The Varsity will turn 125 years old on October 7, 2005, and the staff have spent the past few months looking over old copies of the paper (which you cana see for yourself in the Robarts library Microfilm room, where every page back to 1880 is waiting for your perusal).
One of the most important and humbling lessons we’ve found while browsing those decades-old issues is that a school year is a shockingly brief period of time. Scroll through one of those reels of microfilm and you can easily skim a year’s worth of issues in half an hour and still come up with a pretty good impression of the main concerns of the day. In one sense, this is kind of demoralizing: realizing that all the work of the writers, editors, and photographers will, in a few short years, amount to a few flimsy metres of scratchy microfilm. And that in many cases, those fragile records will be the only evidence left of the activities of U of T students and faculty for that year.
But at the same time, this realization can be liberating: the harsh glare of history is focused elsewhere at the moment, and we’re free to do what we want.
University is traditionally a place for doing improper or inadvisable things, which in stupid movies about universities usually means public nudity, substance abuse, academic flameout, or a combination of all three. But in real life, the possibilities for creative rule-breaking are much richer, and the rewards more lasting. Take mavericks who changed their respective fields by combining novel new approaches: Marshall McLuhan, Wayne Gretzky, Frida Kahlo, Richard Dawkins. They refused to do things the way everyone else did, took a chance on doing it differently, and they made something new. There was very little streaking involved, (as far as we know).
University, especially one as large and varied as U of T, gives you the freedom to sample different disciplines, take chances, do things differently, and break or bend the rules of everyday life. Take that language class, try out for that sports team, discover your secret passion for 16th-century Icelandic poetry. One thing we can tell you, having observed U of T life for 125 years, is that if you take those risks and end up creating something amazing and new, the world will thank you for it. But if your gamble doesn’t succeed, you’re among friends. And in the year 2130, the dreamers, the achievers, the mavericks, and the conformists will all be together on that little roll of microfilm.
