Literary superstars Margaret Atwood and Dennis Lee. Hostage-freeing hero/US ambassador Ken Taylor and movie star Donald Sutherland. Former Ontario premier Bill Davis and Chief Justice of Ontario Roy McMurtry. Like the former school buddies profiled here, they came to U of T and met their match. They compelled each other to reach higher and achieve more. Somewhere, rivalry gave way to admiration, and they bonded. And they still do lunch. Hey, isn’t that what famous friends are for? Actually, that and much more.

The friendships the following luminaries forged at U of T played a role in their success, but mutual success is just one small reason why they stay connected.

Karen Pitre and Kay Worthington at the Hanlan Boat Club

Karen (Wright) Pitre (BASc 1983), executive vice-president of Toronto’s recent 2008 Olympic bid committee, remembers the house, a dilapidated nightmare that later became home to their group of rowing friends, dubbed the Major Street Gang.

The tough times were the best of times for the two friends, who became close while rowing for U of T’s team in 1979, its third year of existence. They struggled with the university and the men’s team for boats, funding and respect. They also juggled intense schedules. Worthington was training for the national team while studying international relations. Pitre participated in two varsity sports – rowing and ice hockey – while studying chemical engineering. “The very best friendships are forged from adversity,” says Worthington.

After university, it was a challenge to stay connected as Worthington focused on rowing, going to three Olympics. She came up empty-handed before finally striking gold twice in Barcelona in 1992. After that, she became a trader in Manhattan and married Mike Teti, the head coach of the U.S. men’s Olympic rowing team. Pitre married Mike Pitre (BASc 1982), earned a law degree, had three children and became a political strategist. She has recently been working as a consultant with the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women in Sports. But the two still get together at annual Christmas reunions with the Major Street Gang, and athletics remain their touchstone of connection and understanding.

Watching Worthington win gold in the women’s fours and eights was “hugely emotional,” says Pitre. “We were a wreck, watching it on TV. One thing you know from having lived and trained with someone is how hard they work, what they sacrificed.”

In turn, Worthington has a good idea what Pitre went through when Toronto’s Olympic bid failed in the summer of 2001. ” I know she was disappointed, but Karen doesn’t talk about stuff like that. She just picks herself up and moves on to the next project. She does what she does because she believes in it strongly.”

“When we started, we knew China had the edge [in getting the Olympics],” says Pitre. “We said there has to be a reason in and of itself for the bid. For me, that was waking Toronto up to its 1,000 acres of derelict waterfront.” Pitre is now part of a team that manages Toronto’s new waterfront redevelopment corporation.

“In sports, you learn how to face defeat,” she says. “That’s why sports are such a lesson in life.”

Fraser Mustard and John Evans at Varsity Stadium

While playing football at U of T, Evans suffered a broken jaw in a game against the University of Western Ontario in London. “He played left tackle and I played right, but he was an All-Canadian,” says Evans. “I always knew that they went after me because they thought I was Fraser Mustard.”

During football road trips by train, the two locked themselves in the women’s washroom in the team’s car – to study. “Misery loves company,” says Evans. “We were medical students playing football and we had an enormous amount of work to keep up with.”

“We were both dumb linemen with a vision,” jokes Evans, “to become quarterbacks.”

In the mid-1960s, Mustard helped Evans as he founded a medical school at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., with a radically new approach to medical education that focused on problem-based learning. Evans was its first dean; Mustard succeeded him when Evans became president of the University of Toronto in 1972.

Since university, the two friends have moved in and out of each other’s careers, serving as collaborators, supporters, joint venturers, cheerleaders and advisers. In their first posting at Sunnybrook hospital in Toronto, Evans took over Mustard’s patient-care duties to allow his friend to do groundbreaking research on the function of platelets in arteriosclerosis and heart disease.

Mustard founded two unique Canadian institutions: the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIAR), which raises the profile of, and funding for, researchers working in diverse fields, and the Founders’ Network, which links some 1,000 supporters with the goal of applying the institute’s research.

Evans, of course, offered a great deal of support to both institutions. “When you’re involved with someone from an early period of life, with the same values and commitment,” says Mustard, “there’s a sense that you can raise a question, and the discussion or advice will be very much on target and a vast improvement on what your own thoughts were. And you can move the agenda forward without getting in each other’s way.”

From their UTS days, Mustard says, both shared the same commitment to social equality and in working to achieve it. Evans says they’re also risk takers – constantly reinventing their careers.

Still, it took more than such commonalities for this remarkable friendship to flourish, says Evans. “At university, you have an opportunity to build a friendship that you don’t outgrow as you do at earlier levels.. But friendships require an effort to keep in touch and to share experiences. I think many of us haven’t done that very well.”

Paul Jones and Rona Maynard in the Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse at UC

“My first lines were, ‘I’m in mourning for my life. I am unhappy,’” says Maynard.

“I thought they had pretty well typecast Rona, and I wasn’t terribly interested in her,” says Jones.

“I didn’t take much notice of him one way or another,” says Maynard. “I had sworn off men at that stage, really as a consequence of being in mourning for my life.”

A cast party at Maynard’s campus co-op changed the fate of the two English majors. “I still wasn’t interested in him,” says Maynard, “but he showed up at my door the next evening. He later told me the reason he set his sights on me was that he and I were the most intelligent people in the room.. I thought he was a person of strong character, completely trustworthy and principled. I had never dated anyone who was an intellectual match for me. I needed a sparring partner, I guess, and hadn’t found one.”

The couple appeared in another show, Sartre’s No Exit, with Arlene Perly (BA 1971 UC, MA 1972), who later married Bob Rae. Maynard and Jones married in October 1970 on Maynard’s 21st birthday. They had a son, Ben, while both were in fourth year.

While at U of T, Maynard faced her parents’ divorce. Her mother, Fredelle, had established a profile as a feminist magazine journalist, and her father, Max, as a professor and painter. Her sister, Joyce, later became famous for penning an autobiography of her affair with writer J.D. Salinger.

