In conjunction with the 2002 Congress held at the University of Toronto, Bob Gidney and Wyn Millar organized a symposium, which was generously sponsored by the University of Toronto Press: “The University of Toronto and Its Histories.” Its purpose was both to recognize the publication of The University of Toronto: A History, by Martin Friedland, and to bring together other scholars actively engaged in producing new research about the University. The list of papers on specialized topics is given below and anyone interested in particular contributions should contact the authors themselves.
There were however three papers which our readers may find of broad interest and which we publish here. All three were intended as addresses, conceived with a particular audience in mind and kept within strict time restraints. Thus they were not intended to meet the conventional requirements of a full-dress or formal academic article. We have chosen to publish them in their original format and style with only the most modest editorial changes – almost exclusively those references to other symposium papers or casual remarks intended for the edification or amusement of symposium participants themselves.
Martin Friedland has had a long and distinguished career at the University of Toronto, first as an undergraduate and law student, then as professor and dean at the University of Toronto law school. He is now Professor of Law and University Professor Emeritus. In formulating our plans for the symposium, we put this question to him: how did someone trained in the law turn his hand to writing history? His answer took the form of the paper that follows.
We also include two brief, reflective papers presented as summary pieces to the symposium itself. These were intended not primarily as commentary on Friedland’s book or on the University of Toronto per se, but rather as ruminations on the history and historiography of the Canadian university generally, and they were shaped in part at least in the light of the more specialized papers by other symposium contributors. Their authors, Paul Axelrod and Brian McKillop, are two of the most influential historians of the Canadian university and probably require no further introduction for any reader of Historical Studies in Education.
Contributors: