School of Graduate Studies in the creation of a number of graduate centres including medieval studies, comparative literature, and drama; and to cope with an eroding budget. And, it had to be admitted, most members of the Governing Council ‘had little understanding of the complexities that were a result of the compromises of 150 years of historical growth’ of Arts and Science.81 Greene’s approach was the opposite of Evans’s – bottoms-up. He believed an Arts and Science plan had to be based in the faculty’s departments. That was where the students were. That was where the teachers, the laboratories, the equipment and supplies were needed. It was the departmental chairs and their colleagues who initiated, amended, or dropped the course offerings in the ‘New Programme.’ And they were the people who had to work out cross-appointments with the colleges and contribute the time of their scholars to the emerging graduate centres. The instructional mission of the university in Arts and Science and other teaching divisions rested there, in the departments, not in Simcoe Hall, not in the Governing Council chamber. Therefore, Greene believed his role as dean in the new planning environment was to base the Arts and Science planning exercise in the departments, to compile and consolidate the departmental plans and pass them up to the central administration. Evans was not pleased. The president, Greene recalled many years later, was ‘very impatient with me.’82

204 Arts and Science at Toronto

The differences over planning were not resolved. Nor was the problem of underfunding. It continued long after both Greene and Evans finished their terms of office. The dean and the president had come into office at the same time. Greene had told the provost he would not accept an extension of his term and left the deanship in June 1977. Evans indicated he would not accept another term and retired from the presidency a year later. As Greene had noted, revolutionary change had take place during their terms of office. Even before the summer of 1972 the heady expansion of the Bissell era had given way to a sustained period of restraint in government support for the provincial university, and Toronto’s decision to cap undergraduate enrolment under the new Basic Income Unit funding system placed the university last on the scale of support of Ontario universities.83 There would be no relief in the next five years. Also in the summer of 1972 Evans and Greene inherited a legislatively defined new governing structure. But the Governing Council membership had yet to be filled and no provision had been made for what and how it was to govern. It was very largely through John Evans’s personal leadership that shape and focus were given to Governing Council, together with a correspondingly elaborate central administrative structure in Simcoe Hall. But neither Evans nor Greene was pleased with the way the new University Act defined the membership of Governing Council: apart from two presidential appointees the leadership of the university’s academic divisions was excluded from the central role they had played in the old university senate. Another Evans initiative, with the presidents of the federated universities, and with the essential support of Greene and the college principals, began the transformation of the federal relationship that had given the University of Toronto its unique character since 1887. That, Evans later recalled, was, ‘a long, long tough fight.’84 The Memorandum of Understanding of 1974 and, in turn, the constitution of the Faculty of Arts and Science, finally brought all the faculty’s teaching departments under the fiscal and academic control of the dean and the faculty council. Also, during Greene’s term the Arts and Science departments, the General Committee, and the faculty council began the process of creating of new programs of study that would give new coherence and structure to undergraduate studies in the faculty. Each and all of these were significant changes. Each and all were essential building blocks for the recreation of the Faculty of Arts and Science and the University of Toronto.

11 More Change

Arthur Kruger, the principal of Woodsworth College, succeeded Robert Greene as dean of Arts and Science. His appointment was announced in March 1977, a brief few months before he would take office.1 Kruger already had considerable administrative experience. In his department, Political Economy, he had looked after the master of arts candidates, been undergraduate secretary and associate chairman. He had been responsible for the social science sector at Scarborough College and been the founding principal of Woodsworth College, where he had learned, as no other dean had done, the aspirations and the challenges of the university’s part-time students. The Office of the Dean, in the fall of 1977, was tiny and under-manned. William Foulds, the assistant dean and faculty secretary, was indispensable to the dean, the council, and the General Committee. Carol Belford, office system coordinator, managed a small faculty office staff. Rufus Churcher, who had been an associate dean with Dean Greene, stayed on for a year with Kruger as his search for ‘blue ribbon’ associate deans went unrewarded. The annual stipend was paltry: $1100 or about half of a teaching assistant’s, plus possible relief from teaching one course. Kruger and Churcher administered the faculty in the 1977–8 session. When Churcher left at the end of the year, Jacob Spelt, a distinguished senior geographer, joined Kruger as vice dean and Jill Webster, a professor of Spanish literature and Robert Pugh, a physicist, accepted appointments as associate deans. In 1978–9 David Keeling was appointed director of academic records and in 1980–1 Peter Harris, a lecturer in German, joined the group as director of student affairs. In 1981–2, Kruger’s last year as dean, Robert Farquharson, professor of German, and J.W. Steiner from the Faculty of Medicine replaced Webster and

206 Arts and Science at Toronto

Pugh. That same year George Altmeyer, who had been a graduate student in history, replaced Keeling as director of academic records.2 The workload for the dean and his associates had grown year by year since the implementation of the Haist rules and the inauguration of the new unicameral government. An expanding central administration in the Office of the President, with a provost and a vice provost more immediately responsible for most affairs in Arts and Science, together with a growing student body3 and faculty complement, meant more and more detailed work in budget administration, planning, and program development. Each year there were Haist rules committees for departmental chairmanships, tenure, and promotion to full professor. Relations with the colleges became more intricate and, for University College and the federated colleges, complicated by the Memorandum of Understanding. And there was more, much more. In the past, most faculty affairs could be settled in the General Committee and faculty council and routinely reported to the senate for approval. Now, nearly all of those had to be explained and defended, one by one, at great cost of time, to Governing Council committees, particularly Academic Affairs and Planning and Resources, and then to council itself. Kruger, like Greene before him, found this a particularly frustrating aspect of the dean’s responsibilities. The university’s deans were ‘left out of the new governing structure’; ‘they had no power,’ but they had to be ‘better prepared.’ Kruger observed. ‘You now came cap-in-hand to Governing Council committees with your new curriculum proposals or your new admissions proposals or whatever and you found that you were being battered when you got there because the alumni representatives felt that you had changed things from the time that they recalled: why were you doing this?’4 It was very time-consuming. And much of it was routine, the annual ‘bread-and-butter’ work of any faculty in a large university. But Arthur Kruger also had an ambitious agenda of his own. He was convinced that students entering the faculty in the late 1970s were not as well prepared for university study as they had once been. At the same time, he told the Varsity, he did not believe that it was the job of the university to teach its students basic skills. It was better, he said, to ‘insist that they get that proficiency in high school.’ The university should take a hard look at admission policies and he was ‘willing to start work now on developing more admission requirements for both the Erindale and the St. George campuses.’ Kruger added that any new standards for admission would not be imposed for four or five years so that the secondary schools would have a chance to prepare for them.5

More Change

207

Kruger also was a strong, vocal critic of the freedom of choice in course selection in the faculty’s ‘New Programme.’ A ‘New New Program’ that Vice-Principal Desmond Morton was promoting for Erindale College attracted his attention. It called for greater restrictions on course selection than were in place at the St George campus and required that students demonstrate some proficiency in both science and humanities by the time they were ready to graduate. Erindale’s ‘New New Program’ was approved by the Academic Affairs Committee of Governing Council in early March 1978 and would be introduced for the 1980–1 academic year. That gave the Mississauga campus much stiffer graduation requirements than Arts and Science had at St George. A graduate had to have completed at least one course in humanities, natural science, and social science. The three-year degree candidate had also to complete a minor concentration in a discipline, while a four-year candidate had to complete two minors or a specialization.6 Kruger wanted even stronger program requirements at St George, believing that ‘all students should be required to specialize in some field of study.’ That should not prevent students studying in other areas and there should be a maximum number of courses a student could take in any one area, including the area of specialization. The university, he said, had a ‘responsibility to set a standard as to what we will sanction as a university degree.’ One of his biggest problems, he forecast, would be ‘making the college system work.’ The Memorandum of Understanding had combined the college subjects’ departments in University College and the three federated colleges into single department structures in Arts and Science. But the memorandum left the colleges without a welldefined ‘new role in the late twentieth century.’ Finally, just for the record, Kruger concluded an interview with the student newspaper by announcing that he was opposed to student membership on tenure committees. Furthermore, he also objected to a 250 per cent increase in visa student fees that Governing Council had imposed for 1977–8, at the very time his appointment as dean was announced. It threatened to curtail enrolment of foreign students at Toronto. Canadian students, he said, would be the losers because they benefitted from ‘rubbing shoulders’ with students from other countries.7 As Kruger was beginning to think about revision of admission requirements in Arts and Science, the issue arose in a different forum, the Academic Affairs Committee of Governing Council, at the end of September 1977. A task force headed by William Saywell, principal of Innis College, had been asked to report on the state of teaching and research in Canadian studies at Toronto and had made several recommendations

208 Arts and Science at Toronto

to the committee. Among them the task force recommended that Grade 13 French, or its equivalent, become an entrance requirement in Arts and Science. A vigorous debate followed. Principal Saywell argued that because Canada was a bilingual nation, a knowledge of French should be part of ‘every well-educated student’s background.’ An undergraduate representative countered that it was not the place of the university ‘to shove national unity down students’ throats.’ A decision on the recommendation was put off until January. Early in the new year opposition from the province’s secondary school system, an ‘overwhelmingly negative’ response from the Arts and Science departments, and ‘an emphatic “non”’ from Simcoe Hall killed the proposed entrance requirement in Academic Affairs and the Governing Council.8 Kruger’s own approach to admission requirements began with the conviction that the university should no longer continue to accept any six matriculation completions as adequate for admission to his faculty. Toronto had no requirement, for example, that secondary school students should pass matriculation in English, or mathematics, or a science. He appointed a committee, headed by Professor Ronald Shepherd, registrar of University College, to study and make recommendations on the issue. Shepherd’s group discovered that some 600 different courses, academic and technical, were being offered in the province’s secondary schools. The committee separated the academic courses from the practical courses and divided the academic ones into five groups: English, languages, sciences, mathematics, and humanities and social science. It then recommended that a candidate for admission to Arts and Science had to complete work in at least three academic groups including English, a language or mathematics, and a science or social science. Shepherd and his colleagues added, and Kruger agreed, that the university had to give the secondary school system a ‘period of grace’ to adjust to the new requirements if they were implemented. When the recommendations became known, there was a strong reaction against them from teachers in the secondary schools.9 Kruger’s growing appreciation of the admissions issue was sharpened by what he described as his ‘first crisis.’ Annually, the faculty set a cut-off point for acceptance based on the average of the six final secondary school grades of its applicants. For that year, 1977–8, students in arts had to achieve an average of 73.5 and in science the cut-off point was 74.5. When it came time to admit the entering class, it was much smaller than anticipated, raising uneasy questions about revenue expectations, staffing needs, and other issues for the future. Was this

More Change

209

going to be a recurring phenomenon or a one-time circumstance? Kruger later recalled that both Simcoe Hall and the chairs of the faculty’s departments worriedly asked, ‘What was going to happen to the Faculty?’ Kruger and his colleagues decided to significantly lower the cut-off average for entrance to all Arts and Science programs to 70 per cent for 1978–9. They went too far and in the fall of 1978 ‘we were bursting at the seams.’ So for 1979–80 the cut-off was raised to 74.5 and the expected, and needed, number of new students enrolled. But the extraordinarily large class of 1978–9 remained a fixture in Arts and Science for the remainder of Kruger’s term of office.10 Another important part of the admissions issue was the development of examinations for entering students. Most important was an English proficiency test. Both Erindale and Scarborough Colleges had been administering such a test for information purposes since 1976–7. In March 1978 the Academic Affairs Committee of Governing Council approved formal use of such a test at Erindale for students entering the college in 1980. Then, in January 1979, the Governing Council approved adopting the test on the St George campus.11 If a student failed the test when first entering the university he/she was given another twelve months in which to pass. If the student had not passed the test within twenty-four months of first registration he/she was barred from further registration until the test was passed. Kruger also wanted another entrance test, and a small faculty committee, chaired by Principal Dennis Duffy of Innis College, suggested a test in Canadian history because all Ontario secondary school students had to take a year course in Canadian history and another in Canadian geography. Peter Harris, the director of student affairs, who was a member of the Duffy committee, approached the College Entrance Examination Board at Princeton, a highly respected institution that had years of experience, about administering the history test. CEEB hesitated and finally said they would not prepare the test, that someone else would have to do it. So, while the English proficiency test was implemented, the history test was not. During the last year of Kruger’s term the CEEB informed the faculty that it would not administer this test and the issue of whether to proceed with additional admissions tests remained unresolved when Kruger finished his term as dean.12 Kruger was even more interested in the course selections students made than he was in admissions issues in the faculty. He had no

210 Arts and Science at Toronto

sympathy at all with the New Programme. It ‘reduced all the undergraduates in the Faculty to the general Arts program,’ he, a former honour course graduate, sniffed. ‘I was very unhappy.’ He strongly believed, he recalled a few years after he left the deanship, that ‘at the university liberal education for the undergraduate has to include a very strong component of study in depth.’ Once named as dean, he consulted widely among several senior faculty members who shared his misgivings about the New Programme, colleagues who believed they had ‘lost too much.’ ‘I was going to lead the counter revolution,’ he said.13 Early in 1978 Kruger appointed Father John Kelly, president emeritus of St Michael’s College, to chair a committee to review the New Programme. Kelly was not a neutral chair: his opposition to the New Programme was well known. ‘The colleges have been ravaged’ by it, he told the Varsity when his appointment was announced; ‘the colleges have lost meaning for students since the inception of the New Program.’14 All the committee members15 were thoroughly versed in arguments for and against the merits of the New Programme. The committee received fifty-three submissions from the colleges and departments, student organizations, and individuals and, after consideration and debate, issued an interim report. That stimulated another fifty-seven responses and more debate among the members. In the end a concise, thorough report was ready in the early weeks of 1979. None of the members agreed with all the conclusions and recommendations. But English professor Jane Millgate spoke for most in saying that it was ‘a good compromise.’16 The Kelly report recommended that the departments and colleges in Arts and Science offer students four different programs of study. The first was a specialist program requiring at least nine and not more than thirteen courses, including pre- and co-requisite courses in a four-year twenty-course degree program. A variant on this was a combined specialist program requiring at least fourteen and not more than sixteen courses jointly designed by two or more departments and/or colleges in a twenty-course degree. Second was a commerce and finance program requiring not more than seventeen courses in a twenty-three-course degree. Third were department and/or college major programs of at least five and not more than seven courses in a fifteen- or twenty-course degree. And finally, there would be a three-course minor program of study. All students graduating with a fifteen-course degree would be required to complete a major program. And all students in a twenty-course degree had to complete a specialist program or combined specialist program or

More Change

211

two major programs. In addition, any student completing a fifteen- or twenty-course degree should be allowed, if he or she so wished, to also complete a minor program. Lastly, within every fifteen- or twentycourse degree at least one-fifth of all courses must be what the committee called ‘non-specialist electives’ as defined by a department or a college, or some combination thereof. The actual design of each of the programs of study would be the responsibility of the sponsoring department or college, should involve both students and faculty in the planning of the programs of study, and have the approval of the faculty. The committee also recommended that existing counselling services in the faculty work to ensure that all students were fully informed about their program choices. And it urged the faculty to work cooperatively with the secondary schools to ‘foster the teaching of English, mathematics and second languages as part of a broadly based educational system in the Ontario schools.’ It recommended that the faculty continue to test English language competency and that, with the colleges, it continue to support and expand the system of writing laboratories and mathematics aid centres available to undergraduate students.17 The Kelly report proposed dramatic change from the New Programme and quickly stimulated both strong support and vigorous opposition. The faculty’s General Committee determined that it could not be taken up until the middle of May 1979, when many of the students, including most of the student members of the General Committee, would have completed their examinations and left campus. The student organizations, particularly the Arts and Science Students’ Union, were outraged: ‘It is very unwise to take a report of this magnitude and ram it through General Committee in a couple of weeks when most students are away – and when no campus papers are publishing.’ Peter Silcox, the secretary of General Committee’s steering committee, responded that ‘we feel that members of University Committees should be available to carry on business.’ He did not impress ASSU.18 Consideration of the report was delayed until the new term began in September and a meeting of the General Committee was scheduled for Monday, 24 September. Again the students protested. There were fortynine student seats on the General Committee, but only twenty-six members would be able to attend and twenty of the unrepresented seats would not be filled until after by-elections in early October. Both SAC and ASSU asked for more time. Kruger refused but did add, ‘I don’t see any need to ram this through.’ The meeting went ahead. It was followed

212 Arts and Science at Toronto

some weeks later, on 29 October, by a debate on the report at Trinity College, where Professor Ian Drummond, a member of the college, and Dean Kruger defended the report. Cam Harvey of SAC told the meeting that ‘the vast majority of students oppose the report.’ So too, apparently, did many members of Trinity College’s council. The provost, Kenneth Hare, said that his council members ‘feel that the report proposals would seriously erode the authority of the colleges in academic matters.’19 And so it went. Then, at General Committee’s 19 November meeting – its third on the report and ‘the calmest of the three,’ the Varsity volunteered – the main recommendations on the specialist/combined specialist, commerce and finance, and major programs were approved, as were recommendations that all students had to include one-fifth of their course selections as non-specialist electives, and that students would be required to select and register their programs of study at the beginning of their second year.20 Kruger reported later that the Kelly report ‘produced a lot of what I wanted.’ But not all: he also wanted to compel all students to fulfil a distribution requirement outside of his/ her chosen area of concentration with ‘a sequence of three or four courses in another subject area.’ The committee, of course, had rejected that notion and opted – in ‘wishy washy’ fashion in Kruger’s view – only for an optional minor. But General Committee did agree that specialist students would have to take three courses outside their area of specialization.21 With that the long debate over the New Programme concluded. Amendments to the Kelly ‘rules,’ as they came to be called, would appear from time to time on General Committee’s agenda in the months and years to come. But the era of ‘free choice’ was over. John Evans was in the last year of his presidency when Arthur Kruger began his deanship. In January 1978 James Ham, the former dean of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering and currently dean of the School of Graduate Studies, was named to succeed Evans. Ham had been an outstanding student in electrical engineering as a Toronto undergraduate and then gone on, in 1946, to do his graduate degrees at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During the last year and a half of his doctoral training he was also on the MIT faculty. In 1952 he was offered a position at the prestigious Bell Laboratories, but returned to Toronto and joined the engineering faculty. In 1964 he became head of his department.22 As president, Ham was welcomed by his university colleagues. He had been a popular dean, had worked for the faculty association, and was, unlike Evans, regarded as an ‘insider,’ the kind of

More Change

213

The Memorandum of Agreement, April 1984. Principal Hare of Trinity, President French of Victoria, President Swan of St Michael’s, and President Ham (B2002-0005/002P)

person who would know how to deal effectively with the on-going funding crisis of the university. He told the Varsity that he expected ‘the next five years to be tough, but years of virtue.’23 After an interview with him a few weeks later, the paper drew a contrast between the president and the president-designate: Evans, it said, was ‘the cool bureaucrat, Ham is the kindly patriarch.’24 Ham had great reservations about the Governing Council, especially because it was regarded as not providing ‘adequate representation for the wisdom of the staff.’ Later, in retirement, he told an interviewer that ‘unicameralism was a disaster, an absolute disaster’ and that he particularly disliked the ‘unduly powerful’ role assigned to the president as the university’s chief executive officer.25 These were sentiments Dean Kruger could eagerly endorse. The university’s deans had been abandoned, left powerless, in the new governing structure, Kruger reflected soon after leaving office. In the old senate, among informed and often congenial colleagues, the university deans were leading figures. Now the dean of Engineering, or Medicine or Law or even Arts and Science, was just a functionary, an allocator of funds and supplicant before this

214 Arts and Science at Toronto

or that Governing Council committee.26 Nor did the deans normally have the direct access to the president they once had. The President’s Office had become ‘Simcoe Hall,’ with an array of vice-presidents and many others serving the president and yet others serving the Governing Council. Dean Kruger’s access to the central administration was through the vice-provost for Arts and Science, Milton Israel in Evans’s time, and then William Saywell during Ham’s presidency. Still, Kruger would quickly add, he always had direct access when needed to the provost, Donald Chant, during most of his deanship. John Evans had created another group, principals, deans, and directors, which met monthly and was chaired by the provost, as a way to maintain a portion of the contact that had been in place in the old senate. It was, Kruger observed, ‘a convenient way of conveying information’ and ‘a useful way of flying balloons.’ The problem was that it provided ‘lots of discussion but it had no power.’27 Kruger’s main problem with the central administration was the unrelenting series of annual budget cuts that had begun during Bob Greene’s deanship and continued through his own. Budget changes were planned a year in advance, and so Kruger’s first-year cut had been crafted by Greene and his colleagues. Then, in the spring of 1978, Harry Eastman, an economist like Kruger and vice-president for planning and resources, told the Varsity, ‘Things look grim for next year and the near future.’28 So it was to be. In Arts and Science Kruger took another $1 million cut for 1978–9: ‘without tension,’ he said. In fact, there was tension and it would get worse in succeeding years. Kruger conceded, ‘You cut where you can, not where you should,’ and that meant that cutbacks, inevitably, were spread unevenly across the faculty. He did begin to make significant cuts in the large humanities departments, English and French, which had inherited very large faculty complements resulting from the way the old college subjects had been staffed, and in classics, once the heart of the humanities, where enrolment was disappointingly low. All three protested, especially the French department. Even so, the heaviest burden of the cutbacks in Arts and Science continued to fall on the science departments, where reductions in laboratory, equipment, and technician support funds were targeted annually. ‘They were getting very resentful and restless.’29 Kruger had asked the provost, Donald Chant, and President Ham to send auditors to Arts and Science to review the faculty’s accounts because the cumulative effect of the years of cutting, he told them, was that they were ‘coming to the end of the road.’ They said no. The next

More Change

215

year, 1979–80, as he was preparing his budget proposal for 1980–1, Kruger, his vice- and associate deans, and the departmental chairs all spent an evening with Ham and Chant at Ham’s home in North Toronto. They requested a change in the budget process from annual exercises to a ‘long view of budgets’ and, equally important, the central administration’s agreement to make ‘differential cuts’ among the university’s divisions. The provost was adamant. Kruger recalled that his response was ‘I won’t; I can’t.’ Chant explained that the process he was using was deliberately ‘neutral’ and it avoided ‘making comparisons which we can’t make.’ To adopt the Arts and Science request would be ‘trying to get us to compare apples and oranges.’ A few years later Kruger reflected: ‘We got nowhere at that meeting … It was very depressing.’30 In 1980–1, Donald Chant’s last year as provost, the budget cut proposed for Arts and Science for 1981–2 was $1.2 million. It would mean, Kruger believed, cutting nearly all term appointments and teaching assistantships across the faculty, reducing staff, and deeply cutting supply budgets. ‘We were heading for a confrontation,’ Kruger recalled. He met with the deans of the School of Graduate Studies and the heads of the colleges and got ‘a general feeling that we simply couldn’t live with that.’ An almost unprecedented cohesion among the deans of the two faculties, the colleges, and the departments began to take shape against the proposed budget. Kruger met with Ham and Chant and told them what was coming and again asked the central administration people to examine the Arts and Science budgets. They again refused. ‘It was not pleasant.’ Faced with that, the departmental chairs wrote their own letter to President Ham, telling him that they would not administer the budget cut: they would look after tenure hearings and all the regular academic issues of departments, but Simcoe Hall would have to do all budgetary decision making, department by department, for Arts and Science. The provost and Vice-Provost Saywell quickly arranged a meeting with the chairs to make the case for the administration’s proposal, but, as Kruger recalled, ‘there was no breaking of the ranks throughout this, all 29 chairman continued to support the position that the Faculty couldn’t find the money.’ In the end, the Arts and Science cut was reduced, the anticipated university-wide cut was too large, and there was, Kruger later recorded, a surplus for 1981–2.31 Looking back, Jim Ham recalled that Kruger had been ‘very reticent’ to accept the proposed budget reduction for 1981–2 and that he had the backing of his chairs and Vice-Provost Saywell. ‘I was keenly aware of this and honestly didn’t enjoy it but I was adamant that the Faculty of

216 Arts and Science at Toronto

Arts and Science had to meet the standards of discipline about itself that everybody else did.’ The ‘rebellion,’ as Ham called it, was ‘partly personality,’ the ‘lively, vociferous person’ of Dean Kruger, and partly a reflection of a faculty that had become ‘rigidified’; ‘it had grown massively, intellectually it had become very diverse, and there was very little sense of a faculty as distinct from a great collection of departments.’ Or, as Ham put it less diplomatically in another interview, Arts and Science was ‘that great ungovernable collection of barons and thieves unable to meet together’ who had, on this occasion, done just that: met together and forced the president of the university to back down.32 It was not something Ham was accustomed to doing. Throughout his administration he had an on-going battle of wills with the students over the issue of tuition fees.33 Shortly after taking office Ham, meeting in a forum with a reporter from Toronto’s Globe and Mail and SAC’s external commissioner on the effects of provincial government cutbacks on the university, declared himself in favour of a tuition increase for Toronto students to 20 per cent of the cost of their annual education. ‘As a citizen,’ he said, the efforts of the William Davis government to reduce expenditure and balance the provincial budget were ‘a good thing,’ and the 1980s, unlike ‘The Golden 60’s’ might be ‘smaller and more beautiful.’ It was a theme to which he returned time and again. The following spring he told a student audience that, provided the province’s student assistance program (OSAP) was adjusted accordingly, ‘students ought to pay something towards their education and 20% is a reasonable figure.’ At the time they were paying 13 per cent, and that was not ‘the best judgment of a social contract between what a student pays and what the public pays.’34 In January 1980 Ham acknowledged that 20 per cent was a ‘long-term figure’ that should not be imposed in one dramatic increase. Year by year the tuition fees crept up. By the fall of 1981 Arts and Science students were charged $915 tuition, 15 per cent of the total cost.35 Increasing student tuition fees as a way to dampen the impact of the government cutbacks on the university was but one proposed strategy. Another, widely rumoured, was that the university would close its two ‘satellite’ colleges, Scarborough and Erindale. During Ham’s presidency both colleges were running well below their planned capacity of 5000 students. Dean Kruger had strong opinions on the subject. He had scant sympathy for Scarborough, where he had led the political economy contingent several years before. It was an autonomous institution with its own Arts and Science curriculum, of which Kruger was sceptical. On

More Change

217

the other hand, Paul Fox, Kruger’s Political Science colleague who was the principal at Erindale, had ‘managed to become part of our community in a very real sense.’ ‘I think Erindale has a real future,’ Kruger said just after leaving the deanship, ‘and Scarborough has none.’36 Just as the 1978–9 session was getting under way, President Ham hastened to Erindale to tell students and faculty that he had no intention of closing either college and to blame rumours to the contrary on ‘irresponsible and mischievous press speculations’ by the Globe and Mail.37 But rumours and speculation persisted. Just two weeks after Ham’s Erindale visit, the Ontario Council on University Affairs issued a report on what the province’s universities might do to combat projected enrolment declines and continuing government funding cutbacks. The first option was for York and Toronto, which had satellite campuses, to close Glendon and Scarborough and Erindale ‘if their closure would not seriously harm the parent institution.’ Ham quickly rejected the notion. Scarborough and Erindale would continue to ‘serve the growing suburban communities of Mississauga and Scarborough,’ he said, ‘and the teaching and research at these colleges is interwoven into the total fabric of the University of Toronto.’38 What to do about the two colleges was rehearsed a year later in the Academic Affairs and Planning and Resources committees of Governing Council. And in the spring of 1982, as Kruger’s term was drawing to a close, the president ‘during a public musing about the closing of Scarborough and Erindale,’ as the university historian, Martin Friedland, put it, had to issue another retraction amidst strong protests from both suburban colleges.39 The root problem in dealing with annual cutbacks in Arts and Science, Kruger believed, was the planning process implemented by Presidents Evans and Ham and their Planning and Resources vice-presidents, George Connell and Harry Eastman. Unlike in the Evans years, when Simcoe Hall bridled at plans emerging from below, in Ham’s term it expected planning in Arts and Science to start with departmental chairs and proceed to the dean’s office and then to central administration. Ever outspoken, Kruger called it ‘a stupid form of planning.’ Departments – and deans – were, if you will, being asked to plan without a plan. Kruger believed that a proper plan had to come from the top; it should state a general goal and offer a number of options to achieve it. Such a plan could embrace a unit like the Faculty of Arts and Science not as several dozen entities but as a coherent unit. More than that, Kruger believed that any Arts and Science plan had to include all three campuses. And, in due course, Simcoe Hall agreed. Jacob Spelt, Kruger’s

218 Arts and Science at Toronto

vice-dean, was asked by the provost to head a small group from the three campuses and the graduate school to work out a multi-year staffing plan for Arts and Science. Its report was ready early in 1981. The Spelt report began with an assumption that there was overcapacity in the faculty. Looking ahead, the committee calculated that by 1990 330 full-time tenure-stream positions would be lost through resignations, retirements, and death. The committee recommended 234 new appointments as replacements, a reduction of 96 full-time positions in the faculty complement across the three campuses. It did not recommend the layoff of any tenured professors during the 1980s decade. With regard to the replacement process, the committee recommended net gains in the full-time complement only in commerce, computer science, economics, political science, statistics, and survey science. The committee also anticipated that there would be substantial attrition in the 1990s and, to counter that, suggested that hiring in several fields might begin in the late 1980s. The Spelt committee went further. It recommended that elementary and low-level courses in all faculty departments be taught by tutors or temporary faculty members whose jobs could be eliminated if demand for such courses dropped significantly. Ultimately the committee hoped that the Faculty of Arts and Science would spend much less time in ‘very basic teaching’ in languages, mathematics, and some of the sciences, and that such tasks would be taken up more fully by the secondary school system. From the hearings and submissions the committee had received it was clear that some Arts and Science departments were not ready to accept the staff reductions the committee was recommending. In such cases, the committee urged, those departments should not be allowed to hire new or replacement staff until their staffing plans had been brought into line with the Spelt report’s recommendations.40 The report was a startling document. It was a full 323-page, carefully detailed blueprint for a decade of tenure-stream staffing in Arts and Science on all three campuses. Nothing like this had ever been seen before at the university. It proposed a major reduction in full-time staff in the arts and sciences, in part matched by projected enrolment reductions in the plan’s later years. Though it was silent, purposely so, on staffing issues in other university divisions, it boldly recommended differential staffing arrangements within the faculty on the three campuses. Departments where there would be high demand would get new appointments. Departments where there was overcapacity, notably in the humanities, would not be making many appointments for the next

More Change

219

decade. This was the kind of plan that Kruger had been looking for throughout his deanship. But many department chairs, and their departmental colleagues, were as strongly opposed to the report’s recommendations as the dean was supportive. Intense debate about the Spelt plan began during the last months of Kruger’s deanship. It would continue, vigorously, in that of his successor. Tuition fees dominated the attention of the Varsity during Arthur Kruger’s deanship. Jim Ham’s announcement, shortly after taking office, that students should be paying 20 per cent of the costs of their education drew continual, critical attention. So too did the declaration of the minister of colleges and universities, Harry Parrott, on television on Monday, 20 February 1978, that ‘university students are too highly subsidized by Government handouts.’41 That remark brought a quick response. Students from universities across Ontario packed Convocation Hall on Thursday afternoon, 16 March to prepare for a protest rally – ‘Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Harry Parrott’s gotta go!’ – across University Avenue at Queen’s Park. More than 7000 students, it was reported, turned out to hear sympathetic speeches from the Opposition leaders and to note, with scorn, the absence of Premier Davis and Minister Parrott.42 A year later, at the end of February 1979, on Monday the 25th, the Planning and Resources Committee of Governing Council agreed to a 16.5 per cent tuition increase for 1980–1. The next day President Ham’s office was occupied by a student sit-in. Ham was ill at the time, but the students remained, occasionally as many as 80 in all, until late Thursday afternoon, just before the Academic Affairs Committee was to consider the increase. ‘Three hours of heated discussion,’ the Varsity reported, ended with a 15–13 vote in favour of the increase. A disappointed president of SAC, David Jones, warned that the increase would ‘restrict admission to the affluent rather than the academically able student.’43 Increases continued, and at the beginning of March 1982 SAC approved a plan to hold a library ‘study-in,’ a class boycott, and a protest rally. Dean Kruger, who was finishing his term, was pessimistic. ‘Cutbacks have become a fact of life,’ he told the Varsity. ‘There is no new blood being injected into the system’ and ‘potential young scholars are being lost.’ Kruger feared that the problem would get ‘progressively worse. If nothing happens the universities will become one mass geriatric ward.’44 Another issue that attracted attention was a debate in the Academic Affairs Committee over reporting the names of students who had been

220 Arts and Science at Toronto

convicted of committing an offence under the university’s Academic Code of Behavior. The original notion of developing a formal code of behaviour had been developed by Ralph Campbell in 1969 towards the end of years of student unrest. But it had been rejected by the central administration because it was not strong enough. A more stringent version of a disciplinary code had been proposed in 1974, and the academic portion of the proposal had been adopted.45 The non-academic aspect of the proposal had not been accepted. The provision about reporting to the Academic Affairs Committee had been added in 1978–9 and applied to all offences whether they had been disposed of at the departmental level or at the University Academic Discipline Tribunal, which, generally, only handled the most serious offences. The problem was that the committee’s meetings were held in public and there was the possibility that the names of the offending students could be published. Eric McKee, the university ombudsman, drew attention to that possibility and requested that no student names be allowed to be published. Instead, in 1980 Academic Affairs proposed that only the names of students convicted by the tribunal be reported to the committee. Proponents of the change argued that it would result in more cases being disposed of at the departmental level, lessening the chance that a student would have to go through the complex business of a case at tribunal unless the offence was of a most serious kind. They also argued that for significant offences disposed of at the departmental level the sanction be changed from giving a student a zero for the piece of work to giving a zero for the course in which the student was enrolled.46 Debate on the issue was heightened by a perception that plagiarism was becoming a serious problem at the university. A Varsity story in December 1981 headed ‘Essay Services (and Cheaters) Prosper’ gave details about two essay-writing businesses in Toronto, Essay Services near York University and Custom Essay Services in the downtown area, both of which were thriving. Essay Services, it was said, had a catalogue of 12,000 essays from which a student could choose, then pay $10 per page for a completed essay. The company would also provide a custom written essay for a student for $20 per page. Custom Essay Services also charged $10 per page for an essay written especially for the purchasing student with slight additional charges for editing the paper. The company said that its writers wrote essays at the B+ level. But it only guaranteed the purchaser that the essay would receive a passing grade. From the university’s point of view purchasing an essay was a very serious offence – an ‘academic crime’ said SAC president Matt Holland.