Jones, it seems, struck the right note of comic relief and dependability for the intense Maynard. “I think I brought to her a basically benign view of the world: that the world is what it is and we should be serene about it.”

Their 30-year relationship has seen Maynard and Jones rise to the helms of two of the largest and most successful magazines in Canadian publishing. As a result of their relationship, both say they have a larger and deeper understanding of the magazine business – Maynard of the business side, and Jones of the editorial side.

The couple have taken great pains to avoid leveraging their connection into power or publicity. Indeed, in an industry as incestuous as publishing, it’s remarkable that there have been next to no magazine articles about their union. The one time they found themselves working together, at Maclean’s, where Jones had been posted and Maynard already worked, Maynard quit. Though the two work for the same company, Rogers Communications, they avoid sitting on committees together whenever possible, and Jones says they have never “done lunch.”

“People think that he and I are a little cabal, and we’re not,” says Maynard. “I have a great deal of respect for his independence, and it is returned to me.”

Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae in the Students’ Administrative Council office, housed in the historical Stewart Observatory

Thanks to a friendship between their diplomat fathers, George Ignatieff (BA 1936 Trinity) and Saul Rae (BA 1936 UC), the two men knew of each other before they met as intellectual rivals at U of T and sparring partners on the Hart House debating floor. “Our fathers were friends and rivals, too,” says Ignatieff, “so our friendship feels like a tribal friendship, between families.”

On campus, the younger Rae (BA 1969 UC, LLB 1977, LLD Hon. 1999) and Ignatieff vied for the spotlight as student activists, Varsity writers and political thinkers, and in the process became close friends, sharing an apartment on Bloor Street in their fourth year. “It was a lively place,” says Rae. “We had a lot of friends over. The best friends I have, for the most part, are from that time, and they influenced me profoundly. Michael’s skepticism about big political theories, along with a lot of other people’s skepticism, affected my view of social democracy and perhaps tempered some of my enthusiasms in a helpful way.”

“He really was the most clever guy I knew in my undergraduate years,” says Ignatieff. “I always feel quite tongue-tied in his presence because he’s so verbally acute, quick and funny.”

But while Rae, the social democrat, opted for politics, Ignatieff, the liberal, carved out a career as an academic, writer and political commentator. “I’m the thinker, and he’s the doer,” says Ignatieff. “The doer always knows more about what’s possible politically. If he had gone into the Liberal party, there’s no limit to what he could have done. That he went into the NDP put a ceiling on how far he could go. He taught me a lot about conviction and paying the price of conviction.”

Since university, the two have never lived in the same country at the same time, yet they have managed to sustain their connection for more than 30 years with phone calls, family vacations and passing-through-town dinners. “When you’re in that position [as premier], it’s hard to have friendships,” says Ignatieff. “I think he liked the fact that I was in London [England] and not in the loop, though our friendship is not confessional. Bob is not a confessional guy.”

“When I was premier, he’d visit and we’d go out for dinner,” says Rae. “I was able to put what I was going through into a broader context.. It allows you to see things differently, to put the successes and failures into a context that makes them both more bearable.. There are friends who know you behind the image.that’s helpful. They value other aspects of you.”

“That competitive thing is probably sublimated somewhere,” Rae admits, “but we’ve never let it get in the way of our friendship..”

“He went into politics, and I went into writing,” says Ignatieff. “‘He knew me when’ is the rationale for our friendship, the emotional continuity.. It’s about a good joke that starts when you’re 18 and is still going at 55.”

Anthony Burton, Doug Cooper (seated) and Atom Egoyan in a residence room in Angel’s Roost at Trinity College

Some of them came to university with artistic ambitions in check, determined, as Burton jokes, to be “stinking-rich lawyers.” Others came, as Egoyan recalls, to be “a diplomat, witty and well-read, who maybe shoots films on the side while solving crises in exotic locales.” Instead, a number of them found, in the drama society, in the literary and athletic societies and through long, rambling conversations, the passion to fully explore what moved them.

“There’s a pretentiousness at Trinity that you don’t find anywhere else,” says Cooper. “But pretence is the first stage of ambition. I think that you have to be pretentious in order to send an image of what it is you intend to become. If you’re lucky, then you grow into that image.

“Atom and I were both hilariously pretentious. We both wore ties,” continues Cooper. “Of all my friends, he was the only one who would kiss you when he saw you, which, me being a WASPy Jew from Rosedale, always made me kind of nervous, although it was really impressive.”

Burton and Cooper were assigned rooms across from each other in their first year, and within two hours, both asked the dean to be moved. Says Burton of Cooper: “He thought I was the model for starchy WASPs.” Says Cooper of Burton: “He saw me as a wild thing who’d just crawled out of the swamp.”

“Actually, I saw him as an anarchist and drug addict,” says Burton. “Then I discovered a sensitive writer and philosopher with a wicked sense of humour.” The next year they asked to room across from each other. “He didn’t exactly convert me,” says Cooper, “but he grounded me morally in ways that might not otherwise have happened.”

Egoyan and Cooper bonded as outsiders, exploring, respectively, their Armenian and Jewish heritages. They became close friends and rival dramatists, staging their productions at the George Ignatieff Theatre. “We’re both really ambitious and driven,” says Egoyan, “and we’re both on a roller coaster. We get really excited about ideas, and also weighed down. We’re able to support each other through that. We know the ride.”

Cooper, who, in his own words, lived “a romantic cliché writing novels and plays in New York,” now writes novels and plays in Montreal. Burton, who presides over a diocese in northern Saskatchewan, still delights in the connection that the three men formed at U of T: “If your friends are substantial people, you probably learn more from them than you do in class.”

Says Cooper: “I can’t imagine that things would have gone the way they have if I had not met these people.”

