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HISTORICAL IDENTITIES: THE PROFESSORIATE IN CANADA
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EDITED BY PAUL STORTZ AND E. LISA PANAYOTIDIS
Historical Identities The Professoriate in Canada
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2006 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-9000-1
Printed on acid-free paper
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Historical identities : the professoriate in Canada / edited by Paul Stortz and E. Lisa Panayotidis. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-9000-1 1. College teaching – Canada – History. 2. College teaching – Canada – Social aspects. 3. Women college teachers – Canada – History. I. Panayotidis, Euthalia Lisa, 1960– II. Stortz, Paul James, 1960– LB2331.H575 2005
378.1 2 0971
C2005-904551-5
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 acknowledge the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP). This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Contents
Acknowledgments
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Introduction: ‘Have You Ever Looked into a Professor’s Soul?’ Historical Constructions of the Professoriate in Canada 3 paul stortz and e. lisa panayotidis Section 1: The International Professoriate 1 ‘Quiet Flow the Dons’: Towards an International History of the Professoriate 31 william bruneau Section 2: The Professoriate and the State 2 Running for Office: Canadian Professors, Electoral Politics, and Institutional Reactions, 1887–1968 63 michiel horn 3 The Professoriate and the Police during the Cold War 84 steve hewitt Section 3: Institutional Development, Society, and the Professoriate 4 ‘The Trail of the Serpent’: The Appointment of a ‘Professor of Didactics’ at Acadia College, 1883 107 barry moody
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5 Crossroads Campus: Faculty Development at Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1950–1972 131 malcolm macleod 6 The Social Sciences at Bishop’s University: The Professoriate and Changes in Academic Culture, 1950–1985 158 donald fisher 7 Teacher Training in Turmoil: The Experience of Professors in Normal Schools and Faculties of Education during the Quiet Revolution in Quebec 183 thérèse hamel Section 4: Gendered Voices in the Professoriate 8 Sister-Professors: Roman Catholic Women Religious as Academics in English Canada, 1897–1962 207 elizabeth m. smyth 9 ‘Woman of Exodus II’: Irene Poelzer, the Women’s Movement, and Teacher Education 225 dianne m. hallman 10 Gendered Careers: Women Science Educators at Anglo-Canadian Universities, 1920–1980 248 marianne ainley 11 Boosting Husbands and Building Community: The Work of Twentieth-Century Faculty Wives alison prentice
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Section 5: Subjectivity, Identity, and the Making of the Professoriate 12 Constructing ‘Intellectual Icebergs’: Visual Caricature of the Professoriate and Academic Culture at the University of Toronto, 1898–1915 299 e. lisa panayotidis 13 ‘Two Middle-Aged and Very Good-Looking Females That Spend All Their Week-Ends Together’: Female Professors and Same-Sex Relationships in Canada, 1910–1950 332 cameron duder
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14 Identity in the Making: The Origins and Early Experiences of the Faculty of Arts Professoriate at the University of Toronto, 1935–1945 351 paul stortz
Select Bibliography Contributors 413 Index
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Acknowledgments
Historical Identities: The Professoriate in Canada reflects our interests in the field of the history of higher education in Canada, and the realization that the study of the historical university for the last twenty years has been changing, expanding, and most important, becoming more critical and diverse. When we first conceived of this collection, we recognized the continuing need for a forum for the publication of original research that would facilitate critical discussion on topics pertaining to universities in historical context. Something in previous studies seemed to be missing, however; where was the discussion of the academic engine and lifeblood of the university – the professoriate? How do the professors who ran, constructed, shaped, and determined the intellectual and academic cultures of the university fit in with the institution itself, and with the community and state? We felt that the mandate of such a collection as this was to promote more study of the dynamics and characteristics of this central and acutely overlooked agent in historical scholarship. Although, over the past several years, in-depth serious research on the history of universities in Canada has been gaining momentum, studies up until now that directly argue the nature of the professoriate remain, alas, infrequent. In envisioning the mandate of this book, issues such as the role of the professor on campus and in society were of specific importance. Are professors in historical context one or all of: social commentators, teachers, academic researchers, disseminators of public knowledge, community and public intellectuals, or civil and state servants? What are the various historical and social contexts of the professoriate’s organization and activities? How did the professors negotiate often conflicting identities? This book is concerned with the inexorable question of the
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Acknowledgments
relationships between the ‘ideas’ of, and the ‘idea’ of, the professoriate and the university – the outlook, practise, role, indeed the very social justification for the professors’ and universities’ existence. How has the professoriate embodied the university itself? Could critical theories, ideologies, and arguments succinctly characterize the university and professors, or is the historical professoriate too diverse for focused study? We were intrigued with this question as it offered a strong academic and interdisciplinary basis for encouraging and publishing original research. We would like to acknowledge our contributors first for their excellent contributions, offering the best of their recent research on the history of the professoriate. This book is synthesis of the some of the most insightful arguments on the professoriate, and would of course not be possible without their participation. We are also grateful to a number of other people who supported, encouraged, and demonstrated considerable interest in this book’s production. Len Husband, Humanities Editor at the University of Toronto Press, was integral in skillfully and professionally guiding the manuscript through to publication. As well, we would like to acknowledge the helpful suggestions of the anonymous readers. At various stages of conception, colleagues provided support for this book, in particular J. Donald Wilson, William Bruneau, and Michiel Horn (the latter two contributors), and Harold Averill, assistant university archivist at the University of Toronto. We would also like to thank our research assistants Patricia Jagger, Tim Krywulak, Jody McMillan, and Donovan Tymchyshyn, and Charles Levi for his careful indexing work. Finally, we would like to thank Stavroula and Andreas Panayotidis, John and Mary Stortz, and of course B. Lance.
paul stortz, University of Calgary e. lisa panayotidis, University of Calgary
HISTORICAL IDENTITIES
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Introduction: ‘Have You Ever Looked into a Professor’s Soul?’ Historical Constructions of the Professoriate in Canada PAUL STORTZ AND E. LISA PANAYOTIDIS
In the December 1942 issue of Acta Victoriana, a student-run journal at Victoria College at the University of Toronto, Obviously Anonymous wrote a brief diatribe on the vacuousness of the professoriate, vitriolically remarking that professors were ‘ivory towerists’ who were ‘horribly egoistic,’ characterized by ‘intellectual snobbishness,’ ‘amusing forgetfulness,’ and ‘basic impracticability,’ possessing an ‘inaccurate approach to life’ and promoting an environment that was ‘stultifying to one’s intellect.’ ‘These rulers of our fate,’ the student lamented, ‘generally fall short of the inspirational.’ ‘Professors are a rather sorry lot.’1 The next issue included a response by Sober Senior, who lamented that the ‘dark place’ inhabited by professors, according to Obviously Anonymous, was in fact the student mind of ‘thick walls’ where ‘so little light had penetrated.’ Acknowledging that some professors were egotistical ‘blowhards,’ Senior countered that most epithets were unjustifiable, that professors embraced new ideas and concepts, got a ‘gleam’ in their eyes when a student showed an inkling of understanding, and that their role, by and large successfully fulfilled, was to ‘[make] you think ... Talk with them as people – they are people, after all. And you will be surprised at their keenness, the breadth and depth of their outside interests, and their interest in students.’ Senior prefaced the rebuttal by sarcastic praise of Obviously Anonymous’s article, calling it ‘a remarkable little achievement in rounding up most of the clichés against professors and academic life.’ Senior provocatively asked: ‘Have you ever looked into a professor’s soul?’2 Stereotypical literary and visual images of professors abound in historical and contemporary popular culture. The usual picture is of a person who has an insatiably curious mind, is both forgetful and single-
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minded, and operates at the expense of emotion, resembling what one author called the ‘U of T egghead.’3 In The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm, one of a series of British books on a fictional professor written for adolescents, Norman Hunter writes: Professor Branestawm, like all great men, had simple tastes. He wore simple trousers with two simple legs. His coat was simply fastened with safety pins because the buttons had simply fallen off. His head was simply bald and it simply shone like anything whenever the light caught it ... It was a wonderful head was the Professor’s. He had a high forehead to make room for all the pairs of glasses he wore ... [T]he Professor was so clever, or perhaps because he was so clever, he was very absent-minded ... He had very few friends because people found it so very difficult to talk with him. It was like being at a lecture or in a schoolroom. Every second word he said you couldn’t understand and he asked you questions worse than any you’d ever find on an exam paper.4
Professor Branestawm, the ‘great (if absent-minded) inventor’ is depicted on the cover of Hunter’s book reading a text while riding a jury-rigged penny-farthing complete with a lamp stand, books for bike pedals, and an extra pair of reading glasses in the spokes.5 In adult literature, the brilliantly deductive Sherlock Holmes meets his only match in Professor Moriarty, who ‘[retained] something of the professor in his features. His shoulders are rounded from much study, and his face protrudes slowly.’ Upon meeting Holmes for the first time, the genius but nefarious mathematician ‘of good birth and excellent education’ commented on the detective’s physiognomy and the reputation preceding him: ‘You have less frontal development than I should have expected.’6 Clearly, stereotypes of the professoriate, perpetuated by their students, society, and sometimes by professors themselves – such as the ubiquitous absent-mindedness – romanticize and mythologize the professor.7 Apart from rigid and sometimes humorous stereotypes, we know little of the professoriate in Canadian history. Scholarship into the history of universities in Canada has tended to eschew direct and systematic examination into the professoriate, making professorial identities and cultures only the periphery of their study. Researchers have often preferred instead to look at such topics as student accessibility and background, learning, academic administration and policy-making, curriculum and discipline construction in political context, the rise of gradu-
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Plate I.1 Professor Branestawm
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ate programs, the intellectual independence of the university in light of state and religious influence, institutional growth or contraction and funding, research accomplishments, and, in general, wider questions of the function of the university in society. The lack of any serious historical studies of the professoriate is salient in Canada. William Bruneau and William Nelson have both commented on the dearth of substantial literature on the professoriate, especially as it applies to faculty associations.8 Moreover, a social history of higher education in Canada prompted one reviewer more than a decade ago to lament that although it is a step in the right scholastic direction to deal with the history of students, gender, curriculum, and research, still ‘we know next to nothing about the professoriate.’9 The accuracy of popular portrayals of professors and their social and work environments in twentieth-century Canada is drawn into question. According to different sociohistorical and cultural contexts, as people viewed the professoriate, and the professoriate viewed itself, popular stereotypes and images reflected less than the actual subject. Generalized identities obscured the professoriate and its impact both on the university and society. This collection of the most recent research by scholars in the history of higher education is predicated on the search for the professoriate as a complicated and intimate historical agent, subject to interpretation, and exemplified in the dichotomy of ascribed identities whose poles are aloof absent-mindedness, for one, and indispensable intellectual engines of the university, for the other. This book’s purpose is to encourage inquiry into the history of professors. As a collection, it offers historical arguments on the professoriate to locate professors at both the institutional and, more broadly, the social-cultural level. Questions about the social history of the professoriate lead directly to considerations of the relationships between intellectuals and society, economics, politics, communities, and cultures. In the main, however, this volume attempts a closer analysis of the identities of a distinct and subjective group in society. We pose a number of questions which are to varying degrees discussed in each chapter. What did it mean to be a professor, and how did the professoriate in Canada fit into the history of the university and society at various historical junctures? What were professors’ main activities, and what were their effects on institutions and on the people around them? How important were interpersonal relations to professors’ occupational success? How did background, education, and prior experience shape the later experiences of those who became professors
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in the university? How were the professors’ working conditions mediated through the professoriate’s individual and collective desires, goals, expectations, identity, behaviours, and values? To what extent did politics and the economy influence the professoriate’s work? How were power, status, prestige, and rewards offered, conferred, or held? What were the effects of singular or multiple knowledge paradigms on the work environment? How did professors deal with challenges to their hegemony, especially considering issues of gender? On a macro level, what can the cultures of the professoriate reveal about university function and activities, the universities’ integral agents, and the relationship between the university and developments in Canadian society as a whole? Professorial Cultures Professors offer a window through which the history of higher education in Canada can be intimately studied. In this volume, we strive to put the horse before the cart, whereas in previous studies, the professoriate has been treated opaquely, in roundabout ways, without concentrating on the agent itself. When national and political histories were popular decades ago, professors were not studied in any systematic way in Canada, and they remained largely neglected when histories of urban, rural, and regional communities, ethnicities, labour, and the environment eclipsed older interpretations of the past. Many systematic studies in higher education – even after the introduction of revisionist historical methodologies revolving around gender, race, and class – have begun with their institutional ‘home’ – the rise of the university. This is both good and bad. These works describe or explain institutional developments from the proud founding and charter, mandate, early struggles, and creation of administrative machinery, through descriptions of student culture and curricular diversification, to the assured confidence and success as a modern progressive university. Biographical expositions of the professoriate are interspersed throughout these institutional offerings, isolated in paragraphs here and there, of ubiquitous head shots of male faculty members and administrators, as if the university were the star and the professors the chorus line. Recent histories deconstruct the university through interdisciplinary and historical approaches. The more penetrating of these studies challenge the institution and its administration in claims to dominant discourses. Any study of the professoriate, however, must fundamentally
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consider intellectual and academic cultures and their relationship to individual and collective identity. One effective method of doing this is to identify the major changes in the structure and activities of the university over time and make connections (because of the number and nature of the sources, with a healthy use of inference) to teaching and research faculty. Group regulation and individual autonomy as they apply to the professoriate can be studied, as can control over knowledge as a non-diminishing commodity; hierarchical structures and power to effect change; and recruitment, prestige, rewards, security, common value systems, servicing of ‘clients,’ mobility in and out of the ranks, physical environment and technologies, extracurricular activity, social and associational memberships, loyalty to the organization, and university politics in general. What effect did the development of the university have on professorial identity and role, and vice versa? By looking at university cultures, are we not guilty of the same lack of focus as in many previous studies that emphasized institutional activity over professorial agency? In this book, we argue that the culture of the professoriate in particular time and space does not separate environment and agent. Professors have often been contextualized with somewhat flat descriptions of working conditions, but our collection adds the human dimension to the intellectual culture in which professors work. Larger social forces are at work in the university. The notion common in this volume is of academic cultures where values, opinions, attitudes, perceptions, ideas, beliefs, expectations, behaviours, discourses, and Weltanschauungen were created by individuals, who were in turn shaped by them. Depending on the society, university, faculty, discipline, department, individual, and historical context, these cultures can be widely divergent. The contributions to this book indicate that the professorial work environment was nuanced, best described as a set of ongoing balances, tipped one way or the other between social and ‘professional’ relationships, individual and collective work activity, ascribed importance of the humanities and sciences, teaching loads and research, and between individual, department, faculty, university, and state goals. We also look at concurrent views of the professor as a social leader and community adviser, and as a university employee and intellectual labourer, and the perceived value of individual background over meritocracy, especially in the cases of hiring and ascribed status. Until 1945 in Canada professors functioned mostly in a socially infor-
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mal environment within an institutional setting that was strictly hierarchical and arguably undemocratic. Although individual creativity was given considerable freedom, the regulation of the myriad tangible and intangible trappings of work such as promotion, hiring and firing, workloads, curriculum, salary, expectations of comportment and duties, and nature of the disciplinary knowledge base were in the hands of a relative few. Much of the power over the professors’ workplace remained unwritten and often unspoken. As a result of a frequently constricted job market for professors, and a small and undifferentiated academic administration, the number and nature of the faculty workforce were determined by relatively few individuals on campus. Professors were controlled through strict behavioural guidelines in contrast to a more diffuse and complex professorial culture after the Second World War. This culture was fuelled by social and demographic change (greater numbers of professors) change on campus, teaching and research foci more closely accountable to industry, and the entrenchment of bureaucratic organizations characteristic of the multi-university. Today, the professoriate’s culture perhaps still might be seen, however, as brooding and introspective, and obstinate in its response to intellectual, gender, or ethnic changes in working and social environments. The university historically has been a conservative institution; that the professoriate may be as well should not be surprising. By looking at the history of faculty development, two essays in this collection are valuable in understanding the connection between institutional culture and professorial identity. Barry Moody (Chapter 4) discusses the complexities of hiring a professor in a volatile amalgam of religion, intellectualism, and internal politics of a small Maritime university in 1883. Founded by Baptists, Acadia College was an excellent example of an institution’s having multiple and conflicting missions, with myriad expectations and roles in society dictated by powerful social forces in the university and surrounding community. Was Acadia to be entirely beholden to theologically based ideologies? Or, should it consider secular interests? Moody analyses the intense debates over what was to be taught in the face of rising demands for professional education and the place of religion in intellectual culture and community brought on by new philosophies. He considers the personalities and stakeholders intricately involved in the future of the institution. Hiring a single professor could indeed be of extraordinary importance, but also revealing of ingrained divisions. Moody illustrates the complex nature of hiring for an integral profes-
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sorial position. This contrasts nicely with Malcolm MacLeod’s longitudinal study (Chapter 5) of hiring, and the considerations inherent in building up an effective academic workforce. In his chapter MacLeod presents instructive quantitative research on the shaping of Memorial University of Newfoundland. He discusses the professional significance of personal qualifications such as a prospective professor’s background, nationality, field of study, and gender. Arguing that statistics are an important and overlooked methodology in the study of the professoriate, MacLeod reveals the intellectual culture of Memorial and, as does Moody with his case study, connects the internal needs of the institution such as program and discipline development with the social and political conditions of the surrounding society. MacLeod finds that during the period that he examines (1950–72), Memorial’s hiring practices were ‘quite thorough, methodical, and fair ... Only in rare instances, usually connected with curriculum innovation, were deliberate attempts made to recruit “stars.”’ This observation stands in contrast to those made of many other Canadian universities during this time, whose methods of hiring were considerably more clandestine. A major theme in this volume is that professorial cultures and offcampus developments intersect. This relationship is contingent and contextual. Donald Fisher (Chapter 6) demonstrates the number of social and community factors involved in uncovering institutional development and discipline construction and their relationship to professorial culture. A small university in the southeastern corner of Quebec, Bishop’s could be considered the quintessential mid-twentieth-century Canadian university in terms of institutional and intellectual culture: informal, based on primary relationships, and collegial – indeed, what Fisher calls ‘cozy.’ Being a social construct, the university was never immune to external pressures to conform to societal expectations. Fisher clearly outlines that this includes the sociopolitical climate in Quebec and the student movement between 1950 and 1985. Rapidly changing conditions in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in the democratization of university governance and considerable structural changes characterized by a professorial culture that became more professional and competitive, and somewhat less friendly. Fisher connects the forces that changed the academic culture at Bishop’s over a few short years, into, alas, a university that offered an education ‘no longer ... primarily to give the mind freedom to think.’ While outside community and politics influenced academic culture
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and professorial identity, factors associated with regionalism – a major theme in Canadian history – offer interesting bases for comparison and future study. Read with Fisher’s work, Thérèse Hamel’s study (Chapter 7) is enlightening for an analysis of a particular program as well as a set of professional institutions in the same province as Fisher and during approximately the same historical period. Where Fisher analyses the academic cultural aftermath of the tumultuous 1960s in Quebec, Hamel discusses the human cost of institutional upheaval, employing an autobiographical narrative approach that focuses on a number of professors affected. Given the institutional constriction and bureaucratic rationalization of teacher training across the province, Hamel examines how educational reform transformed the lives of professors working in normal schools and the impact of educational transition on the academic culture. Reform changed professorial identity, as professors were forced to quickly adapt to changing cultural circumstances. Many professors were faced with career decisions that they did not particularly welcome. Experiences were subject to the university ‘in which these professors worked, [and to] their qualifications, gender, and life status.’ Little question remained that academic culture and professorial identity were inextricably intertwined. Identities and Roles This book centres on both the individual and collective historical identities of professors. Thus far the research, most of which is sociological and policy-based, shows little consensus on how best to describe professors: Are they a ‘cluster of experts,’ an ‘expert occupation,’ a ‘group of subprofessions or emerging professions,’ a ‘professional bureaucracy,’ ‘skilled craftsmen,’ an ‘intellectual-social class,’ an ‘aristocracy of the intellect,’ a ‘community of scholars,’ ‘captains of erudition,’ or merely a ‘collection of personalities’ and ‘procession of individuals’?10 International studies debate whether the professoriate is a sociointellectual class.11 Some studies conclude, generally, that since the mid-twentieth century, but as early as the last decade of the nineteenth century in the United States, concomitant with the rise of law and medicine faculties and the establishment of the American Association of University Professors, the professoriate can be reasonably called a profession.12 Janet Scarfe’s 1982 doctoral thesis, ‘Letters and Affection,’ details the recruitment of professors and their ‘professional’ responsibilities and careers,
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at least in the nineteenth-century institution, while Blair Neatby flatly rejects the notion of the professor in Canada since the Second World War as a professional.13 The debate, certainly in the contemporary multi-university, continues. By exploring international historiography, William Bruneau (Chapter 1) tackles the professoriate in a comparative and argumentative framework. He situates discussions and themes related to the professoriate in international historical works and literature, calling for creative methodologies to help stimulate this overlooked field of historical enquiry. Bruneau finds richness in the existing texts, but also limitations in many of the approaches, a sense of unfinished business in the study of the history of universities. In the current state of scholarship on the professoriate, explaining professors as a basic social group can well benefit from, for starters, exploring their collective history, which is ‘like a river, revealing peoples and societies.’ Similar to the argumentative tenets of this book, Bruneau returns to the approach that in any historical study designed to reveal intellectual culture, professors must be part of the story, a maxim that is basic yet often acutely ignored. Bruneau challenges historians to begin the ‘hunt’ for the historical professoriate, employing myriad ‘perspectives and optics’ to understand this social group both individually and collectively. Our collection approaches the professors as a group of disparate individuals, open to historical interpretation as agents in economic, political, and social relations with each other, the university, the community, and the state. Finding consensus on the historical identity of professors as individuals is as difficult as trying to identify them as a group. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Canada, gradual secularization, partially fuelled by Darwinism, in the midst of community urbanization and industrialization, and the growth and specialization of disciplinary knowledge were having fundamental impacts on the professoriate, its working environment and culture, and its social role both on campus and off, including its reputation as intellectual exemplars for students. The professors’ own intimate view and handling of knowledge were changing significantly. The belief that knowledge ‘meant more than intellectual truth’ and ‘included an intuitive appreciation of spiritual ideals’ was under attack as early as 1880 in Canada, as seen clearly in the university with the rise of the sciences, the social sciences, and political economy.14 By the early twentieth century, the traditional university culture of classical and theological education was being edged out by the sense of social and industrial
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efficiency and the methodological rigour of the sciences. The changes on campus in terms of intellectual culture and program and disciplinary development challenged the tradition of the university as an inculcator of liberal ethics. For some professors, however, the university at its heart was still driven by concerns of morality and philosophical and subjective criticism, reflected in the resilience of the liberal arts and humanities as the core curriculum. For quite some time after 1900 professors in Canada held onto the idea that the professor was a moral leader. At the turn of the twentieth century the professorial community was small and ‘inconspicuous,’ many of its members being ‘moralists, not men of action.’15 As a result, some professors were perceived as being out of touch in a society growing impatient with the teaching of contemplative and reflective practices in universities and more enamoured with the practical outcomes espoused by industry that had a direct impact on standards of living. Did this promote stereotypes of professors on and off campus as anachronistic and eccentric intellectual shut-ins? E. Lisa Panayotidis (Chapter 12) highlights the way in which contemporary interpretive theories, in this case those of visual culture, may be employed to inquire into the professoriate and associated contingent and historically specific meanings such as teaching and research. She argues that the caricatures of the professoriate which appear in Torontonensis (the University of Toronto yearbook) between 1898 and 1915 are not merely decorative images or simple attempts at sardonic humour but served to construct particular understandings and subjectivities. Panayotidis uses these images to discuss contemporary ways of crafting the professor duly as a ‘moral male model’ and as an ‘absent-minded researcher.’ The professor, as viewed by often antagonistic agents on campus – the students – was perceived to have lessthan-magnanimous relations to the students both in the classroom and out. The implications of these variant perceptions indicate the powerful ways in which the notions of teaching, research, and mentorship were inscribed into visual images. By the mid-twentieth century, the role of the professoriate was far less certain. After the Second World War, society and the economy were expanding. Demographic change coupled with increased wealth in wider sections of society prompted massive construction of new facilities of higher education and, in the 1960s, increased bureaucratization of the state and the university brought on by greater student numbers, larger government and university budgets (with exceptions), and frag-
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mentation and solidification of more disciplines on campus. These developments meant that professors could not exclusively be considered separately as teachers, researchers, intellectuals, leaders, advisers, professionals, scholars, administrators, or even ‘immortal pillars of knowledge.’16 In the second half of the twentieth century in Canada, at any one time, the professoriate’s role, activities, culture, and identity were multifaceted. Professors are in a unique position in Canadian society. They have stresses that are unfamiliar to other occupations: they covet objectivity while being influenced by entrenched community values; they are employed by the provinces, yet work for institutions that oppose state intervention; they are intellectual leaders and through occupational expectations are to be creative thinkers, but are often beholden to conservative interests of society; they are intellectually independent, but their environment has sociointellectual and economic constraints that can impinge on academic freedom; they are purveyors of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but especially in the latter half of the twentiethcentury, tangible results of research are most prized.17 Yet, within an often adversarial society, regardless of discipline, department, or research activity, scholars writing about higher education, or the statements made by professors themselves, reverted to the paramount responsibility of intellectuals to promote the welfare of society. In 1947, for example, in a time of vastly increased attention to national institutions and culture in Canada, as compared with before the war, a report prepared for the Humanities Research Council of Canada argued for the fundamental importance of the professoriate to society, imploring that ‘scholars [need to be] retained in our national life ... to make their most vital contributions to our civilization.’18 Professors were rarely averse to getting involved from their armchairs in national political debate, writing extensively on nationalism, international relations, and the nature of Canadian society, epitomized by Frank Underhill’s remarks in the late 1930s at the University of Toronto, which were perceived to be seditious. Anti-intellectualism was inherent in a particular and historically conservative social order embattled by comparatively liberal ideologies espoused by many professors. To the distaste of some members of society and industry, social and political criticism was an efficacious intellectual tool for deconstructing established ideas. This was practised to some effect by the League for Social Reconstruction and by various other professors and intellectuals inside and outside the university.19 Was the intellectual ferment in the 1930s indicative of a desire within
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the professoriate at large to become involved in social and political policy? Michiel Horn (Chapter 2) helps explicate the history of professors’ virtual non-participation in politics. Horn ties in the adversarial university culture with scattered occurrences of professors wearing their political stripes on their sleeves, much to the consternation of some members of the university. He analyses the historical sociostructural nature of the university as inhibitive, while outlining the often timid dispositions of professors to risk their tenured sinecures. Academic freedom, whether implicit or explicit, was a major factor in political activism or complacency, and in the end denied the state and society much-needed critical thought in important and powerful political positions.20 Steve Hewitt (Chapter 3) provides an instructive companion-piece to Horn’s work. He emphasizes the argument of anti-intellectualism in Canadian society, or at least a perceived under-appreciation of the professor. While Horn analyses the pull of the academy to keep the professors in line, Hewitt looks at the push to maintain some kind of intellectual control over what some in society considered to be subversive academic thinking and practices. Building on his work, Spying 101: The RCMP’s Secret Activities at Universities,21 Hewitt notes that while under scrutiny, unnamed members of the professoriate – few in number – acted as casual informants against their own peers, driven by the challenges of some professors to the established order. Here, the professorial culture, affected by sociopolitical stress brought on by polarizing international tensions, was expressed more as a conservative environment that supported institutional and intellectual tradition. ‘Academics faced police scrutiny both because of their influence on the minds of the next generation of a nation’s economic and political elite and because they were situated at an institution which in the twentieth century has been not just upholder of the status quo but also its challenger, frequently from the left.’ It’s clear from both Horn and Hewitt’s chapters that the lot of the professor in Canadian society was never easy. Often the professor was ignored, but the professoriate was rarely thought of, either in positive or negative light, as unimportant on or off campus.22 Background, Experiences, and Gender The historical roles of the professoriate have often been interpreted through dominant ideologies within a patriarchal academic culture. In recent scholarship, the history of women professors has benefited immensely from biographical studies that have allowed the charting of
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individual experiences in the context of powerful environmental influences. For example, William Bruneau’s 1994 article ‘Toward a New Collective Biography’ discusses the potential of looking historically at the various characteristics and life events of a group of professors while analysing the ‘contextual explanations of professors’ literary, political, and philosophical tendencies.’23 Biography has been used to explicate the lives of individual professors, uncovering the nature of various academic cultures, and helping to define the professoriate as a group as well as more than a sum of its parts. Based on a biographical sample of 158 professors, between 1935 and 1945 at the University of Toronto, Paul Stortz (Chapter 14) takes the lives of individual faculty members and investigates whether members of this group of academics shared a common background and upbringing. Were professors born or were they more likely acculturated into a particular way of seeing and thinking? This collective biographical case study suggests that higher education in southern Ontario may have been becoming more Canadianized and that an intellectual class may indeed have existed on university campuses in the middle part of the twentieth century. Importantly, by looking at the backgrounds of these professors, individual experiences among the sample may parallel and even intersect, and the nature of their experiences before entering the professoriate may have a unifying thread of incipient intellectualism while remaining fundamentally distinct and individual. Much of the twentieth century saw the university as traditionally an elitist male organization, an ‘old boys’ club’24 that excluded alternative intellectual approaches. Women professors were in minute numbers during this time despite having impressive qualifications, publications, and education; they felt much like professional or occupational outsiders. The intellectual hierarchical status quo subdued the voices of younger faculty members and marginalized women and, in extreme times, could embrace various forms of political, gender, and racial discrimination including anti-Semitism.25 Although ethnic differences among the professoriate remain a neglected study, with the rise of revisionist social histories and gender theories since the late 1960s, works on women in academe, especially students, have become more numerous. Studies of women professors uncover deep historical inequalities between the sexes in professorial hirings, salary, rank, promotion, tenure, availability of research and teaching facilities, supervisory duties, authorship, and even access to faculty clubs. A gendered class structure drove many women away from campus.
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Wide disparities in power between men and women drastically shaped the sociointellectual experiences of women professors. The book edited by Elspeth Cameron and Janice Dickin, Great Dames, introduces at length the difficulty of biography, especially when attempting to understand people who are marginalized in society and, in our case, professors marginalized in the academy. Cameron and Dickin find that some micro-methodologies employed by women writing biographies or autobiographies, ‘relied on the “and their times” method, especially where their subjects defined themselves in the male hierarchy. For others, a mixed approach involving “against their times” and “apart from their times” seemed most true to their subjects.’26 This contention is frequently supported in our book; women professors as subjects were not only approached as outsiders in academics, but care was especially taken to situate the professors vis-à-vis often adverse academic environments. Dianne M. Hallman (Chapter 9) contributes to the argument that women faced social obstacles far more challenging than those encountered by male professors. Her subject, Irene Poelzer, was an academic pioneer and woman religious; while bringing the women’s movement to institutional reality, she was nonetheless constrained by patriarchal milieus. Poelzer was a feminist intellectual who felt ‘alienation, loneliness, and unwitting complicity with the forces of oppression.’ Poelzer, Hallman continues, felt a voice of intrepid independence that gave her an ‘expression of the emancipatory power of women claiming ourselves as subjects of knowledge, a subtle invocation of the strength of collective action.’ Hallman talks of subjectivity in the powerful feminist historical methodologies that attack the objectification of knowledge/the knower and the lack of women’s experiences and voice. The practice of objectification is obvious and influential in the discursive order and texts in society, institutions, political economy, and the university. In Cultural Politics, Glen Jordan and Chris Weedon suggest that subjectivity ‘encompasses unconscious and subconscious dimensions of the self, and implies contradictions, process and change.’27 Considering this poststructural approach, how might we situate and understand the organization of gender in the academy, in historically, culturally, and contextually specific moments? What cultural narratives and discourses shaped how women experienced the differential power in terms of social and scholarly practices that positioned them (and often disadvantaged them) relative to their male professorial counterparts?
18 Paul Stortz and E. Lisa Panayotidis
Elizabeth M. Smyth (Chapter 8) offers much for discussion about how women were positioned within alternate patriarchal intellectual cultures. She seeks to understand the opportunities and experiences of women – in this case, women religious – in a different academic setting than the environment staffed by the majority of struggling women professors in Canada. By looking at the religious academy, Smyth finds that gender differences are considerably mitigated, as the intellectual and theological forces which complicated women’s professorial roles and identities in other institutions were not as overwhelming. Smyth writes that the women’s ‘vocations as Roman Catholic women religious gave them opportunities unavailable to their secular sisters. As sisterprofessors, they were able to participate actively in a sector of education largely dominated by men ... Sister-professors’ lives were shaped by their multiple identities as women, as Roman Catholic women religious, and as academics.’ As a basis for further comparative studies among similar and other higher education institutions in Canada, sister-professors had multiple and unique identities, being ‘teachers, housemates, and supervisors of extra- and co-curricular activities and members of the same ecclesiastical community as the students they taught.’ Smyth offers further evidence that according to historical context, gender experiences and expectations can be individual, subjective, and particular to institutional and academic environments. Contemporary scholarship on women in the professoriate, although clearly not as extensive as it might be, has attempted to understand women’s professorial experiences within the context of diverse disciplines and methodologies. Was women’s participation as seen by one faculty or discipline more acceptable than as seen by another? When gender is considered, the difference in expectations and participation of professors was palpable. As in society in general, women professors were slotted into traditional roles more reminiscent of maternal roles, conducive to the social view of the woman’s nurturing character in society.28 In our volume, Marianne Ainley (Chapter 10) takes a detailed look at the historically exclusionary policies rife within the sciences – disciplines that were particularly averse to women as professors. She breaks down the twentieth century in Canada into stages of acceptance of women researchers and professors and finds that the few women who were successful in being allowed to grasp the lowest rungs of the academic ladder remained steadfast and intrepid. This portended a momentum towards equality and acceptance of women professors in all disciplines. Acceptance of women in the professoriate
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was led by women scientists who for particular personal and professional reasons, and individual experiences and circumstances, were able to take the extra risks needed to assault an unsupportive intellectual environment. A largely neglected area of research in the professoriate is same-sex or alternative lifestyles. The professional life of a gay or lesbian professor was even more alien than the traditional relationship between women and men faculty. The historical university could be a matrix of conflicting missions, activities, and personalities, but it was as an institution insistent in its defence of the ‘ruling relations.’ Cameron Duder (Chapter 13) demonstrates that discreet relationships could in fact exist in intellectual environments where critical and like-minded individuals worked. Indeed, in some cases the academic culture was flexible to such intimate activity based on individual faculties of reasoning and intellectual training in scientific method. Duder observes the case where one lesbian professor, ‘expressing the terms of her own relationship and in arguing for its legitimacy, spoke both as a lesbian and as a scientist.’ As a scientist, this professor could reason out her preferences in personal relationships, and, as seen in this book, she was affected in all things personal and professorial by the nature of the academy as an institution which, first and foremost, dealt with ideas. In older historiographical accounts of the university, discussion of women’s scholarly and research work in the academy is clearly absent. Women instructors were hired to ease the marking loads of professors or to teach the occasional class without the privilege of being named in the faculty rolls – in other words, being relegated in the academic labour force to cheap help.29 The question of profile in the university extended to women both directly and indirectly associated with the professoriate. Alison Prentice (Chapter 11) takes a long-overdue look at a historical subject neglected in higher education literature. Throughout the twentieth century, the wives of many faculty members were marginalized, despite the wife’s being an integral part of the professor’s personal and professional life. Indeed, faculty wives were often academics in their own right, but they were constantly excluded from the patriarchal scholarship and professorial cultures, which insisted on the primacy of men’s research. Striving to be understood and accepted within unfriendly institutions, wives formed clubs that acted as social organizations for their creative and intellectual output, but even these were inadequate for creating any momentum for women’s recognition in higher education. The clubs ‘were sometimes a voice for women ...
20 Paul Stortz and E. Lisa Panayotidis
fighting for women’s space in their universities, but also assisting women in other ways. At the same time, they appear to have reinforced the hierarchical and competitive character of their husbands’ universities.’ Prentice’s work speaks from her firsthand experiences as both an established professor of history and a faculty wife. The unique perspective drawn from her experience is in many ways similar to that of the rest of the authors in this book, who have worked in the university and present particular understandings of the professoriate as practising teachers and researchers. Taken together, the authors’ works in this collection weave in and out, discussing historical issues of professorial cultures, identities, and environments that resonate even today. Their contributions fully support the claim that the professoriate is multitextual, diverse, and complex. Analogously, the university in Canadian history has come to represent a number of purposes according to social, political, and economic interests, almost never singular in mission or mandate.30 In a public lecture in 1971, Lawrence Stone presented the intriguing hypothesis that over time the university has been many things to many people.31 Is the university a teaching or research institution? Professional or classical? Elite or open? Institution of the state or autonomous and objective? Ivory tower, or industrially utilitarian, a paper mill for the labour force? Stone rightfully dismisses the possibility of explaining the professoriate in universal terms void of context. A central theme of this book is the differences and ambiguities of professors’ social/working conditions throughout the twentieth century, themselves generated by negotiations about professorial identity. Can the professoriate be considered to be working in a holistic, integrated, and collegial environment? Was the professoriate a community, united by a common view of its role and the role of the university, of which the members held common expectations and values? Individual talents and preferences of especially the ensconced, senior professors, were publicized and, importantly, accepted among peers. The politics over departmental status and budget, professorial salaries, and hiring were often disruptive, but professors of the sciencs and the humanities could speak as one voice when attacks were made on privilege, right, and reputation, and especially intellectual, curricular, and pedagogical freedom. In general, however, we must understand that the tension among conflicting views and activities of the professoriate was persistent despite any temptation to find a satisfactorily comprehensive and constant commonality among historical professorial cultures. In terms of social perceptions, what were the professors’ experiences as intellectual leaders who were gatekeepers of a public and ethereal
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commodity – knowledge – to practical as well as less quantifiable and academic ends? This question is important when researching the historical relationship between academic cultures and professorial identities, and it echoes across each chapter in this book. Further explicating the nature of the professoriate, study could well include a wider geographical representation of the professoriate in Canada that would allow deeper comparative analyses, especially in arguments around ethnicity, race, class, and English-French cultural divides. The professoriate in history is a fluid and contextual idea. Indeed, this introduction has purposely avoided a simple definition of the professoriate; the contributors to this collection instead offer the arguments. The key debates about professors in twentieth-century Canada are, much like the current state of historical methodologies, rife with multiple approaches, individual and collective voices and experiences, and myriad social and academic dispositions and cultures. This makes finding a consensus on a particular and transcendent identity – a ‘soul’ – of the professoriate fundamentally difficult but rich in its intellectual insights. notes 1 Obviously Anonymous, ‘On Professors,’ Acta Victoriana 47, no. 3 (Dec. 1942): 10. 2 Sober Senior, ‘We Like Professors,’ Acta Victoriana 47, no. 4 (Jan.–Feb. 1943): 14–15. 3 Paul Babarik, ‘Psychologists in Profile: William Line (1897–1964),’ Ontario Psychologist 8, no. 5 (1964): 60. 4 Norman Hunter, The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm (Middlesex, England: Puffin Books, 1933), 11. 5 Ibid., preface. 6 A. Conan Doyle, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (London: George Newnes, 1894; reprint, New York: A&W Visual Library, 1975), 259–62 (page references refer to the reprint edition). 7 For expanded, recent discussions of stereotypes of professors, see Paul Stortz, ‘“Have You Ever Looked into a Professor’s Soul?” Professorial Identities and Academic Cultures in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Toronto, 1935–1945’ (doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 2006), and E. Lisa Panayotidis and Paul Stortz, ‘Intellectual Space, Image, and Identities in the Historical University Campus: Helen Kemp’s Map of the University of Toronto, 1932,’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, new series, 15 (2004): 123–52.
22 Paul Stortz and E. Lisa Panayotidis 8 William A. Bruneau, A Matter of Identities: A History of the UBC Faculty Association, 1920–1990 (Vancouver: UBC Faculty Association, 1990), 1; and William H. Nelson, The Search for Faculty Power: The History of the University of Toronto Faculty Association, 1942–1992 (Toronto: University of Toronto Faculty Association, 1993), 1. 9 Rebecca Priegert Coulter, review of Youth, University, and Canadian Society: Essays in the Social History of Higher Education, in Canadian Historical Review 73, no. 3 (1992): 408. 10 B.R. Clark, ed., The Higher Education System: Academic Organization in CrossNational Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), as cited in Ingrid Moses and Ernest Roe, Heads and Chairs: Managing Academic Departments (Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1990), 10. David Warren Piper, Are Professors Professional? The Organisation of University Examinations (London: Jessica Kingsley, 1994), 4–5, 12–13, 235–6. James L. Bess, in University Organization: A Matrix Analysis of the Academic Professions (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1982), highlights the various mostly older sociological studies that consider the professoriate in these terms, including the works of: Terence J. Johnson, Professions and Power (London: Macmillan, 1972); Donald W. Light, ‘Introduction: The Structure of the Academic Professions,’ Sociology of Education 47, no. 1 (1974): 2–28; N. Sanford, ‘Academic Culture and the Teacher’s Development,’ Soundings 54, no. 4 (1971): 27–35; A. Edel, ‘Conflicting Aims within the Canadian University,’ University of Toronto Quarterly 7, no. 4 (1938): 545. Note that Edel attacks the phrase ‘aristocracy of the intellect’ as a misrepresentation of the professoriate, instead claiming that pursuit of cultural and scientific ‘spirits’ in the university is the university’s essence. 11 See, for example, Martin Anderson, Impostors in the Temple (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), which discusses intellectual classes as politicalsocial constructs; A.H. Halsey and M.A. Trow, The British Academics (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), esp. 169–200; Walter P. Metzger, ‘The Academic Profession in the United States,’ in The Academic Profession: National, Disciplinary, and Institutional Settings, Burton R. Clark, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 153–60; Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987); and see especially, Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969). Also see Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ‘The Academic Profession in the Federal Republic of Germany,’ in Clark, The Academic Profession, 60–92; Paul Goodman, The Community of Scholars (New York: Random House, 1962); Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America (New York: Hill
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and Wang, 1967), as cited in Wilfred Cude, The PhD Trap (West Bay, NS: Medicine Label Press, 1987), 24; James Miller, ‘Professors, as Viewed by One of Them,’ Dalhousie Review 15 (April 1935). Miller places great emphasis on the impact of professors’ personalities on the role and function of the professoriate. See esp. 37–9. University of Toronto Archives, Department of Graduate Records, a73–0026/121/76, ‘The Man Who Wouldn’t Compromise,’ Varsity-Graduate (Christmas 1984): 87. 12 See John S. Brubacher and Willis Rudy, Higher Education in Transition: A History of American Colleges and Universities, 1636–1968 (New York: Harper and Row, 1968); Martin J. Finkelstein, The American Academic Profession (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1984); Sister M. St Mel Kennedy, ‘The Changing Academic Characteristics of the Nineteenth-Century American College Teacher’ (doctoral dissertation, Louis University, 1961); Carol H. Shulman, Old Expectations, New Realities: The Academic Profession Revisited, AAHE-ERIC/Higher Education Research Report No. 2 (Washington, DC: American Association for Higher Education, 1979), esp. 8–17, where Shulman identifies the forces of research, peer review, and scholarship as fundamental to the rising profession in the 1890s; and esp. Christopher J. Lucas, American Higher Education: A History (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994), where he discusses the continually changing – and oftentimes confused – role of the professoriate as a reflection of the perception of the university as a whole, and Chapter 6 (185–222), where he looks at early to mid-twentieth-century American universities and instructors under ‘paradigms old and new.’ See also: Charles H. Anderson and John D. Murray, eds., The Professors: Work and Life Styles among Academicians (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1971), 1–28; Burton R. Clark, The Academic Life: Small Worlds, Different Worlds, with a Foreword by Ernest L. Boyer (Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1987); Arthur J. Engel, From Clergyman to Don: The Rise of the Academic Profession in Nineteenth-Century Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); Engel, ‘The Emerging Concept of the Academic Profession at Oxford, 1800–1854,’ in The University in Society, vol. 1: Oxford and Cambridge from the 14th to the Early 19th Century, Lawrence Stone, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 305–52. For Canada, and the rise of the professions, see R.J. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar, Professional Gentlemen: The Professions in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). 13 Janet C. Scarfe, ‘Letters and Affection: The Recruitment and Responsibilities of Academics in English-Speaking Universities in British North America in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’ (doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1982), iii; Blair Neatby, ‘The Academic Profession: An Histori-
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14
15
16 17
cal Perspective on “Communities of Scholars in Ontario,”’ in The Professoriate – Occupation in Crisis, Higher Education Group, ed. (Toronto: Higher Education Group, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1985), 10. S.E.D. Shortt, The Search for an Ideal: Six Canadian Intellectuals and Their Convictions in an Age of Transition, 1890–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 6–7. See A.B. McKillop, Matters of Mind: The University in Ontario, 1791–1951 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 204–31; McKillop, A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979); and McKillop, Contours of Canadian Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987). See also Ramsay Cook, The Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late Victorian English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), where religion was under attack by the new intellectual forces of Darwinism and more liberal thoughts on theology, leading to greater secularism in society. On an epistemological level, efforts to incorporate all knowledge with truth and moral and social relevancy helped create institutional (e.g., new departments, academic associations, conferences, funding) as well as pedagogical and curricular change. Shortt, Search for an Ideal, 5. On its back cover, this quote refers to the six intellectuals discussed in the book, but it is an apt description of many of the professors in late-Victorian Canada. Nan McKenzie, ‘Geophysics Professor Leads Busy Life,’ The Varsity, 4 Feb. 1947, 4. The professorial reaction to the rise of the perceived importance of research over teaching is well documented and indicates major shifts in the academic culture of the twentieth-century university. See works by: Yves Gingras, ‘Financial Support for Post-Graduate Students and the Development of Scientific Research in Canada,’ in Youth, University, and Canadian Society: Essays in the Social History of Higher Education, Paul Axelrod and John G. Reid, eds. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 301–19, and Gingras, Physics and the Rise of Scientific Research in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991). The doctor of philosophy degree was an institutional rite of passage that represented the necessary qualification for a professor to be considered an acceptable academic researcher, as discussed in Peter N. Ross, ‘Origins and Development of the PhD Degree at the University of Toronto, 1871–1932’ (doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1972). American texts on the rise of research and its impact on the university include: Roger L. Geiger, To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), and more recently, Larry
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20
21 22
23
24
25
Cuban, How Scholars Trumped Teachers: Change without Reform in University Curriculum, Teaching, and Research, 1890–1990 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999). Watson Kirkconnell and A.S.P. Woodhouse, The Humanities in Canada (Ottawa: Humanities Research Council of Canada, 1947), 171. See Michiel Horn, The League for Social Reconstruction: Intellectual Origins of the Democratic Left in Canada, 1930–1942 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980); and ‘“Free Speech within the Law”: The Letter of the SixtyEight Toronto Professors, 1931,’ Ontario History 72 (March 1980): 27–48. For a study of the intellectual vibrancy of pre-1930 Canada involving some university professors, see Barry Ferguson, Remaking Liberalism: The Intellectual Legacy of Adam Shortt, O.D. Skelton, W.C. Clark, and W.A. Mackintosh, 1890–1925 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993); and for the intellectual fight against liberal modernism, see Philip Massolin, Canadian Intellectuals, the Tory Tradition, and the Challenge of Modernity, 1939–1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). Frank Abbott discusses the intransigent business community in Canada, in ‘Academic Freedom and Social Criticism in the 1930s,’ in The Independence of the University and the Funding of the State: Essays on Academic Freedom in Canada (a special issue of Interchange), Ian Winchester, ed. (Toronto: OISE Press, 1983–4): 110–1. See also Doug Owram, The Government Generation: Canadian Intellectuals and the State, 1900–1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986) for a look at professors in public service. Michiel Horn has written extensively on academic freedom which is influenced by the efforts of the universities to keep its intellectual employees acquiescent. Especially see Academic Freedom in Canada: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). Spying 101: The RCMP’s Secret Activities at Canadian Universities, 1917–1997 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). As Hewitt makes clear, the government was not always accommodating of dissenting professors. See also Donald C. Savage, ‘Keeping the Professors Out: The Immigration Department and the Idea of Academic Freedom, 1945–1990,’ Dalhousie Review 69, no. 4 (1989–90): 499–524. Emphasis in the original. William Bruneau, ‘Toward a New Collective Biography: The University of British Columbia Professoriate, 1915–1945,’ Canadian Journal of Education 19, no. 1 (1994): 69–71. Methodologically, Bruneau relies on the work of prosopographers who have mostly studied medieval parishes, communities, and clerical students. Numerous university histories either discuss or certainly portray the prevalence of the patriarchal system of the university in twentieth-century
26 Paul Stortz and E. Lisa Panayotidis
25
26
27 28
29
Canada. Interestingly, in Seeking a Balance: The University of Saskatchewan, 1907–1982 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983), Michael Hayden comments that the university president ‘knew so many faculty both because the academic community was so small and because the “old boy” system was in full flower’ (at 47). Anti-Semitism was expressed against Jewish professors on Canadian university campuses. See Paul Stortz, ‘“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 series, 14 (2003): 231–61. Elspeth Cameron and Janice Dickin, eds., Great Dames (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 6–7. The introductory chapter of Great Dames provides an excellent overview of the strengths and weaknesses of biographical methodology. Another informative book that highlights the contextual construction of a historical subject is Stephanie Kirkwood Walker, This Woman in Particular: Contexts for the Biographical Image of Emily Carr (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1996). Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon, Cultural Politics: Class, Gender, Race, and the Postmodern World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 15. Historical studies of women professors who were accepted readily into some disciplines and not in others are instructive in revealing a time in Canadian higher education that eschewed alternative viewpoints. In particular, see Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley, ed., Despite the Odds: Essays on Canadian Women and Science (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1990). See also Alison Prentice, ‘The Early History of Women in University Physics: A Toronto Case Study,’ Physics in Canada (March/April 1996): 94–6, 100. For a synopsis of some of the major works on the history of women in higher education until the mid-1990s, see Ruby Heap, ‘Training Women for a New “Women’s Profession”: Physiotherapy Education at the University of Toronto, 1917–40,’ History of Education Quarterly 35, no. 2 (1995): 135–58. For American studies, see, for example: Pnina G. Abir-am and Dorina Outram, eds., Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science, 1789– 1979, with a foreword by Margaret W. Rossiter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Jennifer M. Brown, ‘Gender, Patriotism, and the Academic’s Role in Postindustrial America: An Interpretation’ (doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1983); and Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). F.E.L. Priestley recognized the subordinate role of women academics in The Humanities in Canada: A Report Prepared for the Humanities Research Council of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), 45.
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30 For example, a perusal of McKillop’s Matters of Mind confirms this. Classical historical works popularly cited as exploring the general role of the university include: Abraham Flexner, Universities: American, English, German (New York: Oxford University Press, 1930); John Henry Newman, Select Discourses from the Idea of a University, Landmarks in the History of Education Series, J. Dover Wilson and F.A. Cavenagh, eds., with an introduction by May Yardley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931). 31 Lawrence Stone, Group Biographical Approach to the History of the University, Cassette RT 151 (Washington, DC: American Educational Research Council, 1971).
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Section 1 The International Professoriate
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1 ‘Quiet Flow the Dons’: Towards an International History of the Professoriate WILLIAM BRUNEAU For Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov, the slow-moving Don River was theme, symbol, and ineluctable force in Russian life.1 Analogously, the professoriate has been a constantly moving but substantial factor in the history of North Atlantic communities and states. For Sholokhov, the Don could and should be understood in several perspectives at one time: as a line on a map, a great physical mass, and a broad, brown horizon for several million minds and eyes. It would need literary, historical, scientific, political, and aesthetic insight to grasp the ungraspable, the great river. So, too, the professors who have helped to constitute the university warrant treatment under many perspectives and optics, and their collective history is, like the river, revealing of peoples and societies. The analogy is a reminder: a student of the river would be advised not to spend all her time analysing the composition of the thing, teaspoon by teaspoon. Now and then, it would be well to raise her eyes to the horizon, or simply to get on a comfortable steamer and make her way through Mother Russia, gathering impressions as she goes. That is, one might want to try to deal with the larger entity, not just its many constituents. Alas, historical inquiry about the professoriate in North America and Europe has dealt more with recruitment than with life after appointment, more with professors’ intellectual and technical ‘output’ than with the complications of their daily social and political lives, sometimes with professions but rarely with the profession. In the relatively small body of writing about the professoriate-as-group, beginnings and endings, inputs and outputs matter more than the things that come between. Especially in the North Atlantic world, historians have
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chosen, for any number of good reasons, to assess the advantages conferred by entrance to the academy – but to worry less about the pleasures and perils of afterlife in the classroom, laboratory, or archive. Nor has there been much attention to the ways the professoriate has contributed as a whole to the arts and sciences these past two hundred years or, come to think of it, to the governance of the universities where professors work. Here then is an invitation to revisit the question of the professoriate. Beginning with discussions of work published or forthcoming, much of it from the past thirty years, I suggest promising lines of inquiry and argue that new studies of the professoriate as category, and as group, are possible and overdue. For present purposes, the ‘professor’ is any person holding an academic appointment, whether or not with tenure, but with the hope and expectation that she may eventually have tenure. Some persons in the category may rarely teach, but rather administer, or manage, or run a laboratory. Since at least the 1890s, many in the category are at one and the same time university teachers (whether or not they teach many students) and accredited members of some profession such as medicine, law, school teaching, social work, or engineering. The ‘professor’ is, for my purposes, a person at any rank no longer preparing for a degree, but who has the right to teach – the mediaeval licentia docendi, whether or not that right is exercised. Although this essay deals mainly with universities, it does not deny the value of a wide-angle view of the professoriate, a view taking into account all places where adults, having left the public education system, study for degrees. These may or may not be post-secondary institutions that confer degrees (thus I include junior colleges in the United States, some community colleges in Canada, and certain technical institutes in Europe). This general definition makes room for teachers, administrators, and researchers with the licentia docendi in colleges, university colleges, and post-secondary institutes of technology. Because historical and social studies of the nonuniversity professoriate are at their beginnings, I therefore choose to limit my argument to the university, leaving the wider field for others to explore. Because so much writing on the professoriate has been about individuals, it is helpful to distinguish between professorial biographies as distinct from research on groups of university teachers, or on the professoriate in an institution, a region, or a country. The former have outnumbered the latter for at least a century in Europe and North America. Biographers deal, of course, with the ‘in-between’ aspects of life, as
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well as beginnings and endings, inputs and outputs. The difficulty is how to find, describe, and explain that in-between experience, but this time for the group, the category, the whole of the professoriate. A biography may pay attention to context and argue that the biographee is representative of general structural truths about the wider society from which he comes. But the contents of an individual life cannot be reduced to its context. The reverse is true of the group study, where context may very well be all that matters: how middle class were the professors? How nationalistic were they in time of war? The collective experience of the group is hard to detect, and that alone invites the social, quantitative study of ‘representativeness’ in the group vis-à-vis the outside world. How, then, shall we square the circle, drawing on biographical techniques and broad social study to understand the professoriate? What advantage is there in studying the professoriate as a social category (in neighbourhoods, cities, regions, and national communities)? Should we try to see professors in the complicated equations of university politics (on one side the administrators and on the other students and their families), seeing where and how the profs figure? Shall we use professors to explain the intellectual and cultural life of a nation or a time? An adequate answer requires us to move past biography to something else, something more: but what, exactly? The move from singular to collective is by no means easy. As I wrote a moment ago, books about ‘the professoriate’ or about particular scholarly professions revert often to biography, for want of a ready way to think of the professoriate-as-collectivity. Noel Annan’s witty and stylish book, The Dons,2 to which I shall return, is of this kind. It is biography writ large, with descriptions of whole clans of university teachers, tied by marriage or regional affiliation. Taken together, Annan’s collection of lives says much about the development of the social and natural sciences in the United Kingdom across two hundred years, suggesting it has a great deal to do with the singular and/or family commitments of well-placed individuals. He mentions the ways his dons came to influence (or even to constitute) Britain’s governing elite, hinting at the idea that the professoriate was more than the sum of its individual parts. But at the end, although we are delighted by the vision of the intellectual lives of his subjects, Annan leaves us with no systematic idea of university politics, of the degree in which industrialists and government people take professors seriously, of the rising or falling status of professors.3 Annan’s treatment, and research of its kind, give us suggestive maps of the professorial life and of the sequence of formal childhood schooling to a doctoral degree (or similar qualification) and then entry to
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professorial life.4 But the maps are incomplete and inconsistently drawn. We see, for example, not very much detail about university teachers who followed a more indirect road, who acquired the professional and academic instruction required to earn a living, practised in the field, and only in later life took up professorial work.5 Perhaps most interesting in this line are the few works that move far from Annan’s model and deal with professors who lived mainly private familial existences, raising children or producing works of literature or art outside the usual streams of academic, professional, or industrial employment, and only then – sometimes very late – joined the academy.6 There have been any number of ‘irregular’ entrances into professorial activity,7 but the three patterns just given will serve to open discussion. And they give a first clue about new lines of inquiry on the professoriate, in this case an invitation to take seriously those professorial groups and clans in which, characteristically, career paths are sinuous and even erratic.8 Historians have, especially since the early 1970s, asked why these patterns are as they are. Why enter the academy, or academic life in the first place? Why stay? What sort of social ambition is at work here? How does the motive of sheer ambition weigh up against other limits and powers, including the restraining powers of family background, class, and gender and the enabling gifts of intelligence and talent? Once a person has become a university teacher, do any of these background considerations affect that person’s teaching, research, and political life in the academy? We are lucky in the quantity and quality of international historical work on universities since the 1960s. Studies of the professoriate have, even so, been too few, and too often understood in exclusively sociological terms. Still, we have before us the beginnings of an important, free-standing subject – the possibility of a whole new sub-field of historical and literary research. Above all we want to understand better the lived experience of teaching and research – hence my favourable reference to Brian Boyd’s extraordinary book about Vladimir Nabokov. For this we shall require close studies of the practical decisions peculiar to the university researcher, the college lecturer, and the beginning or senior scholar. We have nowhere near enough such studies in Europe or North America. Without them, it will be difficult to make believable synthetic claims about the professoriate, considered as a whole. Do new professors imagine they have risen in social status by their appointment? At least some do. We have a believable historical picture
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of an entire system (the French) in which professors and lecturers were indeed advantaged by appointment and subsequent life as university teachers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of course there were dilettantes and ‘accidental’ teacher-researchers in the French facultés and even in the Grandes Ecoles. But on the whole, French lecturers and professors escaped a nasty world, or at any rate believed that they had. On a variety of economic and social criteria, they improved not just their life course through academic appointment, but the quality of their daily lives as well.9 We have solid argument for this in the recent work of Christophe Charle, a professor of history at the Sorbonne. Charle has done a complete prosopography – that is, a systematic collective biography – of the entire French professoriate for the period 1870–1940. Even in the early twenty-first century, computerization makes such things possible but by no means easy. Charle knows the parental social status, eventual social destination, and the cursus of most university teachers in France. Where he does not have a detailed computer register for university teachers, he has reliable evidence to show how far his cases are representative and reliable indicators for the generality. Using this enormous database,10 Charle was able to ask profoundly non-quantitative questions and yet use quantitative evidence to help him answer those questions. Let us take one main example from Charle’s thorough treatment of French university history, not neglecting his comparative arguments à la Fritz Ringer11 (see below) about broader educational phenomena in western Europe. Charle gives us four main reasons why between 1870 and 1940 it was nearly impossible to create a true university system in France. First, there was the difficulty of pretending to meet and match the German universities and their research training, all the while maintaining a thoroughly French, wholly Napoleonic, and highly centralized administration of teaching and research. Second, there was the problem how to convince the new bourgeoisie and middle classes of the late nineteenth century that higher education was a good way for their sons to pass their time. Third, there was the economic problem of running a scientific research establishment in an age when equipment and labour were increasingly expensive. Finally, there were the problems associated with the beginnings of what we now recognize as mass higher education and research-oriented graduate instruction in all fields.12 Charle answers the question about the German example with relative
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ease. He simply produces reliable numbers about Franco-German academic and student exchanges, publication patterns, bureaucratic traditions, and scientific funding practices in both countries, along with related circumstantial evidence from French books and articles on the ‘German university question.’ These demonstrate that in certain areas of historical and philological study, and some corners of applied science, the French borrowed the content – but not the structure or the bureaucratic attitudes – of the German example.13 The result was a university system that satisfied the social ambitions of the French middle classes, but did not measure up to the intellectual standards of its German counterpart until almost the end of the twentieth century.14 Using his prosopographical registers, with the help of his numbers, and having mastered published works by French and other commentators, Charle demonstrates in the second half of his book how and why able French women and men had to wait until the very end of his period of analysis to realize the promise of access to universities, let alone the nation’s institutes, the specialized training schools, Grandes Ecoles, and so on. The answer to Charle’s question about the long delay in the provision of true access is simple enough: the entire system had significant funding only after about 1950. Meanwhile, the established arrangement of professorial rewards, whereby a young professor spent time in a rural faculty teaching, earning a reputation as a researcher, and making contacts that would lead to an appointment in Paris, became slightly less rigid after the Second World War. Funding and politics made it possible and even attractive to stay for longer periods, and sometimes permanently in such places as Toulouse, Aix-Marseille, and even in provincial Grenoble (the city that nineteenth-century academics claimed to loathe most of all). Paris had less of a stranglehold on the professoriate by the 1960s. None of this was enough to head off the revolts of 1967–9, but as usual in social history, it turns out that les événements de mai were anticipated, if subtly anticipated, by developments in the French system as a whole over a very long period. Charle’s work was made possible by the advance of computer technology and the astounding assiduity of French archivists (the famous F17 series in the Archives Nationales). But it owes as much to his methodological attitude. Charle is never satisfied to say that one person or school has attained dominance in method or theory – not without detailed empirical evidence, and in most cases, by using biographical or prosopographical data.15 Charle dedicates his book to Pierre Bourdieu, whose earlier work with J.-Cl. Passeron made a similar double claim to
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empirical and cultural completeness.16 I find this claim a little strong, since in none of these works do we have detailed, empirically wellfounded studies of daily professorial life, especially in its relation to administrative power, state bureaucracies, and students. I learn more about the daily life of French professors from stories about or by (to take just two cases, and by no means accidentally, women) Simone Weil and Marie Curie.17 Nevertheless, Charle has suggested a pathway for research down which it would be wise to go. We have valuable analogous studies in the rest of Europe and North America, but they are methodologically remote from our French examples. They go in other directions, sometimes achieving valuable results (given the criteria I have been promoting). Gary Werskey’s collective study of socialist scientists in 1930s Britain, although a little too rigidly Marxist in its analysis of intellectual and political matters, offers helpful asides on the three-part question of how one’s discipline, background, and convictions coexist in a single body – or in his case, five male bodies – and in restrictive institutional and national settings.18 Here is the beginning of a collective study of institutional pressure on academic freedom, and a hint of one way to ‘square the circle’ – to draw on biography and group study methods all at one time. In a different and charming key, we have Noel Annan’s The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses, which is a solid intellectual-social history about British professors and lecturers, if a little novelistic.19 Annan wants strongly to emphasize the familial and cultural backgrounds of the hugely productive scientists and littérateurs with whom he is concerned. His central argument is that the professors about whom he writes owed much to their membership to old and closely-knit clans – grand families whose devotion to the intellect crossed generational boundaries: he cares about the Darwins, the Russells, the Toynbees, and the Trevelyans. Annan is particularly effective in showing linkages between British university teachers of the past 130 years or so, their connections to and disconnections from their mostly aristocratic and gentle origins, displaying their peculiar ways of teaching, and chronicling the late, sad (in Annan’s view) decline of independent scientific work in Britain. The novelistic element comes from the sheer momentum he claims to find in the movement of genius across generations, the continuing attractions of the professoriate as a way of life and a social objective, and the contribution of the profs to all that is, in Annan’s view, peculiarly good (and, as in the question of the treatment of women
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academics, unfortunate) about Britain. These movements have lives and energies of their own, in much the way a group of human beings in a Galsworthy novel would do. Annan’s account of Cambridge women dons shows the strength and the weakness of this way of talking historically. Annan wants us to see the question of women dons at Cambridge as a matter of straight injustice, understood in the classic ethicist’s way, and as drama. His chapter on women dons becomes the story of one important woman, Betty Behrens, taking up the cause of reform (in this case, one might better write reformation) in the 1950s and 1960s. But in the absence of the kind of groundwork a Charle would have done, the chapter remains unpersuasive. This delightful book has importance for other reasons, not least its quick and exact grasp of the effects of Thatcherism on the university teaching and learning life. Its trouble may be simply that it wants a bit of theory. For that, one must apply elsewhere. One feels the power of collective, empirically minded research (informed by high theory, when it helps) in a collection of new-ish books on what might be called applied cultural history. Fritz Ringer’s Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective, 1890– 192020 manages to avoid the dead end of Foucauldian/mechanistic description, resisting the temptation to see the rise and fall of disciplines exclusively as a matter of power relations among those disciplines’ practitioners or between practitioners and the society ‘outside’ the university. Ringer’s work is a balanced appreciation of demographic, economic, and political factors that help account for the rise of literature and sociology, and not just a detailed description of the hermetic world of academic versus academic, of ambitious youth versus vain senior professors, of arbiters of meaning versus those marginalized by their arbitrations. Ringer would never willingly limit his inquiries to matters of ‘discourse,’ an historical dead end if ever there was one. Ringer manages to keep track of his original questions about who runs the show and why – how arguments about the meaning of literature and of education really matter in professors’ teaching practices and in their institutional politics.21 Thus he is persuasive about what makes the ‘new’ French university so new, yet he lacks the massive basis in individual case experience that Charle was to reveal just two years later. The reader of Fields of Knowledge must do patient work to determine the career sequences of professors, the decisive moments in their lives (shall I change sub-fields? shall I teach what I’m researching? dare I teach what local industries and politicians consider useless and dan-
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gerous?) and their day-to-day problems. Ringer settles finally for the commonsensical proposition that education is about interpretation: putting things in perspective, learning to make tight and clean arguments, and making full use of the traditions of interpretation available in French literary, philosophical, and historical study – even if one happens to be a professor of engineering. On discipline formation, we have good books that raise the biographical question as Ringer did, sometimes also hinting at unexpected empirical grounds for their claims. For example, Christopher Stray’s intriguing Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England, 1830–1960 is a massive inquiry into the power of the classics over the minds, hearts, and bodies of British students (one shudders at the thought of the number of floggings administered in Shrewsbury in, say, 1860 because of incorrectly recited 5th-declension nouns).22 Stray gives us an explanatory account of curricular reform at Cambridge (but it might have been at any number of other places), tying it to the concomitant reform of public secondary schooling and the eventual ‘decline’ of the classics for social, political, and theoretical reasons (here I mean some branches of educational theory). Finally, as a representative of several works of its kind, consider Reba N. Soffer’s Discipline and Power: The University, History, and the Making of an English Elite, 1870–1930. This is a study of the practitioners of a field – or a discipline – purveyed by an intellectual history of the professoriate. It is about the making of ‘professorial traditions’ about what counted as history, how it should be presented at the great English universities, and why ‘it explained the historical rectitude of responsible citizenship.’23 The book offers throughout, but especially towards its end, a picture of the careers of people who took Firsts and Seconds in History or Greats at King’s or Balliol, among others. Soffer does indeed persuade the reader that history teaching was an element in the formation of an elite and a visible reminder of one location of power in Britain. Once again, the theory (class, the possibility of a kind of ideological hegemony in some parts of British society, and distributed and centrally held power in the British civil service) is made subservient, and sometimes barely visible by comparison, with the empirical data. But this is less important than that fully three chapters are about professors, understood both collectively and individually. There is, of course, a well-populated category of books on professorintellectuals, descriptive and celebratory – but too often pretentious. These works exhibit tantalizing faith in the proposition that university
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teachers drive the cultural welfare of a society or a nation, without ever having to say why. All one need do is illustrate professors’ tireless commitment to intellectual work, especially if it has been done at great personal or political cost. I call this ‘the golly-gee-aren’t-they-cleverand-determined’ school. Paul Johnson is not quite of this school,24 but lurks at its doorway. Nor are the self-involved lot whose essays compose a recent special number of Salmagundi on ‘intellectuals,’25 whose talk is lost in a fog of post-modern, critical-theoretic vocabulary – although sometimes about professors. The one most openly committed to studies of the professoriate, yet also lurking at the doorway, is Russell Jacoby in his Last Intellectuals.26 Jacoby, too, verges on the sins and errors of the golly-gee school. But for contrast, notice Howard Gardner’s recent offering on ‘extraordinary minds,’ Allan Bloom’s ham-handed discussion of ‘giants and dwarfs,’ and Gilbert Highet’s ‘talents and geniuses.’27 These three led me to invent the ‘golly-gee’ nick-name. They are not at the door, but at the front of the class. These books rely on popular fascination with professorial self-discipline and inventiveness and their ‘change potential’ – the idea that successful, or at any rate energetic ‘professors’ are revolutionaries in disguise and that a close reading of their works will in some way transform the reader, showing that the mere existence of the professoriate promises a new world. Bloom and Highet, perhaps most characteristic of this kind of work, are far from history and far from understanding the professoriate – however loosely we define either one. Let us return, then, to larger patterns of research on university and college teachers, that is, books and articles explicitly on the subject. We are better off, as we have seen, on professorial recruitment than we are (historically speaking) on the daily lives of professors. Once installed in classrooms, offices, archives, and laboratories, professors certainly like to write about themselves, and they have incited much historical biography. But as for work about professors, not by them, and about the conditions and circumstances that favour intellectual work, much remains to be done. We have hilarious and by no means weightless comic fiction about these things,28 but an unexpected dearth of extended historical discussion. Does a strong presidential or rectorial regime make a protective academic home for teachers and writers?29 Or does it on the contrary endanger the freedom of movement of those working on difficult or ‘touchy’ matters?30 Similarly, does a strong academic senate or a strong academic faculty union make a difference?31 Do any of these administrative and legislative structures
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contribute to a lively environment for research and teaching? Does it matter where a university’s money comes from?32 Finally, thinking of the ‘outside world,’ how should we treat professors? Do they constitute a distinct and distinctive cultural and social grouping outside the university, the kind of group that can literally be ‘mapped’ on the ground?33 Are they an important political constituency (in the terms of formal party politics)? Are they a crucial political and cultural resource? Without professors, would the progress of science come at once to a screeching halt? I suggest more could and should be done to right the research ‘imbalance’ of the past thirty or so years. Even before the 1970s, international historical and literary work on higher education favoured students, politicians, and bureaucrats (I am myself guilty on that score) over the professoriate. Work in the field of university history is, then, neither absent nor bad. Rather there is not enough of it, and especially on professors as a ‘collective.’ In the 1970s Joseph ben-David began a twenty-year sequence of publications on the history and evidence of intellectual production in science. Ben-David is one of the pioneers, for good or ill, of historical bibliometrics. His opening salvo, The Scientist’s Role in Society: A Comparative Study,34 examines page-counts and funding ratios for the natural and some social sciences in European and American universities. He followed up this work with two widely reviewed works on the same subject, but increasingly comparative in technique.35 This is clever stuff, aiming to find believable linkages between economic and social facts (gross domestic product, distribution of wealth, industrial diversification, and patent claims) and the rise of the professoriate as we know it. Ben-David is concerned almost entirely with mechanisms, ever searching for the elusive Holy Grail of a connection between material facts and intellectual life, and never finding. My worry here is not that BenDavid is a mechanist (although he is), but that his work is bloodless. Closely related weakness of work on university teaching as a ‘profession,’ of which there have been many since 1980, is its reliance on a form of mechanism. Thus, a profession is a collection of knowledge-’owning’ persons who have some degree of control over entrance to the collectivity representing that knowledge. Further, the profession exercises informal and/or formal regulation of the group’s practices, and that regulation is accepted in law and/or custom. To all this, sociologically minded historians add a further claim: the professions have grown up partly to further the interests of the middle classes, the bourgeoisie, and/or
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various bureaucracies.36 The ‘invention’ of professions thus has been (1) a device for asserting social control, (2) a means of social ascension, and in the latest form of this argument (3) a device for justifying the notion that some kinds of teaching and research are ‘legitimate’ but others are not. ‘Legitimation’ thus becomes the main objective of academic professionals and of would-be professions. The mechanics of power are front and centre here. Taking one approach, it is necessary to do page-counts and to add up the number of research grants received to see who is on the top of her profession, or university. Taking another, it is a question of who has control of the discourse. In yet another approach, the objects of attention are the interest groups and pressure groups that have visibly seized control of the political apparatus of the professional association or the teaching and/or research unit under examination. In these publications, professors make and transmit knowledge for practical purposes, for reasons that can be judged on empirical and quantifiable evidence. Several mechanisms may be at work at one time in the life of any one profession or institution. But over all, the study of the professoriate has tended to become a listing of the intricate mechanics of power, its acquisition, and its applications. Reading Howard Bowen and Jack Schuster’s 1984 American Professors: A National Resource Imperiled is an especially good example, and an eerily a-historical experience. We learn about the growth of a part-time professoriate, but get not a word about the gentleman-scholar ‘ideal’ in which professorial ‘work’ is always part-time. We discover the numerical ‘truth’ about women in the American professoriate, but get not a word about the powerful cultural past or tradition that has (until now at any rate) defined women as permanent minorities in the academy. We hear of faculty performance (bibliometrics again) and professorial social and political attitudes, but get nary a word about the practical politics of university teachers as elected officials and nary an example of professors as community leaders.37 It’s about mechanics and it’s about power. Fascinated by numbers, social class, and markets, Bowen and Schuster assert, for example, through mechanistic reasoning based on ratios of professional supply and demand, gross national product, and demographics, that professors were overpaid in 1970.38 One wonders what Bowen and Schuster may be thinking in 2003. At all events, these authors show no evidence of having considered the salaries of university teachers in the past at Michigan in 1890, or Chicago in 1900, or
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Carnegie in 1920 (Rockefeller’s professors rarely complained), nor do they show any recognition of the enormous historical fact of American diversity (what about degree-granting liberal arts, private theological, and Bible-based establishments, whether Protestant, Jewish, Unitarian, Roman Catholic, Mormon, or more recently, Muslim?). Most of the faculty at these institutions would find the claim of overpay in 1970 a little hard to swallow. By most standards, Bowen and Schuster’s work is good political science or sociology. One can hardly blame them for historical weakness, given the absence of a strong body of historical work on the professoriate, and given that history was not their cup of tea. My desire is simply to call for a massive increase in work on professors and lecturers and their like. It seems we have a case of argument about the weather: everybody knows it’s important, everybody talks about it, but few understand or study it with care.39 Burton Clark has edited a helpful collection of papers on the academic profession that came out three years after the book by Bowen and Schuster. It is similarly mechanistic. Clark’s authors ask: What is the academic ‘market’? How does it ‘shape’ academic openings, careers, and consultancies? The question is not who knows and why, but how is knowledge regulated (note the passive mood of the verb ‘regulated’)? They have the advantage of a comparative framework, offering important discussions of the professoriate in the United Kingdom, Germany, and France in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.40 They are explicit and careful in their treatment of ‘disciplinary shaping of the profession,’41 (they mean the professoriate), but they accept without comment the very concepts their evidence is meant to elucidate. In doing so, they commit a fundamental logical mistake, petitio principii. And in Clark’s book it is rare, even in the introductory chapter, to find specific references to the grand historical movements in which and against which professors have worked and fought. We never know what it is like for a historian or a physicist to transgress a market rule. Nor do we learn how professors apply the contents of their particular lives and individual pasts in their daily work of teaching and in their research. Thus, however good as social science, Clark’s collection is ahistorical and finally, descriptive rather than explanatory. Historians are famous (infamous?) for accepting methods and theory from the humanities and social sciences and then discarding them when the theoretical burden becomes distracting. This was the case in the rise and fall of Marxist and revisionist social histories after 1970,
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and the later brief use (now disuse) of variously extremist forms of Foucauldian ‘cultural’ history. American scholar Sol Cohen has written beautifully and with humour about the uses and limits of these social and cultural ‘borrowings,’ and in particular about the demarcation line between that which historians can integrate and use as explanation and that which they cannot or will not.42 In a more or less conservative vein, Jacques Barzun has done likewise in his demolition of psycho-history,43 and in a liberal vein, so have Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob on the evils of relativist, constructivist, and post-modernist accounts of the past.44 The rise since 1970 of an entire field of ‘higher education studies,’ however, dominated by sociology, administrative theory, political science, and various forms of mechanism has, well, provided historians with an indigestible breakfast.45 Reclamation of university history has begun. It may have a long way to go, but it has begun. Reclamation began with a return to older questions about the category and the concept of ‘professor.’ Where do these come from? How and why did professors manage to achieve the nuts and bolts of academic freedom, yet only after centuries of trying? Why and how did their status – not just social, but also economic, political, and cultural – come to be noticed and named? To speak of professors not as ‘professionals’ but as ‘mandarins’ is one way of seeing how deep the professoriate’s historical roots go. That Weberian idea has at least as much going for it, in an historical explanation of the rise of well-regarded, mass higher education, as do such notions as ‘professionalization.’ One is reminded of Fritz Ringer’s persuasive sequence of four books on the practical power of various conceptualizations of ‘mandarinate,’ ‘social reform,’ res publica, as well as the various meanings of ‘intellectual life,’ inside and outside the academy. Ringer’s quartet begins with his The Decline of the German Mandarins (1969), continues with his comparative study of higher education in Europe and the United States, followed by a comparative study of French academic culture, and finally, returns to his roots with a work about Max Weber.46 These books constitute an important element in the reclamation of university history as history. My complaint is that the broad field of university history stubbornly shows various kinds of imbalance. Historians prefer, as they have since Hastings Rashdall, Stéphen d’Irsay, and their latter-day imitators such as Peter Moraw, Chantal Dupille, and Léo Moulin,47 to discuss student life and its origins,48 elucidate administrative structures, contemplate the vagaries and meanings of educational finance, or raise questions
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about the ‘impact’ (not always sharply defined) of universities and colleges, their intakes and outflows of students, and their ‘production’ of applicable knowledge. It is instructive merely to scan the contents pages of the two main English-language journals in this field, History of Universities and History of Higher Education Annual49: articles on individual professors or professorial collectives account for not even 5 per cent of their production. For that matter, consider the last three volumes of the unprecedentedly fine History of the University of Oxford.50 The two nineteenth-century volumes (6 and 7)51 between them comprise almost 2,000 pages and are unrivalled in depth and breadth of coverage – on the curriculum, on the persistent interest of the British state in Oxford’s reform and constitution, on the life course of students across more than a hundred years of rapid and revolutionary social change, on women and the most reasoned of approaches to matters of gender and power, on money, on the library, and on the buildings: and across those many pages, many of them closely and sustainedly argued, there are thousands of references to professors. Here and there, we find a discussion of the ‘professorial question’ (that is, whether university professors’ lectures and other professorial activities could reasonably be expected to replace the tutorial systems of Oxford’s constituent colleges). We find in these volumes an intriguing discussion of the peculiar entity known as the Hedomadal Board, later (1854) Council, and the implications of the lengthy fight between colleges (with their own rights, privileges, properties, and power) and the University, a fight with vast repercussions for the rise of the natural and the social sciences (for example, how could colleges on their own have afforded to create great laboratories and museums?). What about Oxford professors, as the central preoccupation of argument? There is naught, or nearly so. The volume on Oxford in the twentieth century, edited by Brian Harrison, offers an entire ‘part’ (the fifth), or three chapters on Oxford’s ‘spheres of influence.’52 Across its nine-hundred pages, this volume identifies the multiple tasks and powers of Oxford professors (with women thoroughly included). Various of Harrison’s contributors consider professors as (collectively) governors of colleges, and as examiners, recipients of government or industrial largesse, inventors and creators. Yet they never quite get around to seeing the professoriate whole. The foundation is in-laid, as the wealth of published work on university students, curricula, administration, finances, and politics shows. The time has come to build the house. How best to move towards a
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history of the professoriate? Charle and Ringer provide much of the methodology we require. We might, where it is warranted, also draw from the methods of literary biography and cultural history.53 In short, we do have a solid beginning in argument and approach, but not nearly enough raw data on the daily lives of professors in the classroom and the laboratory, at negotiating tables with administrations, or in dealings with representatives of government and industry. Future research on the professoriate might wish to mine extensive already-published research on students, drawing, for example, from Mortimer Proctor’s 1957 The English University Novel.54 Like so many of the books to which I have already referred, Proctor’s literary ‘take’ on university history is mostly about students. But wait! There are also chapters on English university reform, the ‘damned tribe of scribbling women’ (pace Virginia Woolf and her own room), and the cult of Oxford. The surface argument is that university novels are alike in their superficiality and their insistence on the moral risks that students run. From Chaucer to Henry James, the picture is the same. But, of course, as a reader interested in teachers and professors, I notice that a good quarter of Proctor’s novel is of use for my purposes. And so it is with philosophical and sociological ‘takes’ on student life and student history. Lewis Feuer’s Conflict of Generations and Arthur Marwick’s The Sixties may be read in two ways, after all.55 The great wave of feminist scholarship since 1965 is similarly oriented to student life, but with an increasingly solid appreciation of women’s social, economic, political, and cultural advantages and drawbacks in so overtly gendered a place as the academy. In general studies of women’s biography and autobiography, professors abound.56 The questions about the professoriate, and about authority and political economy in the university, acquire whole new dimensions and significance in the light of this continuing and developing field of historicalliterary research – and to be blunt – self-revelation.57 Speaking of the hard work of mining, there is the slow accumulation of collective biographical knowledge that comes from reading professorial autobiographies and biographies. The last half of the twentieth and the opening years of the twenty-first century have been unexampled in the wealth of books on individual professorial lives and about them. As a young person, I remember the impact of Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography,58 and consequent reading in later years as A.J. Ayer,59 Bryan Magee,60 and even the rather rarefied Willard Quine61 gave us their
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own lives. But most of these same people (certainly Russell, with his squadrons of biographers) have been biographized as well.62 The most profitable route is to follow disciplinary – rather than institutional or national – lines of continuity among members of the professoriate.63 I have elsewhere mentioned Snowman’s study of the Hitler emigrés, but this leads straight to those who hung on in Germany, sometimes surviving the Nazis. One thinks of Victor Klemperer’s Ich will Zeugnis ablegen.64 If one allows that philosophy, history, and literature were usually taught in the faculties of the same German, French, and other European university, then there already exit a flood of discipline-linked biographies (the pertinent books are presented in the notes to the present essay). Among these works, natural scientists present a particularly revealing and attractive subject for historians of the professoriate. Thinking again of German universities, we have especially vivid both fictional and historical representations of the world of physics in German universities, in biographies of Einstein, von Heisenberg, Planck, Schröder, and so on. Russell McCormmach’s novel Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist is as good as one gets for the period of the Great War.65 This book shows how far politics and material circumstance during that war weighed on an individual who was devoted to intellectual life and a faithful member of the professoriate. Here, a physics professor in Wilhelmine Germany, at the nadir of the war, offers an extended meditation on the way his youthful scientific enthusiasms were encouraged and limited by bureaucrats (the ministry, the rectorate) and colleagues, as well as by social and familial background and foreground. Night Thoughts ends with another paradox of professorial life – the importance of international connections to the stimulation of creative science and the inevitably destructive aspect (the war) of those same relations. Although this is historical fiction, it is a satisfying exploration and explanation of professorial life and of the professoriate (pace C.P. Snow). A generation later, it is informative to read the contrasting autobiography of Abraham Pais, a Dutch-Jewish physicist caught up in the frightful world of occupied Europe and the fettered academy of the Third Reich.66 Historian-professors have, naturally, taken rather good care of themselves in the biography department.67 We have careful, semi-Victorian two-volume works like Waldo Dunn’s on James Froude, on the one hand, and the rather more adventurous books of the early 2000s such as
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Kathleen Burk’s Troublemaker: The Life and History of A.J.P. Taylor,68 on the other. Among literally hundreds of autobiographies by members of this tribe, I add mention of one old and one new: Richard Pares’s The Historian’s Business and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr’s gossipy reminiscences.69 These several examples of professorial biography, arranged mostly by discipline, are offered to show how rich is the evidential vein for the would-be historian of the professoriate, and how much labour will be required to impose explanatory order upon it. Where, then, are the entry points for someone wanting to understand the professoriate in historical perspective and taking advantage of new work in the field of university history? One way to begin is to take a risk: to try to find a middle road between mechanistic calculations about ‘group processes,’ legitimation, and power-mongering, on the one hand, and the private world of the professor, on the other. Thinking of examples from the present essay, it would be a fine thing to see where the professoriate (not just great leaders) fit in the history of university administration and management since the mid-nineteenth-century. When a university president in Europe or North America chooses to lead her institution to do experimental teaching or research in unexpected fields, is it because – or partly because – the professoriate wants that innovation, or only because the president is determined to make change happen? When professorial salaries and working conditions come to centre-stage in a university’s history, is it because of competition for scarce university teachers – or because the professors have insisted, perhaps through collective bargaining, on that change? When universities choose to spend time and money on public relations and communications with the ‘outside world,’ to accept at least some of the values of the wider society, to pay close attention to the wishes of business and industry, or to kow-tow to government, what role does the professoriate play? These questions are on the underside of administratively oriented histories of universities. Answers require balanced use of prosopographical, economic, political, and cultural evidence about the professoriate. It will not be enough to ask about students and their families or about the administrative officers and managers who run universities: no, one will have to ask about the profs. You will almost certainly want to know who they were or are; how they have coped with the often conflicting demands of teaching, research, community service, and political pressure; what forms their ambitions have taken; and where
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those ambitions have led. The evidence will be social and collective, partly political and administrative, partly anthropological, sometimes peculiarly ‘intellectual.’ The work may be done partly by way of biography, but biography that endlessly balances broadly ‘social’ context and circumstance with private, personal explanations about taste and motive. But better still would be group and collective studies of professors in whole institutions, fields, disciplines, and professions. Perhaps it would make sense in a study of professors as political animals, whether inside the university or out, to revive a now-dated technique on which political scientists used to rely, the ‘pressure-group’ study. Getting down to practicalities, we want studies of collective professorial experience in curriculum-making. Professors alone do not choose the curriculum, for example, in departments and senates and high administration; rather, the tastes and demands of students, capitalists, and technically minded bean-counters play a part. But what part, exactly, do the profs play? And for the professoriate, there have been consequences for the daily life of teaching, research, and community activity, as each phase of curriculum making has come and gone. There is surely a connection between the history of teaching and research, on the one hand (understood here as curriculum history), and on the other, the rise and fall and rise of collective bargaining, informal networks on campus, and the rise and wane of academic decision-making bodies. When PhDs appear in large public universities across Europe and North America in the 1950s and 1960s, it says a good deal about the ambitions and the make-up of the professoriate of the day, about its abilities to shape programs of study, its idea of what is in the universities’ interests and its own, and its ability to create and fund expensive teaching programs of this kind. By the end of the twentieth century, the wave had passed. New doctoral programs are rarer, and the professoriate’s curricular attentions have moved elsewhere. But where, and why? A new, historically informed view of the professoriate and of the curriculum would help us to see where and why. In these examples, it would surely be helpful to know who were and are the professors and the degree in which their careers are a capstone or a stepping stone in the social histories of the families and clans from which they come. In short, there is still need for balance between oldstyle research on the social origins of professors, on their gender and ethnicity, on their economic interests (and impacts). So far I have scarcely raised the matter of gender in the university and the connected questions of politics, power, and institutional cul-
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ture. But if one wants to see why a new history of the professoriate makes sense now, the collective experience of those relatively few women who taught and studied in universities before the 1960s, and the far larger numbers who now inhabit the professoriate, does make that case. Indeed, questions of gender and institutional culture give point to my earlier treatment of Annan, Ringer, and Stray, all of whom have theories, and all of whom correct them by constantly returning to the data. Ringer (to a lesser degree, Annan) thinks of the professoriate as an ambitious lot, committed to knowledge production, new fields, and old and new professions. Stray reminds us that the rise and fall of the classics are understandable in terms of group experience, but also of the history of the British Empire, its commercial and industrial past, and its mass education systems. These writers correct, and even discard their theories about the university and society, where data demand they do so, and it is bracing stuff. Few studies of the university could be so revealing, with an appropriate balance of methods, as the close scrutiny of the collective experience of women in the professoriate. Evidence of women’s social background and social impact is certainly available. We know much about the slow and often unwilling adaptation of university institutions to the pressure applied by the professoriate, and by the vast movement(s) we loosely call feminism. We could make informed judgments about equity and fairness, in salary, in matters of preference (rank, position, and the like) – and we could do it across several generations. We know much less about the treatment professors meted out to each other, and especially men to women, but that is a matter for research. It is, in short, time and more than time to write a history of the professoriate with gender politics as the explanand, the thing-to-beexplained.70 Hollywood pictures have for three-quarters of a century made good use of the ‘fabulous hidden treasure’ theme. Without suggesting that historians take up the costume affected by Indiana Jones, let alone the risks he ran, it is fair to say that the professoriate hides remarkable, possibly even fabulous, historical potential. We have the advantage of knowing where it is. It is time to set out on the hunt for it. notes I wish to acknowledge the substantive and stylistic advice of Russell Wodell and Christopher Stray. This essay was much improved wherever their advice was taken.
Towards an International History of the Professoriate 51 1 Mikhail Sholokhov, And Quiet Flows the Don (London: Putnam, 1936, 4 volumes; orig. publication in Russian, 1928). Sholokhov was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965 in large part for Quiet Flows the Don. The novel was made into a popular Russian film of the same title in 1957, and was released in a new ‘transatlantic’ version in mid-2004. 2 Noel Annan, The Dons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 3 Annan’s earlier volume, Our Age: English Intellectuals between the World Wars, a Group Portrait (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), gives arresting and believable pictures of those upper-middle and aristocratic classes and groups, largely male, that led and shaped English writing, science, art, and party politics between 1920 and 1940. The great ‘public’ schools – Shrewsbury, Harrow, Winchester, St Paul’s, Eton, and so on – provide much of the background for his book. But then, as Annan nicely shows, the young men from those institutions came into full flower only after they had left school and gone up to Oxbridge. So in the end, Our Age gives a taste of the book that Annan never quite got around to writing, the book about the professoriate as the unending, winding river, the perpetual ‘backdrop’ to British social and political development after about 1880. 4 The locus classicus of continuous professorial careers before 1800 was European and North American universities. See Jacques Le Goff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, trans. Teresa L. Fagan (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), esp. xvi–xxiv. Compare Jacques Verger, Les universités au Moyen Age (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999) and Alan Cobban’s The Medieval Universities: Their Development and Organization (London: Methuen, 1975), esp. chapter 4, ‘Paris: Magisterial Archetype,’ 75–95, and chapter 8, ‘The Academic Community,’ 196–218. For context in broad strokes, see Christophe Charle and Jacques Verger, Histoire des Universités (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), in the series ‘Que sais-je?’ no. 391, replacing Maurice Bayen’s serviceable 1973 work of the same title. 5 Medicine, law, and theology provided examples of this sequence until the 1950s, when faculties of engineering, business, education, and social work joined other new citizens of the multiversity. For a chaotic but revealing discussion of one such case, see Clark Kerr, The Gold and the Blue: A Personal Memoir of the University of California, 1949–1967 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002). From the body of published research on movement of people and knowledge to and from the ‘academy,’ I propose four works on science and engineering in France. All refer to developments in the rest of western Europe and North America, and all discuss professors (not just students or scientists or practising professionals of one sort or another). They are: N.
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and J. Dhombres, Naissance d’un nouveau pouvoir: sciences et savants en France, 1793–1824 (Paris: Payot, 1989); Robert Fox and George Weisz, eds., The Organization of Science and Technology in France, 1808–1914 (Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press and Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1980), esp. Victor Karady, ‘Educational Qualifications and University Careers in Science in Nineteenth-Century France,’ 95–124, and Harry Paul, ‘Apollo Courts the Vulcans: The Applied Science institutes in Nineteenth-Century French Science Faculties,’ 155–82; Charles R. Day, Education for the Industrial World: The Écoles d’Arts et Métiers and the Rise of French Industrial Engineering (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987); and Mary Jo Nye, Science in the Provinces: Scientific Communities and Provincial Leadership in France, 1860–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 6 A valuable discussion of women professors and their various cursus vitarum appeared recently in Elizabeth Smyth, Sandra Acker, Paula Bourne, and Alison Prentice, eds., Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women’s Professorial Work (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). For women in a single field of professorial endeavour, see B. Boutilier and A. Prentice, eds., Creating Historical Memory: English-Canadian Women and the Work of History (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997); Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940–1972 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). And as a singular example, Alison Prentice, ‘Elizabeth Allin: Physicist,’ in Great Dames, Elspeth Cameron and Janice Dickin, eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 264–87. 7 Bertrand Russell, for example, was once a lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge, dismissed after his 1916 trial under the Defence of the Realm Act during the Great War, rehired in 1920, left of his own accord for twenty-five years of turbulent life all over the world, then again became a Trinity College lecturer from 1950 to 1955. On Russell and his professorial colleagues, see Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell, vol. 1, The Spirit of Solitude, and vol. 2, The Ghost of Madness (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996 and 2000), 1: 563–8; 2: 271–3. But compare the forty-two-year-old Vladimir Nabokov’s surprising appointment at Wellesley College during 1941–2 and 1944–8, then at Cornell during 1948–59, when his good fortune with Lolita (1955) allowed him early retirement, at age fifty-six, to the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland. The surprise is that a novelist, a rabid anti-Soviet ideologue, and a dabbler in entomology should have got a teaching appointment in an old and well-regarded women’s college midway through the Second
Towards an International History of the Professoriate 53 World War. On all these matters, see Brian Boyd, Vlidimir Nabokov, vol. 2, The American Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Boyd gives fully 110 pages of detail to the administrative, intellectual, social, and even physical circumstances in which Nabokov lived his professorial life. See also the insightful work of Maurice Couturier, ed., Vladimir Nabokov: Oeuvres romanesques complètes (Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade, 1999). 8 For an empirically satisfying (and well-argued) discussion of patterns in professorial recruitment, including movement in and out of allied professions, see A.H. Halsey, The Decline of Donnish Dominion: The British Academic Professions in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Halsey dealt with the history of the professoriate across the whole of his century, but emphasizes post-1945 developments. Among other resources, Halsey was able to use a massive survey-questionnaire of British university teachers at work in the 1970s and 1980s – some of whom had been undergraduates as early as the 1920s. Halsey’s large and consistent datasets give sociological weight to his generalizations about post-secondary education, especially in the period 1944 to 1990. An example is his argument on the inability of the professoriate to keep close control of access to the higher reaches of corporate and political power in the United Kingdom (the point of his title). 9 Christophe Charle, La république des universitaires, 1870–1940 (Paris: Seuil, 1994). For an important but much earlier sister work, see J.-N. Luc and Alain Barbé, Des Normaliens: Histoire de l’Ecole normale supérieure de SaintCloud (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1982). Luc and Barbé describe a system under which children who attended ‘popular’ elementary schools, and passed into normal schools (rather than completing a full lycée education), might be received eventually into a special ‘school’ that prepared ‘professors’ for those same normal schools. This training produced men (there was a parallel system for women) who did not often write or do much research, but who had an advantageous social position in the provinces. Meanwhile, the lycées were mostly staffed by teachers (confusingly called professeurs) whose advanced education usually occurred in the Paris Ecole Normale Supérieure or in the better provincial faculties of arts. These professeurs typically advanced into the regular university professoriate upon completion of a vast doctoral thesis, often at about age forty-five. 10 On Charle’s methods of coding for his several thousand cases, see La république, 473–4. Cf. James K. McConica, ‘The Prosopography of the Tudor University,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3, no. 1 (1973): 543–54. McConica describes a project that eventually produced explanatory effects
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William Bruneau similar to those of Charle. See McConica, ed., History of the University of Oxford, vol. 3, The Collegiate University (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), and in particular his two contributions to that volume. See Fritz K. Ringer, Education and Society in Modern Europe (Blooming-ton: Indiana University Press, 1979). Charle, La république, 9–18, 399–471. Compare the argument on the French anxiety about German universities in Alsace during the Prussian occupation and after, well portrayed in John E. Craig, Scholarship and Nation Building: The Universities of Strasbourg and Alsatian Society, 1870–1939 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), esp. 29–99, on French, and then German professors and their various adjustments to administrative, political, cultural, and scientific change after 1970, and then again after 1919. Although it is a little out of place at the one-third point of this essay, I cite Paul Axelrod’s ‘Higher Education in Canada and the United States: Exploring the Roots of Difference,’ Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 7, no. 2 (1995): 141–75. This article makes comparative arguments about the immense difference in religious outlook between the two countries, goes on to comparative finance, student intake rates, male-female differences in university enrollments (as against by their later professional life courses), and discusses levels of direct business interest in the finance and governance of universities. Because Professor Axelrod at the outset carefully limits his field of argument and research, he had not to deal with the professoriate as distinct theme, or as a topos. His work is nonetheless immediately relevant as context for anyone interested in the North American professoriate. Compare, on methodological grounds, J. Verger, ed., Histoire des universités en France (Toulouse: Bibliothèque historique Privat, 1986), whose emphasis is on students, general intellectual history, and administrative structures, but only rarely professors. J.-Cl. Passeron and Pierre Bourdieu, Les héritiers, les étudiants et la culture (Paris: Editions de Mnuit, 1964). On Weil, see the beautiful study by Francine du Plessix Gray, Simone Weil: A Penguin Life (New York: Penguin/Viking, 2001), and Florence de Lussy’s introduction to Simone Weil: Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard/Quarto, 1999), esp. ‘La marque d’Alain,’ 97ff. For Curie, see Susan Quinn, Marie Curie: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). Gary Werskey, The Visible College (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1978). Noel Annan, The Dons, was published a year before the author’s death at age eighty-four.