More Change

221

Class in Sidney Smith lecture hall, July 1978 (A1986-0016/002 [1978-1-40]; neg. #40 on strip)

Any student caught handing in a purchased essay could face suspension or expulsion. The problem was, as Dean Kruger correctly told the Varsity, the essay services were ‘legal businesses and there`s nothing that can be done about the actual business,’ adding that ‘it is very difficult to catch someone who is using the service’ and that ‘few have been caught.’47 That was a problem that would not be quickly resolved. Ombudsman McKee also resurrected the idea of adopting a nonacademic discipline code during Arthur Kruger’s deanship. His 1980 report to the Governing Council recommended that the university develop a code to govern student conduct in non-academic matters. McKee noted that ‘disciplinary issues have arisen with growing frequency’ and that they included sexual harassment, behaviour in student residences, disruptive behaviour in classrooms, unprofessional criticism of a colleague, and even the authority of the university police. For generations the Caput had dealt with both non-academic and academic issues until the Academic Discipline Tribunal had been established to deal with academic matters. But, as nearly everyone acknowledged, Caput was outof-date, ineffective, and, McKee said, had only met ‘two or three times since 1975.’ William Alexander, the vice-president for personnel and

222 Arts and Science at Toronto

student affairs, told the Varsity that he and his staff were doing an analysis of the issue for the president and would report soon. Student leaders questioned the need for a non-academic code, citing the province’s legal system as the place where serious non-academic issues might be resolved. Susan Prentice, president of ASSU, added that while the university certainly needed a sexual harassment code, it did not ‘need it in the guise of a non-academic discipline code.’48 In December of 1981 Alexander told the Campus and Community Affairs Committee of Governing Council that a ‘preliminary statement concerning all aspects of student discipline including a procedure for dealing with charges of sexual harassment’ would be released in the next term, adding that any decisions on whether to adopt a code of non-academic discipline would not be taken without consultation with both student and faculty organizations in the university.49 Dean Kruger, meanwhile, had addressed the issue of sexual harassment as it might relate to members of the Arts and Science faculty early in 1980. A professor at the University of Ottawa had been fired after charges were made that the professor had been making ‘unwanted sexual advances’ to a student. Ombudsman McKee reported that in the previous twenty-four months he had received six reports of sexual harassment of students, but that only one of the Toronto students had authorized an investigation of the charge. Kruger quickly circulated a memorandum to his departmental chairs warning all academic staff in his faculty to ‘remain at arm’s length (plus at least one inch)’ in their dealings with all their students.50 While the ombudsman, university administrators, members of Governing Council, and student leaders wrestled with issues of academic and non-academic discipline, the vast majority of students in Arts and Science – and the other undergraduate divisions – went about the business of attending classes, writing essays and examinations, and, if they wished, taking part in the hundreds of student activities scheduled for every week of the academic year. The huge expansion of courses and programs of study, the introduction of the New Programme, and, later, the Kelly rules, stimulated a proliferation of subject- or course-oriented clubs and activities for Arts and Science students. Hart House, as it had since the early 1920s, remained a vibrant centre of activity. It had finally fully opened its doors to women in 1972. In January 1980 the weekly roster of intramural activity for female students at the House included a long list of volleyball, hockey, and basketball matches. The list for male students matched it and added water polo, and there was also a slate of co-ed basketball games. Non-athletic events at the House a few

More Change

223

weeks later included a debate with Cardinal G. Emmett Carter as the honorary visitor, a meeting of the camera club, an art exhibit, a square dance, and a winter carnival at the Hart House farm.51 The major change in the athletic scene at Toronto had taken place earlier, at the beginning of the academic year, when the university’s new Athletic Centre was officially opened. It combined two buildings in the northwest sector of the campus at Harbord and Spadina Avenues, the Clara Benson building for women, which had opened in 1959, and the recently completed Warren Stevens building for men. All the playing facilities were open to both men and women and the centre’s amenities included a third-floor field house with a four-lane running track, four multi-purpose basketball courts, and a 50-metre swimming pool.52 The growth in student numbers in the 1970s had resulted in more and more responsibility for the Faculty of Arts and Science. There were more students seeking to register, to sign up for courses in growing departments in the social sciences, to write essays and examinations, and, finally, in third or fourth year, to petition for and be approved for graduation. Each and all of these necessary routine functions of the faculty carried with them increased opportunities for incorrectly identifying a student. In Kruger’s final year vice-dean Robert Farquharson and Secretary Peter Harris came up with a solution to the problem: photo identification cards. Both recognized that photographing and making identification cards for all the thousands of students in the faculty was going to be a major challenge. The plan was to use the drill hall at Woodsworth College. In preparation, Farquharson and Harris first rehearsed their scheme in the faculty office in Sidney Smith Hall. On the given day they and their colleagues set up six lines, divided by chairs, for students to line up for their photographs. Student photographers used Polaroid cameras to speed the preparation of the identity cards and the students, who had entered on the north side of the hall, were then to exit at its south door onto a parking lot. Hundreds of students were waiting as the doors were opened for business. Then, as the exercise was about to begin, a person from the physical plant department appeared and began to drill a very large hole in the south wall just beside the planned exit door. And when the first student opened that door to leave, he discovered that between him and the surface of the parking lot was a wide, deep trench to accommodate an electric line to a new light in the lot. Amidst the din of the drill Farquharson, Harris, and their colleagues quickly changed the plan, sent the exiting students downstairs past a basement washroom and up stairs to another door back on the north side where the yet to be photographed students were

224 Arts and Science at Toronto

waiting. ‘Pandemonium initially,’ Harris recalled years later. In due course the hardy, resourceful servants of the faculty separated the two groups into ‘two lanes of traffic’ in the driveway and carried on with the first student photo identification at the University of Toronto.53 The Drill Hall Caper at the end of Arthur Kruger’s deanship was, in several ways, symbolic of his tenure as dean from 1977 to 1982. In an environment of continuing annual budget cutbacks, of unpredictable enrolments, and major changes in the faculty curriculum, the dean and his colleagues in Arts and Science muddled through. Kruger and his faculty committees sought to dramatically change the admission requirements for entering students. They got a partial achievement of their goal approved, to be implemented some years after the dean had left office. Kruger was determined to end the ‘free choice’ of the New Programme. In due course, the Kelly committee changes came about. They were not all Kruger wanted, but they were enough. It was in the budget process where Kruger encountered the noisiest drilling, the deepest trench of his deanship. He handled his annual budget cut much as Dean Greene had had to do before him: cut where you could. He leaned heavily on his science departments with their substantial budgets for supplies and equipment, a practice that caused rising resentment in these departments. He did venture into the perilous territory of the large former college subject departments in the humanities, denying replacement appointment requests and provoking anger and dismay, particularly in the French department. But from the start Kruger had no faith in the budget cut process imposed by Simcoe Hall: an annual cutback to be applied equally across every division, large and small, in the university. His pleas for differential budget cuts for the divisions and for multi-year budgeting were summarily rejected, year after year, by the provost and president. By the middle of his fourth year Kruger had decided that if he was asked to extend his term or to take a second term in office, a not unusual occurrence, he would refuse. ‘I had no confidence, at that point, in those above me in the Simcoe Hall group,’ he reflected shortly after leaving office. ‘What I saw was two more years, or if I had renewed five or seven more years of conflict where I would either end up as a member if not the leader of the opposition … My relations with the President had deteriorated to the point that I believed it would damage the Faculty to have me stay on … We were no longer communicating with each other.’54 Arthur Kruger resigned as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science on 30 June 1982.

12 Renewal

Robin L. Armstrong was the new dean. He had grown up in the Cambridge area of southern Ontario, and in 1954 had won a Reuben Wells Leonard scholarship to study at the University of Toronto. He enrolled in University College that fall, taking residence in the newly opened Sir Daniel Wilson Residence Hall and opting for the honours course in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Armstrong completed his baccalaureate and stayed on at Toronto for graduate study. He earned master’s and doctoral degrees in physics at Toronto under the supervision of Harry Welsh, the distinguished head of the physics department, and went on to Oxford for postdoctoral studies. While at Oxford Armstrong returned to Canada for an interview for an appointment at McMaster and, on his return voyage, met with Welsh in Toronto. Back at Oxford, he quickly received offers from both universities and chose Toronto, where he was appointed assistant professor. At the end of the 1960s, just a decade after his graduation with a bachelor’s degree in physics, Armstrong was a tenured professor and associate chair of the physics department. In 1974 he was appointed chair of the department.1 Armstrong’s appointment as dean had been announced early in January 1982, while Kruger was about to finish his term. Readers of the Varsity were reminded that Armstrong had been a member of the Kelly committee and learned that he supported Kruger’s initiative to introduce entrance examinations for Arts and Science. It had initially been proposed that the examinations be designed by the College Entrance Examination Board at Princeton, but when that idea failed Armstrong championed ‘made in Canada’ examinations developed by Arts and Science faculty members. He acknowledged that there were daunting challenges ahead. Relations with both the central administration and

226 Arts and Science at Toronto

the colleges were in need of repair, morale in the faculty was low after a seemingly endless series of funding cuts, classes were overcrowded, there were too few teaching assistants, and teaching loads had grown.2 Armstrong had three vice-deans to assist with the ever-growing workload of the faculty. Bob Farquharson from the German department continued in his post and provided liaison with the Kruger administration during the first year of Armstrong’s appointment. Barry Smith from the zoology department succeeded him. And Smith was joined by Jane Millgate from Victoria College and the English department and Ian Drummond, an economic historian. Both Millgate and Drummond had been on the Kelly committee with Armstrong. Armstrong was responsible for relations between the faculty and each of the departments, for overall management of the budget and appointments, for grievances, and for external relations. Each of the vice-deans dealt with departments in a sector of the faculty and assumed one or more functional tasks, such as college relations, planning and space management, student discipline, or chairing one of the curriculum committees. On the staff side of the office Armstrong had Peter Harris as faculty secretary and George Altmeyer as director of student records, a personal secretary, a financial officer, a personnel officer, and a public-relations officer. Two secretaries assisted the vice-deans, with one of them also acting as the office receptionist. And Altmeyer had a sizeable staff of more than twenty-five people to look after the academic records, transcripts, and thousands of other documents for the more than 23,000 students in Arts and Science.3 While preparing to take office, Armstrong concluded that some form of regular contact with the students in Arts and Science would be important. In October 1982 he announced the formation of a Student Liaison Committee, a ‘small informal group’ with whom he could discuss faculty issues and acquaint himself with the ‘student point of view.’ He asked the presidents of the Association of Part-time University Students (APUS), the Arts and Science Student Union (ASSU), and the student unions in English, French, geography, political science, chemistry, and mathematics to each nominate a member. In addition, he told the Varsity, he also was eager to talk with ‘any group of students who came to talk to him.’4 An initial meeting of the liaison committee stimulated optimistic musings, but enthusiasm for the scheme quickly faded and, in time, less formal but more useful relationships emerged between the dean’s office and the leaders of APUS, ASSU, and the fulltime Arts and Science student groups.

Renewal

227

The first day. Stephanie Weinstein of UC moving in as school year begins (Bulletin, 11 September 1989; photo: Jewel Randolph, A2001-0004/001P[11])

Repairing the relationship between the faculty and Simcoe Hall was a priority for Armstrong’s administration. Like the other chairs, he had supported the faculty’s revolt over the budget cuts in the latter days of the Kruger deanship, but his own approach would be different. ‘My attitude has always been,’ he observed several years after he had left the deanship, that ‘if there is somebody up there who really is going to make all the decisions and pull all the strings, I’m not going to get anywhere by being antagonistic towards him.’5 An opportunity to turn the page was at hand because President James Ham had resigned the presidency at the same time that Arthur Kruger had left the deanship. In January 1983, six months after Armstrong became dean, a search committee announced that the new president would be Donald F. Forster, president of the University of Guelph and veteran provost at Toronto a decade earlier. Forster knew the university very well and had, as the Varsity put it, ‘left his mark as an extremely capable administrator. He is hailed as a leader’ and ‘a workaholic and is wholeheartedly devoted to the university system.’6 Forster was scheduled to be installed as president at the beginning of the new academic year in September 1983. Suddenly, on 8 August, the

228 Arts and Science at Toronto

president-designate, forty-nine years old, died. At the end of August the executive committee of the Governing Council recommended that David Strangway, the provost and acting president, former NASA scientist, and chair of the geology department, be appointed president for a one-year term. In November 1983 a new search committee began to look for a new president. After an extended search George Connell, the president of the University of Western Ontario and a former chair of the Department of Biochemistry and vice-president of research and planning at Toronto, was selected. Connell took office on 1 October 1984.7 Planning, Connell told the Varsity two weeks later, was going to be the keynote of his administration, and what ‘is most important is being able to articulate what the nature of your mission is, and how you’re going to do it.’ His responsibility, he added, was ‘to make sure that the objectives of the parts are harmonious and are consistent with the overall direction’ of the whole university.8 Planning, in so far as it promised more certainty, more stability, for the faculty and its departments would be welcomed in Arts and Science. But the beginning of Armstrong’s term was not auspicious. Kruger had left on his desk a note and a bottle of Aspirin, together with a letter from Provost Strangway which said ‘You owe us 2 million dollars; how are you going to pay it back?’9 In fact, in the fall of 1982 the faculty had a half-million-dollar cumulative deficit and most departments had a structural deficit, that is, the funding in the department’s salary accounts was less than the money required to pay the full salaries of all tenured and other continuing members of the department. The budget for that first year had been set a year earlier during Arthur Kruger’s last year. Over the remaining four years of his term, budget years 1983–4 to 1986–7, Armstrong’s faculty had base-budget reductions of $1.6 million, $1 million, $713 thousand, and $1.3 million. There was no confrontation: over time Armstrong and the central administration had found ways to achieve what he called ‘increased consultation prior to the assignment of budget cuts.’ It was a beginning. But it only scratched the surface of improving the faculty–Simcoe Hall relationship. The leadership of by far the university’s largest faculty still faced major problems at the end of Armstrong’s first term. He told a committee that was reviewing his deanship that it was ‘frustrating for me and for the vice-deans to submit reports that Simcoe Hall has requested and to receive no formal response; it is infuriating to submit reports and then to have the priorities re-ordered without consultation; it is intolerable to respond promptly to urgent requests and to submit urgent [responses], only to have no response or action for months on end.’10

Renewal

229

As for the annual budget cuts, the faculty had to continue what Kruger had begun: not replace most of the faculty members who retired. Between 1982 and 1986 the faculty complement was reduced by 5  per cent. But there was no corresponding reduction in enrolment. Class sizes grew; faculty workloads increased. Eventually Armstrong managed to get approval to make a small number of replacement appointments, but it was a costly venture. It was agreed that when a tenured faculty member retired that person could be replaced if the new appointee was linked (‘bridged’) to a continuing member slated for retirement in the years ahead. In essence, the replacement arrangement mortgaged the future of the faculty. By 1 July 1986, thirty-two ‘bridging’ appointments had been approved. That meant that the true impact of the budget cuts in Armstrong’s first term was not 5 per cent but closer to an 8 per cent reduction in the faculty complement.11 This bridging appointment arrangement had to be updated annually and required intricate planning of the kind envisaged by Connell. It needed the agreement of the departments in the faculty and of the School of Graduate Studies and had to be reviewed with the vice-provost. In addition, to support the arrangement, during the first two years of Armstrong’s first term, the General Committee of Council worked through a set of goals and objectives for Arts and Science.12 A spacedevelopment plan was also developed and a parallel faculty-appointment plan for college-based programs was gradually worked out in the 1985–6 session. As his first term was drawing to a close Armstrong had hoped that this work, unprecedented in the faculty, might result the creation of a ‘tenure pool’ of new appointments for Arts and Science that he could allocate without having to seek annual approvals from Simcoe Hall. It was not to be. But some specific agreements were made: the Department of Computer Science could have automatic replacement of any resignations from its tenure/tenure-stream complement and the statistics department could grow to fourteen appointments during the term of its current chairman. In addition, the Department of Economics would be allowed to replace any mid-career ‘star’ appointments who resigned, though not necessarily in the year in which they left. Finally, following negotiations in 1982 with the Mellon Foundation by John Leyerle, the dean of the graduate school, the foundation agreed to support fifteen tenure-stream appointments in the humanities in Arts and Science. Each  new appointment would be at the assistant professor level and be funded equally by the foundation and the university for a period of five years, leading to a tenure hearing. In all, fifteen appointments were made between 1983 and 1988, a major development that ensured that

230 Arts and Science at Toronto

the humanities disciplines would have some new appointments during years of continuous funding cutbacks.13 If relations with Simcoe Hall were a source of concern and major attention during Armstrong’s first term, no less so were the relationships of the dean’s office with the Arts and Science departments. It was hardly surprising: after all, the faculty was one of the few among Canadian (and many United States) universities that continued to include all the humanities, social science, and scientific disciplines in a single unit. Most had two, some three, separate faculties. To some the potential attraction of breaking up Arts and Science at Toronto was ever present, especially in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, when annual budget cuts appeared to be borne disproportionately by the science departments. Following a request from Simcoe Hall in 1982 that the faculty reduce its support staff, most of which were in the sciences, the science departments, in the fall of 1983, led by Keith Yates, chairman of Chemistry and former associate dean science at the graduate school, produced a ‘White Paper.’ It compared funding in the pure science departments with the departments in the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, compared equipment funding with library acquisition funding and technical staffing versus library staffing, and analysed the impact of inflation on scientific costs. It concluded that the cuts that had been made to equipment and other budget items in the sciences in Arts and Science had inflicted major damage on the ability of the departments to carry out their mandate to teach and conduct research. The white paper was sent to the provost with a request for a separate faculty of science at Toronto.14 The provost, David Strangway, quickly consulted Armstrong, who requested that the white paper be sent to him for a response. Armstrong believed that any split would most likely lead to not two but three faculties at Toronto with all their attendant costs. He reasoned that because Arts and Science was a single unit it was easier for students to move between its sectors and departments. And how would the several departments that crossed boundaries like anthropology, psychology, mathematics, computer science, geography, and history (which could be either a social science or a humanities discipline) be allocated in a tripartite division of Arts and Science? As it was, with the Arts and Science disciplines at the heart of instruction and research at three different campuses, only two of which fell under the control of Arts and Science, the regulatory framework for admission, examination, and

Renewal

231

other matters was already more than complicated enough: imagine, Armstrong suggested, how difficult it would be with three new faculties. He would, he conceded, do his best to divide the budget and apportion the cuts equally between the sciences on the one hand and the humanities and social sciences on the other. Armstrong sent his response to Strangway. But that was all.15 With that, as the chemistry department’s historians, Brook and McBryde, succinctly put it, ‘nothing came of the proposal.’16 Entrenched in the faculty’s academic objectives was Armstrong’s determination not to close any of the departments or substantially curtail their academic objectives. There would have to be changes, but most of these would emerge from the reports of review committees that examined all aspects of a department’s work at the time of change in a chairmanship. And Armstrong did get approval for a few new appointments in humanities departments that had not been allocated any Mellon appointment. Among them Linguistics and Religious Studies each had appointments to add much needed strength and new direction to their department’s teaching and research work. But the paucity of new appointments remained a constant in Arts and Science.17 Lacking them, Armstrong made some changes in teaching-assistant allocations to provide some teaching assistance in heavily burdened departments, and he counted on laboratory fees to give a bit of help to supply/equipment budgets in the science departments.18 The most significant change in departments during Armstrong’s first term was the disestablishment of the Department of Political Economy. The process had begun earlier, in the mid-1970s when the department chair, Harry Eastman, had allocated major responsibilities to three separate associate chairs for political science, economics, and commerce. In 1978, early in Dean Kruger’s term, Brough Macpherson led a ‘Department Structure Committee’ which recommended that the three associate chairs become ‘Directors’ of their respective sectors in the department. Three years later, a group in the economics sector finally recommended that it become a separate department that might either include the commerce group or jointly control the work in the commerce program with the commerce group. That fall, 1981, a large majority of the economists voted for a separate department, but a smaller group in ‘the political economy tradition’ resisted, desiring no change. During the year of transition from Kruger’s deanship to Armstrong’s the university finally worked out a solution to the problem. The faculty in the commerce group would move to the Faculty of Management

232 Arts and Science at Toronto

Studies and the economists in management studies would move to a new Department of Economics. Instruction in the Bachelor of Commerce program would be the joint responsibility of Economics and Management Studies. The unique character of the commerce degree with both strong economics and management components and significant liberal arts requirements would be maintained. Finally, any continuing faculty member who wished not to change could continue to work in the faculty of his/her initial appointment. Shortly before leaving office Dean Kruger asked Governing Council to ‘disestablish’ the ninetyfour-year old and unique University of Toronto Department of Political Economy. Acting chairs were appointed to manage each of the three new entities, and on 31 August 1982 the Department of Political Economy disappeared.19 Since the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding in 1974, during Dean Greene’s term of office,20 the colleges and their growing number of college-sponsored undergraduate programs had also become a significant curricular responsibility for Arts and Science. The college programs had long received the approval of the Arts and Science curriculum committees and Council. But once the Memorandum of Understanding was in place, together with full department status for the formerly college disciplines, the faculty had become deeply involved in the budgeting, appointment, and career-progress decisions in those disciplines. Inevitably, there were tensions, especially between the federated colleges and University College and the faculty. In order to ease the relationships with all the colleges and to help resolve the communications problems with the colleges, Armstrong created a notional ‘Department of the Colleges,’ with an appointed chairman, to represent college ambitions and concerns to the dean. He also sought ways to increase the linkages between the college principals and viceprovosts and the committees and council of the faculty.21 The Memorandum of Understanding had been meant to last for five years and then to be renewed by the federated universities and Toronto on an annual basis. But over the years both the colleges and Arts and Science had discovered a number of concerns. The federated colleges hoped that the memorandum would ensure an increase in the teaching of their own students within the colleges, but that had not happened. The chairmen of the unified departments in the former college subjects complained that too many of their staff remained on their original college employment contracts and did most or all of their teaching within their own college. For their part, although there was a significant

Renewal

233

increase in the number of college-sponsored interdisciplinary programs following the adoption of the Kelly rules, the colleges sought more opportunities to develop their ‘college programs’ and appoint the staff to teach them with fewer restrictions from Arts and Science. Finally, in 1982–3, Armstrong’s first year as dean, President Ham appointed a federated universities–University of Toronto committee to resolve the outstanding issues.22 Then, in April 1984, a new Memorandum of Agreement was ratified by the federated universities and the University of Toronto.23 The unitary nature of the teaching departments in Arts and Science was again underlined, noting that each was an academic and administrative unit but that not all departments could be housed in a single location. The academic role of the colleges was outlined in detail: there could be college sections of multi-section Arts and Science courses and college tutorials reserved for students of a particular college. Either a department or a college could sponsor a workshop, a writing laboratory, or a mathematics aid centre. Colleges might organize specialist, major, and minor degree programs consisting of courses mainly or wholly offered by the college, or degree programs organized by a department where the college provided ‘suitable accommodation’ for such programs. And colleges might offer courses with college prefixes, for instance, Vic 2XX or SMC4XX.24 Members of a college’s teaching staff would either be contractual members of a faculty department or, if they were appointed to teach solely in a federated college program, be contracted members of the college’s staff. Both types of members with a college affiliation would be known as fellows. It was anticipated that most college program faculty would be supplied by the appropriate Arts and Science departments, but colleges could, in certain cases, appoint teaching staff to their programs. Especially important, and not possible under the old Memorandum of Understanding, the federated universities might make their own appointments for teaching in Arts and Science if all parties – the college, the department, and the faculty – agreed. When that happened (and two such appointment agreements were made shortly after the new memorandum was signed), the dean would appoint three members of the search committee and at least two of those members would have to agree on a candidate to make the appointment. In addition, where college staff were contractual members of a department in Arts and Science, the Haist rules would have to be used in tenure, leave, and promotion decisions.25 The Memorandum of Agreement was to last until 1990. During the years following its ratification

234 Arts and Science at Toronto

supplementary agreements, particularly on funding issues, were made and procedures worked out between the faculty and the federated colleges to implement the teaching aspects of the memorandum. In 1990 the Memorandum was renewed.26 Establishing a statement of goals and objectives for the Faculty of Arts and Science was among Armstrong’s priorities when he became dean. At his first meeting with the General Committee of the faculty he said that a planning statement was being drafted and invited members to see it. He hoped to have it ready to present to the committee by the end of the session.27 The committee had an initial look at the statement in a special meeting in April 1984. It sparked a long, spirited discussion before it was taken back for further work over the coming summer. An earlier statement of principles had been elaborated into sets of goals and objectives. Among the goals, the faculty would continue to offer a broad and thorough program of study for undergraduates in a wide range of disciplines. It would contribute to the advancement of knowledge through research and provide opportunities for advanced degree work. It would provide high-quality instruction to students from other faculties, contribute to the general enlightenment of the Canadian community, seek to improve relations with its departments and colleges, use a modified version of the Spelt report28 to guide its appointment proposals, and control enrolments in certain of its programs of study. Among its objectives were to make an ‘adequate number of strong academic appointments, allocate new appointments and other resources in such a way as to ensure that the breadth of teaching and research in Arts and Science will not contract in any major way,’ maintain the curriculum structure that emerged from the Kelly report, ensure that departments had adequate space, equipment, and supplies, and maintain suitable admission standards.29 This statement of goals and objectives set the template for much of the work of General Committee in the years that followed. Peter Silcox, a political scientist who was vice-chair of General Committee and Council and principal of Woodsworth College, chaired a committee that did a detailed examination of the relationship between student programs of study and the faculty’s resources. Should the faculty, the committee was asked, admit students directly to programs of study? What was the impact of breadth requirements upon admission to departmental programs? What about the faculty’s major commitment to service teaching and to teaching in the pre-medical program, to students in the

Renewal

235

engineering, pharmacy, forestry, and other professional faculties?30 One point was very clear: in March 1984 the General Committee learned that Silcox’s group, and the dean, were opposed to admitting students to programs in the first year.31 Armstrong said he strongly believed that delaying the choice of a major or specialist program until second year was a benefit to the student. But, he added, it did pose a major challenge for the faculty because it could not, when admitting students, predict where they were going to commit to a program of study: would it be in a science? a humanities discipline? A science student required more resources than one in a humanities discipline. A consequence of maintaining its present policy, of letting students delay their program choices until second year, was that certain programs of study would have to have enrolment limitations.32 That too was recognized by Silcox and his colleagues. And the present process for limiting enrolment in programs was varied and confusing to students. The Silcox committee said that the faculty should adopt a regular procedure for admission to limited enrolment programs and have it clearly stated in the calendar. Another group, led by David Neelands, the registrar at Trinity College, recommended in November 1984 that a college or department wishing to limit enrolment to one of its programs needed to access the teaching resources of the unit on both the St George and Erindale campuses, and consider the needs of students in other faculties, as well as their own specialists and majors, when making a recommendation for limitation. The responsibility for approving enrolment limitation in a program, the Neelands group said, should rest with the dean, who would report the decision to the General Committee. General Committee strongly objected to letting the dean decide on enrolment limitation and then only report the decision to the  Committee. And that part of the Neelands recommendation was soundly defeated. In January 1985 the Neelands group recommended that limiting enrolments in a program be proposed by the dean and approved by General Committee. Also, it added that all program proposals had to come before the General Committee no later than December of the year preceding implementation and would not become effective until the following September. The motion passed. At last a regular procedure had been adopted and the matter of how to limit program enrolments was settled.33 Admission tests had been initiated during Dean Kruger’s term34 and the first, an English proficiency test, had been started in 1980. But the attempt to get additional tests, such as a test in Canadian history, had

236 Arts and Science at Toronto

stalled. Armstrong favoured the concept of admission testing and told the General Committee in November 1982 that, working in collaboration with the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, four tests, in English, French, mathematics, and Canadian history and geography, would be ready for writing in 1984, for students applying for admission in 1985. Three months later Armstrong reported that after the announcement by the Department of Education of new initiatives in secondary education, he and some colleagues had met with a departmental official. Following the meeting he had asked historian Paul Rutherford to chair a group to consider the implications for admission testing of the Department of Education’s proposed secondary school curriculum initiatives. That group then reaffirmed a commitment to admission testing, but recommended that Arts and Science postpone any action until the ‘shape and impact’ of the department’s proposals was clear, that the dean continue his consultation with the department and report to General Committee a year later, and that a new ad hoc committee review the whole situation and recommend on further action by the faculty in 1985.35 In short, the issue of more admission tests was put to the side. By the time Armstrong made his report on the work of his first term a year later, his enthusiasm for admission testing had markedly changed. ‘Such tests are desirable,’ he said, ‘but not essential.’ More than that, he now believed that admission tests would only be ‘acceptable’ if they were a university, not just a faculty requirement. And, to avoid the prospect of having Ontario’s candidates for admission have to write many such tests, the ideal situation would be to have all the province’s universities agree on a common battery of admission tests.36 Meanwhile, testing the English proficiency of entering students continued. Vice-Dean Farquharson reported at the first General Committee meeting of Armstrong’s administration that in the initial year of testing, 1980, nearly 19 per cent of the 5273 students who wrote the test had failed and been refused registration. Of those students, 35 per cent had eventually passed and were currently registered students in Arts and Science; the remainder, in Farquharson’s words, ‘have presumably abandoned their university careers or migrated to academic groves more tolerant of their linguistic inadequacies.’37 A change in policy after that year’s class allowed students who failed to pass to enter the faculty and have two academic years to pass the test. By 1983 that change, and perhaps better preparation of candidates for admission in the secondary system, yielded better results. Fifty per cent had received a clear pass in 1980, 31 per cent a marginal pass, and 19 per cent had failed. In

Renewal

237

1983 66 per cent had passed, 25 per cent had gotten a marginal pass, and only 9 per cent had failed to pass the proficiency test. Those who were unable to pass the test during their first two years of study were ineligible to re-register for work in the faculty.38 A follow-up report to the faculty council in the spring of 1986 observed that over 700 students who had written the test in May or September 1985 had failed and could not re-register. Of those, 441 had only registered once and had dropped out after their first year, and of 274 who registered for second year, only 46 had actually taken the test a second time. Council concluded that ‘the number of students actually barred from continuing their studies because of the English Proficiency Test is very small, and, again, most of these are more generally in trouble academically.’39 In any case, the issue of admission testing had been resolved by then. The Ontario secondary school system had introduced a new set of Ontario Academic Courses, or OACs, for students intending to go to university. An ad hoc committee chaired by computer scientist Patrick Hume recommended that all applicants to Arts and Science must qualify for an Ontario Secondary School diploma, must present at least six OACs, including one in English, one in mathematics or a language other than English, and four others, of which no more than two could be in the same subject. Students whose first language was not English and who had less than two years’ study in an English-language school system could be exempt from the English OAC if they provided an acceptable score in an approved English proficiency test,40 and those students whose first language was not English but had presented the English OAC would not have to give further evidence of English proficiency. The faculty would use a student’s best six OACs which met these requirements to compute the average standing of the applicant. Finally, the committee recommended that ‘as much as possible’ the new admission requirements come into force by September 1988.41 The 1980s were the first decade of a new century of publication for the Varsity, the paper of record for student affairs and interests at Toronto. Much of the content, like student life itself, varied little from year to year: lead stories about tuition increases, occasional changes to degree requirements, student government, and weekly announcements of extra-curricular activities at Hart House, the student clubs, and the like. At the beginning of the 1984–5 session the paper introduced a new Monday feature: a day-by-day listing of campus events of general interest to Varsity readers, beginning with the noon Shinerama Bed Race on

238 Arts and Science at Toronto

University Avenue from College to Elm Street on Wednesday the 5th. That evening the engineers were taking on the Metro Toronto Police in a volleyball game at Harbord Collegiate. More striking, at the end of the week immigration officers would be at the International Centre on St George Street to deal with visa renewals for international students, and an all-day orientation session for new visa students as well as opportunities to meet with OHIP officials were scheduled for Friday. Both were signs of the increasing presence and importance of both undergraduate and graduate visa students at the university.42 Public affairs and debates about public policy continued to attract the interest of some students during the 1980s. SAC was among the sponsors of a three-day symposium on the land claims of the Dene people in January 1982. The 19 March 1984 edition featured a long interview with Brian Mulroney, the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, and an account of a speech by a leader of the Philippine opposition to the Marcos’s government. Daniel Ellsberg, a prominent critic of the Reagan administration in the United States, drew a large crowd for his advocacy of civil disobedience in a Convocation Hall speech at the beginning of the 1984–5 session.43 In the spring of 1985 the paper carried the story ‘Being Gay at U of T’ and another about the intention of the university to adopt procedures to deal with sexual harassment the following fall.44 Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s speech and a later interview at a Sunday brunch and book signing at Erindale College on 26 January 1986 drew front-page attention in the next day’s Varsity. In the preceding summer SAC had held a referendum on a proposal to include undergraduate students in a mandatory Blue Cross Drug Plan that would have provided prescription drug coverage, including contraceptives, for Toronto students. It became the subject of what the Varsity called an ‘emotional debate.’ A record turnout of 8400 voters defeated the proposal. As a follow-up to that defeat, in February 1986 the director of the university’s health centre announced that it was planning a program to sell birth control pills at cost to students. The program, he said, would complement the centre’s outreach program, which included popular talks on birth control and sexuality.45 Joined by a number of student groups, several faculty members and other interested parties, the Varsity continued its long support for the university divesting its South African securities. The campaign culminated in a rally in front of Simcoe Hall on a bitter cold Thursday afternoon in January 1988. In the Governing Council chamber above members faintly heard the cry of ‘U of T, divest now!’ as they cast their votes on a motion to sell the university’s holdings in

