This is a multidisciplinary clinic for people living with chronic, non-cancer pain – pain that lasts a month or more beyond the usual recovery period or illness, or that goes on for years, as a result of an underlying condition such as osteoarthritis or diabetes. It’s estimated that six million Canadians – roughly one in five – suffer from some form of chronic pain. And at least 500,000 of these live with neuropathic pain – an especially baffling and often excruciating disorder involving damage to the nerves. This can include the aching, whole-body pain of fibromyalgia, or the fiery pain that can follow an attack of shingles. But even a trivial injury such as a bruised knee can trigger it in some individuals. The body’s nervous system somehow gets stuck on the “pain” setting and won’t switch off, even when the injury has healed. This is the kind of affliction that erodes sleep, destroys the ability to work and can drive a person’s life right off the rails. Daily, grinding pain understandably breeds depression and hopelessness. It’s no wonder that spouses and family doctors sometimes run out of empathy when faced with this “looks good, feels bad” predicament – suffering that science can’t X-ray, quantify or cure. Of course, questioning the pain deepens the isolation of the person who must live with it.

What sets the Wasser Centre apart from similar clinics around the world is its unique combination of disciplines – it’s a leader in treating neuropathic pain, and it’s one of the few places in Canada with expertise in pelvic pain, in both men and women. In terms of research it has looked at the benefits of Botox for chronic pain, the usefulness of cannabinoids for people with multiple sclerosis, and it offers a “female-friendly” team for women suffering from vulvodynia, a form of chronic vaginal pain that is far from rare. A staff member, Dr. Doug Gourlay, is a leading expert in the area of pain and addiction, which can exist in a small but problematic percentage of patients.

In 1982, Dr. Gordon teamed up with David Mock, currently dean of U of T’s Faculty of Dentistry, to establish the country’s first centre for research into craniofacial pain at Mount Sinai Hospital. This led to the idea of creating a broader pain management clinic. In 1999, the centre was launched when a pair of philanthropists, Larry (BA 1978 Innis) and Marla Wasser, went to the hospital’s administrators and asked, “What needs funding most?” The answer was pain.

CHRONIC PAIN IS A TREMENDOUS challenge to the professionals who treat it. Often the patients who end up at the Wasser Centre have already been through a long gauntlet of specialists and dozens of medications. They’ve likely been bruised by the system, as well as their pain. And the longer their pain remains untreated, becoming entrenched, the more it turns into a thousand-piece puzzle for doctors down the line. Pain patients are tough cases – in part because traditionally, medicine has been slow to respond to the importance of treating pain. The health professionals who gravitate toward this field tend to be pioneers and mavericks – a brainy, brazen minority. The director of the Wasser Centre is no exception.

Dr. Gordon comes hurrying down the hall toward me. He hitches up his belt, hand-combs his dark curly hair and shakes my hand. With his easy manner and sense of humour, Dr. Gordon gives the impression of impish youthfulness, even though he is neither young nor impish – on top of which, as he cheerfully points out himself within five minutes of our meeting, he’s quite overweight. This is worth mentioning, I think. It was probably a factor in the back pain he experienced – useful for the purposes of empathy – but it also takes him off that doctor pedestal. Patients who meet with him can see that he’s not on perfect terms with his body either. Since the clinic believes in the importance of doctors and patients working in partnership, whatever fosters trust is good.

He leads me into his messy, document-stuffed office, where he moves a stack of blue binders off a chair to make room for me. He’s just back from a conference in Prague and is jet-lagged, but game to talk. The first thing I ask him is how it feels to spend so much time in the company of relentless suffering. Does he like this sort of work? “Well, boundaries are important in this field – you have to feel for the patient, while you remember that you can’t be that patient,” he says. “But when someone tells you they’re feeling better, that their pain is under control and they’re able to go back to school, or work, that makes me feel good. I think we’re doing some good here.”

Wheeling his office chair forward and back as he makes his point, Dr. Gordon talks fast, jumping from topic to topic, assessing a question from different angles at once – which is exactly what the Wasser Centre tries to do, in its team-based, patient-focused approach to pain. The clinic, which is affiliated with U of T, brings together health professionals from neurology, dentistry, psychiatry, anesthesiology, physiotherapy and occupational therapy. It includes acupuncture, biofeedback and other non-traditional ways of treating pain. It tries to address the whole person, since chronic pain tends to affect every part of someone’s life.

What does science have to say about an approach that’s so hard to quantify and evaluate? What does the team approach to pain do that a renewable prescription for OxyContin can’t? “Many studies have shown that the single most important determining factor in achieving a good outcome with chronic pain is the nature of the relationship between the practitioner and the client,” says Dr. Gordon. “We do our best here to practice empathetic care with patients who are burdened with complicated complaints.”

“I really like to put people at ease,” he says. “And for people in pain, having validation – the fact that I am not questioning or judging their pain – is important. I try to teach my fourth-year surgical students how to ask the right kinds of questions. The personal touch is important.”

NEUROLOGISTS, HOWEVER, are not known for their bedside manner, and Dr. Gordon started out in the field of neurology. A U of T graduate and medical professor, he was director and then dean of development for the Faculty of Medicine in the 1990s, when his focus was on fundraising. An early interest in neurological disorders such as muscular dystrophy led him to join a multidisciplinary group that was investigating chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. These pain disorders have aroused a lot of skepticism among doctors in the past because they can include a whole constellation of symptoms and depend more on subjective accounts from the patient than on the usual evaluative tools, such as X-rays. But by using a multidisciplinary approach to look closely at these types of pain, “we saw that there was some neurobiological basis to all this.” The pain was real, even though the etiology wasn’t clear.

Dr. Gordon believes that the most effective way to help people with chronic pain is to form a “therapeutic alliance” with patients. They are expected to take an active role in their own treatment. In practice, this means hard work for the clinic staff, who spend a lot of time with patients, helping them develop relaxation techniques, cognitive-behavioural strategies and other ways to “self-manage” their pain and live with their pain more comfortably. “A big thing in dealing with chronic pain is to set reasonable goals. The traditional medical model is to diagnose, and then treat. But we’re about coping, not necessarily curing – a big difference!”

