Arts and Science at Toronto: A History, 1827–1990 by Robert Craig Brown (review)

Thanks to the work of many scholars, we know more about the history of the University of Toronto (U of T) than that of any other university in Canada. Historians have mined its accessible and well-stocked archives, and new work continues to appear. Robert Craig Brown, an accomplished historian of Canada, now retired, contributes to this bounty with a study of the Faculty of Arts and Science from the early nineteenth century to 1990.

The subject presented the author with a unique challenge. The Faculty of Arts and Science has been something of a mysterious entity for much of U of T’s history. Not formally constituted until 1906, the faculty, even after that date, was difficult to pin down and describe. Arts and science students have dominated the university numerically (constituting more than 70% of undergraduate enrolments in 1986) and have taken courses throughout the university under various administrative bodies, including the federated colleges and satellite campuses. Arts and science faculty have also provided extensive service teaching for professional programs. As a kind of faculty without borders, the history of Arts and Science is, in many ways, the history of U of T. But in the wake of previous publications, most notably Martin Friedland’s The University of Toronto: A History (2002), and A.B. McKillop’s Matters of Mind: The University in Ontario, 1791–1951 (1994), much of the story has been told. Historically speaking, what does this book add to the record?

Not surprisingly, there are elements of historiographical déjà vu in this study, particularly in its first half. The author draws liberally from Friedland, McKillop, and others in recounting the founding of the university, the various federation arrangements that brought religious colleges under the wing of the lay-governed U of T (while giving them considerable curricular autonomy), the pragmatism of President Robert Falconer’s regime (1907–31), the role of U of T academics in the two world wars, the assorted academic-freedom controversies involving arts professors, and the most famous incidents of student activism in the 1960s and early 1970s. Brown provides some new details – physicist John McLennan made wildly exaggerated claims about the significance of his research and development work in the First World War – but the overall narrative is familiar.

Where the book does contribute originally to the literature is in its discussion of U of T’s administrative and academic politics in the post–Second World War period. The centrality but diffuseness of Arts and Science complicated its governance. Key decisions during U of T’s expansion were made by the president’s office and imposed with minimal consultation on Arts deans, although Claude Bissell modified the top-down approach to some degree – not enough, however, to satisfy Dean Vincent Bladen and some of his successors, particularly Arthur Kruger. The latter despised the new unicameral governing structure of the university, which left deans with “no power.” Kruger also locked horns with President James Ham on numerous occasions and described Simcoe Hall’s budgeting process as a “stupid form of planning.” Some senior administrators, on the other hand, believed that Arts and Science was indulged, inefficient, and continuously unreceptive to change. Similar conflict played out through the “revolutionary” undergraduate curricular changes, ushered in by the (C.B.) Macpherson Report of 1967, which Brown explores soberly and in detail. Those who seek to understand the roots of what insiders sometimes describe as U of T’s “ungovernability” will learn much from Brown’s account.

A discerning historian, Brown always provides context, so that changes at U of T are not discussed in isolation. They are set against the background of economic, social, and political developments in Ontario and the country at large. The book is a valuable addition to the literature on higher education, and if it covers some travelled terrain, it does so well.