The College on the Hill: A New History of the Ontario Agricultural College, 1874-1999 (review)

Writing effective higher-education institutional histories is never easy. Too often, charting the development of universities in Canada has fallen into, rather than avoided, the pitfalls of mundanity, as if the history is allegorically representing the mortar itself. Chapter by chapter, the rise of the institution is hagiographically documented, through the laying of the cornerstone to the establishment of the mandate, to the appointment of the administrators, the hiring of the professors, and the enrolment of the first students, then onto the success of these three groups of people over time. The university is on the road inevitably to bigger and better things. Histories are written to explain a current, most often positive, institutional disposition or embodiment and are endemically imbued with an intellectual bias. These parochialisms are difficult to avoid, even in the presence of a strong argumentative thesis.

Ross and Crowley's College on the Hill both succeeds and succumbs. It is an entertaining and responsible book on the rise of an integral force in post-secondary education in Ontario, given that the Ontario Agricultural College was instituted, and never really forgot, its dual original purposes. It was a place for imparting agricultural and rural knowledge and contemporary values while striving at the same time to conform to prosaic and often frustratingly futile directives of the Ontario government, the college's sugar-daddy. College on the Hill clearly outlines the tension between these two broad missions, whether officially recognized in budget and charter or in the academic culture influenced by a variety of factors: presidents' personalities, proclivities, and political skills; professors' particular research and teaching interests; student life and the education of future rural, but often, urban, industrial, and political leaders; and the ubiquitous curricular changes and vicissitudes in departmental formation and reformation. These dynamics underlay the on-going tripartite struggle among government, institutional freedom and autonomy, and rural society and industry; between science, religion, and technology, mass production versus individualism, and emphasis on graduate work vis-à-vis the need to learn the mechanics of crop rotation. The book uncovers the complexity of the Agricultual College and highlights an institution with a clearly multifaceted and pluralistic - or bifurcated? - role in society, tugged to polar ends by social, economic, and political conditions. It is not a schizophrenic school, but one that, by the 1990s, had settled into a role of international player in research into agricultural science, technology, theory, and practice.

The College on the Hill has definite strengths in its sensitivity to the socio-historical context - any university history of significant intellectual value nowadays needs to have this quality - and argues the reasons for the current prestige and contributions of the Agricultural College in the field of rural development. Because of its purpose and audience, the book also devolves, seemingly unavoidably in institutional histories, to a discussion of a great school, a fait accompli that emasculates many of its more provocative elements. It is also, puzzingly, printed in an awkward landscape style throughout. While social conditions, intellectual and curricular movements, demographic and social analyses of Ontario society, local and provincial political cultures, and women and ethnicity in academe are in various degrees well treated, in the end the history remains couched in the inevitable steps to maturity. The obligatory lists of professorial, student, and alumni accomplishments are included as if to legitimize an institution that, as in the story, was the train that could. Science was pursued with 'intelligence and determination,' an administrator demonstrated his 'usual sagacity,' and, at one point the school 'seemed as solid and upright as the man heading it.' But what of the claim that, in a campus literary society in the nineteenth century, 'lay the origins of the international successes achieved by the University of Guelph debaters' one hundred...