This difference between coping and curing makes it difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of a multidisciplinary approach to pain. “That isn’t easy to do,” Dr. Gordon admits, “and we’re just trying to find a good way to measure patient outcomes. Sometimes a ‘good outcome’ for someone with chronic back pain means that he can go back to work, enjoy sex again and get on with life – even though his pain ratings [on the zero-to-10 scale] haven’t gone down.” Pain management is as much about restoring quality of life as it is about addressing the physical aspect of pain.

Another tenet of the Wasser Centre is to bring a “biopsychosocial” approach to pain treatment. This is a scientific-sounding polysyllable that refers to an integration of skills. This can include physiotherapy, counselling, pain medication, sex therapy and anything else that addresses the fallout of dealing with chronic pain. People need to regain a sense of control over their lives, however slim. Many patients want medicine to rescue them; a feeling of having been abandoned often goes along with chronic pain.

“Medicine tends to be made up of isolated silos, and neurologists especially tend to be a little rigid that way,” Dr. Gordon says. “But our team tries to cut across the silos and work horizontally. Ten years ago, I never thought I would be prescribing acupuncture to my patients. And I’m pleasantly surprised at how useful things like cognitive-behavioural counselling can be. I find the contact with other disciplines stimulating.”

Nevertheless, despite this emphasis on emotional supports, Dr. Gordon spends a lot of his time prescribing pain medications. For the past decade, opiates in particular were the great white hope for treating non-cancer pain. But Dr. Gordon thinks that the next 10 years will see a shift away from these drugs. “Opiates are only one of several answers. They’re easy to get on, hard to get off and they come with complications. More and more, I believe that a behavioural approach, with the patient learning and practising self-management, is a key to ongoing success. The future lies not just in better drugs, but in a deeper understanding of how pain affects us.”

That – and more money. People don’t realize pain is a disease, Dr. Gordon says. The subject doesn’t lend itself to poster people, marathons or fundraising ribbons. “The main thing I worry about is money. I spend a lot of time worrying about where the next dollar is going to come from.” The annual cost of chronic pain to the Canadian economy (including medical expenses, lost income and lost productivity) has been estimated at more than $10 billion. Despite this elephant in the room, the funding and facilities for treating pain are, well, painfully limited. There are not enough multidisciplinary clinics in Canada – one for every roughly 250,000 people; Prince Edward Island and the Territories don’t have any at all. University curricula haven’t caught up to the need either; many medical students receive only a handful of hours of pain education. (University of Toronto is among the more progressive in this regard, devoting a week to pain studies for students from medicine, dentistry, nursing, physical and occupational therapy and pharmacy.) The neglect of pain is also reflected in the fee schedules of the health-care system, which doesn’t cover many pain treatments. Nerve blocks, for instance – local injections of anesthesia – are covered by OHIP, which makes them the golden egg for private pain clinics. But equally effective and costly pain treatments, such as Botox injections, are not. “The tipping point in pain care will come when government and other payers understand that chronic pain is a huge and expensive problem, and that the population deserves better,” says Gordon. “It’ll be cheaper in the long term to establish an integrated system of care. It’s already happening in Alberta and in Quebec, and it’s beginning to happen in Ontario.”

THE MORE INVOLVED the patient is in the treatment and learning new ways to cope with pain, the Wasser team has found, the better the outcome. “Too often, medicine is the physician doing something to the patient,” says Dr. Gordon. One of his patients, Catherine Seton, is a shining example of what a doctor-patient alliance can accomplish.

Wearing an optimistic orange coat, Seton arrives for our interview right on time, with her typed notes in a file. “I figure I should be at least as prepared and professional as my doctors are,” she says. Although her short hair is blonde, she is a “genetic redhead,” which, she explains, may be a factor in how she experiences pain. “Redheads use different nerve pathways to process pain,” she says. (Research by Montreal scientist Jeff Mogil has shown that redheads may feel pain differently from others.)

Seton has a complicated pain story that includes the joint and muscular pain of fibromyalgia, and migraine headaches – about 15 a month. We look for someplace quiet to talk, but the best we can do near my office is a Tim Hortons where one of the staff is noisily wet-vacuuming the floor. It’s like interviewing someone in a car wash, but Seton is focused and poised. As steam from the vacuum hisses behind us, she goes over her now-polished account of how a minor car accident in 1993 unleashed a small pain that grew into a “noxious weed” that took over her life. “I ended up with jaw, neck and facial pain, and I was later diagnosed with a mild brain injury. At the time, I was a high school teacher who taught English and drama. I loved my work, but after the accident I had to leave my job. I also went through a three-year argument with my private health insurer, who terminated me. So that was three years without income, or work. And in pain. My life was more or less in ruins, and the strain on our marriage – which survived – was serious.”

She went through a string of skeptical doctors, and tried 25 different medications. In 1999, she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia by a rheumatologist. “In 2002, I went to the Wasser Centre. The first doctor I saw there was a neurologist, Dr. Ralph Kern, who listened to me, asked me what my game plan was and said, ‘Think of me as your quarterback.’ The assumption wasn’t ‘Prove that your pain exists’ but ‘I accept that you’re in pain. Where do you want to go from here?’ The staff there understands that you’ve already had a long struggle.”

Dr. Kern recommended that Seton try acupuncture and visit a physiotherapist, “which was a good move,” she says. She also began a course of regular injections of Botox to help the headaches. “The Botox brings the volume of my migraines down, although it doesn’t prevent them.” It also costs about $1,800 per 10-week treatment.

The clinic also did tests that revealed why so many drugs didn’t seem to do the job for her; she is one of the nine per cent of Caucasians who are classed as “non-responders,” people who don’t metabolize pain medications the way most people do. “I also saw Dr. Gordon at the clinic. The first thing I noticed was the way he listened. He’s the best listener I’ve ever met in health care,” she says. “And he makes you feel in control of the process, which is rare. He manages to combine the qualities of a humanist with a scientist.”

