That same year, Mistry is in junior school, fifth standard, and he gets a creative-writing assignment, the kind schoolteachers everywhere dole out regularly to Encourage Imagination. He likes this kind of stuff. He decides it would be neat to write a story about a cricket bat. He writes it in the first person, as though he’s a willow tree in Kashmir who is chopped down and fashioned into a bat. He’s then sent to a sporting goods store in Bombay. A dad enters the store, buys him for his son. The boy uses him to play cricket with school friends. The End. The teacher likes the story, and it’s even chosen to be in the school magazine at the end of the year. But, says Mistry, “that’s as far as my literary efforts went.”

Mistry writes no short stories outside of school. He does not become a teenager who scribbles away at fiction, or a twentysomething who works furtively on the Great Novel. His best-selling books, Such A Long Journey, A Fine Balance – and the recently released Family Matters – are half a lifetime away. And right now, at age 11, he has better stuff to think about, anyway. Badminton, cricket, hanging out with his friends, reading Enid Blyton adventure stories in the three-room flat that he shares with his two brothers, sister and parents. It will be more than 20 years between publication of “Autobiography of a Cricket Bat” and his first collection of short stories.

I meet Rohinton Mistry in a small conference room on the top floor of Hart House. It’s a warm spring day, and a weak sunlight struggles through the leaded panes, settling on the heavy wooden table and green leather chairs. Mistry, in wire-rimmed glasses and a purple cotton turtleneck, enters quietly, almost deferentially: hello, nice to meet you. He has just begun a book tour for Family Matters, a novel about a Bombay family whose lives shift profoundly when Nariman, the 79-year-old patriarch who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, breaks his ankle and becomes bedridden. Two households – one containing his stepson and stepdaughter, the other, his daughter, son-in-law and two children – struggle to cope with their father’s diminished state. Disturbing family dynamics bubble to the surface: a bitter stepdaughter harbours resentment over the difficult relationship that existed between Nariman and her mother; a gentle, passive stepson prefers to turn a deaf ear to family discord; a son-in-law increasingly deals with stress by directing anger toward his wife and sons. “He’s dealing with issues of morality, making moral decisions in a complicated world,” says Ellen Seligman, Mistry’s editor at McClelland & Stewart. “He’s dealing with the restrictions that this world places on the characters’ lives.”

And, as in all Mistry’s novels, the setting in which these moral struggles take place is Bombay. Like James Joyce’s Dublin or Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, Mistry’s Bombay is a character in and of itself. Shiv Sena corruption, Zoroastrianism, the after-effects of the Babri Mosque riots, the Parsi community: all are discrete threads in the city’s fabric. But – as in Joyce’s work – the city, its families, its people also serve as a microcosm of humanity. Nariman and his family could be plunked down in Balgonie, Saskatchewan, or Mont-Royal, Quebec, and their struggles, their love for one another, their fallibilities, would resonate just as deeply.

However, given that Mistry spent the first 23 years of his life in Bombay, questions of autobiography dog him incessantly. “Depending on how broadly you’ll define the notion, I think all fiction is, in a sense, autobiographical,” he says. “And what do I mean by that? I mean that a fiction writer describes the world, and the world is what he or she perceives with the five senses. So it’s my five senses, therefore it’s my autobiography, if you want to go that broadly.” He points, as an example, to his short story “Swimming Lessons” in Tales from Firozsha Baag, in which the narrator has emigrated from Bombay to Canada. “And the immediate question is, is this an autobiographical story? Well, if that’s the only detail you want to focus on – emigration – then yes, because I have done the same thing. But it’s not an autobiographical story, because what happens in the story is completely imagined.”

Imagine Rohinton Mistry at 19 years old. It is now the summer of 1971 and he is at an open-air concert, 100 miles outside of Bombay, in farm country. Thousands of kids sprawl on the grass while India’s rock bands play the music of such groups as the Rolling Stones, Jethro Tull, the Moody Blues. Mistry describes the similarities between the event and Woodstock: “It was three days of rock and roll and drugs.” Stops. Catches himself. Ahem. “Well,” he jokes quickly, “I didn’t inhale.”

The teenage Mistry isn’t in the audience, listening to the music, sunlight on his face. He’s on the stage, in front of the crowd, with a harmonica. He’s strumming a guitar and singing. Mistry is a folksinger. He has a 20- to 30- minute gig, and will do another one tomorrow night. Mostly he performs the works of such North American singers as Bob Dylan. He also plays in clubs and restaurants and at college functions, and occasionally is an opening act at a rock concert.

He has been playing, in some form, for five years. At 14, he was captivated when an older family friend sang and played the guitar at a get-together. The friend gave him some rudimentary tips, then Mistry picked up a harmonica. An old violin in the Mistry household was sold off, and the proceeds paid for a guitar. He taught himself to play – and to sing – mostly by listening to Dylan’s greatest hits album. “Mr. Tambourine Man.” “Blowin’ in the Wind.” “The Times They are A-Changin’.” He also wrote some of his own stuff, which he’s now quick to dismiss. “It was very derivative – about love, and the usual adolescent nonsense,” he says. “It was more trying to be like Bob Dylan than to express anything original.”

He also learned by mimicking Simon and Garfunkel – and Leonard Cohen. “There’s no one like Leonard Cohen,” I inject, rather lamely. It’s a banal statement to make in the presence of another Canadian: like saying hockey’s fun, or the Rockies are nice. “Yeah, especially that voice,” he says. He delivers a dead-on parody in deep, portentous Vincent Price style: “Suzanne takes you dowwwn.” Then he straightens himself. “Anyway.”

At 19, Mistry is also a student at the University of Bombay. He is studying mathematics and economics – not because of any burning desire to be the next Srinivasa Ramanujan, or to enter the business world – but because in India, young men are expected to pursue science, not arts, degrees. “The BSc was the lowest thing expected,” he says. “The more ambitious fellows became engineers and doctors, and so, lacking in ambition, I chose the lowest rung of what was expected.”

He has also made use of a handy loophole in the curriculum: by majoring in math and economics – as opposed to, say, physics or chemistry – he has to attend college only in the morning. No hard science, no afternoon labs. It frees him up to spend his afternoons in the college canteen, knocking back cups of tea, hanging out with friends, talking about “the stuff of life.”

Shortly after graduating, Mistry moves to Canada. Much like earning a science degree instead of an arts degree, there was an expectation – from family, from society – to emigrate. “It wasn’t as overtly expected as the whole education thing, but that’s the sort of idea you grew up with in the ’60s and ’70s: that real progress was to be made in the West. Opportunities were limited in Bombay. To make something of your life you had to go away,” he says. “You were the outpost, and life was elsewhere – not where you were.”

