A Legacy of Reform

HEA THER MURRA Y A Legacy of Reform This autumn marks the one hundredth anniversary of the University of Toronto strike of 1895, an event which capped a ten-year series of disciplinary and political struggles at Toronto. Pork-barrelled appointments and the university's anglophilic hiring bias had angered 'nativist' students and graduates and the 'Canada-Firsters' sitting on the Senate; at issue, too, was the university's relationship to the government (since appointments to the provincial university were government controlled). The intellectual and disciplinary terrain was also shifting: like other universities of the day, Toronto was registering the impact of disciplinary specialization within the humanities, the growth of social science studies, and the demand for honours degrees and new forms of professional training . These concerns repeatedly emerged during a chain of controversies over university appointments, of which the search for a first dedicated professor of English in the winter of 1888-9 was the most public, involving numerous letters to the papers in a contretemps sufficiently sustained to become itself the subject of analysis - and parody - in the press of the day. The choice of W.J. Alexander appears to have been a wise one: perhaps only this former Toronto student, with higher training at London and Johns Hopkins, who was both a classicist and a published expert on Browning, could have satisfied the nationalists, reformists, philologists, and Arnoldians and their competing demands. But the debate moved to other arenas - appointments in metaphysics and history, particularly and six years later the student writers of the Varsity would criticize the administration for its hiring practices, as well as its refusal to allow socialists and women's suffragists to address the Political Science Club. When the resignation of the paper's editors was demanded, the strike was on: this first student strike at a university of the empire scandalized Victorian Canada, and was answered with the establishment of a Royal Commission (which, not surprisingly, exonerated the administration). While the strike had its clumsy and comic moments (as seized by James Reaney in The Dismissal: or Twisted Beards and Tangled Whiskers, his satirical and slightly surreal play about the strike), the issues raised were significant: we still are confronting some of the same pedagogic and political problems as the staff and students of one hundred years ago. UNrvERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 64, NUMBER 3, SUMMER 1995 350 HEATHER MURRAY While 'English' is inscribed into this controversy through the appointment controversy of 1888-9 - a public debate which focused discussion of both the university's public responsibilities and the modernization of English studies - there is a more direct link between the development of English at Toronto and the 1895 strike. This is to be found in the person of the omnipresent and indefatigable reformer William Houston - politician , teacher, librarian, journalist and prolific penner of letters and manifestos - who appears in different roles throughout the chain of events sketched above. One of the reformist and nationalist Senate members , who remained involved with campus clubs and causes (as graduates of the time commonly did), Houston was in many respects responsible for the reform-minded direction of the Political Science Club. (While women were perhaps the majority of this club's members, to judge from contemporary photographs, their role in the strike has never been detailed.) He would remain devoted to a variety of causes throughout his active life, and to women's suffrage particularly; more specifically for our purposes, however, Houston was also dedicated to the project of reforming the nascent discipline of English studies. It was a subject on which Houston would produce a variety of essays, speeches, and letters, often with particular intensity, as shown by his labours during the last few months of 1885. A program for 'The Study of English,' for example, which had been presented to the Ontario Education Association, appeared in three instalments in the Educational Weekly in the autumn of 1885 [22, 29 Oct, 5 Nov]. While this plan was directed at schools particularly, its principles could be extended to college and university education. '[I]n our schools, colleges, and universities/ Houston wrote 'we have been too long and too much engaged in teaching about English...