Renewal

239

companies that invested in South Africa. It was decisive. The motion passed, 30–12, with one abstention.46 Later that spring Governing Council took another decision that won applause from students and their newspaper. On 19 May it voted to establish a new 114-member Academic Board of Governing Council to replace the much criticized Academic Affairs and Planning and Priorities committees, on which few academics and no academic administrators had sat. The new board would have seventy-eight faculty members and sixteen students as well as a few alumni, government appointees, and administrators, which greatly enhanced the ability of undergraduate students and faculty to have a direct say in the governance of their affairs.47 But throughout the decade, session after session, the abiding issue attracting Varsity attention and criticism was underfunding, rising costs to students, and a seemingly never-ending series of cutbacks. ‘Geology Students May Find Themselves on the Rocks Next Year,’ the paper announced on 6 January 1982. The geology department was planning to limit enrolment in four programs to a total of forty-five students, Geoffrey Norris, the chairman, told the paper, in the same issue that announced Robin Armstrong’s appointment as dean. On 24 March 1983, 300 students and library workers disrupted a Governing Council meeting to protest a proposed $428,000 cutback in the library’s budget for 1983–4. A feared reduction in library hours, Professor Peter Silcox noted, ‘would be especially harmful to part-time students.’48 In the spring of 1985 Governing Council approved a budget which included an $843,000 cut for Arts and Science, and Acting Dean Ian Drummond told the Varsity that, as before, the cut would be taken largely in attrition of the faculty’s teaching staff. It would be uneven, he added, explaining that departments that had more scheduled retirements than others would see more cutbacks at the departmental level, a process that had, by then, been going on for many years in Arts and Science.49 To dramatize the cutbacks problem in a very public way at the beginning of the new session, on Sunday night, 25 September, SAC’s Underfunding Committee placed 180 white crosses, each with a label of a course which had not been offered in the last three years, on the lawn of Sidney Smith Hall, Arts and Science’s headquarters. There they were for all students and faculty to see next morning; 110 more appeared at the Erindale campus and 50 more at Scarborough. ‘They are a reminder to the University,’ the committee chair said, ‘that there are a lot of people as mad as hell.’50 It did not stop. Armstrong told the Varsity in March

240 Arts and Science at Toronto

1987 that Arts and Science was anticipating another $900,000 cut for the next year, 1987–8. As before, ‘a major part of the cut,’ he said, ‘will not be replacing professors or delaying hiring.’51 Two months earlier, at the beginning of the 1987 spring term, the university announced that Robin Armstrong had been reappointed for another five-year term. Ten years as dean, Armstrong said, ‘should be long enough to achieve the things I want to,’ emphasizing that his priority would be improving the ‘undergraduate experience’ in his faculty.52 Both Vice-Dean Millgate and Vice-Dean Drummond, anxious to return to full-time teaching and research, resigned their posts on 30 June 1987. Armstrong, acting on some concerns apparently expressed to the review/search committee, that the humanities departments wanted a stronger voice in the dean’s office, decided to make a change in administration of the faculty. In his new term Armstrong would have only one vice-dean who would assume responsibility for the basic administration of the arts departments, while he would focus more fully upon the departments in the science sector. In addition, there would be three associate deans to represent each of the divisions of the faculty. Historian Robert Craig Brown agreed to become the new vice-dean. Eleanor Cook from the Department of English and economic historian Donald Moggridge were the newly appointed associate deans and Vice-Dean Barry Smith continued his appointment for another year, to be replaced, in July 1988, by zoologist Stephen Tobe.53 As Armstrong was putting his new administrative team in place he also had to make crucial decisions about where to impose budget cuts for the first year of his new term. One of the items selected to be suspended was the English Proficiency Test, which had been in place since 1980. And then, in November 1987, Vice-Dean Brown informed the General Committee that the suspension would be continued in the 1988–9 session. A committee would be asked to study the effectiveness of the EPT program, especially in light of the recent introduction of the new OACs, designed particularly for students intending to go to university.54 A year later the committee reported that there had been some problems with the new OAC English 1 being required for admission because some applicants has passed OAC English as a Second Language, but their schools had reported to the Office of Admissions that the applicants had passed OAC English 1. Consequently, OAC English 1 would no longer be accepted as an entry requirement for applicants who had not had two full years of instruction in an English-language school system. All of them

Renewal

241

would have to pass a recognized examination like the Michigan Test or TOEFL.55 That, in effect, solved the EPT problem. Henceforth, admitted applicants had to have gone through the Ontario secondary school system – or its equivalent in other jurisdictions – and passed the OAC English 1 exam or, if they had less than two full years in that system, they had to have passed one of the recognized language examinations. One way to begin to enhance the undergraduate experience was to make new appointments of talented younger scholars to replace the many senior members of the faculty who were retiring. During his first term of office, through some annually approved bridging arrangements and the Mellon appointments, Armstrong had been able to make a limited number of new appointments. But now he faced another 5 per cent budget reduction in Arts and Science over the next six years. Once again, the prospects for making the number of new appointments the faculty needed looked grim. But in consultation with his department chairs and the college principals, Armstrong devised a scheme to improve the number of new appointments. The essence of the plan was that the faculty would recover funds from all retirements, resignations, and deaths of full-time faculty during the six-year period. In the seventh and eighth years, 1996–7 and 1997–8, there were even more scheduled retirements and those positions would also be brought into the recovery plan. That done, and with cooperation from Simcoe Hall, the faculty could use its appointment ‘credit’ to allocate new appointments in an orderly fashion over the total eight-year period instead of trying to make a large number of appointments in the seventh and eighth years. In short, when a department or college made a strong case for a new appointment, the faculty could schedule that appointment, linked to the modified Spelt report and a developing plan for curriculum renewal, for, say, two years in advance, and advise the department to start looking for potential candidates for the position.56 Reviewing and renewing the curriculum in Arts and Science became a high priority in Armstrong’s second term. ‘I do not think the Kelly programme is the last curricular word,’ he wrote in the late spring of 1986. Given the existing and continuing climate of budget restraint, and continued projections of enrolment increases, Armstrong believed that tightening the structure of the curriculum was becoming more necessary, ‘restricting further the range of free choice which has characterized the arrangements of the Faculty for fifteen years or more.’ ‘The Old Programme sacrificed freedom to other ends,’ he argued. ‘The present arrangements may still be tilted, to an unworkable extent, toward

242 Arts and Science at Toronto

freedom.’ And so he proposed to begin a formal review of the curriculum in the next year, that is, 1986–7.57 In fact, the review did not get under way until the following year, when Associate Dean Eleanor Cook was asked to chair a faculty-wide committee on curriculum renewal in Arts and Science. By then Armstrong’s incentive had been given more urgency by the issuance, in March 1987, of President Connell’s ‘Renewal 1987,’ a call for a universitywide re-examination of each unit’s goals and ambitions and how they would meld with the goals and aspirations of the university as a whole. Connell gave particular, extended attention to Arts and Science. He noted that in 1986–7 27,828 full-time and part-time undergraduate students, 71.5 per cent of all undergraduates, were enrolled in Arts and Science programs at the three campuses. More than that, ‘a high proportion’ of students in other faculties ‘will have had their first university experience in arts and science,’ as, for example, students intending to enter the medical school. The faculty listed 377 possible programs of study and offered a huge array of first-year courses; 145 at St George Street, 63 at Scarborough, and 64 at Erindale, in arts and science disciplines.58 Arts and Science’s New Programme, the president observed, had not ‘arisen from a vision of undergraduate education with a set of unifying principles to give meaning and weight to the educational enterprise. In practical terms, the compromise [embedded in the New Programme] entails continuing difficulties; for the Faculty in making optimal use of its teaching resources, and for many students in identifying with either a department or college.’59 Connell asserted that there was much that was positive about Arts and Science and its curriculum. The diversity of its offerings was ‘vast’ and ‘the range of choice open to the student is great.’ In addition, the academic standard of the faculty was high and ‘a great deal of effective learning takes place.’60 But there was also a long list of major concerns. Because the choice of offerings and programs was so large, entering Arts and Science could be a ‘bewildering experience’ for many firstyear students. And because there were so many learning opportunities, it was difficult to predict how best to allocate teaching resources. This had led to an ever-increasing number of limited enrolment programs, frustrating and disappointing many students who wanted entry to a particular program and were denied.61 Connell thought that the curriculum should be redesigned to embrace four-year programs of study, even though that very idea had already been rejected by the Silcox committee. In addition, he believed that all students pursuing full-time

Renewal

243

studies should be enrolled in a particular program beginning in first year.62 Erindale and Scarborough, Connell noted, had been planned to accommodate 5000 full-time students each. But, in fact, neither campus had been developed to accommodate that many students, while Arts and Science enrolment on the St George campus was 8 per cent above capacity. ‘A case could be made,’ he mused, ‘for reduction of enrolment in Arts and Science on the St. George campus and an increase in graduate enrolment.’63 Dean Cook’s curriculum renewal committee worked throughout the 1987–8 session and issued a ‘working report’ in The Bulletin on 23 June 1988. Initially the response was slight, as Armstrong noted in October 1988,64 but it picked up over the next several months. At the end of the spring term in 1989 the committee’s report was published. Four open meetings were arranged for the following fall on the St George and Erindale campuses to hear reactions to the committee’s proposals. Then, in January 1990, a package of committee recommendations was presented to the General Committee of the Faculty.65 Extended discussion and debate took place at General Committee meetings on 5 and 12  February 1990.66 Finally, curriculum renewal resolutions approved by General Committee were reported to the Faculty Council on 26 March 1990, together with recommendations for changes to faculty committees arising out of the renewal resolutions.67 Committees on counselling and on instruction and evaluation, neither of which had been active for several years, were eliminated. More important, changes were made to the faculty’s curriculum committees. Council agreed that henceforth the Erindale Academic Affairs Committee would be the college’s curriculum committee for courses and programs at the college. One-third of the members on each of the St George curriculum committees – humanities, social sciences, and sciences – would be students. In addition, the new science committee would have one member from each of astronomy, chemistry, computer science, geology, mathematics, physics, and statistics, two members each from botany, psychology, and zoology and four members from basic medical sciences. Also, each curriculum committee would have two members chosen by the colleges. Finally, each of the three committees would have an assessor from each of the other two committees.68 Regarding renewal, admission requirements were restated requiring that each new student present, as before, six OACs in each of the science, humanities, and social sciences and economics and commerce admissions streams. All students were required to present OAC English 1

244 Arts and Science at Toronto

and all science and economics and commerce students had to present OAC calculus. Humanities and social sciences students also needed a mathematics OAC and/or an OAC language other than English. New students would normally take four broadly based 100-series courses out of their first five in the disciplines or, in certain cases, in interdisciplinary courses offered by more than one department or college. Students taking a fifteen-course degree could take no more than ten courses with the same designator; those taking the twenty-course degree, which would be styled an ‘honours’ degree, were limited to fifteen courses with the same designator. Both departments and colleges could offer full or half-year research courses for senior students among its 400-series offerings. As before, students had a choice of minor, major, or specialist programs of study. A minor would have four courses, a major six to eight, and a specialist program nine to fourteen courses. Every Arts and Science student also needed to complete a breadth requirement to graduate. For example, a student specializing in life or physical sciences had to take three breadth courses from a specified list of language and literature, other humanities, and/or social sciences courses, one of which had to be a 200-level course. For a fifteen-course degree the graduating student had to offer no more than six 100-level courses and no fewer than four 300/400-level courses and achieve a cumulative GPA standing of 1.50 or more. Similarly, Honours B.A. or B.Sc. candidates could offer no more than six 100-level courses and needed at least eight 300/400 courses. B. Com. candidates had to complete all the requirements of the commerce and finance program and a breadth requirement. And all honours degree candidates had to earn a cumulative GPA of 1.85 or above.69 The Curriculum Renewal Committee had not accepted either of President Connell’s suggestions: that Arts and Science students at St George or Erindale be admitted to programs in their first year or that on the St George campus the faculty only offer a twenty-course ‘honours’ degree. In due course, with some modifications, General Committee and Council accepted the committee’s recommendations. What, then, had changed? The admission requirements and the requirements to complete a fifteen- or twenty-course degree were much the same as before. And, as before, students were expected to delay choosing a program of study until completion of first year. What had changed, and was most important and most needed, was the elimination of the small but significant inconsistencies in program requirements from one program to another, the variability of course, program, and/or breadth

Renewal

245

requirements, and a host of other details that had led to confusion among both students and faculty. If there was not a great deal more of the ‘structure’ that Armstrong had desired in the curriculum, there was more clarity about what the ‘structure’ of the Arts and Science’s curriculum was and how it could be used by the faculty’s students. Finally, the curriculum renewal plan was going to be implemented in stages beginning in the 1992–3 session,70 and it would serve as the faculty’s curriculum base for more than a decade. The startling changes that senior members of the faculty might have recalled as the ‘revolution’ with the introduction of the ‘New Programme’ and the ‘reaction’ of the Kelly committee recommendations were in the past. At the beginning of the 1990s the Faculty of Arts and Science agreed to more modest change. Given its large size, its varied and complex composition, its more than two dozen discipline-based departments and several colleges, its university and federated universities components, and its thousands of full- and part-time students, that was enough. How students selected the courses and programs of study they wanted in Arts and Science was not on the agenda of the Curriculum Renewal Committee. But it was among the most important decisions a student would have to make during his or her undergraduate career. Readers of President Connell’s ‘Renewal 1987’ document were reminded that entering Arts and Science students had nearly 150 first-year courses to choose from, while students going into second year had more than 300 departmental and college programs of study, from six in Anthropology to nineteen in basic medical sciences, ten in English, ten in Greek and Roman history and Japanese studies, to ten more in philosophy and sixteen in zoology.71 All of this, Connell believed, made it difficult for the faculty to make ‘optimal use of its teaching resources’ and for many students to identify with either a department or a college.72 Once a program was chosen, for example a major and two minors, the student had to be careful to observe course prerequisites and hope for the best if his or her program of studies was among the ever-growing number of programs with enrolment limitations. In 1987–8 there were 19,000 students in Arts and Science on the St George campus, 12,000 in full-time studies, and 7000 part-time students, each of them making a number of course and program decisions annually.73 In addition, hundreds of students in the professional faculties depended on Arts and Science for many of their courses, from English and differential equations in engineering to fine art courses for architecture students and still others for candidates in

246 Arts and Science at Toronto

nursing or pharmacology. Each of these students took a classroom space, fulfilling obligations Arts and Science had to the university’s other undergraduate divisions.74 For the faculty’s own entering and continuing students the enrolment process took place in the colleges each September, as it had for generations. But in the 1980s the number of students continued to grow each year, just as the faculty’s teaching resources diminished and competition for places in both courses and programs intensified. Classrooms for a number of popular courses became more and more crowded, frequently in violation of the provincial fire code. That, as Associate Dean Don Moggridge told the Varsity in February 1988, was a cause of real concern. To resolve the problem, Arts and Science suggested moving back the date for course registration from September to June: earlier enrolment would allow the departments and colleges more time to make adjustments in class size, adding a section where enrolment exceeded the planned commitment of space and teaching resources and reducing classroom size where enrolment was less than anticipated. But student leaders were not impressed. Moving course registrations back to June, and giving such short notice of the change, SAC commissioner Brian Burchell said, ‘is ridiculous.’75 Still, planning in the Office of the Dean went ahead. The new plan, ACCESS, was to have students register their course selections for 1988–9 by mail ballot, beginning in June. That major portion of the plan worked quite well. But the faculty’s administrative officers also knew that provision would need to be made in September for late registrants and students wanting to change their course selections. In order to take pressure off the colleges and to gain better control of course changes, the faculty decided to centralize the process in the drill hall at Woodsworth College. There a bank of telephones and a cadre of trained staff would, it was hoped, quickly and efficiently make the course changes the students desired. Vice-Dean Brown, Secretary Harris, and Registrar Altmeyer (Dean Armstrong was away at the time) checked out the hall the evening before the process was to begin. All seemed well. But the next morning, when registration opened, fewer than half-a-dozen phone stations were working. Dean Armstrong had assured Provost Joan Foley that ACCESS would run smoothly: there would be no long lineups. What no one had anticipated was the large number of students who wanted to change one or more of their course selections. ACCESS broke down. By mid-morning the line outside the drill hall stretched up St George Street to Bloor, across Bloor to Devonshire Place, and down

Renewal

247

Devonshire Place to St Hilda’s College, the women’s residence for Trinity College. Phase two of ACCESS simply was unable to handle the crush of people wanting to use it.76 ‘ACCESS stinks!’ said a Victoria student. Another compared it to Trivial Pursuit and yet another complained that she had waited in line for three hours and then been told to go home because the course that she wanted to change to was already full. ‘It’s degrading to be waiting in a lineup,’ she told the Varsity. ACCESS ‘doesn’t encourage anyone to go to U of T.’ A frustrated faculty coordinator of a college program added that ACCESS was ‘registration of the worst Stalinist variety at U of T.’77 Former dean Arthur Kruger, now back again as principal at Woodsworth College and all too familiar with the problem of too many students in too many diverse programs chasing too little space and too few faculty resources, admitted that Arts and Science had had no choice but to try ACCESS, but ‘I don’t want to see it continue into the future.’78 A month later Armstrong acknowledged to the General Committee that there had been ‘severe problems with the implementation of ACCESS.’ Anthropologist Gavin Smith, sitting in for Don Moggridge as associate dean, had been assigned to review the problems and submit a report. And a committee would investigate using a telephone registration system. Armstrong promised prompt action, telling the Varsity that it would happen ‘as soon as possible … We’re committed to not having another negative situation happen next September.’79 Students and faculty brought their complaints and suggestions to Associate Dean Smith while the registrar, secretary, and other staff gathered information about nascent telephone registration systems that had been implemented at York and Carleton Universities. The dean’s office quickly opted for a telephone registration system. Armstrong enthused about the prospects in the Varsity: ‘Teleregistration would mean students with a touch-tone phone could select their courses without setting foot on campus and instantly know whether they were getting into the course to boot. Students would be able to register 24 hours a day and all week.’ He hoped a system that would also allow students to drop and add courses by telephone could be in place by September 1990,80 and had asked the university registrar, Dan Lang, for help. Lang then told Armstrong that a university-wide telephone registration system was going to be introduced and that the first stage of implementation would begin in the current year, 1989–90.81 It would be a huge task, with many challenges to overcome. How would students without access to touch tone telephones – very much a reality in Ontario and Canada in the late

248 Arts and Science at Toronto

1980s and early 1990s – cope with telephone registration? That was but one of the problems that had to be solved. Still, telephone registration was started and, in time, improved telephone technology and then large computer systems ‘modernized’ the annual rite of course registration for all Toronto undergraduates. Early in 1990 Armstrong told his decanal colleagues that he had been offered, and accepted, the presidency of the University of New Brunswick. He would take up his new position on 1 October 1990. A search committee would be established by the provost for a new dean. In the interim, when Armstrong was absent, Brown would serve as acting dean. The business of the faculty went on as usual. Armstrong and Brown worked with Nina Carlyle on the forthcoming 1990–1 budget, Armstrong handled matters relating to faculty salaries, and Brown chaired the Promotions Committee and Standing Committee. Associate Dean Tobe oversaw the continuing computerization of faculty information systems, Associate Dean Cook led the approval and start-up planning for curriculum renewal, and Associate Dean Moggridge was responsible for ACCESS and the faculty’s complement plan. George Altmeyer managed a large and growing staff in the registrar’s office and Peter Harris, faculty secretary, had general responsibility for student affairs and for preparation of the annual calendar of the Faculty of Arts and Science. As in 1986, when his first term was coming to a close, Armstrong enlisted his colleagues to assist him in preparing an ‘end of term’ report to the provost. Between 1986 and 1990 relations between the faculty and the central administration continued to improve. Because of reform of portions of the Governing Council, Armstrong became a member of the academic board and in 1989–90 also served on the Planning and Resources Committee and as a presidential appointee to Governing Council itself.82 In his report Armstrong strongly endorsed the sharing of responsibilities he had made between himself and Vice-Dean Brown, but added that his successor might well wish to make changes upon assuming office.83 He told the provost that since 1986, in spite of continuing reductions in the divisional budget, Arts and Science had made 101 tenure-stream or tenured appointments on the St George campus and twenty at Erindale. Thirty-five per cent of the St George and 25 per cent of the Erindale appointments had been female.84 Eighty-five St George faculty members and two at Erindale had been awarded tenure in the

Renewal

249

previous four years and, of those, twenty-six percent at St George and fifty percent at Erindale were women. The proportions, Armstrong believed, were ‘consistent with the gender distribution in the ‘pools’ of potential appointees in each of the disciplines represented in this Faculty.’85 In the same time period, 113 faculty members, 108 at St George and 5 at Erindale, had been promoted to full professor, 20 of whom were women. Armstrong believed that much remained to be done regarding employment equity, the length of time to reach tenure, the responsibilities of tutors and senior tutors, and other issues in the faculty and the university.86 But the significant number of new appointments and of promotions of faculty to full professor in recognition of their contributions to research and teaching was signalling a beginning of the renewal in Arts and Science that accompanied the renewal of the curriculum. Robin Armstrong had been dean of Arts and Science for eight years, the longest term of service since Vincent Bladen. When he had taken office, the faculty was in a fragile condition. The budget battles it had had with the central administration, the breakdown of the relationship between Arthur Kruger and James Ham, and the revolt of the faculty’s leadership betrayed, beneath a surface unity, a dispirited leadership within. The science chairs resented the seemingly never-ending erosion of their equipment and laboratory budgets. The arts chairs resented the denial of their growing number of requests for new appointments. And the Kelly rules, as they were known, while restoring some structure to the faculty’s curriculum, were regarded by many senior members of the professoriate as too little, too late and by the champions of the New Programme as a calculated abandonment of its principles. If there was an underlying theme to Armstrong’s deanship, it was to restore a sense of unity and confidence to the Faculty of Arts and Science. There were many parts to the task and few of them were clearly seen in the initial days. Curriculum revision had not occurred to him, nor his colleagues, until late in his first term and had not been given its final incentive until George Connell’s ‘Renewal 1987’ report. ACCESS and the origins of a new registration system for the university came even later. But the key unifying factor, perhaps, was developing a series of initiatives that set the promise of new appointments against the corrosive impact of annual budget reductions throughout the 1980s. Getting guarantees from Simcoe Hall that appointments could be made in a small number of departments with rapidly expanding enrolments and a series of Mellon appointments, in collaboration with the School of Graduate Studies for

250 Arts and Science at Toronto

The last day. A hug on the front lawn, Convocation 1987 (A2002-0007/007P)

Renewal

251

select humanities departments, were highlights of Armstrong’s first term. The transition plan of the second term went much further and broadened the potential of new appointments across the disciplines in a planned, orderly fashion. Renewal of the curriculum; renewal of the teaching and research staff; these, Armstrong hoped, would be the building blocks for the renewal of the Faculty of Arts and Science. Robin Armstrong’s departure coincided with the 140th anniversary of the first statuary recognition of the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto. The University Act of 1850 established the university and, within it, a faculty of arts. It had less than a half-dozen professors, inherited from the preceding King’s College. James Beaven, professor of theology, was elected dean of arts. But that was a shortlived arrangement. Just three years later a new act transformed the university into solely an examining body and the teaching function was assigned to the newly created University College. And so it would be until 1890, a century before Dean Armstrong left the Faculty of Arts and Science. Victoria University, formerly a Methodist College in Cobourg, Ontario, entered into federation with the university and two years later, in 1892, finally moved to a new campus adjoining the University in Toronto. There were now two undergraduate colleges, University and Victoria, each teaching undergraduates. In truth, a de facto faculty of arts, with professors and students teaching and studying the arts subjects of the day, had been a reality at Toronto from the beginning. But now, in 1890, the constitutional foundation of the Faculty of Arts and Science of a century later had been put in place. There was more. In 1877 the three-year degree, in place since the beginning of the university, was styled a ‘pass’ – later called either a ‘pass’ or a ‘general’ degree – and a new four-year ‘honour’ degree was begun. In general, each of the disciplines offered an ‘honour course’ for four years’ duration with few options and a demanding requirement that every student had to achieve ‘honour standing,’ that is, third-, second-, or first-class honours, in every year in order to continue in the degree program. Henceforth the two degrees were foundation stones of the Faculty of Arts and Science. The ‘pass’ (or ‘general’) degree and the ‘honour’ degree remained in place until the adoption of the ‘New Programme’ nearly a century later. Then, in 1890, the Federation Act divided teaching responsibilities between the colleges and the university. University and Victoria Colleges, as well as St Michael’s, which had joined in 1881, and then Trinity, which joined federation in 1904, taught the traditional college subjects, Greek and Latin; English,

252 Arts and Science at Toronto

French, and German; ancient history, orientals, and ethics. All the rest – Italian and Spanish, philosophy and history, all the sciences and the emerging social sciences – were assigned to the university. Only with the adoption of the ‘New Programme’ did that distribution of teaching responsibilities disappear and all disciplines become ‘university disciplines’ in the Faculty of Arts and Science. One inheritance from the original King’s College and the first years of the University of Toronto did not last that long. The university admitted its first female students, nine in all, in 1884. Their admission had been bitterly resisted by many of the university’s and University College’s senior statesmen, led by Sir Daniel Wilson. Wilson professed to support university education for females, but not with men, not at Toronto. Only a strongly supported motion in favour of the admission of women to Toronto by the provincial legislature forced the issue upon Wilson and his colleagues. One hundred years after the proclamation of the Federation Act, as Dean Armstrong prepared to take up new responsibilities as president of the University of New Brunswick, there were nine colleges for arts and science students at Toronto, seven on the St George campus, one at Erindale (within the faculty), and another autonomous college at Scarborough. The division between college and university subjects was gone, as were the former pass and honour degrees, the latter the foundation of Armstrong’s own post-secondary education in the late 1950s at University College. Three- and four-year degrees remained, along with now hundreds of courses and programs of study taken by tens of thousands of students engaged in full- and part-time study. Female students now made up a large and growing proportion of the enrolment in Arts and Science. Female members of the faculty – Helen Hogg in astronomy, Mossie May Kirkwood in English, Madeline Fritz in geology, and Elizabeth Allin in physics – were a rarity in Arts and Science until well after the Second World War. By 1990 they were beginning to make up a significant portion of the teaching and research faculty membership. In 1990 the students’ newspaper, the Varsity, older than the faculty itself, was still a voice for student interests and concerns, a recorder of student activities, and a commentator on all sort of matters great and small. In 1850, fewer than three dozen young men from the 10,000 strong city of Toronto, most Anglicans, made up the initial class in the Faculty of Arts. In 1990 tens of thousands of women and men, some fresh from secondary school and others seniors in their retirement years, from a metropolitan area of several million people, from across Ontario and the other provinces of Canada and, in

Renewal

253

rapidly increasing numbers, from foreign lands around the world, were enrolled in Arts and Science. Ramsay Wright, the first dean of Arts in the post-1890 period, had few decanal duties beyond chairing a number of Faculty of Arts Council committees. (The president of the university chaired the council). In those committees and the council it was often the senior professoriate, the ‘lions’ of the faculty, who had the dominant voice. As late as the 1960s and 1970s faculty council was, in philosopher Robert McRae’s words, ‘the great gladiatorial forum for autocrats.’87 Samuel Beatty, dean from 1936 to 1952, had no office, no staff, and much the same limited responsibilities as Wright before him. It was only in Vincent Bladen’s deanship, 1959–66, and Claude Bissell’s presidency, that the dean of Arts began to assume a larger role in the leadership of the faculty, and an office for the dean and his tiny staff was created at the west end of the second floor of newly opened Sidney Smith Hall. In their day Bladen and Bissell could truly be said to have run the Faculty of Arts and Science, with consultations of colleagues as they pleased, largely by themselves. Very gradually during the deanships of Bert Allen, Bob Greene, and Arthur Kruger, the responsibilities of the deanship grew, especially after the implementing of the Haist rules on appointments and tenure and the ever-growing budgetary responsibilities of the dean’s office. Consultations multiplied, committees proliferated, and vice-deans and associate deans were appointed to shoulder some of the dean’s workload. By the time Robin Armstrong was appointed in 1982, the deanship carried with it a large and diverse package of managerial responsibilities and functions. The director of student records of Armstrong’s first term became registrar in his second. The student affairs officer became faculty secretary. The faculty’s financial officer was joined by new staff appointees in human relations and public relations. Collaboration with other divisions, always an important item on a dean’s agenda, by the 1980s had become a major part of the Arts and Science dean’s responsibilities. Hundreds of students in other divisions took Arts and Science courses and hundreds of Arts and Science students took interdisciplinary courses and interfaculty programs of study. The appointment of Marsha Chandler, an accomplished scholar in public policy and law, as the new dean of Arts and Science was announced in October 1990. A graduate of the College of the City of New York who completed her doctoral studies at the University of North Carolina, Chandler had begun her Toronto career at Erindale College before moving to the St George campus and becoming associate chair

254 Arts and Science at Toronto

and later chair of the Department of Political Science. ‘The greatest challenge for the dean,’ Chandler told the Varsity, ‘ is to work with the departments, colleges and student organizations to forge a greater commitment to teaching in a research university.’88 Ramsay Wright would hardly have recognized the faculty that Chandler was about to lead. But with her challenge, and her priority, he would have heartily agreed.

Appendices

This page intentionally left blank

Appendices

Appendix A Deans of the Faculty of Arts / Arts and Science James Beaven, Metaphysics and Ethics, 1844–50 (King’s College), 1850–3 (University of Toronto) Robert Ramsay Wright, Biology/Zoology, 1901–12 Alfred Baker, Mathematics, 1912–19 Arthur Philemon Coleman, Geology, 1919–22 Alfred Tennyson DeLeury, Mathematics, 1922–34 Francis Barclay Allan, Chemistry, 1934–6 Samuel Beatty, Mathematics, 1936–52 Moffat St Andrew Woodside, Classics, 1952–9 Vincent Whellen Bladen, Political Economy, 1959–66 Albert Derrick Allen, Chemistry, 1966–72 Robert Greene, English, 1972–7 Arthur Martin Kruger, Economics, 1977–82 Robin L. Armstrong, Physics, 1982–90 Marsha A Chandler, Political Science, 1990–7 Carl Amrhein, Geography, 1997–2003 Pekka K. Sinervo, Physics, 2003–8 Meric Gertler, Geography, 2009–

257

258 Appendices

Appendix B Enrolment in Arts and Science, 1906–71 1st year students

Total students

Number of women

Percentage of women

1906–7 1907–8 1908–9 1909–10 1910–11 1911–12 1912–13 1913–14 1914–15 1915–16 1916–17 1917–18 1918–19 1919–20 1920–1 1921–2 1922–3 1923–4 1924–5 1925–6 1926–7 1927–8 1928–9 1929–30 1930–1 1931–2 1932–3 1933–4 1934–5 1935–6 1936–7 1937–8

482 513 529 607 543 584 484 538 398 411 496 739 763 841 682 584 714 733 810 830 850 1,062 966 896 1,087 1,046 1,007 969 989 906

1,414 1,774 2,138 2,313 1,530 1,669 1,846 1,645 2,161 1,853 1,389 1,244 1,449 1,991 2,203 2,454 2,287 2,331 2,500 2,626 2,780 3,044 3,327 3,686 3,924 3,870 3,958 3,766 3,723 4,030 4,152 3,963

531 565 538 504 560 592 527 597 670 643 672 746 819 918 1,112 1,105 1,154 1,189 1,246 1,295 1,374 1,489 1,603 1,728 1,680 1,741 1,630 1,554 1,796 1,851 1,724

29.93 26.43 23.25 32.94 33.55 32.06 32.03 27.63 36.16 46.29 54.02 51.48 41.13 41.67 45.31 48.31 49.5 47.56 47.45 46.58 45.14 44.75 43.49 44.04 43.41 43.99 43.28 41.74 44.56 44.58 43.5

1938–9 1939–40

838 890

3,803 3,648

1,643 1,563

43.2 42.84

Year

Number of ex-service

Appendices

259

Enrolment in Arts and Science, 1906–71 (continued) Year 1940–1 1941–2 1942–3 1943–4 1944–5 1945–6 1946–7 1947–8 1948–9 1949–50 1950–1 1951–2 1952–3 1953–4 1954–5 1955–6 1956–7 1957–8 1958–9 1959–60 1960–1 1961–2 1962–3 1963–4 1964–5 1965–6 1966–7 1967–8 1968–9 1969–70 1970–1 1971–2

1st year students

Total students

Number of women

Percentage of women

837 909 1,024 951 1,053 2,267 2,551 2,172 1,566 1,288 1,195 1,137 1,120 1,082 1,176 1,185 1,200 1,485 1,622 1,630 1,895 2,153 2,327 2,498 2,764 3,057 3,353 3,617 4,055 4,392 4,237 4,417

3,464 3,322 3,256 3,126 3,288 5,652 7,361 8,051 7,161 6,038 5,403 5,054 4,763 3,987 4,384 4,819 5,226 5,796 6,597 6,750 7,222 7,905 8,991 9,965 10,872 11,749 12,727 13,855 15,688 17,151 19,251 20,772

1,532 1,564 1,619 1,786 2,025 2,506 2,430 2,770 2,573 2,323 2,139 2,042 4,899 1,704 1,891 2,155 2,267 2,437 2,748 2,896 3,076 3,456 4,076 4,547 5,091 5,545 6,104 6,561 7,574 8,389 9,528 10,683

44.22 47.08 49.45 57.13 61.56 44.38 33.01 34.4 35.93 38.47 39.59 40.4 39.87 42.74 43.13 44.71 43.38 42.04 41.65 42.9 42.59 43.72 45.33 45.63 46.83 47.19 47.96 47.35 48.28 48.91 49.49 51.43

Number of ex-service

1,300 3,230 2,980 1,984 1,022 484 125 75

260 Appendices

Appendix C Enrolment in Arts and Science, 1965–90 St George Winter 65/6 Full time Part time Total

8,155 3,403 11,558

Winter 66/7 Full time Part time Total

Scarborough

Erindale

Total

191

8,153 3,403 11,749

8,530 3,694 12,224

503

8,530 3,694 12,727

Winter 67/8 Full time Part time Total

8,758 3,124 11,882

1,563

Winter 68/9 Full time Part time Total

8,914 3,809 12,723

Winter 69/70 Full time Part time Total

10,089 5,796 15,885

Winter 70/1 Full time Part time Total

8,931 5,246 14,177

Winter 71/2 Full time Part time Total Winter 72/3 Full time Part time Total

410

13,855

841

8,914 3,809 15,688

1,483

10,089 5,796 19,980

2,215

8,331 5,246 19,251

9,114 5,962 15,076

1,893 705 2,598

11,007 6,667 17,674

9,512 5,788 15,300

2,213 900 3,113

11,725 6,688 18,413

2,124

2,612

2,859

Appendices

Enrolment in Arts and Science, 1965–90 (continued) St George Winter 73/4 Full time Part time Total

