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Ernest Sirluck's life has been full of passion and, not infrequently conflict. His childhood and youth as a Jew in a predominantly Mennonite Prairie village, his service as a divisional intelligence officer in Europe during the Second World War, and his experience as a professor and university administrator during a period of dramatic changes produced a man of firm convictions and the ability to fight for them. His story charts his many battles: against antisemitism and Nazism, mediocrity and academic complacency, ideological zealotry, and government and union encroachment on university autonomy. But he is, first and foremost, an educator, and his autobiography provides an intimate intellectual history of mid-century universities, spiced with anecdotes about the many prominent educators he worked with, among them E.K. Brown, A.S.P. Woodhouse, Northrop Frye, and Marshall McLuhan. Born to Russian Jewish parents in Winkler, Manitoba, Sirluck, grew amidst the antisemitism of the 1930s. This was a particularly strong influence in his life -- the swastika-flaunting Canadian Nationalist Party, exploiting the misery of the Great Depression, had found a receptive audience for their Nazi-influenced propaganda in the German-speaking Mennonite community. During the Second World War, Sirluck interrupted his university education to serve in the field with the Canadian army in Europe. After the war he pursued his doctorate while teaching English literature at the University of Toronto, then was appointed to the University of Chicago, where he taught for fifteen years. When he eventually returned to the University of Toronto to become graduate dean and vice-president, he seized the opportunity to initiate an inter-university rationalization of graduate studies and library services throughout Ontario. Subsequently he was appointed president of the University of Manitoba, where a reduced level of public funding and the influence of a union-oriented government led to the university's general unionization and its first strikes. The special value of this work lies in the unique perspective that Sirluck brings to familiar and unfamiliar event and issues. His deeply held beliefs, persuasive analytical powers, and richly detailed memories combine to make this a fascinating autobiography.

Watson Kirkconnell is one of the most familiar figures in the world of Canadian letters. Educated at Queen's and Oxford, he has published several volumes of poetry and poetry translations, was the founding father and first chairman of the Humanities Research Council, a charter member and national president (1942-44, 1956-58) of the Canadian Authors Association, and has shared in university life for 45 years. He has been active in many other areas of public life; as one of the founders of the Prisoners'Aid Society (now the John Howard Society of Manitoba), a joint organizer of the Citizenship Branch, Ottawa, a founder and first president of the Canadian-Polish Society, as well as the Baptist Federation of Canada of which he was national president (1953-56). In widespread recognition of his work in these many fields Dr. Kirkonnell has received twelve honorary doctorates from universities in Canada, the United States, Hungary, and Germany, knighthoods from Poland and Iceland, and numerous awards from other countries. The chronicle of such a full and active career offers a valuable look at many aspects of Canadian life: in his memoirs Dr. Kirkonnell has avoided a merely chronological arrangement of his autobiography but sought rather to take various phases of the Canadian tradition and to analyse his experience of each down through the years. This Slice of Canada demonstrates the author's discerning faculty of observation and his close involvement, not only with the arts, but with education, religion, politics and other areas of Canadian life.

Harold Adams Innis died a quarter century ago. At the time of his death in 1952 he was Canada's pre-eminent scholar in the field of the social sciences. His reputation was based on his monumental contributions to Canadian economic history and the role of the means of communication in shaping history. As so often happens, his ideas were not greatly followed up, except by Marshall McLuhan, for some years after his death, but there is no growing recognition among Canada's scholars of the depth of his perceptions and the fruitfulness of his thought for understanding of Canada's and of world history. A close friend of Innis at the University of Toronto was Donald G. Creighton, who wrote this memoir of his life in the summer of 1953. To this paperback edition of that work, Professor Creighton has added a new introduction on its origins in the university conditions of its time. A personal tribute, the book is written in Creighton's distinctive and elegant style; it is a skilful biography which will serve well to introduce the career, character, and thought of Harold Adams Innis to a new audience. Donald Creighton himself is recognized as one of the outstanding scholars of his time. Like Innis, he has reinterpreted Canadian history in his many books and this finely crafted memoir reveals the gifts of both the biographer and his subject.

