A brilliant undergraduate, Frye stood first in his class for each of the four years of his honours philosophy and English course. Graduating in 1933, he decided to enter the United Church ministry, but it was a mistake. Circuit riding in Depression-wracked Saskatchewan in the mid-1930s was not for him. He went to Oxford, graduating in 1939 with first class honours in English, then accepted a teaching appointment back at Vic, and never left his alma mater again.

At Oxford, Frye’s intellect had been fired by the poetry of the wild and, to many at the time, incomprehensible English 18th-century poet William Blake. In 1947, Frye made his professional reputation with Fearful Symmetry, a definitive study of Blake’s prophetic poetry. In it, he showed that Blake’s use of symbolism was deliberate, based on Milton and the Bible, and clearly not the work of a madman. In Anatomy of Criticism (1957), he theorized that all literature is bound together by a verbal universe of repeated archetypes, symbolism and rhetoric. These works garnered Frye a large academic following, and in 1951 he was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Over the next 40 years, until his death in 1991, Frye was one of the most decorated and influential university professors in the country, becoming Vic’s chancellor in 1978, and significantly influencing English curricula in Canadian schools and universities, with ideas summarized in On Education, published in 1988. He also lectured or taught at more than 100 universities worldwide and was awarded countless honorary degrees.

Though long removed from his tenure as a minister, Frye never surrendered his Christian sensibility. As one commentator noted recently upon the publication of Frye’s journals, he was “happy to do the Lord’s work.” For most of Frye’s lifetime, the best corner of the Lord’s vineyard was U of T.

Kathleen Coburn (1905-1991; BA 1928 Victoria, MA 1930)
Sometimes, a chosen subject grows to inhabit the mind and life of a scholar to the point where a kind of mutual possession seems to occur. That’s what happened with Kathleen Coburn, a longtime U of T English professor, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), the Romantic poet and critic.

That, at least, was the surmise of A.S. Byatt, whose Booker Prize-winning novel, Possession: A Romance (1990), was inspired by “watching that great Coleridge scholar, Kathleen Coburn, circumambulating the catalogue” at the British Library. In “Choices: On the Writing of Possession” (1991), Byatt wrote, “She has given all her life to his thoughts. And then I thought, ’she has mediated his thoughts to me … Does he possess her, or does she possess him?’ ”

Coburn may not have given quite all her life to Coleridge, but she gave more than 60 of her 86 years to him. Born in 1905 in the small Ontario town of Stayner, Coburn completed her BA and MA degrees at U of T, then earned a BLitt at Oxford, where her interest in Coleridge was cemented when she viewed the poet’s notebooks on shelves in the home of one of his descendants. After returning home to teach at Victoria College, U of T, and with the co-operation of the Coleridge estate, Coburn began the task of preparing the notebooks for publication. Eventually, they were published in four volumes from 1957 to 1990. (A fifth, and final, volume will be published in the fall.) She was also the general editor of the first 14 volumes of Coleridge’s collected works, published between 1969 and 1990. Apart from these two major tasks, Coburn wrote and edited a number of books on Coleridge, including In Pursuit of Coleridge (1977), the story of her many scholarly adventures.

Once when asked, “How on earth have you stood Coleridge all these years?” Coburn replied that he became more interesting to her the longer she studied him. “More lonely, more rebellious, more skeptical and more deeply human.” Possession? A.S. Byatt was probably right.

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)

For Marshall McLuhan, communications theorist and media guru, the height of fame came in a few seconds of screen time in Woody Allen’s 1977 film Annie Hall. In it, Allen’s character, the neurotic Alvy Singer, finds himself standing in line for a movie while enduring the remarks of some Manhattan know-it-all on the topic of McLuhan and television. Just then, out from the corner of the screen steps McLuhan to deflate the pseudo-intellectual with the stinging words: “You know nothing of my work.” McLuhan may as well have been speaking to most of the population, for his reputation rests in part on his surpassing quotability – “the medium is the message,” most famously – not on knowledge of the breadth of his work. Still, his cameo appearance in the film perfectly captured McLuhan as media sage.

Born in Edmonton in 1911, McLuhan moved with his family to Winnipeg and later graduated from the University of Manitoba with BA and MA degrees in English and philosophy. Brilliant and precocious, he earned a PhD in literature from Cambridge in 1943, then spent the remainder of the war years teaching in Canada and the United States. In 1946, he accepted a position in the English department at U of T, where, except for a stint as Schweitzer Chair at New York’s Fordham University in 1967-68, he remained for 34 years until his death in 1980.

McLuhan’s steady intellectual endeavours during the 1950s yielded a stunning output in the following decade, including The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Understanding Media (1964), The Medium Is the Message (1967) and War and Peace in the Global Village (1968). In these writings, McLuhan developed his ideas on communications, arguing that it is the way information is structured and relayed that determines perceptions of reality. His famous distinction between “hot” and “cool” media – between print and radio, for example, and telephone and television – built on this underlying idea, because each form engages the senses differently. The medium becomes the message because of what it elicits in sensory perception.

From his redoubt at U of T’s Centre for Culture and Technology, McLuhan’s influence became worldwide, encompassing everything from Playboy magazine to an NBC television special. Today, the McLuhan Program of Culture and Technology continues to perpetuate his name and ideas. Wired magazine, probably the most influential digital-age popular publication, has proclaimed him its “patron saint.”

Harold Innis (1894-1952)
When Harold Innis returned to Canada from the First World War and headed south to the University of Chicago for a PhD in political economy, he had a clear purpose in mind. The war had marked Innis indelibly, and confronted him with the nature of national culture. How, in the face of powerful empire-building states such as Britain, the United States and Germany, did smaller, colonial nations such as Canada develop a sense of nationhood?

In his doctoral thesis, Innis examined the history of the Canadian Pacific Railway, hardly an obvious topic for a Chicago PhD in 1919. Nevertheless, it was the first step toward 30 years of brilliant academic work at U of T. Innis joined the political economy department in 1920, where he was dismayed, though not surprised, to find that his mainly British and American colleagues applied faulty models to the Canadian economy. In response, he wrote The Fur Trade in Canada (1930), in which he offered the staple thesis of Canadian economic development (fur, fish, timber, etc.). He also rejected the ideas that Canada had no inherent economic logic and that its political boundaries were artificial. The country’s economic development, he argued, had yielded appropriate borders. Innis didn’t stop there. In 1940 he published The Cod Fisheries, which elaborated on Canada’s historic connection to Europe.

During the 1940s, Innis’s ongoing interest in Canada’s place in the Western world spurred him to investigate communications. Concurrently, he served as head of U of T’s department of political economy, and then, beginning in 1947, as dean of the graduate school. In 1950, he published Empire and Communications, a treatise on the ways empires perpetuate themselves, and how they are remembered. For example, the pyramids and temples of ancient Egypt are “time-biased media” because they continue to transmit messages about the nature of Egyptian society after the passage of millennia. Marshall McLuhan’s famous statement, “the medium is the message,” finds its origins here.

Innis died in 1952 at 58. His oeuvre, though deep, was incomplete. But he remains one of the most original Canadian thinkers, and in his spiritual heirs – such as McLuhan and Wired magazine – Innis’s expansive thinking lives on.

Margaret Atwood (1939-; BA 1961 Victoria)
Is there a brighter alumni star in the University of Toronto firmament than Margaret Atwood? Internationally acclaimed author, winner of numerous awards – including the Booker Prize in 2000 for her latest novel, The Blind Assassin – poet, scriptwriter, defender of writers as one-time president of PEN Canada, mentioned perennially for the Nobel Prize for literature … just reviewing Atwood’s lifetime achievements – thus far – could fill volumes.

Born in Ottawa in 1939, Atwood spent much of her youth in Toronto, graduating from Victoria College, University of Toronto, in 1961 with a BA in English. An MA from Radcliffe College in Massachusetts followed, then teaching stints at various Canadian universities. In 1966, she burst upon the nascent Canadian literary scene with The Circle Game, which captured the Governor General’s Award for poetry. It was quickly followed by such works as The Edible Woman (1969), The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) and Power Politics (1971), which established her as a feminist writer of great perception.

Internationally, Atwood’s reputation was solidified with The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), a harrowing story of an anti-female dystopia set in a nuclear-ravaged future. Critically acclaimed and a bestseller, it brought Atwood her first Booker Prize nomination and was adapted for the screen, receiving the full Hollywood treatment.

Since then, Atwood’s literary output has continued unabated. Four more novels, two books for children, poetry, short fiction – the prodigious amount of work emanating from her house in Toronto’s fashionable Annex neighbourhood must owe something to early mentor Northrop Frye. In Gladstonian style, Frye used to record in his diaries whether “I’ve wasted the day or not.” But while Atwood might have Protestant-like work habits like Frye, her whimsical sense of humour speaks to something else – an intuitive understanding of the Canadian character. As she remarked a few years ago upon receiving an honorary degree at Oxford, a Canadian is the one who, standing alongside fellow award nominees, looks first to the right and then to the left when the winner’s name – his or her own – is called, just to make sure the judges didn’t make a mistake. Atwood should know. She’s stood there enough times herself.

Robertson Davies (1913-1995)

Canada’s greatest man of letters, Robertson Davies, master of Massey College in the University of Toronto for 20 years and internationally renowned writer, showed little early indication of uncommon brilliance. Born in 1913 into a newspaper-owning family in the southwestern Ontario town of Thamesville, he lived a peripatetic youth before arriving at Queen’s University in Kingston as a “special student” – special because, unable to meet the undergraduate entrance requirement in math, he was ineligible to earn a degree. Luckily, Oxford, where he went a few years later, took a different view of such things, and he graduated with a BLitt in 1938. His thesis, “Shakespeare’s Boy Actors,” was published in 1939, and for the next year Davies hung about the London theatre scene, finding work at the Old Vic Repertory Company.

In 1940, newly married, Davies returned home, serving as literary editor of Saturday Night magazine for two years before embarking on a quarter-century as editor, then publisher of The Peterborough Examiner. The small-town boy with newspapering in his blood had returned to what he knew best. During these years Davies began writing humorous essays under the pseudonym Samuel Marchbanks, published a troika of novels (the Salterton trilogy) and in 1960 began teaching literature courses at U of T. A few years later, Vincent Massey came calling, searching for the perfect person to be the founding master of the college that would be his family’s namesake. In 1963 Davies moved into the master’s lodgings on Devonshire Place, where he would remain until 1981.

In the years following his retirement from Massey College, Davies – now into his 70s – became one of Canada’s most celebrated authors. In novel-writing, he had found his singular calling, and with the publication of What’s Bred in the Bone in 1985, he secured a worldwide readership. He published his final novel, The Cunning Man, the year before his death in 1995.

It wasn’t just his varied body of work that distinguished Davies as Canada’s foremost literary figure. He looked and sounded the part, too. With flowing silver hair, long beard and jaunty hat, Davies remained a man of the theatre to the last.

Eric Arthur (1898-1982)
Architect, author and Antipodean, Eric Arthur spent most of his professional life at the University of Toronto. Born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1898, like many colonials in those days he attended university overseas in Liverpool, England, after serving in the New Zealand Rifle Brigade during the First World War. Arthur came to Canada in 1923 to take up an appointment as a professor of architecture at U of T and held the position until 1966. Almost immediately, he became active beyond the classroom, helping 
found the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario in 1932.

Arthur’s deep lifelong interest in preserving and restoring the architecture of his adopted home culminated in the publication of Toronto: No Mean City in 1964. Almost 40 years later, it remains a standard text on the architectural history of Toronto. Arthur was instrumental in rescuing Toronto from its garrisoned past as “Muddy York” and infusing it with a sense of pride about many of its 19th-century buildings. Chief among these is St. Lawrence Hall, a gem dating from 1850 located on King Street in the heart of Toronto. Arthur chaired the committee that oversaw its restoration in the mid-1960s. He served also as chair of the jury for the International Competition for City Hall and Square in Toronto, which resulted in a spectacular piece of modern architecture for the city when it opened in 1965.

Few Canadian architects in the 20th century had a more important public role than Arthur, nor did any do more to champion the emergence of modern Canadian architects, while making the case for protecting heritage buildings. In semi-retirement throughout the 1970s, he remained active in Canadian architectural issues. Arthur died in 1982. Recently, U of T’s Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design opened the Eric Arthur Gallery, a wonderfully whimsical glass structure that hugs one wall of the faculty building. The gallery’s inaugural exhibition showcased Arthur’s work as both historical preservationist and modern innovator.

Donald Creighton (1902-79; BA 1925 Victoria)
“In those days they came usually by boat.” So begins Donald Creighton’s Governor General’s Award-winning, two-volume biography of Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, published in the 1950s. In thus describing the arrival of 19th-century immigrants to Canada, Creighton marked himself as a historian committed to history as a literary art. He was also devoted to creating a professional, written record of Canadian history, separate from that of the mother countries, Britain and France.

Born in Toronto in 1902, Creighton studied English and history at Victoria College, U of T. Upon graduation in 1925, he went to Oxford and read for a second BA. Creighton planned to study and do original research on the history of the French Revolution, but at Oxford, the young scholar found himself drawn to Canadian history, at a time when, professionally, the field was scarcely recognized. Insofar as it did exist, Canadian history was mainly bound up in the history of the British Empire. But the more Creighton thought about it – Canada’s heroic contribution to the First World War, the country’s resistance to the relentlessly expansive pressure of the United States, the accommodation within of French and English – the more he became convinced that his own nation’s history was worthy of serious intellectual pursuit. And so, despite lack of interest, especially at home, Creighton began to recreate himself as a historian of Canada. Hired by U of T in 1927, he would move from lecturer to professor to chair of the history department to professor emeritus, in a storied career that spanned more than half a century.

Central to Creighton’s conceptualizing of Canadian history was the “Laurentian thesis,” the argument that Canada made sense both politically as a counterpoint to the U.S., and economically because of the St. Lawrence River, which bisects the eastern part of the continent. In time, Creighton became a fierce Canadian nationalist, denouncing both regionalism and continentalism, views that gained currency in the heady years leading up to the country’s 1967 centennial. Creighton’s work won him acclaim and awards at home, and abroad he became Canada’s best-known historian, winning Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Nuffield Foundation fellowships.

By the end of his life in 1979, Creighton’s conservative, centralist and anti-continentalist views had gone out of fashion, something he resented greatly. But there’s no disputing his broader achievement in cementing the foundation for the discipline of Canadian history.

Sir Ernest MacMillan (1893-1973; BA 1915)
Sir Ernest MacMillan, eminent conductor, educator and musician, made his mark earlier than most people realize as a musical prodigy. By the age of 10 he had composed several songs and played the organ for 3,000 people at Toronto’s Massey Hall.

Born in the Toronto suburban community of Mimico in 1893, MacMillan took musical studies at Edinburgh University and Oxford as a teenager while earning a BA in history from U of T. During a summertime visit to Germany in 1914, he found himself trapped when war broke out. Interned in a prison camp as an enemy alien for the next four years, the young MacMillan overcame the drawbacks of life behind barbed wire to make stunningly good use of his time. He composed music to accompany Swinburne’s “Ode to England.” The “secular oratorio,” as he called it, would earn him a doctorate in music from Oxford in 1918. But he also helped produce a number of musical and operatic productions, including a performance of The Mikado in 1916 for American Embassy officials, not long before the United States entered the war.

At war’s end, MacMillan returned to Canada. A rich assortment of compositions followed, many of which appeared in his famous Canadian Song Book (1937). In 1926, he became principal of the Toronto (later Royal) Conservatory of Music, followed the next year with the concurrent deanship of U of T’s Faculty of Music, which he held until 1952. In 1931, the indefatigable MacMillan began a 25-year run as conductor of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra; during the last 14 of those years he also conducted the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir. In 1935, King George V rewarded him with a knighthood.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, MacMillan toured widely as guest conductor with major orchestras in the United States, Brazil and Australia, and was especially happy to bring the works of Canadian composers to an international audience. Including his childhood accomplishments, MacMillan’s career spanned almost every one of his 79 years – virtually all of them note perfect.

Vincent Massey (1887-1967; BA 1910 UC)

“More British than the British,” said Vincent Massey’s critics, who accused him of being a preening anglophile. There’s little doubt that Massey loved pomp and circumstance, but it’s equally clear that a stout Canadian heart beat inside his leonine frame. After graduating from University College in 1910 with a bachelor’s degree in history and English, Massey earned a second degree in history from Balliol College, Oxford, where he absorbed the Oxonian style for which he would become – sometimes unpopularly – known. A stint teaching history at U of T was followed by service in the First World War.

As scion of the Massey-Harris Company, Canada’s farm implements giant, Massey had to help take care of business, but he was no budding captain of industry; his heart was moved by education, culture and the arts. Beginning in 1911, he had spearheaded the endowment and construction of Hart House at U of T, the first major project in a half-century’s worth of philanthropy. Professionally, he embarked on a diplomatic career, serving as Canadian minister to Washington and as Canada’s high commissioner to London. In 1952, near the conclusion of a six-year term as U of T’s chancellor, and after chairing a landmark royal commission on the arts in Canada, Massey became the country’s first native-born governor general.