The Young Explorers Prize was conceived to mark the 20th anniversary of the institute, which has been described as Canada’s “university without walls.” Birgeneau himself is a member of the institute, as are many other distinguished scientists, both in Canada and elsewhere. According to institute president Chaviva Hosek, the idea was to recognize young Canadian researchers – 40 and under when the competition started – who have already made significant contributions to their fields. The selection was done by a panel of judges, three in the United States and three in Great Britain, who had no connection to the institute, she says.

And why did U of T outstrip the rest? “I don’t have an explanation for you,” says Hosek. For his part, Birgeneau notes that about a third of all Canadian scientists who have been elected to the prestigious Royal Society of London are at U of T. Such an election usually comes at the end of a long and distinguished career. “And we have a little more than one-third of these very bright young people, so I think we’re covering the entire spectrum,” says Birgeneau. The Young Explorers Prize “shows that they are among the elite of young scientists in Canada.”

Molly Shoichet

Chemistry professor Molly Shoichet grew up, she says, “in an environment where I was encouraged to dream and reach for the stars.” These days, she has one dream in particular: she wants to find a cure for the paralysis caused by spinal cord injuries. The problem is difficult because the spinal cord is a complex structure, and its biology is not well understood. Shoichet is trying to combine elements of biology, chemistry and engineering – an approach called tissue engineering – to find ways of promoting regeneration after injury. She holds a Canada Research Chair in tissue engineering and was one of Report on Business Magazine’s Top 40 Under 40 this year.

Ian Manners

In the steamy heat of an early July morning, Ian Manners is trying to rearrange a lunch location for his chemistry research group. It’s no easy task at short notice – there are about 30 people in the group, including students and post-docs. “We make things,” says Manners, “and that always tends to be rather student-intensive.” On this day, Manners is hoping to get his people together to celebrate his CIAR Young Explorers Prize, as well as another recent award. No one really wants to brave the 35-degree heat under the restaurant’s patio awning, but other options are difficult to find for such a large group.

At 41, with a shock of brown hair and a London accent that’s “not really” Cockney, Manners leads a group that is leading-edge in a new field: inorganic polymers. Polymers are long-chain molecules, made up of smaller sub-molecules that are all the same. Think of Tinker Toys, with their round wooden blocks that can be joined in a never-ending series. Organic polymers – the kind nature has been making forever and humans have been making for the past 80 years – have identical sub-molecules, all based on carbon. Proteins, starches, even today’s superstar molecule, DNA, are all organic polymers.

But Manners wants to make polymers with other elements, such as iron, for instance, or boron. Such materials would have novel and perhaps very useful properties – the ability to change their shape under the stimulus of an electric current, for example, or to react with light to produce a desired effect. In fact, Manners is working with a company in Georgetown, Ont., to commercialize a metal-containing polymer that can be used to sense the presence of oxygen in groundwater, and thus measure its environmental health.

Unfortunately, while the idea is “theoretically simple,” Manners says, it’s difficult in practice. Manners and his colleagues have to find new ways of putting molecules together, because the tricks used by the organic chemists don’t translate very well into the inorganic realm. “Our group spends a lot of time and effort trying to solve these synthesis problems,” he says. He picks up a small jar containing fragments of an orange material that looks rather like slightly off-colour cornflakes. The orange stuff, he says, is an iron-based polymer that is resistant to radiation; it might one day be used to make radiation-resistant coatings.

But while the field is only at its beginning, inorganic polymers will probably never take the world by storm as their organic cousins did, says Manners. “The consequences [of humans making organic polymers] are all around us.” But inorganic polymers are likely to be used in specialist instruments – such as environmental sensors – rather than in daily life. “They’re never going to be used for coffee cups or plastic bags,” he says.

Daniel Lidar
What numbers multiply together to give 15? Got them? Now what about 151,515,515? Bit harder, isn’t it? Yet questions like that last one are central to modern cryptography, the sort of thing that keeps your credit card numbers safe on the Internet. They’re important problems because our computers (and our brains) find them hard to solve. But another type of computer entirely – a quantum computer – could solve them easily. And that’s why, says Daniel Lidar of the department of chemistry, there’s great and growing interest in this new field.

Lidar, 34, the second-youngest winner of the CIAR Young Explorers Prize, won for his work in quantum computing. The difference between quantum and classical computing is “substantial,” says Lidar. “The major difference is that a classical computer such as the one on your desk encodes information in what are called “bits.” A bit can be either on or off. But a quantum bit – a “qubit” – can be both at the same time. So a quantum computer with n qubits is like having 2n classical computers all linked together and running in parallel. The power is what makes it easy for a quantum computer to factor large numbers easily (though the most powerful one yet built can only manage to factor the number 15).

The main difficulty in building quantum computers is that they are extremely fragile, Lidar says, and offer data before questions are even asked. That’s where his work comes in – he’s a specialist in what are called “quantum error-correcting codes,” which “protect a quantum computer from the detrimental effects of external environments.” But Lidar thinks useful quantum computers are between 10 and 20 years off, and even when they are running, he says, they won’t replace your laptop. “They’re likely to be specialized devices; they won’t be useful for sending e-mail or doing word processing.” Lidar says their most exciting use might be to simulate other interactions that depend on quantum mechanics – the way atoms interact with each other as a drug meets a virus, for instance.

Josef Penninger
Josef Penninger understands pain: as a child in Gurten, Austria, he dreamed of playing World Cup soccer. “Alas,” he says, “it is difficult to start one’s life having failed in the one thing that I really wanted to do.” As an adult, though, he has made many significant advances in medical research, including the recent identification of the DREAM gene, which controls pain perception. He has been an associate professor in the departments of immunology and medical biophysics, a lead researcher at the Amgen Research Institute and the holder of a Canada Research Chair, but will soon be returning to his native Austria.