When he comes to Canada in 1975, at age 23, Mistry makes the employment rounds. He fills out applications at McDonald’s. Drops off resumés at banks. Makes inquiries at department stores. Within three months, he finds a job at a Toronto bank. After starting as a clerk in the accounting department, Mistry works his way up to higher echelons – or darker recesses, depending on your point of view – of the banking pyramid. For the last two or three years, he is supervisor of the customer-service department, and the most difficult customer complaints inevitably land on his desk. “I didn’t mind that, because I usually let the customers know that my sympathies were with them, and the bank was a nasty institution that had all these rules and regulations and I really had no choice,” he says. “I was just a pawn, doing their bidding. And that helped.

“Soon after I started working at the bank, I discovered it wasn’t going to be my career, it wasn’t really satisfying, although I ended up spending 10 years there,” he adds. “I knew it was a way station.” Within a few years, he decides to take some night classes at York University. The next year, he transfers to U of T.

For four years – two evenings a week in the winter, four in the summer – Mistry takes the subway from work to the St. George Campus. Focusing on English and philosophy, he’s working on a three-year BA, which he will earn in 1983 at Woodsworth College. He reads for his classes on the subway, on his lunch hour at the bank, in the E.J. Pratt library or the Robarts library before class. He devours the poetry of Whitman and Frost, and novels by Hawthorne, Trollope and Eliot; Thackeray’s Vanity Fair; Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift; Melville’s Moby Dick. His wife, Freny (BA 1981 Victoria, BEd 1982), also takes classes, and will eventually become a high school teacher. “The day at the bank was really boring and tedious. Since I enjoyed reading and my wife enjoyed reading, we thought taking some courses and studying things that interested us would make life better,” says Mistry. “I’m sure that people will laugh when I say that I came to night school in the pursuit of happiness. But I did find a lot of it very interesting.”

And through it all, he is still searching. He still doesn’t know what he wants to do. He has propelled himself thousands of miles from home, he has taken this huge risk, but he’s still just another twentysomething kid suffering from career angst, trying to get through the day and find some meaning in it all. What has been consistent in his life? he asks himself. Reading. He has always loved to read. OK, what can I do with that? Could I? No. Hmm.

He turns 29. Then 30. His quiet, careful thoughts grow louder. He has on his resumé, at this point, a handful of torch songs and the Cricket Bat story in a junior school magazine. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” he says wistfully to his wife, “to be a writer?”

This is the beginning.

Soon afterward, in the fall of 1982, The Varsity carries an advertisement announcing the first Hart House Literary Contest. His wife shows it to him. “I’ve been hearing you say, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to be a writer,’” she says. “So why don’t you see if you can write something?”

He performs a minor act of deception: the bank stipulates that if an employee is sick for less than three days, he doesn’t need a doctor’s note. So he phones in sick on Thursday. And on Friday. During his four-day weekend, he spends six to seven hours a day at the typewriter, writing the first draft of “One Sunday,” a story about one boy’s discomfort with his hidden misdeeds – an uneasiness that surfaces after a homeless man sneaks into a neighbour’s apartment. “That was the first time I’d ever sat down to write, and I think I was fascinated by the process itself – watching the words appear at the typewriter,” he says.

He enters the competition. The panel of judges, headed by poet Dorothy Livesay (BA 1931 Trinity, DIP SW 1934, DLitt Sac. Hon. 1987), awards the story first prize. “It was very encouraging, of course, but I thought that it was just a lucky fluke. I hadn’t written anything before; how could this happen? But I kept writing,” he says. He enters again the following year, with the story “Auspicious Occasion.” This time short-story writer Mavis Gallant (DLitt Sac. Hon. 1994) is at the helm of the jury, and she awards him another first prize. She also tells editors John Metcalf and Leon Rooke – who are compiling a short-story anthology – to take a look at this new young writer. They select Mistry’s work for inclusion in The New Press Anthology: Best Canadian Short Fiction. “It’s like a fairy tale, really,” he says, laughing, “the way it all happened.”

Except, unlike a fairy tale, there’s a little more than luck in the brew. In late 1984, Mistry applies for and receives a Canada Council Grant, a literary endowment that allows him to quit the bank and leave customer service permanently behind. His short stories are published in some of Canada’s top literary magazines (only one will ever be rejected), and using this published material together with five or six new stories, he compiles a collection. In 1987, Tales from Firozsha Baag – a series of intertwined stories that focus on the lives of tenants in a Bombay apartment complex – is published by Penguin Books Canada.

Four years later, Mistry follows up the collection with his first novel, Such a Long Journey, which introduces his genius for weaving the smallest moments of daily life with issues of overarching political and social concern. The story’s protagonist, Gustad Noble, is a bank clerk whose modest life begins to crumble after his son defies his wishes for him to attend university. Then, after doing a favour for an old friend, Noble becomes caught up in the back-alley politics taking place during India’s 1971 war with Pakistan. The book is shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and wins the Governor General’s Award for fiction, beating out such works as Margaret Atwood’s short-story collection Wilderness Tips. In 1998, the novel is made into a movie by Sturla Gunnarsson, winning three Genie awards. In 1995, Mistry publishes A Fine Balance, which again is shortlisted for the Booker, and this time wins the Giller Prize. The story is a sweeping, heart-wrenching tale of four people whose lives are profoundly affected not only by each other, but by India’s crushing poverty, the caste system, political corruption and the state of emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi in the 1970s.

In the current Can-lit climate marked by highly stylised prose, Mistry’s work harks back to a more traditional mode of storytelling. His accessible language and rhythms are unpretentious, clean, straightforward, and this pared-down style leaves the reader free to focus on the characters and their plight. “His style is precise, deceptively simple. It’s writing in which the author doesn’t seem to want to call attention to the writing itself,” says editor Ellen Seligman. “The writing is there to serve the story and the characters, so it always reflects those two things.”

It’s November 13, 2001. Mistry has been out doing some errands. Home again, he checks his messages and hears the voice of American talk-show host Oprah Winfrey asking him to call her back. Working from home, Seligman calls in for her messages and receives a similar voice mail from a representative of the show. They’re quick to phone back, and find out that A Fine Balance has been selected as the next pick for Oprah’s book club. The title will be announced on November 30 – giving the folks at McClelland & Stewart little time to complete a hefty printing. “There was much hustle and bustle, as we had to achieve a large printing in a miraculously short period of time – all completely secretively,” says Seligman. She declines to give the exact number printed, but does say that, in North America, more than 750,000 copies were churned out after the book became an Oprah pick.

Mistry spends four days in Bombay in December taping an opening segment for the show. In early January, he travels to Chicago to spend three hours with Oprah and four guests; this will be edited down for the book-club portion. Mistry appears overshadowed by more gregarious guests – particularly a retired Purdue University professor who claims the spotlight with great gusto. But he also appears humble, eloquent. More than seven million people will watch the episode.

