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Category: History Lesson

Faculties of Agriculture

Agriculture faculties often sit oddly within the modern university.  I mean this literally in the sense that they are usually off at one end of campus or in some cases several tens of kilometres away from it.  Despite strong roots (heh) in the biological sciences, they get treated as separate entities for reasons that aren’t really evident from a scientific point of view.  The rough analogy from the physical sciences  is computer science, which, like agriculture, has a pretty high

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June 10, 2021 1 Comment

Statues and Names

Let’s talk about Ryerson and McGill. In brief: McGill University is named after James McGill, a Montreal fur-trader and farmer.  He was not a particularly notable figure in life, but after his death in 1813 he left a reasonably large bequest, including most of the land on which the downtown campus now sits, to start a college.  He also over the course of his life owned five slaves (three Black, two Indigenous). In brief: Ryerson University is named for Egerton

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June 3, 2021 4 Comments

Campuses and Univer-Cities

For the last couple of weeks, I have been plowing through three books on universities and their built environments: Paul Venable Turner’s classic tome Campus: An American Planning Tradition, two recent works on universities and cities: Building the Ivory Tower: Universities and Metropolitan Development in the Twentieth Century by LaDale C. Winling, and In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering our Cities by Davarian L. Baldwin, both dealing primarily with urban universities in the United States (though the latter has some

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May 27, 2021 1 Comment

Problems in Writing the History of Academia

All my historian readers seemed to enjoy last Thursday’s piece about writing campus histories, so I thought I would do a quick follow-up on things that drive me spare about the state of the art in writing about academia.  To my mind, there is a single serious problem, and it is this: institutional histories are everywhere, but they are almost all rooted in local and national histories whereas academia is global.  As a result, most institutional histories are limited when it comes to

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May 13, 2021 2 Comments

How to Write a Campus History

Among the many, many things I never thought I would do before getting into this line of work is reading a whole ton of campus histories.  Seriously, I will read almost anything like this.  It’s about the first thing I do when I get to a campus: head to the bookstore and try to find an institutional history.   And having thus become something of a connoisseur, I can give you an overview about the state of the art. Basically, there is a

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May 6, 2021 2 Comments
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