Massey’s departure from Rideau Hall seven years later, in 1959, marked his formal retirement, but in the last years of his life he reprised his Hart House experience. He used a large amount of capital from the family-endowed Massey Foundation to establish Massey College at U of T, a graduate college modern in style, but modelled on what he had known at Oxford. Massey died in 1967, leaving behind a varied and outstanding legacy that continues to have a significant impact on Canada’s university and cultural life.

Sir Frederick Banting (1891-1941; MB 1916, MD 1922)
If ever there was a small-town Canadian boy who made good, it was Fred Banting of Alliston, Ontario. His discovery of insulin in 1921, with its power to control diabetes mellitus, resulted in Canada’s first Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine two years later. But the fame and honours that followed after he and his colleagues isolated the internal secretion of the pancreas in the winter of 1921-22 could not have been predicted. The youngest of six children born into a farm family in 1891, Banting did poorly in high school, but managed to scrape into divinity at U of T, only to fail his first year. Undeterred, the young Banting transferred to medicine, graduating in 1916 with a transcript of which he could be proud. Immediately, he reported for duty with the Canadian Army Medical Corps and served in France till the end of the First World War, where he was wounded in battle and decorated for valour.

On his return, Banting trained as an orthopedic surgeon and taught part-time at the University of Western Ontario while establishing a general practice in London. But an innate restlessness, no doubt heightened by his tour of duty in the war, drew him inexorably to medical research. On the evening of Oct. 31, 1920, while reading an article in a medical journal, Banting began to consider isolating insulin, the name another scientist had given the pancreatic hormone, and thereby control the metabolism of sugar.

Confident he was onto something significant in diabetes research, Banting approached professor of physiology J.J.R. Macleod, about obtaining lab space. In May 1921, Banting and his medical-student assistant, Charles Best, got to work in their garret in the old Faculty of Medicine building (where the Medical Sciences Building now stands, across from Convocation Hall). After months of intense work and many sharp exchanges between Banting and Macleod, success was achieved. Once insulin hit the market, Banting was elevated to hero status. He was elected to the newly established Banting and Best Chair of Medical Research at U of T in 1923, given a life annuity of $7,500 per year – a tidy sum in those days – by Mackenzie King’s government, and, in 1934, knighted by King George V. During Banting’s rather short lifetime (he died, at 49, in a plane crash in Newfoundland in 1941), he was judged Canada’s most famous citizen by a number of magazine polls. Not bad for a farm boy.

John Polanyi (1929-)
In 1929, during the Weimar Republic, Germany was roiling with domestic turmoil and economic instability brought on by the stock market crash and the attendant miseries of the worldwide Depression. Not a pleasant time or place to live – but in that year John Polanyi, future University of Toronto chemist and Nobel Prize winner, was born to Hungarian parents in Berlin. His father, Michael, was a well-known expatriate scientist and philosopher, who, like many other members of the professoriate, fled Germany with his family in 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor. The family settled in England, where Polanyi, then four, was educated. In 1949, he graduated with a BSc degree from Manchester University, and three years later earned his PhD from the same institution.

The early 1950s were good years for young scientists with valuable skills and a willingness to relocate. The booming North American economy beckoned, and Polanyi left for Canada in 1952 to take up a post-doctoral fellowship with the National Research Council in Ottawa. After two years he headed south to Princeton and a research associateship, then in 1956 received an offer from the University of Toronto to join the department of chemistry. He’s been there ever since, achieving the honour of University Professor in 1974.

In an age of intense academic specialization, John Polanyi is a public intellectual, commenting forcefully on a number of issues, notably the terrors of nuclear war and the necessity of rational nuclear disarmament. Within his own area of scientific specialization, chemical physics, Polanyi’s groundbreaking work was rewarded in 1986 with the Nobel Prize for chemistry. It was a long time coming. Back in 1958 he had discovered that newly formed molecules emit infrared radiation. Building on this discovery in subsequent years, Polanyi was able to expand the boundaries of infrared chemiluminescence and the nature of chemical transformations.

A fellow of numerous august scientific societies, Polanyi has been awarded more than two dozen honorary degrees and many prizes. For U of T, there have been few scientists better known worldwide since Frederick Banting.

Sir Daniel Wilson (1816-1892)

Sir Daniel Wilson, the University of Toronto’s most important – and probably its most interesting – figure as it developed over the latter half of the 19th century, had an academic career that spanned the disciplines of English, history, archeology, ethnology and geology. Energetic and ambidextrous (seemingly so that he could work twice as fast to accomplish all that needed to be done), he was consumed by scholarly and scientific questions, but also turned his hand to administrative tasks. He served as president of both University College and U of T (for a time concurrently) and battled constantly to ensure the university’s independence and secularization in the face of governmental and religious interference.

“Sir Dan,” as he came to be known, was born in Edinburgh in 1816. Educated there, he followed various pursuits including studying art with William Turner and writing a history of Oliver Cromwell and his times. In 1853 he moved to Canada to take up an appointment as professor of English and history at the not-yet-constructed University College. Typically able to prove his worth outside the classroom, too, Wilson helped design UC, but that building was partly destroyed by fire in 1890.

In the high Victorian years, marked by the so-called “crisis of faith” induced significantly by Charles Darwin’s work on evolution, Wilson became a leading Canadian interpreter of the theory of natural selection. In 1862, three years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species, Wilson produced his two-volume opus, Researches into the Origin of Civilisation in the Old and New World. In it, he accepted the extension of geological time and the evolution of species, but rejected natural selection on the grounds – mostly religious – that there are innate differences between humans and animals.

Later, Wilson helped found the Royal Society of Canada, for a time serving as its president, and rather grudgingly, given his longstanding opposition to denominationalism, acceded to U of T’s federation act of 1887, which paved the way for a number of religious colleges to be placed under the university’s umbrella in succeeding years.
In what little time he had away from the university, Canada’s vast and accessible wilderness inspired Wilson to pick up his paintbrush, and he became an accomplished watercolourist. Sir Daniel died in 1892, just after his beloved UC was rebuilt following the fire.

Tak Mak (1946-)
It’s not every day that members of Saudi Arabia’s royal family board a jet to welcome a visiting scientist to the desert kingdom. But that’s what happened to Tak Mak, professor of immunology at the University of Toronto, back in 1995. Mak, along with his late wife, Shirley, was there to begin a week-long visit, during which he would receive the King Faisal International Prize for Medicine. Mak is used to receiving prizes, but the Saudi Arabian experience – “we were treated like royalty the whole time” – stands out.

As a top-tier medical researcher, Mak also stands out. Born in China in 1946, he grew up in Hong Kong, where his family had settled before the communists took power on the mainland. In the early 1960s he left home to attend the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he earned BSc and MSc degrees. Then it was on to the University of Alberta to study the virus mengo encephalomyelitis, which had captured his attention during his master’s program. Upon receiving his PhD in 1972, Mak headed for U of T, where – except for a year at the University of Wisconsin – he has been ever since.

Over the next 12 years Mak worked on various projects, but the one central to his research bore fruit spectacularly in 1984, when he and his collaborators published a paper in Nature detailing their findings on T-cell receptors. Mak’s work illuminated the ways in which T-cells, a key component of the body’s immune system, recognize and combat invaders such as viruses, bacteria and oncogenes (cancer). “Nobody knew what the receptor looked like or how it did its job,” recalls Mak. Now they did, and with this discovery began a wave of professional recognition. Mak was designated a University Professor by U of T. Then came the Gairdner Foundation International Award, the National Cancer Institute of Canada’s Robert L. Noble Prize, the Faisal prize, the Novartis Prize in Immunology and – along with Mark Davis, an immunology professor at Stanford University in California – the Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. Prize from the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation. Most important, however, was the decision taken by AMGEN Inc., one of the world’s largest biopharmaceutical firms, to invest $150 million to establish a research institute affiliated with U of T and the Ontario Cancer Institute, Princess Margaret Hospital, with Mak as director.

Mak’s devotion to unlocking the secrets of the immune system is tireless. “It is perhaps the most intriguing and intricate cellular network in the body,” he says. If he succeeds in solving the deadly puzzle of cancer, it would make the royal treatment in Saudi Arabia look like a warm-up act.

Helen Sawyer Hogg (1905-1993)

The University of Toronto has a long association with astronomy, from the establishment of the Stewart Observatory on the St. George campus in the mid-19th century to Ian Shelton’s 1987 discovery, at the university’s former observatory in Chile, of a supernova.

But no one exemplifies that association better than Helen Sawyer Hogg. She spent almost 60 years at U of T, starting as a research assistant in the astronomy department in 1936, to which her husband, Frank Hogg, had been appointed, and culminating as professor emeritus from 1976 until her death in 1993. In her work, Sawyer Hogg concentrated on globular clusters of stars, in the process discovering hundreds of variable stars and cataloguing and publishing information about them in three editions. Over the course of her career she took more than 2,000 photographs and published more than 200 scientific papers. In the international astronomical community, hers was the face of Canadian astronomy.

Born in 1905 in Lowell, Mass., Sawyer Hogg received her PhD from Radcliffe in 1931 and became one of the first female PhD holders in astronomy in North America. After a move to Victoria, where her husband’s willingness to act as a chaperone allowed her to volunteer at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, she and Frank moved to Toronto, and six years later, in 1941, she was appointed to U of T’s astronomy department. Sawyer Hogg also took a keen interest in educating the general public about the heavens, and for 30 years – 1951 to 1981 – wrote a weekly column for the Toronto Star. In 1976 she published the highly popular The Stars Belong to Everyone. In 1967, Sawyer Hogg was the first Canadian to receive the prestigious Rittenhouse Medal of Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Astronomical Society. She was a companion of the Order of Canada and the recipient of many honorary degrees. The observatory at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa is dedicated to her.

As one of Canada’s leading astronomers for most of the second half of the 20th century, Sawyer Hogg was integral in shaping the discipline in this country and giving it a public profile. As a young woman, “the glory of the spectacle” of an eclipse drew her to astronomy. Nothing ever pushed her away. 

John Tuzo Wilson (1908-1993; BA 1930 Trinity)
For a man whose impressive intellectual breadth included understanding the geomorphology of mountains, it is fitting that John Tuzo Wilson, the eminent 
U of T geophysicist, could point to Mount Tuzo in the Rockies. It was named for his mother, Henrietta Tuzo, who along with his father, was a dedicated mountain climber. Born in Ottawa in 1908, Wilson was the first student to take a BA in geophysics at U of T. Then it was off to Cambridge, compliments of the Massey Foundation, for a second bachelor’s degree, and then to Princeton, where he earned a PhD in 1936. In that year he began working full time for the Geological Survey of Canada. The arrival of war in 1939 changed everything, however, and Wilson embarked on what would become seven years of service in the Canadian Army.

With the war behind him, Wilson returned to his alma mater, where he would remain as professor of geophysics until 1974. An enormous amount of work was crammed into these years, especially in the area of plate tectonics, on which he became a world authority. He was very much the public intellectual, too, serving on a number of boards and councils, including the presidency of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics. At U of T, he was principal of Erindale College from 1967 to 1974. Wilson then retired from U of T, but the word was almost meaningless to him. He took up the post of director general of the Ontario Science Centre until 1985, taught part time as a distinguished lecturer and then professor emeritus at U of T, and even served for three years as chancellor of York University.

Wilson personified the classical ideal of keen mind and active body, and so we have a snapshot of him in 1935 making the first ascent of Mount Hague, at 12,328 feet one of the highest mountains in Montana. Then we see him in the air in 1946, only the second Canadian to fly over the North Pole. He aimed to reach the same heights as an author, writing books on the Middle Kingdom such as Unglazed China (1973). In Wilson, U of T had an adventurous scholar whose professional impact was immense. Much like a mountain, one might say.

George Paxton Young (1818-89)

The credit for Ontario’s public primary school system goes mainly to Egerton Ryerson, that staunch Victorian Methodist. But the province’s high school system owes almost as much to George Paxton Young, Presbyterian and longtime philosopher at University College, University of Toronto. Born into a family of Church of Scotland clergymen in 1818, Paxton Young studied at Edinburgh University and was ordained in the free Church of Scotland.

In 1850, he received the important appointment of minister of Knox Church in Hamilton, Canada West (Ontario). But Paxton Young was not satisfied with being only a pastor; his questing mind, forged in the hothouse of Edinburgh’s philosophical traditions, sought further goals. In 1853, he was appointed professor of philosophy and religion at Knox College. There he remained for 11 years until resigning from both Knox and the Presbyterian ministry in 1864 because of a 19th-century-style set-piece dilemma. His commitment to Presbyterian creeds had waned in light of his dependence upon reason in guiding human affairs, and this new theological position was in conflict with the Church. And so at Ryerson’s behest, he rechannelled his energies, becoming Ontario’s inspector of grammar schools. The reports Paxton Young wrote over the next four years were models of enlightened thinking and did much to push the provincial government toward the creation of a more uniform high school curriculum. In 1868, Knox College reconsidered and Paxton Young returned, but not for long. Three years later he left to become professor of logic, metaphysics and ethics at the non-denominational UC. There, his influence on students was almost as important as that of his better-known colleague, Sir Daniel Wilson.

Paxton Young’s advocacy of an idealism infused by Christianity but temporal in outlook had great appeal to students whose hearth and home – the Protestant Christianity of Ontario – was under severe attack by rationalists. Paxton Young, far-sighted school inspector, noted scholar and legendary teacher, remained in the classroom until his death in 1889.

Bora Laskin (1912-84; BA 1933 UC, MA 1936)
In 1949, Bora Laskin, one of the best legal minds ever produced at the University of Toronto, returned to his alma mater after a few years of teaching at the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Osgoode Hall. In that year U of T reconstituted the way it taught law, launching a professional law school that recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. No one, apart from founding dean Cecil “Caesar” Augustus Wright, was more important in the creation of the law school than Laskin, whose name adorns its library.

Laskin was born in Fort William (Thunder Bay), Ontario, in 1912. In his late teens, he headed south to U of T, where over the next six years he earned BA and MA degrees. He then took an LLB at Osgoode Hall, followed by an LLM at Harvard. Throughout a long academic career, which began at U of T in 1940 and ended there in 1965, he gained a reputation as a strong civil libertarian and a brilliant legal scholar. His work in constitutional and labour law was essential to the development of Canadian jurisprudence in these areas, and his major books, Canadian Constitutional Law (1963) and The British Tradition in Canadian Law (1969), became standard reference texts.

In 1970, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau acknowledged Laskin’s brilliance by appointing him to the Supreme Court of Canada, the first jurist of the Jewish faith so honoured in the country’s history. Three years later he became chief justice. In this capacity he presided over a number of landmark cases, none more celebrated than the constitutional reference case concerning the patriation of the British North America Act, the basis for Canada’s modern constitution, in 1981. A short while later, in 1984, Laskin died while in office.

Lester Pearson (1897-1972; BA 1919 Victoria)
In the midst of the First World War, 20-year-old Lester Bowles Pearson agreed with his flight-school squadron commander that “Mike” was a much-improved moniker, and “Mike” he became, for the rest of his days. Born in 1897, the future prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize-winner enjoyed a charmed life of picnics and baseball until the outbreak of war in 1914. The previous year, Pearson had enrolled at Victoria College. Graduating after the war with a BA in history, he went to Oxford on a Massey Foundation fellowship, where he read modern history and played hockey and lacrosse for the university. “Herr Zigzag,” as the admiring Swiss dubbed him during a hockey tournament, emerged from Oxford with a coveted Blue in both sports.

In 1923, Pearson returned to Canada to teach in U of T’s history department. He loved teaching, and his students thought him vibrant – especially Maryon Moody, the one he married – but he had too much restless energy and enthusiasm for contemporary events to live the sometimes semi-monastic life of a professor. The Canadian Department of External Affairs was thus a magnet, and in 1928 Pearson began a 30-year career as a diplomat, becoming the face of Canada’s foreign service from London to Washington to Ottawa. He would also serve as chancellor of Victoria College from 1952 to 1959. In 1957, Pearson’s career was capped gloriously when he became the first Canadian awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his leading role in brokering an end to the Suez Crisis through the creation of a United Nations Emergency Force. UN peacekeeping was born. In 1963, by then leader of the Liberal party, Pearson was elected prime minister of Canada, serving for five years before retiring.

More than any of his contemporaries, Pearson epitomized Canada’s emergence in the mid-20th century as a country of real power and influence. U of T’s loss was the country’s gain, for while Pearson would have made a competent history professor, his true arena was the negotiating table and the conference hall. Still, it’s unlikely that any other university can boast that a former professor who coached its football and hockey teams went on to win the Nobel Prize and become prime minister.

George Brett (1879-1944)

Sports fans among the readership may be initially disappointed to learn that it is George Brett the philosopher, not the baseball player known for his prowess at the plate, who is included in this collection of leading University of Toronto intellectuals and alumni. They needn’t be. This George Brett, born in Wales in 1879, was a winner, too.