Erindale

Total

9,716

2,496

6,277 15,993

1,051 3,547

12,214 7,328 19,540

Winter 74/5 Full time Part time Total

Scarborough

No data

Winter 75/6 Full time Part time Total

10,226 6,167 16,393

3,570 937 4,507

13,796 7,104 20,900

Winter 76/7 Full time Part time Total

10,105 5,599 15,704

3,596 1,066 4,662

13,701 6,665 20,366

Winter 77/8 Full time Part time Total

9,628 5,509 15,137

3,584 1,063 4,647

13,212 6,572 19,784

Winter 78/9 Full time Part time Total

10,388 6,018 16,406

3,363 1,197 4,560

13,751 7,215 20,966

Winter 79/80 Full time Part time Total

11,000 5,921 16,921

3,594 1,161 4,755

14,594 7,082 21,676

Winter 80/1 Full time Part time Total

10,959 6,187 17,146

3,597 1,275 4,872

14,556 7,462 22,018

261

262 Appendices

Enrolment in Arts and Science, 1965–90 (continued) Winter 81/2 Full time

11,411

3,973

15,884

Part time Total

6,411 17,822

1,222 5,195

7,633 23,017

Winter 82/3 Full time Part time Total

11,208 6,885 18,093

3,701 1,390 5,091

14,909 8,275 23,184

Winter 83/4 Full time Part time Total

11,647 7,266 18,913

3,841 1,454 5,295

15,488 8,720 24,208

Winter 84/5 Full time Part time Total

11,513 7,218 18,731

3,745 1,417 5,162

15,258 8,635 23,893

Winter 85/6 Full time Part time Total

11,408 7,027 18,435

3,447 1,535 4,982

14,855 8,562 23,417

Winter 86/7 Full time Part time Total

11,470 6,944 18,414

No report to Council

18,414

Winter 87/8 Full time Part time Total

12,116 6,957 19,073

3,498 1,628 5,126

15,614 8,585 24,199

Winter 88/9 Full time Part time Total

12,874 7,053 19,927

3,872 1,524 5,396

16,746 8,559 25,305

Winter 89/90 Full time Part time Total

13,346 6,996 20,342

4,195 1,650 5,845

17,541 8,646 26,187

Source: Annual reports to the Council of the Faculty of Arts and Science

Appendices

263

Appendix D Teaching staff in Arts and Science, 1907–8 to 1989–90 / Selected years UT/UC

Female

Feds

1907–8 Professors Associate professors Assistant professors Lecturers Demonstrators Instructors Fellows Totals

22 18 0 17 2 1 0 60

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

17 1 0 7 0 0 0 25

1914–15 Professors Associate professors Assistant professors Lecturers Demonstrators Instructors Fellows Totals

29 22 8 27 19 5 7 117

0 0

1919–20 Professors Associate professors Assistant professors Lecturers Demonstrators Instructors Fellows Totals 1929–30 Professors Associate professors Assistant professors Lecturers

Female

0 0 0

Total

39 19 24 2 1

0

85

29 5

0 0

0 0 0

14 0 2

1 0 0

0

50

1

58 27 8 42 19 7 7 168

39 12 20 26 5 6 2 110

0 0 0 0 0 0 0

32 7 0 19 0 1 0 59

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

71 19 20 45 5 7 2 169

52 35 24 20

0 0 0 1

26 12 0 13

0 2 0 3

78 49 24 37

264 Appendices

Teaching staff in Arts and Science, 1907–8 to 1989–90 / Selected years (continued) UT/UC

Female

Feds

Female

Total

Demonstrators Instructors Fellows Totals

7 6 5 149

3 0 1 5

0 1 2 54

0 1 3 9

10 8 11 217

1938–9 Professors Associate professors Assistant professors Lecturers Demonstrators Instructors Fellows Totals

60 40 50 31 9 10 8 208

0 0 3 7 4 3 1 18

32 10 6 9 0 13 2 72

0 6 0 15 0 0 3 24

92 56 59 62 13 26 14 322

1941–2 Professors Associate professors Assistant professors Lecturers Demonstrators Instructors Fellows Totals

72 39 46 39 2 6 8 212

0 0 6 11 2 3 1 23

30 11 3 16 0 1 0 61

1 4 0 10 0 0 0 15

103 54 55 76 4 10 9 311

1949–50 Professors Associate professors Assistant professors Lecturers Demonstrators Instructors Fellows Totals

66 50 61 73 70 22 39 381

0 1 6 12 5 8 11 43

35 10 8 17 0 2 1 73

0 5 2 13 0 0 1 21

101 66 77 115 75 32 52 518

1959–60 Professors Associate professors

86 74

0 6

36 14

1 9

123 103

Appendices

265

Teaching staff in Arts and Science, 1907–8 to 1989–90 / Selected years (continued) UT/UC

Female

Feds

Female

Total

Assistant professors Lecturers Demonstrators Instructors Fellows Totals

85 90 0 12 0 347

7 10 0 8 0 31

28 11 0 2 0 91

10 3 0 0 0 23

130 114 0 22 0 492

1969–70 Professors Associate professors Assistant professors Lecturers Demonstrators Instructors Fellows Totals

277 275 281 140 0 3 0 976

7 17 39 53 0 5 0 121

53 42 30 29 0 0 0 154

7 10 16 16 0 1 0 50

344 344 366 238 0 9 0 1,301

1979–80 Professors Associate professors Assistant professors Lecturers Totals

497 503 184 66 1,250

72 86 15 5 178

569 589 199 71 1,428

1989–90 Professors Associate professors Assistant professors Lecturers Totals

613 375 172 23 1,183

66 59 7

679 434 179 23 1,315

132

Notes: First female Lecturer was Miss Margaret Eleanora Theodore Addison, BA, Ger[?], Victoria, appointed 1907–8 for 1908–9 session. First female professor was Miss V.E.W.M. Mueller, MA, PhD, Ger, SMC. Promoted 1938–9 for 1939–40 session. The Faculty of Arts and Science calendar stopped differentiating teaching staff by gender in the 1970s. Source: Calendars of University of Toronto Faculty of Arts / Arts and Science

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

1. A Provincial University 1 Cited in Friedland, The University of Toronto: A History, 5. 2 Craig, Upper Canada, The Formative Years, 25. 3 S.R. Mealing, ‘John Graves Simcoe,’ Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB), vol. 5. 4 Craig, Upper Canada, 182 and Mealing, ‘Simcoe,’ DCB, vol. 5. 5 Statutes of the Province of Ontario, 1871, cap. xxxiii, sect. 34ff. 6 Ibid., pp. 184–5; A. Wilson, ‘John Baron Seaton Colborn,’ DCB, vol. 9; Friedland, University of Toronto, 17–18. 7 Careless, The Union of the Canadas, 4. 8 J. Monet, ‘Sir Charles Bagot,’ DCB, vol. 7. 9 Cited in Brook and McBryde, Historical Distillates, 28. 10 Wallace, A History of the University of Toronto, 1827–1927, 42 and Slater, Minerva’s Aviary, 41–5. 11 McKillop, Matters of Mind: The University in Ontario, 1791–1951, 47–52 and 103; Slater, Minerva’s Aviary, 44. See also Harris, Studies in English at Toronto: A History, 6–7. 12 McKillop, Matters of Mind, 47–52; Slater, Minerva’s Aviary, 44. 13 Wallace, History, 56–7; M.S. Cross and R.L. Fraser, ‘Robert Baldwin,’ DCB, vol. 8; Sissons, A History of Victoria University, 81–2; and Careless, Union of the Canadas, 123. 14 Cited in Blackburn, Evolution of the Heart: A History of the University of Toronto Library up to 1981, 14. 15 Wallace, History, 57; Reed, A History of the University of Trinity College, 1852–1952, 39–40. 16 Wallace, History, 259 and 261; Slater, Minerva’s Aviary, 34.

268

Notes to pages 8–15

17 Slater, 45; Friedland, University of Toronto, 32. 18 Blackburn, Evolution of the Heart, 11. 19 Wallace, History, 64–5; Sissons, Victoria, 92; Richardson, A Not Unsightly Building: University College and Its History, 3; Careless, Union of the Canadas, 271. See also D. Gidney, ‘Egerton Ryerson,’ DCB, vol. 11. 20 Wallace, History, 67; Harris, Studies in English, 7–11, Craigie, A History of the Department of Zoology of the University of Toronto up to 1962, 7–8. 21 Harris, Studies in English, 13–14. 22 Langton, Sir Daniel Wilson: A Memoir, 59–60. 23 University College, The Calendar, 1857–58, 8 and The Calendar of University College, Toronto, 1865–66, 49. 24 McKillop, Matters of Mind, 90. 25 Averill and Keith, ‘Sir Daniel Wilson and the University of Toronto,’ in Hulse, Thinking with Both Hands, 145. 26 Brook and McBryde, Historical Distillates, 35 and Richardson, A Not Unsightly Building, 3–4. 27 Sissons, Victoria, 139, Wallace, History, 95–6, and Averill and Keith, ‘Sir Daniel Wilson,’ 174. 28 Friedland, University of Toronto, 101–5. 29 Robert Craig Brown, ‘The Roots of Federation,’ an address given at the celebration of the 100th anniversary of federation of St Michael’s College with the University of Toronto, 5 March 2010, p. 12. 30 Friedland, University of Toronto, 106–10. 31 Richardson, A Not Unsightly Building, 6–7 and C. Berger, ‘Sir Daniel Wilson,’ DCB, vol. 12. 32 Wallace, History, 130–3 and Sissons, Victoria, 81–3. 33 Friedland, University of Toronto, 110. 34 See Bothwell, Laying the Foundation, 20. 35 Cited in Drummond, Political Economy at the University of Toronto, 18. 36 Drummond notes that though the head of the department was the professor of political economy, the ‘Department’ was called Political Science and was usually so called until the 1930s. Its Honour Course was called ‘Political Science and Economics,’ but in the university calendar was usually referred to as ‘Political Economy.’ Political Economy, 53. 37 Averill and Keith, ‘Sir Daniel Wilson,’ 164. 38 Drummond, Political Economy, 16–19. On Ashley’s Toronto career, see the full account here in chap. 3. 39 Wallace, History, 259. 40 Averill and Keith, ‘Sir Daniel Wilson,’ 177 and McKillop, Matters of the Mind, 87. But see Report of the Minister of Education, Ontario, for the years 1880 and

Notes to pages 16–23

41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54

55

269

1881, 357–67, which reports only 267 students in arts. The figure of University College may well have included students in other faculties like medicine who were taking some of their required subjects in University College, thus accounting for the higher number reported by University College. See D. Roberts, ‘Hart Almerrin Massey,’ DCB, vol. 12. Friedland, University of Toronto, 76–9; Allin, Physics at the University of Toronto, 1–6; Gingras, Physics and the Rise of Scientific Research in Canada, 12–17; Craigie, History of the Department of Zoology, 13–16; and White, The Skule Story: The University of Toronto Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, 1873–2000, 14–17. Brook and McBryde, Historical Distillates, 51. Cited in Murray, Working in English, 27. Cited ibid., 37. McKillop, Matters of the Mind, 219. Rouillard et al., French Studies at the University of Toronto, 1853 to 1993, 14–15. Wallace, History, 104–5 and Bothwell, Laying the Foundation, 15. Berger, ‘Sir Daniel Wilson,’ DCB, vol. 12. Cited in Ford, A Path Not Strewn with Roses: One Hundred Years of Women at the University of Toronto, 1884–1984, 12 and see Averill and Keith, ‘Sir Daniel Wilson,’ 166–72. The Varsity, 3 November 1883, p. 1. Letitia Catherine Salter was appointed and served the university in that capacity with distinction until 1916. Ford, A Path Not Strewn, 12–13. Blackburn, Evolution of the Heart, 54 and Burke, ‘New Women and Old Romans,’ 224–7. Burke adds that by 1885, under different editorial leadership, the Varsity was back in favour of co-education. Murray, Working in English, 40 n. 3. 2. The Faculty of Arts

1 See Fasti Academici: Annals of King’s College, Toronto (Henry Rowsell, 1850), passim. 2 UTA (University of Toronto Archives), James A. McLean to his sister, 16 February 1890, B1983-1240. 3 Cited in Shore, ‘“Nebulous Penumbra”: James Mark Baldwin and the Borderlands of Psychology,’ in G. Friesen and D. Owram, Thinkers and Dreamers: Historical Essays in Honour of Carl Berger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 101.

270

Notes to pages 23–32

4 McLean to his sister, 16 Feb. 1890. 5 Ibid. 6 Wallace, History, 145, Friedland, University of Toronto, chap. 14, and Berger, ‘Wilson,’ DCB, vol. 12. 7 Blackburn, Evolution of the Heart, 91–6 and Wallace, History, 144. 8 Friedland, University of Toronto, 153–4. 9 Ibid., 154. 10 UTA, Report of the President, University of Toronto, 1907, p. 7. 11 UTA, Registrar’s Office, University of Toronto Calendar, 1904–5, appendix, pp. 2–13. 12 White, Skule Story, 34 and 50. Though the University Act of 1906 formally ended the official existence of the School of Practical Science, the designation SPS lived on in student references well into the later years of the twentieth century. 13 Friedland, University of Toronto, 121–5; McKillop, Matters of Mind, 159–61. For a detailed and spirited account of the controversy over Young’s successor(s) see Slater, Minerva’s Aviary, chaps. 4–6. 14 Slater, Minerva’s Aviary, chaps. 5–6. See also C. Roger Myers, ‘Psychology at Toronto,’ in Wright and Myers, eds, Academic Psychology in Canada, chap. 3. 15 Averill and Keith, ‘Wilson,’ 191–2. 16 Cited in Slater, Minerva’s Aviary, 175–6. 17 D.B. Marshall, ‘William Dale,’ DCB, vol. 14. 18 Bothwell, Laying the Foundation, 23–9; Friedland, University of Toronto, 161–4. 19 The Varsity, 17 October 1884. 20 Ibid., 7 November 1884. 21 Friedland, University of Toronto, 164–6; Marshall, ‘Dale,’ DCB, vol. 14. 22 Library and Archives Canada (LAC), William Lyon Mackenzie King diaries, 15 February 1895. 23 Ibid., 18, 19, and 20 February 1895. 24 Friedland, University of Toronto, 167–8; LAC, King diaries, 22 April 1895. 25 McKillop, Matters of Mind, 157. 26 Ibid. 27 UTA, Blake to Langton, 5 June 1900, B1983-1190. 28 Langton to Blake, 7 June 1900, ibid.; see also Calendar for 1901–02, University of Toronto, pp. 50–3. 29 UTA, ‘University of Toronto. Confidential Memorandum,’ n.d., in Blake to Langton, 19 January 1900, B1983-1190. Blake writes: ‘I send you as private and confidential a copy of a Memorandum which I have submitted to the Premier.’

Notes to pages 32–40

271

30 Reed, Trinity, 124–6. 31 UTA, ‘Confidential Memorandum,’ nos. 5 and 18; UTA, Loudon to Harcourt, 9 April 1901, B72-0031/12 (09); and UTA, University of Toronto Statutes, University of Toronto Act, 1901, sections 22, 26, and 29. In addition, section 39 said that the lieutenant governor might appoint ‘one of the Deans of Faculties to act for and perform the duties of Vice President in the case of the latter’s [i.e., the president’s] illness or absence.’ 32 The following year, 1902, Loudon appointed Ramsay Wright as the university’s first vice president. When Ramsay Wright retired in 1912 the position of vice president was not filled by President Falconer. 33 Sissons, Victoria, 223 and Friedland, University of Toronto, 193–4. 34 Reed, Trinity, 133–4. 35 See J.G. Greenlee, ‘James Loudon,’ DCB, vol. 14. 36 Friedland, University of Toronto, 172. 37 Ibid., 193; P.E.P. Dembski, ‘Sir William Ralph Meredith,’ DCB, vol. 15, and C.W. Humphries, ‘Sir James Pliny Whitney,’ DCB, vol. 14. 38 Brown, ‘Sir John Cunningham McLennan.’ 39 Friedland, University of Toronto, 197–200. 40 Prentice, ‘Allin,’ 269–70. 41 D. Kimmel, ‘Sir Byron Edmund Walker,’ DCB, vol. 15. 42 Friedland, University of Toronto, 202. 43 McKillop, Matters of Mind, 165–6; Friedland, University of Toronto, 204–9; Wallace, History, 169–70; Sissons, Victoria, 227–8; Blackburn, Evolution of the Heart, 10. There was more in the recommendations and subsequent act including the admission of women to the Faculty of Medicine and new faculties of forestry, education, and household science. 44 Cited in Axelrod, Scholars and Dollars, 12. 45 Friedland, University of Toronto, 208. 46 Greenlee, Sir Robert Falconer: A Biography, 118ff.; Friedland, University of Toronto, 211–15; Wallace, History, 173–4. 47 UTA, University of Toronto Statutes, University of Toronto Act, 1906, sect. 66. 48 Friedland, University of Toronto, 117; Wallace, History, 180. 3. New Beginnings 1 Cited in Bliss, A Canadian Millionaire, 177. 2 Cited in Greenlee, Falconer, 123; see also Friedland, University of Toronto, 219 and University of Toronto Monthly 5.8, pp. 6–14. 3 Friedland, University of Toronto, 219.

272

Notes to pages 40–9

4 From 2500 in 1906 to 3500 in 1908. Wallace, History, 178–9. 5 Greenlee, Falconer, 165 and White, Skule Story, 73. 6 University of Toronto, Calendar of the Faculty of Arts, 1907–08 and 1914–15. The numbers were counted and compiled by the author. 7 Greenlee, Falconer, 169–70; Friedland, University of Toronto, 413 and Wallace, History, 178–9. 8 Rouillard, French Studies, 62. 9 White, Skule Story, 69. 10 Rouillard et al., French Studies, 54–5; Friedland, University of Toronto, 108–9. 11 Slater, Minerva’s Aviary, 537–8; Ford, Path Not Strewn, 343–5; Harris, English Studies, 52–3; and Friedland, University of Toronto, 216–17. The full arrangement was given legislative sanction in another University of Toronto Act in 1913. 12 University of Toronto, Calendar, Faculty of Arts, 1907–08, 45–52. Obviously, after St Michael’s was recognized as a federated arts college in 1910, it had proportionate membership on both the senate and the Faculty of Arts council. 13 Ibid., 53–75. 14 The Varsity, 9 October 1914, p. 4 and 5 December 1908, p. 3. 15 Calendar, Faculty of Arts, 1907–08, 76–8 and 203–22. 16 UTA, Minutes of the Council of the Faculty of Arts, 6 June 1906, A71006/001. A Board of Graduate Studies, established in 1903 during Loudon’s presidency, also reported to the Arts Council. See Greenlee, Falconer, 174. 17 Minutes of the Council, 6 June. 18 Ibid., 7 October 1907. 19 Greenlee, Falconer, 135. 20 For a concise analysis of the rise of higher criticism in Canada see Cook, The Regenerators, passim. 21 See UTA, Martin Friedland Papers, B2002-0022/038, file 15, note re ‘Higher Criticism,’ n.d. 22 On the dispute at Victoria, see Sissons, Victoria, 234ff., McKillop, Matters of Mind, 208, and Cook, The Regenerators, 20–4. On Carman see G.S. French, ‘Albert Carman,’ in DCB, vol. 14. 23 For a fine account of this dispute and Falconer’s role in it, see Greenlee, Falconer, 127–4. 24 The Varsity, 5 October 1909, p. 1. 25 UTA, Office of the President, Falconer Papers, Falconer to Hutton, 29 June 1911, A67-0007/026.

Notes to pages 49–58

273

26 Ibid., Falconer to Wrong, 12 June 1912, A67-007/020. Hodder Williams, a British scholar, was just joining the department. Bothwell, Laying the Foundation, 47. 27 UTA, ‘Statement to the Provincial Government,’ n.d. [July 1913–June 1914 Correspondence], A67-0007/032. 28 Hopkins, Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs (here after CAR), 1914, 415–16. 29 Cited in Friedland, University of Toronto, 235. 30 Ibid. 31 The Varsity, 1 November 1906, p. 71. 32 Friedland, University of Toronto, 229–30 and Wrong’s report to the senate, 10 March 1909, UTA, A67-0007/021. 33 UTA, Memorandum/petition to the senate by the alumni of University College, Victoria College, St Hilda’s and the Faculty of Medicine, n.d. (1909), A67-0007/021. 34 Friedland, University of Toronto, 231. 35 Falconer, ‘The University Spirit,’ The Varsity, 10 October 1907, pp. 1–5. 36 Ibid., 8–9. 37 ‘Freshettes to Be Received,’ The Varsity, 5 October 1909, p. 1. 38 ‘Basketball Team Win First Game,’ The Varsity, 10 January 1911, p. 1. 39 ‘Ladies Tennis Draw’ and ‘Coming Events,’ The Varsity, 16 October 1912, p. 1. 40 ‘Coming Events,’ The Varsity, 26 February 1912, p. 1. 41 The Varsity, 8 December 1908, p. 4, 10 December 1908, p. 3, and 9 October 1914, p. 4. 42 The Varsity, 11 October 1911, p. 1 and Brook and McBryde, Historical Distillates, 77. 43 See Brown and Cook, Canada, 1896–1921, chaps. 10 and 11 and Brown, Borden, vol. 2, chap. 1. 44 The Varsity, 30 September 1914, p. 1. 4. The Great War 1 The Varsity, 30 September 1914, pp. 1, 3. 2 The Varsity, 5 October 1914, p. 1. 3 The Varsity, 30 September 1919, p. 1 and ‘Sir Ernest MacMillan,’ in The Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, at www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com. MacMillan would later become dean of the Faculty of Music and principal of the Toronto Conservatory of Music. Another student, J.D. Ketchum, also

274

4

5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14

15

16

17 18 19 20

Notes to pages 58–63

in Germany at the beginning of the war, was initially interned at Ruhleben, the same camp that MacMillan was in. For Ketchum’s story see Ketchum, Ruhleben: A Prison Camp Society. Brook and McBryde, Historical Distillates, 77–80. Brook and McBryde add that at war’s end Lang wanted to return to the headship of chemistry and direct a newly formed Department of Military Studies in the Faculty of Arts as well as resuming command of the continuing COTC program. Falconer refused, only allowing Lang to continue teaching chemistry to first-year medical students while leading the military studies program. Headship of the chemistry department passed to William Lash Miller, easily the department’s most distinguished scientist, who had informally been leading the department since 1914. Massey went on to command the School of Musketry at Hart House. Brook and McBryde, Historical Distillates, 78. The Varsity, 19 October 1914, p. 1 (‘Drill Precedes Play’), 30 September, p. 1, and 11 November, p. 3 (photographs of parading groups). The Varsity, 28 October 1915, p. 3. The Varsity, 9 October 1914 and University of Toronto, Roll of Service, 1914– 1918, xiv. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto: Harold Averill, curator, Dramatis Personae, an exhibition of amateur theatre at the University of Toronto, 1879–1939. The Varsity, 11 December 1914, p. 3; 14 December, p. 3; 13 January 1915, p.3; 18 January, 1915, p. 3; and 15 February, p. 1 (Taft visit). University of Toronto Roll of Service, 1914–1918, p. xxv. Friedland, University of Toronto, 253–4. UTA, Falconer to McLennan, 27 October 1917, A67-0007, box 53a. Roll of Service, xvi–xvii and 80; UTA, Resolution of University College, 1918–1919, Falconer Papers, A67-007, box 55; and Friedland, University of Toronto, 255. Roll of Service, xix–xxi; and LAC, RG 24 (Department of National Defence), vol. 19053, J.N.E. Brown, ‘The Military Hospitals of Toronto during the Great War,’ file 1451-1/8. The author took a graduate course in Tudor-Stuart history from McDougall in 1957–8, did a doctoral field under his supervision, and read for him weekly while a graduate student in history. Wise, Canadian Airmen, 84–98. Roll of Service, xix and xxv. The Varsity, 13 January 1915, p. 4. Ibid., 6 October 1915, p. 1.

Notes to pages 63–70 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45

275

Roll of Service, xxvi–xxvii and Greenlee, Falconer, 246–9. CAR, 1914, 265–6. Ibid., 266. UTA, University Senate, Minutes, 9 and 22 November 1914, A1968-0012. UTA, Board of Governors, Minutes, 3 December 1914, A1975-1092. Professor Greenlee writes that Mueller was not in Falconer’s jurisdiction because he was at Trinity. But Falconer’s report clearly states that Mueller ‘is Associate Professor of German in University College. See Greenlee, Falconer, 204. Greenlee, Falconer, 267–8. Wilson, Ontario and the First World War, 163–4; Bliss, A Canadian Millionaire, 242–4; and Friedland, University of Toronto, 260–1. UTA, Falconer to Ramsay Wright, 18 December 1914, A67-0007, box 36. The Varsity, 4 December 1914, p. 2. CAR, 1914, 267. Slater, Minerva’s Aviary, 231. Cited in Friedland, University of Toronto, 261. UTA, Falconer to Ramsay Wright, 22 April 1915, A67-0007, box 36. See also MacPhail, Official History of Canadian Forces: Medical Services, 43–4. See Friedland, University of Toronto, 264–6 and R.C. Brown, ‘Lawrence Bruce Robertson,’ DCB, vol. 15. LAC, Sir George Eulas Foster Papers, Diary, October 1915–September 1917, MG 27, II, D7. See Bliss, A Canadian Millionaire, chap. 13. Friedland, University of Toronto, 262. Bothwell, Laying the Foundation, 56 and Brown, Borden, vol. 2, 131. Brown, ‘Sir John Cunningham McLennan,’ 94–5. McLennan’s work on helium in Canada is fully detailed in Countryman, Helium for Airships and Science. UTA, Falconer to McLennan, 14 September 1917, A67-0007, box 48a. UTA, McLennan to Falconer, 18 September 1917, A67-0007, box 48a. UTA, taped interview of Frank Cooley, 1986, B86-0017 (02). UTA, Horace Holmes interview, 1986, B86-0017 (01). Cited in Langton, McLennan, 55. UTA, Janet Cumming McLennan papers, McLennan to Falconer, 3 January 1919, B81-0034 (box 1, file 3). McLennan went on to ask Falconer to consider ‘whether the salary attached to the Chair of Physics in Toronto is adequate under present conditions. The chairs at Sheffield and Birmingham, both of which I have declined to take since I came over, each now carry a salary of £1000 per annum.’ At the end of the month Falconer replied that the

276

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Notes to pages 70–8

question of salaries was ‘very difficult at present.’ Ibid., Falconer to McLennan, 27 January 1919. UTA, McLennan to Falconer, 5 August 1919, A67-0007, box 59a. The Varsity, 24 January 1956, p. 1. Friedland, University of Toronto, 292. Craigie, Zoology, 37–8, Friedland, University of Toronto, 226, and White, Skule Story, 126. Slater, Minerva’s Aviary, 206 and 209. Wallace, History, 202. University of Toronto, Calendar of the Faculty of Arts, 1914–1915 and 1919–1920. University of Toronto, Roll of Service, 1914–1918, xxviii. Ibid., 529–30. Cited in CAR, 1919, 564. 5. Between Wars

1 Thompson and Seager, Canada, 1922–1939. 2 See Ramsay Cook, ‘The Triumph and Trials of Materialism,’ in Brown, Illustrated History, 377–472 and Granatstein et al., Nation, 277–336. 3 From 779 thousand in 1919 to 1.34 million in 1939. Urquhart and Buckley, Historical Statistics, tables S323–31. 4 Ibid., tables B34–8. 5 Ibid., tables S222–35. 6 Ibid., tables S236–9. 7 The Varsity, 27 January 1919, p. 1 and White, Skule Story, 121–2. 8 Ibid., 29 September 1922, p. 1. 9 Ibid., 26 September 1923, p. 1. 10 Ibid., 11 December 1923, p. 1. 11 Ibid., 28 September 1928, p. 1. 12 Ibid., 21 October 1928, p. 1. 13 Ibid., 14 November 1919, p. 1. 14 Ibid., 25 October 1922, p. 1. 15 Ibid., 15 December 1924, p. 1. 16 Ibid., 26 February 1925, p. 1. 17 Ibid., 16 November 1925, p. 1. 18 Ibid., 10 October 1927, p. 1. 19 Ibid., 16 March 1928, p. 1. See also Kidd, ‘Canadians and the Olympics,’ 2. 20 Ibid., ‘Frats Flourish on U of T Campus’; ‘At the present time over thirty societies have chapters in Toronto including seven sororities.’ 16 October 1923, p. 1.

Notes to pages 78–81

277

21 Note by archivist Harold Averill to author, 13 June 2008. 22 The Varsity, 7 December 1921; 5 November 1924, p. 1; 30 September 1925, p. 1; and 7 November 1928, p. 1. 23 Ibid., 10 January 1923, p. 1; 11 March 1927, p. 1; 7 November 1928, p. 1; 10 January 1929, p. 1; and 9 January 1930, p. 1. 24 Ibid., 25 October 1922, p. 1. 25 Ibid., 26 February 1925, p. 1. 26 Ibid., 5 November 1929, p. 1. 27 UTA, Report of the President, 1928–9, p. 9. 28 UTA, Sydney Hermant interview, 1978, B1978-0022, p. 1. 29 There was an exception. St Michael’s College, which attracted many students from the United States, continued enrolling students with grade 12 standing at Assumption College at the University of Western Ontario for their first year, then transferred them to St Michael’s. In fact, this was a paper transaction only: though enrolled for first year at Assumption, the students never left St Michael’s. Father Laurence Shook, the historian of St Michael’s, noted that the procedure with US students was necessary for the college ‘because they were in these depression years almost the only students still paying tuition.’ Cited in Axelrod, Making a Middle Class, 32. 30 UTA, Report of the President, 1929–30, pp. 6–7. 31 Ibid., 1931–2, p. 4. 32 The official age of retirement was sixty-five, but Falconer had a special committee which recommended to him whether or not a retiree should be reappointed on annual appointment after sixty-five. All were required to retire at seventy years of age. Slater, Minerva’s Aviary, 235. 33 The Varsity, 26 September 1923, p. 1. Mavor’s title was Professor of Political Economy, but the department was called Political Science until 1924, when it was retitled the Department of Political Economy. Note from archivist Harold Averill to author, 13 June 2008, and Drummond, Political Economy, 53. 34 The Varsity, 1 October 1926, p. 1. 35 Drummond, Political Economy, 55–6. 36 The Varsity, 27 September 1923, p. 1. 37 UTA, Report of the President, 1919–20, pp. 42–50 and 1929–30, pp. 94–107. 38 UTA, Mossie May (Waddington) Kirkwood interview, p. 28. As a woman, Kirkwood’s lot in English at University College was not easy. She recalled that in 1923 she was going to be married to Professor Kirkwood of Trinity College and so informed Principal Malcolm Wallace, who ‘didn’t fancy married women on the staff.’ The matter went to the college council, which concluded that she would have to be replaced. None of her successors

278

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51

52

53 54 55

56 57

58

Notes to pages 82–4

worked, and, though married, Wallace again offered her an appointment as the first dean of women at the college. See ibid, pp. 15–17. Ibid. Brown, Illustrated History, 449. Urquhart and Buckley, Historical Statistics, tables C47–55. Ibid., tables D280–7. Thompson and Seager, Canada, 1922–1939, 210. Ibid., 254. Ibid., 234. Friedland, University of Toronto, 323. For a somewhat different range of cuts in the grant between 1930 and 1935, see Masters, Henry John Cody, 190–3. UTA, Richard M. Saunders interview, 1973, B1974-0027, p. 79. UTA, Report of the President, 1931–2, p. 3. UTA, Report of the President, 1935–6, p. 8. Cody did not address the subject of salaries again in his annual reports during the remainder of the 1930s. Salaries were frozen during the Second World War at a floor level of $2000 for lecturers – just what Saunders had been offered when he was appointed in 1930 – and $5500 for full professors. See Drummond, Political Economy, 87. Ford, Path Not Strewn, 58 and Blackburn, Evolution of the Heart, 104. UTA, Report of the President, 1930–1, p. 2 and Friedland, University of Toronto, 306–8. In 1941 the Department of Law in Arts became the School of Law with W.P.M. Kennedy at its dean. Friedland, University of Toronto, 306–7 and UTA, Bora Laskin interview, pp. 3 and 47. UTA, Report of the President, 1933–4, p. 6. Chant had been a professor of astrophysics in the physics department since 1918 and had been on staff since 1907. The observatory was formally opened a year later, on 31 May 1935. UTA, Report of the President, 1934–5, pp. 4–5. UTA, Report of the President, 1937–8, pp. 6–7. UTA, Report of the President, 1939–40, p. 4. On anthropology see Friedland, University of Toronto, 330 and on sociology, UTA, Report of the President, 1937–8, pp. 11–12. Sociology did not achieve full independent status until 1963. Drummond, Political Economy, 100. UTA, Report of the President, 1931–2, p 6. A department of fine art had originally been recommended in the 1906 royal commission. UTA, Report of the President, 1932–3, p. 5 and 1934–5, pp. 10–11; Masters, Cody, 190–3 and Friedland, University of Toronto, 326. An excellent analysis of the creation and early years of the Department of Fine Art is Panayotidis, ‘The Department of Fine Art,’ 100–22. University of Toronto, Calendar of the Faculty of Arts, 1929–30 and 1939–40.