Towards an International History of the Professoriate 55 20 Fritz Ringer, Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective, 1890–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 21 Terry N. Clark’s book on the rise of sociology as a field of intellectual practice, and a sharply contested battlefield in the French university, Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), is less concerned with the professoriate than with administrative and curricular battles, fights over textbooks in classrooms across the land, the circulation and (occasionally vitriolic) contents of newly founded journals, and public slanging matches in the French press in the 1890s and early 1900s between warring sociological factions. In Clark’s discussion of these politics, the profs are somehow lost. For the purposes of this essay, it made sense to draw more closely on Ringer than on Clark. The same principle – that is, an insistence that the professor be a part of the story – has informed my choices throughout this historiographical essay. 22 Christopher Stray, Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England, 1830–1960 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 23 Reba N. Soffer, Discipline and Power: The University, History, and Making of an English Elite, 1870–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 210. 24 Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989). 25 R. Boyers, ed., Salmagundi: Intellectuals (Saratoga Springs, NY: Skidmore College, 1986). 26 Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1982). 27 Howard Gardner, Extraordinary Minds (New York: HarperCollins, 1997); Allan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960–1990 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990); Gilbert Highet, Talents and Geniuses: The Pleasures of Appreciation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957). 28 Most recently and famously, see the American Robert Russo’s Straight Man (New York: Random House, 1997), and David Lodge’s trilogy of university novels: Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975); Small World: An Academic Romance (London: Secker and Warburg, 1984); and Nice Work: A Novel (London: Secker and Warburg, 1988). For a less comic, rather grander treatment, and a social-historical resource in its own right, see C.P. Snow’s The Masters (London: Macmillan, 1952). 29 One has usually to look for ‘historical’ discussions of presidents, rectors, and college heads in their autobiographies; for example, in Canada: Claude Bissell, Halfway Up Parnassus (Toronto: University of Toronto
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William Bruneau Press, 1974); John B. MacDonald’s disarming, but highly selective Chances and Choices: A Memoir (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Alumni Association, 2000); Albert Trueman’s well-written but self-serving A Second View of Things: A Memoir (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982). A useful American example is John Dewey’s forthright and difficult relations with ‘strong’ presidents at the University of Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century and at Columbia University thereafter. See Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Thomas C. Dalton, Becoming John Dewey: Dilemmas of a Philosopher and Naturalist (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). With the exception of Harold Perkin’s Key Profession: The History of the Association of University Teachers (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969) and occasional studies of the AAUP, AUT, and NEA in the United States, there are few reliable and critical histories of national faculty associations or unions in Europe or North America. On these matters, historians have been busy for years – if only because in Europe and North America there has been a continuous and strong connection between scientific research in the university and outside funding. The consequences of this pattern for academic freedom have been remarkable and increasingly negative. See below, ‘Money and the Professoriate.’ An unexpected consequence of sustained public funding for higher education has been a rising demand for ‘accountability’ in the professoriate. For this, see W. Bruneau, ‘Shall We Perform or Shall We Be Free?’ in The Corporate Campus, J. Turk, ed. (Toronto: James Lorimer, 2000), 145–68; and W. Bruneau and D.C. Savage, Counting Out the Scholars: How Performance Indicators Undermine Universities and Colleges (Toronto: Lorimer, 2002). See the work of Christophe Charle (quite distinct from his huge project on La République des professeurs) on professors’ patterns of home ownership , family size, and civic involvement in Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: ‘Situation sociale et position spatiale: Essai de géographie sociale du champ littéraire à la fin du XIXe siècle,’ Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 13 (1977): 45–59; and ‘L’expansion et la crise de la production littéraire, 2e moitié du 19e siècle,’ Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 4 (1975): 44–65. See also W. Bruneau, ‘The UBC Professoriate, 1915–1945,’ Canadian Journal of Education 19, no. 1 (1994): 59–78, which shows how networks of professorial social life, political activity, and private cultural activity are characteristic of professors outside the university, and how a collective biography of professors would thus show (and
Towards an International History of the Professoriate 57 even explain) how the ‘inside’ of the academic relates to the ‘outside.’ 34 Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971. 35 J. ben-David, Centers of Learning: Britain, France, Germany, United States: An Essay (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977) and Scientific Growth: Essays on the Social Organization and Ethos of Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 36 For a good classical treatment, see Félix Ponteil, Les classes bourgeoises et l’avènement de la démocratie, 1815–1914 (Paris: A. Michel, 1968), but also Antoine Prost, Histoire de l’enseignement en France, 1800–1967 (Paris: A. Colin, 1968). 37 Howard Bowen and Jack Schuster, American Professors: A National Resource Imperilled (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), ‘Faculty Attributes,’ 30–54; on part-timers, 150ff. 38 Ibid., 88–9. 39 See Paul Stortz, ‘New Perspectives on the Professoriate Down Under’: Review of College Academics, by Anthony Potts, CAUT Bulletin 45 (Oct. 1998): 7. 40 Burton R. Clark, ed., The Academic Profession: National, Disciplinary, and Institutional Settings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). To go back a couple of decades, even Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, in their Academic Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1968), give us a novel discussion of social stratification, federal-versus-local Sturm und Drang in higher education governance, gender, the rise of professional ‘schools’ in the ‘multiversity,’ colour, and race, and yet they never deal with the professoriate. It is all about students, and never about much else. This is a striking omission, and all the more when one thinks that in the 1970s the whole field of educational history was shaken by several forms of neoMarxist revisionism and claimed to be concerned with entire social classes previously ignored, as well as questions of power and privilege not noticeable until then in work on higher education. With all that, one might have thought there would be a stream, indeed a river of books about professors and the professoriate. 41 Tony Becher, ‘The Disciplinary Shaping of the Profession,’ in Clark, The Academic Profession, 271–303. 42 Sol Cohen, Challenging Orthodoxies: Toward a New Cultural History of Education (New York: Peter Lang, 1999). 43 Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-history, Quanto-history, and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). 44 Telling the Truth about History (New York: Norton, 1994). For a still more powerful, and historically valuable defence of ordinary reason in history, see Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New
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William Bruneau York: Free Press, 1990), and his latest, Return to Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). Compare Harvey Siegel, Rationality Redeemed: Further Dialogues on an Educational Ideal (New York: Routledge, 1997). About 5 per cent of the content of the Canadian Journal of Higher Education (and this is a generous estimate) provides sustained historical-informed argument on higher education. The American and European counterparts are marginally more generous to historical or near-historical studies. Ironically, these same periodicals are rife with quantitative, essentially descriptive reports on the professoriate. In most cases, research reports of this kind offer mildly worded assurances that they, and the evidence upon which they are written, are ‘guided by’ or are ‘a basis upon which to test’ some form of social ‘theory.’ Parsons and Jencks and Coleman are alive and well in these journals: history is simply out of place, or perhaps out of court. The reason higher education studies moved in this direction, rather than toward litterae humanae and explanation, is well portrayed in Janet Gross Stein, The Cult of Efficiency (Toronto: Anansi, 2001). Unaccountably, Stein misses in her discussion, and in her bibliography, the most important work of the postwar period on the subject, Raymond Callahan’s Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces that have Shaped the Administration of the Public Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962, and numerous reprints). Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969); Education and Society in Modern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979); Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective, 1890–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Max Weber’s Methodology: The Unification of the Cultural and Social Sciences (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, A.B. Emden and F.M. Powicke, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 3 vols.; Stéphen d’Irsay, Histoire des universités françaises et étrangères des origines à nos jours (Paris: A. Picard, 1933, 1935), 2 vols.; Peter Moraw, ed., Unterwegssein im Spätmittelater (Berlin: Dunker und Humblot, 1985); Chantal Dupille, Les enragés du XVe siècle, les étudiants au Moyen Age (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1969); Léo Moulin, La vie des étudiants au Moyen Age (Paris: A. Michel, 1991). See V.H.H. Green, The Universities (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), esp. at 358 for a bibliographical survey to that date of research on the social
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origins of students and their use of the university to retain or to improve their social ‘situations.’ For a later and much more sophisticated view, see James K. McConica’s contributions to his own edited volume in the History of the University of Oxford, vol. 3. Respectively: Amersham, England: Avebury, 1981–present, 17 vols. so far; and Department of Higher Education of the State University of New York at Buffalo, and more recently the University of Pennsylvania, 1981– present, 21 vols. so far. T.H. Aston, ed., in 8 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2000). Published in 1997 and 2000, respectively. Brian Harrison, ed., The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 8, The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 543–636. An example of an historical-literary view of the professoriate is Lionel Gossman’s Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Mortimer R. Proctor, The English University Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). Lewis Feuer, The Conflict of Generations (New York: Basic Books, 1969); Arthur Marwick, The Sixties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). See, for example, Carolyn Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life (New York: Random House, 1988) and Jill Ker Conway, When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (New York: Knopf, 1998). Consider Jill Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain (New York: Random House, 1989) and her professorial autobiography, True North: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1994). A further, and Canadian, example in the Ker Conway lineage, if one may speak so, is Maria Tippett’s Becoming Myself: A Memoir (Toronto: Stoddart, 1996). This last, although a selfindulgent and self-involved narrative, gives its closing thirty pages to professorial life in a British Columbia university. The book is helpful to a historian because, it also provides a series of highly selective discussions about why this woman would ever want to be a university teacher. It is an interesting primary source just because it gets past the impediments to this academic woman’s ‘becoming,’ and asks about practical motivation, and practical experience as a research and teaching colleague-partner. Bertrand Russell, Autobiography (New York: Little, Brown [vols. 1 and 2] and Simon and Schuster [vol. 3]), 1967–9). A.J. Ayer, Part of My Life (London: Collins, 1977). Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997). W.V. Quine, The Time of My Life: An Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: MIT
60
62
63
64
65 66 67
68 69
70
William Bruneau Press, 1985); cf. Alex Orenstein, W.V. Quine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). On the ‘philosophy’ professoriate, see D. W. Hamlyn, Being a Philosopher: The History of a Practice (London: Routledge, 1992) and the unfortunately neglected A.W. Levi, Philosophy as Social Expression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). Hamlyn makes a great point of his having been administratively and socially active, and not entirely caught up in philosophy work. He is not (and has never been) an isolated case. See, for example, the enthused and slightly amateurish Drusilla Scott on A.D. Lindsay: A Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1971). Lindsay was a philosopher of sorts, but better known as a Master of Balliol College and then first ViceChancellor of Keele University. For a reasoned argument on the common basis of good biographies of philosopher-professors, see Richard Freedman, ‘Genius and the Dutiful Life: Ray Monk’s Wittgenstein and the Biography of the Philosopher as Sub-Genre,’ Biography 25, no. 2 (2002): 301–42. Viktor Klemperer, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten (Berlin: AufbauVerlag, 1995), 5te Auflage; translated as I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, vol. 1, s1933–1941, and vol. 2, 1942–1945 (New York: Random House, 1998–9); Daniel Snowman, Hitler’s Emigrés: The Cultural Impact on Britain of Refugees from Naziism (New York: Vintage 2003). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Abraham Pais, A Tale of Two Continents: A Physicist’s Life in a Turbulent World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). For an essay on the methodological and evidential claims of historianprofessors’ self-descriptions, see W.A. Bruneau, ‘Must Biography Be Educational?’ Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 13, no. 1/2 (2001): 182–200, with an extended essay on several historianprofessors’ biographies, among them Lord Acton’s. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. R.A. Humphreys and Elisabeth Humphreys, The Historian’s Business and Other Essays, Richard Pares, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961). Pares’s father was a businessman and politician with ancient ties to Russia, and a help to the Nabokov family in the 1920s, thus tying the middle of the present essay to its end. Schlesinger’s book is A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917–1950 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000). If Mr Schlesinger is an innocent, one fears to think what the rest of us are. The term explanand comes from the still-valuable work of William Dray, Laws and Explanation in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957).
Section 2 The Professoriate and the State
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2 Running for Office: Canadian Professors, Electoral Politics, and Institutional Reactions, 1887–1968 MICHIEL HORN In his classic study of social class and power in Canada, The Vertical Mosaic (1965), the sociologist John Porter wrote: ‘It would probably be difficult to find another modern political system with such a paucity of participation from its scholars.’ Canadian academics, he stated, were generally loath to become involved in party politics, whether as candidates for office or as party insiders. What or who was responsible for this state of affairs? Porter discerned the towering academic stature and legacy of the University of Toronto economic historian Harold Adams Innis (1894–1952). ‘No one played a more important role in the depoliticizing of the higher learning in Canada than ... Innis,’ Porter wrote. ‘His position as head of the Department of Political Economy at the University of Toronto, his own prodigious scholarship, and the numerous scholarly offices which he held made him ... one of the most powerful figures in Canadian academic circles. A generation of Canadian-trained social scientists came under his influence and acquired his attitudes, among which was the opinion that political parties were nasty things for scholars to play around with.’1 Although in the late nineteenth century a few professors were active in politics, with some running for public office, and by the 1960s more were doing so than ever before, Porter’s assessment of the apolitical proclivities and habits of Canadian academics was, when he wrote, generally accurate. His explanation of these phenomena was well wide of the mark, however. Innis’s hostility to professorial involvement in party politics probably influenced his students as well other Canadian social scientists in the 1930s and 1940s. But Porter made no attempt to demonstrate the strength
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and reach of Innis’s influence. In any case, that influence cannot explain the low politicization of academics before Innis arrived on the scene. There are other and more credible explanations for the historical reluctance of Canadian professors to enter party politics, explanations that Porter ignored. In my book Academic Freedom in Canada I have noted that, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the people attracted to and accepted into academic life tended strongly to be of middle-class background, and they tended to hold what the presidents, deans, and department heads who recommended their employment considered to be sound opinions.2 Added to this was a preference for the contemplative rather than the active life. The conditions of academic work also played a role. Never notably well paid, given the length of preparation, and at times (as in the 1940s and 1950s) quite badly paid, academic employment tended to compensate for this by generally, though not invariably, offering a high degree of security and freedom. Men and women who found academic work agreeable – the available evidence suggests that most did – lacked compelling reasons to run for office or even to become active in party politics. And what of personal characteristics and preferences of professors? The political economist and political gadfly Eugene Forsey once described most of his colleagues at McGill University as ‘rabbits’ who were afraid to challenge the principal of the university and its board of governors.3 Allowing for overstatement in this case, it does seem to be true that the great majority of Canadian academics were reluctant to challenge authority, and especially the power exercised by presidents and governing boards. In explaining the low involvement of Canadian academics in politics, it is important to note that, into the 1960s, most governing boards of Canadian universities, even when they did not actively discourage professors from taking part in politics, certainly did nothing to encourage them. Some boards explicitly forbade political activity. One distinction is immediately necessary. The executive heads and governing boards of the private institutions – before 1960 a majority of Canada’s universities – were less hostile to political activity than those of the provincial institutions. The key reason lay in sources of funding. The private colleges and universities, whether denominational or secular, depended on tuition fees, gifts, and endowment income, with direct formula grants from the federal government assuming growing importance after these were introduced in 1951. (They ended abruptly in
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1966–7.)4 By 1920 a few private institutions, such as Queen’s University and Western University (later the University of Western Ontario), were receiving provincial grants, but into the second half of the twentieth century these were not a major part of their income. At many private institutions, as a consequence, professorial political activity remained relatively uncontentious, at least so long as the political party in which a professor became active did not arouse hostility among members of governing boards or important donors. The Conservative and Liberal parties were generally ‘safe and sound.’ A rare exception occurred in 1917–18, when the Chancellor of Queen’s joined a wealthy alumnus in seeking the dismissal of the political economist O.D. Skelton because of his active support for Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal party during the 1917 federal election. The party’s opposition to conscription for military service struck many English Canadians as unpatriotic. Principal Bruce Taylor resisted the pressure put on him, though, and Skelton kept his position.5 Two examples from the history of Dalhousie University serve to illustrate the point that the choice of party mattered. Richard Weldon, while dean of law, was also from 1887 to 1896 the Conservative member of Parliament for Albert County, New Brunswick. ‘The Dalhousie Law School was in consequence peculiar,’ P.B. Waite writes: ‘It began two weeks before the regular arts and science classes, but it ended early in February, two months before the others. This allowed the dean of law to go to Ottawa for the session of the House of Commons!’6 Evidently Dalhousie’s president and board were willing to accommodate Weldon. Almost three-quarters of a century later, the political scientist J.H. Aitchison found the board of governors rather less acquiescent. Early in 1962 he accepted nomination as a New Democratic Party (NDP) candidate in a Halifax constituency, a federal election being expected later that year. He intended to ask for a leave of absence if he were to be elected, but in April 1962 he reported to J.H. Stewart Reid, executive secretary of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT): ‘I have received unofficial word that the attitude of the Executive Committee of the Board of Governors to my candidacy could not be more negative.’ A key part of the problem seemed to be his choice of political vehicle. His dean (and later president), Henry Hicks, was ‘holding up a formal communication to me in the hopes of persuading the Board to change its mind ... If it doesn’t we are prepared to take strong measures and I shall vigorously and openly criticize it.’7 The ‘we’ referred to was the Dalhousie faculty association. Aitchison asked Reid for information
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about the policy at other universities. Four weeks later Aitchison wrote again to report success: ‘It was a famous victory, thanks, mainly, to the information you were able to provide.’8 (This was the only victory Aitchison would savour. In the election, held in June 1962, he did not come close to saving his deposit.) Comparing two instances that were separated by three-quarters of a century is, of course, problematic. It is possible, though it cannot be known with any certainty, that board members would have opposed Aitchison’s candidacy if he had obtained a Liberal or Progressive Conservative nomination. As we shall see, though, in the 1950s and 1960s professors at another private Nova Scotia institution, St Francis Xavier University, were free to run for political office. It seems therefore unlikely that Dalhousie board members objected to political candidacy as such, and likely that it was the NDP they objected to. Howard P. Whidden’s experience in electoral politics was very different from Aitchison’s. Asked to run as a Unionist candidate in 1917 – the Unionists were a fusion of the Conservatives and pro-conscription Liberals – Whidden, who presided over Brandon College, a Baptist institution, gained the approval of his board. He was elected to the House of Commons and until 1921 served both his constituents and his institution. In Whidden’s case (as in Weldon’s), the respectability of the political vehicle he adopted made it easy for the board to accommodate him. Another Baptist institution, Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, gave a young political scientist, Norman McLeod Rogers, permission to run for the House of Commons as a Liberal candidate in 1926. Unsuccessful on this occasion, he ran again in 1935, when he was teaching at Queen’s University. Upon being elected, and having been assured of a post in the cabinet led by William Lyon Mackenzie King, he resigned his professorship. Five years earlier, in 1930, Cyrus Macmillan of the McGill English department gained leave of absence early in the year to become Mackenzie King’s Minister of Fisheries, apparently on the understanding that he would resign from McGill if he were to be elected to the House of Commons.9 He failed to win his constituency on 28 July 1930, and as the government also went down to defeat, Macmillan was back in the classroom in September. Other private institutions at which political candidacy became an issue included Wesley College in Winnipeg, the University of Western Ontario, Trinity College and Victoria University in Toronto, Montreal’s Sir George Williams College, and St Francis Xavier University in
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Antigonish, Nova Scotia. In all but one instance, governing boards approved of the candidacy, though sometimes with misgivings. The exception was Wesley College, a Methodist institution whose board of regents, believing that electoral activity disrupted college life, adopted a resolution in 1910 requiring its employees to resign if they wished to run for office.10 For years the policy inhibited all partisan activity at Wesley (which became United College in 1938 and is known today as the University of Winnipeg). The historian A.R.M. Lower wrote in 1945 to a former member of the Wesley faculty: ‘We feel we are too small an institution to make it wise for any of us to identify ourselves publicly with any of the parties.’11 By the mid-1950s, though, the historians Kenneth McNaught and Harry Crowe were active in the leftist Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). Asked in 1987 whether he could recall any attempt to stop them, McNaught answered in the negative.12 But had either of them sought to run for office, the 1910 policy might well have been invoked. In 1945 another Methodist/United Church institution, Victoria University, adopted a more permissive policy. President Walter Brown reported to the board of regents that a representative of one of the political parties had asked whether a faculty member might be allowed to run in the forthcoming Ontario provincial election. Brown had discussed this with a group of board members without identifying either the individual or the party he wanted to run for. The group was of the view that electoral politics ‘was not the type of life that develops scholarly interests.’ Then, too, ‘it might antagonize donors as well as the parents of prospective students.’ (The presumed preferences of wealthy donors were bound to loom large in the minds of private-university board members.) Some thought this sufficed to ban running for office, ‘but the majority took the view that it was not advisable ... to deny members this right, and therefore no absolute prohibition was made.’ The recommendation Brown made to the full board was that anyone seeking to enter electoral politics ‘should be given leave of absence with the privilege of protecting his pension rights, and the college would assure that man, as far as possible, a position when he returns.’13 (That women faculty members might want to run for office seems not to have occurred to anyone.) The board approved this recommendation. In May 1945, the classicist Eric A. Havelock obtained three weeks’ leave of absence to campaign as a CCF candidate in Wellington North. He did not think he would win this largely rural seat, Havelock recalled in 1967, but like many CCFers he thought that the party, having elected
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thirty-four members to the legislature in 1943 to become the Official Opposition, would form the government in 1945. In that event, Havelock’s understanding with party leader E.B. Jolliffe was that he would get the education portfolio and a safe urban seat would be found for him.14 Havelock lost and returned to his teaching post, the CCF having sustained a major defeat. Brown welcomed him back, expressing the hope that he would ‘henceforth eschew politics.’15 The classicist thought Victoria ‘a bit cheap’ in withholding three weeks’ pay even though the teaching term had ended, and he had marked all his exams before leaving for the politically stony fields north of Guelph. More important, he sensed that his incursion into electoral politics had marked him once again as controversial – during the 1930s he had been criticized for making pro-CCF and pro-labour speeches16 – so that when Harvard offered him a position in 1947 he left Victoria with few misgivings.17 At the University of Western Ontario the issue of electoral politics first emerged in the early 1920s, but it did not become a practical concern until three decades later. In 1921 the economist and historian Louis A. Wood was apparently asked to become a Progressive candidate. He turned down the offer, but came to believe that the invitation, as well as his support for the farmer and labour movements, contributed to his forced resignation in 1923.18 Wood’s belief outruns the evidence. In his memoirs, President Sherwood Fox states that a member of the board of governors sought Wood’s dismissal because Wood had allegedly offered himself as a candidate, but that Fox rejected this as a cause for dismissal and that Wood was let go on other grounds.19 The explanation of Wood’s dismissal remains unclear;20 what is clear is that Western did not stop professors from running for office. The classicist R.E.K. Pemberton obtained permission to run for the CCF in London in the 1953 and 1957 federal elections. He reported that no one at the university sought to interfere, but that he nevertheless yielded to his wife, Gwen Pemberton, who ran in his stead.21 Yet another CCF activist, the Sir George Williams College chemist J. Stanley Allen, obtained permission in 1940 to run in the federal constituency of Montreal–Mount Royal. He finished far up the track but was more successful in municipal politics, serving during the war years as a member of the Montreal City Council and the Protestant School Board. His success may have cost him his teaching position: when Principal Kenneth Norris asked for his resignation early in 1944 the stated grounds were that Allen’s public life encroached on his teaching
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and his service to the YMCA-owned college. Doubts persist, however, whether these were the real grounds or whether Allen’s socialist activism was at issue.22 Trinity College, Anglican though federated with the University of Toronto, gave the classicist George M.A. Grube permission to become a candidate in the 1940 federal election, ‘provided that the campaign will not interfere with [your] duties to the College or with the progress of the students.’23 Were he to be elected, he was expected to resign his academic post. There was no danger of that: he ran for the CCF in Toronto-Broadview and finished a distant third. Much the same result rewarded his efforts in the 1945 and 1949 general elections, as well as in a 1950 by-election, all in the Broadview riding. During the war years he also ran unsuccessfully for Toronto City Council. Why, after the first defeat, did he bother to run again? Because somebody had to, he said in a 1944 speech. ‘Few university professors even ... can or dare to take part in political activities if their opinions be unorthodox ... But freedom of speech cannot survive in cold storage.’24 Even at the private institutions the number of people who ran for office was hardly overwhelming. Permission to do so was usually granted, however, on the understanding that victorious candidates would resign their professorships. This was not invariably the case. Leave of absence might be granted either formally or informally. For example, Allen J. MacEachen, who taught sociology and economics at St Francis Xavier University, a Roman Catholic institution, gained election to the House of Commons as a Liberal in 1953 and was re-elected in 1957. When he went down to defeat in 1958, he was able to return to the university, and taught until he re-entered the House of Commons in 1962. The provincial universities, of which before 1950 there were six (New Brunswick, Toronto, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia) took a more jaundiced view of electoral activity and of political activity in general than did the private institutions. The reason lay in the dependence of the provincial universities on the governments that funded them. A provincial government, presidents and boards feared, might punish an institution by reducing its annual grant if it allowed partisan activity by some of its professors in opposition to the government. Yet only the University of Saskatchewan formulated an explicit policy right at the outset, the board of governors adopting a regulation in 1909 that ‘no Professor or Assistant Professor shall become a candi-
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date for a seat in the Provincial Legislature or Dominion House of Commons.’25 Participation in municipal politics was permitted, because the national and provincial parties, Conservative and Liberal, had not entered this realm. At the other provincial universities the restrictions were no less real, though largely unstated. One president did express an opinion hostile to electoral as well as other political activity. Speaking in Convocation Hall in February 1922, the University of Toronto’s Sir Robert Falconer addressed the subject of academic freedom. So far as the University of Toronto, ‘a state university,’ was concerned, he said, academic freedom should be restricted to the classroom, the study, and the laboratory. The professor in a publicly financed university was ‘the servant of the nation’ in matters of the intellect. Like judges and civil servants, professors were not free to do as ordinary citizens did. ‘It is ... expedient that a professor in a State University should take no active share in partypolitics,’ whether in the form of running for office or of engaging in partisan debate. Doing so might harm the institution. ‘A government might well, without giving any reason, easily show its displeasure in such a way as to affect adversely the fortunes of the institution and the financial position of many guiltless and wiser colleagues.’26 One can easily imagine the presidents of other provincial (and even some private) universities reading this and nodding their assent. All the same, in the 1930s another provincial university reluctantly granted political leave to one of its professors. The circumstances were indeed unusual. In August 1933 the board of governors of the University of British Columbia received a request from the head of the Department of Education, George M. Weir, that he be allowed to accept the Liberal nomination in a Vancouver constituency in the upcoming provincial election. This required careful handling. As recently as June that year the board had refused to appoint J. Allen Harris, who had been an assistant professor of chemistry at the time he lost his position on budgetary grounds in 1932,27 to an instructorship in UBC’s summer school, on the grounds that he had accepted a Liberal nomination in a provincial constituency. In fact, the board had passed a motion opposing the appointment of ‘any person who is entering public life.’28 Applying this to Weir was problematic, however. Years of economic hardship had discredited the Conservatives, in office since 1928. Few doubted that the Liberals would sweep into office, and Weir was said to be Liberal leader T.D. Pattullo’s choice for the education portfolio. Buying time, the governors passed a motion stating that they ‘have
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taken no action nor do they intend to take any action which will in any way curtail the civil rights of any member of the staff, but should any person on the staff be elected ... then the Governors will consider the situation thereby created.’29 In other words, Weir had leave to run but nothing more. On 2 November 1933 the Liberals (including Weir) triumphed as expected. In December the UBC board had to adjudicate his request for leave of absence without pay while he served as provincial secretary and minister of education. President L.S. Klinck reported to the board that he had met Premier Pattullo and had informed him that he, Klinck, and UBC’s board of governors expected Weir to resign. Pattullo had challenged this: ‘It would not be fair to Dr Weir to ask him to resign unless the Board should decide to appoint a Head to the Department of Education.’ Klinck had expressed doubt that the board would do so immediately, whereupon Pattullo had asked him ‘to re-open the case ... as soon as the Governors felt they were in a position to appoint a man to the post.’30 Understandably reluctant to cross Pattullo, the board then resolved, with two members dissenting: ‘That Dr Weir be given leave of absence, without salary, from the time he became Minister until such time as the Board shall decide to appoint a permanent Head in the Department of Education.’31 The governors did not yet know it, but they would keep Weir’s position unfilled for the next eleven years, eight while he was in the provincial cabinet and three more while he did war-related work in Ottawa. One of the dissenters in December 1933, Judge J.N. Ellis, left the board in 1935. When Pattullo wrote to thank him for his service, Ellis replied with bitter and reproachful words. ‘I would have thought more of the thanks,’ he wrote, ‘had you carried out your promise made to me in the Vancouver Hotel when we both agreed that Dr Weir’s conduct, in remaining on the Faculty, while a responsible minister of the Crown, was to say the least in bad taste and reprehensible.’32 Having stayed on the board at Pattullo’s direct request, Ellis had waited for him to implement his promise to induce Weir to resign after the first session of the legislature: in vain. Ellis regretted he had not in December 1933 obeyed his first impulse to leave the board. Pattullo replied that he could not recall giving the promise Ellis had referred to. He saw nothing ‘reprehensible’ in Weir’s conduct, the premier added, urging Ellis to take a wider view. ‘Political life is very uncertain,’ Pattullo wrote, ‘and I think it would be an unfortunate thing
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if capable men must be excluded unless they are prepared to give up their businesses or professions.’33 This attitude had implications beyond Weir’s case, and J. Allen Harris became its beneficiary. In 1935 Pattullo asked that Harris be returned to full-time employment at the university while retaining his seat in the Legislative Assembly34 (like Weir, Harris had been elected in 1933). The board had expressed its willingness to reinstate Harris, provided money were made available for this and he resigned his seat. This was unacceptable to Harris and Pattullo, and after a board committee met the premier the board of governors changed its stand. On the understanding that he would take leave without pay while the assembly was in session, normally during the winter months, Harris became a fulltime research assistant, with his salary and the costs of his research to be paid from a special $10,000 annual government grant.35 In 1937 he did not seek re-election, and the following year he rejoined the university at his old rank and salary, the special grant being added to UBC’s regular income. Harris’s treatment, like Weir’s, was unusual. The board’s decision to see things Pattullo’s way owed something to the circumstances in which Harris had lost his job in 1932 – the board had undertaken to rehire the dismissed professors when the university’s finances improved. As well, the board’s acquiescence in Weir’s leave of absence made it impossible to maintain that university employment and electoral politics were mutually exclusive. Finally, enticed by the grant paid in support of Harris, and worried by the possible consequences of resisting Pattullo’s demands, board members acquiesced in a clear infringement of the university’s autonomy. As a result of the Weir and Harris cases, though, UBC became the first provincial university to enable professors to take political leave. The precedent set at UBC affected that university only, and very few professors availed themselves of the precedent. The board of governors of the University of Alberta, in contrast, decided in 1935 to compel professors to resign their positions if they wished to run for office. The occasion was the classicist W.H. Alexander’s nomination to represent the CCF in an Edmonton constituency in the 1935 federal election. President R.C. Wallace disapproved, and in late December 1934 he gave Alexander a copy of a memorandum that he intended to place before the board of governors at their meeting in January 1935. ‘On the one hand, the best interests of the University have to be safeguarded,’ Wallace had written. ‘On the other hand, there are rights of citizenship
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which must be protected and maintained.’ The interests of the university required that professors avoid involving themselves in provincial politics in any way. Federal politics were not similarly sensitive, so that professors should be free to express their opinions. But running for office was another matter: ‘A member of the staff cannot serve as a member of the House of Commons and carry on his duties in the University.’ In order to run, therefore, professors would first have to resign their university positions.36 Alexander declined Wallace’s invitation to address the board. But in his response to the president’s memorandum, he did identify the flaw in Wallace’s argument. It might make sense to ask professors to resign if elected, Alexander wrote, but why ask them to resign in order to run? ‘If the position you are suggesting ... is to be defended on the ground that it is logical and not simply authoritarian, it becomes very necessary to be sure that the logic will stand ... searching examination. ... If of course the position taken is to be purely authoritarian, this is a less important consideration, but ... others arise which are more alarming still.’37 Unswayed by Alexander’s letter, Wallace presented his memorandum to the board at its January 1935 meeting. One board member, Elmer Roper, who belonged to the CCF, immediately criticized Wallace’s argument: ‘This seems completely to overlook the fact that a candidate may be defeated as well as elected.’38 Roper also questioned whether the university needed rules to deal with political candidacy at all. But most board members sided with Wallace, illogical or not. Only Roper and one other member voted against the president’s recommendation. This was the signal for Alexander to decline the nomination. To his friend Frank Underhill, the University of Toronto historian, Alexander wrote: ‘My political ambitions are few – getting too old for one thing, and for another rather like being a professor – but I had hoped to give radicals a chance to vote for a half-sensible candidate in a bourgeois constituency, where I should certainly have been trimmed handsomely.’ The board’s decision was ‘ridiculous,’ but given a choice between political candidacy and his faculty position, Alexander preferred the latter.39 That did not end the matter. When the board’s resolution became known, the reaction in some circles was hostile. The Alberta Federation of Labor passed a resolution calling on the legislature to amend the University Act in such a way as to prevent the board of governors ‘from putting into effect any ruling which would restrict the citizenship rights of members of the University staff.’40 Delegates to the annual conven-
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tion of the governing United Farmers of Alberta (UFA), which was affiliated with the CCF, called for a similar restriction on the board’s power.41 Some weeks later a government MLA, Fred White, introduced a private member’s bill that replicated the wording of the UFA convention resolution almost verbatim. It was passed into committee, where both Wallace and Alexander appeared as witnesses. Referring to two (unnamed) ‘men of long experience and great wisdom in the administration of Canadian provincial universities,’ Wallace asserted that both were ‘very firmly of the opinion that the only wise course [was] to keep the university free from political activity’ and that they had ‘consistently administered accordingly.’ The board’s resolution was not unreasonable, for ‘no recommendation would go to the board for the permanent filling of a vacancy caused by a candidature until after the election.’ This would enable the board to rehire any defeated candidate. Finally, Wallace denied that the board’s action had been directed against Alexander personally or against the CCF.42 Alexander contradicted this, arguing that ‘the board order was directed against himself and no one else, as he was the only person who was within striking distance of a nomination.’43 The government found the bill potentially embarrassing. Premier R.G. Reid and his cabinet colleagues had no wish to interfere with university autonomy, but they were concerned about the implications of the board resolution and they knew that Alexander enjoyed support in UFA circles. Reid and his predecessor, John Brownlee, met with the governors and asked that they somehow remove the matter from the political arena, given that it was an election year. After the two men left, the board agreed to suspend the policy ‘for the present year.’44 As a consequence, Reid opposed White’s bill on final reading, and it went down to defeat: fifteen for, thirty-three against.45 Alexander chose not to try for another CCF nomination. ‘I should thank our Bd of Govs for having saved me $200 [his deposit],’ he wrote to Underhill after the 1935 general election, the CCF having fared badly in Alberta.46 The board’s resolution came into effect in 1936, only to be rescinded six years later as the consequence of an unusual causal chain. The process of change began improbably in May 1941, when the university senate (voting by secret ballot) narrowly denied Premier William Aberhart the honorary degree that had been unanimously recommended by the committee on honorary degrees and ceremonials and had already been offered to the premier by the board chairman,
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H.H. Parlee, and President W.A.R. Kerr, together with an invitation to deliver the convocation address.47 Kerr resigned in dismay and disgust, complaining ‘that for reasons of personal grudge or grievance, politics have been introduced into this institution.’48 For his part, Aberhart did not get mad; he got even. In August 1941 his government appointed a ‘survey committee’ to carry out a detailed examination of the university. Among the issues to be examined were ‘the use now being made of the monies available and probable financial needs in the future,’ the relationship between the courses offered and the need for them, ‘the ability of the Province to finance them, and the number of students served by each,’ the qualifications and teaching loads of all faculty members, and the institution’s research performance.49 An unprecedented intrusion by the government into university affairs suddenly seemed possible. It did not get that far, in part because the dominant members of the committee were Parlee and the acting president, Robert Newton. The committee report was at pains to show how useful the university was. It also stated: ‘An independent University, free from outside control, is one that is most satisfactory and best serves the state.’50 Premier Aberhart acquiesced in this. And yet, the committee’s recommendation that professors henceforth be allowed to run for office owed something to his influence. Newton, whom the government appointed to the presidency in 1942,51 believed that professors would serve a more useful role in the community if they could involve themselves in politics; somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, Aberhart agreed.52 As a consequence, the survey committee report stated that the university has a duty to give leadership ‘with regard to social and economic problems’ and that professors ‘ought to be encouraged rather than restrained from exercising their full rights of citizenship.’ They should be free to participate in politics, including political candidacy, ‘unless it appeared, in particular circumstances, that the activities of any member of the staff were prejudicial to the University.’ No general regulations should be passed, however, allowing the board of governors to deal with each case ‘on its merits and as the occasion arises.’53 Some board members were unhappy with the proposed change. Aware that the government favoured it, however, and with Newton arguing for change, the board moved at the end of 1942 to rescind the policy adopted in 1935. Henceforth each application for political leave would be assessed ‘on its merits.’54 Perhaps because of the discretionary
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power this gave to the president and board, though, or for other reasons, into the 1960s no University of Alberta professors seem to have taken advantage of their new freedom. The University of Saskatchewan was the next provincial institution to abandon its prohibition of electoral activity. For thirty-five years no faculty member challenged the policy adopted by the board of governors in 1909, but soon after the election of the CCF government led by T.C. Douglas in 1944, a former member of the Faculty of Law launched a protest against the rule. ‘I feel very strongly that this very unjust rule at the University should be abolished (and I know you agree with this),’ Raphael Tuck wrote to Douglas. ‘After a man is elected, it is an entirely different thing, but he should not be forced to forego his means of livelihood for the privilege of being nominated as a candidate.’55 No reply is on record, perhaps because Douglas may have thought the matter was under consideration, the university’s board of governors having established a survey committee in January. This committee reported in December 1945, stating that it had paid particular attention to the University of Alberta’s committee and to the changes it had recommended in that institution’s operations. However, Alberta’s policy on political candidacy, proposed by that province’s survey committee, evidently did not strike the Saskatchewan committee as worth emulating. Whatever the case, among its recommendations none addressed the issue of candidacy.56 As a result the board maintained the 1909 policy,57 only to rescind it in early 1950.58 The board’s reason for doing so remain obscure, but Michael Hayden, the university’s historian, thinks ‘that the change came as a result of pressure from the CCF government.’59 Nevertheless, for more than a decade no professors availed themselves of the opportunity thus created. Unlike the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Manitoba had no formal policy on political candidacy. Not until 1951, however, did any professor ask for permission to run for office. In March that year the dean of agriculture, Grant MacEwan, received an invitation from the Liberal party to contest Brandon, thought to be safe Liberal seat, in a federal by-election to be held in June. Enticed by a hint from Prime Minister Louis St Laurent that a cabinet appointment might follow, and in any case increasingly disenchanted with academic life,60 MacEwan accepted the nomination, even though the board of governors had passed a resolution that in that case he must ‘immediately’ resign from the university.61 Alas, MacEwan’s political career did not unfold as anticipated. He lost the by-election but did not try to return to
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the university, moving to Calgary instead and eventually becoming Alberta’s lieutenant-governor. MacEwan’s departure interested the recently founded faculty association, and in 1952 its executive wrote to the board in an effort to reach an understanding of the board’s attitude to political candidacy ‘in local, provincial and federal politics,’ with specific reference to the ‘concern’ created by the board’s action in forcing MacEwan to resign.62 The Manitoba board did not bother to respond to this letter or to another on this subject that reached it in 1953. Indeed, the minutes of the board contain no evidence that its members ever discussed either letter. The faculty association did not press the issue, though, because salaries and benefits loomed larger than political candidacy. The report that the chairman of the association made to the members in 1954 devoted not one word to the subject.63 Running for office and political leave do not seem to have re-emerged as topics for discussion until the later 1960s. The faculty members of the University of New Brunswick were probably less active politically than those of any other provincial institution, avoiding not just political candidacy but partisan activity of any kind. The university was small and its relations with the government close. Until 1952, when a university council was founded to take charge of academic affairs, UNB’s academic and financial affairs were in the hands of a single governing body called the senate. Its members included the minister of education and his deputy minister. As well, until 1950 Premier John B. McNair served as one of the ten members of the senate named by the provincial government, having first been appointed twelve years earlier when he was attorney-general. In a 1950 letter to President A.W. Trueman, Premier McNair alluded to unidentified ‘risks inherent in the present situation’ that prompted his resignation but added that, during the years he had served on the senate, ‘no single instance has occurred to suggest anything of a political nature in the administration of the University affairs.’64 The comment would have been more accurate in referring to the behaviour of the university’s professors. The University of Toronto also lacked a formal policy on running for office. However, not only Sir Robert Falconer but also his successor, Henry J. Cody, disapproved of political candidacy and restricted the political activity of professors in other ways as well. When Frank Underhill joined the executive of the Ontario CCF Clubs in late 1932, Cody ordered him to withdraw. Underhill gathered information about the political involvement of professors in the United States and Great
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Britain, but to no avail. To keep his academic position he had to submit.65 Sidney E. Smith, who became president in 1945, took much the same view his predecessors had taken. So did the board of governors, though they were not completely inflexible. In 1950 Harry M. Cassidy of the Faculty of Social Work wanted to contest the provincial Liberal leadership. Smith recommended to the board that, should Cassidy be elected leader, he be required to resign his university position ‘within a reasonable time thereafter ... and in no event later than December 31st, 1950.’ Were he to be unsuccessful (as indeed he was), he might continue as a faculty member. The board approved.66 Smith himself resigned from the university in 1957 to run for the House of Commons and became Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s first secretary of state for external affairs. In the 1960s the university came around to adopting a more permissive policy. Responding to faculty criticism of the university’s structure of governance, President Claude T. Bissell in 1964 set up an advisory committee, chaired by the physiologist R.E. Haist, to consider new procedures affecting faculty in their employment relations. One result was a recommendation, accepted by the board of governors as a resolution in 1966, that outlined the conditions under which staff members might run for office.67 ‘Members of the academic profession,’ the resolution began, ‘ought to be as free as the members of any other profession to choose to enter public life. There is an obligation upon the University ... to see to it that no impediments are placed in the way of a member of the academic staff with a desire to enter public life.’ Only academic administrators were excluded. Candidates for election might get leave at full pay for up to one month. Successful candidates could get leaves without pay or at reduced pay for up to five years. Those who became ministers of the Crown would be expected to resign their university positions, as would those who wished to exceed five years of political leave. Those who returned within five years would face no loss of rank or academic entitlement.68 A sign of the times, perhaps, was that a Globe and Mail editorial criticized the resolution as being too restrictive.69 For the time they were liberal, however, and the newspaper carried letters from President Bissell and Professor K.G. McNeill defending the new policy.70 The first faculty members to avail themselves of the policy seem to have been the political scientist Robert Fenn and the geographer James Lemon, who
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both obtained NDP nominations in the Toronto area in the 1968 federal election. Neither was elected. By the time the University of Toronto’s governing board resolved to grant political leave, professorial candidates were becoming increasingly commonplace. The CAUT had adopted a policy statement in 1962 recommending that professors who wanted to run for office be given leave to do so. A survey indicated that eighteen academics contested federal seats that year and that four of them won seats.71 (Of the four no fewer than three were from St Francis Xavier University.) Even in universities that relied for the bulk of their financial support on the public purse, political candidacy was coming to be more widely accepted. When the CAUT’s national secretary polled various candidates after the federal election in April 1963, most reported having experienced no impediments to running. The response of Pauline Jewett, a Carleton University political scientist who had won a seat for the Liberal party, was noteworthy. It had been easy to get a leave of absence until such time as she might wish to return to academic life, she wrote.72 Not all universities were quite that accommodating. More common seems to have been the five-year rule adopted by the University in Toronto. That was enough to tempt an increasing number of academics to test the political waters. In 1968, for example, Robert Fenn was not the only Toronto-area political scientist to run for office. Edward Broadbent of York University was another. He did win his seat, OshawaWhitby, and eventually became the national leader of the NDP. And yet the number of academics who ran for office continued to be small. Universities underwent rapid change in the 1960s, but not with respect to electoral politics. In this area, old habits largely persisted. In summary: into the 1960s few academics sought to enter electoral politics. The record suggests that institutional barriers and personal preferences both played a role in this. With respect to institutional reactions to professors seeking to enter politics: especially at the six traditional provincial universities (New Brunswick, Toronto, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia), governing boards and presidents generally opposed the entry of their professors into electoral politics. The main fear was that this might harm relations with provincial governments and lead to reductions in provincial grants. Still, only the University of Saskatchewan and, for a while, the University of Alberta, seem to have had policies that effectively forbade running for
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office. The University of British Columbia’s board of governors seemed to be on the verge of introducing such a policy in the 1930s, but yielded to the provincial government’s wishes that it grant political leave to a faculty member. At the private universities the picture was more diverse. No institution really encouraged political activity, but only one, Wesley College, went so far as to ban electoral politics for its faculty members. There are hints that the nature of the political vehicle did matter. Into the 1960s, left-wing parties were unwelcome to the lawyers and businessmen who typically dominated governing boards. However, this did not keep academics like J. Stanley Allen, G.M.A. Grube, and Eric A. Havelock from running as CCF candidates in the 1940s and 1950s. The personal reasons for non-participation probably outweighed the institutional barriers. Professors generally enjoyed their employment and the high degree of security that came with it. Salaries were not munificent during much of the period under discussion, but especially full professors were unlikely to be tempted by the financial rewards, such as they were, of political life. If professors left the academy, the civil service was more likely to attract them than active politics. This was especially true in times of war; but in peacetime, too, universities, most notably Queen’s, witnessed a movement of academics, especially in the fields of economics, history, and political science, into public service in Ottawa.73 Some reached positions of prominence; a few former academics, among them Lester B. Pearson (history, Toronto) and J.W. Pickersgill (history, Wesley College), eventually left the bureaucracy to became political leaders. One thing seems certain: Whatever motives were at work in keeping Canadian professors out of active politics, John Porter was mistaken in his explanation of the (non)-phenomenon. The influence of Harold Adams Innis played at most a negligible part. notes 1 John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada (Toronto, 1965), 503. 2 Michiel Horn, Academic Freedom in Canada: A History (Toronto, 1999), 64–5. 3 National Archives of Canada (NAC), MG 30 D 204, Frank H. Underhill Papers, vol. 4, Eugene Forsey to Underhill, 2 May 1941. 4 See David A.A. Stager, ‘Federal Government Grants to Canadian Universities, 1951–1966,’ Canadian Historical Review 54, no. 3 (1973).
Electoral Politics and Institutional Reactions 81 5 Horn, Academic Freedom in Canada, 46–7. 6 P.B. Waite, The Loner: Three Sketches of the Personal Life and Ideas of R.B. Bennett, 1870–1947 (Toronto 1992), 19. 7 NAC, RG 28, I 208, CAUT Papers, vol. 2, Academic Freedom and Tenure (AF&T), J.H. Aitchison to J.H.S. Reid, 3 Apr. 1962. 8 Ibid., 1 May 1962. 9 McGill University Archives, RG 2, Principal’s Office, c.85/2202, [Dorothy McMurray], comments on a draft, by F. Cyril James, of the university’s annual report [1943]. 10 A.G. Bedford, The University of Winnipeg: A History of the Founding Colleges (Toronto 1976), 129. 11 Queen’s University Archives, coll. 5072, A.R.M. Lower Papers, vol. 1, Lower to Salem Bland. 24 Aug. 1945, copy. 12 Author’s interview with Kenneth W. McNaught, Toronto, May 1987. 13 United Church/Victoria University Archives (UC/VUA), President’s Office, 89–130V, 52–18, Walter T. Brown, ‘The Staff and Politics,’ 18 Apr. 1945. 14 Author’s interview with Eric A. Havelock, New Haven, CT., Apr. 1967. 15 UC/VUA, President’s Office, 89–130V, 30–344, Brown to Havelock, 12 June 1945, copy. 16 Horn, Academic Freedom in Canada, 111–14. 17 Havelock interview. 18 NAC, MG 27, III C1, W.C. Good Papers, vol. 6, 5023–4, L.A. Wood to Good, 16 May 1923; 5039–45, Wood to Good, 24 May 1923. 19 William Sherwood Fox, Sherwood Fox of Western: Reminiscences (Toronto 1964), 128–9. 20 Horn, Academic Freedom in Canada, 76–8. 21 Author’s interview with R.E.K. Pemberton, London, Ontario, Mar. 1967. 22 Horn, Academic Freedom in Canada, 169–70. 23 Trinity College Archives (TCU), G.M.A. Grube Papers, M.S. 98, vol. 18, Illegible [Bursar] to Grube, 15 Feb. 1940. 24 Ibid., series II, vol. 2, G.M.A. Grube, ‘The Intellectual in Politics’ [1944]. 25 ‘Regulations of the Board,’ Statutes of the University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon, 1912), 53. 26 Robert Falconer, Academic Freedom (Toronto, 1922), 13. 27 Horn, Academic Freedom in Canada, 291. 28 University of British Columbia Archives (UBCA), Board of Governors (BoG), Minutes, vol. 12, 29 May 1933. 29 Ibid., 10 Aug. 1933. 30 UBCA, President’s Office (PO), mfm reel 83A, file: George M. Weir, L.S.
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31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51
52 53 54 55 56
Klinck, Memorandum on the interview with the Honourable the Premier, 7 Dec. 1933. UBCA, BoG, Minutes, vol. 12, 18 Dec. 1933. Provincial Archives of British Columbia (PABC), Add. Mss. 3, T.D. Pattullo Papers, vol. 73, file 7, J.N. Ellis to Pattullo, 3 Sept. 1935. Ibid., Pattullo to Ellis, 4 Sept. 1935, copy. PABC, GR1222, B.C., Premier, vol. 137, file 2, Pattullo to L.S. Klinck, 22 Oct. 1935, copy. UBCA, BoG, Minutes, vol. 14, 4 and 28 Oct. 1935, 20 Nov. 1935; PO, mfm reel 43, E.21 Sp., G.M. Weir to L.S. Klinck, 23 Nov. 1935. University of Alberta Archives (UAA), RG 19, W.H. Alexander Personal, 81–37–9, R.C. Wallace to W.H. Alexander, 7 Dec. 1934. Ibid., Alexander to Wallace, 31 Dec. 1934. UAA, BoG, Minutes, 4 Jan. 1935. NAC, Underhill Papers, vol. 2, Alexander to Underhill, 26 Jan. 1935. Calgary Herald, 16 Jan. 1935. Ibid., 19 Jan. 1935. Ibid., 13 Mar. 1935. Ibid., 4 Apr. 1935. UAA, BoG, Minutes, 10 Apr. 1935. Calgary Herald, 20 Apr. 1935. NAC, Underhill Papers, vol. 2, Alexander to Underhill, 18 Oct. 1935. Horn, Academic Freedom in Canada, 152–3. UAA, President’s Office (PO), 3/3/12–3, W.A.R. Kerr to J.H. Blackmore, 31 May 1941, copy. UAA, BoG, Executive Committee, Minutes, 9 Sept. 1941, with copy of Order-in-Council 1117/41. University of Alberta, Survey Committee, Interim Report, Alberta, Sessional Paper No. 50, 1942. Until 1967 the president of the University of Alberta was appointed by the provincial cabinet, a result of the wish of the first president, Henry Marshall Tory, to be independent of the board of governors. UAA, Robert Newton, ‘I Passed This Way,’ unpublished manuscript, 298–301. University of Alberta, Survey Committee, Interim Report, 31. UAA, BoG, Minutes, 12 Dec. 1942. Saskatchewan Archives Board (SAB), R33–1, T.C. Douglas Papers, vol. 224 (5–3), Raphael Tuck to Douglas, 10 Mar. 1945; emphasis in the original. Ibid., File 1, Report of the University of Saskatchewan Survey Committee, 14 Dec. 1945.
Electoral Politics and Institutional Reactions 83 57 University of Saskatchewan Archives (USA), ‘Regulations of the Board of Governors,’ [1948], 11. 58 USA, BoG, Minutes, 10 Jan. 1950. 59 Michael Hayden to the author, 15 July 1994. 60 Max Foran, Grant MacEwan’s Journals (Edmonton, 1986), 105–6. 61 University of Manitoba Archives (UMA), UA/14, vol. 46, BoG, Minutes, 1 May 1951. 62 Ibid., UA/20, President’s Papers (PP), vol. 149, File 7, W.G. Stobie to Members of the Board of Governors, 16 June 1952. 63 Ibid., PP, vol. 149, File 6, J. Hoogstraten, ‘Chairman’s Report,’ 30 Mar. 1954. 64 University of New Brunswick Archives, RG 136, President’s Correspondence, 1948–50 F-P, file 30, John B. McNair to A.W. Trueman, 24 Apr. 1950. 65 Author’s interview with Frank H. Underhill, Ottawa, Jan. 1967; NAC, Underhill Papers, vol. 3, S. Delbert Clark to Underhill, 13 Jan. 1933, and vol. 8, Norman Thomas to Underhill, 12 Jan. 1933. 66 University of Toronto Archives (UTA), BoG, Minutes, vol. 26, 26 Oct. 1950. 67 William H. Nelson, The Search for Faculty Power: The History of the University of Toronto Faculty Association 1942–1992 (Toronto, 1993), 14–31 passim; author’s conversation with William H. Nelson, Toronto, May 1994. 68 UTA, President’s Office (Bissell), A71-0011/96, ‘Arrangements for Political Candidacy,’ attached to Claude T. Bissell, Memorandum to the Teaching Staff, 7 June 1966, copy. 69 ‘The Academic in Politics,’ Globe and Mail, 7 July 1966. 70 Claude Bissell, K.G. McNeill, letters, Globe and Mail, 7 July 1966. 71 A.W.R. Carrothers, ‘Report of the President,’ CAUT Bulletin 11, no. 1 (1962), 6; ‘Academics in Politics,’ ibid., 11, no. 2 (1962), 2. 72 NAC, CAUT Papers, vol. 2, Pauline Jewett to J.H.S. Reid, 23 May 1963. 73 See J.L. Granatstein, The Ottawa Men: The Civil Service Mandarins, 1935– 1957 (Toronto, 1982); Doug Owram, The Government Generation: Canadian Intellectuals and the State, 1900–1945 (Toronto, 1986).
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3 The Professoriate and the Police during the Cold War STEVE HEWITT
Samuel Levine’s academic career at the University of Toronto ended before it really began. Arrested in September 1940 by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) under the Defence of Canada Regulations, the fellow in geophysics was sentenced to six months in prison for possessing communist literature. Even after his release from prison, freedom proved elusive – he was confined to an internment camp until October 1941. Once released from the camp, he had no job to return to, and eventually he made his way to the United States. In his study of academic freedom in Canada, Michiel Horn rightly calls this incident ‘doubly sad because it unfolded in the context of a war fought to defend human freedom,’ and he singles out the RCMP for special opprobrium.1 The story of Samuel Levine, along with the 1949 cases of University of Alberta biochemist George Hunter and University of Toronto physicist Leopold Infeld, both of whom also suffered because of their political beliefs, seems all too typical of the relationship between the professoriate and the police.2 In the existing historical literature on the subject, which largely emanates from the United States, the police appear as a clear threat to the academic freedom of the university, especially in the context of the Cold War.3 Indeed, on the surface, conflict of some degree between the professoriate and the police seems almost inevitable. On the one side is a highly educated collection of individuals, often drawn from the more privileged classes; on the other, a profession that in its modern incarnation has largely been the preserve of the working class.4 In the Canadian example, as an institution the RCMP also had little understanding of the world of academe. Into the 1960s recruits with as little as a Grade 8 education could sign on with
The Professoriate and the Police during the Cold War 85
Canada’s national police force. This lack of sophistication fuelled mutual distrust between academe and the police. Conflict, however, is but one of two general and interrelated aspects of the historical relationship between police forces and academics during the Cold War era. The first involves the more familiar guise of the professoriate being, because of its work, negatively affected and even damaged by the police, and partially in response positioning itself among the most vocal critics of police powers. Academics faced police scrutiny both because of their influence on the minds of the next generation of a nation’s economic and political elite and because they were situated at an institution which in the twentieth century has been not just an upholder of the status quo, but also its challenger, frequently from the left. ‘For Security, the most threatening thing about the quietly spoken history lecture,’ writes Fiona Capp with reference to Australia but with equal applicability to Canada, ‘was that [the] words carried the weight of the academy ... The “institutional subversive” … had the potential to wield considerable influence over a captive audience and to subvert the system from within.’5 During the Cold War in North America this form of subversion involved communism, and uncovering communism became the raison d’être for domestic security services.6 The prevailing notion of a threat additionally meant that for the state, measures had to be taken to protect students, who were widely viewed as easily impressionable, from professors preaching what was deemed to be subversion. To combat subversion within academe, state security services required details on who and what was involved. Hence the second component of the police-professoriate relationship, an aspect that is intentionally less well known, largely secret, and thus extremely difficult to uncover in any sort of systematic way. Some members of the professoriate, far from being at odds with the police, directly or indirectly assisted them, even enabling work that impinged on academic freedom. In this version the dominant (and crude) dichotomy of academics as victims and police as victimizers does not apply – academics have been among the victimizers by serving as police informants. Both aspects of the police–professoriate relationship will be examined in this chapter. This will be done through the available primary sources, which in the case of faculty serving as informants are fragmentary because of the still-sensitive nature of such relationships, and relevant comparative material. The latter is particularly useful because some countries, principally the United States, have been more forthcoming in releasing police records, and because all security services employ similar meth-
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ods of intelligence collection – only scales and extremes differ between nations. Although the RCMP was created in the nineteenth century, the modern force did not take form until the end of the First World War. The new version included both a traditional policing role and, as of the concluding years of the war, work as a security intelligence agency. The latter development paralleled similar changes in the United States and the United Kingdom and was initially directed at groups, including socialists and labour unions, opposed to the war.7 Soon, however, the appearance of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) in 1921 captured the RCMP’s complete attention and marked for that institution the real start of the Cold War and the beginning of a relationship that would last more than six decades as the RCMP spied on, infiltrated, and even sabotaged the CPC. Motivating the police mission was the belief that more than anything else communism and communists represented a subversive threat to the Canadian state, the equivalent of a fifth column burrowing away from within. This notion flourished especially after September 1945 when Igor Gouzenko, a clerk at the Soviet Union’s embassy in Ottawa, defected and brought along top secret documents that revealed the existence of a Soviet spy ring involving prominent members of the Communist Party of Canada. Three years later, in words that had relevance to the police interest in academe, the RCMP warned about the particular proselytizing threat posed by communists: ‘A convinced Communist is a man possessed. He is not amenable to argument or persuasion, or even coercion. Society must always be on guard against him, and each citizen must be prepared to combat his ideas wherever they crop up.’8 Pursuing its quarry, the RCMP’s security role grew dramatically as it sought subversion throughout Canadian society, doing so with little direction from the Canadian government and with its primary working definition being that some association with communism had to be present. The force’s domestic counter-subversion role grew in the 1960s, when a variety of new social movements, including student power and Quebec nationalism – both of which the police initially interpreted as communist-inspired or -related – challenged the Canadian state. As centres of alternative thought, universities appeared on friendly terms with those who defied the status quo of the state. That also made them places where the police searched for subversion on a regular basis.9
The Professoriate and the Police during the Cold War 87
A similar trend was under way in the United States, where the potential damage to academics and academic freedom from the police was readily apparent. From the 1920s on, many in positions of power worried about the influence of radicalized academics on young minds. The spread of communism was central to that fear. Nor was it required that the person in question even be a communist. ‘Some professors have aided the communist cause,’ warned Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director J. Edgar Hoover, ‘by tearing down respect for agencies of the American government, belittling tradition and moral custom, and by creating doubts in the validity of the American way of life.’10 Arguments about academic freedom carried little weight with Hoover, who saw the issue in simplistic moral terms: ‘Intellectual freedom is American Intellectual license and debauchery is un-American. In righteous indignation it is time to drive the debauchers of America out in the open … If their motivations are sincere, but due to ignorance, they have no right to instruct in the mental and spiritual development of American’s youth. And if they espouse foreign causes, then they should be stopped from further debauching.’11 Hoover’s attitude reflected the opinion of many Americans – both the ordinary and the powerful. The American Medical Association, for example, publicly criticized educators who encouraged a positive view of the welfare system and thus ‘hatred and scorn for the American system of private enterprise.’12 Unlike many of his compatriots, FBI Director Hoover was in position to act on his fear. In 1951, under its ‘Responsibilities Program,’ the Bureau began leaking strategic and anonymous information to university administrators about individuals suspected of being communists or having Red leanings.13 The FBI avoided entanglements and could accurately say that it had not called for anyone to be fired – that was left up to the employer. Norman Cazden, an assistant professor of music at the University of Illinois, was one victim of the program. The university’s president had received an anonymous document listing the professor’s past communist associations and therefore did not renew Cazden’s contract. Several faculty members fired in the United States because of their political beliefs ended up teaching at Canadian universities.14 McCarthyism, or what Ellen Schrecker and others argue should be more accurately called ‘Hooverism,’ had parallels, albeit on a smaller scale, on the Canadian academic scene.15 Not only did the RCMP monitor the political leanings of faculty members, but many, both inside and outside of the force, also fretted about the presence of revolutionaries
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on campus. In 1949 Watson Kirkconnell, president of Acadia University and a fervent anti-communist, received national attention after he warned in the pages of Saturday Night about radical left activities at Canadian universities.16 ‘A Communist teacher is a Communist robot,’ he later told a gathering at McMaster University. ‘Any Communist professor should be dismissed and debarred from any faculty because he is responsible for undermining campus morale and committing espionage in order to destroy his own country.’17 With growing tension between the West and the Soviet Union, some newspapers and politicians echoed Kirkconnell’s rage. Also in 1949, the Ottawa Journal criticized Carleton College after it gave permission to Tim Buck, leader of the Labour Progressive Party (the Communist Party of Canada’s official name between 1943 and 1959), to speak to students. ‘College professors are apt to look at a question like this as theoretical rather than practical. They see the world through the eyes of the scholar, are aloof and detached,’ wrote the author of the editorial. ‘Such men are unduly impressed by the suggestion that there should be no bounds on free speech, that in effect in the name of free speech we must permit our boys and girls to hear treason lauded.’18 In that same year the University of Alberta fired George Hunter on the grounds that he had preached communism to his students, and the University of Toronto’s Leopold Infeld decided to remain permanently in his native Poland after Progressive Conservative Party leader George Drew, among others, accused him of being a Soviet spy.19 The Professoriate and Police as Antagonists The Cold War rhetoric and events on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel worried those sworn to uphold academic freedom in Canada. They responded with a combination of counterattacks and pre-emptive strikes against any effort, especially on the part of Canada’s security agency, the RCMP, to curtail university-related freedoms. In 1957 Arthur Lower, a well-known historian at Queen’s University and a target of the RCMP since at least 1940, warned in Maclean’s about the danger posed to civil liberties by the Mounted Police. He continued to be a strong and vocal critic of police security investigations on university campuses into the following decade.20 While Lower’s individual voice received considerable attention because of his prominence, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) played the leading role in attempting to restrict – or at least
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bring in some concrete rules to govern – police security investigations at Canadian universities during the Cold War. Under the existing system, the RCMP literally policed its own operations, the extent of which only it knew.21 This unregulated atmosphere and the fact that RCMP members had little understanding of the world of academe concerned the CAUT. The out-of-control McCarthyism of the United States of the 1950s had demonstrated the danger to those who held and expressed unpopular opinions. The CAUT, Canada’s main university faculty organization, and others argued that the mere presence, or even simply the fear of the presence, of undercover police members on campus could inhibit academic freedom. Several incidents in the early 1960s involving members of the RCMP approaching university students for information on subversive activities heightened concern and led to the matter being raised in various newspapers and by opposition political parties in the federal parliament. Demonstrating a backlash against McCarthyism and the new spirit of the 1960s, much of the media coverage reflected the argument of one editorial: ‘If Communism is evil, intellectually free students will discover the fact. They don’t need RCMP officers, who might be better employed elsewhere, to do their thinking for them.’22 One area of particular concern was open appearances by Mounties on university campuses across Canada from the late 1940s on, to conduct security screenings. These involved interviewing faculty members about colleagues and past and present students seeking government employment for which a background check was needed. The CAUT worried that the police were using these visits as ‘fishing expeditions’ in an effort to collect more information than was strictly necessary about students and others or to recruit informants. A 1962 resolution condemned such practices: The intrusion of security police upon the campus is not merely an inconvenience. It is incompatible with the objects and nature of a university. No one can be both a spy upon and a teacher to his students. Few students, in an era of expanding openings and international tension, can be sure of never in their lives needing security clearance. Will they, in defiance of common prudence, raise questions and experiment with ideas freely in the presence of a faculty whose members are potential police witnesses? To do so would require sublime confidence in security officers’ ability infallibly to distinguish between radical utterances and seditious belief. Even if such confidence should be justified, there remains the danger that
90 Steve Hewitt the intellectual toys of one decade may prove the dangerous opinions of the next. The investigation of political views on the campus, for whatever object, inevitably tends to inhibit the processes of teaching and learning which are the university’s function. Such investigations are therefore objectionable in principle, and if tolerated in practice, are liable to cause serious harm.23
The CAUT actively encouraged faculty members not to respond to RCMP questions that strayed into the religious and political beliefs of individuals. It also repeatedly approached the government of John Diefenbaker for a meeting and was just as frequently rebuffed. In the general election of April 1963 Lester Pearson and the Liberals defeated the Conservatives. Perhaps because of his personal experience with the besmirching and ultimate suicide of his friend Herbert Norman, the Canadian ambassador to Egypt who was destroyed by American accusations that he was a secret communist, Pearson presented a friendlier response to the CAUT.24 Thanks to the new prime minister’s efforts, a meeting took place in November 1963 involving the RCMP, the CAUT, the government, and representatives of the National Federation of Canadian University Students. The CAUT took the opportunity to pose several questions to RCMP Commissioner George McClellan about the extent of his force’s activities on university campuses. He provided non-specific answers to the detailed queries. Not surprisingly, the informal agreement resulting from the meeting had different meanings to the different parties. The CAUT believed that the first step in bringing order to police operations on the nation’s campuses had been achieved.25 Much to the chagrin of the Mounties, who spied on it and labelled its methods as ‘devious,’ the CAUT maintained a watchdog role against police interference with academic freedom after the 1963 accord. The CAUT also continued to push for change in the procedures governing RCMP security screenings on campus. It sought, for example, a written record of such interviews, something the RCMP opposed officially out of a belief that it would inhibit those being interviewed from supplying information – and unofficially because it would hamper ‘fishing expeditions.’26 Four years after the meeting with the RCMP commissioner, the CAUT continued its campaign through a submission to the Royal Commission on Security. Despite not having received a complaint about police activity since 1963, the CAUT, recognizing that a lack of awareness of being spied on did not mean that the spying was not occurring, pushed for
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tighter restrictions on police intelligence-gathering on university campuses. In the end, the opinions of the RCMP carried greater weight with the commission; it recommended relaxing restrictions governing security investigations. This relaxation occurred in the immediate aftermath of the October 1970 kidnapping of James Cross, the British trade commissioner in Montreal, and the murder of Quebec Minister of Labour Pierre Laporte by members of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ). The October Crisis, as it became known, prompted the Canadian government to free the Mounted Police from any restrictions governing its campus work.27 Nine months after secretly providing the RCMP with a free hand on Canadian campuses, Pierre Trudeau’s cabinet, fearing the impact of the policy shift on academic freedom and ensuing negative publicity, restored the restrictions on the police. In part, restoration was irrelevant because nationwide discontent at universities had noticeably subsided by the early 1970s, giving the RCMP less of a rationale to go to campuses. The CAUT campaign continued to make police intrusions on campus potentially costly from the standpoint of public relations.28 For most of the remainder of the decade, little was heard about the tensions between the professoriate and the police. This changed in 1977, when the federal government, in response to growing allegations of police wrongdoings and public concern about such activity, established the Royal Commission Concerning Certain Activities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, better known as the McDonald Commission. Soon accounts of police ‘dirty tricks,’ some involving universities, were making regular appearances in the media and the Canadian parliament. The CAUT wrote to university presidents across Canada asking for details on any such incidents and complained to the federal government. Its executive secretary warned in testimony to the McDonald Commission of the broad interpretation by the state of the nebulous concept of subversion. The CAUT’s position argued for a much narrower concept that required clear evidence of criminal activity.29 The federal government accepted the McDonald Commission’s recommendation that the RCMP surrender most of its intelligence activities. In 1984, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), a civilian intelligence agency without the power of arrest, was born. Having learned from the experiences of its RCMP predecessor, CSIS consulted the CAUT about university issues. In 1995, for example, the director of CSIS met with academic representatives. The two bodies remain at odds into the twenty-first century, however; the academic organization
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seeks greater restrictions on investigations against university-related targets while the spy agency argues for exactly the opposite.30 The Professoriate as Police Assistants While tension and mutual antagonism appeared to dominate the relationship between the RCMP and professoriate, there was a second, and little recognized, aspect to this interaction: indirect and direct assistance offered by faculty members to the RCMP. The indirect assistance involved the use of scholarship by the police in an effort to understand the social change under way in the Canada of the 1960s. In a police report examining youth protest, for example, a Mounted Policeman consulted University of Toronto sociologist Kenneth Walker’s work on student radicalism and similar American studies to better understand it.31 As well, in general, the RCMP improved its analytical skills as an institution in the 1960s and 1970s, as more and more of its members entered the world of higher education as students. Drawing on scholarship and the benefits of a university education represented only one form of assistance. The more significant involved outright cooperation between some faculty members and the RCMP. While other police methods for collecting information, like the use of technology, are more commonly known and feared, in reality a great deal of police information actually came from ‘human sources,’ the neutral police label for informants.32 In the case of universities, this involved members of the professoriate supplying information. Instructors were particularly important because the RCMP deemed students as frequently unreliable and lacking information as a result of their transient presence on campus. Academics, on the other hand, had a career and reputation to ensure silence about their relationship with the police, and many had familiarity with their campuses after years of service. Relying on individual faculty members was not without its drawbacks. In 1970 the RCMP lamented the weakness of its coverage of campus unrest, caused in part, it asserted, by retirements and transfers of faculty. It launched a recruitment program to replace the faculty informants who had been lost.33 How many academics were involved in some way with the RCMP is impossible to say. In 1972 there were only five paid informants at Canadian universities, but this is an unrepresentative figure, since the majority were unpaid. Details remain sparse because the most guarded secrets of any intelligence or police service are the names of its infor-
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mants. In Canada these names will in theory remain a secret forever, both to protect the privacy of those who aided the police and their descendants and because the police and intelligence agencies would find it difficult to recruit informants in the future if names of earlier informants were publicly divulged.34 As a police and intelligence service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police could not have functioned without a large number of secret helpers. The RCMP stored their names in what it called its ‘Human Resources Index,’ a collection of files containing complete biographical records on its civilian spies – eventually the information was distilled to more useful index cards – that in the 1960s was 230 inches (19 feet) long. Certainly the Mounties spied on more academics than those from whom they had received information, especially since a single informant had the capacity to provide details on several colleagues. Some idea of the number of those spied on is available. In 1959, for example, the RCMP held files on ninety university professors across Canada. Ten years later, files existed on 357 non-students in the higher education sector in Ontario alone.35 Evidence of academics serving as police informants exists in relevant scholarship from outside Canada and is useful in understanding how the two worlds can interact. Not surprisingly, the most extensive manifestation of cooperation between the police and professoriate comes from a communist country that no longer exists – the German Democratic Republic. Its domestic security body, the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, more commonly known as the Stasi, actively sought informants in the university, as it did throughout East German society. The informants were employed to spy on colleagues or gather intelligence while travelling abroad. At Humboldt University in East Berlin, the Stasi secretly employed close to 25 per cent of the academic staff.36 Limited examples from the United States also are available. In Compromised Campus, Sigmund Diamond, himself a victim of McCarthyism, examined the close relationship between the FBI and Yale and Harvard. Through records obtained under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, Diamond documented the aid provided by administrators and faculty members, including Henry Kissinger and William Yandell Elliott, in the state’s effort to cleanse American campuses of left-wing radicalism. The FBI believed academics had a duty to help by infringing on academic freedom in order to save it: ‘Informants are a useful and valuable part of any internal security or national defence program and liberals and intellectuals need to face reality and recognize this … It is in the interest
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of all intellectuals and liberals that they cooperate fully with the FBI if they are to continue to enjoy the freedoms which make their academic interest possible.’37 Faculty Informants in Canada Although the extent of the use of faculty informants in Canada was undoubtedly lower than in the United States or the German Democratic Republic, parallels remain, including the case of Samuel Levine. How did he become a Mounted Police suspect? ‘You will note also in para. 6 of the report that Sam levine admitted being a paid agitator of the C.P. according to Prof. Louden.’ This passage from an RCMP report six months before Levine was arrested, which accidentally slipped by an Access to Information censor, suggests that it was a faculty member who assisted the police in their investigations.38 Levine’s file is rare in that the specific name of a faculty informant appears. Such information is not normally released under Canada’s Access to Information Act and in this example was done by mistake. Indeed, in many of the reports, the police used a code number instead of the informant’s name; even that scant amount of information is still removed before information is released. Despite the state’s excision of information from police files, documentary evidence of the assistance rendered to the police by faculty members remains. Leopold Infeld was a world-renowned theoretical physicist at the University of Toronto. He had come to the attention of the RCMP in 1942 when he participated in a rally calling for an end to the wartime ban on the Communist Party of Canada. ‘Different informers from among University of Toronto circles’ supplied members of the Mounted Police information about the physicist over the next ten years until Infeld returned in 1950 to his native Poland, where after being accused of spying for the Reds, he opted to remain.39 The use of faculty members as informants remained evident a decade later when, prompted by political and media pressure, the RCMP conducted an internal investigation to ascertain the extent of its use of student informants across Canada. Despite repeatedly stating that they did not use students, the police still had informants at universities. ‘The practice has been to solicit the co-operation of established sources on the Administrative or Professor level,’ reported a Mountie whose beat included the University of Western Ontario and Toronto-area institutions.40
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The RCMP sought informants among the professoriate because professors had access to inside information, which allowed the police to avoid the risk of having to journey onto campus themselves. Alternative intelligence gathering, such as telephone intercepts or hidden microphones, required extensive resources and, in the case of the latter, considerable potential for embarrassment through discovery. Targeted organizations and individuals, moreover, could avoid surveillance simply by reducing, for example, the use of the telephone.41 Informants were crucial. How did the RCMP manage to recruit faculty members as informants and why would these individuals offer their assistance, knowing that this action could involve the betrayal of colleagues and friends? Duress or coercion possibly played a role. Faculty members who were recent immigrants, for example, may have felt particularly vulnerable when the police came calling. Compulsion, however, is more applicable where some advantage might be held over the informant because of his or her criminal record or in a police state like East Germany, where a variety of pressures could be brought to bear to ensure compliance. 42 In intelligence work in a relatively open society, however, the police had little in the way of coercion to apply to a potential informant. In fact, and this was particularly applicable to universities, where faculty members carried greater social status than police officers, the opposite was true. Potential recruits could cause considerable damage to the Mounted Police by relaying the police’s tactics to the media or opposition political parties. Since more complex motivations for assisting the RCMP were involved, recruitment had to be handled rather deftly. ‘Human sources,’ as the RCMP frequently called them, either offered their services freely or were recruited involuntarily. Typical of the former was a Carleton University political science professor, who while at a party divulged details about Vietnamese students at his institution.43 Variations on the two types of source recruitment were not uncommon. In the late 1960s, a senior Mountie described a program to enlist faculty members as informants. It involved developing relationships with those who had given references for background checks and appeared reasonably sympathetic towards the police: ‘When the foregoing plan had been pursued over an extended period of time, some rather pleasant developments took place. The most significant of these was in the number of professors, etc., who eventually offered their full cooperation on all matters of interest to us. Many, without prompting on our part, volunteered, or at least chose to discuss, the activities and
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political views of a number of their colleagues.’44 As this example suggests, recruiting an informant involved considerable effort on the part of the RCMP. A relationship of trust and even friendship had to be developed over a considerable period of time before an appeal for assistance was made. The new informant had to be sure that the police handler would protect his or her identity, while the latter needed to ensure that the entire process was not a set-up for embarrassment. As the associations between the two parties increased, the police representative attempted to ascertain the most appropriate grounds for requesting a faculty member’s assistance. Even once the informant agreed to provide aid, he or she would be kept on what amounted to a trial basis while the quality and accuracy of the information offered the police was assessed. A secret friend of the RCMP was of little use if he or she lacked access to useful details.45 There were numerous reasons why a faculty member might offer or be convinced to secretly aid the police. During the height of the anticommunist hysteria of the Cold War, an obvious motivation was ideology. When individuals like Watson Kirkconnell could find a ready audience for warnings of the Red threat to higher education, it is hardly surprising that some professors saw it as their public duty to supply details to the RCMP about suspected campus communists. Recruitment could involve straightforward ego manipulation, however, as the police officer involved made the source feel important and that his or her service was indispensable. As well, appeals to patriotism cannot be underestimated. In many regions of Canada, the RCMP enjoyed widespread popularity and respect, making appeals for assistance from concerned citizens readily acceptable. In other cases, the RCMP may have relied on the tensions generated by the often competitive academic world to exploit professional feelings – envy, discordance, or ethnic, national, or racial prejudice – as a recruiting tool. The excitement of having power over the lives of others or participating in a secret relationship with the police might have appealed to some. Finally, there was simply money. Informants were frequently paid for the information they offered.46 Various motivations frequently overlapped. In 1961 at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, for instance, a source on campus supplied the RCMP with a list of five faculty members that he or she considered to be ‘Communistically inclined.’ The evidence for this judgment was that the five were outspoken, critical of the university’s administration, and involved in personality clashes with colleagues.47
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Events of the 1960s, specifically the rise of student power and Quebec nationalism, generated different types of motivation. In the case of the former, student occupations and sit-ins at the University of British of Columbia and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and Sir George Williams University in Montreal captured national attention. Some university personnel viewed the RCMP as less of a threat to academic freedom than the people associated with the demonstrations and the repeated challenges to university authority. By 1969 administrators and faculty members at some universities, including McGill, began approaching the police for assistance in handling campus discontent.48 Whatever the reason they joined, faculty recruits aided the police hunt for so-called subversion in a variety of ways. At Simon Fraser University, a major centre of campus unrest, sources supplied their handlers with inside information on the activities of the executive of the university’s faculty association and about broader campus problems.49 One sympathetic University of Saskatchewan academic sent the police copies of internal CAUT documents related to the organization’s stance on campus investigations. Another source supplied the RCMP with a detailed account of a Laurentian University Faculty Association meeting, including the names of individuals who voted for motions calling for tighter restrictions on the police. As late as 1977 the RCMP was still receiving copies of the CAUT’s correspondence from a human source, in this case one in the Kitchener-Waterloo area.50 As the CAUT examples suggest, informants were particularly effective at relaying information and documents from behind closed doors, in some cases repeating snippets of private conversation that would have otherwise been unavailable to the police: ‘[University of Calgary professor Robert] ware also enlightened ... the source by relating he had been contacted by telephone by a chap from the Canadian Liberation Movement ... who, according to ware, is very active and sounded like he has very sensible politics.’51 In other cases, informants relayed more elaborate details from a meeting, such as one held by the University of British Columbia’s Asian Studies Department. The contents of private documents were leaked, such as University of Saskatchewan faculty association correspondence or an invitation from the head of the University of Windsor’s department of sociology and anthropology to attend a conference. Even gossip that the wife of a member of the University of Alberta zoology department was a secret communist was deemed worthy of repeating to the RCMP.52 In all cases what was supplied, materials or words, ended up in a police file.
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Finally, academic sources served as RCMP watchdogs on campus life in general. At the first sign of trouble they could send a warning to the authorities. At the Université de Moncton, a site of protest by Acadians at the end of the 1960s, a source telephoned and wrote to the RCMP on university letterhead to inform them of the appearance on campus of an alleged radical. The local RCMP later felt confident enough to assure headquarters that ‘sources will keep us informed should anything irregular be forthcoming on the Campus.’53 Conclusion By the 1970s and 1980s, with the lessening of Cold War tensions and the campus demonstrations that had arisen in the 1960s, the dual relationship between the RCMP and the professoriate discussed in this chapter had been rendered less important. The RCMP intelligence branch, fighting an ultimately unsuccessful battle for its survival, by then had far less interest in the activities of academics. It turned increasingly to overt sources and not covert ones when it sought information about universities. In turn, this reduced the need for informants among faculty members. For those who had assisted in the past, life continued as normal.54 What the informants undertook on behalf of the RCMP was for them merely a part-time occupation and one without recriminations unless they were troubled by their consciences. Instead, their hidden life had an impact on the public victims of academic witch-hunting like Samuel Levine and Leopold Infeld and through the monitoring of the lives of countless more. The tension between the role of members of the professoriate as intellectual critics of society and its institutions, including the police, with the reality that professors themselves are members of that society has survived the end of the Cold War.55 It remains equally relevant in the context of the post–September 11 ‘War on Terror.’ In the earlier time many in the professoriate perceived their societal role as requiring them to resist the powers of the state, especially when these potentially had an impact on academic freedom. Simultaneously, an unknown number of colleagues saw this same dynamic as representing a duty to assist the state, even if it meant betraying personal relationships and damaging academic freedom in the process. Perhaps some who followed the second course took comfort in the fact that their involvement did not cause or contribute to state repression of the type witnessed in East Germany or even the United States. Whatever the case, faculty infor-
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mants made RCMP investigations of higher education in general and the professoriate in particular much easier. notes 1 Michiel Horn, Academic Freedom in Canada: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 148–9. For more on the case of Levine, see H.S. Ferns, Reading from Left to Right: One Man’s Political History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 119, 181. 2 Horn, Academic Freedom in Canada, 150–1, 203–11. 3 Lionel S. Lewis, Cold War on Campus: A Study of the Politics of Organizational Control (London: Transaction, 1997 [1988]); Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (New York: Little, Brown, 1998); Sigmund Diamond, Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945–1955 (London: Oxford University Press, 1992); Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, eds., The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars against Dissent in the United States (Boston: South End Press, 1990); Nelson Blackstock, COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom (New York: Vintage Books, 1976). 4 Greg Marquis, ‘Working Men in Uniform: The Early Twentieth-Century Toronto Police,’ Histoire sociale/Social History 20, no. 40 (1987): 259–77; Clive Emsley, The English Police: A Political and Social History (New York: St Martin’s, 1991). 5 Fiona Capp, Writers Defiled (South Yarra, Australia: McPhee Gribble, 1993), 90. 6 For more on this, see Reg Whitaker and Steve Hewitt, Canada and the Cold War (Toronto: Lorimer, 2003). 7 Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System (New York: Knopf, 1980); Christopher Andrew, Her Majesty’s Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (New York: Viking, 1986). 8 RCMP, Law and Order in Canadian Democracy: A Series of 20 Lectures Prepared by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on Crime and Police Work in Canada (Ottawa: E. Cloutier, 1949), 137. 9 Steve Hewitt, ‘Intelligence at the Learneds: The RCMP, the Learneds, and the Canadian Historical Association,’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 8 (1998): 267–86. 10 Hoover, as quoted in Lewis, Cold War on Campus, 21.
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11 Hoover, as quoted in Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988),168. 12 Robert E. Summers, Freedom and Loyalty in Our Colleges (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1954), 33. 13 Schrecker, No Ivory Tower, 258; Diamond, Compromised Campus, 243–74. 14 Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 211–12; Schrecker, No Ivory Tower, 291–3. 15 Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 203–39; David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard Books, 1993), 335–42. The best study of the impact of the Cold War on Canada is Reg Whitaker and Gary Marcuse, Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). 16 Watson Kirkconnell, ‘Communists on the Canadian Campus Are Now Briefed for Their Missions,’ Saturday Night, 18 Jan. 1949, 6–8. 17 ‘“Feeble Red Cell” Seen at McMaster,’ Toronto Telegram, 19 May 1953. 18 ‘More on Carleton and Tim Buck,’ Ottawa Journal, 21 March 1949. 19 Horn, Academic Freedom in Canada, 150–1, 203–11; Steve Hewitt, Spying 101: The RCMP’s Secret Activities at Canadian Universities, 1917–1997 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 79–82. 20 Arthur Lower, ‘Is the RCMP a Threat to Our Liberty?’ Maclean’s, 6 July 1957; ‘RCMP Campus Activities Criticized by Professors: Commissioner Says Force Questioned Students,’ Kingston Whig-Standard, 21 March 1963. 21 Steve Hewitt, ‘“Information Believed True”: RCMP Security Intelligence Investigations on Canadian University Campuses and the Controversy Surrounding Them, 1961–1971,’ Canadian Historical Review 81, no. 2 (2000): 191–228. See also Donald C. Savage, ‘Academe and Subversion: McDonald Commission and the Universities,’ CAUT Bulletin 28, no. 6 (1981): 9–11. 22 Hewitt, ‘Information Believed True’; and ‘Much Ado About Nil,’ Northern Daily News, 27 March 1963. 23 National Archives of Canada (NAC), RG 146, vol. 2770, file 95-A-00094, pt. 1, CAUT Resolution, 10 Oct. 1962; ‘Resolution on CAUT Policy Regarding RCMP Activity on Universities Campuses,’ CAUT Bulletin 12, no. 1 (1963): 19. 24 John English, The Worldly Years: The Life of Lester Pearson, 1949–1972 (Toronto: Vintage Books, 1992), 164–183; Whitaker and Marcuse, Cold War Canada, 402–25. 25 McDonald Commission, Second Report, vol. 1, Freedom and Security under the Law (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1981), 484–6; ‘RCMP Activities on University Campuses,’ CAUT Bulletin 13, no. 1 (1964): 54–60.
The Professoriate and the Police during the Cold War 101 26 NAC, RG 146, vol. 2782, file 96-A-00045, pt. 8, Victoria Security Service to Officer-in-Charge ‘E’ Div. Security Service, Vancouver, 6 October 1971; NAC, RG 146, vol. 5008, file 97-A-00076, pt. 6, RCMP Inquiries on University Campuses, 23 June 1970. The RCMP’s files related to CAUT are in NAC, RG 146, vol. 59, file 96-A-00169. 27 NAC, RG 146, vol. 5008, file 97-A-00076, pt. 6, RCMP Inquiries on University Campuses, 23 June 1970; Gerard McNeil, ‘RCMP on Campus Again?’ Montreal Gazette, 1 May 1971; Hewitt, ‘Information Believed True.’ 28 Donald C. Savage, ‘Keeping Professors Out: The Immigration Department and the Idea of Academic Freedom, 1945–90,’ unpublished paper, 1990; Reg Whitaker, Double Standard: The Secret History of Canadian Immigration (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1987), 247–54; I. Cinman, ‘National Security Considerations Bar Academic from Canada,’ CAUT Bulletin 25, no. 2 (1977): 3. 29 ‘No Bugging Here, K-W Universities Say,’ Kitchener-Waterloo Record, 18 Jan. 1978; I. Cinman, ‘No Room for RCMP Spying on Campus, Say Universities,’ CAUT Bulletin 25, no. 7 (1978): 1; Cinman, ‘Universities No Place for Cloak and Dagger Activities, says CAUT,’ CAUT Bulletin 25, no. 8 (1978): 1; NAC, RG 146, vol. 59, file 96-A-00169, pt. 2, Canadian Association of University Teachers, 19 Dec. 1977; NAC, RG 146, vol. 96-A00169, pt. 1, Transit Slip, C/Supt. Vaughn to Supt. Taylor, S/S Pollock, 21 Feb. 1978; Testimony of Donald C. Savage, McDonald Commission, vol. 94, 15240–5; Ralph Wilson, ‘RCMP Mum on Report It Requested Names of U of O Clubs’ Members,’ Ottawa Citizen, 5 Oct. 1977; ‘Professors Question RCMP Role on Campus,’ Ottawa Citizen, 19 May 1978. For more on the state and its definitions of subversion, see Elizabeth Grace and Colin Leys, ‘The Concept of Subversion and Its Implications,’ in Dissent and the State, C.E.S. Franks, ed. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989), 62–85. 30 Solicitor General of Canada, Access Request 1336-SEC-98067, CSIS Security Investigations on University Campuses, 12 Aug. 1985; Solicitor General of Canada, Access Request 1336-SEC-99002, Paul Dubrule, Director General, National Security Directorate, to Horst Intscher, Assistant Deputy Solicitor General, 23 Nov. 1995; Security Intelligence Review Committee, ‘CSIS Investigations on University Campuses (SIRC Study 1998–14),’ Access Request, file no. 2800-82; Jim Bronskill, ‘Changes to Spy Agency Operations on Campuses Draws Ire from Teachers,’ National Post, 13 Sept. 1999. 31 NAC, RG 146, vol. 25, file 93-A-00019, pt. 6, Report of Cst. T.L. Beckett, Oct. 1968. 32 For a discussion of the politics of labels applied to informants, see Donner, Age of Surveillance, 464.
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33 CSIS, Report of Cst. H.W. Kirkpatrick, 2 March 1939; Interview with A, a former RCMP Security Service member, 18 April 1998; Interview with B, a former RCMP Security Service member, 20 May 1998; Interview with E, a former RCMP Security Service member, 12 July 1999. Pseudonyms are used for former RCMP personnel who wish to remain anonymous. NAC, RG 146, vol. 2768, file 96–A–00045, pt. 7, Director of Security for Chief of the Defence Staff to M.D. Sexsmith, Deputy Director General (Ops) Security Service, 20 Jan. 1976; NAC, RG 146, vol. 5008, file 97-A-00076, pt. 7, Academe and Subversion, June 1970; NAC, Records of the McDonald Commission, RG 33, box 105, file 6000-5-60.6, access request 98-A-00034, [name deleted] to Officer i/c Sources, 24 Oct. 1968. The McDonald Commission included a description of the different types of police sources in its final report. McDonald Commission, Second Report: Freedom and Security Under the Law, vol. 1 (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services, 1981), 296–7. 34 The examples of Canadian informants contained in this chapter were almost exclusively released inadvertently under the Access to Information Act. 35 McDonald Commission, Second Report, vol. 1, 489; Anonymous to author, 16 Feb. 1999. NAC, RG 146, vol. 2793, file 98-A-00129, Memorandum for Mr McClung, 9 March 1959. Confidential source. As a modern point of comparison, it was revealed in 1998 that British police forces employed as many as 50,000 informants. Duncan Campbell, ‘Police Fear for Informers,’ Guardian Weekly, 18 Oct. 1998, 9. 36 David Childs and Richard Popplewell, The Stasi: The East German Intelligence and Security Service (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 87–8, 92; Adam Lusher, Matt Born, Sebastien Berger, and Paul Stokes, ‘Hull Lecturer Is Unmasked as Stasi agent,’ Daily Telegraph, 18 Sept. 1999; Polly Newton, ‘Agent Lecturer Travelled on Stasi False Passport,’ Daily Telegraph, 20 Sept. 1999. 37 William C. Sullivan, senior FBI Agent, as quoted in Diamond, Compromised Campus, 149. Both Lionel Lewis and Frank Donner document the cooperation afforded the FBI by university administrators and some academics. Lewis, Cold War on Campus, 251–5; Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System (New York: Knopf, 1980), 155–8. 38 NAC, RG 146, vol. 65, file 97-A-00044, pt. 1, Kemp to the Commissioner, 16 March 1940. No one by the last name of Louden was on the faculty at the University of Toronto at this time. There was, however, a Loudon. He was
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39 40 41 42
43
44 45
46
47
Prof. Thomas ‘Tommy’ R. Loudon, head of the department of applied mechanics in the faculty of applied science and engineering. Loudon, a war veteran, was heavily involved with the Canadian Officer Training Corps and in March 1940 became the new head of the school of aeronautical engineering of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. Approximately at the same time, reports from a senior police informant at the University of Toronto ended. Toronto Telegram, 18 March 1940. NAC, RG 146, vol. 4267, file 98-A-00046, pt. 5, Joint Intelligence Bureau, Appendix B to Special Report, 18 Jan. 1956. NAC, RG 146, access request 98-A-00133, Supt. N.O. Jones to the Commissioner, 27 Dec. 1962; ibid., Report from Sudbury, 27 Dec. 1962. NAC, RG 146, vol. 5008, file 97-A-00076, pt. 7, Academe and Subversion, June and Dec. 1970. Barbara Miller, Narratives of Guilt and Compliance in Unified Germany: Stasi Informers and their Impact on Society (London: Routledge, 1999), 47–51. Even in this case although coercion might initially be used the Stasi handler would seek to develop a more cooperative relationship because the information supplied by a willing informant was significantly better than that supplied when under duress. NAC, RG 146, vol. 2768, file 96-A-00045, pt. 7, Director of Security for Chief of the Defence Staff to M.D. Sexsmith, Deputy Director General (Ops) Security Service, 20 Jan. 1976. Memo of Asst. Commissioner Leonard Higgitt, 29 Nov. 1967, as quoted in McDonald Commission, Second Report, vol. 1, 343–6. For a description of a failed attempt to recruit an informant within the Canadian peace movement, see James T. Stark, Cold War Blues: The Operation Dismantle Story (Hull, QC: Voyageur Publishing, 1991), 320–362. The four main incentives used to recruit spies have received the acronym MICE (Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego). Stanislav Levchenko, On the Wrong Side: My Life in the KGB (Washington, 1988), 106. For a variation on the MICE concept, see Stan A. Taylor and Daniel Snow, ‘Cold War Spies: Why They Spied and How They Got Caught,’ Intelligence and National Security 12, no. 2 (1997): 101–25; Malin Åkerström, Betrayal and Betrayals: The Sociology of Treachery (New York, 1991), 122, 21–2; author’s interview with A; Recollections of C, a former RCMP Security Service member, 20 Feb. 1999; Peter Marwitz, a former RCMP Security Service member, to author, 12 June 1998. NAC, RG 146, vol. 59, file 96-A-00169, pt. 1, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, Communist Activities Within, 6 Nov. 1961.
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48 ‘Academic Freedom Threatened on Campus,’ UBC Reports, 3 Oct. 1967; ‘University Backlash Feared,’ Winnipeg Free Press, 5 Nov. 1970; NAC, RG 146, vol. 2790, file 98-A-00133, DSI to Officer i/c SIB ‘O’ Div, 2 July 1969. 49 NAC, RG 146, vol. 2785, file 96-A-00045, pt. 4, Report of [name deleted], 24 Oct. 1967; NAC, RG 146, vol. 2785, file 96-A-00045, pt. 7, Simon Fraser University, 6 June 1968. 50 NAC, RG 146, vol. 59, file 96-A-00169, pt. 1, Report of [name deleted] – ‘F’ Division, Saskatoon, 30 Nov. 1962; NAC, RG 146, vol. 59, file 96-A-00169, pt. 1, Report of [name deleted], Re: Criticism and Actions by Subversive Organizations against RCMP Canada, 28 Nov. 1962; NAC, RG 146, vol. 59, file 96-A-00169, pt. 2, Report of Sgt. G.W. Taylor, i/c Kitchener District, 14 Dec. 1977. 51 NAC, RG 146, vol. 2777, file 96-A-00045, pt. 5, University of Calgary, 16 May 1972. 52 NAC, RG 146, vol. 2783, file 96-A-00045, pt. 20, UBC, 28 Oct. 1969; NAC, RG 146, vol. 59, file 96-A-00169, pt. 1, Report of [name deleted], 22 Nov. 1962; NAC, RG 146, vol. 2758, file 96-A-00045, pt. 1, University of Windsor, 3 June 1966; NAC, RG 146, vol. 79, file 98-A-00004, pt. 1, George Hunter, Re; Subversive Activity within the University of Alberta, Edmonton, 2 June 1949. 53 NAC, RG 146, vol. 31, file 93-A-00089, pt. 1, [name deleted] to Officer Commanding RCMP Moncton, NB, 3 March 1969; NAC, RG 146, vol. 31, file 93-A-00089, pt. 2, Report of Cpl. R.J.D. Jeaurond, 8 Feb. 1971. 54 Some police informants with university connections have written memoirs. Carole de Vault was a student at the Université du Quebec à Montréal who aided the Montreal police during the October Crisis. In the United States, two student informants have written memoirs. Carole de Vault and William Johnson, The Informer: Confessions of an Ex-Terrorist (Toronto: Fleet Books, 1982); William Tulio Divale and James Joseph, I Lived Inside the Campus Revolution (New York: Cowles Book Company, 1970); Larry Grathwohl, Bringing Down America: An FBI Informer with the Weathermen (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1976). 55 Jason Vest, ‘Postcard from Bloomington,’ Nation, 4 March 2003; David N. Gibbs, ‘Spying, Secrecy and the University: The CIA Is Back on Campus,’ Counterpunch, 7 April 2003.
Section 3 Institutional Development, Society, and the Professoriate
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4 ‘The Trail of the Serpent’: The Appointment of a ‘Professor of Didactics’ at Acadia College, 1883 BARRY MOODY Many traces of Eden we [the Baptists] still maintain, but the trail of the serpent is over it all. – disgruntled Baptist, 18831
During its first forty-five years the selection and hiring of professors at Acadia College had usually been accomplished with little fanfare and less controversy. Never had the establishment of a new department or chair raised serious opposition, or even comment, in the Baptist denomination of the Maritimes, which had founded the college in 1838. Nothing in the institution’s past, therefore, had prepared the governors for the outpouring of anger that met their establishment of the Chair of Didactics or Education2 and the appointment of the well-known educationist Dr Theodore Harding Rand during the summer of 1883. The controversy that raged in the public and denominational press for nearly six months threatened at times to sever Acadia from some of its most prominent supporters and further divide, perhaps irrevocably, the often fractious denomination. Although the problems were eventually resolved, if not to everyone’s satisfaction, the numerous letters, articles, and pamphlets generated by the struggle provide a wonderful insight into the conflicting views of university governance, professorial standards, the role of ‘professional’ subjects at a liberal arts college, professorial salaries, and denominational control. In the process of debating the issues surrounding this controversial appointment, Maritime Baptists articulated differing concepts and understandings of a college and how it ought to function. In many respects, the quarrel over the Chair of Didactics foreshadowed
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many of the issues that would continue to be debated and discussed for the next hundred years – and more – at many universities across Canada and beyond. A close look at the college in crisis sheds considerable light on traditional and changing concepts of the nineteenth-century professoriate, at least as the Baptists of the Maritime provinces viewed them. The conflict which so disrupted the supporters of Acadia College in 1883 seemed, in many respects, to have arisen from thin air. Certainly there was no hint of trouble brewing in the months leading up to the crucial meetings of committees and of the Board of Governors that August. Since its founding in 1838 by the Regular Baptists of Nova Scotia, Acadia had faced many periods of doubt and even crisis, but such problems had never centred on either the course of study or the personage of a specific professor. With firmly held concepts of the proper separation of church and state, the denomination was usually determined to reject the very idea of government grants; consequently previous crises had often been financial ones. The college depended for its financial survival on the meagre tuition and boarding fees charged its students, income from a small endowment fund, and annual appeals to the Baptist churches of the Maritimes. The self-sacrifice of its president and professors was normal, and expected. Salaries were very low and frequently seriously in arrears. On many occasions, the professors were sent out to canvass the churches for their own salaries.3 A disastrous fire in 1877 had swept away the college’s only building, and an ambitious rebuilding program and construction of a women’s seminary on the campus had put further strains on the meagre resources of the institution and its Baptist constituency. By 1882 a staggering debt of $33,000 had been accumulated, and there were dire predictions from some that the college would sink under its weight. These recurring financial problems form an important backdrop to the controversy over the new Chair of Didactics or Education. (‘Or Education’ was added to the title early in the controversy.) From Acadia’s founding, the teaching staff had ranged from a low of one (after the death by drowning of its second professor) to a high of five by the early 1880s. Seldom had there been any protracted discussion over a hiring. From the beginning, the institution had refused to discriminate against instructors or students on the basis of religious persuasion, so the issue of denominational affiliation of faculty members had never arisen, at least openly.4 Acadia’s administration and supporters usually considered themselves fortunate to find qualified
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faculty at all, and in the past had not been averse to hiring from the United States or Great Britain or even from among its own graduates.5 There seemed little reason to think that the hiring of 1883 would raise any more interest or contention than had any previous appointment in the forty-five-year history of the institution. On the surface at least this seemed to be a fairly simple tale. Meeting in August 1883, the Board of Governors, after some debate, created a new position at Acadia College, a Chair of Didactics or Education, and asked the Senate of the college to nominate a suitable candidate. The Senate duly met the following month and recommended the appointment of Dr Theodore H. Rand, at that time the superintendent of education in the nearby province of New Brunswick; he was also a graduate of Acadia College.6 That same day, the Board of Governors accepted the recommendation of the Senate and appointed Rand to the position.7 Normally, that would have been the end of the affair – except for a brief announcement in the denominational press – and the new professor would have quietly taken up his duties at the college. But this was no ordinary appointment as the board, to its sorrow, quickly learned, and the denomination and the college were almost immediately engulfed by a controversy unprecedented in the history of the institution. Immediately following the announcement by the board of the appointment of Dr Rand to the new Chair of Didactics,8 letters began to appear in the pages of the denominational press, the Christian Messenger, and soon the secular press as well, as the storm of controversy erupted. The intensity and extent of the debate clearly reflected the degree to which many of the Baptists of the Maritimes, and especially of Nova Scotia, felt that Acadia was their college, functioning to serve their needs and to reflect their values and attitudes. It is equally clear that not everyone on the board agreed that this was the primary purpose of the institution. One writer to the press mused on the meaning of Acadia in the week before the fateful decision was made by the board: Every true Baptist feels that Acadia College is his College. From these schools we expect our teachers, our missionaries, our leaders in all departments. Hither we can send our children, feeling assured that they will be subjected to a form of high Christian cultivation, and having the guarantee of fifty years’ experience that they will not merely receive the training which helps them in this world, but that they will also probably have the wisdom which cometh from above, and fits them for the next. ... The College is the parent of our schools, of our missions, and of our
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literature, of our powers of interpretation of the word of God itself, of our whole intellectual and moral welfare as a denomination of Christians, and the most fitting return we can make is to keep her in as high a rate of efficiency as possible. ... Above all, they will have the proud satisfaction of feeling that they have a school founded by the people and sustained by the people. [we look forward to great gifts for Acadia] but till then let us solace ourselves with the idea that it is no ordinary blessing to have a College embedded in the hearts of the people.9
Many Baptists could look at the history of Acadia College as evidence that God had surely been with the institution during its often difficult history,10 and many did indeed believe that ‘it is no ordinary blessing to have a College embedded in the hearts of the people.’ It was for this very reason that emotions rose to such a height only a short time after the writing of this optimistic assessment. A great many Baptists believed that Acadia was their institution, should reflect their views, and must fulfil their aspirations. When the board chose another direction, and seemed unresponsive to the views of perhaps the majority, a pervasive sense of betrayal, even crisis, arose in the minds of more than a few. In many respects, the resulting division between the board and ‘the people’ foreshadowed eighty years of controversy, which was not resolved until the final and bitter separation of the university from the denomination in the mid-1960s.11 The Christian Messenger, edited and published in Halifax, from the beginning put a bold face on the actions of the Senate and Board of Governors at Acadia College, praising the vision and daring displayed by their decision. A week after the appointment, while acknowledging that an already considerable disquiet was being expressed, the editor lauded the move, underscoring the importance of the board’s action. A news report in the same issue noted that ‘of the propriety and urgent need of such a branch of instruction as the new Professor will take in hand there can be no doubt,’ and it reported positive reaction from other, non-Baptist sources in the Maritimes. The article went out of its way to emphasize the significance of what was being inaugurated at Acadia: It will be no slight honor for that college [Acadia] to be the first in the Dominion of Canada to give effective recognition to a branch of university education with which only the greater universities of the Old World and the United States have yet attempted to grapple.
