Chris Kobrak

Chris Kobrak was an American of German/Irish background who spent much of his academic life in Paris. But this is my story about Chris's Canadian adventure.

In 2003 five publicly minded Canadian businessmen decided that it would be useful to have a Chair in Canadian Business and Financial History at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. To that end, they contributed Can$3 million to establish a Chair in the subject, to be known as the Wilson/Currie Chair, after the two lead donors—L. R. (Red) Wilson and Dick Currie. Both individuals were highly successful not only in their careers but also as Chancellors of McMaster University and the University of New Brunswick, respectively. Three other individuals, James Fleck, Anthony Fell, and the Honorable Henry N. R. (Hal) Jackman contributed Can$250,000 each, and because James Fleck was a faculty member, the university matched that gift.

In addition to the Can$3 million from the five donors, John McArthur, former Dean of the Harvard Business School, contributed an additional US$50,000, and the late Michael Bliss, University of Toronto Emeritus Professor and author of Northern Enterprise: Five Centuries of Canadian Business,¹ contributed his business history collection to Rotman's Business Information Centre (BIC) library.

In the July 2004 press release announcing the Chair, a first in Canada, Dean Roger Martin stated, "Today's business leaders need to be able to place the business problems they face within a historical and societal context so they can understand business trends from the past and use that information to anticipate future changes in the marketplace." Subsequently, Rotman expanded on the press release and indicated that an international search would be conducted with advertisements in the Economist and other international publications. The original advertisement stated: "The chair holder will have an internationally distinguished record of excellence in research and teaching and provide academic leadership for the School's scholarly activities in the area of business history. The appointment will be effective July 1, 2007."

This proved optimistic. The process took much longer. There were a number of issues, including that identified by Tom McCraw, the former Isidor Strauss Chair at Harvard Business School, who John McArthur said was the best recruiter ever. McCraw complained about the difficulty of convincing colleagues as to who would be a suitable fit—they always wanted someone exactly like themselves. McCraw said he spent a disproportionate amount of time convincing his colleagues otherwise. Above and beyond that significant issue was the limited supply of business historians with "an internationally distinguished record of excellence in research and teaching" in Canadian business and financial history.

As the years passed, the donors, understandably, became impatient. Then, in 2009, I was attending the Business History Conference in Milan. One of my Rotman colleagues, Don Brean, had told me to get to know Chris Kobrak from ECSP. As I recorded in my diary at the time, "Met Don Brean's friend—Chris Kobrak who presented on Biz History & Economic Performance—very impressive." With Don's help, we invited Chris to become a visiting professor at the Rotman School of Management.

Chris, with his boundless curiosity for new and different experiences, accepted the invitation. Together in 2012 we team-taught a course comparing the U.S. and Canadian financial systems from the late eighteenth century to the 2008 credit crisis. It was a wonderful learning experience for me, as I consider myself more of Main Street business historian as distinct from a Wall Street business historian. We met for four days in Paris in fall 2011 to prepare our course outline. For anyone who knew Chris, you can imagine how uproarious the sessions were. Not being a financial historian, I asked him why we were including a session on housing. He looked at me in astonishment and asked if I had ever heard of Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.

This got my competitive juices flowing. I did my research and found that Canada's housing policy had been shaped in the 1930s by the Great Depression, which hit Canada harder than any other developed country. The author...