Mistry himself doesn’t say much about the experience. He says it was “quite fun.” He says, “Oprah is a lovely person. Really warm, and makes you feel at home, and the four guests who had been invited to discuss the book were delightful people.” In other interviews, he repeats this mantra. Oprah is delightful, she is warm, she is lovely. He reveals little more. A famously guarded interview subject, Mistry has the ability to deflect unwanted queries in a highly courteous manner, and his graciousness is an effective armour. It allows him to reveal what he wants – and hide what he doesn’t want seen – in gentlemanly style. The media have called him “reclusive” and “intensely private,” and in a world that can’t discern the vast chasm between quiet and shy, he is often saddled with the timorous adjective.

“He’s a reticent person,” says David Staines (BA 1967 St. Michael’s), a friend and dean of arts at the University of Ottawa. “He’s an observer more than he’s anything else; he observes the human condition.” Mistry’s wariness is no doubt fuelled by the dangers of media interpretation; after all, just as fiction can distort fact, facts can be selectively presented. As one character in his short story “Swimming Lessons” notes: “Fiction can come from facts, it can grow out of facts by compounding, transposing, augmenting, diminishing, or altering them in any way; but you must not confuse cause and effect, you must not confuse what really happened with what the story says happened, you must not lose your grasp on reality, that way madness lies.”

One cold March morning, well before I interview Mistry, I visit the York University archives, which house some of his works and correspondence. A librarian in his early 20s brightens when he’s told I’m here to look at Mistry’s papers. There are boxes of requests for interviews, for speaking engagements, for endorsements for novels, for advice. I wonder about the difficulties of being a private man faced with such an avalanche of public pleas; the letters – despite being deferential, despite being punctuated with “please” and “thank you” – seem to amount to a sort of collective clawing. Hundreds of anonymous hands reaching for answers.

Toward the end of the afternoon, the archivist approaches to ask me if I need any more help before his shift is done. His gelled spikes of hair sprout toward the ceiling like blades of grass. “A Fine Balance is one of the best books I ever read,” he says. He pauses, tilts his head, spikes now on a slight angle. “It’s like cigarette smoke. It stays on you for a long while afterward.”

Whether Mistry would like his work associated with the noxious odour of cigarettes is anybody’s guess. Yet I suspect he would understand the analogy: his novels are full of the stench of life. His characters sin and are sinned against; they are battered by the cruelty of the world around them. But despite their own flaws, despite the lousy, sleight-of-hand tricks that life pulls on them, they often persist in struggling to find a state of grace, to find meaning, to find happiness, to be good people. Perpetual spiders in the waterspout.

“With [my] characters, I’m interested in what makes a human being, and I don’t have any agenda that I start out with, that this person shall illustrate greed and this person shall illustrate the spirit of generosity,” says Mistry. “I do not start out with a theme or a scheme that I want to illustrate or work with.” Then he pauses and asks himself, “What do I want to do?”

What do I want to do? It is a question that followed him through his early adult years. But now he is almost 50. A lifetime of choices has led him here, and his answer comes easily. “I want to tell a darn good story.”

Stacey Gibson is associate editor of University of Toronto Magazine.

But when you talked with him or, more likely, listened to him, appearances faded away. He crackled with ideas; his charm was immense, probably because his interest – however fleeting – was real.

I met Peter Gzowski at a Canadian University Press convention in Toronto over Christmas in 1956. He was editor of The Varsity, and I was number two on the University of Western Ontario Gazette.

I believe he proposed most of the motions, but I’m vague on what actually happened because I spent most of my time in the Ladies and Escorts room at the Park Plaza Hotel, our unofficial headquarters. (As long as you had one lady – remember this was the ’50s – any number of males could escort her.) It was during one of these off-campus gatherings that Peter and the Gazette editor, Keith Kincaid, came up with the idea of swapping issues. Western students would put out one issue of The Varsity, and Peter and some of his crew would do the same for us. So a handful of us came up from Western a month or two later and did an issue of The Varsity. I wrote a humour column and then to fill a hole on the editorial page, I dug up an editorial I had written at Western.

And that’s how Peter gave me an afternoon of fame.

My editorial called for the abolition of the monarchy. I still remember the last sentence: “For too long have we been blinded by the gleam of jewels in a crown across the sea.” It had created no stir at all at Western, but Peter could smell a good story.

After the issue was shipped off to the printer, I went back to the Park Plaza, but Peter, a stringer for the Telegram, called around and got some incensed reactions to this young whipper-snapper who had dared attack the Queen. His story made the front page of the first edition of the Tely, and in later editions it was jumped on by the Star.

By the time I arrived back in London on the afternoon train, most of my 15 minutes of fame had already flown. But the editorial was reprinted in Time, and one company even pulled its ad.

A week or two later, Peter and some staffers came to London and put out a most respectable issue of the Gazette. Peter came with me to an English class: “Only class I’ve been to this year,” he whispered.

That summer he got a job – degreeless – as city editor of the Moose Jaw Times-Herald. I had a summer job with the CNR, and when I found I would have a one-day stopover there, I sent him a telegram. (We didn’t trust phones; this was the ’50s.) He wired back that I should meet him on the main drag. Saskatchewan, even more draconian than Ontario, had taverns for men only – with a limit of one glass of draft per person at a time. When I walked into the pub on that sweltering July day, Peter – still scruffy, but emanating influence – waved me over to a table festooned with glasses of draft. About 30 of them.

I don’t remember much more about Moose Jaw, although I will long remember much about Peter. As do we all.

Paul Rush attended U of T as a master’s student in 1960 before embarking on a career in newspapers, magazines, radio and television. He is a former chair of the magazine journalism program at the Ryerson School of Journalism.

At age 21, in 1956, he became editor of The Varsity. Those of us who held the job after him believed he made it not just the best student paper in the country, but U of T’s “unofficial school of journalism.” He left a legacy that countless Varsity staffers – Thomas Walkom, Linda McQuaig, Bob Rae, Michael Ignatieff, Barbara Amiel – later sweated blood to uphold.

Gzowski died on Jan 24, 2002. But his spirit endures.

This is a look at his year as Varsity editor.

1
Peter Gzowski appeared “out of the blue” to be elected the 1956-57 editor of The Varsity, then a daily, during a closed-door session of the Students’ Administrative Council. “It was all a bit vague,” says Mike Cassidy, who was the Varsity staff’s “obvious candidate” and first choice for editor.

The barest facts were known about Gzowski: he had left U of T after first year in 1952-53, had already worked for The Timmins Daily Press for two years, was currently a stringer for the Telegram and, according to Cassidy – who later became leader of the Ontario NDP from 1978 to 1982 – he suddenly popped up enrolled at University College.

Then, the editorship of The Varsity was “a stepping stone to a major-league career in journalism,” says Harvey Levenstein, Gzowski’s university affairs editor, later a history professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

After accepting the appointment in front of 50 fuming Varsity staffers who had been locked out of the meeting, Gzowski said that he was “very honoured” and that he was going home to bed.

2
Gzowski chose Mike Cassidy as his managing editor.

3
In one of his first editorials, Gzowski applauded President Sidney Smith’s message to first-year students to study hard and achieve excellence – then one-upped the president. “Surely, raising the standards of admission to our seats of highest learning is the first and most important step.”