Shitij Kapur

The ghost of Sigmund Freud looks over Shitij Kapur’s shoulder in his office at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). Actually, it’s a plush doll of the great doctor, seated under a much larger plastic model of the brain and peering down at Kapur’s desk. The doll and the model summarize Kapur’s research interests: brain science, exemplified by modern brain-imaging techniques, and psychiatry, exemplified by psychotherapy. Montreal-born Kapur, 38, was raised in India; he came back to Canada when CAMH acquired a PET scanner, which would allow him to apply brain science to the study of schizophrenia. U of T was also home to a “crucible of academics” who were world leaders in understanding how the brain works. “We not only had the technology, but we also had these giants on whose shoulders one could stand,” says Kapur, who is head of CAMH’s schizophrenia research section and an associate professor of psychiatry at U of T.

One aspect of Kapur’s work is to study how anti-psychotic drugs work, and the PET scanner is a key tool – it lets him see what parts of the brain are activated when a patient is taking a drug. Brain-imaging groups around the world, he says, “can probably take a lion’s share of the credit for teaching us how these medications work.” His own group found that the drug Haldol, given in much lower doses, could still be effective in treating schizophrenia.

Any discussion of brain science tends to be “hijacked,” Kapur says, by those who want simple answers. He uses this analogy: if your child is throwing a baseball awkwardly and missing the catcher’s glove, it’s probably because of the way various neurons are firing. But no one would suggest brain surgery or drugs to manipulate the neurons; it’s simpler and more effective to use what Kapur calls “mind-mind interaction” – coaching, in other words. In the same way, there are clearly biological bases for diseases such as schizophrenia, and a major thrust of his work is teasing those out. “How do alterations in brain chemicals lead to hallucinations?” he asks. The PET scanner lets him study the chemical aspects of the disease, but treatments, he thinks, may not lie entirely in chemistry. Just as in the baseball analogy, “we have to do the behavioural stuff.” The progress of brain imaging has been phenomenal: “It would not surprise me if, by the end of my career, we could map the circuit of a single thought.” But while that would be a “great victory” for neuroscience, he says, we shouldn’t forget that we can already do much the same thing just by talking to each other – something Freud pioneered.

Ted Sargent
Ted Sargent, who holds the Nortel Networks-Canada Research Chair in nanotechnology, is trying to use his deep understanding of physics and chemistry to build what he calls an “agile optical network” that will work with, not against, the fundamental properties of matter and light. He looks to biological systems for inspiration, he says, because they are flexible and robust while embracing the “natural variability” of the physical world. When Sargent was awarded the 1999 Silver Medal of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council for some of his work, the council described it as “groundbreaking” research that will make “laser light the driving force of future microchips.”

Stephen Scherer

Associate professor of medicine Stephen Scherer loved hockey and baseball as a child, but in school, his favourite subjects were geography, history and biology. Genetics, he says, combines all of those – the teamwork of research, the geography of the landscape of chromosomes, the natural history embedded in DNA and the way the biology of genes is influenced by (and influences) environment. He’s a director of the Centre for Applied Genomics at the Hospital for Sick Children, where one of his major research goals is to understand the interaction of nature and nurture. This year, he was one of Report on Business Magazine’s Top 40 Under 40.

Jerry Mitrovica

Unlike Sherlock Holmes, who stated that “it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data,” geophysicist Jerry Mitrovica has made a habit of theorizing before he has data. “I know the data is coming,” he says. Take the so-called “four-piston model” of the Earth’s interior motions that he and colleague Alessandro Forte proposed a little more than a year ago. The idea is that four vast columns of rock are slowly moving, two up and two down, like pistons, far below the Earth’s crust. It’s a theory Mitrovica likes to illustrate with a lava lamp; its blobs of red goop play the role of rock rising through the Earth’s mantle. “Alex and I got hammered on that paper,” says Mitrovica, but earlier this summer American researchers found seismological evidence that appears to support the theory. “Lots of times when I theorize, I just hope there’s someone out there who’s smart enough to get the data.”

That’s what he’s hoping right now, in fact. In recent years, Mitrovica has played a key role in teasing out what happens to sea levels when major ice sheets melt – something that’s very relevant today. Turns out that the sea level rises, but not everywhere and not necessarily where you’d think. About 14,000 years ago, there was a sudden rise in global sea level, by approximately 20 metres in about 200 years. Something, somewhere, melted. But where? In a March paper in Science, Mitrovica and colleague Peter Clark suggest ways of using their “sea-level fingerprint” technique to figure out what happened. Now it’s up to the data people, and, says Mitrovica, “I’ve no doubt that within a year, that problem will be solved.”

Mitrovica, now 41, was just under the age limit when the CIAR began its search for the best and brightest, and, he quips, that meant he had an advantage: “I could use every one of the 40 years to make my mark.” His first major success came on a “really hot problem” handed to him by his supervisors for his master’s degree: why is it that continents sometimes flood? (For instance, Denver, now famously a mile high, was once under water.) Mitrovica’s solution? The western edge of North America was dragged down by the suction of a tectonic plate that was sliding under it and later bounced – v-e-r-y slowly – back up. “It turns out,” says Mitrovica, “that continents go up and down for the same reason they go sideways.”

In the long run, though, plate tectonics isn’t a complete answer to how the earth evolves. “For one thing,” Mitrovica asks rhetorically, “what makes the plates move?” It’s that deeper solution that he would like to find. All of his research – on why continents flood and what happens when ice sheets melt – is turning out to be connected, he thinks, to what makes the Earth keep evolving. Within the next few years, “we’re going to see another revolution like plate tectonics, and with it will come a large-scale view of what the Earth is doing, the chemistry of the Earth, how it evolves, how it links to climate.”

Michael Smith is a Toronto science writer.

In the summer of 1969, in a small community centre on Bathurst Street in Toronto, Brathwaite and York University student Horace Campbell tutor seven young African Canadians. They are preparing the high-school dropouts for university. It’s a pilot project, a test. Campbell had asked York University to open its doors to more minority students; York said, bring us qualified applicants. That fall, York accepts five of their students.

