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professional obligation, and personal decision, and the teaching staff would, therefore, play the determining role in its government. In short I was arguing for the kind of university that Professor Belshaw has devoted his book to expounding and defending. (CLAUDE T. BISSELL) Claude Bissell, Halfway up Pamassus: A Personal Account of the History of the University of Toronto, "932-197". University of Toronto Press, "97, $12.50 This book is essential reading for the more than one hundred thousand living Varsity alumni and alumnae, as well as for all students of higher education in Canada. The former will probably be sadder for reading it and the latter should be wiser. Neither are likely to be elated by this goodtempered but depressing narrative of a loyal president's vain struggle to salvage Canada's leading university. When Bissell came to the University of Toronto as a freshman in "93Z he found it a 'great good place.' The best pages in the book are undoubtedly those describing the old-fashioned 'elitist' university of the 19305: there were giants in those days, whose names were Brett, Innis, and Woodhouse . The "9405 are a vague outline: Bissell was away at war and the university, robbed of both staff and students, was functioning at half steam. Towards the end of the decade the veterans came flooding into the ivory tower and the university would never be the same again. The fifties were the period of Bissell's rapid rise to prominence on the Canadian university scene: dean of men, assistant to the president, vice-president, president of Carleton University, and finally, in "958, president of his alma mater. With the 19605 came the fat years of skyrocketing enrolments and a massive construction program on the Toronto campus. But the Trojan horse of affluence carried enemies into the citadel: subsidized student revolutionaries, hastily recruited junior instructors, and a few lateblooming tenured radicals who saw in the university a 50ft-bellied victim and in its president an amiable idealist reluctant to deal ruthlessly with hooligans. It was all over in a year or two, and members of the teaching staff, who had for the most part stood idly by, began dazedly to realize that their university was losing its place in the first rank of intellectual institutions. One marvels that the victim of such treachery and indifference can look back 50 calmly and generously on the events and persons of that decade, and even contrive to detect, in the garrulousness and pettifoggery sanctioned by new council and committee structures, evidence of openness and vitality. The writing of this meticulously reconstructed and elegantly phrased record must surely be reckoned the crowning work of HUMANITIES 427 supererogation in the distinguished but unhappy career of Toronto's eighth president. (DAVID M. HAYNE) Vincent Lucci, Phonologie de l'Acadien, vol. VII, Studia Phonetica, 1973, viii, 1.50; Allan Grundstrom and Pierre Leon, editors, Interrogation et intonation, vol. VIII, Studia Phonetica, 1.973, xii, 167 The title of Lucci's work and its subtitle, Parler de la region de Moncton, Nouveau Brunswick, Canada, are somewhat misleading, as the study is based on the dialect of some half-dozen informants from villages near Moncton, whose average age at the time of the investigation was over 75 and who were all of rural background with little formal education. Although the author's intention is to present a picture of Acadian speech that is as little influenced as possible by contact with English or educated French, he may have given a description of a speech no longer current for the region. Lucci begins with a brief historical survey of French in Acadia, population tables (based on the 1961 census) and a critical review of earlier studies, particularly those of J.E. Garner (1952) and G. Massignon (1962). Then follows the phonological study proper, a functional analysis of the sound system of Acadian following the methodology used by Andre Martinet in his investigation of the Franco-proven~al dialect of Hauteville in Savoie (1956). The method consists essentially of comparing sounds in minimal pairs with a view to establishing an inventory of the phonemes of the dialect. Here Mr Lucci follows faithfully and competently the Martinet...

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