Dr. Gordon also encouraged her to become co-chair of the first Wasser Patient Advisory Group. She has since become an eloquent patient advocate who has found a unique way to dramatize the issue of pain. In 2004, I happened to see her presentation, a performance from a series she created called “Speaking of Pain – The Story Project,” at a conference organized by the Wasser Centre.

Seton and three other chronic-pain patients stood on stage. Reading from scripts on music stands, they delivered a wellrehearsed, four-part dramatic monologue – a kind of string quartet of voices conveying what it feels like, emotionally, socially, professionally, sexually, financially, to live with pain. It was a powerful piece. “The audience has spent the day watching all these PowerPoint presentations on screen, and then all of sudden, there are real people on stage,” says Seton. “Just having a body in front of them instead of a slide makes a difference.”

In 2005, Seton delivered a one-woman performance called “Noxious Weed,” about the importance of addressing pain, to a World Health Organization conference in Ottawa. Seton has also appeared in several television documentaries on the subject. She may be an exceptional “graduate” of the clinic, but I think she is also evidence of a slow but steady shift in our perception of pain. When she first came to the Wasser Centre, Seton expressed relief to her neurologist for having been listened to and been taken seriously. “Welcome to the future of health care,” he replied.

If only.

Marni Jackson (BA 1968 VIC) is a senior editor at The Walrus and the author of Pain: The Science and Culture of Why We Hurt.

The Wassers first became involved with Mount Sinai Hospital in 1995, when they read a story in the Toronto Star about a 13-year-old girl who needed surgery to correct a birth defect that had left her jaw fused almost shut. Moved by the young girl’s plight, the Wassers offered to pay for the cost of replacement jaw joints, which weren’t covered by OHIP.

A few years later, the Wassers approached the hospital about making a larger contribution – to a field that didn’t receive adequate funding or support from the public or private sector.At the time,Wasser says neither he nor his wife nor any members of their family had ever experienced chronic pain. But they were motivated by the fact that roughly one in five Canadians suffer from it. “Most of the money goes to things like cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s – things that people are aware of. We wanted to find an area that people wouldn’t normally fund,” he says.

The couple met with Dr.Allan Gordon, who had cofounded the hospital’s craniofacial pain unit, and that sealed the deal.“He is a fantastic individual,” says Wasser. “He’s the kind of person that, if given the chance, will make a huge difference to pain treatment in Canada, and ensure that Mount Sinai Hospital continues to take a leadership role in progressive health care.”

Southworth had canvassed Ontario’s leading lumbermen to see if they would employ graduates, and all but one of them said they would not. Unless the men controlling Canada’s forested lands could be convinced that a forestry college was desirable, Southworth could see no “particular need” for one.

Southworth’s inauspicious assessment haunted Bernhard E. Fernow during his tenure as the faculty’s first dean. Neither the forest industry nor the Ontario government offered much support for the new school, and the university was able to provide little more than subsistence-level funding.

Bernhard E. Fernow, the first dean of U of T's Faculty of Forestry

Fernow, who had founded North America’s first professional forestry school at Cornell University in New York, was aware of these challenges when he accepted the job at U of T. There were fewer than a dozen foresters in Canada in 1907, and Fernow, 56, recognized that his graduates faced bleak job prospects. “Only a radical change in attitude – a realization that forest conservation is a present necessity and that existing methods are destructive of the future – will bring forward the needed reform,” he postulated shortly after the faculty opened in the fall of 1907. He reasoned that the school was cause for hope, since a greater number of foresters in Canada would heighten public awareness of their work.

During his 12 years as dean, Fernow strove relentlessly to produce the best graduates possible. He asked U of T’s Board of Governors to set the faculty’s entrance requirements above those required by the rest of the university. They agreed. In Fernow’s view, the collective reputation of foresters and forestry was at stake. Fernow, an imposing presence with combed grey hair and an untamed moustache, had little patience for forestry students who did not live up to his ideals. When he discovered during the 1910-11 school year that a handful of students were skipping classes, he sent the guilty parties a curt letter: “Allow me to say to you that I consider it decidedly impolite on your part to cut lectures without excuse.”

When Fernow found out that student George Smith was cutting classes and labs during the same academic session, the dean advised him that “for the good of the Faculty, if not of yourself, you will have to mend or retire.” When Smith continued his wayward drift, Fernow fired off another letter warning that he intended “to clean out from the Faculty all those who did not attend faithfully, because we cannot afford in our profession any laggards.” Smith heeded Fernow’s warning and went on to graduate in 1914.

Fernow’s high standards created a high attrition rate. Enrol-ment in the four-year program grew from six in 1907 to almost 50 at the start of the First World War, but, typically, 40 per cent of each year’s class failed out of the program. In the student yearbook, the class of 1913, with 16 first-year students, noted jocularly that “the hand of the Examiner was heavy upon us, and but 11 survived, more or less battered, to enter the second year.” Two more would fall before the class graduated.

Fernow was old school in his heavy-handedness, yet he had a soft touch that belied his gruff countenance. If you respected his rules, he bent over backwards to make you feel part of the faculty. The dean often opened his Avenue Road home to his students. His wife, Olivia Reynolds, who was born in the United States, taught the students German. (Most forestry literature at the time came from Germany.) She and the dean also hosted an open house each Sunday to ensure the students ate well at least once a week.

The dean showed tremendous patience with students who demonstrated drive, even if they sometimes missed the mark. “I do not know how often the vilest sinner may return,” he explained to one floundering student, “but I am always willing to give anyone another chance if he recognizes the depth of his guilt.” On the occasions that Fernow realized his mentoring was insufficient to right a sinking ship, he dispatched an update to the affected parents, offering them an opportunity to help facilitate a recovery before it was too late.