A year later, the summer project moves to U of T and becomes the year-long, access-to-education Transitional Year Programme (TYP), with Keren Brathwaite as a founding member and Jack Dimond as its director. U of T guarantees acceptance to anyone who passes the program with an average of 65 per cent or better. TYP broadens its mandate to include Native Canadians, new Canadians, single parents, the working class, indeed, any adult who – because of racism, poverty, family difficulties, medical issues or other circumstances – does not have the proper qualifications for university admission.

The program opens the door to anyone who has a dream of a university education and the will to achieve it.

Stories
Debbie Innes, 37, grew up in Sudbury, Ont., and was adopted into a white, middle-class family with four children. She is black. She was streamed out of the academic curriculum and into the general program in high school, but she didn’t think she was smart enough to go to university, anyway. She heard the racial taunts and believed them. Innes completed TYP in 2001 and also won a Bank of Montreal National Scholarship for admission to U of T. (Other scholarships available to TYP students include the National Scholar Scholarships and the Graduate Achievement Awards.)

Mohamed Abdulle, 31, had a pretty clear reason for leaving high school: civil war. His family fled Somalia – one brother to Sweden, his mother and five of his seven siblings to Egypt. He and his sister and father – a judge – landed in Toronto. Abdulle worked two warehouse jobs to put his father and sister through college, and to send money to his mother and siblings. Six years on, he figured his future was shipping and receiving. A truck driver told him, “No, no, no. Don’t stay here. Go back to school.” During his TYP year in 1998, he wrote an essay about the impact of the civil war on his family, which was subsequently published in The Globe and Mail. He will graduate with an honours degree in history and political science this fall.

For Nicole Tanguay, 41, a Cree woman, high school ended when she was forced to leave her foster home on Vancouver Island. She moved to Toronto and worked a series of jobs educating First Nations people and marginalized women on how to manage a small business. Still, she couldn’t move into the management jobs she sought. She finally applied to TYP. She won a National Scholarship to U of T, and is now in third year of an honours bachelor’s program in Aboriginal studies, drama and English. Last summer, she worked for the Bank of Montreal on diversity issues.

It took John Cox three years to tell his story to fellow students in his semiotics program at U of T. He had been a lobster fisherman for 10 years and hated it. He came to Toronto for a job that didn’t pan out. On his 35th birthday, with no money and no job, he found himself standing on a dock at Toronto’s Harbourfront, looking for options. He saw an advertisement for TYP and applied that same day. He wouldn’t tell this story to students outside TYP because he was embarrassed about his age, 37. “Who’s gonna hire someone that old?” he thought. Media giant Rogers Communications hired him last summer, to work in special promotions for the magazine Today’s Parent.

Tyler Burgess quit school at 16. He started working in a factory during the days and drumming for a rock band at night. This spring, almost two decades later, Burgess will finish an honours BA in history at U of T. After completing TYP in 1999, he won a prestigious $10,000-a-year, four-year Bank of Montreal National Scholarship. He was one of 15 selected from 700 nominated scholars from across Canada.

Struggles
“It’s like a soap opera here,” says Marilli Martyn, TYP secretary, herself a graduate of TYP in 1986 and U of T in 1990, with a degree in English and drama. “They have the same tragic, horrible things happen to them, but they’re not rich.”

The students also lack something else, other than money, when they start TYP: confidence. “They were all knocked out of the educational system for a variety of reasons,” says program director Rona Abramovitch. “Once you’re knocked out, your sense of being able to navigate the system is seriously in question. You have got the message that you’re not smart enough, or whatever. You really have to go against the stream, to say, ‘I can do this.’”

Abramovitch adds that the TYP requirements can also be intimidating at first. During the year, students are required to upgrade academically at a university-level pace, as well as achieve 60 per cent in one-and-a-half university courses and a 65 per cent average overall. Some enter with only Grade 10. “It’s university-level curriculum designed to fill in the gaps students have,” says Abramovitch. “There’s lots of one-on-one attention and it’s very intensive.” In another, complementary program administered by TYP, Steps to University, capable secondary-school students who are disadvantaged by economic, family or personal circumstances are encouraged to enrol in a University of Toronto course (Introduction to Sociology) while they’re finishing high school. This earns them a credit toward an undergraduate degree if they pass and, as a further incentive, gives them the opportunity to attend a number of on-campus events and lectures.

On Tyler Burgess’s first day as a university student – at U of T! Amazing! – he wanted to leave as soon as he arrived on campus. He wanted to leave halfway through orientation day. He wanted to leave after he wrote a math test to determine his level and got stuck on the first question. He says the panicky feeling of wanting to run stayed with him for a month.

Correct that. Sometimes he still feels it, even as he finishes his BA. “It would have been so easy to pack it up and leave, but I couldn’t let myself quit,” says Burgess. “Then I started meeting other people [in TYP] who felt the same way. They had doubts. There was a lot of camaraderie and support, and it became a really close-knit community. Then it was like, I’d be letting everyone down if I quit. Then I started getting good grades, and that was encouraging.”

Mohamed Abdulle found his confidence in composition classes with Keren Brathwaite. She teaches works that speak to her students’ experiences: novels by Native Canadian women, African-American men, Caribbean women and former TYP students such as Makeda Silvera, author of two short-story collections and a novel. She encourages students to write about themselves. “We locate the curriculum in their own experience and we challenge them to use their experience toward expanding education,” says Brathwaite, now TYP associate director and English co-ordinator. “We explain why voice is important, why their voice has not been heard and how important it is to use their voice.” Abdulle says: “She told us that people who write about themselves write better. I related my human-nature course to the civil war in Somalia. All the courses were reflections on my own life. I wanted to write more and more.”

