Sir Robert Falconer
A large oil painting in greys and browns, Sir Robert looking stern and fleshy, the portrait dominating the office from the east wall behind Prichard’s desk.

Sir Robert is wearing a necktie in the painting. Prichard likes to tell the story about Falconer, on a career-changing train journey from Halifax to Toronto in the summer of 1907, removing his clerical collar, never to wear one again, and tying on a four-in-hand, a symbol of his move from the religious to the secular. Falconer had been a Presbyterian minister and the principal of Pine Hill Presbyterian College in Halifax when a University of Toronto search committee seized on him to be the university’s new president. On the day of his installation, Sept. 26, 1907, Falconer was 40 years old. That made him the youngest president of the 20th century, one year, one month and 10 days younger at his installation than the second most junior, Rob Prichard, was at his. Youth was one bond that Prichard says he found with Falconer.

A grand vision for the university was another. Robert G. Greenlee, Sir Robert’s biographer, writes that Falconer “had no desire to inhabit a mere colonial outpost, dependent on others for ideas and for the men to inculcate them.’’ Thus, on his watch, which stretched to 25 years, Falconer brought to the university a resounding new emphasis on research and graduate work. He put up Hart House and Simcoe Hall. He effected sweeping modernization at the medical school. He spread the welcome mat for such scholars as the historian Frank Underhill, the scientist Frederick Banting, the economist Harold Innis.

Prichard says that he himself arrived in office without such a clear view for the university. He spent his early period sussing out the place. He practically memorized Greenlee’s book about Sir Robert. He arranged monthly discussion lunches with faculty members, 12 different guests per lunch. And he popped up all around the campus, asking, listening, absorbing.

“What was central to Rob’s eventual achievements,” says Heather Munroe-Blum, Prichard’s vice-president of research and international relations, “was that he knew the university’s history and its current state in more detail than practically any other living person.”

From that vantage, Prichard enunciated a mission that seemed audacious. Toronto would become, he insisted, “Canada’s pre-eminent university, ranking among the finest public research universities in the world.” Prichard announced the objective in the same language several times a day, every day, to audiences of one and to audiences of one thousand. He said it so often that when Governing Council prepared a 45-page report of helpful suggestions for Prichard in 1995 on the eve of his second term, the report contained just one cavil: Governing Council was sick and tired of hearing that the university’s goal was to be pre-eminent and internationally significant. “I read that and I thought, this is good!” Prichard says. “If everybody’s tired of hearing it, it must be working! There must be a consensus for the mission around the university!”

Prichard was right. The university, driven by its president’s energy and determination, blossomed into a place of optimism and growth. Academic standards were elevated. Research deepened. The architecture school, scheduled to be deep-sixed in the 1980s, re-emerged as a superior graduate school in the 1990s. The nursing school was reworked to function more like a law school with higher entrance requirements and no more admission straight from high school, and the law school, which Prichard had largely reinvented as its dean in the 1980s, sat comfortably in the 1990s in the big leagues with Harvard Law and Yale Law. The way medicine is taught was revamped once. The way arts and sciences are taught was revamped twice. New bridges were built to the business community resulting in such institutions as the Rotman School of Management. The university came to rank second only to Nortel as a hotbed of Canadian technological research. And the university grew dense and thrived with cross disciplines, students earning law degrees and PhDs in philosophy at the same time, MBAs pursuing engineering degrees, architecture students working in geography, medical students learning about law. “To help get these things done,” Prichard says, “there had to be a sense of purpose coming out of Simcoe Hall.”

His purpose was Falconeresque in its scope, entirely fitting to Prichard as the president who moved his office back upstairs. “This is the room where Sir Robert sat when he created the modern university,” Prichard says. “I strongly identify with that.” Nor was it a coincidence that Prichard rescued a neglected Falconer portrait from a remote Simcoe Hall corner. But, Sir Robert devotee that he is, Prichard seems not to have registered one detail of Falconer’s career: his weariness after a quarter century on the job. “While I still regret to leave my colleagues,” Falconer told an academic friend in 1931, “it will be a relief to lay down my duties.”

“I’d love to serve as long as Sir Robert!” Prichard says with his apparently unquenchable enthusiasm. Prichard’s feeling that the university renews itself through a new president is the only reason he sees for propelling himself out the door. “Otherwise, if it were entirely personal, I’d aspire to come into the office every day until my 65th birthday.”

Claude Bissell
Another large oil painting, this one full of colour, the portrait of an elegant Bissell, hanging in the anteroom outside Prichard’s office.

When Bissell, the university’s president from 1958 to 1971, came to dinner parties at the home of Prichard’s parents, Rob was the young kid who carried the guests’ coats upstairs. Rob’s father worked for Bissell. Stobo Prichard, Welsh-born, took his medical training in London, England, where Rob entered the world on Jan. 17, 1949. Then Stobo moved his family to Toronto in 1951 where he made a most distinguished career as a pediatric neurologist at the Hospital for Sick Children and a professor at the university’s Faculty of Medicine.

“In one way or another, the university has been shaping my life since I was three or four years old,” Prichard says. He learned to swim at Hart House, to skate at Varsity Arena. At the law school, he was student, teacher, dean, and after this long association Claude Bissell has left with Rob, the coat-check kid, an example of gentlemanliness.

That was Bissell’s style as president, an English literature scholar with a courtly manner, a courteous president who caught the unswerving devotion of the faculty. None of this was lost on Prichard who thought to apply the gentlemanly arts to his own regime. Bissell himself took an interest in Prichard’s career in a way that was, in Prichard’s words, “completely helpful but never invasive.” So it was that, of all the living former presidents, it was Bissell whom Prichard asked to speak at his own installation ceremony on Oct. 12, 1990.

“And I have the painting of Claude hanging here,” Prichard points out, “to remind me and everybody who comes to the office that, as a president, he was an example of a leader who was also a beautiful man.”

George Connell
One of a set of framed formal photographs of the university presidents on the west wall, Connell wearing an expression of amused intelligence.

