“The truth about stories,” Thomas King opens his 2003 Massey Lecture, “is that’s all we are.”
There are stories everywhere, not just in novels, newspapers, or myths acknowledged as such. Our lives are made up of them, and the ones that we tell ourselves tell us who we are, where we’re from, and what we’re allowed to do. This is a story about the date 1827 on U of T T-shirts, when King’s College was founded, but really it is about U of T’s philosophical founders, and why we never talk about them. But forgive me, I should begin in medias res.
“The Task Force [on University Resources] thus recommends that we continue to advocate for responsible self-regulation of tuition. On this model, the University would be responsible for establishing the appropriate tuition level for each of its programs, reflecting more accurately actual operating costs, quality of the experience, and demand. Included in the concept of self-regulation is an elimination of the restrictions on ancillary fees…”
This is taken from the synthesis report of Towards 2030, the University of Toronto administration’s plan for the next 20-odd years. You will recognize various elements of this story without me having to tell it to you. As with all myths, the fun is in the telling: you can pick and choose various elements and combine them to tell a whole new tale. Here we have rising fees to cover a provincial funding gap. But this time, deregulation is called self-regulation, with the word “responsible” tacked on.
Here’s another excerpt. In the period between now and 2030 the number of Ontarians aged 18 to 24 years—in other words, of undergraduate age—is expected to grow substantially, to as much as 80,000 above 2005 levels. The Ontario government expects that at least half of these potential undergraduates will be looking for a post-secondary education in Toronto.
“The University of Toronto is already working closely with the Government of Ontario and with sister institutions on regional plans responsive to the coming wave of undergraduate and graduate students in the Toronto region. It seems clear, however, that our University’s most important contribution to meeting new enrolment pressures will arise through proportionately greater growth in our graduate and second-entry professional programs, rather than primarily from undergraduate expansion.”
Here you will recognize the story of U of T’s role in broader society as an elite research institution and professional school. This falls under what I deem “the Great Minds for a Great Future” cycle. Under the rubric of stories that tell us who we are, it’s very interesting how we assume a demand for graduate and professional programs, even though what the province highlights is that Toronto is where demand for undergraduate places will be highest.
In a plebiscite held in the fall of 2008 by the University of Toronto Students Union, 93 per cent of the 5,398 students, faculty, and staff voted against the adoption of 2030. President Naylor responded that students didn’t understand what the plan is about, and the Governing Council ratified the 2030 framework anyways.
What has been notably lacking from the Towards 2030 discussion is any reference to U of T’s own history. Even among its critics, the current discourse about the University of Toronto maintains that it is an elite institution, that conservatism is our tradition, and that we have not, officially at least, considered alternate roles the school could play in society. We need to tell ourselves additional narratives. Canada’s foremost intellectual and author of 2008’s A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada, John Raulston Saul calls the deregulation of tuition at U of T “a betrayal of the idea introduced by responsible government and Robert Baldwin—a betrayal of the University of Toronto.”
King’s College Circle is named after an earlier incarnation of U of T. There are few physical remains of the former institution— the reconfigured observatory that now houses UTSU, the elm trees by Whitney Hall that were once part of a mighty forest—yet the attitudes that pervade in the 2030 document reflect a similar philosophy regarding the university’s place in society as those held by the man who negotiated the King’s charter, John Strachan.
Strachan was a member of the Family Compact, a small, powerful clique that ran Upper Canada as an oligarchy for much of the early 19th-century. Like others from his caste, Strachan received appointments from the Lieutenant Governor and held an unelected position on the legislative council from 1820 to 1841. He was wealthy: by way of comparison, the 150-acre plot of land allotted as the site for King’s College (from College to Bloor, from Queen’s Park to St. George) cost the same amount as Strachan’s lavish home. It is widely believed that Strachan’s conversion to Anglicanism was motivated by political convenience, though he remained a staunch defender of the faith. It was his stipulation that all members of King’s College be members of the Church of England.
The courtyards and halls of Trinity College still honour Strachan—who founded the college as protest against the new U of T—yet there’s nary an oncampus remembrance for Robert Baldwin, the man who transformed Strachan’s religiously-controlled elite into the publicly controlled civic university.
I receive most of my information about our school’s King’s College days while sitting in the Flavelle House office of Professor Martin Friedland. Friedland is a former dean of the law faculty, and the man U of T chose to write its official history, published in 2002. He says that while the transition from an Anglican King’s College to a secular University of Toronto changed the nature of the university, it didn’t have an immediate effect on who taught, ran, or attended lectures at the school.
Dennis McKim, a PhD student who is writing his dissertation on the intersection of religion and politics in 19th-century British North America, sees it slightly differently. While it’s true that the culture at the newly-built University College was still informed by Christian values, U of T’s existence represented a shift away from the highly sectarian social divisions that had come before.
Says McKim: “What the advent of U of T eventually represented was a shift to a more pluralistic and small-l liberal conception of Canadian society, in which people of different backgrounds would be educated together, and that there would be an effort to transcend those parochial, religious, and ethnic class differences and divisions.”