It was about that time that Gzowski adopted the pseudonym “Mr. Smith.”

4
A favourite Gzowski editorial theme was campus shenanigans: “In this vastly monotonous world,” he wrote, “it is the duty, not the right, of the undergraduate to have a good time.”

5
One slow news day, Gzowski sent two reporters to steal Ontario Premier Leslie Frost’s homburg. When the students successfully grabbed it, Gzowski made them call Frost’s office and report they were holding the hat for ransom. “He believed that if there was no news, a good journalist goes out and makes it,” says hat-napper Harvey Levenstein.

6
Gzowski’s editorials and reporter Cathie Breslin’s columns (“Cathie Breslin Meets.”) set the tone for The Varsity that year, according to the paper’s associate editor Doug Marshall, now science editor at The Toronto Star.

Breslin, later a distinguished magazine writer and novelist in New York, “broke all the journalistic rules,” says Marshall. Gzowski gave her free rein, and her columns gave the paper a professional panache. “She would interview campus personalities by talking at them for an hour or so, then she would come back and write a great column.”

Breslin wrote this about Gzowski’s editorial-writing technique: “His editorials had a painful prelude (three trips to the washroom for an average one, and five for a really good one) – but once the 
idea lighted, the typewriter would clack from the inner sanctum, and a few minutes later the 
editorial was done.”

7
Gzowski’s first editorial on The Liquor Control Act of Ontario in 1956: “This wondrous, wealthy, booming province of ours has the stupidest liquor laws imaginable.”

8
Gzowski on The Liquor Control Act of Ontario in 1956, yet again: “The act is the laughingstock of the continent, and a disgrace to those who claim maturity for Ontario.”

9
Gzowski on The Liquor Control Act in 1957: “The people of Ontario have grown fairly accustomed to the LCBO’s stupidity, and they tolerate it with bemused understanding, as a dog-owner will sometimes take pride in exhibiting his pet’s goofiness.”

10
A number of romances flourished during Gzowski’s tenure. Two led to marriage. Features editor Sam Ajzenstat and arts/music/drama editor Janet MacDonald married, as did associate news editor John Gray, later the Moscow correspondent with The Globe and Mail (he retired from the paper last year) and reporter Elizabeth Binks, who became a noted CBC radio host. Both couples are still together, although the Ajzenstats differed after Gzowski’s death. “We couldn’t remember if he was in pharmacy or forestry,” says Janet. “But what did it matter? He didn’t go to classes.”

11
Gzowski preferred the informal classes held at the King Cole Room at the Park Plaza Hotel. “Many young people got an education there,” says Cassidy. “They never asked your age.”

12
Perhaps drawing on high school memories at Ridley College in St. Catharines, Ontario, Gzowski criticized the protocol of note-taking: “It is impossible to follow a delicate line of thought while writing down the words used to develop it. An educated person is a thinking person, not a stenographer.”

13
Though the only degree Gzowski received from U of T was an honorary doctorate in 1995, many staffers considered him their best teacher.

“We all learned to write from Peter,” says Janet (MacDonald) Ajzenstat, who would become a political science professor at McMaster University. “He still influences me: don’t bury your lead, cut to the thesis right away, get your precious idea up front. I still write that way, even in scholarly essays.”

Gzowski’s pedagogical touch? “He wasn’t nasty, but he wasn’t nicey-nice,” says Levenstein. “He’d just say, ‘Look, this is a piece of shit, this is why, and why don’t you rewrite it?’”

14
Apparently, Gzowski honed his fuzzy, warm ‘Mr. Canada’ image well after leaving U of T, according to Howard Mandell, then assistant sports editor, since retired as chief of anesthesiology at Centenary Health Centre in Scarborough, Ont.

“He sat at one end of the offices, and sports was at the other. I didn’t really have much to do with him except when he didn’t like how we set up our pages – then he certainly let us know it,” says Mandell. “But when he was chancellor of Trent and my daughter graduated, he looked up and pointed and smiled when her name was called. I was in the third row. I hadn’t seen him in 40 years.”

15
“Praise from Gzowski,” says Sam Ajzenstat, “was a great thing to get.”

16
One of Gzowski’s favourite late-night topics of conversation was destiny. Staff put the paper “to bed” around midnight, then a case of beer would appear and Gzowski would “hold forth,” according to Sam Ajzenstat, who would become a professor of philosophy at McMaster University. “He had a strong feeling back then that our fathers’ generation had seen the Depression and the Second World War, and we were never going to be the heroes our fathers and mothers were. He used to urge us to find the challenges that would bring out the best in us. Those talks were always inspiring, especially in the middle of the night.”

17
Gzowski as a psychic: “The growth of radio and television coverage, and the advances in the agency system that serves the day’s news across the continent, are leading us toward a new era.. Not long from now, teletype service to the living room will supplant the home-delivered newspaper.”

18
A scene from a Gzowski weekend: “The masthead would get paid, but there used to be a tithe on our salaries,” says Levenstein. “Ten or 20 per cent would go into a beer fund, then every Thursday, when we put the Friday edition to bed, we’d adjourn to Peter’s apartment on College Street, which he shared with a Canadian Press rewrite man. Peter would send a cab to the beer store and get five or six cases of beer. A nonstop party would ensue, basically for the whole weekend. A lot of professional newspapermen from the Star and Globe and Tely would pass through. The rest of us would talk about religion and God and other ideas, but Gzowski never did. He just talked about journalism.”

19
Gzowski, often referring to The Varsity as Toronto’s “little daily newspaper,” wrote several editorials chastising the big-league Toronto dailies. On their failure to denounce rising student fees, Gzowski wrote: “[They] have been chewing the issue like a child chewing bubble gum – occasionally producing a snappy little bubble, but more often just rolling it around to get the taste of it.”

20
Gzowski on Canadian politics, after covering the Conservative leadership convention that elected John Diefenbaker: “The drabness of Canadian politics lies not in our stars but in ourselves. If a politician were to speak out frankly in this country, he would lose more votes than he would gain. And so we shall probably have to keep choosing between different shades of grey.”

21
Gzowski stirred up one of the first real expressions of student protest in the ’50s, writing a series of relentless editorials calling the Hungarian Revolution “our generation’s Spain.” He urged students to rally in support of Hungarian university students protesting the Soviet invasion of their country, and according to Cassidy, he was “in the heart” of student rallies at Hart House.

In one editorial, Gzowski called on Students’ Administrative Council, colleges, faculty association and students to send money, and on the university to create scholarships for Hungarian students. In subsequent editorials, he “reminded” various constituencies to follow his advice – then harangued them until they did.

22
Gzowski on letters to the editor: “People who have violent opinions and time on their hands [to write letters] have something lacking if they do not join in activities related to their interests. Therefore, most people who write letters to newspapers are fools.”

23
Gzowski criticized the English- and French-backed Israeli invasion of Egypt that year and slammed the dailies for not explaining the issue: “Israel has ignited the fuse to a bomb that may blow up the world. There seems to be no complete grasp of the situation.”