While some students undoubtedly bridled under Fernow’stough love, the dean earned the undying respect of many of his charges. At the time of his convocation, E. H. Finlayson (BScF 1912), who would go on to enjoy a prolific career with the Dominion Forest Service, wrote to Fernow: “I go out into the world, Doctor, with respect and gratitude to you for all you have done for me, and I trust that my work will prove me a worthy disciple of your teachings.”

When Fernow passed away in 1923, former student James Kay (BScF 1919) wrote to Fernow’s successor on his life-changing experience with the dean. “I have often thought and felt that the most precious and permanent thing that remains with us long after we leave the University has not come from deep study of books or lectures, but an indefinable something that is passed on, or radiates from the men who try to guide our aspirations.”

This “indefinable something” may have been the remarkable camaraderie that Fernow fostered among his students and staff. The Faculty of Forestry was a tiny professional school where students took many of the same courses together for four years. During field trips, they lived and worked side by side. “We have studied together, scraped through Exams together, tramped, worked and slept together, have feasted and gone hungry together,” forestry students wrote in the 1913 yearbook. These ties were further cemented through the creation of the Foresters’ Club in 1909, which met every two weeks during the school year, and to which all staff and students belonged.

FERNOW DID WHAT HE COULD to develop foresters of the highest distinction, but the faculty’s success ultimately rested with the provincial government and U of T. Yet as much as Fernow understood there was a political aspect to his job, he never came to grips with one basic fact: the Ontario government was not interested in his forest conservation message. During the Tories’ reign from 1905 to 1919, they did little to conserve Crown timber.

Faculty and students of forestry, 1907-08

Their disinterest was driven home to Fernow in 1907, the first year of the faculty’s existence. Frank Cochrane, Ontario’s minister of lands, forests and mines, announced that his department would “inaugurate a more rational and conservative policy regarding the treatment of timber resources.” The plan included hiring Fernow’s graduates to manage the provincial reserves, monitor cutting, improve the forest-fire ranging system and reforest parts of southern Ontario. In an article in University Magazine shortly after Cochrane’s announcement, Fernow wrote that “the Faculty of Forestry has received a testimony of justification which will rejoice every forester’s and every patriotic citizen’s heart.” But in the end, little came of Cochrane’s promise.

Fernow’s penchant for speaking his mind stands as a lesson in how not to lobby effectively. By consistently challenging provincial politicians, Fernow created an ever-widening chasm between the Faculty of Forestry and the bureaucrats responsible for administering Crown timber. Strangely, he appeared acutely aware of the deleterious impact of his behaviour, but unable (or unwilling) to change his confrontational approach. He remarked to a fellow professor at Purdue University in Indiana that his run-ins with the Ontario government brought “more trouble than glory!” By 1918, shortly before Fernow stepped down as dean, the provincial government had hired only one of the faculty’s 55 graduates.

His dealings with U of T were tense, too. He took the job as dean on the condition that he receive at least one full professor, one associate or assistant professor and two assistants. But when the faculty opened, he was assigned only one lecturer and one assistant. Fernow protested vehemently to U of T’s president, Robert Falconer, who the following year found the money to fund another lecturer. Space was also insufficient, and the situation worsened as the faculty expanded. Fernow repeatedly stressed this shortcoming to the U of T administration, and in his 1912 annual report concluded despondently that “after the first quinquennium of its existence, it cannot be said that the Faculty has reached a permanent form.”

THE FIRST WORLD WAR had a profound impact on Fernow’s close-knit group of students and staff. He and Olivia kept a stream of correspondence flowing from the dean’s office to “their boys” who had enlisted. And those in uniform faithfully responded to the Fernows’ requests for updates on how they were faring overseas.

One of Olivia’s dispatches to the front in March 1917 captures the deep-seated emotion. “Dear Boys,” her letter begins, “you certainly are the finest fellows in the world. Would you believe it? We have heard from 21 of you since Christmas. Every letter counts.” After jocularly reporting that Albert Bentley (BScF 1921) was interviewing Germans “in their own tongue” and that “it looks as if he speaks a better German than they,” she turned to the tragic news of Douglas Aiken (BScF 1916), who had died on the battlefield in November 1916. “He was so brave that he went by the name of fire-eater,” she wrote. “I almost smiled, though the tears were in my eyes. Our lovely, gentle student! Oh! Dear boys, you can’t imagine how lonely the forestry building is, and how we are longing to have our undergraduates back for work and our graduates for a greeting. Goodbye! Write again! We all love your letters!”

As much as the Fernows agonized over the safety of “their boys” overseas, the dean had reason to worry about his own security during the war. An immigrant from the city of Posen in the former Prussia, Fernow had become a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1883. But a fervent “anti-Kaiser” sentiment pervaded Canada during the war, casting aspersions on anyone associated with Germany. This generated significant pressure on Falconer to discharge any professors with German roots. By November 1914, just three months after the start of the war, Falconer had fired three faculty members of German descent.

A Tory MPP trained his sights on Fernow in January 1915, arguing that it is “dangerous when [German] men are permitted to impart knowledge to the youth of this country.” The MPP threatened to lobby for the withdrawal of financial assistance to the university until it guaranteed that it would “discharge every German on staff.”

Fernow responded by defending his loyalty to the Allies. In a statement in The Globe, he declared that “all the young men of the country should join the army to go and fight for Britain.” He stated that he had “urged every member of his classes to take up military training” and “helped to make it convenient to do so.” In closing, Fernow wrote that he was a pacifist, and that “this war should stop at once.” The pressure on U of T to fire Fernow mounted with each passing month of the conflict, but the dean responded to each new attack with an increasingly zealous defence of his loyalty to the Allies.

Fernow’s performance during the war was even more extraordinary because of what he had managed to conceal. In the mid-1950s, Ralph Hosmer, a friend and a former head of Cornell’s forestry department, revealed that Fernow had retained deep sympathy for his native land during the war. Hosmer recounted that in 1917, while at a Society of American Foresters meeting in Washington, D.C., the U of T dean told a group of colleagues, “My heart is with the fatherland, but my head with the Allies.” Hosmer said Fernow’s remarks indicated the tact that he had exercised during those difficult years in Toronto.

