Making a Multiversity

York University is living in interesting times. Another chapter in its seemingly interminable history of strike action is now closing, with a walkout by contract faculty and teaching and graduate assistants. For months, negotiations were locked, crippling much of the functioning of the institution, including the regular offering of classes. The strike became the longest-running post-secondary walkout ever in English Canada, and ended only with back-to-work legislation. Despite this forced settlement, the future remains uncertain. What happens months or years from now at York will surely be predicated on its unremitting cultures of social and academic tension—interdisciplinary, interdepartmental, interpersonal and intercultural.

But, like other Canadian universities that have faced similar challenges, York has adapted to stay productive, accountable and, most importantly, solvent. For an institution launched in the lead-up to the 1960s-era explosion of university enrollments, with the provincially mandated goal of delivering rapid growth, the university’s accomplishments are substantial. Its faculty have gained an impressive reputation in teaching, research and service to society against a backdrop of almost continual expansion whose pace has been little less than staggering.

To what extent can York’s history be seen to represent what other, much older (and now, mostly smaller) universities have endured? And to what extent was it a unique struggle that only a university of York’s origins and inimitable development could have encountered? Michiel Horn’s The Way Must Be Tried: York University Remembered and John T. Saywell’s Someone to Teach Them: York and the Great University Explosion, 1960–1973 each give compelling answers. Both books, by York historians and professors emeriti, are strongly positioned. Horn, a faculty member at Glendon College since 1968 and now York’s official historian, has chronicled the university’s development to 1985, when Harry W. Arthurs took over as president. Saywell, York’s dean of arts and sciences and later dean of arts from 1964 to 1973, has written a personal and pensive memoir of his time as administrator.

Horn’s book—its title a translation of York’s Latin motto—is grounded in research using archival and secondary literature as well as a series of interviews with former administrators, staff, faculty and students. He emphasizes York’s successes, but by no means avoids its obstacles and problems. The result is a history that effectively delineates the university as observers and participants broadly saw it over time. Horn begins with the conception of a new Toronto university, as envisioned in the 1950s by some of the city’s business people and professionals. He then describes the quick actualization of this vision through York’s early subsidiary status with the University of Toronto followed by its brief existence in the idyllic setting of what would later become its second campus at Glendon College, and ends with its landing in a nondescript patch of former farmland on the outer fringes of northern Toronto.

In its first quarter century, York more than met the ambitious targets set by the provincial government to deal with the explosion in university enrollments during in the 1960s, while it forged its own distinctive model of interdisciplinary education. The university’s greatest practical failure, at least until the mid 1970s, was in failing to bridge the deep divisions within its administrative and faculty ranks. These boiled over in a highly public way in 1970, when the departure of the university’s founding president, Murray Ross, led to a fissure between supporters of the two main contenders to replace him: John Saywell and James Gillies, then dean of administrative studies. An uneasy compromise was reached with the selection of an outsider, David Slater. But the new president’s indecisive handling of a budget crisis soon led to a forced resignation. Only with the appointment of H. Ian Macdonald as president in 1974 was relative harmony restored.

Horn touches on incidents of student activism in the 1960s and ’70s, and the perceived “Americanization” of York’s faculty ranks in the late 1960s. Neither phenomenon was unique to York. By the mid 1960s, student unrest was a fact of life in many universities across the continent, while the dearth of Canadian doctorate holders meant that newly minted universities in this country had little choice but to look outside, especially southward, for recruits. Horn pinpoints one important way in which York’s development was unusual. “The existence of an older, larger, better-funded university downtown has shaped York throughout its first half-century,” he notes. It was a state of affairs, Horn intimates, whose impact has not disappeared even today. Nonetheless, his prognosis for the future is upbeat:

The discursive flow of voices that arises from Horn’s use of his interview material produces a welcome, collaborative feel. With a litany of names and memories, at times this account resembles an expansive, richly detailed yearbook—one adorned with ubiquitous headshots of men in suits, groups of proud members assembled for important events and forbidding bunker shots of the main Keele campus, which for years was seen by many of its denizens as, for example, a “hideous wasteland” in dire need of an aesthetic makeover.