Connell wasn’t laughing in the summer of 1986. He had been president for two years, and now, looking around him, he decided the university had lost its way. For the next eight months, Connell pulled back on other presidential duties while, by himself, he consulted with people and wrote an analysis of the troubles. The result was a 134-page booklet, complete with charts and graphs, which Connell titled Renewal 1987. Prichard regards it as a seminal document for his own period in office. “In many, many ways, picking up on Renewal 1987,” he says, “I see my presidency as a continuation of what George began.”

Connell highlighted the necessity for multi-year planning, for expansion of research resources, for a dozen or more additional reforms. Prichard pursued all of them in his unrelenting manner. But of all the areas emphasized in Renewal 1987, the one where Prichard surely succeeded beyond Connell’s most optimistic dreams happens to be the area that is Prichard’s least favourite to discuss. The area is fund-raising. “I thought it was a distortion of the president’s role to focus on the issue of money when we had none,” Prichard says. “And I still think it’s a distortion to focus on money now that we have started to get some.”

Nevertheless, the need to bring in cash was never far from Prichard’s thoughts – or his conversation – for 10 years. Paul Fox tells a small illustrative story. Fox has graced the university since 1954, a distinguished political scientist, principal of Erindale, now professor emeritus, and he recalls a university-related dinner in the mid-1990s where he found himself at the same table as Prichard and two captains of industry.

“This is the greatest political scientist in Canada!” Prichard suddenly said, referring to Fox and startling both him and the two captains. “A Paul Fox chair should be endowed at the university!” Prichard looked at the two nonplussed captains. “How about some money for the chair? What about it?”

The Paul Fox chair still remains a Prichard dream, but many dozens of other dreams came to reality. When Prichard assumed the presidency, the university had seven permanently endowed chairs; today there are 131. And in 1990 the total of the university’s permanent endowment stood at a mere 220 million dollars. In 2000, it reached a stunning 1.2 billion dollars.

Even Bill Graham finds this impressive. Graham, a professor of philosophy, headed the University of Toronto Faculty Association for most of the 1990s and was inevitably on the opposite side of Prichard on many university issues. He concedes that the endowment fund does “represent a cushion that didn’t exist before, a buffer against forces that seek to encroach on the university.” However, he says the fund was built on money that should have been used to improve the employee pension plan; when the plan was in surplus the university was granted a contribution holiday and used those funds to boost the endowment fund, much to the chagrin of the faculty association.

A perverse irony is that, among some people inside and outside the university, the effusive energy that Prichard brought to his fund-raising tasks got him a reputation as just another over-the-top salesman. This is supposedly in contrast to his successor, Robert Birgeneau who, as a physicist of great standing, is perceived as a true academic.

“That view of Rob is entirely false,” Munroe-Blum says. “He could never have been as successful as he has been without a thorough knowledge of the core academic mission of the university and the passion to realize it. And – how can people forget this? – Rob is himself a scholar in the law.”

Prime ministers and other political superstars
Small framed photos in rows along two tables against the north wall. Here’s Prichard with Jean Chrétien, Prichard with Brian Mulroney, with Bill Clinton, Paul Martin, Mikhail Gorbachev.

There’s a downside to socializing with celebrity statesmen. “For each of those photographs,” Prichard says, “there was a dinner I had to host or attend on behalf of the university.” Dinners every night except Saturday and Sunday for 10 years, followed by trips back to an empty Simcoe Hall for undisturbed reflection and paper shuffling until one or two a.m. Prichard thinks the most comprehensive change in his post-presidential life will be the evenings that will now be freed up for family and friends.

Prichard makes a loyal friend. He is loyal to Lionel Schipper, for one. Most of Prichard’s pals are connected to the law, and Schipper is one of them, a 1956 U of T law school grad, an immensely wise lawyer and businessman, constant in contributing to the university’s work in neurodegenerative diseases, Jewish studies and the law.

“To the extent I have made a difference as President,” Prichard wrote to Schipper on Dec. 16, 1999, “it is substantially due to the lessons I learned from you at the most formative moments of my career within the University.” The letter also spoke of Schipper’s commitment to the university and of his “personal qualities of integrity, loyalty, wisdom and generosity which are so widely recognized throughout our community.”

Lionel Schipper becomes on June 20, 2000, the last person to receive an honorary degree in the 190 convocations that Prichard presided over in his years as president.

At 10:30 one night this spring, another Prichard friend, Gerry Schwartz of Onex, interrupted Prichard’s solitary work at Simcoe Hall. “Prichard,” Schwartz said on the telephone, “I really look forward to the day when you earn 10 times as much money as you earn today and work one-tenth as much time.”

If Prichard is to get suddenly rich, it won’t start happening in the next year. For 2000-2001, he has rented a small house in Cambridge, Mass., where he’ll live four days a week while he lectures in his specialty, torts, to 150 Harvard law students. And after that? “Being a law school professor at the University of Toronto,” he says. “Being a public commentator. But my problem is still going to be, how can I find anything as meaningful as being president of this university?”

Jay Prichard
A studio photograph of a three-year-old of sunny, heart-lifting beauty. This is the child whom Prichard calls “the miracle boy.”

On Prichard’s first day as a student at the law school in 1972, his eyes locked on a classmate. Slender, blond, radiant. “I fell instantly in love,” Prichard says. The object of his affections was Ann Wilson. The two married during the Christmas holidays three years later. Ann pursued a career that took her into a favourite area, policy analysis, and she works today for the Ontario Ministry of Intergovernmental Affairs. She gave birth to three sons. Wil, majoring in history, enters the sophomore class at Harvard this September. Kenny is headed into his last year at Upper Canada College, dad’s old school. And the boy in the photograph, Jay, against every conceivable odd, is on schedule for Grade 9.

It was brain cancer that struck Jay. He was six years old, and at the Hospital for Sick Children, chemotherapy and radiation battered his little body for a year. During one terrible period, he couldn’t speak, suffered paralysis, couldn’t focus his eyes. But he had superb medical care, and he had his parents, mother by day, father by night.