Notes to pages 86–90

279

59 Cited in H. Blair Neatby, ‘William Lyon Mackenzie King,’ in Cook and Belanger, eds, Canada’s Prime Ministers, 286–7. 60 Friedland, University of Toronto, 318 and UTA, George Maximilian Grube interview, p. 38, B1974-0028. 61 Friedland, University of Toronto, 320. See also Horn, The League for Social Reconstruction. 62 Cited in Greenlee, Falconer, 298–9. 63 Grube interview, pp. 40–2. 64 Ibid., 41. 65 On the CCF see Thompson and Seager, Canada, 1922–1939, 230–3. 66 The Varsity, 3 November 1933, p. 1. 67 Cited in Friedland, University of Toronto, 335. 68 Ibid., 335–7. 69 Ibid., pp. 348–9, McNaught, Conscience and History, 27, Wright, Professionalization of History, 121–2, and Berger, Writing of Canadian History, 79–84. Underhill remained at the University of Toronto until 1955, when he moved to Ottawa to become curator of Laurier House. 70 The Varsity, 16 January, p. 1 and 22 January, p. 1, 1931. 71 Ibid., 23 January, pp. 1–2. As significant as the support for the ‘68’ was, it is worth remembering that in the 1930–1 academic year there were 756 members of the academic staff and 7407 students registered in colleges and faculties of the university. UTA, Report of the President, 1930–1, p. 1. 72 Ibid., p. 1. 73 Ibid., 8 January 1932, p. 2. 74 Ibid., 28 September 1933, p. 1. 75 See, for example, The Varsity, 6 October 1936, p. 1 and 9 December 1937. 76 Ibid., 21 and 22 January 1936, p. 1 and 9 December 1936, p. 1. 77 Ibid., 15 February 1932, p. 1. 78 University of Toronto, Calendar of the Faculty of Arts, 1920–21, 135–40; 1930–31, 47–3; 1935–36, 46–52; and 1940–41, 195–201. 79 The Varsity, 15 February 1932, p. 1. 80 See above, pp. 41, 79. 81 The Varsity, 30 September 1932, p. 1. 82 UTA, Report of the President, 1933–4, p. 2. 83 Hermant interview, p. 13. 84 UTA, Mary Louise Northway interview, p. 32. 85 The Varsity, 5 January 1934, p. 1. The total fund for the loans was $5000, of which $1500 was available for the 1934–5 academic year, suggesting either that the joint executive did not anticipate many students needing loans or

280

86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

Notes to pages 90–8

that most students applying for loans would receive much less than the maximum $100 amount. See ibid., 4 January 1935, p. 1. Urquhart and Buckley, Historical Statistics, tables D254–66. See also Thompson and Seager, Canada 1922–1937, 138–9 and 151. Hermant interview, pp. 12–13. Bissell, Parnassus, 1. See ‘Dominion Drama Festival,’ www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com. The Varsity, 15 December 1931, pp. 4–5, 10 December 1937, pp. 5–6, and 19 January 1939, p. 4. Ibid., 17 October 1934, p. 1 and 5 October 1936, p. 1. Ibid., 29 October 1936, p. 1 and 3 December 1936, p. 2. Ibid., 22 February 1938, p. 1. Ibid., 16 November 1938, p. 1. For a masterful Canadian account of the crisis of 1939 and the outbreak of war see Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict, vol. 2, chap. 7. The Varsity, 28 September 1939, p. 1. 6. A University at War

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12

13

The Varsity, 28 September 1939, p. 1, ‘Continue Your Studies – President Cody.’ UTA, Report of the President, 1939–40, p. 1. The Varsity, 25 September 1941. Ibid., 26 September 1940, p. 1. UTA, President’s report, 1940–1, p. 7. The Varsity, 23 September 1940, p. 1 and 1 November 1940, p. 1. Ibid., 10 October 1940, p. 1, 15 October 1940, p. 1, 31 October 1940, p. 1, and 1 November 1940, p. 1. Ibid., 14 March 1941, p. 3 and President’s report, 1940–1, p. 7. President’s report, 1944–5, p. 5. Female students made up about 43% of the enrolment in arts in the immediate pre–war years. They were 49.45% of arts students in 1942–3 and 61.56% in 1944–5. The following year, when the first large group of veterans arrived in the faculty, the percentage of females was 44.38. See appendix C. The Varsity, 1 October 1942, p. 3. Friedland, University of Toronto, 341. See also Nancy Kiefer and Ruth Pierson, ‘The War Effort and Women Students at the University of Toronto, 1939– 45,’ in Axelrod and Reid, eds, Youth, University, and Canadian Society. UTA, Hart House military film, ‘Second World War: 1942–1943,’ A19730050:004. The establishment of the Naval Training Division at Toronto was announced early in February 1943. See The Varsity, 11 February 1943, p. l.

Notes to pages 99–105

281

14 ‘Science Students Regulations 1942 Declaration Forms,’ The Varsity, 2 February 1943, p. 1. 15 The Varsity, 17 February 1944, ‘Essential Courses Defined. Must Be in Top Half to Continue in Arts,’ p. 1. 16 Ibid., 10 March 1944, p. 1. 17 Ibid. 18 President’s report, 1943–4, pp. 1–2. Cody added that if any of those men were rejected by an army medical board and were then given an appropriate work permit by the National Selective Service, they could return to the university to resume their studies. 19 Ibid., 1940–1, p. 6. 20 Ibid., pp. 7 and 23–4. 21 UTA, Elizabeth Allin interview, 1993, B1993-0035/02. In 1941 Allin and her two colleagues were promoted to the rank of assistant professor at a salary of $2000. With several of the professors from the department doing war work, ‘it was necessary to have somebody appointed to enlarge the staff,’ she explained of her promotion. Allin and her colleagues were paid extra for their work with the service personnel. It ‘just about doubled our salary,’ she remembered. 22 President’s report 1940–1, p. 17, 1942–3, p. 16, and 1943–4, p. 19. Paul Stortz, in his thesis on the University of Toronto professoriate, 1935–1945, calculates that the war-related research grants in 1943–4 accounted for 24% of the university’s revenue for that year. Stortz, ‘“Have You Ever Looked into a Professor’s Soul?”’ 165. 23 Ibid., 7–8. 24 Brook and McBryde, Historical Distillates, 107. 25 President’s report, 1941–2, p. 6. 26 Ibid., 1941–2, p. 2. 27 Ibid., 1942–3, p. 3. 28 Ibid., 1943–4, p. 3 and 1944–5, p. 2. 29 UTA, C. Dana Rouillard interview, 1974, pp. 23–8, B1974-0045. 30 UTA, John Alvin Surerus interview, 1973, p. 18, B1974-0023. 31 The Varsity, 5 October 1942, p. 1. 32 Ibid., 9 October 1942, p. 1, 13 October 1942, p. 1, 14 October 1942, p. 1, 2 and November 1942, p. 1; President’s report, 1942–3, p. 7. 33 The Varsity, 5 October 1942, p. 1. 34 Ibid. 35 President’s reports, 1939–40, p. 2, 1940–1, p. 1, 1942–3, p. 2, and 1943–4, p. 1. 36 Ibid., 1941–2, p. 5, 1942–3, p. 11, and 1944–5, p. 13. 37 Ibid., 1940–1, p. 13 and 1945–6, p. 15.

282

Notes to pages 105–9

38 Ibid., 1942–3, p. 11, 1944–5, p. 13, and 1945–6, p. 15. 39 Surerus interview, 1973, p. 29, B1974-0023. Surerus was in the class of 1915 at Victoria, and in the spring of 1916 enlisted in the signals section of the Canadian engineers. He went overseas in the fall of 1916 and to France the following spring, just before the Battle of Vimy Ridge. At the time of the armistice Surerus was attached to the intelligence section of the Canadian army and was one of the first people to go into Germany after 11 November 1918. He was stationed at Bonn until he was demobilized in the summer of 1919. Ibid., pp. 24–5. 40 Friedland, University of Toronto, 342–6; Storz, ‘“Rescue Our Family,”’ 231–61. Other refugee scholars appointed in the Faculty of Arts were chemist Eric E.F. Baer; medievalist Theodore Eschmann; chemist Hermann O.L. Fischer; chemist Jean Manfred Grosheintz; German scholar Herta Hartmanshenn; physicist Bernard Haurwitz; economic historian Karl Helleiner; physicist Walther Henrick Kohl, mathematician W. Kohn; medievalist Gerhart M.A.B. Ladner; political economist Egbert Munzer; and mathematician Alexander Weinstein. See Stortz, ‘“Have You Ever Looked?”’ 204–5. Stortz, working after Friedland had completed his history of the university, has compiled the most comprehensive list to date of the refugee scholars who came to Toronto between 1935 and 1945. 41 Stortz, ‘“Have You Ever Looked?”’ 209–14 and UTA, Karl Helleiner interview, 1978, reel 2, B1978-0006/002. 42 Stortz, ‘Rescue Our Family,’ 245–50. 43 UTA, ‘A Statement Concerning the Admission of Certain Refugees to the University of Toronto in the Fall Term of 1942, By the President, Dr. H. J. Cody,’ Office of the President [Cody], A67-0006/057 (09); The Varsity, 16 November 1942, p. 1; and Friedland, University of Toronto, 346. 44 The Varsity, 16 November 1942, pp. 1 and 4. 45 Ibid., 17, 23, 24, and 25November 1942, p. 1. 46 Ibid., 11 December 1942, p. 1 and Friedland, University of Toronto, 346. 47 UTA, C.E. Higgenbottom, secretary to the board of governors, to Professor Boeschenstein, 10 May 1943 and Boeschenstein, ‘Report on Educational Activities,’ August 1944, B198-0014/002 (03). In the fall of 1942 the program asked George Brown, professor of history, to give a set of lectures on American history to prisoners at Camp no. 30 in Ontario. The following year he gave another set of lectures on Canadian history. See his report, 9 February 1944, ibid., file no. 037. 48 President’s reports, 1942–3, p. 43 and 1943–4, p. 46. 49 President’s report, 1941–2, p. 6. 50 Ibid., p. 2; The Varsity, 21 January 1943, p. 1.

Notes to pages 110–13

283

51 President’s report, 1940–1, p. 23 and 1941–2, p. 19. 52 UTA, T.F. McIlwraith to Cody, 24 December 1941, A68-0006/051 (02). 53 President’s reports, 1940–1, pp. 9–10 and 1943–4, p. 44. In 1947–8 the school was changed to become the Department of East Asiatic Studies in the Faculty of Arts. The following year L.C. Walmsley was appointed associate professor and head of department and the faculty council approved a new honour course in East Asiatic Studies. President’s reports, 1947–8, pp. 15 and 32, 1948–9, pp. 12 and 31. 54 Ibid., 1941–2, p. 8. 55 Ibid., 1942–3, p. 6. 56 Friedland, University of Toronto, 490 and President’s report, 1948–9, p. 14. 57 President’s report, 1942–3, p. 7, 1943–4, p. 6, and 1945–6, p. 9; Friedland, University of Toronto, 364–7; and Masters, Cody, 288–9. 58 President’s report, 1940–1, p. 21 (report of the dean of arts). 59 Ibid., 1944–5, p. 23. 60 The intriguing story of Cody’s sudden resignation in favour of becoming chancellor and of Smith’s becoming president is very well told in Friedland, University of Toronto, 364–9. 61 President’s report, 1945–6, p. 9. 62 UTA, Office of the President [Sidney Smith], Department of Chemistry, 1945–6, A68-0007/box 001 (09) and Department of Fine Art, 1945–6, box 001 (10). In June 1946, in response to a request from the Faculty of Arts council’s Research Committee, Smith approved the payment of $2 per day for living expenses to faculty doing research away from Toronto. Arts Research Committee, 1945–6, box 006 (01). 63 President’s report, 1945–6, pp. 8–9. 64 Ibid., p. 3; Slater, Minerva’s Aviary, 316 and Drummond, Political Economy, 87. At the same time Smith announced a new faculty pension scheme in which a teaching staff member would receive a pension at retirement (age 65–70) equivalent to 2% of his salary times his years as a member of the scheme. While on active service the member paid 5% of his salary into the scheme and the university contributed the remaining costs. Also a group life insurance plan was introduced which was especially directed at the spouses of deceased staff members. ‘At relatively low cost [not specified] and without medical examination’ the plan was intended to ‘obviate many of the grievous circumstances in which the widows of staff members who die during active service on the staff have found themselves.’ Ibid. 65 President’s report, 1944–5, p. 25 (report of the dean of arts). 66 Ibid., 1945–6, pp. 1 and 26. 67 Ibid., p. 2.

284 68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75 76

Notes to pages 113–21

UTA, Richard Merrill Saunders interview, 1973, pp. 102–3, B1974-0027. Calendar of the Faculty of Arts, 1944–45, 43–5. See White, Skule Story, 158–62. Surerus interview, p. 30. In 1945–6 there were 1300 veterans enrolled in the Faculty of Arts. Veterans’ enrolment peaked the next year at 3230, fully 43.8% of total enrolment in the faculty. By 1949–50 it had dropped to 1022. The last count of veterans in arts was in 1952–3, when 75 were enrolled. See appendix B. President’s report, 1948–9, Report of the principal of University College, p. 33. Ibid., 1950–1, p. 1. UTA, Leonard Smith interview, 1974, p. 34. Surerus interview, p. 31. 7. New Realities

1 See Granatstein et al., Nation, 401–10. 2 Ibid., 415 and Brown, ed., Illustrated History of Canada, 478–83. 3 UTA, Report of the President, 1951–2, p. 16. The Department of Extension offered courses to another 10,455 students and 6815 music students studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music in 1951–2, so the total at the university was 28,840. Ibid. 4 President’s report, 1951–2, p. 17 and 1954–5, p. 9. 5 Ibid., 1951–2, p. 17. 6 Ibid., 1952–3, p. 6. 7 Ibid., 1952–3, p. 5. 8 Ibid., 1954–5, pp. 1–7. 9 University of Toronto, Calendar of the Faculty of Arts, 1945–46, 205 and Calendar, 1950–51, 226–7. Additional fees brought the total for most B.A. candidates to $200 and $226 for B.Comm. candidates in 1945–6 and $237 and $267 in 1950–1. 10 The Varsity, 27 September 1951, p. 1. 11 Ibid., 2 March 1956, p. 1, 10 October 1956, p. 1, and 22 February 1957, p. 1. 12 President’s report, 1956–7, p. 4. 13 Ibid., p. 6. A building for women’s athletics was also in the plan. It opened in 1959–60. President’s report, 1958–9, p. 9. See also Friedland, University of Toronto, 405–6 and 409. 14 President’s report, 1954–5, p. 13. 15 President’s report, 1953–4, p. 8. 16 President’s report, 1952–3, p. 18.

Notes to pages 121–6 17 18 19 20

21

22

23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36

285

President’s report, 1954–5, p. 14. President’s report, 1953–4, p. 8. President’s report, 1956–7, p. 4. President’s report, 1954–5, p. 18. By the early 1950s the president was granting half salary for one session leaves of absence for research and full salary for year-long leaves of absence. President’s report, 1951–2, p. 17. In 1955 the National Research Council began offering $800 summer supplements to science and engineering professors who were doing research. White, Skule Story, 185. Smith reported that in 1955–6 twenty-five faculty members at Toronto received offers from American universities. ‘We were able to retain 19. We lost 6.’ President’s report, p. 3. Paul Fox and John Dales in Political Economy were among the new assistant professors in 1954–5; Ed Safarian joined them as a lecturer the following year and David Gallop in Philosophy was another lecturer; in 1956–7 William Dray was appointed assistant professor in Philosophy, and John Polanyi in Chemistry, William Dean in Geography, and Endel Tulving in Psychology were among the new lecturer appointments. See President’s reports, 1954–5 through 1956–7. Ross, Short Road Down, 13–15. Ibid., 20. President’s report, 1948–9, pp. 48–9 and p. 3 of the report of the dean of arts; President’s report, 1950–1, pp. 2–4. The Varsity, 30 September 1953, p. 1. President’s report, 1955–6, p. 17. English ‘service teaching’ had begun in the 1920s for the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering. By the 1950s, Robin Harris noted, the department was offering more than thirty sections to other faculties, taught by ‘teaching fellows’ who were doctoral candidates in English. See Harris, English Studies, 124–8. President’s report, 1953–4, p. 9. Ibid., 1954–5, p. 22. Ibid., 1948–9, pp. 6–7 and Rouillard, French Studies, p. 135. President’s report, 1950–1, p. 2. In 1951–2 47% of arts students were in three-year degree programs and 53% in the four-year honour course. Ibid., 1951–2, p. 1. Ibid., 1951–2, pp. 7–8. See above, p. 123. Rouillard, French Studies, 98. President’s report, 1950–1, p. 24. Ibid., Report of the dean of the Faculty of Arts, p. 50.

286

Notes to pages 126–32

37 ‘Persecuted Professor,’ The Globe, 16 March 1990. 38 Review of Leopold Infeld, Why I Left Canada: Reflections on Science and Politics, 1978 by Gilbert deB. Robinson in UTA, B2001-0007, box 01(03). 39 ‘Toronto Physicist Resigns,’ The Varsity, 22 September 1950, p. 1. 40 Quote from Infeld to A. John Coleman, 2 September 1950, UTA, B2001–0007. 41 Friedland, University of Toronto, 398–9. 42 In Warsaw the Canadian embassy asked Infeld to surrender his Canadian passport. Then, in a remarkable act of spitefulness in 1958, the Conservative government of John Diefenbaker passed an Order in Council removing Canadian citizenship from Infeld’s two Canadian-born children. ‘Persecuted Professor,’ The Globe, 16 March 1990. In the mid-1990s University of Toronto chancellor Rose Wolfe inquired of Jack Diamond, secretary of the Governing Council, about the Infeld affair. Diamond and historian Michael Marrus investigated and reported in 1995 that Toronto had ‘missed a critical opportunity 45 years ago to speak out on the principles of academic freedom on behalf of Infeld.’ President Robert Prichard asked Infeld’s son, Eric, for permission to designate his father as ‘professor emeritus’ to recognize Leopold Infeld as an ‘honourable member of the academic and Canadian community.’ Permission was granted, and Eric Infeld attended the awarding of the designation in May 1995. See ‘Closing the Circle,’ University of Toronto News, 29 May 1995. 43 The Varsity, 22 September 1950, p.2. 44 Ibid., 5 January 1951, p. 2. 45 Ibid., 29 December 1956, p. 7 and 18 February 1957, p. 1. 46 UTA, clippings 1949–53 in ‘Hart House Farm’ file, 4th:36.05.02. 47 ‘Officially Open Caledon Hills,’ The Varsity, 13 October 1950, p. 1. 48 The Varsity, 1 October 1957, p. 5. 49 Ibid., 16 November 1950, p. 7. 50 Ibid., 11 December 1953, p. 11. 51 President’s report, 1955–6, p. 10. 52 The Varsity, 24 September 1954, p. 1 and 20 October 1954, p. 1. 53 President’s report, 1954–5, pp. 9–10. 54 UTA, Hannah Institute, Oral history interviews, Mr Henry Borden transcript, p. 45, B1987-044/001. 55 Ibid, p. 35. 56 Friedland, University of Toronto, 411–12. 57 UTA, Borden transcript, pp. 46–7. 58 President’s report, 1956–7, p. 28. 59 Friedland, University of Toronto, 413. Sidney Smith’s career at External Affairs was short lived. He died suddenly in 1959.

Notes to pages 134–9

287

8. The Sixties 1 The Varsity, 8 January 1959, p. 1. On Bissell’s brief (two-year) tenure as president of Carleton University see Neatby, Blair, and D.C. McEown, Creating Carleton, chap. 5. 2 The Varsity, 8 January 1959, p. 1. On Bissell’s selection by the chairman of the board of governors see UTA, Henry Borden interview, 1981, B19870044/001. (Henry Borden was vice chairman of the board at the time and later became chairman.) 3 ‘Bissell Calls for Clear Distinction,’ The Varsity, 5 February 1959, p. 1. 4 UTA, Report of the President, 1958–9, p. 1. 5 ‘Ross Named York University Head’ and ‘Statement on York University,’ The Varsity, 4 December 1959, p. 1 and President’s report, 1958–9, p. 4. On the origins and development of York University see Ross, The Way Must Be Tried and, especially, Saywell, Someone to Teach Them and Horn, York University. 6 President’s report, 1958–9, p. 2. Jacques Barzun was a French-born professor of the history of ideas and culture and senior administrator at Columbia University. His book House of Intellect, dealing with American undergraduate education, was published in 1959. 7 President’s report, 1959–60, p. 2. 8 President’s report, 1959–60, p. 3, 1961–2, p. 10, and 1969–70, p. 1. 9 President’s report, 1959–60, p. 3, 1965–6, p. 15, and 1969–70, p. 1. 10 Brook and McBryde, Historical Distillates, 121 and 137. The 1969 roster was 12 professors, 13 associate professors, 13 assistant professors, 17 lecturers of whom 15 were part-time appointees with PhDs, 3 instructors, and 1 laboratory supervisor. 11 President’s report, 1962–3, p. 18 and 1964–5, pp. 8–9. 12 When Bissell became president, Moffat St Andrew Woodside moved from the Faculty of Arts to the principalship of University College and Vincent Whellen Bladen of the Department of Political Economy became the new dean of arts. 13 Report of the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, President’s report, 1962–3, p. 51. 14 President’s report, 1965–6, p. 10. The building, now the Earth Sciences Centre, would not be built for several years. 15 Ibid., 1966–7, p. 65. 16 President’s report, 1959–60, p. 5 and 1960–1, p. 15. 17 Ibid., 1959–60, p. 6. 18 Ibid., 1959–60, p. 6.

288

Notes to pages 139–48

19 Ibid., 1960–1, p. 15. 20 Ibid., 1961–2, p. 35. 21 Ibid., 1960–1, p. 16 and 1961–2, p. 6. Principal Wetmore died suddenly in January 1963. His successor as principal of New College was Professor Donald G. Ivey of the Department of Physics. 22 ‘The Principal of New College,’ President’s report, 1964–5, pp. 48–52. 23 President’s report, 1962–3, pp. 5 and 8. 24 ‘Principal of Scarborough College,’ President’s report, 1963–4, pp. 49–50; ‘Dean of Arts and Science’ and ‘Principal of Scarborough College,’ President’s report, 1964–5, pp. 43 and 56–7. 25 The Varsity, 20 September 1965, p. 1. 26 President’s report, 1965–6, pp. 166–8. 27 Ibid., 1966–7, p. 182 and 1968–9, p. 104. In the 1968–9 report Principal Plumptre explained that ‘the far less structured nature’ of Scarborough’s revised curriculum did not lend itself well to the demands of televised course instruction, that use by the facility had declined and the number of full-time staff had been reduced, and that use of the facility had been offered to other divisions of the university and also to ‘outsiders, particularly educational bodies.’ Also see Brook and McBryde, Historical Distillates, 165–6. 28 President’s report, 1966–7, p. 180. 29 Ibid., 1967–8, p. 98, 1968–9, pp. 103–4, 1969–70, pp. 74–5, and 1970–1, pp. 106–8. 30 ‘Principal of Erindale College,’ President’s report, 1965–6, p. 168 and President’s report, 1966–7, pp. 186–8. 31 President’s report, 1967–8, p. 99. 32 Ibid., 1969–70, p. 72. 33 Ibid., 1970–1, p. 109–10. 34 ‘The Principal of Innis College,’ President’s report, 1965–6, pp. 161–4. 35 Ibid., President’s report, 1966–7, pp. 172–3. 36 Ibid., 1967–8, p. 92. 37 Ibid., 1969–70, p. 69. 38 Ibid., 1967–8, p. 94, 1968–9, p. 99, and 1970–1, p. 105; Friedland, University of Toronto, 447–9. 39 The Varsity, 4 November 1960, p. 1. 40 Ibid., 18 October 1968, p. 1. 41 Ibid., 12 February 1969, pp. 1 and 3. 42 Bladen, Bladen on Bladen, 27. 43 Drummond, Political Economy, 48 and 108–14. Bladen, at Sidney Smith’s urging, was the first head of a department to be called ‘chair’ instead of ‘head.’

Notes to pages 148–52

289

44 Cited in Ross, The Short Road Down, 15–16. 45 President’s report, 1958–9, appendix, ‘Registration of Students.’ There were 2505 men and 1800 women, with 1596 in University College, 1356 in Victoria, 578 in Trinity, and 775 in St Michael’s. 46 Ibid., Dean of arts report, p. 27. 47 President’s report, 1959–60, p. 3 and Dean of arts report, p. 35. 48 President’s report, 1965–6, appendix, p. 46. Of the full-time undergraduates, 4477 were men and 3855 were women. 49 Ibid., 1958–9, p. 5. 50 There were 469 full-time faculty appointments in 1958–9 and 610, an increase of 147, in 1965–6. Ibid., 1958–9, p. 186 and 1965–6, appendix, p. 44. 51 President’s report, Report of the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, 1960–1, pp. 35–6. In 1961–2 Wetmore left the office of the dean to assume the principalship of New College. He was replaced by E.P. Nuffield from the Department of Political Economy. Ibid., 1961–2, p. 37 and Report of the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, p. 51. 52 Ibid., 1964–5, pp. 42–3. The departments were Anthropology, Astronomy, Botany, East Asian Studies, History, Islamic Studies, Italian and Hispanic Studies, Mathematics, Philosophy, Political Economy, Psychology, Physics, and Zoology. 53 Ibid.; UTA, Vincent Bladen interview, 1974, p. 183, B74-0038; and President’s report, 1960–1, Report of the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, p. 35. For the 1948–9 general course see chapter 7, pp. 124–6. 54 President’s reports, Reports of the dean of Arts and Science, 1962–3, p. 48 and 1963–4, p. 41; Bladen, Bladen on Bladen, p. 144. 55 President’s report, 1961–2, p. 34. 56 Ibid., 1962–3, p. 49. 57 Group A courses: East Asian Studies; English Language and Literature; Islamic Studies; Latin; Modern History (English option); Modern History and Modern Languages; Modern Languages and Literatures; Ancient Near Eastern Studies; and Slavic Studies. Group B courses: Fine Art; Music; Philosophy; Philosophy (English or History option); Social and Philosophical Studies; Anthropology; Modern History; Political Science and Economics; Psychology; and Sociology. Group C courses: Mathematics; Physics; Chemistry; Mathematics and Physics; Mathematics and Chemistry; Physics and Chemistry; Physics and Geology. Group D courses: Geography; Geological Sciences; Biology; Science; Life Sciences; Physiology and Biochemistry; Food Chemistry and Household Economics. University of Toronto, Calendar of the Faculty of Arts and Science, 1963–64, passim.

290

Notes to pages 152–7

58 Calendar, 1963–64, p. 41 and The Varsity, 1 March 1965, p. 1. 59 All this process, of course, was ‘one on one,’ with the decanal trio dealing with each head or chair in strict confidence. The notion of having all departmental budgets scrutinized by a committee of senior colleagues, chaired by and advisory to the dean, would doubtless have been considered most improper by a senior administrator of Bladen’s generation. 60 Cited in Bladen, Bladen on Bladen, 139–41. 61 Saywell, Someone to Teach Them, 6 and Bothwell, Laying the Foundation, 135. 62 Slater, Minerva’s Aviary, 372–3. 63 Cited in Bladen, Bladen on Bladen, 141. Informality was also the rule in the selection of division heads. Bladen told an interviewer in 1974 that ‘in those days’ the president, when appointing a dean, would get the advice and opinions of the chairmen of the division’s departments, other deans, ‘and some other valuable academic counselors.’ ‘I think it is a very good way of doing it,’ Bladen concluded, ‘a lot more effective than a committee.’ UTA, Bladen interview, 1974, p. 147, B1974-0038. 64 Nelson, The Search for Faculty Power, 33. 65 Friedland, University of Toronto, 469–70. 66 UTA, ‘The Appointment and Tenure of Administrative Posts within Academic Departments and Divisions, i.e., chairmen and heads, deans and directors.’ A1975-0021/079/03. 67 President’s report, Report of the Dean of Arts and Science, 1965–6, p. 63. 68 UTA, Bladen interview, 1974, p. 165, B1974-0038. 69 President’s report, ‘The Chief Librarian,’ 1966–7, p. 213. 70 New members of the faculty from abroad included people from the United States, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, and other nations. 71 Allen was one of the last appointments Bissell would make before the adoption of the Haist rules. 9. Transformation 1 Brook and McBryde, Historical Distillates, 144–5; Slater, Minerva’s Aviary, 376–7; and UTA, Report of the President, Report of the Dean of Arts and Science, 1964–5, p. 44. 2 Slater, Minerva’s Aviary, 413. At the beginning of his deanship Allen’s associate deans were D. Ralph Campbell and A. (Archie) C. Hallett. Bill Foulds continued as assistant dean of the faculty. President’s report, Report of the Dean of Arts and Science, 1966–7, p. 65. 3 President’s report, 1967–8, p. 25.

Notes to pages 158–60

291

4 On the circumstances causing criticism of the curriculum in the 1960s see, among others, Patricia Jansen, ‘Educating an Elite: A History of the Honour Course System at the University of Toronto,’ Ontario History 81, no. 4 (December 1989), 269–88 and Bothwell, Laying the Foundation, 137–50. 5 President’s report, 1966–7, p. 6. 6 The Varsity, 24 March 1966, p. 1 and Friedland, University of Toronto, 531. Members of the committee were C. Brough Macpherson, Political Economy, chair; Frank H. Buck, student, School of Graduate Studies; Ramsay Cook, History; William G. Friend, Zoology; H.S. Harris, Philosophy, York University; J. Robin deJ. Jackson, English; Stanley Nyburg, Chemistry; Ronald Shepperd, Classics and registrar, University College; Paul Hoch, Fellow, Physics; and William Kent, Office of the University Registrar, committee secretary. 7 The Varsity, 5 December 1966, p. 1. 8 Cited in Slater, Minerva’s Aviary, 379. 9 Ibid., 380. 10 UTA, Dana Rouillard interview, 1974, p. 11, B1974-0045. 11 While the Macpherson committee was wrestling with the college issue in the spring of 1967, the university and Trinity and Victoria came to an agreement that the ethics faculty at the two colleges would be crossappointed without salary to the university philosophy department at University College. One implication of this agreement, which had reluctantly been accepted by the federated universities only because of the sharp decline in enrolments in their ethics programs, was that their ethics faculty members could teach non-ethics courses in philosophy in their roles as university philosophy department people at University College. Another was that if either Trinity or Victoria wanted to hire new personnel in ethics and have them cross-appointed to the university, those appointments would have to meet the hiring criteria of the university philosophy department. Trinity or Victoria could hire new personnel who did not meet those criteria, but those people would not be accepted for crossappointment to the university department at University College. In the 1970s, under different circumstances, the ethics departments at Trinity and Victoria were finally closed. See Slater, Minerva’s Aviary, 385–6. 12 Interview of Ramsay Cook, conducted by the author, 25 August 2006. 13 The Varsity, 27 September 1967, pp. 1 and 4, 29 September 1967, p. 4, and 2 October 1967, pp. 4 and 8–9. 14 Report of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Undergraduate Instruction in the Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toronto, 1967, pp. 12–20.

292 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Notes to pages 161–5

Ibid., pp. 23–30. Ibid., pp. 33–7. Ibid., pp.42–3. Ibid., pp. 84–96. President’s report, 1958–9, p. 4. Report of the Presidential Advisory Committee, 54–6. Ibid., 60–77. Ibid., 115. Another summary of the work and report of the Macpherson committee is Friedland, University of Toronto, 531–3. The Varsity, 6 October 1967, p. 1. In the spring of 1968 sixteen students, representing the various discipline groups in Arts and Science, were elected by their colleagues and approved by the board of governors for full membership on the faculty council and it committees. President’s report, Report of the Dean of Arts and Science, 1967–8, pt. 2, p. 4. Bissell, Halfway Up Parnassus, 184. President’s report, 1966–7, p. 7. In the fall of 1967, when Bissell was writing this report, he was at Harvard and John (Jack) Sword was acting president of the university. In his memoir Bissell wrote that ‘the case against the system was strong and it was made with calm, irresistible logic. It was a logic that many of the staff refused to accept.’ Bissell, Parnassus, 185. Ibid., Report of the Dean of Arts and Science, p. 66. President’s report, Report of the Dean of Arts and Science, 1967–8, pt. 2, p. 3. Watson, Religious Studies, 36–7. President’s report, Report of the Dean of Arts and Science, 1968–9, pt. 2, p. 3. UTA, Bissell diary, 2 October 1968, B88-0091/002. The Varsity, 8 October 1968, p. 1 and 28 October 1968, p. 1. Bissell, Parnassus, 155. Ibid. and Conway, True North, 155. To illustrate the difference between a program of studies in the humanities for the honour course bachelor of arts and the New Programme four-year bachelor of arts in the humanities, let us look at an honour course student in 1961–2 taking the classics honour course and a four-year classics student in the New Programme in 1972–3. In the first year the honour course student would have a one-hour option of a course in anthropology, French, music, Near Eastern literature, or religious knowledge. He would have two prescribed hours in English, five hours in Greek, three hours in Greek and Roman history, and five hours in Latin. In second year he would again have the one-hour option, then three prescribed hours in English, one and a half in art and

Notes to page 165

293

archaeology, five and a half in Greek, one hour of Greek and Roman history, and five hours of Latin. In the student’s third and fourth years, he would again have a one-hour option plus, in third year, six and a half hours of Greek, one hour of Greek and Roman history, and five and a half hours of Latin and, finally, in fourth year, one and a half hours of art and archaeology, seven and a half hours of Greek, three hours of Greek and Roman history, and four hours of Latin. His sister, who started eleven years later, in 1972–3, in the New Programme, and who also was concentrating her studies in classics in a four-year, twenty-course degree program, would seek advice from the Department of Classics. It would recommend that she take a 100-level course each in Greek and Latin in her first five courses. In second year she would be advised to take two 200-level courses each in Greek and Latin and have free course selection. Similarly, from a wide range of 300- and 400-level courses she would be advised to take two each of Greek and Latin in both third and fourth year plus having one other course to take each year, completing her twentycourse program of studies. If these same two students chose to pursue a bachelor of science degree, the same general pattern of heavily prescribed courses in the honour course in, say, chemistry, would have to be followed, beginning with a common first year for all science students of mathematics, physics, and chemistry, and then concentrating more on chemistry in the remaining three years. In the New Programme the chemistry student would, like her bachelor of arts friend, have one free course choice each year, but to do the prescribed chemistry courses (at least three out of five in each of third and fourth years) would have particular prerequisites to fulfil in the preceding year. So, while a student could, in theory, take any choice of courses she or he wanted in a 20-course New Programme degree program, in fact, as Professor Conway points out, if a student wanted to take a set of courses at the 300 and 400 levels, whether it be in classics or chemistry, that student would normally have to do some prerequisite work in lower-level courses first. Perhaps the more significant change in the arts stream of programs in the New Programme was that there were far more courses to choose from in it than the very limited number of potential choices in the old honour course programs of study. 34 The Varsity, 31 January 1969, p. 1. 35 Rouillard, French Studies, 205. One result of the adoption of the ‘New Programme’ was the elimination of the religious knowledge (RK) one-hour course requirement in the curricula of the federated colleges and the religious knowledge option (RKO) in the University College curriculum.