After earning a first-class degree in classics (or “Greats”) at Christ Church, Oxford, Brett taught for a few years at Government College, Lahore, in today’s Pakistan, then British India at the height of the Raj. His next move was to Canada, to teach classics at U of T. In 1908, however, his interest in the new field of psychology caused him to migrate to the department of philosophy, where he remained until his death in 1944, working to establish psychology as a separate discipline within the academy.

The years just before, during and shortly after the First World War proved especially fruitful for Brett. As one observer has noted, in his major work of scholarship, A History of Psychology (published in three volumes from 1912 to 1921), he assessed and largely rejected the mind theories of his day, concluding that psychology is the study of the immediate data of the inner life. He was committed to historical modes of understanding, as his 1913 book, The Government of Man, makes clear.

Human freedom, he argued, emerges over time from the relation between changing social orders and the inner life. Such was Brett’s impact that he is acknowledged as the founder of the Toronto school of intellectual history, an informal group of like-minded psychologists who saw Brett as their mentor.

As chair of U of T’s department of philosophy from 1927-44, and dean of the School of Graduate Studies, Brett was perhaps the most important figure in the development of psychological, ethical and religious studies in Canada during the first half of the 20th century. He founded the Canadian Journal of Religious Thought and served as editor of The International Journal of Ethics. At U of T, he was the first editor of the University of Toronto Quarterly, now in its 71st year.

Brad Faught (PhD 1996) is a Toronto writer and regular contributor to University of Toronto Magazine.

Hey, You at the Back: Dublin-born clergyman John McCaul (the second president of King’s College), shared this secret about his renowned oratorical skills: “Speak slowly and as distinctly as possible, and at the same time fix your eyes on one or two persons near the door. When you have . gained their attention . keep the voice at that pitch and . you will hold your audience.”

Here’s How He Counts: James Loudon, a math scholar, became U of T’s first Canadian-born full professor in 1875, then its first Canadian-born president (though the university’s fourth) in 1892.

A Kick in the Kishka: When the exuberant, Gaelic-speaking president Sidney Smith (1945-57) tasted kishka at a Holy Blossom Brotherhood Temple dinner in 1955, he raved about the dish so much that The Noshery restaurant sent a private supply to the Smiths. Nearly 20 years later, Orthodox Jewish students in residence complained about having to pay full board for food they couldn’t eat – kosher meals were not available anywhere on campus.

Big Wheels: President Claude Bissell (1958-71) was chauffeured about in his favourite sedan, a Celebrity Oldsmobile 98 – ordered new every three or four years so that he could enjoy the latest accessories. The wheels came off that perk when George Connell took over in the late ’70s – he shared his car and driver with the university’s vice-presidents.

Easy Rider: President George Connell (1984-90) rode some exciting wheels: a Harley that he revved on the front steps of Simcoe Hall. Decked out in motorcycle leathers, “Dr. Wild Thing” became a front-page pinup for The Varsity’s annual gag issue. (Connell’s head had been superimposed on Sheila Copps’ body to hilarious effect, or so thought the Varsity staffers.)

Pedagogic Wonders

If It Please the Court: Before coming to Canada in 1842, Henry Holmes Croft, U of T’s first professor of chemistry, turned down an offer to become court pianist to the King of Hanover. The skilled musician and Renaissance man ended up in a completely different kind of court: testifying in trials concerning death by poison.

Say That Again: William Henry Van der Smissen, professor of German from 1866 to 1913, was so fond of his own lectures he once repeated a favourite three times in one year, to the same class.

A True Breadwinner: Political economist Vincent Bladen may well have been an expert on price systems and the economist Adam Smith, but he won the hearts of colleagues with his fabulous fruit loaf. It inspired Professor Robert Finch to this poetic rapture: “The whole description’s wasted/if you should happen never to have tasted” a fruit loaf done the Bladen way.

He Went Back Home to Rest: Professor Guy Frederic Marrian arrived at U of T in 1933. Over the next three years he supervised seven biochemistry theses – likely a record in those times. In 1936, he solved one of the mysteries of birth by discovering that two female sex hormones trigger labour. He returned to England in 1938.

This Was a Shock: While conducting research on hypothermia, Dr. W.G. Bigelow discovered that electrical charges could induce a heart to continue beating when it otherwise might have stopped. His research team went on to develop the first pacemaker suitable for clinical use in 1949.

Jock Talk
The Grass Is Always Greener: When the foundation for a new gym on the back campus of University College was laid in 1892, students objected so strongly to losing their playing field that they struck this deal: they would pay to have the foundation removed, even doing much of the work themselves, if the university would relocate the gym. The gym moved to the present-day site of Hart House, and the back-campus playing field still exists today.

Bowled Over Again: That same gym, built in 1893, included a bowling alley, probably the only one on campus. Alas, the gym and alley survived only until 1912, when they were demolished to make way for Hart House, which offered many amenities – but not bowling.

Hockey, Whatever: Musicians were the unlikely beneficiaries when Varsity Arena opened on Bloor Street in 1926: the ice rink was found to have excellent acoustics. It became the summer home of popular symphony concerts in the 1930s and ’40s, drawing audiences of as many as 5,000.

Thanks for the Memories: After several unsuccessful attempts to sneak into Hart House for training in the 1960s, future Olympic medallist Abby Hoffman figured the House would have to let her in when she joined a team of male U of T students training on the Hart House track in preparation for the 1967 World University Games. No such luck. Nevertheless, the determined Hoffman did go to the games with the team. To her chagrin, the university later sent her a bill for her travel expenses.

Udder Nonsense
High Steaks: For Halloween high jinks in 1868, UC undergrads lured their steward’s cow up the stairs of the dining-hall bell tower. The steward awoke to a cacophony of ringing, to find his cow’s switching tail tied to the bell-rope. It’s a good deal harder to coax a cow downstairs than to persuade it to go up. In the end, Bossie had to be slid down from the tower on boards.

Cow-ching: In the 1880s, the university collected rent on pasture land it owned on the southeast corner of Bloor Street and Avenue Road – where Victoria College, Annesley Hall and the Club Monaco clothing store now stand. In his memoirs, journalist Hector Charlesworth offered these fond musings of pasturing his family’s milker: “When I lost the key of the pasture, I had to go trembling to the bursar’s office to procure a new one.”

Cow-towing It Out of Town: In the early days, there were only a handful of students in agricultural science at U of T, giving Professor George Buckland of agriculture ample time to create a 25-acre experimental farm where Hart House now stands. Though a mediocre instructor, Buckland succeeded in his attempts to create greener pastures in 1874, when he helped to establish the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph.

War Stories
Cold War One: President Robert Falconer resisted pressure to close the university during the First World War to release students for war service, saying that doing so would “still one of the most helpful voices in the country.” However, with munitions industries getting priority for fuel, the university did close for three weeks during the winter of 1917, when it ran short of coal.

Cold War Two: On Halloween of 1953, Victoria College students, dressed in white robes and carrying lighted candles, burned American Senator Joseph McCarthy in effigy to protest his Communist witch-hunting campaign. “The students were safe, though, from a McCarthy investigation or reprisal,” reported the New York Times, “being Canadian undergrads at U of T.”

War and Peace: In 1935, the Student Christian Movement (SCM) advocated a uniform-free Remembrance Day ceremony, to emphasize peace in the future rather than past wars. Their service attracted a full house at the Hart House Theatre while, steps away, a large group, including soldiers in uniform, attended a ceremony at Soldiers’ Tower.

Important Fluff: One of Uof T’s most successful Second World War inventions came from the botany department: substituting kapok in Mae West life jackets with the fibrous parts of milkweed. For some time, Russian dandelions grew rampant on campus, and U of T scientists managed to develop a synthetic rubber from the plants.

No Free Exchanges: The Students Administrative Council (SAC) came under fire in February of 1939 for picking up the entertainment tab of German exchange students on campus. “The happenings in [their] country were not their fault,” said SAC. A few weeks later, the council pulled the plug on SAC’s support when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia.

Little Brits Flee Blitz: U of T staff and graduates found homes for or took in 147 children who were removed from London from the summer of 1940 to October 1941 during and after the devastation of the Battle of Britain.

Problematic Erections
High Defence: Sidney Smith Hall opened in 1961 to a litany of complaints – about its overwhelming size, its ill-cooled and stinky basement animal labs and, as President Claude Bissell diplomatically phrased it, its “arrangement of masses.” Toasting the building’s opening, Professor F.H. Anderson reached these oratorical heights: “. the building is not . a hurdy-gurdy, a bonbon dish, a seashell, a soufflé, a church or a boiler factory, but manifestly a humanized stronghold and urbane habitation, ready practically to serve the high utility of ancient and modern humane scholarship.” We hope he was able to land a corner office.

Design as Smokescreen: In a 1966 letter, U of T governor Sydney Hermant complained that while the new Scarborough College was “most imaginative and spectacularly functional – smokestacks notwithstanding,” there was a “general feeling” that the cost “was almost double the original budget.” President Claude Bissell’s diplomatic response: “It will be hard to get at the truth of Scarborough, since the building arouses shrill opinions.”

Bargain Tower: The tower that tops the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library – called by many the goose’s head to the goose’s body that is Robarts Library – is purely decorative, meant to add esthetic balance. One cost-saving plan, however, nearly cut the head off the goose, until the chairman of the property committee learned that the tower would cost only $10,000. He then declared that, at that price, he quite liked it.

Curious Yellow: At a distance the exterior of University College seems to be made entirely of stone, but two-thirds of it is clad in a very pale yellow brick from a local brickyard. Time and dirt change all.

Town and Gown Diplomacy

Surely They Weren’t Vic Students: In 1892, Ontario Premier Oliver Mowat accused U of T of being a hive of immorality, claiming that “women were seen about the place at late hours.” The dean of residence agreed that Queen’s Park was a “notorious” meeting place, where men and women walked together at nighttime, but he added: “I have often met them and taken care to observe whether or not they were students. I have never met a student with a woman…. The residence cannot be held responsible for the conduct of the immoral citizens of Toronto.”

So Who Went There? U of T asked its graduate students to leave residence in 1893, accusing them of leading undergrads astray. When the 13 grads refused, the dean tossed their personal effects into the dining hall. Several took the matter to court, but the charges against the university were dropped. The graduates found other digs, presumably farther from Queen’s Park.

They Named a Square after Him: In 1955, Toronto Mayor Nathan Phillips demanded the removal of three pictures from a Hart House art exhibit, calling the works “obscene.” One of the artists, Michael Snow, later became famous for his Flying Geese sculptures that soar in Toronto’s Eaton Centre.

These Profs Deserve a Hand
Do the Write Thing: Sir Daniel Wilson, U of T’s third president, had a handy skill: he could write different words with his left and right hands, simultaneously.

Money, Indeed, Talks
Too Much Ivy on the Ivory Tower: When prominent architect Eric Arthur complained in 1974 that ivy was destroying University College, Principal Archibald Hallett countered that “every alumni visitor” would “scream” if the lush greenery were stripped away. An expert from the grounds department duly investigated and diplomatically reported, “While ivy may in fact feed on the lime in brickwork, stonework and mortar joints. there is less weathering damage to brick and stonework where it is covered with ivy.”

Anti-Hades Kitty: The first principal of New College, D.G. Ivey, suggested that the $10 fees forfeited by students who applied for, but didn’t accept, residence be used to start a fund to buy artistic, athletic or academic items for the residence. Ivey proposed calling it the Cerberus Fund, after the mythical three-headed watchdog at the gates of Hades, as it might well “help to keep the college from going to hell.”

Professorial Dust-Ups
The Message Wasn’t Clear Then: Dean of Graduate Studies Andrew Gordon was dead set against funding a centre for Marshall McLuhan’s study of culture and technology. President Claude Bissell rushed to a lukewarm defence: “Whatever one may think of McLuhan’s work, he is undoubtedly one of our great international figures.I think we must do all that we can to keep him.” McLuhan got his centre in 1963, and the building where it is still housed in 1968.

War of Words: Oscar Pelham Edgar loved to lecture from a heavy oak lectern. Andrew James Bell loved space to roam. As the two taught in the same classroom, the lectern was constantly shuffled in and out until Bell had the final say: he and one of his students heaved the lectern from a second-storey window of Victoria College.

The Fairly Peeved Sex

Money Makes the Break: The threat of possible court cases and the Ontario government’s concern about the cost of setting up a separate women’s university had much to do with women finally gaining admission to U of T in 1884.

Speaking Volumes
Thrice Burned: After the University College fire of Feb. 14, 1890, French lecturer John Squair asked the Ontario Normal School for a bequest of 20 rare French novels that were collecting dust in their library. He was refused. In 1927, he found the same novels collecting more dust in the Ontario Legislative Library. Again, Squair got the brush-off. Finally, 90 years after the first request, U of T library was offered the books.

Wrong Timing: In 1897, history Professor George M. Wrong was so determined to produce an annual review of historical publications about Canada that he paid out of his own pocket to have the first volume published. In 1920 it became the Canadian Historical Review, and it is still published today. Eventually, Wrong was rightly reimbursed for his early investment.

Intoxicating Words: A 1942 stag party thrown by poet, and then U of T instructor, Earle Birney apparently inspired the first chapter of Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry. Frye attributed the cause for his revelation to “The Truant,” a poem read at the party by its author, E.J. (Ned) Pratt.

Check the Credits: Morley Callaghan’s 1948 The Varsity Story was certainly nostalgic, but it was not fond memories of the ol’ Blue and White alone that inspired the novel. U of T’s board of governors commissioned the work as part of a fundraising campaign.

Bons Mots or Naughty? Attempts to unify the French curriculum in the 1950s met with fervid resistance: St. Mike’s nixed some books that were on the index, a list of titles that Catholics were prohibited from reading. The compromise? St. Mike’s students got a work by André Gide (although he was verboten), as long as the other colleges agreed to read the approved François Mauriac.

Oh, Henry! U of T library’s order for a copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in 1962 was held at Canada Customs, as the book had been on its prohibited list since 1938. The library took its fight for the book to the university president and solicitors. Pssst: U of T’s libraries currently have six copies.

The Times Were A’ Changin’
Black Mark: Barbara Arrington, a black student at U of T, was asked to join a women’s fraternity in 1959, but days later, her invitation was revoked because of possible “friction with affiliated fraternities in the American south,” reported The Varsity. The resulting furor led to the university’s public disavowal of fraternities.

Jewish Barrier: There was a quota system during the 1940s and ’50s that restricted the number of Jews allowed into pre-medicine. In 1959, Robin Ross, the university registrar, told President Claude Bissell that 14 well-qualified Jewish applicants were refused. “In most cases,” wrote Ross, “it was quite unrealistic to argue that the rejected candidates were refused on any other grounds than that they were Jewish.” The quota system disappeared in the 1960s.

The Iron Ceiling: Perhaps the last barrier to co-education at U of T was breached when women were allowed to become fellows of Massey College in 1974. Hart House had admitted women just two years earlier. Vincent Massey, a bulwark of traditional upper-class conservatism, had died in the late 1960s, and the tide had turned toward more liberal times.

First Rates
Stick and Karat Approach? Until 1885, students who graduated first in honours classics, mathematics, modern languages and history, mental and moral philosophy and natural sciences received gold medals for their efforts.

Was It a Sugar High? U of T built North America’s first decompression chamber in 1941, to test the effects of high speed and high altitude on pilots. The first to try out the chamber was Sir Frederick Banting, who co-discovered insulin in 1922. Banting tested to the equivalent of 25,000 feet and minus 59 degrees Fahrenheit and was prepared to push further, but his staff intervened.

King of Computers: Canada’s first electronic computer, purchased by U of T in 1952, computed projected effects of the St. Lawrence Seaway on water levels in the Great Lakes. It also played checkers.

A Close Call in Space

Thankfully Not Spaced Out: With Apollo 13 crippled in space, NASA asked U of T’s aerospace institute for air-pressure calculations to ensure safe re-entry of the capsule into the earth’s ozone. Confident they were part of a wider NASA team, researchers cranked out the correct figure within the three-hour deadline, without computers. They learned later they were the only scientists assigned to the problem.

Sex and the Single Male

No Sax Please, We’re Skittish: In the ’20s, the Hart House musical club soberly decreed that no jazz or ragtime music could be played on its pianos. The ban was lifted in 1957 for the Peter Appleyard Quartet and Moe Koffman’s group. Oscar Peterson rattled the ivories for a packed Great Hall in 1961.

Exchange Trips Lead to Sweaty Moments: Finnish students built the first sauna at Hart House Farm in 1954, returning the favour of Hart House members who had helped build a communal sauna at the Finnish Institute of Technology in Helsinki during an exchange trip three years earlier.

Pool Envy? Some men admitted that the real reason they wanted to keep women out of Hart House was so that they could continue a long tradition of swimming nude in the pool. The women’s offer to join them in the practice was not accepted. Women were fully admitted, fully clothed, to Hart House in 1972.

The Way We Were
Over budget: Vic undergrad Norman Jewison produced his first show, All Varsity Revue, to acclaim and profit in 1948. The future Hollywood director then blew the profit and put the show in the red by taking the cast on an unauthorized trip to Montreal. Cost: $316.

Frostbitten: Atom Egoyan, known for his downright emotionally chilly films, shot his first flick, Howard in Particular, in 1979 and edited it in the frosty film board room on the second floor of Hart House. Recalls Egoyan: “I did most of the cutting wearing mitts.”