By war’s end, almost all of the faculty’s students and graduates who were eligible had enlisted, and 52 of its 55 graduates had served on the front. Fernow repeatedly boasted about thisexemplary level of commitment but, as he noted in 1918, “it is thus that the Faculty of Forestry has suffered perhaps more than any other by the call to arms.” Fifteen students lost their lives and dozens were injured in battle.

The war’s tragic toll compelled Fernow to take a more lenient attitude – at least temporarily – toward his students. True to form, he granted leniency only reluctantly. U of T’s policy was to grant students who served overseas credit for one full year of university. While recognizing that the students had provided a valuable service, Fernow felt this might undermine his goal of creating the best possible graduates. So, with little choice but to accept the university’s policy, Fernow took steps to safeguard the faculty’s reputation. As the dean gruffly explained to John Simmons (BScF 1915) in the spring of 1915, the faculty had “reluctantly come to the conclusion that in view of your enlistment, although your record is poor, we may give you the degree honoris causa for you have hardly earned it by your work. I must advise you, however, that upon your return you ought deliberately to take another year to fit yourself for life work, for with your present equipment you will hardly be able to secure or hold down any position in the forest service, and we would hardly be able to recommend for such.”

In Fernow’s view, safeguarding the faculty’s reputation also meant barring women from the profession. The dean was adamant that they should never become foresters. To one young woman who inquired in 1918 about employment prospects in the field, Fernow replied: “There are some occupations for which women are not specially fitted and forestry is one of them, at least in Canada, on account of the rough life in the woods which it entails.” The faculty would adhere to this viewpoint for the following four decades.

BY 1916, if not earlier, Fernow lost patience with what he saw as U of T’s indifference to the plight of his faculty. Fernow’s parting correspondence to President Falconer revealed much about the challenges that had fettered his progress and defined his decade as dean. In May 1919, he wrote Falconer to ask for a retroactive salary increase and the honour of being named Professor Emeritus. He closed by promising to earn the honorary title by making himself “useful to the Faculty, the child of my creation.”

Fernow had overseen the faculty’s establishment and growth but had received far less support than he believed he had been promised. Although his successor, Clifton Durant Howe, an associate professor with the faculty, would take up the post without the same expectations of staffing and space, he, too, would grapple with the issues that arose from running a forestry school that neither the university nor the Ontario government seemed particularly inclined to nourish.

This article is adapted from Mark Kuhlberg’s book about the history of the Faculty of Forestry, to be published in 2008. Kuhlberg (BA 1989) is a history professor at Laurentian University.

Students are not the only ones asking the big questions. As the Faculty of Forestry enters its second century, its scientists are investigating a range of pressing issues – from climate change and habitat loss to the economic sustainability of one of Canada’s bedrock industries. “These are exciting times,” says Smith, who was appointed dean in 2005 after academic postings at the University of New Hampshire and Texas A&M University. “It’s no less exciting than when the faculty’s founders in 1907 asked,‘How are we going to make a living out of the bush?’”

These days, the answer would surprise those who think foresters merely manage timber. Smith cites the research of Professor Mohini Sain, director of U of T’s Centre for Biocomposites and Biomaterials Processing, who is developing ways to use wood microfibres and nanofibres in moulded plastic products. Sain claims that within five years, processed plant fibres could be used to make up 25 per cent of a car.

Several other faculty members are developing sustainable urban forests. Properly planted street trees can help cool cities and offset greenhouse gas emissions associated with the use of air conditioning. Professor Jay Malcolm is examining the impact of global warming on Ontario forests. And John Caspersen, an assistant professor of forest ecology and silviculture, has been studying the effects of forest management on the structure and composition of forest ecosystems.

Smith is interested in the potential of forests as a source of renewable energy.The plant material cast off in traditional pulp-andpaper processing, for example, is rich in chemical compounds that have high energy content. Smith is involved with a team trying to develop a bio-refinery in eastern Ontario that could increase the use of primary wood products while reducing the energy needed in pulp-and-paper processing.The area has endured the closure of a Domtar plant and is eager for new opportunities. “The pulp-and-paper industry could go from relying heavily on fossil fuels to depending more on renewable sources of energy and weaning itself from the electrical grid,” says Smith. “The question is: Where will the capital come from to build these new types of refineries?”

He points out that the founding of the Faculty of Forestry a century ago helped bring greater scientific rigour to the management of one of Canada’s most abundant resources.Today, foresters study everything from bird migration to greenhouse gases and the standard of living in remote aboriginal communities.“A hundred years ago, it was a question of how to get the wood out,” says Smith.“Now, our work affects everybody from downtown neighbourhoods to rural communities.”

A man in the back row raises his hand.

“Not you, you’re my age,” the professor says, waving off the fortyish man. “Let’s let one of the younger ones answer.”

The student sits back, deflated. He won’t dare try to comment again. Like me, he is a “non-traditional student”: mature was the word we used to use, though that’s fallen out of favour, a tacit reminder that nobody really grows up anymore.

The two of us, greying returnees to a system we left 20 years ago, are in an interesting spot. Are we there to contribute, the way we did when we were 19? Or merely to preside in the back rows like stone gargoyles, watching the “traditionals” at their labours?

The number of older students is growing, thanks to “credential creep.” A higher level of education is simply more important than it used to be, particularly in areas such as nursing, business and education. As always, a minority are here just for the fun of it. But most students of a certain age (we are mainly part-timers) are busy with other duties in the outside world, and squeamish about sticking out in a class full of young learners. Hence the growing popularity of distance learning, during which you can study, as one online commentator put it, “while wearing fuzzy bunny slippers and drinking scotch.”