Appointment of a ‘Professor of Didactics’ at Acadia College 111 We look upon the appointment of Dr. Rand as the pioneer professor, whose mind will first give direction to the new enterprise of his alma mater, as the happiest one that could possibly have been made. No man in Canada, now that Dr. Ryerson is gone, has studied so profoundly the whole theory and practice of education.12
Both the new department and the new professor received much praise, with the newspaper printing glowing endorsements of Rand’s qualifications and the visionary actions of the board in going in this new direction. Another article observed that ‘it would seem as though new blood were being infused into the ruling body of the college, and that our beloved Acadia is awakening to the consciousness of what she may yet accomplish for the elevation of the people’ – implying that new blood was needed to awaken a sleeping college and faculty. This same writer piously endorsed the actions of the board: ‘I should be slow to criticise the united action of the Governors of the College, representing as they do, the intelligence and wisdom of the denomination, and feeling, as perhaps, no others can, the solemn nature of the trust committed to their hands – and the responsibilities of their office. To this their action let all the people say “Amen.”’13 However, it was not ‘Amen’ that many Baptists were already muttering under their breaths! The opposition to the new departure at Acadia centred on a number of issues, the discussion of which revealed the differing views present within the Baptist community and even within the college itself. The opponents of the appointment focused on what was claimed to be the speed and secrecy of the decision, the lack of extensive consultation, the salary, the qualifications of the proposed holder of the chair, the area of study, and the financial condition of the institution. All of these issues would receive a thorough airing in the press, denominational meetings, and private discussions. Both opponents and supporters of the appointment issued pamphlets to further circulate the views of the two camps.14 Although the board conducted its crucial meetings while the annual Convention of the Maritime Baptist Churches was in session, the issue of the new chair for Acadia was not raised during these open meetings, as had been the usual practice in years past. However, another decision by the board, to suspend theological training at the college and transfer it to Baptist College in Toronto was brought before the convention for its approval during those same meetings.15 Why, it was asked by some, was not the decision to introduce a new area of study at Acadia similarly dealt with? Why was the discussion of the new departure undertaken behind closed doors with none of the open consultation that
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Baptists felt should pertain in a denomination that prided itself on governance from the bottom up? Terms such as ‘secret meetings’ and ‘plots’ were bandied about by opponents of the idea.16 Even some who had no real objection to the appointment itself were uncomfortable with the way in which it was made. As one commented: ‘But it is the manner in which the business has been planned, matured and carried on to completion, without the knowledge and concurrence of the Convention to which I take exception.’17 Another claimed that there existed among the Baptists ‘a widespread feeling to the effect that the manner in which the new movement had been originated and carried through was unworthy of the churches of Christ … nothing is more intolerable to a free people than to feel that they have been, and are, being “managed”… But, in the judgment of plain men, the secrecy of the transactions consorts well with its injustice, and both are alike intolerable to Baptists.’18 Running throughout this thread of the opposition is the clear feeling that the entire Baptist constituency had the right to know, and to have some input into, what was being planned for the denomination’s college. That intimate relationship between the churches and Acadia College had characterized much of the history of the institution to this point. Although certainly not all Baptists had been supportive of Acadia in the past, it had survived the many threats to its existence precisely because it was ‘embedded in the hearts of the people.’ However, by the 1880s Acadia College had grown considerably. It had evolved into a more complex and diverse institution and that close connection between people and their college was going to be more difficult to maintain. The Board of Governors was now responsible for the management of a boys’ preparatory school (Horton Academy), a girls’ school (Acadia Seminary), and a college with a growing number of students and faculty, new facilities, and new financial obligations. At least some of the governors saw the evolving role of the board in a new light, one that would increasingly dominate both the governance of Acadia and the relationship between the institution and its Baptist sponsors in the years to come. The board would have to consider first what was best for the college, and only then take into account the opinions of members of the denomination. One board member attempted to explain it to the people: ‘Often must they [members of the board] take steps in advance, trusting first in God, and then in the denomination, always keeping in view the great object of advancing the moral and spiritual, as well as the educational interests of the youth
Appointment of a ‘Professor of Didactics’ at Acadia College 113
entrusted to their care.’ He argued that ‘their motives in managing the institution are pure, unselfish, and promoted only by an earnest desire to perform their high duties.’ He took also strong issue with those who argued for a public airing of all issues in the governance of the college: ‘While responsible to the convention, however, and bound to report to that body, they are not responsible to anonymous newspaper correspondents, nor required to justify their proceedings through the public press.’19 Others supported such views of the proper role and responsibility of the Board of Governors. As one correspondent noted, ‘it is better for the governors to go ahead of public sentiment, than to lag behind it.’20 For some, the basic issue was ‘who controls policy for Acadia, a Baptistappointed but independent board, or the denomination at large?’ For the major defender of the board action, the answer was clear: ‘popular assemblies are not the places for determining the policy and developing the plans of our institutions of learning. This, we entrust to our president and to the governing bodies.’21 This quarrel over Rand’s appointment was about power and who ought properly to exercise it – and not just about either the proposed chair or its prospective holder. Decisions of great significance to the college had been made recently without full and open consultation with the people. Only three years before, Acadia had opened its doors to women, and its first female graduate was soon to receive her degree in the spring of 1884. No open discussion within the denomination, no resolutions of Convention, in fact no vote of the board itself, had preceded this important departure.22 In the minds of many, however, the establishment of a new department and the appointment of Rand were different matters entirely, and secrecy and lack of consultation inflamed the opponents of these actions of the Board of Governors. The confusion over control lay not only in the division between the Board of Governors and the Baptist body in general. Internal to the institution, new structures and uncertain roles complicated the issue of college governance. At Acadia, the Rand affair in many respects marked the opening shots of an ongoing struggle between the board, senior administrators, and the Senate over control of academic matters. The Senate of Acadia College had been established a little more than a year before the conflict arose. Initially called ‘the Body of the College,’ the Senate was charged with responsibility for the academic life of the college.23 Rand and his chief supporter and publicist, the Reverend Dr Edward M. Saunders, were both members, as were the president of the college and the entire faculty. At the regular annual meeting of the
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Senate, held on 5 and 6 June 1883, no mention was made of didactics or education or of the possibility of a new chair at the college. Already, however, the issue of the respective powers of the Senate and Board of Governors had arisen, with the Senate requesting the appointment of a joint Senate-Board committee to define more precisely the roles of the two bodies.24 While this was the first occasion when such clarification was sought, it would most assuredly not be the last. It is clear from the records that the Senate had been entirely bypassed in the discussion and decision-making surrounding the establishment of the chair and the appointment of Rand. However, when the board ran into the swelling voice of dissent, it quickly attempted to shift the responsibility onto the shoulders of the faculty and Senate. Saunders, especially, advanced an entirely fictitious version of the governance of Acadia College, arguing that ‘within the past few years [the early vision] has been matured in the creation of the senate – the body – the real college … On the senate, then, from a literary point of view, and not on the governors, rests the onus of this advanced movement [Rand’s appointment].’ In fact, he continued, ‘the governors, advised and guided as they were [by the Senate], had no other course to pursue than to found and fill the chair of the principles and practice of education in Acadia College.’25 The Senate, and especially its executive, the president and faculty of the college, were responsible, therefore, for all matters academic. President Sawyer had, as early as the spring of 1883, already planned for this new chair, and had Rand in mind to fill it; the faculty was unanimous in its support of him. That, at least, was the version that Saunders put forth in the press. Now Saunders asked rhetorically, ‘Do these dealers in fugitive and groundless rumors assume to take the reins out of Dr. Sawyer’s hands, and become the guides of educational affairs for the Baptists of these Provinces?’26 When Sawyer and the faculty publicly declared that they had taken no such stand, and made no such decision,27 Saunders essentially accused them of lying, and warned, ‘I therefore counsel the insane, noisy, blind public criticism rushing pell-mell against the united and unanimous decisions of the faculty, the senate, the board of governors, not to expect the help of the president and professors in the work of revolution and destruction.’28 The public exchanges became so heated that one observer commented that Maritime Baptists had lowered themselves to using ‘the opprobrious epithets culled from the vocabulary of Yankee politicians.’29 A careful reading of the minutes of the Board of Governors and the
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Senate, and the public exchange of letters that ensued, leaves no doubt that this was almost entirely a board-driven venture and that, whatever Saunders and others might argue publicly, real power in this as in most other matters still resided with the board, and not with the Senate or faculty. As one observer astutely noted, ‘the governors recommended the senate to make a recommendation to them; the senate made the recommendation as recommended; and the governors adopted the recommendation which they had recommended the senate to make.’30 In strictly academic matters, the board was more determined than perhaps at any time in its history to date to exercise real control over the affairs of the college, whatever public face some members might try to put on the affair. While some opponents of the new departure focused on the way in which it was done, others took issue with the nature of the proposed department and with the designated professor himself. In the thorough discussion of the appropriateness of the Chair of Didactics, much was revealed about popular views of what was and was not an appropriate subject for college instruction. For the first time in Acadia’s history (but by no means the last), there was to be a wide-ranging discussion of the issue of ‘professional’ studies (or ‘job training’ as some called it) and its role in the college curriculum. Furthermore, even if all could agree that education was an appropriate subject, was Theodore Harding Rand the appropriate man for the job? Was the teaching of education the most pressing academic need of Acadia? On none of these important issues was there agreement. Those who supported both the establishment of the chair and the appointment of Rand argued strongly that such moves by Acadia were absolutely necessary in the new age that was dawning. Shortly after the announcement of the action taken by the board, the editor of the Christian Messenger newspaper attempted to explain the situation to his coreligionists: It has been seen for some time past by the more progressive collegiate institutions that whilst they were giving out their stores of knowledge to their students, there was a need of more being done by way of preparation for communicating to others the knowledge that was being gathered. Not that every student should become a professional teacher, but it is well known that the principles which lie at the foundation of the art of successful teaching are necessary in every profession to enable men to apply what they know, and so to render their knowledge practical and useful.31
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Another commentator submitted that ‘if it is important to acquire knowledge[,] far more important is it to be able efficiently to impart that knowledge to others. This is a Science and an art and must be acquired by diligent study under qualified teachers.’32 For others, it boiled down simply to ‘the necessity of teaching a man to express himself.’33 Considerable pride was taken in noting that establishing such a chair by Acadia would be an innovative move in the Canadian college scene. In their enthusiasm for the expected benefits of the new department, however, some of the supporters did not hesitate to question the abilities of current educationists, including Acadia’s own faculty and graduates: It has been the subject of criticism, and sometimes the animadversion has been fairly made that the graduate of a college was unable to apply the knowledge he had gained. He was taught everything except to express himself or, to put it in another way, he was unable to impress his convictions upon others … The young men and women who listen to the prelections [sic] of such a man will naturally absorb the idea of the necessity of doing something with their knowledge. They will not be content with being mere sponges to retain knowledge … The plan hitherto has been to select a scholar of high attainments to fill the chairs in philosophy, or languages, mathematics, or indeed any university subject, totally regardless of the one important thing, whether that man has the faculty of instructing others. The consequence has been that many of these able men have been failures. Some of them, it is true, have learned to teach, but by slow and limping methods, and have never done as well as they would have done had they been taught continuously through their college career, the value of the power of expression.34
The appointment of a professor of didactics would rectify these longstanding ills. While some defenders of the new chair emphasized the assistance such a course of study would give to young men (and a few young women) in learning to express themselves well, others saw the significance of this move in relation to the evolution of school teaching in the Maritime region. This was ‘eminently a progressive action. It is one of the most important steps in the interest of general education that has been taken in Canada for many years.’35 Rand himself articulated a clear understanding of what was in process when he said that ‘the establishing of such a chair [of Education] is the first act in this Domin-
Appointment of a ‘Professor of Didactics’ at Acadia College 117
ion tending to give university recognition to the teaching profession … Chairs of Education … are the modern means of diffusing a sympathetic and healthful influence from the university to elementary schools.’36 Acadia’s student newspaper, the Athenaeum, cut through to the heart of what was involved in this appointment when it noted that, among other things, the new chair was designed to ‘promote the transformation of teaching from an occupation to a profession.’37 Although many, including the majority of the Board of Governors of Acadia College, saw such a move to be practical, necessary, and even visionary, others were far less comfortable with this intrusion of technical training into the hallowed halls of academe. Opponents of the proposed course of study focused on both the subject matter and the underlying premise, which seemed to find a place for technical training in the university. There was a great deal of confusion on both sides of the issue over exactly what ‘didactics’ meant or what areas of study were to be encompassed by the new department. Several members of the Board of Governors attempted to explain to the increasingly restive Baptists the meaning of what was for many a new word and a new concept, but not even Saunders, the chief apologist for the new chair, could calm the agitation.38 To many who complained through the pages of the denominational and secular press, the new department would remain an unnecessary frill of little or no practical value in an arts education. That Acadia would be the first college in the country to offer such a program carried no weight with this group. The feeling was that if didactics or education were so important as an area of study, how was it that so many colleges, for so many years, had been able to function well without it? Others argued loudly that, while education might well be an appropriate course of study, there were other pressing needs at Acadia College that demanded action first. Changes in emphasis in matters of curriculum were evident in such discussions, with the move away from the standard classical education to a more ‘modern’ approach being underscored. The need for a professor of modern languages at the college was argued by a number of opponents of the new department; if there were money to spare for additional appointments (and not all were convinced of this), surely this area of study should hold a higher priority.39 In this modern age of the late nineteenth century, the science department would have to be strengthened if Acadia and its students were to keep pace with developing affairs in North America. These are
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practical subjects, of real worth to the students, and Baptists had always valued practicality in their support of Acadia. One correspondent explained that: ‘Acadia’s children are crying for the milk of Modern Languages, Natural Sciences, &c; … When the essentials are provided, if we can afford it, we will all talk with one voice about Didactics.’40 Some of Acadia’s supporters were obviously uncomfortable about what they saw as the intrusion of technical training into the college program. This would appear to be the first time that discussions of such matters took place at Acadia; it would certainly not be the last time. For the next century and more there would be times when considerable unease would be evident in discussions surrounding the issue of technical training. In some respects, the opening shot of a prolonged debate was being fired over the appointment of Dr Rand as Professor of Didactics or Education at Acadia. Frank H. Eaton, a member of Acadia’s Board of Governors, urged that the debate over Rand and didactics be used as the springboard for ‘a thorough examination and reconstruction of the Arts Curriculum of Acadia College.’ In his list of questions to be discussed was this concise statement of the issue: ‘Is there any place in an Arts Curriculum for Professional or Technical studies?’41 It is perhaps unfortunate that the board made the decision about the new department before the discussion of the principle underlying it, rather than after it. Saunders, Rand’s chief supporter and apologist, for one, felt that it was already too late for such a debate. He argued that ‘uniformity in college courses is gone, clean gone forever.’ The old perception of the liberal arts program was not only under assault, but actually already vanquished. ‘School arrangement, management and government lie outside of an arts course … It is, however, late in the day for us to hold up our hands in holy horror at the invasion of the sacred temple of an arts course by professional studies.’42 Having said that, however, Saunders attempted to temporize by arguing that nothing new was actually being attempted at all. Surely, he claimed, teaching is what everyone is about anyway, in one form or another, and its practice has been at the centre of educational endeavours from the start: ‘Do we not see that the whole world is an unorganised school? What but the practice of education is going on in every household, in every organization, in in [sic] every meeting for pleasure or profit, in every assemblage for worship, in the writing of the newspapers, the reviews, and the books, and in the parliaments of the world? … We are all teachers whether we admit it or not.’43 By this ingenious argument, the arts program
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was in actual fact a disguised exercise in teacher education, and in this view nothing radical was being contemplated in terms of technical training. With the decision to appoint a ‘professional’ to the faculty of Acadia arose the difficult issue of appropriate salary level. Could one expect such professionals to teach for the meagre salaries offered the regular faculty? Would a salary differential be justified, even essential, in attracting men to such positions? Rand’s appointment at a salary considerably above the normal range for Acadia set off additional howls of opposition and outrage within the Baptist community and created no little tension within the college itself. The faculty members at Acadia College were traditionally underpaid, even by the low standards of Canadian colleges of the time. Often those salaries, meagre as they were, tended to be considerably in arrears.44 While the president of Acadia College, Dr A.W. Sawyer, was paid $1,200 per annum and the professors $1,000, with lecturers receiving even less, the initial proposal was to appoint Rand at $2,000, although that was revised downward to $1,600. In addition, Rand insisted that the salary commence at the date of appointment (11 September 1883), although he would not be taking up his duties for some months. Even many who might otherwise have been supportive of Rand’s appointment felt that this was ‘an act of gross injustice to the [other] professors.’45 However, as one member of the board justified it to the broader constituency: I saw the invidious distinction made in giving Dr. Rand more than the other professors. But I said to myself, How can Dr. Rand come down from his position in New Brunswick and accept half the salary at Acadia? Why should we ask any man to sacrifice himself to that extent? … I also felt that it was time to start anew on the salary question, to show our people that more must be given to good men, that we could not hold them for the meagre pittances we had been paying, and that from this we might go on to increase the stipends of the other professors … I regard Dr. Rand as fully worth the salary offered.46
If a college were to offer professional studies, would salary differentials be not only justified, but necessary? The Board of Governors obviously thought so, for on its formal acceptance of the recommendation of the Senate, it was moved that Rand be appointed at a salary of $1,600 per annum.47 Although this was considerably below the $2,000 that had
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been proposed earlier during the same meeting, it was still $400 more than the president’s salary. However, as with all other aspects of this contentious appointment, the issue of salary differentiation quickly became the centre of further controversy. Many argued that the high salary demanded by, and offered to, Rand was an affront to the president and faculty of Acadia College, and was a rank injustice. ‘The present professors have only small salaries, and I verily believe remain in their position from the love they have for Acadia. How is it that Dr. Rand is of so much more value to Acadia than Dr. Sawyer [the president] … than Dr. Higgins … than Professor Jones?’48 It was argued by Rand’s supporters that he ‘loveth our people [Maritime Baptists],’ but his demand for such a high salary was a clear indication ‘that is not the kind of love that our professors have had for it [Acadia] in the past, which hassled them to devote their lives to it, and contribute of their small salaries toward its support.’49 Another critic observed that ‘it is contrary to all usage, political, ecclesiastical or educational, for the chief of staff to receive a less salary than his puisne assistant. No more demoralizing element, affecting both discipline within and support from without, could be introduced into any institution of learning than this virtual imperium in imperio.’50 One of the members of the Board of Governors attempted to justify the salary differential on the basis that the president and faculty had been consulted and that they themselves had concurred.51 Unfortunately, the board minutes make no mention of such a meeting, and ‘A Baptist,’ writing to the Halifax Herald, maintained that he had been informed by the faculty that they knew nothing of such ‘concurrence.’52 Yet another writer observed perceptively that it did not matter if it were true: ‘Fancy a professor placed in such a position saying “yes, I object, I’ll ‘strike’ if you do.” They ought not to have been placed in so delicate a position. The only possible answer that they as gentlemen could give was the one they did.’53 Although said disparagingly, the word ‘strike’ was used here for the first time in discussing the faculty’s relationship with the board at Acadia, nearly a century before faculty strikes would become a much more common and accepted concept. Beyond, and far more important than the issue of morality and fairness, some held, was the belief that such an unseemly scramble for money posed dangers to the foundations of an institution that was both academic and Christian. One writer warned: Undoubtedly the Baptists believe that Acadia is supported for the cause of Christ and the extension of the Redeemer’s Kingdom on the earth … and
Appointment of a ‘Professor of Didactics’ at Acadia College 121 that the professors and officers of the College and Academies are labouring unselfishly for the accomplishment of this grand and noble ideal … This is the fundamental motive in the founding of Denominational Colleges. This is the reason why Denominational Colleges can find capable Professors to fill their Chairs at a smaller salary than that given in many non-denominational Colleges of the same standing. These Professors, for the cause of Christ and the furnishing of Christian character, are ready to remain and labor on small salaries … But let personal and mercenary motives prevail among its Professors, its Governors, and its supporters; let the least suspicion of selfish motives obtain in the denomination, and the hour of Acadia’s prosperity has vanished ... Let the confidence of the denomination in the management of College matters be shaken seriously, and the life of the College is short. Acadia is strong in the feelings and affections of her warm hearted Alumni and generous friends; but affection cannot cluster around selfishness, the reckless pursuit of aggrandizement and of a course betraying the utmost want of confidence in those who have supported and are loyally supporting the Institutions.54
For many, more was at stake here than the hundreds of dollars that separated the salary of Acadia’s newest faculty member from his peers. The traditional concept of the Christian college, and indeed of higher education itself (as understood by Maritime Baptists), under which Acadia College had been founded, survived and even occasionally flourished, seemed to be challenged by this new idea that professors might seek positions for personal financial gain rather than for the loftier ideals of Christian and intellectual service. Such a prospect was indeed disturbing to large numbers of Acadia’s supporters. For those who sought employment in the halls of academe, like those who preached the Gospel, reward should come not from filthy lucre but from dedicated, and sacrificial, service. For the first time in the institution’s history, supporters of Acadia College were forced to debate an issue that has continued to trouble Canadian academe ever since: having admitted ‘professional studies’ into the college, how in justice, fairness, and economy are the required ‘professionals’ to be attracted to the academic life? This issue added considerably to the remarkable sense of peril that many seemed to feel as they contemplated the machinations of the Board of Governors in 1883. In the area of salary at least, the opponents of Rand and the board had their way. In the face of widespread denominational opposition, and an extensive campaign in the form of signed petitions aided by
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intransigence on the part of Rand, the board offered the position on the same salary and terms under which the rest of the faculty served. Rand finally accepted the position at a salary of $1,000 – exactly half of what he had initially asked for. In this initial foray into the murky waters of differential salaries for ‘professional studies’ uniformity (and economy) had prevailed.55 At the beginning of the prolonged debate over the new chair and professor, there had been no discussion about the suitability of the candidate. Most people seemed to take it for granted that, if the chair were to be established, Rand was undoubtedly the man to occupy it. Even the chair’s detractors were quick to point out that ‘no one will for one moment question Dr. Rand’s fitness for the position.’56 But, as Maritime Baptists for the first time extensively debated a faculty appointment, further probing of the issue of faculty qualifications ensued, casting considerable light on evolving views on this subject. The matter of qualifications was a difficult one for nineteenthcentury academics and laity alike. One’s initial academic degree might come from any one of the numerous colleges, great and small, of North America or Britain, where a solid grounding in the classics would be assumed. Advanced degrees were, however, more problematic. The master’s degree could be sought from one’s alma mater after a specified number of years and with the payment of a set fee. No further studies might be required. Doctoral degrees, where they existed, were often honorary. In the case of many small colleges such as Acadia, it was not unusual for the institution where one worked to bestow that degree. Prolonged study and dedicated service, rather than earned degrees, often constituted the required qualifications. By the 1880s, however, attitudes and standards were changing, and the debate over Rand’s appointment highlighted the shifts apparent in popular and academic circles in the Maritimes; such a debate would not have taken place a generation before. Theodore Harding Rand, a native of the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia, had attended Horton Academy and Acadia College, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1860. After teaching briefly in Wolfville and Truro, Rand was appointed to the newly created position of superintendent of education for Nova Scotia in 1864 – a political appointment – at the relatively young age of twenty-nine. He served with considerable success and some conflict until 1870, when he was relieved of this position. The following year he was appointed to a similar position in New Brunswick to implement the provisions of that province’s
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recently passed Common Schools Act. Rand occupied this post at the time of his controversial appointment to Acadia.57 Thus, although he had twenty years of experience with the public school systems of two provinces, and had indeed done much to mould and shape those systems, Rand possessed only his AB from Acadia and an honorary DCL from the same institution (1878). A decade before, such qualifications would have been deemed adequate. In 1883, however, many wondered aloud if they were sufficient for the new age. To the end of the debate, Rand’s supporters continued to argue that ‘no one doubts his qualifications for the office he is to hold in Acadia.’58 But in fact, voices of doubt were being raised about Rand’s qualifications. One critic wrote that it was being argued that ‘Dr. Rand studied only at Acadia and is pre-eminently fitted for a Professorship in Didactics without ever studying under such a professor; ergo a professorship in Didactics is not essential to the education of Acadia’s students – even in Didactics … Can a man become pre-eminently qualified for a professorship in Modern Languages without studying under such a professor? The same question may be asked in regard to the Natural Sciences.’ Formal training in the subject to be taught was essential in the minds of a growing number of critics. Another asked acerbically, in response to a letter from a Rand supporter: Will Mr. E[aton] please tell us when Dr. Rand acquired his great ability as a teacher? Did he take a course in the ‘principle and the practice of education’? and if so, under what professor and in what institution? If Dr. R. has attained such great eminence in the teaching profession without such a course, why may not others of moderate ability attain the same eminence? … The very fact of selecting a man as pre-eminently qualified to give instruction in a department of learning, in which he himself has never been instructed, is sufficient of itself to explode Mr. E’s argument on this point.59
Prior training and instruction in a subject were deemed essential to many. ‘How happens it that a man who has never been taught this wonderful subject is so eminently qualified to fill this important position?’60 Some were prepared to go even further: ‘I have never heard and never knew Dr. Rand was considered anything more than of ordinary ability. He may be well qualified for the position of superintendent of education, and may have performed his work well when in that office, yet that is no guarantee that he possesses extraordinary ability.’61 An-
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other scathingly commented: ‘Where did he receive his didactical training? Or in what respect has he shown any fitness for such a position? No one but the governors who concocted this scheme has been able to perceive wherein it lies, or that Dr. Rand is anything more than a man of ordinary ability.’62 Even Rand’s supporters realized the strength of the argument about proper training, and from which direction the winds of academic change were increasingly blowing. As one board member attempted to argue rather apologetically, ‘it is true he [Rand] has not been to Germany, but he has twenty years’ experience in educational work, has fine literary aptitudes, and a power of communicating his thoughts second to no man in the denomination at the present moment.’63 The argument that, at least in ‘professional studies,’ years of practical experience more than compensated for lack of formal training in the field found few open supporters among Acadia’s champions, although it would become a frequently heard opinion in the twentieth century. Although Acadia College had been founded by the Baptists and had been largely staffed by men of that denomination, from the beginning the institution had determinedly pursued a remarkably open policy concerning denominational affiliation. There is no doubt, however, that a denominational bias existed in the appointment of the faculty and administration.64 When a member of the board attempted to add that Rand was ‘a Baptist all over and through and through’ to his other qualifications for the job,65 one writer, at least, was unimpressed: It is perchance very well to be a Baptist, but to be one ‘through and through’ would seem to have little place for other qualities, most desirable in an officer, whose business it is, par excellence, to mould and form the plastic minds of the young. Rigid denominationalism is thought to cramp the intellectual powers and to narrow very unfavourably the horizon of our views. A broader and more comprehensive vision is desirable in this age of free thought and enlightenment – one that can see sincerity and goodness and worth outside the pale of the denomination to which we may chance to belong.66
Once again the events and debates of 1883 foreshadowed developments in the first half of the next century, as Maritime Baptists attempted the increasingly difficult balancing act of Christian commitment on the one side and academic qualifications and professionalism on the other.
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The last major issue debated by advocates and detractors of the appointment of the new professor was that of favouritism. Neither side could escape the obvious fact that Rand was himself a member of the board that had appointed him, a board on which sat a number of his powerful friends. Certainly this was not an unusual situation for a small institution of limited means such as Acadia. In the past, Acadia College had been happy to gain qualified professors and presidents from whatever source it could and had certainly not been averse to appointing its own. For some at least, such past practices were less acceptable by the 1880s, while the uncomfortable feeling that Rand had manipulated the situation to his advantage caused increasing disquiet.67 Rand himself was a member of the committee of three that had recommended to the Board of Governors and, through it, to the broader Baptist body that Baptist theological training in Canada should be consolidated in Toronto, which led directly to the departure of Dr Daniel Welton from Acadia and provided the opening for the establishment of the new Chair of Didactics. The fact that Rand was thus scarcely a disinterested party was lost on no one. That Rand campaigned privately for the establishment of the chair, and his own appointment, is evident. As one critic phrased it, ‘it only required a little interviewing, a little whispering, a little skulking, a few secret meetings, a little manipulation of the senate, and hurrah! hurrah!! Acadia College has got what no other college in Canada has – a Professor of didactics!’68 For these critics, the conclusion to be drawn was inescapable: ‘was not the chair made for the doctor, and not the doctor for the chair?’69 Was Acadia ‘to be made the last resting place of the disappointed hopes and unemployed talents of any of her old sons’? Why did not Harvard and Yale and Brown, with plenty of both money and students, have no professor of didactics? ‘Either, I suppose, they have not seen the needs of it at all, or perchance they have no needy sons, or perchance their governing body value their college too highly to sacrifice its interests for a friend, be he never so needy.’70 Others spoke openly of Rand’s need to leave his post in New Brunswick, where he had encountered strong opposition in the past year or two, largely because of what were perceived to be his autocratic ways and self-aggrandisement.71 One person stated openly that ‘there was every probability of his dismissal over there [New Brunswick]. He had become extremely unpopular. Teachers’ institutes were speaking out in unmistakable terms, the party in power was opposed to him in politics, and the death of Dr. Elder deprived him of his chief friend and
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supporter in the Government.’ As a prudent man, Rand was making for himself ‘a hiding place,’ with the assistance of some of his cronies.72 Was this how a modern college ought to be staffed? In this debate, then, the whole issue of favouritism and the ‘old boys’ club’ at Acadia College was given a thorough airing for the first, but most assuredly not the last, time. The unprecedented outcry of opposition to the terms and manner of Rand’s appointment finally brought a recalcitrant board to heel. A twoday debate in late December 1883, filled with motions, amendments, and withdrawals of motions, finally saw Rand appointed to a chair the name and scope of which were to be determined later by the Senate.73 After the many dozens of pages of debate in the press, the public announcement of the final resolution of this issue was brief in the extreme, noting only Rand’s appointment and avoiding any reference to the prolonged controversy.74 This compromise patched up and temporarily papered over many of the deep fissures that had bitterly divided the Baptist and Acadia communities. It certainly did not resolve most of the issues that this protracted debate had raised. In fact, these same issues would return again and again to haunt the college (and later university) in the century to come, as Acadia and its Baptist constituency grappled with a changing academic and intellectual world. The Rand affair foreshadowed that struggle, and in many respects encapsulated the issues and problems of the changing order. Unfortunately, it did not really provide any of the needed solutions, as the various forces groped their way towards new understandings of university governance and professorial standards. The Rand controversy, in some respects, heralded the inauguration of a new era in the relationship between Acadia College and its founding denomination. At least some of the members of the college’s Board of Governors now saw a division between ‘the people’ and the leadership of the college, a widening gap that was not only inevitable but necessary at times. Gradual alienation of many of Acadia’s supporters would be the result. After 1883, the college entered an era in which it was less markedly a denominational institution, although it was not yet a secular one. In the half century that followed, it would become increasingly difficult to maintain the at-times tenuous ties binding the two together. Baptist support for Acadia College, both financial and moral, would wither in the face of this increasing alienation. For most Baptists of the Maritimes, Acadia would gradually cease to be ‘a College embedded in
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the hearts of the people.’ The Rand case did not, of course, create this divide between college and people, but it did provide the venue for an articulation of varying interpretations of institutional governance, board responsibility, and college ‘ownership.’ Such differing opinions must have been developing before the disruption of 1883; Rand’s appointment merely provided the opportunity to express deeply held and strongly differing views, really for the first time in the college’s history, bringing many issues boiling to the surface. It is obvious from the wide-ranging debate that neither Rand’s supporters nor his detractors were entirely ‘modern’ in their opinions. This was not a struggle between the forces of past practice and old-fashioned denominationalism on the part of Rand’s detractors and forward looking, even visionary attitudes on the part of the board. Both sides, however, would contribute to what would become the ongoing discussion of the nature of the institution over the next six or seven decades as Acadia, sometimes painfully, attempted to refashion and redefine itself. Whether it could retain its relevance to both its Baptist constituency and the evolving intellectual and academic needs of the twentieth century remained to be seen. And as for the focus of this controversy, after a brief one-and-a-halfyear stay at the college he was so disturbed by his appointment, Rand left to take up a new position at Toronto Baptist College.75 No replacement was named to further the teaching of education at Acadia; it would be another forty years before the institution once again offered this branch of instruction to its students.76 Thus, by 1885, both Rand and the Chair of Didactics were gone. Only the issues and the bitterness remained behind. notes 1 Correspondence: Anonymous and Otherwise, concerning the New Chair at Acadia College. How it was Inaugurated? Dr. Rand, ‘Didactics,’ &c (Halifax, 1883), 22, Alius [sic] Alumnus to editor of the Morning Chronicle. 2 Although it was initially referred to as a Chair of Didactics, it soon became necessary to add ‘or Education’ since there was so much confusion as to the meaning of didactics. In the end, the term didactics was dropped completely. 3 See Acadia University Archives (AUA), Wolfville, NS, Minutes of the Board of Governors (BoG), vol. 1; R.S. Longley, Acadia University, 1838–1938 (Wolfville, 1938), 45–65, 94–5.
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4 Longley, Acadia University, 37. It was not until 1965 that religious affiliation of faculty became a major issue, and then spectacularly. 5 Ibid., 38–41, 66–7, 71–3. Barry Moody, ‘Breadth of Vision, Breadth of Mind: The Baptists and Acadia College,’ in Canadian Baptists and Christian Higher Education, G.A. Rawlyk, ed. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 18–20. 6 AUA, BoG minutes, vol. 1, 325–6, 29 Aug. 1882; 327, 11 Sept. 1883; AUA, Minutes of ‘The Body of the College’ (Senate), vol. 1, 16, 11 Sept. 1883; Margaret Conrad, ‘Rand, Theodore Harding,’ Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 12 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 879–84; Margaret Conrad, ‘“An Abiding Conviction of the Paramount Importance of Christian Education”: Theodore Harding Rand as Educator, 1860–1900,’ in An Abiding Conviction: Maritime Baptists and Their World, Robert S. Wilson, ed. (Hantsport, NS: Lancelot Press, 1988), 155–95. 7 AUA, BoG minutes, vol. 1, 327–8, 11 Sept. 1883. 8 The name of the new chair varied almost from week to week, indicating considerable confusion as to the scope and purpose of the new area of study in the minds of both the board and the general public. 9 Christian Messenger (CM), 25 July 1883, 3, D.A. Steele to the editor. 10 Moody, ‘Breadth of Vision,’ 18–20. 11 CM, 19 Sept. 1883, 4, editorial and article, ‘Opening of the Academical Year at Wolfville.’ 12 Barry Moody, ‘The Secularization of Acadia University, 1965,’ unpublished paper. 13 CM, 10 Oct. 1883, 4, M.P.F. to editor. 14 Correspondence: Anonymous and Otherwise; [Edward M. Saunders], Defence of the Governors of Acadia College, in the Founding of the Chair of Education, and in the Appointment of Dr. Rand. by Dr. Saunders, in Reply to J.W. Barss, Esq. and Others (Halifax, 1883), 18 pp. 15 CM, 29 Aug. 1883, 4. 16 Correspondence: Anonymous and Otherwise, 3; CM, 7 Nov. 1883, 1, D.A. Steele to editor. 17 CM, 12 Dec. 1883, 3, I.J. Skinner to ed. 18 Ibid., 24 Oct. 1883, 1, H.H. Read to ed. 19 B.H. Eaton to the editor of the Mail, reprinted in Correspondence: Anonymous and Otherwise, 7–8. 20 Halifax Morning Herald, 20 Oct. 1883, 4, A.M. to editor. 21 Defence of the Governors of Acadia College, 5. 22 Moody, ‘Breadth of Vision,’ 24. 23 AUA, Minutes of Senate, Acadia College, vol. 1, 1 June 1882, 1.
Appointment of a ‘Professor of Didactics’ at Acadia College 129 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56
AUA, BoG minutes, Acadia College, vol. 1, 8 June 1883, 316. Saunders, Defence of the Governors, 7–8. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 12–13; Halifax Morning Herald, 10 Nov. 1883, D.F. Higgins to editor; A.W. Sawyer to editor. Saunders, Defence of the Governors, 13. CM, 7 Nov. 1883, 1, D.A. Steele to editor. Correspondence: Anonymous and Otherwise, 17. CM, 19 Sept. 1883, 4, editorial. Ibid., 19 Sept. 1883, 4, ‘Opening of the Academical Year at Wolfville.’ Ibid., 7 Nov. 1883, 1, D.A. Steele to editor. Ibid., 26 Sept. 1883, 4, reprint from the Amherst Gazette. M. M’Vicar, ‘Educational Departure,’ CM, 10 Oct. 1883, 4, M. M’Vicar, ‘Educational Departure.’ Speech of Theodore H. Rand, in Fredericton Capital, reprinted in CM, 14 Nov. 1883, 5. Reprinted in CM, 28 Nov. 1883, 4. Defence of the Governors of Acadia College. CM, 19 Dec. 1883, 4, A.J. Denton to editor; A Graduate to editor of the Herald, in Correspondence: Anonymous and Otherwise, 4. CM, 14 Nov. 1883, 1, D.G. MacDonald to editor. Ibid., 14 Nov. 1883, 3, Frank H. Eaton to editor (emphasis his). Defence of the Governors, 10–11. Ibid., 12. See AUA, Bog minutes, vol. 1. Alumnus to editor of Halifax Herald, in Correspondence: Anonymous and Otherwise, 6. CM, 7 Nov. 1883, 1, D.A. Steele to editor. AUA, BoG minutes, vol. 1, 329, 11 Sept. 1883. Correspondence: Anonymous and Otherwise, H.H. Read to the Editor of CM, 12. Ibid., F. Andrews to the Editor of the Halifax Mail, 14. Ibid., Another Alumnus to the Editor of the Halifax Herald, 21. Ibid., B.H. Eaton to the Editor of the Halifax Mail, 9–10. Ibid., A Baptist to the Editor of the Halifax Herald, 17. Ibid., F. Andrews to the Editor of the Halifax Mail, 13. CM, 19 Dec. 1883, 4, A.J. Denton to Editor. AUA, BoG minutes, vol. 1, 20 and 21 Dec. 1883, 335–7. Correspondence: Anonymous and Otherwise, A Graduate to the Editor of the Halifax Herald, 3.
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57 Conrad, ‘Rand,’ 879–84; Conrad, ‘An Abiding Conviction,’ 156–95. 58 CM, 28 Nov. 1883, 3, reprint from Acadia Athenaeum. 59 Correspondence: Anonymous and Otherwise, Elihu to the Editor of the Halifax Herald, 11. 60 Ibid., F. Andrews to the Editor of the Halifax Mail, 14. 61 Ibid., Querist to the Editor of the Halifax Mail, 13. 62 Ibid., Scholarship Holder to the Editor of the Halifax Morning Chronicle, 22–3. 63 CM, 1 Nov. 1883, 1, D.A. Steele to editor. 64 From 1838 to 1948, the president of Acadia was invariably a Baptist clergyman. Only in 1964 was a non-Baptist appointed as president; within two years the Baptists had lost control of the institution altogether. 65 Correspondence: Anonymous and Otherwise, B.H. Eaton to the Editor of the Halifax Mail, 9. 66 Ibid., A Baptist to the Editor of the Halifax Herald, 17. 67 Conrad, ‘Rand,’ 882. 68 Correspondence: Anonymous and Otherwise, Alius Alumnus to the Editor of the Halifax Citizen and Evening Chronicle, 22. 69 Ibid., Didactitian to the Editor of the Halifax Morning Chronicle, 15. 70 Ibid. 71 Conrad, ‘Rand,’ 881–2. 72 Correspondence: Anonymous and Otherwise, Alius Alumnus to the Editor of the Halifax Morning Chronicle, 22. 73 AUA, BoG minutes, vol. 1, 334–7, 20–1 Dec. 1883. 74 CM, 26 Dec. 1883, T.A. Higgins (for the Board of Governors) to the Editor, 4. 75 Conrad, ‘An Abiding Conviction,’ 174. 76 Longley, Acadia University, 128.
5 Crossroads Campus: Faculty Development at Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1950–1972 MALCOLM M AC LEOD As the 1940s ended, Memorial College at St John’s, Newfoundland, was a sleepy, subdued place just recently promoted to the status of university. A staff of thirty offered fifteen predictable subjects. Just over two decades later, the faculty at bustling Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) had expanded by 2,000 per cent. In 1972 a staff of 634 offered thirty-five subjects, including music, full professional preparation for teaching, engineering, business, nursing, and social work, plus all the intricate specialties associated with the study of medicine. As the first class of medical students entered its last courses before graduation, 1972 marked the close of a period of great expansion in both key aspects of faculty development: the number of professors, and the scope of their expertise. Nearly a thousand academics were added to Memorial’s staff during that exhilarating time. Four-fifths of them were male – although some of patriarchy’s most stringent restrictions were abandoned, a pattern of male domination persisted from the previous era. More of the newly hired professors were Canadian than British. The proportion of scholars from the United States among new appointments grew to just over onesixth. This was no great problem, compared with the much greater degree of Americanization that was then occurring at many other Canadian universities. During the period, perhaps surprisingly, there was no dilution in the academic qualifications of those appointed. What policies for recruitment and retention of staff guided this expansion and elaboration? One is also tempted to wonder: To what extent might this be Canada’s outstanding example of faculty development in those years?
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Growth In Newfoundland’s post-Confederation decades, the dominant fact about Memorial University was its tremendous growth. During the 1950s and 1960s, student numbers leaped from 300 to 10,000; Memorial would soon be the largest university in the Atlantic region. The faculty had to keep pace. Easily overpowering turnover and attrition, during the twenty-two years from 1950 to 1972, 954 new hirings were recorded. They followed the chronological pattern illustrated in Table 5.1. The figures show an increase in faculty numbers that was steady throughout the 1950s, more aggressive in the mid-1960s, and positively explosive for a few years starting in 1967. The great increase in the number of faculty members was propelled by two chief factors. Newfoundland’s leaders, the political more than the educational,1 promoted a rapid adaptation to mainland Canadian standards of access to higher education. Second, they were determined to make their country (province) more self-sufficient in this respect, abandoning the pre-Confederation pattern which had directed Newfoundlanders ambitious for even a first degree to at least two years of study abroad. Since 1932 – seventeen years before the new province entered Confederation – Newfoundland’s high school leaving standards had been precisely the same as those in Canada’s Maritime provinces. In contrast, its university participation rate for a long time stayed well below the Canadian average.2 In 1951 Newfoundland had just 1.2 university students per 1,000 population; Canada had five. By 1971, however, participation by the age-group in Newfoundland (twelve students per 1,000 population) was about 90 per cent of the Canadian average.3 Part of this steep increase was achieved with the aid of a radical policy of free tuition for everyone, which could only be sustained for 1966–8.4 A principal event that propelled greater university participation was Memorial’s move in 1961 – presided over by Eleanor Roosevelt as one of the last official acts of her long life – to a spacious new campus on Elizabeth Avenue in the northern outskirts of St John’s. This eliminated the restrictions imposed by previous overcrowding at the downtown Parade Street location. Through the following decade, there followed the development of a half-dozen professional schools and numerous new directions in the curriculum. Besides changing social habits among Newfoundland youth and families, the other major cause of Memorial’s forced growth was the pro-
Faculty Development at Memorial University 133 Table 5.1. Number of newly hired faculty members at Memorial University, year by year 1950 to 1971 Year
Hirings
Year
Hirings
1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960
5 7 5 9 6 8 6 20 15 18 15
1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971
20 40 33 38 63 62 103 55 167 108 151
Note: These statistics are based on a full list of newly hired faculty members, deposited in Memorial’s Centre for Newfoundland Studies. This ‘master list’ includes those employed for teaching and/or research, rather narrowly defined. To make the MUN study more comparable with those that may emerge concerning other universities, some positions traditionally given faculty status at Memorial University (MUN) – particularly in the library, registrar’s office, and extension service – have been excluded. (See Rosemary A. Cavan, Information assistant at AUCC, to Helen Carew, President’s assistant 22 Aug. 1967, MUN file ‘AUCC 1966–7.’) Counting these appointments would have added forty-two names over the twenty-two-year period. Most part-time appointments, including numerous clinical posts in Medicine and Nursing, are also omitted.
vincial government’s determination to rapidly achieve the reality of a well-developed university.5 This meant a great expansion of curriculum. When Memorial College first became Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1949, its small faculty offered the traditional junior college subjects plus geography, along with teacher training, pre-engineering courses, and household science. During the next two decades, new disciplines introduced included geology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, religious studies, linguistics, and folklore. Other arts subjects started small, but then expanded into autonomous schools or faculties: commerce/business, public welfare/social work, nursing, and music. Education diversified into six departments. The Marine Sciences Research Laboratory was the first MUN institute whose full-time faculty members had no responsibilities in undergraduate teaching. Engineering discontinued its subservient status as a feeder school for Nova Scotia Technical College and began awarding its own degrees in many of the sub-fields offered elsewhere in larger institu-
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tions (for example, civil and electrical engineering) as well as a new specialty peculiar to Newfoundland, ice engineering. Most portentous of all curriculum innovations was a new subject, biochemistry, in 1959. Ten years later this department became a key nucleus of basic sciences at the heart of the new Medical School’s academic program.6 To many observers, medicine was the academic/ professional program which distinguishes the most significant universities from merely ordinary ones.7 The naming of Ian Rusted as prospective dean of medicine in 1966 – number 440 in the master list of all Memorial appointments8 – therefore should likely be judged the most significant step in faculty recruitment since J.L. Paton was named the first professor of Classics and German (and founding president) in 1925. Growth between 1950 and 1972 was inhibited, or at least complicated, by a high rate of faculty turnover. On average, only twenty-seven professors remained for every forty-three hired, creating a faculty retention rate of 63 per cent, or just under two-thirds. During the brief twenty-two-year period, this typically young group of faculty members saw only a few deaths, cases of serious illness, and normal retirements. Other powerful forces of attrition were at work. In the volatile academic marketplace of those years, some people were attracted away by better offers elsewhere. This was the pull factor. In Memorial’s case the push factor was also potent. The Newfoundland university was in a community that many felt had a questionable cultural reputation in other parts of Canada, as reflected in ‘Newfy’ jokes, and exacerbated by the relative remoteness of St John’s from major urban centres in North America. Its location, the faculty thought, was among ‘factors which tend to discourage university teachers from applying for positions at MUN.’9 A sense of physical isolation was detrimental to morale in many professors’ families. In a questionnaire used to gather information for this study, one response concerning some briefly held appointments was: ‘Short stay – their wives hated this place.’ Three such cases occurred in the Department of History over five years, suggesting that a major reason for high turnover was this simple failure to adjust. Dismissals were negligible in affecting the turnover. There was one interesting, abrupt case during transition from junior college to university in the early 1950s. Originating in the Board of Regents, hints flew that some of the least-qualified people were ‘dead wood’ and not suitable as staff members in an institution struggling to deserve its new status. One professor of science understood the warning signals and
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took a sabbatical year for further study in the United States. Midwinter, far from home, he received a distressing letter from Memorial’s newbroom president. The university wanted his resignation because students in his subject, going on to Dalhousie University in Halifax, were not as well prepared lately as they had previously been.10 The next dismissal seems to have been a full fifteen years later. A department head, on campus only a few months, was confronted by rumours that academic credentials on his résumé were fabricated. Sitting in VicePresident M.O. Morgan’s office, he was comfortably explaining the discrepancies when Morgan suddenly reached for the phone and called the American institution which was alleged to have awarded him a doctorate. As it turned out, the degree was bogus, and he was soon gone. In the period we are reviewing, there were no cases of professors dismissed for being too interested in women students, or for railing against capitalism or religion in their classes.11 In 1943, wartime Memorial blocked one appointment, however, when an appointment that had been offered was rescinded after the candidate expressed pacifist principles.12 Memorial’s most famous firing linked to academic freedom occurred in 1977, when Marlene Webber’s dismissal from the School of Social Work triggered controversy that laid Memorial under several years of censure by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT). Webber was accused of using the classroom to spread communist propaganda. The case is outside the chronological scope of this study.13 Recruiting Studying the development of the faculty at MUN between 1950 and 1972 revealed some surprises. One initial expectation was confirmed: that great growth in facilities and in the number of students and faculty members occurred in this period. Other hypotheses, however, proved wrong. For example, one would expect that recruiting sufficient academic staff to St John’s might be difficult because of its isolation. The record speaks otherwise. No pronounced or persistent complaints from faculty members about working conditions were lodged, not even when the number of new posts to be filled swelled to over one hundred in 1967 and to 167 in the record year 1969. In the early 1960s positions in the science disciplines, especially mathematics, were sometimes hard to fill, and one year the Faculty of Education failed to make all of its desired appointments.14
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Difficulties with recruitment were manageable and grew weaker as time passed. ‘Experience of the past year,’ said a 1967 report, ‘would indicate that it is becoming increasingly less difficult ... to attract high quality staff.’ Credit was given to Memorial’s ‘reputation abroad and our improved facilities.’15 Stephen Taylor, the British peer who was president from 1967 to 1973, thought that Newfoundland’s distance from other places was actually often an advantage. To the romantic mind, he recalled, the island was a ‘last frontier before the barren wastes of the Arctic ice cap. When it became my job to recruit faculty for the university, the task was made strangely easy, for many excellent academics felt exactly as I did ... Here adventure called.’16 Scoffers told Ian Rusted that his idea of attracting a good medical faculty to Newfoundland was an ‘unlikely dream.’ Rusted organized international advisory committees (typically two or three members each from Canada, the United States, and Britain) to help recruit for the key posts.17 With involvement and responsibility thus shared widely across the transatlantic medical community, a credible faculty was attracted as planned, on schedule. Such methodical approaches were important for Memorial’s success in recruiting. MUN joined the National Conference of Canadian Universities (later AUCC) in 1953 and the Association of Universities of the British Commonwealth (AUBC) in London, England, the following year. Thereafter, advertisements about academic vacancies at Memorial regularly went through both Canadian/North American and British/Commonwealth channels.18 These links were valued because of the assistance they provided in filling staff appointments.19 Less regular and patterned recruiting efforts saw inquiries for potential faculty members made through scholarly associations and graduate schools, through coincidental contacts, and via the network linking ‘old boys’ (and by this time a few ‘old girls’ as well) who had worked together previously as students or colleagues.20 On at least one occasion, the RCMP Security Service was asked for background information on certain applicants.21 For a few senior positions in Lord Taylor’s time, distant scholars who might not know they were on a shortlist would be invited for a visit to be looked over.22 For North America, Memorial’s most important calls for applicants went out in the ‘Vacancies Circular’ distributed by AUCC. From 1959 onwards this publication appeared three times a year, with job postings listed at no cost to member institutions.23 The service offered by the headquarters of AUBC seems to have been especially useful. AUBC
Faculty Development at Memorial University 137
placed ads in appropriate journals and newspapers (with the expense transferred to MUN at the end of the year), and steered visitors from Europe to speaking engagements on the MUN campus if they were flying through Gander anyway.24 Most importantly, AUBC regularly set up expert panels to interview candidates and make recommendations. In 1956, the first year MUN used this service while looking for three language teachers, ten other Canadian universities did so as well. As time passed, while other Canadian universities generally made less use of this access to a world-wide network, MUN moved in the opposite direction and used the service increasingly. By the mid-1960s MUN was advertising 70 per cent or more of its vacancies through the Commonwealth channel, often in competition with only four or five other university employers in Canada.25 MUN explained to AUCC that the Commonwealth service was especially good at reaching Britons employed outside of the United Kingdom. By these means Memorial had also retrieved several very good Canadians pursuing graduate studies abroad.26 Apparently feeling the need for extra advertising with a positive spin, the university administration in 1966 published a handsome thirtysix-page book in coffee table format, with plenty of pictures. According to its preface, A Guide to Life and Work at the University in St John’s was ‘directed specifically to those who may be contemplating joining the faculty.’27 Two years later, a simpler Faculty Association publication lent a hand to the recruiting effort. The MUNFA Guide to St John’s, assembled by a deliberately chosen American/British/mainland Canadian team of recent arrivals, was very much a manual for newcomers. It gave practical advice, for example how to steer one’s household furniture through customs with minimum wear and tear, or how to take advantage of international tax regimes and pay no penalty. A section ‘For “Immigrants” from Canada’ was meant to reassure mainlanders who might be wary of Newfoundland’s reputed distinctiveness that, where the university was located, urbanization had produced conformity to continental norms. ‘Around St John’s most of the Rock is covered with concrete, just like home ... Little features of social life are the same as in other Canadian cities: two TV channels, flight to the suburbs, Colonel Sanders on Sundays.’28 The attractions of employment at MUN were sweetened by many of the standard inducements: leave, pensions, and travel grants, along with some unusual ones. Sabbatical and sick leave, removal allowances, and a good pension plan were always available, and a shared-
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cost insurance scheme was inaugurated in 1962. During the 1960s, a university fund to assist summer travel for professors’ research or for further study (many faculty entrants were graduate students elsewhere when hired at MUN) grew from $5,000 to $20,000. Ambitious plans for curriculum development beyond the Bachelor’s level were partly pushed for the sake of recruitment. When the Association of Atlantic Universities (AAU) proposed concentrating all graduate studies in the region at Dalhousie University and the University of New Brunswick, Newfoundland refused to cooperate. Already MUN had to ‘cope with preconceptions ... about the remoteness and isolation of our location,’ President Gushue complained to a national factfinding inquiry. ‘If we did not stress the availability of research and of graduate work we should find it difficult to attract the right type of Faculty.’29 Salaries became less of a problem than faculty members’ protests and politicking sometimes made them seem. In the early 1950s full professors at MUN earned less than 60 per cent of the rate at the wealthiest central Canadian universities; entry-level salaries also compared badly. This regional disparity persisted, but weakened.30 By 1971 of thirty-one universities reporting their starting rates for new assistant professors, MUN ranked nineteenth – close to the national average. Submissions from the Faculty Association tended to stress comparisons with institutions that had more generous pay scales, and thus a need for higher salaries.31 Given MUN’s overall success in recruiting the faculty it needed, however, salaries may have been satisfactory. Not everyone had an urgent requirement for accident insurance or grants to finish a degree, but housing was another matter. In this regard Memorial developed inducements which became very elaborated and a characteristic expression of institutional self-reliance. MUN had been in the housing business since J.L. Paton, the first president, bequeathed his duplex residence near the old Parade Street campus when he left Newfoundland for England in 1933. Through the 1960s the university offered second-mortgage loans at low interest, up to $2,000 per faculty member, and then agreed to guarantee larger loans, up to 15 per cent the cost of a house. In 1966, faced with numerous complaints from newly appointed faculty members that they could not find a place to live, the university began buying new, three- and four-bedroom homes to rent to professors. By 1969 MUN was landlord of sixty-five such properties. Memorial’s rental business was quite large-scale but short-lived. A
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tenant’s maximum period of occupancy was two years.32 By 1972, as urban St John’s rapidly adjusted to the task of accommodating a large university, the university began selling its houses. In most cases they were purchased by the occupants or other MUN employees. The last thirty properties were on the market in 1975. The provincial cabinet minute which gave MUN authority to liquidate residential real estate in St John’s stipulated that the proceeds were to be used to buy forty houses for staff at the new regional college which Memorial was starting up on the west coast of Newfoundland.33 Memorial used a wide array of tactics to make its recruitment efforts a success story: widespread advertising, carefully crafted special inducements, and the spinning of isolation into opportunity and remoteness into reputation. Towards the mid-1970s the combination of approaches jelled so well that no particular problems remained concerning the job of recruiting good university staff to St John’s. Gender As in recruiting, the matter of gender in an initial hypothesis also proved incorrect; sex proved as puzzling in the history of MUN staffing as in everyday life. One could expect that around the 1960s – in a society becoming familiar with and adjusting to the idea of feminism – the relative significance of women in the professoriate would show some advance. This was not the case in the number of faculty members recruited. The declining proportion of women in Memorial’s total teaching complement was unexpected, but it may also be misleading (Table 5.2). The figures for the 1940s relate to a very small staff, and include the Second World War period when men were less available than usual.34 Note that in the early 1970s the rate at which women were hired, compared with men, stayed close to what it had been through the 1950s and 1960s, about one-fifth. This statistical stability confounds expectations that over time the proportion of women in the professorial workforce would increase significantly. Nevertheless, a giant step in the liberation of women to pursue careers on MUN faculty did occur in 1962, when a twenty-two-year logjam was cleared. In 1940 the Board of Governors had decided that married women could not be employed – a serious decision which triggered two controversial dismissals at the time. Through the 1950s single women who held teaching posts at MUN knew that if the occasion should arise, they would have to choose
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Table 5.2. Gender of newly hired faculty members at Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1940–1972 Women
Decade
Total recruitment
(n)
(%)
1940–9 1950–9 1960–9 1970–1
32 99 596 259
12 20 117 41
38% 20% 20% 16%
Source: Based on a full list of newly hired faculty deposited at MUN’s Centre for Newfoundland Studies. See note at table 5.1.
between marriage and an academic career. Married women might remain employed, but only from term to term at the board’s whim, subject to constant uncertainty.35 Discrimination against married women was reconsidered during the 1950s, but kept in place. In 1952, the administration codified and published the usual terms of employment for faculty in a booklet familiarly known as the ‘Book of Rules.’ The faculty countered with various complaints. One of their official stands was that marriage should not change a woman’s appointment.36 The administration agreed to negotiate, but weak revisions in 1955 were not satisfactory. Talks dragged on for several years. In 1959 revised ‘Terms and Conditions of Employment for Teachers’ were promulgated. Some important changes were made, especially the elimination of rigidly expressed qualifications for appointment or promotion.37 The ban on married women, however, was still intact. Not only that: the faculty declared itself satisfied. The new ‘Terms and Conditions’ incorporated the faculty’s major recommendations, MUN Teachers’ Association President David Pitt indicated in a circular.38 All members of the staff were officially invited to consider the revised rules, and all in fact accepted them, including the dozen women faculty members and librarians. The view supporting the inclusion of married women in the faculty lacked even one fully determined champion.39 The administration changed its exclusionary rule in the early 1960s. First, women married to outsiders were accepted into employment, then women who were married to other faculty members. There were recruiting advantages to the new stance. Several wives of male faculty members were well-qualified scholars who wished to work. They could be hired with minimal effort and, already residing locally, did not complicate the university’s housing puzzle. Also, among those whom
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Memorial wished to attract from abroad were husbands and wives who would come only if the spouse were employed too. Thus, the sexliberalization in MUN’s hiring policy was a by-product of necessity and convenience, rather than an adjustment to faculty wishes or to lofty ideas about gender equality. Lifting the ban on married women was done without fanfare; there was no announcement. The change is evident, however, from studying the list of forty faculty members appointed in the fall of 1962. In previous years, all the women in faculty lists were designated ‘Miss.’ But in 1962, along with five ‘Miss’es were also five ‘Mrs’es. Three wives of long-time faculty members were part of this group, along with a couple of others whose appearance indicates an important new development in MUN staffing patterns: the wife-husband team recruited and employed together.40 A sign of transition from the old policy to a new one was the fact in that first year most of these women were termed ‘visiting lecturers.’ By the following year ‘visiting’ was dropped; now they were free to pursue formal academic careers at the very same university as their husbands. The idea of the ‘package deal’ – two professors taken in one hiring decision – remained an important feature of MUN recruiting throughout the next decade, and well beyond. In 1965, the next year in which faculty hiring was to be the greatest yet, five of the eighteen women hired belonged to professor-couples, usually but not necessarily in the same discipline. Notably, MUN’s acceptance of married women as faculty members did not affect the overall proportion of women among those newly hired. In the 1960s the status of women was changing in Canadian society as well as on many campuses. In 1966 the AUCC asked universities across the country about their policies on employing both husband and wife. University of Toronto had no particular policy, and only United College (Winnipeg) was still following the outdated policy of not employing married women. Slowing the overall improvement in the status of academic women, eleven universities headed by Dalhousie University, the University of Western Ontario, and the University of British Columbia would hire both, but not in the same department. They thus denied one spouse in the many cases where love had blossomed behind the stacks, or through joint studies in graduate school. Memorial was in the progressive majority group led by McGill – eighteen of thirty institutions reporting a definite policy – which would employ both husband and wife on the individual merits of each.41
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Academic Qualifications In respect to scholarly preparation, once again this study’s initial hypothesis was wrong. Given the rapid expansion of the university during the period under review, and the competition among MUN and numerous other institutions for available qualified personnel, it seemed reasonable to expect a general decline in academic qualifications among newly hired faculty members. A careful count of relevant credentials was made, noting the information given about each name the first time it appeared in the MUN calendar. The tabulation (see Table 5.3) shows no decline. Many scholars under thirty years of age, whose highest degree was a master’s, were at the time they applied for a faculty position in the process of seeking a doctorate. Over time, they would soon be even better qualified. Of the 954 cases in the period of this study, a few new hires, less than a dozen, showed no qualifications at all (especially early appointments in physical education and social welfare). Some of these no-degree cases may have been just a matter of information not being available. One delightfully archaic appointee claimed just one qualification, namely, ‘Esq.’ We deemed it not equivalent to any academic standing. Memorial’s intake included a solid nucleus of fully qualified professors with doctorates, sometimes hired right out of graduate school or a post-doctoral program, sometimes attracted from other universities. Surpassing this group in qualifications were numerous four-degree people, approximately a dozen five- or six-degree cases, and the outstanding example of Hugh Sampath. Sampath joined the faculty in 1968 during a little statistical lull between two years of massive hiring. He was a native of Trinidad, and finding it difficult to choose between anthropology and psychiatry, he became fully qualified in both. His progress as a student before joining the MUN faculty was a Bachelor of Arts from McGill University, a master’s from Columbia, a Master of Arts and Bachelor of Literature from Oxford University, a Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery from Oxford, and finally a Diploma in Psychiatry back at familiar McGill. Our basic approach was to count degrees and equivalent qualifications held by new appointees. There are some perils and fine discriminations that must be kept in mind when trying this arithmetic. In North America, having three degrees – bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate – was usually considered full qualification for college teaching and re-
Faculty Development at Memorial University 143 Table 5.3. Number of degrees, diplomas, and other qualifications held by faculty members appointed at MUN, 1950-1972 Decade
Number of faculty appointed
Number of academic credentials
Average credentials per professor
1950–9 1960–9 1970–1
99 596 259
178 1,190 559
1.8 2.0 2.2
Source: Based on a full list of newly hired faculty deposited at MUN’s Centre for Newfoundland Studies. Note: For the most part, this table accommodates credentials issued by universities. A few exceptions are designations granted by professional associations after specific courses of study, such as the ‘Chartered Accountant’ status of some professors appointed in commerce/business. Certificates of teaching competence and medical specialties are included.
search. In many universities in the British tradition, however, the master’s is a first degree. Therefore, a two-degree program culminating in a British doctorate should be considered roughly equal in credentials to an American or Canadian three-degree doctorate. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Memorial offered an interesting conjoint degree involving teacher-training, which was often taken simultaneously with another first degree. Quite often MUN hired its own graduates, some of whom were four-degree people, for example holding a BA, BA(Ed), MA, and a PhD. All these examples, with the number of degrees ranging from two to four, are roughly equivalent, and excellent preparation for appointment to a university post. If in some cases two degrees and four degrees can be equal, then obviously just counting the number of degrees will not answer all questions. For addressing the question of faculty preparation, however, counting seems as good a method as any other (while keeping in mind all necessary exceptions and contrary patterns). The count of qualifications held by new appointees at MUN reveals a very important chronological sequence. Memorial faculty were well qualified at appointment, and surprisingly, their quality actually improved throughout this period of great competition. Why was this the case? In the 1950s, on university campuses in the western world, generally huge increases in student population pressured governments and colleges to rapidly expand programs of graduate study needed to prepare the instructors. The greatest bulge of new demand struck Newfoundland in the late 1960s, a few years after it had washed through central Canada.
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By that time rather plentiful cadres of would-be professors were tumbling from recently enlarged graduate schools in Canada and other countries.42 Qualifications were a matter of serious discussion between the administration and the faculty during the 1950s. MUN’s hiring standards, fully published and disclosed to the public, stipulated that a master’s degree was required for appointment as lecturer or assistant professor, with a doctorate necessary for promotion to associate professor. The Teachers’ Association thought that such regulations ‘cast reflections upon the present Faculty as evidenced by comments and radio announcers and front-page columns of local papers.’43 All cases, the association argued, should be treated individually on their own merits. The renegotiated 1959 Terms of Appointment dropped all references to any particular degrees needed for employment or promotion.44 By the late 1960s, part of the grant money available from the university budget was specifically designated to assist faculty members to improve their qualifications. Thus Memorial institutionalized a stance that did not insist upon candidates possessing full credentials at the time of hiring. Good prospects would not be excluded – and programs perhaps left unstaffed? – merely because people had not yet accomplished what they certainly could, especially if given practical encouragement. Sometimes other types of qualifications could be as significant as academic ones when recruiters were looking for scholars who would come to Newfoundland and stay. In 1967 a list of Canadians pursuing graduate studies abroad circulated on campus. Thinking of programs difficult to staff, acting President M.O. Morgan noted one particular prospect who was studying physical education at Ohio State University. The director of physical education at MUN expressed gratitude for the hint, but he had ‘just completed negotiations with final appointee for next year – an Englishman married to a girl from Topsail presently studying at University of Florida – the right person for the vacancy.’45 Topsail is a suburb of St John’s. One hoped that having family so close by would make this professor’s appointment less vulnerable, as others often were, to awkwardly rapid turnover. When studying faculty members’ qualifications, another significant aspect to note is where faculty had experienced post-secondary education. In their later work environment, faculty members would tend to reproduce patterns and atmosphere which they knew during their own careers as students. To help us think about the kind of university Me-
Faculty Development at Memorial University 145 Table 5.4. Location of institutions where MUN faculty earned academic qualifications prior to appointment, decade by decade, 1950–1972 1950s
1960s
1970s
Degrees and diplomas from institutions in:
No.
(%)
No.
(%)
No.
(%)
United States of America Britain/Ireland Canada (Including MUN) Continental Europe Asia Australia/New Zealand Africa Latin America
24 45 87 (7) 15 4 3 – –
(13) (25) (49) (4) (8) (2) (2) – –
277 291 501 (138) 38 48 17 16 2
(23) (25) (42) (12) (3) (4) (1) (1) (–)
178 126 226 (68) 7 11 4 5 2
(32) (24) (40) (12) (1) (2) (1) (1) (–)
Source: Based on a full list of newly hired faculty deposited at MUN’s Centre for Newfoundland Studies. See note at table 5.1.
morial was in process of becoming, let us ask (see Table 5.4) where the incoming professors had previously studied. Table 5.4 shows that universities in mainland Canada, the United States, and Great Britain were the most important training grounds. Over time, American colleges became increasingly important, granting 32 per cent of the degrees held by those appointed in the early 1970s, compared with 28 per cent from Canadian institutions on the mainland. Britain quite consistently provided about one-quarter of the qualifications. Memorial itself became significant too, having granted 12 per cent of degrees held by persons appointed to the staff through the 1960s and early 1970s. These were mostly undergraduate degrees, since MUN’s movement into doctoral studies was just beginning. The number of qualifications from Memorial, and Newfoundlanders recruited back into service in their own university, would have been greater except for the unwritten rule recalled by Leslie Harris (student in the 1950s, joined the faculty in 1962, university president 1981–90): ‘Memorial graduates could not get positions here unless they had spent at least two years somewhere else ... One did not come straight out of graduate school, back to Memorial to teach, for fear of inbreeding.’46 Even though more countries were involved, as time passed the rest of the world became relatively less important in shaping the prior experience of Memorial’s new professors. Continental Europe shrank in significance from awarding 8 per cent to just 1 per cent of degrees. The first
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Asian degrees in all of Memorial’s experience were recorded when graduates of Madras and Seoul joined the faculty in 1958. In the following decade universities in Asia, especially in India, awarded 4 per cent of the degrees of new faculty members. Nationality From which segments and sections of the human race were Memorial’s faculty members drawn? Before 1950 Memorial University College was staffed chiefly by Newfoundlanders with mainland-Canadian credentials and experience. Students at the college in St Johns, and most of their professors, shared the same basic socialization: that of British subjects in a Newfoundland milieu, which was increasingly influenced by and attracted to neighbouring North American societies. The tabulation of qualifications held by those who joined the faculty in the 1950s and 1960s, however, suggests the staff became much more international in character. To what degree, it is important to ask, did the socialization of the professoriate come to challenge or contrast with traditional norms of Newfoundland? Here the early hypothesis was that MUN experience might well show a pronounced Americanization of the faculty. Once again, the expectation was proved wrong by an experience that was more complex, and in this case much more global. Between 1940 and 1970, Newfoundlanders declined from a threequarters majority to a consistent one-fifth of new hirings (see Table 5.5). Mainland Canadians were usually at the same level, about 20 per cent (their proportion rose to one-third during the 1950s). Statistically, the decline in Newfoundlanders was balanced by an influx of British and Irish appointees and a significant but far from overwhelming intake of scholars from the United States. The world outside Atlantic Englishspeaking countries continued providing about 15 per cent of new faculty – from continental Europe, India, and Australia chiefly. Eventually, relatively exotic places like Egypt, Jamaica, Argentina, and even Macao were at least thinly represented. We predicted galloping Americanization of the faculty because of the furor in the late 1960s concerning an avalanche of American appointees in Canadian universities. The publicity was in part triggered when a ginger group of activists at Carleton University, Ottawa, produced statistics showing that three-quarters of recently hired academic staff at Canadian universities were non-Canadians, and mostly from one foreign source.47 Overwhelmingly large cohorts of American appointments
Faculty Development at Memorial University 147 Table 5.5 Nationality of faculty members hired by Memorial University, 1940–1970a 1940s
1950s
1960–6
1967–70
Nationality
No.
(%)
No.
(%)
No.
(%)
No.
(%)
Mainland Canada Newfoundlandb American British/Irish Continental Europe Asia Australia/New Zealand Africa West Indies/Latin America
6 22 – 2 – – – – –
(20) (73) – (7) – – – – –
32 20 7 22 10 3 2 – –
(33) (21) (7) (23) (10) (3) (2) – –
57 53 36 77 17 19 2 3 2
(21) (20) (14) (29) (6) (7) (1) (1) (1)
92 92 74 111 22 19 3 10 4
(22) (22) (17) (26) (5) (4) (1) (2) (1)
Source: Based on a full list of newly hired faculty deposited at MUN’s Centre for Newfoundland Studies. See note at table 5.1. a This table represents information known or assumed for 819 of 833 persons. The term ‘nationality’ in this table’s heading requires explanation. Some professors had grown up in countries other than their birthplaces. The country where an individual learned social values and expectations, from his or her own formative experiences was assigned as the most meaningful ‘nationality’ for purposes of this analysis. b It seemed more reasonable to include the three appointees from St Pierre with Newfoundland rather than with Canada or continental Europe.
did not appear at Memorial chiefly because of the strong British connections which Newfoundland and its university maintained. ‘Our faculty continues to grow in numbers,’ President Gushue reported in 1960, ‘and we have at Memorial one of the most interesting groups in Canada. We have sought faculty members from many universities and countries in the belief that universality is essential.’48 There were gaps, however, in that universality. Before 1972 the MUN faculty included very few Jews, and no blacks: the small contingent from Africa was composed of white South Africans and Egyptians. Nevertheless, Gushue spoke a good deal of truth. The Memorial campus was certainly the most varied and cosmopolitan scene in all of Newfoundland, where society tended very strongly to be homogeneously white, of British or Irish descent, and English speaking. MUN’s planners were satisfied with the amalgam of academics which their recruitment policies had brought together by the early 1970s. Ian Rusted thought that for the Medical School, a ‘reasonable goal during the first few years would be a faculty with a mix of one-third Canadian, one-third from the United States, and the remainder from Britain or elsewhere.’ The original pattern was quite close to the target, but in a
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few years Canadians swelled to half the staff, and Americans dropped to less than 15 per cent.49 Was Memorial’s experience of faculty development between 1950 and 1972 more or less typical for universities in Canada, or was it in any respects unusual? This is a difficult question to answer. Faculty members have been greatly overlooked in previous historical studies, so we really know very little, in a corporate or group sense, about them. The recent historiography of Canadian universities shows a great shift from one approach to another. Until the 1980s studies tended to be top-down administrative accounts, concentrating on presidents and governors, the plans they laid and the buildings they built. Then the influence of social history was felt. Demographic analyses of the student body were added to administrative studies. Thus the object of scholarly attention enlarged from administrators only, to embrace clients (students) as well. This field of vision, however, was still incomplete. Between administrators on one hand, and students on the other, there is the executive apparatus which acts to realize the purposes of the university: namely, the faculty. Even the highest-quality university histories of the late twentieth century were weakened by relying upon anecdotal impressions, rather than methodical statistics, in their evaluation of this key group. For example, both John Reid’s study of Mount Allison and Peter Waite’s work on Dalhousie University contain numerous pages of statistics about students, but none probing patterns in the faculty.50 In its mixture of backgrounds and origins, the faculty at MUN may have been more international than many universities on the mainland. At Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, for example, Canadians kept a 70 per cent share of faculty posts through the 1960s.51 At MUN, during the same decade, nearly 60 per cent of those hired were nonCanadians. McGill University in Montreal is described in that decade as having a ‘preponderance of non-Anglo-Saxon teachers,’52 but MUN was unlike that either. The mixture of ethnicities at McGill reflected the polyglot communities which immigration had drawn to the surrounding metropolis. Four-fifths of Memorial’s foreign teachers, however, came from an ethnic background similar to that of the majority of Canadians, having originated in widely scattered corners of the former British Empire. At St John’s the accents of Tasmania and Witwatersrand, Manhattan and Manchester, jostled against those of the Avalon peninsula and Alberta.
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Professors at MUN were probably as well qualified as those at comparable universities on the mainland. The range extended from wellregarded Queen’s, where during the 1950s arts and science faculty members with doctorates increased from 50 per cent to 54 per cent, to smaller Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Quebec, where the proportion fell to 30 per cent by the mid-1960s.53 At MUN, this particular measurement shows that in the 1950s, 39 per cent of new appointees held a doctorate. The proportion declined to 36 per cent during the early 1960s. Fortunately, gender inequities in universities have been studied from many angles.54 In its hiring practices MUN was a little more liberal in accepting women faculty members than the average Canadian university, and a little less volatile – that is, more consistent. Across Canada the proportion of women on staff fell from 17 per cent in 1950 to 13 per cent in 1964, staying at that lower level into the 1970s.55 MUN did not follow this trend of decline. Instead, a consistent pattern emerged throughout the whole period with about one-fifth of all appointments in the university being women. Fifteen years after Memorial dropped its no-wives-of-faculty rule in 1962, there was a report that ‘many’ universities still continued denying ‘married academics the right to work in the same department or even the same institution.’56 In its hiring practices generally, MUN seems to have been quite thorough, methodical, and fair. Ordinary vacancies were advertised widely. Only in rare instances, usually connected with curriculum innovation, were deliberate attempts made to recruit ‘stars.’ Many universities, it seems, like Mount Allison in Sackville, New Brunswick, relied on networks of personal connections rather than impersonal advertisements.57 By doing so, they likely deprived themselves of interesting prospects in an increasingly international, even global, academic marketplace. When Memorial relaxed the rule against employing married women and both spouses, the university was then more vulnerable to the possibility of nepotism. No complaints of improper appointments, however, have come to light in this study. Memorial’s efforts to be competitive in salary rates – and most extra inducements offered to attract and keep staff – were similar to those at other universities, from one end of the country to the other. One particular inducement at MUN, however – its housing policy – was quite unusual. It was not uncommon for Canadian institutions to make some moderate effort to assist faculty members to solve their housing problems. Many examples include plans at the University of Waterloo,
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Bishop’s University, and St Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.58 In the late 1960s, as Memorial’s rushed growth outstripped the local community’s housing capacity, similar plans for mortgage assistance no longer sufficed. The result was the university’s giant leap into the status of residential landlord. This business peaked with sixty-five houses rented out and clamorous waiting lists each fall. It was an adroit policy, probably unique in Canada, to address the recruitment and retention problem faced in eastern Newfoundland. As Memorial seized the status of ‘largest full-service university in the Atlantic provinces,’59 growth was the period’s great overriding theme. Did faculty development at any other college in Canada match the tremendous expansion and elaboration of MUN in the decade following the 1961 removal to Elizabeth Avenue? In the number of faculty members, no doubt several other Canadian universities grew at least as fast as MUN. In Ontario, for example, during the five-year stretch from 1965 to 1969, as new universities came into operation and old ones expanded, full-time enrollment almost tripled (191 per cent increase).60 Those same years were among MUN’s best for growth, yet the student body did not quite double (up 85 per cent). With increased enrollment, there was more pressure for faculty enlargement in Ontario than in Newfoundland. After growing rapidly at first, however, many of Ontario’s new universities such as Brock in St Catharines, Trent in Peterborough, and Laurentian in Sudbury levelled off in student numbers before reaching the size and scope that MUN attained. Faculty development involves not only raw numbers of academics hired, but also the reason they are employed. We need to take into account whether an institution’s curriculum is static or expanding, whether programs are persisting or proliferating. For example, if a huge university tripled in size but only continued offering its familiar old specialties, its ‘faculty development’ might not be as significant as that at a smaller college which merely doubled its student population but added important new programs. When both the explosion in numbers and the elaboration of the curriculum are considered, proceedings at Memorial through the 1960s to 1972 were, in the whole Canadian context, very impressive.61 We cannot see precisely where this story fits in the national context, however, until there are more detailed studies explaining what happened in other parts of Canada. Perhaps the experience in Newfoundland was of such intensity, speed, and scope as to make it the outstanding example
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of faculty development for the whole country. This is a good and sensible, if unexpected, hypothesis. It remains entirely unproved, however, pending the appearance of more institutional studies with which Memorial’s record can be compared. notes The author would like to thank Melvin Baker, Memorial University archivist and historian, for assistance in preparing this essay, and at the other end of the country William Bruneau of the University of British Columbia, who offered comments on an early draft. 1 See the story of how MUN president Raymond Gushue kept saying 2,000 would be the ideal registration level, while Premier Joey Smallwood continually rebuked him in public by mentioning eight to ten thousand or more. David M. Cameron, More than an Academic Question: Universities, Governments and Public Policy in Canada (Halifax: Institute for Research on Public Policy, 1991), 92–3. 2 This took place under the aegis of an organization and bureaucracy which ignored the international border that officially bisected the region: the Common Examining Board of the Maritime provinces and Newfoundland, established 1930–2. See Malcolm MacLeod, Kindred Countries: Canada and Newfoundland before Confederation (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association Historical Booklet No. 52, 1994), 20. 3 Figures for 1951 and 1971 calculated from F.H. Leacy, ed., Historical Statistics of Canada, 2nd ed. (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services [MSS], 1983), A2-24, W340-357. 4 Cameron, More than an Academic Question, 166–7. 5 See the discussion of Memorial’s expansion and elaboration in Melvin Baker, ‘Memorial University of Newfoundland,’ Encyclopaedia of Newfoundland and Labrador, vol. 3 (St John’s: Cuff, 1991), 505–9. 6 See John Bowers, ed., New Medical Schools at Home and Abroad (New York: Macy Foundation, 1978), 222. 7 Without a medical school, David Cameron would not likely have referred to Memorial as Atlantic Canada’s largest ‘full-service’ university. More than an Academic Question, 439. Throughout the 1990s, the annual ranking of Canadian universities by Maclean’s magazine grouped institutions in three categories according to curriculum development and research intensity. Universities were ‘primarily undergraduate,’ or ‘comprehensive,’ or – the
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11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
Malcolm MacLeod most prestigious – the ‘medical-doctoral’ group, with a ‘broad range of PhD programs and research, as well as medical schools.’ Ann Dowsett Johnston, ‘Measuring Excellence,’ Maclean’s, 15 Nov. 1999, 60–7. The master list, described in the note attached to table 5.1, is deposited in the MUN Library Centre for Newfoundland Studies. Harris and Papezik to the President, 9 Feb. 1966, MUN file ‘MUNFA 1966–70.’ The report from Dalhousie was the clinching evidence of inefficiency used against the unlucky sabbaticant. The professor landed on his feet, however, continuing his career in community and state colleges in California. The case is one of the last examples of Memorial University accepting Dalhousie as senior partner and mentor, before they became equals and rivals. MUN, Hatcher Papers. Earlier, a professor who left Memorial’s faculty in 1933 had been the subject of many rumours about his being too interested in women students, but there is no indication that this is why he left. See Malcolm MacLeod, A Bridge Built Halfway: A History of Memorial University College, 1925–50 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), 145. Michiel Horn points out that dismissals which infringed on academic freedom usually arose when professors challenged widely held political or religious ideas, especially in circumstances that offended the ruling university order. See Horn, Academic Freedom in Canada: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). MacLeod, A Bridge Built Halfway, 95. It is also beyond the period studied in Horn’s book, where there is only a brief discussion. See Horn, Academic Freedom in Canada, 318. M.O. Morgan (vice-president) to President R. Gushue 30 April 1963, MUN file ‘ACU, 1963.’ MUN, President’s Report: 1966–7, 11, 27. Lord Taylor of Harlow, A Natural History of Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 404. Bowers, New Medical Schools, 232. This practice was unlike many mainland universities, which did not advertise at all. They did not advertise vacancies because they were well established and it was ‘beneath them’ or, being newly established or less eminent, they did not want to demonstrate that professors were not particularly interested in applying for positions there. At the end of the 1960s three-quarters of positions to be filled in Canadian universities were never advertised. See Robin Mathews and James Steele, The Struggle for Canadian Universities (Toronto: New Press, 1969), 65.
Faculty Development at Memorial University 153 19 See, for example, Gushue to Board of Regents 2 July 1954; and Gushue to Secretary, AUBC, 17 March and 26 May 1954, MUN file ‘ACU 1954–9.’ 20 The federal government’s ‘Operation Retrieval’ was no help. For the most part, Canadian graduate students in the United States did not receive the invitation to come to recruiting meetings held on their campuses because the Department of Labour’s addresses for them were badly outdated. See papers in MUN file ‘AUCC Aug.–Dec. 1965’ and ‘June–Dec. 1966.’ Mathews and Steele published a survey on Operation Retrieval done by one of the Canadians at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Forty per cent of the graduate students tried to use the service, but ‘no student has been led to a job offer through his contact with the agency.’ Mathews and Steele, The Struggle for Canadian Universities, 68–70. 21 Inspector H.C. Russell, RCMP St John’s, to Commissioner 4 January 1963, cited in Steve Hewitt, ‘“Information Believed True”: RCMP Security Intelligence Activities on Canadian University Campuses and the Controversy Surrounding Them,’ Canadian Historical Review 81, no. 2 (June 2000): 203. 22 Taylor, A Natural History of Everyday Life, 424–5. 23 Circular of 4 Jan. 1967, MUN file ‘AUCC 1966–7.’ 24 See Gushue’s first letter to the AUCC 17 March 1954, MUN file ‘ACU 1954–9.’ 25 For example, advertisements via this channel helped MUN fill twentyeight of the forty positions in 1962, and thirty-four of thirty-eight positions in 1964. The most common other Canadian advertisers in the mid–1960s were McGill University, Queen’s University, University of Manitoba, University of Alberta, and University of British Columbia. See AUBC, Report of the Council for appropriate years, Appendix II, ‘Overseas appointments,’ MUN files ‘Association of Commonwealth universities’ 1960–2 and 1964–5. 26 E. Sheffield, AUCC, to M.O. Morgan 20 May 1966, and reply MorganSheffield 3 June 1966. MUN file ‘AUCC June–Dec. 1966.’ The reply did not mention the one slightly sour note that had caused AUBC to apologize to MUN about the ‘unfortunate experience’ with a language teacher who had been hired in Europe on AUBC’s recommendation after answering an advertisement in the Times Literary Supplement. She arrived as expected and signed a two-year contract, but in the second year, at the last moment as classes began, she wrote to say she had another position in the United States and would not be returning. Assistant secretary AUBC to Gushue 30 September 1958, MUN file ‘ACU 1954–9.’ 27 Memorial University, A Guide to Life and Work at the University in St John’s (St John’s: Memorial University, 1966), i.
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28 J.W. Larner, ed., Guide to St John’s (St John’s: MUNFA, 1969), 4. 29 Gushue to John Crean, Bladen Commission, 9 April 1965, MUN file ‘Bladen Commission.’ 30 MacLeod, A Bridge Built Halfway, 96. David Cameron found that by 1960 salaries paid in universities of the Maritimes were 75 per cent and 80 per cent of those in central Canada, for full and associate professors respectively. More Than an Academic Question, 81–2. 31 Salary brief to the Board of Regents, January 1958; MUNFA Salary Brief, 1971–2, 9–10. MUN files ‘MUNTA 1954–61’ and ‘MUNFA 1966–70.’ 32 See President to Board of Regents, 15 Dec. 1966; MUNTA committee headed by Bill Kearns, report Nov. 1969; and other documents in MUN file ‘Housing.’ 33 Minute of 11 March 1975, MUN file ‘Housing.’ The divestiture authorized in 1975 applied to all the residences Memorial then owned, except for a certain number of houses it had acquired through expropriation in Pippy Park. See Eaton to Morgan, 17 Jan. 1977. 34 While civilian males were in short supply, nearly half of college hirings, seven of seventeen, were women. MacLeod, A Bridge Built Halfway, App. 4, 276–84. 35 Ibid., 90–3. 36 Report of faculty on ‘Rules,’ 1953, MUN file ‘Terms and Conditions of Employment of Faculty, 1952–65.’ 37 The 1952 ‘Rules’ had seven titled sections. One, comprising eight paragraphs, specified in detail exactly what degrees were necessary for various ranks. It disappeared entirely in the 1959 revision. 38 Pitt to faculty members, 30 Jan. 1960, MUN, ‘Terms and Conditions … 1952–65.’ 39 Gushue to Board of Regents, 7 May 1960, ibid. See also, papers in file ‘MUNTA 1954–61.’ 40 Julie and Don Steele, both Canadians, came to the Department of Biology from McGill University; Mr and Mrs F.J.K. Taylor – he was a Newfoundlander, she a mainland Canadian – joined the Department of Physical Education from teaching posts in New Brunswick. Faculty list in MUN, Calendar 1962–63 (St John’s: MUN, 1962). 41 In 1956 Dalhousie had adopted the old MUN rule ‘that marriage by a woman faculty member was deemed to terminate her appointment,’ but apparently did not maintain it very long. Peter Waite, The Lives of Dalhousie University, vol. 2 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 187. AUCC, March 1966 questionnaire, MUN file ‘AUCC June–Dec. 1966.’ Although Memorial’s hiring has since the 1960s been gender-blind, the
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42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50
university’s pension practices have not been. From the 1950s, while the rate of pension contributions for most male academics was 6 per cent of salary, for women it was 5 per cent (with no survivor benefits). Since 1977, all new employees have paid the higher rate, but previously employed women were given the option of continuing under the old plan and many did so. Some may not retire until around the year 2012 or 2015, and not until then will all of MUN’s professoriate, women or men, have the same standardized treatment in pension arrangements. MUN files ‘Faculty Pensions’ 1956–64, 1962–5, 1966–7; and telephone interview with Human Resources analyst Glen Roberts, 27 Feb. 2002. See Cameron, More Than an Academic Question, 59–60, 100. Faculty Report on the Rules, 1953. MUN file ‘Terms and Conditions … 1952–65.’ MUN, Terms and Conditions of Appointment, Tenure, Service & Employment of the Teachers of the University (22 April 1959), section II. Circular of 29 May 1967. Foster to Morgan 19 June 1967. MUN file ‘AUCC 1966–7.’ Malcolm MacLeod, ed., Crossroads Country: Memories of Pre-Confederation Newfoundlanders (St John’s: Breakwater, 1999), 300. A major spur to the controversy was the alarmist work by Mathews and Steele, The Struggle for Canadian Universities. MUN, President’s Report, 1959–60, 1. Bowers, New Medical Schools, 232. For example, Reid’s second volume has one and a half-dozen different tables analysing students at Mount Allison, and for purposes of comparison sometimes students at other institutions in the Maritimes, with respect to male-female ratios, religious affiliation, enrollment numbers, parents’ occupation, failure rates, and home background by size of community or by geographic origin (province or foreign country). Mount Allison University, vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 439–57. Waite has a statistical appendix analysing students by program, gender, and permanent residence. Lives of Dalhousie, vol. 2, 407–15. Neither has any similar statistics on the attributes of professors. A couple of scholars have paid some attention to the demography of faculty members. William Bruneau sketched out an appealing prosopographical approach in his ‘Toward a New Collective Biography: The UBC Professoriate, 1915–45,’ Canadian Journal of Education 19, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 65–79. His full study has not yet appeared. I provided six columns of data on the eighty-three faculty members appointed at Memorial University College, 1925 to 1949 (MacLeod, A Bridge Halfway, App. 4, 276–84), now supplemented with
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54
55
56 57
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Malcolm MacLeod similar information on the 954 professors hired during 1950–71, on which this study is based. (The list is deposited in the MUN Library Centre for Newfoundland Studies.) Frederick G. Gibson, ‘To Serve and Yet Be Free’: Queen’s University, 1917–61 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983), 483. Stanley Frost, McGill University: For the Advancement of Learning, vol. 2 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984), 404–5. Gibson, ‘To Serve and Yet Be Free,’ 336, 343–4. Christopher Nicholl, Bishop’s University, 1843–1970 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 259–60. Among other studies, see: The Chilly Collective et al., Breaking Anonymity: The Chilly Climate for Women Faculty (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1995); Anne Dagg and Patricia Thompson, MisEducation: Women and Canadian Universities (Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies In Education, 1988); Margaret Gillet, We Walked Very Warily: A History of Women at McGill (Montreal: Eden Press, 1981); M. Patricia Marchak, Racism, Sexism and the University: The Political Science Affair at University of British Columbia (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996); Gisele Thibault, The Dissenting Feminist Academy: A History of the Barriers to Feminist Scholarship (New York: Lang, 1987). Constance Backhouse, ‘Women Faculty at the University of Western Ontario: Reflections on the Employment Equity Award,’ Canadian Journal of Women and the Law (1990): 40. Jill Vickers and June Adam, But Can You Type? Canadian Universities and the Status of Women (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1977), 105. See Reid, Mount Allison, vol. 2, 250–1. In 1977, Vickers and Adam thought Canadian universities were a ‘system which still generally recruits on the basis of an old-boy network.’ But Can You Type?, 104–5. For the University of Waterloo, see M.O. Morgan to Premier F. Moores, 12 Sept. 1972, MUN file ‘Housing.’ For Bishop’s University, see Nicholl, Bishop’s University, 279. James D. Cameron, For the People: A History of St Francis Xavier University (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 325. Cameron, More than an Academic Question, 439. Paul Axelrod, Scholars and Dollars: Politics, Economics and the Universities of Ontario, 1945–80 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 207. One suspects that if there were more outstanding faculty development, and growth as rapid, anywhere else in anglophone Canada, it would be at York University. From its establishment in 1960, York also grew quickly through the same years as Memorial’s terrific expansion. York had the
Faculty Development at Memorial University 157 population of Toronto and its northern outskirts – several times that of all Newfoundland – from which to draw students. Enrollment increased over 500 per cent in one five-year stretch during the late 1960s. Axelrod, Scholars and Dollars, 207. St John’s never saw anything like that. Before long York’s curriculum rivalled Memorial’s in comprehensiveness, offering preparation in several professions including law, but not medicine, as well as all the usual and some exotic arts and science subjects. Michiel Horn’s autobiography reveals that in September 1972, ‘more than a hundred’ new faculty members were added to the staff at York. Becoming Canadian: Memoirs of an Invisible Immigrant (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 263. Were there any years that matched Memorial’s bell-wether 1969, when 167 new professors were added?
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6 The Social Sciences at Bishop’s University: The Professoriate and Changes in Academic Culture, 1950–1985 DONALD FISHER Academic culture at Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Quebec, underwent a fundamental change in the late 1960s and 1970s as the ‘old’ Bishop’s was transformed into the ‘new’ Bishop’s. The transformation emerged from the interaction among a whole range of external and internal forces, not least of which was the establishment of the social science departments. The most important external factors included the socio-political climate in Quebec, the student movement, and the democratization of university governance. These structural trends were accompanied by the rise of what Weaver has called ‘disciplinary professionalism’ as academics struggled to establish their own disciplines and their own profession as professors.1 The most important internal factors inevitably were to some extent expressions of the external forces outlined above. As the university became more democratic, the old hierarchy was challenged in other ways, a challenge that culminated in unionization of the faculty in 1976. The emergence and eventual dominance of the Department (later Division) of Business Administration in the political economy of the university irrevocably altered the ethos of the old Bishop’s. Founded in 1845 and chartered in 1853, Bishop’s University began as an Anglican, liberal arts university whose mission was not utilitarian.2 Then and through most of its history, the intent was to create an academic community that through the study of what is best in Western Civilization would produce in students what John Henry Newman called a ‘philosophical habit of mind.’3 Bishop’s University was created to serve the English-speaking community of the Eastern Townships, to preserve British values and, in particular, to prepare Anglican clergymen in an area where Americans had settled. The population in the
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middle of the nineteenth century was predominantly English speaking,4 but the latter half of the twentieth century has seen the Englishspeaking population decrease and English schools close. Throughout the period of this study, the university remained small, and student enrollment did not exceed 1,200. The focus during the 1950s and 1960s was on a ‘sound and liberal education,’5 primarily at the undergraduate level, with a limited number of students in MEd and MA programs. All students were required to take foundational courses in the humanities, divinity, Latin, and Greek. A turning point occurred in the 1960s and the early 1970s. While these were the years of massive expansion and dramatic change for the social sciences in English-speaking Canada, for English-speaking universities in Quebec the change was in the opposite direction. The creation of the Collèges d’enseignement général et professionnel (CEGEPs) in 1967 as a direct result of the recommendations contained in the Reports of the Royal Commission of Inquiry on Education in the Province of Quebec (1963–6), better known as the Parent Commission, produced a sharp reduction in numbers of both students and faculty members, not only in the social sciences but across the campus, and an ensuing malaise about the university’s role and its future. Yet the general shift towards more democratic forms of governance through increased representation, and the establishment of social science disciplines at Bishop’s in the years leading up to 1970, combined, as they did throughout Canada, to produce structural changes that irrevocably changed the ethos of the university. In particular, the rapid expansion of Business Administration symbolized a new utilitarian Bishop’s that could no longer afford the luxury of being an elite, liberal arts university. The election of the Parti Québécois in 1976 and the passage of Bill 101 the following year served to maintain a climate of insecurity in Quebec’s English-speaking universities and prompted an exodus of well-educated Anglophones. This chapter is based on a case study of Bishop’s University. The work is part of a larger study documenting the history and sociology of the social sciences in English-speaking universities in Canada.6 The main purpose is to trace the work people do directly and through institutions to create, maintain, and break down boundaries between knowledge units7 and to document the changing balance between different forms of capital (economic, cultural, and social) as the social science field and the culture of the university changed.8 My concerns in this chapter are with the boundary separating the social science ‘field’9 from other knowledge and the boundaries separating social science
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disciplines from each other. By tracing the history of the social sciences at Bishop’s, my intention is to show how the social science professoriate changed through time, and to explicate the changing relation between the social science field and the culture of the university. The Social Sciences at Bishop’s University The total number of social science faculty during the period under study never exceeded forty. Among the applied disciplines or fields, social work and law were not represented, while in the pure disciplines or fields anthropology was missing. The departments at Bishop’s were small; only Business Administration achieved a size comparable to a department in a larger university, becoming the largest single academic unit (division) in the university by 1985. While the social science faculty doubled between 1965 and 1975, the expansion was not as dramatic as in English-speaking Canada. In 1950 only three social science departments existed: History, Philosophy and Economics, and Education. The expansion of the social sciences occurred in part as new disciplines and fields become recognized as departments between 1957 and 1967. Economics and Philosophy separated in the mid-1950s. 10 The Department of Business Administration was created in 1958, with Psychology following suit in 1960, Political Science and Geography in 1961, and Sociology in 1967. Through the 1950s and 1960s, all of the social science departments except Education were part of either the Faculty of Arts and Science, or later simply the Faculty of Arts. The three-faculty structure (Arts, Science, and Theology) with a single Dean of Faculties was reformulated in 1971 with the creation of five divisions: Business Administration, Humanities, Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Social Sciences, and Graduate Studies. History was placed in the Humanities Division; the Department of Education, which had been expanded into the Graduate School of Education in 1964, became the centrepiece of the new Division of Graduate Studies. Until then, the Department of Education had reported directly to the Principal. Each division elected a chair, who reported to the newly titled Dean of Faculty, whose role continued the tradition that everyone belonged to ‘one’ faculty. Decisions were taken by majority vote in meetings of ‘the faculty.’ Departments now elected ‘chairmen’ rather than having appointed heads. The story of the social sciences is perhaps best told by focusing on three disciplines or fields: Education, Business Administration, and
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History. Education because this field came to be regarded as a guardian of the liberal arts tradition of Bishop’s. Business Administration because this field became the dominant academic unit on campus and pushed the university in a utilitarian direction. History because this discipline until 1971 sat on the boundary separating the humanities from the social sciences. Education as a field began at Bishop’s in 1898; it became a department in 1928 and subsequently expanded into the Graduate School of Education. In an ironic twist, given the university’s commitment to the liberal arts at the undergraduate level and hence its emphasis on the disciplines of history, philosophy, and theology, this professional field at the graduate level in many ways became the representation of the ethos of Bishop’s. In no small way, this perception was based on the commitment and devotion of three men who constituted the program over sixty years. Education was defined as a multidisciplinary liberal arts field. The academic focus was ‘foundational’ and was intended to supplement the general education deemed essential for anyone entering the profession. Education survived and expanded in part because these professors maintained their separation from the rest of the university. The ‘separate’ place of Education depended on close connections to the educational community and the active support of a series of Principals. Sitting between, on the one hand, the Central Board of Protestant Examiners or the Provincial Department of Education and, on the other, the university administration gave the program autonomy and its academic director a great deal of freedom. The fact that teacher education was housed within a university from the late nineteenth century was unique in the British Empire, and distinctly different from what was happening in French-speaking Quebec (see Chapter 7 in this volume). Prior to the Parent Report, all teacher training for French-speaking students took place in small Normal Schools scattered throughout the province. MacDonald College served the needs of English-speaking teacher education students in the greater Montreal area. Jeffrey D. Jefferis, an alumnus of the program (1927), ran the department for twenty-four years from 1944 through to 1968. For most of that period ‘Dr Jeff’ was the Department of Education. Jefferis was an experienced high school teacher who had gone on to McGill and the University of Toronto, where he completed a doctorate in Classics. With his retirement, J. Angrave, with two degrees from Bishop’s (BA and MEd), took up the challenge. He had been teaching full-time in Education
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since 1963. Alan W. Jones (MA, Durham University) who had joined the program in 1969, became the director in 1974 and continued until his early death in 1985. Through their devotion to teaching and the cultural role of Bishop’s in preparing teachers for rural English schools in Quebec, these men created and reproduced a ‘learning community’ that emphasized the link between theory and practice. As one ex-Principal of Bishop’s put it, the Professors of Education represented ‘the best that Bishop’s had to offer.’11 Jefferis was a gifted teacher who combined a solid intellect and vast reading with a mischievous sense of humour. He was deeply attached to the ‘idea’ of Bishop’s. He and his wife lived on campus and invited students for tea on a regular basis. Apart from the summer of 1950, when the university was undergoing renovations, he also ran the summer program and hence did not take vacations. From 1931, the Department of Education operated a summer school for practising teachers. The courses were designed for teachers who aspired to positions as principals or inspectors but also formed part of the regular graduate work that led to a master’s degree by thesis. ‘Jeff’s boys and girls,’ as the graduates labelled themselves, spoke of him with a mix of reverence and good-natured parody. No gathering of the program’s alumni went for long without the recounting of stories about Jefferis and his ideas. He had high expectations of the trainees and demanded a full commitment to their training. The graduates, in turn, tended to remain active in the teaching profession much longer than average. In 1964, seventy-nine of the eighty-seven men he had trained were still teaching,12 and by the 1980s, graduates were over-represented in the Englishspeaking administration of education in Quebec. The separation of the Graduate School of Education from the rest of the university was even more pronounced under Jones’s leadership. An independent man himself, he ran the school as an independent unit. In some ways he was even more of a character than Jefferis. Neither Jefferis or Jones held driving licences and had therefore to rely on other staff or students to fulfil their supervisory duties. Jones lived in Huntingville, several miles from campus, and his habit was to rise at four a.m. and walk to work along the railway tracks. He did not join the Faculty Union when it was founded in 1976 and on principle did not accept the salary increases that followed the introduction of a salary scale. When all other classes were cancelled because of a particularly bad flood that closed the university for four days in April 1982, Jones found a boat and rowed the students across the river. The School of
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Education was the only unit to remain open. His independence and the independence of the program expressed his conservatism. He and his students continued to wear gowns well into the 1980s, long after the practice had stopped on the rest of campus, and in the tradition of English independent schools, women were addressed as ‘Miss’ and the men by their surnames. Business Administration If Education exemplified at least part of the ethos of the traditional Bishop’s, nothing could be further from the case when we turn to Business Administration. From the early 1950s, the business community supported the inclusion of Business Administration in the Bishop’s curriculum. In 1951 a group of local businessmen expressed an interest in beginning a small cooperative program. Discussions of the possibility of a summer program became a reality in 1954 with staff training sessions for Canadian National Railway (CNR) employees. Internally, Principal A.R. Jewitt led the movement to introduce a full program in Business Administration. Jewitt was appointed in 1948. He was a former professor at the University of Western Ontario, and had been enormously impressed with Western’s successful undergraduate program in Business Administration, which was modelled on the experience at Harvard University and began life in the Faculty of Arts and Science. In February 1957 Jewitt presented his brief to the Executive Committee of Corporation. He highlighted that, in addition to attracting highcalibre freshmen, a course in Business Administration would provide a service to both business and industry in the Eastern Townships and central Quebec. Furthermore, Jewitt described the proposed course as an extension of the traditional program of liberal education at Bishop’s rather than a departure.13 In April 1957 Corporation approved a motion that the university endeavour to institute a course leading to a BA in Business Administration. R. Errol Duval, a young graduate of Bishop’s who had recently obtained his MBA from the University of Western Ontario, was hired as a full professor in the new Department of Business Administration in the summer of 1958. The business community in the person of John Molson (President of Corporation) and the other trustees came out strongly in favour of the initiative. The department’s links to the business community were strengthened immeasurably with the creation in 1959 of the Advisory Committee to the Department of Business Administration. Duval sought
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Molson’s help in recruiting top-echelon executives who would ‘act as Liaison Officers between the department and Business.’14 The objectives of the committee were: (1) to advise and criticize the department head as to his procedures designed to implement the over-all objectives of the department; (2) to establish a firm link with the Canadian business community; (3) to assist in dealing with problems in the general area of public relations – for example, to advise on matters such as fund- raising.15 Such a committee had been the main force behind the success of the school at Western, and Duval fully expected the Bishop’s committee to fulfil the same purpose. The first advisory committee meeting was held in October and began an annual ritual by convening in the Mount Royal Club in Montreal. Each step in the institutionalization of business administration was vigorously opposed on the grounds that the field ran counter to the ethos of Bishop’s; to offer any ‘technique’ was a radical departure from tradition. The new Department of Business Administration was created against the wishes of the majority of faculty and students. The only plausible social science at this stage was economics. Opposition came mainly from the staff in the Humanities who argued that academic professional training should be a post-graduate experience that followed a first degree in the liberal arts. Repeatedly, faculty demonstrated an ideological preference for ‘pure’ disciplines as opposed to the ‘impurity’ of applied, professional fields. For Assistant Professor Harry Abravanel of the Division of Business Administration, Bishop’s University like all other universities was oriented towards theoretical disciplines. According to this view, universities emphasize ‘pure’ disciplines and remain somewhat separate from the modern world. The clear implication of that attitude meant there was ‘something “impure” about the study of management.’16 Professor D.C. Patridge (Chairman, Department of Business Administration) in his 1970–1 report summarized the views of Business Administration faculty: ‘Here at Bishop’s there has always been a feeling that Business contaminates the pure atmosphere of a liberal Arts College.’17 Jefferis, in his 1975 response to the Educational Goals Committee, put it simply: ‘Business Administration is not a proper topic for University education.’18 The role of business administration in the university changed in dramatic fashion in the early 1970s. In 1969 the university hired Dr R.S. Jain as the fourth full-time member of the department. As enrollment grew, so the pressure to increase the size of the department became
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more intense, and the battle lines between the department and the rest of the university were clearly drawn. Patridge in the 1969–70 annual report fired the first major salvo on workload issues. As he pointed out, only the English Department had taught more students during the previous year. In 1972, Jain (Chairman, Division of Business Administration) echoed the concerns expressed by Patridge in the previous two years. ‘We have again labored understaffed and overworked ... The average course load (i.e., number of students taught) per professor is about 125 for Business. For other programmes it is as low as 5–10 students!’19 The message was clear. With more professors, Business Administration could attract more students and thus help the university survive. In his 1975 Report on the Business Division to the Educational Goals Committee, Professor P.F. Fenton (Chair, Division of Business Administration) pointed out that ‘elimination of the business program could seriously jeopardize the viability of the university.’20 As Fenton saw it, the program would remain understaffed because Senate did not understand the needs of the program. Requests were routinely abridged or deemed ‘out of tune’ with the broad objectives of the university. The long background document ‘In Pursuit of a Mandate’ prepared by Harry Abravanel in 1982, is perhaps the most important symbol of the mounting frustration in Business Administration. Abravanel documented the bitterness and hostility directed towards the division and characterized the current situation in the university as ‘paralysis.’ The economists displayed a personal hostility towards their colleagues, labelling them technicians and salesmen. The joint honours program with Economics, which had been operating since the late 1960s, collapsed after the department attempted to undermine the existence of the division. Without consultation, the Department of Economics had conducted a survey of graduates in Business Administration asking them to evaluate their professors. The paralysis was the result of competing visions of the comprehensive university, which for Abravanel was not possible without the inclusion of the professional disciplines. The status that accrued to other professional fields like medicine, law, or engineering and the modern disciplines like economics, geography, sociology, and psychology, remained an elusive goal for management.21 At Bishop’s this was partly because of the training of the faculty – only Abravanel had a doctorate in Business Administration. This lack of research background among the business faculty was a major obstacle to mounting a graduate program. In part as a response to attacks by other faculty members, Business Administration came together physi-
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cally, occupying the ground floor of the Johnson Building. Since then, the building has been extensively renovated as the Division of Business Administration occupied an increasing proportion of the space. In the end, but well after the period of this study, the Williams School of Business and Economics was founded in 1997. History As would befit any liberal arts university, History has always occupied a central place in the academic life of Bishop’s. The postwar years were dominated by Donald C. Masters (BA, MA, Toronto; DPhil, Oxford), the department head from 1944 to 1966. For more than twenty years, Masters was by far the most distinguished scholar at Bishop’s. He published numerous books including The Winnipeg General Strike (1950) and A Short History of Canada (1958). He was an active member of the Canadian Historical Association council and in 1953 became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Masters was a national figure in his discipline. At Bishop’s he ran a one-person department until 1960 when R.P. Thaler joined him. As one might expect given the place of this discipline in the academy, Masters and his colleagues defined themselves first and foremost as humanists, and when divisions were created, history automatically joined the Humanities Division. For the most part, the historians were concerned to preserve the ‘general education’ character of Bishop’s and to develop graduate work. They were frustrated in both objectives by the changes in Quebec’s educational policy and the university’s lack of commitment to graduate studies. The university’s approach to general education was forced to change when the Champlain Regional CEGEP opened its Lennoxville campus in 1972 on the same grounds as Bishop’s. Through the early 1970s, concerns were raised about the future stability of the department and by inference the future of liberal education at Bishop’s.22 According to one faculty member, by the late 1970s the ‘original philosophy of Bishop’s had long been abandoned.’23 The Division of Social Sciences The creation of the Division of Social Sciences at Bishop’s was the first formal recognition of the social science disciplines. Four main factors account for the creation of this new administrative unit. First was the growth of these disciplines and the emergence of departments since the mid-1950s. The second factor was the desire on the part of senior
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administrators to create a more representative administrative structure. Third was the need to accommodate the demands of the Department of Business Administration. Finally, a new administrative structure allowed for the smooth introduction of more democratic governance procedures. Five disciplines – Economics, Psychology, Political Studies (formerly Political Science), Geography, and Sociology – came together in this administrative unit. The new level of administration moved the departments from what had been collegial relations into more bureaucratic and political forms of organization.24 Each discipline maintained a strong boundary so that all academic decisions were made within the department rather than the division. Economics T.A. Judson was hired as Assistant Professor of Economics in 1954 and remained at Bishop’s for the next thirty years. He came to Bishop’s with an MA in Economics from the University of Toronto and subsequently obtained a PhD from the same university. The department ran with one man through to the early 1960s. Three faculty members were hired during the decade: G.S. Groves in 1963, R.F. Barnett in 1966, and F.A. Siddiqui in 1968. Dr C.B. Haver joined the department in 1973 when he was hired as the Dean of Faculty. This unit was remarkably stable; all five remained until the mid-1980s. Groves, Barnett, and Siddiqui were the mainstays of the department. All three arrived at Bishop’s expecting to finish their doctoral degrees but all remained ABD. They focused their attention on teaching and faculty affairs. They were active in the faculty association and were part of the group who struggled to transform the association into a union. All three were promoted and had by 1985 become full professors. They became part of an established ‘opposition’ who through the faculty union pressed for conditions comparable to those in other universities with regard to salaries, promotion and tenure procedures, and the allocation of sabbaticals. Through the Faculty Council and Senate they tried to maintain the ‘old’ Bishop’s. Internally, this meant that the department did not adopt the wider trend in the discipline of economics toward econometrics. Psychology As one senior faculty member made clear, personalities are terribly important at a small university. Heads in the old tradition of Bishop’s
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could hire and fire with impunity. They could and did make these decisions independently. The record on faculty appointments within the Department of Psychology, for example, was dismal. The department was dominated by conflict. As one faculty member noted, the department experienced a ‘tremendous turnover of people, coming and going and being fired, often with tremendous conflicts.’25 At the end of the thirteen years that David D. Smith (PhD, McGill University) was Head and then Chairman (1960–73), thirteen faculty had been appointed and only three were still in the department.26 Those that departed had either resigned, or been fired, often after rows with Smith. The added pressure of Quebec politics produced a ‘poisonous atmosphere’27 within the department. As people fought to hold onto their jobs they exhibited symptoms of depression and breakdown. Stephen Black, a graduate of McGill with a PhD from McMaster University, joined the university in 1973. Black was on the physiological side of the discipline of psychology and was responsible for developing the biological courses. He, along with Smith, Lionel G. Standing, and Stuart J. McKelvie remained together in the department until 1987 when Smith retired. All four had doctorates and defined themselves as both teachers and researchers. The appointment of Standing (BSc, University of Manchester, PhD, Queen’s University) in 1969 allowed the department to offer courses in the psychology of perception and led to the establishment of the Perception Laboratory, the department’s third. The appointment of McKelvie, an experimental psychologist with a PhD from McGill, in 1972 marked the beginning of a period of solid development in the department. Described by one colleague as ‘a remarkably effective person,’28 McKelvie was the nucleus around which the department settled down. The fighting and the firings stopped with the election of Standing as department Chair. This began a cycle of three-year terms on a rotating basis. In the early 1980s, Anton F. de Man (DSSc. University of Leyden) was hired to take over the clinical side of the discipline from Peter Horvath. Psychology was the ‘flagship’ of the Division of the Social Sciences. During the worst years for enrollment in the early 1970s, it consistently maintained relatively high numbers and in 1973–4 was second only to English as the choice of concentration among undergraduates entering BA programs.29 Beyond numbers, the psychologists defined themselves as ‘basic’ scientists and ‘never thought of [themselves] as social scientists.’30 As the only department to have experimental laboratories it did not have much in common with the other disciplines in the division. As
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one faculty member put it, ‘there is this feeling we are a science … [This is] not snobbish … when you look at all the things we do, we do manipulate variables more than any other department.’31 In comparison, the Department of Economics as a whole did little research, produced few papers for publication, and displayed a cynical attitude towards research. Inevitably the relation between research, publication, and rewards in the university became a major bone of contention that tended ‘to dominate the Division.’32 While all departments in the division subscribed to the primacy of teaching, the economists were more conscious of maintaining connections to the broad liberal arts traditions of the old Bishop’s.33 All these differences became political as the economists tended to run or in the eyes of some take over the meetings of the division. The political differences between the psychologists and the economists were a major source of tension. The economists, said one psychologist, ‘always seem[ed] to be taking positions that in our eyes were somewhat distasteful academically.’34 In addition, the two departments disagreed on the conduct of courses and academic standards. These structural contours created strong boundaries among the social sciences throughout the period of this study. The division had four lines of fracture: science, research, teaching, and politics. Departments had different missions. Psychology was at one end of this continuum and Economics at the other. Dr C.L. Ogden Glass, known to most people as ‘Oggie,’ became Principal in 1960. Glass was a 1935 graduate of Bishop’s, a Rhodes Scholar from Quebec, and a former Headmaster of Ashbury College, Ottawa, and Bishop’s College School. He was a popular figure on campus and had a strong and abiding respect for the liberal arts tradition of Bishop’s. As one faculty member noted, ‘the university [meaning Glass] … recognized that the social sciences existed and that they should be represented at Bishop’s.’35 In effect, he expanded the definition of the liberal arts by adding the two new departments (Political Science and Geography) in 1961. His appointments cut across the boundaries of traditional and new disciplines. Geography W. Gillies Ross (BA, MA, Royal Military College) was hired as a Lecturer and became the first member of the Department of Geography. He proceeded to systematically build a close-knit, ‘social science’ depart-
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ment. On entering the Division of Social Sciences, Geography was the only department within the division and one of the few academic units in the university whose members were together physically. In 1968–9 the geographers decided to move as a unit into the space vacated by the School of Education on the first floor of McGreer Hall. They converted some of the space into a laboratory and map room, held onto a small classroom, and then used the laboratory as a focal point around which they grouped their offices. For the next twenty-five years the whole department remained in this space. As one of the geographers put it, ‘we have always felt that we functioned well as a department, we got along well as individuals and there was merit from the students’ point of view in having us all together. There was certainly merit in the convenience part of it ... it is an anomaly here.’36 As the building became entirely administrative apart from Geography, their physical separation from the mainstream grew.37 As a reflection of its physical isolation, the department, like the others in the division, was isolated academically. The geographers, like the rest of the division, could detect very little cooperation between departments. From the early 1970s, and in spite of efforts to create interdisciplinary programs, the fundamental unit within the university became the department. No strong sense of collective identity emerged among the social scientists on the basis of discipline or subject. Rather, the five disciplines (Geography, Psychology, Economics, Political Science, Sociology) were merely part of a political, administrative structure. The downsizing in the early 1970s was done along department lines. Each department became ‘the fundamental unit of growth ... Rather than there being an allocation by the faculty or division ... departments have developed very strong identities, and have sought to retain those identities.’ Geographers like everyone else became ‘inward looking in a disciplinary sense ... and compartmentalized in a curriculum sense.’38 For another faculty member, ‘the departments were really compartments ... there were bulkheads between them.’39 Like other departments, Geography built the necessary barriers around itself. The main lines of tension between Geography and the other social sciences were about politics and about research versus teaching. The geographers drew distinctions between themselves and others who did no research or made no significant contribution to their disciplines. Some of the people in this group belonged to the old Bishop’s. They had been hired without a doctorate and remained on faculty as ‘a core of people whose primary interest was teaching rather than research.’