Prichard arrived at the hospital each evening at nine. He had a reading lamp and a cell phone. He worked and slept next to his sick son. In the morning, he showered at the hospital, dressed and hurried to his new job as president at the university up the street.

“You should see that boy today!” Prichard says exuberantly. “He walks! He talks! He sees! He makes jokes! He finished runner-up in the public speaking contest at his school!”

Some people think Prichard goes over the top in his enthusiasms. Maybe he’s entitled.

And maybe – not really much maybe about it – it has been Prichard’s obvious fervour, the celebratory joy he brings to his job, the passion for the office that has carried the university to a position where, unmatched since Sir Robert Falconer’s day, it is achieving great distinction in the broadest world of higher education. Prichard may go over the top, but it looks like he has taken everybody else at the University of Toronto with him.

Jack Batten (BA 1954 VIC, LLB 1957) is a Toronto author.

Act One
As archdeacon of York, and later bishop of Toronto, John Strachan held a position of great influence and used it to argue forcefully that the colony required a college to further the work of the semi-established Church of England and thereby provide a basis for civil society. In 1827, he obtained a charter from the Crown, founding King’s College which would be supported by public funds and headed by him as president. And that’s when the trouble started. The Methodists objected; so, too, the Presbyterians and the Baptists. Why should the Anglicans be favoured, they fumed. The government decided in 1849 that what Upper Canada required was a provincial university free of sectarian exclusivity – the competing denominations could fight it out amongst themselves, but not necessarily at public expense. Strachan knew what was coming and in 1848 he resigned in protest and found solace in the founding of the University of Trinity College.

Act Two
John McCaul succeeded Strachan as head of King’s College, which would be renamed the University of Toronto in 1850. Born in Dublin, the classics scholar and Church of Ireland clergyman left his homeland in 1839 to take the principalship of the boys’ school, Upper Canada College, where he became a friend and ally of Strachan. But in 1843 when King’s College finally admitted its first students, McCaul resigned from UCC and nailed his colours to the mast of the new institution by becoming its vice-president and, in 1848, president. By turns described as quite a magnificent fellow and a martinet, McCaul was a lynch pin in the university’s transition from the Anglican confessional period of Strachan to the balmy uplands, as its advocates maintained, of non-denominationalism.

Act Three
Sir Daniel Wilson is a towering figure in the history of both U of T and of Canadian intellectual life in the high Victorian years. He came to Canada from Edinburgh in 1853 to take the recently advertised 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 president of the University of Toronto between 1853 and 1889. After a reorganization in 1853, University College was U of T – this was where the teaching took place – and UC’s president exercised considerable authority within the university, although ultimate executive power lay with the chancellor, who headed the university.)

The province of Canada and the bustling city of Toronto both intrigued and amused Wilson. The relative lack of social hierarchy he found especially notable: “It is quite the settled custom here,” he wrote home not long after arriving, “for the gentlemen to do the marketing. It excites no surprise to see a clergyman with a basket on his arm, pricing the butter and eggs for breakfast! …. This is the continent for the ladies, they have it all their own way.”

A polymath of the best Victorian type, Wilson was responsible for the introduction of the word “prehistoric” to the English language, was a gifted watercolourist and wrote prolifically. Best of all, as far as U of T’s senate was concerned, he was committed to non-denominational education and upheld firmly the principle of intellectual freedom. As he put it in 1877 when rejecting an offer to be head of an Anglican college in London, Ont.: “One of the grand blessings of the Reformation was the emancipation of the human mind from ecclesiastical authority …. Truth has everything to gain from the most absolute freedom of enquiry.”

Act Four
Strachan, McCaul and Wilson were the formative presidential trinity in U of T’s history. They were followed by the mathematician and classicist, James Loudon, president from 1892 to 1906. He presided over the institution during the fin de siècle when that great hallmark of modern higher education, 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
Maurice Hutton served as acting president from 1906 to 1907. Then a president in the mould of the early titans was appointed: Robert Alexander Falconer. Sir Robert, as he became in 1917, presided over U of T for a quarter century until 1932 and generally is considered its greatest president: Our institution’s version of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, remarks historian Michael Bliss. In the received clerical tradition, Falconer came to U of T from the principalship of Pine Hill Presbyterian College in Halifax. He had an eclectic academic background which included London and Edinburgh universities, as well as various German institutions. He was just 40 years of age at the time of his appointment, physically vigorous and beholden to no one on campus. He oversaw the rapid expansion of U of T’s facilities: Varsity Stadium in 1911, Hart House in 1919, Simcoe Hall in 1924 and University (today’s Varsity) Arena in 1926. During the war years, he resisted stoutly calls for the dismissal of German-born professors from the faculty. Owing to their presence, U of T was accused in the press of being pro-German and pacifist in the heated atmosphere of the times, but Falconer did his best to ignore what was baseless propaganda.

Act Six
Falconer was succeeded by the gentle Henry John Cody, an Anglican canon in the style of Strachan and highly active politically, serving as Ontario’s minister of education in 1918-19 in the William Hearst Conservative government. Cody, who was at the helm from 1932 to 1945, was a paragon of Upper Canadian moral rectitude whose presidency brought something of a God-and-King personal style to the office. Coming in the enormous shadow cast by Falconer, it was difficult for Cody to place his own stamp on U of T. After a dozen years in office he agreed with the Board of Governors that there should be a smooth transition to a new president, and it is a measure of the affection in which he was held that the board appointed him chancellor in 1945.

Act Seven
Cody’s successor was the exuberant, Gaelic-speaking law professor Sidney Smith (1897-1959). Precocious, homespun and a man of immense energy, Smith presided over U of T for 12 prosperous, postwar years until 1957. He remained a Cape Bretoner at heart, though, repeating often the story of a summertime encounter with an old friend of the family in Port Hood: “What are you doing now?” Smith was asked. “Well, I am president of a university – of the University of Toronto,” he replied, whereupon the wizened old friend looked at Smith’s well-built, almost six-foot frame and remarked: “That’s not much of a job for a big man like you.” Ultimately, Smith agreed. Always politically engaged, he departed from U of T in 1957 in order to become secretary of state for external affairs in the new Diefenbaker Conservative government. However, his new role was short-lived, as he died unexpectedly in 1959.