Then he accused Canada of following on the “coattails” of the United States and Britain and called on the government to take a clear stand on the Middle East crisis: “Where does Canada stand? Is our own very competent Minister of External Affairs going to make a statement?.Does it seem unfair to ask for leadership?”

24
Gzowski was fired from his part-time job of reporting on campus news for the Telegram after he criticized that paper, and the other Toronto dailies, for their sensational coverage of the trial of 17-year-old murder suspect Peter Woodcock. Gzowski called the coverage not only “despicable” and a “disgrace” but a “trial by headline,” and suggested that the papers were in contempt of court.

25
Gzowski on Remembrance Day: “Twice within the memory of our fathers, the young men of this country have been called to fight for a cause they can hardly understand. When you have been brought up in freedom, you do not know that it is worth fighting for.. Think of that for two minutes. If they died in vain, you may be called upon to do the same.”

26
Gzowski had to be carried from the train on arriving back from a student-exchange weekend in Montreal. But once staff got him back to The Varsity’s offices, he ordered them to lead him to his desk. That evening, “Mr. Smith” wrote what is often considered his most inspired story of the year:

“Varsity visitors were whisked to a reception, the start of a three-day flow of French-Canadian hospitality.. Even the staid Ontario visitors watched the sun come up in Montreal. Arguments were too lively, music too danceable, songs too voluble for anyone to go to bed..”

27
Gzowski on Toronto: “Toronto, they say, is dirty: Chicago is by degrees filthier, and yet few people express an intense hate of Chicago. Toronto is aloof and unfriendly: New Yorkers are renowned for their inability to make strangers feel at home, but New York is spoken of in reverent tones. Toronto is a hypocritical town, ‘the city of churches’ with a flourishing red-light district: Montreal has more churches per capita and probably more prostitution. Toronto is boring on Sundays: have the critics ever been to Salt Lake City?.

“Whatever its cause, hating Toronto seems to have lost most of its point in a country as mature as ours pretends to be.”

28
Gzowski on Timmins, Ontario: “Of all the features that combine to make a beautiful feminine body, 
none are more attractive than ankles. What could possibly be prettier than a well-turned ankle 
climbing on a bus?.

“But on this campus, perhaps the only place in the world, this fact is not appreciated. Girls wear knee socks.. In Timmins, they wear silk stockings when it’s 50 below zero.”

29
Breslin on Gzowski: “In the few flamboyant months that Peter has been editor, a lot of people have come to know him. If nothing else, they have not been bored.. On Sunday night, he leaves for The Times-Herald in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, to be ‘the youngest goddamn city editor in Canada.’”

30
Three staffers who worked under Gzowski would become Varsity editors: Mike Cassidy, Sam Ajzenstat and Doug Marshall.

“When any particular night ended, a lot of us would not bother going home,” says Ajzenstat. “We would just push aside all the typewriters and lay coats down on the desks and go to sleep right there.. He helped make us an extremely tight-knit social group. We shared our money freely. We all smoked and shared our cigarettes freely.
“He was a romantic. We [reporters] were outsiders in society, but society needed us.to punch holes in the system.. It was a kind of Humphrey Bogart image, with the cigarette hanging out of the mouth, and we all wore trench coats.

“Those of us who left [newspapers] thought that journalism had to be romantic, or it was nothing 
at all.”

31
Gzowski dropped in on Varsity staffers two decades later, in 1979, after the paper had published an editorial that “took exception” to CBC-TV firing one of its former editors from “90 Minutes Live,” Gzowski’s brief foray into late-night TV.

“It was a tongue-in-cheek editorial that kind of acknowledged that the show wasn’t very good, and we probably weren’t very respectful. I think we called him a klutz,” says George Cook, a former editor of U of T Magazine, who was Varsity editor at that time. “Gzowski didn’t make any comment about the editorial or express any sensitivity. He just hung around and talked for a bit. I think he dropped by to say that when you write these things, you should remember you’re writing about a real person.”

32
Gzowski on that year at U of T: “On the university rolls, I was a student in General Arts, headed for a degree, but in practice I went to no classes and wrote no essays. I was editor of the student paper, and that was my life.”

Margaret Webb (BA 1985 UC) was editor of The Varsity in 1985-86.

During rush hour, highways typically operate at only 25-per cent capacity; 


“Incidents,” such as a stalled vehicle or an accident, cause 60 per cent of traffic gridlock;

A 10-minute “incident” creates approximately 100 minutes of congestion;

There are solutions that could reduce your commute time by as much as 50 per cent, without adding a single new mile of road or transit service.

Baher Abdulhai can list half a dozen ways, off the cuff, that his research could help you get home faster and safer. At 36, this “roads scholar,” as he has been dubbed by the media, is already one of the world’s leading experts in intelligent transportation systems. And he and his researchers are just at the threshold of what they might accomplish.

This past November he launched his brainchild, U of T’s new $4.3-million Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Centre and Testbed, which will turn Toronto’s transportation system into a laboratory for creating and testing high-tech solutions to gridlock. The centre, Canada’s transportation flagship, already rivals the world’s best: the advanced traffic research centre at University of California at Irvine, where Abdulhai earned his PhD in 1996 and derived his inspiration.

Will Recker, who heads UC Irvine’s centre, confessed to TechWeekly that he was “blown away but not surprised” by what Abdulhai has created since U of T recruited him away from the sunny beaches of southern California in 1998.

“When [Abdulhai] walked in the door, he had a clear vision,” says Eric Miller, director of U of T’s Joint Program in Transportation, which oversees the ITS arm. “He had the idea for the lab, and he said this is how he would build it, this is what it would look like and this is what it would accomplish…. The research coming out of this lab will influence the way we do our urban and transportation planning in the city. It will also attract bright young minds to the field, which can only be good for transportation.”

Abdulhai started studying highways in his birthplace – what he calls “the battle zone” – Cairo, Egypt, a city of 14 million with a snarled transportation system. “There are few traffic controls,” says Abdulhai, who completed a master’s degree in civil engineering at Cairo University. “It’s a big, huge mess. You have to force your way through.”

He initially focused on highway infrastructure – designing better highways and roads – which brought him to the University of Alberta to do a PhD in pavement management. There, he heard about the emerging field of ITS, which uses large-scale computer systems to simulate real traffic patterns on real roadways, then tests alternative flow patterns and control mechanisms. For instance, an ITS computer program can simulate the addition of on-ramp traffic lights regulating access to highways and predict the effect on traffic flow. The goal is to apply information technology to maximize capacity on existing roadways and transit systems.

“I had always liked developing computer applications for infrastructure analysis and management, so this [ITS] was immediately fascinating,” says Abdulhai. “It gave me an opportunity to deal with a massive system. In Egypt, our approach [to solving gridlock] was ad hoc, and I knew we could do a lot better if we applied intelligent systems.”