Not That We Don’t Trust You: In 1985, the administration sent university employee and part-time student John Maine to buy a paper from an essay-for-purchase service advertising on campus, with this prudent advice: “The purpose of the exercise is to secure as much information as possible about the operation..I will leave it to your judgment to concoct a plausible topic. However, I think it would be wise to avoid one directly related to any course in which you are now enrolled.”

Words Are Quite Enough: The Hart House library committee would not order Esquire, a popular men’s lifestyle magazine launched in the 1930s. They worried that there would be “certain pages carried off” – the magazine’s rather wholesome illustrations of women, one presumes.

Freaky: Rochdale College (1968-75), a short-lived experiment in alternative education started by U of T students and faculty but never affiliated with U of T, sold degrees to help pay the mortgage. For the non-BA, one had to “say something useful,” while for the non-PhD, one had to simply “say something.” The price tag for the degrees ranged from $25 to $100.

REALLY Rad: At the height of student unrest in 1968, Marshall McLuhan suggested that President Claude Bissell call the students’ bluff. “Simply invite them in to organize the entire educational job. Pay them no salaries whatever..Make them do the entire job for one year while the regular staff relaxes and studies the experiment.”

Their Kinda Gal: At the annual winter carnival, started in 1955, the Snow Queen was judged for her “enthusiasm, willingness, and general appearance,” but she was also scrutinized for her ability to snowshoe, saw wood and cook pancakes over an open fire.

We Love You, Ya, Ya, Ya

Splitsville? A week after playing a 1969 concert at Varsity Arena with his Plastic Ono Band (which included Eric Clapton), John Lennon promptly split with the Beatles. But, no, we did not cause the ruination of the Fab Four. According to one source, Lennon later said: “I knew on the flight over to Toronto or before we went to Toronto.”

Harmony, Dude: Three months after that September concert, John Lennon and Yoko Ono dropped by U of T to visit Marshall McLuhan. (They were en route to meet Pierre Trudeau in Ottawa and later staged their famous love-in in Montreal.) During the meeting, arranged by CBS Television, the two pop walruses discussed their theories on music, language and peace. As the pair drove away in their Rolls, however, McLuhan’s message was less than rock-star cool: “These portals have been honoured by your presence,” he said.

Striking the Right Note: To choose a grand piano in 1984, the Hart House music committee invited eight professional pianists to play seven grands over a two-day period. Obsessive? Greats such as Anton Kuerti would later play the chosen instrument. The perfect pitch? A 1935 New York Steinway, which echoes in the Great Hall.

Neither Here Nor There

Odd Sods: The Rotary Clubs of Toronto were so anxious to have something to report to an international convention in 1964 about their gift to establish an International Student Centre that the university agreed to a sod-turning ceremony at a fictitious site on Huron Street. Two years later, the ISC moved into an established building, Cumberland House, on St. George Street.

Odd Ends
Decommissioned: From 1958 until recently, U of T was a nuclear power, albeit a minor one. The Wallberg Building housed the first small reactor, replaced by SLOWPOKE – the Safe Low-Power Kritical Experiment reactor – in 1971. The reactor, used for research, was decommissioned in 2000.

Unslimed: Before exams, students used to seek out the mythical carved beast that perches on the newel post of the east staircase in University College, and rub it for luck. Luckily the tradition is extinct, as the griffin (some say it’s a dragon) has been severely darkened by generations of sweaty palms.

Under-used: One of the oldest chairs in the university was dubbed the Prince of Wales chair, as the royal tush reputedly touched down on it when the prince visited in 1860. Then, the P of W propped up chancellors while they bestowed degrees. When a more ornate model arrived, the humble chair was shuffled off to serve a series of ends: it was used by the speaker for the University College parliament before engineering pranksters stole it, then The Varsity bought it as its managing editor’s chair. Today, situated on the left side of the fireplace in the UC Junior Common Room, it supports whatever bottom happens to plunk down on it.

Rites of Passage

Blame the Overachiever: Claris Edwin Silcox, editor of both The Varsity and Torontonensis in 1908, penned the lyrics to the university’s anthem, “The Blue and White” song, the same year. Music was by Clayton E. Bush.

Verse 1:
Old Toronto, mother ever dear
All thy sons thy very name revere

Yes, we’ll hail thee,

Ne’er will fail thee

But will seek thy glory with our might,

(Yes we are)

Ever loyal, faithful, frank and strong,

We will sound thy praises in our song, 

Aye, and cheer both loud and long,

The Royal Blue and White

Chorus: 

Toronto is our University

Shout, oh shout, men of ev’ry faculty 

Velut arbor aevo,

May she ever thrive
O 
God forever bless our alma mater

Verse 2: 

Soon our college days will all be past, 

Duty bids us part from friends at last 

But we’ll sever,

Trusting ever 

Love for Varsity may us unite – 
(unite us) 

Then we’ll serve the mother of us all,

And the merry days of youth recall,

While whatever may befall, 

We’ll flaunt the Blue and White

Chorus: 

Toronto is our university.
 
Home Again: U of T held its first official homecoming weekend in November 1948. More than 4,000 alumni came, making it the largest gathering of the U of T community since the centennial celebration in 1927.

Blame the Irish Accent: Some attribute the engineers’ Toike Oike chant to an Irish caretaker who worked at the School of Practical Science. Apparently, at the end of the day, he was in the habit of telling stragglers to “take a hike.” By the late 1920s, the chant had evolved into the engineering song:

Toike Oike, Toike Oike

Ollum Te Chollum Te Chay 

School of Science, School of Science

Hooray, Hooray, Hooray.

Research by Charles Levi. Some of the items that appear here are also related in The University of Toronto: A History by Martin Friedland. They are used with permission of the author.

Frank Darling’s Convocation Hall is that sort of building. Its columned exterior and inviting entrances, its all-embracing dome, the exactitude of its inner sightlines, the precision and economy of its seating arrangements, its connection to its purpose: we greet these qualities almost with insouciance.

“Con Hall” embraces crowds of graduands and their well-wishers on a seasonal rotation – autumn and spring – as predictable as a February cold. Its rafters overlook the colourful processions, lame jokes and tired exhortations that sate our yearning to mark a new stage in life, in one of the few ceremonies that a secularized culture has not snatched from us. It is a space as reassuring as a warm muffler.

That said, Darling uttered in glazed brick an architectural statement as expressive of the academic culture of his time as the fairy-spun alloys of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao are of the present day. The apparent ease of Darling’s statement belies the scale of the university politics he was dealing with, a tangle as deep and tenacious as the root system of a forsythia. Three storylines – Con Hall’s, Darling’s and the University of Toronto’s – explain what the university meant in Darling’s time. Conflict – cultural, religious, political and, above all, academic – shaped that vision.

War and Remembrance

Comparing the cultural politics of mid-19th-century Toronto Anglicanism with those of late-19th-century Ontario Liberalism might seem at first like matching a wine-tasting against a bowling tournament. However, similar features of each process defeated both Frank Darling and his father, Rev. William S. Darling (1818-1886), who was rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity from 1875 to 1882. In each case, their clientele wanted their institutions to be reassuring and traditional.

William Darling’s version of the traditional failed to reassure its Toronto consumers. By the late 1850s, colonial Anglicanism in Toronto appreciated that product differentiation involved more style than substance. Anglican and Methodist clergy could dance for days on theological pinheads. Everyone in the pews understood that a somewhat predictable God rewarded virtue (mostly) and punished vice (often).

What increasingly separated Anglicans from the competition was their stylistic flair. Good music, good smells, cultivated sermons preached to quality audiences: these, rather than low-Church evangelizing, made for a distinctive variety of Christianity. Fresh from the Oxford Movement in England, William Darling came to Toronto and gave Holy Trinity Canada’s first surpliced choir. He introduced other Anglo-Catholic refinements in the services and decorations, until his congregation found itself too distinctive, too elegantly serviced, for what was still a tough colonial culture. The result: in the early 1880s, William Darling was forced out of active involvement with Holy Trinity. He died in Italy in 1886.

His son, no less a stylistic innovator, endured a similar reckoning. After attending such elite enclaves as Trinity College School and Upper Canada College and fleeing a banking job that his father had arranged for him, Frank Darling began working in the Toronto architectural firm of Gundry and Langley in 1866. There he served the sort of gofer apprenticeship that constituted architectural training in the English-speaking world. By 1870, again moving up the ladder of colonial achievement, he joined the office of British architectural luminary G.E. Street (the Strand Law Courts). Toronto’s Anglican establishment supplied him with a number of commissions for Gothic Revival churches.

In 1882, the firm of Darling and Curry won Ontario’s first international architectural competition. The commission for the new provincial legislative buildings at Queen’s Park was theirs. The firm had come up with a grand Gothic complex, more intense in its decorativeness than Thomas Fuller’s new Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. The drawings display a vision of legislative politics as a secularized civic religion.

Sadly, the legislature, composed mainly of small-town Scottish farmers and businessmen, would have been more at home costing threshing machines than running an international architectural competition. The Gothic buildings seemed, well, uplifting and inspirational and in every way suited to a political culture that kept its head bowed and its pockets filled. But something bad happened on the way to Queen’s Park. My hunches here supplement the spare historical records.

Would a largely Protestant, liberal, modernizing government really want to render its personal architectural statement in a style originating in cultural forces that were anything but Protestant, liberal and modern? If you were building an agricultural and engineering college, would you want it to look like Oxford? If you were putting up legislative lodgings for a province built upon the encouragement of resource exploitation, technologized agriculture and manufacturing capacity, would you want something that looked like a church? And a Roman church at that? The province had helped fight a war to keep the West from ever becoming Catholic and French-speaking. Should it meet in buildings that reminded its members of all those things?

Darling’s buildings were never started. The kind of wheeling and dealing that leaves no written record concluded when the government announced that it had never really meant what it said about Darling’s submission. No, it had been thinking all along about something else, something better ventilated (this last, a matter of record). The commission had in fact been handed to one of the judges in the botched competition, British-born Peter Waite, who practised in Buffalo, N.Y. The ethics by which he was selected would have been appropriate in the fo’c’sle of a pirate ship and shocked the nascent profession of architecture in Canada.

Amid the furor, and despite the fact that Kivas Tully, the provincial architect, had approved of Darling’s scheme and was a family friend and fellow Gothicist, Darling maintained a dignified silence. New plans went ahead, and the Richardsonian-Romanesque pink palace that may seem dated now, but was the very last word in up-to-dateness then, became the Ontario legislature. Henry Hobson Richardson, the American who adapted the Romanesque as the apotheosis of fin-de-siècle style, had himself beaten out Thomas Fuller’s firm for the capital buildings in Albany, N.Y., in a similar kind of switched decision. Gothic was Out, Romanesque was In. And Darling, ever a realist, later executed striking work in that same Richardsonian-Romanesque mode.

Still, he had taken a hit. The cultural wars that had marooned his father seemed to have harpooned him, too. But other battlefields lay ahead.

Classicism and Enlightenment
Skip years now, to the first decade of the 20th century, and consider the man whom the University of Toronto retained as its official architect. The Queen’s Park setback had not harmed Darling’s standing with the forces of cultural nationalism. Whatever botch the politicians had perpetrated took nothing away from his prowess; placing him on retainer guaranteed that the university would have at least one imagination of distinction to apply to the problem of following Frederick Cumberland’s masterpiece – now University College. It was inevitable that the university would expand.

But what exactly was it that was expanding? There stood the weird, compelling UC, with its tacked-on, New-World School of Chemistry (now Croft Chapter House) modelled on a 14th-century abbot’s kitchen. The bauble functioned as one of those out-of-the-way places where odd people, few of them gentlemen, did science. New structures arose, accommodating the scientific activities that were reshaping society and culture. An Ontario university that could not meet the demands of that new culture was going to become yet another training school for preachers and poets. New colleges stood on the campus, but those colleges had been financed by religious communities, each of which had its peculiar, uneasy relationship with science and what it was doing to the traditional ways of making sense of the world.

This seemingly put-together-without-a-kit university formed an alumni association only in 1900. It seemed to have just grown, and lacked even a common meeting place, since the hall that had been used for convocation was destroyed in the University College fire on Valentine’s Day 1890. What kind of campus was it anyway? Certainly not one that the provincial legislature supported lavishly, or at times even willingly.

Slowly, the idea caught on that the university indeed needed someplace where everybody could sit down and listen to each other. Yet even then, a fight broke out. Put the building to the southwest of the university? Wouldn’t that block the view of the beloved UC, restored from fiery destruction after the conflagration of 1890? And even when those brush fires got tamped down, the new alumni association couldn’t raise all the money needed for a Convocation Hall, nor would the government provide any assurances.

We all know the end of the story: practically everyone reading this has had a degree conferred upon him or her in Frank Darling’s Convocation Hall. University historian Martin Friedland’s account of the intrigues that accompanied the beginnings of this Good Thing appeared in these pages in Spring 2000. Briefly, a mixture of bluff, bullying and log-rolling got government onside, and an alumni organization university-wide in its aspirations and loyalties (rather than denominationally based) helped by fundraising. When the building resulting from those labours opened in 1907, what did it say?

First, and above all, it spoke of University. In fact, its circular shape spoke of an inclusive university. Architectural historians discuss Darling’s debts to other similar structures, such as the Sorbonne theatre. What they may fail to mention, however, is that the very idea of centrality had gone missing at U of T. The spirit behind Con Hall kept U of T from devolving into a collection of colleges and schools. Convocation Hall stood in support of an evolutionary, modern, unitary ideal. How appealing that idea must have seemed at the beginning of the 20th century in a nation newly embarked upon creating a unified federal structure.

That modern ideal had been legislated into being by Queen’s Park in 1906. Bestowing upon the university a governing structure composed of an academic senate and a lay board of governors, the province had fitted the institution with a shape that would stay put until the 1970s. What historian Michael Bliss calls the “Golden Age” of the university would glow in the yellow brick that Darling favoured in his choice of materials. His Convocation Hall would be joined on its south side by a new home for physics (now the Sandford Fleming Building). The combination of the two would provide an impressive sweep, even though the gridded, block-long brevity of an uncurved street (King’s College Road) occluded much of that sweep when a visitor entered from the south.

Two features – dome and pillars, top and support – bring home the inclusive statement that Darling’s Con Hall proclaims. Pillars bespeak classicism, the classicism that by Darling’s time had been decoupled from its religious underpinnings and been turned into the emblem of the inquiring secular intellect. A questing 20th century would uncover a broad band of the irrational underlying classical culture, but for Darling and his public the pillars represented an austere, fearless, restlessly inquiring spirit that was quintessentially Greek.

Domes recall temples, mosques, cathedrals. That is, they call forth a universal religious impulse, a religious aspiration as akin to Thomas Jefferson’s one-God-at-most deism as it is to Italian architect Gianlorenzo Bernini’s exuberant baroque Catholicism. The inquiring spirit sits beneath the inclusive circle of the dome, inviting all to a feast of reason. Convocation Hall solemnly proclaims the aspirations of the modern university, and the remnants of the homage it paid to reason inspire us still.

It is as if Darling had swept aside the gnarled, decorated verve of the Gothic and thrown himself instead into a spirit more austere and less sensuous. He went on to design Trinity College, its ornamentation turning religion into a matter of style rather than consequence, the stuff of book jackets rather than psalteries. Something had been left behind: the Gothic-as-belief-system that had powered the Gothic Revivalists, but had now vanished from the serious world.

The banks became Darling’s greatest patrons. His confectionary Bank of Montreal at the foot of Yonge Street (now the Hockey Hall of Fame) swaggers as a model for the banks he later created, often the sole piece of distinguished architecture to be found in small towns throughout the nation. Whatever architectural dreams came to be in those small towns, Darling dreamed them first.

But his Convocation Hall interior rests, finally, on something more than dreams: it reproduces a symmetry found throughout nature, but especially north of the 49th parallel. Look if you will at the plan for the interior, the seating where you perched and counted the number of people to be graduated before your moment of fame arrived. Then look at that interior plan’s source in nature. It is a snow crystal. Can anyone conceive of a more Canadian design?

The dream of reason can be madness, as Goya told us. But for a moment, in Convocation Hall, the dream of a unified and inclusive system of education rests upon the associative, binding qualities of a snowflake. What could be warmer and more sensuous in a cold country?

Professor emeritus of English Dennis Duffy (MA 1962, PhD 1964) is indebted to Susan Bellingham of the University of Waterloo library for research assistance.

Act Two
John McCaul succeeded Strachan as head of King’s College, which would be renamed the University of Toronto in 1850. The Church of Ireland clergyman left his homeland in 1839 to take the principalship of Upper Canada College. In 1843, when King’s College finally admitted its first students, McCaul – described by turns as a magnificent fellow and a martinet – became the new institution’s vice-president and, in 1848, its president.

Act Three
Sir Daniel Wilson came to Canada from Edinburgh in 1853 to take the chair of history 
and English literature at University College. In 1880 he became president of UC and nine years later added the presidency of U of T to his portfolio. (There was no University of Toronto president between 1853 and 1889. After a reorganization in 1853, University College was U of T.) A polymath of the best Victorian type, Wilson was also committed to non-denominational education and upheld firmly the principle of intellectual freedom.