Sandra Djwa has provided readers with a fascinating artifact: a cultural biography with a human face. Roy Daniells (1902-1979), an English professor who finished his career at the University of British Columbia, and an outstanding scholar, teacher and poet, influenced at least four generations of students and is the subject of Professing English. Once established as a professor, Daniells was a key figure - a cultural catalyst - in the consolidation of English as a discipline and the development of Canadian literature as a recognised body of writing and a legitimate focus of scholarship, interacting with major personalities of the era like Earle Birney, Northrop Frye, E.J. Pratt, Sinclair Ross, Margaret Laurence and A.S.P. Woodhouse. Djwa's examination of his life is a moving personal story as well as a mini-history of literary studies in Canada. It is also the account of an individual struggling against a strict religious upbringing who turned instead to the devotional poets of the seventeenth century. In this biography, Daniells'life becomes a prism refracting aspects of the discipline - the old ties between religion and literature, the making of a professor, mentorship and the way it functioned, women in the academy and changes in the discipline and the professoriate. His devotion to English studies and his unflagging encouragement of young Canadian writers and students makes Daniells one of the greatest unsung heroes in recent history. Thanks to this wonderful biography, he will receive the recognition he so justly deserves.

As Registrar of Queen's University, Jean Royce shaped the university's development, and personified the university for generations of students. Appointed in 1933 by men who sought to exclude women from positions of authority, Jean Royce navigated the precarious gendered environment of institutional life for thirty-five years. As gate-keeper and talent scout, she encouraged all who qualified, revealing herself out of sympathy with those who would preserve Queen's as Protestant men's club or English-Canadian enclave. Attentive to detail and internationalist in vision, she became the most powerful woman ever to work at Queens. Her forced retirement at 64 devastated her, but following her election by alumni to the Board of Trustees she played a key role in expanding educational opportunities for women.Spanning the first eight decades of the twentieth century, Jean Royce's life provides a lens for looking at working-class family life before the Great Depression, social mobility through education, feminism's continuing presence in the twentieth century, and the constraints and possibilities for single women in work, relationships, cultural life, and international travel. Centrally, her life provides a close look at the development and politics of a major Canadian university.

The Keynesian economist Mabel Timlin, the first woman to be elected President of the Canadian Political Science Association, and first woman to be elected to Section II of the Royal Society of Canada, went from secretary to student to Professor during her years at the University of Saskatchewan (1921 to 1959). In'No Ordinary Academics'Shirley Spafford describes the circumstances and people that turned a department in an isolated prairie university into a thriving intellectual community that would nurture some of Canada's best minds. Politics, Economics, Economic History, and other fundamental determinants of Canadian life arose from the research of liberal thinkers such as Timlin, Frank Underhill, MacGregor Dawson, and Norman Ward, who saw the necessity of the government's role in economic development.These were academics who knew how not to be dull - and this institutional biography is the same. As Spafford narrates the academics'daily lives, their struggles to gain recognition, the transfer of power from the president's office to the peer group of faculty members, and the cross-pollination of ideas with the University of Toronto, the drama of an intellectual community of the University of Saskatchewan is brought forth with an inspired originality, engendered, by the excitement of the place itself.

Anyone interested in Canadian academic affairs, history writing, left-wing politics, or Toronto society will find themselves utterly engaged by the witty and urbane voice behind these memoirs of a man who seemed to know simply everyone. Kenneth McNaught's delightful autobiography mixes acute observations on key political issues with memories of his student days in the 1930s, watercolour painting, and summers on Garden Island.Born in 1918, Kenneth McNaught attended Upper Canada College, North Toronto Collegiate Institute, and the University of Toronto, where he eventually became a history professor. During McNaught's stay at United College of Winnipeg in the1950s, historian Harry Crowe was dismissed when a private letter critical of the administration found its way into the president's hands. McNaught gives a gripping account of his involvement in this landmark case in the history of academic freedom, which resulted in the development of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, and proved to be his most formative experience. He also discusses his role in the League for Social Reconstruction, the turmoil in the universities in the 1960s, Canada's complicity in Vietnam, the campaign against nuclear war, and his reaction to the growing independence movement in Quebec.Conscience and History is a thought-provoking personal look at the ethical questions Canadians have faced in the past fifty years written by one of our leading historians.

Halfway up Parnassus is a personal account of the University of Toronto with particular emphasis on the period when Dr. Bissell was its president, from 1958 to 1971. The first half of that period was the flowering of the old, self-confident university, with its established patterns of government, and its untroubled constituents. The second half saw the slow, powerful emergence of a new university, uncertain of itself and its role, seeking to find a form for democratic aspirations—not, however, without some dramatic confrontations with left-wing students. Nowhere in Canada was the process more sharply defined than at the University of Toronto. This book records that process from the point of view of a major participant. It is also intended as a series of portraits of major academic figures and as an intimate recollection of a society that is passing away.It is not a philosophical book about education, but a human document—an attempt to render the tone of academic society, and in this account Dr. Bissell has combined, to great effect, autobiography, descriptive narration, and historical analysis. The book will be of interest to Canadians concerned about our intellectual and cultural life, and to academic societies everywhere.