John Saywell’s memoir offers a spartan contrast when placed alongside Horn’s lushly illustrated volume. Sharp, frank and unconcerned with roseate reminiscences (even his book’s title—excerpted from a 1963 report to the Ontario government—carries a sardonic punch), Saywell relives his time as an academic administrator immersed in a cauldron of intellectual debate and frequent disagreement.

The sense of manipulation that Saywell felt at the hands of the charismatic Murray Ross, thanks to “a lack of transparency, and a widespread lack of trust” frames much of his tale. His narrative’s climax is a nuanced retelling of the 1970 crisis over the choice of Ross’s replacement. Clearly, Saywell still smarts at the political and personal machinations of the search process. Although he evinces some sympathy for the ultimately successful candidate, David Slater, and the “unnecessary tragedy” of Slater’s later resignation, Saywell comes across as somewhat weary from the incessant meetings, councils and hallway deliberations. Never dull company, he is honest in sharing his disillusionments. His war stories of colourful personalities in conflict and alliance (some of them best left to a campfire on a dark and foreboding night) provide a useful guide for any aspiring administrator in today’s managerially complex post-secondary environment. For example, his discussion of sabbaticals at York in the early 1970s, which defines educational leaves as being “too often … recharging the mind on a Spanish beach,” is germane and entertaining; so too his description of early curriculum committees being “created, convened, disbanded, and reconstituted.” York’s original context may have been unique, but Saywell makes clear that many of its growing pains and periodic discontents were timeless in nature.

In his concluding, reflective chapter, Saywell extends some of the specific arguments made throughout his story into general assertions on what he sees as the wider lessons of York’s historical development. Among the most significant is his call for streaming in the current Canadian university system:

Noting that York’s official plan outlines a program to transform the university into being more research intensive, Saywell notes that “lower teaching loads will follow as surely as night follows day. All faculty in the chosen few and most in the aspiring many will want to participate in what Jacques Barzun lamented in 1968 as ‘the flight from the classroom’.”

Although Horn’s history is the macro overview to Saywell’s micro quasi-primary document, the two books converge in important ways. Neither is an overly hagiographic account, despite Horn’s greater preference for positive achievements than the less sanguine Saywell. Also, both give similar views of key events and personalities. For example, Murray Ross is portrayed in each book as quirky and untrustworthy but vaguely tolerable, given his personal dynamism and enthusiastic ambitions for York and its future. In contrast, David Slater is seen by both authors as a nice guy hard done by.

Tellingly, both accounts depict York in its first decade and a half as a largely masculine construct. In Saywell, nary a mention is made of women and their input at York up to 1972, while in Horn the role of women is hardly touched upon until more than halfway through the book, starting with an assertion in reference to the early days that “[the university] may have been free of racism, but not of misogyny.” “In many ways…,” Horn asserts, “York was … a man’s world.” Despite such initially tenacious patriarchal roots, the university’s image of newness and openness made it attractive to students of either sex, some of whom became critical activists and, later, members of the university administration and the professoriate. Faculty members were given relatively free rein to mould their teaching and research interests, while chairs, deans and members of the board of governors and senate had room to push through organizational innovations of their own making. Such conditions were largely unavailable in universities almost anywhere else.

For Horn and Saywell, York’s history is best seen through the eyes of those who lived it—a sometimes capricious, biased approach, to be sure, but one that lends an engaging sense of immediacy to what could otherwise have been bland university annals. Each author alludes to the sense of time as a tight constraint in forming the institution. As much as change could be radically pushed (Horn notes that, according to some, the university seemed to have grown too quickly), the process inevitably seemed sluggish to its main instigators, due to the realities of constructing a brand new institution in such short order. Horn’s history is buoyant and optimistic; Saywell’s book, replete with contested minutiae characteristic of administrative cutthroat politics, remains punchy. Neither is a dispassionate account. Both are sure to be consulted by scholars of higher education, as well as by those with more generalist curiosity.

Since its founding, York has invariably met crises head on, most of which were efficaciously resolved. They were often succeeded by new ones, but none was so serious as to negate York’s gradually solidifying claim as a premier intellectual institution in Canada. Ambitious dreams, ideological ferment and expansion unmatched by any other Canadian university have been the trademarks of York’s first half century. Horn and Saywell show that these are not soon to be replaced at what is now an academic colossus still learning to walk as an adult.