When he got a call from Steve Ritchie, a professor of civil engineering at UC Irvine, to join an ITS research project – “he said he could give me a week to think about it” – Abdulhai went home and told his wife, Nayera, and that night, they packed their bags for California.

For his dissertation, Abdulhai approached traffic flow (or, more often, chaos) as if it were a computer science problem, using pattern recognition to decide if traffic was “normal” or “abnormal.” “Abnormal” happens when traffic on a freeway suddenly slows or stops and remains knotted in gridlock, sometimes for no discernible reason. These interruptions are called “incidents.” It could be a stalled vehicle, an accident, even a motorist braking suddenly, which causes a chain reaction of braking, which in turn can bring traffic to a standstill a mile behind the original “incident.”

As in chaos theory, traffic “incidents” are the butterfly’s beating wings that can wreak havoc miles away. An incident that impedes traffic for just one minute can create 10 minutes of congestion, and incidents account for 60 to 65 per cent of all delays in congested urban areas. The effects are catastrophic but, says Abdulhai, “a computer program that could detect the problem immediately and notify traffic operators to remove the problem would minimize the effect on traffic.”

To detect incidents, he collected data relayed from loop detectors embedded at 500-metre intervals along freeways in San Francisco and Orange County. These loop detectors, found in most highways, indicate how many cars pass over them in any given time period. Abdulhai incorporated these numbers into an algorithm (a set of instructions that tells a computer how to solve a problem). The program worked like a human brain, executing thousands of instructions simultaneously, rather than sequentially, like a normal computer. It operated like a set of eyes on the freeway, observing when traffic slowed down and sped up. If the computer “observed” traffic moving over one detector at a regular rate, but moving slower at a detector behind it, it inferred that an “incident” or accident had occurred in the stretch of roadway in between.

“His research represented a major advance and arguably one of the most significant developments in, and contributions to, the field of freeway incident detection to date,” says Ritchie. “[Abdulhai] has demonstrated an extraordinary ability to forge new strategic partnerships and create win-win relationships with supporters and participants in the ITS Centre at Toronto.”

The ITS Centre and Testbed Abdulhai founded at U of T is like an all-seeing eye on Toronto traffic. It is linked, by fibre-optic cable, to the Ontario Ministry of Transportation and City of Toronto traffic centres, and receives real-time data fed from the detector loops embedded in highways and roadways all over the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). It also receives real-time video feed from the ministry’s 200 traffic cameras situated throughout the GTA. The centre, located in the Sandford Fleming building, looks like a NASA control room, with 30 computer stations facing a wall of 20 video monitors. If a computer signals an “incident” from the detector feed, researchers will be able to call up the video feed to study the congestion.

The centre is still in its first phase: building a massive computer simulation of the GTA transportation system, a virtual Toronto, with highways, city roads, rail and transit routes that are “alive” with virtual vehicles, GO trains and subways moving through the system. The “virtual port land” is complete – you can now watch a simulation of “real” cars clogging up the Spadina entrance to the Gardiner Expressway during a typical evening rush hour.

“The centre will deal with Toronto as a huge experimental ground,” Abdulhai says. “And this city is a great traffic lab because it has extensive freeways, a huge surface network, a comprehensive transit system, and yet it’s nicely congested. It is not using its capacity properly.”

The centre reached its research capacity almost immediately, with 30 graduate students at work on various studies. Prasenjit Roy, who studied civil engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, came to U of T to do his master’s degree because of the centre and Abdulhai. He is working directly with Abdulhai to create an “automated incident detection” program, which will not only detect traffic incidents, but also notify proper authorities to deal with them. “He gave me a huge, challenging assignment and I panicked,” says Roy. “But he’s guiding me through it, step by step, to get results little by little.. The results are very promising.”

Roy says his algorithm can detect 92 to 94 per cent of all incidents, and it is not site specific – meaning that the same program will learn traffic patterns at different sites, then adapt itself to detect incidents there. The program will be ready in July or August, and it’s conceivable that the Ministry of Transportation could evaluate and implement it within the next year. “This is cutting-edge research that’s going to be applied,” says Roy, “and I’m very much a part of what we’re developing. It’s very satisfying.”

Sitting behind Roy in the centre is Veljanovska Kostandina, from the University of Skopje in Macedonia. She’s working toward a master’s degree in transportation engineering. Her assignment is developing an algorithm that will “learn” the best way to control freeway access through on-ramp metering. A normal highway lane has a capacity of 2,000 vehicles an hour, but during rush hour, when traffic slows to stop-and- go, that capacity drops to 250 to 400 vehicles an hour. Ramp metering on the Gardiner Expressway, for example, would control the number of vehicles entering it and prevent it from becoming clogged, says Abdulhai. “During rush hour, freeways can drop to about 25 per cent of capacity, exactly when you need it most. You could build four Gardiner Expressways to get that capacity back, or you could introduce ramp meters. If you do proper ramp metering, you can cut travel time by as much as 30 per cent – and that’s a conservative estimate. Waiting on an on-ramp for a few minutes is a small price to pay for a smoother trip home.”

Kostandina is just starting her work and admits she’s also feeling a little overwhelmed. She’s new to the field of traffic engineering, but there’s a cool synergy in the centre – she can turn to colleagues for help, and she’s in demand for her computer knowledge. Still, her research is bound to provoke wide reaction. Toronto experimented with metering 10 years ago, and it failed miserably. Abdulhai contends that the metering was applied incorrectly, and this is where the centre proves most useful: in the “virtual Toronto,” researchers can test a solution before it is ever implemented in the “real Toronto.” “If you do [ramp metering] right, you get the benefits,” says Abdulhai. “If you do it wrong, you get disaster.”

But when it comes to transportation, it can take more than solid scientific research to change attitudes. Undergraduate student Jaime Abraham discovered the speed that 85 per cent of drivers are travelling on Ontario’s Highway 401 is well over the posted limit of 100 km/h and close to 130 km/h. Abdulhai then recommended increasing the speed limit to 130, arguing that the higher speed limit would be safer. “What happens now,” says Abdulhai, “is you get most people driving between 110 and 130 and some people driving at 100, so there’s a spread in speed values, which leads to an increase in road rage, aggressive passing on the right and, really, chaos. We said the speed limit should be set at what 85 per cent of the population drives. Then we should enforce etiquette – if you want to drive slower, you have to drive in the right-hand lane. That would keep traffic moving at the same speed and improve lane discipline.”

Abdulhai’s recommendation provoked reaction from several politicians and police forces and landed him in the media hot seat. “I was on one radio show and this woman called up and said, ‘The professor just wants to drive his Mercedes fast,’” laughs Abdulhai. “First, I wish I had a Mercedes. And second, this is not what I want; this is what 85 per cent of the population is already doing. We’re just asking, is 85 per cent of the population crazy? Or is the law inappropriate? We’re not recommending this for school zones. These are freeways we’re talking about. And we’re not even suggesting something new. In England and Germany, where traffic fatalities are lower, the speed limits are similar to what we’re proposing.”