I’ve tried that route, too, but it’s a pretty lonely slog. Your professors and classmates are so far-flung and invisible that they may as well be fictional. There are no debates, no peals of laughter, no interesting tangents or provocative questions. The scotch and slippers are a definite plus, though, and should probably be incorporated into traditional classrooms.

Classrooms are where learning really happens – thanks to challenging, brilliant professors, yes, but also thanks to students. The world can narrow horribly as we age; we know that there are people living outside our offices and neighbourhoods, but we have little to do with them. In university, we were regularly exposed to people from all races, creeds, cultures, orientations – and age groups, too, if we were lucky. That diversity of perspectives is a gift we took with us before disappearing into the tiny warrens of work and family. If you’ve lost it, it’s worth going back for. Even 20 years later.

I HAVE ONE CLASS AT CONVOCATION HALL, and the building hasn’t changed. The sense memory of a hundred hangovers has me slumped in a seat that seems impossibly tiny, since it was not only 20 years, but 20 pounds ago that I sat here. I remember watching my fellow graduands file forth to collect their degrees on that hot June day in 1986 and thinking that those chandeliers must surely be ready to fall on them. But the ancient fixtures are still there, inching scarily out of the ceiling like stalactites.

Otherwise, the campus has changed a lot. I’ve missed the massive technological conversion of the 1990s, and the battles over identity politics and the “canon.” Nobody marches about cruise missile testing, or South Africa, or abortion laws like they used to. Plagiarism was much more difficult back then: professors warned against it perfunctorily, like flight attendants demonstrating how to use oxygen masks. Now they are crazed with paranoia on the subject, and rightly so, since all you have to do is press a couple of buttons on your laptop and the contraband shimmers to life before you.

Being yesterday’s woman, I cannot bear to lug a laptop to class. This means I am deprived of the ability to play Minesweeper during my breaks, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. We didn’t have Minesweeper in 1986; we had to talk to each other. One conversation sticks out in my memory.

IN THE FALL OF 1985, I ENROLLED IN A RENAISSANCE HISTORY course. It was relatively small, as classes were in those days. There was a middle-aged woman in my tutorial. I don’t remember her real name, so let’s call her Lois. She wore sensible loafers, A-line tweed skirts and a cameo brooch (nowadays, we the fortyish wear jeans, runners and T-shirts with sports logos on them, and the truth is we all look a bit like desiccated camp counsellors).

Lois can’t have been much older than I am now, and probably returned to school after raising a brood of children. She knew all the answers and did all the readings: you know the type. Writer Thomas Merton sniffily described one such person, whom he taught before entering the monastery: “She was one of those middleaged ladies…who handed in neat and punctilious themes and occupied, with a serene and conscious modesty, her rightful place as the star of the class. This entitled her to talk more than anybody else and ask more unpredictable questions.”

Well, Lois was one of those. I was wary of her, since she held a mirror to what I so glaringly was in those days – a lousy student. One day I was leaving “Sig Sam” after a rare bout of studying. Lois saw me and called my name. I tried to dodge her, but it was no use. I was in no mood to discuss essay topics, or the content of the last lecture, since it was a course from which I’d pretty much gone AWOL. My hair was a wreck, my lipstick smeared; it was the studying after the partying before. Was it, perhaps, the night I fell asleep on the kitchen floor – the morning I woke up with actual wood splinters in my cheek?

But there was Lois, bright-eyed and perfectly coiffed. “You know,” she said, “the professor is tremendously impressed with your opinions. In fact, he won’t start the tutorial without you. Where have you been? We want you back!” I – with parents 2,000 miles away, abstractions rarely seen – was being watched. It was creepy, but exciting too. It made me think that learned people actually valued my views on Petrarch and Erasmus, contaminated as they were with “likes” and “you knows”; the professor, of course, but more importantly Lois. Someone who took learning seriously: someone you could watch, weekly, being transformed by it.

I am a mother myself now, and I know how the breed works. We are natural saviours, gravitating always to the fallen, and so maybe Lois’s lure was just a con. In any case it worked. I returned to Renaissance history and aced it. We often criticize the over-parenting of today’s students, but sometimes a little peer mentoring isn’t such a bad thing. Sensible Lois – traditional and mature Lois – where are you now? I’m glad to have had you in my class.

IT IS TRUE THAT, FOR YEARS,WOMEN HAVE TAKEN UP BOOKS AT mid-life. Often we are reminded of how the world sees us. “I get requests from lots of groups like this,” moaned one male author on a visit to my book club, rubbing his temples. “It’s always the same – middle-aged women.”

Perhaps the poor man was girding himself for the onslaught of our opinions. In youth, we pretended to know everything, when in fact we knew nothing. In our 40s it’s the other way around: we are always feigning interest and innocence. Our opinions are largely formed and our minds closing, and the fight to keep them open gets harder every day. Merton was right – we try not to bug the professors, but we do. “Dr. So-and-So,” we say, “Have you ever read… I don’t think that’s what it says… Perhaps you should…” For which we get bored looks, ones that say: Am I wrong? Maybe. It’s still going to be on the test.

So maybe you can’t go home again. Or maybe you can: as David Denby recounted in Great Books, his terrific book published in 1996 about returning to school at age 48, it is fascinating to study Marx after spending years in the workplace; King Lear after seeing your parents age; Austen after courting and marrying; Hobbes after being robbed or cheated. We read such works to see what life will be like, but we rarely look back to see if they were right.

A warning, though: if you do go back, they will make brutal fun of you. Your friends and family, that is. Oh sure, they will make all the appropriate noises about how much they admire you; how they’ve always wanted to go back, too. They will ask what you’re reading. They will seem to be serious. But the second you tell them your final exams are over, they won’t be able to resist. “Dude!” they’ll smirk. “Keg party!” You will ignore them, because you are a scholar – someone who can recall, effortlessly, that it was Gertrude Stein who told us there was “no there there.” But, of course, you knew that. Didn’t you?

Cynthia Macdonald (BA 1986 St. Michael’s) is a writer and part-time social sciences student at the University of Toronto.