Act Four
Wilson was followed by the quiet mathematician and physicist James Loudon, president from 1892 to 1906. He headed the institution during the fin de siècle when the PhD degree was established at U of T. As well, he saw the university consolidate its federation model with the notable inclusion of Trinity College – Strachan’s legacy – under its umbrella in 1904.

Act Five
Robert Alexander Falconer, who presided over U of T until 1932, is generally considered the university’s greatest leader. He oversaw the rapid expansion of U of T’s facilities, including Varsity Stadium in 1911 and Simcoe Hall in 1924. During the war years, he stoutly resisted calls for the dismissal of German-born professors from the faculty.

Act Six
Falconer was succeeded by the gentle Henry John Cody, an Anglican who served as Ontario’s minister of education in 1918-19 in the William Hearst Conservative government. Coming in the enormous shadow cast by Falconer, it was difficult for Cody (at the helm from 1932 to 1945) to place his own stamp on U of T. After a dozen years in office, he was appointed chancellor in 1945.

Act Seven
Cody’s successor was the exuberant, Gaelic-speaking law professor Sidney Smith, who presided over U of T for 12 prosperous postwar years until 1957. He departed from U of T to become secretary of state for external affairs in the new Diefenbaker Conservative government, but died unexpectedly two years later. Smith was a strong supporter of the liberal arts, and, appropriately, U of T’s arts and sciences building was named for him.

Act Eight
In 1958 the president of Carleton University, Claude Bissell, was persuaded to leave Ottawa and return to his alma mater as president. Campus radicalism, revamped curricula, hippie culture, an expansion in student numbers: Bissell witnessed it all and was highly effective in navigating U of T through the heady 1960s. Significantly, the board of governors was replaced by governing council, which incorporated direct student representation.

Act Nine
In 1972 John Evans came to U of T from McMaster University in Hamilton, where he had been dean of medicine. His presidency was marked by the 1972 report of the Wright Commission on Post-Secondary Education in Ontario. In responding to it, Evans foreshadowed U of T’s fiscal and philosophical challenges by itemizing “public accountability” and “participation of the university in civil society” as two of the hallmarks 
of public higher education in the years to come.

Act Ten
James Ham, president from 1978 to 1983, was an outstanding electrical engineer, as well as a great believer in the humanizing effects of the liberal arts. In response to the increased push for vocational education in the less-than-radical late ’70s and early ’80s, he stated unequivocally: “A liberal arts education helps foster a vital sensitivity to people and ideas.” This attitude informed his presidency throughout its five years.

Act Eleven
David Strangway’s status as acting president was upgraded upon the death of Donald Forster in August of 1983. Forster, appointed as Ham’s successor, died of a heart attack before his installation, leaving Strangway to take the job. In 1984 Strangway departed for the University of British Columbia, heeding the call of Lotus Land.

Act Twelve
The naming of George Connell as president in 1984 marked a homecoming for the biochemist, who spent his entire career at U of T before assuming the presidency of the University of Western Ontario in 1977. For Connell, funding became the dominant issue of his tenure, as government cutbacks to higher education became a grim reality. Under his leadership, U of T launched the Breakthrough fundraising campaign, the progenitor 
of the highly successful current campaign.

Act Thirteen
Connell did not seek another term, making way in 1990 for the advent of law professor J. Robert S. Prichard, who chose Falconer as his role model. Prichard and his administration took fundraising to new levels in Canada (when Prichard entered office, the university had seven permanently endowed chairs; when he left, there were 131). He also implemented strategies that would elevate academic standards and sharpen U of T’s edge as one of the world’s leading research institutions.

Act Fourteen
The appointment in November 1999 of Robert Birgeneau, an alumnus of St. Michael’s College and former dean of the School of Science at MIT, signalled the increasingly serious international aspirations of the University of Toronto. Birgeneau continues his own research in solid-state physics and hopes to see the university “move in the same stratosphere as the universities of Oxford, Tokyo and Berkeley.”

Brad Faught (PhD 1996) is a Toronto writer and regular contributor to University of Toronto Magazine. This is a condensed version of an article that first appeared in the Summer 2000 issue of this magazine.

Oronhyatekha was 14 when a travelling American phrenologist, placing hands on his head, pronounced him educable and spurred him to leave the reserve for higher education. He studied at Ohio’s Kenyon College, where his phenomenal memory earned him top grades. After meeting an Oxford professor who was visiting Canada with the Prince of Wales in 1860, he decided to study at Oxford, and, to this day, a portrait of him in full Mohawk regalia can be found at that university. Back home, he married Ellen Hill (a descendant of Joseph Brant, the Mohawk chief and British ally against the Americans). He continued his education at U of T (where Prof. Daniel Wilson described him as a brilliant student). In 1866, he was awarded a medical degree, then practised as a doctor for about 15 years in several Ontario communities.

Then, as if these accomplishments were not enough, the doctor left medicine for another career, in 1881 becoming the supreme chief ranger of the Independent Order of Foresters (IOF), a worldwide fraternal organization that offers its members a variety of benefits, including affordable life insurance. Putting his unique stamp on this position, which he held for the rest of his life, he travelled the world to open branches of the IOF, whose members now number more than one million worldwide. Well before corporate branding became commonplace, Oronhyatekha heightened the international profile of the IOF – and of himself – immeasurably. And when he travelled, he did what any well-educated successful gentleman of that era did – he collected artifacts: Indo-Persian battle-axes, Australian boomerangs, Burmese drums, Japanese shoes and more than 1,000 specimens of marine shells and coral, along with native artifacts including a silver belt medal and compass owned by Tecumseh, an ally of General Brock.

Oronhyatekha’s death in 1907 was marked by a huge funeral procession and memorial service at Massey Hall, then a smaller service with Mohawk chants in Deseronto, where he was buried. Oronhyatekha and his wife, though they had several children, left no direct descendants. But his legacy lives in his collection, which was transferred to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto in 1911. – Susan Lawrence

Augusta Stowe-Gullen

In 1869, Emily Stowe – who would become one of Canada’s first women physicians – applied to the University of Toronto to take classes in physiology and chemistry. When informed she was not welcome to attend, she declared, “The day will come when these doors will swing wide open to every female who chooses to apply.”

Stowe eventually went to the United States to earn her medical degree. But less than 15 years later, her daughter, Augusta, would help push open the university’s weighty doors. She attended Victoria College (which joined with U of T in 1892), becoming the first woman to graduate in medicine in Canada.

A shy teenager, Stowe (MD 1883 Victoria, MDCM 1887 Trinity) struggled through the medical school’s “friendless halls” and often cried herself to sleep at night. But she found a friend in classmate John Gullen, whom she married a week after convocation.

The newlyweds skipped their honeymoon to attend a postgraduate course in children’s diseases in New York. After returning to Toronto, Stowe-Gullen was appointed the first female staff member at the fledgling Ontario Women’s Medical College. Initially a demonstrator in anatomy, she quickly progressed to lecturer in children’s diseases, then professor of pediatrics, a position she held until the Women’s Medical College amalgamated with U of T in 1906. She ran a private practice out of her home and worked at the Western Hospital (her husband was a founder) – even delivering the institute’s first baby. She was also one of the first three women elected to the U of T Senate in 1911.

A member of Toronto’s beau monde, Stowe-Gullen kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about upscale Rosedale parties and charity euchres at McConkey’s – the swanky restaurant of the day. She was also fond of expensive, ornate dresses, and she and her husband were one of the first couples in Toronto to own a vehicle.

Throughout her life, Stowe-Gullen was best known as a champion of women’s issues, serving as honorary president of the Canadian Suffrage Association and a founding member of the National Council of Women. Two of her greatest sorrows were that her suffragist mother did not live to see the franchise for women, and that many of her peers took their hard-won voting privileges for granted. However, she never stopped fighting for female emancipation. In a National Council of Women speech, she echoed a creed she lived by: “[We] have always tried to find out what was wrong – and to right it.” – Stacey Gibson

Anderson Ruffin Abbott
In mid-19th-century Toronto, fetching a physician was somewhat of a last resort. Understandably so. An 1855 advertisement for a new medical establishment on Yonge Street announced: “Leeches applied, Cupping, Bleeding, and Teeth Extracted.” Nevertheless, medical training was rigorous and reserved for the privileged few.

Anderson Ruffin Abbott, born in Toronto into wealth and good social standing, studied at the Toronto School of Medicine and by 1860, at age 23, had graduated in medicine at the University of Toronto. He was granted a licence to practise a year later, and after several years of apprenticeship, in 1867 became the first Canadian-born black doctor.

He was also a poet, soldier, musician, lecturer and writer. His father, Wilson, was an influential real estate dealer who, by 1870, owned more than 75 properties across Ontario. Along with Abbott’s mother, Ellen, he advocated for black rights, buying slaves in order to free them and leading an 1840 delegation to Toronto city council to protest travelling minstrel shows.

Like his parents, Abbott was involved extensively in his community. Over the years he was the president of the Wilberforce Educational Institute, the Chatham Literary and Debating Society and the Chatham Medical Society. He also wrote regularly for local papers such as the Chatham Planet and the Dundas Banner, speaking out for black rights and condemning racial discrimination.

Abbott also served in the American Civil War, interrupting his training as a medical licentiate (the equivalent of an intern) to join the Union Army in 1863. Eventually accepted as a field surgeon, he was stationed at Camp Barker, Washington, D.C., one of only eight black surgeons to serve in the war. In the army, he faced almost as much racial discrimination as he fought. However, he won the recognition of Abraham Lincoln and became a great family friend.

In 1869, Abbott returned to Toronto and served as resident surgeon at the Toronto General Hospital. Two years later he married Mary Casey and opened a practice in Chatham, Ont. In 1874, he became the coroner for Kent County, also believed to be a first for a black. He spent his last years in Toronto, where he died in 1913. He is buried at a family plot in the Toronto Necropolis.

Obscured by time, Abbott remains an enigma. While he argued strongly against segregated education and other racial prejudice, it is unclear where he got the courage and confidence to do so. (He had more than his share of moxie, to judge from some of his writings. In 1869, a poem he wrote, asking for his wife’s hand in marriage, was published in the Toronto Globe: “I come not here/ With blandishment to woo thee,/ I know the secret of your heart,/ I know full well you love me.”)

For Rosemary Sadlier, president of the Ontario Black History Society, it was Abbott’s commitment to the black community as well as his medical achievements that make him stand out. “Sometimes people forget their origins,” says Sadlier, “but that was not something he was willing to do.” – Lisa Bryn Rundle

Following the eulogy, the casket lid was opened. When people were invited to view the body, only a single soul – an elderly caretaker who had worked for my grandfather for years – shuffled up to the stage and gazed at his face. My grandmother suppressed a cry of anguish. No one else came forward.

I would not hear the story of my grandfather’s funeral, or the reaction to his open casket that chilled the proceedings, until well into my adulthood. In fact, as I grew up, my father, a successful medical specialist, never spoke of his father, an ambitious, driven doctor of Irish Protestant blood, known as Gerry. Given what I would later come to know – that during the ’20s and ’30s, Gerry achieved fame as the visionary architect of Canada’s modern public health system, founding the internationally renowned Connaught Laboratories and University of Toronto School of Hygiene, institutions responsible for saving countless lives – my father’s silence seemed all the more strange. Why would such a magnificent story be withheld from a man’s own grandchildren?

Many years passed before I attempted to lift the lid of my grandfather’s story, burrow through the wall of my father’s silence, and decode the secrets of my paternal bloodlines. Following a trip to my ancestral village in Northern Ireland, I delved into assorted archives, letters, photo albums, and interviews with medical historians and aging former colleagues of my grandfather. I soon realized that my private family story was inextricably bound up in an epic national drama.

The year is 1882. The grandson of tough Irish immigrants who had sailed to Canada in 1824, William FitzGerald, an austere man with sad eyes and a bushy handlebar moustache, opened a small apothecary shop on a muddy street in Drayton, Ontario, a gaslit village of 800 people several hours’ train journey northwest of Toronto. Later that year, his first of four children, Gerry, was born.

As a teenaged apprentice toiling in his father’s rural drugstore, Gerry immersed himself in medical history books, drawn to heroic figures like Louis Pasteur, who in 1881 successfully vaccinated a herd of sheep against anthrax. In 1885, Pasteur risked administering an unproven, rudimentary rabies vaccine to nine-year-old Joseph Meister, bitten 14 times by a mad dog. In saving the boy’s life, Pasteur, a pioneer of the germ theory of disease, laid the foundation of modern preventive medicine.

Tending to his invalid mother, Alice, who rarely rose from her bed, young Gerry soon realized the limits of his father’s healing powers. So it was that in September 1899, on the cusp of a hopeful new century, a precocious 16-year-old country boy wearing wire-rimmed spectacles, bow tie and stiff white collar, set off for the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine, burning with an obsessive career ambition – to stamp out the terror of contagious diseases before they spread. Prevention was the key.

In January 1907, fresh from internships in neurology and psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Hospital and Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Baltimore, 24-year-old Gerry was appointed the first pathologist and clinical director of the Toronto Asylum for the Insane at 999 Queen Street West. Working under Dr. C.K. Clarke, Gerry was swept up in the revolutionary bacteriological discoveries of the time, founding the asylum’s first laboratory and teaching courses in psychiatry at U of T. After centuries of relative ignorance, modern medical science promised, at last, to fathom the complexities of human disease.

In December 1907, Gerry’s mother died of heart failure at age 51. Nine months later, he made a fateful decision: he abandoned neurology and psychiatry in favour of a career in the related but separate fields of public health and preventive medicine.

Succeeding Gerry as pathologist and clinical director of 999 Queen Street was Dr. Ernest Jones, a Welsh colleague and eventual biographer of Sigmund Freud. Jones would remain in Toronto for the next five years, “living in sin” for a time at 407 Brunswick Avenue with his morphine-addicted mistress (later analysed by Freud), and provoking widespread alarm within the city’s medical establishment for what was seen as his unsavoury preoccupation with psychosexual issues. Gerry was taken with Jones’s intellectual dynamism, and they exchanged letters and papers. But the dedicated yet tactless Freudian proselytizer – once characterized as “Freud’s Rottweiler” – left town in 1913 following an alleged sexual harassment scandal that horrified ultra-repressed “Toronto the Good.”

Gerry gradually lost contact with Jones while deepening his connection with Dr. C.B. Farrar, whom he had first befriended while interning in Baltimore. An orthodox psychiatrist who would become editor of the American Journal of Psychiatry and the founding director of the Toronto Psychiatric Hospital (the forerunner of the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry) in 1925, Farrar once condemned communism, Catholicism, unionism and psychoanalysis as “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” With the departure of Jones, the radical new psychoanalytical ideas about dreams, repression and “the talking cure” did not take root in Toronto for another 40 years.

Why did Gerry abandon psychiatry? Perhaps he was disturbed by what he had witnessed at 999 Queen Street – a snakepit in desperate need of reform – and realized that his therapeutic impact on psychotics would be limited. Or perhaps he realized he could accomplish far more in the emerging field of public health – easier to rub out diphtheria, for example, than schizophrenia. Whatever his motives, the decision would change the course of Canadian medical history.

At the turn of the last century, Canada’s primitive public health system was in crisis, overwhelmed by the rapid industrialization and immigration of the Laurier boom years. Conditions in urban areas were appalling: overcrowded immigrant worker slums, an estimated five to 15 per cent of the population infected with venereal diseases, periodic typhoid epidemics in Toronto caused by polluted water and unpasteurized milk, and shocking infant mortality rates. From 1880 to 1929, more than 36,000 Ontario children perished from diphtheria, a leading cause of death among children ages two to 14, which slowly asphyxiated its young victims. The efforts of understaffed, under-trained municipal and provincial boards of health were often reactive and unco-ordinated; a federal department of health would not be formed until after the First World War.

In the first decade of the century, public health reformers struggled against popular and political resistance to stricter sanitation laws, including compulsory smallpox vaccination. Anti-vaccinationists charged that, in addition to infringing on civil rights, compulsory immunization was a class weapon used against common working men, who often lost many days wages suffering from severely ulcerated arms, the vicious side-effect of the crude vaccine. Gerry saw an opportunity to make a difference on a grand scale.

In April 1910, following a year on a research fellowship in bacteriology at Harvard University, Gerry married Edna Leonard of London, Ont., a former Havergal College student and an heiress to a family foundry fortune. As part of a working honeymoon, they travelled to Europe. Gerry studied at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and Brussels, learning how to make rabies, diphtheria and smallpox vaccines and antitoxins under the mantle of Dr. Emile Roux, Louis Pasteur’s right-hand man and a co-creator of the world’s first diphtheria antitoxin. During Gerry’s first week in France, the German bacteriologist Paul Ehrlich announced the momentous discovery of Salvarsan for the treatment of syphilis.