And then there’s the work. Like most who enter, Nicole Tanguay had a Grade 11 education but considered herself illiterate. John Cox had a Grade 12 diploma (he took general-level courses), but found the TYP year tougher than his first year in university. “You have to make the transition to going back to school, and you’re under the gun to get accepted,” says Cox. “The competition is really tough. Everyone has something to prove. Everyone wants an A, and U of T doesn’t just give out As. I usually started at 10 every day and did homework every evening and Saturdays and Sundays. By nine or 10 at night I’m totally cooked…but they prepare you really well.”

There are the inevitable meltdowns. After her TYP year, and in her first year of university, Debbie Innes was feeling overwhelmed by some of the reading material for her women’s studies course. She was reading the essay, but nothing was making sense. She was thinking she would never get through the course. As the night wore on, she worked herself into a panic.

Then she called her academic adviser, Maureen FitzGerald (BA 1964 Victoria), at home. FitzGerald, who teaches at TYP and University College, broke down the terrible monster. Read the first paragraph, read the last paragraph, find the thesis. Relax – it’s just an essay. “I never believed in myself, that I could do well,” Innes says. “It became like a self-fulfilling prophecy. None of my [earlier] teachers were willing to work with me, to build up my confidence. Here, they just always believed in us, that we could do it. They believe for you until you’re ready to believe for yourself.”

Success stories
TYP staff tell them all the time. Between 60 and 80 per cent of TYP students pass and continue on to U of T. But it’s the specific stories that reverberate: TYP graduates who have become teachers, lawyers and business people. Sometimes knowing that others have made it is the shot of inspiration you need to push you on, says Mohamed Abdulle. His mentor, Bakary Gibba, was a construction worker removing asbestos from Sidney Smith Hall in 1992 when he found out about TYP. Now he’s completing a PhD in history at U of T. His thesis is on the slave trade in his native Gambia.

Tyler Burgess returns each year to mentor new TYP students on an informal basis. “Some people kind of feel embarrassed about how they got into U of T, so they stay away from it after they finish, but I never feel that way. I always feel really grounded there…. There are some things I can’t talk about anywhere else. Like, modifying your speech at school. It’s an academic language. For me, it’s a foreign language. It’s false, compared to the way I usually talk. Some of the young black guys really identify with that…. I seem to always end up talking to the ones who are really upset. I give them the same advice [previous TYP alumni] gave me: ‘It’s all going to work out. Don’t panic. Do things one day at a time.’”

After finally finding their voices in TYP, students are often quick to apply them. At U of T, Nicole Tanguay worked on a race and ethnocultural equity conference committee, and also worked with several arts groups as an adviser, organizer and performance artist. Mohamed Abdulle was part of a group of Somali students who attended the United Nations Millennium Summit in New York City. “This program is like an oasis,” says Abdulle. “It’s like a fertile place in the middle of nowhere for people like us. A TYP student said that once. I agree.”

Carol Couchie (TYP 1989/90), who became the first Aboriginal licensed midwife in Canada, returned to speak at a TYP awards ceremony. “Nine years ago, I was a frightened, angry, hurt single mother,” she said. “I have come to you to speak about respect, power and the power of change…. When a baby is born, the universe is changed. When a student enters U of T, the student is changed, but more importantly, the university is changed.”

Dreams
Tyler Burgess did not come to university to get a job. “I wanted an education,” he says. “I wanted to learn about history and philosophy. But my friends and family couldn’t understand that. They didn’t go to university. They thought it was some scheme I cooked up to get out of working…. But the world has expanded for me. Most people, they get locked into this really small reality: work, their boss, buying stuff.”

Still, now he is thinking about a job, perhaps teaching high school. He believes he might be able to connect with troubled students and help them to stay on track and in school. “Maybe it’s useful to hear it from people who experienced certain things,” he says. “Maybe it gives you credibility to talk about that stuff.”

Mohamed Abdulle is considering law school or graduate school. His marks are average, but he isn’t worried that they will hold him back. “TYP gave us this chance,” he says. “That’s all we need. I know I can find a way to succeed.”

Nicole Tanguay wants to create an artist-run Aboriginal arts centre in Toronto, bringing theatre, music, literature and visual arts all under one roof. “That’s at least 10 years down the road,” she says, then reconsiders. “Well, maybe it won’t take that long.”

John Cox wants to put the theory of semiotics into practice, somehow. He wants to help change the school system, to change prevailing cultural narratives, to change attitudes. “Semiotics is about how societies communicate and how people communicate with each other,” he says. He wants to prevent his story from happening to others. “I got streamed into the general program. My dad’s a fisherman, the teachers think I’m going to fish. It’s totally unfair…. You should never tell a kid he can’t do something. It builds a stigma he lives with his whole life…. There’s got to be some purpose to it all, why I was on that dock and ended up here.”

Debbie Innes doesn’t know what she wants to do, but she knows one thing now. She’s confident she can get there. “I’m really focused now. It’s like a harmonic conversion. You feel you’re part of a greater vision. Something clicks into place. And you realize, ‘Yes, this is the path I’m supposed to be taking.’”

In 1998, OISE/UT awarded Keren Brathwaite its prestigious Distinguished Educator Award. In 1999, the U of T Alumni Association presented her with the Ludwik and Estelle Jus Memorial Human Rights Prize. Still, she’s not satisfied. “We need a comprehensive approach to access in the university,” she says. “We need other measures to get at the inequities in our entire education system. TYP is just one small program.”

In her OISE acceptance speech, Brathwaite said, “I support excellence in education, but I believe that it must be accessible education, not the domain of the privileged…. We must learn from all of life’s classrooms.”

Margaret Webb (BA 1985 UC) is a freelance writer in Toronto.

Tom Bolton’s licence plate bears the designation CYG X1. On occasion, people ask if it refers to the song “Cygnus X-1” by the rock band Rush. Little do they realize that Bolton, a University of Toronto astrophysicist, is the fellow who – 30 years ago – discovered the black hole that inspired the song.