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Another group came with their degrees but ‘coasted to a halt as they became more interested in administration.’40 This differential emphasis on either teaching or research placed people in different camps with very different outlooks. As the culture of the university changed to favour research, so the researchers were more likely to be rewarded with salary increases and promotion. Political Science T.W.L. McDermot, a graduate of McGill, another Rhodes Scholar, and a former Canadian High Commissioner to Australia, was appointed to the first Chair of Political Science. McDermot was known to Glass41 and had accumulated extensive teaching experience at both the secondary and university levels before joining the foreign service. He had been Principal of Upper Canada College in Toronto (1935–42). In this sense, both men brought to Bishop’s part of the English public school tradition that took for granted that morality was a prime factor in a disciplined life.42 As a result of the untimely death of McDermot in 1966, Joseph Wearing (BA, Western and Oxford; MA, Toronto, DPhil, Oxford) was appointed Acting Head of Political Science. In submitting the annual report from the department for 1965–6, Wearing could justifiably claim that McDermot’s ‘concern for excellence and his lively interest in both the discipline and the students largely account for his success in establishing a strong department of Political Science at Bishop’s.’43 Ewart A. Prince (MA, Toronto; PhD, London), a specialist in international affairs, was appointed Professor and Head of Political Science in September 1968. In his first report, Prince outlined the five main objectives of the department: to teach the discipline through specialized courses; to offer general courses; to encourage faculty members to carry out research; to establish an institution for the study of Quebec politics; and, to establish an MA program.44 By the end of the 1960s, the department had according to Prince developed a ‘homogeneity.’ The four full-time faculty ‘worked together well and productively.’45 In addition, Prince reported a significant change in the culture of the department that was in part a response to the student movement but also based on the faculty’s own commitment to democratic structures. As a matter of policy, students in Political Science participated in meetings of the department through their representative, the President of the Political Science Club, who had full voting privileges. More
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generally students were involved in discussions and evaluations of course offerings and were consulted on new appointments. The solidarity between students and faculty was described by one faculty member as a brotherhood, using the Aristotelian notion of friendship. The whole department attended regular Monday meetings in the Political Science Student Association common room. The meetings would often extend into faculty homes, where refreshments would be served and on occasion discussions extended through the night. In the early 1970s, honours students and faculty in political science created a ‘real community.’46 The political scientists made clear distinctions between their department and the other social sciences. They had no contact with the psychologists, who were seen as experimentalists. The scientific barrier was clear from the inception of the Division of the Social Sciences. When the question was raised about the placement of Psychology, the political scientists noted that the psychologists’ ‘orientation is highly behavioral, highly oriented to areas we know nothing about.’47 According to one faculty member, the social sciences could not be defined as an academic unit. The social scientists did not occupy the same space and when they did meet, they often bickered. As one interviewee made clear, the one thing the social science departments had in common was their ‘political incompetence.’48 The political scientists were closest to the economists but attempts to maintain a program in political economy were not successful. By the 1980s, crossing department lines had become very difficult. The only serious attempt to challenge these boundaries occurred in the early to mid-1970s. Gary Caldwell (MScSoc. Laval, sociology) in 1972 suggested a ‘fusion’ of the Sociology and Political Studies Departments and committed the sociologists to ‘open negotiations’ through the academic year 1972–3.49 The possibility of merging was referred to in the hiring plans of the Department of Political Studies whose 1972–3 annual report referred to the need for an anthropologist who would be ‘versed in political and social anthropology.’50 While a number of meetings were held to discuss the merger, the political scientists met only out of a spirit of collegiality and cooperation. The conflict over what the administration at Simon Fraser University perceived as inappropriate political activity by some members of the Department of Sociology at that university and the national publicity that followed placed a further question mark over sociology and meant that the political scientists remained unenthusiastic.51
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Sociology Through most of the period of this study, Sociology held the lowest status within the division. Within universities in general, departments and individuals sometimes gain reputations that have remarkable stability, and according to one faculty member at Bishop’s, the political activities of both students and faculty in the Department of Sociology led the rest of the university to attach ‘political stigmata’ to the discipline. Founded in 1967 amid great interest from the students, the department went through a period of instability during the first five years, as professors resigned and the Principal appointed Acting Heads in the face of these difficulties. With the arrival of Caldwell, the curriculum gradually settled into three major divisions: theory; methodology; and Quebec and Canada. Yet Caldwell was a political activist who wanted to change both the curriculum and the governance structures of the university. He wished to link theory and practice in meaningful ways within the university. In the fall of 1972, he led an abortive attempt to establish a Parti Québécois club on campus.52 This act and Caldwell’s open political stance did not endear him with the English-speaking community or his colleagues at Bishop’s.53 During 1972–3, he actively promoted the newly created ‘departmental committee’ of instructors and three representatives of the Union of Sociology Students. This ‘parity departmental committee’ discussed all major departmental decisions and according to Caldwell its work generated ‘considerable enthusiasm ... about the future of Sociology at Bishop’s.’54 Caldwell was active in both the Faculty Association and subsequently the Union. The Division of Social Science contained far more ‘activists’ than the other divisions.55 Numerous people characterized faculty meetings as a continuous squabble. Individuals and departments gained political reputations linked to internal changes in governance, in particular the inclusion of students in the decision-making processes. The sociologists quickly gained the reputation of being the most radical department. The political scientists were likewise at the forefront of changing governance structures but did not occupy the same radical territory. Key political scientists allied themselves with the core group of economists who were extremely active in university politics within the division and in the university at large. They occupied an interesting position structurally because through their emphasis on teaching, they saw them-
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selves as the guardians of the old Bishops; but they were nonetheless at the forefront of the struggle to democratize the governance procedures of the university. The feudal hierarchy of the old Bishop’s no longer served their interests as the university became more research oriented. The political scientists were advocates of a union, while in contrast the geographers and the psychologists maintained a clear separation between their academic work and their political activities. A Sea Change in Academic Culture The specifics of Quebec politics produced a rather different result at Bishop’s than in other parts of the country. Student enrollment was halved when it continued to expand rapidly elsewhere. The reforms engendered by the Parent Commission created a crisis of confidence at Bishop’s. One plan proposed by influential members of the Ministry of Education would have seen Bishop’s surrender its charter as a university and become the CEGEP for the English-language community in mainland Quebec. While this might be regarded as a rational plan given the history of Bishop’s and the desire to make liberal education available to all, these moves must be set against the clear intention of the government to diminish the role of the English sector in tertiary education in Quebec. The aggressive side of French-Canadian nationalism was apparent in the statement by a senior member of the ministry to a faculty meeting in the early 1970s that within five years Bishop’s would ‘cease to exist.’56 Bishop’s eventually survived, but only after giving up most of its traditional liberal education territory. One unintended consequence of the political changes in Quebec was that Bishop’s was pushed in the direction of specialization more quickly than similar universities in New Brunswick (Mount Allison) and Nova Scotia (Acadia).57 The radicalism of Quebec politics was reinforced by the demands by students that universities dismantle their authoritarian hierarchies. In a more general sense, the 1960s on campuses in Canada were characterized by democratization. The Parent Commission recommended that both faculty and students be involved collegially in the governance of tertiary institutions. Similarly, the Duff-Berdhal Commission on University Government in Canada, which had been sponsored by the Canadian Association of University Teachers and the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, recommended democratization and more collegial forms of governance.58 These reports set the stage for the dramatic internal changes at Bishop’s. Governance issues inevi-
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tably intertwined with the whole set of social and physical relations that had come to define the old Bishop’s. The Principal and Corporation were in complete control of the university. Like the Principal, Heads could hire and fire with a certain degree of impunity. Up until the early 1970s, the university was run on the principle of seniority.59 When an office or a faculty house became vacant, they were offered in order by number of years of service and then alphabetically. Senior faculty were offered the best timetables with classes usually on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The Heads fixed everything with little or no input from faculty and definitely without input from students. The dress code required both the faculty and students to wear gowns to classes and the dining hall. High Table continued the traditions of Oxbridge. Men had to wear ties and women could not wear slacks.60 As one faculty member remembered, Bishop’s in 1960 was ‘almost a specimen preserved in amber of a pre–World War Two liberal arts college – the attitudes, the mentality, the pace of life, the decision-making process – was reminiscent of Tom Brown’s schooldays.’61 The place fit well into its colonial background.62 Even in the late 1960s, the university could still be described as a ‘cozy village’ where ‘everybody got to know everyone else quickly.’63 New faculty members were usually invited to afternoon tea by one of the senior families living on campus. Tea and the inevitable cucumber sandwiches set the genteel stage for life at Bishop’s. For another faculty member, the old Bishop’s was characterized by an incredible sense of community and intimacy. Faculty met every day as they converged on the Old Common Room which occupied the entire third floor of McGreer Hall. The commitment of faculty to the university was more like a calling than a vocation in the contemporary sense. Classes were small. Faculty members were expected to take a paternal interest in their students. The faculty was almost entirely male. Jefferis had urged the appointment of a women to a tenure-track position in 1953 but was turned down. By the end of the 1950s, two women had been hired as lecturers. The first woman to be hired within the social sciences was Phyllis Home in the Department of History in 1965; she was followed by sociologist Ann Denis in 1969. The old communal Bishop’s changed in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. While some faculty members had attempted to reform the relationship between Corporation and Senate during the 1960s, the most potent symbol of change came in 1969 when Glass, the archetype of the old Bishop’s, resigned as Principal. The stress of battling with a strongly
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interventionist Ministry of Education and with the newly formed Student Executive Committee took its toll on his health. The activism of the students had resulted in a class boycott earlier that year.64 Glass had been hired to maintain and protect the liberal education tradition of his alma mater but all he could see ahead was its demise. In 1969, student representatives began voting in the Faculty of Arts and the Senate and were invited to meetings of Corporation. The Departments of Political Science, Geography, and Sociology also actively included students in their decision-making processes. The divisional structure established in 1971 replaced appointed Heads with elected Chairs. The rupture with the old ways came in 1976 with unionization, and the adversarial relationship between the administration and the faculty was thus formally recognized. Many incidents had precipitated this change in part because of the vague wording of the rules, orders, and regulations. A particular bone of contention was the manner of granting a sabbatical. Corporation had kept a university-wide ladder by seniority from which two or three people would be chosen, but a union meant a collective agreement where all privileges were negotiated in public. Conclusion The new Bishop’s had a different curricular ethos. The old Bishop’s had emphasized the principle of close personal contact between professor and student producing a community of purpose. For Jefferis, Bishop’s was different from other institutions because of the emphasis on a sound and liberal education. Bishop’s was not merely a small McGill, an Anglophone Sherbrooke, or a little Oxford on the Massawippi.65 All students in the arts had to take either two courses in Ancient Civilization or a course in Greek or Latin. Initially, the Bachelor of Business Administration program had a high liberal arts content, and Bachelor of Science students had to take courses in English, History, and Economics.66 As a small institution, Bishop’s was capable of ‘providing a unique focus for the synthesis of knowledge.’ Bishop’s offered a ‘way of life’ to its students which fostered the ‘development of the whole individual.’67 By the early 1970s, Bishop’s had ‘abandoned [its] former “Liberal Arts” general programmes’ and had turned to specialization.68 The new Bishop’s was more democratic but also more bureaucratic. By the 1980s, Bishop’s still presented itself as the liberal arts university in Quebec, but did not ‘altogether practice what [it preached] in the way of breadth and liberality of a liberal arts education.’69
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The role of the professoriate changed dramatically during the transition form the old to the new Bishop’s. The re-ordering of values around what counted as a liberal education had a profound impact on the intellectual and social climate of the university. Professors became more involved in the governance of Bishop’s as hierarchical structures were challenged and to some extent broken. Professors in Economics, Political Science, and Sociology were active in this process of democratizing the university. As noted earlier, the communal spirit that within the old hierarchy had engendered a ‘noblesse oblige’ pattern of behaviour was replaced by an adversarial relationship between Corporation and the faculty union. The differential commitment to the old values versus the new ones tended to define departments and disciplines. These definitions were often the result of the leadership of particular individuals. Professors tended to be divided along four lines of tension: science; research; teaching; and political activism. As a whole the professoriate in the social sciences was highly committed to teaching. Where difference occurred it was a matter of degree. The three professors of Education were probably more committed to the old ideals and certainly placed teaching at the centre of their work. Similarly, the economists placed more emphasis on teaching than research. The psychologists and geographers, however, were exemplars of the new academic approach. The psychologists defined themselves as experimental scientists in the natural science mode who placed a strong emphasis on research and publication. Similarly, the geographers were committed to the ideals of the social and natural sciences. For those professors who chose to combine political activism with their roles as professors, it followed that their disciplines and departments gained reputations for not being ‘academic,’ not committed to the ideals of science and research. While this description does fit the economists and to some extent the political scientists, there were always contradictions. Caldwell, who was arguably the most radical professor on campus, was also an active researcher. Legitimacy of knowledge depends to some extent on the boundary separating ‘science’ and ‘policy’ remaining strong and robust. Disciplines with high levels of academic and scientific capital70 tend not to be either professional or applied, and faculty members and students within these disciplines are most likely to eschew political involvement. Political activism in the academy is equated with low levels of academic and scientific capital. ‘Purity’ in this culture has, then, these two
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major oppositional dimensions. The professors of Business Administration were most concerned about the charge of ‘impurity.’ The new Bishop’s became more utilitarian and more vocational in the narrow sense. As Business Administration became institutionalized, so this academic unit became more and more central to the political economy of the university. Economic capital and utility overcame the earlier emphasis on cultural and social capital. A Bishop’s education was no longer offered primarily to give the mind freedom to think. notes 1 F.S. Weaver, Liberal Education: Critical Essays on Professions, Pedagogy, and Structure (New York: Teachers College Press, 1991). 2 R. Harris, A History of Higher Education in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 5. 3 J.H. Newman, The Idea of a University (New York: Longman’s, Green, 1947). 4 For details of the population in 1844, see Christopher Nicholl, Bishop’s University, 1843–1970 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994). 5 ‘Mission Statement,’ Bishop’s University, Academic Calendar (1995–6). 6 The two major components of this SSHRC funded study are a national survey by questionnaire conducted in 1996 by Donald Fisher and Frank Echols and case studies of four universities chosen by their region, their type, and the way the social sciences developed in them. We used a normative definition of the social sciences, taking the list of the discipline associations that belonged to the Social Science Federation of Canada in 1978 as the criterion for inclusion in this study. The disciplines and fields were divided into two categories, ‘pure’ and ‘applied.’ The ‘pure’ disciplines and fields included Anthropology, Economics, Geography, History, Political Science, Psychology and Sociology. The ‘applied’ disciplines and fields include Administrative Sciences (commerce, business administration and public administration), Education, Law, Social Work, and Urban Studies. The four universities are Dalhousie, Bishop’s, York, and Saskatchewan. Bishop’s was chosen to represent the ‘mainly undergraduate’ category and because of its location in Quebec. In the Fall of 1995, this researcher spent three weeks at Bishop’s exploring the region, doing documentary research in Bishop’s archives, and interviewing eighteen former and present senior members of faculty. 7 See D. Fisher, ‘Boundary Work: Toward a Model of the Relation Power/ Knowledge,’ Knowledge in Society 10, no. 2 (1988): 156–76. Fisher, ‘Boundary Work and Science: The Relation between Power and Knowledge,’ in
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9 10
11 12 13
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Theories of Science in Society, S.E. Cozzens and T.F. Gieryn, eds. (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990), 98–119; Fisher, Fundamental Development of the Social Sciences: Rockefeller Philanthropy and the United States Social Science Research Council (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); Fisher, ‘A Matter of Trust: Rockefeller Philanthropy and the Creation of the Social Science Research Councils in the United States and Canada,’ in The Development of the Social Sciences in the United States and Canada: The Role of Philanthropy, T. Richardson and D. Fisher, eds. (Stamford: Ablex, 1999), 75–93; D. Fisher and G. Edwards, ‘The Legitimation of Educational Studies in Canadian Universities: A Social History of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education,’ in A Challenge Met: The Definition and Recognition of the Field of Education, M. Allard, J. Covert, C. Dufresne-Tassé A. Hildyard, and M. Jackson, eds. (Ottawa: Canadian Society for the Study of Education, 1999), 8–118; T.F. Gieryn, ‘BoundaryWork and the Demarcation of Science from Non-science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists,’ American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 781–95; T.F. Gieryn, ‘Boundaries of Science,’ in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, S. Jasanoff, G.E. Markle, J.C. Peterson, and T. Pinch, eds. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), 393–443; Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Knowledge unit refers to a group of disciplines, a discipline, or a field of knowledge. See P. Bourdieu, ‘Intellectual Field and the Creative Project,’ Social Science Information 8, no. 2 (1969): 89–119; Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, (1988); F. Ringer, Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective, 1890–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Ibid. Some confusion exists around the date when economics became a separate department. Whereas the ‘Department of Philosophy and Economics’ is listed in the 1955 Commonwealth Universities Yearbook, the archives contain a document that would indicate that the split occurred as early as 1953. See ‘Memo-Curriculum of department of Economics, 1953–54,’ by R.M. Macintosh, Bishop’s University Archives (henceforth BUA), Principal’s Files, Box 21, File 501, Department of Economics. Interview with author, 12 Nov. 1995. Nicholl, Bishop’s University, 290. Quoted in a paper by R. E. Duval (Professor of Business Administration, Bishop’s University) ‘Building a Business Programme in a Traditionally Liberal Arts College,’ May 1959, Principal’s Files, Box 22a, File 804, His-
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21 22 23 24
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Donald Fisher tory of Bishop’s University. ‘Corporation’ is the term used to refer collectively to the governing bodies of Bishop’s; see Nicholl, Bishop’s University, 179–80. Ibid. Memorandum, ‘Department of Business Administration, Advisory Committee,’ Duval to Molson, 6 May 1959, 1, ibid., Box 17, File 205, Business Administration-Correspondence. ‘In Pursuit of a Mandate,’ by Harry Abravanel (Assistant Professor, Division of Business Administration), 3 May 1982, 19, ibid., Box 67, File 76, Business Administration-Planning. Memorandum, ‘Annual Report-Department of Business Administration, 1970–71,’ Professor D.C. Patridge (Chairman, Department of Business Administation) to Dr D. Healy (Principal), 30 June 30 1971, ibid., Box 39, File 11, Annual Reports, 1970–1. J.D. Jefferis to the Educational Goals Committee (n.d., probably 1975), ibid., Box 51, File 375, Committee on Educational Goals. Memorandum, ‘Annual Report, Division of Business Administration, 1971–72,’ Dr R.S. Jain (Chairman, Division of Business Administration) to Dr D. Healy (Principal), 6 July 1972, 3, ibid., Box 39, File 12, Annual Reports, 1971–2. A Report on the Business Division at Bishop’s University to the Educational Goals Committee,’ P.F. Fenton (Chair, Division of Business Administration), 1975, 2, 11, and 14, ibid., Box 51, File 3, 1975-Committee on Educational Goals. Abravanel, ‘Report,’ 19, 26–7. Annual Report, Department of History, 1969–70, ibid., Box 39, File 10, Annual Reports, 1969–70. First interview with author on 2 Nov. 1995, 4. The distinction here draws on an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) typology (1990) of forms of organization of higher education institutions: collegial, political, bureaucratic and market. Third interview with author on 10 Nov. 1995, 5. D.D. Smith, Leaves from an Album of Memories (Lennoxville, available from the author, 1988), 224. Third interview, 10 Nov. 1995, 7. Ibid. Annual Report, D.D. Smith (Head, Department of Psychology), 1972–3 reproduced in Smith, Leaves from an Album, 220–1. Third interview, 10 Nov. 1995, 9; and fourth interview with author on 10 Nov. 1995, 12.
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31 Second interview with author on 7 Nov. 1995, 18. 32 Ibid., 20. 33 The data on teaching indicate that the department of economics maintained a high faculty-to-student ratio. 34 Second interview, 7 Nov. 1995, 18. 35 First interview with author on 1 Nov. 1995, 9. It should be noted that Education had been pressing for instruction in geography. 36 Third interview with author on 6 Nov. 1995, 13. 37 Ibid., 8. 38 Ibid., 6 and 11. 39 First interview, 1 Nov. 1995, 11. 40 Ibid., 15–16. 41 See Nicholl, Bishop’s University, 253–4. 42 See Principal’s Files, Box 24, File 1306, Terence W.L. McDermot. 43 Report on the Department of Political Science, 1965–6, 29 June 1966, 2, ibid., Box 27, File 1710, Department of Political Science. 44 Annual Report of the Department of Political Science, 1968–9, 1–2, ibid., Box 39, File 9, Annual Reports, 1969. 45 Annual Report of the Department of Political Science, 1969–70, 3, ibid., Box 39, File 10. 46 Second Interview, 8 Nov. 1995, 8. 47 Third interview, 7 Nov. 1995, 6. 48 Ibid., 12. 49 Annual Report, 1972–3, Sociology Department, 1, Principal’s Files, Box 39, File 13, Annual Reports, 1972–3. 50 Annual Report of the Department of Political Science, 1972–3, 1, ibid. 51 Second interview, 8 Nov. 1995, 5. 52 Annual Report, 1971–2, Sociology Department, 2, Principal’s Files, Box 39, File 12. 53 Second interview, 1 Nov. 1995, 13. 54 Annual Report, 1972–3, Sociology Department, 1. 55 Fourth interview, 8 Nov. 1995, 10. 56 Smith, Leaves from an Album, 216. 57 See C. Storm, Liberal Education and the Small University in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996) for accounts of the changes at Mount Allison University. 58 See J. Duff and R.O. Berdhal, University Government in Canada: Report of a Commission Sponsored by the Canadian Association of University Teachers and the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966).
182 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66
67 68 69 70
Donald Fisher Fourth interview, 8 Nov. 1995, 12; interview with author, 6 Nov. 1995, 9. Second interview, 7 Nov. 1995, 15–18. Fourth interview, 8 Nov. 1995, 14. Second interview, 8 Nov. 1995, 8. Third interview, 8 Nov. 1995, 12. See Nicholl, Bishop’s University, 280. See Principal’s Files, Box 22a, File 1003, J.D. Jefferis, no date. Summary of a Brief Submitted to the Royal Commission of Inquiry on Education in the Province of Quebec by Bishop’s University, 1962, ibid., Box 21, File 504, Department of Education, 1945–1963. Report to the Council of Universities from Bishop’s University, 14 Dec. 1971, 1, ibid., Box 51, File 7, Committee on Educational Goals. Ibid., 3. Interview, 6 Nov. 1995, 6. P. Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital,’ in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, J.T. Richardson, ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 241–58.
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7 Teacher Training in Turmoil: The Experience of Professors in Normal Schools and Faculties of Education during the Quiet Revolution in Quebec THÉRÈSE HAMEL
The narrative of one’s life is the most singular and complete form of a collective history. This history takes shape at each and every moment in particular lives, but each partakes of the other. The collective memory of a group need not be sought in the addition of individual memories, but is part of and is expressed through each of these particular memories, whose expression, both through content and form, refers to the individual being a part of society. Bertaux-Wiame, ‘Mémoire et récits de vie’
Quebec universities have had the mandate to train primary and secondary school teachers since the late 1960s. Following the recommendations in the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry on Education in the Province of Quebec,1 normal schools, which had carried out this task for over a century, were abolished. In the case of Quebec, this happened very rapidly, resulting in changes similar to a Copernican revolution. Within a decade, the transition was made from some one hundred institutions scattered across the province to a few universities, which were from then on responsible for training future teachers. Carried out in the wake of the social upheaval during the period described as the Quiet Revolution, the official decision in the late 1960s to abolish normal schools and transfer teacher training to universities was far from being approved unanimously. While a number of normal school profesTranslated by Magee and Nguyen Associées.
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sors were integrated into the universities, within faculties of education or departments in other disciplines, many chose or were obliged to leave the field of teacher training. Little is known about those who were thrown into this turmoil and whose personal lives were changed dramatically as a result of this disappearance of a vast number of institutions. Although the abolition of normal schools was not met with indifference, little is known about the views of one group of stakeholders – those who taught future teachers at the time. The purpose of this chapter is to examine how the abolition of normal schools and the transfer of teacher training to universities were experienced by the people involved in these institutions. Different groups were affected by the Quiet Revolution, among them the religious orders – priests, monks, and nuns – who were the largest group working in the normal schools before this radical social transformation. However, from the late 1960s onwards, people already working in universities were asked to take charge of preparing teachers. What did the normal school staffs think of this reform, which had the potential to radically change the face of teacher training? How did they react to the abolition of institutions to which they had devoted many years of their lives? What were the consequences for their professional lives? What were their retrospective views on the reform? These questions will be explored in this chapter. To situate this particular history, we shall concentrate on the narratives of people who experienced this major transformation in teacher training.2 Based on their autobiographical narratives, we shall reconstruct the way people viewed the reform of which they were part, their professional trajectories, and their analyses of the reform many years after its implementation. This chapter is organized into four sections: First, an explanation of the autobiographical narrative approach is presented, followed by a sketch of the context of a not-so-quiet revolution. Then there follows an analysis of the consequences to professional trajectories when the normal schools were abolished in Quebec and, finally, an examination of the individuals’ memories of the reform. The Autobiographical Narrative Approach To understand the reform beyond what is presented through a documentary history, the views of the people who were directly affected by this reform must be heard. This approach is based on the underlying
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research question: Could this reform have taken on different meanings depending on the protagonists’ role in social relations? Our hypothesis is that the major policies adopted by the architects of the reform and the policy-makers could very well differ radically from the views of the social actors – the main targets in the educational institutions affected by the abolition of normal schools. This hypothesis appears to be all the more justified because the reform was carried out very rapidly, leaving little time between the phases of discussion, mature reflection, and its application. Nevertheless, to confirm this hypothesis, the social actors’ analysis of the reform at the time must be reconstituted. For these reasons, we chose an analytical method in which individuals can express their opinions – hence the idea of working with autobiographical narratives. The approach of letting teacher educators express their opinions results from our reading of Nous les maîtres d’écoles by Jacques Ozouf, who elicited autobiographical narratives of retired teachers from the belle époque (i.e., pre-1914 France).3 Their accounts propel us back to the mood of trouble in this crucial period of French history. Ozouf’s methodology was not only fascinating in many respects but also produced prolific results – several thousand individuals agreed to write their autobiographical narratives. Having been won over by Jacques Ozouf’s original approach, we attempted to experiment with it in Quebec, not only for the reasons mentioned above but also because the great advantage of autobiographical narratives is that the number of informants rapidly multiplies. That this study had a widely dispersed older population was an additional argument in favour of this method. However, though inspired by Ozouf’s approach, this research was much more modest in terms of both the number of narratives (fewer than 150) and the approach to the issue. The specifics of using autobiographical narratives4 in the Quebec context are briefly examined here. Among all the people affected by the abolition of normal schools, we focused on teacher educators.5 This choice was made because little is known about how the normal school teachers related to the reform in the 1960s. Furthermore, these teachers had had the opportunity to come into contact with many cohorts of students and had trained several generations of teachers. Their relationship with history and their views on the events are richer than those of their students, who know about only their own cohort. Three groups were targeted: normal school professors who were integrated into the universities at the time of the transfer; normal school
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professors who were not integrated into the universities following the abolition of their institutions; and lastly, professors and administrators who were already working in universities at the time of the transfer. Two-part survey frameworks eliciting autobiographical narratives were sent to informants. In Part I, informants were encouraged to recall the key moments that structured their personal, social, and professional trajectories. In Part II, informants were asked to ‘delve into their memories’ and respond to questions centred on the following themes: Memories of the Reform; Professional Trajectory; and Retrospective Views on the Reform. They were urged to give us their version and interpretation of the events in which they were directly involved. A Not-So-Quiet Revolution Before presenting the memories of the participants and discussing the context with which the social actors surveyed were struggling, we need to examine the main events that marked this era. The early 1960s seemed to breathe new life into the world of teacher training institutions. For all stakeholders, the need to enhance the status of the teaching profession was no longer in doubt. It was generally agreed that in-depth reform was necessary to respond to the new needs created by, among other things, the policy of compulsory school attendance in 1943. This period of great experimentation was characterized by a growing desire to professionalize teaching. An increasing number of stakeholders believed that this objective could be achieved only by raising the level of education of future teachers. This measure inevitably gave rise to the issue of the possible integration of teacher training into universities. The criticisms of teacher training institutions which were raised during the hearings of the Tremblay Commission6 in 1955 as well as the numerous briefs on education submitted to the commission brought the issue of the reform of teacher training into the public arena. However, it was the Royal Commission of Inquiry on Education in the Province of Quebec (better known as the Parent Commission)7 that truly kicked off the reform. Teacher training was the subject of an entire chapter in the Parent Report and, in its recommendations, the commission advocated the transfer of teacher training to universities. These recommendations were based on an analysis of the problems with the training given at the time. The argument was based on a severe
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criticism of existing institutions – the normal schools. Although no other type of institution was spared, the criticisms of the training system were mainly levelled at the normal schools for girls under the responsibility of teaching nuns. Normal schools, which were scattered across the Province of Quebec, were considered too small and to have too few students to be able to provide high-quality training. In addition to these already harsh comments, the commissioners considered that the training provided in normal schools was not up to the standards of ‘a progressive education.’ Drawing on world trends at the time, the commissioners cited American, British, and English-Canadian examples which gave priority to university-based teacher training and the specialization of primary and secondary school teachers. From the outset, the Parent Report recommended that the educational level of primary and secondary school teachers be raised and that future teachers be given access to higher education. The commissioners’ position was very clear. As formulated in recommendations 151 and 152, teacher training would come under the category of higher education, and a thirteenth year of schooling would be required for admission into university teacher training centres.8 For a number of reasons, the period which followed the publication of the second volume of the Parent Report cannot be summarized easily. On the one hand, the main protagonists who were involved in teacher training were polarized by the debates over the future of normal schools. On the other hand, this period was marked by overlapping and simultaneous movements. During this period, the state took over the education system and became the main operating agent in teacher training. The Department of Education (Ministère de l’éducation), which was created in 1964, paved the way for this by setting up the structures needed to manage teacher training and to examine the principle and methods of integrating it into the universities. The new managers of this educational revolution approached their task in a climate of hesitation and uncertainty. Total integration into universities was not unanimously approved by the different partners affected by the reform. Nevertheless, after the Parent Report was tabled, the administrative machine started to prepare the way for the abolition of at least part, if not nearly all, of the institutions which had been responsible for teacher training up until then. This was clearly illustrated by a number of measures. Despite reassuring statements recorded in the minutes of the teacher training planning committee’s sixth meeting on 22 April 1965, the committee’s intention was to elimi-
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nate the Class B diploma, which was awarded by a great number of normal schools under the responsibility of religious communities. The committee members thought that this measure would encourage several normal schools to merge and thereby force institutions which were unable to provide the education leading to the Class A diploma to close down. Based on their harsh criticisms of teacher training institutions and their proposal to entrust higher education institutions with this training, the commissioners launched a vast operation of consultation which caused a great stir. Following the publication of the second volume of the Parent Report, panic spread throughout the normal schools. The recommendation to transfer teacher training to the universities had created great insecurity among normal school stakeholders. In its preliminary report, the Mission de coordination des institutions de formation de maîtres dans le cadre des universités et des cégeps (mission to coordinate teacher training institutions within universities and CEGEPs), which was created in 1968, wrote: ‘We found that there was considerable anxiety at all levels of public and private normal schools, i.e., among administrators, professors, and students.’9 Given the polymorphous composition of teacher training institutions, strategies varied from institution to institution. The intentions, but especially the consequences, of the recommendations of the Parent Report were not the same for the different types of normal schools.10 Various factors seemed to have influenced the decision of heads of teacher training institutions about whether or not to integrate into universities, including the institution’s public or private status, its geographical location (in the regions or urban centres), its size, the type of program taught, and the composition of the teaching staff. The strategies used at the time can be classified under four major types: selfelimination, survival, regrouping, and early integration. Self-Elimination During the deliberations of the Parent Commission, several normal schools excluded themselves from the field of teacher training. From 1963 to 1965, thirteen normal schools for girls scattered across the province closed down. In 1964, when the Fédération des écoles normales (Normal School Federation, FEN) – an organization dedicated to defending the interests of normal schools – was created, a number of institutions informed the organizers that they would not be participat-
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ing in the association because they would soon disappear from the field of teacher training. A few years later, during the deliberations of the Mission de coordination des institutions de formation des maîtres dans le cadre des universités et des cégeps, several normal schools told the mission’s members who came to consult with them of their decision to close down their institutions, most often to concentrate on providing private primary, secondary, and even post-secondary education. This self-elimination movement was present in nearly all the province’s regions. Survival While some normal schools decided to leave the world of teacher training in order to specialize in another form of educational activity, several refused to abandon a field in which they had been working for several decades. Thus, the Pont-Rouge and St-Damien normal schools in the Quebec City region and the Pie X Normal School in Shawinigan even refused to abolish the Class B diploma because they considered that they could still serve their regions. Other normal schools resisted self-elimination for completely different reasons. For example, the NotreDame de Foy Normal School in Cap-Rouge tried to use Section 58 of the Act Respecting the Université du Québec to obtain the legal status of a higher normal school or institute. For different reasons again, the Institut pédagogique de la Congrégation de Notre-Dame refused to integrate into the Université de Montréal, pointing to its expertise in preschool and primary school education. Several state normal schools, for their part, intended to put their experience in teacher training to good use. Far from wanting to close or merely continue their work, they considered themselves to be sufficiently competent to participate actively in the proposed reform. Thus, the Ecole normale Tanquay wanted to become a university centre that would serve the Lower St Lawrence–Gaspé region. In Trois-Rivières, the Ecole normale Maurice Duplessis actively participated in the creation of the university centre that served the region, which became the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. Within the FEN itself, the teaching nuns wondered whether or not they should abandon the teacher training sector. They ended up keeping their institutions going for a while before giving them up to the universities. The FEN leaders, for their part, considered that teaching nuns should regroup their institutions, as the scholasticates had done,
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so that they could put their expertise to use in the new teacher training institutions. Regrouping Many normal schools decided to self-eliminate or continue their work in regions far away from the urban centres. Others opted to regroup their staff into larger units in order to respond to the needs created by the increased specialization of programs. The movement of scholasticates – normal schools for priests and nuns – was centred around the Scolasticat central de Montréal, made up of a number of formerly independent institutions, and the Scolasticat Notre-Dame de Foy, an intercommunity regrouping of a number of institutions serving the Quebec City region. Priests’ and nuns’ normal schools were not alone in uniting their forces in order to make their training competitive in the face of the eventual integration into universities. Several state normal schools pooled their clients and teaching staff in order to offer training that met the criteria for specialization and improvement in education. Traditional segregation based on gender and institutional status (public or private) had fallen out of favour, and in the early 1960s, consortia, which were also called common markets, were organized.11 The immediate consequence of this movement was co-education, and from then on male and female student teachers attended the same classes. Even the religious institutions gradually accepted lay students, since the state normal schools were not producing sufficient numbers of teachers. The regrouping strategy had an impact on both individuals and groups who were part of a movement to defend an institution, at a time when the FEN was lobbying to prevent existing teacher training institutions from bearing the brunt of the reform. Early Integration The universities did not wait for the green light in 1969, the official date when the transfer of teacher training to universities was to proceed, before officially embarking on this path. Indeed, long before then, university schools of education were being integrated. The mid-1960s saw the creation of faculties of education in existing universities at Quebec City, Montreal, and Sherbrooke.12 In addition to these various movements, this was also an exciting period in which new positions were taken on the future of teacher
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training. Polarized by the possibility of transfer to universities, many protagonists who did not completely welcome this measure developed intermediate positions which were not taken up by the architects of the reform. The need to eliminate certain normal schools and to regroup teacher training institutions into larger units was supported by many FEN members. However, total integration of teacher training into universities gave rise to fears and was far from being unanimously approved. Some considered eventually separating primary school teacher training from secondary school teacher training, since, according to this position, the latter would be the only one to make the jump into the university sector. On the other hand, the FEN, which agreed with raising teacher training to university level, was in favour of the organization of university teacher training centres based on those normal schools with the best performance, instead of the integration into universities. In the end, the model recommended in the Parent Report prevailed. The integration of teacher training into universities was officially announced in April 1969. Both the primary and secondary school teacher training systems were incorporated into existing universities. Since these universities could not produce sufficient numbers of teachers, the network of Universités du Québec was established, with the mandate to train primary and secondary school teachers. These universities covered the main regions of Quebec. In urban centres where universities already existed, the state normal schools sought, not without conflict, to become part of the faculties of education, or departments or structures already in place, to create the new institutions responsible for teacher training. The normal schools for girls and religious (the scholasticates) were among those most negatively affected, as they were either eliminated or recycled into private schools. Professional Trajectories When Normal Schools Were Abolished The autobiographical narratives collected provide a portrait of the trajectories that individuals followed when the entire teacher training system was transferred to the universities. Our purpose is not to examine this reform in detail, based on a statistically representative sample of the population but rather, based on the narratives of the witnesses at the time, to determine how these individuals’ personal and professional lives were drastically changed by this extensive educational reform.13
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The Normal School Career Given the age of a number of teacher educators who responded to this autobiographical narrative survey, their careers would have started sometime between 1925 and 1969. This means that some had lived through the period of growth in normal schools. Moreover, 45 per cent started their career in normal schools before the Class A diploma was created in 1953. The length of careers in normal schools varied considerably. While some people taught only one year in this type of institution, others persevered in it for up to forty-four years. Almost half of the people surveyed (46%) acquired eleven years’ or more experience in normal schools and almost one-fifth spent more than twenty years there. Priests and nuns had the longest careers in normal schools. All of the people whose careers in normal schools lasted more than twenty years belong to a religious community. While an overwhelming proportion of professors taught in only one institution (41%), or two to three at the most (24% and 18% respectively), some individuals had taught in six, eight, or even nine different normal schools! The geographical and institutional mobility required of teacher educators could, at times, be very constraining. The case of two normal school professors who taught in no less than four Quebec administrative regions gives an idea of the availability of some categories of teachers, in particular priests and nuns whose communities owned institutions all over the province. It is therefore not surprising to find that a third of the professors surveyed had taught in at least three institutions. Most of the professors taught at the Class A and B diploma levels, (82% and 73% respectively).14 Of the professors surveyed, only 10 per cent taught at a university during their careers, and this was because they lived in one of the urban centres of Quebec City, Sherbrooke, and Montreal. They had the opportunity to teach mainly in university schools of education, such as the Ecole normale supérieure, the Ecole de pédagogie et d’orientation, the Institut pédagogique St-George, or the Institut pédagogique de la Congrégation de Notre-Dame. During their careers, normal school professors were principally devoted to teaching, and the great majority of them performed few or no administrative functions, such as those of a director or principal. Probably the most striking data relate to the teaching experience acquired by teacher educators before entering normal schools. Almost all (94%) respondents had from one to thirty-eight years of teaching expe-
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rience. The majority of them had at least ten years’ experience in the education sector before being appointed to the staff of a normal school. This clearly demonstrates the belief at the time that a normal school career should be preceded by a period of teaching apprenticeship. Thus, the relative importance of teaching experience as opposed to academic qualifications as an implicit criterion for hiring was merely the consequence of the existing standard, which became explicit in the regulations of the Catholic Committee of the Conseil de l’instruction publique.15 Although nearly all of the respondents had experience in the education sector before starting their career in normal schools, their level of academic qualification seems to be low compared with current standards for certification. Thus, almost half (46%) held a higher normal school diploma at the most, which is equivalent to thirteen or fourteen years of schooling, depending on the gender of the student teachers.16 Six per cent of respondents held the Class A diploma. Finally, 21 per cent held a bachelor of education and 11 per cent a licentiate (a degree between a bachelor’s and a master’s). Several of the people surveyed obtained other diplomas after entering the normal schools. Although 37 per cent opted for the licentiate, 15 per cent held a master’s degree and 7 per cent a doctorate. Integration into the Universities The situation of normal school professors at the time of the transition to the universities provides an understanding of the temporal, geographical, and institutional dimensions of the integration process. Threequarters of the people surveyed (76%) taught in normal schools and scholasticates at the time of the transfer, and only 4 per cent worked in consortia or university transition centres, institutions which preceded the integration of teacher training into universities. Moreover, almost one-fifth of the respondents were no longer involved in teacher training once it was transferred to universities. Although this appears surprising, it can be explained by the number of normal schools closed immediately before their official abolition in 1969 and the number of institutions transformed into private primary or secondary schools or even post-secondary institutions. In addition, some teacher educators who were near retirement age might have viewed integration into the universities as being useless or even too demanding. More than two-thirds of the professors who were integrated into the
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universities (71%) joined the universities immediately at the time of the transfer. Another one-quarter (24%) were integrated only after further training. One person joined the public service before being appointed to a university. State normal school professors were granted special status, ensuring them of a position in the public service if they decided to leave the university. They were also eligible for grants to complete their training and thus meet the university requirement for a doctorate. The integration of the normal schools into the universities completely reversed the relative importance of the criteria that had governed entry into the profession of teacher training. Previously, experience in the education sector had prevailed as an implicit and explicit standard for teaching in normal schools. With the transfer to the universities, academic degrees took on great importance, and even became the main selection criterion for new university professors. Even though the protocols established specifically for normal school professors affected by the reform provided for a reduction in these standards during the transition period, many normal school professors rapidly sought to complete their training. Although more than half (52%) of the teacher educators who responded were integrated into universities without obtaining any further diploma after integration, a full one-quarter (29%) obtained a doctorate and 14 per cent a master’s degree after entering faculties of education. Except for the positions of department, program, or module director, the normal school professors who were integrated played a small role in the university’s administrative field. One-third (33%) of the respondents held other jobs after being integrated. What was the situation of those who were not integrated? At the time of the transfer, 61 per cent held a teaching position, mostly in public (22%), private (27%), or college (30%) education.17 These relatively extended teaching careers were replaced by employment in community administration (58%), the public service (14%), and school administration (14%). Qualifications acquired after their normal school careers were not very important. Indeed, more than half (56%) did not obtain any further diploma. It should not be forgotten that this group of informants is older than the group of integrated professors. Of those who nevertheless sought a higher qualification, most obtained a licentiate (8%), a master’s degree (10%), or a doctorate (6%), while the remaining respondents obtained various other diplomas. Several general characteristics seem to have had an influence on whether or not respondents could be integrated into universities. Most
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of the staff who were not integrated were nuns who were, in general, older than the professors taken into universities. Several of those who did not have the doctorate required to teach at a university found that the time and energy invested to obtain one would be too onerous. Conversely, teaching experience in a university during the normal school career was a factor that facilitated integration into universities. Although age, life status, education, or even the normal school career distinguish the group of integrated professors from the group of nonintegrated professors, which workplace they were in at the time of the reform certainly seems to have had an influence. Only 2 per cent of the professors in our survey who worked in normal schools for girls were integrated into the universities. However, 38 per cent of the people who taught in normal schools for boys and 27 per cent of those who taught in co-educational schools were integrated.18 Whether an institution was public or private was also an extremely important factor. It should be recalled that the components of the Université du Québec in the regions were all established on the basis of existing state normal schools, which made it easier to integrate the staff of these institutions into the newly created universities. Memories of the Reform The narratives collected vary greatly.19 Some are highly elaborate and go far beyond the space provided in the study framework. Others are briefer, and the authors’ thoughts are contained in two to three pages. The aim of the section of the survey framework called Memories of the Reform was to elicit autobiographical narratives by putting the respondents back in the context of the reform, from 1960 to 1975. To what extent were they directly involved in the development of events? Had they been consulted by the architects of the reform? What was their analysis of the reform as well as the actions taken individually or as a group? This last factor will be examined in the pages that follow. Many said they had sensed that the reform was coming. Change was in the air and, in their view, the face of teacher training and the teaching profession was being transformed. The Quiet Revolution was seen as a gust of wind that swept aside all that lay in its path. These changes were sometimes perceived as preparing the normal school staff for the worst – the closure of their institutions. One female respondent succinctly put it: ‘We were gradually preparing for the abolition of normal schools.’ According to another narrative, ‘The Ministère’s
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strategy was, undoubtedly, to gradually make even the large normal schools capitulate in the face of continuously rising standards’ (2 (205) ML, age 58). For many nuns, this period seemed to be characterized by a disrespect or even hostility towards the achievements of teaching religious communities. They were the main ‘victims’ of the 1960s reform, but the reform also radically changed teacher training policies for lay professors. One respondent said that ‘it is obvious that with these political decisions, we clearly felt that the closure of normal schools would come rapidly even though we had regrouped in our region and achieved a high level of performance’ (1 (014) ML, age 51). Another respondent stated, ‘I don’t remember much about the factors or “secrets” which gave rise to changes. It would seem that we were carried by the wind of the Quiet Revolution which came up with miraculous solutions for everything. There were “thinkers everywhere”’ (1 (013) ML, age 54). On the contrary, for others, the abolition of normal schools was completely unexpected, and, in the words of one respondent, ‘Because of the improvements to the curriculum and the generous subsidies from the Ministère, we did not expect the closure of normal schools to happen so soon’ (2 (106) FR, age 82). The respondents believed that many different factors had prompted policy-makers to carry out this transformation. A considerable number of them saw the reform of teacher training institutions as the consequence of the Parent Report. Everything occurred as if the report’s conclusions had been considered to be the starting point, the key and unquestionable basis of the reform which got under way at that time, despite the divergent positions expressed during the presentation of briefs to the commission. For many respondents, the transfer to the universities was the result of severe criticisms of education in normal schools. According to numerous respondents, the architects of the reform sought to standardize the teacher training system, which was considered to be fragmented and disorganized. The great number of normal schools scattered across the province, their small size, which prevented them from providing an education that met the increased demand for specialization, and their lack of all kinds of pedagogical materials were often mentioned as factors leading to the endorsement of the analysis made in the Parent Report in the mid-1960s. Even some of the staff of institutions that were the prime targets of the reform agreed. Many, however, came to the defence of normal schools in remote regions, because they believed that these institutions provided the less well-to-do living in these regions
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with training that was accessible locally, paving the way for teaching careers in their communities. Many respondents considered that the normal schools abandoned by the reformers could no longer properly meet the new specialization requirements. According to a number of accounts, the normal schools were criticized for their particular emphasis on pedagogical training and practice teaching instead of learning the subjects to be taught. To compensate for this shortcoming, it was decided that teacher training would from then on be entrusted to universities. One respondent put it like this: The context of that era should be put in perspective. Quebec was going through an educational reform and calling into question the entire education system, except for university education. One of the harshest criticisms made about normal schools in their preparation of primary and secondary school teachers was the pedagogy, the didactics, the practice teaching which played too great a part in relation to broadening the knowledge in the subjects to be taught, in particular at the secondaryschool level. For policy-makers, it thus seemed necessary to entrust universities with the mission to remedy and reverse the situation in favour of knowledge acquisition. Moreover, since the ‘research’ mission was the prerogative of universities, it was logical to ask them to initiate research studies in the field of pedagogy and teacher training. (1 (021) ML, age 55)
Many respondents analysed the reform from a completely different perspective. For them, the reform of their institutions was simply the result of rationalistic or technocratic logic, according to which the newly created universities (the Université du Québec network, among others) absolutely needed the normal schools’ clients in order to justify their existence. Only one respondent expressed a somewhat different opinion that even without the Parent Report, the educational reform would have taken place anyway. In this case, the integration process in the faculty of education where this person worked had already advanced significantly even before the transfer was officially approved. Among all the factors mentioned above, one seems to have caused particular concern among the respondents. For many, the reform was the result of a latent war between the politicians and the Church. According to these autobiographical narratives, the transfer to the universities served only the interests of an emerging social group who wanted to eliminate the religious institutions which, it should not be forgotten, formed the majority in normal schools. Many respondents
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were surprised by the speed of events. For one, what had taken the teaching communities more than one hundred years to build was simply brushed aside. Many of the professors who were not integrated felt dispossessed. One said, ‘In general, that whole era seemed to me to be a troubled and confused period that was hostile to what Catholic teachers, in particular members of religious congregations, had achieved up to then’ (2, (108), FR, age 77). According to some accounts, the policy-makers stopped subsidies to normal schools in order to ensure that they would eliminate themselves rather than having to close them down, which would hurt many people. For many respondents, the secularizing process then going on in Quebec was indistinguishable from the nationalization of the Quebec education system. Economic factors also seem to be a reason for integration; maintaining a great number of institutions scattered across Quebec was becoming increasingly expensive. The religious communities were facing a drastic fall in membership because of a decline in recruiting, and the maintenance of numerous educational institutions under their management was increasingly cumbersome. Normal school professors also seemed to be targeted as, according to several accounts, they were considered to be unable to meet the specialization requirements because of their low qualifications. A number of professors pointed to their level of education, maintaining that they were insufficiently qualified to adequately fulfil the mandate given to them. Indeed, one respondent stated that she was living proof of the lack of education of normal school professors. It should not be forgotten that the desire to provide future teachers with a more advanced and especially a more specialized education was part of the prevailing ideology at the time. Many hastened to add that Quebec was influenced by the ideological and political trends of other societies. Although for some France was the dominant model, for others the American neighbour was the example being copied by Quebec. The transfer to universities was perceived as a strategy to enhance the competence of teacher educators, who would acquire the status of university professors while having to comply with the requirements of their new adoptive institution. Some normal school professors were attracted by this new professional path when their institutions were abolished. According to a respondent who worked in the regions, the normal school professors’ secret desire to enhance their professional status was a significant factor in the reform. In some responses gathered, informants placed much more emphasis on the progress of their careers as educators
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integrated into the universities rather than on an enhancement of the teaching profession for future primary and secondary school teachers. Several respondents were in favour of raising their educational requirements to the university level, but they were not in favour of a pure and simple transfer of teacher training to universities. One said: The Parent Report recommended that teacher training should be at the university level, but should not necessarily be taken over by the existing universities ... The normal school system could have been successfully integrated into the university network. The professors in these institutions were generally well qualified. This issue was thoroughly discussed with the government’s public officials, but the game was lost in advance ... At that time, we argued that the universities were not ready to take charge of elementary and secondary school teacher training. (2 (209) FR, age 63).
Moreover, many deplored the fact that the reforms carried out within existing teacher training institutions were not taken into account. One respondent stated that The regrouping efforts were cast aside in a cavalier fashion. The normal schools for boys were regrouped into a common market, which had increased the specialization to 27 credits of concentration in a subject, that is, already an entire year (the 16th year) at the university level. The Fédération des écoles normales had suggested that this regrouping be sanctioned by making them into teacher training centres that would be attached to the universities, as an affiliated institution (1 (017) ML, age 61).
These different perspectives provide an understanding of how the reform of teacher training was experienced and viewed by the primary stakeholders, the people involved in this training at the time of the Parent Report. Their analyses show that many people totally disagreed with the philosophy behind the abolition of the normal schools. Although many were in favour of in-depth reforms of the normal schools, they felt that they were not listened to. Many stakeholders supported the plan to provide a university education, but not the way in which this was done. In fact, the universities’ actions gave rise to several fears. The main stumbling block seemed to be the issue of control. For a number of witnesses at the time, university-level training did not necessarily mean training under the control of a university. Alas, control is still very much an issue in today’s universities.
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Conclusion These narratives help us to understand the analyses and give voice to opinions that could not always make themselves heard at the time of the reform. They also help to clarify how teacher educators sought to modernize teacher training from within. Far from entrenching themselves in strictly defensive positions, many protagonists were engaged in reform movements, either within an organized group such as the Fédération des écoles normales or their respective institutions, or together with other normal schools. Many agreed that a university level of education should be achieved and required, but total integration into universities caused fear, which seemed to discredit everything that had preceded it. Several courses of action presented in the narratives or the briefs submitted to the Parent Commission were not taken up because they were swept away by the wind of change of the Quiet Revolution. The experience of people thrown into the turmoil of the Quiet Revolution shows that views on the abolition of normal schools and the transfer to universities differed depending on the institution in which these professors worked, their qualifications, their gender, and their life status. These accounts reveal that certain courses of action other than those recommended by the architects of the reform were not implemented and that these individuals came to a turning point in their careers. They had to either abandon their teacher training career or integrate into a university with a newly acquired mandate in teacher training. From the protagonists’ accounts, a range of intermediate positions can be observed between what was wanted by the architects of the reform and by the people already responsible for teacher training. Practically everybody was considering and even encouraging in-depth reform. Some already made sweeping changes to their own institutions or together with other normal school professors. However, the changes considered were not necessarily aimed at the direct transfer of teacher training to universities. Although there was a consensus on raising qualifications and many protagonists supported the idea of university-level training, the university as an institution invested with numerous mandates seemed to give rise to considerable apprehension. Nevertheless, these issues, which were quite significant at the time for some of the protagonists, are still highly relevant today. In fact, it is reasonable to think that after more than thirty-five years of reform, the transfer of teacher training has had
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time to prove its worth. The question to be asked today is whether the hopes aroused by the reform have yielded the expected results and whether teacher training has managed to carve out a place for itself within the university sphere. The goals of integration were numerous, including raising the training to a higher level within the school hierarchy and developing a research culture. The formal raising of the training within the hierarchy has been achieved, but the status of teachers is still an issue. As regards commitment to a research culture, the faculties of education have certainly adapted to the shift taken by the entire university institution.20 The question now, however, is how to link this particular and specific mandate together with the task of training teaching professionals within universities. The examination of the new tensions generated by this reform and by the questions of some protagonists who have thought hard about these issues in their accounts spurred us to pursue the analysis and the paths drawn by the normal school staff members. To this end, we wanted to examine the professors in faculties of education since their integration into universities.21 To further our examination and analysis of this reform, a new research study, called Traditions and Transition in Teacher Education: the Experiences of Teacher Education in Ontario, Quebec and Saskatchewan, 1945–2002, was undertaken with colleagues from Ontario and Saskatchewan. The purpose of this new study is to understand how faculties of education have evolved since the transfer of teacher training to universities. This research makes the link between what we have just presented above and the current examination of the future of teacher training. In the first study, part of the framework was aimed at determining the professional trajectory achieved by the teacher educators affected by the reform. The aim was to understand how individual history and social history interlinked with one another at a time of major transformation of the education system. This research perspective is pursued further in the new project by relating it to the interviews conducted with generations of professors who had been involved in universities since the creation of faculties of education and especially since the transfer of teacher training to universities.22 The development of faculties of education at a time when challenges are crucial and fundamental for the future of this university sector should be based on a critical, introspective, and sociohistorical exami-
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nation of the major changes that have been occurring on a daily basis for more than thirty-five years in universities which have, among other things, the mandate to train teachers and other education and research professionals. We hope that this research will help fill the gaps in our knowledge of university institutions, thus enabling us to better assess the role played by a research culture in the field of education. Finally, it will eventually help us to grasp the profound and perhaps unexpected consequences of some basic trends within universities in the past thirty or forty years – what are the models and paradigms that inform the universities and what are their consequences for the social actors who work there? notes 1 Better known as the Parent Report. 2 For a general overview of the history of normal schools and the transition to the university, see Thérèse Hamel, Le déracinement des écoles normales. Le transfert de la formation des maîtres à l’université (Quebec : Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, 1991); and Hamel, Un siècle de formation des maîtres au Québec 1836–1939 (Montreal: Hurtubise HMH, 1995). These research studies were both funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC). We wish to thank them for their support in the realization of those research programs. 3 See Jacques Ozouf, Nous les maîtres d’écoles. Autobiographies d’instituteurs de la Belle Époque (Paris: Julliard, 1967). 4 According to Ozouf’s definition, an autobiographical narrative is a narrative written by the individual himself or herself. This narrative recounts his or her personal, professional and social trajectories. See ibid. 5 These people might have held positions such as administrator, normal school principal, or normal school director at one time or another during their careers. 6 Also known as the Royal Commission of Inquiry on Constitutional Issues. 7 Specifically, vol. 2 of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry on Education in the Province of Quebec (the Parent Report). 8 Before 1953, the pre-requisites to enter a normal school were at the most the equivalent of a Grade 10; they were higher for boys than for girls. The length of the program in the normal schools depended on the type of diploma. In 1953, the prerequisites were equivalent to Grade 11 for boys and girls; the brevet A, the highest diploma, was a program lasting four years. For more details, see Hamel, Le déracinement and Un siècle de formation.
Normal Schools and Faculties of Education in Quebec 203 9 Rapport de la Mission de coordination des institutions de formation des maîtres dans le cadre des universités et des Cégeps (1969), 11 (my translation). 10 There were different types of teacher training institutions in Quebec: normal schools for girls under the responsibility of teaching religious communities; scholasticates-normal schools for priests and nuns; state normal schools, and university schools of education. For further information on these different categories of institutions, see Hamel, Le déracinement. 11 This strategy was more an administrative organization with links among institutions and sharing of the professors and students than a total merging of institutions. 12 Jean Hamelin, Histoire de l’Université Laval: Les péripéties d’une idée (SainteFoy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1995); Creutzer Mathurin, ‘Les conditions sociohistoriques de la création des facultés de sciences de l’éducation au Québec’ (doctoral dissertation, Université de Montréal, 1992); Roger Openshaw, ‘Some Historical Influences upon Current Tertiary Mergers,’ Delta 50, no. 1 (1998): 41–64. In the English-speaking community, the integration of teacher training into universities began in 1907 at McGill University. 13 For the purposes of analysis of autobiographical narratives, 147 files were retained. The entire body of narratives is divided as follows: twenty-one from the group of professors integrated into universities, 118 from the group of non-integrated professors, and eight from the group of professors who were already working in universities at the time of the transfer. 14 The sum of the percentages exceeds 100 because some teacher educators might have taught at more than one level during their career at the normal school. 15 This council had a great responsibility in the managing of educational affairs in the Province of Quebec before the creation of the Ministry of Education in 1964. The bishops had a major role to play on the Roman Catholic committee. 16 These figures, which may be surprising, can be easily accounted for since 27 per cent of the respondents obtained their diplomas before 1939 and 60 per cent before the creation of the Class A diploma in 1953. 17 The sum of the percentages is higher than 100 because several individuals held more than one position in education. 18 That normal schools under the responsibility of female religious orders were the main group excluded from the universities explains that percentage in part. In the state normal schools created in the mid-1950s, there were more men and laypeople, and this explains in part the best rate for boys in the integration into universities. 19 The code that follows the excerpt of the autobiographical narratives
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corresponds to the following factors: 1, 2, or 3 identify the target group followed by the number of the narrative (1, integrated into universities; 2, non-integrated; and 3, present at the university at the time of transfer). The letter F or M corresponds to the gender of the respondent and the letter L or R to status (lay or religious) and, lastly, age of respondent. 20 On this aspect, see Thérèse Hamel and Marie-Josée Larocque, ‘The Universitarisation of Teacher Training in Quebec: Three Key Periods in the Development of a Research Culture in Laval University,’ Tidskrift för lärarutbildning och forskning (Journal of Research in Teacher Education), special issue, no. 3–4 (2003): 187–204; and Hamel and Larocque, ‘Observations from Quebec: The Emergence of a Research Culture in Education through Legitimacy and Universitarisation in Quebec, 1940–2000,’ in the first thematic issue of the journal European Educational Research Journal/Revue de la European Research Association 1, no. 1 (2002): 99–117, ‘The Emergence and Development of Educational Research as an Academic Discipline in Europe.’ 21 This project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC). Other collaborators on this project are Sandra Acker, Elizabeth Smyth, and Jo-Ann Dillabough from the Ontario Institute for the Studies in Education at the University of Toronto (OISE/ UT) as well as Dianne Hallman of the University of Saskatchewan. For a general overview of this project, see Sandra Acker, ‘Traditions and Transitions in Teacher Education: The Development of a Research Project,’ Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 12, no. 1 and 2 (2000): 143–54. 22 More specifically, we try to understand how a research culture has developed in universities and what impact this culture has had on the experience and career paths of teacher educators involved in these higher education institutions. How did the tensions and traditions in the universities and, in particular, the faculties of education fit into the experience of professors and administrators who lived through these key periods? How did people deal with the tensions between at least two cultures: one centred on research and the other on a mandate to train teaching professionals? Were these tensions linked together in a creative way, as advocated in the faculty’s mission in the last ten years, or did they give rise to a destructive tension, thus creating conflict between the priorities of two contradictory cultures seeking to become predominant or hegemonic? Our projects, which are related to those of teams working in other national contexts, particularly Switzerland, Iceland, and Sweden, will allow us to raise convergent and divergent points of view in a comparative perspective.
Section 4 Gendered Voices in the Professoriate
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8 Sister-Professors: Roman Catholic Women Religious as Academics in English Canada, 1897–1962 ELIZABETH M. SMYTH As part of the proceedings of the 1960 National Conference of Canadian Universities and Colleges, a group photograph was taken (see plate 8.1). When it is examined today, two features are striking. The first is the presence of only one woman. She is Dr Margaret McCarthy, president of Mount St Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The second is how the woman is dressed. Dr McCarthy is wearing the habit of a Roman Catholic woman religious. A Sister of Charity of Halifax,1 she is known in her community as Sister Francis d’Assisi. Dr McCarthy is a member of a unique cohort of academics within the Canadian professoriate known as sister-professors. Their vocations as Roman Catholic women religious gave them opportunities unavailable to their secular sisters. As sister-professors, they were able to participate actively in a sector of education dominated by men and, as exemplified by Dr McCarthy, reach the highest positions of power therein. Sister-professors’ lives were shaped by their multiple identities as women, as Roman Catholic women religious, and as academics. This chapter analyses the origins and development of sister-professors in English-speaking Canada over seven decades. The period begins in 1897 with the decision of members of the Quebec-based Congrégation de Notre Dame to offer university-level courses at Mount St Bernard Academy, in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.2 It ends in 1962 with the opening of the Second Vatican Council, whose directives for reform of religious life utterly transformed the world of the sister-professor. To understand the life of a sister-professor, one must appreciate the context in which she lived and worked. This chapter traces how her multiple identities as a religious, as a Roman Catholic woman participating in higher education, and as a sister-professor were formed by examining the
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Plate 8.1 National Conference of Canadian Universities and Colleges, 1960 (Sisters of Charity Archives)
current historiography of the role of women religious in higher education, the evolution of Catholic women’s higher education, and the life histories of sister-professors drawn from two religious communities.3 The chapter concludes with directions for further study. Women Religious in Higher Education Linda Eisenman has observed that ‘Catholic women reveal a long and influential history in higher education, with religious teaching orders responsible for founding scores of colleges for women beginning in 1895. Beyond institutional histories, the overall experience of Catholic collegiate women or religious teachers remains relatively unexamined.’4 There are many reasons that explain this gap in the historical record. Sister-professors are vowed women within an institutionalized patriarchy, the Roman Catholic Church. Because they are women, the Church denies them access to the professional caste of the priesthood and assigns them roles separate from and unequal to that of vowed men.
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Some scholars define their roles as servants of the institution and assess them as problematic subjects for scholarly inquiry.5 Sister-professors are women academics within the institutionalized patriarchy of the university, where historically women have been underrepresented and relegated to roles that were frequently undervalued both by their contemporaries and by historians.6 Sister-professors had their origins in denominational colleges of higher education where both patriarchies were able to reinforce one another. As women academics and as women religious who generally worked in small single-sex institutions, sisterprofessors emerge as a marginalized component of the professoriate. Specific practices of some women religious present challenges to those scholars wishing to undertake an analysis of sister-professors. Some congregations of sisters defined their historical identity as one of silent serving, typified by this maxim of the Sisters of St Joseph: ‘Desire neither praise nor reward for your good works in this life ... On the contrary behave in such a manner that your good actions are hidden in time and known to God alone to appear only in eternity and even never to appear, if God so wills.’7 Thus, some congregations have been reluctant to emphasize their achievements. Another challenge is one of access to sources. The majority of essential documents are located in the private archives of religious communities that are frequently strictly controlled domains, with community archivists playing a dual roles as conservators and gatekeepers.8 Scholars need to address and overcome these challenges to uncover how sister-professors were able to carve out careers and experiences that would have been unavailable to them as laywomen. As historian Natalie Zemon Davis has exampled and Carolyn Heilburn has written, ‘finding no satisfactory place for themselves in the world, [they] learned to call upon other talents and other attributes, choosing threshold over societal confirmation.’9 Recent works have responded to Linda Eisenman’s call for a ‘fuller explication of this population’ as congregations of women religious have collaborated with historians to document the histories of the 190 colleges for women established by sisters throughout the United States. Some of these colleges were established as a direct result of a congregation’s need for education of its own members.10 The vast majority, however, were the institutions in which sister-professors educated generations of women (and more recently men) in an academic environment dominated by women.11 Similar shifts in scholarship are observable in the literature of English Canada. This is especially true in the Maritimes, where the publication
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of five commissioned histories of two congregations highlight the milieu in which sister-professors played important roles. As the opening anecdote illustrates, the Sisters of Charity of Halifax had a profound influence on higher education for women. Since 1997 four volumes that provide a rich context for analysis of the work of sister-professors in this religious congregation have been published. A fifth work, a commissioned history of the Sisters of St Martha (the Marthas), Antigonish, which had its origins in the Sisters of Charity of Halifax, traces the evolution of the Marthas from providing domestic service at St Francis Xavier University to engaging in social service and in education at all levels, including the professoriate.12 From these recent historical studies and my own work on women religious as educators, some important findings emerge to contextualize the study of women religious within the professoriate. The academic lives and works of sister-professors are defined by their religious vocations. Each woman religious who takes a job within the academy is first and foremost a member of a religious community. She is bound to her religious community by a series of vows, through which she has promised to actualize the charism or religious spirit of her community by her involvement in life beyond the convent walls. The community’s constitutions and customs regulated and detailed numerous aspects of her daily life: from the daily schedule of prayer and meals, through the intricacies of the habit, to operations of community enterprises. Constitutions outlined the specific roles that were open to members of the community and contained explicit details concerning the characteristics and duties of the members assigned to those roles.13 The sisterprofessor had to honour the obligations of her religious life, prepare for her activities in the classroom, be active in the congregational governance, and ensure that her scholarly output was in keeping with secular institutions. As higher education, like social service and health care, professionalized in the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the lives of the sister-professors became increasingly complex. The Evolution of the Catholic Colleges for Women in English-Speaking Canada Women religious are members of congregations whose missions are generally defined as serving God through service of neighbour. For many congregations, their missions have evolved over the centuries as they responded to emerging needs. This is in fact how the role of sister-
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professor emerged. It was a congregational response to the need for Catholic higher education for women. Because congregations of male religious, who had the monopoly on Catholic higher education (a fact directly related to education for the priesthood), were unwilling to establish co-educational tertiary institutions or to include women, lay or religious, in their institutions, it became apparent that if women were to pursue higher education in a Catholic environment, women religious would have to establish colleges themselves. Discussions began in motherhouses across Canada about how to launch Catholic women’s colleges, using the convent-based high schools, the convent-academies, as a base. The creation of a women’s college from a motherhouse conventacademy reveals much about the complexity of the world of the sisterprofessor.14 Once a community committed itself to offer university-level programs, several simultaneous actions had to occur. The sisters had to enter into negotiations with the local bishop who, as ecclesiastical superior, granted permission for congregations to alter their missions and mandates. They had to initiate the process of academic accreditation of their proposed institution. They had to prepare the faculty, structure the curriculum, and recruit students. In 1894 the Congrégation de Notre Dame’s Mount St Bernard Academy in Antigonish began to offer university-level courses, thus becoming the first institution administered by a Canadian community of women religious to offer an arts degree. Under the leadership of Sister St Maurice Collins, and sisters Sister St Maurice and Sister St Leonard Thompson, the academy entered into an affiliation agreement, and in 1897 four students of Mount St Bernard College were awarded degrees through St Francis Xavier University. Addressing its golden jubilee celebrations, Reverend M.A. MacAdam remarked, ‘This was a venturesome step and not a few there were who had misgivings as to its wisdom, for until then no other Catholic School for ladies had undertaken so bold an enterprise ... There isn’t one religion for men and another for women ... There isn’t one religion for code of morals and another for women ... There isn’t one system of philosophy for men and another for women.’15 When one analyses the case of the establishment of Catholic women’s colleges at the University of Toronto, the veracity of this statement becomes clear, for women religious encountered resistance from both the ‘godless’ University of Toronto16 and from their brothers in faith at St Michael’s College. It is difficult, if not impossible, to document when discussions began of the foundation of a women’s college. Yet there is
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considerable evidence to suggest that discussions predated the 1906 success of St Michael’s College in gaining affiliate status as an arts college within the University of Toronto. The Community Annals of the Sisters of St Joseph of Toronto, the record of daily events within the convent and community, refer to information being exchanged on the American experience. During a 1902 visit Miss Burns of Boston, ‘a regent of the Women’s Catholic University (Trinity College, Washington) kindly offered to send us their Curriculum, Examination Papers, etc.’17 Three years later, Reverend Dr H. Hyvernat of Catholic University of America, in Washington, DC, lectured the community on the higher education of women.18 It is likely that all of this garnering of information was undertaken to support the order’s negotiations with the University of Toronto. The experience of the priests of the Congregation of St Basil (the Basilians) in successfully affiliating their men’s Catholic college, St Michael’s College, with the University of Toronto in 1908, undoubtedly inspired the two Toronto congregations of women religious, the Sisters of St Joseph and the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (the Loretto Sisters) to action. Archival sources attest to the fact that both congregations were cementing their ties with the university and actively pursuing the preparation of their sisters for delivering a college-level program by engaging in extramural studies at both the University of Toronto and at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.19 Many Sisters of St Joseph became star pupils at the University of Toronto, annually taking many academic prizes.20 In the case of the Sisters of St Joseph, concrete steps were taken to give the college a physical space, with the groundbreaking ceremony on 2 May 1909 for a ladies’ college21 in spite of the fact that no affiliation agreements had been signed. This was the one of the major struggles: where and what were the sister-professors to teach? Both the Sisters of St Joseph and the Loretto Sisters wanted to affiliate their colleges independent of St Michael’s and of each other. The University of Toronto would not agree to this, and the resulting compromise shaped the academic lives of the sisterprofessors. As a historian of St Michael’s College has explained, ‘all girls proceeding to a degree in the faculty of arts should be enrolled in St Michael’s; lectures in college subjects were to be given at both St Joseph’s and Loretto ... lecturers in religious knowledge, ethics, logic and psychology were to be supplied by St Michael’s; university subjects were to be taken at the university proper as was the case with men; degrees should be conferred by the university through St Michael’s.’22
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Yet, as the historical record indicates, the presence of women at St Michael’s College was neither welcomed nor encouraged. A member of the St Michael’s faculty recalled that having ‘to admit women students to their arts courses came at first as a shock to the administration of St Michael’s.’23 An even less charitable assessment was cited in Anne Rochon Ford’s history of women at the University of Toronto: ‘An official from St Michael’s is quoted as having said just after the turn of the century that, “The question of higher education for women is not a vital one for the College nor of interest to the Canadian hierarchy.”’24 These thoughts were undoubtedly impressed on the male students as well, for the editors of the 1913 Yearbook of St Michael’s College explained that since St Michael’s was ‘being forced to provide for the higher education of young women, since it is directly responsible for them’ the following admirable compromise was created: ‘Loretto Abbey and St Joseph’s College offer the solution to this problem ... Young women can receive as high a training as given in any University in the world, and hardly leave convent walls. Not only is the success of the sisters in other work a sufficient guarantee of what they will accomplish here but the examinations are a test that makes efficiency essential.’25 Beginning in 1912, two women religious appear as college deans in the list of the administrative officers of St Michael’s College,26 re-enforcing that the three colleges operated as three separate sites. St Joseph’s and Loretto offered limited programs. Sisters at both Colleges taught English, Latin, German, and French. Priests from St Michael’s came to the women’s colleges to teach Religion and Philosophy. College activities were likewise separate with each having their own social, cultural, athletic, and religious ceremonies. The yearbooks of St Michael’s College attest to the separate identities of the three colleges. The presence of women faculty and students in the pages of the yearbook vary significantly from year to year. No women faculty are listed until 1918 and none are pictured. The first portraits and biographies of women graduates appear in 1915 and continue until 1927, when the college yearbook ceases and becomes an ‘old boys’ annual. From that year on, the information on the activities of the women’s colleges can then be found exclusively in the pages of the convent-academy annuals: The Lilies and The Rainbow. There was some degree of academic cooperation among the three communities, and as the years went on, students began to move among the three colleges. While men took courses at the women’s colleges, ‘women students were not allowed to attend lectures at St Michael’s
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College.’27 St Michael’s began to teach women students in separate classes and in the 1940s began co-educational classes in Philosophy and Religion. In 1953 the three colleges were melded into one co-educational instructional unit. This was done to eliminate duplication of teaching and administration. With this change, the identities of sisterprofessors were further altered as they were to witness the transformation of their academic colleges to university residences. Life Histories of Sister-Professors Communities of women religious had to extract the resources to mount a college from a limited pool of human and financial assets. The selection of the most appropriate candidate to be a sister-professor was one of the most important decisions of a community leadership team. In selecting a sister for this role, the community was removing a resource from one enterprise to place in another. As well, any education necessary was at community expense. In addition to the actual costs involved in a sister’s education (tuition, housing, and books), were the additional costs of removing from the community coffers the salary which she would generate. In instances, for example, where the sister had been an educator, an administrator, a heath care or social service professional, the community may have had to hire a layperson to take her place and, accordingly, pay that individual a salary. Finally, the community had to address the fiscal realities of its students by keeping tuition low. One sister-professor recalled: ‘The College was heavily in debt ... few Catholics had enough income to pay the small fee for board and tuition ... [the community was] generous in granting reductions and scholarships. The result was that we did not have enough money for library supplies and textbooks ... [Sister-professors] not only taught twenty-one or twentytwo hours a week, but also had telephone duty, did dishes, did house charges, helped with housekeeping and cleaning ... In the fall we had extensive “bees” for canning ... In summertime, it seemed we were always picking strawberries, raspberries, boysenberries or vegetables.’28 Communities looked to a select group of promising sisters to fill these challenging roles. The life histories of some of these sisters clearly illustrate the high price that some communities paid for their commitment to higher education. In both the Sisters of St Joseph of Toronto and the Ursulines of the Chatham Union, one can locate examples of sister-professors who studied at the community high schools as young women, became sisters,
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and were sent by the community for higher education. Mary Whalen, a thirteen-year-old pupil from Chalk Lake, enrolled in St Joseph’s Academy boarding school in 1884. As a high school student, Mary ‘gave ample promise of the gifts of mind and heart’ with a particular aptitude for mathematics. She entered the Sisters of St Joseph in 1892 and, as Sister Perpetua, became a high school teacher. She was one of the first sister-students enrolled in the University of Toronto and served twice as dean of St Joseph’s College.29 She died after spending forty-five years as member of the community. Her obituary reads: [Sister Perpetua] devoted all her energies to perfecting, as far as possible, the College work of the community; the rapid strides made in higher education, the preparation of an adequate staff, the collecting of a library, the procuring of the present splendid building in Queen’s Park are all in great measure due to her unflagging interest and self-sacrifice. Never was she found too busy or too tired to assist others; the storehouse of her remarkable mind and memory was open to all. And perhaps there is no higher testimony to the foundation which she laid for Catholic College work than the high standards the College maintains and the splendid types of graduate students teaching in the High Schools and Collegiates throughout the Province ... But however striking her life was an educator, her intellectual pursuits never interfered with her duties as a religious.30
Another sister-professor of St Joseph’s College, Sister Mary Agnes Murphy, died a very senior sister, ‘in her sixty-fifth year of religious life.’ Her obituary states that she was ‘the first woman to take a degree from St Michael’s College after it became a federated College of the University. A member of the French staff, she won the respect of her colleagues in the university by the soundness of judgment no less than by her fine scholarship. Her students remember with gratitude not only her efficiency as a teacher but her understanding and patience.’31 Likewise, the obituaries of the Ursulines of the Chatham Union contain similar examples of sister-professors who entered the community from the boarding school and had long and rich lives as members of the professoriate. Sister St Michael Gunian, a 1919 graduate of the Ursuline academy ‘The Pines,’ entered the community in 1927. She was a stellar scholar, teacher, and community activist. To commemorate her sixtyfifth year as an Ursuline, Sister St Michael Gunian wrote the story of her life in which she recalled her long career as a sister-teacher and sisterprofessor. She reflected on the opportunities she had for research, teach-
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ing, and learning within a community of women religious dedicated to education. She concluded: ‘I am convinced that the greatest poverty is the poverty of ignorance; that the greatest service a Catholic Women’s College can offer today’s women, to abused minorities and to the Third World poor, is to free them from the shackles of ignorance through education and so empower them to free themselves.’32 Yet, the lives and careers of these three sister-professors stand in marked contrast to two others whose lives and academic careers were tragically short. The life and work of Mary Maud McKay Warnock, known in religion as Sister Mary Austin, illustrates a different experience of a sister-professor at St Joseph’s College. Sister Austin began her lifelong association with the Sisters of St Joseph as a child. Her dying mother placed her in the boarding school. She received all her education, and indeed almost all her upbringing, from the Sisters of St Joseph. One of her many obituaries commented that ‘she had all the educational facilities of the Academy-College ... her attainments were equal to her opportunities.’33 Sister Austin became a high school teacher and was selected by the community to engage in further study at the University of Toronto. The Annals of 1909 note that Sister Austin won the Edward Blake Scholarship, a remarkable achievement ‘as Sister attended only some lectures (she taught all year).’34 The following year, she continued her achievement, winning the George Brown Scholarship and ‘lead[ing] the University in Moderns (Romance and Teutonic), getting, as usual, First Class Honours in Second Year.’35 In 1911 she obtained similar results and, ‘although she has been suffering from ill-health, received First Class Honours in Third Year Moderns. She and another candidate [won] the Italian Prize.’36 She received her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) with first-class honours in 1912. After the affiliation of St Joseph’s with the university, Sister Austin became part of the St Joseph’s College faculty and served as the second dean. She died, unexpectedly, in 1916, as a result of complications following surgery for appendicitis. Sister Austin’s obituaries reveal much about the public perception of the work of the sister-professor at St Joseph’s College. Two engaging articles were written about her just after her death. Her colleague in the University of Toronto English Department, Professor W.P.M. Kennedy, reflected on her contribution to education. Calling her one of Canada’s finest scholars, possessing ‘rare judgment, continual study of student psychology and a remarkable variety of methods in dealing with character,’ Professor Kennedy said: ‘The women of St Michael’s College
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where she taught have lost more than a teacher; they have lost in this world a friend. The University has lost not only one of its most brilliant graduates but a teacher of the highest order and for myself, I have lost not a mere colleague but a guide and counselor who never once misdirected me.’37 Another article, entitled ‘A Modern Nun,’ used the occasion of Sister Austin’s death to reflect on her achievement and the demands placed on her as a sister-professor. The writer commented that ‘thirty-six hours a week, about three times the number of hours calculated for the ordinary professional instructor, was the regular labour for years of this frail nun.’ The article continued: ‘The life of the modern nun that we thoughtlessly indicate by the familiar phrases of the silence and tranquility of the cloister, retirement from the bustling scenes of solicitous material life and its struggles, unbroken communion with the world beyond, neglect of cares of this fleshly existence seems very misleading and very inaccurate.’38 This article certainly identified the challenges which Sister Austin and her community faced as they expanded their mission without all of the resources that would have enabled them to carry out these tasks comfortably. While she was ‘in a word, the finished product of St Joseph’s Academy-College, the tree and the fruits of its productiveness,’ she also represented the costs of diversification. Sister Austin was described as possessing ‘the versatility and masculine robustness of mind [that] may sometimes have carried her too far into the joys and excitement of intellectual living and thus caused her mind to outrun the frailer partner to which it was yoked.’39 The history of sister-professors at Brescia College at the University of Western Ontario contains a similar story. Beatrice Major, know in religion as Mother St Michael Major, was the first instructor of history at Brescia Hall, the Ursulines of the Chatham Union’s women’s college at Western. She was educated in England at Ursuline schools and earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Liverpool, where one professor described her as ‘an admirable student, in my opinion, one of the best in her year ... She has the scholarly qualities which go to make a true teacher.’40 She received her teacher’s training at Liverpool Mount Pleasant Training College. In 1914, the year after she immigrated to Canada, she joined the Ursulines and began to teach in Ursuline schools. When Brescia Hall was established, she was selected to enroll in the Master of Arts Program at Western for the 1919–20 academic year. The Annals of Brescia College tell the rest of the story of her own academic learning
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thus. She was positively assessed by Reverend R.R. Rankin SJ, Dean of the Graduate School, Fordham University, as a doctoral candidate and subsequently enrolled ‘tak[ing] part of the work extramurally, part in attendance at the summer sessions held at Fordham.’41 From 1920 on Mother St Michael held the multiple roles of doctoral student, professor of English and History, and Registrar of Brescia Hall. The heaviness of these commitments took their toll on her already fragile health, and on 14 April 1926 she died. Western’s Professor W. Tamblyn mourned her passing: ‘[How] delightful, how able and how perfect Mother St Michael was and how valuable a life has been lost to all of us.’ Her community likewise mourned her loss: ‘Naturally endowed with a brilliancy of intellect given to few, a student of rare ability, a teacher of exceptional talents, yet modest and retiring, she was loved by all with whom she came in contact as an ideal religious teacher, whose salutary influence will long remain a happy memory to those who were so fortunate as to have been placed under her guidance.’42 The decision to establish Catholic women’s colleges exacted a high price from the leadership and the members of communities of women religious. Not only did the community have to partition out its scarce economic resources, but it also had to engage in creative staffing in both its elementary and secondary schools to make a tertiary institution work. From the life histories of the sister-professors one can observe that the multiple demands placed on these women resulted in many career paths – some long, others tragically short. What is common within them is their commitment to the academy in a unique role. Sister-professors were teachers, housemates, and supervisors of extraand co-curricular activities and members of the same ecclesiastical community as the students they taught. They shared an academic and a faith culture with their students. The values they transmitted in their classrooms and in their behaviour shaped the lives of generations of Canadian women and men.43 Conclusion The role of sister-professor was a product of the commitment of communities of women religious to offer higher education for Catholic women. One of the strongest statements defining this role is found in documents in the 1968 report of the Commission on the College to the Chapter of the Sisters of St Joseph. The report identified three roles held
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by the sister-professor: teacher, counsellor, and colleague. Moreover, the report defines the unique role played by women religious in each, attesting to the value which the community holds in maintaining a presence in the university setting: ‘The Sister-Professor who is competent finds her ideas respected, and in lectures, seminars and private interviews leads her students to interpret the literary works under study and to find their Christian implications ... [The Sister-Counsellor] by her presence on the campus is a statement of the transcendent values and a reminder of God and redemption ... [The Sister-Colleague] is a respected colleague and her views have weight in these deliberations. In each decision there is a Christian way of judging and she is there to enunciate it.’44 At the end of a century that has seen the waxing and the waning of the involvement of women religious in higher education, both women religious and secular scholars have just begun to systematically study the actualization of this articulated vision. The once vibrant culture of the workplace of the sister-professor, the Catholic women’s college, and the role of the sister-professor herself, are disappearing. Before they and their institutions are relegated to artifacts on the historical landscape, it is important that we capture and not lose this cohort within the Canadian professoriate. Many historians and congregations have initiated oral history projects, with the objective of capturing the congregational histories in the words of their members.45 This chapter has begun the discussion; there is much left to do. Sister-professors should be studied as individuals, as a cohort, and as part of a women’s scholarly community. Comparative studies of French-Canadian, American, and international communities of women religious engaged in higher education should be undertaken. The experience of the Ursulines, the Lorettos, and the Sisters of St Joseph in estab-lishing colleges within secular universities should be analysed alongside of communities, such as the Sisters of Charity of Halifax and the Congrégation de Notre Dame, who established independent community-run colleges or placed their colleges within a Roman Catholic setting. The impact of the reforms of Vatican II on the academy as played out through the lives of sister-professors should be explored. As women religious were given more voice within community life and as the vow of obedience was redefined to one of collaborative discernment, major shifts occurred in work patterns. The decision to place a woman religious on the academic path was no longer made solely by the general superior and her council. The wishes of the sister, as well as her intellec-
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tual and personal qualities viewed through the lenses of community need, were taken into account. This increased individual decisionmaking led some sister-professors to seek employment in university sectors outside of community-run colleges. This element of personal choice, coupled with the plummeting number of new members, led to a crisis in the operations of many colleges as communities no longer had both the academic and domestic staff to make the colleges financially viable. The evolution and, in some cases, the disappearance of the academic workplace of sister-professors, the Catholic women’s college, should be analysed. The three Ontario Catholic women’s colleges are a study in contrasts. At the University of Western Ontario, the Ursulines directly affiliated their college with the secular university. Perhaps as a result, Brescia College has successfully maintained its independent academic presence. Unlike the Catholic women’s colleges at the University of Toronto, which have become known as residences, Brescia College continues to develop new academic programs. Might this have been an option for the Toronto colleges had they successfully affiliated on their own?46 Only more research will answer these questions, while raising new ones concerning the role and place of the sister-professors within the landscape of Canadian higher education. For these women represent a commitment of a community of women to higher education in its many forms, in and beyond the classroom and across generations. notes The research reported was generated with the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 1 For further information, see T. Corcoran, SC, Mount Saint Vincent University: An Unfolding Vision 1873–1988 (Lanham, MD: University of America Press, 1999); M.O. McKenna, SC, Charity Alive: The Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul, Halifax, 1950–1980 (Lanham, MD: University of American Press, 1988). 2 On 8 October 1908, the Congregation Notre Dame officially opened two parallel institutions, l’Ecole Superieure d’enseignment pour les jeunes filles and Notre Dame Collegiate institute at the Montreal motherhouse. Both institutions were affiliated with Laval University. For a fuller discussion, see J. Maynard, ‘Catholic Post-secondary Education for Women in Quebec: Its Beginnings in 1908,’ Canadian Catholic Historical Association
Roman Catholic Women Religious as Academics 221 Historical Studies 59 (1992): 37–48. 3 The two communities are the Sisters of St Joseph of Toronto and the Ursulines of the Chatham Union. The author thanks the leadership team and the archivists of each of the five communities who administered Catholic women’s colleges for access to the documents analysed here: The Sisters of St Joseph of Toronto (St Joseph’s College, University of Toronto), the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (IBVM; Loretto College, University of Toronto), Sisters of Charity of Halifax (Mount St Vincent University), the Ursulines of the Chatham Union (Brescia College, University of Western Ontario), and Congrégation de Notre Dame (Mount St Bernard College, St Francis Xavier University). 4 Linda Eisenman, ‘Reconsidering a Classic: Assessing the History of Women’s Higher Education a Dozen Years after Barbara Solomon,’ Harvard Educational Review 67, no. 4 (1997): 693, 708. 5 For a fuller discussion, see E.M. Leonard, ‘Separation of the Sexes: The Development of Gender Roles in Modern Catholicism,’ in Equal at the Creation: Sexism, Society and Christian Thought, J. Martos and P. Hegy, eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 114–22; J.K. McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); J. Manning, Is the Pope Catholic? A Woman Confronts Her Church (Toronto: Malcolm Lester, 1999). 6 This is not to deny the notable exceptions that include L. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); J. Nidiffer, Pioneering Deans of Women: More than Wise and Pious Matrons (New York: Teachers College Press, 2000); R. Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: The Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); B. Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); and Eisenman, ‘Reconsidering a Classic.’ 7 J.P. Medaille, SJ, Maxims of the Little Institute (1657), trans. Federation of the Sisters of St Joseph (Erie, PA: Federation of the Sisters of St Joseph, 1975). 8 See E.M. Smyth, ‘“Writing Teaches Us Our Mysteries”: Women Religious Recording and Writing History,’ in Creating Historical Memory: English Canadian Women and the Work of History, A. Prentice and B. Boutilier, eds. (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), 101–28. 9 Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); C. Heilburn, Women’s Lives: The View from the Threshold (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 101. 10 This number represents some 30 per cent of women’s colleges in the United States. See J.A. Eby, ‘A Little Squabble among Nuns? The Sister
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Formation Crisis and the Patterns of Authority and Obedience among American Women Religious 1954–1971’ (doctoral dissertation, St Louis University, 2000); M.J. Daigler, ed., Through the Window: A History of the Work of Higher Education among the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2000); A. Harrington and P. Moylan, eds., Mundelin Voices: The Women’s College Experience, 1930–1991 (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2001). 11 In addition, see T. Schier and C. Russett, eds., Catholic Colleges for Women in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); M.C. Chandler, ‘Supporting the Social Identity of Women Religious: A Case Study of One Apostolic Congregation of Women Religious in the United States’ (doctoral dissertation, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California, 2001). 12 For further commentary, see E.M. Smyth ‘Writing the History of Women Religious in Canada (1996–2001),’ International Journal of Canadian Studies/ Revue internationale d’études canadiennes 23 (2001): 205–11; Smyth, ‘Preserving Habits: Archival Research within Communities of English Canadian Women Religious,’ in A Century Stronger: Women’s History in Canada 1900– 2000, S. Cook, L. McLean, and K. O’Rourke, eds. (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 22–6; Smyth, ‘Professionalization among the Professed,’ in Challenging Professions: Women and the Professions in English Canada, E.M. Smyth, A. Prentice, S. Acker, and P. Bourne, eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 234–54; Smyth, ‘Writing Teaches Us’; G. Anthony, SC, A Vision of Service: Celebrating the Sisters of Charity (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1997); G. Anthony, SC, Rebel, Reformer, Religious Extraordinaire: The Life of Sister Irene Farmer SC (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1997); J. Cameron, ‘And Martha Served’: History of the Sisters of St Martha, Antigonish (Halifax: Nimbus, 2000); Corcoran, Mount St. Vincent; M. D’Allaire, Les communautés religieuses et l’assistance sociale à Montréal 1659–1900 (Montreal: Editions du Meridien, 1997); D. Juteau and N. Laurin, Un métier et une vocation. Le travail des religieuses au Québec de 1901 à 1971 (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1997); G. Laperriere, Congregations religieuse de la France au Québec, vol. 2 (Quebec: Les Presses de Université Laval, 1996); N. Laurin, D. Juteau, and L. Duchesne, À la recherche d’un monde oublié. Les communautés religieuses de femmes au Québec de 1900 à 1970 (Montreal: Le Jour, 1991); McKenna, Charity Alive. 13 Typical of these descriptions is the following outline of the duties of a teacher: ‘The office of teacher is full of difficulties requiring much exertion of the voice and great application of the mind … the choice of the sisters who are destined to be teachers should be to the congregation a special object of solicitude. [With] common sense and good judgment, [their]
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14
15
16
17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24
natural disposition must be mild and inclined to virtue; hence those shall not be received who have a violent temper, are haughty, stubborn, frivolous, inconsistent, proud, idle.’ Teachers should have ‘previously prepare lessons … so that while understanding perfectly what they teach, they may be able to communicate it to their pupils with clearness and precision … devot[ing] to their own improvement all the time that is necessary, but they shall not study any other than those prescribed by the Superior or Directress [of Schools] in order that their progress in science may be accompanied by their progress in humility and obedience.’ Archives of the Sisters of St Joseph of Toronto (Morrow Park; henceforth abbreviated as ASSJ). Constitutions of the Sisters of St Joseph of Toronto (Toronto: Sisters of St Joseph of Toronto, 1881), 43. B. Puzon, ed., Women Religious and the Intellectual Life (San Francisco: International Scholars Press, 1996); M. Oates, ed., Higher Education for Catholic Women (New York: Garland, 1987). Congrégation de Notre Dame Archives Montreal, Mount Saint Bernard Centennial 1883–1983, [300.115] 21. Also see J.F. Cameron, For the People: A History of St Francis Xavier University (Kingston and Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1996). This label is attributed to a number of leading Anglicans, including James Beavan, who thus described the University of Toronto. See J.G. Slater, ‘A Capsule History of the History Department [of the University of Toronto].’ Available at http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/philosophy/history/ (accessed 17 Aug. 2000). ASSJ, Annals of the Sisters of St Joseph of Toronto (Annals), 8 July 1902, 318. Unfortunately, none of this material has survived in St Joseph’s Archives. Ibid., 22 Sept. 1905, 392. Ibid., 2 May 1908, 428. Sister Austin Warnock won the Edward Blake Scholarship in 1909. In 1910 she won the George Brown Prize and the Italian Prize, standing first in Moderns. Ibid., 30 June 1909, 444, and 9 June 1910, 450. Ibid., 6 May 1909, 441, citing a description in the Catholic Register. L.K. Shook, Catholic Post-Secondary Education in English-Speaking Canada: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 158. Ibid., 157. K. McGovern, Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (IBVM), ‘Outline of the History of Loretto,’ a paper read before the students and guests at the annual dinner in honour of Mary Ward, 22 Jan. 1976, 3. In Anne Rochon Ford, A Path Not Strewn with Roses: One Hundred Years of Women at the University of Toronto, 1884–1984 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 34.