Over the next three years, Gerry set a blistering pace, establishing a network of international contacts while working with leading experts in pathology and bacteriology at the University of Freiburg in Germany, the Lister Institute in London, the New York City Department of Health and the University of California at Berkeley. In 1913, armed with his international training, he returned to Toronto ready to execute the first step of his master plan. Now an associate professor of hygiene at U of T, he prepared the first Pasteur anti-rabies vaccine in Canada at a small provincial Board of Health lab at 5 Queen’s Park Crescent.

Encouraged by this success, he boldly proposed to the University of Toronto that he manufacture a safe, effective Canadian-made antitoxin for diphtheria, and distribute it free or at cost to doctors, pharmacists and boards of health across Canada. Treatment with imported American antitoxin cost as much as $25 – the equivalent of two weeks’ wages for most working families. One Toronto doctor recorded a story of a family who could afford to treat only one of their two children. Tragically, one child lived and one died.

The university’s board of governors initially deferred Gerry’s proposal – the idea of uniting an academic institution with the commercial production of biomedical products was unprecedented anywhere in the world. Impatient with their inertia, Gerry, with $3,000 borrowed from his wife’s inheritance, built a rudimentary stable at 145 Barton Avenue, near Bloor and Bathurst streets, in December 1913 and stocked it with lab equipment. He bought five horses bound for the glue factory for about $3 each, and hired a technician.

The dangerous, painstaking process of making diphtheria antitoxin involved injecting a horse with small, incremental amounts of poisonous diphtheria toxin – lethal enough to kill several men but not a horse – which would mix with the animal’s blood and build up immunity over time. The human antitoxin would then be obtained from white blood cells in blood drawn from the horse.

Following the diphtheria success, the U of T board of governors approved Gerry’s idea – an enlightened decision, as it would turn out – and the University of Toronto Antitoxin Laboratories were formed on May 1, 1914. The idea was that a full range of preventive medicines should be available free to all Canadians, regardless of class or income.
With the outbreak of the First World War only three months later, the fledgling lab, in a cramped basement space in the U of T medical building, was soon overwhelmed by the demand for preventive medicines to inoculate thousands of Canadian soldiers. Fortuitously, philanthropist Albert Gooderham, chairman of the Ontario division of the Canadian Red Cross and a member of the Gooderham & Worts distillery empire, came to the rescue, donating 58 acres of farmland at Dufferin and Steeles, 12 miles north of U of T, and money for more extensive lab buildings.

The labs quickly grew into a dynamic wartime factory, pumping out enormous quantities of tetanus antitoxin, anti-typhoid vaccine, diphtheria antitoxin, anti-meningitis serum and smallpox vaccine, dramatically reducing the numbers of soldiers dying of disease in the trenches. During the latter stages of the war, Gerry served in France as a major commanding a mobile pathology lab attached to the British Fifth Army.

In October 1917, at Albert Gooderham’s request, the U of T Antitoxin Labs were renamed the Connaught Laboratories, after the outgoing Governor General of Canada, Prince Arthur (who was also the Duke of Connaught and Queen Victoria’s youngest son).

In 1919, in the wake of the post-war influenza pandemic that killed more than 20 million people worldwide, the Canadian government established our first national Department of Health. To ensure a national character for Connaught, Gerry set up a scientific advisory committee that soon became the Ottawa-based Dominion Council of Health, comprising himself and four other members, as well as the federal and provincial deputy ministers of health. Despite early opposition from commercial drug manufacturers and druggists, by 1920 all provinces were distributing Connaught’s products to the public for free.

Thus, within a decade of the building of a primitive horse stable on Barton Avenue, two historical events – the Great War and the discovery of insulin by Frederick Banting and Charles Best (with Collip and Macleod) in a U of T lab in 1921-22 – vaulted Canadian medicine into a world leadership position. In the early 1920s, before eventually cutting a deal with the Canadian arm of American pharmaceutical house Eli Lilly, the Connaught Laboratories were manufacturing almost 100 per cent of the Canadian supply of insulin, and its production capacity for its full range of preventive medicines was now comparable to that of the Pasteur Institute in Paris and the Lister Institute in London.

Now a full professor of hygiene at U of T, Gerry began restructuring and staffing the department of hygiene within the Faculty of Medicine. He wrote a textbook on preventive medicine and overhauled undergraduate medical education, introducing mandatory field courses in public health. It proved a tough sell – most med students preferred studying curative, clinical medicine to tramping through noxious sewage treatment plants on steamy summer afternoons.

By the early 1920s, the Connaught’s work caught the attention of the New York-based Rockefeller Foundation. Impressed with Gerry’s dedication to medical research and education, the Rockefellers donated $1.25 million for the establishment of a School of Hygiene – only the third in North America, after Johns Hopkins and Harvard – to be erected at 150 College Street. This generous endowment brought enormous international prestige to the university, the city and the country.

As director of both the Connaught Laboratories and the new, four-storey School of Hygiene, opened in 1927, Gerry was now realizing his dream of transforming Canada’s health conditions. For the school’s faculty, he helped assemble a multidisciplinary team of men and women that would come to include leading experts in the emerg-ing medical sciences of immunology, microbiology, biometrics, parasitology, virology, epidemiology, environmental health, nutritional science and sanitary engineering. Each year, the school trained post-medical graduates who went on to direct public health services in municipal, provincial and federal departments of health. During this period, Gerry also lobbied the federal government to develop a national health insurance program.

The Connaught philosophy, mens sana in corpore sano (a sound mind in a sound body), became a way of life. Practising what he preached, Gerry required the Connaught doctors to eat nutritionally balanced cafeteria meals, follow exercise regimens and regularly compete in tennis tournaments at the School of Hygiene to promote team spirit.
For decades, the sprawling Connaught Labs Farm in Downsview, together with its academic arm, the Georgian red-brick School of Hygiene on College Street, formed an independent, self-sustaining division of the University of Toronto. Laying the foundation of provincial and federal health programs across Canada, its triad of research, teaching and manufacturing of biomedical products in the name of public service was unique in the world. Within a generation, the Canadian public health system had transformed itself from a colonial backwater to set a new international standard of excellence.

Former colleagues of my grandfather remember the Connaught as a seamlessly efficient organization demanding selfless service to a collective, missionary ideal. Gerry himself was seen as a study in contrasts. On the surface, he was calm, courteous, even mild-mannered, giving direction by means of subtle suggestion; yet under the controlled, genteel demeanour, he was a fireball of energy. “Play to win or don’t play at all,” he urged. June Callwood, in a 1955 Maclean’s article on the Connaught Laboratories, says my grandmother used to complain, “I’m married to an idea, not a man.”

During the 1930s, Gerry took on yet more work. Delegating much of the day-to-day running of the Connaught to his colleague, Dr. Robert Defries, in 1931 Gerry became scientific director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s international health division, the first Canadian appointed to that position. Following a four-year term as dean of medicine at U of T, and now a world authority in his field, he spent a full year in 1936-37, travelling to 24 countries in Europe and North America, assessing dozens of medical schools and hospitals for the Geneva-based League of Nations.

The fall, when it came, was precipitous. By 1938, ravaged by insomnia, migraine headaches, a bleeding ulcer and decades of overwork, a man obsessed with attacking disease had effectively ruined his personal health.

In February 1939, Gerry swallowed a fistful of Nembutal tablets at his home in Toronto, fell into a coma and recovered. Within weeks, his old friend and psychiatric colleague, Dr. C.B. Farrar, now director of the Toronto Psychiatric Hospital, arranged for his admission to the Hartford Retreat, a private sanatorium in Connecticut.

During a harrowing year there, Gerry suffered 57 insulin shock treatments, often falling into a cycle of profuse sweating, painful convulsions and sometimes a deep coma. Gerry’s letters to Farrar are rife with self-laceration: “I am a disgrace to my family.. I should be taken out and shot.” Not a religious man, he asks to see a Catholic priest. Repeatedly, he accuses himself of having committed an unpardonable sin – for which “the penalty is death.”

Farrar, a virulent anti-Freudian, together with the Hartford psychiatrists, doubtless gave Gerry no opportunity to talk his problems out. Upon his release, Gerry received a letter from the Hartford Retreat psychiatrist-in-chief that ended: “I am glad all your difficulties are now permanently behind you.”

In April 1940, two days before his 30th wedding anniversary, Gerry returned to Toronto and tried to resume his work. But on June 16, 1940, in a state of paranoia he told his wife that the University of Toronto was out to get him. Again he took an overdose of Nembutal; again he was rushed to Toronto General Hospital; again he recovered.
My grandfather’s death certificate states that he died of a duodenal ulcer four days later. It was only in 1996, interviewing a former U of T dean of medicine, that I learned the true details of his death, details suppressed for over half a century, and withheld – perhaps rightly so – from my own father.

On June 20, 1940, as my grandfather lay recovering from the toxic drug overdose at Toronto General Hospital, a nurse placed a tray of food on his lap. When she withdrew, he grasped the knife and, marshalling the stoic willpower of his Irish Protestant forefathers, he felt for the femoral artery in his thigh, and stabbed his flesh again and again. In less than five minutes, John Gerald FitzGerald was dead. A life of self-sacrifice was over. He was 57.

Despite the exorbitant cost in private suffering, a civilizing public legacy survived. In addition to insulin, one of the Connaught Laboratories’ major global achievements includes the control of diphtheria (by 1940, the year of Gerry’s death, Toronto and Hamilton had become the world’s first diphtheria-free cities). The lab also contributed to the mass production and worldwide distribution of penicillin in the 1940s and the Jonas Salk polio vaccine in the 1950s. In the 1970s, together with the World Health Organization, it played a leading role in the conquest of smallpox, the first disease erased from the face of the earth.

In 1972, the University of Toronto sold the Connaught Labs and it was later privatized; the multiple disciplines within the School of Hygiene were eventually integrated into various departments of the Faculty of Medicine. Without a single, forceful personality to sustain it, Dr. FitzGerald’s unique institutional vision had run its course – 58 years – almost exactly the length of his own life.

Following a series of contentious corporate takeovers and mergers in the ’80s and ’90s, the labs today serve as a division within the German- and French-owned, multibillion-dollar Aventis Pasteur pharmaceutical empire.

In the age of AIDS and increasingly frequent public health scandals such as the contaminated water crisis in Walkerton, Ont. – near my grandfather’s birthplace – the thrust of his life’s work stands as timeless as ever. As the re-emergence of virulent, drug-resistant infectious diseases threatens humanity in new and unforeseen ways – not to mention the unthinkable spectre of global bioterrorism – contemporary public health workers face what seems like a Sisyphean task.

As for my grandfather’s unpardonable sin, it remains an enigma – an enigma that drives my own ongoing need to understand him, my father and myself. From the stranger I never knew, the healer who still lives inside me, I am learning a simple truth: that the truth itself, like an invisible microbe, remains perpetually elusive quarry, no more or less meaningful than a dream.

James FitzGerald is the author of Old Boys: The Powerful Legacy of Upper Canada College (Macfarlane, Walter & Ross, 1994). He is currently working on a biography of Dr. J.G. FitzGerald.

And if you follow my glance, you will see a red-tailed hawk sitting meditatively in one of the tall trees. Two or three times a year, our paths cross – one of us lost in post-workout thought, the other contemplating dinner, but each taking advantage of the quiet diversion that is Philosopher’s Walk.

There once was a creek running through the narrow valley that still keeps to its old contours between Bloor Street and Hoskin Avenue, and maybe the pensive raptor has some ancestral memory of its ancient hunting grounds. Or perhaps, like the rest of us who slow down as we make our way through the most peaceful part of the St. George

Campus, it just appreciates this little patch of rus in urbe – especially during mulberry season, when the greedy pigeons and squirrels are at their most distracted.

It’s to Aristotle that we ultimately owe the name and, in my mind, the purpose of Philosopher’s Walk. He liked to stroll while he taught, and his followers became known as the Peripatetics – a grandiose term that translates as “people who walk around,” a philosophical task for which most of us are pretty well qualified. The university’s philosophical society used to meet in one of the stately houses that bordered the path, and it’s not hard to imagine some deep thinker deciding that it was much more stimulating to be a Peripatetic in the open air than to sit stoically in a stuffy salon.

It’s still a good place to get your thoughts going. You can be ambling along Bloor Street, stuck on the minutiae of shopping or lunch, and suddenly the walk’s deceptively narrow entranceway lures you in. The ceremonial gates might get you thinking about the fleeting nature of empires: they mark the 1901 visit of the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York, later King George V and Queen Mary – 250,000 people turned out to greet them. The trills pealing from the Royal Conservatory of Music and the Edward Johnson Building further south can take your mind back to the politically liberating themes of Verdi’s operas or prompt a meditation on why Canada produces so many good singers. Then there are the exposed concrete vents and Trinity’s misfit garage and the rain-filled ruts from some stray off-road vehicle – it seems even university courses in esthetics can’t keep people from committing ugliness in a place of intellectual beauty.

And when you come upon excited French tourists taking snapshots of the same black squirrels the hawk is eyeing for dinner, you can’t help but ponder how one person’s commonplace is another person’s strange and amazing. Surely Aristotle had something to say about that.

Hart House Library
It was, is and forever will be the best place in the university to sleep. Not that you’re supposed to doze off in the Hart House Library: old wardens of the House made a point of waking sleepers on their daily rounds. But something about the place – the plush leather chesterfields, the rhythmic wheeze of the ancient radiators, the strong sense of being academically off-duty – makes the mind relax and the eyes feel heavy.

The library puts you at ease. It’s a welcoming, almost hedonistic space meant from the start to be an escape from the classroom’s busy discipline. Notice that there are no tabletops here to lay out textbooks, and notice also how the red carpet muffles the sound of footsteps so the more relaxed readers can carry on their closed-eye contemplation.

But for most students, free time in the library is too precious to be spent snoring – Morley Callaghan, a hard-boiled writer not usually given to states of ecstasy, wrote that the place evoked “a strange elation.” I remember my father telling me how he raced from his commerce classes to devour the powerful social realism of Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos back in the ’30s. A famous photograph taken in 1944 shows couches crammed with students in uniform, young men in training for battle reading literature as if their lives depended on it. No image better supports the original idea of Hart House’s designers, that this is a room meant to legitimize dreaming and elevate the pleasures of the imagination.

Of course it’s not all silent rapture. On many nights of the year, writers and readers get together to turn books into more active elements of the room. In my undergraduate days, we lit the massive, Brideshead Revisited-sized fireplace at the far end to create the kind of intimacy we vainly hoped would put Mordecai Richler on his best behaviour. Now, as evidence of the passionate bibliophilia this room has always inspired, its fireplaces go unlit and the antiquated heating system carries the polite warning, “Please do not leave books on the radiators. The heat is very bad for them.”

Of course, sometimes bibliophilia turned into bibliomania and books disappeared – tight security and the library’s spirit of relaxation not being a perfect match. According to the library committee records, someone with either an overwhelming zeal for ideas or a wicked sense of irony carried off R.H. Tawney’s The Acquisitive Society back in 1944. But even for long-term borrowers, there’s no escaping the library’s stylish ethos – the bookplate in each book, a bird’s-eye view of Hart House, was designed by J.E.H. MacDonald, a member of the Group of Seven.

Varsity Stadium
In its heyday – its heydays, really – Varsity Stadium hosted 30 Grey Cups, filled its 27,000 seats for spectacular Blues football games, welcomed Pierre Trudeau and Mother Teresa, put Canada on the pop-festival map, earned a reputation as the country’s best soccer venue and gave John Lennon’s solo career a kick-start.

Varsity occupied such a central part of the sports and cultural milieu that even its low points – the 1950 “Mud Bowl,” Alice Cooper and his notorious chicken, Yoko Ono’s stage debut – contrived to become important historical references.

But lately the cosy concrete stadium, with its narrow cinder track and beautifully impractical grass field and state-of-the-art (for 1956) floodlights, has fallen on hard times. Anyone who knew Varsity in its glory days, who saw Bryce Taylor pass, or Chuck Berry duck-walk, or Pelé be Pelé, has spent the past few years feeling regret as the dilapidated bowl slowly deteriorated into a working archeological site.

Varsity is due to disappear this year. In its place will come four residence buildings and a new 5,000-seat stadium replete with a 400-metre all-weather track, if not real grass.

Those who see a landmark disappearing – those of us who like to insist it was Varsity Stadium that really broke up The Beatles – need to remember that the site has been in a constant state of evolution since the university rugby team, fleeing charges of excessive rowdiness, moved here from King’s College Circle in 1898. The first stadium wasn’t built until 1911, and the facility was variously augmented and reconstructed over the next 40 years. As recently as 1976, boosters of the stadium’s role as an Olympic soccer venue were bragging that the Games’ legacy would include a VIP lounge and drug-testing room. What if the drug-testing room had been around during the two pop festivals held on the field in 1969? Would Alice Cooper be an unknown?

Varsity Stadium, I’m surprised to realize, has been a constant fixture in my life. I went to one of those festivals, as far as I can recall, the one that featured The Band and Steppenwolf and – what were they thinking? – Tiny Tim. But then I was also one of the 15,000 who saw Pierre Trudeau during his 1974 election tour, and a decade before that I came here as a 12-year-old kid to watch the Blues dominate all comers. I went to track meets in the days when athletes ran on cinders, saw my first rugby game, cringed to the sounds of the Lady Godiva band, ran back a punt just like my idol, Blues’ halfback Gerry Sternberg, though not quite as far, and barely survived a 440-yard race along those same outmoded cinders.