Smith was a strong supporter of the liberal arts, as demonstrated by his essay in the university’s annual report for 1949 that quoted a survey of the humanities: “The humanities are not the sole custodians of a liberalizing or humanizing education. It is the spirit in which they are studied, and the fact that they lend themselves to such study, that makes them especially helpful in humanizing the imagination.” Appropriately, U of T’s new arts and social sciences building was named for Smith.

Smith was succeeded by an acting president, the marvellously named Moffatt St. Andrew Woodside. Though Woodside’s interregnum was brief there was much activity on campus, including the installation in 1957 of the SLOWPOKE nuclear reactor that marked an industrial spinoff of the Cold War for U of T.

Act Eight
Then in 1958 the English professor and president of Carleton University, Claude Bissell, was persuaded to leave Ottawa and return to his Alma Mater as president. Bissell would preside over U of T during the yeasty 1960s. 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 what was an explosive period in the history of universities everywhere. Most significantly from the standpoint of U of T’s administration, the Board of Governors was done away with and replaced by Governing Council. This new governing body incorporated for the first time in the university’s history direct student representation.

Act Nine
Starting in 1972, U of T saw a series of shorter presidencies.John Sword (acting president 1971- 72) was followed by John Evans from 1972 to 1978. Former captain of the football Blues as an undergraduate, and a health scientist, Evans came from McMaster University in Hamilton, where he had been dean of medicine. His presidency was marked by the implementation of the new University of Toronto Act, inherited from the Bissell period, and by the implications of the 1972 report of the Wright Commission on Post-Secondary Education in Ontario. In responding to the latter, Evans foreshadowed U of T’s fiscal and philosophical challenges of the 1980s and ’90s by itemizing “accountability” (to the public) 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, who belied the stereotype of the hard scientist by being a great believer in the humanizing effects of the liberal arts. In response to the increased push for vocational education that was beginning to animate some students’ thinking of what best constituted a university education in the less-than-radical late 1970s and early ’80s, he stated unequivocally: “A liberal arts education helps foster a vital sensitivity to people and ideas.” This attitude informed his presidency, which ended with a well-earned retirement in 1983.

Act Eleven
David Strangway became the accidental president when his status as acting president following Ham’s retirement was upgraded upon the surprise death of Donald Forster in August of 1983. Forster, appointed as Ham’s successor, died of a heart attack before his official installation, leaving Strangway to take on the job. But Strangway was not long for the upper reaches of U of T officialdom. In 1984 he departed for the University of British Columbia, heeding the call that Lotus Land makes to many Canadians.

Act Twelve
The naming of George Connell as president in 1984 marked a homecoming for the biochemist and U of T graduate, who spent his entire teaching and administrative 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 presidential tenure, as government cutbacks to higher education became a grim reality during his six-year term. Under his leadership U of T launched the Breakthrough fund-raising campaign, the progenitor of the highly successful and current campaign that started in 1997.

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 (see article Decade of the Dynamo). Prichard and his administration took fund-raising to new levels in Canada, and he implemented the strategy that would sharpen U of T’s edge as one of the world’s leading research institutions.

Act Fourteen
The appointment of Robert Birgeneau, an alumnus of St. Michael’s College and dean of the School of Science at MIT, signals the increasingly serious international aspirations of the University of Toronto. When the appointment was announced in November 1999, Prichard called his successor a scholar and academic leader of the highest international standing. “There could be no better choice to lead U of T into the next century,” Prichard noted. “This is brain gain at its best – one of Canada’s great minds is returning to guide a great university. It is wonderful news for the university, the province and the nation.”

Birgeneau observed in an interview in March with the campus newspaper The Bulletin that U of T houses an “incredibly rich intellectual environment.” He plans to continue 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.” It will take a great deal of work, he said, “but it is possible.”

Under Birgeneau’s leadership, old traditions and new expectations will continue to compete for attention; we know that only a big man can do the job – until one day, a woman, too, is given the leading role and will play her part in the history of the University of Toronto.

Brad Faught (PhD 1996) teaches history at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B.

Guy Gavriel Kay
Like his father, a Winnipeg surgeon, Guy Gavriel Kay always had a passion for writing. After graduating in philosophy from the University of Manitoba, he went to Oxford to work with Christopher Tolkien, son of the Anglo-Saxon scholar and celebrated fantasy writer, J.R.R. Tolkien, on the senior Tolkien’s last major manuscript.

But, again like his father, Kay was a pragmatist, so he returned to Canada to find a profession – knowing that making a living as a novelist would be a long shot. Kay entered the Faculty of Law at U of T in 1975 and graduated in 1978. At first he found the place decidedly uninspiring. “I arrived from rural England, and there I was at school in downtown Toronto, and I just hated it,” says Kay. “I hung around the Hart House library and read The New Yorker to remind myself that I really was a writer.”

He did well (in fact he came second in his first-year law class), even though he could often be found at the pinball machine in the law-school basement. Looking for more intellectual diversion, he cut a week of school to attend a major conference on Celtic studies at U of T. Here, he encountered the scholar/guru who had awakened a generation of North Americans to the power of myth, Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

That conference inspired the opening chapter of Kay’s first book, The Summer Tree. It opens in Convocation Hall on U of T’s campus and introduces a Joseph Campbellish figure who turns out to be a mage (or benign sorcerer). The book was the first volume of Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry series and won an international cult following. A few years ago his agent joked that the continuing sales of the Fionavar books would help Kay and his wife, Laura, put their sons, Sam and Matthew, through college.

An ambitious man, he eventually pushed past the frontiers of fantasy into a new sub-genre, speculative historical fiction. In 1990 he brought out Tigana, which takes place in an imagined world much like Renaissance Italy, and, in 1992, A Song for Arbonne, set in a fictional medieval Provence. In 1995, he released The Lions of Al-Rassan, which describes a multiracial society akin to Moorish Spain.