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25 University of St Michael’s College Archives (USMCA), The Echo (1913), 48. 26 USMCA, R.J. Scollard, ‘The Members of the Corporation, the Collegium and the Administration of the University of St Michael’s College 1852/3– 1984/5.’ 27 ASSJ, ‘St Joseph’s College,’ Manuscript, 3. 28 Sister St Michael Guinan, Meandering with Memory (London: Brescia College, 1995), 59. 29 ASSJ, ‘Obituary: Sister M. Perpetua Whalen,’ St Joseph Lilies 27, no. 2 (1938), 209. 30 Ibid. 31 ASSJ, ‘Obituary: Sister Mary Agnes Murphy,’ 20 Oct. 1962. 32 Guinan, Meandering with Memory, 147. 33 ASSJ, untitled, undated obituary. Sister Austin Warnock, ‘Scrapbooks,’ vol. xviii, xiv. 34 ASSJ, Annals, 30 June 1909, 444. 35 Ibid., 9 June 1910, 450. 36 Ibid., 10 June 1911, 458. 37 ASSJ, ‘Sister Austin: Obituary,’ written by W.P.M. Kennedy, MA, Professor of English Literature, St Michael’s, Toronto University [sic], ‘Scrapbooks,’ vol. xviii, xiv. 38 ASSJ, unsigned obituary, ‘Modern Nun: Sister Austin,’ ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Archives of the Ursulines of the Chatham Union (UA), I.N. Mackay, LLD, University of Liverpool, 22 July 1907, Mother St Michael Major File. 41 UA, Necrology, Mother St Michael Major, File 1. 42 Ibid. 43 For a similar perspective, see E. Edwards, Women in Teacher Training Colleges, 1900–1960 (New York: Routledge, 2001). 44 ASSJ, Commission on the College [1968], 2, St Joseph’s College Box. 45 Among the congregations who have undertaken oral history projects are the Sisters of St Joseph of Toronto. See E. Smyth, E.M. Wicks and L. Wicks, eds., Wisdom Raises Her Voice: The Sisters of St Joseph of Toronto Celebrate 150 Years: An Oral History (Toronto: Transcontinental Press/Sisters of St Joseph, 2001). 46 For further discussion, see E.M. Smyth, ‘The Culture of Catholic Women’s Colleges at the University of Toronto 1911–1925,’ Canadian Catholic Historical Association Historical Studies 70 (2004): 1–20; Smyth, ‘Professionalization among the Professed.’
9 ‘Woman of Exodus II’: Irene Poelzer, the Women’s Movement, and Teacher Education DIANNE M. HALLMAN … I know what it means to be broken denied my language enchained in subtle slavery guarded from my own life my own oppressor Now I move from all that I am woman of Exodus II I am woman of Exodus I am woman of I am woman I am I1
These words were penned by Irene Poelzer during the early years of her career as Professor of Educational Foundations at the College of Education, University of Saskatchewan, where she taught from 1970 to 1993. They form part of the poem that opens her collection of poetry published in 1975, poetry that she wrote to help assuage the pain she felt when she heard stories of exclusion, loss, abuse, and betrayal told to her by women in her courses and at work who sought her understanding ear. These words say much about what it meant (means) to be a feminist woman professor in the male-dominated university: alienation, loneliness, and unwitting complicity with the forces of oppression. They are also a manifesto of hope: a disruption of the pretence of neutrality and objectivity by strong assertion of the subject ‘I,’ an expression of the emancipatory power of women claiming ourselves as subjects of knowledge, a subtle invocation of the strength of collective action. Drawing
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on her Judeo-Christian heritage for an apt metaphor, Poelzer describes the women’s movement as the second exodus. As the early Hebrews left the bondage of Egypt for the land of promise, so must women move out of the bondage of patriarchy into the fulfilment of their humanity. And, as the early Hebrews found out, and Poelzer’s career attests, the journey is not easy. Irene Poelzer brought the women’s movement into the College of Education, the university, and the wider community during her twentythree years as a professor. Among her many women-focused activities, she developed and taught courses for both pre-service teachers and graduate students that prepared them to challenge sexist practices in society and to undertake research from a feminist perspective. Offering the course on Women and Education for the first time in 1973, Poelzer made the College of Education one of the first in Canada to incorporate a women’s studies focus.2 Little is known about the Canadian professors who worked to establish women’s studies as a legitimate field of inquiry, and even less is known about those who did so in professional schools where the impact was broadly distributed throughout the field.3 That Poelzer, a woman religious, was able to establish a feminist focus in the College of Education is perhaps even more surprising given the context. The University of Saskatchewan, generally perceived as a conservative institution, was geographically distant from and less resourced than, say, Concordia in Montreal, the University of Toronto, or the University of British Columbia – other universities where women’s studies courses and programs were launched.4 The rich weave of Poelzer’s religious and educational ideals has much to offer historians of education and feminism, and her initiative and gutsiness in the face of indifference and opposition are worthy of emulation. How did a woman religious become ‘the mother of feminism’ on a university campus?5 What may seem at first to be a paradox makes sense when the terms ‘woman religious,’ ‘mother,’ and ‘feminism’ are unhooked from cultural stereotypes and seen as multiple and shifting identities that coalesce, break apart, and reassociate in the living of them. Irene Poelzer’s feminism is grounded in and nourished by both a religious charism and the women’s movement; her religious vision and commitments are shaped by the feminism of the women’s movement. This mix is unusual among feminist academic women working in secular institutions, and it lends a distinctive quality to Poelzer’s story. According to Poelzer, it all began with the unanswerable question she posed as a child growing up in a close-knit German Catholic commu-
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nity, ‘Why can’t I be a priest?’ The hurt of this exclusion has lasted a lifetime; yet from an early age it was directed into a passion for promoting the full human dignity of women. Poelzer was not alone in revisiting, revisioning, and reinterpreting Christianity from the perspective of women. The 1960s and 1970s saw a resurgence in attention to the relationship of women and religion. Like their sisters of the late nineteenth century and earlier, women of the late twentieth century – this time with the advantage of academic credentials and university positions – attacked the sexism entrenched in organized religion and rediscovered the rich and varied traditions of women’s spirituality.6 Women who engaged in a critique of Christianity’s patriarchal beliefs and practices, yet sustained their faith in the liberation message of the Gospel, identified themselves as Christian feminists. As Poelzer herself argued: ‘For any Christian theology to be true to itself and to its purpose, it must address its interpretation and its symbolization of the Christ message to the whole of the human situation – persons, events, relationships – and it must do this by means of language and symbols that are truly meaningful to all persons. In the past, theology has concerned itself almost exclusively with the male experience of life and has neglected the female experience.’7 Christian feminism had gained some visibility and credibility in departments of religious studies and in the more progressive theological seminaries. Yet, the fact that Poelzer developed these ideas within the context of a traditional religious order and applied them to teacher education in a secular context is less usual. Indeed, her passion for justice for women was both so intense and so comprehensive that at least one colleague admiringly referred to her as ‘militant,’8 an image that is perhaps difficult for the secular imagination to reconcile with the religious vow of obedience.9 From Deimler to Professor Irene Poelzer was born in 1926, the fifth of twelve children of Michael Poelzer and Elizabeth Hinz. Poelzer identifies herself as the middle child who was not fully part of either the older or the younger group of siblings. Her family called her a deimler, the dreamer who spent hours gazing at the clouds above the cow pasture. Her contemplation led her to writing and poetry; she remembers ‘publishing books’ at an early age, creating covers and drawings to illustrate her stories and poems. She traces her love of philosophy to her parents’ capacity to question
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everything, to take nothing for granted. Farmers, by virtue of necessity, are very practical people. They call a spade a spade. The honesty, practicality, and forthrightness Poelzer learned from living off the land with family and community served her well in hewing paths through the rhetorical obfuscation and political machinations that often characterize the academy. Her grandparents were among the German Catholics from the United States who heeded the call of a land company to settle in the St Peter’s Colony of central Saskatchewan in the early years of the twentieth century.10 Benedictines were invited to found a school (for boys). Elizabethan (hospitalliers) and Ursuline (teaching) sisters soon followed. In this relatively closed Roman Catholic community, Irene Polezer’s parents met, married, and settled down to farm in a tiny village near Humboldt called Bay Trail, which has since, like so many of Saskatchewan’s rural villages, disappeared. In 1929 her parents moved to Oregon, but they returned within a year to rescue the farm in Saskatchewan from bankruptcy. The brief time spent in Oregon gave Poelzer her first inkling that there were other people in the world besides Catholics. She recalls her surprise that children in Oregon with whom she ‘played church’ did not know the Gloria. Children of the St Peter’s Abbacy frequently left school after Grade 8 (or sometimes Grade 10) to assist with family and farming responsibilities for the usually brief time until they could take up their own. Poelzer’s parents valued education. Her mother was a schoolteacher. With pride Irene recounts that her mother had won the Governor General’s Medal in Grade 12 at Regina Collegiate, and then later supplemented her normal school training with university courses in education. Although her father had little formal schooling, Poelzer frequently refers to him as a philosopher. These parents were atypical in their insistence that all their children finish Grade 12 and one year of further education before deciding what to do in terms of a job or career. All twelve of Michael and Elizabeth Poelzer’s children went on to finish post-secondary and professional education. Irene took her high-school courses by correspondence so that she could look after her younger siblings while her mother taught school. She then went to the University of Saskatchewan where she completed a bachelor of arts in 1950 with a double major in English and philosophy. In 1950 women represented less than 25 per cent of undergraduate enrollment. With the Depression and then the Second World War, the percentage of women in full-time undergraduate study in Canada had
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been in decline since the late 1920s, a situation that did not demonstrably improve until the 1960s.11 In such close-knit religious communities as those in St Peter’s Abbacy, the ‘normal kind of process’ was for at least some boys and girls to enter religious orders. Four of Poelzer’s sisters joined religious orders. In 1950 Poelzer entered the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Toronto, also known as the Loretto Sisters. A deeply felt religious commitment was certainly a factor in her decision. Yet with a sentiment reminiscent of Marta Danylewycz’s argument that ‘taking the veil’ was ‘an alternative to marriage, motherhood, and spinsterhood,’12 Poelzer says: ‘I saw a lot of other girls my age, and they would end up getting married and having babies and working on the farm with its drudgery, and all this, and I had a taste of the intellectual life, and so …’ Circumstances had conspired so that Poelzer could visit the Loretto Convent in Sedley, Saskatchewan, an occasion that clinched her decision about which order to join. At the time she knew only that she wanted to teach, a desire in keeping with this order’s apostolate. She knew little of Mary Ward, founder of the order, and her ‘galloping girls.’13 However, she soon learned a history of radicalism that resonated well with her own inclinations. Elizabeth Rapley describes the early seventeenth-century women’s religious congregation begun by Mary Ward (1585–1645), first in the Spanish Netherlands (where many English Catholics had taken refuge from their Protestant government) and later in London and York. Under Ward’s leadership the English Ladies, as they were then called, modelled themselves after the Jesuits, with many living under simple vows and without religious habit. Most importantly, they rejected clausura or the enclosed monastic life separated from the world. In 1631 the congregation was suppressed by papal bull, largely because ‘the women had arrogated to themselves functions reserved to men,’ including catechizing, which was expressly forbidden to women.14 More than two centuries later, in 1847, five members of the Irish branch of the Lorettos (which traces its origins to Mary Ward) came to Canada and ‘made a path by walking,’ setting up ‘poor schools’ and teaching in separate schools in Toronto and the surrounding area.15 Irene Poelzer, too, made her own path by walking, spending the next twenty-seven years teaching and studying with the Lorettos. She spent six years as a teacher at the Loretto Abbey in Toronto, and after a couple of brief teaching assignments elsewhere in Ontario, she was sent to Sedley School in Saskatchewan, where she served as principal and
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teacher for nine years. She recalls having to teach French, and not knowing a word of the language. She learned quickly, and not just French. During the 1960s, with the support of her order, she earned a bachelor of education degree at the University of Saskatchewan, and then completed two degrees at the master’s level: an MEd in 1968 at the University of Saskatchewan in Foundations of Education and an MA in 1969 at the University of Seattle in English literature. She continued graduate studies at the University of Oregon, where she was awarded a doctorate in 1972. But even before her doctoral dissertation was fully under way, Poelzer was invited to teach in Educational Foundations at the University of Saskatchewan. As it happened, Sister M. Ruth’s (Poelzer’s religious name) appointment to the faculty of the College of Education in 1970 coincided with the tabling of the Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada. The report’s 167 recommendations provided a strong impetus to those concerned with the status of women in Canada and generated several government initiatives to direct implementation. This landmark document provides a snapshot of the main issues, concerns, and frames of reference for the organized women’s movement of that time.16 Irene Poelzer was not intimately associated with the Royal Commission or the local organizing that occurred in its wake.17 Nevertheless, the public discourse about the social, economic, and political conditions of women generated by the commission report is important to acknowledge. This was a moment in time when women as a social group had national attention. Moreover, for women religious, the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962–5) precipitated a rigorous reexamination of women’s roles both within orders and in the wider church.18 Poelzer, who had ‘kind of stood out’ as a ‘nun in habit’ when she was the first master’s student to graduate from the University of Saskatchewan’s Department of Educational Foundations, was entering the professoriate as a sister in street clothes at an auspicious time for the spread of feminist consciousness.19 The College of Education began the fall term of 1970 in its brand-new building on campus. Previous to that the college’s quarters had been divided between facilities on campus and the old teachers’ college building in Saskatoon. The new building symbolized the dominance of the university tradition of teacher education over the teachers’ college model that had formally ended in 1964 with a provincial agreement that moved all teacher education to the University of Saskatchewan.20 Increasingly rigorous university standards of teaching, research, and
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professional practice steadily redefined the work of teacher educators throughout Poelzer’s career. Her first ten years would see fluctuating enrollment, steady growth in faculty numbers, significant upgrading of teacher certification standards, and a major program revision. By 1980 full-time student enrollment was the lowest and the complement of faculty was the highest that it had been in a decade.21 New faculty appointments were made in the late 1970s to implement the recently revised program; however, downsizing followed throughout the 1980s and 1990s.22 Women were clearly the majority among education students, but most professors were men. This pattern remained constant throughout Poelzer’s career, with the relative proportion of women professors staying about the same at about one-fifth. When she joined the college in 1970, twenty-three of the 118 faculty positions (19.5%) were held by women; when she retired in 1993, women held fourteen of the seventythree positions (19.2%). In 1993 only two women (including Irene Poelzer) held the rank of full professor compared with thirty-nine men (5.1%).23 Scratch on the Wall If you make your scratch on the wall, in 200 years if everyone makes a scratch, the wall comes down.
Irene Poelzer is fond of making an analogy between the collective scratch on the wall and the eventual destruction of the injustice that the wall represents. In her case, it might have seemed that what she scratched away by day was rebuilt at night by the armies of patriarchy. Discussion of her scratch illustrates the resilience of the wall. Yet for Poelzer, resistance and even backlash were useful in that they exposed cracks; they opened a space for dialogue. Often throughout her life she would be deliberately provocative, pushing against the accepted ways of doing things: ‘In a way I was a gadfly; I would sting people and they squirmed. It opened things up.’ One of Poelzer’s most enduring accomplishments was the creation of a new undergraduate course (for six credit units): Women and Education. She developed this course in 1973 as a corrective to the malecentredness of formal education: ‘a terrible injustice is done to women when the knowledge we teach is built on the experience of only half the human race.’ She compares this to teaching only the history of blueeyed people. When a woman’s experience, the source of her knowl-
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edge, is not present in what she studies, she is forced to live a split: ‘Formal education keeps some people less human and others more human … it should help us to live more humanly … to heal the woundedness.’ Women and Education was primarily concerned with demonstrating the social construction of reality, and bringing the experience of women to bear on questions of knowledge and the work of societal institutions. The theoretical underpinnings of the course reflected the feminist scholarship of the day, which emphasized awareness of sexism and sex stereotyping, the rediscovery of women’s contributions to history, recognition of women’s paid and unpaid work, and active involvement in promoting women’s liberation.24 The works of Juliet Mitchell and Sheila Rowbotham were among those that informed Irene Poelzer’s thinking and the content of the course in its beginning years.25 In the early 1970s, feminist scholarship was still sparse; the explosion of feminist writing in the humanities and social sciences had not yet happened. In designing her course for the college curriculum, Poelzer was insistent that it be called ‘Women and Education’ rather than the more narrowly focused ‘Women in Education,’ which was a topic that was beginning to appear in educational discourse.26 The ‘and’ gave a much wider scope to consider agents of socialization other than formal education (e.g., family, church, law, and popular culture) in the development and reinforcement of what was then referred to as sex roles. Her insistence gave rise to what she wryly calls the ‘“in” and the “and”’ debate on the floor of the 1973 faculty meeting where her course was under consideration for college approval. Poelzer credits the success of the motion to approve the course at that meeting to the strategically timed arrival of women faculty members who, although slated to teach while the meeting was going on, left their classes briefly for the vote.27 The success was bittersweet: ‘The course was eventually passed but with the proviso that a rider would be added to its calendar description to the effect that it would not qualify (as did all other 400-level Educational Foundations courses) as satisfying the program requirements for a “compulsory elective” (apparently not a contradiction in terms). As a “free elective,” it might wither on the vine for lack of enrolment; in any case its second-class status was obvious to all who read the calendar.’28 Irene Poelzer recalls that some administrators counselled students against taking the class, perhaps unwittingly making it all the more appealing. She remembers that thirty students on average enrolled in the course, a number consistent with or better than other elective courses.
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In the early 1980s, the six-credit Women and Education was divided into two three-credit courses that are taught to the present day.29 After another acrimonious faculty debate, either one was accepted as fulfiling the requirement of a fourth-year Educational Foundations elective. However, one detractor opposed their qualification because they dealt with only half the human population.30 Poelzer’s Women and Education course is but one example of an iconoclastic spirit that pervades her life and work. She deliberately used the course to challenge institutional norms and regulations: ‘When I first taught the course I invited everyone to come. About seventy people, mostly women came. I thought if people want to take the course they should be able take the course [without formally registering]; I didn’t see a problem with that but the university saw a problem.’ Her pedagogy within this and other courses pushed the boundaries of what was ‘normal’ or taken-for-granted as institutional protocol. She had her students call her by her first name, Irene. Genuine dialogue, she believed, required an ‘I-Thou’ relationship on an equal footing. Class members were also required to learn their classmates’ first names or ‘they failed the course.’ She told students not to take notes because it interrupted the flow of conversation. If a student absolutely had to take notes, Poelzer assured the class that she would stop the discussion while the individual wrote. When one student complained that she might lose her ‘A’ standing because of this class with its ‘mad woman professor,’ who insisted that students learn each other names and not take notes, Irene Poelzer calmly persuaded the student that it would be less difficult to memorize thirty-seven words (student names) than ninety pages of notes. In some courses she told students that their assignment was to hand in one page of writing on Friday that would be returned to them on Monday. When students asked what they should write about, she replied, ‘I don’t know. How would I know what you have to offer?’ By disrupting the normative student-teacher role regarding assignments, she opened up a space for dialogue, responding to whatever the students had written with her own page of questions or comments. No grade was given on this twelve-week exchange. The point of Irene Poelzer’s pedagogical strategies was to promote awareness of self and of one’s deeply held beliefs, to validate experience, interrogate assumptions, and promote connection and dialogue with others. In one class, a mock wedding where the male and female roles were reversed may have done more to develop awareness of the
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effacement of women’s identity in traditional marriage than a dozen treatises. Yet professors, particularly women professors, who transgress the norms and traditional practices of the academy in favour of more democracy and dialogue in the classroom are not always greeted with enthusiasm or even sympathy from students.31 Irene Poelzer’s colleague Robert Regnier attributes her success in teaching against the grain to her Christian affirmation of human possibility and redemption. Drawing on Freirian notions of the ‘“uncompleted student”’ and ‘“ideological traps, ”’32 Regnier explains: ‘She was prepared to rethink in a way that would allow students to think again; she would challenge her own explanations to even say “well, I haven’t explained that right,” or “I need to take another run at this,” or ... “the student is obviously not seeing this because he is caught in a perspective that I don’t yet understand and I’m going to have to figure that out” ... there was always this willingness to feel where students were even though they could be wrong but trapped in their own ideology.’ Poelzer preferred conversion to opposition; she always held onto the possibility of change. Regnier continued: ‘I think that comes from her Christian assumptions; she’s not going to give up on people.’33 The ever-present possibility of redemption is captured in a story that Poelzer tells about how, when she was a child, her father rehabilitated her badly broken arm, restoring to use through daily massage and exercise what the medical doctors had assumed to be beyond repair. Mending How does a green twig, bent-broken dangling from its branch mend without distortion unless someone cares and wraps it gently?34
Somewhat ironically, in light of her deliberate subverting of institutional norms, Irene Poelzer’s innovation and excellence in teaching was recognized in 1984 with one of the college’s highest honours, the Founders’ Award. Poelzer acknowledges a number of mentors in her development as a teacher, with her mother figuring prominently among
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them. She also acknowledges the hard work and many years it takes to perfect the craft of teaching. A graduate student who, on observing her classes, despaired of ever being able to initiate and sustain such lively, meaningful, and challenging discussion in her own teaching, was assured by Poelzer that it had taken almost her entire career to achieve these skills.35 At the behest of her colleagues in 1973, Poelzer reluctantly took up the headship of the department. She took a novel approach to administration, striking two committees made up of the department’s faculty and graduate students: one to deal with the budget and financial matters, the second to deal with all other issues vital to the smooth running of the department. Graduate students and faculty were recognized as equals. Decisions were based on consensus. This system garnered the respect of some colleagues and irritated others.36 For Poelzer, her attempt to do it differently made the work less onerous but no less oppressive: ‘As a department head my loyalty had to be to administration; I found I was using my energies to keep a system in place that kept women in their place.’ Two years into her term, she requested a leave of absence without pay and accepted an invitation from her former teacher and mentor Doris Dyke to spend a year at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. Whether or not she felt refreshed for the fight, upon her return to Saskatoon Irene Poelzer was soon embroiled in a public battle. The occasion was afforded by the 10 December 1976 issue of the Saskatchewan Bulletin, the bi-monthly publication of the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation. The cover featured a small girl in a large apron rolling out cookie dough and obviously about to use the near-at-hand cookie cutters to make Christmas cookies. Poelzer wrote a polite letter of protest indicating that ‘giving front page prominence to a photo which has many sexist implications at this time in history is certainly bad taste and poor judgement on the part of the editors.’37 The outpouring of invective against her is an excellent example of the mechanism that Debbie Wise Harris has described, whereby women who call attention to sexist practices become the targets of personal abuse.38 In the next issue of the publication, Anthony P. Dutchak exhorted Dr Poelzer to ‘make better use of her leisure time than trying to find something sexist about the photographs in the Saskatchewan Bulletin.’ E.L. Phillips wrote that ‘it is a tough world when you can’t print a picture of a cute kid without some idiot making an issue of it.’ Another writer suggested that ‘she appears to have lost her objectivity in what
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apparently must be her personal struggle for self-identity.’39 Two weeks later Poelzer’s colleague Murray Scharf, who would later become dean of the College of Education, joined the fray with a tongue-in-cheek letter that ribbed Poelzer for using a ‘more insidious form of sexism [than the photo]’ with her references to ‘daughter(s)’ and ‘girls’ instead of gender-neutral terms. Another who signed ‘I.M. Chauvinist’ poked fun at Poelzer’s charge of sex stereotyping with an allusion to the background of the photo where ‘obviously a male tree [is] hovering over a poor, suppressed female bush.’40 The 11 March 1977 edition of the publication contained the last word on the subject with a note from the editor that ‘18 letters on one issue, no matter the content, probably suffice.’ Here, letters of support from faculty and students objected to the personal attacks levelled at Poelzer, while Poelzer herself wrote with restraint of ‘the necessity of more education … and of more “caring” dialogue.’41 Looking back on this exchange after twenty-three years, Poelzer takes a gadfly view of it: the backlash that her initial sting provoked ‘brought the whole issue to light.’ At about this same time Poelzer was in the throes of a personal dilemma. Several circumstances were making her rethink her membership in the Lorettos. Although she cared deeply for the sisters (and continues to do so), her feminism and understanding from Vatican II that people are the ‘soul of the church’ were factors in her decision to move on. In 1978 she left the Lorettos and joined the Sisters for Christian Community, a grassroots movement begun in 1970 in the United States concerned with revisioning and revitalizing the notion of a consecrated life.42 Not recognized by the Vatican, the sisterhood is a loosely organized community of self-supporting members who are committed to creating Christian community wherever they live. They maintain no houses or other properties in common. In the late 1970s, Irene Poelzer began teaching in the recently established Northern Teacher Education Program, a field-based program designed to train teachers for Saskatchewan’s northern communities where at least 75 per cent of the population is of Aboriginal ancestry.43 For four years she travelled to the education centre in La Ronge, Saskatchewan, where she taught English literature and composition and/or an introductory course in written communication. Her work among Métis women there prompted her later research in the field, which resulted in the text, co-authored with her sister Dolores Poelzer, entitled In Our Own Words: Northern Saskatchewan Métis Women Speak Out. In her prologue Irene Poelzer states:
Irene Poelzer, the Women’s Movement, and Teacher Education 237 I wanted my research to become a tool which these Métis women could utilize in their struggle to understand and to participate as subjects in the momentous cultural and economic changes taking place in their home territory. It seemed to me that, in addition, my research should help them overcome many of the obstacles that keep them from realizing a fair share of the benefits that accrue from the development of the north’s natural and human resources. Moreover, it was long overdue that we outsiders heard the perspective of native women who, more often than not, are never consulted, and whose problems and experiences are kept invisible. There was an urgent need for these women to express directly their own perceptions of problems which they experienced, of possible solutions, and of what it means as a native woman to live on the invisible side of social and economic change.44
Irene Poelzer spent a year in northern communities, interviewing a total of eighty-six Métis women. She then worked with her sister Dolores, who was teaching sociology at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, to categorize and organize the data. The resulting nineteen chapters present the perceptions of her interviewees on ‘employment,’ ‘sex-defined familial roles,’ ‘housing,’ ‘recreation,’ and a wide range of other topics. The book concludes with an action-oriented epilogue. To what extent Poelzer’s research became the tool for Métis women that she envisioned is difficult to assess. The gaze of white researchers who do field work in Aboriginal communities has certainly come under attack in recent years. Still, the ways that individual women and their communities may have been touched by this particular contact is largely unknown and perhaps unknowable: ‘You don’t know the repercussions of what you do: you cast your seeds; that’s all you can do. You never know what will grow.’ Irene Poelzer’s reach in casting seeds was wide. In the early 1980s, in conjunction with an advisory board made up of representatives from several educational agencies in the Province of Saskatchewan, she developed a summer institute for women that combined credit and noncredit courses and events. For two years it was run out of the Department of Educational Foundations, drawing some four hundred participants who attended women’s studies lectures, viewed films, and participated in workshops as diverse as WENDO (a self-defence course for women), financial planning, and the needs of farm women.45 Poelzer was instrumental in getting a women’s program in the Division of Extension and Community Relations set up, and the Women’s Educational Summer
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Institute (WESI) was incorporated into this new structure. WESI eventually fell victim to institutional demands for complete cost-recovery programming. Yet for several years it provided a unique opportunity for Saskatchewan women to have access to the resources of the university, to become informed about a wide range of current issues related to women, and to develop organizational and leadership skills. The presentday Saskatchewan Women’s Agricultural Network traces its origin to the WESI workshop series entitled ‘This land of ours – a place for rural women.’46 Some seeds scattered wide and some fell close at hand. Educational Foundations remained a small department with a limited graduate program throughout Poelzer’s career. Until the mid-1980s faculty taught all graduate courses as overload, and thesis supervision is still not credited as part of the teaching assignment. Nevertheless, in 1981–2 Poelzer developed a graduate focus on Women and Education for a master of education with thesis. She undertook the creation of two graduate courses for this specialization: Feminist Thought and Its Implications for Canadian Education, and The Experience of Women in Canadian Education.47 Thesis supervision was another area where Poelzer’s approach cut through the usual protocol. Poelzer was valued for her insistence on validating personal experience, for making students’ own existential concerns the starting point of inquiry. She took students out of the standard box of formulaic thesis construction, encouraging new areas of research and unusual forms of written expression, such as the incorporation of stories or personal diary entries. As the lone faculty member with expertise in feminist theory, she was very much in demand as a supervisor both in and outside the department. Many feminist professors in similar situations have found that administrators overburden them rather than increase resources. And colleagues let them do the extra work rather than taking on the challenging task of learning feminist content and methods in their own fields.48 Irene Poelzer was esteemed for her capacity to draw women together from various constituencies of campus life. While she included men in her vision of gender justice, her primary audience was women. Beginning in the 1970s she organized noon-hour brown bag lunches ‘for anyone who wanted to come.’ After the first year, they were held in a venue outside the College of Education and became a forum to discuss a wide range of women’s concerns. In her college she worked both formally and informally to bring faculty, professional associates, secre-
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taries, administrators, and students together. In 1991 Poelzer was successful in persuading the dean to strike a gender equity committee in the college that included representatives from all strata. The committee’s mandate was to educate the college with respect to gender equity issues and to take action on a wide range of concerns including barriers to women in administration, exclusion of clerical personnel from decisions affecting their work, lack of child care for students, and many other issues that had been recently outlined by an ad hoc committee.49 Secretary Carole Sunley remembers, ‘I was impressed by Irene’s ability to keep her focus on fairness and gender equity while firmly stating her position in a respectful way to people who were in need of enlightenment (sometimes rather badly).’ Sunley continues, ‘Irene organized video presentations over lunch breaks [a time when secretaries could attend] and led a discussion at the end of the films. Everyone was welcome to attend and participate in the discussions, and many did – including men. Her philosophy appeared to be inclusive of all. She was determined to bring issues of feminism to the forefront and defended gender equity as a legitimate entity in its own right.’ These sessions were generally well attended: ‘Irene was a speed boat; we all got caught in her wake and held on.’50 The patient building of a network of support for and among women met with considerable hostility that often manifested itself in gender and sexual harassment of female employees. In 1991, Poelzer called a meeting of all woman in the college, from administrators to cafeteria staff, to support a women colleague who at the time (and for years to come) was the target of particularly intense harassment. Poelzer remembers this meeting as ‘electric’ because of the way women rallied to support their co-worker and each other, sharing stories of their own workplace tribulations. Poelzer’s status as a woman religious had not protected her from unwelcome sexual advances, a fact that she disclosed at this meeting. Poelzer remembers well the threat that cast a pall over the proceedings. Prior to the meeting she had received an anonymous phone call from an angry-sounding man who asked a question guaranteed to chill the heart, ‘Do you want to have another Montreal massacre?’ – a reference to the 1989 murder of fourteen women at L’Ecole Polytechnique by Marc Lepine. The women continued to meet regularly to provide emotional support to those who had been targets of sexual and/or personal harassment. Carole Sunley speaks of the importance of this network: ‘It made all of us aware of events which were taking place and gave us a sense of
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empowerment because we had a forum where we could openly discuss these issues. We did not feel a sense of isolation while the network existed. Unfortunately the network lost momentum when Irene retired, essentially because it required a very strong person to stand up to the opposition we had received, and it needed her direction to push it forward.’51 Opposition to Irene Poelzer was not always overt. One of the most difficult obstacles feminists face is that patriarchy structures relationships among women so that we undermine ourselves. A major disappointment in Poelzer’s career was the university’s decision to create a women’s studies unit in the College of Arts and Science rather than integrate women’s studies in the programs of all colleges and departments throughout the university. She believed that a separate unit or department would result in the isolation and trivialization of women’s studies and that other colleges such as agriculture, law, and medicine would then shirk their responsibilities to consider the concerns of women and the results of feminist research in their fields.52 Poelzer attributes the failure of the wider approach to a lack of common vision and solidarity among women in achieving the goal of full equality. This chapter captures but a small portion of the work with which Irene Poelzer was involved during her professional career. It says nothing of her work supervising interns, her advocacy on university committees, participation on editorial boards, or her active involvement in the governance of St Thomas More, a Catholic college federated with the University of Saskatchewan. Like many feminist academics, Poelzer overextended herself, a factor that most likely contributed to serious health problems during her career. Poelzer attributes her difficulty setting limits on how much she does for other people to her place in the birth order: ‘As the middle child you often don’t know your borders; you don’t know your boundaries; you are pulled all over the place.’ However, others who know ‘greedy institutions’53 such as universities might look to the high personal expectations and competing allegiances or ‘role muddles’54 with which feminists struggle as a more likely source of the difficulty. When Irene Poelzer retired in 1993 she was feted and her many accomplishments celebrated. But a few months later her position, which had been filled by a term appointment, was slated to be deleted. A measure of the impact that Poelzer had on the people whom she touched was the force of the protest mounted at this indignity. Administrators of the university received hundred of letters, phone calls, as well as per-
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sonal visits from people outraged by this action. This went on for nearly two years. At the end of the first year, Poelzer returned for a public lecture to lobby for the position to be continued. Supporters presented her with a loaf of bread and a bouquet of roses to symbolize women’s need for both. With liturgical grace, she shared her bouquet, calling on individuals from different groups who were vital to the struggle for justice for women to accept a single rose. She included Murray Scharf, Dean of Education, who had recommended deletion of the position.55 Poelzer now lives in the Shuswap region on the acreage of her dreams: it has a creek, a pond, a meadow, a forest, and a ranch house. Her apostolate is to create Christian community where she lives. And she does, caring for an ailing sister, sharing the produce of her huge organic garden, prodding the local priest with feminist views, and welcoming friends and strangers into her home. She has left many of her academic projects behind, letting a nearly completed manuscript go unpublished and passing on a huge database of interviews to a colleague. She has clearly relinquished her former way of life to embrace a new one rich in possibility and love. Aloneness I hadn’t expected the years of life to be moving along towards such aloneness Where are the others who were running with me short and long periods? Have I lagged far behind? Or, shot miles ahead of them all? To journey back – the distance grows from all I came for; To wait – but for what? Better to turn my face forward and hope the Christ of Emmaus lives.56
Walk On – and On To take up the career of one professor poses interesting theoretical, ethical, and methodological challenges in relation to the writing of the history of the Canadian professoriate. To write about a figure as charismatic and iconoclastic as Irene Poelzer is to walk a fine line between balanced academic research and hagiography. To write about the living
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is to weigh personal integrity and ‘the truth’ against the multiplicity and instability of truth. To write of a vision of university teaching thoroughly grounded in religious commitment is to risk oversimplification and misunderstanding by a profession no longer tied to its religious heritage. And to write as an academic feminist about another feminist is in part ‘the struggle of memory against forgetting.’57 It is remembering that women’s presence in the professoriate is recent and still tenuous; it is celebrating the achievements of those who, by walking, opened a path for women; and it is recognizing both the value and the limits of that history. The telling of career stories are lessons for life: ‘the more nuanced the reading of the subject’s life, the more openings there are for the reader to enter and learn from it.’58 As academics seek to understand the shifting nature of their work and its relation to society, the stories of those who have gone before us help consolidate or challenge current identities. For feminist academics and activists, Irene Poelzer’s story has particular salience. To extend Poelzer’s Judeo-Christian image of the Second Exodus, we may wonder if women are back in the land of oppression rather than entering the land of promise and freedom. Women have made modest gains in the professoriate, but the university climate is still chilly.59 A close colleague of Poelzer comments: ‘Little attention is given to women’s issues now. It’s as if sexism is not a problem anymore or that it was solved way back in the sixties and seventies. well, some people still haven’t got it!’60 Moreover, the current processes of economic restructuring and the dismantling of the welfare state disproportionately affect women in all sectors of society, redirecting them from full-time paid employment to insecure part-time work and increased domestic responsibility.61 Women still haven’t got it – equality. And yet, Irene Poelzer’s exodus image strikes a note of hope. We create ourselves as we go along life’s journey. We teach what we live. We do not know when our smallest action for justice may open up new possibility and hope. The answers are in our living, our be-ing. As another Christian feminist put it, ‘The journey is home.’62 notes 1 Irene Poelzer, Woman of Exodus II (Battleford, SK: Marian Press, 1975). 2 Don Cochrane, ‘A Tribute to Dr Irene Poelzer on Her Retirement,’ College of Education, University of Saskatchewan, 23 April 1993. Unpublished text
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3
4 5
6
7
8 9 10
11 12
of an oral tribute. Based on a survey of fifty-five teacher training institutions in Canada, Cochrane found that ‘no college of education in the country had an undergraduate course of this nature earlier than we did at the University of Saskatchewan (only McGill and Dalhousie universities also offered courses in 1974 at the undergraduate level; most universities did not catch up until the 80s and 90s).’ A massive research project on women’s studies in Canada was undertaken in the late 1980s. It does not provide individual biographies. See Margrit Eichler (with assistance of Rosonna Tite), ‘Women’s Studies Professors in Canada: A Collective Self-Portrait,’ Atlantis 16, no. 1 (1990): 6–24, and other reports in the same issue. Ruth Roach Pierson and Marjorie Griffin Cohen, Canadian Women’s Issues, vol. 1, Bold Visions (Toronto: Lorimer, 1995), 175–82. Irene Poelzer, interviews with author, Shuswap region, British Columbia, 25 and 26 July 2000. All further unacknowledged quotations in the text are from these interviews. See Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), chap. 7. For late twentieth-century examples of the re/discovery of feminist spirituality and Christian feminism, see Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, eds., Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1979); Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983); Elizabeth Shüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroads, 1985); and the Canadian Women and Religion Newsletter (edited by Irene Poelzer from 1978 to 1981). Irene Poelzer, ‘Feminist Theology: Implications and Significance for Women as Persons,’ in La femme, son corps, et la religion: Approaches pluridisciplinaires, Elizabeth J. Lacelle, ed. (Montreal: Les Editions Bellarmin, 1983), 71–82, quotation at 71–2. Robert Regnier, interview with author, Saskatoon, 1 Sept. 2000. Several interviewees commented on the apparent contradiction of Poelzer being both a feminist and a ‘nun.’ See Clinton O. White, ‘Education among German Catholic Settlers in Saskatchewan, 1903–1918: A Reinterpretation,’ in Schools in the West: Essays in Canadian Educational History, Nancy M. Sheehan, J. Donald Wilson, and David C. Jones, eds. (Calgary: Detselig, 1986), 175–92. Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1970), 168. Marta Danylewycz, Taking the Veil: An Alternative to Marriage, Motherhood,
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14 15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22 23
Dianne M. Hallman and Spinsterhood in Quebec, 1840–1920 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987). Elizabeth Rapley, The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), 31. Ibid., 32; see also 117 and 212. Marion Norman, ‘Making a Path by Walking: Loretto Pioneers Facing the Challenges of Catholic Education on the North American Frontier,’ Canadian Catholic Historical Association Historical Studies 65 (1999): 92–106. Status of Women Report. See also Monique Begin, ‘The Royal Commission on the Status of Women: Twenty Years Later,’ in Challenging Times: The Women’s Movement in Canada and the United States, Constance Backhouse and David H. Flaherty, eds. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), 21–38. See, for example, Saskatchewan Women ’73: Task Force Report on the Status of Women in Saskatchewan (Regina: Saskatchewan Advisory Council on the Status of Women, 1973); and Ali Norman, ‘The Women’s Web: Networking in Saskatchewan and the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada’ (Master’s thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 1997). Elizabeth Smyth, ‘Professionalization among the Professed: The Case of Roman Catholic Women Religious,’ in Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women’s Professional Work, Elizabeth Smyth, Sandra Acker, Paula Bourne, and Alison Prentice, eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 244–5. For the distinction between nuns and sisters, see ibid., 237–8. Poelzer refers to herself as a nun, but as a Loretto under canon law she was a sister. After Vatican II, the Lorettos returned to Mary Ward’s original plan for ordinary dress. Eleanor Campbell, Reflections of Light: A History of the Saskatoon Normal School (1912–1953) and the Saskatoon Teachers’ College (1953–1964) (Saskatoon: College of Education, 1996), 151–2. University Studies Group, University of Saskatchewan Statistics (Saskatoon: University of Saskatchewan, 1980), table 2.3 and table 6.2. There were 1,696 full-time students and eighty-nine full-time faculty. See sections on the College of Education in University of Saskatchewan calendars over the years. University of Saskatchewan Calendar, 1970–1, J–2-3; 1992–3, 129. The figures for the 1970–1 faculty are inflated by ‘representatives of other Faculties or Departments.’ I thank Rick Schwier and Barry Brown for their help in ascertaining the number of women on faculty.
Irene Poelzer, the Women’s Movement, and Teacher Education 245 24 For an excellent overview of the relationship between education and the women’s movement, see Pierson and Cohen, Bold Visions, 162–202. 25 Juliet Mitchell, Woman’s Estate (New York: Penguin, 1971); and Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (New York: Penguin, 1973). 26 See, for example, American Federation of Teachers, Women in Education: Changing Sexist Practices in the Classroom (Washington, DC: ATF, nd [circa 1972]); and Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation (STF), A History of Women in Education (Saskatoon: STF, 1988), 6–10. 27 Minutes of a Faculty of Education Meeting, 22 Nov. 1973. Official Minutes, College of Education, University of Saskatchewan Archives, Saskatoon. The minutes are silent on any debate that took place on the floor. 28 Cochrane, ‘A Tribute.’ The rider was added to the calendar after the undergraduate program revision in 1978 and did, in fact, apply to some other courses. 29 Don Cochrane, Head, Department of Educational Foundations, to Reg Wickett, Chair, Senior Committee on Studies, 20 Feb. 1981, memo regarding a proposal to have EDFDT 416/416A, Women and Education, split into EDFDT 482A/B, Women and Education and EDFDT 483A/B, Women and the Teaching Profession. Official Minutes, College of Education, University of Saskatchewan Archives. The proposal was approved at a faculty meeting later that year. 30 Cochrane, ‘A Tribute.’ 31 See Magda Gere Lewis, Without a Word: Teaching beyond Women’s Silence (New York: Routledge, 1993); Christine Overall, A Feminist I: Reflections from Academia (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1998); Roxana Ng, ‘“A Woman Out of Control”: Deconstructing Sexism and Racism in the University,’ Canadian Journal of Education 18, no. 3 (1993): 189–205; Sherene Razack, Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). 32 See Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970). 33 Regnier, interview with author. 34 Poelzer, Woman of Exodus II, 43. 35 Carol Schick (Regina), telephone conversation with author, 9 Sept. 2000. 36 Regnier, interview with author. 37 Dr Irene Poelzer, ‘Use of Photo Questioned,’ Saskatchewan Bulletin, 14 Jan. 1977, 3; see STF, A History, 14–15. 38 Debbie Wise Harris, ‘Keeping Women in Our Place: Violence at Canadian Universities,’ Canadian Woman Studies 11, no. 4 (1991): 37–41.
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39 ‘Readers Claim Photo Not Sexist,’ Saskatchewan Bulletin, 28 Jan. 1977, 3. 40 ‘Is It or Isn’t It? Photo Sparks Controversy,’ Saskatchewan Bulletin, 11 Feb. 1977, 3. 41 ‘Readers Criticize Reaction to Poelzer Letter,’ Saskatchewan Bulletin, 11 March 1977, 6–7. 42 See Lillanna (Audrey) Kopp, Sudden Spring: 6th Stage Sisters: Trends of Change in Catholic Sisterhoods, A Sociological Analysis (Waldport, OR: Sunspot Publications, 1983). 43 Catherine Littlejohn and Robert Regnier, ‘Aboriginal Teacher Education: Mission Statement and Background Paper,’ paper prepared for Faculty Executive of the College of Education, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, 1989, 29–33. 44 Dolores T. Poelzer and Irene A. Poelzer, In Our Own Words: Northern Saskatchewan Métis Women Speak Out (Saskatoon: Lindenblatt and Hamonic, 1986), xvi. Her other major publication was also of primarily local interest, Irene Poelzer, Saskatchewan Women Teachers, 1905–1920: Their Contributions (Saskatoon: Lindenblatt and Hamonic, 1990). 45 Angela T. Wong, ‘A Review of the Women’s Program,’ a report prepared for the Division of Extension and Community Relations, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, 1986. 46 Glenis Joyce, interview with author, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, 7 Sept. 2000. 47 Curriculum Vitae for Irene Poelzer, Department of Educational Foundations, 30 June 1992. Viewed by author with permission. 48 See Sandra Acker, ‘Caring as Work for Women Educators,’ in Smyth et al., Challenging Professions, 277–95; Dianne M. Hallman, ‘Coming Up for Air: Feminism, a Pedagogy of the De/pressed,’ Resources for Feminist Research 26, no. 1 & 2 (1998): 109–16. 49 Bev Pain, Linda Aikenhead, Bea Leer, Ailsa Watkinson, Tammy Durant, Joan Glossop, Irene Poelzer, and Glenis Joyce, ‘Gender Equity Committee Report to Associate Dean Robinson,’ paper prepared for the Associate Dean of the College of Education, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, 11 June 1990. 50 Carole Sunley, interview with author, Saskatoon, 8 Sept. 2000. 51 Ibid. 52 See Ad Hoc Committee of the Committee on Academic Affairs, Final Report on the Status of Women’s Studies at the University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon: author, 1989); and Irene A. Poelzer, Educational Foundations, to Dean Murray Scharf, College of Education, 26 Feb. 1990, memo regarding the recommendations of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Status of Women’s
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53 54 55 56 57 58 59
60 61
62
Studies, Correspondence, College of Education, University of Saskatchewan Archives. Sandra Acker, ‘Women, the Other Academics,’ Women’s Studies International Forum 6, no. 2 (1983): 191–201, quotation at 192. Overall, A Feminist I, chap. 2. Sunley, interview with author. Poelzer, Woman of Exodus II, 41. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Heim (New York: Knopf, 1980). Dian[n]e M. Hallman, ‘Authorship and Authority: The Lessons of Biography,’ Vitae Scholasticae (Spring 1995): 15–25, quotation at 17. For a local example, see Reinventing Our Legacy: The Report of the President’s Advisory Committee on the Status of Women (Saskatoon: University of Saskatchewan, 1993). For more recent work, see Women in the Canadian Academic Tundra: Challenging the Chill, Elena Hannah, Linda Paul, and Swanai Vethamany-Globus, eds. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press), 2002. Joyce, interview with author. See, for example, Shelagh Day and Gwen Brodsky, Women and the Equality Deficit: The Impact of Restructuring Canada’s Social Programs (Ottawa: Status of Women Canada, 1998). Nelle Morton, The Journey Is Home (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985).
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10 Gendered Careers: Women Science Educators at Anglo-Canadian Universities, 1920–1980 MARIANNE AINLEY Women have taught science at Anglo-Canadian universities since the 1890s, but their opportunities remained limited throughout most of the twentieth century. If we compare their professional paths with those of their male colleagues, we find that women faced a variety of genderspecific obstacles. Historical research by Margaret Rossiter, Nessy Allen, and others in the United States and Australia, and Alison Prentice and myself in Canada, has shown that many questions should be asked about the historical and contemporary situation of women in science in general, and women science educators in particular.1 These questions should not simply revolve around numbers.2 Indeed, feminist historical scholarship has documented that contrary to the belief that few women entered science as a profession, beginning in the late nineteenth century, numerous university-trained women scientists taught at western universities or worked at various research institutes. Initially, the misconception that there have been few women in the scientific workforce, combined with gynopia, ‘the inability to perceive the very existence of women or to perceive women in undistorted ways,’3 led to the exclusion of women scientists/science educators from the early historical literature. Until the mid-1970 women’s history was a neglected field and women scientists and their accomplishments were also marginalized in the emerging field of history of science. During the past thirty years, scholars in women’s history, the history of education, and the history of science have brought to our attention qualitative information about women’s varied experiences in the scientific workforce. From this historical research we have learned how to ask different questions. These, in turn, have led to finely nuanced investigations regarding why some academic institutions and disciplines have been more welcoming to women than others, why the number of women
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scientists employed has varied at different historical periods, and why so few women have been at the highest echelons of the academic hierarchy.4 From these studies we have also ascertained how individual women scientists have experienced gendered careers and why their academic horizons have remained limited.5 ‘Limited horizons’6 aptly describes the options available for women academics, including science educators, single or married, at Canadian universities. It refers to academic lives that, by male standards, would rarely be considered ‘good careers.’ Indeed, most women scientists in Canada did not have ‘male-stream careers’: they were limited by an increasingly complex and stratified scientific community that led to hierarchical and lateral segregation in the scientific workplace and by society’s expectations that women should quit the paid workforce when they marry. Like many other scholars, I find the term ‘career’ problematic, because the notion of a career has been defined according to men’s expectations and experiences in the army, the civil service, and the various male professions.7 Because historically not all scientists achieved the ideal of a male-stream career, that is, straightforward unimpeded advancement to higher-level, better-paid positions that enabled them to conduct well-funded scientific research and achieve rewards and recognition in the scientific community, we need to broaden our definition of ‘career.’ This is necessary because the term ‘career’ does not even reflect the reality of men’s professional lives, but has become so entrenched in our thinking that it is hard to replace. I too have been unable to find a term or construct a model that would be applicable to the working lives of all women scientists in the west during the twentieth century and will use the words ‘career,’ ‘professional life,’ or ‘professional path’ interchangeably. Research on Canadian Women and Science In the United States and Great Britain, the second wave of feminism brought with it unprecedented interest in the areas of women and science and women and technology. The early writers in this field were women scientists who focused on the status of women in science and on ways to increase women’s participation in science. This was followed by a widespread concern regarding how science treats women, which, in turn, led to outspoken criticisms of western science: its ideology, its androcentrism, its language, and its underlying philosophy.8 In Canada the initial scholarship in the field also came from women
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scientists, such as Margaret Benston, Rose Sheinin, Donna Mergler, and Karen Messing. It was only in the early 1980s that a few historians recognized the need to investigate the gendered history of medicine, science, and technology. It was during this period that I became interested in the history of women scientists.9 My early work experiences in science enabled me to have an insider’s view of science, while my graduate training and research in the history of science provided me with both a context and an outsider’s view of Canadian women’s experiences in science.10 One of my major projects that furnished both the context and comparative data on men and women science educators at Canadian universities was a scientific biography of University of Alberta zoologist Dr William Rowan. This research enabled me to differentiate between the general problems faced by most science educators as well as those problems that were gender-specific.11 For my historical work on Canadian science I have used American zoologist Marion Namenwirth’s definition: ‘Science is a system of procedures for gathering, verifying, and systematizing information about reality.’12 I also followed the broad view of science employed by the History of Science Society and the Canadian Science and Technology Historical Association, which includes the social and applied sciences. My data on women scientists consist of astronomers, biologists, chemists, physicists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and psychologists. Like their male counterparts in these fields, these women scientists too have gathered, verified, and systematized ‘information about reality.’ To investigate women’s lives in science, I used current research methods in the history of science, that is, archival work combined with interviews and/or oral histories. And while, like many other scholars, I was initially interested in the actual numbers of women scientists as compared with men scientists, I soon found that statistical data could not provide the information needed for finely detailed history of science research. In fact, the overuse of statistics by early researchers in the field of women and science, most of whom were scientists, only documented what they already knew, that there have been relatively few women scientists in high-level academic positions.13 By contrast to the dearth of useful information from statistical sources, my archival research at more than twenty Canadian universities,14 resulted in plenty of usable data. For example, I obtained relatively detailed institutional and personal information on the working lives of more than two hundred women scientists who received their first degrees between 1890 and 1980. In addition, I collected archival informa-
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tion on several hundred other women who worked, albeit for relatively short periods of time, in a variety of low-level academic positions in science. I also conducted interviews with, or about, one hundred women scientists who obtained their first degrees between 1890 and 1980; fifty of these women taught at Canadian universities.15 To study individual and institutional differences as well as historical change, I placed these women into three time periods – 1890–1920, 1920–50, and 1950–80 – depending on when they first obtained academic positions in science. To identify gender-specific differences, I compared women’s professional experiences in each period with those of their male peers. When I analysed the experiences of about five hundred Canadian scientists, women and men, I found several important factors that were significant in their professional lives. These included family background, initial encouragement, school environment, the existence or absence of mentors, the availability of scholarships and bursaries, having an advanced degree and a post-doctoral fellowship, and age at first and second positions. Gender-specific factors that influenced the experiences of women scientists included the effects of marriage or alternative life choices, slow professional advancement, inappropriate remuneration, and the presence or absence of peer recognition. Other important factors included their publication record, opportunities to participate in professional networks, and luck. These comparisons provided insight into the additional challenges women scientists in general, and science educators in particular, faced during most of the twentieth century. Given the general contexts of the history of Canadian science and women’s education, the convergence of two late-nineteenth-century trends in Canada – access to higher education for white, middle-class women of Anglo-Celtic (though not of French)16 background and the institutionalization and professionalization of science – created new opportunities in science for women. By contrast, according to Margaret Rossiter, in the United States the professionalization of science led to the exclusion of women.17 My archival research confirmed that in Canada by 1890, AngloCanadian women studied science at the older universities such as Mount Allison, Acadia, Dalhousie, the University of New Brunswick, McGill, Queen’s, and the University of Toronto. Although at the time science was not yet an especially prestigious field, it was an alternative to traditionally female occupations, such as homemaking and teaching. More importantly, university education in science and other areas per-
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mitted Anglo-Canadian women to become independently single. By contrast, until the 1960s, few francophone women studied and worked in science.18 Although for most women a graduate degree did not automatically guarantee a suitable academic or research position, between 1890 and 1980, hundreds of women worked as science educators at Canadian universities on a variety of levels. From my archival and oral history research, as well as from the research of other Canadian scholars such as Judith Fingard, Margaret Gillett, Alison Prentice, and Mary Kinnear, it is clear that many institutional factors have influenced women scientists’ academic advancement, such as the lack of research funding, the sexist attitude of administrators, antinepotism practices, and the lack of collegiality and mentoring.19 Women’s lives in science were also affected by society’s expectations of women to stay home after marriage and the lack of a social support network, which often prevented women from doing labour-intensive research. To make sense of the large amount of data I collected at university archives and in interviews, I studied the type of work women scientists did at universities as well as the length of time they remained in a particular position rather than using the partial statistics available in the various university archives,20 partial because the university calendars often did not mention the names and positions of women in assistant and other low-level positions. Focusing on the type of work and time period at various levels allowed me, instead, to identify the differences between part-time and full-time work, male-stream and alternative career paths, institutional and disciplinary differences, and historical change. It also made it possible to document the impact of hierarchical and lateral segregation on women’s teaching and research opportunities. Women often experienced hierarchical segregation when they remained in undervalued and underpaid positions. They were laterally segregated when they were channelled into certain areas of science considered suitable for women, such as botany or household science.21 Teaching and/or Research: Single Women in Academe In addition to classroom teaching, university scientists do research in the laboratory, museum, and/or the field, but the emphasis placed on their teaching and research functions has varied considerably within and among different universities and disciplines. The relative impor-
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tance of teaching and research has changed over time. For example, for most of the twentieth century, Mount Allison University, a small institution, stressed teaching,22 while at the larger universities (e.g., McGill and Toronto), faculty members were expected to both teach and pursue research. With scientific work becoming more complex and stratified by the end of the nineteenth century, the heavy teaching loads became even more onerous. Many science educators felt that their work could be accomplished only with the help of teaching and research assistants. At the larger universities both women and men obtained paid positions as part-time or full-time assistants, demonstrators, and/or instructors either while they were students or as graduates.23 With the exception of the 1930s, hundreds of women and men held temporary scientific positions as students and/or graduates throughout the twentieth century. Women science students first engaged in part-time work at McGill University in the early 1890s and at the University of Toronto around the turn of the century. Dalhousie and the Western Canadian universities began to employ women in these positions during the First World War, while other institutions, such as the University of New Brunswick and Bishop’s University lagged behind.24 During the Depression, as universities eliminated previously established part-time positions for students, few women found academic positions even if they had a doctoral degree. These posts resurfaced during the early years of the Second World War when, to replace male faculty on war service, universities employed women graduates (rather than students) as teachers or laboratory personnel. When we study women scientists at academic institutions we learn that most of those who had lifelong involvement in academe began working as students or part-time faculty members. Between 1890 and 1920, only Carrie Derick (1862–1941) at McGill University and Clara Benson (1875–1964) at the University of Toronto had long-term teaching and research activities. These pioneering women science educators had many successes, although their professional lives were not comparable to their male peers. Unlike most of their male colleagues, they remained single because at the time a professional life for women was considered both by society and by most educated women to be incompatible with traditional family commitments.25 By contrast, during the 1920 to 1950 period, more women scientists obtained academic employment. Some still felt that ‘a woman can only have one career,’26 while others hoped to combine family life and a ‘career.’ Their experiences varied considerably.
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One of the best-known single woman scientists was the economist Dr Mabel F. Timlin (1891–1976), who was born in the United States and trained as a schoolteacher. She moved to Canada in 1917, had a variety of jobs, and in 1921, while working as a secretary (in the Department of Agricultural Extension at the University of Saskatchewan), enrolled in night school to study for a Bachelor of Arts degree (which she completed in 1929). In 1930, Mabel Timlin became a part-time ‘reader’ in economics and still maintained her full-time post as a secretary.27 Five years later, while pursuing doctoral studies at the University of Washington, she was appointed instructor in economics. She became assistant professor in 1941 (PhD 1940) and was promoted to associate professor in 1946 and to full professor in 1950. She retired as professor emeritus in 1959. Mabel Timlin’s major works were on Keynesian economics and immigration policy. She received the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship (1945–6) and a Canada Council Special Senior Fellowship (1959–60), and was the first woman social scientist to be elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1951) and the first woman president of the Canadian Political Science Association (1959). In 1967 she was awarded Canada’s Centennial Medal. Two years later the University of Saskatchewan conferred on her an honorary Doctor of Laws degree, and in 1976 she was named to the Order of Canada.28 Dr Helen Battle (1903–94) was among the first cohort of women graduate students in marine biology at the University of Toronto, and in 1928 she became the first Canadian woman to obtain a doctorate in the subject. She immediately found academic employment, although other women who graduated somewhat later did not because of the Depression. She was appointed assistant professor of zoology at the University of Western Ontario in 1929, promoted to associate professor in 1933, and to full professor in 1947. She retired in 1967 and never married. Helen Battle was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the second president of the Canadian Society of Zoologists. In 1967 she received the Canada Centennial Medal, and in 1971 the Fry Medal of the Canadian Society of Zoologists, the J.C.B. Grant Award of the Canadian Association of Anatomists, and honorary doctorates from the University of Western Ontario and Carleton University.29 In contrast to Mabel Timlin and Helen Battle, many other Canadian women scientists experienced slow advancement and remained in underpaid and undervalued university positions for a long time. May
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Barclay (BA 1919, MA 1920), for example, worked at the University of British Columbia for forty years. She was hired by the Department of Mathematics as an assistant in 1920 and was in this lowly position for thirteen years before being promoted to instructor in 1935. She became an assistant professor in 1946, and that is what she remained until 1962. At the University of Toronto, the botanist Dr J. Gertrude Wright (PhD 1923) worked for thirty years as an assistant professor. McGill University hired physics graduate Dr Anna McPherson (1901–79, PhD Chicago 1933) in 1940 as a part-time demonstrator. She was promoted to lecturer in 1944, assistant professor in 1947, and associate professor in 1954. Anna McPherson was an excellent teacher, but the teaching load was heavy, and she had practically no time for research. Because she had few publications, she was never promoted to full professor.30 Dr Edna Eastcott (1888–1963) taught in public schools before studying chemistry at the University of Toronto (MA 1923, PhD 1925) under the well-known chemist, Dr Lash Miller. At the University of Toronto she found only sessional work, first as an assistant (1922–44) and later as lecturer of chemistry from 1944 to her early retirement in 1951. Clearly, even if they remained single, women had widely differing lives in science. Helen Battle had early and good professional experiences, but Mabel Timlin’s career was delayed because she worked fulltime in poorly paid positions while studying for her graduate degrees. May Barclay, J. Gertrude Wright, and Edna Eastcott remained for long periods in low-level positions, and Anna Macpherson waited for years to obtain an academic position and then because of her onerous teaching schedule had no time for research. Although these women were honoured as teachers and achieved visibility in the scientific community, they faced difficulties because of their gender. Marriage/Motherhood and Science Women science educators faced additional challenges when they married. Canadian society believed that marriage and motherhood were more important for women than having a career. Women were expected to happily give up paid employment when they married and these beliefs proved detrimental to all women’s careers.31 In 1924 the first two women scientists at the University of Manitoba, Lily A. McCullough (MA Manitoba) an assistant in the Department of Political Economy since 1917, and zoology lecturer Eileen Bulman (MA Columbia), who was hired in 1921, left their academic posts when they mar-
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ried. Merle Colpitt (MA Dalhousie) became the first woman scientist to be employed at Dalhousie University when she was hired as a demonstrator in physics in 1917. She was promoted to instructor in 1920, but left in 1926 after she married Dr H.L. Bronson, professor of physics. At the University of British Columbia, Doris Lee (MA British Columbia) was an assistant in the Department of Economics, Political Science, and Sociology from 1925 to 1928. After her marriage, she worked sporadically in the same department until 1946. Married women scientists’ professional options decreased dramatically during the Depression. In 1931 the University of Toronto’s Board of Governors declared it ‘undesirable to employ married women ... unless the Board are satisfied in individual cases that such persons require to earn money for the support of their families.’32 Rather than formal antinepotism regulations, at McGill University the personal bias of the principal and various department heads prevented the hiring of married women whose husbands were faculty members.33 Sir Arthur Currie, principal of McGill University, opposed the employment of Dr Annie Porter Fantham, a well-known parasitologist and wife of the new head of zoology, because he ‘did not like husband-and-wife business.’34 The botanist Dr Eleanor Silver Keeping (née Dowding, 1901–91, PhD Manitoba 1931) married University of Alberta mathematician Fred S. Keeping; she found that as the wife ‘of a faculty member she could not receive a salary’ at the university.35 Thus, she was on staff without pay at the university while working as a research assistant at the Dominion Experimental Farm in Edmonton from 1934 to 1949. Generally speaking, the few women academics that retained their positions after marriage during the period 1920 to 1950 period faced heavy workloads, slow advancement, and low pay. Marriage to a colleague did not prevent the continued employment of Dalhousie University scientist Dr Dixie Pelluet (1896–1990, PhD Bryn Mawr 1927) who, in 1931, was recruited from the United States as an assistant professor in zoology. In 1934 she became engaged to Dr Ronald Hayes and asked Dalhousie President Carleton Stanley to give his ‘word as a gentleman’ that she could retain her post should she wish to marry. Because of the existing antinepotism practices, she did not admit that she was to marry another Dalhousie employee. Although she was an outstanding teacher and researcher, Dixie Pelluet remained an assistant professor for a decade. Her eventual promotion to associate professor carried no pay increase because academic salaries were frozen until after the Second World War. She became a full profes-
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sor only three months before her retirement in 1964. The university then hired three men to replace her! She knew that her advancement and income suffered because she was married.36 Gertrude Smith Watney (1902–85, PhD Berkeley 1934) retained her position in the Zoology Department at the University of British Columbia only for a brief while after she married a colleague. She was hired as an instructor of zoology and biology in 1926 and was promoted to assistant professor in 1930. Between 1927 and 1940 she published eight papers and completed her doctorate; but her contract was not renewed in 1940 after her marriage.37 Antinepotism ‘rules’ were waived at most universities when administrators wished to hire someone to replace men on war service. During the Second World War, women scientists who had to leave academia when they married were suddenly able to find academic positions. Most such wartime appointments were short-lived. At the University of Toronto the Department of Physics hired its former graduates Dr Beatrice Deacon (née Reid, PhD 1929) as a lecturer and research assistant and Dr Matti Rotenberg (née Levi, PhD 1926) as a part-time laboratory demonstrator.38 At the University of New Brunswick Norah Toole (1906–90, BSc McGill 1929), a former science teacher at the Montreal High School for Girls who gave up her post when she married the chemist Frank Toole in 1934, found temporary employment in 1942. Although she was married to the head of the Chemistry Department and had two children, she became a laboratory instructor on an eight-month contract because of the wartime shortage of male personnel. Without an advanced degree, she remained an underpaid instructor until her retirement, without a personal pension, in 1971. Norah Toole was an excellent teacher and mentor, as well as a social activist. Her contributions to the life of the university and the community were recognized in 1984 by the Person’s Award and, in 1989, by an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of New Brunswick.39 Dr Jeanne Manery (1908–86, PhD University of Toronto 1935) had a more research-oriented path. She married Dr Kenneth Fisher, an assistant professor of zoology at the University of Toronto, in 1938. The following year, to be near her husband, she left a good research position at the University of Rochester, New York, for a less interesting one at the University of Toronto. She later recalled that her ‘appointment as a Demonstrator in the department of Biochemistry [University of Toronto] was in flagrant opposition to the policy of having no married women on staff, but was accepted because the position was so unimportant.’
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During the Second World War, she took on ‘the responsibility of [her] husband’s laboratory and courses in the department of Zoology.’ She was one of seven wives who, ‘given SPECIAL LECTURER STATUS, assumed their husband’s responsibilities during the war years.’40 When their husbands returned to their full-time work after the war, these women either lost their positions or were demoted to low-paying, lowprestige positions.41 In 1945 Jeanne Manery Fisher resumed her position as demonstrator, became a part-time assistant professor in biochemistry three years later, a full-time assistant professor in 1953, and associate professor in 1959. Ten years later she was promoted to full professor. She retired in 1977 as professor emeritus. She was an excellent biochemist, but compared with her husband, her professional advancement was slow because, as she later recalled, she was ‘born forty years too early and of the wrong sex.’42 In 1941 the American-born and -trained astronomer Dr Helen Sawyer Hogg (1905–93) was also appointed as a ‘special’ part-time lecturer at the University of Toronto, where her husband was an assistant professor. She obtained permanent academic employment as assistant professor of astronomy only after she became a widow in 1951. She was promoted to associate professor in 1955, and full professor two years later. The scientific community had already recognized Helen Hogg’s research on variable stars. In 1940 she became the President of the American Association of Variable Star Observers. In 1946 she was the first woman physical scientist to be elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 1950 she received the Annie Jump Cannon Prize of the American Astronomical Society. Helen Hogg was well aware at the time that hers was an unusual professional path for a woman.43 The Post–Second World War Period The situation remained variable for most women scientists who found employment at Canadian universities between 1950 and 1980. At McGill University most women scientists suffered from slow advancement. Zoologist Dr Joan Anderson Marsden (d. 2001, PhD 1951) recalled that after her doctorate she worked at McGill ‘at a salary I could not live on,’ and thus she also had to teach, part-time at night, at Sir George Williams University. Eventually, ‘poverty, insecurity, and the lack of status’ prompted her request for promotion to assistant professor. Much to her surprise the university complied in 1958. She became associate professor in 1962, and full professor in 1967. Her marriage to a scientist at
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another university apparently did not unduly hinder her professional advancement, and for her McGill was a ‘good place’ to be.44 Dr Rose M. Johnston (PhD 1953), a biochemist at McGill and a wife and mother, remained an assistant professor for ten years before being promoted to associate professor in 1966. She became a full professor in 1978. She later chaired the McGill Biochemistry Department for more than ten years and in 1987 was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In an oral history interview in 1989, Rose Johnston recounted that from the time she received her doctorate it took her twenty-five years to be promoted to full professor. During that quarter-century, she received numerous grants and published what she called ‘a reasonable amount’ – and saw no reason for her slow promotion except for ‘being a woman.’45 As a rule, academic advancement remained slow for most women, particularly if they were married, or in some ways different from their colleagues. As a widow and a mother, Delphine Maclellan (née Wallace, 1914–95, BSc 1936, MSc 1964) worked sporadically at the Atlantic Biological Station in St Andrews, New Brunswick, for twenty years before starting a university career. At age forty-seven, she entered the master of science program in zoology at McGill University, taught the laboratories in biological oceanography (1963–5), became senior staff demonstrator in 1965, was appointed lecturer in 1967 and made an assistant professor in 1973. Although she was a challenging teacher, and a respected researcher in marine biology, her gender and age prevented her from having a satisfactory career. Dr Max Dunbar, Director of the Marine Science Centre at McGill, kept her at a low-level, poorly paid position and, in 1966, turned down her initial request for a raise. The following year, with the help of McGill President Dr H.R. Robertson, she obtained a considerable pay increase.46 In 1970 Delphine Maclellan applied for promotion to assistant professor but was turned down. Three years later she was promised promotion, but the chair of the department did not put her name forward because another woman scientist also applied. Delphine Maclellan then appealed to Dr W.F. Hitschfeld, Dean of Graduate Studies, who promised ‘to look into it,’ and in spite of the non-support of her department chair, she became an assistant professor in 1973 and remained at that level until her retirement in 1979.47 Dr Margaret Benston (1937–91), an American theoretical chemist, was hired by the newly established Simon Fraser University in 1966. She was a challenging teacher and promising scientist and obtained
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tenure in 1970. She became interested in the emerging fields of computer science, science studies (with a special interest in scientists’ responsibility to society), as well as women’s studies. Her professional advancement slowed down because her research interests increasingly deviated from mainstream science.48 Anthropologist Dr Jean Briggs had a practically male-stream career at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She was hired as assistant professor of sociology in 1966. The following year, with a doctorate from Harvard, she became assistant professor of anthropology and was promoted to associate professor of sociology and anthropology four years later. She became full professor as well as chair of the Department of Anthropology in 1976.49 Conclusion From the foregoing, it is clear that women scientists have had varied experiences at Canadian universities. At the turn of the twentieth century, there was an initial openness that allowed women scientists to enter academia and become independent. My overall data indicate that the few women science educators who obtained their degrees between 1890 and 1920 found employment relatively easily. Their advancement was slow compared with their male colleagues, who earned more, were not faced with the choice between family life and a career, benefited more from the informal networks of scientists, and obtained more recognition. During the period 1920 to 1950 there were many women who studied science and aspired to academic careers. Marriage and a career were no longer regarded by most women academics to be mutually exclusive, but were still considered incompatible by many universities. Although some married women taught science, none had a professional path that could be considered comparable to a man’s. Women’s opportunities became restricted again during the 1930s when, because of the Depression, even with a doctorate few women found appropriate positions. The Second World War improved the professional options for women scientists, albeit temporarily. But after the war, suburban lifestyles combined with society’s renewed emphasis on family values kept many women out of the paid workforce.50 Some women scientists themselves believed that they should stay at home with their children. Others, who interrupted their careers to have a family, were unable to return to full-time research and/or teaching positions because of the lack of affordable day-care for their children.
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So they accepted part-time academic positions that not only paid poorly – often covering only the cost of a babysitter – but also provided no benefits. During the postwar period, even single women advanced more slowly and earned less than their male colleagues. Peer recognition and exclusion from the informal network of science continued to work against women having professional paths similar to men’s.51 Finally, positive changes occurred in the 1960s. Because of university expansion during that decade, positions for women scientists opened up both at newly created institutions and at older ones. The Women’s Movement led more women to expect to enter and remain in the workforce. Although most women science educators were still from the dominant Anglo-Celtic culture, women from other ethnic backgrounds also began to teach at Anglo-Canadian universities.52 Among them were French-born chemist Geneviève Delmas-Patterson (McGill), German-born material scientist Ursula Franklin (University of Toronto), Indian mathematician Kailash Anand (Sir George Williams), Taiwanese physicist Hsey-Er Lin and East-Indian biologist Malliga Nagarajan (University of Prince Edward Island), Caribbean geneticist Barbara Jones (McGill), and Cree-Chinese biochemist Lillian Dyck (University of Saskatchewan). The presence of women scientists among the Canadian professoriate provided role models to other aspiring women scientists and helped destroy the stereotype of science as being an exclusively male domain. Women have been part of academic teaching from the 1890s, but they have had different experiences from each other and from their male colleagues. Even with the same or similar training as their male peers, many women found it difficult to obtain suitable academic positions and appropriate advancement, while others had truncated careers. Women science educators were also the recipients of overt or covert discrimination, the latter manifested in micro-inequities, that is, ‘exclusionary behaviours that are often so small that they go unnoticed’ – except by the recipients – and create unfavourable working environments for women.53 Nevertheless, as the above examples indicate, women science educators remained committed to their profession as caring and challenging mentors, teachers, and researchers.54 notes I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for research grants in the years 1985 to 1993; Tina Crossfield, Ariel Fielding, Pamela Genn Fry, Vicki Marcok, Nancy Robbins, and Christina
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Thorsein for invaluable research assistance; Isabelle Anderson, John Baldwin, Marjorie Griffin Cohen, Robert Dimand, Hannah Gay, Brigid Toole Grant, Marion Lowe, Robin Neill, Ken Rae, T.K. Rhymes, Rose Sheinin, Dorothy Smith, Shirley and Duff Spafford, and Barry and Janet Toole for primary research material; and David Ainley, Mary Baldwin, Sally Cole, John Drysdale, Margaret Gillett, Susan Hoecker-Drysdale, Dee Horne, Barbara Meadowcroft, Alison Prentice, Ann B. Shteir, and Suzanne Zeller for helpful discussions and intellectual and moral support. 1 Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Pnina Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram, eds., Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science, 1789–1979 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Helena Pycior, Nancy Slack, and Pnina Abir-Am, eds., Creative Couples in the Sciences (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996); Allen, ‘Australian Women in Science – A Comparative Study of Two Physicists,’ Metascience 8 (1990): 75–85; Allen, ‘“The Sea Has Many Voices”: Profile of an Australian Woman Scientist, Journal of Australian Studies, no. 38 (Sept. 1993): 41–50; Allen, ‘Plant Pathology in Western Australia: The Contribution of an Australian Woman Scientist,’ Prometheus 15, no. 3 (1997): 387–98; Kelly Farley, ed., On the Edge of Discovery: Australian Women in Science (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1993); Alison Prentice, ‘Three Women in Physics,’ in Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women’s Professional Work, Elizabeth Smyth, Sandra Acker, Paula Bourne, and Alison Prentice, eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 119–40. 2 Quantitative studies such as the Royal Society of Canada, Plan for the Advancement of Women in Scholarship (Ottawa: author, 1989), or Industry, Science and Technology Canada, Women in Science and Engineering (Ottawa, 1991) collected information about women only by looking at the top levels of the scientific workforce. This disguised the fact that numerous women have studied and worked in Canadian science since the end of the nineteenth century. 3 Shulamit Reinharz, Feminist Methods in Social Research (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 168. 4 See, for example, Margaret W. Rossiter, ‘Sexual Segregation in the Sciences: Some Data and a Model,’ Signs 4 (1978): 146–51; Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley, ‘Women’s Work in Geology: An Historical Perspective
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6 7
8
9
on Gender Division in Canadian Science,’ Geoscience Canada 21, no. 3 (1995): 139–41. These qualitative studies followed the detailed historical investigations of the experiences of male scientists during and after the First World War. Most of the biographies and institutional histories are based on a combination of archival work and interviews. Chemical Heritage, a quarterly publication of the Chemical Heritage Foundation, continues to publish interviews that provide an invaluable resource on the lives of scientists. Imperial College Press in Britain has published three volumes of these interviews during the past few years. Detailed studies of the lives of women scientists followed the biographical model. Given that Canadian university archives did not have consistent acquisition policies well into the twentieth century and that until after the Second Women’s Movement of the 1970s women’s papers were often dismissed as unimportant, and even thrown out, interviews and/or oral histories became important sources of information. By the 1980s a number of universities, including the University of Toronto and Queen’s University, have done oral history projects with women scientists. The information obtained from oral sources complement archival data and provide additional perspectives on institutional, disciplinary, and gendered issues in science. On the need for archival information, see Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley, ‘Women Scientists in Canada: The Need for Documentation,’ Resources for Feminist Research 15, no. 3 (Nov. 1986): 7–8. I thank Dr Susan Hoecker-Drysdale for the term and for numerous productive discussions on the subject. Although some of the feminist literature from the 1970s talks about alternative career models, these refer to married women professionals who were mothers rather than single, ‘success-oriented,’ women. See Martha S. White, ‘Women in the Professions: Psychological and Social Barriers to Women in Science,’ Science 170 (23 Oct. 1970): 413–16. During this period, women in most British and North American scientific associations formed women’s caucuses to study the ‘status of women in the profession.’ See, for example ‘Women in Physics,’ a report of the Committee on Women in Physics, Bulletin of the American Physical Society 17 (1972): 740. There were many others. Philosophers concerned with the gendered nature of science include Helen Longino, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sandra Harding. A special issue on ‘Science and Technology/Science et technology’ of Canadian Woman Studies 5, no. 4 (1984) includes writings by women scien-
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tists such as Margaret Benston, Karen Messing, Rose Sheinin, Ursula Franklin, and Donna Mergler. No historical articles appear in the publication. However, a special issue on ‘Women, Technology and Medicine in Canada’ of Scientia Canadensis 9, no. 1 (1985), the Canadian history of science journal, contains articles by historians Wendy Mitchinson, Diane Dodd, Marilyn Barber, and Diana Pedersen, but none by historians of science. In the ‘Editor’s Note,’ Richard Jarrell states that the editors wished to ‘call historians’ attention to some hitherto overlooked dimension of our scientific and technological past.’ He further states that historical literature ‘concerning women and science scarcely exists ... [and] apart from a very few, like Maud Menten [a well-known biochemist] ... these women’s names have disappeared from history’ (ibid., 2). The first brief historical articles by Ann B. Shteir and Marianne G. Ainley appeared in Resources for Feminist Research 15, no. 3 (1986). 10 I worked as an ‘invisible’ chemist in industrial, academic, and government laboratories from 1956 to 1978. My graduate work (1977–85) centred on the professionalization of science, the history of Canadian science in general, and ornithology, in particular. This research highlighted issues of funding, government priorities, teaching, and scientific careers. In 1984 I received a pilot project grant from the Canadian Institute on the Advancement of Women to study Canadian women natural scientists during the period 1900–50. Within three months it became evident that there have been many more women natural scientists at Canadian universities and research institutes than anyone would have imagined. 11 Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley, Restless Energy: A Biography of William Rowan (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1993). The extensive correspondence of Rowan from 1916 to 1957, combined with interviews with his former colleagues and students, illustrated the immense power of academic administrators, such as H.M. Tory, as well as the difficulties caused by large classes, long working hours, lack of research funding, and inadequate or non-existent scientific equipment. The William Rowan Papers are at the University of Alberta Archives, acc. no. 69-16. Rowan’s problems were similar to those encountered by all Canadian science educators, regardless of gender, in the period 1920–60. In addition to Rowan, information is available on hundreds of Canadian men in science. Research by historians has provided data on about three hundred male scientists most of whom were employed at academic institutions beginning in the late nineteenth century. 12 Marion Namenwirth, ‘Science Seen through a Feminist Prism,’ in Feminist Approaches to Science, Ruth Bleier, ed. (New York: Pergamon Press, 1986), 19.
Women Science Educators at Anglo-Canadian Universities 265 13 Research that relies largely on statistics has been found to be of little value and often even misleading by historians of science. My own early attempts to use data from the Historical Statistics of Canada soon proved to be unhelpful for the following reasons: It was impossible to ascertain who worked in the various science departments of Canadian universities because the statistical categories did not separate academics in the faculties of arts and science. Given that most Canadian universities did not have science faculties per se until well into the twentieth century, and science was therefore taught in faculties of arts, official data sources from the historical statistics and census data could not present the full picture. In fact, the statistics on academics in general and women academics in particular have obscured more than they have revealed. What they have told us is the number of women actually employed in academic or other institutions at a given period, but not how many of them were in the various sciences, and at what level, or for how long they stayed in low-paying positions. They have not revealed how many trained women scientists were not employed as scientists – at all – or the number of those who changed fields because they could find no scientific employment or dropped out from university studies and academic and other places of scientific employment, for whatever reason. Statistical data cannot explain why there have been fewer women scientists than men in the Canadian workforce; and what were the factors that kept women out of the laboratory and the field. The data do nothing to destroy stereotypes of women and science, and they most certainly do not demystify ‘western science.’ 14 I personally consulted the following university archives: Prince Edward Island, Dalhousie, Acadia, Mount Allison, New Brunswick, Moncton, Laval, Bishop’s, McGill, Toronto, Queen’s, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, Calgary, British Columbia, Regina, Lethbridge, Simon Fraser, Carleton, and Ottawa. My research assistants worked in the archives of the universities of Montreal, Toronto, and Western Ontario, as well as at McMaster, and Memorial universities. Unless otherwise indicated, all information regarding women scientists at these universities derives from archival research. 15 I conducted oral histories with or about women who had worked at Dalhousie, New Brunswick, McGill, Sir George Williams, Queen’s, Toronto, Saskatchewan, Alberta, UBC, and Simon Fraser. In some cases I was able to interview either a woman scientist or her colleagues and/or family members; in others, if the scientist was no longer alive (e.g., Norah Toole, Mabel Timlin), I obtained detailed information from interviews with
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Marianne Ainley family members, students, and/or colleagues. My sample also includes oral histories done by other universities with women scientists, such as Dr Allie V. Douglas (Queen’s) and Drs Dorothy Forward, Helen Hogg, and Madeleine Fritz (University of Toronto). See Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley, ‘“Despite the Odds” Revisited: Reflections on Canadian Women and Science,’ Simone de Beauvoir Review 18/19 (1999–2000): 85–100. Most women scientists before 1960 came from the dominant British-Canadian culture. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America. See Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley, ‘Les femmes dans les sciences au Canada: Y-a-t-il une division sexuelle du travail?’ in Femme et Sciences, Lucie Dumais and Veronique Boudreau, eds. (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1997), 1–15; ‘Une nouvelle optique concernant la recherche sur l’histoire des femmes canadiennes et les sciences,’ Recherches feministes 15, no. 1 (2002): 93–111. Judith Fingard, ‘Gender and Inequality at Dalhousie: Faculty Women before 1950,’ Dalhousie Review 64 (Winter 1984–5): 697–703; Margaret Gillett, We Walked Very Warily: A History of Women at McGill (Montreal: Eden Press, 1981); Lee Stewart, ‘It’s Up to You’: Women at UBC in the Early Years (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1990); Mary Kinnear, In Subordination: Professional Women, 1870–1970 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995); Alison Prentice, ‘Bluestockings, Feminists, or Women Workers? A Preliminary Look at Women’s Early Employment at the University of Toronto,’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 2 (1991): 231–61. This was because university calendars mostly excluded the names of personnel in low-level academic positions, such as demonstrators and assistants. Stephen G. Peitchinis, Women at Work: Discrimination and Response (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989). John G. Reid, Mount Allison University: A History to 1963 (Ann Arbor, MI: Ann Arbor Books on Demand, 1984). The terminology varied from one institution to another and over time. Generally speaking, assistants and demonstrators worked under the supervision of a faculty member, while instructors worked independently, as did other faculty members. Although women were admitted as students in 1886, the first woman to be employed in a scientific position at the University of New Brunswick was Frances Crocker, who became an assistant in biology in 1941. The first woman scientist at Bishop’s was Marie Laskey in 1950.
Women Science Educators at Anglo-Canadian Universities 267 25 Margaret Gillett, ‘Carrie Derick (1862–1941) and the Chair of Botany at McGill,’ in Despite the Odds: Essays on Canadian Women and Science, Marianne G. Ainley, ed. (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1990), 85. On Clara Benson, see also Marianne G. Ainley and Tina Crossfield, ‘Canadian Women’s Contributions to Chemistry, 1900–1970,’ Canadian Chemical News 46, no. 4 (1994), 16–18; Ainley ‘“Women’s Work” in Canadian Chemistry,’ Canadian Woman Studies 13, no. 2 (1993): 43–6; Ruby Heap, ‘From the Science of Housekeeping to the Science of Nutrition: Pioneers in Canadian Nutrition and Dietetics at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Household Science, 1900–1950,’ in Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women’s Professional Work, Elizabeth Smyth et al., eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 141–70. 26 The University of Toronto geologist Dr Madeleine A. Fritz maintained this. Joan Burke, personal communication. 27 At the University of Saskatchewan, from 1920 to 1940, a ‘reader’ was hired to read papers or assignments. J.S. Thomson, ‘Memo to Deans and Heads of Departments,’ 28 Jan. 1946. Presidential Papers II B-17 (1), Arts and Science (1944–6), University of Saskatchewan Archives. 28 See Marianne G. Ainley, ‘Mabel F. Timlin, 1891–1976: A Woman Economist in the World of Men,’ Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal 23, no. 2 (1999): 28–38. 29 D.B. Mac Millan, ‘Battle, Helen Irene,’ Canadian Encyclopaedia, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1988), 186; interview with Helen Battle, 13 June 1985. 30 Edith Engleberg, personal communication. 31 See sections on child-rearing and motherhood in Alison Prentice, Paula Bourne, Gail Cuthbert Grant, Beth Light, Wendy Mitchinson, and Naomi Black, Canadian Women: A History, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1996). 32 Anne R. Ford, A Path Not Strewn with Roses: One Hundred Years of Women at the University of Toronto, 1884–1984 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 58. 33 Among them was Helen MacGill Hughes. Her husband, Dr Everett Hughes, had a position at McGill; Helen was his unpaid assistant. See Susan Hoecker-Drysdale, ‘Women Sociologists in Canada: The Careers of Helen MacGill Hughes, Aileen Dansken Ross, and Jean Robertson Burnet,’ in Despite the Odds, 154–61. The correspondence regarding ‘Mrs Fantham’ is in the Zoology Department files, RG2, C63, McGill University Archives (MUA).
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34 ‘Mrs Fantham,’ nd, typescript attached to a letter from L.W. Douglas to J.J. O’Neill, 21 Feb. 1938. RG 2, C63, Zoology Department, 1938–9, MUA. To date I have found no written antinepotism rules at any Canadian university. I agree with American historian Margaret Rossiter, who wrote, ‘How these informal practices and expectations became rules is not clear,’ (in Women Scientists in America, 195). In ‘Gender and Inequality at Dalhousie,’ Judith Fingard wrote that ‘hiring was based on personal recommendation’ (at 689). This allowed married women to help their husbands and widows to take over their husband’s classes (ibid.). Nepotism rules did exist in the civil service, as did various restrictions on the employment of married women. See Nicole Morgan, The Equality Game: Women in the Federal Public Service (1908–1987) (Ottawa: Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women, 1988). 35 Silver Keeping, personal communication; Esther Fraser, ‘Silver and Other Organisms,’ New Trail 32, no. 2 (1976): 6. 36 Dixie Pelluet, personal communication; Dixie Pelluet Papers, MS-1-3-C381, Dalhousie University Archives; Judith Fingard, ‘Gender and Inequality,’ n2. John Farley, personal communication. 37 Gertrude Smith Watney, communication to author, 11 Nov. 1985. 38 University of Toronto archivist Harold Averill to author, 20 June 2002. 39 January 1940, Barry Toole’s Second Scrapbook, courtesy of Janet and Barry Toole; Janet Maclellan Toole, Barry Toole, and Brigid Toole Grant, conversations with the author. According to the faculty questionnaires, in 1945–6, Dr F. Toole, a professor of chemistry, earned $3,500 a year. Norah Toole worked on an eight-month contract since 1943 and earned $600 a year. President’s Papers; Norah V. Toole, Curriculum Vitae, Case 73m, no. 88a, both at the Harriet Irving Library, University of New Brunswick. 40 Jeanne Manery Fisher, retirement speech, 1975, quoted by Dr Rose Sheinin, ‘Jeanne Manery Fisher: Scientist, Feminist, a Model of Excellence,’ address to the Canadian Biochemical Society, Winnipeg, 23 June 1987, 7–8. 41 As a demonstrator, J.M. Fisher earned $1,100 per year. Her special lecturer position paid $1,700 during 1944–5. Her return to the demonstratorship meant a loss of income, as her salary reverted to its previous level. J.M. Fisher Papers, Box 86-0035/0025, University of Toronto Archives. Kenneth Fisher became assistant professor of zoology in 1937, associate professor in 1948, and professor and chair in 1956. 42 Sheinin, ‘Jeanne Manery Fisher,’ 5. 43 Helen S. Hogg, conversations with the author, 25 June 1991 and 12 Aug. 1992. See also Marianne G. Ainley, ‘Marriage and Scientific Work in
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44
45 46 47
48 49
50
51
52
53
Twentieth-Century Canada: The Berkeleys in Marine Biology and the Hoggs in Astronomy,’ in Creative Couples in the Sciences, 143–155. Joan Marsden, interview with the author, 28 Nov. 1986; Joan Marsden, ‘A Good Place for Me,’ in A Fair Shake: Autobiographical Essays by McGill Women, Margaret Gillett and Kay Sibald, eds. (Montreal: Eden Press, 1984), 124–35. Rose Johnston, interview with the author, 20 Sept. 1989. Tape deposited at Concordia University Archives. Delphine Maclellan, interview with the author, 19 Aug. 1988. Tape deposited at Concordia University Archives. Ibid. Although salaries could not be verified at McGill University because Quebec Bill 65 prohibits access to nominative information, she recalled that her pay increase was from $5,000 to $7,700 per annum. Marion Benston Lowe, interview with the author, 26 July 1996; Margaret Benston, staff files, Simon Fraser University Archives. Like women scientists in other fields, few women anthropologists have had employment opportunities similar to their male colleagues either in Canada or in the United States. Jean Briggs’s academic advancement points to an unusually good career. Prentice et al., Canadian Women; Veronica Strong-Boag, ‘Home Dreams: Women and the Suburban Experiment in Canada, 1945–1960,’ Canadian Historical Review 72, no. 4 (1991): 471–504. Fifteen ‘Women and Science’ panel discussions at Concordia, Carleton, and the University of Northern British Columbia between 1988 and 2002. These panels were organized for students, community, and faculty to discuss women, science, and technology in historical and contemporary perspectives. This was made possible by a new Canadian ‘non-discriminatory’ immigration policy (enacted in 1962). On immigrant women in Canada, see Resources for Feminist Research 15, no. 5 (1986). Nilima Mandal Giri has been investigating the situation of immigrant professional South Asian women. See Giri, ‘Canadian Women Academics of South Asian Origin in Montreal,’ Le Bulletin/Newsletter – Simone de Beauvoir Institute Simone de Beauvoir 12, no. 2 (1992): 18–42; and Giri, ‘South Asian Women Physicians’ Working Experiences in Canada,’ Canadian Woman Studies 18, no. 1 (1998): 61–4; also Giri, ‘South Asian-Canadian Women in Science in Montreal,’ in Equity and Justice/Equité et Justice, Dana Hearne and Marie Louise Lefebvre, eds. (Montreal: John Abbott College Press, 1997), 97–104. Elizabeth McGregor and Sandra Harding, ‘Science by Whom?’ in The Gender Dimension of Science and Technology: Extracts from World Science
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Report, Sandra Harding and Elizabeth McGregor, eds. (New York: Unesco, 1966), 10. 54 Mabel Timlin’s correspondence with numerous students is a testimony to her having mentored them, regardless of their gender. Mabel Timlin Papers, University of Saskatchewan Archives; Norah Toole at the University of New Brunswick made a special effort to mentor women science students. Norah Toole, Faculty Questionnaire, 3 Sept. 1946. President’s Papers, Harriet Irving Library, University of New Brunswick.
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11 Boosting Husbands and Building Community: The Work of TwentiethCentury Faculty Wives ALISON PRENTICE On 17 February 2001, the Globe and Mail ran a feature article focusing on the fact that the University of Toronto’s Mary Catherine Birgeneau was to be the first Canadian university president’s spouse paid a salary for her work as a wife. ‘Here Comes Mrs Big,’ subtitled ‘Spouses on Salary,’ noted that Toronto had ‘come under attack for being the first Canadian university to put its president’s wife on the payroll.’ But, it went on, ‘when you are expected to fly anywhere to talk business on a moment’s notice, troop thousands of guests through your home, raise funds and give speeches – is that a marriage or a job?’1 A cartoon of Birgeneau shows her gloved, hatted, and bejewelled, and busy writing at a small, old-fashioned desk. Scattered about are emblems of her job: a sign saying ‘corporate wife,’ a champagne bottle, a clock, a twenty-dollar bill, a glass of sherry, and a ticket to some public event. Although her photographed face is large and strong, there are suggestions of fragility. Birgeneau appears to be wearing a paper dress and neither she nor her desk seem to have any legs. And behind her there is a small, partly opened door. Is the door an escape route for the president’s wife? Or is it an opening for other wives who perform unpaid work for the university and might also like a salary? There is no doubt that the decision to pay a salary to a university president’s wife reflects a major change in thinking that has been percolating in Canada for some years. Yet, if it has recently come to be questioned, the fact of university professors’ or administrators’ wives doing unpaid labour for their professor husbands and for their spouses’ universities has been around for a long time. The first publication on the topic that came across my desk focused on the scholarly work that faculty wives often did for their husbands.
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Published in 1978, Marilyn Hoder-Salmon’s essay is a lament for all the unpaid and rarely recognized research and writing, typing and proofreading that American professors’ spouses had done and still did for their academic partners. Hoder-Salmon told the stories of some women who had eventually gone public about their work, but pointed out that most such wives remained, except for the innumerable prefaces in which their husbands acknowledged their contributions in a sentence or two, virtually unknown.2 As a faculty wife turned academic, I knew of similar Canadian examples. In addition, I had been briefly involved with the University of Toronto faculty wives’ club and was aware of the work such associations did for universities. Finally, I had also begun to notice the work of professors’ wives, or surrogate wives such as research assistants and secretaries, in studies I was undertaking of women’s employment at the University of Toronto.3 It was perhaps owing to some comments of mine about this latter work that a friend called my attention to the essays on Oxford and Cambridge faculty spouses in a 1984 collection entitled The Corporate Wife.4 Shirley Ardener’s reading of Oxford men’s biographies and of diaries and memoirs by their wives and children revealed both the hierarchies among professors’ wives and the elaborate social obligations and management tasks that often fell to them at the turn of the twentieth century. One woman boarded incoming students and soon found her household treated by her husband and his colleagues ‘as an outstation of Balliol.’ Well into mid-century, college-related entertaining was seen as almost obligatory. Ardener concluded that there were two models for post–Second World War Oxford wives. There was the ‘involved wife,’ happily contributing in myriad ways to the life of the university, and there was the ‘excluded wife’ who was ‘frustrated, isolated, eating her (proverbial) scrambled eggs alone while waiting for her husband to return from stimulating talks across a laden college table or from poring over his books.’ As she noted, most wives probably blended the two models, while, more recently, there may be a third group so involved with their own professional lives that they identify with neither of the first two.5 Lydia Sciama explored Cambridge wifehood both historically and from the inside as a professor’s spouse who was also herself an anthropologist. Sciama focussed particularly on wives who had scholarly training, and she finds that – after the active involvement of such women in the campaign for the admission of women to Cambridge –
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scholarly professionalism and wifehood came to be seen, by most women, as incompatible. Moreover, ‘professionalism took over exactly where monasticism had left off as a force antithetical to marriage,’ with the demands of professionalism providing dons ‘with a strong ideological basis and moral justification for ... extreme neglect of families and wives.’ An informal sample of thirty-five wives, all of them Sciama’s contemporaries, revealed three groups: women who designated themselves as ‘academic wives,’ those who used the term mainly to designate others, and those (very few) who avoided the phrase altogether. The thirty-five women divided more or less evenly between those who were fairly happily committed to their roles as professors’ wives and those who were ambivalent, or more positive about other aspects of their lives. Over time, though, even the committed wives began to feel that their roles were ‘unacceptably narrow and marginal, not to mention uneconomical.’6 Although their authors described them as ‘preliminary,’ Ardener’s and Sciama’s studies make it clear that the ‘faculty wife,’ or ‘academic wife’ as the British call her, is understood to exist and is therefore a legitimate category of analysis.7 We may have been slow to examine professors as a social group, but we have been slower still to undertake studies of the many non-faculty women who make universities tick, such as secre-taries, research workers, cleaners, or professors’ wives. All deserve our attention, wives included.8 As Sylvia Van Kirk showed us a quarter-century ago, fur traders’ indigenous and mixed blood wives were essential to the creation of the unique British North American institution of the fur trade, while Meg Luxton’s classic, More Than a Labour of Love, tells how shift workers’ wives kept the mines and other industries going in late-twentieth-century Flin Flon, Manitoba. Both studies illustrate the general argument put forward by Dorothy Smith in 1973 on the significance of women’s family labour in support of men’s work. Smith also called our attention to the special personal work undertaken by the middle-class wives of managers and professionals, work that modern corporations sub-contracted to the family. As she pointed out, educators’ wives were no exception.9 Such studies are the broad context for this preliminary exploration of faculty wives’ work in Canada. The narrower context is my own identity as a University of Toronto faculty wife. Because my husband was employed at Toronto’s Physics Department from 1958 until his retirement in 1993, I am like Lydia Sciama in approaching this study as an insider. I come to it not only as a historian interested in women’s work
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in higher education, but also as a wife whose attitudes to my role as a professor’s spouse were far from consistent. Indeed, tentative interest in the role changed to ambivalence – and ambivalence sometimes verged on hostility. But there was also ongoing curiosity. Who expected what from faculty wives? What was the history of this role? And where was the institution of ‘faculty wife’ going in Canadian universities? I have undertaken to explore these questions under three broad headings: first, the work of wives as individuals in a variety of settings; second, faculty wives’ work through the clubs they created in many Canadian universities; and third, the decline of these clubs and of the faculty wife’s role. The Work of Individual Wives Wives’ work in the home, their work as personal assistants to their husbands, or their unpaid or poorly paid employment in universities has taken many forms and not all of them can be documented here. But perhaps we can catch a glimpse of the variety and importance of such work. I begin with an account of Jane Smith, an economics professor’s wife who told me her life story in the spring of 2000.10 Her history is instructive not least in her sense of herself as an essential member of a two-person team. After completing a bachelor of arts degree at the University of Toronto in 1945, Smith found employment in Ottawa with the federal government. There she met her future husband, who at the time was completing doctoral studies that had been interrupted by the Second World War. The Smiths married in 1947 and were soon looking for university employment. Jane Smith certainly included herself in her description of this search and its results. ‘We had four job offers,’ she said. They decided on a position at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Her husband settled into an assistant professorship there, and she settled down to rearing their first child and her role as a committed faculty wife. Jane Smith remembers attending only one meeting of the faculty wives’ association at McMaster. Because a silver candelabra was on display with lighted candles in broad daylight, she thought the group pretentious, and the formal circle in which the women sat not very inviting. McMaster’s Baptist heritage may also have been in evidence. ‘I felt sinful wearing lipstick,’ Smith laughed. ‘It was not my kind of thing.’ Yet her memory of the event suggests, once again, her sense of involvement in her husband’s career. The difficulty was that she could not see herself helping him if she had to do it by way of the wives’ club
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at McMaster. She made this clear to her husband when she got home from the meeting, telling him that ‘other wives might be stepping stones but I was going to be a stumbling block.’ As it turned out, her husband’s career went forward and Jane Smith contributed much to its success. They moved to the University of Manitoba, and although she soon had three more children to care for, Smith also became active as a faculty wife. First, she discovered that the faculty wives’ club at her new university was both more welcoming and more stimulating. ‘They were very kind – I was picked up and taken and the program enchanted me.’ Smith joined the club but did not play a leading role in it. Her contributions to her husband’s career and to university life unfolded mainly through other avenues. Her own sense was that her most essential contribution was in her role as a homemaker: keeping things together when the family was flooded out of their house, and moving the household in connection with her husband’s research and consulting postings – a not infrequent occurrence since there were at least seven such moves. Moving the family was a demanding task, and Smith’s memories of some of these temporary postings were not happy ones. By the time of the first move, from Manitoba to Kingston, there were four children, and having to live ‘in someone else’s home ... where you had to be very careful’ was not easy; she ‘hated’ having to protect ‘another woman’s treasures’ from a houseful of kids. The next posting had them moving into an unfurnished house in an Asian city, where she found life ‘very difficult.’ A colleague of her husband had a local mistress who helped her get some furniture, and eventually she found adequate schooling for her children although, for her youngest child, this meant Smith’s own daily attendance at the school. Over the years many more such moves were similarly unsettling. It was the lonely and disorienting times of her earliest sojourns away that led Jane Smith to her second role as a faculty wife, a role she played most actively in the 1960s. ‘What I did was to invite new faculty wives over to dinner before the big reception the president had.’ She made sure the women all had rides and that everyone went to the party as a group. Entertaining other wives in her husband’s department and helping them to get connected was something she chose to do informally, and she enjoyed it. But at about the same time that she stopped attending the faculty wives’ club, she also cut out entertaining connected with the university. ‘Something snapped and I thought I’m not going to do this any more.’
