Matters of Mind: The University of Toronto 1791-1951

Alexander D. Gregor is associate dean of the Faculty of Education at the
University of Manitoba and co-editor of Postsecondary Education in
Canada: The Cultural Agenda.

This thorough and comprehensive examination of the development of
university education in Ontario not only provides an invaluable insight
into the character of Canadian higher education as a whole, but also
examines the intellectual and institutional developments in higher
education against the broad backdrop of their social context, and not as
some self-contained and self-determined entity. By reconstructing the
forces shaping the larger society, the author is able to explain and
interpret what would otherwise seem like strange and arbitrary changes
within the universities themselves.

The study begins with the first formal stirrings of institutionalized
higher education, and extends to the period of adjustment immediately
following World War II. (The period after that, which involves the
growth and development of mass higher education, would require another
whole volume, and is therefore quite sensibly not addressed herein.)

Scrupulously researched and documented, the work is nonetheless
presented in a very readable form, with a prose style unintimidating to
the general reader. Emphasis is not fixed on organizational and
curricular issues alone. The story is told in large part through the
lives and words of the principal players, inside and outside the
academy; and in similar fashion, intriguing detail is included about the
changing circumstances and character of the student population. Against
this backdrop, McKillop provides a masterly analysis of the development
of the academic disciplines (which similarly were shaped as much by the
external forces of religion and society as by any inner epistemological
logic) and of the gradual emergence of a uniquely Canadian academic
culture.

Matters of Mind is required reading for any-one who wants to understand
the Canadian university.