These historical fantasies grow out of intense research (“I get grad-student syndrome,” Kay admits. “I don’t want to write until I’ve checked one last detail”). Remarkably, the author has retained the loyalty of the fantasy market – this spring he was guest of honour at the British National Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow – while also winning respect from that toughest of audiences, academics.

This spring the head of the classics department at the University of Vermont asked Kay to speak there. She had just read Sailing to Sarantium (like his latest novel, Lord of Emperors, it is set in a place much like sixth-century Byzantium, rife with charioteering factions, religious rivalries and Byzantine intrigue). Come autumn, Kay will speak at U of T’s Convocation Hall about ethics, society and the role of narrative – “something about how we all, professional historians included, construct the narratives we need out of a set of events,” says Kay.

As one who has worked hard to transform raw material from the imperial reign of Justinian and Theodora into an imaginary realm, he is disturbed by the co-option of real characters into fiction by contemporary authors; he sees this as a symptom of the way we undervalue works of pure imagination. “Don’t get me onto my soapbox!” he warns.

With eight books translated into 16 languages, Kay is one of Canada’s most successful writers, and he is not shy about extolling the power of the storyteller. “That’s who the Lord of Emperors is: the writer, the artist,” he says, “the person who leaves the record of what the kings have done.” Which is why libraries like the one at Hart House still cast a spell over him. “There’s a ghost there, my younger self, reading The New Yorker, and asserting my identity as a writer.”

Caroline Roe
When she writes the name of the town “Girona,” Caroline Roe uses the Catalan spelling, as opposed to the standard Castilian Spanish “Gerona” you’ll find on most maps of northern Spain. “It’s political,” says Roe, the creator of the successful new Isaac of Girona paperback mysteries, starring a 14th-century Jewish doctor.

There are three Isaac mysteries out already, published by Berkley Prime Crime, and two more are in the works. Already published in Spanish, Isaac’s first adventure, Remedy for Treason, was launched last year in a Catalan translation in Girona. Roe (BA 1962 UC, MA 1968, PhD 1974) flew from her home in Toronto to the city of 72,000, which, she says, has probably the best-preserved walled Jewish quarter left in Europe. Girona’s mayor uncorked champagne and Roe thanked him in Castilian, all the while wishing she knew more Catalan. She has spent this past winter learning the language at U of T.

Languages come easily to her. Her mother was a professional opera singer, so perhaps it’s in the ear. In any case, after high school in Windsor, Ont., she studied modern languages at University College, with a bent toward Old French, Spanish and English. It was the early 1960s, and even though women couldn’t be members, she hung out with the music crowd at Hart House and played with the Paul Robinson classical string orchestra, which performed some concerts there.

Something else seems to come easily to Roe: her ability to vividly recreate the smells, tastes and mores of Isaac’s times. This gift is rooted in scholarship: she did her PhD in 1974 in “vernacular didactic literature in England in the 12th and 13th centuries.” A former chair of the medieval studies student committee, she met her husband Harry Roe (author of the newly published translation Tales of the Elders of Ireland) in the rambling, old Centre for Medieval Studies on Queen’s Park Crescent and still counts medievalists among her closest friends.

The medievalists also gave her her new fictional sleuth. For 17 years, after completing her doctorate, Roe taught English at Branksome Hall, the private girls’ school in Toronto, and in 1979 began writing mysteries in the summers under the name Medora Sale. She won the Arthur Ellis Award for best first crime novel in 1986, but in the early 1990s the market for a feminist detective in contemporary Toronto dried up and Sale/Roe’s Harriet Jeffries series ended with the sixth book – leaving Roe to wonder what she would write next.

The answer came as she was chopping vegetables for a medievalists’ party. A friend told her about Bishop Berenguer of Girona, who was known to have had a Jewish physician. This doctor was not Isaac of Girona (he was a philosopher and kabbalist who lived in Narbonne, France a century earlier). “But his students are known to have gone to Girona,” says Roe, “so I’ve imagined my Isaac as a student of his students.”

Remedy for Treason was shortlisted in 1999 for both an Anthony Award (in the United States) and an Arthur Ellis Award, and the Isaac novels have been well-received: “Finely written, well-plotted” said The Washington Times. “Should go instantly to the top of any Cadfael-lover’s list,” said The Globe and Mail, citing the best of the historical mystery sub-genre, Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael series. In fact, there’s a boom now in historical crime – “you need to line up in England to book a year and a plot of ground,” Roe jokes.

She doesn’t give all her fellow writers full marks. An active member of Crime Writers of Canada and former head of Sisters in Crime (the international coven of women mystery writers), Roe says with a sunny smile, “I’ll tone down my natural bitchiness, but I will say there’s a split between those people from the research side and some from the commercial-fiction side.” Anachronisms strike her like an off-note in music.

Deep into research for the gentle, blind, shrewd Isaac of Girona’s next adventure, Roe slaves to get her history right. “You have no idea how hard it is to find out how long it took a 14th-century galley to sail from Barcelona to Sardinia,” she sighs. But find out she will.

Val Ross (BA 1972 UC) is a Toronto writer and editor.

How would you like to help commercialize a new way to make diesel fuel from old cooking oil and waste grease? Or how about a process to screen potential drugs more rapidly? Or maybe a new family of antibiotics? Those are just a few of the possibilities. Adams, the new president and CEO of the Innovations Foundation, has a whole portfolio of great technologies looking for experienced business people to help turn ideas from potential to profit. “We have opportunities coming out our ears,” says Adams, who took over the helm of the foundation this past September. Not only that, but new technologies and inventions keep coming through the door from the vast well of ingenuity that is the University of Toronto.

Among the thousands of University of Toronto alumni, Adams figures that there must be a few good men and women who would like to get involved in new businesses. “We’re always looking for people who have management experience,” Adams says, “and we’ve been trying to find alumni who’d like to take on an advisory role.”