It may not be immediately apparent to outside observers, but a quiet revolution is underway at U of T. Countless faculty members and staff are focused as never before on transforming the way students experience the university, both inside and outside the classroom.

For years, U of T has faced a number of challenges due to the size and makeup of its student population. Most undergraduates don’t live on campus. And a recent survey on student engagement found that even though U of T has more than 300 student clubs and the largest varsity and intramural sports program in Canada, 60 per cent of commuter students spend zero hours a week in extracurricular activities. As always, the money to solve this problem is in short supply: Ontario remains last among the provinces in per capita funding of higher education, a position it has occupied for many years.

U of T has long addressed these challenges with an arsenal of not-so-secret weapons. The college system on the St. George campus divides a large student community into smaller neighbourhoods. Our professors are outstanding, and we offer a tremendous choice of programs and courses, including a substantial number of small classes in the upper years of any baccalaureate program. We also offer students the chance to learn abroad at more than a hundred universities around the world.

Recently, however, we’ve been improving the student experience with other initiatives. We are re-engineering the undergraduate academic experience by extending the opportunity to join First-Year Learning Communities to 650 students in the Faculty of Arts and Science (almost triple the number of two years ago). These small groups of students meet regularly outside of class with a senior student and a staff member, providing new students with a way to meet their classmates and learn about the university in a casual setting.

We’re improving the quality of the spaces available to students for academic purposes. New facilities include the Leslie L. Dan Pharmacy Building, the Arts and Administration building at U of T Scarborough and the Hazel McCallion Academic Learning Centre at U of T Mississauga. And we now offer wireless internet access at 900 separate points across all three campuses. We’re also expanding the quality and quantity of places that enhance life outside the classroom. The Recreation, Athletic and Wellness Centre at U of T Mississauga, the Varsity Centre and the new baseball field at U of T Scarborough add some much-needed capacity to our athletic facilities. And the new Multifaith Centre in the Koffler Institute on Spadina Avenue offers students a place to express their spirituality.

We’re using new electronic resources to build communities and participation. Students will be able to use a new customized portal and can now access ULife www.ulife.utoronto.ca, a resource that brings together more than 1,000 listings of extracurricular activities at U of T in a neat, user-friendly database. Students looking to get involved in filmmaking, debating, sports, social activism, charities – almost anything they can think of – will find a way to do so through ULife.

I could list more initiatives. We need lots of them, because U of T is a big place and change comes slowly. What matters, however, is that there is now clear momentum in the right direction.

That momentum is overdue. Time after time, when I meet with students, I hear two views of the University of Toronto. One, incredibly positive, I hear from students who are involved in extracurricular activities or from those who have found courses and professors that are transforming the way they see the world. The other view comes from students who simply can’t find their “comfort zone” inside or outside the classroom; this view is still too prevalent. A few years from now, we hope the vast majority of our students will look back on their time at U of T as a transformative period of learning, personal growth, and positive experiences. That’s how many of us remember it, and we owe this generation nothing less.

Global warming has been prominent in the news this year, since former World Bank economist Nicholas Stern issued his 700-page report on climate change, with stark warnings that before the end of this century rising temperatures could wipe out 20 per cent of the global economy and displace as many as 100 million people. Stern’s report was the most comprehensive yet about the perils of delaying action on climate change.

Although Stern notes, quite rightly, that the private sector will play an important role in developing new low-carbon technologies, universities will also play a vital part – educating the next generation about climate change, working with industry to develop new energy sources and transportation technologies, and working with government to devise effective policies. In previous issues of U of T Magazine, we’ve written about research into alternative energy sources, as well as U of T’s own attempts to reduce its ecological footprint. In this issue, we take a historical look at a man who argued for the importance of conservation long before it became fashionable.

When Bernhard E. Fernow, the founding dean of U of T’s Faculty of Forestry, was hired a century ago, modern-day resource management didn’t exist. Trees were harvested with little regard for the environment or future needs. Shortly after the faculty opened, in the fall of 1907, Fernow presciently stated, “Only a radical change in attitude – a realization that forest conservation is a present necessity and that existing methods are destructive of the future – will bring forward the needed reform.”

A hundred years later, U of T’s Faculty of Forestry is at the forefront of the green revolution in Canada. One faculty member, Mohini Sain, is developing ways to use wood fibres in plastic products. Some day soon, says Sain, plant materials could make up as much as 25 per cent of a car. Professor Tat Smith, dean of the Faculty of Forestry, is investigating ways to wean the pulp-and-paper industry – a voracious consumer of energy – from fossil fuels.

Other faculty members are investigating climate change and habitat loss. What’s interesting about much of this research is that it’s cross-disciplinary. This approach, which draws on expertise from a variety of fields to investigate a problem, is becoming increasingly common at universities – and has been used with considerable success at the Wasser Pain Management Centre at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. Dr. Allan Gordon, who co-founded the centre, treats chronic pain using cognitive-behavioural counselling, acupuncture, biofeedback and other non-traditional techniques (as well as some more traditional ones). Importantly, patients are encouraged to help develop their own treatment plan. Patient Catherine Seton was so impressed with the Wasser Centre that she now gives presentations about her experience. “They make you feel in control of the process,” she says.

Donald Coxeter peers into a large kaleidoscope during a visit to the University of Minnesota in 1967

But a battered geometry was eventually revived, thanks in large part to Donald Coxeter (LLD 1979). A professor of geometry at U of T for more than 60 years, he is the subject of the recent book King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry, by Siobhan Roberts.

When Coxeter received his first posting at U of T in 1936, he was already an expert in polytopes, a type of shape that resides in multiple dimensions. He became interested in reflections and symmetries, and he invented geometric tools (called Coxeter groups, Coxeter numbers and Coxeter diagrams) that broadened and deepened the study of symmetry in both geometry and algebra. Coxeter also wrote two influential books, Regular Polytopes and Regular Complex Polytopes, which, according to Roberts, are widely considered the sequels to Euclid’s Elements. And it wasn’t just Coxeter’s academic contributions that revived an ailing discipline. “He was so passionate about the beautiful and elegant gems of classic geometry that he just kept propagating his passion like an apostle,” explains Roberts.