This much of Varsity, the best part now, will stay with me.

John Allemang (BA 1974 Trinity) is a writer for the Globe and Mail.

But their births in 1852 were not easy ones. A century and a half ago, the matter of what role – if any – churches should play in education was fiercely contentious. Secularism won the war, of course, with the establishment in 1850 of the University of Toronto. The new non-denominational institution’s home was University College, which arose from the metaphorical ashes of the Anglican King’s College. But Bishop John Strachan didn’t give up his struggle to establish an Anglican seat of higher learning: dismissing U of T as a “godless” institution, he founded another Anglican college named Trinity.

Trinity College, originally housed in an imposing building on Queen Street West in what is now Trinity-Bellwoods Park, was independent until 1904, when it federated with U of T.

One of the smallest colleges on the St. George Campus with 1,400 undergraduates, Trinity demands high marks since twice as many students apply as are accepted. Distinguished grads include Gov. Gen. Adrienne Clarkson (BA 1960, MA 1962, LLD Hon. 2001) and both of Canada’s women bishops, Ann Tottenham (BA 1962, STB 1965, BEd 1974, ThD Hon. 1995) and Victoria Matthews (BA 1976, MDiv 1986).

The University of St. Michael’s College was born out of tough times, too. It was founded by the French Basilian Fathers in response to a request from Toronto’s Catholic bishop to provide education for the Catholic community. The college that began in 1852 with eight students in the Bishop’s palace on Church Street now feeds the minds of almost 4,000 students in its current location east of Queen’s Park. Noted St. Mike’s alumni include U of T president Robert Birgeneau (BSc 1963) and poet Anne Carson (BA 1974, MA 1975, PhD 1981).

Here’s a quick backward look at the other colleges’ beginnings:

Founded by the Methodists in 1836 in Cobourg, Ontario, Victoria College federated with U of T in 1892, when its grand Romanesque revival structure was built in a cow pasture just south-east of Bloor Street and Avenue Road. Theatre has always thrived at Vic, whose 2,900 full-time and more than 900 part-time students can participate in a satirical revue, which has been an annual event for 126 years. Famous alumni who cut their dramatic teeth at Vic include Norman Jewison (BA 1949, LLD Hon. 1985, DLitt Sac Hon. 2001) and Donald Sutherland (BA 1958, LLD Hon. 1998).

We jump ahead to the 1960s, when rebellious baby boomers made love not war and expected higher education in increasing numbers. In 1964, the cornerstone of New College was laid at Willcocks and Huron Streets, and Innis College (named for Harold Innis, the brilliant academic whose work inspired Marshall McLuhan) was founded. It wasn’t until 1973, however, that Innis arose at Sussex and St. George streets.



In the ’60s, U of T also expanded east and west of the city. The University of Toronto at Scarborough has grown from a modest 10 evening classes held in a local high school, to a thriving campus of more than 6,000 students, many of whom take advantage of its co-op program. U of T at Mississauga (formerly Erindale), recently launched an exciting new program in communication, culture and information technology.

The youngest college, Woodsworth (named for J.S. Woodsworth, the first leader of the CCF, precursor to the New Democratic Party) offers a full range of student services year-round and is home to about 4,000 students.

Susan Lawrence (BEd 1972) is a Toronto editor and writer.

Croft was a jack of all trades around U of T in those days. Vice-Chancellor, professor of chemistry, forensic scientist, founder of the University Rifles (a corps of volunteers determined to protect U of T from the Fenian scare) – no job seemed beyond the balding and bewhiskered Croft. And the base for this range of activities was the Students’ Laboratory, as the Croft Chapter House was called originally.

Cumberland & Storm modelled their laboratory on the one found at the University Museum at Oxford. Its architects (Deane & Woodward) had used the 14th-century abbot’s kitchen at Glastonbury Abbey as a model. Cumberland & Storm followed suit but also made some modifications. The round laboratory they produced at UC was both larger than its Oxford prototype and better ventilated – a must in the gaseous world of chemicals. As Sir George Porter, an English Nobel Prize-winning chemist, remarked a few years ago, it is “the biggest fume hood of all time.” The chapter house was also isolated enough to protect it from a fire that broke out in University College on Valentine’s Day 1890. The fire ravaged much of the college, but the Croft remained standing.

The chapter house has long since surrendered its function as a laboratory of science. Now, it is favoured as a location for the alchemy of university departmental meetings where professors gather and argue at its enormous boardroom table. The only evidence of its former life is a portrait hanging above the fireplace of Professor Croft with his beakers; that is, now that the ghost of a workman killed during the construction of University College has disappeared. (It is said that another worker, in love with the same woman, attacked him with a dagger. When his bones were found and removed after the fire, the spectre disappeared.) Alchemy, indeed.

Brad Faught (PhD 1996) is a Toronto writer and regular contributor to University of Toronto Magazine.

On the evening of February 15, some 700 angry U of T undergraduates, almost the entire student body, crammed into the meeting hall, incensed by the dismissal of Professor William Dale for defending their cause in a letter to The Globe. Since September, Varsity editor James Tucker had been the voice of student complaint, writing a series of editorials criticizing the provincial government for meddling in professorial appointments and defending the students’ right to comment on the affairs of government and the university. The university expelled Tucker, but he kept up his attacks in The Varsity, emboldened by the students’ pledge to pay his tuition at another university the next year.

At the Wardell demonstration, another student activist emerged, future Prime Minister of Canada William Lyon Mackenzie King (BA 1895 UC, LLB 1896, MA 1897). According to one account, King “electrified” the crowd when he denounced an “age-old cult of tyranny” and called on students to boycott classes. For nearly a week, students kept up their angry protest in the hallways of University College while professors lectured to virtually empty classrooms.King called for an end to the strike when university president James Loudon met with a student delegation and agreed to a commission to look into the university’s affairs. The government-appointed commission censured the students, Tucker and Dale were never reinstated, and many students never forgave King. In his subsequent political career, he was known as The Great Compromiser.

Still, the protest, which made front-page headlines, gave rise to a later Royal Commission that formed the basis of the University of Toronto Act of 1906. It called for a clearer separation of government and university, for the creation of a university board of governors to manage its own affairs and also a student council – later the Students’ Administrative Council – to represent student interests.

What the student strikers fought for – freedom of expression, critical inquiry and dissent – are considered touchstones of the university today. They did not achieve success in their time. Indeed, it would take another 60 years of persistent activism for students to achieve “anything approaching freedom of expression or association,” according to Michiel Horn (MA 1965, PhD 1969), a professor of history at York University and author of Academic Freedom in Canada: A History. Horn, who completed his PhD at U of T during the height of the student movement in the ’60s, says the work of the student activist is hardly finished. University administrators, he says, ever mindful of funding ties to government and business, still often choose good public relations over encouraging students “to examine different points of view” or “to think critically if it reflects badly on the university.” “Academic freedom for university professors is largely secured,” says Horn, “but student academic freedom has never been safe. A student who shoots off his or her mouth is apt to find there is little protection at all.”

Here are a few who took the risk.

Turn of the Century: The She Decades
The first three rows at the Wardell Hall demonstration were packed with female undergrads, comprising some 100 of the 700 strikers, remarkable given that the women had won the right to attend lectures only a decade before, in 1884. Still, three women joined the delegation that pressed President Loudon to call an investigation into university affairs. The Mail and Empire reported that the women were “in many instances more extreme in their partisanship even than the young men.”

The female politicos may well have had more experience asserting their rights than their male colleagues. In a bid to prove their competency for university, several women wrote the university matriculation exams in the late 1870s, though they were not yet allowed to attend lectures. Henrietta Charles and Eliza Balmer were among those who continued their studies privately and won scholarships. In 1881, Charles wrote a dramatic plea begging for the right to attend lectures. Both formally joined the first women to attend lectures in 1884.

The women who stormed into Wardell Hall a decade later were particularly incensed by the dismissal of Professor Dale, a liberal educator and supporter of co-education. They were doubly angered by the whiff of government patronage surrounding the appointment of Professor George Wrong. In 1909, the aptly named Wrong led a university committee to investigate segregating female undergraduates into a separate college geared to teaching the domestic arts.

Again, the women battled back. The University Women’s Club helped form a United Alumnae Association to campaign for the election of three female graduates to the U of T senate committee in 1911 – specifically to defeat Wrong’s proposal. The women won, although Varsity’s wartime editor, Betsy Mosbaugh (BA 1945 UC), argued in a 1945 editorial that still the university had no true co-education, but a kind of “parallel education,” with men and women segregated in lecture halls and extracurricular activities.

As historian Sara Z. Burke (BA 1986 UC), assistant professor at Laurentian University, points out, it’s telling that Vincent Massey announced his gift of Hart House in 1910, shortly after Wrong’s proposal for a women’s college was defeated. Massey made it a condition that Hart House be open only to males, to discover “the true education that is to be found.in the conversation of wise and earnest men.” The university honoured his terms until his death in 1972, when the doors of Hart House finally opened to women. Mosbaugh’s call for true co-education would have to wait until activists took up that cause in the ’70s.

The ’20s: A Moral Awakening
James Endicott (BA 1923 Victoria, MA 1924, ThD Hon. 1942 Emmanuel) called himself “probably the most denounced public person in Canada” when I interviewed him for The Varsity in 1986. Endicott, who died in 1993, was the president of SAC in 1923-24. It was described as an “uneventful year” by his son Stephen in a biography of his father, Rebel out of China.

While studying at Emmanuel College to enter the ministry, Endicott attended Bible-study sessions in the basement of Victoria College, led by a rather unorthodox chemistry professor, Dr. H.B. Sharman. By son Stephen’s account, Sharman pressed the group to challenge religious doctrine and to discover the will to do right even if “in opposition to the traditions and great institutions of the day” and “no matter what the cost.”

The approach stuck with Endicott, who helped found the Student Christian Movement (SCM). According to historian Horn, the SCM had just enough support from prominent Canadians to “maintain an aura of respectability,” although it spiced religious study with political action, taking up the causes of labour, racial equality and peace.

After graduating, Endicott went to China as a missionary and was later censured by the United Church of Canada for supporting student followers of Mao Tse-tung. He started an underground newspaper, which evolved into the Canadian Far Eastern. In 1947, he returned to Canada and university campuses to lecture on behalf of the burgeoning peace movement. In the chill of the Cold War, he advocated closer ties with the Soviet Union and China and denounced nuclear weapons. Considered a radical, Endicott was banned from speaking at the University of Alberta in 1953. “He was vilified during the Cold War,” says his son. “Afterward, the United Church recognized him as one of its prophets and apologized.”

The ’30s: No Speaking Easy
It was a tough job being editor of The Varsity in the ’30s, if you had an opinion and cared to voice it. In 1931, Andrew Allan wrote an editorial suggesting that university life led many students to a “practical atheism” – practising no true devotion and attending church just frequently enough to win acceptance in established society.

The editorial whipped up the Ontario legislature, under pressure in the Depression to defend funding of an institution that might promote free thinking, if not outright immorality – the two were often confused.

The university’s board of governors denied Allan’s comments and removed him from his post as editor. In response, Allan published Milton’s “Second Defense of the People of England” in place of his next editorial. SAC, then publishers of The Varsity, responded to Milton’s argument for a “free discussion of the truth” by suspending publication of The Varsity for the rest of the year.

SAC was still reeling from a 1929 editorial by L.J. Ryan (BA 1929 St. Michael’s) about an even more contentious topic: sex. In this editorial, Ryan claimed that the “new institution of petting” was “simply an exchange of amenities” between the sexes, causing no harm to one’s character. The student government capitulated to pressure from the university board of governors and fired him. The entire Varsity masthead promptly quit and started publishing a rival, called The Adversity, in the pages of the Toronto Telegram, where the rebel student journalists continued their fight for “a real student government” and an “unhampered student newspaper.”

In 1934, SAC, respectful of the university’s financial dependence on the government, laid down a set of publishing guidelines for The Varsity, forbidding discussion of politics, or any controversial subjects that might stir up “hostility,” then assured the university board of governors that “The Varsity shall cause no more trouble.”

Opinions differ on when a “real student government” finally appeared, but The Varsity won its editorial independence, officially separating from SAC in 1980 and electing its own board of student publishers.

The ’40s: The Socialists’ Calendar

While The Varsity wrote tidy reports of lectures on the issue of the decade – racial discrimination – the Student Christian Movement (SCM) joined student demonstrations at the Palais Royale dance hall and the Icelandia ice rink, which discriminated against black patrons.

Stephen Endicott (BA 1949 Victoria, MA 1966, PhD 1973), following his father’s path as a rabble-rouser, was active in the SCM and president of the U of T Labour-Progressive Party (LPP) club (the party was so named because of a federal edict that prevented the club from calling itself the Communist Party). U of T forced the students to disassociate themselves from the university when they picketed the Imperial Optical Company in support of workers trying to unionize. Sydney Hermant, a member of the university’s board of governors, owned the company. Endicott, now a senior scholar in the department of history at York University, recalls that the students still managed to stall a trolley car in front of the Hermant building (at Victoria and Dundas) and pull it off the tracks.

In 1947, the SCM took part in a demonstration at Queen’s Park to protest potentially escalating student fees. Though they marshalled the support of 10 student groups, only 125 people showed up. A Varsity editorial, suggesting the protesters had “a lot to learn,” directed the students to take their complaints to the university administration.

“The Varsity was hostile to student activism then,” says Endicott, who helped start a rival paper, Campus. “There was revolution stirring in the world, in China and Vietnam, and then you had the Cold War. There was quite an attempt by the media to stir up fears of communism and to dampen student activism as unpatriotic.”

The ’50s: Polite Engagement
In a Varsity article about the tenor of his time on campus, Keith Spicer (BA 1956 Victoria, PhD 1962), former chair of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), wrote that “subtly enforced conformity” fostered the decade’s reigning hallmark: apathy. As co-ed lounges opened up across campus, students focused their attention on socializing and preparing for a life of material gain.

And yet the campus was crawling with future politicians: Stephen Lewis (LLD Hon. 1991), future leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party, was a leader in the campus socialist party; Ed Roberts (BA 1960 Victoria, LLB 1964), who succeeded Joey Smallwood as leader of the Newfoundland Liberals, edited The Varsity; Walter McLean (MDIV 1960 Knox) and Barbara (Leaman) McDougall (BA 1960 UC), later prominent ministers in former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s federal cabinet; and Gov. Gen. Adrienne (Poy) Clarkson (BA 1960 Trinity, MA 1962, LLD Hon. 2001) all served on SAC.

“We did not call ourselves activists,” says Clarkson. “The phrase ’student activist’ did not exist, but in the context of the time I probably was one.” Clarkson, a first-generation Chinese Canadian, was vice-president of SAC and head of St. Hilda’s College residence the following year. “We were preoccupied with world affairs and civil rights. We boycotted all South African goods,” she says. “We saw ourselves as working within the system, but we did feel that our university had a role in helping educate people in the Third World.”

She regrets making no progress on one issue: getting women admitted to Hart House. When then-Senator John F. Kennedy came to debate William Buckley Jr., women staged a protest to be allowed into the debate – to no avail. “All these things took root in me,” says Clarkson. “I felt there was not enough time to deal with these issues in university, but I thought, we will later – and I think we did.”

The ’50s “though calm and respectful relative to what happened a decade later,” were by no means uninvolved, says Walter McLean, SAC president in 1959-60. As a tour bus driver during summers, McLean shared the driving of a bus full of students “non-stop overnight” to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in part “to see the civil rights movement up close and try to understand it.”

After SAC, McLean won the presidency of the National Federation of Canadian University Students (NFCUS) and co-founded the Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO), serving for five years as CUSO’s first director of West Africa (based in Nigeria). “We were on the edge of a new world,” says McLean, who later served both as minister of immigration and as Mulroney’s special representative for Commonwealth and foreign affairs to the UN, dealing primarily with apartheid in South Africa. “A lot of us ended up in the House because the issues we tackled on campus gave us a national vision.”

The ’60s: Student Power
They staged a two-day sit-in at Simcoe Hall, occupied the president’s office, staged teach-ins at Hart House and Convocation Hall, shouted a Dow Chemical (think napalm) employment recruiter off campus, agitated for financial relief for draft dodgers and turned the lawns of the campus into a tent city for transient youth. The target – and some would say scapegoat – for much of the anger of U of T’s student movement in the ’60s was the administration, with then-U of T president Claude Bissell (BA 1936 UC, MA 1937, DLitt Hon. 1977) at its head. Police posted a 24-hour security guard outside the president’s house.

Inspired by the civil rights movement and as eager to challenge authority as its American counterparts, yet with no national issue or Vietnam war to protest, the student movement focused its political energy on revolutionizing the university. Its official leader was Steve Langdon (BA 1970 Trinity), SAC president in 1968-69 and subsequently a prominent NDP member of Parliament. He kicked off SAC’s most activist administration ever by challenging Bissell to debate the role of the university. Langdon argued that the university should not be neutral, concerned with the pursuit of knowledge, as Bissell saw it, but actively concerned with socio-economic issues outside the institution.