Adams himself is no stranger to academia, senior management or technology transfer. His patented process for storing blood platelets in a non-plasma medium was developed shortly after he obtained his doctorate in medical sciences from McMaster University in Hamilton. At the time, he was working for the Canadian Red Cross, which he left to become an associate professor of both biochemistry and surgery, and director of the artificial heart development program at the University of Ottawa. Eventually, the program morphed into a publicly traded company, World Heart, which continues to develop artificial hearts.

Adams left U of O to start his own company, Hemo-Stat Inc., which developed several hematology devices now being commercialized by Du Pont Canada Inc. Six years ago, he bought control of Corvita Canada and ran it until it was purchased by Boston Scientific in 1999. And he’s also been the founding investor in several start-up technology companies.

Sitting in his sparsely decorated office, overlooking the bustle of University Avenue in Toronto, Adams contemplates the near future with a good deal of zest. “To me, this is just a great job,” he says. It allows him to combine his academic and entrepreneurial backgrounds and to help other academics turn their ideas into products that will have an impact on the world. And he gets to turn other entrepreneurs on to new opportunities.

Consider Neteka, Inc. “I think they’re going to go ballistic,” says Adams. The company consists of a bunch of recent U of T graduates (plus a colleague from the University of Calgary) who showed up on the foundation’s doorstep last year with a great idea – making the Internet multilingual – and little or no idea what to do about it.

Edmon Chung (BASc 1998, MEng 1999), the 24-year-old president and chief creative officer of the fledgling company, got the idea when he was searching for information about a Chinese company on the Internet. The problem was that he only knew the company’s Chinese name, and there was no way to use Chinese characters to surf the Net. “I discovered the same problem exists for most of the world’s languages,” he says. So he decided to do something about it: With U of T colleagues Rebecca Chan (BASc 1998, MEng 1999), Wilson Chow (BSc 1999), Ken Lee (BASc 1998) and David Leung (BASc 1998), he developed prototype software that accepts non-English characters. “At that point,” he says, “we realized it was important to protect our intellectual property.”

But that sort of savvy didn’t come with Chung’s master’s degree in industrial engineering. He and his friends were not entirely at a loss, but they were certainly on unfamiliar ground. And in that, they’re on the same footing as many of the inventors and scientists who bring their ideas to the foundation. In the end it was fatherly advice that guided Chung: “One of the reasons we went to the Innovations Foundation,” he says, “was because of a reminder from my father that the university must have some advice for profs or students.”

Chung and his colleagues went to the foundation in late spring last year. “We basically searched the Web page and then went and knocked on the door,” he says. “Right from the start the foundation was really helpful and welcomed the idea.” With the foundation’s help, they registered a package of patents and developed a business plan. Meanwhile, the foundation started beating the bushes for capital. This March, a Toronto venture capital company, Quorum Funding Corp., invested $1 million in Neteka, sending a strong signal that the young entrepreneurs are on the right track.

For his part, Adams sees nothing but blue skies ahead for Neteka. As a representative of the foundation, he sits on the company’s board, and, he says, “the business potential is incredible.” He thinks Neteka’s software will “revolutionize the Internet,” opening it to billions of people who don’t speak, read or write English and who don’t even use the same alphabet.

The Innovations Foundation got its start in 1980 to take advantage of the wealth of inventions at the University of Toronto and to license them to private-sector companies. It was not, it’s fair to say, an overnight success. For one thing, there was not much incentive for an academic to commercialize an innovation, because the university claimed complete ownership of any inventions made on company time. As a faculty member, it made sense to go ahead and publish your revolutionary discovery in the usual journals and at least get scientific kudos. But once a discovery is published, it’s public property, and it’s difficult, if not impossible, to sell public property.

So, in 1990, the university changed that policy. Since then, an inventor on faculty just has to disclose the invention to the university. Then, he or she has two choices: Keep the rights and most of the potential profits, or sign them over to the university and keep a smaller share. Sounds like a no-brainer, but the catch is that if you keep the rights you have to handle all the nitty-gritty details of commercialization by yourself.

Before 1990, there were on average 22 disclosures a year. Now, Adams says, there are between 75 and 100 a year – evidence that the policy has worked. And, says Adams, “it’s increasing. Even in the past six months we’ve seen a big upsurge in opportunities coming through the door.”

That surge is a sign of a sea change in understanding that discovery goes hand in hand with commercialization, he says. But there’s a problem: Fully half of the inventors who come to the foundation have already disclosed their ideas, perhaps at a scientific meeting or in a journal. That may mean there’s no intellectual property to form the basis of a commercialization drive.

Instead of the old publish-or-perish rule of academia, Adams says, “we’re trying to change the paradigm – patent, then publish, then prosper.” As part of that push, Adams makes it a point to get out of his office and make the rounds of the various university departments looking for opportunities and incidentally spreading the patent-first gospel.

Many inventors at U of T opt to keep their rights and commercialize their technology themselves. But chemist David Boocock is not one of them. Boocock, who is chair of the department of chemical engineering and applied chemistry, has come up with a way to turn used cooking oil into diesel fuel, as well as a suite of related technologies. The benefit would be reduced reliance on fossil fuels, as well as a way to recycle the used oil.

Boocock knew the technology had enormous potential – but not necessarily in his hands. “I’m not a businessman,” he says. “I’m a scientist, and it seemed really reasonable to let people who know the business side handle it.”

He turned to the foundation, he says, almost by accident. A staff member of the university business development office, which works closely with the foundation, was in his department, essentially shaking the tree to see what technologies might fall out. “I said ‘Oh, by the way, I have this,’” Boocock says, “and within a couple of months we were rolling. It was amazingly fast.”

American rights to the discovery have been licensed to the Biodiesel Development Corp. of California, which is building a demonstration facility in the United States. The foundation, Adams says, is now looking for business talent (U of T alumni, take note) to commercialize Boocock’s process here.

There’s also enormous potential in Europe, where used oils are already being converted to diesel fuel, using an inefficient and costly process. Boocock says his technique takes 10 minutes at ambient temperatures and pressures, and the “base-catalysed” process produces a material that can be added to – or even substituted for – diesel fuel. In the European process, by contrast, the waste oils have to be processed several times before they’re ready to be used for fuel.

