Make No Small Plans: The University of Calgary at 40.

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

In the 1960s a slew of new universities appeared on the Canadian landscape and, predictably, some 40 years later books are appearing which celebrate some or all of an individual university’s history. By far the best, because it is so comprehensive, well researched, and well written, is James Pitsula’s magnificent As One Who Serves: The Making of The University Of Regina (Montreal: McGill Queen’s, 2006). Rasporich’s contribution is in a different league, but to be fair, it was not intended as a scholarly history of the university. Rather it is a “narrative and memoir” written by a prolific historian, now retired, who also served at one point in his career as the University’s Dean of Social Sciences.

Based on interviews, personal files contributed by others, past issues of campus newspapers, and minutes of the GFC (General Faculty Council, i.e. the Senate) and its committees, the book was written to deadline over a six week period. Under the circumstances, the results are not all that bad. To be sure, in spite of its imaginative title (which pinches a well-used quote from Daniel Burnham, an American architect who added that “a noble logical plan will never die”) the writing is pedestrian, as reflected in the fact that names are sprinkled like chalk dust throughout the text. (Pitsula would have supplied a little anecdotal profile of the most important.) That said, the text is well-illustrated, and with small effort, one can discern the major contours of change in the period which saw the university (like the one in Regina) grow from a stand-alone college to one affiliated with the University of Alberta to stand-alone independence in 1966. Since that time, reflecting in large part the vicissitudes of the province’s economy and the skills of its various presidents and other academic leaders, Rasporich proudly documents how the University of Calgary has now become a major and influential player on the Canadian university scene, whose influence far exceeds that of many of its peers who began about the same time.