Lost Opportunity

Big and ambitious projects at Canada’s universities are among the less celebrated achievements of our country. What successes our scholars and researchers have given to us and to the world rarely get mentioned in the popular press, let alone held up as points of enduring national pride. Such mammoth undertakings as our own Dictionary of Canadian Biography, the Historical Atlas of Canada, the massive Erasmus, Samuel Coleridge, Émile Zola and John Stuart Mill publications, the equally bold acquisitions from the Lichtenstein Collection by the National Gallery of Canada, and the collecting, particularly from Egypt and China, but also around the world, by Charles Trick Currelly at the Royal Ontario Museum—these were accomplished with vision, knowledge and vigour.

Jason Kalman and Jaqueline du Toit’s Canada’s Big Biblical Bargain: How McGill University Bought the Dead Sea Scrolls chronicles one project that could have joined this pantheon and...