Langdon, who now runs an international training and advisory firm, was chiefly concerned with democratizing Bissell’s proposed new university government to ensure that students had a fair say. He and his co-strategist, SAC’s university affairs rep Bob Rae (BA 1969 UC, LLB 1977, LLD Hon. 1999), went to argue the case with faculty. An effective orator and deal-maker, Rae convinced professors to agree to student/faculty parity on the commission on university government, whose report would be the basis of the U of T Act of 1971. The Varsity wrote that Bissell left that meeting “shaking.” Later Rae helped draft the report, which collapsed the university’s unwieldy governing bodies into its current structure of governing council, with its 50 members elected from the university’s stakeholders: students, faculty, alumni and administration, lieutenant-governors-in-council and two presidential appointees.

Rae now credits Bissell with keeping the student movement from becoming violent, as happened at so many other universities in the ’60s. “I came to admire Claude tremendously,” says Rae, former premier of Ontario. “There were certainly confrontations, but his civility prevailed and affected those of us who debated with him.”

The late ’60s also saw the birth of Rochdale College, founded by U of T faculty and students – among them future kid-lit superstar and Poet Laureate of Toronto Dennis Lee (BA 1962 Victoria, MA 1965). Inspired by the notion of a collectively run, free university with self-directed seminars, the enterprise was such a success in its first year that an 18-storey tower was built at 341 Bloor St. W. But in the ensuing attempt to fully occupy the tower, the alternative-education reformers lost out to tenants into alternative drugs. Even so, Rochdale nourished the beginnings of such cultural forces as Theatre Passe Muraille, Nishnawbe Institute and Coach House Press.

One of the enduring successes of the ’60s was the formation of Pollution Probe in 1969, Canada’s first major environmental advocacy organization. Hundreds of U of T students rallied together after Sherry Brydson (BA 1970 Woodsworth) wrote a series of articles in The Varsity about pollution. Commerce student Tony Barrett (BCom 1969 Trinity, MBA 1987) helped organize the group and became its first staff member. “It was very clear to us where population and economic growth was headed,” says Barrett, “but people in power and business people did not want to listen. That’s when I turned into a flame-thrower.”

The group went on to score major successes, among them neighbourhood recycling efforts (which led to the Blue Box recycling program), the Canadian Coalition on Acid Rain, Canada’s ban on DDT and Ontario’s Environmental Bill of Rights. Still, Barrett, now an environmental consultant, is less than satisfied: “We were driven to make a difference, but we did not make enough of a difference..We’re pretty rich and fat in Western societies, while we’re disrupting and destroying climates the world over.”

Langdon is rather more optimistic about his decade’s contribution. “The ’60s and ’70s set in motion a lot of strains that led to our institutions being much more open and responsive,” he says. “Canada really stands out in terms of its openness and the democratic nature of our institutions. I think it has a lot to do with the student movement.”

The ’70s: Her Outrageous Acts
One of the largest women’s studies programs in Canada owes its inception to a then-19-year-old hellraiser, Ceta Ramkhalawansingh (BA New, Dip Child Study 1974, MA 1980). She and Kay Armatage (MA 1967, PhD 1974), then a PhD student and now a professor of women’s studies, put together a program outline, made up a brochure, photocopied U of T’s crest onto it and distributed it. “I got called into the dean’s office,” recalls Armatage, “and he said ‘This is not how we do things. We call together a committee.’ So I asked to be on that committee, and the women’s studies program came about in 1975.”

Ramkhalawansingh, who came to U of T at age 16, served on SAC, represented students on the university’s new interdisciplinary studies committee, campaigned for campus day care, disseminated birth-control information and advocated pro-choice. “I went to an all-girls’ high school in Trinidad,” says Ramkhalawansingh, now a manager of access and equity with the City of Toronto. “We studied maths and sciences and had a personal sense of accomplishment and confidence. When you grow up thinking you can participate equally and then find blatant prohibitions, you want to start challenging that.”

At The Varsity, co-editor Linda McQuaig (BA 1974 UC), who went on to write for the Globe and Mail and to author several books, including All You Can Eat: Greed, Lust and the New Capitalism, raised feminist consciousness with several articles – posing as a pregnant student to expose an anti-abortion counselling service on campus and going undercover as a topless dancer.

She and co-editor Tom Walkom (BA 1973 UC, MA 1974, PhD 1983) also helped provoke one of the largest student demonstrations on campus by printing a petition in The Varsity in 1972 to protest the exclusion of undergraduates from the new Robarts Library stacks. Students packed Convocation Hall for a protest rally, then occupied Simcoe Hall until the decision was reversed.

The ’80s: The Business of Activism
I was editor of The Varsity during some of the most significant issues of the ’80s – divestment, underfunding, the threatened closure of the school of architecture – but I can’t say it was an inspiring time.

As in the ’50s, apathy reigned, yet our generation lacked the intimate tutorial system and the optimism about jobs and the future that characterized the post-war years. We dutifully took up the significant workload the student movement left us and represented students on a myriad of committees and governing council – but we lacked the anger and sense of entitlement that fed ’60s activism.

We graduated into a deep recession with staggering student loans. We should have been deeply offended; instead, we worked hard to prove our merit according to the reigning ethos of the time: business and money.

At The Varsity, we did not want to be a passionate, activist student paper; we wanted to be the Globe and Mail. Gay students got elected to some of the highest student offices yet stayed in the closet, focusing not on liberation politics but on balancing the books and good governance. We considered it a good career move that one of our most articulate student leaders, Tony Clement (BA 1983 UC, LLB 1986), now Ontario minister of health, bypassed representing us on SAC to consort with real power on governing council.

“We were much more impaired as activists in the ’80s than in the ’60s,” says Virginia Green (BA 1985 Victoria), who helped found U of T’s Divestment Committee in 1983. “The world had changed. The whole yuppy, consumerism thing was taking over, and no one really cared about injustices.”

The Divestment Committee is a key example of ’80s activism in action. Started by the African and Caribbean Students’ Association, the committee launched a multi-year awareness campaign and sought support from student groups across campus. It focused its battle against apartheid on a specific issue: calling on U of T to divest its interests with companies that did business with the racist South African regime.

“We went through all the bureaucratic processes,” says Green. “We were angry, but we channelled that anger into effective means. We submitted a brief to governing council that was the size of a PhD thesis.”

When divestment activist Lennox Farrell, now a high school teacher (BA 1974 Scarborough, BEd 1976, MEd 1980), was accused of throwing a mace at South African ambassador Glenn Babb during a raucous Hart House debate, the committee helped form a top-notch defence team. Charges against Farrell were eventually dropped. Still, Green, now a member of the band Spirit Wind and a novelist, laments that the university did not fully divest its holdings in South Africa until several years later, in 1988.

The Gay ’90s
Coming out just before entering Trinity College in 1995 was no “major revelation” for then-student Bonte Minnema, though it would prove to be for the rest of the university campus. As president of the LGBTOUT (Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and Transgendered of the University of Toronto), Minnema took a microphone to the streets and into Simcoe Hall to talk up gay awareness. He staged same-sex kiss-ins on St. George Street, convinced SAC to let him be Homecoming Queen at a football game and even talked the Lady Godiva Memorial Band into attending some queer-positive events. “I was the official drag queen,” says Minnema, now working to raise money to complete his women’s studies and sociology degree.

U of T was already making progress in promoting gay rights. A group of faculty, staff and students, co-ordinated by political science professor David Rayside and Transitional Year Programme director Rona Abramovitch, initiated the Positive Space Campaign. The Sexual Diversities Studies program was started at University College, and faculty and alumni launched the Rainbow Triangle Alumni Association. And Minnema was instrumental in getting U of T to set up a Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgendered Queer Resources and Program Office.

According to current gay activist Mickey Cirak (BA 2000), U of T in the mid-’90s “was sort of conservative and squeamish on gay issues.” After Minnema – nicknamed the “fearless diva” – Cirak says “queer visibility was established.”

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

While King’s College (the precursor to U of T) began welcoming gentlemen scholars in 1843, its doors remained firmly shut to females until the fall of 1884. In the meantime, women had to be content with a series of feeble inroads: in 1877, they were permitted to write admissions exams to U of T, but, paradoxically, could not attend lectures. They were also welcome to write end-of-year exams – if they could afford the costly private tutors necessary to prepare themselves for the tests. And in 1881, they began competing for scholarships, although the award money had to be directed to private tutors.

By 1884, the quiet demand for women’s admission to U of T had swelled to a clamour. The president at the time, Daniel Wilson, was averse to coeducation, and instead rallied publicly for a separate women’s college in the tradition of Oxford and Harvard (although he did not try to launch such an institute). But on March 5, 1884, a provision was passed by the Ontario legislative assembly to admit women to U of T. The first three entered on Oct. 6, 1884; eight more soon joined them. The 11 female students had no access to a reading room, a residence or library catalogues; there wasn’t even a women’s washroom on campus. Nonetheless, they soon emerged from the shadows at U of T to kindle their own unwavering lights.

First Woman to Attend a Lecture
The first woman to attend a University of Toronto lecture was invited not on the basis of her academic skills, but her height. Catherine Brown was the youngest daughter of George Brown, founder of The Globe newspaper and a prominent politician. Her well-to-do family was close to U of T president Daniel Wilson, and as a young girl Catherine had begged Wilson to allow her to attend his lectures. He flippantly answered that when she was as tall as he was, he would permit her to sit in. Wilson likely hadn’t counted on Catherine inheriting her father’s tall, lanky frame, but when she sprouted an inch above the president, he compromised: she and her older sister, Margaret, could listen to his anthropology lectures through the open door of his office next to the lecture room, where they would be concealed from the lascivious eyes of the young men.

The anthropology lectures were the only classes Catherine and Margaret ever attended. Even after women were welcomed at U of T in 1884, the sisters continued receiving private lessons in their father’s opulent mansion in midtown Toronto. Did they feel oppressed in their domestic surroundings and long for a return to the larger academic world just beyond the elegant walls? There are no records of their thoughts or feelings. Catherine and Margaret were among the first five women graduates in 1885, and both received bachelor of arts degrees in modern languages. Afterward, they returned with their family to their homeland of Scotland, eventually marrying and having children.

A

Fighter for Women’s Admission to U of T

Described in a 1915 newspaper article as “a young woman of delicate frame and modest mien, and quite the antithesis of militant womanhood,” Eliza Balmer was actually an intrepid leader in the fight for women’s admission to U of T. One of the first females to attend classes in 1884, Balmer won several scholarships and graduated with a BA in modern languages and philosophy in 1886.

In 1883, Balmer petitioned the university to allow women to attend lectures and rallied 11 other women to do the same. (They campaigned with a series of politely worded letters and were rejected with equally courteous refusals.) That same year, through an intermediary, Balmer asked philosophy professor George Paxton Young for permission to attend his lectures. Young replied that he would accept her, and the university president “would have the onus of ordering her out.” Although the account is probably spurious, legend has it that Balmer did attend the classes – and was greeted with boos from a small number of males, cheers from the majority.

In 1891 Balmer became one of the first female teachers at Harbord Collegiate in Toronto, as well as the head of its department of modern languages. However, in her later years she suffered from what were thought to be nervous breakdowns and died of pellagra in her late 40s.

First Woman Lawyer

When Clara Martin was a law student living in a Toronto boarding house, a young male resident denounced her as a “very odd sort of woman.” His observation seemed to rest on her penchant for riding a bicycle – eyebrow-raising behaviour for a well-bred lady in the late 1800s. This wasn’t her first, or last, act of social impropriety, however. Martin – who graduated with a math degree in 1890 and a bachelor of civil law degree in 1897 from Trinity College, and an LLB in 1899 from U of T – succeeded in becoming the first woman lawyer in the British Empire. Her road was often a difficult, lonely one. “I was looked upon as an interloper, if not a curiosity,” said Martin of her articling days at a Toronto law firm. “The clerks avoided me and made it as unpleasant for me as they possibly could.”

Martin was also the first female student at Osgoode Hall Law School. In 1891, the Law Society of Upper Canada had informed her that admission to Osgoode was restricted to “persons” – and under the British North America Act, women did not qualify as such. With the help of Oliver Mowat, premier and attorney-general of Ontario, Martin galvanized the legislature into passing an 1892 act granting women access to the law school. She entered Osgoode the following year and was called to the Bar of Ontario in February 1897.

After working as a law clerk at two Toronto firms, Martin opened her own private practice. In 1923, at the age of 49, she died of a heart attack. Recalling her difficult path, and the stoicism of her early student years, Martin once said, “Were it not that I set out to open the way to the bar for others of my sex, I would have given up the effort long ago.”

Mother-Daughter Duos
Jennie Stork Hill (BA 1890), one of the first female students admitted to U of T in 1884, attained an enviable set of goals for a turn-of-the-century woman: she became a published poet, a teacher and president of the Edmonton Council of Women. She also reportedly harboured a desire to be an architect, a dream that took root in her daughter, Esther Hill, who succeeded in becoming the first woman architect in Canada. As a young girl, Hill stumbled upon a book on English homes and dreamed of designing similar creations. But years later, when she sought career advice from the professor of architecture at the University of Alberta, he discouraged her from entering the trade – counsel the strong-minded teenager rejected. In 1920 Hill earned an architecture degree from U of T, then completed postgraduate work in town planning at the university. She worked as an architect in Edmonton and, over her lifetime, also served as a draftsperson, printer and master weaver.

In 1880, 16-year-old Helen Gregory – in long gloves and a bustled gown – was presented as a debutante in Toronto. Little did the city’s gentry suspect that the young socialite would soon become one of the first woman judges in Canada. A talented musician and one of the first two women to graduate from Trinity College, Gregory earned a bachelor of music degree in 1886, followed by a BA in 1889 and an MA in 1890.

Gregory served as judge of the Juvenile Court in British Columbia for 22 years, fighting to improve the legal status of women and children through marriage-act amendments and laws governing mothers’ allowances, old-age pensions and welfare. Before entering the Canadian courts, she was a newspaper correspondent, who once flew to Japan to report on its social conditions. She also published books, including News and the Human Interest Story.

Elsie Gregory MacGill was more mechanically minded than her mother, Helen. As a child she was a self-proclaimed “Miss Fix-It” who dreamed of becoming a radio engineer before turning her attention to aircraft design. The first Canadian woman to receive an electrical engineering degree (at U of T, in 1927), and a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering (at the University of Michigan, in 1929), MacGill designed, built and produced aircraft. The best-known planes that she worked on include the Hawker Hurricane fighters, used by the Royal Air Force in Britain during the Second World War, and the Helldiver fighters, commissioned for the United States Navy. In her late 30s, she opened her own aeronautical consulting firm.

Shortly after finishing her studies at the University of Michigan, doctors discovered that MacGill was suffering from polio and told her she would likely spend her life in a wheelchair. “I didn’t want to live, but I did,” she said. MacGill taught herself how to walk with canes – and, three years later, sold her wheelchair.

Like her mother, MacGill championed women’s rights, serving as a member of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. She also wrote a biography, My Mother, the Judge, tended her cherished rose garden and tolerated a media fascinated with her presence in a male-dominated field. (One Toronto Star headline from 1940 proclaimed, “She Talks Plane Design Like It Was [A] Recipe for Pie.”) “I didn’t think it was any more remarkable for a woman to be a judge than it is for me to be an engineer,” said MacGill in an interview shortly before her death at age 75. “What’s the big deal?” In 1983, she was inducted into Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame.


First Women Professors
During the First World War, Clara Benson unearthed an unlikely connection between food and explosives: their chemical properties, she found, could be analysed using the same methods. Comparing, say, a tomato and mortar powder was a novel idea, and munitions labs quickly adopted her tools for analysis.

Benson’s achievements in science harked back to the turn of the century: in 1903 she graduated with a PhD in physical chemistry, one of the first two women at U of T to receive a doctorate. But few research opportunities existed for women chemists, so Benson became a demonstrator in food chemistry at the School of Household Science. In principle, the program was not one she agreed with, but she quickly rose to the position of lecturer. In 1906, when the school was designated as a full-fledged faculty, Benson and principal Annie Laird became the university’s first associate professors.

Unlike Benson, Laird – a graduate in household science from Drexel Institute in Philadelphia – had always been a strong supporter of the course, and felt that it “should be regarded by the pupils and the general public not only as a school of cooking, but a combination between art and science.” Laird headed the Faculty of Household Science for 34 years, although she was never granted the title of dean; instead she was referred to as the faculty’s “director” or “secretary.”

Annie Laird and Clara Benson earned groundbreaking titles in 1920, however: they became the first female professors at the University of Toronto – 36 years after women were first admitted to U of T.

The author would like to acknowledge Anne Rochon Ford’s A Path Not Strewn with Roses as a helpful resource.

The small bowls are supported by four classical figures representing religion, poetry, geography and history, and on the base are the names of more than 40 gentlemen whom Strachan helped to educate. After Strachan’s death in 1867, Religion, Poetry, Geography and History were sent off to Trinity College.