One of the companies that knows the Innovations Foundation of old is Select Therapeutics, which is based in the United States, although CEO Robert Bender makes his home in Ottawa. Select has licensed several technologies from the foundation, including one that uses bacteria found in everybody’s gut to battle cancer.

“If you believe that publicly funded research is likely to be of benefit to society as a whole,” Bender says, “then an organization such as the Innovations Foundation plays a critically important role.” Select took advantage of that role in 1997, when it licensed a discovery made by a group led by Dr. Clifford Lingwood at U of T and the Hospital for Sick Children. The group had discovered that a protein derived from a strain of the E. coli bacteria could be made to attack cancer cells and their associated blood vessels.

Verotoxin, as the protein is known, has demonstrated dramatic potential: In June 1999, researchers showed that it completely eliminated malignant human brain tumours grown in mice. Of course, curing cancer in mice is only a first step, but an exciting one.

Select has gone back to the well several times, most recently for a method of early detection of HIV – something that, if it pans out, will be of enormous value to patients and doctors, allowing earlier detection and treatment of the virus. The technology detects changes in the cell through an enzyme called fyn kinase, which, in small-scale in vitro experiments, shows increased activity in HIV-infected samples in as little as half an hour. The advantage over current tests, which can take days if not weeks, is obvious.

Select licenses technology from several universities, Bender says, and that’s not an easy job. That’s why something like the Innovations Foundation is needed – it makes “prospecting university research” much easier for the busy entrepreneur. It’s also, of course, a boon for the university community, which sees its efforts rewarded financially (the foundation had revenues of $6.5 million over the past five years) and emotionally (by having a beneficial impact on society).

But, Adams cautions, technology transfer is not the solution to tight money at the university. “We make money,” he says, but not “the millions and millions” that administrators envisaged in the ’80s. (In fact, even the top money-makers among university tech-transfer operations – at places like MIT and Stanford – earn most of their income from one or two superstar technologies, but come nowhere close to having a significant impact on their university’s bottom line.)

One non-monetary boon, Adams says, is the collaborative research agreement, in which licensees of a technology put money back into the university (usually the initial researcher’s lab) for more study and development. But the real driver for the academic community, he says, “is to have an impact through what you are doing.” If you can do well by doing good, so much the better.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. Or so the adage goes. Trouble is, as Bruce Harbinson can tell you, the world may take a while to get the word. Harbinson is president and CEO of Polyphalt Inc., a company based on a U of T process to reuse plastics and polymers in asphalt. The process is successful and, indeed, Polyphalt now lays claim to a variety of related technologies that improve road-building materials. The high-tech asphalt mixture cracks less in cold weather and ruts less in hot. Bottom line? The road lasts longer.

Polyphalt got its start in 1992 and has been slowly making a name for itself, licensing its technology to road-builders and asphalt-makers around the world. “For several years now, we have been held up as a success story,” Harbinson says. But the real breakthrough finally may have come this year, when Polyphalt signed a $10-million investment deal with a subsidiary of the giant Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings Ltd. of Hong Kong. The company builds roads and other infrastructure throughout Asia and has major investments in China. Now, Harbinson says, Polyphalt is “poised to become a pre-eminent player” in the world road-building market. It’s an overnight success – after several years of hard work building the company.

The lesson, perhaps, is that technology transfer is slower than the adage-makers would have us believe, despite the swift acceptance of a start-up like Neteka. But an equally valid lesson is that useful technologies eventually do find a role in the world – if they’re moulded and guided by astute management. And that’s where, as Adams says, U of T alumni can make a mark. “Give us a call,” he says, “and tell us what your skills, talents and connections are.” You might find yourself leading a potential technology giant into the future – and making a difference in the world.

Michael Smith is a Toronto science writer.

The centre, which opened in November 1996, closed last year after receiving an anonymous gift of $2 million, which allowed it to double its size and create climate-controlled exhibit and storage space. It reopened in April with four exhibits: two that suggest the quality and range of the 4,000 works in the centre’s permanent collections and two that exercise its new ability to stage significant travelling exhibits.

With 8,000 square feet of display space, the centre is now one of the biggest public galleries in Toronto after the Art Gallery of Ontario. Its goals are to establish acquisition and operating endowments and to have a $1-million operating budget within five years. As large as those ambitions may seem, they were not conceived just to display art. The real purpose of the gallery, according to director David Silcox, is to support scholarship. The centre will create or host exhibitions in the fine arts, decorative arts, architecture and photography, and will sponsor related talks, conferences, films and concerts.

All of these goals represent a modest pond when compared with the art centres of McGill or Queen’s, or the galleries of Harvard, Yale or Stanford. Still, the exhibits that herald this new stage in the centre’s development are impressive, indeed. There is an exhibit of 100 vintage photos by the American photographer Lee Miller and works by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood from the Dennis Lanigan collection. From the centre’s permanent collections, there are masterworks by the Group of Seven and a selection of Byzantine icons from the Lillian Malcove Collection.

The frog, it is clear, is on its way to becoming a prince. In the following pages, we invite you to accompany the curators on a tour of major pieces from the four exhibits now on display.

The University of Toronto Art Centre is open Tuesday to Friday, noon to 5 p.m., and Saturdays noon to 4 p.m. For ongoing and current exhibits visit: www.utac.utoronto.ca

Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, Sedona, Ariz., 1946 by Lee Miller (1907-1977)

Miller’s own early background in surrealism was always reflected in her work, and her sleight of hand in this tongue-in-cheek rendering of the doll-like Tanning and the giant (in his own mind?) Ernst is a typical example of her idiosyncratic approach.

Taken during a visit to America with her English husband, artist Roland Penrose, this photograph is among Miller’s late work. After her photo essays on the horrors of Dachau and the aftermath of the Second World War in dangerous and remote locations in eastern Europe, photography held less appeal for Miller, and she turned down most assignments that were offered. One of the few subjects that did interest her in this period, and for which she would usually accept a commission, were portraits of fellow artists.

