The Varsity wasn’t always the lithe, stunningly handsome publication that you hold in your hands right now. When it published its first issue, on October 7, 1880, it was a cramped little booklet published once a week and mostly concerned itself with provincial education policy and occasional rambling letters on what universities were like in Europe. Although it’s interesting as a historical artifact, it was, quite frankly, a fairly drab and dull little paper. Copies sold for 5 cents each.
Volume One, Number One of The Varsity opened with an editorial entitled “The Start” and it is, I’m sad to say, a terrible piece of writing.
Obtuse, pointlessly wordy, annoyingly hesitant yet also pompous and self-important, it’s a good example of a peculiarly Victorian style: “The Varsity starts on its career unattended by malevolence and amid the hearty “God-speed-you!” of friends,” it reads, after blathering needlessly for an entire paragraph about a bunch of New York Times articles from the previous year.
“…[O]ur intentions are very demure: not a guiding star, not an interpreter, but a register of opinion in and out of the University in matters of education as unbiased annalist of University life; and, in this last connexion, a strenuous advocate of what constitutes individual well-being. Efficiency from each of these points of view will demand from the undergraduates intellectual effort of no small significance.”
Thankfully, over the years, a lot more than the writing style has changed: in the same issue, and also on the front page, was an article entitled “Co-Education in University College,” and opened with the line: “The question of co-education of the sexes in College for the training of adults is still a vexed one, and some time must elapse before it can be regarded as finally disposed of.” I am proud to say that The Varsity advocated women’s admission to U of T a full three and a half years before the first female undergraduates walked through the door at University College on March 6, 1884.
I may not like the style of that first Varsity, and it’s easy to pick on its florid verbiage and stuffy tone. But for all these superficial complaints, I think the message of that first Varsity is a noble one of optimism, equality, breadth of belief and opinion, and intellectual and moral courage.
“[We] desire that the University of Toronto shall possess the best university paper in [North] America…” the editors wrote in that first issue. We still desire that, although I know we have a lot of work to do. If someone reads this editorial another 125 years from now, I hope they’ll overlook its quaint style and see that while the words change, the message still applies.