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Jane Smith’s career as a professor’s wife fits Ardener’s idea of the ‘involved wife.’ At first Smith worried that she wasn’t up to the role but, in the end, she found herself putting a great deal of effort into it. Nor does she regret her contributions; indeed, she appreciates the growth that occurred as a result of her travels and the demands made on her, both in Canada and abroad. But gradually Smith became ambivalent about her work as a faculty wife. She continued to travel with her husband and make homes for him abroad despite her growing belief that this had a negative effect on her health. She eventually rejected any social role connected with the university. The pattern displayed in Jane Smith’s life must have been shared by many other professors’ wives. The majority probably moved house far less often, with two or three sabbatical relocations likely being more typical, but others undoubtedly entertained even more or had heavier, longer term involvement in faculty wives’ clubs. An obituary of one such wife, published in the Globe and Mail in 2000, recounted her volunteer activities, which began with her husband’s engagement at the University of Toronto in 1939. Much of Barbara Brieger’s voluntary work took place in churches and hospitals or at the University Settlement, but a great deal of it involved entertaining students and faculty of the university’s Department of Fine Art, both at her home in Toronto and in nearby Port Hope.11 Helen Bott was one of a small but interesting group of women who in the years between the two world wars became both faculty wives and employees at their husbands’ universities. In a letter written in 1964 to another faculty wife, her good friend Nellie Chant, Bott included an intriguing reference to an essay by Chant entitled ‘Thoughts on Women,’ adding that she would like to get her own thoughts about women on paper. Earlier Bott had been employed at the Institute of Child Study, a school affiliated with the University of Toronto, and her letter notes that ‘our case was quite special, related to the home, the academic holidays – and a flexible program – quite different from ordinary conditions of employment even for skilled males.’ Although we do not know what Nellie Chant had written to prompt this comment, it is clear that both women were interested in the question of wives who had paid employment, often at the same university as their husbands did.12 Bott and Chant would have been aware of the numerous Canadian wives with intellectual or professional interests who had worked with or without pay in roles that were related to their husbands’ academic jobs. Such a wife was the spouse of the historian A.L. Burt of the
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University of Alberta. According to Professor Burt, his wife Dorothy had been on the staff of the Biology Department and was ‘so determined to get into the [History] Club’ at Alberta ‘that she captured it by marrying me in the summer of 1915.’ When her new husband had to go overseas, Dorothy Burt continued ‘to mother the Club,’ and she carried on in that role until the Burts left Alberta in 1930. However, this was not all that she did. According to Sylvia Van Kirk, Mrs Burt also founded ‘the women’s equivalent of the [all male] History Club’ at the university, an association known as the Bluestockings Club. In a talk to the History Club that Van Kirk gave in 1969, she paid homage to the service Mrs Burt and her successors had provided to both clubs, noting that ‘Mrs Burt played an indispensable role as “Mother” and hostess of the History Club’ and that, after her departure, her position had ‘been capably filled by many professors’ wives’ over the years.13 A different sort of service entirely was performed by Audrey Hawthorn when her husband Harry Hawthorn was hired to establish the Anthropology Department at the University of British Columbia in 1947. Audrey Hawthorn was highly qualified. Trained at Columbia and Yale, she had also worked as an anthropologist in Peru. Her opportunity came when the president of UBC offered her the position of ‘honorary curator’ of a valuable collection of artefacts that had come into the possession of the university. The honorary, unpaid status suited her, she later argued, as she had young children and ‘did not want to take a formal appointment.’ By the time she had been twenty years on the job, however, Audrey Hawthorn had played a leading role in the creation of a new museum for the university and the development of its superb collection. She had taught courses and guided countless student assistants in their work. At that point, she was happy to be rewarded with a proper, paying position.14 Audrey Hawthorn’s situation was similar to that of Helen Hogg, who was initially able to work beside her husband as an astronomer, in the 1930s, only because she agreed to do so on a voluntary, unpaid basis. At the University of Toronto, she shared her husband’s office and received a small salary for her work at the Dunlop Observatory, eventually also getting a paid lectureship at the university in 1941. It was not until her husband’s death in 1951, however, that Helen Hogg was able to move into the professorial ranks.15 Judith Fingard has pointed out that at Dalhousie University, during the middle decades of the twentieth century, the number of professors’ wives who taught or did other significant work for their husbands’ university for little or no salary was
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legion. Some taught in their own right; others filled in for ‘their incompetent, bored, or incapacitated husbands.’ According to Fingard, ‘the role of wives as surrogate professors is one of the hidden dimensions of academic marriages.’16 Susan Hoecker-Drysdale has analysed the career of the Canadian sociologist Helen MacGill Hughes, whose marriage to Everett Hughes took her from studies at the University of Chicago to McGill and then back to Chicago in the years before, during, and after the Second World War. While at McGill, Helen Hughes completed a doctorate, published her first book, and did some teaching for the university. She was also fully involved in the fieldwork that resulted in her husband’s influential first monograph, French Canada in Transition, published in 1943.17 Back in Chicago, she was offered part-time editorial employment with the American Journal of Sociology, for a while working directly under her husband; eventually she held the position of managing editor. Helen Hughes described this job in an article she chose to entitle ‘Maid of All Work or Departmental Sister-in-Law: The Faculty Wife Employed on Campus,’ noting her status incongruence and the fact that the promotion to manager did not result in increased compensation. Yet she was sorry to give up this job when Everett left Chicago for another university. Helen Hughes worked on several more of her husband’s publications, and in at least one case was acknowledged as joint author. But in the end, she seems to have regretted that a combination of factors resulted in her not having made an independent career of her own. Hoecker-Drysdale’s assessment is that the Hughes actually had a ‘twoperson career.’ As she puts it, ‘Helen deferred to Everett and his career, serving as his research assistant, editor, and coordinator of events. She had to set aside her own interests.’18 Things began to change in the 1960s when such practices started to seem increasingly problematic. But the employment of scholarly wives as independent entities sometimes took a very long time to achieve because of lingering antinepotism rules at many universities. Unlike Helen Hughes, Audrey Hawthorn, Helen Hogg, and most of the Dalhousie wives described by Fingard, during the second half of the twentieth century faculty wives with professional interests often sought employment totally unrelated to their husbands’ university work. Jacquelyn Peitchinis was such a wife. By the time she met her husband Stephen Peitchinis, at the University of Western Ontario, Jacquelyn was a hospital-trained nurse. They married in 1952, and she embarked on a university degree in nursing at Western. When he applied to the Lon-
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don School of Economics, she was already teaching at Western and was able to parlay her certificate in nursing education into a program for herself at the University of London’s Institute of Education. Returning to Canada, Jacquelyn Peitchinis resumed teaching at Western, and both she and her husband were associate professors there in 1968, when Stephen accepted a job at the University of Calgary. This move initially presented a problem for Jacquelyn, as the university had no nursing school. She solved the problem by engaging in further graduate studies and by the early 1970s had acquired a doctorate in educational psychology. Just before her doctoral defence, Jacquelyn Peitchinis was hired as Director of Nursing Research and Development at Holy Cross Hospital, and later she was named director of research for three Calgary hospitals, a position she held until her retirement in 1992.19 Peitchinis had a few irritating moments as a result of her presumed status as a faculty wife. On one occasion she did particularly well on a term paper for an English course at Western, but when the paper was returned, her professor asked if her husband had written it. ‘I was so mad I nearly threw a shoe at him,’ she recalled. On another occasion, she should have won the prize for the highest grade in an economics course, but it went to someone else because Peitchinis’s husband was on faculty. However, she never suffered from the antinepotism rules that often made it impossible for wives to obtain positions in the universities that employed their husbands. If the University of Western Ontario had such rules, it turned a blind eye to the fact that both members of the Peitchinis family were on staff – perhaps because Jacquelyn was in a field regarded as belonging to women, and therefore not seen as competing with men. In Calgary, she found employment outside the university. Jacquelyn Peitchinis found little time for the role of faculty wife. On her return at Western, she had been sent over to a faculty wives’ tea by Nursing Dean Edith McDowell with ‘a jelly roll and a brick of ice cream.’ But she did not attend – ‘we just delivered the stuff.’ When invited to join the faculty wives’ club at Calgary, she sent her regrets. Although her husband was chair of his department for two terms, Jacquelyn Peitchinis did no university-related entertaining at home. The couple held one reception at their golf club the year that five new people joined Stephen’s department, but there was no further involvement on her part. Jacquelyn felt that such work was ‘his business.’ My own case was not quite as straightforward. As a secondary school teacher with a master’s degree, I was gradually drawn into part-time
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teaching at the University of Toronto during the expansions of the 1950s and 1960s. This slow process meant that, in the beginning, I was quite involved in the social side of my husband’s career: entertaining students and colleagues, as well as providing bed and breakfast to physicists visiting from out of town. I also went to one very memorable meeting of the University Arts Women’s Club, the main faculty wives’ club at the University of Toronto. The networking that the club provided in fact changed my life, for it was at that meeting – through a ‘getacquainted’ game – that I met a young historian on the way to an illustrious career in French and women’s history, who was the wife of a University of Toronto mathematician. Natalie Zemon Davis eventually asked me to work on a project, which she and Germaine Warkentin developed, on the experience of Toronto women graduate students who had children.20 The study opened my eyes to the fact that, although there were conflicts between the two roles, many women (and a few men) did successfully combine child-rearing with scholarly endeavour. Learning about their difficulties and successes, working with Davis and hearing about her path as a historian, coupled with her enthusiastic response to my intellectual interests, were vital to my growth as a scholar. I was married in 1960. By 1967 I was involved in a doctorate and, by 1972, launched on a career in university teaching. Jacquelyn Peitchinis and I were probably typical of faculty wives who had demanding jobs during the second half of the twentieth century. Either from the beginning, or in my case as my career began to unfold, we did not have much time to play the role of faculty wife or to be involved on a long-term basis with faculty wives’ clubs. Eventually, Jane Smith came to the same conclusion. If the universities or our husbands’ departments needed some kind of social glue – and there was every evidence that they did – we were not going to provide it. Faculty Wives’ Clubs Toronto’s University Arts Women’s Club was one of the professors’ wives’ associations that sprang up at many Canadian institutions of higher learning in the early or middle years of the twentieth century. Of the four whose records I have examined, the oldest is the Faculty Women’s Club (FWC) of the University of British Columbia, founded in 1917. The University Arts Women’s Club (UAWC) and the University College Women’s Club, both University of Toronto organizations, came into existence in 1929 and 1932 respectively. The much younger Univer-
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sity of Victoria FWC was founded in 1963, shortly after the founding of that university. In the following discussion I focus chiefly on the two British Columbia clubs. UBC’s club was called into being by the university’s president during the First World War. The wives of faculty met in the university’s boardroom in September 1917 to consider a request that they supervise the boarding houses of women students. They agreed to do this and also decided ‘to organize a club for work in the University.’ By early the next month, a group of nineteen women had a constitution and by-laws and had elected a slate of officers. The mandate was broad: ‘The object [of the FWC] shall be the promotion of sociability among the faculty and staff, to take an active interest in student affairs, and for such further activities as may from time to time arise.’21 Fifty years later the University of Victoria FWC was explicit that social goals were paramount. ‘Why join Faculty Women’s Club? The purpose of the organization is to promote sociability.’22 Christmas gatherings and parties to welcome newcomers were now standard events, with the teas and luncheons of the first half of the century gradually replaced by coffee parties, dinners, and wine and cheese parties in the second half. Self-education blended with this social purpose, and the clubs often had meetings with speakers. In their pamphlet histories of the University of Toronto and UBC clubs, Helen Smith and Jo Robinson suggest that the women began by drawing on their own membership for talks or other entertainment. Club members spoke of their travels; members who were university administrators talked about women’s concerns at the university, such as the need for residences or a women’s building.23 An innovation of the post–Second World War years was the idea of creating club interest groups. At UBC, such groups were begun immediately following the war, with seven under way by 1946. In both the UBC and Toronto cases, it was clearly the expansion of their respective universities that suggested the need for smaller groups, where women could find companionship pursuing particular interests.24 Although it is not clear exactly when the University of Victoria club started to have such groups, by 1977 the club could boast an interest group coordinator.25 All the clubs attempted, with varying degrees of commitment and success, to involve themselves in the welfare, however defined, of their communities. Very early in the history of the UBC club, members raised money for scholarships, and the financial needs of women students in particular remained an ongoing concern.26 The FWC at UBC also took it
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upon itself to advise the university about issues that concerned its members. An early FWC letter proposed the creation of proper lunch facilities for students, another the appointment of a dean of women. In her study of women at UBC, Lee Stewart suggests two reasons for the latter proposal. One is that the first woman faculty member, Isabel MacInnes, was finding herself overwhelmed by her multiple responsibilities; the second is that UBC’s faculty wives had ‘grown tired of shouldering the university’s responsibility for female students.’27 During and after the Second World War, the UBC club raised money for various university buildings and helped to furnish both a lounge for women students and a co-op boarding house for girls. The shortage of residential space in 1946 prompted an FWC demand for women’s dormitories at the university, and club members also tried to render whatever assistance they could to the members of a Students Wives’ Club that had sprung up after the war. The 1950s saw student space to be a continuing concern, as FWC members assisted students to find suitable boarding spaces, helped furnish new dormitories, and supplied dishes and furniture for a centre for foreign students. In 1957 the Student Affairs Chairman of the FWC did ‘an extensive student housing study,’ and eight members of the club attended a meeting of the University Housing Committee to discuss her report.28 This work did not stop as the university and the club expanded. By 1963 the FWC at UBC was running a furniture loan service on campus, although problems developed when the storage hut seemed too small and damp. In 1965 members became concerned about the difficulties new faculty were having getting housing and tried to recruit volunteers to help newcomer families upon their arrival in Vancouver.29 A loan fund was set up for mature women students, which in 1976 was turned into a bursary. The FWC also organized service opportunities for members on an individual basis, with some offering to read or tape books for blind students, while others gave babysitting assistance to single parents on campus.30 The FWC’s 1982 constitution formalized such charitable efforts with another statement of purpose: ‘to provide for community service activities by interested groups within the Club.’31 The University of Victoria FWC, younger and smaller, never developed service goals on this scale. To the extent that service was provided, the club seems to have focused on individual needs. In March 1971, for example, the FWC sent out a call for used clothing to help a woman student who had four small children. The club also raised money for scholarships and put on a Christmas party for the children of university
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employees. But the primary focus for Victoria’s FWC members was their own sociability: welcoming newcomers and creating networks for themselves.32 If faculty wives organized them, both the names they ultimately chose for their associations and the records that survive suggest that all four clubs examined here wanted to include other university women in their membership. Evidence clearly shows that some women faculty and female university administrators were, at least initially, happy to participate in these clubs. Certainly at the University of British Columbia, early women professors appear to have been fully involved. In her history of UBC’s FWC, Jo Robinson reports that Professor Isabel MacInnes was president from 1919 to 1921 and was also an occasional speaker, giving a talk to the members on ‘The Feminist Movement,’ for example, in April 1922.33 Ongoing constitutional revisions and the occasional letter suggest that the issue of membership was complicated by the growth of the university and by changing attitudes. In 1957 the FWC of UBC created three categories of membership: honorary, active, and associate, the last including women administrators and wives of administrators, as well as – puzzlingly – the women faculty members and faculty wives in six of the newer departments of the university.34 The 1965 constitution of the smaller University of Victoria club avoided divisive categories but identified two groups that could belong: ‘members and wives of full and part-time faculty, teaching and research staff (with the exception of students); and members and wives of Professional Staff and University Administrators as listed in the Calendar.’35 The feeling in both cases is one of an ongoing and not entirely successful struggle for inclusiveness. The same feeling is echoed in the briefer records of Toronto’s small University College Women’s Club.36 Sometime in 1964, Nellie Chant, who had been a member of the UAWC in Toronto and later belonged to UBC’s FWC for almost 20 years, decided to survey other Canadian faculty wives’ clubs to find out more about them, as a way of preparing a retrospective talk for UBC club members.37 She wrote to nine clubs and received replies from six. She learned from Betty Gerrard that the University of Saskatchewan club had never broadened its mandate to include women other than wives, a fact reflected in its chosen name, Faculty Wives’ Club.38 No reply to Chant’s survey reported anything comparable to the UBC club’s dedication to student welfare. Toronto’s respondent claimed that the UAWC now did ‘nothing whatever’ for students. Other universities
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reported that they arranged hospitality for foreign students only, and several said that they raised small amounts of money for scholarships and bursaries. Helen Bott, who as we have seen was an old friend of Nellie Chant from their days together in Toronto, enclosed her reply in a personal letter, noting that once upon a time both she and Chant had found the Toronto gatherings ‘stuffy’ and had ‘tried to inject new ideas’ into the club.39 Chant had not remembered this. On the contrary, she chiefly recalled being mentored in the Toronto club by ‘older women from whom one could learn a great deal – of poise, graciousness and charm, of attitudes towards life and work, and to the university.’40 Chant also talked about the importance of a broadened community. ‘One met women from all departments whose interests and experiences differed widely and yet who shared one very important common interest. Many lasting friendships were begun.’ She was certain that many others had the same feeling and that, across the country, faculty women’s clubs had played an important role promoting community goals in institutions that were everywhere becoming larger and more impersonal.41 By the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, there is no doubt that younger women associated with universities were beginning to question their roles and the value of membership in faculty wives’ clubs. It is intriguing in this context to read in an American book of advice to aspiring women scholars, published in 1974, a strong warning to young women instructors against joining faculty wives’ associations.42 ‘Judging from their comments,’ Marjorie Farnsworth contends, ‘faculty men tend to look down on their wives.’ Thus, if a woman academic wanted to be regarded as an equal, she should not attend faculty wives’ social gatherings. She was expected to be busy with her scholarly work, and attending such events would damage her professional reputation. More intriguing still is Farnsworth’s view of what such organizations were all about. She predicted that most women scholars would feel uncomfortable in the company of faculty wives because ‘many of the women are in competition with one another and pay court to the wife of the dean or department chairman in hopes of advancing their husbands’ careers.’ Since academic women were already ‘under the thumb of the department chairman and the dean,’ Farnsworth argued that it was double jeopardy to be ‘under their wives’ thumb as well.’43 Her description of faculty wives’ clubs no doubt contains a large grain of truth. Class and status divisions undoubtedly did surface in most of them.
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This resonates with the memories that historian Jean Barman has of the few years she participated in UBC’s Faculty Women’s Club. Brought into the club in her early days as a faculty wife by an elderly, widowed neighbour who needed lifts to FWC events, Barman learned about ‘an intimate UBC, where everyone knew everyone else’s business.’ Hierarchy ‘grounded the club,’ she recalls; ‘women had status based on their husband’s role, influence, and seniority at UBC.’ Table cloths and silver urns still prevailed at general meetings in the early 1970s, but ‘it was [in] the interest groups where the friendships and the jostling for position occurred’ – and several of these groups were quite exclusive. In some, such as the gourmet club and the book club, a member’s success seemed to be measured by the extent of the professor husbands’ enjoyment or approval, rather than the satisfaction of the wives themselves. According to Barman, these earlier generations of wives were heavily involved in ‘strategic parryings,’ sharing ‘tidbits from their husband’s conversations ... about UBC life, around which their own lives also perforce revolved.’ In retrospect, Barman wonders if some of this information had been deliberately ‘planted’ and how many careers were made, altered, or ruined ‘because a particular wife did not, for one reason or the other, fulfill her appointed role as a conduit.’44 Jean Barman’s insights confirm those put forward in the early 1970s by Dorothy Smith regarding the conflicted roles of corporate wives who were supposed to foster the careers of their husbands and in doing so may have become alienated from the moral universe into which they were drawn as a result.45 Many faculty wives were undoubtedly always uncomfortable with the public aspects of the role and simply opted out, as did J.R.R. Tolkien’s wife Edith at Oxford during the middle years of the twentieth century. It became known that ‘Mr Tolkien’s wife did not call.’46 Certainly, two decades or so later, by the 1970s and 1980s, women like Edith Tolkien may well have been in the majority. Jean Barman feels that many of her contemporaries saw the UBC FWC as a purely social organization and opted out from lack of interest, not seeing it as ‘an important vehicle for claiming status for their husbands and, if desired, furthering their husband’s careers.’ But others were perhaps ‘wise for realizing that it was through this means that they themselves would be socialized into the life of the university, as opposed to remaining its critics.’ In the four or five years of her association with UBC’s Faculty Women’s Club, Barman saw that ‘change was in the air’: younger wives were less and less interested in the FWC.47
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Decline of a Role The sceptical wives at the University of British Columbia were justifiably ambivalent about their roles. As we have seen, the primary and most frequently reiterated goal of the faculty wives’ association was to encourage sociability, first by assisting women newly arrived at the university who were moving into unfamiliar worlds and needed befriending, and second, by creating ongoing networks of sociability and support for women who might otherwise continue to be isolated. A second purpose, most notable perhaps in UBC’s club, was to involve faculty wives in the life of the institution that employed their husbands. But the clubs had trouble achieving these goals. There was the confusion about the constituency or constituencies they were intended to serve (already touched upon above), as well as an often tedious and ongoing search for meeting space they could call their own. These two concerns underscore the uncertainty many faculty wives felt about their own position and status, an uncertainty that may have increased over time as universities became more socially diverse and complicated. Mid-century faculty wives were, for the most part, white and middle class, and they expected to have some agency; many were also highly educated. But what was their actual status as far as the universities were concerned? Like British governesses in the nineteenth century, who were neither servants nor family members in the households that employed them,48 women married to professors were perhaps not quite sure where they belonged. Were they part of the university or not? What other university women could they relate to, if any? Although many wives obviously tried to answer these questions through their participation in faculty wives’ associations, clarity wasn’t always achieved. I have found little to document the gradual separation of faculty wives from the universities that employed their husbands during the first half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, with care, the trend could undoubtedly be illustrated by reference to many small changes over time. At the University of Toronto, for example, the wife of the head of the physics department came in regularly to pour tea at departmental colloquia in the early decades of the twentieth century, but this practice was eventually abandoned. Professor Elizabeth Allin recalled that, during the 1920s and 1930s, it tended to be the women graduate students in physics who made and poured the daily tea. The regular Sunday luncheons at the home of Professor George Wrong of the his-
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tory department, hosted by his wife and daughters, were famous in their time, but by mid-century such luncheons belonged to the past. During the middle decades of the century, the ‘tea ceremony’ in the history department was in the hands of the departmental secretary, Miss Freya Hahn, who poured at the daily social hour in Flavelle House.49 Probably by the time Hahn retired, the tea ceremony was also a thing of the past. The growing numbers of women undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and support staff, not to mention their increasing workloads, created a new climate at universities. In some cases, they made wives’ services, like pouring tea at colloquia or having luncheons for students, unnecessary. However, there is little doubt that all of these women found their lives and interests intersecting less and less with those of faculty wives.50 As the critiques of Marjorie Farnsworth and Jean Barman suggest, the 1970s seem to have marked a turning point for faculty wives’ association. Confidence in the clubs’ purposes and achievements suffered erosion, as the second women’s movement took hold in universities as elsewhere. Faculty member Helga Jacobson of the UBC Women’s Action Group (WAG) wrote to UBC’s FWC in 1972 suggesting that its members might like to join WAG, also requesting a financial contribution to assist with the printing of WAG’s fifty-page report on the status of women. The reply was cool. The FWC executive had discussed the request, the corresponding secretary replied, but all funds were earmarked for students; in addition, the FWC did not, as a rule, contribute to other organizations.51 When women on the faculty showed signs of coming into direct conflict with FWC members’ professor husbands over issues like women professors’ salaries, tenure, and promotion, these faculty wives undoubtedly began to feel the discomfort of divided loyalties. Were they supporters of women’s causes – or of husbands who opposed what the husbands saw as an increasingly strident feminism in the university? It would appear that the FWC executive at the University of British Columbia chose the safe route: not to be involved in faculty women’s issues. Women faculty, for their part, had probably gradually withdrawn from participating in UBC’s FWC long since. Their lives had become too busy. Professor Margaret Prang, who joined the UBC history faculty in 1959, knew about the FWC and remembers that ‘female members of the faculty were always invited.’ She also recalls that she never went: ‘I didn’t want to give people the impression that I had nothing better to do.’52 Although UBC deans of women continued over
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the years to play a mediating role – in the 1970s Dean Margaret Fulton seems to have made particular efforts to bring feminist faculty and faculty wives together53 – the gulf only seems to have widened. Symbolic of their marginal status in the university was the difficulty that faculty wives’ clubs had finding any kind of permanent physical home in their respective universities. Toronto’s club lost a forty-year battle, poignantly described in Helen Smith’s history under the heading ‘Moving Tents and Ports of Call.’ By 1975 the UAWC had given up and was meeting at a parish hall near the university.54 While the UBC women were eventually successful, their long struggle had ambiguous results. In the 1940s the club met regularly in the Mildred Brock Room of the Brock Memorial Building, a lounge for women students that UBC’s FWC members had worked towards for fifteen years and finally helped to achieve in November 1940. However, the space really belonged to the students. Two FWC women had served on the committee that furnished the UBC Faculty Club in 1947, and when the FWC organized gatherings that included their husbands, they were allowed to use Faculty Club space. But no suggestion was made that the faculty wives had any fixed right to hold their ordinary FWC meetings there. When a new Faculty Club building opened in 1959, it was a slightly different story. According to Jo Robinson, the new facilities became not only ‘the centre for most social events on the campus,’ but also a place for meetings of the FWC.55 Yet a ‘permanent meeting place’ of its own still eluded the club. It was thus with great hope that the executive began negotiations for exclusive use of rooms in a mansion close to the campus, which the university purchased in the 1960s, and with delight that the FWC was able to announce, in August 1967, that its Cecil Green Park clubrooms were open for business.56 Cecil Green Park House was not a perfect solution, however. By 1969, the records suggest, there were ongoing conflicts concerning parking. The president of the FWC wrote to the university’s superintendent of traffic and safety to request parking stickers for members of the club. The outcome of the request is not clear, but in 1974 Freda Pryce wrote again to university authorities on the subject. FWC members appreciated the parking problem, she noted, but they would like to avoid the possibility of ‘irate office staff’ threatening them with the police.57 The difficulty did not go away, and this was not the end of the FWC’s clubroom woes. In later correspondence with the university, the tone of grievance deepens. In 1979 Pryce wrote to the university’s finance
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department, complaining of having to pay someone to move a few tables. ‘We have never before been charged for a service of this kind, and are rather surprised to be billed now, in view of the considerable contributions made to the University by the Faculty Women’s Club.’58 By the early 1990s FWC executive thought the club was losing its right to be in Cecil Green altogether, and once again it asked whether university authorities had lost sight of the FWC’s role and importance. On behalf of the university, an official replied that FWC’s clubrooms were ‘in no danger of being reallocated or reduced. The contribution made by the Faculty Women’s Club to the university over the years is recognized and valued.’59 An underwhelming statement, one might say, and significant that the administrator who signed it was UBC’s VicePresident of External Affairs. The University of Victoria records indicate that, for the most part, the FWC there was able to use the university’s Faculty Club for its activities. Yet achieving this use was not without difficulty. A letter from the secretary of the Faculty Club to the president of the FWC, dated 29 April 1970, suggests that there had been some confusion and, as a result, a measure of irritation on both sides. Enclosed with the letter was a detailed agreement between the two clubs, with five further points of clarification ‘to avoid the possibility of future misunderstandings.’60 The Faculty Club clearly belonged to the faculty, not to faculty wives. It is in the records of the University of Victoria FWC that we find the most soul searching about the club’s value and future. Indeed, correspondence and minutes reveal considerable anguish during the final decade of that club’s existence.61 A 1972 letter documents the embarrassment club officers experienced when speakers were invited to meetings – and hardly anyone attended. In the winter of 1973, the FWC executive sent out a questionnaire to the membership to find out why attendance and interest were so low. A thoughtful response from one of its former presidents, Joan Lawrence, suggested that the club might have outlived its purpose, ‘at least in its present form.’ Evidently there was difficulty finding women willing to take on executive roles for the coming year. This, Lawrence judged, ‘would seem to imply that there is little, if any, need for such an organization.’ In making this statement, Lawrence was emphatic that the FWC’s reason for existence was purely social and her basic message was that, if newcomers of recent years had found the club’s social activities valuable, then it was up to them to carry it on. Lawrence appended to her response a number of concrete suggestions about how the FWC might usefully reconstitute itself, in-
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cluding a reappraisal of interest groups, which she judged served ‘a very small minority’ and were duplicated elsewhere in the community.62 The University of Victoria Faculty Women’s Club did not fold instantly. It struggled on, and the records suggest a measure of revitalization as well as considerable effort to prevent the inevitable before the club’s final demise. An ongoing difficulty in identifying its constituency perhaps best symbolizes the new mood on campus. In 1976, and again in 1978, FWC executive received letters from men faculty, allegedly responding to invitations to join the FWC. ‘Unfortunately,’ one stated, ‘I believe I am disqualified by the fact that I am male. I must also tell you that I am single in case you should pronounce my wife uncouth in not replying to your kindness.’ The other wrote that he was ‘delighted and moved’ to receive his invitation. The club had taken ‘a bold and imaginative measure.’ Given the problem of ‘petty differences as to language, race, colour, creed, ethnic origin and sexual preference’ that threatened ‘to subvert national unity,’ this writer believed that the FWC’s courageous decision to invite him to join represented ‘a decisive break with the arbitrary stereotypes of the past.’ He concluded by stating his intention to attend the welcoming party and requesting advice as to dress.63 If the wish to reach interested newcomers during the 1970s elicited attempts at humour on the part of men faculty at the University of Victoria, at UBC the FWC’s efforts to do the same thing seriously irritated at least one female professor. Writing to the university’s president in September 1974, this new faculty member protested an invitation she had received to a Faculty Women’s Club reception given in the name of the university’s president. ‘I am not prepared to attend a reception for new women members of the faculty and wives of new members of the faculty unless there is a similar reception held for new male members of the faculty and husbands of new faculty members,’ she stated. The invitation, she argued, singled out women members of faculty and sent a clear message that they were ‘not considered equal to the men members’ and were ‘assumed to have little in common with them.’ The letter went on to suggest that, if the reception were a longstanding university tradition, it was its author’s sincere view that this tradition had outlived its usefulness.64 UBC’s club carried on despite this complaint and undoubtedly many unwritten ones like it. At the University of Victoria, however, in May 1980 the president of the Faculty Women’s Club wrote to the membership regretfully announcing that the FWC would cease to function.65
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Conclusion Faculty wives and their clubs did not conform to any one type, and both changed over time. The intimate wives’ groups that had once mentored women like Nellie Chant had become much larger by the 1970s. It was not clear that faculty wives or their clubs could do much to foster the sense of community that seemed to be so absent in the mammoth institutions that many Canadian universities had become. For most academics and their spouses, departmental parties had become the chief locus of sociability, although even these could become unwieldy as departmental gatherings grew too large for people’s homes.66 Faculty wives not only worked individually and collectively to improve the social atmosphere and sense of community at their husbands’ universities. They also worked hard to promote their husband’s careers through their clubs and their domestic and sometimes their scholarly work. Feminist scholarship has long recognized this general truth about wives’ work, but it deserves to be reiterated in the context of universities. In this essay, I have not documented faculty wives’ important emotional work; nor have I provided much evidence for their frequent and often major contributions to their husbands’ research, writing, and teaching careers. As far as individuals are concerned, my emphasis has been on the entertaining and welcoming work that wives did for their husbands and also the special work involved when professors were highly mobile, as in the case of Jane Smith’s husband. As the story of Jacquelyn Peitchinis suggests, even one move had the potential to wreak havoc in a professional wife’s career. Fortunately, Peitchinis had the resources and motivation to re-create herself professionally; equally fortunately, Jane Smith had the energy and commitment to make new homes for her husband and children over and over again. Although her health suffered, she did not collapse utterly under the strain. The stories of those who did fall apart completely or whose marriages could not survive their husbands’ university commitments – or shenanigans – are not part of this account, but can be imagined. Most people associated with universities know more than one such story. Individually and through their associations, faculty wives attempted to mitigate such disintegrative forces. They were sometimes a voice for women, for example, fighting for women’s space in their universities, but also assisting women in other ways. At the same time, they appear to have reinforced the hierarchical and competitive character of their
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husbands’ universities. When the crunch came in the 1970s, the contradictions in their position were exposed. Women on faculty felt ambivalent towards faculty wives and their clubs; at the same time, faculty wives who, at UBC, were delighted to hear a lecture on feminism in the 1920s, seemed less able to support the kind of feminism that many women academics espoused fifty years later. Such divisions, which must have been partly generational, and the changing patterns of women’s employment which moved more and more wives not only into scholarly work but into the public workforce generally, gradually weakened the faculty wives’ clubs, while the immense size of universities made it increasingly difficult for them to fulfil their most important mandate in any case. Indeed, as a University of Victoria document suggests, if the clubs were seen as anachronistic by the 1980s,67 one wonders if the sense of community they attempted to foster was really a viable goal. An important feminist ideal, that married women have a right to economic security through participation in the labour force, undermined the ideology of wifehood, and the volunteer faculty wife gradually went out of style. At the level of administration, however, traces of her role remain, and sometimes the role is still very powerful. Mrs Birgeneau’s salary and the epithet of ‘Mrs Big’ may evoke distaste among those who yearn nostalgically for the old days when all professors’ wives provided unquestioned support to their husbands’ careers and offered themselves freely to universities that were supposedly untainted by the tensions of class, race, or gender. But studies of higher education increasingly demonstrate, as does some of the evidence presented here, that those days may never have existed. And Mrs Birgeneau’s salary at least gives recognition to what many have known for years: being an involved faculty spouse may be a labour of love, but also a sacrifice. It has always been a job of work and one that may well deserve a wage. notes I would like to express my gratitude to friends who read and criticized earlier versions of this essay, suggested or provided important sources, and/or encouraged me to complete it. Many thanks to Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley, Jean Barman, Paula Bourne, Bill Bruneau, Rebecca Coulter, Cathy James, Jim Prentice, Marjorie Theobald, Sylvia Van Kirk, Jean Wilson, and Ailsa Zainu’ddin. Thank you also to Margaret Prang, Jacqueline Peitchinis, and Jane Smith for their willingness to share their life histories.
Work of Twentieth-Century Faculty Wives 293 1 Gayle MacDonald and Leah McLaren, ‘Here Comes Mrs Big,’ Globe and Mail, 17 Feb. 2001, R1 and R13. 2 Marilyn Hoder-Salmon, ‘Collecting Scholars’ Wives,’ Feminist Studies 4, no. 3 (1978): 107–14. 3 See ‘Bluestockings, Feminists, or Women Workers? A Preliminary Look at Women’s Early Employment at the University of Toronto,’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association (1991), 231–61, and ‘Elizabeth Allin: Physicist,’ in Great Dames, Elspeth Cameron and Janice Dickin, eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 272. 4 Hilary Callan and Shirley Ardener, eds., The Incorporated Wife (London: Croom Helm, 1984). 5 Shirley Ardener, ‘Incorporation and Exclusion: Oxford Academics’ Wives,’ in ibid., 27–49. 6 Lydia Sciama, ‘Ambivalence and Dedication: Academic Wives in Cambridge University, 1870–1970,’ in ibid., 50–66. 7 See ibid., 58–60. 8 I have searched in vain for the monograph on faculty wives that Ardener foreshadowed in her article. However, two recent collections usefully focus on academic couples. See the historically oriented Creative Couples in the Sciences, Helena M. Pycior, Nancy G. Slack, and Pnina G. Abir-Am, eds. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), which has some Canadian content, and Marianne A. Ferber and Jane W. Loeb, eds., Academic Couples: Problems and Promises (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), esp. chap. 2, ‘The History of Women and Couples in Academe.’ See also Ann Innis Dagg, ‘Academic Faculty Wives and Systemic Discrimination – Antinepotism and Inbreeding,’ Canadian Journal of Higher Education 23, no. 1 (1993): 1–18; and Helen MacGill Hughes, ‘Maid of All Work or Departmental Sister-in-Law,’ American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 4 (1973): 267–72. 9 Sylvia Van Kirk, ‘Many Tender Ties’: Women in Fur-Trade Society (Winnipeg: Watson and Dwyer, 1980); Meg Luxton, More Than a Labour of Love: Three Generations of Women’s Work in the Home (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1980); Dorothy Smith, ‘Women, the Family and Corporate Capitalism,’ in Women in Canada, Marylee Stephenson, ed. (Toronto: New Press, 1973), 2–35. 10 I use this pseudonym as my subject wishes to remain anonymous. Our interview took place in Victoria, BC, on 5 June 2000. 11 ‘Barbara Brieger,’ 16 Oct. 2000. 12 University of British Columbia Archives (UBCA) Faculty Women’s Club (FWC) Files, 1–3, Helen Bott to Nellie Chant, 2 Aug. 1964. 13 University of Alberta Archives (UAA), acc. 74–153, item 7, Sylvia Van Kirk,
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15
16
17 18
19 20 21 22
23
24 25 26 27
Alison Prentice ‘Ladies in the History Club,’ speech at the 300th meeting and History Club Banquet, 22 March 1969. Van Kirk was the first woman president of the history club. Audrey Hawthorn, A Labour of Love: The Making of the Museum of Anthropology, UBC. The First Three Decades, 1947–1976 (Vancouver: UBC Museum of Anthropology Museum Note No. 33, 1993), 2–3. Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley, ‘Marriage and Scientific Work in TwentiethCentury Canada: The Berkeleys in Marine Biology and the Hoggs in Astronomy,’ in Creative Couples, Pycior et al., 143–55. Judith Fingard, ‘Gender and Inequality at Dalhousie: Faculty Women before 1950,’ Dalhousie Review 64 (1984–5): 690–1. See also Constance Backhouse, ‘An Historical Perspective: Reflections on the Western Employment Equity Award,’ in Breaking Anonymity: The Chilly Climate for Women Faculty, The Chilly Collective, eds. (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1995), 61–95. Everett Cherrington Hughes, French Canada in Transition (Toronto: Gage, 1943). Susan Hoecker-Drysdale, ‘Sociologists in the Vineyard: The Careers of Helen MacGill Hughes and Everett Cherrington Hughes,’ in Creative Couples, Pycior et al., 220–31; Helen MacGill Hughes, ‘Maid of All Work.’ The idea of the ‘two-person career’ was first formulated by Hanna Papanek in her ‘Men, Women, and Work: Reflections on the Two-Person Career,’ American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 4 (1973): 852–72. Interview of Jacquelyn Peitchinis by the author, Victoria, 27 June 2000. See ‘Graduate Married Women Survey,’ University of Toronto Archives (UTA), Germaine Warkentin Papers, acc. B1978/0004. Jo Robinson, Faculty Women’s Club: Sixty Years of Friendship and Service, 1917–1977 (Vancouver: Faculty Women’s Club of UBC, 1977), 1–2. University of Victoria Archives (UVA), University of Victoria FWC Files, 1–5, Joan Johnson letter ‘Faculty Women’s Club Welcoming Party,’ Oct. 1977. Helen P. Smith, A Brief History of the University Arts Women’s Club, 1929– 1974 (Toronto: typescript pamphlet, 1975), 10–11; Robinson, Faculty Women’s Club, 13–14; UBCA, FWC Files, passim. Smith, A Brief History, 7; Robinson, Faculty Women’s Club, 14. UVA, University of Victoria FWC Files, 1–5, letter from Marilyn Hewgill, Co-Coordinator of Interest Groups, Sept. 1977. Robinson, Faculty Women’s Club, 5–6. Lee Stewart, ‘It’s Up to You’: Women at UBC in the Early Years (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1990), 67–72. MacInnes was also busy in the UBC’s Faculty
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28 29
30 31 32
33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48
49
Association and its president in 1924–5. See Bill Bruneau, ‘Faculty Association: Past and Present,’ part 3 UBC Faculty Focus 35, no. (2002), 3–5. Robinson, Faculty Women’s Club, 5–22. UBCA, FWC Files, 3–10, Peggy Schofield to Mrs S.H. de Jong, 15 March 1963; Report of the Committee on Housing to the Executive, Faculty Association, 17 Dec. 1965. Robinson, Faculty Women’s Club, 30–3. UBCA, FWC Files, 1–2, ‘Faculty Women’s Club of the University of British Columbia,’ Constitution and By-laws 1982. UVA, FWC Files, 1–1, D.G. Davis to Mrs Sharyl Yore, 4 Oct. 1974; 1–2, Statement and Question, by Lyndis Davis, 11 Jan. 1973; Announcement of Meeting, 4 March 1971. Robinson, Faculty Women’s Club, 4–5. UBCA, FWC Files, 2–1 ‘Constitution of the Faculty Women’s Club,’ as amended April 1957. UVA, University of Victoria FWC Files, 1–1. UTA, University College Women’s Club Records, 1932–67. UBCA, FWC Files, 1–3, Nellie Chant, ‘Faculty Women’s Clubs in Retrospect,’ Oct. 1964. Ibid., Betty Gerrard to Chant, 11 Aug. 1964. Ibid., Helen Bott to Chant, 2 Aug. 1964. Ibid., Chant, ‘Faculty Women’s Clubs in Retrospect,’ 3. Ibid., 3–5. Marjorie W. Farnsworth, The Young Woman’s Guide to an Academic Career (New York: Richards Rosen Press, 1974), 108–9. Ibid., 109. E-mail communication to author from Jean Barman, 23 March 2002. Dorothy Smith, ‘Women, the Family and Corporate Capitalism,’ 20–32. Ardener, ‘Incorporation and Exclusion,’ 33. E-mail communication from Jean Barman, 23 March 2002. M. Jeanne Peterson, ‘The Victorian Governess: Status Incongruence in Family and Society,’ in Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, Martha Vicinus, ed. (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1973), 3–19. Prentice, ‘Elizabeth Allin,’ 272; Alison Prentice, ‘Laying Siege to the Professoriate,’ in Creating Historical Memory: English-Canadian Women and the Work of History, Beverly Boutilier and Alison Prentice, eds. (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), 211; Robert Bothwell, Laying the Foundation: A Century of History at the University of Toronto (Toronto: Department of History, University of Toronto, 1991), 73.
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50 For the resentment that some early faculty wives felt when students to whom they served sandwiches ignored them, see Smith, A Brief History, 18. 51 UBCA, FWC Files, 4–3, Mrs I.F. Bell to Helga Jacobson, 17 Nov. 1972. 52 Interview of Margaret Prang by the author, Vancouver, 19 April 1994. 53 See UBCA, FWC Files, 6–2, club correspondence with the dean of women, 1973–80. 54 Smith, A Brief History, 4–6. 55 Robinson, Faculty Women’s Club, 14–15, 23. 56 Ibid., 24–5. 57 UBCA, FWC Files, 4–3, Mrs J.D. Chapman to Mr J.A. Kelly, 6 May 1969; Freda Pryce to Mr Byron Hender, 12 Feb. 1974. 58 Ibid., 4–5, Freda Pryce to the Department of Finance, 8 April 1975. 59 Ibid., 7–10, correspondence regarding Cecil Green House, esp. Peter W. Ufford to Mrs Sandra Froese, 12 Jan. 1993. 60 UVA, FWC Files, 1–2, Joe Thomson to Mrs N. Swainson, 29 April 1970. 61 Ibid., 1–11, Marion Dixon to FWC members, 20 May 1980. 62 Ibid., 1–2, Lyndis Davis letter, 30 Dec. 1972; questionnaire and accompanying letter from Lyndis Davis, n.d., referring to a Jan. 1973 decision to explore the club’s raison d’etre; Joan Lawrence, ‘Suggestions for Committee,’ n.d. 63 Ibid., 1–4, John Cawood to Ann Scarfe, 10 Oct. 1976, 1–9, Jonah Goldstein to Sheila Bridgeman, 21 Sept. 1978. 64 UBCA, FWC Files, 4–4, Kathleen J. Waddell to President Gage, 30 Sept. 1974. 65 UVA, FWC Files, 1–11. 66 The Toronto physics department’s Christmas party had to become two parties when everyone invited could no longer fit into the home of the chair. Similarly, the annual UAWC carol party was split into two events when the university president’s residence could not accommodate all the wives who wanted to attend. 67 UVA, FWC Files, Anne Maclean, ‘Inventory for the Records of the University of Victoria Faculty Women’s Club,’ i.
Section 5 Subjectivity, Identity, and the Making of the Professoriate
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12 Constructing ‘Intellectual Icebergs’: Visual Caricature of the Professoriate and Academic Culture at the University of Toronto, 1898–1915 E. LISA PANAYOTIDIS The Professor is a queer creature; of a type inviting the laughter of the unwise … in point of costume and appearance he becomes an easy mark.1 Stephen Leacock
Writing in 1921 for the first issue of the satirical magazine the Goblin, humorist and university professor Stephen Leacock entertained his readers by pillorying the popular image of the professor, noting that ‘[the university] … lends itself to the purposes of easy ridicule. The professor stands ready as its victim.’ In his essay, Leacock casts the professor as a man (the professor is always coded as male), unfettered with the daily cares of the world and even campus life, living, as he does, in a world of exalted ideas. The putative ‘absent-mindedness’ that results because of this intellectual alienation causes the professor to fall victim to a series of unfortunate transgressions. ‘He wears a muffler in April, not having noticed that the winter has gone by! He will put on a white felt hat without observing that it is the only one in town; and he may be seen with muffetees upon his wrists fifty years after the fashion of wearing them has passed away.’2 Two cartoons depicting a professor, and a professor and student, accompanied the essay, illustrating Leacock’s comical anecdotes about his experiences of and within the professoriate. In the first cartoon, over the caption ‘In morning coat, white flannel trousers and a little straw hat,’ a professor is seen in profile casually strolling. Recalling this ‘learned man at the University of Chicago,’ Leacock notes that his ensemble was
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only ‘fit for a child to wear at the seaside.’ Sardonically he adds, ‘that man’s own impression of his costume was that it was a somewhat sportive and debonnair [sic] combination.’ According to Leacock, nonconformist and inappropriate attire is not the only mark of the ‘absentminded’ professor. Eccentric mannerisms, idiosyncratic speech, and a customary detachment served to construct a figure ripe for spoofing. ‘Can it be wondered, then,’ Leacock mused, ‘that every college paper that sets out to be “funny” turns loose upon the professoriate.’3 Leacock’s ridicule of the professoriate is not surprising, given that he was a Canadian professor. Clearly, his academic status granted his comments a legitimacy, holding a certain amount of ‘truth’ value as those of an insider. A closer reading of the essay reveals Leacock’s own conflict with the ‘pedantry and priggishness’ of academe and the anachronistic morality imposed upon university undergraduates. Embedded into his jocular critique of professors’ dress, mannerisms, speech, and intellectual aloofness, lies a not-so-subtle attack on antiquated forms of education and learning and upon incompetent and often distracted professors and their relation to teaching and research in the modern university.4 As such, Leacock was adamant that journals such as the Goblin ‘fill … a great place in the life of a university … [offering] readers a better perspective and a truer proportion than is apt to be found in the cramped vision induced by the formal pursuit of learning.’5 The Art of Lampooning the Professor Lampooning the professoriate in word and image in student-run periodicals like the Goblin was certainly not new, nor particularly unheard of in the staid halls of the University of Toronto in the early twentieth century. Many satirical magazines in North American colleges and universities arose in the aftermath of the First World War, in the heady days of the early 1920s, coinciding with student movements and aimed at enhancing students’ involvement in university governance. The visual parody of the professoriate at the University of Toronto, however, had surfaced popularly in an unlikely place: Torontonensis, the University of Toronto’s yearbook, inaugurated in 1898 and produced by the graduating class each year.6 In this chapter, I critically examine how cartoons and drawings in Torontonensis, between 1898 and 1915, reveal student views about the function of the professoriate.7 As a historian of visual culture and education, my approach to the study of the historical professoriate in Canada
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is grounded in contemporary theories of visual culture and interpretive considerations about visuality, especially how images function within specific sociocultural milieus. In part I intend to illustrate how visual sources may serve as provocative entry points to understanding more deep-rooted debates in the histories of higher education and the professoriate.8 Accordingly, an inevitable and complex relationship between the text and image exists, one that is always fluid and changing. That is, the caricatures are not just visual evidence for the verbal and textual debates, nor are the images produced in a sociocultural vacuum. Rather, the two work simultaneously together to shape readers’ and viewers’ understandings, to confirm or challenge their perspectives, and to construct new ways of thinking and acting according to those beliefs. While I began with the visual images – the cartoons and drawings – I was ultimately led towards popular understandings and debates about the cultural and educational function of the professoriate, in relation both to teaching and research in the university, and to the professoriate’s association to its students and the broader community. For students, these cartoons – ‘life-like portraits of prominent men in characteristic attitudes … exhibiting truth to nature’ – illustrated a complex set of relations and practices around university teaching and learning.9 I am particularly concerned with Torontonensis’s original audience(s) – students at the university at the time of the yearbook’s annual production, and how the cartoon images may have been seen or read and the various meanings ascribed to them.10 While the quality of teaching and the moral tenor of the teacher-professor had always been fodder for students, beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century a particular way of thinking about (and acting on) the educational function of the professors and their role on the educational and/or moral training of the university man was routinely discussed in the college papers. This shift in thinking reflects the university’s reorientation from an institution whose primary goal was overwhelmingly teaching to one that by the Second World War had an avowedly research agenda. Perhaps more crucially, over time, and concomitant with this change, and reflected in the cartoons in Torontonensis, the ‘absent-minded professor’ was reshaped into an ‘absent teacher-mentor’ and ‘self-absorbed researcher.’ A dualism between teacher and researcher was struck, the vestiges of which we live with today. As a product of this historical and cultural context, the student editors (and editorial boards) of Torontonensis were predisposed to interpret and represent popular discourses and debates to their readers. In
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the process they reconstructed and furthered those beliefs and ideas while introducing new ones. Particularly interesting is how Torontonensis is not just inscribed by a particular set of contextual meanings and values but how its student editors chose to depict those convictions through visual parody and caricature. In 1903, Toronto’s Saturday Night magazine made reference to the cartoons and drawings contained in Torontonensis, noting that: ‘[The gentle art of “lampooning” is] a timehonoured amusement of students the world over. To jibe to one another’s foibles or at the little eccentricities of their “dons” is a harmless safety valve for the escape of the pent-up energies of exuberant youths at college.’11 The exuberance of youth is one way to account for these representations, but it is simplistic. It neglects the complexity of how the cartoons signify a set of relations, identities, and assumptions about a world, how they give rise to contemporary intellectual discourses, and how they function visually to assert a ‘truth’ of representation and the commonsensical (naturally given) approach to the world. In the absence of a specific historiography of historical yearbooks and visual representations of the professoriate, I have looked at similar discussions regarding other ‘intellectual’ or ‘teaching’ professionals.12 That scholarly work, situated at the intersections of interdisciplinary study, provides critical insights into the way representations of ‘teaching professionals’ are intertwined through memory, myth, and culture.13 Given the lack of historical documentary data about the production, social and cultural intentions, and subjective understandings of the editorial board and cartoonists of Torontonensis, I have consulted a wide array of texts, including, but not restricted to, college and local newspapers and magazines, graduate student files, novels, and serious and humorous essays of social criticism written in the popular press.14 This approach, a recursive and rich process of viewing, reading, and viewing, has illuminated some of the ways in which these images might have been read. Finally, as with all interpretive work, the study is necessarily incomplete, being subject to new viewings and/or readings. As Lepert has noted, ‘the image is a place to see what we can see, a site of exploration, a place to travel, and like all sites worthy of a visit, worth returning to because there is always more to see.’15 A ‘Pictorial Souvenir of Memories’ Within only a few years of its inaugural issue, Torontonensis had attained a broad reputation outside the university, being regularly re-
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viewed by local newspapers and magazines. By 1903, its status was secured at least locally as a ‘unique publication … [and] brilliant annual.’ Toronto’s Saturday Night magazine devoted an entire page to the 1903 volume of the yearbook, primarily commenting on and reproducing caricatures that lampooned university professors, administrators, and their policies. The cartoons were always prominently noted when they were reviewed in the local media, recounting their meaning to the broader public. The Toronto World noted that the ‘cartoons are representative of the public opinion of a university at its best. They are clever, saucy, audacious, without being ill-natured … It is the handsomest and most complete account of all that goes on in the classical ground of Queen’s Park that has ever appeared.’ The Globe reported that the 1903 ‘volume far excels its predecessor in style and matter … [it makes] the impartial observer wish himself at Varsity.’16 While I do not discuss depictions at length in this paper, I suggest that in order to understand how the ‘professor’ is visually and discursively constructed in the yearbook, we must consider it relative to how ‘student’ was constructed and particularly how the gendered school experience was depicted.17 Ensuing debates over students’ narrative representations in the yearbook demonstrated that students were highly invested in how they were cast, imagining how future generations might scrutinize them. As one commentator noted, ‘in a book which will be kept by many of us as long as we keep any book, which will tell our friends for all time [w]hat we were and stood for in our university life, there should be no little thoughtfulness exercised in the way we are spoken of and speak of one another.’18 The yearbook’s literary and aesthetic organization, and the changes that were undertaken over time, suggest some of the ways in which the book was conceived by its editors, in light of contemporary approaches to both representational practices and the use of new technologies. Between 1898 and 1915 all volumes of Torontonensis contained, at least in some form, a list of features, organized in a sequential manner which sought to narrate the events, personages, and highlights of the previous year. While the ordering of these features changed little over time, specific sections, such as the student biographies, underwent annual transformation. The formal arrangement of the yearbook, its allusions to grandeur, its institutional context, and its technologies of display determined to some extent how an image was viewed and/or read by its audiences. Images are perceived differently depending on their context. Coded as a privi-
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leged and almost ‘reverent’ text, the yearbook was qualitatively different from the local newspaper or even the on-campus student newspapers that routinely debated Torontonensis’s attributes and inadequacies. The location of the cartoons in the yearbook invited particular, and different, ways of seeing. On the one hand, the inclusion of the cartoons seem ‘natural’: mischievous but harmless depictions of students’ experiences of their university professors and student culture. On the other hand, the cartoons’ stark black and white contours served to fracture the seeming formality and ‘fine-art’ style in the rest of the yearbook. By drawing attention to themselves they make obvious the venerable context in which they are embedded, making transparent the social and educational identities produced and mediated in these representations. The cartoons perform as a visual discourse contributing to the making of a particular kind of subject: the ‘absent-minded professor.’ Although over time Torontonensis came to be read for its riotous spoofing of all facets of university life, it was intended as a souvenir remembrance of students’ college experiences, events, and friends over the course of four years of study, and a last fond gesture to their Alma Mater.19 The notion of remembrance was structured around several prominent themes. Foremost, the yearbook recited, extolling in the process, a normative account of an ideal student experience at university – one shaped by rigorous academic study and social and athletic involvement, and one which consciously recognized the stark duality between the university and the impending workplace beyond. As such, it signified the university and the multitude of experiences one might have there as essentially different from those to come in the outside world of work, serving to reinscribe the proverbial meaning of the ivory tower, and students as wanderers in the academic grove.20 Although it was not often mentioned, at least one student noted ‘that it might be important to have old university friends later in life,’ suggesting the intricate way notions about elite social and business circles underlay this understanding of remembrance.21 The yearbook implicitly and explicitly advised freshmen, juniors, sophomores, and seniors on how they might shape and make sense of their university experience. For example, the 1899 Greeting was addressed to those ‘who have fought the good fight and finished their course, and to those who are still in the race ... to those who are passing through the middle stage of their metamorphosis in their junior year; to the Sophomores, just awakening to the joys, the delights, the beauties, the charm of college life; and to the Freshmen, the most fortunate
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company, in that they still have before them the best, the happiest years of their lives.’22 Remembrance of their time at their Alma Mater could also be evoked and mediated by ‘seeing’ images, in this case half-tone photographic engravings and drawings, copiously scattered throughout the text, depicting various scenes of the university, in particular its sprawling landscapes and Gothic Revival buildings. Drawings of buildings encased in decorative lettering, headers, and borders in the artistic and representational styles of the day appear in all sections of the yearbook. The rise of photographic techniques made photographs economical and plentiful.23 These images invited viewers to recall the golden memories of their academic years: ‘pictured before them in majestic magnificence, the image of the great theatre of many university events; the rugged outline of undergraduate reminiscences, the old building; and of course the professor.’24 Capturing, as one editorial noted, ‘every special phase of university life and activity ... [and assuming] [no] one was too high, no one too low to be the subject of his [the cartoonist’s] mirth,’ it was assumed that ‘clever drawings and cartoons ... will revive memories better than any words of description could do.’25 Faculty Types: ‘Picturing’ the Professoriate In the early years, the caricatures, commissioned most likely by the editorial board, were drawn by professional artists such as Frederick M. Brigden, George Semple, Charles W. Jeffreys, N. McConnell, and John Russell. Well-known political cartoonist John Wilson Bengough, founder of the Grip, a humorous weekly published in Toronto between 1873 and 1894, also drew a number of cartoons.26 That Torontonensis could attract and financially underwrite the work of professional artists illustrates both its elite status and the social connections of its editors and editorial board. In latter years, following criticisms about ‘engaging ... downtown artists,’ student cartoonists were utilized on a more regular basis – a subtle recognition that student artists could (and perhaps should) more ‘truthfully’ and ‘accurately’ represent the university experience and certainly the faculty and their peers. While relatively little is known about the student artists who produced these images, they were drawn from across colleges and faculties and went on to pursue disparate career paths.27 Pepi Carl Fux (who changed his name to Fox), an engineering stu-
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dent, was one of the few student artists who was acknowledged in his Torontonensis biography, ‘as the popular staff artist of the brilliant year ’07 ... well-known to the readers of Varsity and Torontonensis.’28 Joseph Louis Sheard, a student cartoonist whose work appeared in the 1911 yearbook, was duly recognized in his Torontonensis biography as having ‘graced the halls and pillars of University College with his artistic presence’29 Arthur Pearson McKenzie, also listed as a cartoonist in 1911, received an MA from Victoria College in 1914. He became a Professor of Industrial Psychology at Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan. Sinclair Maclaroy Adams, also a cartoonist for the 1913 volume, received a BA in 1913, and worked as a reporter for the Toronto Star. After a series of academic teaching positions he was appointed an assistant professor of Greek at Trinity College, University of Toronto in 1922. Ralph Emerson DeLury, who drew several content pages for the 1903 issue, eventually became Assistant Dominion Astronomer. His brother, Alfred Tennyson DeLury, became a professor of mathematics and Dean of Arts at the University of Toronto.30 Playwright and historian Merrill Denison (1893–1975) was listed as the Art Editor of the 1913 volume of Torontonensis. Lastly, Stanley H.F. Kemp, who drew a number of landscape images of the university for the yearbook, received his BA (1906) and MA (1908) from University College. He eventually became a commercial artist in Toronto, associated with Tom Thomson and J.E.A. McDonald, and chief designer for the Crown Cork and Seal Company.31 In all, in the years encompassing this study, the work of ten professional artists and fourteen student artists was identified in the yearbook. The cartoon images represent the professoriate as various ‘Faculty Types,’ articulating the differences in education and power that mark the professoriate from the student body. Viewed historically as a series of vignettes, the cartoons signify aspects of professorial function and identity and are duly framed within an overarching narrative which speaks critically about existing social relations as subjectively understood by the students. As visual representations they operate within a particular genre – in this case caricature – practised according to its own set of rules and principles. Olga Skorapa suggests that ‘comics’ position in opposition to the newspaper, to “real” books, and to real “art” makes them particularly rich as sites of multilayered dialogic ... interaction, oppression, resistance, and meaning(s).’32 Cartoon images of the professoriate were used in a variety of ways and for particular functions and effects. The images were used as decorative borders around the clubs societies’ pages. While some of these
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Plate 12.1 ‘The College Professor.’ By Joseph L. Sheard (Torontonensis, 1911, 133)
clubs, societies, and associations were shown with more traditional iconic images, such as a scales of justice for the political economy club and a sculpture of an ancient Greek philosopher for the classical club, a number of the images depict professors as a way to represent such clubs as the natural science association, the mathematical and physical society, and the philosophical society. These images draw upon traditional cultural understandings of disciplinary paradigms and content. The majority of the images depict professors on their own or in the company of colleagues. One 1911 Torontonensis cartoon, entitled ‘The College Professor,’ illustrates the diverse ways in which the professor was visually construed by multiple audiences: students, the professors themselves, and the public (Plate 12.1). These professional and occupational representations situate the professor as a social and cultural category, affirming position and class. As Leacock explicated in ‘The Apology of a Professor, An Essay on Modern Learning,’ a semi-humorous essay of social criticism: ‘This man is a professor, that man an “insurance man,” ... – a “liquor man”; with these are “railroad men,” “newspaper men”; “dry goods men,” and so forth.’33 Visual and textual images of the professoriate relied on popular stereotypes of the absent-minded professor to invoke identification with their
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Plate 12.2 ‘Faculty of Arts.’ Title Page. By Joseph L. Sheard (Torontonensis, 1909, 31)
audiences. ‘Shut out from the general society of the business world,’34 the professor is culturally identified around bodily and behavioural attributes and characteristics: dress, mannerisms, age, and sex. He was always seen and read in opposition to the business man against whom he is constructed as the ‘Other.’ ‘His angular waistcoat, his missing buttons, and his faded hat, will not bear comparison with the doublebreasted splendour of the stock broker.’35 When professors are depicted together, they are often portrayed as engaging in devious scheming against their students. In one 1911 title page introducing the Faculty of Arts, a panicked and bewildered student is shown agonizing over an exam while five professors straddle the banner above and gleefully look on, seeming to take perverse pleasure in the student’s predicament (Plate 12.2).
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Plate 12.3 ‘The Faculty.’ Title Page (Torontonensis, 1913, 73)
Exam taking was one of the most oft-used themes in the cartoons and professors are invariably cast as educational tyrants and gatekeepers of knowledge. In another memorable 1913 image, two professors are shown playing chess. On closer scrutiny, the chess pieces are in fact students in academic robes. Students are represented as virtual pawns, hapless dupes in the face of administrative and professorial power (Plate 12.3). Perhaps the most intriguing series of images are those that run consecutively and announce the faculty page. What began in 1898 as a sedate and unexceptional decorative banner, simply titled ‘Our Faculty’ designed by Canadian artist Frederick M. Brigden, would by 1911 become an image of notoriety, positioning the professoriate as malevolent overseers interested only in merrily weighing the fates of their charges (Plate 12.4). The first figural image appears in 1903 and depicts a large ungainly bird feeding a seated male student, who is dressed in academic gown and cap, to distinguish him as such (Plate 12.5). (It is notable that in images depicting professor and student in the same cartoon, the student is almost always male.) The bird, much larger in scale than the student, seems to float in the clouds, his gaze (and beak) touching the
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Plate 12.4 ‘The Faculty and “Found Wanting.”’ By Pepi Carl Fox (Torontonensis, 1911, 15)
banner ‘The Faculty,’ and resolutely not meeting the eyes of the student. The student’s gaze and his open mouth, however, are squarely focused on the bird. This could be popularly read as the personification of the mother bird feeding its young, in this case with the knowledge and wisdom of the ages, but the viewer’s eye is drawn to the exchange between them. An unambiguous relationship between the bird (professor) and the student is struck, signifying a set of understandings, assumptions, beliefs, and knowledge about what was held to constitute the pedagogical relationship. By comparison, in the 1904 faculty page, Canadian artist C.W. Jeffreys drew the same subject as a wise owl in non-caricature form. One is struck not only by the interpretive potential of visual expression, but also by the way in which student cartoonists, authorized through what we might call internal membership, cast the professor. Perhaps not to be outdone by the student cartoonist and perhaps spurred on by the editorial board to comment farcically on the relationship between professors and students, Jeffreys 1905 faculty page portrays four professors simultaneously throwing literal question marks at
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Plate 12.5 ‘The Faculty.’ Title Page. By R.E. Delury (Torontonensis, 1903, 18)
a frazzled student, who is almost caught off-balance by the swirling question marks. The professors, looking as if they are engaged in a competitive game of horseshoes, are intensely absorbed in the process of throwing their questions and having them envelop the student (Plate 12.6). Although few University of Toronto professors seem to have publicly responded to the ongoing circulation of these fixed stereotypes, at least one comment from historian George Wrong sheds light on how the professoriate might have countered this typecasting. Seeming to destabilize the dominant image of the professor in word and image, and to reframe it as a rejoinder of ‘youth,’ Wrong recalled his own undergraduate student days in a book entitled, Fossil Man and His Modern Representatives. As a student, Wrong suggested ‘the idea always came to me that the “modern representative” of fossil man, must be a professor … possibly it was due to the tradition handed down from older days of grave, unpractical, absent-minded elderly professors who were the victims of the not very innocent pranks of undergraduates, some of whom are now old enough to be fossils themselves.’ Reflecting on recent hires at the university, Wrong noted that the look of these men was drastically different. ‘Few were elderly, not many wore spectacles,
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Plate 12.6 ‘The Faculty.’ Title Page. By Charles W. Jeffreys (Torontonensis, 1905, 17)
a small majority was even well dressed, and nearly all would have posed rather as men of the world than as bookworms.’ He noted definitively that ‘the professor has changed and so has the student.’36 Wrong attempted to interrupt the ostensible construction of the professor as an elderly, bespectacled book worm, and reframe him as a young, stylish man of business. Alternately, James Mavor, professor of political economy at the University of Toronto was infamous for his bohemian attitude and attire, and playfully performed the popularly accepted look of a ‘professor.’ Ironically, although he was partly responsible for circulating popular
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and often debasing images (visual and verbal) of the professoriate, Stephen Leacock, in his ‘The Apology of a Professor,’ bemoaned the troubling effects of these cultural stereotypes and the lack of discernment of the public on the nature of academic culture, the professor, and his role in society. Charging an indiscriminating generality, he noted the myriad and unfortunate ways in which the term professor was bandied about. ‘It is a professor who plays the banjo. A “professor” teaches swimming. Hair cutting, as an art, is imparted in New York by professors.’ He added, ‘So it comes that the true professor finds all his poor little attributes of distinction – his mock dignity, his gown, his string of supplementary letters – all taken over by a mercenary age to be exploited, as the stock in trade of an up-to-date advertiser.’37 ‘Intellectual Icebergs’: The Professor/Student Polemic In attempting to understand the various meanings behind these depictions, I became aware of a much deeper debate of disparate intellectual cultures and interpersonal relations on campus between students and professors. At the core of this debate was the pedagogical function of the professors, who were alternately cast as moral mentors (and hence thoughtful and attentive teachers) or detached and unapproachable researchers. The debates that reverberated in the student papers, and oft-times more publicly in the local press, pitted students against professors, and at times student against student. In the early twentieth century, the long-held university culture of teaching was giving way to increasingly different concerns, one being the importance of original research. Students may have felt the impact of reduced attention from their professors, changing the experience of the university education once enjoyed by their fathers. For many students, the function of the professor was to attend to the moral vicissitudes of students’ educational – and also social – lives. For students like Oliver Mowat Biggar, a member of the Torontonensis and Varsity editorial boards, who wrote a popular scathing article ‘Education vs. Learning’ (1897) in which he outlined the ‘defects in … [the] methods of educating’ at the University of Toronto,38 for a professor to fail to discharge this grave responsibility was to sever the pedagogical contract between professor and student. Situating Oxford University as the pinnacle of educational and moral excellence, Biggar fervidly disparaged the University of Toronto’s policies, practices, and particularly its professors. An intransigent adversary of co-education, Biggar was chiefly concerned with how the
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university moulded, or not, a male student’s character. Biggar believed that the training one received at that time at the university had little effect upon a man’s moral life. He claimed that ‘[If] ... Toronto University does not give men manners [it] ... may logically be argued that Toronto University does not make men.’39 Citing a litany of systemic problems such as the curriculum (the curriculum ‘prescribes too much work and specific reading’) and the presence of women in the university, who have a ‘bad effect upon the rest,’40 Biggar would ultimately position the teaching staff and their alleged lack of interest in male students as the crux of the problem: ‘Today there is no vital interest between men and professors. The undergraduates never discuss professors as men, but only as relatively good and bad teachers; and when the professors do discuss individual undergraduates, it is as to their capacity for obtaining marks at the May examinations, and never as men from whom something may be expected after they leave the University.’ For Biggar, troubled by the uncollegial and unsupportive relations between professors and students and among the male students themselves, receiving a university education was much more than regurgitating a set of pre-conceptualized facts and bodies of knowledge: It meant having a particular kind of university experience, one which required the sympathetic union between professor and student. At present, Biggar argued that there ‘was no chance of making … [professors’] acquaintance in any other capacity than that of sections of a peripatetic encyclopaedia.’41 Biggar imagined a vibrant and holistic educational experience in which students and their moral mentors – the professoriate – partook of all the social and cultural amenities offered by the institution. Arguing in favour of the residential system, which he conceived as the ‘centre of university life and spirit,’ Biggar bemoaned the lapse in the ritualistic accoutrements such as the wearing of academic robes on campus, and particularly the lack of the tutorial system as practised at Oxford. Biggar’s letter provoked a heated debate among students and obliquely among university administrators on the role of the professoriate in the university and on the professors’ relation to their students. Subsequent respondents called into question the meaning of the university and its mandate to shape one’s character. They also took issue with Biggar’s naming of the professoriate as the source of the difficulty, which held them accountable for these conditions. One student questioned whether this ‘grievance lies within the control of the persons
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criticized.’ Hugh Monroe asked rhetorically, is not the function of the university ‘the ardent, independent, disinterested pursuit of truth … result[ing] in mental and moral development?’ Monroe viewed ‘character’ as an essential attribute into which one was born, shaped by one’s early interactions at home and school. He noted ‘self-reliance is the feature of university life. When he enters university, he should no longer crave for the discipline of nursery, but be a man.’42 Consequently, Monroe reasoned that the function of the professor was ‘not [to] play at guest and host’ but rather to ‘inspire the student with something of his own love for his subject; to present truth in its most attractive form, and, most important of all, to be to him a living example of the fact that knowledge is power.’43 Calling Biggar’s attack on the professoriate on a whole as ‘pure assumption’ and full of ‘sweeping generali[ties],’ Monroe noted that given the number of undergraduates and professorial workloads, ‘What amount of personal interest and intimate acquaintance is possible? What time has the professor of English to spend with each of his one hundred and sixty students either by way of taking breakfast with him or discussing those high ideals and high aspirations with which he may be overflowing?’44 While seeming to diverge on the origin and extent of the problem, Biggar’s and Monroe’s understandings about what constituted a gentleman were analogous: They both assumed that it is an essential attribute to which one is born. For student Harold Fisher, a devotee of the English model of university study, the debate laid too much emphasis on students’ acquaintances with ‘learned/cultured’ professors.45 Fisher, a persistent and zealous voice in these debates, was adamant that the issue concerned how students might positively affect ‘the mere teaching or lecturing efficiency of the professors.’ Fisher believed that relations between professors and students were only enacted and constituted in ‘practical work,’ in this case lectures. Fisher described what he perceived as the ubiquitous lecture format: The Professor lectures at students and the students listen. Fisher noted that through their pedagogical approaches, professors alternately treat students as ‘well-trained philosopher(s) … and continually talk over the head[, or as] a school child, and treated to a process of spoon-feeding.’ Fisher refused to accept the structural argument that student enrollment and faculty workloads made relations between the two groups improbable. He noted derisively that ‘the argument seems to be that as the lecturer cannot know everyone under his care, it is therefore of no use for him to know anyone.’ The problem, as Fisher saw it, was that ‘professors did not understand the needs of
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the student and hence to understand the real function that they discharge in our Educational System.’46 Fisher asked provocatively, what is ‘the role of the Professor?’ Casting the professor as a ‘tutor’ or ‘supervisor,’ names drawn from the Oxford and Cambridge tutorial system, respectively, Fisher saw the professor as an intermediary between students and the books and bodies of knowledges under discussion in the lecture halls. He countered that while others were quick to dismiss professors as mere regurgitators of great books, the lecturer must ‘discharge a function quite different from that performed by books.’ Original research conducted by professors and critical analysis of the lecture material had no place in the lecture hall. ‘The time is now past for using the ordinary lecture room as a place where original thought is expounded … [students want] substantial work that has stood the criticism of the thinkers of the world … If the professor does not agree with the writers of these books, or if he has some new ideas on the subject … the best thing for him to do is to put his ideas into a book.’47 Clearly for Fisher, books, not the professor, were the most important source of students’ knowledge. The ‘true source of all true knowledge’ was in being able to make links among ideas – ‘universal facts are of absolutely no use unless they are related.’ Assisting students in the process of ‘inwardly digesting’ material was envisaged as the most important function of the professor.48 In conclusion, Fisher suggested that the more congenial and collegial approach would be to do away with the conventional lecture format and replace it with the ‘seminary’ model, which would ‘place the professor in a position to find out for himself the needs of the student, and to enter with more sympathy into his difficulties.’49 Not surprisingly, Fisher was probably aware that his observations and the meanings he ascribed to them might not be shared by his fellow students or by the faculty. Discussions about the professors and their relationship to the student body were constant, and in some cases served as material for student wit, visual and textual.50 A humorous editorial in the Varsity begins with the provocative remark that ‘professors hold themselves aloof from the undergraduates to such an extent that they do not care to recognize them on the street.’ The article continues tongue-in-cheek, that given the number of students with which a professor would come in contact, to remember the various faces he may have only casually glanced in the lecture room is impossible. The remedy, according to an idea allegedly offered by one professor, was that ‘since we cannot
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remember all the students … it seems to me the only way out of the difficulty is for the undergraduates themselves to salute us when we meet on the street. We are all glad to know and recognize our students, but it is impossible to remember [them] all.’ The author notes sarcastically, ‘this may appear a trifle to some, but it is such little things that help to bring the Professor and student into closer touch, and disillusion the mind of the latter that the former wishes to always keep him at arm’s length.’51 Visual representations, sometimes harsh, which commented upon the professor’s detachment coupled with an inordinate sense of obsession with intellectual pursuit were disseminated in just about every issue of Torontonensis. Several stand out, however: In the 1904 issue, under the section ‘College Journalism,’ L.A. Eddy, the business manager of the yearbook, is shown pointing to an advertisement about the release of the new issue of the Varsity. His thumb is strategically pointing to the announcement of the ‘thrilling serial’ entitled ‘The Bashful Professor or Is the Student Neglected?’ The blatant insinuation would clearly not have been lost on its audience (Plate 12.7). In 1907, a Biographies title page depicts an elderly bespectacled professor with a magnifying glass straining to see a student one-eigth his size standing on a table. The professor’s apparent irritation, perhaps at having been disturbed from his reading (a finger seems to hold his place in the book) is seen against the student’s enthusiasm, at presenting himself to his teacher (Plate 12.8). The professor’s steely gaze seems fixated on studying the student, passing judgment on him; looking for minute traces of intellectual or moral flaws. The diminutive posture of the student in relation to the professor is manifestly evident, a metaphor suggesting the relations that exist between them. The stereotype of the professor is further explored in a 1914 image that depicts a professor with his nose literally in a book (Plate 12.9). Typical of the students’ (and society’s) perception of the professoriate, the professor is bug-eyed, seemingly part of the text he is studying. In what is surely meant to be an unflattering depiction, the professor’s body is not unlike the arch of a snake. In the background is the ubiquitous personal library, in this case complete with bellows for blowing dust off the books. Judging by the shot glass within arm’s reach, the professor enjoys imbibing hypophosphate. While the professoriate was at least publicly measured in its response to the uncomplimentary public textual and visual representations of them by their students, occasionally university administrators would
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Plate 12.7 Manager, University of Toronto. By JFK (Torontonensis, 1904, 271)
attempt to counter, although rather obliquely, students’ criticisms of the university, and by extension their role within it, in the student journals.52 Perhaps to offset Fisher’s remarks (while never addressing him directly) about the limitation of lectures and the ineffectiveness of lecturers, Chancellor Burwash of Victoria College wrote an article for the Varsity about what constitutes a ‘good lecture’ in the ideal university.53 Burwash’s narrative tone barely concealed his disdain for Fisher’s comparison of the University of Toronto to a mere high school. Burwash outlined how university studies required a more rigorous and selfregulating attitude from the student. While the student may have been spoon-fed in high school, Burwash was unwavering in his belief that at some point he must be ‘taught greater independence in his methods of
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Plate 12.8 ‘Individual Biographies.’ Title Page. By Pepi Carl Fox and JRGM (Torontonensis, 1907, 51)
work.’54 After all, Burwash noted, ‘Every man who enters the University is supposed to do so with an earnest and practical purpose. He does not come there to have a good time, get a taste of city life, form pleasant associations, take part in college sports and societies, and pass a sufficient number of examinations to secure his B.A. degree.’55 Noting that the university offered many advantages, Burwash offered ‘a hint or two to the student’ as to how to make the best use of the available facilities and particularly ‘the lectures of his professors.’ He advised students ‘that a good lecture is a living example by a living master … the investigation or opening up of some field of truth.’ Burwash suggested that ‘during the lecture, with the professor’s permission, he may occasionally ask a question. Few professors will be other than pleased by pertinent questions.’ The work of the student upon hearing the lecture ‘is to travel the same path for himself … put into his own words and form of thought the whole subject as by the aid of the lecture he has mastered it for himself.’ Preparation before the lecture and organization after the lecture were fundamental. ‘Two lectures a day mastered in this way will give most students quite enough to do.’56 Burwash saved his most scathing remarks for Fisher’s allegations about
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Plate 12.9 Professor with Nose in a Book. By E.L. Boyden (Torontonensis, 1914, 105)
the professoriate and their inability to act as effective mentors on behalf of their students. Burwash scorned Fisher’s suggestion that his high school tutors were in any way superior to the university faculty, suggesting that ‘a man who is a most efficient tutor or master in a secondary school may utterly fail to reach the highest ideal as a university professor. The true University professor must be the guide of the earnest student – pointing out the way by which he may climb for himself rather than carrying or lifting him up the steep places of science and philosophy.’57 Fisher’s evaluation of high school teachers as more encouraging, compassionate, and perhaps caring than their university counterparts was a clarion call for Burwash, who saw it as an opportunity to publicly chastise the student. Burwash threateningly noted that ‘even [with] the best of intentions a student may fail through not understanding the character and requirements of his work. He comes to the University not to prepare and write so many lessons as a school boy, nor even to be taught and to master so many subjects as a High School pupil.’58
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Unlike Burwash, Chancellor the Reverend Oates C.S. Wallace of McMaster University believed that extra-mural activities and the ‘personality’ of one’s professor were two of the most important influences on the life of an undergraduate.59 Wallace bemoaned that ‘the man who becomes a bookworm, turning his back upon campus and college society; who habitually absents himself from university receptions, and rarely stops for a chat in lecture room, corridor or rotunda, and who visits no fellow-student’s room, and considers every visitor an invader and intruder, is liable if not likely to be as uncultured and as unfit for life when he receives his parchment at the close of his four years at the University as he was the day he registered as a Freshman.’60 Wallace constructed a damning and feminized representation of the over-intellectualized student/scholar: ‘The crouching scholar, lounging and awkward, or ill at ease in the presence of men, and talking with heavy, nervous lips, or weakly bashful, or brazenly uncouth, excites pity for his conscious, or contempt for his unconscious, ignorance, and is handicapped at the outset of life, and he must have remarkable merit or force if he is to gain among men due recognition of his powers and attainments.’61 Disagreements about the role, effectiveness, and comportment of the professoriate were not confined within university walls but were often debated in the popular press. W.T. Allison, a University of Toronto graduate, raised considerable comment in campus circles when he wrote an article in the Toronto Evening News severely criticizing the attitude of professors towards their students. Allison argued that ‘if the University is to play an important part in the Parliament and national life of the people one vital need must be filled … “a warmer humanity in its professors and students,” and that is impossible so long as the professor[s] continue to show their present frigidity and aloofness, a spirit of seclusion and reserve, which has chilled the enthusiasm of many of their students and has set before them a false standard of conduct for life by making them think that the wisest and most cultured men are the most exclusive and unsympathetic of mortals.’62 The result, Allison noted, was that the university will ‘go on producing prodigies of learning, but will not send out manly men and useful citizens into the world.’ Unlike his peers who heralded the English universities as the apex of educational distinction complete with sympathetic relations between professors and students, Allison cited American examples, particularly Yale as a university that promoted harmonious interactions in the lecture halls and on campus. Allison
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wistfully imagined ‘professor standing side by side with the student at some exciting football match, or boat race … the real meaning of college patriotism and friendliness.’ He concluded: ‘Unless both professors and students learn to meet one another in their work together as sociable, friendly, sympathetic human beings, instead of intellectual icebergs, Toronto University can never hope to do the great work for Canada which Yale University is doing for the United States.’63 Although noting Allison’s legitimacy to speak as a graduate, the Varsity response considered his attack on the professoriate as extreme. Citing the ‘smallness of the staff’ in such a large institution and the impossibility of one-to-one supervision of students, the Varsity subtly alluded to the fact that while some professors were making concerted efforts to have a more ‘sympathetic and democratic attitude towards their students,’ students were reluctant to recognize these efforts. However, despite its seeming support of ‘specific’ university professors, the Varsity article did qualify their remarks, noting that ‘some of our professors are not sympathetic and democratic in their attitude towards the students … and must realize their responsibility in this regard.’64 Critically, the editorial called for systemic change, offering three substantive suggestions. First, it called for appointed ‘advisors’ for each and every student, someone to whom a student could go to for educational advice and mentorship (as was commonly done at Oxford and Cambridge). Second, it suggested the development of the ‘Quiz’ system of instruction which had been introduced by some of the professors. Finally, the editorial advocated that the president of the university ‘come into closer contact with the students … it is regretted that it should be necessary that the majority of students should graduate without ever becoming personally acquainted with the President of their Alma Mater.’65 At least one Varsity article offered a remedy to the seemingly impenetrable gulf that seemed to exist between professor and student. Arguing for the implausibility of having professors entertain students individually or collectively, the editorial made two suggestions: that professors be ‘at home’ in their own rooms for one or two hours at a stated time each week (the contemporary equivalent of office hours), and that at the annual dinners, professors mingle with students, unlike the traditional seating plan that saw professors spatially and symbolically segregated from the student body.66 An article from an ‘American College Girl’ (apparently commissioned by the editor of the Varsity) brought an altogether gendered
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perspective to the question of teaching and learning. The ‘college girl’ provocatively noted that ‘any college may have buildings and faculty ... [but] it is the students, and their success or failure in creating a healthy, varied and original life together, that makes or mars a college.’67 F.V. Keys made a similar argument regarding women’s influence as teachers, making particular note of American women’s colleges. Drawing upon the example of Vassar College (founded in 1861), Keys pointed to the empathetic relations between teachers and students, attributing them in part to the ‘single large building,’ in which staff and students studied and lived.68 She noted that at Toronto, local tradition had negated the possibilities of interaction and engagement beyond the boundaries of the classroom. Tradition, practice, and policies tended to concentrate the teacher’s focus upon the classroom. She noted that: ‘Theoretically, this is the ideal condition. As the college is the intellectual centre of the community, so the class-room is, or ought to be, the centre and soul of a college.’ Particularly interesting in Keys’s comments is the way in which she begins to conceptualize the gendered differences in pedagogy and supervision. ‘Men who teach in women’s colleges say that the influence of the women teachers is more far reaching and more forcible than their own, for the simple reason that greater insight into character and greater ease of intercourse are incident upon identity of sex. It is certainly true that the relations between the women teachers and their students are more likely to be extended indefinitely beyond the period of undergraduate life.’69 As visually represented in various caricatures, students were quick to vilify professors who seemed aloof, arrogant, intellectually elitist, or inaccessible. Alternately, professors who exemplified what students considered constructive and pleasant relationships were acclaimed in the campus press. For example, the Varsity reported on the details of an after-dinner impromptu party at the home of Professor of Political Economy James Mavor. After outlining the events of the evening and how students ended up at Mavor’s home, the author of the article noted that, ‘Professor Mavor is to be congratulated on the interest he takes in his students and the way in which he has assisted in breaking the ice between faculty and students.’70 Additionally, on his appointment as Principal of University College in 1901, Maurice Hutton was similarly lauded for the ‘sympathetic’ manner in which he supported students and their initiatives. The article reasoned that ‘this will prove a mighty power in building up within our provincial university a nobler, a more
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sympathetic, a more completely harmonious student character whose influence will be national and cosmopolitan.’71 Conclusion Critically examining the caricatures in Torontonensis gives us an altogether different way in which to interpret the multitude of cultural and historical meanings around what constitutes a university education, relations between professors and students, and conceptions around pedagogy, teaching and learning. The caricatures, as I have argued, are not mere decorative images of jocular hilarity, athough I suspect they provided (as they might today) some amusement for students and perhaps for professors. Rather, they serve to construct particular understandings and ways of thinking about professors and their function in the university, in the classroom, and vis-à-vis their students. The caricatures are not simple reflections on the world but representations of a world as they construct and shape partisan accounts of ‘reality.’ Although it was a student publication, Torontonensis forged explicit forms of subjectivity, meanings, values, emotions, and conscious and unconscious forms of identity that were seen as desirable. These narratives were neither monolithic nor overarching but were subject to continual contestation and conflict. Produced in a particular social context and time, the caricatures highlight contemporary ways of crafting the professor, duly as a ‘moral male model’ and as an ‘absent-minded researcher’ uninterested in his students, on or off campus. Although seemingly oppositional, both narratives take up the tension between the professor’s personal and professional relationship with the student. On the one hand, the professor was there to objectively criticize his charges; on the other, departments and classes were relatively small by comparison with today’s, and if the professor made no effort to know his students, this was magnified considerably considering the size of the class. Often times intensely unflattering portraits of professors in Torontonensis may be attributed to specific exclusionary or inclusionary interactions with students. However, the cultural meanings generated are not ultimately reducible to such pat simplifications but must be seen within the broader context of sociocultural determinates. The sympathetic or antagonistic relations that ensued were firmly grounded in late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social mores and cultural meanings. These understandings, beliefs, and assumptions
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were blatantly expressed in humorous and often bitter form in the caricatures. Students responded to contemporary notions that positioned them as gentlemanly heirs to intellectualism and the world of commerce. Clearly, university life prepared students for a particular kind of professional demeanour and life skills. It was not only about a canonical set of knowledge to imbibe in preparation for assuming an ascribed position in the elite but also a way of being and acting in the world and in university. For others, it was a truism that the pivotal aim of a university education was the development of a strong, healthy, well-rounded mind and character, rather than the mere absorption of knowledge, machine-like, by the student. Students’ actions were also prompted by a general questioning in society that saw the growth of empirical research at the expense of traditional theological knowledge. This may have enhanced the character of the professoriate as a dusty dinosaur sequestered in his office poring over irrelevant texts. The caricatures in Torontonensis invoke new historical questions about the representation of gender and race in school yearbooks and particularly how ways of being and/or acting were codified within. They also reveal pedagogical relationships in intellectual cultures and how university structures, procedures, and policies distanced the professoriate from the student body and redefined the necessary relationship between teaching and research. notes 1 Stephen Leacock, ‘A Sermon on Humour,’ Goblin 1, no. 1 (1921): 9–10. Leacock’s article was subsequently published in the British/American edition of College Days (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1923), although omitted from the Canadian edition of College Days (Toronto: S.B. Gundy). On the Goblin, see: John N. Mappin, The Goblin: A Brief History of Canada’s Humour Magazine of the 1920s (Porcupine’s Quill, 1989) and Terry Mosher, ‘The Goblin, Fun While It Lasted,’ Montreal Gazette, 25 Feb. 1989. 2 Leacock, ‘Sermon on Humour,’ 9. 3 Ibid. 4 Though seemingly in support of modern methods in education, two essays in College Days (Toronto, 1923) contest Leacock’s more traditional sentiments on the subject; he bemoans the ‘deplorable change’ among the present generation of undergraduates who are ‘composed of the very dregs of the human intelligence, and betokened and outlook and a point
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E. Lisa Panayotidis of view more fitted for the nursery than the classroom’(at 12). He had equally harsh pronouncements with regard to the professoriate: ‘The professors whom I see about me to-day, ordinary, quiet men, with the resigned tranquility that betrays the pathos of intellectual failure’ (at 13). Leacock, ‘Sermon on Humour,’ 10. Torontonensis is Latin for Toronto. Though popularly represented as the first such yearbook of its kind at the university, two previous attempts had been undertaken in 1869 and 1886–1887. Original copies of these yearbooks may be found at the University of Toronto Archives (UTA), P78-0764 (1869), The University College and Scientific Society’s Annual 1869 1, no. 1, and P78-0163 (1886–7), Yearbook of the University of Toronto 1, no. 1. While caricatures were re-introduced after the war, the images of the professoriate after the war were more frequent, poignant, cutting, and irreverent compared with but a few years earlier, and they became a mainstay in university journalism. The Rebel (Feb. 1917 to Jan. 1920), the Trinity College journal, published a special issue of cartoons and poems of select faculty members and their disciplines, which had previously been printed in the 1917 to 1919 issues of the Rebel (UTA, LE 3 T6 R373 C2). Joan Murray has suggested that this illustrative practice was continued by Canadian Forum, the follow-up to the Rebel from its inception in 1920. See Canadian Forum 49 (April–May 1970): 42–5. Torontonensis serves as a case study in this chapter, in preparation for a broader historical study of visual images of the professoriate, in a national context. Owen, Torontonensis, 25. Given the scarcity of information that exists on the editors or editorial groups’ intents with regard to the images and the events to which they may or may not be responding, I do not presume one fixed authorial reading/ viewing but rather present a narrative of possibilities. For a broad historical view of student activities at the University of Toronto, see Charles M. Levi, Comings and Goings: University Students in Canadian Society, 1854–1973 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003). Saturday Night, 1903, 7. Cited in ‘The Year Book,’ The Varsity 22, no. 18 (25 Feb. 1902). See, for example, Terry Warburton, ‘Cartoons and Teachers: Mediated Visual Images as Data,’ in Image-Based Research: A Source Book for Qualitative Researchers,’ Jon Prosser, ed. (London: Falmer, 1994). Terry Warburton and M. Saunders, ‘Representing Teachers’ Professional Culture through Cartoons,’ British Journal of Educational Studies 44, no. 3 (1996): 307–25; Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr, and Anthone Beonde, ‘Educational Cartoons as
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Popular Culture: The Case of the Kappan,’ Schooling in Light of Popular Culture (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998), 231–45. Roslynn D. Haynes, From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage Books, 1996); Sandra Weber and Claudia Mitchell, ‘That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Like a Teacher’: Interrogating Images and Identity in Popular Culture (London: Falmer, 1995). Antonio Nóvoa, ‘Ways of Saying, Ways of Seeing: Public Images of Teachers (19th–20th Centuries),’ Paedagogica Historica 36, no. 1 (2000): 21–52. There, however, a more substantive scholarly study of how images of the professoriate (in college and university contexts) function in literary studies and popular fiction genres. See, for example, Richard George Caram, ‘The Secular Priests: A Study of the College Professor as Hero in Selected American Fiction (1955–1977)’ (doctoral dissertation, St Louis University, 1980); Bobby Glenn Hendrickson, ‘A Portrait of College Professors in the Novels of the 1960s’ (doctoral dissertation, University of Arkansas, 1976); Gordon John Loberger, ‘The Portrayal of the University Professor in the American Short Story’ (doctoral dissertation, Ball State University, 1973). I have found Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the ‘carnivalesque’ useful in my thinking about how cartoons might act as sites of ‘reification of the dominant ideology and their resistance to it.’ I see the Torontonensis’s cartoons as a carnivalesque spectacle in which students contest and attempt to subvert and redress the existing power relations between themselves and their professors. M.M. Bahktin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1984). Bakhtin’s (1895–1975) concern with the social and culturally repressive policies and measures enacted by the Stalinist regime during his own time inspired his scholarly investigations into how language registered the conflicts between social groups. Contemporary, visual culture theorists downplay or dismiss altogether the artist’s intent (arising from Roland Barthes’s declaration of the ‘death of the author’ and the ‘birth of the reader’) as the final determinate of the image’s meaning. They argue instead that since images are produced within a broader social context it is a more significant space of analysis than what the artists thought they were doing. Ultimately, artists conceptualize, envision, and produce art within a particular social, political, cultural, and economic context and time and hence can never be ‘free’ of the discursive and subjective conditions under which they labour. Leppert, Art and the Committed Eye, 8. ‘The Year Book,’ The Varsity 22, no. 18 (25 Feb. 1903).
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17 The exhibition of gender was evocative in the yearbook. Particularly interesting are a 1903 series of images ‘Plates of Types of Girls,’ depicting a number of university types, including ‘The Hockey Girl,’ ‘The Reception Girl,’ ‘The Fencing Girl,’ ‘The Summer Girl,’ and the ‘Domestic Science Maid.’ A broader discussion of these particular images taking up how they construct difference across years and genders, and the discursive frameworks in which they are enmeshed, is forthcoming. Racialized colonial representations, drawn by George Semple in relation to the YMCA and Missionary Society of Victoria, cast a particularly racist pallor on the yearbook (Torontonensis, 1900, 165). On the exhibition of gender, see Sarah Hyde, Exhibiting Gender (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). 18 A.E. McFarlane, ‘“Torontonensis”: A Criticism,’ The Varsity 17, no. 12 (20 Jan. 1898): 164. 19 James Loudon, ‘University Spirit,’ The Varsity 22, no. 1 (14 Oct. 1902): 1. 20 Torontonensis, 1898, 6. 21 Biggar, ‘Education vs Learning,’ The Varsity 16, no. 15 (10 Feb. 1897): 175. 22 Torontonensis, 1898, 6. 23 As early as 1864, the Canadian Journal of Photography was disseminating conceptual and technical advice to professional and amateur photographers and circulating knowledge of the technology broadly. See also Joan M. Schwartz and James R. Ryan, eds., Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003). I am interested in the way photography allowed nineteenth-century viewers to visualize themselves and their world and consequently how technology aided in this imagining. 24 Endymion, ‘Torontonensis: A Friendly Criticism,’ The Varsity 17, no. 15 (15 Feb. 1898): 199. 25 ‘The Year Book,’ The Varsity 22, no. 17 (18 Feb. 1903): 262. 26 Karen McKenzie and Mary F. Williamson, The Art and Pictorial Press in Canada: Two Centuries of Art Magazines (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1979). See also J.W. Bengough’s Grip Cartoons (Toronto: Rogers and Larminie, 1875) and Caricature History of Canadian Politics, 2 vols. (Toronto: The Grip Printing and Publishing Company, 1886). Having severed his connection to Grip in 1892, Bengough worked successively as a cartoonist for the Montreal Star and Toronto Globe, taking on such freelance work as was offered by Torontonensis and other periodicals requiring illustrations and/or caricature. See also Christina Burr, ‘Gender, Sexuality, and Nationalism in J.W. Bengough’s Verses and Political Cartoons,’ Canadian Historical Review 83, no. 4 (2004): 505–54; Burr, Spreading the Light: Work and Labour
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27 28 29 30
31
32
33
34 35 36
37 38
Reform in Late Nineteenth-Century Toronto (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); and Carman Cumming, Sketches from a Young Country: The Images of Grip Magazine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). To identify student artists I utilized where available student record files at the University of Toronto Archives. Toronto Globe, 18 Sept. 1933. UTA, Graduate Records. A73-026/107(76). Pepi Carl Fux. Torontonensis, 1911, 84, J. Toronto Star, 5 Dec. 1935; Toronto Globe and Mail, 9 June 1960. UTA, DGR A73-0026/278(81), Arthur Pearson McKenzie. DGR, A73-0026/2(55), S.M. Adams. Adams also served as librarian of Trinity College Library from 1927 to 1954. DGR. A73-0026/82(27), R.E. DeLury. DGR. A73-0026/82(56), Merrill Denison; DGR. A73-0026/194(65), Stanley Heber Franklin Kemp. Stanley Kemp’s daughter Helen (1910–86) would also play an important part in visually depicting the university campus. See E. Lisa Panayotidis and Paul Stortz, ‘Intellectual Space, Image, and Identities in the Historical University Campus: Helen Kemp’s Map of the University of Toronto, 1932,’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 15 (2004): 123–52. Olga Skorapa, ‘Carnival, Pop Culture and the Comics: Radical Political Discourse,’ in Schooling in the Light of Popular Culture, Paul Farbe, Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr., and Gunilla Holms, eds. (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998), 213–30. Stephen Leacock, ‘The Apology of a Professor: An Essay on Modern Learning,’ in The Social Criticism of Stephen Leacock, Alan Bowker, ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 28. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 28. George Wrong, ‘Professors and Undergraduates,’ The Varsity 22, no. 1 (14 Oct. 1902). Contemporary fashion could also dictate the attire of the professors. Saint-Elme de Champ, lecturer in French, grew a spade beard when he arrived at the university in 1896 – he was very young and younglooking and wanted to appear mature. When beards went out of fashion a decade later, he kept his and became a cartoonist’s delight until his retirement in 1945, remaining the butt of many sly male students’ references to ‘beaver.’ Harold Averill, e-mail to author, 13 Oct. 2002. Leacock, ‘An Apology,’ 30. Biggar, ‘Education vs Learning,’ 174–7. Biggar (1877–1948), the grandson of Sir Oliver Mowat, Premier of Ontario (1873–96), had a distinguished career as a lawyer, and in various roles in public and foreign service,
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41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59
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E. Lisa Panayotidis including acting as the first federal elector officer, as judge advocate in post–First World War peace negotiations, and as chairman of the joint Canadian–United States Permanent Defence Board. Ibid., 174. On the University of Toronto’s early promotion of Oxford as a way to nurture an intellectual elite in Canada, see Patricia Jasen, ‘Educating an Elite: A History of the Honour Course System at the University of Toronto,’ Ontario History 81, no. 4 (1989): 269–88. Biggar’s arguments were already out of date, although they still held currency in a few areas at the university where Sam Blake and others made a last stab at a separate college for women about 1910. It is worth noting that the ideal for university hiring until the 1880s was not the English educational system but the Scottish one. Ibid., 175. Hugh Monroe, ‘Facts vs Assertions,’ The Varsity 14, no. 17 (24 Feb. 1897): 198. Ibid. Ibid., 199. Harold Fisher, ‘Professors and Books,’ The Varsity 18, no. 14 (Feb. 1899): 175–7. Ibid., 175. Ibid., 176. Ibid., 177. Ibid. ‘The Professor and the Student,’ The Varsity 18, no. 13 (25 Jan. 1899): 166. Ibid. Chancellor Burwash, ‘Methods of Study for University Students,’ The Varsity 20, no. 6 (13 Nov. 1900): 73–4. It is unclear whether Burwash’s article was contributed or commissioned. Ibid., 73. Ibid. Ibid., 73–4. Ibid., 73. Ibid. Chancellor O.C.S. Wallace, ‘Is There Educational Value in the Social Life of the University,’ The Varsity 20, no. 7 (20 Nov. 1900): 87–8. On Wallace, see Charles M. Johnston, McMaster University, vol. 1, The Toronto Years (Toronto: 1976). Ibid., 88. Ibid.
Visual Caricature of the Professoriate 331 62 W.T. Allison, ‘College Life at Yale and Toronto,’ Toronto Evening News, Saturday 30 June, 1900, 6. 63 Ibid. 64 ‘Faculty and Students,’ The Varsity 20, no. 5 (6 Nov. 1900): 64. 65 Ibid., 65. 66 Editorial, The Varsity 22, no. 5 (11 Nov. 1903): 70. 67 American College Girl, ‘The College Original,’ The Varsity 25, no. 6 (9 Nov. 1905): 85. 68 F.V. Keys, ‘Women’s Sphere of Influence as Teacher in Women’s Colleges,’ The Varsity 25, no. 6 (9 Nov. 1905): 88. 69 Ibid. 70 ‘Prof. Mavor’s Dinner,’ The Varsity 20, no. 13 (15 Jan. 1901). On Mavor, see also E.L. Panayotidis, ‘James Mavor Cultural Ambassador and Aesthetic Educator to Toronto’s Elite 1892–1925,’ Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 8 (1997–8): 61–173. 71 Edmund H. Oliver, ‘Principal Hutton,’ The Varsity 21, no. 3 (19 Oct. 1901).