Roberts is currently developing a documentary film about Coxeter for TVO and the National Film Board. In 2002, she filmed Coxeter in Budapest, Hungary, at the last geometry conference he attended. She also interviewed mathematicians from around the world during the Coxeter Legacy Conference at U of T in 2004, the year after Coxeter’s death at age 96. Roberts says it was Coxeter’s unique appeal that propelled her into both projects: “When I met Coxeter he was 94, but he still had an intellectual charisma about him.”

After reading Coxeter’s diaries (which he kept for more than 75 years), Roberts was also charmed by his eccentricities. He was hopelessly awkward with romantic matters and proposed to his wife, Rien, in a graveyard. To “get the juices flowing,” he stood on his head every morning before breakfast. “He thought about geometry every waking hour, in the bath and while driving…and even while napping or sleeping, which he said was the best time for a breakthrough, when the brain is at rest,” says Roberts.

The practical applications of Coxeter’s geometry are far-reaching. According to Roberts, Coxeter’s investigations into symmetries have touched almost every area of mathematics and science that involves patterns, including the data-mining technology behind Amazon.com and anti-terrorism programs. And if the geometry of protein folding is figured out – proteins play a central role in body chemistry – Coxeter’s geometry could one day contribute to medical breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s disease, cancer and AIDS.

But for Roberts, Coxeter’s passion is reason enough to care about his work. “His legacy,” she says, “might be in demonstrating… faith in intuition and imagination and wandering exploration just for curiosity’s sake.”

The 17 participants in Toneatto and Nguyen’s study received instruction in mindfulness meditation, which cultivates an ability to respond to all mental states – even unpleasant ones – with non-judgmental, accepting, present-moment awareness. Yet preliminary results show that not everyone achieves this state of mind.

The participants – students in Toneatto’s fourth-year Buddhist psychology course – meditated for at least 20 minutes per day for eight weeks and kept a daily diary of their experiences. These diaries revealed variable levels of relaxation and distraction, and uneven success rates in maintaining a non-judgmental attitude. “The students reacted to the challenge of meditating in very different ways, and that means people may need individualized guidance or instruction,” says Toneatto. The participants also answered questionnaires at the beginning and end of the study about their overall stress and quality of life. The researchers are now looking for correlations between what people did during meditation and any changes in individuals’ overall well-being.

The idea for the study came to Nguyen after she and Toneatto reviewed research on the impact of mindfulness meditation on symptoms of anxiety and depression. She says the review – which will be published in April in The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry – made her see that there was a gap in the research literature. Nguyen and Toneatto found that the benefit people derived from meditation varied between studies, and the majority of the researchers did not include people’s adherence to the mindfulness program or what happens during the process.

By studying the meditation experience, Toneatto and Nguyen hope to better understand the problems that novice meditators encounter and the unequal benefits people receive from meditating. “If we can help improve the delivery of mindfulness instruction, we’ll strengthen the overall intervention,” says Toneatto. In response to rising interest in Buddhist-related techniques in Western medicine, New College will launch a new minor program in Buddhism, Psychology and Mental Health this fall.

Ryan Ting-A-Kee, a neuroscience PhD candidate at the Institute of Medical Science at U of T, has recently found that mice can be made to enjoy caffeine more when their brain chemistry is manipulated. “Normally the animals don’t like the large doses of caffeine that we’re giving them,” says Ting-A-Kee. “But if you give them a dopamine blocker, all of a sudden they like it.”

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is associated with producing rewarding feelings in the brain, “but there is evidence that dopamine is doing a lot of other things,” says Ting-A-Kee. “This shows that in certain circumstances it can have the reverse effect.” Block the dopamine, and the caffeine suddenly feels a whole lot better.

While Ting-A-Kee teases that he’s secretly being funded by Starbucks, the actual applications of his research may lie in addiction treatment.“There may be a parallel,” he says. “Other drugs, particularly nicotine, may work in a manner similar to caffeine.” Better understanding of brain chemistry could open up new treatment options for people hooked on highly addictive substances.

All the same, don’t be too surprised some morning to find yourself ordering a large cappuccino – and hold the dopamine.

“There are two types of inequality in the House of Commons,” says Choudhry. “The first is that the largest and fastest-growing provinces – Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia – are underrepresented in the House. Secondly, there’s been a tendency to systematically overrepresent rural voters as opposed to urban voters.” The goal, he says, was to ensure that less populous provinces and rural minorities received fair representation in parliament. But Choudhry and Pal believe this system is now making Canada’s democratic system increasingly unequal, and that visible-minority voters are being left behind.

“Immigrants are largely from visible-minority communities,” Choudhry says, “and as it turns out, those visible-minority immigrants are settling in precisely the areas of Canada that are underrepresented in the House of Commons.” For instance, Kenora – the smallest electoral riding in Ontario – is a predominantly rural riding with a population of 60,570. Mississauga East-Cooksville, an urban riding with a large visible-minority immigrant population, registers at 122,565. Yet both have equal weight in the House, with one member of Parliament each. The net result is that urban visible-minority immigrants generally have less voting power in government.

To help ensure fair representation – for visible minorities, urbanites and residents of the three largest provinces – Choudhry and Pal propose creating more seats in parliament for Ontario, Alberta and B.C., and amending legislation to ensure that electoral districts are drawn to stricter population guidelines. “The point of our paper is that ‘one person, one vote’ should mean something,” says Choudhry. “It’s the benchmark against which we measure democracy.”

By moving the software online and making it easy to use, Aarabi hopes that it will allow some people to satisfy their curiosity without an expensive trip to the surgeon.And, for those who are interested in more than a virtual procedure: a new version of the software has recently become available to plastic surgeons.To try your own digital facelift, visit www.modiface.com.