294

36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47

Notes to pages 165–9

The requirement for an ethics course in the federated colleges and a course, in John Slater’s words, ‘in nearly every subject except religion’ for University College students had been in place since 1904. See Slater, Minerva’s Aviary, 582. The Varsity, 31 January 1969, p. 1. Cited in Rouillard, French Studies, 148. Arthur Kruger, who became dean of Arts and Science in 1977, recalled that circumstances external to the Macpherson report mitigated against implementation of its recommendations, including the initiation of formula funding by the Province, which had a negative impact on the University of Toronto. Simply put, Kruger argued that there were insufficient funds to finance the curricular and counselling needs of the Macpherson recommendations. But Kruger was adamantly opposed to the New Programme eventually adopted, calling it a ‘disaster for most students.’ See UTA, Arthur Kruger interviews, 1983, tape V, B1986-0062. UTA, John M. Robson interview, 1982, tape 6, B1986-0058. UTA, John R. Evans interview, 1983, tape 1, B1986-0044. Brook and McBryde, Historical Distillates, 146. President’s report, Report of the Dean of Arts and Science, 1960–70, pt. 2, p. 4. President’s report, 1966–7, p. 1. Ibid., 1964–5, pp. 1–2. Friedland, University of Toronto, 527–8 and Roberta Lexier, ‘The Sixties in Canada,’ 27 and Lexier, ‘The Backdrop against Which Everything Happened: English-Canadian Student Movements and Off-Campus Movements of Change,’ History of Intellectual Culture 7, no. 1 (2007). In the weeks following the protest at the placement service an Ad Hoc Committee on Campus Complicity and the Varsity focused attention on defence-related research projects on campus and on the apparent links that members of the board of governors had to companies supplying war material to United States armed forces. See The Varsity, ‘Review,’ 12 January 1968, p. 7 and 17 January 1968, pp. 1 and 5. UTA, Bissell, Diary, 21 January and 30 April 1968. See also 25 and 26 April 1968. B88-091/002. The Varsity, 16 September 1968, p. 1. Bissell diary, 29 August and 4 September 1968. On 9 September Bissell and Ross met with Chief MacKay and his chief of the university police force. MacKay wasn’t eager to intervene in the university’s affairs and expressed ‘concern in having precise legal grounds for coming on the campus.’ Diary, 9 September 1968.

Notes to pages 169–75 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

295

Ibid., 10 October 1968. Ibid., 9 October 1968. President’s report, 1964–5, p. 4. Ibid., 1965–6, p. 5. Ibid., p. 7. Bissell, Diary, 6, 21, and 24 June 1968. Bissell established his President’s Council in 1965 as a group to provide a link between the academic side of the university and the board of governors and to introduce some faculty members into the governance of the university. The council included three board members, seven senior academic administrators, three administrative officers, and seven elected faculty members. See Ross, Short Road Down, 40. Bissell, Diary, 9 August 1968 and Ross, Short Road Down, 41–3. Bissell, Diary, 20 September 1968. Ibid., 3 October 1968. Ibid., 1 November 1968. Ross, Short Road Down, 41–3. Professors Ben Etkin (Engineering), J.E. Hodgetts (Political Science and principal, Victoria College), Larry Lynch (Philosophy), and J.S. Thompson (Anatomy) represented the university faculty. Stephen Grant, D’Arcy Martin, and Bob Rae represented the undergraduate students and Gary Webster the graduate students. Vacy Ash and Wallace McCutcheon were the board of governors observers. McCutcheon died while the commission was at work and was replaced by William Harris. Friedland, University of Toronto, 529–30 and 544. Bissell, Diary, 10 January 1969. Ibid., 2 January 1969. The Varsity, ‘Review,’ 22 November 1974, ‘Politics and the Man: Bissell and the U of T,’ review of Bissell, Halfway Up Parnassus, by Bob Rae and UTA, Bob Rae interview, 1984, B86-1179-1-4. Bissell, Parnassus, 170 and Friedland, University of Toronto, 543–4. Nelson, The Search for Faculty Power, 46. Ibid., 47. The heads of the ATS, SAC, and Graduate Students’ Union were members of Friedland’s committee. See Friedland, University of Toronto, 545. Ibid., 545–6. Ibid., 546–9 and Bissell, Parnassus, 172–7. Bissell, Diary, 10 September 1968. Ibid., 3 October 1968. Ibid., 5 November 1968. Bissell, Parnassus, 40–1. President’s report, 1969–70, p. 10.

296

Notes to pages 177–81 10. Unfinished Business

1 Friedland, University of Toronto, 549. 2 The Varsity, 29 October 1971, p. 1. 3 Friedland, University of Toronto, 551 ; The Varsity, 29 October 1971, p. 1, 24 November 1971, p. 1, and 28 February 1972, p. 7. On the controversy within the board of governors over the terms of negotiation of the initial choice of the selection committee, A.W.R. Carrothers, see Friedland, 550–1 and UTA, Henry Borden interview, Oral history interviews, University of Toronto, Faculty of Medicine, pp. 86ff., B1987-0044/001. 4 UTA, John R. Evans interviews, 1984, tape 009, B1986-0044. 5 Ibid. Paul Cadario, a senior student in the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, a student member of Governing Council and chairman of the council’s Standing Committee on Internal Affairs, put President Evan’s ideas about the role of the council more starkly: ‘What he wanted it to do was deal with policy and to stay out of administration.’ UTA, Cadario interview, 1982, tape 004, B1986-0045. 6 Evans interviews, ibid. 7 Robert Greene interview, February 2007, in possession of the author. 8 In 1969–70, near the midpoint of Allen’s term, he was a candidate for the presidency of York University. Professor David Slater of Queen’s was eventually selected. See Saywell, Someone to Teach Them, 150–60. 9 Moffat St Andrew Woodside, professor of Classics, University College, was the other, who had served from 1952–9. 10 Greene interview. 11 The Varsity, 22 March 1972, p. 1. 12 Jim Conacher to Greene, 25 March 1972. In a follow-up note two weeks later (Jim) Conacher told (Dear Bob) Greene, ‘I shall give you every cooperation I can and look forward to a sympathetic hearing from you regarding the practical problems that will face me as a departmental chairman responsible to you.’ Conacher to Greene, 8 April 1972. Both letters, sent to the author by Professor Greene in the spring of 2007, are in the author’s possession. 13 UTA, Report of the Presidential Advisory Committee to Review the New Programme in the Faculty of Arts and Science [hereafter Berlyne report], pp. 2–4, A1979-0051/001. The other faculty members were Rev. Gregory Baum, St Michael’s College; James Cruise, Biology; Paul Fox, Political Economy; Robert E. Jervis, Applied Science and Engineering; Peter Meincke, Physics and Trinity College; and Frank Watt, English. Two graduate student members were Robert Anderson and Kurt Loeb. Bruce

Notes to pages 182–9

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33

297

Bowden, Linda Hall, and Rita Mifflin were the undergraduate members. Consultation between Evans and Greene in the establishment of the committee is reported in UTA, Faculty of Arts and Science, Report of the Committee to Implement the Berlyne Report [hereafter implementation report], p. 1. A1979-0051/007. Berlyne report, 8–9. Ibid., 12–13. Ibid., 13–15. Ibid., 20, 23, and 26. Ibid., 32–3. Ibid., 35. Implementation report, 2. Ibid., 1. The other faculty members of the implementation committee were Robin Armstrong, Physics; Lynn Forguson, Philosophy; Peter Russell, Political Economy and principal of Innis College; and J.A. Walker, French. Student members were A.G. Harrison, Kurt Loeb, D. Milovanovic (Loeb’s alternate), I.L. Morrison, and M. Stollar. Ibid., 3–6. Ibid., 10–12. Ibid., 14–15. Ibid., 1–2 and Berlyne report, 29. The fiscal issue is nicely summarized in Harris, English Studies, 153 and 172–3. Friedland, University of Toronto, 553 and Slater, Minerva’s Aviary, 454. Evans interviews. Ibid. Ibid. The Varsity, 16 January 1974, p. 1. See also ‘Evans Wants Decision from Federated Colleges,’ ibid., 9 January 1974, p. 1. UTA, ‘Memorandum of Understanding Relating to the Role of the Colleges in the Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toronto,’ A1975-1118. The memorandum applied to Erindale as well as all the St George colleges, but did not apply to Scarborough. UTA, Minutes of Simcoe Circle, 17 April 1974, A1979-0057, box 004. The ‘Simcoe Circle’ was a formal gathering, usually once every other week, of the vice-presidents, the vice-provosts, the secretary of the Governing Council, and one or two others with the president for two hours to keep everyone in Evans’s inner circle aware of what was happening in the central administration. Frances Ireland, the president’s research assistant and adviser, recalled that ‘meetings were strenuous. Very structured …

298

34 35 36 37

38 39 40

41 42

43

44 45

46 47 48 49 50

Notes to pages 189–94

Responsibility was assigned to particular individuals. Acting minutes circulated with responsibilities marked.’ UTA, Frances Ireland interviews, 1982, B1986-0056, tape 11. The Varsity, 7 October 1974, p. 7. Friedland, University of Toronto, 282–3 and 572–4. UTA, Arthur Kruger interviews, tape 1, January 1983 and tape 12, February 1983, B1986-0062. Kruger interview, February 1983. After years of collecting a modest annual donation from its students and then receiving a large grant from the province, Woodsworth opened an award-winning expanded and renovated headquarters in 1992. And in 2004 a multi-storeyed building with classroom and residence space for the college’s full-time students (nearly 1000), opened at the southeast corner of St George and Bloor Streets. Ibid., and Friedland, University of Toronto, 574–5. See Friedland, University of Toronto, 573–4. ‘Report of the Committee to Review the Undergraduate Programme to the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science,’ appendix B, ‘Certification of Completion of Specialist and Minor Programmes,’ University of Toronto Bulletin, 24 September 1979, p. S-8. UTA, B1981-0033, box 002(04). The Varsity, 22 November 1974, p. 1. Ibid., 10 January 1975, p. 1. At the time, French and the other college subject departments were in transition from being ‘combined departments’ to being part of single university departments as specified in the ‘Memorandum of Understanding.’ Ibid. Dean Greene observed that French, Chemistry, and some other departments had to deal with external professional organizations which set regulations for the discipline’s content and grade of achievement to achieve certification. Robert Greene to author, 6 May 2009. Greene interview. See Memo of D.A. Chant, Provost, to Principals, Deans, and Directors, 19 September 1977. The same file includes a 1976 change to the requirements for completion of a three-year bachelor of arts degree specifying that the student must complete a minimum of three 300/400 series courses. Colin Dobell and Elaine Ishabashi to W.D. Foulds, 17 June 1976. UTA, David Keeling Papers, A1987-0018, box 020. The Varsity, 28 October 1970, p. 1 and 27 November 1970, p. 1. Ibid., 22 January 1971, p. 1 and 27 January 1971, p. 1. Ibid., 12 January 1972, p. 1. Ibid., 7 November 1973, p. 1. Ibid., 7 October 1974, pp. 6–7.

Notes to pages 195–201

299

51 Blackburn, Evolution of the Heart, 231–7; Friedland, University of Toronto, 537; and The Varsity, 7 February 1972. 52 The committee had five faculty members, four students, and two senior staff members of the library. 53 The Varsity, 10 March 1972, p. 1. 54 Ibid., 13 March 1972, p. 1. 55 Cited in Friedland, University of Toronto, 538. 56 See The Varsity, 7 March 1973, p. 1. 57 Blackburn, Evolution of the Heart, 231–7. 58 The Varsity, 24 February 1973, pp. 1 and 4. 59 Greene interview. 60 The Varsity, 28 March 1973, p. 4. 61 Ibid., 25 September 1974, p. 1 and 4 October 1974, p. 1. During 1974 UTFA asked the views of members on the issue of appointments, tenure, promotion, and dismissal for fiscal reasons at Toronto. Fifty per cent of the 700 respondents stated that a graduate student on a tenure committee would be acceptable or desirable. But two-thirds of respondents believed that undergraduate representation on a tenure committee was unacceptable. Nelson, The Search for Faculty Power, 85. 62 The Varsity, 23 October 1974, p. 11 and 26 March 1975, p. 1. 63 Ibid., 7 April 1975, p. 1 and 10 September 1975, p. 4. 64 Nelson, The Search for Faculty Power, 86–7; The Varsity, 10 September 1974, p. 7; and Friedland, University of Toronto, 539. 65 UTA, Simcoe Circle minutes, 13 March 1974, A1979-0057, box 004. 66 Nelson, The Search for Faculty Power, 87 and The Varsity, 10 September 1974, p. 7. 67 Nelson, The Search for Faculty Power, 87. 68 UTA, The Bulletin, 29 March 1974, p. 1. 69 For many years students, faculty, and senior administrators had believed the Caput was obsolete and needed to be replaced as the university’s discipline body, but attempts to produce a code of non-academic behaviour acceptable to all parties had broken down, largely over student demands for parity composition on any new disciplinary body. 70 Friedland, University of Toronto, 540–1 and The Varsity, 30 September 1974, p. 1 and 11 November 1974, p. 5. 71 Evans interview. 72 Ibid. 73 The Varsity, 7 October 1974, p. 6. 74 Evans interview. 75 The Varsity, 4 December 1974, p. 1.

300

Notes to pages 202–9

76 Greene interview. 77 Bulletin, 10 October 1975, p. 1. 78 The Varsity, 26 November 1976, p. 1 and UTA, Robert Greene to Dr H. Parrott, 3 January 1977, A1984-0026, box 070. 79 Evans interview. 80 Greene interview. 81 Greene to author, April 2007, email message in possession of the author. 82 Greene interview. 83 See Rea, The Prosperous Years, 114–15 and Friedland, University of Toronto, 560–2. 84 Evans interview. 11. More Change 1 The Varsity, 18 March 1977, p. 1. Joan Foley, an associate dean in Arts and Science, was announced as the new principal of Scarborough College at the same time. 2 UTA, Arthur Kruger interview, February 1983, tape 15, B1986-0062, and Calendar, Faculty of Arts and Science, 1978–9 to 1982–3. 3 Enrolment in Arts and Science increased by 1145 students between the first and third years of Kruger’s appointment, from 9721 in 1977–8 to 10866 in 1979–80. 4 Kruger interviews, January 1983, tape 8. 5 The Varsity, 21 September 1977, p. 6. 6 Ibid., and 13 March1978, p. 1. 7 The Varsity, 21 September 1977, p. 6. 8 Ibid., 3 October 1977, p. 1, 16 January 1978, p. 1, and 3 February 1978, p. 1. Also in January 1978, the University Office of Community Relations under the vice-president of internal affairs, Frank Iacobucci, announced that the Richard Ivey Foundation had agreed to fund for five years a new Ethnic and Immigration Studies Program co-directed by historian Robert Harney and sociologist Raymond Breton. In due course the program sponsored a number of activities, including encouragement of courses on immigration and ethnic studies in a number of Arts and Science departments. 9 Kruger interviews, February 1983, tapes 15 and 16. 10 Ibid. 11 The Varsity, 13 March 1978, p. 1 and 14 January 1979, p. 1. 12 Kruger interviews, tape 17. The first year the English proficiency test was administered 20% of the entering class failed and another 30% got a

Notes to pages 210–14

13 14 15

16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

301

‘marginal pass.’ The admissions tests were strongly opposed by the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation. ‘That got me in a lot of trouble with the schools,’ Kruger recalled. Provost David Strangway and Vice Provost Saywell supported introduction of the tests, but William Kent, the university director of admissions (and also chairman of the Mississauga school board) was strongly opposed. The proposal for tests additional to the EPT slowly made its way from the General Committee and Council of the Faculty through Governing Council committees where, at Academic Affairs, it ‘passed overwhelmingly.’ Ibid., tape 16. Ibid., tape 18. The Varsity, 3 February 1978, p. 1. Father Kelly was joined on the committee by Robin Armstrong, chair of the physics department, Ian Drummond of the Department of Political Economy, Ms. V. Fowles, full-time undergraduate, Jane Millgate from the English department, D.A.B. O’Riordan, full-time undergraduate, P.A. Wilson, part-time undergraduate, Leo Zakuta from the Department of Sociology, Richard Brott, assistant to the dean as secretary, and William Foulds, assistant dean and faculty secretary as assessor. UTA, Jane Millgate Papers, Bulletin, 24 September 1979, B81-0033/002 (04). Ibid. Ibid. The Varsity, 21 March 1979, p. 1. The text of the report was not published in the Bulletin until 7 May, a week before the General Committee meeting was scheduled. Ibid., 31 October 1979, p. 1. UTA, Millgate Papers, Agenda for the Special Meeting of the General Committee on November 26, 1979, B81-0033/002 (06). Kruger interview, tape 18. The Varsity, 9 January 1978, p. 1 and 11 January 1978, p. 1; and UTA, James Ham interviews, April 1988, tapes 2–5, B1990-0001. The Varsity, 11 January 1978, p. 1. Ibid., 8 March 1978, p. 9. Ham interview, tape 6. The Varsity, 8 March 1978, p. 9; Ham interview, tape 6; Kruger interview, tape 8. Kruger interview, tape 8. The Varsity, 22 February 1978, p. 1. Kruger interview, tape 19. Of the disparity between cutbacks in the arts subjects, where tenured faculty accounted for nearly all of the costs, and

302

30 31 32 33

34

35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Notes to pages 215–20

the science departments, with their laboratory requirements and expenses as easier targets for cutbacks, Kruger wryly observed that ‘the animals are not tenured.’ Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ham interviews, tapes 13 (May) and 8 (April). In fact, the tuition issue had become a matter of concern before Ham assumed the presidency. In December 1976, in response to a proposal from the Ontario government to raise the tuition fee by 300% for visa students, President Evans, William Dunphy, the chair of the Academic Affairs Committee, John Bassett, Sr, a senior member of the Governing Council, and SAC President Shirley French met with Harry Parrott, minister of colleges and universities, to tell him that the Academic Affairs Committee on 25 November 1976, had refused ‘as a matter of principle’ to implement the fee increase for visa students ‘for the time being.’ But on 17 March 1977, Governing Council approved a fee for new visa students that was 250 per cent above the normal tuition. By 1982 new visa students were being charged a tuition fee of $5000 per annum. The Varsity, 5 January 1977, p. 1, 18 March 1977, p. 1, and 7 April 1982, p. 3. The Varsity, 8 November 1978, p. 1 and 9 March 1979, p. 1. In 1979–80 Arts and Science students were paying $710 tuition, 13% of the total annual cost of $5461 per student. An increase to 20% would have meant an increase of $382 in that year. Ibid., 9 January 1980, p. 1 and 19 October 1981, p. 1. See also ibid., 22 February 1982, pp. 1 and 4. By 1981–2 Arts and Science students were paying $915 tuition, which represented 15% of a total per student annual cost of $6100. An increase to 20% would have added an additional $305 to the annual fee. Kruger interview, tape 11. The Varsity, 13 September 1978, p. 1. Ibid., 27 September 1978, p. 1. Ibid., 13 October 1979, p. 1 and Friedland, University of Toronto, 583. Also see UTA, The Bulletin, 7 June 1982. The Varsity, 11 February 1981, p. 3 and 25 March 1981, p. 1. Ibid., 22 February 1978, p. 1. Ibid., 17 March 1978, p. 1. Ibid., 29 February 1980, p. 1. Ibid., 1 March 1982, p. 1. Ibid., 7 January 1980, p. 1 and 19 November 1982, p. 1. A student convicted at the departmental level could receive a grade of zero for the piece of

Notes to pages 220–9

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

303

work which violated the code. A person whose case went to the tribunal could be expelled from the university. Ibid., 7 January 1980. Ibid., 9 December 1981, p. 6. Ibid., 5 October 1981, p. 3. Ibid., 9 December 1981, p. 7. Ibid., 12 March 1980, p. 1. Ibid., 9 January 1980, pp. 4–5 and 4 February 1980, p. 2. Ibid., 19 September 1979, p. 3. Peter Harris to author, email message, 14 June 2009. Kruger interview, tape 21. 12. Renewal

1 Interview with Robin L. Armstrong, 11 June 2009. Armstrong was awarded the Herzberg Medal of the Canadian Association of Physicists for achievements in research in 1973 and in 1979 was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. 2 The Varsity, 6 January 1982, p. 1. 3 UTA, ‘Submission to the Faculty of Arts and Science Review Committee, May, 1986,’ p. 3 (henceforth Arts and Science submission). A copy given to the author by Robin Armstrong, June 2009. In 1982–3 there were 11,358 fulltime and 6958 part-time students in Arts and Science at St George and 3786 full-time and 1339 part-time students at Erindale. Minutes of the General Committee, 4 October 1982, A2000-0005. 4 UTA, Minutes of the General Committee, 1 October 1982, p. 1. 5 Armstrong interview. 6 The Varsity, 7 February 1983, p. 1. On the announcement of Forster’s appointment see The Varsity, 21 January 1983, p. 1. 7 Friedland, University of Toronto, 588–91 and The Varsity, 6 September 1983, p. 3. 8 The Varsity, 15 October 1984, p. 3. 9 Armstrong interview. 10 Arts and Science submission, p. 1. 11 Ibid. 12 See UTA, Minutes of the General Committee for 4 April and 3 October 1983, A2000-0005. Among the objectives of the faculty were making an adequate number of strong academic appointments suitably distributed among its departments; maintaining the curriculum structure recommended in the Kelly report; ensuring that departments had adequate

304

13

14 15 16

17

18

19 20

Notes to pages 230–2

space, equipment, and supplies for both undergraduate and graduate teaching and research; maintaining suitable academic standards; and allocating new appointments and other resources to ensure that the present breadth of teaching and research in the faculty be maintained. Arts and Science submission , pp. 7–8. In the end there were fifteen ‘Mellon Fellow’ appointments allocated; two in English, two in history, two in philosophy, and one each in classics, English and medieval studies, French, German, Italian, Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, Near Eastern studies, Slavic studies, and Spanish and Portuguese. In each case a regular departmental search committee was appointed which included Vice-Dean Jane Millgate from Arts and Science and Craig Brown, associate dean humanities, from the School of Graduate Studies. R.C. Brown Papers, Memorandum on Mellon Professorships, Dean Marsha Chandler and Vice Dean Robert Craig Brown, Faculty of Arts and Science, to Professor John Leyerle, Department of English, 8 December 1990. Brook and McBryde, Historical Distillates, 154–5. Arts and Science submission, pp. 5–6. Brook and McBryde, 155 and Armstrong interview. ‘There never was a formal report back to the Provost,’ Armstrong recalled. ‘Basically the whole process died.’ A Student’s Administrative Council study of underfunding in the spring of 1984 reported that the introductory psychology course, PSY 100Y, had 1494 students and was being taught by one professor and six assistants; that enrolment in the Italian studies department had doubled without any increase in faculty appointments; that the staff–student ratio in Fine Art had ballooned from 9:1 to 17:1; that in the last eight years the English department had lost 28 faculty members; and that since 1978–9 the number of teaching assistants in the university had dropped more than 12%. The Varsity, 28 March 1984, p. 1. Arts and Science submission, pp. 11–12. The laboratory fee was collected for the first time in the 1984–5 session. Armstrong told the General Committee that Physics had used it to buy a new computer for laboratory use; Chemistry had used it to replace some 30-year old-spectrometers; Geology had purchased some new microscopes; the Biology 100 course had bought new equipment; and Astronomy had purchased photographic plates for its telescope. UTA, Minutes of the General Committee, 7 January 1985, A2000-0005. The story of the disestablishment is skilfully told in Drummond, Political Economy, 161–5. See also Sawyer, The Rotman School, 13–20. See chapter 10, pp. 187–8.

Notes to pages 232–8

305

21 Arts and Science submission, p. 18. 22 UTA, Report of the University of Toronto/Federated Universities Joint Grants Working Group, 29 May 1984, pp. 1–7, A1992-0024/004. 23 UTA, A Memorandum of Agreement Regarding the Institutional Relationships of the University of Toronto and the Federated Universities in the Faculty of Arts and Science, 18 May 1984, A1992-0024/004. 24 Ibid., pp. 2–3. 25 Ibid., pp. 6–7 and Arts and Science submission, p. 18. For the funding arrangements for college teaching see Memorandum of Agreement, p. 8. 26 And renewed again in 1998. See Friedland, University of Toronto, 571. 27 UTA, Minutes of the General Committee, 4 October 1982, A2000-0005. 28 Armstrong regarded the Spelt report as a ‘blunt instrument’ which had not been agreed to by the departments in Arts and Science, and its recommendations were modified by the faculty after broad-ranging discussions within the faculty. Armstrong interview. 29 Minutes of the General Committee, 4 April 1983 and 3 October 1984. Dean Armstrong noted that the goals and objectives statement had been sent to Simcoe Hall and discussed by the planning subcommittee of the Planning and Resources Committee of Governing Council. ‘Nothing formal has ever been heard with respect to this document,’ he wrote in 1986, ‘but it seems to have been generally well received in Simcoe Hall.’ Arts and Science submission, p. 8. 30 Ibid., 6 December 1982. 31 Ibid., 5 March 1984. 32 Ibid., 7 January 1985. 33 Ibid., 5 November 1984 and 7 January 1985. 34 See pp. 207–9. 35 Minutes of the General Committee, 1 November 1983 and 7 February 1983. 36 Arts and Science submission, p. 15. 37 Minutes of the General Committee, 2 October 1982. 38 Minutes of the Faculty Council, 19 March 1984, Faculty Council Minutes, 1983–1990, on loan to the author by the Faculty of Arts and Science. 39 Ibid., 17 March 1986. 40 The approved tests were the Michigan Language Test and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOFEL). 41 Minutes of the Faculty Council, 16 March 1987. 42 The Varsity, 5 September 1984, p. 2. 43 Ibid., 7 September 1984, p. 1. 44 Ibid., 7 March 1985, p. 6. 45 Ibid., 11 February 1986, p. 1.

306 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71 72 73 74

75

Notes to pages 239–46

Ibid., 25 January 1988, p. 1. Ibid., 14 March 1988, p. 1 and 7 June 1988, p. 1. Ibid., 30 March 1983, p. 1. Ibid., 4 July 1985, p. 2. Ibid., 26September 1985, p. 1. Ibid., 16 March 1987, p. 1. Ibid., 9 January 1987, p. 1. See Minutes of the General Committee, 2 March 1987, p. 137 and 5 October 1987, p. 139. Ibid., 2 November 1987, p. 148. Ibid., 3 October 1988, pp. 168 and 170. Armstrong interview and R.C. Brown files, ‘The Budget of the Faculty of Arts and Science’ (draft), Dean’s report, April 1990. Arts and Science submission, p. 17. Connell, ‘Renewal 1987,’ 29. Ibid. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 31–2 and 38–9. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 41–2. This particular suggestion was seized upon by the undergraduate student leadership and the Varsity and they made it a point of sharp contention for the remainder of Connell’s term in office. Minutes of the General Committee, 3 October 1988, p. 167. Ibid., 2 October 1989, p. 198 and 8 January 1990, pp. 210–13, 215–20 and deans’ briefing notes, pp. 1–5. Ibid., 5 February 1990, pp. 222–33 and 12 February 1990, pp. 235–40. Minutes of the Faculty Council, 26 March 1990, pp. 60–4 and 69–73. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., pp. 69–73. R.C. Brown files, ‘Round Table Information Report’ from Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toronto, to the Ontario Conference of Deans of Science, March 1992. See University of Toronto, Calendar, Faculty of Arts and Science, 1987–1988. Connell, ‘Renewal 1987,’ 29. Minutes of the Faculty Council, 21 March 1988, p. 45. Yet another ‘complication’ in scheduling courses and controlling enrolment patterns was the fact that hundreds of pre-medical students placed huge demands on life science and basic medicine courses and programs in Arts and Science for two years and then abruptly left the faculty’s rolls. The Varsity, 8 February 1988, p. 1.

Notes to pages 247–54

307

76 Dean Brown was summoned to the provost’s office to explain what had gone wrong and why there had been such long, frustrating line-ups. The provost was not amused. 77 The Varsity, 19 September 1988, p. 1. 78 Ibid. 79 Minutes of the General Committee, 3 October 1988 and The Varsity, 31 October 1988, p. 1. 80 The Varsity, 31 October 1988, p. 1. 81 Minutes of the General Committee, 2 October 1989, p. 198. 82 R.C. Brown files, ‘The Faculty and the Central Administration’ (draft), Dean’s report, April 1990. Armstrong added that the problem of representation at the academic board had not been fully resolved, because if he had to be absent from a meeting he could not designate an alternate to attend and engage in the debate at a board meeting. 83 Ibid., ‘The Dean and the Dean’s Office’ (draft). That was done by the new dean, Marsha Chandler, who asked Brown to stay on as vice-dean and share the duties of the dean. Dean Chandler, for example, had all disciplines/departments reporting to her rather than having some, as Armstrong had done, reporting to himself and some to Brown. 84 Early in Armstrong’s term he started designating a decanal representative on every tenure-stream appointment search committee as one way of improving the number of female appointments. The dean’s designate was often a woman, particularly so in the case of a department which had few or no female faculty members. Every committee submitted to the dean a short list of candidates to be interviewed, and if all the candidates were male, the name and credentials of the highest-ranking female candidate had also to be submitted. In several cases during his deanship, Armstrong accepted the short list only with the proviso that the highest-ranking female candidate also had to be interviewed. Armstrong interview. 85 R.C. Brown files, ‘Appointments, Tenure and Promotions in the Faculty of Arts and Science’ (draft). 86 Ibid. 87 Slater, Minerva’s Aviary, 325. 88 The Varsity, 8 October 1990, p. 1.

This page intentionally left blank

Bibliography

Allin, Elizabeth J. Physics at the University of Toronto, 1843–1980. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981. Averill, Harold, and Gerald Keith. ‘Sir Daniel Wilson and the University of Toronto.’ In Elizabeth Hulse, ed. Thinking with Both Hands: Sir Daniel Wilson in the Old World and the New, 139–210. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Axelrod, Paul. Making a Middle Class: Student Life in English Canada during the Thirties. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990. – Scholars and Dollars: Politics, Economics, and the Universities of Ontario, 1945– 1988. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982. Axelrod, Paul, and John Reid, eds. Youth, University, and Canadian Society: Essays in the Social History of Higher Education. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989. Berger, Carl. The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing since 1900. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976. Bissell, Claude. Halfway Up Parnassus: A Personal Account of the University of Toronto, 1932–1971. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974. Bissell, Claude T., ed. University College: A Portrait. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1953. Blackburn, Robert H. Evolution of the Heart: A History of the University of Toronto Library up to 1981. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989. Bladen, Vincent. Bladen on Bladen: Memoirs of a Political Economist. Scarborough: Scarborough College, 1978. Bliss, Michael. A Canadian Millionaire: The Life and Business Times of Sir Joseph Flavelle, Bart. Toronto: Macmillan, 1978. Bothwell, Robert. Laying the Foundation: A Century of History at University of Toronto. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.

310

Bibliography

Brook, Adrian G., and W.A.E. (Peter) McBryde. Historical Distillates: Chemistry at the University of Toronto since 1843. Toronto: Dundurn Group, 2007. Brown, Robert Craig. ‘Lawrence Bruce Robertson.’ Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 15. – Robert Laird Borden: A Biography. Vol. 2, 1914–1937. Toronto: Macmillan, 1980. – ‘Sir John Cunningham McLennan.’ Physics in Canada 56, no. 2 (March/April 2000), 91–101. Brown, Craig, ed. The Illustrated History of Canada. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1987. Brown, Robert Craig, and Ramsay Cook. Canada, 1896–1921: A Nation Transformed. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1974. Burke, Sara Z. ‘New Women and Old Romans. CHR 80, no. 2 (June 1999), 219–41. – ‘Revisiting the Great Divide: World War I and Women’s Higher Education in Ontario.’ CHA paper, Saskatoon, May 2007. Byers, Daniel ‘Mobilizing Canada: The National Resources Mobilization Act, the Department of National Defence, and Compulsory Military Service in Canada, 1940–1945.’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, new ser., vol. 7 (1996), 175–203. Careless, J.M.S. The Union of the Canadas: The Growth of Canadian Institutions, 1841–1857. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1967. Chant, C.A. Astronomy at the University of Toronto: The David Dunlap Observatory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1954. Connell, George E. ‘Renewal 1987.’ A discussion paper on the nature and role of the University of Toronto. March 1987. Conway, Jill Ker. True North: A Memoir. Toronto: Knopf, 1994. Cook, Ramsay. The Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late Victorian English Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. Cook, Ramsay, and Réal Bélanger, eds. Canada’s Prime Ministers, Macdonald to Trudeau. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Corbett, E.A. Sidney Earle Smith. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961. Countryman, Barry. Helium for Airships and Science: The Search in Canada, 1916– 1926. Toronto: Privately printed, 1992. Craig, G.M. Upper Canada, the Formative Years, 1784–1841. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1963. Craigie, E. Horne. A History of the Department of Zoology of the University of Toronto University Press to 1962. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, [1966]. Drummond, Ian M. Political Economy at the University of Toronto: A History of the Department, 1888–1982. Toronto: Faculty of Arts and Science, 1983.

Bibliography

311

Ford, Anne Rochon. A Path Not Strewn with Roses: One Hundred Years of Women at the University of Toronto, 1884–1984. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. Francis, R. Douglas. Frank H. Underhill, Intellectual Provocateur. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986. Friedland, Martin L. The University of Toronto: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Gidney, Catherine. A Long Eclipse: The Liberal Protestant Establishment and the Canadian University, 1920–1970. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004. Gingras, Yves. Physics and the Rise of Scientific Research in Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991. Granatstein, J.L., Irving M. Abella, T.W. Acheson, David J. Bercuson, R. Craig Brown, and H. Blair Neatby. Nation: Canada since Confederation. 3rd ed. Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1983. Greenlee, James G. Sir Robert Falconer: A Biography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. Harris, Robin S. English Studies at Toronto: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. Helmes-Hayes, R. A Quarter-Century of Sociology at the University of Toronto, 1963–1988. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1988. Hopkins, A. Castell, ed. The Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs. Toronto, 1900–38. Horn, Michiel. Academic Freedom in Canada: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. – The League for Social Reconstruction: Intellectual Origins of the Democratic Left in Canada, 1930–1942. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980. – York University: The Way Must Be Tried. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009. Hulse, Elizabeth. Thinking with Both Hands: Sir Daniel Wilson in the Old World and the New. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999; esp. Averill and Keith, ‘Sir Daniel Wilson and the University of Toronto’ (see above). Humphries, Charles W. ‘Honest Enough to Be Bold’: The Life and Times of Sir James Pliny Whitney. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. Johnston, Charles M. McMaster University. Vol. 1, The Toronto Years. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976. Ketchum, J. Davidson. Ruhleben: A Prison Camp Society. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965. Kidd, Bruce. ‘Canadians and the Olympics.’ Under Canadian Olympians. Library and Archives Canada, http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/ databases/olympians/001064-1000-e.html.