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13 ‘Two Middle-Aged and Very Good Looking Females That Spend All Their Week-Ends Together’: Female Professors and Same-Sex Relationships in Canada, 1910–1950 CAMERON DUDER In his magnum opus, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, the first parts of which were published in 1898, Havelock Ellis wrote that the movement for women’s emancipation was ‘on the whole, a wholesome and inevitable movement. But it carries with it certain disadvantages.’1 The main disadvantage, in his view, was that ‘while men are allowed freedom, the sexual field of women is becoming restricted to trivial flirtation with the opposite sex, and to intimacy with their own sex; having been taught independence of men and disdain for the old theory which placed women in the moated grange of the home to sigh for a man who never comes, a tendency develops for women to carry this independence still farther and to find love where they find work.’ Ellis was in many ways more liberal in his acceptance of feminism than were most men of his era. He nevertheless fell prey to a common assumption about its effects: that women’s emancipation resulted for some in lesbianism. The women’s movement could not, he argued, directly cause sexual inversion, but it could ‘develop the germs of it.’2 In one sense, Ellis was right. The coming together of large numbers of women in higher education in the workplace and, indeed, in feminism did give women the opportunity to form intimate relationships with each other. As lesbians and bisexual women, or the various kinds of female ‘sexual inverts’ as they were called in Ellis’s day, came together in such environments, they were able to realize for the first time that they were not alone. The universities and colleges, the workplaces, the
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parties, and the political groups were all sites for the establishment of same-sex relationships between women. Between the turn of the century and the Second World War such environments became increasingly suspect in the eyes of many; for women attracted to other women, they were worlds of opportunity. Ellis was of the opinion that higher education could develop an underlying sexual inversion or a ‘spurious imitation’ of it, and he suggested that ‘the congenital anomaly occurs with special frequency in women of high intelligence who, voluntarily or involuntarily, influence others.’3 He and others were concerned that higher education provided a context in which lesbianism was encouraged because of the grouping of women together and the existence of strong friendships, mentoring, and even relationships between female faculty and students.4 This essay discusses academic women and same-sex relationships in early twentieth-century Canada. The very particular world of the university and medical school, in an era in which same-sex relationships remained unacceptable but could be maintained by female academics and professionals provided they were pursued with discretion, was crucial to the way in which women who loved other women came to understand women’s networks, their own relationships, and societal proscription of homosexuality. Professors Frieda Fraser, Elizabeth Govan, Elizabeth Allin, and Dorothy Forward, all of the University of Toronto, combined academic lives with twentieth-century versions of the ‘romantic friendship.’ This essay will focus primarily on Frieda Fraser, who perhaps more visibly than the others transgressed heteronormativity and appropriate feminine gender.5 Her relationship with Bud Williams embodied the language and the framework of the romantic friendship, yet with a clearly physical element. I suggest here that Fraser’s understanding of that relationship and rejection of societal attitudes towards it were influenced by her status and training as a scientist. Fraser’s identity as an academic and a trained biologist intersected with her sexuality in her communications with Williams, and in her explanations of relationships between women and critical evaluation of attitudes towards samesex relationships and normative gender roles. Moreover, an academic life allowed Fraser to pursue a career despite her non-traditional gender performance. The subject of same-sex relationships between university women has been examined more fully for the United States than for Canada. Lillian Faderman suggests that ‘more than any other phenomenon, education
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may be said to have been responsible for the spread among middleclass women of what eventually came to be called lesbianism.’6 Educated women not only came together in large numbers in the colleges, but they also were able to create new professions for women and allfemale societies around those professions. Moreover, because the colleges often required faculty to live on campus, young college women also had role models for romantic friendships in some of their female professors.7 In the developing world of higher education, women had to be very discreet about their encounters, but universities did at least provide women with social opportunities apart from men.8 Such institutions, and most particularly the American women’s colleges, became explicitly linked in the public mind with lesbian behaviour. Late nineteenthand early twentieth-century antifeminist rhetoric in Europe and the United States often included the charge that higher education masculinized women and could turn them into lesbians.9 Little research has been done on relationships between university women in Canada, and few Canadian scholars have examined the lives of female academics and professionals in relation to sexual orientation.10 There remains a reluctance on the part of scholars of higher education for women and of the professions in Canada to suggest that their subjects might have been lesbian. For example, in their biography of Charlotte Whitton, who at university had formed intimate relationships with women, Patricia Rooke and Rodolph Schnell are at pains to distance their analysis from any ‘taint’ of homosexuality. On several occasions, Rooke and Schnell make it clear in No Bleeding Heart that, in their opinion, the amorous correspondence between Whitton and other women was simply a playful manifestation of close friendships, belonging ‘to the literary genre which emerged out of the “romantic friendships,” which were not uncommon in an era where gender roles were clearly defined and where unsupervised heterosexual interaction and social intercourse were constrained.’11 In an earlier work, Patricia Rooke examined same-sex support structures in Whitton’s life.12 There she suggests that the eventual relationship between Whitton and Margaret Grier, her life partner, was sexually chaste, but she nevertheless acknowledges it not only as a relationship formed ‘for convenience and economic expedience while retaining individual independence,’ but also as one including ‘intense emotional commitment in a quasi-marital union.’13 Rooke shows the importance to women like Whitton of strong, supportive same-sex relationships,
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both in the professional world and in personal life, in allowing them to succeed in forms of employment at that time still unusual for women. The support Whitton received at Queen’s from Professor Wilhelmina Gordon was an important influence in her university life. It was among educated women, academic women, and professional women that Frieda Fraser found her community and formed her friendships and her partnership with Bud Williams. When a university student in 1918, Fraser formed an intimate relationship with Edith Bickerton (‘Bud’) Williams, a relationship that lasted until Williams’s death in 1979.14 Fraser spent the overwhelming majority of her social life in the company of women and formed the kinds of friendships and networks common among educated middle-class women in the early twentieth century. The collection of letters between Frieda Fraser and Bud Williams is the largest thus far available to scholars of Canadian lesbian history. It is also a rare and unusual collection in its expressiveness and detail about a passionate relationship between two women. Their relationship embodies a twentieth-century version of the middle-class romantic friendship, yet with a clearly sexual element. It also reveals the emotional hardships women had to endure in order to be with one another, and it clearly illustrates the depth of lesbian passion.15 Fraser and Williams were born and raised in Toronto. It is unclear precisely when they met, but their relationship seems to have begun in 1918. It was during their separation between 1925 and 1927, while Fraser undertook postdoctoral medical training in the United States and Williams travelled in Europe and worked in banking in England, that they began the passionate correspondence left to us today.16 Frieda Fraser came from an academic family. She was the child of William Henry Fraser, Professor of Italian and Spanish at the University of Toronto, and Helene Zahn. Frieda’s brother Donald, nine years her senior, joined the university’s Department of Hygiene and Preventative Medicine in 1920 and helped to develop the School of Hygiene. In 1932 he became full professor. Frieda received her bachelor’s degree in physics and biology from the University of Toronto in 1922 and went on to study medicine, completing her Bachelor of Medicine (MB) in 1925. She then moved to New York where she completed an internship at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. Her post-doctoral training in chest diseases was undertaken at the Henry Phipps Institute at the University of Philadelphia. In 1928 Frieda Fraser returned to the University of Toronto to take up
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the positions of demonstrator in the Department of Hygiene and Preventative Medicine in the School of Hygiene and research associate in the Connaught Laboratories. In 1933 she was promoted to a part-time lectureship and in the following year she became full-time. During the Second World War she was made an associate professor and a full professorship followed in 1949. In 1955 Fraser was appointed Professor of Microbiology. She retired from the University of Toronto in 1965. In the latter part of her career, in addition to her teaching duties, Fraser was involved in a research project to develop an antigen for tuberculosis. Bud Williams did not come from an academic family. Her father was ‘in Insurance’ and her mother was a housewife.17 Williams had tried university education but had not enjoyed it, and decided instead to travel and then find employment in banking. There seems not to have been any family opposition to Williams’s working in a bank in England. Clerical work in the developing banking system was an appropriate employment for a woman of her class and had the added ‘advantage’ of keeping her away from Fraser, something Williams’s mother desired greatly. The majority of the letters between Frieda and Bud were written between 1924 and the early 1940s, and most come from the period 1924–7. Because Fraser and Williams began living together in the late 1930s, their correspondence diminished significantly from the 1940s onwards. Most of the letters were written during Fraser’s internship and post-doctoral studies and before she was hired at the University of Toronto. Nevertheless, they tell us much about the formation of a subjectivity combining Fraser’s sexuality and her status as an academic. Fraser’s lesbian subjectivity18 and her relationship with Williams were informed by Fraser’s academic life. Their relationship conformed in its expression to the norms of the romantic friendship, a form of relationship which still could be found among academic women in Canada, even though it was no longer in vogue among middle-class women. Fraser and Williams used a language of devotion and spoke often in spiritual terms. Their letters show that they knew that their relationship was thought unnatural by many but also that they rejected others’ viewpoints. Williams tended to object on the basis that people were being unreasonable. Fraser agreed, but her objections also reflected her academic training as a scientist. Although in the interwar years and during and after the Second World War there were an increasing number of women academics in Canada, it was still unusual for a woman to work as an academic,
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particularly in the sciences.19 Frieda Fraser was one of only a small number of such women at the University of Toronto. Furthermore, she was a woman of somewhat masculine appearance for her time, and she was a woman in a long-term same-sex relationship. That she was able to maintain her position and her relationship was the result of the combined influence of an academic environment of moderate toleration of relationships between women and the existence of strong bonds with other women of like mind. Lesbian women formed networks with other women in the universities and in wider social settings. Faderman argues that ‘women who live by their brains’ were frequently drawn to each other.20 These networks were vital in terms of their providing a social world in which women who had no intention to marry and have children could socialize without the burden of constant talk of such matters or questions about when they would marry. They were also vital because female networks supported women’s advancement in careers thought unusual or even undesirable for women. Advancement for academic women was slow in all fields, but particularly in ones not regarded as feminine. Frieda and Bud, like many a lesbian woman, noticed women who appeared in public in pairs. This is not to suggest that all such women were lesbian, but rather that women with an awareness of their own same-sex desires noticed women whose primary companions were women rather than men, and then looked for further signs of a samesex relationship. To many in mainstream society, even in a period of increasing suspicion of women’s friendships, two women travelling together were of little interest; to a lesbian woman, they were – unless they were obviously related to one another or behaving heterosexually – a red flag and were noticed immediately. Fraser was quick to notice female couples among her academic and medical colleagues, although she was perhaps more reluctant than Williams then to find out more about them. In 1927 she wrote to Bud that ‘Miss Lawter had dinner with me today. I am simply bursting to ask whether her partnership with Miss Cook is disapproved of. If I were you I would know all about it by now.’21 Of another couple Fraser observed: There are two middle-aged & very good looking females that spend all their week-ends together here. I think one lives in New York. They are going to Europe this summer for six months after planning it for I don’t know how many years. If I thought we’d be as charming together at that
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age I’d certainly say bless you my children even if I didn’t approve. They’d neither of them be nearly as nice alone. The one is mousey [sic] alone for she lives here, and the other would be angular with asperities.22
It should be noted that Fraser, while being able to notice and connect socially with other women like herself, did not necessarily form a large community network with them. There was community in the sense that lesbians by this time already shared common behavioural and visible characteristics, such that they were able to recognize one another, but that community was not based on a formalized internal structure, consciously realized and rigorously policed, the like of which arose in Canada from the late 1950s. Fraser’s community was a small group of women who either were in same-sex partnerships themselves or were not hostile to Fraser’s partnership with Williams. Frieda and Bud gained satisfaction, however, from knowing that there were others like themselves about. Historians have shown that in the early twentieth century, people who were questioning their sexuality were able to find a language with which to explain their desires and experiences in the sexological literature that was beginning to emerge. Although that literature pathologized homosexuality, it did at least break the public silence on the subject. Distribution was generally limited to the medical profession and the educated elite, however. Fraser’s letters to Williams reflect an awareness of the latest ideas on the subjects of sexuality and gender and a critical engagement with those ideas from the perspective of a scientist. Frieda and Bud spoke often in their letters of family and broader societal attitudes towards relationships between women, and theirs in particular. They were frequently critical of those who portrayed them as unnatural or unhealthy. Fraser was generally a much more reserved person than Williams, and she was rather less inclined to comment on people’s attitudes, but she did on one occasion describe an afternoon tea she had attended: ‘I went to tea at Gertrude Graden’s and found myself suddenly in a rare & intellectual atmosphere. I was immediately introduced to & sat down beside an active middle aged woman with an air whose opening remark was “Tell me about the contraceptive clinics in Toronto.”’ Quite how the conversation turned to the subject of women’s relationships is unclear, but Frieda commented, ‘The problem that seems to be in their minds at the moment was the everlasting odd women. I wonder if there
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are enough of them to warrant all the fuss & if they are necessarily abnormal or unhappy or mentally deformed.’23 Here Fraser seems to be suggesting that society had blown the magnitude of the ‘problem’ out of all proportion and also that the assumptions about ‘odd women’ were, in her view, incorrect.24 Fraser may or may not have identified as an ‘odd’ woman – she provides no definitive statement of her identity – but her refutation of the pathologization of such women can be seen as an example of her own self-awareness and her resistance to the assumption that relationships between women were unhealthy because, among women, those thought most ‘odd’ were lesbians. A letter of 1926 reveals Fraser being unusually voluble on the subject of societal attitudes, and heteronormativity in particular. Her letter reveals a mixture of biological expertise, critical analysis of social pressures, and knowledge of Freudian ideas. The beginning of the letter has been lost, unfortunately, so we may not know what incident sparked this unusually long commentary. Fraser remarked to Williams that ‘there is an outrageously high value put on the passion of men for women & women for men.’ She then entered into a lengthy discussion of biologically based ideas of ‘natural’ and appropriate human sexual behaviour. Bringing to the fore her training as a scientist, she told Williams that when you consider that originally the motive force in question was intrinsically an intermittent mechanism & that now when the need for it is biologically dropping to an extremely low level people keep harping on it as though it were a constantly necessary factor for a normal existence it seems damned silly of them not to say perverse. No one thinks it indecent of the bees & ants to have developed what is virtually an intersex. In fact they are highly respected. And they do it on the basis of political economy or social hygiene. Imagine what a scandal if some of the workers forgot themselves! And there it seems to be simply a matter of being interested in something else; which a philosopher might call self sacrifice or self control for the communal good but which a biologist would call a tropism. ... Moreover to be truly womanly, take yours truly (generally allowed to be within normal limits even if barely), if one of the ruling instincts of the world is so feeble that in 26 years it has only called attention to itself by my wanting to pat the hair of or kiss the tops of the heads of men engaged
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in looking down microscopes when I see them from the top, I can’t bring myself to take it too seriously. Of course one could argue a) that I’m setting up a resistance to it à la Freud – allowing that if it is all it is cracked up to be it should surely be strong enough to break down that much. Or b) that people like me are abnormal. But in that case, though there is no defense, one would have to admit that they manage to rub along in fair numbers.25
Fraser’s sharp criticism of social norms reveals both awareness of general antipathy towards same-sex relationships and a resistance to that homophobia and also to prevailing gender norms. She clearly regards biological arguments about heterosexuality being for the survival of the species as superfluous in an era when there did not exist the same biological need for reproduction as had previously been the case, and her challenges to those arguments are framed in biological terms, not merely expressions of their unfairness and prejudice. Fraser’s comments on intersex illustrate the influence of early twentieth-century definitions of a ‘third sex’ as well as her own training in biology. Although it is impossible to determine with certainty whether or not she would have placed herself in the category of a third sex, it can be said that Fraser was fully aware and was accepting of her own gender non-conformity. She acknowledges that she is ‘within normal limits’ of womanliness, but her addition of the phrase ‘even if barely’ demonstrates an awareness of her lack of femininity in the traditional sense. It is clear from this letter that Fraser took philosophical and scientific issue with biological and Freudian notions of the naturalness of heterosexuality. Her comments regarding ruling instincts and Freud demonstrate that she found fault with the argument that heterosexuality was the driving human force because in Fraser’s case it had had little effect beyond the occasional desire to kiss one of her male colleagues affectionately. Countering Freud, Fraser suggested that any force that is natural and strong should easily be able to counter any resistance. What must be remembered is that, while medical, sexological, and psychological works were appearing more frequently in the 1920s than had previously been the case, they were not available to the lay reader. Only some among the wider public managed to obtain copies of works on the subjects of sex and sexuality. Fraser’s knowledge of these subjects was directly influenced by her training in biology and medicine. She shows evidence of having read widely on the subject.
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Other letters show the influence of scientific training. Fraser revealed that, at the afternoon tea at Gertrude Graden’s, ‘Gertrude’s partner had a pretty idea. She had been reading Lysistrata which seems to be a book deploring the sexlessness of working women in modern times & how it was against Nature. She wanted to write an essay from the point of view of the amoeba deploring the modern trend & how terrible this new business of sex differentiation was. So utterly against Nature & so forth as the amoeba which was invented before sex differentiation would naturally think it.’26 As a scientist, Fraser was in an informed position in relation to emerging ideas about sexuality and gender. She was able to reject common assumptions not only because they did not fit her personal experience but also because her training enabled her to evaluate them critically from a scientific perspective. Her understanding of her sexuality was therefore informed by her academic identity and training. Whereas Williams was relatively open with her feelings and used very emotional language with which to express her love for Fraser, Fraser was a somewhat reserved person. She did express her love for Williams, but in a more restrained way. Both women wrote of devotion in relation to same-sex relationships between women, wrote in spiritual and effusive terms about each other, and wrote often of their future together. They spent quite some time in their letters reflecting on their relationship, on how it felt to be apart, and on what the future might hold. On several occasions, Frieda playfully used scientific analogies in her discussion of the relationship. In one of these letters, she attempted to describe what was between them by referring to velocity, saying: My dear – Don’t you think it matters whether one of us is ahead? I do in so far as I think it holds us back a bit, & I don’t in so far as it doesn’t stop us in spite of that i.e. our velocity is the algebraic sum of the component velocities V = V1 + V2, & V & V1 ´ V2, which is much more serious. I quite agree with you that we must make something of it. What? What do you think we have made if it so far? I haven’t thought about that yet. What do you think we are likely to make of it in the next 8 yrs? Or the next two?27
Fraser often referred flirtatiously to physical contact between herself and Williams and to the need to behave well. In 1927 she wrote, ‘It is nearly as difficult to go to sleep quickly now as any time. I might supplement your observation by reminding you that we were extremely good the last night you were in New York. This tends to prove that if at large we would be quite sensible.’ Again playing with scientific con-
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cepts, she observed that ‘the well known law that the attractive force between two bodies varies inversely as the square of the distance & directly as their masses doesn’t seem to hold.’28 The above passages illustrate the weaving together of the academic and the personal in Fraser’s relationship with Williams. Science was very much a part of Fraser’s identity and consequently it played a role in her communications with Williams, in her understanding of her sexuality and, I would suggest, in the construction of her subjectivity. Because she lived and worked as a scientist, it was within a scientific framework that she experienced the world, including her primary relationship. It was the combining of these two subjectivities that enabled Fraser so strongly to reject social norms in terms of sexuality and gender and to resist the considerable family pressure upon her to break with Williams. Fraser’s self-assessment that she was barely within ‘normal limits’ of femininity was based on a gender performance which was very unusual for the time. Throughout her letters to Bud, she depicts herself as masculine. For example, she inquired of Bud in 1927, What has possessed you to get a lorgnette (you see I even jib at writing it). I can just imagine how snooty you will [look.] [drawing of femininelooking Bud with bun and dress holding lorgnette to her eyes] … In self defence I shall either [picture of small skinny figure crawling away] or more probably the worm will turn & I shall [picture of masculine woman with slicked-back hair and monocle]. You really are asking for it. We will make a pretty pair.29
In another letter of 1927, Fraser favours a masculine identifier, lamenting that ‘O my lamb if I go on loving you as vigourously [sic] as this it will be very trying. I hope you can stand a lot of letters; that seems to be one of the things that happens. I must stop. It is devilish late but I’ve been so full of beans lately it is awfully hard to go to bed. And what is the use? You don’t give a guy much rest you know.’30 Individually, these and many other examples of gender play in Fraser’s letters need not suggest more than fashionable, 1920s ‘New Woman’ humour. Cumulatively, however, their effect is to show that Fraser had a more personal investment in masculinity than someone for whom gender was simply a joke. Both the consistency and the insistence of the masculine identifiers that Fraser uses are, I suggest, indicative of a rejection of traditional femininity on her part, if not an adoption of a
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Plate 13.1 Excerpt from Frieda Fraser’s letter (Fraser Records, file 11, Fraser to Williams, 11 March 1927)
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masculine subjectivity. And as a scientist, she was able to approach this subject not only from a personal stance, but also in an analytical way which addressed it as a biological issue. The relative openness with which Fraser and Williams lived and Fraser’s unconventional gender performance were unusual even among academic women before the 1960s. It was more often the case that women whose primary commitment was to other women were wary of condemnation and sought to appear respectable and feminine. The lengthy association between Elizabeth Allin and Dorothy Forward provides an example of that concern about public perception and appearances. Allin and Forward were contemporaries of Frieda Fraser at the University of Toronto. Both undertook post-doctoral studies in physics at Cambridge University in 1933 and 1934, having received Royal Society of Canada fellowships, and on their return both worked in the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto. Dorothy Forward was appointed lecturer in 1935 and then associate professor in 1940, a position she retained until her retirement in 1960. She stayed on as a special instructor until 1964. Elizabeth Allin was appointed demonstrator in 1934 and was professor of physics from 1941 until her retirement in 1972.31 Allin and Forward knew each other prior to their being at Cambridge, but had lived in separate colleges at the University of Toronto. It was Forward who suggested that they travel together to Cambridge and share accommodation. Allin recalled in an interview conducted in 1993 that Forward ‘suggested to me when we both got the same amount of money anyway that we might travel together and that was very pleasant for me.’ They shared an apartment at Cambridge and continued the arrangement on their return home. ‘When we came back,’ Allin said, ‘we decided it would be a nice idea to share accommodation and we didn’t immediately but after a year, I think it was, we managed to get an apartment that suited both of us and since then we have shared accommodation.’32 The interviewer, Karen Fejer, asked Allin when she and Forward had started living together. Perhaps reflecting an awareness of or concern regarding what was being asked about, Allin closed off the line of questioning rather abruptly, stating, ‘It’s just a matter of shared accommodation. She pays half expenses, I pay half expenses, and we get along. She’s easy to get along with. That’s all I know about that.’33 It is not possible to comment about the degree of intimacy Allin and Forward shared. The available sources permit us only to say that they
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shared a permanent living arrangement and a deep emotional connection to one another formed early in their adult years. It is likely, however, that their arrangement, whatever their outward behaviour, would have been viewed by contemporaries with some suspicion. Allin’s abrupt shutting down of the discussion of her living with Forward may reflect past experience of hearing gossip about women living together, and perhaps even witnessing the effects of such gossip on women’s reputations. Respectability and the separation of career and private life were concerns for all academic women in the early twentieth century, but particularly for those women who lived with other women. An academic career enabled a woman to remain single and even to live with another woman in relative financial comfort. For two women in a sexual relationship, an academic career could provide greater freedom to live as a couple, but only if they appeared respectable, and if lesbianism was not suggested by their outward behaviour. Most kept the true nature of their relationships secret from colleagues and family members. Frieda Fraser’s relative openness was thus rather unusual. Although the situation was better in the 1940s, it was still the case that same-sex relationships were not approved of and that academic women had to be careful about reputation and respectability. Letters from a Vancouver woman, ‘B,’ to Elizabeth Govan chart Govan’s rising success as an academic in social work. They also reveal the awareness of continued negative attitudes towards relationships between women. Elizabeth Steel Livingston Govan received a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Toronto in 1930 and then took a second bachelor of arts degree at Oxford, graduating in 1932. She followed that degree with a master’s degree in Public Welfare Administration and a Diploma in Social Work from the University of Toronto. In 1938 Govan travelled to Australia to take up a position as a casework tutor in Sydney. The following year, she was appointed to the University of Sydney, and in 1940 she became the director of social studies.34 Govan returned to Toronto in 1945 and took up a junior position as an assistant professor. She completed her studies in 1951 with a doctorate from the University of Chicago and then left the academic world to work on special projects for the Canadian Welfare Council. Elizabeth Govan returned to the University of Toronto in 1956 to accept a full professorship in social work. Little is known of Govan’s intimate woman correspondent. From the few letters that remain of B’s correspondence with her during the 1940s,
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it appears that B was studying at the University of British Columbia for a degree in Public Welfare. Govan, or Betty, as B called her, had telephoned her some time in 1944 or 1945. The two women may have met each other as early as 1928, when Govan was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto. After Betty had visited B in Vancouver, B remarked to a friend, ‘“We picked up just where we left off ...” and she immediately sensed my sense of ... revelation, or something. She said ... “It proved a lot of things for you, didn’t it ... because you have changed and grown up almost completely since 1928.”’35 The correspondence between Elizabeth Govan and B has been examined by Carol Baines, who quotes the letters at length. Baines seems reluctant to call the relationship a lesbian one, arguing that ‘given the lack of definitive evidence, one can only speculate.’36 She does suggest that the early twentieth-century pathologization of lesbians ‘may well help us understand some of the ambivalence that Govan experienced’ about her personal relationships. Nevertheless, Baines seems to be seeking evidence of a physical relationship as proof of Govan’s sexual orientation. I would suggest that the letters reveal enough about the depth, passion, and intimacy of the Betty–B relationship, coupled with an expressed awareness on B’s part of the societal disapproval of such relationships, to place the relationship firmly outside the boundaries of acceptable heterosexuality – even if the women did not refer to themselves as lesbians or have a genital sexual relationship. Because only one side of this correspondence remains, we cannot assess the degree to which Govan herself argued against negative attitudes towards relationships between women, nor the degree to which her own experience of sexuality might have been informed by her training and status as an academic. What is obvious, however, is that those negative attitudes were still there two decades after Frieda and Bud lamented the existence of them and that they constrained the behaviour of Elizabeth Govan and B. It is possible that Fraser’s role as a woman professor, her rise through the ranks to full professor status, and her research record made her a role model and even a mentor for women students and junior academic staff, helping to challenge negative attitudes about non-conformist women. Universities – unintentionally, it should be noted – operated to foster lesbian and feminist subjectivities while simultaneously being influenced by them. Fraser, a woman who steadfastly resisted all attempts on the part of family members to disrupt her relationship with Williams, and whose appearance would have been thought very mas-
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culine at the time, was the product of this new academic world – and yet she was also one who helped to forge it. Unfortunately, the available sources do not allow us to make any conclusions about her influence on her students. It is axiomatic that our historical subjects were influenced by the social contexts in which they lived. In terms of sexuality in the early twentieth century that influence has often been assessed in terms of constraint, of limitation. Historians now acknowledge the importance of emerging discourses of sexuality available through sexological publications in enabling self-identification, in constructing subjectivities, and in formulating political and legal challenges to homophobia. Such discourses usually defined same-sex relationships as unhealthy and unnatural, either biologically or socially. They were nevertheless an important element in many lesbians’ and gay men’s understanding of their own sexuality and in the formation of communities based on that sexuality. Work environments enabling the coming together of groups of women facilitated the development of same-sex relationships among women. Frieda Fraser commenced her relationship with Bud Williams well before she was employed at the University of Toronto. From the beginning of that relationship, however, her subjectivity in relation to her sexuality was linked intimately with academic life and her biological training. The two worlds of Fraser’s primary emotional relationship and her academic life were intimately linked and came together particularly in her understanding and endorsement of relationships between women. In expressing the terms of her own relationship and in arguing for its legitimacy, Frieda Fraser spoke both as a lesbian and as a scientist.
notes 1 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 1, part 4 (New York: Random House, 1937), 262. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 The concerns about the effects of university education were somewhat different for men and for women. In her chapter in this volume, Lisa Panayotidis outlines the concerns raised by Oliver Mowatt Biggar about the relationship between the university environment and male character.
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Cameron Duder Biggar seemed to desire more manly relationships and role models for men at university but was not explicitly saying that university education feminized them, thus problematizing their heterosexuality. Higher education for women, on the other hand, was regarded by many as problematizing femininity and making women ‘man-like,’ thus encouraging masculine sexual desires. The term ‘heteronormativity’ refers to the idea that heterosexuality is the normal and ideal sexual orientation and that other sexualities are abnormal. Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981), 13. See Faderman, ibid., 20; Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Penguin, 1992); Leila J. Rupp, ‘“Imagine My Surprise”: Women’s Relationships in Historical Perspective,’ Journal of Lesbian Studies 1, no. 2 (1997): 155–76. Romantic friendships were intensely emotional, and in some cases physical, relationships between middle- and upper-class women. The romantic friendship was common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although by the late nineteenth it was being regarded with some suspicion by sexologists and a wider public. Typified by an emphasis on spirituality, a language of devotion and loyalty, and an association with training in the values thought proper for marriage, the romantic friendship was regarded as being non-physical. Faderman, Odd Girls, 107–8. Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, 229, 235; Sherrie A. Inness, The Lesbian Menace: Ideology, Identity, and the Representation of Lesbian Life (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 35. Notable exceptions are Elspeth Cameron and Janice Dickin, eds., Great Dames (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997) and Jerry Wine, ‘Lesbian Academics in Canada,’ Resources for Feminist Research 12, no. 1 (1983): 9–11. Included in Great Dames is Alison Prentice’s study of Professor Elizabeth Allin, discussed later in this essay, who formed a lifelong partnership with Professor Dorothy Forward. As Cameron and Dickin point out regarding Allin and two other ‘great dames’ discussed in their book, such relationships did not necessarily have a sexual component or involve self-identification as lesbian relationships, and describing them as lesbian is therefore problematic. They urge the future investigation of ‘woman-towoman commitment, whether it be sexual or not’ (at 15). Wine’s article is about lesbian academics in the present day and the very recent past, and
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11 12
13 14 15
16
17 18
19
20 21
many of its conclusions are therefore not applicable to the early twentieth century; however, Wine’s research clearly demonstrates the continued requirement for women academics in same-sex relationships to keep separate their personal and academic lives. P.T. Rooke and R.L. Schnell, No Bleeding Heart: Charlotte Whitton, a Feminist on the Right (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1987), 32. Patricia T. Rooke, ‘Public Figure, Private Woman: Same-Sex Support Structures in the Life of Charlotte Whitton,’ International Journal of Women’s Studies 6, no. 5 (1983): 412–28. Ibid., 425. University of Toronto Archives (hereafter UTA), B95-0044, Fraser Family Personal Records (hereafter Fraser Records). Frieda and Bud did not refer to themselves or others as ‘lesbian.’ However, their letters clearly indicate that they were aware that others regarded their relationship as unnatural. While they did dispute that judgment of their relationship, it was on the basis of the unfairness of the judgment rather than on inaccuracy in terms of the relationship itself. I have chosen, therefore, to discuss them in relation to lesbianism but without ascribing to them a lesbian identity. Family members are in agreement with this perspective. The letters between Frieda and Bud, and other papers relating to their relationship and to their personal and working lives, were donated to the University of Toronto Archives by Donald Fraser and Nancy Fraser Brooks, nephew and niece of Frieda, after Frieda’s death in 1994. Nancy Fraser Brooks to author, e-mail, 23 Nov. 1999. By ‘subjectivity’ I mean a sense of self in relation to the world. The construction of subjectivity is an ongoing process of negotiation between oneself and one’s social context. Subjectivity is not the same as identity, which most often refers to a more stable and essential part of the individual. On the history of university women in Canada, see, for example, Ruby Heap and Alison Prentice, eds., Gender and Education in Ontario: An Historical Reader (Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 1991); Anne Rochon Ford, A Path Not Strewn with Roses: One Hundred Years of Women at the University of Toronto, 1884–1984 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985); and Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley, ed., Despite the Odds: Essays on Canadian Women and Science (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1990). Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, 226–7. Fraser Records, sous-fonds III, Box 36, File 11, Frieda Fraser to Edith Bickerton Williams (hereafter Fraser to Williams), 14 March 1927.
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22 Ibid., 5 March 1927. 23 Ibid., File 7, Fraser to Williams, 7 Feb. 1926. 24 ‘Odd women’ could be lesbians, spinsters, or ‘New Women.’ The term describes those women who did not conform to prevailing gender norms and norms of sexuality and who were noticed by and of concern to heterosexual and gender-normative society. Such terms were often used to define and pathologize those women whose gender and sexual nonconformity made them unusual to broader society and whose politics often made them a threat as well. 25 Fraser Records, Box 36, File 9, Fraser to Williams, n.d. [1926?]. 26 Ibid., File 7, Fraser to Williams, 7 Feb. 1926. 27 Ibid., File 8, Fraser Williams, 2 March 1926. 28 Ibid., File 11, Fraser Williams, [?] March 1927. 29 Plate 13.1 follows text from a preceding page in the file: ‘What has possessed you to get a lorgnette (you see I even jib at writing it). I can just imagine how snooty you will [look.]’ In Plate 13.1 the drawings could be interpreted as ‘in self defence I shall either [crawl away] or more probably the worm will turn & I shall [wear a monocle].’ The ‘blind twin’ is likely a joke about the eyeglasses. Fraser Records, File 11, Fraser Williams, 11 March 1927. 30 Ibid., 6 Feb. 1927. 31 For an analysis of Allin’s career and her experiences as a woman academic, see Prentice, ‘Elizabeth Allin: Physicist’ in Cameron and Dickin, Great Dames, 264–87. 32 UTA, B1993-0035/002, Elizabeth Allin Records, Interview, 19 April 1993. 33 Ibid. 34 Carol Baines, ‘Professor Elizabeth Govan: An Outsider in Her Own Community,’ in Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women’s Professional Work, Elizabeth Smyth et al., eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 47–8. 35 UTA, Elizabeth Steel Livingston Govan Papers, B79-0027, Box 3, File 4, B to Elizabeth Govan, n.d., ellipses in original. 36 Carol Baines, ‘Professor Elizabeth Govan,’ 60.
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14 Identity in the Making: The Origins and Early Experiences of the Faculty of Arts Professoriate at the University of Toronto, 1935–1945 PAUL STORTZ Future Bright: The Past All Understood Torontonensis (1918)1
Between 1935 and 1945 the University of Toronto underwent rapid, intensive, and considerable change – from constrictive financial and hiring policies in the 1930s, to wartime mobilization, to plans for reconstruction and eventual expansion in a postwar world. This transformative period saw the beginning of the university’s ‘modernization.’ The university evolved from the Second World War and immediate postwar years in political outlook, curricular offerings, research emphases, disciplinary fragmentation and specializations, student voice, and other characteristics that were later to constitute the ‘multi-university’ starting in the 1960s.2 The intellectual and academic cultures at the University of Toronto in the 1930s and 1940s were being pulled in discordant ways. The Depression closed the purse strings of the government to new funding. Curricular expansion was curtailed. Radical politics off campus were reflected in, and indeed generated by, some of the politics being taught in the classroom and espoused by instructors. The war changed the mindset of the university from objective criticality to an instrument of the state. The liberal arts were forced to adapt. Various pressures for inclusion were growing from women’s and ethnic groups, in particular the call for more representation of women in the instructorial pool. Numerous pleas for succour by refugee professors from Europe chal-
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lenged the mostly Anglo-Saxon cultural uniformity of the university.3 This was at once a fervent and introspective time for the university. The intellectual atmosphere at the University of Toronto was vibrant as ideas and curricula were challenged and debated. Disruptive socioeconomic conditions throughout Canada were unsettling within the university, and in many cases they presented unfamiliar problems to those on campus. In this time of questioning the nature, function, and future of the university, the role of the professors cannot be overlooked. The professoriate was the engine of the university, the catalyst and caretaker of the academic culture. Depending on the historical context, professors were agents of change or, in contrast, promoters of conservatism and intellectual hegemony on campus. Recent studies have attempted to redress historical scholarship that neglects systematic analyses of the professoriate in Canada. Past work that has managed to successfully deal in whole or in part with professors has focused on intellectual/political/social thought and action, gender, academic freedom, and role in the state and in society.4 This chapter asks instead if the professoriate, as a collection of individuals, can be defined by common identity, by social status, and by both selfperceived and designated roles – in essence, constituents of an intelligentsia. Further, can an intellectual culture be traced back to the roots of early experiences, individual backgrounds, and familial environments of its most vital participants? Can we determine any commonalities from professors’ pasts that contributed to the construction of academic identities later in life, and can we uncover any possible indicators of future behaviours and career decisions that could later affect the intellectual structures, roles, and activities of the university? A closer examination of professors as individuals before being hired at the university offers an initial foray into the history of a veritable intellectual class in Canadian society up to the middle part of the twentieth century. The fundamental importance of the professoriate in the socioacademic structures of universities, and in the overall development of higher education in Canada, prompts an intimate look at professors as a collection of people which make up a particular and unique group in society. Importantly, we have to ask: ‘who were they?’ By discussing individual life histories, at least until graduating from high school, the professoriate could be better understood with regard to how it shaped its own reality, defined its personal and working lives, and constructed self-identities, and in so doing controlled in particular ways a critically vital institution in society.
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Birthplace and Early Background This study encompasses 158 individual professors included in the University of Toronto Calendars lists of teaching staff in the Faculty of Arts between 1935 and 1945.5 Of the 158 professors, eight (5.1%) were women.6 The professors in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Toronto make up on average 33.4 per cent of each year’s full-time professorial workforce of the whole university (including federated colleges but not including lecturers and ‘associates’),7 and between 11.0 per cent (in 1939) to 11.4 per cent (in 1943) of the entire full-time professorial workforce (full, associate, and assistant professors) in all Canadian universities at the time.8 Determining the year of birth was possible for 123 professors. The earliest birthdate in our sample was 1848 (Alfred Baker, mathematics) and the latest was 1913 (John H. Hodgson, physics; Donald J. LeRoy, chemistry) with a median birth year of 1895. The place of birth was recorded for 138 professors in this study: over half (55.8%) of the professoriate in the Faculty of Arts was born in Ontario (see Figure 14.1). Toronto and central Ontario (east of Kitchener-Waterloo to Peterborough) made up 57.2 per cent of all the places in Ontario of the professors’ births and 31.9 per cent of the entire 138 recorded birthplaces. Almost 30 per cent of other birthplaces in Ontario were listed as from southwestern Ontario. The vast majority of the sample grew up in or near their birthplace, judging by the evidence of a few explicit cases of professors who had moved from their place of birth in infancy or early childhood9 and by correlating the place of birth with the elementary schools they attended. Many in the sample who were born and raised in Canada came from rural areas. Twelve of twenty-three birthplaces of professors in southwestern Ontario were towns, villages, and unincorporated villages of fewer than 1,800 residents. This included seven individuals, recorded in the Canadian Who’s Who,10 as hailing from a county – usually indicating a sequestered homestead, such as a farm.11 Of the twenty-six members of the sample who were born in central Ontario (except Toronto), seventeen were from towns or smaller communities (including thirteen from a farm or county); the same proportion for members from eastern Ontario is five individuals out of nine. From these statistics, a total of 66.1 per cent (39/59) of all professors born in Ontario (excluding those born in Toronto) were from rural areas.12 When Toronto is included, the figure drops to 50.6 per cent; include the entire sample of 138 professors with traceable birthplaces, and 28.3 per cent were born in rural Ontario.13
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United States, 8.0% Germany, 2.2%
Other Provinces, 13.8%
Other, 7.2% (includes Ireland, Poland, Italy, Russia, China, and South Africa)
Ontario, 55.8% Ontario-Born Professors (n = 77) Northern Ontario, 1.3%
Toronto, 23.4%
Southwestern Ontario, 29.9%
Eastern Ontario, 11.7%
Central Ontario, 33.8%
Figure 14.1 Place of Birth (n = 138) (recorded place of birth for sample of professors listed between 1935 and 1945 as working in the University of Toronto Faculty of Arts)
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Making broad inferences about the professoriate and the influence of place of birth on career and outlook is tenuous at best, but some biographers of professors and professors themselves claimed at least an indirect relationship. This was especially the case with individuals raised in small towns. Harold Innis’s life, for example, ‘began simply, in rural Ontario, as so many Canadian careers ... in the nineteenth century.’14 Born and raised on a farm in southwestern Ontario – likened to an isolated, self-contained and complex social and economic entity – Innis saw the farm as an ‘incredible mass of detail [which he] regarded ... as part of a vast organic whole.’15 According to his biographer Donald Creighton, being a ‘country boy’ seemed to imbue Innis with a sense of naiveté, inquisitiveness, and clarity of thought. Complemented by a strict Baptist community nearby, the family farm gave Innis ‘his instinct for simplicity, his capacity for continuous hard work, his fund of rather cynical down-to-earth common sense, and his ability to communicate understandingly with people in a wide variety of walks of life.’ It shaped his ‘basic moral and spiritual equipment.’16 Other professors similarly gave credit to their physical surroundings as being formatively influential. Small-town or farm living seemed to hold the greatest sway (indeed, few sources mention urban upbringing as important)17 with a sense of romance.18 Sociologist S.D. Clark’s western Canadian radicalism and prairie progressivism, which pervaded his academic writing, was said to be a direct result of his early experiences on an impoverished farm.19 Mathematician Alfred Tennyson (A.T.) DeLury’s upbringing in rural Manila, Ontario (for which he always had affection) was ‘simple and happy.’ It cultivated later pursuits of gardening, poetry, and art, and helped hone the interpersonal skills of gentility and humour essential for a successful career as instructor and supervisor, and especially dean of arts.20 Mathematics professor Samuel Beatty ‘had the good fortune to be born in the country,’ which introduced him to ‘responsibility in early life’ and ‘an ideal setting for a “better than thou” attitude!’ 21 Physicist Harry Lambert Welsh grew up loving astronomy in part due to studying the uncluttered night skies on a farm in central Ontario,22 as did Reynold K. Young, who received his initial astronomical ‘training’ on a farm in Ontario’s Wentworth County.23 Invaluable for his academic work on labour issues, political economist Harry Logan came to understand the ‘emotional level of the workings of trade unions and the everyday life of people at the work place.’ This was undoubtedly influenced by his farm background, which was characterized by a reliance on other people in a relatively isolated social/ economic unit. Throughout his life, Logan maintained an encompass-
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ing ‘love of the country.’24 Charles T. Currelly, archaeologist and curator of the Royal Ontario Museum, discussed the impact of being raised in small-town Ontario in the late nineteenth century. As an ‘Exeter Boy,’ Currelly spent much of his free time watching craftsmen at work in the village, which he credits to enhancing his academic understanding of ancient communities. The Scottish values in the community seemed conducive to future pursuit of a university education, evidenced by his own academic career and the number of men of influence in later years raised in the area.25 Family Influence Compared to the sporadic evidence of community and its influence on future academic predispositions, the impact of early familial relationships, as well as childhood and adolescent experiences, is much clearer. Family support was often cited as being significantly influential. In a number of cases, the parents, and especially the father – which may come as little surprise considering the overwhelming percentage of the professorial sample who were male – served as professional role models and helped determine the aspirations of the children. Out of a total of fifty-four professors (34.2% of the total sample) whose fathers’ occupations could be charted, eleven fathers (20.4%) were ministers of the Methodist, United, or Baptist churches, with another two involved in religion in the capacity of archdeacon and editor of a Methodist newsletter. A further nine fathers were involved in education as principals, teachers, school inspectors, and trustees and included a private-school headmaster and a university professor. Nine fathers were general merchants/businessmen, and seven could be fit into the professional categories of chartered accountant, physician, lawyer, and judge. Four fathers were involved in local politics (two as former mayors). An assortment of miscellaneous occupations of fathers included tailor, furniture craftsman, writer, government geologist, and sea captain. The principal occupation of ten fathers was farming.26 Many fathers of professors had a particularly high community profile,27 and the lineage and relatives of some professors were reported to be wealthy, erudite, and socially or professionally prominent.28 Some professors had the benefit of growing up in an educationpositive atmosphere, and they considered their family as a crucial factor in career aspirations in academe.29 Some households headed by fathers who were professionals nurtured hard work and commitment
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coupled with a genuine belief in the efficacy of education. For example, Italian and Spanish professor Gordon Cummings Patterson’s father was president of Central Electric Supply Company in Toronto, and psychologist John Davidson Ketchum’s father was a judge who raised three other sons who all graduated from Trinity College at the University of Toronto and subsequently became teachers.30 Applied mathematics professor Arthur F.C. Stevenson’s family was headed by a man ‘of independent means, a chess player, and poet.’ Stevenson grew up in England on his father’s estate with a love of nature complemented by an exacting curiosity reportedly cultivated by private education.31 Economics professor Vincent Bladen’s father created a supportive environment for study. He was a chartered accountant and ‘had many of the qualities of a good professor.’32 Families headed by professionals did not hold a monopoly on the ethic of a solid education – indeed Innis’s parents’ unfailing support of Harold, and their encouragement for him to be a teacher, is well documented33 – as families associated with religious occupations also held strong beliefs in the value of learning. The father of mathematics professor Michael Alexander MacKenzie was an archdeacon who ensured that his son grow up ‘in the school of plain living, high thinking and scrupulous honour.’ MacKenzie was educated in religious colleges in Toronto and Cambridge, and was later known for being a ‘model of industry, orderliness, and thoroughness.’34 C.T. Currelly grew up in a family of strong Methodist connections, noting that the clergy in his small town counted on sending their sons to university. His family encouraged Currelly to study for the Methodist ministry (which he did temporarily after receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree from Victoria College in natural science) and even moved to Toronto to facilitate his success in secondary and post-secondary schools.35 William Jarvis McCurdy’s predilection for philosophy can be traced back to his Presbyterian upbringing in Nova Scotia, where his father, a minister with a theological degree from Dalhousie University, encouraged him to follow the same occupational path.36 A strong philosophical background was evident in Edward Johns Urwick’s education as well, as his father, a leading Congregational minister, held sway over Urwick’s educational choices. As a professor of economics years later, Urwick devoted much attention to social issues – for example, in the late 1930s he helped establish the Welfare Council and served as vice-chairman of the Lieutenant-Governor’s Committee on Housing Conditions, both in Toronto.37 Fathers whose background or occupation centred directly on educa-
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tion had a considerable impact on the career choices of their children. Although having a father who was a school principal, trustee, inspector, or teacher would undoubtedly be influential on a child’s future educational goals,38 some professors claimed a direct lineage from university alumni. The father of geography professor Griffith Taylor was a ‘brilliant student’ in chemistry at Owens College (now Manchester University), whose success at academics and later as government geologist prompted Griffith to enter academe himself. Encouragement for Griffith to read and analyse his father’s extensive collection of maps created a familial atmosphere conducive to study.39 H.O.L. Fischer’s father was no less ‘one of Europe’s most outstanding chemists’ at the University of Berlin (later exiled by the Nazis), and Thomas F. McIlwraith’s grandfather was a ‘well-known’ pioneer ornithologist who stimulated McIlwraith’s early fascination with natural history.40 Gilbert de Beauregard Robinson charts his own interest in mathematics back to his grandfather, who studied at L’Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. He noted: ‘I suppose one’s background – one’s parents’ and grandparents’ interest and vocations – has a great deal to do with one’s outlook on life. My grandfather and both my parents were schoolteachers; my grandfather and my father taught classics and my mother taught French. All graduated from University College in the University of Toronto.’41 Generational links with the University of Toronto were clear in a few cases. Some connection between relatives’ experience with the university and later career choices is worthy of speculation. Daniel Bertrand DeLury’s uncle was A.T. DeLury, who headed the University of Toronto’s mathematics department for years; mathematician William James Loudon’s uncle was president of the university from 1892 to 1906; and biology professor Edmund Murton Walker was the son of Sir Edmund Walker, who among other accomplishments sat on the university’s Board of Trustees and later in its Senate before becoming chancellor, and who married a sister of professor William John Alexander, first head of the English department.42 Whereas the impact of the paternal side of the family on ambition and career choice can at times be made, to what extent did mothers encourage their children to pursue academic interests? Creating and maintaining a household environment that could predispose a child to advanced studies was not as high profile as a father’s occupation and was less documented; but some professors traced the development of their interests to their mothers. For example, once settled in Hamilton, Ontario, after having emigrated from Germany in 1855, child psychol-
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ogy professor William Blatz’s family quickly became ensconced in the community, with Victoria, William’s mother, taking on a leadership role among family and neighbours alike. Victoria, driven and intelligent, encouraged her son to consider becoming a doctor. She ‘put a strong emphasis on academic endeavour and simply assumed that all her children would do well in school.’43 Innis’s mother’s father ‘strove to educate his children and to impress them with the enormous value of education.’ This was not lost on the next generation, where Mary, Innis’s mother, by virtue of her ‘alert, direct, faintly appraising gaze [which] bespoke intelligence and character’ unswervingly directed Harold towards higher education.44 Coming from a long line of missionaries and teachers, Irene Spry (née Biss), later a professor of political science, had a host of relatives who ‘sparked her incipient academic interests, but no one had more direct impact than her mother. Spry’s childhood was distinguished by the assimilation of her mother’s strong views on the process of education. Her mother had an enquiring and fearless mind ... and believed that children should be encouraged to test their abilities and perceptions whenever opportunity arose.’45 Due to the itinerant nature of her father’s work, Spry’s mother assumed the role of an ‘absolutely brilliant teacher ... Irene managed her advanced education with a skill that must have been born in ... early training sessions.’46 Psychologist William Line remembered his mother as ‘brilliant’ despite her own lack of schooling. She encouraged four of her children to become teachers, two of whom became university teachers.47 Biologist John Richardson Dymond’s mother was simply noted as a ‘woman with a particularly keen mental equipment.’48 Parents often set the tone of the family’s cognitive environment, and an explicitly education-positive household undoubtedly held some sway in a youth’s choice of career. Intellectual interaction among all family members was influential. In Blatz’s case, the family was headed by parents who were ‘good listeners with a fund of common sense and inventive knowledge’ and who would engage in leisure-time exercises designed to make learning fun. For example, in one elaborate game supervised by Blatz’s mother, the children would make tickets with the names of all the rail stations on an imaginary route. To stimulate organizational and planning skills, and to have the children think out how they would react to ‘travel contingencies,’ Blatz and his siblings would work out schedules and train connections, purchasing tickets with play money after assigning ‘the conductor of the day.’ Another ‘favourite
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game’ was ‘speeching,’ where on certain occasions each child in turn would climb onto the dining-room table and give a speech on a given topic, sometimes to gibes from the audience below.49 Religion and politics in family discussions were an interesting mixture in training for intellectual discourse. A young Innis approached religion sceptically. He combined this with the experiences of ‘a simple country life,’ interaction with intellectual acquaintances in the community, and ‘successive shocks of [progressively] more sophisticated schools,’ into a disciplined, impatient, and critical outlook.50 While he spent ‘many years in sheltered religious surroundings,’ the Innis household was nonetheless politically astute, characterized by informal arguments and a predilection for the parliamentary debates in the Liberal Toronto Globe. ‘[As] often before in rural Liberal households, the Globe exercised a distinct educational influence. It gave Harold a respectful admiration for the range of Sir Wilfrid [Laurier]’s vocabulary. It sent him scurrying to the dictionary to look up words.’51 Although greatly influenced by his mother’s Presbyterianism, historian Frank Underhill recalled that he often left church early with his father because of their ambivalence with the ritual. In essence, the Underhill household, with its ‘Victorian conventionality and lower middle-class propriety,’52 was a political one. Underhill remembered ‘the numerous casual conversations between his parents at the dinner table about good or bad politicians; the discussions village politicians had ... in the back room of his father’s store; the town meetings with lists of grievances from tariffs to taxes, political patronage to local improvements; [and] his father’s political speeches in support of local Grit candidates.’53 For Underhill, as with Innis, the Globe – ‘the Scotsman’s Bible’ – provided fodder for intellectual debate and information on current affairs and politics.54 ‘Natural’ Attributes and Early Experiences The experiences of early childhood and adolescence were another major source of influence on the ultimate decision to enter academics as a career. These experiences, which were important in shaping individuals’ professorial lives, were at times eclipsed by a seemingly underlying predisposition for a career in higher education. In historical biography, ‘hindsight’ is an imprecise approach that can construct false meanings because it imposes present analyses on past motivations. With this in mind, many biographers and commentators of the professoriate as-
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serted that academics seemed ‘natural’ for university life. Did prodigies exhibit congenital intellectual attributes? Being ‘number 1’ in primary school always felt natural for history professor Richard M. Saunders, whose mother was ‘always ambitious’ for him (‘I had always been told I had to be first’). As a child, physicist Florence Quinlan was cited as having ‘considerable natural ability’ in the ‘arts of Mathematics and Physics and Music.’55 Others were supposedly ‘born’ to be successful. Mathematics professor Cecilia Krieger was a ‘born academic’; George Langford was ‘a born leader’ who was later considered a consummate teacher, researcher in geology, and administrator;56 and Samuel Beatty and A.T. DeLury were both ‘born teacher[s]’ – DeLury, since childhood, was ‘born to fuss with figures.’57 The Toronto Mail reported that his mathematical mind was augmented by a ‘predilection for the beautiful, imaginative poetry, fiction, and drama’ typical of an Irishman by descent, and this was considered essential in his reputation as an exceptional lecturer.58 As well, Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter ‘was one of those prodigies who seemed to tumble out of the womb number-crazed ... His mother noticed that when he was 2 or 3 he had become entranced with the columns of numbers printed on newspaper stock pages. This was soon replaced by an interest in cones and triangles and the symmetry of all geometric objects.’59 Scholarly habits learned early were recorded for a few professors. Griffith Taylor ‘was a precocious child who was encouraged by his [parents] to write.’ He submitted a letter to the editor of the Manchester Weekly Times when he was seven years old.60 Frank Underhill quickly earned the reputation of a bookworm due to his penchant for prodigious reading and his introverted tendencies. Coupled with an appreciation for hard work and discipline given to him by his parents, he ‘was conscious of being different and better intellectually than his peers by his greater perception, quickness of mind, and the depth and breadth of his knowledge. From an early age he stood apart.’61 Frederick Earl Beamish’s ‘quiet and thoughtful’ disposition as a child made sense in light of his successful career as a chemist who went on to publish over one hundred research articles, chapters, reviews, and textbooks.62 One author remembered archaeologist Currelly, when a child, as ‘a curator in miniature ... [He] was interested in Indian relics and sketches of historical magnates. He was no prig, but he was certainly a precocious boy. He avoided most childhood pranks, because they were a waste of time ... He excelled at whittling, and I remember an intricate bit of whittling he did, which puzzled all the children in the neighbourhood.’63
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Professors such as Charles A. Ashley (politcal economy) and T.F. McIlwraith (anthropology) both demonstrated ingrained childhood tendencies towards their future respective disciplines.64 Partially due to insatiable curiosity and a sense of individual accomplishment, as an adolescent sociology professor S.D. Clark seemed to have taken his future seriously with a ‘vaguely formulated desire to accumulate college degrees.’65 Early on, history professor Bertie Wilkinson was ‘recognized as the scholar of the clan,’66 and interestingly, physicist Lachlan Gilchrist’s youthful athletic prowess, honed from genes (as reported by the Royal Society of Canada) and a physically active adolescence, led him to being described as a ‘powerful and vigorous man’ and, to at least one colleague, a tireless geophysical teacher and researcher.67 As discussed earlier, the nature of the community, especially rural, had some impact on professors’ formative personality and later career choice, but to what extent did other, more specific early experiences influence their academic proclivities? Indeed, in a speech given at Oxford in 1948 Harold Innis talked about how the university should exploit young talented minds. He gave significant credence to upbringing and experience, suggesting that ‘receptivity of information which is cultivated and rewarded in schools and also in universities is a totally different thing from the education, sometimes conferred even by adverse circumstances, which trains a man to seize opportunities.’68 A safe assumption can be made that a person’s early social, emotional, and intellectual life helped form values, dispositions, and preferences. For example, historian George Wrong’s ambition was speculated to have roots in the challenging nature of his family life: his father was forced to foreclose on his farm in 1864 and struggled to raise a large family on little income. As a result of this, Wrong ‘suffered a childhood of “bitter frustration and humiliation”’ and ‘all his life was careful with money. He was determined never again to be in want,’ and was later accused of blatant social climbing.69 In adolescence, a brief stay in an Orillia, Ontario, jail did little to deter Karl Schofield Bernhardt’s desire for an education. Stealing radishes was but one event in his life, which was marked more by discipline, chores, and a myriad number of jobs early on that helped him succeed in academics. As a leading child psychologist in the 1940s, he opposed corporal punishment and advocated hard work and perseverance.70 A small travelling library that visited the local community prompted H.L. Welsh to leave the family farm periodically for self-imposed reading
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time. According to one commentator, Welsh’s interest in astronomy was whetted by these periodic visits.71 Travel counted heavily in some professors’ early experiences because it allowed for more intimate study of the environment and other social groups and cultures. For Alan Freeth Coventry, Elwood S. Moore, and Gilchrist, leisurely nature walks, ‘long walks,’ or horseback trips to and from primary school stimulated interest in biology, geology, and geophysics, respectively.72 The son of a government metallurgist, Griffith Taylor travelled extensively when young, and later became ‘increasingly intrigued with the study and influence of geography and topography on the development of countries and civilizations.’73 By virtue of having a father involved in an international education service, Irene Spry’s childhood was filled with travel to Europe and to exotic places such as India and the interior of Africa. Among the astounding experiences while travelling, Spry recounted the plethora of beggars in India. She witnessed the traditional marriage of the head house-servant to a seven-year-old ‘and the enormous pressure of people: one felt the population pressure.’74 James Eustace Shaw, the a son of a Baptist missionary, and George Brown, whose father was a Methodist minister, also travelled widely in their youth. Eventually, Shaw, who spent much time in and around Rome, chose to study the romantic languages and culture, while Brown felt history was an appropriate calling. Brown’s father was allowed to serve only a few years in each parsonage, forcing the family to pack ‘their few belongings, chinas, and linen, and [move] ... sometimes a whole province away.’ According to one reviewer, the young Brown lived an ‘important chapter in Canadian history’ in the first years of the twentieth century, seeing firsthand the land rush in Saskatchewan and the growing population and economies of southern Ontario and Vancouver.75 Primary and Secondary Schooling Personal reminiscences and analyses from biographers on the role of childhood experiences offer some clues into the future choice of, and success in, the vocation of academe; surviving records of the life of professors while still primary and secondary school students often indicate a more direct relationship. Childhood pre-school dispositions and seemingly ‘natural’ abilities were sometimes cited as stimulating
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an interest in education, and some evidence suggests that individuals had their intellectual interests sparked or intensified while in primary school. For example, Donald Stuart Ainslie’s primary school education helped him develop a ‘zeal to learn the science of numbers and “the order of things”’ that eventually ‘brought him to Varsity.’76 As a young pupil, Leopold Infeld discovered ‘that his great passion was for physics.’ Early in school, astronomer Clarence Augustus Chant ‘decided that what he wanted most was to become one of those scientists who, in Kepler’s haunting phrase, “were always thinking God’s thoughts after him.”’77 Coventry (biology), McIlwraith (anthropology), E.S. Moore (geology), and H.L. Welsh (physics) all developed interests in their respective fields during their primary school days,78 and Reynold Young (astronomy) simply developed ‘aspirations for greater knowledge.’79 Some inference could be made that positive experiences in primary school contributed to a healthy belief in education and a greater curiosity in intellectual pursuits. Most sources are cursory when describing primary school experiences (for example, without detail A.T. DeLury simply had a ‘high standing [in] the village school’),80 but Beatty was more explicit, recalling his time at a rural school both in terms of an early understanding of subject matter and the effectiveness of small multi-grade classrooms. ‘At first Grammar was a trial,’ he recalled, ‘and why not when I heard that “a noun was substantive,” “a verb is a word that expresses action,” “an adjective is this,” and “an adverb is that.”’ Beatty went on to describe early recollections of trying to understand Euclid, recounted as an inquisitive pupil determined to uncover the trick to solving arithmetic problems. The educational setting was conducive to learning, Beatty remembered, in that the public school in the country (near Owen Sound, Ontario) gave the smaller students a chance of listening to more advanced lessons that were given to the older students.81 Similarly, Creighton discussed the effect of a one-room school on Innis’s early education, where, near Otterville, Ontario, Innis was ‘not restricted to the work of his own class and compelled to travel forward at the rate of its slowest member.’ Innis took advantage of a multi-grade setting, and in one instance won a spelling contest with pupils older than himself.82 Italian and Spanish professor Emilio Goggio directly credits the grammar school and teachers for facilitating his enculturation into North American society and education. Emigrating from Italy to the United States in the early 1900s at the age of fourteen, Goggio enrolled in a Boston grammar school, which was ‘a good idea for in
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learning English I was not too shy speaking to children younger than I. My teachers were extremely kind and helpful. They moved me up one grade every now and then so that I graduated in three years instead of the regular time.’83 Could the type of high school that the soon-to-be aspiring professors attended make a difference in career aspirations? Although tracing the kind of primary school that our sample attended is difficult (one-room or multi-roomed, rural or urban, public or private), out of the total of eighty-six professors for whom exact high school enrollment can be determined, forty (46.5%) attended a collegiate institute, four (4.7%) attended Upper Canada College (UCC), seventeen (19.8%) went to private schools (including three to Trinity College in Port Hope and two to University of Toronto Schools), and twenty-five (29.1%) went to public high schools; one was home-educated (R.M. Saunders, history). Merely going to high school was the domain of the few – by 1901 only 10 per cent of all elementary school graduates in Ontario attended high school84 – but the students who attended collegiate institutes, private schools, and UCC (70.9% of the traceable sample) may have been at a considerable advantage because of a formal education more rigorous than the traditional public school. In Ontario, throughout the 1870s and 1880s, the collegiate institutes were reserved by educational officials for emphasis on classical instruction, ‘so far as to prepare youth for certain [p]rofessions, and especially for the [u]niversities.’85 Although the distinction in course offerings between collegiate institutes and public high schools blurred after 1890, and given the wide variety of quality among all high schools in the early 1900s, the status of some of the institutes remained more exclusive. For example, in the case of St Catharines Collegiate in 1884, ‘if you want a first-class certificate or university scholarship, go to St Catharines.’86 Private schooling was even more exclusive – as the mandates of many of these schools varied but prominently included ‘the desire to create a leadership class’ and were ‘patronized by parents who sought for their children either denominational education, superior or more specialized teaching, or social advantages.’87 Upper Canada College, for example, was wellknown as a university preparation institution. Statistically, the privilege of private education, both primary and secondary, is borne out in 1919 census figures, which show that in Canada, out of 1,689,590 students in grade and high schools, only 51,743 students (or 3.1% of all students) attended private schools.88 In comparison to primary school experience, considerably more evi-
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dence indicates success in the high school classroom for students who later became professors. In high school, aroused academic interests were recorded for psychologist K.S. Bernhardt, cultivating a ‘thirst for knowledge which led him to Victoria [University]’; at Upper Canada College, George Parkin de Twenebrokes Glazebrook turned his attention to historical pursuit; and at St Catharines Collegiate, William John Knox Harkness (biology) spent much time studying nature.89 Physics professor John Satterly’s experience at the Ashburton Grammar (high) School in England was fundamental to his blossoming interest in academe. Satterly was described as ‘an extremely serious student,’90 and ‘his attendance ... [was] probably a decisive influence on his future career. Although the School had been founded in 1314 as a chantry “to be free scole and to say Masses,” it had acquired in the 1890s, under a headmaster well in advance of his times, a strong mathematical and scientific bent. It was therefore natural that [Satterly] should proceed to higher studies in science.’91 Economist Vincent Bladen moved up quickly through the ranks of primary and secondary school, starting late (because of illness) but catching up with relatively little difficulty. ‘I think there is an advantage in this late start,’ Bladen recounts, ‘... you don’t get bored.’ He remembers himself in high school in Stoke-on-Trent as ‘happily competitive, intellectually stimulated, [and] ambitious to emulate the sixth formers who were winning scholarships to Cambridge.’ The school itself was conducive to Bladen’s academic interests. ‘It was a good school; it was good to me, and for me.’92 For many individuals, high school demanded study and reflection, which precluded the forging of significant and long-lasting friendships.93 In Bladen’s case, as well as with Currelly, however, friends made in high school only helped to bolster an already deep desire to succeed academically by forming a scholastic support group among peers.94 Achievement in high school was often a precursor to future study in universities, both as an indication of aptitude necessary for postsecondary education and as a requirement for entrance. High marks in mathematics characterized biologist J.R. Dymond’s years and his reputation as a ‘brilliant’ student at Strathroy Collegiate; for historian R.M. Saunders, school work came easily, and he almost always placed in the top of his class scholastically. This prompted the decision to have him skip two academic years. At Barrie Collegiate, Italian and Spanish professor G.C. Patterson ‘met with considerable success’ in school, attaining first-class honours in junior matriculation and senior teachers’
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examinations; and at St Andrew’s College, G. de B. Robinson’s interest and ability in mathematics quickly became evident. He graduated as top student in the school.95 First-class honours in high school were recorded for at least eight professors in our truncated sample of eighty-six,96 at least fifteen others were awarded highly competitive entrance scholarships to university (fourteen of which were for the University of Toronto); and yet eight more students received the prestigious First Edward Blake Scholarship for university study – one of the highest awards granted at the University of Toronto. Determining the exact number of professors of the total sample of 158 who won scholastic honours is elusive at best because biographical data on many of them in terms of their high school and academic achievements are incomplete.97 Incipient academic interests were further stimulated in high school, and many individuals in our study credited instructors for their impact on the decision to continue on to higher education. ‘I have heard so much in the last decade ... about the need to train teachers, to teach them how to teach,’ Bladen recounted in 1978. ‘The real question is not how to “teach” but how to educate.’ Bladen remembered an upperlevel history master and tutor, whose ‘pride in his students’ inspired him scholastically, along with two other instructors who ‘took me deep into French literature’ and another who ‘inspired a real love of the classics.’98 According to his biographer, Innis’s teachers at Woodstock Collegiate Institute were all ‘capable of communicating the interest and excitement of their subjects,’ and Innis had the distinct advantage of having scholarly potential in the eyes of the school principal.99 At Markham High School, and with the highest entrance examination marks ever achieved by a pupil in that school, Underhill quickly came under the influence of a science teacher, who stimulated his academic curiosities. He especially benefited from the mentorship of the principal, George Reed, who insisted that Underhill pursue classical studies at the University of Toronto. With such support, as well as enthusiastic parental guidance and much free time to read, Underhill went on to excel in classics, modern languages, mathematics, Greek, Latin, and English, winning a raft of scholarships and ensuring his entrance into higher education.100 At Harbord Collegiate Institute, C.T. Currelly noted the ‘group of outstanding teachers’ who made no effort at discipline but stimulated the students in such a way that helped make unruliness infrequent.101
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Teachers in high school could have a positive impact on an individual’s desire for further education. In at least one example, however, high school experience was a disincentive for learning. Interestingly, in Griffith Taylor’s case, King’s School in Sydney, Australia, was considered one of the best schools but was the unhappiest of places for him. At King’s, he ‘obtained a hatred for classics which carried the rest of his life.’ He challenged the ‘educationalists’ there to justify ‘wasting’ so much time in such a pursuit and being more interested in sports than work.102 Conclusion This study concentrates on, roughly, the first sixteen years of a professor’s life, what may be considered the formative stages of the individual’s cognitive development, the honing of early intellectual acumen, and the mental and emotional foundation upon which further academic interests are based. This perspective of the professoriate has been rarely researched in previous studies and allows for a clearer understanding of a group of narratives and voices that helped shape particular intellectual and academic cultures in higher education in Canada. The professors as individuals and as a group were subjective historical agents who offered a window into higher education, and since professors were also the lifeblood of the university, the construction of their identities is of fundamental historical concern. Any kind of comprehensive collective biography of professors in Canada that systematically identifies the important events in life histories in totality is as yet to be undertaken with more ambitious prosopographical and longitudinal analysis. Professors’ life courses must also be considered from the time of leaving high school to their hiring into the ranks of the professoriate, and indeed beyond. Nonetheless, the nature of the professoriate in historical context must at some point try to discern backgrounds, characteristics, familial cultures, and early education and experiences that would reveal clues as to the evolution of professorial communities that had common, or conflicting, personal and professional understandings. Researching the degree of commonality and differences among these historical data might help solve the puzzle put forth in 1942 – that the ultimate decision to work in the university as a career ‘is very much like matrimony; everybody agrees that it is an important event but so many intangibles are involved that nobody knows exactly how it happens.’103
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The analysis of a professor’s background has direct applicability to the University of Toronto in the middle part of the twentieth century. Looking at a largely Ontario-born collection of individuals, personal variables played a significant part in shaping a predisposition towards higher education, and they may help explain, for example, the professorial preferences for an increasingly Canadian- and North American– centric focus on research and teaching policy starting in the early 1940s. This initiative towards ‘Canadianizing’ the university was well exemplified in the University of Toronto by Frank Underhill in history and by Harold Innis’s remarks on the misguidance of esteeming Britishness in the hiring of new instructors and in the curriculum.104 Many of these Faculty of Arts professors, after all, were born and raised in Canada – indeed, in our study, 69.6 per cent of the professors in the sample were born in Canada. Evidence is relatively scant for examining the background of women professors in our sample, but the nature and experiences of childhood and early education had a profound influence on their – at the time – brazen choice of a career in partriarchically dominated academics. Although women professors were in very small numbers in Canada until years after the Second World War, the few women between 1935 and 1945, encouraged by supportive family members and shaped by early experiences, pioneered the push towards gender representation in higher education. Professors’ worlds, both men and women, unfolded within their control, and they invented themselves and negotiated their surroundings, based upon decisions and motivations made in nurturing environments of inquisitiveness and critical thinking in their childhood and youth. Collective identities were created and shaped by early common experiences, education, and circumstances, but in the end the historical character of the professoriate in Canada remains highly contextualized, capricious, and individually unique. notes The research for this chapter was made possible through an earlier Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada doctoral fellowship. I would like to thank Janice Dickin for her helpful comments, and Harold Averill at the University of Toronto Archives for his outstanding support. 1 By-line included in the entry on Norris E. Sheppard (mathematics) in the Victoria College Torontonensis, 1918, 55. Students’ Administrative Council,
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University of Toronto, Torontonensis: The Yearbook of the University of Toronto (Toronto: Joint Executive of the Students’ Administrative Council). 2 For ‘modernization’ of Canadian universities in general, see Philip Massolin, Canadian Intellectuals, the Tory Tradition, and the Challenge to Modernity, 1939–1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), esp. chaps 3 and 4. An instructive discussion of the changing official priorities and academic cultures of Ontario universities is found in Paul Axelrod, Scholars for Dollars: Politics, Economics, and the Universities of Ontario, 1945–1980 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982). The increasing bureaucratization of higher education challenged the centrality of objective scholarship and research. This was experienced in universities in other provinces as well. 3 See Irving Abella and Harold Troper, ‘Canada and the Refugee Intellectual, 1933–1939,’ in The Muses Flee Hitler: Cultural Transfer and Adaptation, 1930– 1945, Jarrell C. Jackman and Carla M. Borden, eds. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983), 257–69; Donald H. Avery, Reluctant Host: Canada’s Response to Immigrant Workers, 1896–1994 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1995), chaps 5 and 6; Martin L. Friedland, The University of Toronto: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 341–8; and Paul Stortz, ‘“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 series 14 (2003): 231–61. 4 Literature that deals with higher education invariably mentions professors in some form, but, apart from some singular biographies and institutional histories, works that concentrate more fully on the professoriate as agents for university and state development and as idiosyncratic individuals are rare. William A. Bruneau’s introduction to prosopographical methodology is one of the few writings that analyses a group of professors in Canada. See ‘Toward a New Collective Biography: The University of British Columbia Professoriate, 1915–1945,’ Canadian Journal of Education 19, no. 1 (1994): 58–78; and Alison Prentice, ‘Laying Siege to the History Professoriate,’ in Creating Historical Memory: English-Canadian Women and the Work of History, Beverly Boutilier and Alison Prentice, eds. (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), 197–232. For some works that feature professors in social and intellectual context, see Sara Z. Burke, Seeking the Highest Good: Social Service and Gender at the University of Toronto, 1888–1937 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); Michiel Horn, The League for Social Reconstruction: Intellectual Origins of the Democratic Left in Canada, 1930–1942 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980); A.B. McKillop, A Disciplined Intelligence:
Faculty of Arts at the University of Toronto 371 Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1979); Janet Scarfe, ‘Letters and Affection: The Recruitment and Responsibilities of Academics in English-Speaking Universities in British North America in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’ (doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1982); S.E.D. Shortt, The Search for an Ideal: Six Canadian Intellectuals and Their Convictions in an Age of Transition, 1890–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976). On gender, see, for example, Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley, ed., Despite the Odds: Essays on Canadian Women and Science (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1990); Ainley observes that historically ‘many of [the] invisible scientists were ... women, and their hidden contributions to science and society as researchers, teachers, and editors of scientific journals have so far been minimized or neglected’ (at 20). See also Mary Kinnear, In Subordination: Professional Women, 1870–1970 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995); Alison Prentice, ‘The Early History of Women in University Physics: A Toronto Case Study,’ Physics in Canada (March/April 1996): 94–6, 100; Prentice, ‘Scholarly Passion: Two Persons Who Caught It,’ in Women Who Taught: Perspectives on the History of Women and Teaching, Alison Prentice and Marjorie R. Theobald, eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 258–83; Prentice, ‘Bluestockings, Feminists, or Women Workers? A Preliminary Look at Women’s Early Employment at the University of Toronto,’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association (1991): 231–61. Also see Horn, A History of Academic Freedom in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Massolin, Canadian Intellectuals; and Doug Owram, The Government Generation: Canadian Intellectuals and the State, 1900–1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986). For a more detailed analysis of the historiographical literature on the professoriate, see the Introduction and Bibliography in this book. 5 Unless otherwise noted, the term ‘professors’ will refer to professors emeriti, and full, associate, assistant, research, and visiting professors. The professors in this study were drawn from a total of eighteen departments in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Toronto: anthropology, applied mathematics, archaeology, astronomy, biology (zoology), botany, chemistry, geography, geology and palaeontology, history, Italian and Spanish, mathematics, mineralogy and petrography, philosophy, physics, political economy (also known as Political Science and Economics, Commerce and Finance), psychology, and sociology. The sample does not include professors from smaller autonomous departments that disappeared during these years: actuarial science was absorbed into mathematics in 1938; Chinese studies (reflecting the growing interest in the war in the Pacific theatre)
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appeared in 1941 but became a sub-department of archaeology in 1943). Tiny departments that were either specialized in nature or had a unique relationship to the Faculty of Arts were also excluded – for example, military studies, which throughout most of the ten years had but one or two members; and the music and fine arts departments. Finally, departments that belonged to university colleges, all of which had separate administrations apart from the university, and departments whose professors’ prime affiliation was with another faculty were not included. 6 The women were Elizabeth J. Allin (physics), Irene Mary Biss (later Spry, but she left the university after marrying; political science), Kathleen May Crossley (physics), Norma Henrietta Carswell Ford (later Walker, biology), Madeleine Alberta Fritz (geology and palaeontology), Cecilia C. Krieger (mathematics), Florence Mary Quinlan (physics), and Jessie Gertrude Wright (botany). 7 This figure is calculated on a yearly average between 1935 and 1945 of 119 full, associate, and assistant professors in the Faculty of Arts versus an average 356 total professors per year employed in the university as a whole. 8 These figures are calculated by comparing the total number of professors in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Toronto with the professorial salary lists in Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Education Statistics Branch, Higher Education in Canada (hereafter HE) (Ottawa: Department of Trade and Commerce, various years). Between 1938 and1944, the number of University of Toronto Faculty of Arts professors in relation to the total fulltime professorial workforce in Canada varied little. For example, this proportion in both 1938 and 1942 was 11.1%. The 1938–9 statistics were compiled using table 10, ‘Salary Classification,’ HE (1938–40), 28; (1940–2), 30; and statistics for 1944: HE (1942–4), 49. HE records the total number of teaching staff in Canadian universities for selected years but, without making a distinction, includes lecturers and instructors together with professors. A more accurate compilation was obtained by tallying the number of professors (full, associate, and assistant) included in the salary lists, but they may or may not include research, visiting, or emeritus professors. This would possibly force the percentages down, but only slightly. From 1940 on, the salary statistical tables include the University of British Columbia, University of Alberta, University of Saskatchewan, University of Manitoba, University of Toronto including Victoria and Trinity, University of Western Ontario, McMaster, Queen’s, McGill, Bishop’s, Acadia, Dalhousie, St Francis Xavier, Mount Allison universities, and the University of New Brunswick.
Faculty of Arts at the University of Toronto 373 9 Of the 138 professors for whom places of birth could be determined, only fifteen had records of moving to a different part of the province or country in their youth: six of the fifteen moved to Toronto (five from the United States or England/Scotland), two moved to Vancouver, two to the Maritimes, two to north-central Ontario, and three to western Canada. 10 The Canadian Who’s Who: A Handbook of Canadian Biography of Living Characters, vol. 2, 1936–1937, ed. Sir Charles G.D. Roberts and Arthur Leonard Tunnell (Toronto: Trans-Canada Press, 1937); vol. 3, 1938–1939; vol. 4, 1948; and vol. 8, 1958–1960. Volumes 4 and 8 were officially titled The Canadian Who’s Who: A Biographical Dictionary of Notable Living Men and Women, and they did not list editors. 11 A further four professors of the twenty-three were born in places in southwestern Ontario that have undetermined population sizes, according to contemporary indexes or gazetteers. This may suggest that the places are smaller than villages but are not farmsteads. 12 This figure includes one professor who was born in a remote area in northern Ontario. Rural areas are defined here as communities of no more than 1,800 people. 13 That half of the Ontario-born professors in this study were born in small communities is not surprising, considering the overall rural nature of Canadian demographics in the decades around the turn of the century. See Donald Kerr and Deryck W. Holdsworth, eds., Historical Atlas of Canada, Vol. 3, Addressing the Twentieth Century, 1891–1961 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), Plate 4. Specific population statistics for Ontario communities at the turn of the century are available in Department of Interior, Canada, Atlas of Canada (Ottawa: Department of Interior, 1906). The other provinces of birth were British Columbia (n = 1), Alberta (1), Saskatchewan (1), Quebec (3), New Brunswick (2), Nova Scotia (7), and Prince Edward Island (4). 14 University of Toronto Archives (UTA), Vincent Wheeler Bladen Papers (hereafter Bladen Papers), B72-0003, Box 005, File 30, ‘Harold Adams Innis: Text of a Talk Delivered by Professor D.G. Creighton over the TransCanada Network of the CBC,’ 2. 15 Donald Creighton, Harold Adams Innis: Portrait of a Scholar (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957), 10. 16 Ibid., 12, 19. 17 Langford is one of the few professors who is quoted as having been raised in a non-rural area and how that influenced his relationship to his later academic pursuits. See E.W. Nuffield, ‘George Burwash Langford, 1898– 1977,’ in Royal Society of Canada, Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal
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Paul Stortz Society of Canada (hereafter Royal Society of Canada) 17 (Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada), 83. Spanning five decades, volumes of the PRSC were consulted according to the year of the member’s death. In Torontonensis (1915) D.S. Ainslee waxes poetic about tiny Comber in southwestern Ontario: ‘“Wom ne’er a place surpasses; For honest men and bonny lasses”’ (at 62). Deborah Harrison, The Limits of Liberalism: The Making of Canadian Sociology (Montreal: Black Rose Books), 17–18, 145. UTA, DGR Files (A73-0026/082/23). PF, Jean Graham, ‘An Irish Citizen’ (18 March 1933) and ‘Alfred Tennyson DeLury Leaving University’ (11 June 1934). The DGR (A73-0026) and the PF (or Vertical Files) contain published, mostly newspaper, clippings of individual administrators, professors, (some) students, and alumni. The content of the DGR and PF files often overlap, but they differ in that the PF is not technically an accession because it remains open and ongoing; published articles or clippings from 1999, for example, an obituary, are included in these files. The items in the DGR and PF are different by source (i.e., magazine, newspaper, typed speeches, obituaries, or assorted articles) and format (draft, clippings, or published material). Often, one or more of author, journal, date, or page numbers are missing. UTA, B92-0003/007/10, Henry J.C. Ireton Papers (hereafter Ireton Papers), ‘Reply to the Toast Proposed by Principal F.C.A. Jeanneret’ (1952), 1. Robin L. Armstrong, ‘Harry Lambert Welsh, 1910–1984,’ Royal Society of Canada 23 (1985): 175. Torontonensis, 1909, 95. V.W. Bladen, ‘Harold Amos Logan, 1889–1979,’ Royal Society of Canada 19 (1981): 121. Charles Trick Currelly, I Brought the Ages Home (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1956), 3–7. Three fathers had more than one occupation, giving a total of fifty-seven occupations for a sample size of fifty-four individuals. Adjectives such as ‘well known,’ ‘leading,’ and ‘famous’ are included in descriptions of some fathers. For example, biologist William John Knox Harkness’s father was a ‘successful’ farmer. See J.R. Dymond, ed., Fish and Wildlife: A Memorial to W.J.K. Harkness (Toronto: Longmans, 1964), 3. Frank Underhill’s father was ‘shrewd’ in business matters, and also deemed ‘successful.’ See R. Douglas Francis, Frank H. Underhill: Intellectual Provocateur (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 5. Chemistry professor William Howard Martin’s father was a ‘highly respected principal at a local Collegiate Institute’ (UTA, DGR files, A73-0026/310/33 –
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hereafter DGR 310/33, etc. Physics professor Hugh Grayson Smith’s father was a ‘well-known’ Toronto barrister (DGR 428/92 and PF, Star, 11 Aug. 1917). For example, see geologist Arthur Philemon Coleman, who was a direct descendant of John Quincy Adams, in Who’s Who 8 (1957), 214. Innis’s family was well ensconced in the area as pioneers whose ancestors were British loyalists (Creighton, Innis, 4). The Royal Society of Canada 31 (1937), xviii, makes mention of W.A. Park’s United Empire Loyalist roots. Only two professors reported childhood households that were neutral or antithetical to formal education. Mathematician Leopold Infeld’s father, a leather merchant, wanted him to be a businessman and, according to Infeld, ‘could not understand my desire to study ... I received no support from home.’ Dorothy Haworth, ‘Worked with Einstein,’ Telegram, 7 Jan. 1950, 4. Historian Richard Saunders’s father was not ‘overly keen’ on school, and the son could not recall growing up in an ‘overstimulating childhood intellectually.’ Richard Merill Saunders, Interview (hereafter Saunders Interview), UTA B74-0027, Oral History Collection. For Patterson, see DGR 358/32; for Ketchum, DGR 199/54 and PF. G.F.D. Duff, ‘Arthur F.C. Stevenson,’ Royal Society of Canada 7 (1969), 105. Vincent Bladen, Bladen on Bladen: Memoirs of a Political Economist (Toronto: Scarborough College in the University of Toronto, 1978), 2. See Creighton, Innis, Chapter 1. DGR 280/12, ‘Michael Alexander MacKenzie’ (no author, n.d.); ‘Resolution Respecting the Late Professor MacKenzie,’ 2. Currelly, I Brought the Ages Home, 5–8. DGR 258/62, assorted files. The DGR (482/66) and PF contain numerous clippings of Urwick’s social welfare interests and initiatives throughout his career. See also Burke, Seeking the Highest Good, 115–29; and Ian M. Drummond, Political Economy at the University of Toronto: A History of the Department, 1888–1982 (Toronto: U of T Faculty of Arts and Science, 1983), 56–61. Innis’s father, a farmer, was a school trustee (Creighton, Innis, chap. 1); Chemistry professor Frederick Reginald Lorriman’s father was a school inspector (DGR 241/42); and Florence Mary Quinlan’s father was a school trustee and auditor (DGR 371/08). Marie Sanderson, Griffith Taylor: Antarctic Scientist and Pioneer Geographer (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1988), 1–5. For Fischer, DGR 103/04, Globe and Mail 15 March 1937; and see John Barker, ‘T.F. McIlwraith and Anthropology at the University of Toronto, 1925–63,’ Canadian Research of Sociology and Anthropology 24 (May 1987): 254.
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41 Gilbert de B. Robinson, Recollections (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 1. 42 No evidence exists to suggest that such close ties to U of T (or other universities) were a deterrent to one entering academe. For DeLury, see DGR 082/25 and PF; Loudon, DGR 241/91 and PF; Walker, DGR 490/97 and PF. 43 Joceyln Motyer Raymond, The Nursery World of Dr Blatz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 12–13. 44 Creighton, Innis, 6. 45 Gerald Friesen, ‘Irene M. Spry: A Biographical Note,’ Explorations in Canadian Economic History: Essays in Honour of Irene M. Spry, Duncan Cameron, ed. (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1985), 320. 46 Ibid. 47 Paul Babarik, ‘Psychologists in Profile: William Line (1897–1964),’ Ontario Psychologist 8, no. 5 (1976): 57. 48 DGR 091/47, ‘Director of Ontario Museum Is Native of Metcalfe and Graduate of Strathroy C.I.,’ Strathroy Age-Dispatch, 20 March 1941. Other examples of professors whose maternal lineage had a positive impact on their early interests include Samuel Beatty, whose mother ‘acted as though we had a good name to preserve’ (Ireton Papers, ‘Reply to the Toast,’ 1). Physics professor Henry John Ireton’s grandmother ‘was very anxious’ that he attend university; Ireton’s mother was a schoolteacher. See Henry John Ireton, Interview, transcript, UTA B74-0024, Oral History Collection. G. de B. Robinson’s mother too, was a schoolteacher, a fact found worth mentioning in the Royal Society of Canada 4 (1993), 107. 49 Raymond, Nursery World of Dr Blatz, 10–12. 50 Robert Foliet Neill, ‘The Work of Harold Adams Innis: Content and Context – An Essay in the History of Economic Thought’ (doctoral dissertation, Duke University, 1966), 5–6. 51 Creighton, Innis, 20. See also Neill, ‘Work of Innis,’ 2–7. 52 Carl Berger, The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing since 1900, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 56. 53 Francis, Underhill, 7. 54 Ibid., 8. 55 Saunders Interview; for Quinlan: Torontonensis, 1917, 70. 56 For Krieger: Gibert de B. Robinson, ‘Biography,’ Canadian Mathematical Congress 7, no. 5 (1975): 1; Nuffield, ‘Langford,’ 85. 57 DGR 024/12 and PF (Beatty), Ian Montagnes, ‘Three in a Procession,’ Varsity Graduate, Sept. 1959, 44–5, 64; DGR 082/23 and PF, DeLury, Thursday Post, 28 Nov. 1951; Graham, ‘An Irish Citizen.’
Faculty of Arts at the University of Toronto 377 58 DGR 082/23 and PF, ‘Alfred Tennyson DeLury Leaving University,’ Mail, 11 June 1934. 59 ‘Mathematics Meets Art for U of T Master Geometer,’ Globe and Mail, 9 May 1996, A8. 60 Sanderson, Taylor, 3. 61 Francis, Underhill, 6. 62 DGR 023/05, Owen Sound Sun Times, 12 Feb. 1938. 63 DGR 076/02 and PF, Globe and Mail, 3 Sept. 1932. 64 See Charles Allan Ashley, Interview, UTA B74-0024, Oral History Collection, who ‘was always interested in the math side of things’; and Barker, ‘T.F. McIlwraith,’ 254, who held an early fascination with natural history. 65 Harrison, Limits of Liberalism, 17–20. 66 J.M. Robson, ‘Bertie Wilkinson, 1898–1981,’ Royal Society of Canada 20 (1982): 153. 67 J.T. Wilson, ‘Lachlan Gilchrist, 1874–1962,’ Royal Society of Canada 54 (1962): 181–2. 68 Bladen Papers, File 23, ‘Harold Adams Innis, 1894–1952,’ 1–2. 69 Alan F. Bowker, ‘Truly Useful Men: Maurice Hutton, George Wrong, James Mavor, and the University of Toronto, 1880–1927’ (doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1975), 73–4. 70 DGR 027/91, Dorothy Haworth, ‘Varsity Line-Up: Half-Hour in Jail Ended Crime Career,’ Telegram, 21 May 1949. 71 PF, Harry Lambert Welsh. ‘Harry Lambert Welsh O.C.’ This appears to be a draft copy of Armstrong, ‘Harry Lambert Welsh,’ 175–6. 72 Kenneth M. Mayall, ‘A.F. Coventry, 1888–1973,’ Canadian Field-Naturalist 88 (1973), 99; W.W. Moorhouse, ‘Elwood S. Moore, 1878–1966,’ Royal Society of Canada 4 (1966): 161; Wilson, ‘Gilchrist,’ 181. 73 DGR 462/36, Donald Jones, ‘Alberta’s Economic Power was Predicted 40 Years Ago,’ Toronto Star, 27 Oct. 1979. 74 Friesen, ‘Spry,’ 320. No specific date is associated with these memories, but one may assume that they refer to a time around the First World War. 75 C.D. Rouillard, ‘James Eustace Shaw, 1876–1962,’ Royal Society of Canada 2 (1964): 145; DGR 040/53, Dorothy Haworth, ‘Varsity Line-Up: Historian and Editor of University Press Son of Ontario Manse,’ Telegram, 14 Jan. 1950. 76 Torontonensis, 1915, 62. 77 For Infeld, see DGR 167/04 and PF, Whom the Gods Love dust jacket; for Chant, PF, Donald Jones, ‘A Rosedale Widow Endowed Toronto with an Astronomer’s Dream Come True,’ Toronto Star, 22 Oct. 1977. 78 Mayall, ‘Coventry,’ 99; Barker, ‘McIlwraith,’ 254; Moorhouse, ‘Moore,’ 161; and Armstrong, ‘Welsh,’ 175.
378 79 80 81 82 83
84 85
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89 90 91 92 93
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Paul Stortz Torontonensis, 1909, 95. DGR 082/23 and PF, Graham, ‘An Irish Citizen.’ Ireton Papers, ‘Reply to the Toast,’ 1–2. Creighton, Innis, 10–11. Goggio was born in Incisa Belbo, Piemonte. See PF, Julius Molinaro, ‘On Italy and Italians: The Legacy of Emilio Goggio,’ Mosaico (July–Aug. 1975), 16. Robert M. Stamp, The Schools of Ontario, 1876–1976 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 40. J. George Hodgins, ed., Historical and Other Papers and Documents Illustrative of the Educational System of Ontario, 1858–1876 (Toronto: King’s Printer, 1911) xxiii, 109, as cited in Stamp, Schools of Ontario, 7. The School, May 1919, 572, as cited in Stamp, Schools of Ontario, 41; see also 80–3. Stamp, Schools of Ontario, 41. Table 1, Statistical Summary of Education in Canada by Provinces, Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Education Statistics Branch, Historical Statistical Survey of Education in Canada, 1919/20–23 (Ottawa: author, 1921), 18–19. The earliest census figures which compare public and private schooling are for 1919. For Bernhardt: Torontonensis, 1926, 65; Glazebrook: DGR 119/29, Toronto Monetary Times, Feb. 1943; Harkness, DGR 138/08. DGR 397/61, Jean Tweed, ‘In the Public Eye: Prof’s Show Enthralls Students,’ Saturday Night, 11 May 1946, 24. At Ashburton, Satterly won a National Scholarship in Physics and Chemistry. See Royal Society of Canada 2 (1964), 139. Bladen, Bladen on Bladen, 3. Interestingly, as a result of circumstances that may be traced to academic ability, Bladen, Innis, Taylor, and Underhill were bereft of significant relationships with other students in their school. See Bladen on Bladen, 3–5; Creighton, Innis, 14–15. For Taylor, a predilection for study and an aversion to sports provided little opportunity to pursue friendships. See Sanderson, Taylor, 6; and Francis, Underhill, 8–10, where young Underhill’s passion for reading left him little time to cultivate outside relationships. See Bladen on Bladen, 4. C.T. Currelly (archaeology) had the opportunity to study with students who later became professors themselves, ministers, or heads of large firms. See his I Brought the Ages Home, 7–8. Friends must have undoubtedly played a role in an individual’s success in high school, but existing evidence remains sparse. Professors’ recollections mostly centre on instructors and academic activities.
Faculty of Arts at the University of Toronto 379 95 For Dymond, DGR 091/47, ‘Director of Ontario Museum’; Saunders Interview; for Patterson, Torontonensis, 1913, 60; and G.F.D. Duff, ‘Gilbert de Beauregard Robinson, 1906–1992,’ Royal Society of Canada 4 (1993): 107. 96 First-class honours went to Eli Franklin Burton (Physics), A.T. DeLury (mathematics), Dymond, Lachlan Gilchrist (physics), William Arthur Parks (palaeontology), Patterson, Robinson, and Saunders. 97 Bladen won an entrance scholarship to Oxford university. He philosophizes on the meaning of scholarships: ‘It is important ... to maintain the prestige of the scholar, to foster pride in his achievement. But it is important to finance those who are able but poor.’ Bladen, Bladen on Bladen, 6; Alexander Brady (political science), Emilio Goggio (Italian and Spanish), and Andrew Robertson Gordon (chemistry) won scholarships (in 1915, Gordon headed the list of four scholarship winners in matriculation exams at U of T Schools to enter the first year of U of T); DGR 121/76 and PF. Frank Scott Hogg (astronomy), Archibald Gowanlock Huntsman (biology), F.R. Lorriman (chemistry), W.H. Martin (chemistry), McIlwraith, Alexander MacLean (geology), John Satterly (physics), Harold Boyd Sifton (botany), Underhill, and Bertie Wilkinson (history) won scholarships. First Edward Blake Scholarship winners included: Arthur Albert Brant (physics), Edward Horne Craigie (biology), N.H.C. Ford (biology), Hubert Richmond Kemp (economics), Arthur FitzWalter Wynne Plumptre (political science), H.G. Smith (physics), J.G. Wright (botany), and R.K. Young (astronomy), who, according to Torontonensis, 1909, 95, ‘turned his footsteps to his present field of labors’ as an undergraduate because of the scholarship. Peter M. Millman, Royal Society of Canada 16 (1978): 121. Winners of multiple scholarships included: Brant, Hogg, Lorriman (at Thorold Public High School, won four scholarships), Martin (who had a ‘large number of scholarships’ according to Torontonensis, 1913, 55), McIlwraith (who ‘received several prizes for scholarships’ at Highfield High School in Hamilton; see Barker, ‘McIlwraith,’ 254), and Plumptre (who at UCC won the First Edward Blake Scholarship in mathematics, the Governor-General’s Medal for general proficiency, the Old Boys’ prizes in mathematics, Latin, and English essays, and a prize in French, according to material in DGR 365/ 67 and PF). 98 Bladen, Bladen on Bladen, 4. 99 Creighton, Innis, 13–15. 100 Francis, Underhill, 8–10. Underhill particularly liked to read liberal and ‘yellow journalism,’ presaging what many would later see as Underhill’s radical political and academic temperament.
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101 Currelly, I Brought the Ages Home, 7. 102 Taylor does not elaborate on his dislike of the classics. See Sanderson, Taylor, 6. 103 Logan Wilson, The Academic Man: A Study in the Sociology of a Profession (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), 15. 104 The call for more Canadian faculty members and course content in the Faculty of Arts was becoming vocal at the University of Toronto during the 1930s and 1940s. For example, see Innis’s remarks about the need to reshape Canadian universities towards a more nationalistic character in UTA B86-0018/18 (1943), Alexander Brady Papers; and B79-0039/014 (some documents do not have specific dates), William Thomas James Easterbrook Papers.
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This bibliography includes a selection of mostly English-language texts and articles published since 1985 that are related to the history of the professoriate in Canada. Very few works argue directly, in detail, or predominantly on professorial identities and cultures in historical context, but the entries below offer some idea as to the wealth of secondary source material that exists on various aspects, environments, activities, and arguments applicable to professors. The bibliography starts by listing research on professors’ academic and nonacademic lives, and their understandings constructed through gendered experiences. Biographies are a popular methodology for discussing a host of issues that deal with the history of the professoriate and higher education, and they are among the most difficult to categorize. Some biographies will have pertinence to other categories, while other categories may include biographies that discuss historical cultures or topics in greater part. Outside of sources listed under Biography, and Gender and Ethnicity, the bibliography also identifies institutional and sub-institutional (Department, Faculties, Schools) developments, as well as works on larger system of higher education, most of which are in sociohistorical (as opposed to descriptive) context. Within these sources, the professoriate is at the very least a shifting backdrop of historical agents which, however presented in the texts and articles, is a subtle or explicit engine and determinant of intellectual and academic cultures of universities in Canada. With post-revisionist, post-colonial, and interdisciplinary methodologies and theories being applied in greater frequency to university histories, research on institutional developments in higher education can reveal a great deal on the professoriate, even if professors as a group in some of these works are a relatively silent partner. In many of the entries below, professors are only sometimes front and centre. Works listed in the remaining categories – Discipline Construction, Academic
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Freedom and the State, Intellectual Histories, and Teaching, Research, and Cultures of the Professoriate – further develop professorial identities through professors’ intellectual and academic activities, particularly in the creation and dissemination of knowledge, and in the intended and unintended consequences of such activities. This bibliography is necessarily selective. Some excluded works fall more predominantly into the field of the history of university students. As well, inhouse or self-published texts or sources from smaller presses were not included, which, although instructive in themselves in varying degrees, were difficult-to-impossible to physically access. As pertaining to especially the Intellectual Histories category, reflections on and analyses of Northrop Frye’s, Marshall McLuhan’s, and Harold Innis’s writings are scholarly mini-industries, with a voluminous amount of material written in the past twenty years on their thoughts as applied to new methodologies and research. This bibliography offers a representative sample of these works and, for the sake of brevity, does not cite each and every article in an edited text on their works. For further research into various aspects of the professoriate, Michiel Horn’s bibliography on academic freedom in History of Intellectual Culture 2, no. 1 (2002) (available at www.ucalgary.ca/hic/), is worth consulting, as are the ongoing bibliographies on the history of education included in selected volumes of Historical Studies in Education. For succinct and interesting biographies of some professors, see the Royal Society of Canada: Proceedings and Transactions, which date back to the early twentieth century, as well as entries in the Canadian Who’s Who.
Biography Ainley, Marianne Gosztonyi. ‘Norah Toole (1906–1990): Scientist and Social Activist.’ In Framing Our Past: Women in Canada in the Twentieth Century, 308–10. Kate O’Rourke, Lorna McLean, and Sharon Anne Cook, eds. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. – Restless Energy: A Biography of William Rowan, 1891–1957. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1993. – ‘William Rowan, 1891–1957.’ Bulletin of the Canadian Society of Zoologists 22 (Jan. 1991): 33–5. – ‘A Woman of Integrity: Kathleen Gough’s “Career” in Canada.’ Anthropologica 35, no. 2 (1993): 235–43. Ash, Marinell, et al. Thinking with Both Hands: Sir Daniel Wilson in the Old World and the New, Elizabeth L. Hulse, ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
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Ayre, John. Northrop Frye: A Biography. Toronto: Random House, 1989. Barker, John. ‘T.F. McIlwraith and Anthropology at the University of Toronto, 1925–63,’ Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 24 (May 1987): 252–68. Benedetti, Paul, and Nancy DeHart, eds. Forward through the Rearview Mirror: Reflections on and by Marshall McLuhan. Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1996. Bliss, Michael. William Osler: A Life in Medicine. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Bruneau, William. ‘Music and Marginality: Jean Coulthard and the University of British Columbia, 1947–1973.’ In Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women’s Professional Work, 96–116. Elizabeth Smyth, Sandra Acker, Paula Bourne, and Alison Prentice, eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Bruneau, William, and David Gordon Duke. Jean Coulthard: A Life in Music. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2005. Buxton, William, and Charles R. Acland. ‘Introduction: Harold Innis – A Genealogy of Contesting Portraits.’ In Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions, 3–28. Charles R. Acland and William Buxton, eds. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. Buyniak, Victor O. ‘Constantine Henry Andrusyshen: The First CanadianBorn Slavist.’ Journal of Ukranian Studies 16, no. 1–2 (1991): 211–18. Cameron, Elspeth. Earle Birney: A Life. Toronto: Viking, 1994. Carey, James W. ‘Innis “in” Chicago: Hope as the Sire of Discovery.’ In Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions, 81–104. Charles R. Acland and William Buxton, eds. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. Champ, Joan. ‘Arthur Silver Morton and His Role in the Founding of the Saskatchewan Archives Board.’ Archivaria 32 (1991): 101–13. Christian, William. George Grant: A Biography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Cleghorn, Robert A. ‘The McGill Experience of Robert A. Cleghorn, MD: Recollections of D. Ewen Cameron.’ Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 7, no. 1 (1990): 53–76. Collins, Aileen, Michael Gnarowski, and Sonja A. Skarstedt, eds. Eternal Conversations: Remembering Louis Dudek. Montreal: DC Books, 2003. Conway, Jill Ker. True North: A Memoir. Toronto: Knopf, 1994. Corbett, Edward Annand. Henry Marshall Tory: A Biography. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1992. Corden, Max, James S. Duesenberry, Craufurd D. Goodwin, J. Allan Hynes, Richard G. Lipsey, Gideon Rosenbluth, Paul A. Samuelson, and Elizabeth Johnson Simpson; Laurence S. Moss, ed., comp. ‘Harry G. Johnson (1923–
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1977): Scholar, Mentor, Editor, and Relentless World Traveller.’ American Journal of Economics and Sociology 60, no. 3 (2001): 601–49. Davies, Gwendolyn. ‘J.D. Logan and the Great Feud for Canadian Literature: 1915–1923.’ Canadian Issues/Thèmes Canadian 17 (1995): 113–28. Djwa, Sandra. The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987. – Professing English: A Life of Roy Daniells. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Ferns, Henry Stanley. Reading from Left to Right: One Man’s Political History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. Forsey, Eugene. A Life on the Fringe: Memoirs. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990. Francis, R. Douglas. Frank H. Underhill: Intellectual Provocateur. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986. Friesen, Gerald. ‘Irene M. Spry: A Biographical Note.’ In Explorations in Canadian Economic History: Essays in Honour of Irene M. Spry, 319–26. Duncan Cameron, ed. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1985. – ‘Principal J.H. Riddell: The Sane and Safe Leader of Wesley College.’ In Prairie Spirit: Perspectives on the Heritage of the United Church of Canada in the West. Dennis L. Butcher et al., eds. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1985. Frost, Stanley Brice. The Man in the Ivory Tower: F. Cyril James of McGill. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991. Godfrey, Charles. Aikins of the University of Toronto Medical Faculty. Madoc, ON: Codam, 1998. Gordon, W. Terrance. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding. A Biography. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Graham, John R. ‘Charles Eric Hendry (1903–1979): The Pre-War Formative Origin of a Leader of Post–World War II Canadian Social Work Education.’ Canadian Social Work Review 11 (1994): 150–67. Greenlee, James G. Sir Robert Falconer: A Biography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. Griffith, B.A. ‘My Early Days in Toronto.’ IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 16, no. 2 (1994): 55–64. Heighton, Ernest. Dr Howard L. Bronson, Physicist: 1878–1968. Halifax: E. Heighton, 1990. Heyer, Paul. Harold Innis. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. Horn, Michiel. Becoming Canadian: Memoirs of an Invisible Immigrant. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. – ‘A Cold War Tale: Leopold Infeld and the University of Toronto.’ Dalhousie Review 79, no. 3 (1999): 319–33.
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– ‘The Ideas of Leonard March, 1967–1982: Some Personal Recollections.’ Journal of Canadian Studies 21, no. 2 (1986): 67–76. – ‘Memoirs as Cultural and Intellectual History: A Personal View.’ History of Intellectual Culture 1, no. 1 (2001). Available at www.ucalgary.ca/hic/ Kelen, Susan. ‘Maude Abbott: A Biography.’ Canadian Journal of Cardiology/ Journal Canadien de cardiologie 16, no. 7 (2000): 893–8. Kerr, Robert B., and Douglas Waugh, eds. Duncan Graham: Medical Reformer and Educator. Toronto: Dundurn, 1989. Kidd, J.R. Roby Kidd, Adult Educator, 1915–1982: The Autobiography of a Canadian Pionner. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) Press, 1995. Kuitunen, Maddelena. ‘Emilio Goggio: Ambassador of a Cultural Heritage.’ Italian Canadiana 12 (1996): 26–36. Kyer, Clifford Ian, and Jerome E. Bickenbach. The Fiercest Debate: Cecil A. Wright, the Benchers, and Legal Education in Ontario, 1923–1957. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. Lubek, Ian, Nancy K. Innis, Rolf O. Kroger, Gregory R. McGuire, Henderikus J. Stam, and Thom Herrmann. ‘Faculty Genealogies in Five Canadian Universities: Historiographical and Pedagogical Concerns.’ Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences 31, no. 1 (1995): 52–72. Macbeth, Robert A. ‘William Fulton Gillespie, 1891–1949: A Transitional Figure in Western Canadian Academic Surgery.’ Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 15, no. 2 (1998): 379–400. MacLeod, Malcolm. ‘Special Six Per Cent: Scientific Aspirations/Achievements of Pre-confederation Newfoundlanders Who Went Abroad to Study.’ In Early Science in Newfoundland and Labrador, 50–62. D.H. Steele, ed. St John’s: Avalon Chapter of Sigma Chi, 1987. Marchand, Phillip. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger. Toronto: Vintage Books, 1998. Masters, D.C. Henry John Cody: An Outstanding Life. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1995. McBryde, W.A.E. ‘William Lasch Millar: Canada’s Unique Chemist.’ Journal of Canadian Studies 26, no. 3 (1991): 101–19. McKenzie, Judith. Pauline Jewett: A Passion for Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. McKlee, J.S.C. Random Recollections of a Peripatetic Physicist. London: Minerva Press, 1998. McLeod, Tommy. ‘McKee of Brandon College.’ Manitoba History 40 (AutumnWinter 2000–1): 33–46. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews. Ed. Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
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McNaught, Kenneth. Conscience and History: A Memoir. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Milton, Paul. ‘An Introduction to James Cappon’s 1889 “Address.”’ University of Toronto Quarterly 64, no. 3 (1995): 462–8. Molinaro, Matie, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye, eds. Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987. Moore, Terence. Joe Doupe, Bedside Psychologist. Toronto: Hannah Institute and Dundurn Press, 1989. Moriarty, Catherine. John Galbraith, 1846–1914: Engineer and Educator. Toronto: Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, University of Toronto, 1989. Neufeld, David. ‘C.J. Mackenzie and the Challenge of the Prairies.’ Saskatchewan History 41, no. 2 (1988): 41–51. Nevitt, Barrington, and Maurice McLuhan, eds. Who Was Marshall McLuhan? Exploring a Mosaic of Impressions. Toronto: Stoddart, 1994. Panayotidis, E. Lisa. ‘James Mavor: Cultural Ambassador and Aesthetic Educator to Toronto’s Elite, 1892–1925.’ Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 8 (Fall 1997–Spring 1998): 161–13. Platt, P. Wallace. ‘From Professor to Pastor: George Bernard Flahiff and the Experience of Vatican II.’ Historical Studies: Canadian Catholic Historical Association 67 (2001): 42–56. – Gentle Eminence: A Life of Cardinal Flahiff. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1999. Pringsheim, Klaus H. Man of the World: Memoirs of Europe, Asia and N. America (1930s–1980s). Oakville: Mosaic Press, 1995. Prymak, Thomas M. ‘George Simpson, the Ukrainian Canadians and the “PreHistory” of Slavic Studies in Canada.’ Saskatchewan History 41, no. 2 (1988): 53–66. Raymond, Joceyln Motyer. The Nursery World of Dr Blatz. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Ricour, Pierre. Le Québec, folle enterprise? Quasi-mémoires d’un professeur, 1939– 1988. Montreal: n.p., 1987. Risk, R.C.B. ‘The Many Minds of W.P.M. Kennedy.’ University of Toronto Law Journal 48, no. 3 (1998): 353–87. Robinson, Gilbert de B. Recollections. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. Roper, Henry. ‘The Lifelong Pilgrimage of George E. Wilson, Teacher and Historian.’ Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society 42 (1986): 139–52. Ross, Morton. An American Critic in Canada: The Literary Memoirs of Morton L. Ross. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1999. Ross, Murray G. The Way Must Be Tried: Memoirs of a University Man. Toronto: Stoddart, 1992.