If and how fast the centre’s research is put into practice depends greatly on its partners. It received funding from 15 public and private-sector partners, including Transport Canada, and it will work closely with the City of Toronto and the Ontario Ministry of Transportation. Abdulhai has already met with the new waterfront redevelopment commission, which is considering proposals to bury, dismantle or reconfigure the Gardiner Expressway. With the testbed’s “virtual portland” complete, the centre can test every option and forecast the effect on local traffic.

“We’re part of the loop, part of the network,” says Abdulhai. “We’re the research arm. We’ll come up with ideas, and they’ll ask us to test their ideas. We’ll provide them with technical answers and quantifiable research. How long it takes for research to be implemented is a political issue. My hope is that politicians move aggressively.” He estimates that if research currently underway in the lab were applied today, it could reduce the average commute time by as much as 50 per cent.

Abdulhai’s specific research area – intelligent management of roadway traffic – is only one of four that will be using the centre. Researchers working on transit, commercial transportation and long-term transportation planning will also use the “virtual Toronto” to explore ways of increasing the effectiveness of other transportation systems in Toronto. Eric Miller, the director of the Joint Program in Transportation and an expert in long-range transportation planning, says his team will be able to build large-scale models to simulate the development of Toronto over the next 10 to 20 years. “Ultimately, we’d say with our model, if you built the waterfront, for example, would they come? We can look beyond traffic to what development, businesses, housing and mix of transportation would be there.

“The increasing motorization of travel – even in Toronto, which has good transit service – does not support sustainable development. The increasing surburbanization of business has increased our use of highways. We will test how transportation can be used as a tool to shape city planning and development.”

Indeed, Miller believes the centre will draw researchers from other fields such as economics, urban planning and psychology. The range of projects they might tackle are limitless. Back at the lab, Abdulhai’s researchers are developing a program to ease “administrative gridlock,” enabling city computers to negotiate with Ministry of Transportation computers to determine optimal rerouting in case of freeway incidents and congestion. He envisions the day when motorists can link into computers at traffic control centres to be “guided” on the best route to travel according to current traffic conditions.

“I find the management of transportation a huge challenge,” says Abdulhai. “You’re faced with a problem that is only going to get worse, given that the growth of populations is far outpacing the growth in transportation systems.”

“ITS is where the action is,” says Miller. “It combines research with a practical application. You’re doing something that has a real and tangible impact on millions of people.”

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

“This event is not a typical canoe trip for the club,” says Dubord, an enthusiastic canoeist who frequently partakes in UTOC’s many adventures on Ontario’s northern lakes and rivers. Three years ago, he was inspired with the idea for a local paddle. “After years of looking out over the lake from where I live on Queen’s Quay, I thought, ‘Why not?’”

It’s hard to say what is typical for UTOC (pronounced “you talk”), a club formed in 1957 by a handful of U of T students itching for some stress-busting outdoor activities. During the ’60s, the club purchased a small parcel of land southwest of Collingwood, Ont., for the sum of $350 and subsequently built an open-concept cabin that sleeps 30 on foam mats. The cabin is adjacent to thousands of acres of public land. Favoured activities at the cabin range from cross-country skiing on the club’s own Kolapore Trails to rock climbing, caving, hiking and cycling in the summer. There are also canoe trips in Algonquin Park and beyond.

Members can phone the Tripline (416-201-5795) for information about a trip, read about upcoming adventures in the bimonthly UTOC Bulletin mailed or 
e-mailed to members, or log onto the group’s Web site (see address below). A substantial number of pursuits – including dancing, co-ed soccer and a French club – occur in Toronto.
According to publicity officer David Block (BA 1987 Trinity), the club – now in its 45th year – at one time boasted 800 members, but now has about 300 to 350 people. And while membership is open to all U of T students, alumni and staff, applicants with no U of T affiliation may join.

On the Toronto Islands outing, Dubord is paddling with Darlene Varaleau (MBA 1996, LLB 1996), an avid canoeist, skier and long-time UTOC member who is surprised more university members don’t get involved with the group. “It’s really an underutilized club given the population of students and alumni,” says Varaleau.

After lunch, the trippers turn their canoes toward the skyline and cross the harbour, dodging ferryboats and yachts. The day is completed with smiles and cold drinks.

Block recounts a recent inquiry he received from a new student. When he asked the caller how she had heard about UTOC, she told him that her father had been a member 20 years before. “We’ve made it,” says Block proudly. “UTOC: The next generation.”

In an article published nine years earlier, Brown explained her motivation for seeking an education and likened her life to “a canyon, deep and dark, to the point of being stifling…. Fresh air and the sunlight of knowledge are high above me, while I stand on the brink of defeat. To remain here would have meant certain death to the human spirit,” she wrote. “Outside this pit was the satisfaction through academic and mental achievement. A difficult climb was the only way to the top.”

Difficult doesn’t begin to describe Brown’s journey to Convocation Hall. She was born seemingly healthy in 1935, but her sight and hearing steadily deteriorated until she was finally diagnosed at age 18 with toxoplasmosis and neurofibromatosis, diseases that disrupt the central nervous system. The diagnoses came after surgeons removed an orange-sized tumour from her brain, leaving her completely deaf (she had already lost her sight).

Yet she never complained about her fate, says Joan Mactavish (BA 1942 Victoria, DLitt Sac. Hon. 2002) – winner of the 2001 Victoria College Distinguished Alumni Award – in her book, Bravo! Miss Brown: A World Without Sight and Sound. Officially, Mactavish was Brown’s 25-hour-per-week tutor through her five years of study at the University of Toronto at Scarborough (then Scarborough College). Brown studied year-round, taking summer courses on the St. George campus. In reality, Mactavish’s hours were immeasurable and her duties countless. These were the days before the concept of accessibility, and Brown flatly refused special treatment.

Mae Brown and tutor Joan Mactavish attending a lecture. Mae's hands were her portal to information.

Every ordinary academic task was an ordeal, with layers of translation from spoken and printed words to manual communication and braille, then back again. One multiple-choice psychology exam, for example, took 15 hours over three days to complete. It was a gruelling, cumbersome process, yet Brown managed to get mostly As and Bs.

Before attending university, Brown had been a maid, craftswoman, sewer and Braille proofreader. These were unsatisfying – some of them hateful – occupations to her. “I would like to find a way of fitting into normal society and to secure a form of better employment,” she wrote to a friend. “I find the need to live rather than to just exist. I am prepared to live up to any expectations if provided with an opportunity.” To her, a full, meaningful life meant getting a degree so that she could help others in her position.

Brown was able to enjoy the rewards of her efforts only briefly after earning her bachelor of arts degree. She worked for just over a year, developing services for the deaf-blind at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) in Toronto, before her death in 1973 at the age of 38. Mactavish, determined not to let Brown’s dreams and achievements die with her, agreed to conduct a study for the CNIB in 1975 on the needs of the deaf-blind in Ontario.