312

Bibliography

King, Alyson E. ‘Centres of “Home-Like Influence.”’ Material History Review 49 (Spring 1999), 39–59. Kuhlberg, Mark. One Hundred Rings and Counting: Forestry Education and Forestry in Toronto and Canada, 1907–2007. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Langton, H.H. James Loudon and the University of Toronto. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1927. – Sir Daniel Wilson: A Memoir. Toronto: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1929. – Sir John Cunningham McLennan: A Memoir. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1939. Levi, Charles. Comings and Goings: University Students in Canadian Society, 1854– 1973. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003. Lexier, Roberta. ‘The Sixties in Canada: Student Movements at EnglishCanadian Universities.’ Paper presented at 2007 annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association. MacPhail, Sir Andrew. Official History of the Canadian Forces in the Great War, 1914–1919. The Medical Services. Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1925. Masters, D.C. Henry John Cody: An Outstanding Life. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1995. McKillop, A.B. Matters of Mind: The University in Ontario, 1791–1951. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. McNaught, Kenneth. Conscience and History: A Memoir. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Murray, Heather, ed. Working in English: History, Institution, Resources. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Myers, C. Roger. ‘Psychology at Toronto.’ In Mary J. Wright and C. Roger Myers, eds, History of Academic Psychology in Canada. Toronto: C.J. Hogrefe, 1982. Neatby, Blair, and Don McEown. Creating Carleton. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Nelson, William H. The Search for Faculty Power: The History of the University of Toronto Faculty Association, 1942–1992. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1993. Panayotidis, E. Lisa. ‘The Department of Fine Arts at the University of Toronto, 1926–1945: Institutionalizing the “Culture of the Aesthetic.”’ Journal of Canadian Art History 25 (2004), 100–22. Prentice, Alison. ‘Elizabeth Allin.’ In Elspeth Cameron and Janice Dickin, eds, Great Dames, 264–87. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Rea, K.J. The Prosperous Years: The Economic History of Ontario, 1939–1975. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985.

Bibliography

313

Reed, T.A., ed. A History of the University of Trinity College, 1852–1952. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952. Reford, Alexander. ‘St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, 1958– 1978: The Frustrations of Federation.’ Canadian Catholic Historical Association, Historical Studies 61 (1995), 171–94. Richardson, Douglas, et al. A Not Unsightly Building: University College and Its History. Toronto: Mosaic Press, 1990. Ross, Murray G. The Way Must Be Tried: Memoirs of a University Man. Toronto: Stoddart, 1992. Ross, Robin. The Short Road Down: A University Changes. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. Rouillard, C.D., and Colleagues. French Studies at the University of Toronto, 1853–1993. Toronto: Department of French, 1994. St Michael’s College. Seventy-Fifth Anniversary: St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1927. Sawyer, John A. The Rotman School: An Historical Perspective, 1908–1998. John A. Sawyer, 1998. http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/alumni/ schoolhistory.pdf. Saywell, John T. Someone to Teach Them: York and the Great University Expansion, 1960–1973. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Shore, Marlene. ‘“Nebulous Penumbra”: James Mark Baldwin and the Borderlands of Psychology.’ In Gerald Friesen and Doug Owram, eds, Thinkers and Dreamers: Historical Essays in Honour of Carl Berger. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Simpson, John. ‘A Long Eclipse: The Liberal Protestant Establishment and the Canadian University, 1920–1970.’ Ontario History 100, no. 1 (2008). Sissons, C.B. A History of Victoria University. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952. Slater, John G. Minerva’s Aviary: Philosophy at Toronto, 1843–2003. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Stacey, C.P. Canada and the Age of Conflict. Vol. 2, 1921–1948, The Mackenzie King Era. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981. Stortz, Paul. ‘“Rescue Our Family from a Living Death”: Refugee Professors and the Canadian Society for the Protection of Science and Learning at the University of Toronto, 1935–1946.’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, new ser., vol. 14 (2003), 231–61. Stortz, Paul James. ‘“Have You Ever Looked into a Professor’s Soul?”: Professoriate Identities and Academic Culture in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Toronto, 1935–1945.’ PhD thesis, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 2006.

314

Bibliography

Stortz, Paul, and E. Lisa Panayotidis. Historical Identities: The Professoriate in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Thompson, John Herd, and Allen Seager. Canada, 1922–1939: Decades of Discord. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1985. University of Toronto. Roll of Service, 1914–1918. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1921. University of Toronto, Presidential Advisory Committee. Undergraduate Instruction in Arts and Science. Report of the Presidential Advisory Committee, 1967. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967. Urquhart, M.C., and K.A.H. Buckley, eds. Historical Statistics of Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965. Walden, Keith. ‘Hazes, Hustles, Scraps and Stunts: Initiations at the University of Toronto, 1880–1925.’ In Paul Axelrod and John G. Reid, eds, Youth, University and Canadian Society: Essays in the Social History of Higher Education, 94– 121. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989. Wallace, W. Stewart. A History of the University of Toronto, 1827–1927. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1927. Warkentin, John. ‘“Partially Provided”: Geography at the University of Toronto, 1844–1935.’ The Canadian Geographer 52, no. 3 (2008), 380–400. Watson, Gordon. Religious Studies in the University of Toronto. University of Toronto, Department for the Study of Religion, 1997. White, Richard. The Skule Story: The University of Toronto Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, 1873–2000. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2000. Wilson, Barbara M. Ontario and the First World War, 1914–1918. A Collection of Documents. Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1977. Wise, S.F. Canadian Airmen and the First World War: The Official History of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Vol. 1. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980. Wright, Donald. The Professionalization of History in English Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. abdication crisis of 1936, 89 Abols, Gus, 177 ACCESS, 246–8, 249 administration. See governance and administration admission requirements: in the 1920s, 79–80; in the 1950s, 125; in the 1970s and 1980s, 206, 207–9, 224, 225, 235–7, 240–1, 243–4; admission testing, 209, 225, 235–7, 240– 1; in the early 1900s, 41, 44; junior/senior matriculation, 10, 41, 44, 45–6, 79–80, 89, 109, 113–14, 117, 119, 125; at King’s College, 6–7 agriculture, 9, 98 Ajax (Ontario), 114, 140 alcohol, prohibition of, 75 Alexander, W.J., 17–18, 29, 80, 81 Alexander, William, 221–2 Alford, John, 84 Allen, Albert (Bert): appointment as dean, 156; on the Macpherson report, 163–4; on the need for new

buildings, 138; on the New Programme, 165; on university governance, 157 Allin, Elizabeth, 34, 100, 252, 281n.21 Altmeyer, George, 206, 226, 246, 248 alumni: rejection of proposed college for women, 51; War Memorial Fund, 63, 71 Alumni Association, 71 Amyot, John, 67 Anglican Church (Church of England): and King’s College, 4–5, 7–8; and Trinity College (Toronto), 8; and the University of Toronto, 11, 15, 252 Annesley Hall (Victoria, after 1903), 44 anthropology, 84, 138 Antigone (University College production), 19 applied science and engineering. See engineering Armstrong, Robin L.: and ACCESS, 246, 247; on admission testing, 236; appointment as dean, 225–6; and budget cuts, 226, 228, 229, 230–1, 239–40; and changes in the

316

Index

office of the dean, 240, 253; and curriculum renewal, 241–2, 243, 245; on delaying choice of major or program, 235; and the departments, 230–1; and the disestablishment of the Department of Political Economy, 231–2; end-ofterm report, 248–9; and faculty appointments, 229, 231, 241, 248–9; and faculty-Simcoe Hall relationship, 227–8, 230; and female appointments, 307n.84; Herzberg Medal, 303n.1; and the Kelly committee, 225, 226, 301n.15; reappointment of, 240; on the Spelt report, 305n.28; and statement of faculty goals and objectives, 234–5; and the Student Liaison Committee, 226; and teaching assistants, 226, 231; and teaching loads, 226, 229; and the universitycolleges relationship, 225–6, 233 Arts and Science Students’ Union (ASSU), 211–12, 222, 226 As You Like It (student production), 59 Ashley, C.A., 87 Ashley, William James, 15 Association of Part-time Undergraduates Students (APUS), 189, 197, 198, 226 Association of the Teaching Staff (ATS)/University of Toronto Faculty Association (UTFA), 154, 171, 172, 175, 179, 197, 198, 199 Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC), 186 Assumption College, 12, 277n.29 astronomy, 70, 304n.18 Athletic Centre, 223

athletics: basketball, 52, 54, 76, 77, 129, 222; compulsory physical education classes, 71; cricket, 11; fencing, 52; football, 11, 52, 76, 128, 129; Gymnasium, 44, 52; hockey, 52, 76, 129, 222; lacrosse, 52, 129; soccer, 129; tennis, 52, 54; track, 52; volleyball, 129, 222; for women, 44, 52, 54, 76, 77, 129, 223, 284n.13; in wartime, 59, 104–5; Varsity Arena, 76; Varsity Stadium, 76 automobiles, 73–4, 75–6 Averill, Harold, and Gerald Keith, 27 Bagot, Charles, 6 Baker, Alfred, 16, 17, 67, 71 Baldwin, James, 23, 26–7 Baldwin, Robert, 7 Banfield, Edward, 198–200 Baptist Church, 5, 12, 13, 48 Barzun, Jacques, 136, 287n.6 Beamish, Fred, 101 Beatty, Samuel, 87, 104, 112, 126–7, 253 Beaven, James, 6, 8, 17, 37, 251 Belcourt, Napoléon, 78 Belford, Carol, 205 Bell, Kenneth, 50 Bennett, R.B., 82, 85, 86 Benson, Clara, 68 Benzinger, Immanuel, 64–6 Berdahl, Robert: Duff Berdahl report, 154, 169 Berger, Carl, 19 Berlyne, D.E.: Berlyne committee, 181–5, 189, 191 Bickersteth, J.B., 88 biology, 9, 81, 98–9, 124, 202, 304n.18; department of, 16, 32, 37, 70, 82.

Index See also Biology Building; names of individual faculty members Biology Building (Queen’s Park Crescent), 24, 25, 142 Bissell, Claude: appointment of Allen as dean, 156, 157; appointment of Bladen as dean, 148, 149; appointment of departmental chairs, 153; appointment as president, 91, 133– 4; and the colleges established in the 1960s, 139–40, 141, 142, 147; and the Faculty of Arts and Science, 253; and the faculty budget, 152–3; as dean of residence at University College, 115, 134; on the engineering student raid, 130; and enrolment growth, 149, 158; on the honour course system, 161; and the Macpherson committee, 158, 162, 163–4, 167; on the need for a new Arts and Science building, 138; on new faculty appointments, 137; and President’s Council, 170, 171, 175, 176, 295n.53; and reforms in university governance, 154, 169–75, 176; resignation of, 174, 175, 176; on revolution, 167; on senior and junior universities, 134–6; service during the war, 102, 134; as student, 90–1; and the ‘tent city’ protest, 168–9; on undergraduates in the 1960s, 167–8; on University College, 139; on York University, 136 Blackburn, Robert, 8, 196 Blackwood, David, 144 Bladen, Vincent: appointment as dean, 148; on the appointment of deans, 290n.63; and the

317

appointment of departmental chairs, 153; on the centralization of the faculty’s business, 149; as champion of honour course system and new colleges, 148; and changes in the office of the dean, 150, 253; as departmental ‘chair’ instead of ‘head,’ 288n.43; on departments’ ‘temporary quarters,’ 138; term of service, 249; on examinations, 151–2, 160; and the Faculty Council, 150–1, 152, 166; and Helleiner, 106–7; and preparation of the faculty budget, 152–3; and revision of general course, 150; ‘top down’ administrative approach, 154, 155, 157 Blake, Edward, 14, 15, 22, 29, 30, 31, 32, 40 Blake, Samuel, 30–1, 48, 270n.29 Blake, William Hume, 6 Bland, A., 62 Blue Cross Drug Plan, 238 Blue and White Society, 114 board of governors: 1925 report on failure rates, 78–9; and 1930s salary cuts, 83; appointment of Bissell as president, 133–4; appointment of Evans as president, 176–7; appointment of Falconer as president, 39; approval of architect’s plan for Innis College, 145–6; establishment of, 35, 36, 39, 43; and the Fellowship of Reconciliation letter of protest, 86; and governance of the colleges established in the 1960s, 140–1; and Infeld, 127; and plans for new buildings in the 1950s, 123; and professors

318

Index

of German origin, 64–6; recognition of St Michael’s as autonomous arts college, 42; and reforms in university governance in the 1960s, 154, 167, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175; and refugee students, 107–8; and resignation of Loudon as president, 36; and salary-range increase in 1955, 122; and salaryrange increase in 1963, 137; support for faculty representation on, 154; and tuition increases, 89; and Underhill, 87–8 Boeschenstein, Hermann, 102, 108–9 Bohr, Neils, 81 bookstore (University of Toronto), 24 Borden Dairy Building, 138 Borden, Henry, 170 Borden, Robert, 55, 56, 67, 68, 131 Born, Max, 126 botany, 10, 142; department of, 70, 138, 243 Bott, E.A., 60, 101, 102 Brauer, Richard, 106 Brebner, James, 36, 80 Breton, Raymond, 300n.8 Brett, George, 58, 80–1 Brieger, Peter, 84, 106 Brook, Adrian G., and W.A.E. (Peter) McBryde, 17, 101, 166, 231, 274n.4 Brott, Richard, 301n.15 Brown, Bob, 130 Brown, George, 282n.47 Brown, Robert Craig, 240, 246, 248, 304n.13, 307n.76, 307n.83 Burchell, Brian, 246 Burke, Sara Z., 269n.54 Burton, Eli, 68, 100, 101, 106 Burwash, Nathanael, 12–13, 48 Bush, Douglas, 179

Cameron, John Home, 80 Campbell, Ralph, 220 Canadian Army Medical Corps (CAMC), 60, 61, 67, 71, 101 Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), 169 Canadian Authors Association, 78 Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF), 67, 69 Canadian Forum, 87 Canadian Officers Training Corps (COTC), 58–9, 60, 93, 95–6, 103, 274n.4 Canadian Red Cross, 60, 62, 63, 93, 96, 98 Canadian studies, 207–8 Caput, 35, 43, 75, 130, 200, 221, 299n.69 Careless, Maurice, 153 Carleton University, 133, 247 Carlyle, Nina, 248 Carmen, Albert, 48 Carnegie Foundation, 84 Carrothers, A.W.R., 177 Carter, G. Emmett, 223 Casa Loma, 76 Cassidy, Harry, 87 centenary celebrations, 75, 76 Chandler, Marsha, 253–4, 307n.83 Chant, C.A., 70, 84, 278n.52 Chant, Donald, 214–15 Chant, Sperrin, 102 Chapman, Edward J., 9 Claringbold, David, 178 chemistry, 9, 32, 124, 138, 148, 166, 293n.33; department of, 16, 18, 37, 70, 82, 112, 120–1, 137, 191, 274n.4, 298n.43, 304n.18; development of explosives, 101; transformation from art to science, 17. See also names of individual faculty members

Index Cherriman, J.B., 9, 16 Chinese studies, 110 Chrétien, Jean, 238 Church of England. See Anglican Church Churcher, Rufus, 205 cinema studies, 146–7, 192 civil rights movement, 133, 168 Claudel, Paul, 78 classics, 9, 18, 37, 38, 186, 188, 214, 292–3n.33, 304n.13; ‘Classics in English,’ 125. See also names of individual faculty members Cochrane, Charles, 58 Cody, Henry: and 1905 commission to review the university, 35; on athletics in wartime, 104–5; on Chinese studies, 110; on closing the Faculty of Arts, 109; and the Fellowship of Reconciliation letter of protest, 86; on refugee students, 107; on salary cuts in the 1930s, 83; and Smith, 111; on specialization vs. general education, 111; and Underhill, 86, 87–8; on the war effort, 93, 95, 98, 101–2; wife of, 96 co-education. See women, admission of Colborne, John, 5 Cold War, 116, 126–7, 128 Coleman, A. John, 127 Coleman, Arthur, 71 colleges, denominational/federated: competition among, 186–7; crossappointments, 139, 140, 151, 159–60, 187, 188, 203, 291n.11; declining roles of, 151, 179, 185–6, 210, 212; federation with the university, 7, 9, 12–15, 21, 22, 33, 251– 2; financial difficulties, 186;

319

Memorandum of Agreement (1984), 213, 233–4; ‘Memorandum of Understanding Relating to the Role of the Colleges’ (1974), 187–9, 198, 203, 204, 206, 207, 232, 233; recommendations of the Berlyne committee concerning, 182–3, 184–5, 189; and refugee students, 107–8; share of endowment funds for, 12; subjects taught by, 7, 14, 15, 21, 32, 42, 81, 109, 139, 151, 159, 161, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 207, 214, 224, 232, 251–2; tuition fees, 89; and the University Act of 1971, 174, 176; university-colleges relationship, 184–9, 198, 204, 206, 207, 225–6, 232–4. See also names of individual colleges Columbia University, 25, 66, 168 Comfort, Charles, 102, 112 commerce, 15, 37, 89, 98, 101–2, 182, 183, 210, 212, 218, 231–2, 243–4 Common Schools Act of 1871, 4 communism, 85, 86, 88 computer science, 138, 218, 229, 230 Conacher, James (Jim), 150–1, 154, 180–1, 296n.12 Connell, George: appointment as president, 228; on the New Programme, 242; and planning, 217, 228, 229; ‘Renewal 1987,’ 242–5, 249 conscription. See under First World War; Second World War Constitution Act of 1791, 3 Convocation Hall, 24, 34, 37, 61, 78, 179 Conway, Jill, 165, 166 Cook, Eleanor, 240, 242, 243, 248 Cook, Ramsay, 159–60

320

Index

Cooley, Robert, 69 Coolidge, Calvin, 78 Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), 82, 85, 87 Cornell University, 31 course evaluations, 182, 184, 197–8 Creighton, Donald, 153 Croft, Henry Holmes, 6 Crossley, Kathleen, 100 curriculum: Berlyne committee on, 181–5, 189, 191; curricular changes in the 1950s, 125–6; curricular changes in the 1960s, 149; curriculum renewal committee in the 1980s, 241–5; debate over arts and science curriculum in the 1960s, 157–67; in engineering in the early 1900s, 41–2; honours courses (four-year), 9–10, 18, 41, 44–5, 79– 80, 111, 135–6, 152, 158–9, 161–2, 164, 165, 166, 181, 251, 252, 285n.31, 292–3n.33; introduction of fouryear general course in the 1920s, 80; introduction of general course in the late 1940s, 124–5, 132; Kelly report on, 210–12, 222, 224, 225, 226, 233, 245, 249, 301n.15; ‘New New Program’ at Erindale College, 207; New Programme, 164–6, 176, 180, 181–5, 189, 191–2, 203, 207, 209–12, 222, 224, 242, 245, 249, 251–2, 292–3n.33, 293–4n.35, 294n.37; pass courses (three-year), 9–10, 18, 41, 44–5, 79–80, 81, 111, 124–5, 158–9, 160, 162, 164, 165, 251, 285n.31; and proposed preprofessional year, 124; revision of the general course in the 1960s, 150; ‘service teaching,’ 42, 81–2, 124, 234–5, 285n.27; subjects taught by

the colleges, 7, 14, 15, 21, 32, 42, 81, 109, 139, 151, 159, 161, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 207, 214, 224, 232, 251–2; wartime committee to study arts curriculum, 111. See also individual subjects Dale, William, 28, 29 Dalhousie University, 107 Darwinism, 16, 17 Dating Bureau, 92 David Dunlop Observatory, 84, 278n.52 Davis, William, 147–8, 170, 173, 216, 219 Dawes, H.F., 68 Debarbieri, Jim, 147–8 dentistry, 88, 95, 98 Depression, 82–93, 277n.29 ‘Depression and the Way Out’ radio series, 87 Devonshire House, 34, 61 DeWulf, Maurice, 81 Diamond, Jack, 286n.42 Dick, David, 24 Dickens, Charles, 6 Diefenbaker, John George, 131, 286n.42 disciplinary codes, 219–22 Division of Extension, 81–2, 87, 100, 109, 141, 189, 191, 284n.3 Dominion Drama Festival, 91 Dow Chemical Corporation, 168 dramatic arts, 19, 54, 105, 191, 203 Draper, W.H., 6 Drew, George, 126 Drummond, Ian, 212, 226, 239, 240, 268n.36, 301n.15 Drury, E.C., 75, 78 Duff Berdahl report, 154, 169

Index Duff, George, 196–7 Duffy, Dennis, 209 Dunlop, William J., 100, 109, 189 Dupré, Stefan, 190, 199 Eakin, Thomas, 47–8 Eastman, Harry, 214, 217, 231 economics, 14, 15, 106–7, 202, 218, 243–4; department of, 101–2, 229, 231–2. See also political science/ political economy. See also names of individual faculty members Edgar, Pelham, 102 education, 32, 98, 271n.43; department of, 236 Einstein, Albert, 106, 126, 127 electricity, 23, 24, 73 Ellis, W.H., 60, 67 Ellsberg, Daniel, 238 engineering, faculty of, 25–6, 32, 35, 70, 74, 82, 88, 114, 140, 230, 234–5, 285n.27; in the 1850s, 9; applied science enrolments in the 1890s and early 1900s, 25–6; 1953 student raid, 130–1; curriculum in the early 1900s, 41–2; and the development of munitions, 67–8; Kipling visit, 78; and the NRC, 285n.20; voluntary militia unit of university engineers, 55. See also names of individual faculty members Engineering Society, 108, 130 English: classical languages giving way to, 18; ‘Classics in English,’ 125; as college subject, 14, 32, 188, 214, 251–2; department of, 18, 101, 214, 304n.17; enrolment, 81, 151; extension courses in, 142; proficiency testing, 123, 209, 211, 235–7, 240–1, 300–1n.12; remedial courses

321

in, 123; and ‘service teaching,’ 81, 124, 285n.27; and the Transitional Year Program, 190–1. See also names of individual faculty members enrolment: in the 1850s and 1860s, 8, 15, 252; in 1880, 15, 268–9n.40; in the 1890s and early 1900s, 25–6, 37, 40–2, 46, 48, 50–1; in the 1940s and 1950s, 109, 110, 113, 115, 117– 18, 120, 124, 132, 134, 135–6, 137, 138, 148–9, 289n.45; in the 1960s and 1970s, 133, 137, 140, 148–9, 158, 196, 183, 185, 204, 209, 214, 217, 224; in the 1980s, 229, 242, 243, 245–8, 303n.3; in applied science, 25–6; declining college enrolments, 185; in English, 81, 151; at Erindale College, 144, 148, 303n.3; during the First World War, 60, 71; growth of part-time enrolments, 136–7, 183; in history, 81, 148; implementation of ACCESS, 246–8, 249; at Innis College, 140, 145; limiting enrolment in programs, 235, 239; in mathematics, 81, 148; in medicine, 25–6, 81–2, 124; at New College, 140; ‘Plateau Committee’ on post-war enrolment growth, 119–20, 122–3, 134, 148; in psychology, 81; in political science, 81; at Scarborough College, 142, 143, 149; during the Second World War, 104, 109, 110; at University College, 15, 51, 60, 268–9n.40, 289n.45; between the wars, 71, 81– 2, 89–90, 279n.71 entrance requirements. See admission requirements Erindale College (later University of Toronto at Mississauga): in the

322

Index

1980s, 238, 239, 242, 248–9, 303n.3; admission requirements for, 206, 209; capacity, 243; curriculum committee, 243; enrolment, 144, 148, 303n.3; establishment of, 140–1, 144; extension courses at, 144; facilities, 147–8; and the ‘Memorandum of Understanding Relating to the Role of the Colleges,’ 297n.32; ‘New New Program,’ 207; rumoured closure of, 216–17; specialist programs at, 191. See also names of individual administrators and faculty members ethics, 8, 10, 14, 32, 42, 188, 251–2, 291n.11, 293–4n.35 evaluations, course, 182, 184, 197–8 Evans, John: appointment as president, 177–8; and the ‘Banfield Affair,’ 199–200; and budget planning, 201, 203–4, 217; on his central challenge as president, 200; and the Governing Council, 178, 200–1, 204, 214; on the ‘Haist Rules,’ 201; and Innis College, 147; and the New Programme, 166, 181; and the University Act of 1971, 177–8, 204; on the universitycolleges relationship, 186–7, 188– 9, 204; Varsity interview, 194; and student representation on tenure committees, 198 Evers, Medgar, 133 examinations, 151–2, 160–1, 164; admission testing, 209, 225, 235–7; English proficiency testing, 123, 209, 211, 235–7, 240–1, 300–1n.12; examination fees, 89; matriculation, 10, 44, 45–6, 47, 79, 109, 125

extension courses: Division of Extension, 81–2, 87, 100, 109, 189, 191; at Erindale College, 144; at Scarborough College, 141, 142, 144; School of Continuing Studies, 191, 196. See also part-time studies faculty: in the 1840s and 1850s, 9, 37; 1891 report on appointments and ranks, 27–8; in 1905–6, 37; appointments in the 1920s and 1930s, 80– 1, 83–4; appointments in the 1950s and 1960s, 137, 141–2, 149, 157, 285n.22, 289n.50; appointments in the 1980s, 229–30, 231, 241, 248–9, 304n.13; association (ATS/UTFA), 154, 171, 172, 175, 179, 197, 198, 199; and competition with American universities, 121, 122; controversy over appointments in the 1890s, 27–30; cross-appointments, 139, 140, 141, 142–3, 144, 151, 159–60, 187, 188, 203, 291n.11; distribution by rank in the early 1900s, 41, 71; female, 51, 122, 248–9, 252, 277– 8n.38, 307n.84; increase in appointments between 1907 and 1914, 40–1; at King’s College, 6, 7, 8; in the late 1800s, 16, 17–18; lectureship salary in 1892, 28; new salary scale in 1945–6, 112–13; new salary scales in the 1950s, 121, 122; new salary scale in 1963, 137; participation in university governance, 154–5, 169, 171, 174–5; pension plans, 122, 283n.64; professors of German origin during the First World War, 16, 64–7, 105; proposed faculty-wide instructional

Index timetable, 149; rank of associate professor, 27–8; refugee scholars, 105–7, 282n.40; retirement age, 122, 277n.32; salaries during the Second World War, 278n.49, 281n.21; salary cuts in the 1930s, 83; ‘service teaching,’ 42, 81–2, 124, 234–5, 285n.27; Spelt committee recommendations concerning, 218–19; teaching assistants, 143, 205, 215, 226, 231, 304n.17; teaching loads, 226, 229; tenure and promotion, 121–2, 172, 185, 197–8, 206, 207, 233, 249, 253, 299n.61; and the world wars, 55, 58, 59, 60–1, 101– 2, 103. See also names of individual faculty members Faculty of Arts Council/Arts and Science Council: and admission testing, 237; approval of the New Programme, 164; Berlyne committee critique of, 183; Bissell on, 175; Committee on Arts Studies, 45; creation of, 35, 37, 39; debate over senior matriculation, 79; first meetings of, 45–7; General Committee of, 167, 183–4, 191, 192, 193, 204, 206, 211–12; and Greene, 180– 1; and the introduction of reading week, 152; and the Macpherson report, 163–4; reforms in the 1960s, 150–1, 166–7, 172–3; Research Committee, 283n.62; and revision of the general course in the 1960s, 150; structure and representation, 43, 45 Falconer, Robert: appointment as president, 36–7, 39–40; and appointments in political science

323

and history, 49–50; and Chair of Physics salary, 275–6n.45; and the debate over higher criticism, 47–8; on the establishment of a geography department, 84; on the Fellowship of Reconciliation letter of protest, 86; first address to students, 51; first meeting of Faculty Council as president, 46–7; on the four-year general course, 80; and funding challenges, 48–9; on the importance of research, 40, 74–5; and Lang, 274n.4; and professors of German origin, 64–7, 275n.25; and prohibition of alcohol, 75; and proposed college for women, 50–1; response to increase in enrolment, 40–2; and retiring professors, 80, 277n.32; on the ‘roaring ’20s,’ 75; on the role of the Faculty of Arts, 40, 42; on salary cuts in the 1930s, 83; on senior matriculation, 79; on the war effort, 57, 60, 63, 68–9; wife of, 62–3, 96 Farquharson, Robert, 205–6, 223, 226, 236 fascism, 85, 88 Federation Act of 1887, 12–15, 21, 22, 251–2 Fellowship of Reconciliation, 86, 88 Fennell, A.B., 89 Ferguson, Howard, 75 Fernow, Bernard, 64 financial issues and difficulties: in the 1890s and early 1900s, 30–2; 1922 commission to investigate university financing, 78; in the 1970s and 1980s, 186, 201–4, 213, 214–19, 224, 228–9, 230, 239–40;

324

Index

during the Depression, 83, 89–91; before the First World War, 48–9; need for increases in revenue in the 1950s, 120; tuition fees/student fees, 10, 30–2, 37, 45, 89–91, 120, 202, 216, 219, 284n.9, 302nn.33–5; ‘White Paper’ concerning budget cuts in the sciences, 230. See also government of Canada funding; government of Ontario funding fine art, 84, 111, 245–6, 278nn.56–7, 304n.17 Finkelman, Jacob, 83–4 fire (1890), 22–5, 37 First World War, 57–72; anti-German sentiment during, 64–7, 105; casualties, 60, 63, 71; changes following the war, 70–1; City of Toronto during, 63–4; clinic for disabled soldiers, 60–1; conscription, 53, 55, 60, 94; COTC units on campus, 58–9, 60, 274n.4; enlistment of students and faculty, 57, 59, 60; enrolment during, 60, 71; Falconer on the war effort, 57, 60, 63, 68–9; Overseas Club, 59; proportions of male and female students during, 71; returning soldiers, 63, 70; RFC/RAF training centres, 61, 62, 74; scientific research during, 67– 70, 100; Soldiers’ Tower, 63, 71; and St Michael’s College, 58; Taft visit, 59; technological legacies of, 73–4; and University College, 34, 58, 60, 62; Varsity during, 56, 57–8, 59–60, 62, 71; and Victoria College, 58; war-related events on campus, 58–64; women and the war effort, 60, 62–3 Fitzgerald, John, 67

Flavelle, Joseph, 35, 40, 65, 68 Fleming, John, 165 flu epidemic of 1918, 70 Foley, Joan, 184–5, 246 Forneri, James, 9, 17 forestry, faculty of, 39, 40, 64, 70, 98 Forster, Donald: and the 1973 student ‘sit-in,’ 197; appointment as president, 227–8; death of, 228; and the Governing Council, 178; report on academic appointments, 197; and the ‘tent city’ protest, 168–9; and the university-colleges relationship, 187 Foster, George, 67 Fotheringham, J.T., 55 Foulds, William, 150, 163–4, 205, 301n.15 Fowles, V., 301n.15 Fox, Paul, 99, 217 freedom of speech, 29, 86, 199–200 French: budget cuts, 214, 224; as college subject, 14, 32, 186, 188, 251–2, 298nn.42–3; enrolment, 81, 151; extension courses in, 142; Grade 13, 208; and grade distribution, 192; honour course in, 159; at Innis College, 146; options, 191–2. See also names of individual faculty members French, Goldwin S., 213 French, Shirley, 302n.33 Friedland, Martin, 35, 51, 60, 98, 131, 173, 217, 282n.40 Fritz, Madeline, 252 Gauthier, David, 198 geography, 84, 138, 226, 230, 236 geology, 16, 32, 37, 98–9, 138, 192, 239. See also names of individual faculty members

Index German, 14, 17, 32, 41, 44, 188, 251–2. See also names of individual faculty members Germany: anti-German sentiment during the world wars, 64–7, 105; Nazi, 85, 105; prisoners of war, 108–9; professors of German origin during the First World War, 16, 64–7, 105 Gerstein Science Information Centre, 24, 43, 147 Gilchrist, Lachan, 110–11 Globe, 29, 66, 286n.42 Globe and Mail, 216, 217 Gooderham, William, 14 Goudge, Thomas, 102, 153, 159 Gouzenko Affair, 126 governance and administration: appointment of departmental chairs, 153; appointment of first vice president, 271n.32; appointment of ‘Lady Superintendent,’ 20; Caput, 35, 43, 75, 130, 200, 221, 299n.69; Chair of Physics salary in 1919, 275–6n.45; Dean of Arts (office), 32–3, 112, 149–50, 151, 152–3, 205–6, 226, 240, 248, 253–4; departmental ‘chair’ instead of ‘head,’ 288n.43; Duff Berdahl report, 154, 169; under the Federation Act, 13–14, 22; ‘Haist Rules,’ 155, 179, 201, 206, 233, 253; President’s Council, 170, 171, 175, 176, 179, 295n.53; reforms in the 1960s, 154–5, 157, 169–75; role of departmental chairs, 203; role of government in governance, 33–4; ‘Simcoe Circle,’ 297–8n.33; under the University Act of 1853, 9, 22; under the University Act of 1901, 32–3,

325

35; under the University Act of 1906, 35–6, 37, 39, 170; under the University Act of 1971, 173–4, 175, 176, 177, 185, 188, 204; unicameralism, 172, 173, 175, 203, 206, 213. See also board of governors; Faculty of Arts Council/Arts and Science Council; Governing Council; names of individual administrator; senate Governing Council, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177–8, 200–1, 204, 213–14; academic affairs committee, 178, 188–9, 193, 194, 197, 198, 206, 207– 8, 209, 217, 219–20, 239; and the ‘Banfield affair,’ 198–200; establishment of the Academic Board of, 239; and increase in visa student fees, 207, 302n.33; internal affairs committee, 178, 296n.5; planning and resources committee, 178, 188–9, 206, 217, 219; and student representation on tenure committees, 198; and universitywide financial planning, 203 government of Canada funding: grants administered by the AUCC, 186; for returning soldiers, 109, 113–15; support for research, 100, 120, 281n.22; of wartime training courses, 100. See also financial issues and difficulties government of Ontario funding: after the 1890 fire, 24; 1914 grant, 49; 1922 commission to investigate university financing, 78; cutbacks in the 1970s and 1980s, 201–4, 216, 219; for denominational colleges, 12, 20–1, 186; during the Depression, 83; in the early 1900s, 32, 34;