Black holes have seized people’s imaginations ever since Bolton published observational proof of their existence in 1972. They have spawned science-fiction plots about time travel and secret passageways to other dimensions, and they have fascinated anyone who ponders what the heavens might hold.

Bizarre beyond comprehension, a black hole occurs when a gigantic star implodes to become extremely small and dense, resulting in an immensely powerful gravitational pull. “Things can go in, but they can’t go out,” Bolton explains. Even light cannot escape from a black hole, making it invisible from the outside.

That was the challenge for astronomers seeking these elusive phenomena in the late 1960s and early 1970s: if black holes indeed existed, how could they be detected? Only indirect clues were available, such as strong X-rays pouring from an unidentified source or a mysterious back-and-forth motion in a star’s orbit, suggesting a gravitational tug from an unseen companion.

Bolton didn’t set out to find a black hole in the summer of 1971. Then a 28-year-old post-doctoral fellow and part-time faculty member at the University of Toronto, he simply had access to plenty of telescope time at the university’s David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill, Ont., and spent several nights a week peering at the heavens through the 1.88-metre telescope inside the domed observatory. His first love was binary star systems (two stars that orbit each other, similar to the earth-moon orbit).

That summer, he grew interested in a possible binary system involving a giant blue star called HDE226868 and something else that was emitting powerful X-ray signals. He thought this invisible X-ray source, dubbed Cygnus X-1 (because it was in the constellation of Cygnus, the Swan), was likely a neutron star.

In September, he started observing HDE226868. Heading to the observatory that night, Bolton met a grad student who remarked that this binary system might contain a black hole. “No way,” Bolton told him. But the next day, looking at photographic plates of the star’s spectrum, he saw some puzzling emission lines – bright marks in unusual places. “That tweaked my interest,” he says. He decided to continue observing HDE226868.

By November, Bolton had enough data to estimate that HDE226868 was moving around its invisible partner at more than 70 kilometres per second – far, far faster than anticipated. Such tremendous speed meant that whatever body was emitting the X-rays was far too dense, and its gravitational pull was much too strong, to be a neutron star.
The only feasible option was a black hole. “At this point my excitement reached a fever pitch, and I could hardly eat or sleep,” Bolton recalls. A stream of gas seemed to be flowing from the star to Cygnus X-1, swirling around it at incredible speeds before vanishing. As a result, the gas became super-heated and produced the X-rays that had drawn astronomers’ attention.

They were heady findings, and Bolton admits he was naive not to consider that others might be racing to publish the same results. Sure enough, in December a colleague handed him a preprint of a paper by two English astronomers about Cygnus X-1 and HDE226868. But their observations were cautiously worded, and Bolton believed he had better data. He decided to submit his own results for publication. “If I was wrong, it could be my career,” he says. “On the other hand, if I was right, it could be my career!”

In December, an American colleague supplied some last-minute findings that erased any remaining doubts in Bolton’s mind. He wrote his paper; it appeared in Nature in February 1972, shortly after the English astronomers published their data. But Bolton had staked his claim: the high energies of the X-rays and the large mass of the star’s unseen companion raised “the distinct possibility that [Cygnus X-1] is a black hole.”

“Theorists have been postulating black holes, but this could be observational evidence for one,” commented University of Toronto astronomer Helen Hogg in her popular Toronto Star astronomy column.

Today, Bolton looks back on those exhilarating months as “easily the most exciting time of my career.” In December 1972, he published a detailed follow-up paper in Nature Physical Science, later included in a Harvard University Press selection of the most important astronomy papers published between 1900 and 1975. He was interviewed by The New York Times and was invited to speak at Princeton University.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and the next few years brought arguments against Cygnus X-1. “At the time, it was tremendously exciting and tremendously controversial,” recalls John Percy, who, like Bolton, is a professor in U of T’s department of astronomy and astrophysics.

Bolton himself wondered why no other black holes were being identified. Finally, at the end of the 1970s, another candidate was proposed; today, about 10 stellar-mass black holes have been pinpointed. And with the idea of black holes firmly established, “astronomers subsequently went on and found super-massive black holes at the centre of many galaxies,” says Percy.

Bolton doesn’t claim to be an expert on black holes. “I find them, you explain them,” says the 59-year-old astrophysicist, who, according to family legend, uttered “moon” as his first word. But Bolton can rest assured – locating one of these cosmic oddities is clearly achievement enough.

Kristine Culp is a freelance writer in Toronto.

The date – July 4 – explains both the fragrance and the orderliness. Neuman is a mere two days into her new post as provost, or chief academic officer. The flowers are gifts of congratulation from colleagues. And the tidiness is confirmation that the full gust of demands, crises, queries, deliberations and other headache-inducing situations – and the resulting papers, files and disarray that accompany it – hasn’t yet 
blown in.

But Neuman is someone who can handle plenty of headache-inducing moments. The native Albertan has just returned to Canada after a three-year post as dean of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts at the University of Michigan, where she also served as a professor of English and women’s studies. An academic administrator, scholar and professor, Neuman recognizes that each of these three roles will be of value in her new appointment. “I think that those sensibilities lead into each other; that if you want to do this job, it serves you well to have done scholarship, to have been a teacher, to have had all that academic experience,” she says.

As provost, Neuman is responsible for the university’s academic and budgetary affairs and also constructs the framework for U of T’s overall budget. She oversees and works with the principals, deans and directors of faculties, colleges and schools to set academic priorities; she also oversees the chief librarian. And to help ready the university for the incoming tidal wave of students that will sweep into the university – resulting from the elimination of Grade 13 in Ontario, and growing population and immigration trends – Neuman is working with the president and vice-president on issues such as faculty recruitment and capital planning. (The large influx of students will start in September 2003, but the trickle began this September.)