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Ruth, Norbert J. From Assumption College to the University of Windsor: The Dean’s Story, Reverend Norbert J. Ruth, CSB, 1952–1971. Windsor: Assumption University, 1997. Sanderson, Marie. Griffith Taylor: Antarctic Scientist and Pioneer Geographer. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1988. Schabas, Ezra. Sir Ernest MacMillan: The Importance of Being Canadian. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Scott, Frank R. A New Endeavour: Selected Political Essays, Letters, and Addresses. Michiel Horn, ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986. Semple, Neil. Faithful Intellect: Samuel S. Nelles and Victoria University. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005. Senese, Donald. ‘James Mavor: Canadian Pioneer of Russian Studies.’ International Journal of Canadian Studies 9 (1994): 125–36. Sheets-Pyenson, Susan. John William Dawson: Faith, Hope, and Science. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996. Shore, Marlene. ‘Carl Dawson and the Research Ideal: The Evolution of a Canadian Sociologist.’ Canadian Historical Association: Historical Papers (1985): 45–73. Shrum, Gordon. Gordon Shrum: An Autobiography. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1986. Sirluck, Ernest. First Generation: An Autobiography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Skilling, H. Gordon. The Education of a Canadian: My Life as a Scholar and Activist. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1999. Spafford, Shirley. No Ordinary Academics: Economics and Political Science at the University of Saskatchewan, 1910–1960. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Taylor, John. ‘A Sense of Time and Place: Gilbert Stelter’s Contribution to Urban History.’ Urban History Review 29, no. 1 (2000): 48–52. Todd, Robert, general ed. Dictionary of British Classicists, 1500–1960. Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004. Tye, Diane. ‘Narrative, Gender and Marginality: The Case-Study of Ella Lauchner Smith.’ Canadian Folklore Canadien 13, no. 2 (1991): 25–35. Vandervoort, Julie. Tell the Driver: A Biography of Elinor F.E. Black, MD. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2001. Van Die, Marguerite. An Evangelical Mind: Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839–1918. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989. Waite, Peter B. Lord of Point Grey: Larry MacKenzie of UBC. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1987. Waugh, Douglas. Maudie of McGill: Dr Maude Abbot and the Foundations of Heart Surgery. Toronto: Hannah Institute and Dundurn Press, 1992.
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Wright, Donald. ‘Donald Creigton and the French Fact, 1920s–1970s.’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association (1995): 243–72. Zack, Manuel, Lawrence Martin, and Alvin A. Lee. Harry Thode: Scientist and Builder at McMaster University. Hamilton: McMaster University Press, 2003.
Gender and Ethnicity Acker, Sandra. ‘Caring as Work for Women Educators.’ In Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women’s Professional Work, 277–95. Elizabeth Smyth, Sandra Acker, Paula Bourne, and Alison Prentice, eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. – ‘Women Academics in Britain and Canada.’ Women’s Education des femmes 9, no. 3 (1992): 16–20. Ainley, Marianne Gosztonyi. ‘“Despite the Odds” Revisited: Reflections on Canadian Women and Science.’ Simone de Beauvoir Review 18–19 (1999– 2000): 85–100. – ‘Last in the Field? Canadian Women Natural Scientists, 1815–1965.’ In Despite the Odds: Essays on Canadian Women and Science, 25–62. Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley, ed. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1990. – ‘Les femmes dans les sciences au Canada: Y-a-t-il une division sexuelle du travail?’ In Femme et Sciences, 1–15. Lucie Dumais and Veronique Boudreau, eds. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1997. – ‘Mabel F. Timlin, 1891–1976: A Woman Economist in the World of Men.’ Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal 23, no. 2 (1999): 28–38. – ‘Marriage and Scientific Work in Twentieth-Century Canada: The Berkeleys in Marine Biology and the Hoggs in Astronomy.’ In Creative Couples in the Sciences, 143– 55. Helena Pycior, Nancy Slack, and Pnina Abir-Am, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. – ‘Une nouvelle optique concernant la recherche sur l’histoire des femmes canadiennes et les sciences.’ Recherches feministes 15, no. 1 (2002): 93–111. – ‘Rowan vs Tory: Conflicting Views of Scientific Research in Canada, 1920– 1935,’ Scientia Canadensis 12, no. 1 (1988): 3–21. – ‘ “Women’s Work” in Canadian Chemistry,’ Canadian Woman Studies 13, no. 2 (Winter 1993): 43–6. – ‘Women’s Work in Geology: An Historical Perspective on Gender Division in Canadian Science.’ Geoscience Canada 21, no. 3 (1995): 139–41. – ed. Despite the Odds: Essays on Canadian Women and Science. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1990. Anand, Kailash, assisted by Anita K. Anand. ‘Cypra Cecilia Krieger and Human Side of Mathematics.’ In Despite the Odds: Essays on Canadian Women
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and Science, 248–51. Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley, ed. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1990. Archer, Violet. ‘Making Music.’ In Our Own Agendas: Autobiographical Essays by Women Associated with McGill University, 76–82. Margaret Gillett and Ann Beer, eds. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995. Baines, Carol. ‘Professor Elizabeth Govan: An Outsider in Her Own Community.’ In Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women’s Professional Work, 44–64. Elizabeth Smyth, Sandra Acker, Paula Bourne, and Alison Prentice, eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Beaveridge, Janice. ‘Getting a Job Done and Doing It Well: Dr Blossom Wigdor, Psychologist and Gerontologist.’ In Despite the Odds: Essays on Canadian Women and Science, 252–62. Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley, ed. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1990. Beer, Ann. ‘On Being Lucky.’ In Our Own Agendas: Autobiographical Essays by Women Associated with McGill University, 281–91. Margaret Gillett and Ann Beer, eds. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995. Burke, Sara Z. Seeking the Highest Good: Social Service and Gender at the University of Toronto, 1888–1937. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1996. Chu, Clara M., and Bertrum H. Macdonald. ‘The Public Record: An Analysis of Women’s Contributions to Canadian Science and Technology before the First World War.’ In Despite the Odds. Essays on Canadian Women and Science, 63–73. Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley, ed. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1990. Dagg, Ann Innis. ‘Academic Faculty Wives and Systemic Discrimination: Antinepotism and Inbreeding.’ Canadian Journal of Higher Education 23, no. 1 (1993): 1–18. Davies, Megan J., and Colin M. Coates. ‘Kathleen Wood-Legh: A Canadian in Cambridge.’ In Creating Historical Memory: English-Canadian Women and the Work of History, 254–70. Beverly Boutilier and Alison Prentice, eds. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997. Fingard, Judith. ‘Gender and Inequality at Dalhousie: Faculty Women before 1950,’ Dalhousie Review 64 (1984–5): 690–1. Ford, Ann 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. Fulton, Keith Louis, and Michèle Pujol. ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Twenty Years of Women’s Studies at the University of Manitoba.’ Resources for Feminist Research 20, no. 3–4 (1991): 31–6. Ghosh, Ratna. ‘Across Cultures.’ In Our Own Agendas: Autobiographical Essays by Women Associated with McGill University, 136–46. Margaret Gillett and Ann Beer, eds. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995.
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Gibbs, Sarah P. ‘Fighting for My Own Agenda: A Life in Science.’ In Our Own Agendas: Autobiographical Essays by Women Associated with McGill University, 47–59. Margaret Gillett and Ann Beer, eds. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995. Gillett, Margaret. ‘Carrie Derick (1862–1941) and the Chair of Botany at McGill.’ In Despite the Odds: Essays on Canadian Women and Science, 74–87. Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley, ed. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1990. – ‘The Heart of the Matter: Maude E. Abbott, 1869–1940.’ In Despite the Odds: Essays on Canadian Women and Science, 179–94. Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley, ed. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1990. – ‘The Lonely Heart: Maude E. Abbott, 1869–1940.’ In Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in Coeducational Institutions, 1870–1937, 183–223. Geraldine Jonich Clifford, ed. New York: The Feminist Press, 1989. Gillett, Margaret, and Ann Beer, eds. Our Own Agendas: Autobiographical Essays by Women Associated with McGill University. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995. Heap, Ruby. ‘From the Science of Housekeeping to the Science of Nutrition: Pioneers in Canadian Nutrition and Dietetics at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Household Science, 1900–1950.’ In Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women’s Professional Work, 141–70. Elizabeth Smyth, Sandra Acker, Paula Bourne, and Alison Prentice, eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. – ‘Training Women for a New “Woman’s Profession”: Physiotherapy Education at the University of Toronto, 1917–1980.’ History of Education Quarterly 35, no. 2 (1995): 135–58. Hoecker-Drysdale, Susan. ‘Women Sociologists in Canada: The Careers of Helen MacGill Hughes, Aileen Dansken Ross, and Jean Robertson Burnet.’ In Despite the Odds: Essays on Canadian Women and Science, 152–76. Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley, ed. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1990. Kealy, Linda. ‘The Status of Women in the Historical Profession in Canada, 1989 Survey.’ Canadian Historical Review 72 (Sept. 1999): 370–88. Kennedy, Dolly. View from the Hill. Vancouver: University Women’s Club of Vancouver, 1990. Kinnear, Mary. ‘Disappointment in Discourse: Women University Professors at the University of Manitoba before 1970.’ Historical Studies in Education 4, no. 2 (1992): 269–87. – In Subordination: Professional Women 1870–1970. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995. – Margaret McWilliams: An Interwar Feminist. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991. Kirkpatrick, Patricia G. ‘Priestesses, Goddesses, Witches, and Whores.’ In
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Our Own Agendas: Autobiographical Essays by Women Associated with McGill University, 126–35. Margaret Gillett and Ann Beer, eds. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1995. Kirkwood, Rondalyn. ‘Blending Vigorous Leadership and Womanly Virtues: Edith Kathleen Russell at the University of Toronto, 1920–1952.’ Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 11, no. 1 (1994): 175–205. – ‘Discipline Discrimination and Gender Discrimination: The Case of Nursing in Canadian Universities, 1920–1950.’ Atlantis 16, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 52–63. Kolodny, Annette. ‘“A Sense of Discovery, Mixed with a Sense of Justice:” Creating the First Women’s Studies Program in Canada.’ National Women’s Studies Association Journal 12, no. 1 (2000): 143–64. O’Grady, Jean. Margaret Addison: A Biography. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2001. Prentice, Alison. ‘Bluestockings, Feminists, or Women Workers? A Preliminary Look at Women’s Early Employment at the University of Toronto.’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association (1991): 231–61. – ‘The Early History of Women in University Physics: A Toronto Case Study.’ Physics in Canada (March/April 1996): 94–6, 100. – ‘Elizabeth Allin: Physicist.’ In Great Dames, 264–87. Elspeth Cameron and Janice Dickin, eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. – ‘Laying Siege to the History Professoriate.’ In Creating Historical Memory: English-Canadian Women and the Work of History, 197–232. Beverly Boutilier and Alison Prentice, eds. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997. – ‘Scholarly Passion: Two Persons Who Caught It.’ In Women Who Taught: Perspectives on the History of Women and Teaching, 258–83. Alison Prentice and Marjorie R. Theobald, eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. – ‘Three Women in Physics.’ In Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women’s Professional Work, 119–40. Elizabeth Smyth, Sandra Acker, Paula Bourne, and Alison Prentice, eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. – ‘Vivian Pound Was a Man? The Unfolding of a Research Project.’ Historical Studies in Education 13, no. 2 (2001): 99–112. Rowles, Laura. ‘Long Experience and a Happy Existence.’ In Our Own Agendas: Autobiographical Essays by Women Associated with McGill University, 33–46. Margaret Gillett and Ann Beer, eds. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995. Smyth, Elizabeth M. ‘The Culture of Catholic Women’s Colleges at the University of Toronto 1911–1925.’ Historical Studies 70 (2004): 111–33. – ‘Preserving Habits: Memory within Communities of English Canadian Women Religious.’ In A Century Stronger: Women’s History in Canada 1900–
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2000, 22–6. S. Cook, L. McLean, and K. O’Rourke, eds. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000. Smyth, Elizabeth, Sandra Acker, Paula Bourne, and Alison Prentice, eds., Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women’s Professional Work. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Stewart, Lee. ‘The Politics of Women’s Education: Establishing Home Economics at the University of British Columbia, 1914–1949.’ Historical Studies in Education 1, no. 2 (1989): 267–81. 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 series 14 (2003): 231–61.
Institutions and Systems in Higher Education Axelrod, Paul. ‘McGill University on the Landscape of Canadian Higher Education: Historical Reflections.’ Higher Education Perspectives 1 (1996–7): 199–234; reprinted in Fontanus (Fall 1998): 117–33. – ‘Service or Captivity? Business-University Relations in the Twentieth Century.’ In Universities in Crisis: A Mediaeval Institution in the Twenty-first Century, 45–68. William A.W. Neilson and Chad Gaffield, eds. Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy, 1986. – ‘The University of Toronto through Historians’ Eyes.’ Historical Studies in Education 14, no. 2 (2002): 299–308. Baker, Harold R. ‘A History of CAUCE: Its Formation, Development, and Role.’ Canadian Journal of University Continuing Education 19, no. 2 (1993): 37–65. Baker, Melvin. ‘Memorial University’s Role in the Establishment of a Provincial Archive for Newfoundland in 1960.’ Newfoundland Studies 9, no. 1 (1993): 81–102. Blackburn, Robert H. Evolution of the Heart: A History of the University of Toronto Library up to 1981. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989. Brackney, William H. ‘McMaster University: McMaster Divinity College.’ American Baptist Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1999): 172–7. Bumsted, J.M. The University of Manitoba: An Illustrated History. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2001. Cameron, James D. For the People: A History of St Francis Xavier University. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996. Carpenter, Thomas H., ed. Queen’s University: The First One Hundred and Fifty Years. Newburgh, ON: Hedgehog Productions, 1990.
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Centre for Higher Education Research. Learning from Our Past: The History of Higher Educational Development in Canadian Universities. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 1997. Clark, Howard C. Growth and Governance of Canadian Universities: An Insider’s View. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003. Clarke, Bill. Historic Dalhousie: Images of Our Past. Halifax: Nimbus, 2001. Cole, A.O.C. Trent: The Making of a University, 1957–1987. Peterborough: Trent University Communication Department, 1992. Corcoran, Theresa. Mount Saint Vincent University: An Unfolding Vision 1873– 1988. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999. Court, John P.M. ‘An Erosion of Imagination: Unfulfilled Plans for a University Botanical Gardens and Taddle Creek, 1850–1884.’ Ontario History 95, no. 2 (2003), 167–91. Dennison, John D. Challenges and Opportunity: Canada’s Community Colleges at the Crossroads. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1995. Friedland, Martin. The University of Toronto: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. – ‘Writing the History of the University of Toronto.’ Historical Studies in Education 14, no. 2 (2002): 282–98. Gorman, Jack. Pere Murray and the Hounds: The Story of Saskatchewan’s Notre Dame College. Hanna, AB: Gorman and Gorman, 1990. Graham, Amanda. ‘Not a Perfect Solution but a Good Illustration: The Life and Times of the University of Canada North, 1970–1985.’ Northern Review 12–13 (Summer–Winter 1994): 117–32. Hanrahan, J., ed. The Role of Small Colleges in Canadian Higher Education: Past, Present, and Future. Saskatoon: St Thomas More College Press, 1988. Healy, Esther. ‘St Francis College, the Formative Years, 1854–1860: Richmond, Canada East.’ Journal of Eastern Township Studies 8 (Spring 1996): 25–42. Horn, Michiel. ‘Under the Gaze of George Vancouver: The University of British Columbia and the Provincial Government 1913–1939.’ BC Studies 83 (Autumn 1989): 29–67. Johnston, K. Brian. ‘Government and University: The Transition of Memorial University of Newfoundland from a College to a University.’ Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1990. Kilgour, David, ed. A Strange Elation: Hart House, the First Eighty Years. Toronto: Hart House, 1999. Kirkwood, Rondalyn Ann, and Jeannette Armstrong. Take Counsel with One Another: A Beginning History of the Canadian Association of University Schools of Nursing, 1942–1992. Ottawa: The Association, 1992. Langford, Arthur N. ‘B.Sc., the M.Sc., and Related Topics at Bishop’s Univer-
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sity, Lennoxville Quebec,’ Part 2, ‘The (Arthur R.) Jewitt Years.’ Journal of Eastern Township Studies 7 (Fall 1995): 89–119. MacDonald, G. Edward. The History of St Dunstan’s University. Burden: P.E.I. Museum, 1989. MacLeod, Malcolm. A Bridge Built Halfway: A History of Memorial University College 1925–1950. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990. – ‘Making Friends and Enemies: Public Relations at Memorial University College, 1925–1950.’ History of Intellectual Culture 1, no. 1 (2001). Available at www.ucalgary.ca/hic/ McCaffray, Charles J. UNBC, A Northern Crusade: The How and Who of B.C.’s Northern U. Duncan, BC: C.J. McCaffray, 1994. McFarlane, Ivan Owen. ‘Development of Higher Education in Ontario, 1945– 1985: From the Perspective of Equality of Educational Opportunity.’ Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1995. McGahan, Peter. The ‘Quiet Campus’: A History of the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, 1959–1969. Fredericton: New Ireland Press, 1998. McIntosh, Gordon, Mary Spencer, and Kay Dier, eds. Echoes in the Halls: An Unofficial History of the University of Alberta. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1999. McKillop, A.B. ‘Bissell’s “Great Good Place” and the History of Higher Education in Canada: Reflections on the Symposium.’ Historical Studies in Education 14, no. 2 (2002): 309–18. – Matters of Mind: The University in Ontario, 1791–1951. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. McLaughlin, Kenneth. Waterloo: The Unconventional Founding of an Unconventional University. Waterloo: University of Waterloo, 1997. Meehan, Peter M. ‘From College to University: The Basilian Fathers and Assumption, 1950–1963.’ Historical Studies: Canadian Catholic Historical Association 64 (1998): 91–114. Montague, Susan. A Pictorial History of the University of New Brunswick. Fredericton: University of New Brunswick, 1992. Moody, Barry. ‘Give Us an A’: An Acadia Album, 1838–1988. Wolfville: Acadia University, 1985. Moran, Louise. ‘Genesis of the Open Learning Institute of British Columbia.’ Journal of Distance Education 8, no. 1 (1993): 43–70. Morrison, James H. ‘Black Flies, Hard Work, Low Pay: A Century of Frontier College.’ Beaver 79, no. 5 (1999): 33–8 Neatby, H. Blair. Creating Carleton: The Shaping of a University. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002.
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Smith, Peter L. A Multitude of the Wise: UVic Remembered. Victoria: Alumni Association of the University of Victoria, 1993. Waite, Peter B. The Lives of Dalhousie University, vol. 1, 1818–1925, Lord Dalhousie’s College; vol. 2, 1925–1980, The Old College Transformed. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994 and 1997. Westfall, William. The Founding Moment: Church, Society, and the Construction of Trinity College. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002. Willis, Lucy D. Fifty Years: Just the Beginning. Saskatoon: College of Nursing, University of Saskatchewan, 1988. Wilmot, Laurence F. ‘Robert Machray and the Foundation of the University of Manitoba in 1877.’ In The Anglican Church and the World of Western Canada, 83–93. Barry Ferguson, ed. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1991. Woodcock, George. The University of British Columbia: A Souvenir. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1986. Young, Brian. The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum: The McCord, 1921–1996. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000.
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Clark, Ralph Joseph. ‘A History of the Department of Extension at the University of Alberta, 1912–1956.’ Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1986. Colbert, Judith Anne. Continuing Education at Guelph: The Emergence of the University School. Guelph: University of Guelph, 1989. Crepeau, Gustave. La Faculté des Sciences de l’Education de l’Université de Montréal: Profil Historique. Montreal: Vice-decant à la Recherche, Université de Montréal, 1990. Damer, Eric. ‘Building a Department of Adult Education at the University of British Columbia, 1957–1977.’ History of Intellectual Culture 2, no. 1 (2002). Available at http://www.ucalgary.ca/hic/ – Discovery by Design: The Department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of British Columbia: Origins and History, 1907–2001. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2001. – ‘The Rise and Fall of a Science of Adult Education at the University of British Columbia, 1957–1985.’ Historical Studies in Education/ Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 12, no. 1/2 (2000): 29–53. – ‘The Study of Adult Education at UBC, 1957–1985.’ Doctoral dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2000. Daub, Mervin, and P. Bruce Buchan. Getting Down to Business: A History of Business Education at Queen’s, 1889–1999. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. Duval, Roche. Les Ceminements Educatifs de l’Orientation et de la Pédagogie de 1943 à 1993 à la Faculté des Sciences de l’Education de l’Université Laval. SainteFoy: Universite Laval, 1995. Fahmiy-Eid, Nadia, and Johanne Colin. ‘Savoir et pouvoir dans l’universe des disciplines paramédicales: La formation en physiothérapie et diétetique à l’Université McGill, 1940–1970.’ Histoire sociale/Social History 22, no. 43 (1989): 35–63. Farley, John. ‘Building a School of Nursing with Rockefeller Money: Three Nova Scotians at the University of Toronto.’ Journal of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society 3 (2000): 85–104. Faucher, Albert, ed. Cinquante ans de Sciences Sociales à l’Université Laval de la Faculté de Sciences Sociales (1938–1988). Quebec: Université Laval, 1988. Fisher, Edward J. Twenty-Five Years: School of Optometry, University of Waterloo, 1967–1992. Waterloo: The School, 1992. Fraser, R.S. Cardiology at the University of Alberta, 1922–1969. Edmonton: Department of Medicine, University of Alberta, 1992. Gidney, Robert D., and W.J.P. Millar. ‘The Reorientation of Medical Education in Late Nineteenth Century Ontario: The Proprietary Medical Schools and the Founding of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto.’ Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 49, no. 1 (1994): 52–78.
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Goulet, Denis. Histoire du Collège des Médecines du Québec, 1847–1997. Montreal: Le College, 1997. – Histoire de la Faculté de Médecine de l’Université de Montréal, 1843–1993. Montreal: Vlb., 1993. Graham, John R. ‘A History of the University of Toronto School of Social Work.’ Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1996. Hammock, Virgil. ‘Art at Mount Allison: A History.’ In Liberal Education and the Small University in Canada, 105–13. Christine Storm, ed. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996. Hanaway, Joseph, and Richard Cruess. McGill Medicine, vol. 1, The First Half Century, 1829–1885. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996. Harris, Robin S. English Studies at Toronto: A History. With a foreword by H. Northrop Frye. Toronto: Department of English, University of Toronto, 1988. Helmes-Hayes, R., ed. A Quarter-Century of Sociology at the University of Toronto, 1963–1988. Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press, 1988. Horlick, Louis. Medical College to Community Resource: Saskatchewan’s Medical School, 1978–1998, vol. 2, History of the College of Medicine, University of Saskatchewan. Saskatoon: College of Medicine, University of Saskatchewan, 1999. Jones, Gaynor G. ‘The Fisher Years: The Toronto Conservatory of Music, 1886– 1913,’ in Three Studies, 59–145. Toronto: Institute for Canadian Music, 1989. Kelly, Laurence. ‘Industrial Relations at Queen’s: The First Fifty Years.’ Relations industrielles 42, no. 3 (1987): 475–99. Kiceniuk, Deborah Susan. ‘A Study of the Change in the Medical Education Curriculum at Dalhousie University from 1947 to 1967.’ Doctoral dissertation, Dalhousie University, 2000. Kops, William J. ‘The Tweedie Years, 1949–1975: Continuing Education Division, University of Manitoba.’ Canadian Journal of University Continuing Education 22, no. 1 (1996): 21–32. Kuitunen, Maddalena, and Julius A. Molinaro. A History of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto: 1840–1990. Toronto: Department of Italian Studies, University of Toronto, 1991. Lupul, Manoly R. ‘The Establishment of the Canadian Institute of Ukranian Studies at the University of Alberta: A Personal Memoir.’ Canadian Ethnic Studies 26, no. 2 (1994): 88–111. MacLeod, Malcolm. ‘Teachers in Tents: 8th Annual Rural Science Summer School in New Brunswick, 1922.’ Acadiensis (Spring 1996): 82–91. McAuley, Don. Twenty-Five Years of Teacher Education at Brock University. St Catharines, ON: Vanwell, 1989.
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Varga, Donna Marie. ‘The Cultural Organization of the Child Care Curriculum: The University of Toronto Institute of Child Study and Day Nurseries, 1890–1960.’ Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1991. White, Richard. ‘Professionals and Academics: Relations between the School of Practical Science and the University of Toronto, 1878–1906.’ Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 13, no. 2 (2001): 147–64. – The Skule Story: The University of Toronto Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, 1873–2000. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Zilm, Glennis, and Ethel Warbinek. Legacy: History of Nursing Education at the University of British Columbia. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1994.
Discipline Construction Austin, Barbara, ed. Capitalizing Knowledge: Essays on the History of Business Education in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Batts, Michael S. A Brief Survey of Germanic Studies at Canadian Universities from the Beginnings to 1995. Bern and New York: P. Lang, 1998. Beckwith, John. Music at Toronto: A Personal Account. Toronto: J. Beckwith, 1995. Behiels, Michael. ‘Father Georges-Henri Levesque and the Introduction of Social Sciences at Laval, 1938–55.’ In Youth, University, and Canadian Society, 320–41. Paul Axelrod and John G. Reid, eds. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989. Bell, David Graham. Legal Education in New Brunswick: A History. Fredericton: University of New Brunswick, 1992. Blagrave, Mark. ‘Drama, the Campus, and the Curriculum at Mount Allison: “This green plot shall be our stage.”’ In Liberal Education and the Small University in Canada, 114–28. Christine Storm, ed. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996. Bogaard, Paul A. ‘Science within the Liberal Arts: Mount Allison and the Maritime Universities.’ In Liberal Education and the Small University in Canada, 89–104. Christine Storm, ed. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1996. Calam, John. ‘Teaching Teachers on Campus: Initial Moves and the Search for UBC’s First Professor of Education.’ Historical Studies in Education 6 (1994): 177–200. Creet, Mario. ‘Science and Engineering at McGill and Queen’s Universities and the University of Toronto, 1880s to 1920s.’ Doctoral dissertation, Queen’s University, 1992. Djwa, Sandra. Professing English at UBC: The Legacy of Roy Daniells and Garnett
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Sedgewick. The 1999 Garnett Sedgewick Memorial Lecture. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 1999. Fraser, Brian J. Church, College, and Clergy: A History of Theological Education at Knox College, Toronto, 1844–1994. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995. Fisher, Donald. ‘Boundary Work: Toward a Model of the Relation Knowledge/Power.’ Knowledge 10, no. 2 (1988): 156–76. – ‘Harold Innis and the Development of the Social Sciences in Canada.’ In Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions, 135–58. Charles R. Acland and William J. Buxton, eds. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. – ‘A Maker of Trust: Rockefeller Philanthropy and the Creation of the Social Science Research Councils in the United States and Canada.’ In The Development of the Social Sciences in the United States and Canada: The Role of Philanthropy, 75–93. Theresa Richardson and Donald Fisher, eds. Stamford: Ablex, 1999. – The Social Sciences in Canada: Fifty Years of National Activity by the Social Science Federation of Canada/Fédération canadienne des sciences sociales. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1991. Fisher, Donald, and J. Atkinson-Grosjean. ‘Brokers on the Boundary: AcademyIndustry Liaison in Canadian Universities.’ Higher Education 44 (2002): 449–67. Fisher, Donald, and Gail Edwards. ‘The Formation of the Field of Education in English-Speaking Canadian Universities, 1950–1990: Professionalization and the Interdisciplinary Perspective.’ In Les fondements de l’interdisciplinarité dans la formation à l’enseignement, 205–33. Yves Lenoir, Bernard Rey, and Ivani Fazenda, eds. Sherbrooke: Éditions du CRP, Université de Sherbrooke, 2001. – ‘The Legitimation of Education in Canadian Universities: A Social History of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education/Société Canadienne pour l’étude de l’éducation.’ In A Challenge Met: The Definition and Recognition of the Field of Education, 7–117. Michel Allard, James Covert, Collette Dufresne-Tassé, Angela Hildyard, and Michael Jackson, eds. Ottawa: Canadian Society for the Study of Education and University of Toronto Press, 1999. Gauvreau, Michael. ‘Philosophy, Psychology, and History: George Sidney Brett and the Quest for a Social Science at the University of Toronto, 1910– 1940.’ Canadian Historical Association Historical Papers (1988): 209–36. Gidney, Robert D., and W.P.J. Millar. Professional Gentlemen: The Professions in Nineteenth-Century Ontario. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. – ‘Starting with the Task: Rethinking the History of Nineteenth-Century
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Academic Freedom and the State Abbott, Frank W. ‘The Crowe Affair: The Academic Profession and Academic Freedom.’ Queen’s Quarterly 98, no. 4 (1991): 818–39. Axelrod, Paul. ‘The Ironies of Academic Freedom.’ In Interpreting Censorship
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Intellectual Histories Acland, Charles R., and William J. Buxton, eds. Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999.
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Armour, Leslie. ‘Philosophy and Denominationalism in Ontario.’ Journal of Canadian Studies 20, no. 1 (1985): 25–38. Axelrod, Paul. ‘Challenges to Liberal Education in an Age of Uncertainty.’ Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 10, 1/2 (1998): 1–19. – Making a Middle Class: Student Life in English Canada during the Thirties. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990. – Values in Conflict: The University, the Marketplace, and the Trials of Liberal Education. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002. Axelrod, Paul, and John G. Reid, eds. Youth, University, and Canadian Society. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989. Berger, Carl. The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing since 1900. 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986. Boyd, David, and Imre Salusinsky. Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Brooks, Kevin. ‘Writing Instruction in Western Canadian Universities: A History of Nation-Building and Professionalism.’ Doctoral dissertation, Iowa State University, 1997. Buxton, William. ‘The Bias against Communication: On the Neglect and Nonpublication of the “Incomplete and Unrevised Manuscript” of Harold Adams Innis,’ Canadian Journal of Communication 26, no. 2 (2001): 211–29. – ‘Time, Space and the Place of Universities in Western Civilization: Harold Innis’ Plea.’ International Journal of Canadian Studies 15 (Spring 1997): 37–48. Cameron, James. ‘”Easing Forever the Brand of Social Inferiority”: Saint Francis Xavier University and the Highland Catholics of Eastern Nova Scotia.’ Historical Studies: Canadian Catholic Historical Association 59 (1992): 49–64. – ‘Ethnicizing Atlantic Canadian Universities: The Regional Impact of the Canadian Ethnic Studies Program, 1973–1997.’ Canadian Ethnic Studies 34, no. 2 (2002): 1–24. – ‘From Intimacy to Detachment: The History of Relations between St Francis Xavier University and the Diocese of Antigonish to 1970.’ Journal of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society 4 (2001): 70–83. Carroll, William K., ed. Fragile Truths: Twenty-Five Years of Sociology and Anthropology in Canada. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1992. Cavell, Richard. McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Coggon, Jennifer. ‘Quinarianism after Darwin’s Origin: The Circular System of William Hincks.’ Journal of the History of Biology 35 (2002), 5–42. Cook, Ramsay. The Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late Victorian Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985.
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Cormier, Jeffrey. The Canadianization Movement: Emergence, Survival, and Success. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Cotrupi, Caterina Nella. Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Denham, Robert D., ed. Northrop Frye Unbuttoned: Wit and Wisdom from the Notebooks and Diaries. Frankfort, KY: Gnomon Press, 2004. – A World in a Grain of Sand: Twenty-Two Interviews with Northrop Frye. New York: P. Lang, 1991. Donaldson, Jeffrey, and Alan Mendelson, eds. Frye and the Word: Religious Contexts in the Writings of Northrop Frye. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Evenden, Matthew D. ‘Harold Innis, the Arctic Survey, and the Politics of Social Science during the Second World War.’ Canadian Historical Review 79, no. 1 (1998): 36–67. Faulkner, Tom. ‘The Religious Roots of the Universities in the Atlantic Provinces.’ In Religious Studies in Atlantic Canada: A State-of-the-Art Review, 17–25. W.R. Paul, ed. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001. Ferguson, Barry. Remaking Liberalism: The Intellectual Legacy of Adam Shortt, O.D. Skelton, W.C. Clark, and W.A. Mackintosh. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993. Fingard, Judith. ‘Focussing on Their Roots: University of New Brunswick Historians and Regional History.’ Acadiensis 30, no. 1 (2000): 38–44. Ford, Russell. Northrop Frye on Myth: An Introduction. New York: Garland, 1998. Gagnon, Alain-G., and Sarah Fortin. ‘Innis and Quebec: Conjectures and Conjectures.’ In Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions, 209–24. Acland R. Charles and William Buxton, eds. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. Gauvreau, Michael. ‘Baptist Religion and the Social Science of Harold Innis.’ Canadian Historical Review 76, no. 2 (1995): 161–204. – The Evangelical Century: College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991. – ‘War, Culture, and the Problem of Religious Certainty: Methodist and Presbyterian Church Colleges, 1914–1939.’ Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society 29, no. 1 (1987): 12–31. Gidney, Catherine. A Long Eclipse: The Liberal Protestant Establishment and the Canadian University, 1920–1970. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004.
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Graham, John R. ‘An Analysis of Canadian Social Welfare Historical Writing.’ Social Service Review 70¸ no. 1 (1996): 140–58. Hamilton, Albert Charles. Northrop Frye: Anatomy of His Criticism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Hart, Jonathan Locke. Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination. London: Routledge, 1994. Hubert, Henry Allan. ‘The Vernacular in Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Colleges.’ Canadian Literature 131 (Winter 1991): 114–125. Jasen, Patricia. ‘Cicero on the Frontier: Higher Education Learning in Pioneer Canada, NS. and NB.’ Beaver 71, no. 2 (1991): 42–50. – ‘Educating an Elite: A History of the Honour Course System at the University of Toronto,’ Ontario History 81, no. 4 (1989): 270–88. – The English Canadian Liberal Arts Curriculum: An Intellectual History, 1800– 1950. Winnipeg: National Library of Canada, 1987. – ‘Ways of Knowing: An Intellectual History of the Liberal Arts Curriculum in English-Canadian Universities.’ Doctoral dissertation, University of Manitoba, 1987. Johnson, Nan. ‘Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the Canadian Academy: An Historical Analysis.’ College English 50, no. 8 (1988): 861–73. Lee, Alvin A., general editor. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vols. 1–17. Volume editors: Robert D. Denham, Alvin A. Lee, Jean O’Grady, Goldwin French, Michael Dolzani, J. Gorak, David Staines, Nicholas Halmi, Angela Esterhammer, Imre Salusinszky. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996–2005. Lee, Alvin A., and Robert D. Denham, eds. The Legacy of Northrop Frye. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Litt, Paul. The Muses, the Masses, and the Massey Commission. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Massolin, Philip A. ‘Academic Modernization and the Decline of Higher Learning: The University Question in the Later Scholarship of Harold Innis.’ Canadian Journal of Communication 23, no. 1 (1998): 45–64. – Canadian Intellectuals, the Tory Tradition, and the Challenge of Modernity, 1939– 1970. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. – ‘Modernization and Reaction: Postwar Evolutions and the Critique of Higher Learning in Canada.’ Journal of Canadian Studies 36, no. 2 (2001): 130–63. McKillop, A.B. Contours of Canadian Thought. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. – ‘Historiography and Intellectual History.’ In Clio’s Craft: A Primer of Historical Methods, 77–96. Terry Crowley, ed. Toronto: Copp Clark, 1988.
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McLuhan, Eric, and Frank Zingrone, eds. Essential McLuhan. Don Mills: House of Anansi, 1995. Neat, Timothy, and Gillian McDermott. Closing the Circle: Thomas Howarth, Mackintosh and the Modern Movement. Aberdour, Fife: Inyx Publishing, 2002. Noble, Richard. ‘Innis’s Conception of Freedom.’ In Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions, 31–45. Charles R. Acland and William Buxton, eds. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. Normandin, Sebastian. ‘Eugenics, McGill, and the Catholic Church in Montreal and Quebec, 1890–1942.’ Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 15, no. 1 (1998): 59–86. O’Grady, Jean, and Wang Ning, eds. Northrop Frye: Eastern and Western Perspectives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Owram, Doug. The Government Generation: Canadian Intellectuals and the State, 1900–1945. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986. Panayotidis, E. Lisa, and Paul Stortz, ‘Intellectual Space, Image and Identities in the Historical University Campus: Helen Kemp’s Map of the University of Toronto, 1932.’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, new series, 15 (2004): 123–52. Parent, Mark. ‘Religion at the Small University: A Comparison of Three Maritime Universities.’ In Liberal Education and the Small University in Canada, 129–51. Christine Storm, ed. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1996. Patterson, Graeme. History and Communications: Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, the Interpretation of History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Pitsula, James M. ‘Cicero Versus Socrates: The Liberal Arts Debate in the 1960s at the University of Saskatchewan Regina Campus.’ Historical Studies in Education 15, no. 1 (2003): 101–29. Rawlyk, George, ed. Canadian Baptists and Christian Higher Education. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988. Reid, John G. ‘Beyond the Democratic Intellect: The Scottish Example and University Reform in Canada’s Maritime Provinces, 1870–1933.’ In Youth, University, and Canadian Society, 275–300. Paul Axelrod and John G. Reid, eds. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989. – ‘The Excellence Debate and the Invention of Tradition at Mount Allison: A Case Study in the Generation of Mythology at a Canadian University.’ Dalhousie Review 69, no. 2 (1989): 190–210. Sandler, Robert, ed. Northrop Frye on Shakespeare. Markham, ON: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1986.
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Sheehan, Nancy. ‘History of Higher Education in Canada.’ Canadian Journal of Higher Education 15, no. 1 (1985): 25–38. Shore, Marlene. The Science of Social Redemption: McGill, the Chicago School, and the Origins of School Research in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. – ed. The Contested Past. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Spry, Irene M. ‘Economic History and Economic Theory: Innis’s Insights.’ In Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions, 105–13. Charles R. Acland and William Buxton, eds. Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queen’s University Press, 1999. Stamps, Judith. ‘Innis in the Canadian Dialectical Tradition.’ In Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions, 46–66. Charles R. Acland and William Buxton, eds. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. – Unthinking Modernity: Innis, McLuhan, and the Frankfurt School. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995. Waite, Peter B. ‘Gaudeamus Igitur: Some Recent University Histories.’ Acadiensis 19, no. 2 (1990): 225–31. Walter, P. ‘Literacy, Imagined Nations, and Imperialism: Frontier College and the Construction of British Canada, 1899–1933.’ Adult Education Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2003): 42–58. Willmott, Glenn. ‘Marshall McLuhan: From Modernism to Minimalism.’ Doctoral dissertation, Duke University, 1992. – McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Winchester, Ian. ‘The Concept of University Autonomy – An Anachronism?’ In The Professoriate – Occupation in Crisis, 29–42. Higher Education Group, ed. Toronto: Higher Education Group, OISE, 1985.
Teaching, Research, and Cultures of the Professoriate Abbott, Frank W. ‘Founding the Canadian Association of University Teachers, 1945–1951.’ Queen’s Quarterly 93, no. 3 (1986): 508–24. – ‘The Origin and Foundation of the Canadian Association of University Teachers.’ Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1985. Avery, Donald. The Science of War: Canadian Scientists and Allied Military Technology during the Second World War. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Blackburn, Robert H. ‘Mackenzie King, William Mulock, James Mavor and the University of Toronto Student’s Revolt of 1895.’ Canadian Historical Review 69, no. 4 (1988): 490–503.
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Bruneau, William A. A Matter of Identities: A History of the UBC Faculty Association, 1920–1990. Vancouver: UBC 75th Anniversary Committee, 1990. – ‘Toward a New Collective Biography: The UBC Professoriate, 1915–1945,’ Canadian Journal of Education 19, no. 1 (1994): 59–78. Bruneau, William A., and Donald C. Savage. Counting Out the Scholars: How Performance Indicators Undermine Universities and Colleges. Toronto: CAUT/ Lorimer, 2002. Bryden, John. Deadly Allies: Canada’s Secret War, 1937–1947. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989. Corbet, Elise A. Frontiers of Medicine: A History of Medical Education and Research at the University of Alberta. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1990. Fee, Margery. ‘Puck’s Green England and the Professor of English: PostColonial Fantasies at the University of British Columbia.’ University of Toronto Quarterly 64, no. 3 (1995): 398–416. Friesen, Gerald. ‘H.C. Pentland and Continuing Education at the University of Manitoba: Teaching Labour History to Trade Unionists.’ Labour 31 (1993): 301–13. Fulton, E. Margaret. ‘Historical Commitments in New Times: The Restructuring and Reorientation of Teaching and Research.’ In Universities in Crisis: A Mediaeval Institution in the Twenty-first Century, 231–49. William A.W. Neilson and Chad Gaffield, eds. Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy, 1986. Gingras, Yves. ‘Croissance de la recherche scientifique et transfromation de la Section III Société royale du Canada.’ Scienta Canadensis 10, no. 1 (1986): 53–71. – ‘Financial Support for Post-Graduate Students and the Development of Scientific Research in Canada.’ In Youth, University, and Canadian Society, 301–19. Paul Axelrod and John G. Reid, eds. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989. – ‘The Institutionalization of Scientific Research in Canadian Universities: The Case of Physics.’ Canadian Historical Review 67, no. 2 (1986): 181–94. – Physics and the Rise of Scientific Research in Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991. Gripton, James, and Allan Irving. ‘Social Work and Social Welfare: Research in Canada in the Post-War Years, 1945–1960.’ Canadian Social Work Review 13, no. 2 (1996): 205–20. Hamel, Thérèse, and Marie-Josée Larocque. ‘The Universitarisation of Teacher Training in Quebec: Three Key Periods in the Development of a Research Culture in Laval University.’ Tidskrift för lärarutbildning och forskning (Journal
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of Research in Teacher Education), Umeå, Suède, Special issue, no. 3–4 (2003): 187–204. – ‘Observations from Quebec: The Emergence of a Research Culture in Education through Legitimacy and Universitarisation in Quebec, 1940– 2000.’ European Education Research Journal, Revue de la European Research Association 1, no. 1 (2002): 99–117. Harvey, Edward B. Taking Social Research to the Larger World. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2005. Helms-Hays, Richard. ‘Images of Inequality in Early Canadian Sociology, 1922–1965.’ Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1985. Higher Education Group, ed. The Professoriate – Occupation in Crisis. Toronto: Higher Education Group, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1985. Horn, Michiel. ‘Tenure and the Canadian Professoriate.’ Journal of Canadian Studies 34, no. 3 (1999): 261–81. – ‘Unionization and the Canadian University: Historical and Personal Observation.’ Interchange 25, no. 1 (1994): 39–48. Innis, Nancy K. Academic Genealogy of the Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario. London: Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, 1988. Irving, Allan. ‘Leonard Marsh and the McGill Social Science Research Project.’ Journal of Canadian Studies 21, no. 2 (1986): 6–25. Marcum, James A. ‘The Development of Heparin in Toronto.’ Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 52, no. 3 (1996): 310–37. McKillop, A.B. ‘Public Intellectuals and Canadian Intellectual History: Communities of Concern.’ In Les idées en mouvement: perspectives en histoire intellectuelle et culturelle du Canada, 121–39. Damien-Claude Bélanger, Sophie Coupal, Michel Ducharme, eds. Laval: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2004. More, Ellen S. ‘Doctors or Professors: Late Victorian Physicians and the Cultures of Professionalism.’ Canadian Review of American Studies 23, no. 3 (1993): 125–48. Neatby, H. Blair. ‘The Academic Profession: An Historical Perspective. “Communities of Scholars in Ontario.”’ In The Professoriate – Occupation in Crisis, 10–28. Higher Education Group, ed. Toronto: Higher Education Group, OISE, 1985. Nelson, William H. The Search for Faculty Power: The History of the University of Toronto Faculty Association 1942–1992. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1993. Nicholl, Christopher. ‘Ivory Tower?’ Journal of Eastern Township Studies 4 (1994): 61–73.
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Pols, Hans. ‘Between the Laboratory and Life: Child Development Research in Toronto, 1919–1956.’ History of Psychology 5, no. 2 (2002): 135–62. Salter, Liora, and Cherly Dahl, ‘The Public Role of the Intellectual.’ In Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions, 115–34. Charles R. Acland and William Buxton, eds. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. Stortz, Paul. ‘“Have You Ever Looked Into a Professor’s Soul?” Professorial Identities and Academic Cultures in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Toronto, 1935–1945.’ Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 2006. Stortz, Paul, and E. Lisa Panayotidis. Introduction. History of Intellectual Culture 1, no. 1 (2001). Available at www.ucalgary.ca/hic/ Zimmerman, Arthur E. In the Shadow of the Shield: The Development of Wireless Telegraphy and Radio Broadcasting in Kingston and at Queen’s University. An Oral and Documentary History, 1902–1957. Kingston: Zimmerman, 1991.
Contributors 413
Contributors
Marianne Ainley is a historian of science, editor of Despite the Odds: Essays on Canadian Women and Science (1990), and author of Restless Energy: A Biography of William Rowan, 1891–1957 (1993) and many other works on the gendered history of Canadian science. As Professor Emerita, women’s studies, University of Northern British Columbia, and adjunct professor of both environmental studies and women’s studies, University of Victoria, she is working on an interdisciplinary project on gender, environments, and the transfer of knowledge in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canada and Australia, and completing two books on Canadian women and science. William Bruneau was educated at the universities of Saskatchewan and of Toronto, and has long frequented archives in France, the United Kingdom, and Canada. He taught in UBC’s Department of Educational Studies from 1971 to 2003, when he took early retirement to have time for historical research and for his grandchildren. Professor Bruneau has written mostly about university history and politics. He recently co-authored Counting Out the Scholars: How Performance Indicators Undermine Universities and Colleges (2002), co-edited (with J.L. Turk), Disciplining Dissent: The Curbing of Free Expression in Academia and the Media (2004), and co-authored (with D.G. Duke) Jean Coulthard: A Life in Music (2005). He is editor for volumes 17 to 20 of the Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell. Cameron Duder is an independent scholar and sessional lecturer based in Victoria, British Columbia, and New Zealand. He teaches and researches in the areas of the history of sexuality, gender studies,
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colonization, and racialization. His recent work includes ‘Public Acts and Private Languages: Bisexuality and the Multiple Discourses of Constance Grey Swartz,’ BC Studies 136, 3/4 (Winter 2002/3), published under the name Karen Duder. Donald Fisher is a professor of sociology in the Department of Educational Studies and Co-director of the Centre of Policy Studies in Higher Education and Training, the University of British Columbia. His areas of ineterest are philanthropy and higher education, university education, the development of the social sciences, and academicindustry relations. His recent publications include ‘Les politiques publiques et le développement d’un systéme d’éducation postsécondaire en Colombie britannique’ (with K. Rubenson and D. House) in Revue des sciences de l’éducation (2003); ‘Brokers on the Boundary: Academy-industry Liaison in Canadian Universities’ (with J. Atkinson-Grosjean) in Higher Education (2002); ‘Changes in Academy/Industry/State Relations in Canada: The Creation and Development of the Networks of Centres of Excellence’ (with J. AtkinsonGrosjean, J. House, and D. House) in Minerva (2001); The Development of the Social Sciences in the United States and Canada: The Role of Philanthropy (edited with T. Richardson) (1999); and ‘The Changing Political Economy: The Private and Public Lives of Canadian Universities’ (with K. Rubenson) in J. Currie and J. Newson, eds., Universities and Globalization: Critical Perspectives (1998). He is currently the President of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CFHSS). Dianne M. Hallman is an associate professor of educational foundations in the College of Education, University of Saskatchewan. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in feminist studies in education, as well as core components of pre-service teacher education. She publishes in the areas of educational biography and the history of teaching and teacher educators. She has recently completed a SSHRC project with Sandra Acker (PI) and others on Canadian Teacher Educators, ‘Traditions and Transitions in Teacher Education: The Case of Saskatchewan,’ Tidskrift för lärarutbildning och Forskning/ Journal of Research in Teacher Education 10, 3–4 (2003): 169–85. Thérèse Hamel is a professor at the Départment des Fondements et pratiques en éducation of Université Laval, Québec. Her main areas
Contributors 415
of interest are the history and sociology of education, in particular the evolution of a culture of research in faculties of education in Quebec. Her recent books include De la terre à l’école: Histoire de l’enseignement agricole au Québec, 1926–1969 (with Jacques Tondreau and Michel Morisset; Hurtubise-HMH, 2000); Un siècle de formation des maîtres au Québec 1836–1939 (Montréal: Hurtubise-HMH, 1995); and Le déracinement des écoles normales: Le transfert de la formation des maîtres à l’université (Institut Québécois de recherche sur la culture, automne 1991). Steve Hewitt is a lecturer in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. He is the author of Spying 101: The RCMP’s Secret Activities at Canadian Universities, 1917–1997 (University of Toronto Press, 2002) and, with Reg Whitaker, Canada and the Cold War (James Lorimer, 2003). He is currently working on a history of the modern informant. Michiel Horn, FRSC, is a professor emeritus of history at York University’s Glendon College and University Historian. His most recent books are Academic Freedom in Canada: A History (University of Toronto Press, 1999) and The Sweat of the Gods: Myths and Legends of Bicycle Racing (Mousehold Press, 2005), a translation of Het zweet der goden: Legende van de wielersport (2003) by Dutch sociologist Benjo Maso. Malcolm MacLeod grew up at Halifax and earned degrees from Dalhousie University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Ottawa. He joined the History Department at Memorial University in 1968, retiring there in 2002. He is the author of A Bridge Built Halfway: A History of Memorial University College, 1925–50 (1990); Kindred Countries: Canada and Newfoundland before Confederation (Canadian Historical Association, Historical Booklet no. 52, 1994), and numerous other works. He is currently a research associate of the Rural Research Centre at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College in Truro. Barry Moody is a professor and head of the Department of History and Classic at Acadia University, Nova Scotia, where he has taught for thirty-six years. His main research interests are colonial Nova Scotia and the history of religion and higher education of the Maritime region. He has published and lectured widely in these areas. He has contributed extensively to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography and serves on a number of editorial boards.
416
Contributors
E. Lisa Panayotidis teaches courses in visual culture, spatiality, and education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Calgary. Her published work has examined the political and cultural function of the arts in diverse educational settings and in different historical and cultural contexts in Canada. Her current SSHRC-funded research addresses the multiple and contingent discursive and visual relations among social reconstruction ideologies, the formation of a federal cultural policy in Canada, and professional artists’ discourse on the social and cultural function of the arts in schools. Alison Prentice is a professor emerita of the University of Toronto and an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria. She is a feminist historian whose research interests have included the origins of public schooling and the gendering of paid and unpaid work at all levels of education – most recently in universities. Her current research is on the academic professions, particularly in departments of history and physics, as well as on the related work of faculty wives. Elizabeth M. Smyth is an associate professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. She is engaged in a course of research on Canadian women religious in education, social service, and health care. With Linda Wicks, she is the co-editor of Wisdom Raises Her Voice The Sisters of St Joseph of Toronto Celebrate 150 Years (Transcontinental Press/Sister of St Joseph of Toronto, 2001). Paul Stortz teaches Canadian studies and the histories of ethnicity in the Faculty of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary. He has published on the development of rural school systems and communities, and on the history of the professoriate in Canada, in particular looking at refugee professors in the twentieth century. He is founding co-editor of History of Intellectual Culture (www.ucalgary.ca/ hic/), a peer-reviewed on-line journal.
Index
417
Index
Aberhart, William 74 Aboriginal peoples 236–7, 273, 361 Abravanel, Harry 164, 165 academic freedom 14, 15, 37, 44, 64, 70, 85, 87, 89–91, 93, 98, 135, 352 academic gowns 163, 175, 309, 313, 314 Acadians 98 Acadia Seminary 112 Acadia University 9, 66, 88, 107–27, 174, 251; senate-board conflict at, 113–15 accountants 356–7 Adams, Sinclair Maclaroy 306 Africa 147, 363 agriculture 76, 240. See also farmers and farming Ainsley, Donald S. 364 Aitchison, J.H. 65–6 Aix-Marseille 36 Alberta 74, 77, 148, 277 Alberta Federation of Labor 73 Alexander, W.H. 72–4 Alexander, William John 358 Allen, J. Stanley 68–9, 80 Allen, Nessy 248 Allin, Elizabeth 286, 333, 344–5
Allison, W.T. 321–2 ambassadors 90, 171 American Association for the Advancement of Science 254 American Association of University Professors 11 American Association of Variable Star Observers 258 American Astronomical Society 258 American Medical Association 87 Anand, Kailash 261 Anglicans 69, 158 Angrave, J. 161 Annan, Noel 33, 37–8, 150 anthropology: Jean Briggs appointment at Memorial University in, 260; discussion of hiring in at Bishop’s University, 172; emergence as discipline, 133, 160, 277; T.F. McIlwraith and, 362, 364; Hugh Sampath’s qualifications in, 143; University of Windsor Department of, 97; women in, 250 Antigonish, NS 67, 150, 207, 210, 211 anti-Semitism 26n25 Appleby, Joyce 44 applied science. See engineering
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Index
archaeology 356 archdeacon 356–7 Ardener, Shirley 272, 273, 276 Argentina 146 armed forces 249 Ashburton Grammar School, England 366 Ashbury College, Ottawa 169 Ashley, Charles A. 362 Asian studies at the University of British Columbia, 97 Association of Atlantic Universities 138 Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada 136–7, 141, 174, 207–8 Association of Universities of the British Commonwealth 136–7 astronomy: Clarence Chant and, 364; Ralph E. DeLury and, 306; Helen S. Hogg and, 258, 277; H.L. Welsh and, 363; women in, 250, 258; Reynold K. Young and, 355 Atlantic Biological Station 259 Australia 85, 146, 171, 248, 345 Ayer, A.J. 46 Baines, Carol 346 Baker, Alfred 353 Balliol College 39, 272 banking 335, 336 Baptists: denominational interest in Acadia University, 109–10; discussions of teaching of didactics at Acadia University, 111–27; as fathers of university professors, 356, 363; as founders of Acadia University, 9, 66, 107–8; Harold Innis and, 355; involvement in McMaster University, 274
Barclay, May 254–5 Barman, Jean 285, 287 Barnett, R.F. 167 Barrie Collegiate, Ontario 366 Barzun, Jacques 44 Battle, Dr Helen 254, 255 Bay Trail, SK 228 Beamish, Frederick Earl 361 Beatty, Samuel 355, 361, 364 Behrens, Betty 38 Ben-David, Joseph 41 Bengough, John Wilson 305 Benson, Clara 253 Benston, Dr Margaret 250, 259–60 Berlin, Germany 93 Bernhardt, Karl Schofield 362, 366 Biggar, Oliver Mowat 313–15, 329– 30n38 biochemistry: George Hunter and, 84; as new subject at Memorial University, 134; women and, 257, 258, 259, 261 biology: Alan Freeth Coventry, and 364; John Richardson Dymond and, 359; Frieda Fraser and, 333, 335, 340; William John Knox Harkness and, 366; nature walks as factor fostering interest in, 363; Edmund Murton Walker and, 358; women and, 250, 254, 257, 259, 261, 277 birds 309–10. See also ornithology Birgenau, Mary Catherine 271, 292 Bishop’s University 10, 149, 150, 158–78, 252 Bissell, Claude T. 78 Black, Stephen 168 Bladen, Vincent 357, 366, 367 Blatz, Victoria 359
Index Blatz, William 358–60 Bloom, Allan 40 boarding houses 281, 282. See also residences boats and boating 162, 322 Boston, MA 212, 364 botany, women and 252, 255, 256 Bott, Helen 276, 284 Bourdieu, Pierre 36 Bowen, Harold 42–3 Boyd, Brian 34 Boyden, E.L. 320 Brandon, MB 76 Brandon College 66 Bresica College, University of Western Ontario 217–18, 220 Brieger, Barbara 276 Brigden, Frederick M. 305, 309 Briggs, Dr Jean 260 British Columbia, as site for location of faculty wives’ clubs 281 Broadbent, Edward 79 Brock University 150 Bronson, H.L. 256 Brown, George 363 Brown, Tom 175 Brown, Walter 67, 68 Brown University 125 Brownlee, John 74 Buck, Tim 88 Bulman, Eileen 255 Burk, Kathleen 48 Burns, Miss 212 Burt, A.L. 276–7 Burt, Dorothy 276–7 Burwash, Nathaniel 318–21 business 131, 133, 163–4, 308, 312 business administration, at Bishops University 158, 159, 160, 161, 163– 6, 176, 178
419
Caldwell, Gary 172, 173, 177 Calgary, AB 77, 279 Cambridge University: Vincent Bladen on, 366; curricular reform at, 39; educational practices at, 316, 322; faculty spouses at, 272–3; Michael Alexander Mackenzie at, 357; women dons at, 38; women physicists at, 344 Cameron, Elspeth 17 Canada Council 254 Canadian Association of Anatomists 254 Canadian Association of University Teachers 65, 79, 88–92, 97, 135, 174 Canadian Historical Association 166 Canadian Liberation Movement 97 Canadian National Railway 163 Canadian Political Science Association 254 Canadian Science and Technology Historical Association 250 Canadian Security Intelligence Service 91–2 Canadian Society of Zoologists 254 Canadian Welfare Council 345 Capp, Fiona 85 Cap-Rouge, QC 189 Carleton University 79, 88, 95, 146, 254 Carnegie Institute of Technology 43 cartoons 5, 300, 301–4, 305–12, 317– 20, 324 Cassidy, Harry M. 78 Catholic University of America 212 Cazden, Norman 87 Centennial Medal 254 Central Board of Protestant Examiners 161 Chalk Lake, ON 215
420
Index
Chant, Clarence Augustus 364 Chant, Nellie 276, 283–4, 291 Charle, Christophe 35–7, 38, 46 Chaucer 46 Chauvinist, I.M. 236 chemistry: J. Stanley Allen and, 68; Frederick Earl Beamish and, 361; J. Allen Harris and, 70; Donald J. LeRoy and, 353; professor’s fathers and, 358; Frank Toole and, 257; women and, 250, 255, 259, 261 chess 309, 357 Chicago 278 civil service 39, 80, 249, 274 Clark, Burton 43 Clark, S.D. 355, 362 classics: as foundation of university education, 12, 39, 50, 117; fathers of professors and, 358; George Grube and, 72; Eric Havelock and, 67, 68; Jeffery Jefferis and, 161; J.L. Paton and, 134; Frank Underhill and, 367. See also Greek, Latin Cody, Henry J. 77 co-education 214, 313–14. See also women, admission to university Cohen, Saul 44 Cold War 84–99 Collèges d’enseignement général et professionel (CEGEP) 159, 166, 174, 188, 189 Collins, Sister St Maurice 211 Colpitt, Merle 256 Columbia University 143, 277 commerce 133 communism 84–99, 135 Communist Party of Canada 86, 88, 94 computers, use in history 35–6 Concordia University 226
Congregation of St Basil 212 Congregational Church 357 Connaught Laboratories, University of Toronto 336 Conseil de l’instruction publique 193 Conservative Party 65, 66, 70, 88, 90 Convocation Hall 70 Cook, Miss 337 Co-operative Commonwealth Federation 67–8, 69, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 80 Coventry, Alan Freeth 363, 364 Coxeter, Harold Scott MacDonald 361 Creighton, Donald 355, 364 Cross, James 91 Crowe, Harry 67 Crown Cork and Seal Company 306 Curie, Marie 37 Currelly, Charles T. 356, 357, 361, 366, 367 curriculum: at Acadia College, 115, 117; at Bishop’s University, 163, 170; innovations at Memorial University in 134, 149; need for studies on professorial experience in creating 49; resilience of humanities and liberal arts in, 13; student dissatisfaction with, 314. See also names of specific subjects Currie, Sir Arthur 256 Dalhousie University 135, 138, 148, 251, 357; employment of women, 141, 235, 253, 256–7, 277–8 Danylewycz, Marta 229 Darwin, Charles 37 Darwinism 12, 24n14 Davis, Natalie Zemon 209, 280
Index Deacon, Dr Beatrice Reid 257 Defence of Canada Regulations 84 DeLury, Alfred Tennyson 306, 355, 358, 361, 364 DeLury, Daniel Bertrand 358 DeLury, Ralph Emerson 306, 311 De Man, Anton F. 168 Denison, Merrill 306 Dennis, Ann 175 Derick, Carrie 253 Diamond, Sigmund 93 Dickin, Janice 17 didactics 107–11, 114–18, 123–5, 127, 197 Diefenbaker, John 78, 90 D’Irsay, Stephen 44 disciplines: creation and fragmentation, 12–13, 14, 39, 158, 159, 167, 169, 351. See also names of specific subjects Dominion Experimental Farm 256 Don River, Russia 31 Douglas, T.C. 76 Drew, George 88 Duff-Berdhal Commission 174 Dunbar, Dr Max 259 Dunlop Observatory, University of Toronto 277 Dunn, Waldo 47 Dupille, Chantal 44 Durham University 162 Dutchak, Anthony 235 Duval, R. Errol 163–4 Dyck, Lillian 261 Dyke, Doris 235 Dymond, John Richardson 359, 366 Eastcott, Edna 255 Eaton, Frank H. 118, 123 economics: at Bishop’s University,
421
160, 164, 165, 167, 169, 170, 172, 174, 176, 177; Vincent Bladen and, 366; Allen J. MacEachen and, 69; and public service in Ottawa, 80, 274; Edward Johns Urwick and, 357; women and, 250, 254, 256, 274, 279 Eddy, L.A. 317 editors as fathers of professors, 356; students as, 301, 302; women as, 278 Edmonton, AB 72, 256 education: children of Jane Smith’s search for, 275; as college at University of Saskatchewan, 225; as course at Acadia University, 107–11, 114–18; as department at Bishop’s University, 160–3, 170, 177; as faculty at Memorial University, 135; nuns and, 210, 214. See also didactics; normal schools; school teaching; teacher training Edward Blake Scholarship 216, 367 Egypt 90, 146, 147, 226 Einstein, Albert 47 Eisenman, Linda 208–9 Elder, Dr 125 Elliott, William Yandell 93 Ellis, Havelock 332–3 Ellis, J.N. 71 engineering: at Bishop’s University, 165; at Memorial University, 131, 133–134; Pepi Carl Fux and, 305; professors of, 32, 39; women and, 250 English (as subject of study) William John Alexander and, 358; at Bishop’s University, 165, 176; W.P.M. Kennedy and, 216; Cyrus Macmillan and, 66; nuns as
422
Index
teachers of, 213, 218; Jacquelyn Peitchinis and, 279; Irene Poelzer and, 228, 230, 236; professors of, 315; Frank Underhill and, 367 English Ladies 229 ethics (subject of study) 212 Euclid 364 Europe: antifeminist rhetoric in, 334; historical research on the professoriate in, 31, 32, 34, 37, 41, 44, 47, 48, 49; professors trained in, 145, 351; visitors from being steered to Memorial University, 137. See also names of individual countries Faderman, Lillian 333, 337 Falconer, Sir Robert 70, 77 facultés 35 faculty unions. See unions faculty wives. See professors and professoriate, wives of faculty women’s clubs 280–92 Fantham, Annie Porter 256 farmers and farming 228, 237, 355, 356, 362. See also agriculture Farnsworth, Marjorie 284, 287 Federal Bureau of Investigation 87, 93–4 Fédération des écoles normales (FEN) 188–90, 191, 199, 200 Fejer, Karen 344 feminism: Havelock Ellis’s acceptance of, 332; as factor in understanding gender imbalance in Memorial University faculty, 139; faculty wives’ discussions of, 283, 292; faculty wives’ uneasiness with, 287–8; Irene Poelzer and, 225, 226, 227, 230, 232, 235, 236, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242; pressure on
universities from, 50; RCMP interest in, 86; scholarship on, 46, 248, 291. See also women’s studies, women’s movement Fenn, Robert 78, 79 Fenton, P.F. 165 Feuer, Lewis 46 films 237, 239 fine art 276 Fingard, Judith 252, 277–8 First World War 47, 86, 253, 281, 300 Fischer, H.O.L. 358 Fisher, Harold 315–16, 318–20 Fisher, Dr Kenneth 257 Flavelle House, University of Toronto 287 Flin Flon, MB 273 Ford, Anne Rochon 213 Fordham University 218 Forsey, Eugene 64 Forward, Dorothy 333, 344–5 Fox, Sherwood 68 France 35, 185, 198. See also professors and professoriate, in France; universities, in France Franklin, Ursula 261 Fraser, Donald 335 Fraser, Frieda 333, 335–47 Fraser, William Henry 335 Freirian notions 234 French (subject of study) 213, 215, 230, 280, 258 Freud, Sigmund 339–40 Front de Libération du Québec 91 Froude, James 47 Fry Medal 254 Fulton, Margaret 288 Fux, Pepi Carl 305, 310, 319 Galsworthy, John 38
Index Gander, NF 137 Gardiner, Howard 40 gays and lesbians 19, 332–47 gender. See feminism; marriage; women genetics 261 geography: at Bishop’s University, 165, 167, 176, 177; emergence as discipline, 160, 169–71; James Lemon and, 78; Griffith Taylor and, 358 geology: fathers of professors and, 356, 358; at Memorial University, 133; Elwood S. Moore and, 363, 364 geophysics: Lachlan Gilchrist and, 362, 363; Samuel Levine and, 84 George Brown Scholarship 216 German (subject of study) 134, 213 German Democratic Republic 93–4, 95, 98. See also Stasi Germany 47, 124, 358. See also German Democratic Republic; professors and professoriate, in Germany; universities, in Germany Gerrard, Betty 283 Gilchrist, Lachlan 362, 363 Gillett, Margaret 252 Glass, C.L. Ogden 169, 171, 175–6 Glazebrook, George Parkin de Twenebrokes 366 Goggio, Emilio 364–5 Gordon, Wilhemina 335 Gouzenko, Igor 86 Govan, Elizabeth Steel Livingston 333, 345–6 governesses 286 Graden, Gertrude 338, 341 Grand Ecoles 35, 36
423
Greek (subject of study): Sinclair Maclaroy Adams and, 306; at Bishop’s University, 159, 176; sculpture relating to, 307; Frank Underhill and, 367 Grenoble, France 36 Grier, Margaret 334 Groves, G.S. 167 Grube, George M.A. 69, 80 Guelph, ON 68 Guggenheim Fellowship 254 Guinan, Sister St Michael 215–16 Gushue, Raymond 138, 147 Hahn, Freya 287 Haist, R.E. 78 Halifax, NS 65, 110, 135, 207, 210, 219 Hamilton, ON 274, 358 Harbord Collegiate Institute, Toronto 367 Harkness, William John Knox 366 Harris, Debbie Wise 235 Harris, J. Allen 70, 72 Harris, Leslie 145 Harrison, Brian 45 Harvard University 68, 93, 125, 163, 260 Havelock, Eric A. 67, 80 Haver, C.B. 167 Hawthorn, Audrey 277, 278 Hawthorn, Harry 277 Hayden, Michael 76 Hayes, Dr Ronald 256 Hedomadal Board/Council 45 Heilburn, Carolyn 209 Heisenberg, Werner von 47 heterosexuality 339–41, 346. See also marriage Hicks, Henry 65
424
Index
Higgins, Dr Daniel F. 120 higher education. See normal schools; universities Highet, Gilbert 40 Hinz, Elizabeth 227–8 historians: approaches to studying cartoons as forms of art, 300; biographies of, 47–8; Merrill Denison as, 306; in public service in Ottawa, 80; studies of sexual language by, 338, 347; George Wrong as, 311 history (subject of study): at Bishop’s University, 160–1, 166, 176; George Brown and, 363; as element in elite formation, 39; in European universities, 47; at Memorial University, 134; nuns as teachers of, 218; Richard M. Saunders and, 361, 365, 366; transgressions of market rules in, 43; Frank Underhill and, 369; at University of Alberta, 277; at University of Toronto, 286–7; Bertie Wilkinson and, 362; women in, 175, 280 History of Science Society 250 Hitschfeld, W.F. 259 Hoder-Salmon, Marilyn 272 Hodgson, John H. 353 Hoecker-Drysdale, Susan 278 Hogg, Dr Helen Sawyer 258, 277, 278 Hollywood, CA 50 Holmes, Sherlock 4 Holy Cross Hospital 279 Home, Phyllis 175 homemaking 251, 275, 336. See also household science Horton Academy 112, 122
Horvath, Peter 168 household science 133, 252 housing: at Memorial University, 138–9, 149–50; nuns and, 214; Irene Poelzer’s study of, 237; Jane Smith’s experiences with, 273. See also boarding houses; residences Hughes, Everett 278 Hughes, Helen MacGill 278 Humanities Research Council of Canada 14 Humboldt State University 237 Humboldt University 93 Hunt, Lynn 44 Hunter, George 84, 88 Hunter, Norman 4–5 Hutton, Maurice 323 Hyvernat, H. 212 India 146, 261, 363 Infeld, Leopold 84, 88, 94, 98, 364 Innis, Harold Adams 63, 80, 355, 357, 359, 360, 362, 364, 367, 369 Institute of Child Study, University of Toronto 276 Ireland 229; professors hired from, 146–7 Italian (subject of study): William Henry Fraser and, 335; Emilio Goggio and, 364; Gordon Cummings Paterson and, 357, 366; Sister Mary Austin and, 216 Italy 364 Jacob, Margaret 44 Jacobson, Helen 287 Jacoby, Russell 40 Jain, R.S. 164–5 Jamaica 146
Index James, Henry 46 Japan 306 J.C.B. Grant Award 254 Jefferis, Jeffery D. 161, 162, 164, 175, 176 Jeffreys, Charles W. 305, 310, 312 Jesuits 229 Jewett, Pauline 79 Jewitt, A.R. 163 Jews 147. See also anti-Semitism Johnson, Paul 40 Johnston, Dr Rose 259 Jollife, E.B. 68 Jones, Alan W. 162 Jones, Barbara 261 Jones, Robert V. 120 Jordan, Glenn 17 judges 356–7 Judson, T.A. 167 Keeping, Eleanor Silver 256 Keeping, Fred S. 256 Kemp, Stanley H.F. 306 Kennedy, W.P.M. 216 Kepler, Johannes 364 Kerr, W.A.R. 75 Ketchum, John Davidson 357 Keynes, John Maynard 254 Keys, F.W. 323 King, William Lyon Mackenzie 66 King’s College, Cambridge 39 Kingston, ON 148, 212, 275 Kinnear, Mary 252 Kirkconnell, Watson 88, 96 Kissinger, Henry 93 Kitchener-Waterloo, ON 97, 353 Klemperer, Victor 47 Klinck, L.S. 71 Krieger, Cecilia 361 Kwansei Gakun University 306
425
laboratories: at Bishop’s University, 168, 170; development at Oxford, 45; as place of professors’ daily work, 40; as place where professors are happy, 32; as site for academic freedom, 70; women in, 252, 253, 258, 259 Labour Progressive Party 88 Langford, George 361 Laporte, Pierre 91 Latin (subject of study) 159, 176, 212, 367 Laurentian University 96, 150; Faculty Association, 97 Laurier, Sir Wilfrid 65, 360 Laval University 172 law (subject of study) 11, 32, 65, 76, 160, 165, 240 Lawrence, Joan 289 Lawter, Miss 337 lawyers 356 Leacock, Stephen 299–300, 307, 312– 13, 325–6n4 League for Social Reconstruction 14 L’Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal 239 L’Ecole Polytechnique, Paris 358 Lee, Doris 256 Lemon, James 78 Lennoxville, QC 149, 158, 166 Leppert, Richard D. 302 Lepine, Marc 239 LeRoy, Donald J. 353 Levi, Charles Morden 326n10 Levine, Samuel 84, 94, 98 liberal arts: at Acadia University, 118; adaptations in after Second World War, 351; at Bishop’s University, 158, 161, 164, 166, 169, 175, 176; in core curriculum, 13
426
Index
liberal education 159, 166, 174, 177 Liberal Party 65, 66, 69, 70–1, 76, 78, 79, 90, 360 libraries: at Memorial University, 140; at Oxford, 45; at St Michael’s College, 214, 215; student perceptions of professors’, 317 Lin, Hsey-Er 261 Line, William 359 linguistics 133 literature (subject of study) 38, 47, 230, 236 Logan, Harry 355–6 logic (subject of study) 212 London School of Economics 279 London, UK 229 Loretto Abbey, Toronto 212, 229 Loretto Sisters 212, 219, 229, 236 Loudon, Thomas R. 102–3n38 Loudon, William James 358 Lower, A.R.M. 67, 88 Luxton, Meg 273 MacAdam, Rev. M.A. 211 Macao 146 McCarthy, Margaret 207 McCarthyism 87, 89, 90, 93 McClellan, George 90 McConnell, N. 305 McCormmach, Russell 47 McCullough, Lily A. 255 McCurdy, William Jarvis 357 McDermot, T.W.L. 171 MacDonald College 161 McDonald Commission 91 McDonald, J.E.H. 306 McDowell, Edith 279 MacEachen, Allan J. 69 MacEwen, Grant 76–7 McGill University 64, 66, 97, 141,
148, 176, 251, 253, 255, 256, 259; employment of women at, 253, 255, 256, 258–9, 261, 278; professors trained at, 143, 161, 168, 171, 278 McIlwraith, Thomas F. 358, 362, 364 MacInnes, Isabel 282, 283 McKelvie, Stuart J. 168 McKenzie, Arthur Pearson 306 MacKenzie, Michael Alexander 357 Maclellan, Delphine Wallace 259 McMaster University 88, 168, 274–5, 321 Macmillan, Cyrus 66 McNair, John B. 77 McNaught, Kenneth 67 McNeill, K.G. 78 McPherson, Dr Anna 255 Madras, India 146 magazines 302–3 Magee, Brian 46 Major, Beatrice (Mother St Michael Major) 217–18 Manchester, UK 148 Manery, Dr Jeanne 257–8 Manhattan Island 148 Manila, ON 355 Manitoba 275 Marine Science Research Laboratory, Memorial University of Newfoundland 133 Markham High School, ON 367 marriage: 229, 233–4, 249, 251, 252, 259, 271, 273, 278, 291, 337, 363; as barrier to employment of women, 140–1, 149, 249, 251–8, 260. See also wives of professors Marsden, Dr Joan Anderson 258 Marwick, Arthur 46
Index Masters, D.C. 166 mathematics: at Acadia University, 116; at Ashburton Grammar School, 366; Alfred Baker and, 353; Samuel Beatty and, 364; at Bishop’s University, 160; Alfred T. DeLury and, 306, 355; Professor Moriarty and, 4; Florence Quinlan and, 361; Gilbert Robinson and, 358, 367; Arthur F.C. Stevenson and, 357; student societies for, 307; women and, 255, 256, 261 Mavor, James 312, 323 medicine: at Bishop’s University, 165; William Blatz and, 359; Frieda Fraser and, 333, 335, 338, 340; at Memorial University, 131, 134, 147; professors in, 32; and professors’ fathers, 356; in the United States, 11; women and, 240, 250 Memorial University of Newfoundland 10, 131–51; employment of women at, 139–41, 149, 260 Mergler, Donna 250 Messing, Karen 250 metallurgy 363 Methodists 67, 356–7, 363 Métis 236–7 microbiology 336 Miller, Dr Lash 255 ministers 356–7, 363 missionaries 109, 359, 363 Mitchell, Juliet 232 modern languages (course of study) 116, 117–18, 123, 216, 363, 367. See also individual languages Molson, John 163–4 monks 184 Monroe, Hugh 315 Montreal: businessmen in, 164;
427
kidnappings in, 91; 239; normal schools in, 190; politics in, 68; universities in, 66, 97, 148, 161, 192, 226 Montreal High School for Girls 257 Moore, Elwood S. 363, 364 Moraw, Peter 44 Morgan, M.O. 135, 144 Moriarty, Professor 4 Moulin, Léo 44 Mount Allison University 148, 149, 174, 253 Mount Pleasant Training Centre 217 Mount Royal Club 164 Mount St Bernard Academy 207, 211 Mount Saint Vincent University 207 Murphy, Sister Mary Agnes 215 museums 45, 252, 277, 356 music 87, 131, 133, 361 Nabokov, Vladimir 34, 52n7 Nagarajan, Malliga 261 Namenwirth, Mario 250 National Conference of Canadian Universities. See Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada National Federation of Canadian University Students 90 Nazism 47, 358 Neatby, Blair 11 Nelson, William 6 New Brunswick politics in, 65; Theodore Rand and, 109, 119, 122, 125, 149, 174 New Democratic Party 65–6, 79 Newfoundland: ice engineering in, 134; isolation of, 136; social habits in, 132, 146, 147; student enroll-
428
Index
ments in, 143, 150; universities in, 131, 139, 144 Newman, John Henry 158 newspapers 302–3, 313, 321, 361 Newton, Robert 75 New York 257, 313, 335, 337, 341 New York Infirmary for Women and Children 335 normal schools 11, 161, 183–5, 187– 202. See also teacher training Norman, Herbert 90 Norris, Kenneth 68 Nova Scotia 65–6, 67, 109, 122, 135, 150, 174, 207, 235, 357 Nova Scotia Technical College 133 novels 302. See also individual titles nuns: normal schools and, 184, 187, 189, 190, 192, 195, 196; as pioneers in women’s education, 17, 18, 207– 20; Irene Poelzer as, 226, 239 nursing 131, 278–9 oceanography 259 October Crisis 91 Ohio State University 144 old boys’ networks 16, 126, 136 Ontario: Canadianization of higher education in, 16; collegiate institutes in, 365; Irene Poelzer in, 229; politics in, 67, 77; professors born and raised in, 353, 355–6, 363; professors jailed in, 362; RCMP informants in, 96; student enrollment in, 150; teacher education in, 201; universities in, 148, 212, 220, 274. See also individual place names and institutions Order of Canada 254 Oregon 228 Orillia, ON 362
ornithology 358 Ottawa 65, 71, 80, 86, 146, 169, 274. See also House of Commons (Canada) Otterville, ON 364 Owen Sound, ON 364 Oxford University 45, 46, 176, 285, 313–14, 316, 322, 362; professors trained at, 143, 171, 345; women at 272, 285, 345 Ozouf, Jacques 185 Pais, Abraham 47 parasitology 256 Parent Commission 159, 161, 164, 183, 186–8, 191, 196, 197, 199, 200 Pares, Richard 47 Paris 36, 358 Parlee, H.H. 75 Parti Québécois 159, 173 Passeron, Jean-Claude 36 Paton, J.L. 134, 138 Patridge, D.C. 164–5 Patterson, Geneviève Delmas 261 Patterson, Gordon Cummings 357, 366 Pattulo, T.D. 70–2 Pearson, Lester B. 80, 90 Peitchinis, Jacquelyn 278–9, 280, 291 Peitchinis, Stephen 278–9 Pelluet, Dixie 256–7 Pemberton, Gwen 68 Pemberton, R.E.K. 68, 80 Person’s Award 257 Peru 277 Peterborough, ON 150, 353 Phillips, E.L. 235 philosophy: at Acadia University, 116; at Bishop’s University, 160,
Index 161; in European universities, 47; Frieda Fraser and, 339; Greeks and, 307; William Jarvis McCurdy and, 357; at Memorial University, 133; Irene Poelzer and, 227, 228; at St Michael’s College, 213, 214; science and, 249 physical education 142, 144 physics: Frieda Fraser and, 335; Lachlan Gilchrist and, 362; history of, 47; John H. Hodgson and, 353; Leopold Infeld and, 84, 94; Florence Quinlan and, 361; John Satterly and, 366; student societies for, 307; transgression of market rules in, 43; Harry Lambert Welsh and, 355, 364; women and, 250, 255, 256, 257, 261, 286, 344 Pickersgill, J.W. 80 Pitt, David 140 Planck, Max 47 Poelzer, Doris 236–7 Poelzer, Irene (Sister M. Ruth) 17, 225–42 Poelzer, Michael 227–8 poetry 225, 227, 355, 357, 361 Poland 88, 94 police 15, 84–99, 288 police informants 92–8 political economy: of ants, 339; Charles A. Ashley and, 362; at Bishop’s University, 172; Eugene Forsey and, 64; Harold Innis and, 63; Harry Logan and, 355; James Mavor and, 312, 323; rise of in Canadian universities, 12; student societies for, 307; in the university, 46, 158, 178; women and, 255 political science: at Bishop’s University, 160, 167, 169, 170, 171–3, 174,
429
176, 177; Howard Bowen and Jack Schuster’s work in 43; dominance in higher education studies, 44; Robert Fenn and, 78; Pauline Jewitt and, 79; public service in Ottawa and, 80; RCMP police informants and, 95; Norma McLeod Rogers and, 66; Irene Spry and, 359; women and, 256 political studies 167, 172 Porter, John 63, 80 Port Hope, ON 276, 365 Prang, Margaret 287 Prentice, Alison 19–20 Presbyterians 357, 360 priests 184, 190, 192, 208, 213, 227, 241 Prince, Ewart A. 171 privacy legislation 43, 229 Proctor, Mortimer 46 professors and professoriate: autobiographies of, 184–6, 195–200, 215– 16, 279–80; benefit packages for, 136; in British fiction, 4, 46; collective biography of, 16, 31, 33–50, 131, 192–5, 250–2, 352–69; deficiencies in Canadian history of, 6, 241; in France, 35–7, 38, 43; in Germany, 35–6, 43; hiring and dismissal of, 9, 10, 31, 40, 87, 107–27, 131–51, 164, 168, 172, 211, 214, 215, 231, 248–9, 252, 256, 311, 369; idea of, 8, 31; international perspectives on, 11–12, 31; job market, 9, 43, 48, 134; police informants, 15, 92–8; police scrutiny of, 15, 84–99; in politics, 15, 38, 49, 63–80, 84, 93, 135, 173, 177, 227, 257, 351, 355; professionalization of, 11–12, 41–3, 44, 96, 122–4, 142–6, 158, 184, 194,
430
Index
210, 249, 273, 284; refugees, 351; retention of, 134, 168; role in Canada, 3, 63–80; role on campus, 8, 12, 177, 281, 282, 301, 306, 314, 316; role in society, 6, 12–13, 14, 20–1, 41, 272, 301, 307–8, 313, 317; social status of, 33, 34–5, 44, 64, 84, 95, 284–5, 307, 352; stereotypes of, 4–6, 13, 40, 299–325; student perceptions of, 3, 13, 233, 301, 304, 307–12, 313–24; in the United Kingdom, 37–8, 43, 285; in the United States, 42–3, 87; wives of, 19–20, 134, 140–1, 162, 271–92; women in, 15–19, 207–20, 248–61; work and working conditions of, 7–9, 12, 19–20, 38, 40, 43, 46, 47, 48, 49, 64, 85, 119, 135, 159, 173, 192, 210, 214, 217, 235, 238, 251, 252–5, 277, 278, 291, 300, 301, 313, 315, 316. See also women professors; names of individual professors and universities Progressive Party 68 Protestant School Board 68 Protestants: 229. See also Anglicans; Congregational Church of Canada; Methodists; Presbyterians; United Church of Canada provincial grants 65, 69, 108 Pryce, Frieda 288 psychiatry 133 psycho-history 44 psychology: at Bishop’s University, 160, 165, 167–9, 170, 172, 177; William Blatz and, 358–9; John Davidson Ketchum and, 357; William Line and, 359; Arthur Pearson McKenzie and, 306; at Memorial University, 133; at St
Michael’s College, 212; women and, 250 public welfare (subject of study) 133 Quebec: application of Jacques Ouzouf’s theories to, 185; educational policy in, 166, 197, 198; nationalism in, 86, 91, 97, 159, 174, 198; normal schools in, 184, 187; politics in, 158, 159, 168, 171, 174, 183–4; Rhodes scholars from, 169; secularization of, 198; sociological study of, 173; teacher education in, 161, 162, 183, 201; tumultuous 1960s and, 11; universities in, 10, 149, 176, 183, 192, 207; university relations with business in, 163. See also Bill 101; Front de Libération du Québec; Parent Commission; Quiet Revolution Quebec City 189, 190, 192 Queen’s Park (Toronto) 215, 303 Queen’s University 65, 66, 80, 88, 148, 149, 168, 212, 251, 335 Quiet Revolution 183–4, 195, 196, 200 Quine, Willard 46 Quinlan, Florence 361 Rand, Dr Theodore Harding 107, 109, 111, 113–16, 118–27 Rankin, Rev. R.R. 218 Rapley, Elizabeth 229 Rashdall, Hastings 44 Reed, George 367 Regina Collegiate 228 Regnier, Robert 234 Reid, J.H. Stewart 65 Reid, John 148 Reid, R.G. 74
Index religion: and Acadia University, 108– 27; and Bishop’s University, 159; factor in relationship between Frieda Fraser and Edith Williams, 336; family discussions of as preparation for professors, 360; normal schools and, 188, 190; place in intellectual culture, 9; Irene Poelzer and, 234, 241; Quiet Revolution and, 184; role in Canadian society, 12. See also ministers; missionaries; monks; nuns; priests; religious studies; individual religious denominations religious studies 133, 212, 213 research. See sciences, research in; professors and professoriate, work and working conditions of residences 214, 220, 282, 314. See also boarding houses ‘Responsibilities Program’ 87 Rhodes Scholarships 169, 171 Ringer, Fritz 35, 38–9, 44, 46, 50 Robertson, Dr H.R. 259 Robinson, Gilbert De Beauregard 358, 367 Robinson, Jo 281, 283, 288 Rockefeller, John D. 43 Rogers, Norman McLeod 66 Roman Catholics 18, 69, 197–8, 207– 20, 226, 228, 229, 240. See also nuns; priests; Second Vatican Council; specific religious orders Rome 363 Rooke, Patricia 334 Roosevelt, Theodore 132 Roper, Elmer 73 Ross, W. Gillies 169 Rossiter, Margaret 248, 251 Rotenberg, Dr Mattie Levi 257
431
Rowan, Dr William 250 Rowbotham, Sheila 232 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) 84–99, 136; Human Resources Index of, 93 Royal Commission on Security 90 Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada 230 Royal Military College 169 Royal Ontario Museum 356 Royal Society of Canada 254, 258, 259, 344, 362 Russell, Bertrand 37, 46, 52n7 Russell, John 305 Russia 31. See also Soviet Union Rustead, Ian 134, 136, 147 Ryerson, Egerton 111 Sackville, NB 149 St Andrews, NB 259 St Andrew’s College 367 St Catharines, ON 150, 365, 366 St Francis Xavier University 66, 69, 79, 150, 210, 211 St John’s, NF cosmopolitanism of, 148; descriptions of, 137; remoteness of, 134; students in, 146; suburbs of, 144; urban development of, 139; universities in, 131, 132 St Joseph’s College, Toronto 213, 215, 216, 217 St Laurent, Louis 76 St Michael’s College, University of Toronto 211–14, 215, 216 St Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan 240 Sampath, Hugh 142 Saskatchewan: George Brown and, 363; Irene Poelzer and, 228, 229,
432
Index
236, 237; teacher education in, 201; women’s education and, 237, 238 Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation 235 Saskatchewan Women’s Agricultural Network 238 Saskatoon 235 Satterly, John 366 Saunders, Edward M. 113, 117, 118 Saunders, Richard M. 361, 365, 366 Sawyer, A.W. 114, 119, 120 Scarfe, Janet 11 Scharf, Murray 236, 241 Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. 48 Schnell, Rodolph 334 scholarships 281. See also specific scholarship names school teaching 32, 109, 116, 117, 251, 254, 255, 257, 279, 319–20, 356, 358, 359; in France, 185. See also education; normal schools; teacher training school trustees 356, 358 Schrecker, Ellen 87 Schuster, Jack 42–3 Schrödinger, Erwin 47 Sciama, Lydia 272–3 sciences: at Acadia University, 118, 123; Clarence Augustus Chant and, 364; Frieda Fraser and, 336, 338. 339, 341, 342, 344; history of, 249–50; at Memorial University, 134; methodological rigour of, 13; at Oxford, 45; research in, 35–6, 37; rise of in universities, 12; John Satterly and, 366; socialists in 37; Frank Underhill and, 267; women in, 18–19, 248–61, 333, 336–7. See also individual scientific subjects and scientists
Second Vatican Council 207, 219, 230, 236 Second World War 9, 12, 13, 36, 47, 84, 94, 135, 139, 175, 186, 228, 256, 272, 274, 278, 281, 282, 301, 333, 336, 351, 369; improved job opportunities for women in, 253, 257, 258, 260 secretaries 254, 272, 273, 287 secularization 9, 12 Sedley, SK 229 Semple, George 305 Seoul, South Korea 146 sexual harassment 239 Shaw, James Eustache 3, 63 Shawinigan, QC 189 Sheard, Joseph Louis 306, 307 Sheinin, Rose 250 Sherbrooke, QC 190, 192 Sholokhov, Mikhail 31 Shrewsbury Public School, UK 39 Siddiqui, F.A. 167 Simon Fraser University 97, 172, 259 Sir George Williams University 66, 68, 97, 258, 261 Sisters for Christian Community 236 Sisters of Charity 210, 219 Sisters of St Joseph 209, 211–12, 214, 215, 216–17, 218, 219 Sisters of St Martha 210 Skelton, O.D. 65 Skorapa, Olga 306 Smith, David D. 168 Smith, Dorothy 273, 285 Smith, Helen 281, 288 Smith, Jane 274–6, 280, 291 Smith, Sidney E. 78 Snow, C.P. 47
Index Snowman, Daniel 47 socialists 86 social sciences: at Bishop’s University, 159–78; feminist scholarship in, 232; Harold Innis and, 63; at Oxford, 45; rise of in universities, 12; women and, 250. See also specific subject names social service 210–14 social welfare 142 social work: absence at Bishop’s University, 160; Harry M. Cassidy and, 78; Elizabeth Govan and, 345; at Memorial University, 131, 133, 135; professors of 32 sociology: at Bishop’s University, 165, 167, 170, 172, 173–4, 175, 176, 177; Howard Bowen and Jack Schuster’s work in, 43; S.D. Clark and, 355, 362; dominance in higher education studies, 44; emergence as discipline, 38, 133, 160, 173–4; Allen J. MacEachen and, 69; Dolores Poelzer and, 237; at University of Windsor, 97; Kenneth Walker and, 92; women and, 250, 256, 260, 278 Soffer, Reba N. 39 Sorbonne 35 South Africa 147 Soviet Union 86, 88 Spanish (subject of study) 335, 357, 366 Spanish Netherlands 229 Spry, Irene Biss 359, 363 Standing, Lionel J. 168 Stanley, Carleton 256 Stasi (German security body) 93, 103n42 Stevenson, Arthur F.C. 357
433
Stewart, Lee 282 Stoke-on-Trent, UK 366 Stone, Lawrence 20 Strathroy Collegiate (Ontario) 366 Stray, Christopher 39, 50 student history 41, 46 student life 44, 46, 304, 306–307, 313, 319, 321 student movement/power 10, 86, 91, 92, 97, 158, 171, 174, 176, 300 student newspapers 117, 300, 301, 302, 304, 313, 318 student representation 176 students: 13, 16, 41, 45, 46, 48, 63, 67, 75, 88, 108, 115, 125, 143, 146, 148, 162, 168, 172, 173, 175, 185, 188, 211, 213, 214, 215, 217–18, 232–3, 234, 236, 238, 280, 281, 282, 299– 300, 301, 302, 303, 311, 315, 325; in Britain, 39; as cartoonists, 305–6; enrollment, 112, 132, 143, 159, 174, 231; foreign, 282; participation in university governance, 171–2; as police informants, 92, 94; professors perceptions of 317–21; selfrepresentation of, 303–5; women as, 16, 135, 213–14, 231, 281–2, 286–8 Students Wives’ Club, University of British Columbia 282 student welfare 281–3 student yearbooks 213, 300–14. See also Torontonensis Sudbury, ON 96, 150 Sunley, Carole 239, 240 Sydney, Australia 345, 368 Tamblyn, W. 218 Tasmania 148 Taylor, A.J.P. 48
434
Index
Taylor, Bruce 65 Taylor, Griffith 358, 361, 363, 368 Taylor, Stephen 136 teacher training: 11, 115–17, 131, 133, 143, 161–2, 183–202, 225–6, 367. See also didactics; education; normal schools; Parent Commission teaching: See education; normal schools; professors and professoriate, work and working conditions of; teacher training Thaler, R.P. 166 Thatcherism 38 Third World 216 Thompson, Sister St Leonard 211 Thomson, Tom 306 Timlin, Dr Mabel 254, 255 Tolkein, Edith 285 Tolkein, J.R.R. 285 Toole, Frank 257 Toole, Norah 257 Toronto: Baptist education in, 125; birthplace of Frieda Fraser and Edith Williams, 335; Helen Bott and Nellie Chant’s friendship in, 284; businessmen in, 357; commercial artists in, 306; contraceptive clinics in, 338; experience of women in, 280; humorous newspapers in, 305; faculty wives’ clubs in, 288; politics in, 66, 69, 79; religious orders in, 214; schools in, 171, 229; Jane Smith in, 276; student traditions in, 323 Toronto Baptist College 127 Toronto City Council 69 Torontonensis 13, 300, 301–13, 317– 20, 324–5, 351 Toulouse, France 36 Toynbee family 37
Tremblay Commission 186 Trent University 150 Trevelyan family 37 Trinidad 143 Trinity College, Toronto 66, 69, 306, 357 Trinity College, Washington 212 Trinity College School, Port Hope, ON 365 Trois-Rivières, QC 189 Trudeau, Pierre 91 Trueman, A.W. 77 Truro, NS 122 tuberculosis 336 Tuck, Raphael 76 Underhill, Frank 14, 73, 74, 77, 360, 361, 367, 369 Unionist Party 66 unions 86, 355; faculty unions, 40, 120, 158, 162, 167, 173–4, 176, 177 United Church of Canada 67, 356 United College, Winnipeg 67, 141 United Farmers of Alberta 74 United Kingdom 33, 37, 39, 50, 77–8, 86, 143, 187, 249, 335, 336, 357; professors hired from, 109, 131, 136, 137, 146; professors trained at, 145, 217, 366. See also professors and professoriate, in the United Kingdom; universities, in the United Kingdom United States: 11, 32, 44, 77, 84, 89, 90, 92, 110, 135, 143, 158, 187, 198, 209, 212, 228, 236, 248, 249, 250, 251, 272, 321, 333, 334, 364; police spying in, 85–7, 93–4, 98; professors hired from, 109, 131, 136, 146, 256, 259; professors trained in, 145, 254, 335. See also professors
Index and professoriate, in the United States; universities, in the United States Université de Moncton 98 Université de Montréal 189 Université du Québec 189, 191, 195, 197 Université du Québec à TroisRivières 189 Université de Sherbrooke 176 universities: alumni, 304, 358; Americanization of, 131, 146; buildings, 45, 108, 170, 175, 212, 215, 230, 281, 287, 288–9, 305, 323; democracy in, 9, 10, 158, 159, 171, 174, 177, 234, 322; entertaining at, 172, 175, 271, 272, 275–6, 279, 280, 281–92, 322–3; expansion in Newfoundland, 131–2; financing of, 36, 41, 64–5, 67, 69, 75, 108, 111, 112, 125, 214, 235; in France, 35–6, 38, 44, 47; in Germany, 35–6, 47, 93; governance of, 32, 40, 44, 46, 64–80, 87, 91, 93, 108–27, 134, 140, 158, 160, 177, 281, 282, 300, 317, 322; hierarchical structures of, 8–9, 120, 158, 174, 177, 252, 272, 291; history in Canada, ix, 7, 9–12, 20, 148, 301, 352; international history of, 12, 34, 41, 44; lectures at, 313– 21; police spying at, 88–91; popular views of, 115, 117, 321; role in society 5, 7, 20, 314–15, 352; Roman Catholics and, 211–14; teacher training in, 115–17, 183, 186–8, 190–1, 193–4, 196–201, 226, 230; in the United Kingdom, 39, 45, 145, 272–3, 315, 321; in the United States, 41–3, 44, 145, 209, 321–3, 334; vocational training in,
435
115–17, 118, 121, 164, 165, 178, 183, 186–8, 189, 191, 196–201. See also professors and professoriate; students; specific subjects of study; specific institution names University Arts Women’s Club, Toronto 280, 283, 288 University College, Toronto 306, 323, 358 University College Women’s Club, Toronto 280, 283 University of Alberta 79, 84, 88, 97, 250, 256, 276–7; policies on professors running for political office at 69, 72–6 University of Berlin 365 University of British Columbia 79– 80, 97, 226, 281–3, 285–9, 290, 292, 346; employment of women at, 141, 255, 256, 257, 277; policies on professors running for political office at, 69, 70–2 University of Calgary 97, 279 University of Chicago 42, 278, 279, 345 University of Florida 144 University of Illinois 87 University of Leyden 168 University of Liverpool 217 University of London 17, 279 University of Manchester 168, 358 University of Manitoba 79, 255, 276; policies on professors running for political office at, 69, 76 University of Michigan 42 University of New Brunswick 79, 138, 251, 252, 257; policies on professors running for political office at, 69, 77 University of Oregon 230
436
Index
University of Philadelphia 335 University of Prince Edward Island 261 University of Rochester 257 University of Saskatchewan 79, 97, 225, 226, 228, 230, 240, 254, 261, 283; policies on professors running for political office at, 69–70, 76 University of Seattle 230 University of Sydney 345 University of Toronto 3, 13, 14, 16, 63, 69, 70, 73, 84, 88, 92, 94, 141, 226, 251, 254, 255, 256, 272, 273, 276, 277, 280, 281, 286, 287, 300, 303, 306, 311, 312, 318, 321–3, 333, 335, 336, 344, 351–2, 353, 358, 364, 369; employment of women at, 253, 255, 256, 257–8, 261, 271, 272, 277, 280, 333, 335–6, 337, 344, 347; policies on professors running for political office at, 70, 77–9; professors trained at, 161, 167, 171, 215, 216, 254, 257, 274, 345–6, 357, 358, 367; Roman Catholic colleges at, 211–13, 220; student criticism of, 313–15. See also St Michael’s College; Trinity College; University College; Victoria College University of Toronto Schools 365 University of Victoria 280–2, 289–90, 292 University of Washington 254 University of Waterloo 150 University of Western Ontario 65, 94, 163–4, 171, 218, 220; employment of women, 141, 254, 278–9; policies on professors running for political office at, 66, 68 University of Windsor 97
University of Winnipeg 67 University Settlement, Toronto 276 Upper Canada College 171, 365, 366 Ursulines of the Chatham Union 214, 215, 217, 219, 220 Urwick, Edward Johns 357 Vancouver: George Brown and, 363; faculty wives’ clubs in, 282; politics in, 70, 71; universities in, 97 Van Kirk, Sylvia 273, 277 Varsity 306, 313, 316–17, 318, 322, 323 Vassar College 323 Vatican II. See Second Vatican Council Victoria College, Toronto 3, 306, 318, 357, 366; policies on professors running for political office at, 66, 67–8 Vietnam 95 Waite, Peter B. 65, 148 Walker, Sir Edmund 358 Walker, Edmund Murton 358 Walker, Kenneth 92 Wallace, Rev. Oates C.S. 321 Wallace, R.C. 72–4 Ward, Mary 229 Ware, Robert 97 Warkentin, Germaine 280 Warnock, Mary Maud McKay (Sister Austin) 216–17 Washington, DC 212 Watney, Gertrude Smith 257 Wearing, Joseph 171 Weaver, F.S. 158 Webber, Marlene 148 Weber, Max 44
Index Weedon, Chris 17 Weil, Simone 37 Weir, George M. 70–2 Weldon, Richard 65, 66 Welfare Council, Toronto 357 Welsh, Harry Lambert 355, 362–3, 364 Welton, Daniel 125 Werskey, Gary 37 Wesley College, Winnipeg 66, 67, 80 Whalen, Mary (Sister Perpetua) 215 Whidden, Howard P. 66 White, Fred 74 Whitton, Charlotte 334–5 Wilkinson, Bertie 362 Williams, Edith Bickerton (Bud) 333, 335–47 Winnipeg, MB 66, 67 Witwatersrand 148 wives of professors. See professors and professoriate, wives of Wolfville, NS 66, 122 women: at Acadia University, 108, 116; admission to university, 113, 213; balancing work and family, 280; at Bishop’s University, 163; as education students, 232; Havelock Ellis on, 332; employment of, 272; enrollment levels 228, 231; faculty wives advocacy for, 291; feminist scholarship on, 46; at Memorial University, 135; as mothers of professors, 358; at Oxford, 45; in normal schools 188, 191, 195, 200; in nursing, 279; Irene Poelzer and, 225, 229, 235, 236, 237, 238, 240; political activism of, 351; as students, 281; at the University of Toronto, 314, 322–3. See also coeducation; feminism; gays and
437
lesbians; marriage; professors and professoriate, wives of; women professors; women’s movement; women’s studies women professors: at Bishop’s University, 175; in Canadian Universities, 64, 353, 369; historical scholarship on, 15–19, 37–8, 50; lesbianism and, 332–47; at Memorial University, 139, 140–1, 149; at Oxford, 45, 46; Irene Poelzer as, 225, 231, 232, 242; in politics, 67; relations with faculty wives, 283, 284, 287, 290; in science, 248–61; in the United States, 42; nuns as, 207–20 women religious. See nuns Women’s Catholic University 212 Women’s Educational Summer Institute 237–8 women’s movement 230, 332 women’s studies 226, 231–3, 237, 238, 240, 248, 260, 280 Wood, Louis A. 68 Woodstock Collegiate, ON 367 Woolf, Virginia 46 Wright, J. Gertrude 255 Wrong, George 286, 311–12, 362 Yale University 93, 125, 277, 321–2 York, UK 229 York University, Toronto 79, 156– 7n61 Young, Reynold K. 355, 364 Zahn, Helen 335 zoology at the University of Alberta, 97; women and, 250, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259