The career of Sidney Earle Smith, Dean of Law, Dalhousie University (1929-34), President of the University of Manitoba (1934-44), President of the University of Toronto (1945-59), had a variety of backgrounds which were significant in determining his impressive achievement in Canada's humanistic tradition. He was reared in the vigorous landscape and living of the Maritimes, rigorously trained in the discipline of the law whose traditions he always enjoyed and respected, challenged and stimulated by very different but equally significant administrative problems as president first of a struggling western university (Manitoba), and then of the largest and most complex in Canada (Toronto), and finally was caught up in the compelling swirl of international politics from the office of Secretary of State for External Affairs. At every stage of these activities Sidney Smith made an indelible impression on his associates. One of these, who knew him intimately in the work of the Canadian Association for Adult Education, is the author of this short but revealing biography.Mr. Corbett has carefully and vividly sketched in the backgrounds of his subject's story, has woven into the account with ingenious informality reminiscences of the man and his work by a goodly company of his colleagues, and has brought out his personality, style, methods, beliefs in a persuasive atmosphere of personal warmth and strong academic conviction. This is a book of lively charm to read, and also a valuable recording of a public servant who'left a mark upon his time and his country that the passage of the years will further illuminate.'Its initial appearance in the year of the opening of Sidney Smith Hall, built to house the Faculty of Arts whose interests he had always served with sturdy devotion, is a happy association.

Joanne Tompkins travelled to the Baffin Island community of Anurapaqtuq to take on the job of principal at the local school. This is the fascinating story of her experiences in the four years she spent there and the many challenges she faced. On her arrival in the Inuit village, Tompkins found struggling teachers and failing students in a community that was grappling with social and economic change. Outlining strategies that worked and others that failed, she gives a vivid account of the day-to-day trials and rewards that she and community members experienced as they worked to create a productive and exciting school environment. This engaging and informative account of change in an Inuit school will be of great use to educators and administrators, and appeal to general readers as well. One educator who read the manuscript paid it the compliment of comparing it to Sylvia Ashton-Warner's classic tale of teaching Maori children, Teacher.

Thousands of Western European immigrants streamed into Canada after the Second World War, seeking refuge from the economic devastation of their homelands. Many sought to assimilate as quickly as possible into the Canadian mainstream. Michiel Horn, in Becoming Canadian: Memoirs of an Invisible Immigrant, shares his reflections on the process of social integration. As a Dutch immigrant to British Columbia in 1952, Horn had to make sense of the cultural demands of two worlds. Over forty years later, a professor of Canadian history, he recounts his own personal history, relating it to broader issues.'I have tried.'he writes,'to describe the process of assimilation as I experienced it, and to make sense of the ambivalence immigrants feel towards their adopted country and their country of origin, the sense that they belong to both yet fully to neither.'Horn's autobiography explores the story of his Dutch middle-class family and seeks to answer what it means to replace one nationality with another. He begins with his years in Holland during the Second World War, discusses his family's immigration to Canada, and explains how the family built a life for itself in Victoria. Several of the themes that run throughout the narrative relate to the often uneasy transfer of Dutch values to a Canadian context, the influence that Holland still has on Horn's life, and his own thoughts on multiculturalism as public policy in Canada. Becoming Canadian is a timely memoir, and Horn's consideration of the process of assimilation, and of his own position as an'invisible immigrant,'is topical and revealing.

Robert Barr has been almost completely overlooked by critics and anthologists of Canadian literature, in part because, although he was educated in Canada, he spent most of his life in the United States and England. However, since most of his serious novels are either set in Canada or have some Canadian connection, Barr deserves attention. The Measure of the Rule, originally published in 1907, is the nearest he came to writing an autobiographical novel. It concerns the Toronto Normal School and the experiences there in the 1870s of a young man who undoubtedly is Barr himself. In this novel, Barr is exorcising unhappy memories and is ironic, even bitter, about the school's quality of education, the rigid discipline observed by its staff and their indifference to their students, and the sexual segregation practiced. A number of men under whom Barr actually studied are vividly caricatured. As a realistic study of Ontario's only central teacher-training institution in the late nineteenth century, The Measure of the Rule will appeal both to those interested in Canadian fiction of that period and to those more concerned with the evolution of the system of education established by Egerton Ryerson. Also included with this reprint of the novel is an essay originally published in 1899 and entitled'Literature in Canada.'In this essay, Barr elaborated upon his opinions of the school system and its quality of education.