One of her main priorities will be continuing the university’s mission to ensure that every able student, regardless of financial situation, has access to the University of Toronto. The issue of accessibility has strong personal roots: growing up in Onaway, Alta., on a 320-acre mixed grain and cattle farm without running water, a telephone or electricity, the voracious reader and her family didn’t have a budget for books. But the University of Alberta maintained an extension library that loaned reading material to people across the province; the government subsidized postage for those who couldn’t afford it. “It was before the days of pervasive television, so it was really a commitment on the part of the province to enable literacy across the province,” says Neuman. “A lot of books came into the house that way – everything from John Steinbeck to Zane Grey to The Odyssey – so I read a lot of trash and I read a lot of good literature, more or less indiscriminately.” So enthusiastic a reader was Neuman that when her mother became pregnant with her brother-to-be, “I subscribed the baby before he was born so I could have another couple of books,” she says.

Neuman also points to her own access to a university education. She went to the University of Alberta in the 1960s, during the rising crest of the baby boom – a time when the federal government funded universities quite well, and tuition was low. It was only because of these low fees – tuition was about $400 per year – that Neuman was able to attend university. She went on to earn a BA, an MA and a PhD in English, all from the University of Alberta. “Governments don’t have the money now to fund universities as well as they once did,” she says. “As a consequence, universities charge higher tuitions – which is important because you do need money to teach well – so the financial-aid programs that this university has been putting in place are incredibly important initiatives. They ensure access in a different way than when I was young, but they do ensure access.”

After earning her PhD, Neuman worked her way up to professor of English at the University of Alberta, and also became the university’s first director of the Women’s Studies program in 1986. She later served as chair of the department of English, then moved on to the University of British Columbia to serve as dean of the Faculty of Arts. In the late ’70s, Neuman was also a founding member of NeWest Press, a regional press in Edmonton that places an emphasis on Western Canadian writers. It was during this time that she became interested in Canadian literature as an area of study, publishing such books as Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch. Other scholarly work focused on autobiography as a literary genre. “It’s really about how you construct a self…. When I started doing this work, I don’t think I could have told you why I was personally so interested in it, but many years later I came to realize that it probably had something to do with being a Western Canadian woman in an English department,” says Neuman, noting that the one Canadian literature course available during her graduate year focused primarily on Toronto and Montreal writers. “There’s a wonderful book by Toronto author Austin Clarke entitled Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack, and it talks about what it was like to grow up in a British educational system in which you read English literature, and what does it mean to read English literature if you’re a kid from the Caribbean? How do you see yourself represented? You don’t find an understanding of your own world in that literature. In a much more modest way, that was my experience.”

This lack of literary representation seems to have informed a later decision at the University of Michigan, where she enabled the establishment of the Global Ethnic Literature Seminar. Michigan’s study of ethnic literature was strong within individual divisions, she notes, but this program allowed a variety of departments – from anthropology to Asian Languages and Culture – to create a strong overall focus on ethnicity in literature. Neuman also helped build up the Center for African American and African Studies, increasing the faculty from six to more than 20; and she increased the number of Native American faculty within the college. “Throughout her career, she has shown commitment and sensitivity to equity issues and remained unrelenting in her commitment to excellence,” says U of T President Robert Birgeneau. It is a commitment she intends to uphold.

Even if it means a messy office.

The double cohort – which will occur when grades 12 and 13 graduate together at the end of this school year – and the baby boom echo are only partly responsible for this influx. Beyond 2005-6, even greater participation rates are predicted, which means that more students in Ontario, and especially in the Greater Toronto Area, will be opting for a university education. The fact that an increasing number of high-school students want to attend university is a clear indication that the public universities of Ontario are doing an outstanding job.

While the media have been foretelling crisis, overcrowded classrooms and qualified students being turned away, we view this surge in enrolment as a unique opportunity for U of T to expand its faculty of world-class educators and researchers, invest in academic facilities, develop new programs and enhance existing ones – particularly at the University of Toronto at Mississauga (UTM) and University of Toronto at Scarborough (UTSC).

In the long run, UTM and UTSC will absorb most of the increased enrolment, becoming equivalent to mid-sized Ontario universities. UTM, currently part of the Faculty of Arts and Science, will become a separate undergraduate faculty complete with its own departments and academic chairs, and is expected to grow by about 40 per cent to around 9,000 students. UTSC, already a separate faculty since 1972, will grow by a third, to 8,000 students. There will also be enhancements in the on-campus graduate programs. All faculty will be members of graduate departments that span the three campuses.

Expansion at the two campuses will enhance the curricular strengths of each. Much of the growth at Scarborough will involve enrichment of its already strong co-op programs. This year, for example, the campus began offering joint programs with Centennial College in journalism, new media and paramedicine. Last year, UTM forged its third academic partnership with Sheridan College, offering a bachelor of arts in communication, culture and information technology. The rest of the expansion at UTM will be in unique areas such as biotechnology, where the university has already distinguished itself.

On all three campuses, physical expansion is underway with new student residences slated for New College, Woodsworth College, University College, UTSC and UTM. These projects will add 2,600 spaces to the current stock of 5,000.

Of course, this enrolment increase will place more demand on student aid. However, the University of Toronto will not waver from its 1998 financial-aid guarantee: no student will be prevented from coming to the university, or from finishing a degree, for want of financial assistance. In addition, the government recently announced a second phase of the Ontario Student Opportunity Trust Fund (OSOTF). The OSOTF program will provide need-based financial aid for 400,000 students in Ontario over the next decade.

The province has not yet made a formal commitment to providing the necessary funds for classrooms, offices and laboratories, although we are optimistic that it will do so shortly. This support is imperative in order for the university to meet its expansion goals. Any changes that occur at UTM and UTSC must reflect the University of Toronto’s status as a leading research university, and that means building world-class facilities to attract outstanding academics and researchers to teach our next generation of students. I feel that this is an extraordinary opportunity that, with the province’s backing, is well within our reach.