Maureen Smith is the facilities and program manager of the University of Toronto Art Centre. The Legendary Lee Miller was on exhibit until June 30, 2000.

Algoma Hills, 1921 J.E.H. MacDonald (1873-1932)

Harris arranged with the Algoma Central Railway Line (running between the Sault and Hearst) to shunt the artists off onto an unused siding, where they camped out in a loaned boxcar (a prototype, one might surmise, of the modern RV).

From this temporary base they made day hikes and paddles in the wild and rugged territory, to produce oil sketches, such as the one reproduced here. J.E.H. MacDonald, the senior member of the Group, has found a high vantage point from which he depicts receding cliffs and hills in muted olives and greys. Our eye begins, however, with the sun-bleached, rough rocks in the foreground, then hops to the bright orange of some deciduous trees in full fall colour in the middle ground, before meandering through the distant hills and finally reaching the small band of cloudy sky at top. All detail has been schematized and simplified so that we concentrate on the whole – the pulsating oneness of the sublime wilderness landscape. This sketch typifies what the Group was all about in its heyday, capturing and then conveying to its public the grandeur and awesome beauty of the more remote areas of Ontario’s near North, and the mythic power of that northernness in all its melancholy and elusive beauty.

Algoma Hills is part of the permanent collection of the Art Centre.

Portrait of Henry Wentworth Monk, 1858 by William Holman Hunt (1827-1910)

Monk was born near Ottawa in 1827. Seized with religious fervour (he trained briefly for the Anglican ministry), he worked his way as a sailor to Palestine in 1853 to work on an early kibbutz. Hunt met Monk near Jerusalem in 1854, where Hunt had gone to do his famous painting The Scapegoat. The two shared the idea of a Jewish return to Palestine and Jerusalem as a centre for world government.

Monk returned home and wrote a book promoting this idea and with anonymous financial support from John Ruskin had it published in England in 1858, the same year he sat for this portrait. According to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, “Monk held that railways, steamships, and the telegraph made possible a world government based in Jerusalem whose first act of justice would be the full emancipation of the Jews.”

In 1864, Monk was the sole survivor of a shipwreck off the northeast coast of Canada, after which he was given to various personal eccentricities – a refusal to cut his hair or beard, a fear of germs, a preference for sleeping and eating outdoors, and a habit of plunging his whole head into ice-cold water to relieve his severe pains. In Ottawa in the 1870s he worked for the Ottawa Daily Citizen and devoted his energies to the creation of the Palestine Restoration Fund and the idea of an international tribunal to ensure world peace. He died in Ottawa in 1896.

The University of Toronto Art Centre exhibit A Dream of the Past: Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Movement Paintings, Drawings, and Watercolours from the Lanigan Collection was on view until September 22, 2000.

Elaborately carved cross on a base, with case, Italo-Byzantine, late 15th or early 16th century

On the base are three sets of images. However, here the scenes are not quite so easily recognized and do not have inscriptions. An unusual feature is the common background, repeated from one unit to another, which might suggest that the scenes are from the performance of a late medieval play based on Christ’s Passion. Such representations are not common, which enhances the importance of this work.

A further point of interest is the cruciform box that houses the cross. The wood frame is covered with parchment and varnish, and lined with red silk. On close examination, left, there are letters printed on the parchment. Infrared photographs make the reading quite easy and provide a large clue to the date of the box and, by extension, the cross. It is clear that several sections of the text were scrambled during printing, which explains why the sheets were discarded. The text is A Commentary on the Decretals of Gregory IX, written by Nicholaus de Tedeschi around the middle of the 15th century. Assuming the box was made not long after the sheets were discarded, the box (and presumably cross) must have been made sometime in the last quarter of the 15th century, or early 16th century.

The carved cross is part of the permanent collection of the Art Centre.

The addition of the Canada Research Chairs program represents an unprecedented opportunity to strengthen the university’s place among the finest public research universities in the world. And it comes at a propitious moment. For after a very difficult period in the first half of the 1990s, numerous developments nationally and provincially suggest we are on the cusp of one of the most exciting and productive periods in the university’s history. Indeed, our prospects may have never been better.

At the federal level, the Canada Research Chairs are accompanied by a number of other new programs including the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research. Recent provincial developments are also very encouraging. Over the past three years, the Government of Ontario has created an array of significant new programs to support innovation and research, among them the Ontario Research and Development Challenge Fund, the Ontario Innovation Trust and the Research Performance Fund. These provincial initiatives complement current federal programs and challenge Ottawa to continue to increase its investment in critically important areas.

The interplay of federal and provincial programs is creative federalism at its best, and our universities and students will benefit substantially. Almost all of these programs allocate funds based on excellence of performance, not entitlement, size or enrolment, and as a result, the outstanding quality of our faculty leads to a very positive performance for U of T.

We have also been blessed with remarkable private support from our graduates and friends. To date the Campaign has received commitments exceeding $600 million and our work is not yet done. Our alumni have demonstrated an unprecedented level of commitment, and we are very thankful for all of your support.

Our new president, Dr. Robert (Bob) Birgeneau, takes office on July 1, 2000. He returns to his Alma Mater with an exceptionally distinguished record in both physics and academic administration, and he is superbly prepared to lead U of T in taking full advantage of the very encouraging circumstances we now face. He inherits a remarkable team of senior leaders who are deeply committed to the university. And he will lead a faculty that ranks with the finest concentrations of academic and intellectual talent anywhere in the world.

I hope you will extend to President Birgeneau the same wonderful encouragement and support you have given me for the past decade. I feel profoundly privileged to have been permitted to serve our university as president. I leave office and return to the faculty with deep gratitude to all of you and great optimism about our future prospects. Thank you all.

“You can see how someone in the 19th century read an 18th-century biography or history, why a reader liked or disliked a certain book, how readers argued with the authors on politics, religion, law and philosophy or how a play was performed in the 1920s,” Jackson says. “These remarks can be an excellent source of historical information.” Her book Marginalia: Readers’ Notes in Books, 1700 – 2000 (Yale University Press) will be published next year.