The study’s key recommendations, which Mactavish helped to implement, made several of the services Brown envisioned a reality. Today, instead of learning on the job as Mactavish did, there is a formal training program for “intervenors” for the deaf-blind. A specially designed apartment building in Toronto – the only one of its kind in North America – offers independent living for the deaf-blind in a safe environment with every imaginable aiding device. And just last year, the Canadian Helen Keller Centre opened in Toronto, addressing the need for outreach and training devoted exclusively to the deaf-blind.

Through active involvement in all of these developments, Mactavish has built a permanent legacy for the cherished student she calls “a true Canadian hero.” “Mae was my teacher as much as I was hers,” she says.

Megan Easton is a freelance writer in Kingston, Ontario

Students and their families have every right to be concerned about the rising costs of a university education, which are due in large part to shrinking provincial grants. Their fear that access to university will become restricted to the most privileged segments of society is understandable. After all, our two major sources of income are the province and tuition, with provincial operating grants making up by far the largest portion of our revenue. Since provincial funding in real dollars declined significantly over the past decade, inevitably tuition fees had to 
go up. The alternative would be a long-term decline in the quality of education, and we cannot allow that to happen.

Tuition Fees
Every dollar added to the cost of an undergraduate education is deeply felt, but in reality, in most programs, tuition-fee increases in recent years have been relatively modest. Tuition in 2002-03 will rise by no more than five per cent for more than 90 per cent of our students, and more than half will see an increase of less than two per cent. For example, first-year Arts and Science students will pay $4,107, an increase of only $78 over last year, which is in keeping with recent annual increases. Regulated tuition-fee increases are limited to a rate well below the rate of inflation in academic costs, and most other fee increases, after factoring in financial aid, are just keeping up with the inflation rate.

Accessibility

Despite increases in tuition fees, access to U of T by lower-income students is holding steady or improving. Indeed, a study led by Professor Ian Orchard, the new principal-designate of the University of Toronto at Mississauga, demonstrates that in both our undergraduate student population and within our professional faculties, nearly 20 per cent come from backgrounds where parental income is less than $30,000. This percentage has increased over the past three years.

The survey also indicates little change in the proportion of students who identify themselves as belonging to minority groups. The figure remained static at 44 per cent in the professional programs and has been around 50 per cent at the undergraduate level for several years.

Student Financial Support

Access is an important touchstone at U of T. The university is committed to providing financial-aid packages that open doors to the disadvantaged and reduce their debt burden upon graduation.

One advantage that University of Toronto students have over others is that once they have arrived here, the U of T Advanced Planning for Students (UTAPS) program guarantees that economic hardship will never prevent them from completing their programs. The university’s commitment to that guarantee has been dramatic. Whereas in 1990-91 U of T provided need-based undergraduate financial support of about $1.2 million, 10 years later we distributed nearly $19 million in such aid.

As for graduate students, in 2001 U of T became the first Canadian university to offer a guaranteed level of financial support for doctoral students. Graduate funding packages, starting at a minimum of $12,000 plus tuition and fees, are available for five years, meaning that students are able to complete their programs more quickly and without significant financial hardship.

The Link Between Tuition Fees and Financial Support
Tuition-fee increases cannot always be avoided, but when they do happen the university tries to ensure that those who can afford them least are the least affected. Thirty cents of every dollar resulting from tuition increases is devoted to financial support for the neediest students. When combined with endowed funds and graduate-student aid, this 30-per cent reinvestment will help U of T enhance its spending on student support by $8.1 million in 2002-03, bringing the total amount available to more than $90 million.

Student Debt
While some students carry alarming debt loads, fortunately they are in the vast minority. Generally, there is a great deal of misinformation among the public about student debt. Of students graduating from first-entry programs at U of T in 2000-01, more than half had no Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) debt at all, and a further quarter had an OSAP debt of less than $15,000. Still, undergraduate student debt must be reduced for the approximately five per cent of our graduating class who leave the university with the maximum OSAP debt of $28,000. Such high debt is unacceptable in my view, and we must work with the province and our students to reduce this burden by reforming the OSAP system, including fairer methods for assessing the financial need of students from middle-class families.

People often ask me why our administration is pushing so hard on the student-aid front. In response, I ask them to consider what constitutes a great university. A great university has a world-class faculty offering exemplary undergraduate and graduate programs. Outstanding students come to this great university in order to reap the attendant benefits. The goal of financial aid should be to ensure that all qualified students have access to that great university. On all three campuses, we are rapidly moving toward this ideal, and I find that very gratifying.

However, there are 
some mistaken impressions that bear correcting

Fallacy #1 With fees in professional faculties, such as law, increasing dramatically, it will not be long before undergraduate fees go out of sight, too.

It is important to remember that the Faculty of Law represents less than one per cent of all students at U of T. In general we expect that policies for professional faculties will be different from those for undergraduate programs. The Faculty of Law’s model, whereby tuition will cover the bulk of educational costs as well as funds to guarantee accessibility, may be appropriate for certain professional faculties, but the university will not follow this path for our undergraduate programs. I should emphasize that I strongly support the law faculty’s highly principled and consultative approach to grappling with a difficult set of challenges.

Fallacy #2 Increasing fees mean that going to university is becoming an impossible dream for low-income and minority students.

Access has been maintained and indeed enhanced at U of T, as a result of our student financial-support program. The province of Ontario overall has an admirably high participation rate in post-secondary education.

Fallacy #3 Students are being forced to pay an unreasonable portion of the cost of their education.

Province of Ontario guidelines suggest that undergraduates in Arts and Science programs should pay about 35 per cent of the overall cost of their programs. In fact, at the University of Toronto, students currently pay less than 25 per cent of the total costs. By contrast, in the 1960s students paid close to the current 35-per cent guideline. Our fundamental problem is that our overall funding is too small, and it is not keeping up with inflation.

Fallacy #4 Since U of T has such a huge endowment, it should not be increasing tuition fees.

In spite of our success in building our endowment to unprecedented levels, the endowment income still accounts for only about six per cent of our total budget revenue, with about half of this going to student aid. This means that the endowment contributes about three per cent of our operating costs. Thus, although our endowment is of fundamental importance, it is not a substitute for the provincial operating grant or tuition.

Fallacy #5 Because of increasing tuition costs, all students are graduating with huge debt.

Of students graduating from first-entry programs in 2001, 56 per cent had no Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) debt at all. The average OSAP debt of our first-entry students on graduation is less than $7,000.

Fallacy #6 Tuition fees represent the lion’s share of the total cost for a student attending university.

Tuition fees have long been the flashpoint in debates about the financial barriers that limit access to post-secondary education. However, tuition fees constitute only a fraction of the total cost of attendance. In fact, tuition fees are eclipsed by the total cost of books, accommodation, living expenses and foregone earnings. Our real challenge is to construct a student-aid program that recognizes the total cost of attending a post-secondary institution.