326

Index

endowment funds, 7, 8–9, 12, 20– 1, 30; increased in the 1950s, 120; OSAP, 216; revenues from northern land grants, 30, 32, 36. See also financial issues and difficulties grade distribution, 192–3 graduate studies: arts graduate students in 1903–4, 26; Board of, 272n.16; expansion of graduate programs, 40, 203; School of, 140, 154, 187, 203 Grammar School Act of 1807, 4 Greek, 6, 10, 37–8, 41, 44, 45, 46, 125, 245, 292–3n.33; as college subject, 14, 32, 251–2 Greene, Robert: and the academic standards committee, 192; appointment as dean, 178–9; and the Berlyne committee, 184; and budget planning, 201–4, 214, 224; and the colleges, 179, 187, 188–9, 232; and controversy over dismissals in the mathematics department, 197; and curricular reform, 179, 180, 181; and grade distribution, 193 Greenlee, Robert, 47, 275n.25 Greenwood, Tom, 30 Grindal, Norma, 198 Grube, George, 86–7 Gymnasium, 44, 52 Gzowski, Casimir, 24 Haist, R.E., 154–5; ‘Haist Rules,’ 155, 179, 201, 206, 233, 253 Hallett, Archie, 173 Ham, James, 213; appointment as president, 212–13; and budget cuts, 214–16, 217; and the colleges, 233; and Kruger, 224, 249;

and rumoured closure of satellite campuses, 216–17; and tuition fees, 216, 219; on unicameralism, 213 Hanley, Charles, 146 Harbord Street Collegiate Institute, 63–4 Harcourt, Richard, 32 Harcourt, William, 28 Harding, Malim, 178, 198 Hare, F. Kenneth, 143–4, 212, 213 Harney, Robert, 300n.8 Harris, Peter, 205, 209, 223–4, 226, 246, 248 Harris, Robin, 140, 145, 146, 147, 285n.27 Harris, William, 178 Hart House, 52, 60, 61, 63, 76, 90, 92, 104, 105, 222–3; Farm, 128, 129, 223 Harvard University, 31, 66 Harvey, Cam, 212 Havelock, Eric, 86, 88 Hebrew, 10, 44, 45, 125 Helleiner, Karl, 106–7 Hepburn, Mitchell, 83, 86 Hermant, Sydney, 79, 90, 91 Heyworth, Peter, 195, 196 higher criticism, 47–8 Hincks, Francis, 8–9, 12 Hincks, William, 9, 16 history, 10, 14, 17, 32, 124, 151, 251–2; admission test in, 209, 235–6; controversy over the appointments of Wrong, 28–30; department of, 18, 44, 49, 101, 202; enrolment, 81, 148; extension courses in, 142; and female students, 50; and rejection of Namier, 50; and the Transitional Year Program, 190–1; and the

Index Underhill controversy, 86–8, 279n.69. See also names of individual faculty members Hogg, Helen, 252 Holland, Matt, 220 Holmes, Horace, 69 Honorary Scientific Advisory Council, 67, 68, 70, 100–1. See also National Research Council (NRC) honours courses (four-year). See under curriculum Hoover, Herbert, 78 household science, faculty of, 39, 40, 68, 271n.43 Hume, James Gibson, 26–7, 29, 66, 80 Hume, Patrick, 237 Hungarian Revolution, 128 Hungarian Student’s Club, 128 Huntsman, A.G., 106 Hutton, Maurice, 36, 49, 51, 81 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 9 hygiene, 67 Iacobucci, Frank, 300n.8 identification cards, photo, 223–4 Ignatieff, Nicholas, 128, 187 immigration and ethnic studies, 300n.8 Imperial Munitions Board, 68 Infeld, Leopold, 84, 106, 126–7, 286n.42 Innis College: architect’s plan for, 145–6; and competition among colleges, 186; courses and programs, 146, 191–2; enrolment at, 140, 145; establishment of, 140–1, 145–7; relocation, 145; Transitional Year Program, 146–7, 190–1. See also names of individual administrators and faculty members

327

Innis, Harold, 83, 106, 140 International Festival of Poetry, 179 International Polity Club, 59 International Student’s Organization, 129 Ireland, Frances, 297–8n.33 Islamic studies, 138, 149 Israel, Milton, 214 Italian, 14, 32, 54, 191–2, 252, 304n.17. See also names of individual administrators and faculty members Ivey, Donald G., 288n.21 Jackson, Gilbert, 49–50 Jarrett, Peter, 197 Jeanneret, F.C.A., 58, 80 Jews and Judaism: first Jewish professor, 83–4; rejection of Namier, 49–50 John W. Graham Library, 34 Johns Hopkins University, 16 Joliat, Eugène Amié, 125 Jones, David, 219 Jury, Alfred, 29 Kanowich, Seymour, 197–8 Keeling, David, 205, 206 Kelly, John, 210; Kelly report, 210–12, 222, 224, 225, 226, 233, 245, 249, 301n.15 Kemp, Edward, 69 Kennedy, John F., 133 Kennedy, Robert F., 133 Kennedy, W.P.M., 278n.51 Ketchum, J.D., 273–4n.3 Keys, Lilly Denton, 60 King, Martin Luther, 133 King, W.H., 62 King, William Lyon Mackenzie, 29– 30, 78, 82, 85–6, 87, 93, 94, 131

328

Index

King’s College (Nova Scotia), 17 King’s College (Toronto): admission requirements, 6–7; and the Anglican Church, 4–5, 7–8; Department of Oriental Languages, 126; as elite institution, 119; establishment of, 4–5, 6; faculty, 6, 7, 8; Faculty of Arts at, 22, 37; library, 8; location of, 6; Maple Leaf (student newspaper), 11; size of graduating classes, 37; students, 6–7, 22, 37. See also names of individual administrators and faculty members Kipling, Rudyard, 78 Kirkwood, Mossie May (Waddington), 81, 252, 277–8n.38 Kirschmann, August, 27, 64 Knox College, 12, 13, 14, 24, 44, 45 Kochberg, Paul, 148 Kruger, Arthur: on ACCESS, 247; and admission requirements, 206, 207–9, 224, 225, 235, 300–1n.12; appointment as dean, 205; and budget cuts, 214–19, 224, 228, 229, 301–2n.29; disestablishment of the Department of Political Economy, 232; and Ham, 224, 249; and the introduction of photo identification cards, 223–4; and the issue of sexual harassment, 222; on the new governing structure, 206, 213– 14, 224; and the New Programme, 207, 209–10, 211–12, 224, 294n.37; on plagiarism, 221; resignation of, 224, 227, 228; and rumoured closure of satellite campuses, 216–17; and Woodsworth College, 189–90, 205, 247 Kylie, Edward, 58

La Fontaine, Louis-Hippolyte, 7 Lang, Dan, 247 Lang, W.R., 55, 58, 70, 274n.4 Langdon, Steven, 163, 164, 171 Langton, Hugh, 31, 43–4 LaPointe, Ernest, 87 Lash, Zebulon, 48 Laskin, Bora, 154, 155 Latin, 6, 10, 37–8, 44–5, 83, 191–2, 292–3n.33; as college subject, 14, 32, 251 Laurier, Wilfrid, 55 law, faculty of, 8, 9, 15, 32, 38, 135; constitutional law, 14, 32, 45; department of law, 83, 278n.51; at King’s College, 6 Lea, Billy, 129 Leah, Anthony, 200 League for Social Reconstruction, 87 Leyerle, John, 229 libraries: broadening student access to, 147, 180, 194–6; Carnegie Library at Victoria, 84; cutbacks to, 239; John W. Graham Library, 34; King’s College library, 8; Robarts Library, 147, 180, 194–6; university library (1892 building on King’s College Circle), 24, 25, 37, 43–4, 147 Lloyd, Godfrey, 49–50 logic, 10, 17, 27, 32, 42 Loudon, James: appointment as president, 28, 33; appointment as professor, 16; appointment of Wright as vice president, 271n.32; closure of university residence, 44; contentious career as president, 30, 33–4, 36; and controversy over the appointments of Wrong, 29–30;

Index on the Deanship in Arts, 32–3; and the Federation Act, 12; and the first meeting of the Faculty Council, 44; physical science laboratory, 16–17; support for Hume, 26; and Varsity, 54 Lougheed, James, 63 Macallum, Archie (A.B.), 64, 67, 70 MacCallum, Reid, 112 Macdonald, Bruce, 35 MacIver, Robert, 80 Mackenzie, Michael Alexander, 33 Macklem, T.C.S., 33 MacLean, Cy, 129 MacMillan, Ernest, 58, 59, 108, 273–4n.3 Macpherson, Brough, 102, 158, 198, 231; Macpherson report, 158–67, 291n.6, 294n.37 Mail and Empire, 86 Maitland, Peregrine, 4, 5 management studies, 182, 231–2 Marrus, Michael, 286n.42 Massey family, 16, 60, 105 Massey, Hart, 145–6 Massey, Raymond, 62 Massey, Vincent, 58, 68 Mathematical and Physical Society, 52 mathematics, 9, 10, 17, 32, 44, 45, 82, 98–9, 100, 202, 218, 230, 236; aid centres, 211, 233; controversy over dismissals in the 1970s, 196–7; controversy over Infeld, 126–7; enrolment, 81, 148; at Innis College, 146; at King’s College, 6–7; and the Transitional Year Program, 190–1. See also names of individual faculty members

329

Mavor, James, 28, 29, 49–50, 80 McAndrew, W.J., 130 McCaul, John, 6, 8, 9 McClintock, Ellis, 129 McDougall, Donald, 61 McGill University, 31, 53, 76, 103, 107, 109, 128 McIlwraith, T.F., 110 McKee, Eric, 220, 221, 222 McKillop, Brian, 10–11 McLean, James, 23, 24 McLennan, John, 60, 68–70, 71, 100, 275–6n.45 McMaster University, 13, 107, 177 McNaught, Kenneth, 87 McRae, Robert, 150, 253 McTaggart, H.A., 58 Medical Sciences Building, 16, 142 medicine, faculty of, 8, 9, 11, 24, 32, 67, 101; admission of women, 271n.43; enrolment, 25–6, 81–2, 124; at King’s College, 6, 8; premedical students, 234, 306n.74; and ‘service teaching,’ 42, 234. See also names of individual faculty members Meek, T.J., 81 Meighen, Arthur, 78, 87 Mellon appointments, 229–30, 231 241, 249–51, 304n.13 Meredith, William Ralph, 34, 35 metaphysics, 8, 10, 17, 26–7, 32 Methodist Church, 7, 48, 74; and Victoria College, 5, 13, 35, 251 Military Service Act, 60, 94 military studies, 70, 125, 274n.4 Miller, William Lash, 274n.4 Millgate, Jane, 210, 226, 240, 301n.15, 304n.13

330

Index

mineralogy, 9, 10, 16, 32, 37 Moggridge, Donald, 240, 246, 247, 248 modern languages, 9, 17, 101–2, 110, 148; classical languages giving way to, 18; and female students, 50; petition from lecturers in, 27. See also names of individual faculty members Modern Language Club, 11, 54 Montgomery, Henry, 33 Montgomery, Lucy Maude, 78 Morgan, L.T., 88 Morton, Desmond, 207 Mowat, Oliver, 12, 13, 15, 18, 26–7 Mueller, P.W., 64–6, 275n.25 Mulock, William, 12, 14, 22, 111 Mulroney, Brian, 238 Munk School of Global Affairs, 34 Museum of Natural History, 16 music, 84, 273n.3, 284n.3 Myers, C. Roger, 102 Namier, Lewis (L. Bernstein Naymier), 49–50 National Research Council (NRC), 67, 100–1, 102, 285n.20. See also Honorary Scientific Advisory Council National Resources Mobilization Act (NRMA), 94, 99 natural history, 9, 12, 16, 18. See also biology Naymier, L. Bernstein. See Namier, Lewis Nazism, 85, 105 Neelands, David, 235 Nelles, Samuel, 12, 13, 14 New College, 139–41, 149, 151, 167, 186, 288n.21, 289n.51 New Programme, 164–6, 176, 180, 203, 251–2, 292–3n.33, 293–4n.35,

294n.37; Berlyne committee (1972– 3), 181–5, 189, 191–2; Kelly committee (1978–9), 209–12, 222, 224, 225, 226, 233, 245, 249, 301n.15; Macpherson committee (1966–7), 158–67, 291n.6, 294n.37; ‘New New Program’ at Erindale College, 207; review and renewal in the 1980s, 241–5, 249 Nicholson, H.A., 16 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 57 Nixon, Richard, 199 Norris, Geoffrey, 239 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 116 Northway, Mary Louise, 90 No. 4 General Hospital, 60, 61, 67 Nuffield, E.P., 289n.51 Ontario Agricultural College (Guelph), 78, 82, 103 Ontario College of Pharmacy, 82 Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), 236 O’Riordan, D.A.B., 301n.15 Osgoode Hall Law School, 111 Osler, Edmund B., 65, 66 Overseas Education League, 78 Panayotidis, E. Lisa, 278n.57 Parkes, A.E.M., 96, 103 Parrott, Harry, 202, 219, 302n.33 part-time studies, 136–7, 183; APUS, 189, 197, 198, 226; history of, 189; Woodsworth College, 95, 189–91, 192, 205, 223, 234, 246, 247, 298n.37. See also extension courses pass courses (three-year). See under curriculum Patterson, John, 68

Index Pearson, Lester, 58 Phillips, Eric, 127, 131, 134 Phillips, L.F., 55 Philosophical Society, 52 philosophy, 9, 124, 142, 151, 188, 245, 252; department of, 27, 44, 70–1, 81, 138, 191–2, 291n.11; extension courses in, 142; at Innis College, 146; at King’s College, 7; at St Michael’s College, 13, 42, 81; as university subject, 14, 32, 252. See also names of individual faculty members photo identification cards, 223–4 physical education. See athletics physics, 9, 17, 44, 45, 98–9, 138, 191; atomic, 126–7; Chair of Physics salary in 1919, 275–6n.45; courses for servicemen, 100; department of, 70, 82, 101–2, 120–1, 137, 225; enrolment, 81, 124, 148; geophysics, 111; as university subject, 32. See also names of individual faculty members Physics Building, 34, 37 physiotherapy, 60–1 Pike, William H., 17, 29 Pine Hill Presbyterian College, 36–7, 39 plagiarism, 220–1 Plumptre, A.F.W., 142, 143, 288n.27 Polish Student’s Club, 129 political science/political economy, 82, 113, 202, 218; enrolment in, 81; department of, 83, 84, 107, 148, 268n.36, 277n.33; departmental library, 44; disestablishment of the Department of Political Economy, 231–2; and female students, 50; and geography, 84; at Innis

331

College, 146; mandating the teaching of, 14–15; at Scarborough College, 190, 205, 216–17; and sociology, 15, 84, 149; as university subject, 14–15, 32. See also economics; names of individual faculty members Political Science Club, 52 Potter, Richard, 6 Prentice, Susan, 222 Presbyterian Church, 5, 7, 15, 74 Princeton University, 16, 62, 106, 126, 127; CEEB, 209, 225 Prichard, Robert, 286n.42 professors. See faculty prohibition of alcohol, 75 psychology, 26, 27, 202, 304n.17; department of, 70–1, 81, 230; extension courses in, 142; at Innis College, 146; at St Michael’s, 42; wartime research, 101. See also names of individual faculty members Pugh, Robert, 205–6 Queen’s Hall, 34, 54 Queen’s University, 5, 7, 12, 13, 41, 54, 72, 76, 103, 107, 109, 127, 128 Quiet Revolution, 133 Quinlan, Florence, 100 Rae, Bob, 171 reading week, 151–2 refugees: scholars, 105–7; students, 107–8, 128 Regina Manifesto, 87 Regiopolis College, 7, 12 religion: as college subject, 8, 13, 32, 47; debate over higher criticism, 47–8; religious knowledge option, 47–8, 293–4; religious studies/

332

Index

theology, 7, 35, 42, 43, 45, 186, 188, 231; University of Toronto as nonsectarian/secular, 7–8, 9, 15, 20, 21. See also names of individual faculty members and religions research: 1940s payment to faculty doing research away from Toronto, 283n.62; Falconer on the importance of, 40, 74–5; government funding for, 100, 120, 281n.22; scientific research during the world wars, 67–70, 100–2, 104 residences: closure of university residence in 1899, 44; Devonshire House, 34, 61; in colleges established in the 1960s, 139–40, 145–6, 147–8; SAC ‘tent city’ protest, 168–9, 170; for women, 34, 37, 44, 140, 145–6 Robarts, John, 170 Robarts Library, 147, 180, 194–6 Roberts, Charles G.D., 17, 18, 78 Robertson, Bruce, 67 Robinson, E.A., 148 Robinson, Gilbert deB., 102, 122, 134 Robson, John (Jack), 165–6 Roman Catholic Church, 7, 13, 42, 74, 106 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 85 Ross, George W., 12, 18, 26, 33; on the admission of women, 19; and funding issues in the early 1900s, 30–1, 32 Ross, Murray G., 135 Ross, Robin, 168–9 Rouillard, C. Dana, 102, 125, 159, 160 Royal Air Force (RAF), 74, 102 Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), 98, 100, 116 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), 82–3, 133

Royal Canadian Navy (RCN), 98, 100, 116 Royal Flying Corps (RFC), 61, 62 Royal Navy: debate over the ‘navy question,’ 53, 55 Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), 71, 110 Russell, Peter, 147, 187 Rutherford, Paul, 236 Ryerson, Egerton, 5, 9 Salter, Letitia Catherine (‘Lady Superintendent’), 20, 269n.52 Sandwell, B.K., 78 Satterly, John, 68, 69 Saunders, Richard, 83, 113, 114–15, 278n.49 Saywell, William, 207–8, 214, 215–16, 300–1n.12 Scarborough College/University of Toronto at Scarborough: in the 1980s, 239, 242, 243; and English proficiency testing, 209; enrolment at, 142, 143, 149; establishment of, 140–2; extension courses at, 141, 142, 144; facilities, 143, 147–8; and the ‘Memorandum of Understanding Relating to the Role of the Colleges,’ 297n.32; relationship with the university, 142–4; rumoured closure of, 216– 17; televised instruction, 142, 288n.27. See also names of individual administrators and faculty members Schabas, William, 200 School of Continuing Studies, 191, 196. See also extension courses; part-time studies School of Practical Science (SPS), 16– 17, 26, 32, 35, 37, 42, 142, 270n.12. See also engineering

Index Science Association, 52 Second World War, 94–115; 1942 Remembrance Day Services, 97; anti-German sentiment during, 105; Cody on the war effort, 93, 95, 98, 101–2; compulsory physical examinations for students, 104; conscription, 94, 98–9; COTC units on campus, 93, 95–6, 103; educational program for war prisoners, 108–9; enrolment during, 104, 109, 110; faculty salaries during, 278n.49, 281n.21; non-student groups resident on campus, 100; and refugee scholars, 105–7, 282n.40; returning soldiers, 109, 113–15, 117, 119, 132, 134, 284n.72; scientific research during, 100–2, 104; uniforms on campus, 103–4; Varsity during, 92–3, 96, 99, 103, 107, 108; ‘war revenues,’ 100, 281n.22; women and the war effort, 93, 96–8, 100, 103 Self, Roger, 69 senate: approval of bachelor of science degree, 149; committee on professors of German origin, 64–7; and controversy over appointments in the 1890s, 27, 30; debate over senior matriculation, 79; establishment of four-year degree, 9–10; and governance of the colleges established in the 1960s, 140–1; last meeting of, 174; and scheme of federation, 13; and opening of scholarships to women, 19; Plateau Committee, 119– 20, 122–3, 134, 148; and reforms in university governance the 1960s, 167, 170, 171, 172, 175; and refugee students, 108; structure and

333

representation, 7, 9, 12, 13–14, 22, 32–3, 35, 39, 43 ‘service teaching,’ 42, 81–2, 124, 234– 5, 285n.27 sexual harassment, 221, 222, 238 Sheffield, Edward F., 119 Shepherd, Ronald, 208 Shook, Laurence, 103, 277n.29 Sidney Smith Hall, 137–8, 147 Silcox, Peter, 211, 235–6, 239 Simcoe, John Graves, 3–4 Sirluck, Ernest, 168–9 Slater, John, 27, 43, 157, 294n.35 Slavic studies, 110, 148, 304n.13 Smith, Barry, 226, 240 Smith, Gavin, 247 Smith, George Oswald, 33 Smith, Goldwin, 34, 35, 36, 40 Smith, G.M., 49 Smith, Leonard, 115 Smith, Sidney: appointment as University College principal, 110; and Bissell, 134; and departmental ‘chair’ instead of ‘head,’ 288n.43; on departmentalism, 111–12; on economic barriers against university education, 119; on the engineering student raid, 130; on extra-curricular activities, 130–1; and financial and personnel affairs, 112; and Infeld, 126–7; on the need for expansion, 121; on new land and buildings, 120–1; personality, 131; and post-war enrolment growth, 117–18, 148; on remedial English courses, 123; resignation of, 131–2; and returning soldiers, 113, 115, 132; and salary increases, 121, 132; on secondary schools, 123; on ‘service teaching’ by the Faculty of Arts, 124;

334

Index

succession to president, 111; on the University of Toronto as elite institution, 118–19, 120, 123 Smuts, Jan Christian, 78 Snider, Walter, 128 Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, 106–7 sociology: class sizes, 202; department of, 84, 138, 149, 278n.55; and political economy, 15, 149; at Scarborough College, 142. See also names of individual faculty members Solandt, Omond, 177 Soldiers’ Tower, 63, 71 South African securities, 238–9 Spanish, 44, 45, 46, 54, 191–2; as university subject, 14, 32, 252 Sparshot, Francis, 159 Spelt, Jacob, 205, 217–19 Spencer, Bob, 195 St Hilda’s College, 44, 51, 54 St Laurent, Louis, 116 St Michael’s College: 1950 homecoming parade, 118; as autonomous arts college, 42; COTC unit, 58; endowment funds for, 12; enrolment at, 289n.45; federation with the university, 12, 13, 14, 251, 272n.12; female students at, 42–3; governance and administration, 43, 185; philosophy at, 13, 42, 81; and provincial funding, 186; relationship with the university, 13, 185, 188; residence facilities, 44; and the Second World War, 103; subjects taught at, 14, 42; and University College, 42; and US students, 277n.29. See also names of individual administrators and faculty members

Steiner, J.W., 205–6 Stortz, Paul, 281n.22, 282n.40 Strachan, John, 4–5, 6, 8 Strangway, David, 228, 230, 231, 300–1n.12 students: in the 1850s, 8, 10–11, 37; in the 1880s, 15; 1895 student strike, 29–30, 44, 52; in the 1920s, 75–7, 78–9; 1944 ‘Liberal Arts Petition,’ 99; 1953 engineering student raid, 130–1; activism in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, 133, 164, 167–9, 170, 176, 193–200, 219, 238–9; admission of female students, 18–20, 42– 3, 252, 271n.43; arts student body of 1903–4, 26; and the ‘Banfield Affair,’ 198–200; and Blue Cross Drug Plan, 238; Blue and White (student newspaper), 11; and broadening access to libraries, 147, 180, 194–6; code of behaviour, 219–22; compulsory physical examinations in wartime, 104; dances, 54, 59, 76, 128–9, 223; Dating Bureau, 92; enlistment of, 57, 59, 60; fraternities and sororities, 11, 78, 276n.20; and the Hungarian revolution, 128; international, 129, 207, 238, 302n.33; involvement in war-related events on campus, 58, 62–3, 96–8; and the Kelly report, 211–12, 225; at King’s College, 6–7, 22, 37; loans, bursaries, and scholarships, 63, 89, 90, 119, 279– 80n.85; Maple Leaf (student newspaper), 11; ‘occasional,’ 26, 110; parity issue, 172, 173, 174, 193–8; ‘Parity Festival,’ 195; part-time, 136–7, 183, 189, 197, 198, 205, 226; and petitions concerning

Index Underhill, 87–8; photo identification cards, 223–4; pre-medical, 306n.74; refugees, 107–8, 128; representation on decision-making bodies, 162, 171, 172, 174–5, 176, 179, 180, 193–4, 197, 198, 207, 211, 292n.23, 297–8n.33; in the sciences, 26; ‘starred,’ 45–6; student production of Antigone, 19; student production of As You Like It, 59; tuition fees/student fees, 10, 30–2, 37, 45, 89–91, 120, 202, 216, 219, 284n.9, 302nn.33–5. See also admission requirements; athletics; curriculum; enrolment; names of individual students and student organizations; graduate studies; Varsity Students’ Administrative Council (SAC): in the 1930s and 1940s, 90, 96, 108; in the 1950s, 128, 129–30; in the 1960s, 151, 158, 163, 168, 169, 171, 175; in the 1970s, 177, 194, 195, 196–8, 200, 211–12, 302n.33; in the 1980s, 216, 219, 220, 238, 239, 246, 304n.17 Students’ Book Department, 24 Students for a Democratic Society, 198–200 Student’s Parliament, 52, 53 Student’s Union and Gymnasium, 52 Suez Crisis, 125–6 Sullivan, Henry, 6 Surerus, John, 102, 105, 115, 282n.39 Swan, Peter, 213 Sword, Jack, 178, 179, 195, 196 Synge, J.L., 83, 126 Taft, William Howard, 59 Tapper, Bonno, 64–6

335

Taunsett, Kate, 20 Taylor, Bruce, 72 teach-ins, 168, 199 teaching assistants, 143, 205, 215, 226, 231, 304n.17 televised instruction, 142, 288n.27 ‘tent city’ protest, 168–9, 170 Thompson, Phillips, 29 Tobe, Stephen, 240, 248 Toews, Peter, 64, 66 Toronto (formerly York): in the 1800s, 3–4, 5, 6, 16; in the 1950s, 117, 135; during the Depression, 74, 82, 83; during the First World War, 63–4; international geophysical meetings in, 131 Toronto Baptist College, 12, 13. See also McMaster University Toronto Public Library, 120 Toronto World, 64, 66 Transitional Year Program, 190–1 Trinity College (Dublin), 7 Trinity College (Toronto): 1953 engineering student raid, 130–1; and the Carnegie Foundation, 84; COTC unit, 58; endowment funds for, 12; enrolment at, 289n.45; establishment of, 8; ethics crossappointment, 291n.11; extracurricular activities in 1911–12, 54; federation with the university, 12, 13, 33, 251; governance and administration, 43, 185; and the Kelly report, 212; Overseas Club, 59; and provincial funding, 186; relationship with the university, 187–8; residence facilities, 44, 247; subjects taught at, 14, 251–2; Women’s Voluntary Service Detachment drill at, 96. See also

336

Index

names of individual administrators and faculty members Tucker, James, 29 tuition fees/student fees, 10, 30–2, 37, 45, 89–91, 120, 202, 216, 219, 284n.9, 302nn.33–5 Underhill, Frank, 86–8, 279n.69 unicameralism, 172, 173, 175, 203, 206, 213 United Church of Canada, 74 United Nations, 116 United States: in the 1960s, 133, 168; attracting faculty in face of competition from universities in, 121, 122, 137, 285n.21; ‘Banfield Affair,’ 198–200; student fees at universities in, 30–2; US students at St Michael’s College, 277n.29; visit of former president Taft, 59; and the world wars, 61–2, 116 University Acts: Act of 1849, 7–8, 9; Act of 1850, 7, 251; Act of 1853, 9, 11, 12, 22; Act of 1873, 12; Act of 1901, 32–3, 35, 37; Act of 1906, 35– 6, 37, 38, 39, 170; Act of 1971, 173– 4, 175, 176, 177, 185, 188, 204 University of Birmingham, 96, 275n.45 University of British Columbia, 92 University of California, 31, 32; Berkeley, 168 University of Cambridge, 96, 126 University of Chicago, 31 University Civilian Defence Committee, 98 University College: in the 1850s, 9, 10–11; 1890 fire at, 22–5, 37; in the 1920s, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80; 1953 engineering student raid, 130–1;

appointments in the 1960s, 157; Banfield visit, 199; and the debate over higher criticism, 47–8; early student organizations, 11, 31; elimination of religious knowledge option, 293–4n.35; enrolment at, 15, 51, 60, 268–9n.40, 289n.45; establishment of, 9, 251; federation with the university, 12–13, 14–15, 22, 251; female students at, 19–20, 34, 50, 51, 53; governance and administration, 9, 22, 32, 35, 43, 45, 185; as home to the Faculty of Arts, 37; language laboratory at, 125–6; overcrowding of, 50–1; philosophy cross-appointment, 291n.11; physical science laboratory, 16–17; production of Antigone, 19; relationship with the university, 20, 32, 109–10, 139, 174, 185, 186–7, 206, 232; remedial English examination at, 123; tuition, 89; and ‘service teaching,’ 81; and St Michael’s College students, 42; and the University Act of 1901, 32; and the University Act of 1906, 37; and the world wars, 34, 58, 60, 62, 104. See also names of individual administrators and faculty members University College Literary Society (UC Lit), 23, 52, 78 University College Football Club, 11 University College Literary and Scientific Society, 11 University Cricket Club, 11 University Glee Club, 11, 59 University of London, 9, 20, 39, 157 University of Manchester, 84, 96 University of Manitoba, 107, 110, 111, 131

Index University of Michigan, 31 University of Minnesota, 32 University of Oregon, 75–6 University of Ottawa, 12, 54, 107, 222 University of Oxford, 15, 34, 96 University of Toronto at Mississauga. See Erindale College University of Western Ontario, 103, 109, 128, 154, 277n.29 University of Wisconsin, 31–2 Upper Canada College, 5, 6, 7, 12 Urwick, E.J., 80 Varsity: in the 1920s, 75, 76, 78–9; on the 1953 engineering student raid, 130; in the 1960s, 133–4, 147, 148, 152, 160, 163–4, 165, 168; on ACCESS, 246, 247; on the admission of women, 19–20, 50, 269n.54; advertisements in, 44, 54–5, 91–2; on the appointments of Wrong, 28–30; after Armistice Day, 76; and Armstrong, 225, 226, 239–40; on budget cuts, 214, 219, 239–40; and Chandler, 254; and Connell, 228; content in the 1980s, 237–40; on the election of university president in 1971, 177; Evans interview, 194; on the Fellowship of Reconciliation letter of protest, 88; on the first intercollegiate basketball game, 54; during the First World War, 56, 57–8, 59–60, 62, 71; on Forster, 227; founding of, 11; Greene interview, 180; on Ham, 213; on Hart House Farm, 128; on increased funding in the 1950s, 120; and Infeld, 126, 127; on the Kelly report, 212, 225; Kruger interview, 206, 207; on non-academic

337

code of behaviour, 221–2; on plagiarism, 220–1; on professors of German origin, 66; during the Second World War, 92–3, 96, 99, 103, 107, 108; on student access to Robarts Library, 196; on student representation on tenure committees, 198, 207; on tuition fees, 219; on the women’s debate over the ‘navy question,’ 53 Varsity Arena, 76 Varsity Stadium, 76 Victoria Literary Society, 54 Victoria College: 1953 engineering student raid, 130–1; Burwash Hall, 61; Carnegie Library at, 84; and the debate over higher criticism, 47–8; de facto Faculty of Arts at, 22, 251; endowment funds for, 12; enrolment at, 289n.45; ethics cross-appointment, 291n.11; federation with the university, 7, 12, 13, 14, 21, 251; female students at, 26, 54; governance and administration, 43, 185; as Methodist institution, 5, 13, 14, 35, 251; and provincial funding, 186; relationship with the university, 188; students in 1903–4, 26; subjects taught at, 14; and the world wars, 58, 108. See also names of individual administrators and faculty members Vietnam War, 133, 168 Waddington, Mossie May. See Kirkwood, Mossie May Wakeman, Nanci, 148 Walker, Byron Edward, 35, 36, 40 Wallace, Malcolm, 58, 79, 80, 109, 110, 277–8n.38

338

Index

Wallace, Stewart, 58 Wallace, W.S., 106 Walmsley, L.C., 283n.53 Walter, F.H., 88 Warner, John, 48 Watson, Gordon, 163 Webster, Jill, 205–6 Weinstein, Stephanie, 227 Welsh, Harry L., 102, 225 Wetmore, Frank, 101, 139, 150, 289n.51 White, William C., 110 Whitney Hall, 34 Whitney, James Pliny, 34–5, 40, 48 Wilkinson, Bertie, 84, 102, 103 Williams, D.C., 141, 142 Williams, Ralph Hodder, 49, 50, 61–2, 273n.26 Wilson, Daniel: and the 1890 fire, 24; and the 1891 report on appointments and ranks, 27; on the admission of women, 19–20, 252; and Alexander, 18; appointments of, 9, 13, 17; and Baldwin, 26; death of, 28; and the Federation Act, 12, 13, 14; and the first student organization, 11; on the matriculation examination, 10 Wilson, P.A., 301n.15 Wilson, Tuzo, 131, 144 Winters, Robert, 135 Wolfe, Rose, 286n.42 women: in the 1920s, 75; academic segregation of, 19, 20, 50–1; admission of, 18–20, 42–3, 252, 271n.43; appointment of ‘Lady Superintendent,’ 20; athletics for, 44, 52, 54, 76, 77, 129, 223, 284n.13; female faculty, 51, 122, 248–9, 252, 277– 8n.38, 307n.84; female students

at St Michael’s, 42–3; female students at University College, 19– 20, 31, 34; female students at Victoria College, 26; feminism, 20, 133; ‘freshies,’ 51, 52–3; and Hart House, 128, 222; and the modern languages and history, 50; proportion of women enrolled in 1895, 40; proportion of women enrolled during the First World War, 71; proportion of women enrolled in the 1930s and 1940s, 280n.10; proportion of women enrolled in the 1960s, 289n.48; senior women’s basketball team in 1925, 76; use of university library, 43, 51; residences for, 34, 37, 140; and the world wars, 60, 62–3, 93, 96–8, 100, 103 Women’s Dramatic Club, 54 Women’s Literary Society, 31, 52–3, 54 Women’s Patriotic League, 62 Women’s Union, 90 Women’s Voluntary Service Corps, 96 Women’s War Service Committee, 96–7, 98 Woodhouse, A.S.P., 110 Woodside, Moffat St Andrew, 124, 132, 139, 148, 150, 157, 287n.12 Woodsworth College, 95, 189–91, 192, 205, 223, 234, 246, 247, 298n.37 Workman, George, 48 Wright, George, 112 Wright, Ivan, 84 Wright, Robert Ramsay, 16, 25, 29, 33, 35, 37, 43, 45, 65, 253, 254, 271n.32 Wrong, George M.: controversy over the appointments of, 28–30; and professors of German origin, 66;

Index and proposed college for women, 50–1; request for salary increases, 49; and the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, 106 Wundt, Wilhelm, 26 Wycliffe College, 12, 13, 14, 24, 28, 35, 44, 45, 58, 61, 108 Wynn, Graeme, 4 Yale University, 31, 62, 66 Yates, Keith: ‘White Paper,’ 230

339

York University, 135–6, 149, 217, 247 Young, George Paxton, 17, 26 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), 11, 44, 52, 108–9 Zakuta, Leo, 301n.15 zoology, 10, 191–2, 243, 245; department of, 70, 120–1, 137; at Scarborough College, 142. See also names of individual faculty members