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 “standard” approach to institutional history, which is a straight-up narrative dating from maybe 10-20 years before the founding of the institution to somewhere maybe about a decade from the present day.  These come in two varieties – the text-heavy version and the visual-heavy coffee-table version.  If you want to read an almost flawless example of the former, read Martin Friedland’s The University of Toronto: A History.  For the latter, Canada has quite a few plausible candidates, including Eric Damer and Herbert Rosengarten’s UBC: The First Hundred Years, Duncan McDowell’s Queen’s University 1961-2004: Testing Tradition both of which are pretty good.

The problem with this genre though, is that there is a considerable paint-by-numbers aspect to them.  Assuming the institution was crated in the 19^th century, for instance (true of many significant North American universities), campus histories will nearly all cover the following topics:

·       Ludicrous regional/religious rivalries which beset the institution at its birth.

·       Tales of early financial fragility

·       The creation of Actual Professional Faculties

·       Women!  Women are here!

·       Brave Men Run off to Die in Flanders.

·       Student hijinks in the roaring 20s

·       We Definitely Did Not Discriminate Against Jews Around This Time

·       Off to War Again, only this time with More Research.

·       Gosh There are a Lot of Veterans Around

·       Hey, there is Money for Research!  Look at our first famous researchers!

·       Lots of Baby Boomers Means a Chapter or Two on All the New Buildings We had to Build

·       Longhairs and Radicals and Maybe a Sit-in or Two

·       Gosh, Women are on Faculty Now.

·       Have We Lost Our Soul Chasing After So Much Money?  No.  No, we have not.

That’s Canada, anyways.  In the US, there is a lot of space taken up by meaningless name-listing of athletic directors, and the football team’s win-loss records.  If the institution is old enough, you’ll also get some discussion about the institution’s history of slavery and – much later – integration (this could happen in Canada too, but even in 1980 Stanley Frost could write a history of McGill and pass over the issue of James McGill’s slaveholding status in total silence).  In Australia and New Zealand, there is always an early chapter which might be called “Do You Have Any Idea How Hard it is to Attract Decent Faculty when the UK is a Three-Month Boat Ride Away?”  But otherwise, it’s a universal formula. 

The exact mix of these differences is always a bit idiosyncratic – for instance, Helene Bizet’s L’université de Montréal: la quête du savoir has way more about the Catholic church than you’d ever imagine (turns out the key actor who needed to greenlight the 1919 split with Laval was not the Premier of Quebec but Pope Benedict XV).  But the conventions are pretty strict: “thou shalt not speak ill of anyone strongly associated with the institution even if they are kind of dodgy” (Frost’s history of McGill contains a long apologia for Principal Dawson, a “Great Man of Science” despite being the leading opponent to Darwin in North America).  Friedland’s history of U of T is thus quite jarring – in a pleasantly surprising way – when it basically suggests that Banting’s efforts on insulin were a fluke and it was a terrible idea to hand so much of the university’s scientific work to someone quite so mediocre.    

Even histories which take an “outsider” stance – like Joe Frantz’s The Forty-Acre Follies, an unofficial history of the University of Texas, Austin – more or less conform to the speak-no-evil rule.  The closest I have seen anyone come to breaking this rule is Michiel Horn’s The Way Must Be Tried: York University, A History and that was only because so many of the institution’s protagonists seemed to have it in for each other – it’s almost impossible to write about York without getting a little bit in the dirt. 

Much of the artistry in this kind of book lies in knowing how to divide up the story.  A common way to do this is to build the story around significant personages, mainly university presidents.  And that usually makes a certain amount of sense: every university has two or three presidents who really changed the course of the institution, and their tenures make good start and end points.  But you can take this approach too far: Miracle on the Mesa, a History of the University of New Mexico, is entirely built around administrations which, given how many interim presidents the university has had – mainly a legacy of dysfunctional governance, a history of shitshow Presidential searches and a ludicrous tendency for presidents to get fired because of their architectural preferences (is a university built in the Pueblo style actually a university, or can learning only take place in Georgian neo-classical buildings?) – makes for a pretty disjointed narrative.

A very few books break this pattern, and they are the ones worth reading.  Laurentian University: A History does something pretty nifty.  It spends the first seventy-odd pages doing a standard, narrative history of the institution’s development since 1960 (who the presidents were, events in the community and with government), and then spends the next 250 pages on a series of thematic, parallel narrative treatments: students since 1960, faculty at Laurentian since 1960, development of Franco-Ontarian education since 1960, etc.  It’s a more sensible way to interpret developments at an institution than trying to cram all the institutional and social history into every single time-restricted chapter.  It’s my favourite Canadian institutional history.

Then there is Becoming MIT: Moments of Decision, edited by David Kaiser which is a delightfully short history of the remarkable institution.  Brevity is her achieved by jettisoning most of the narrative that clutters up most other histories and focuses simply on a few key episodes in the institution’s history: how it developed its own unique blend of applied and pure sciences, how it narrowly avoided a merger with Harvard in the years around 1900, how it grew during World War II, and how it belatedly came to recognize and address structural sexism in the 1990s.  It obviously passes over an enormous amount in silence and if you’re really into Ernest Renan you might find this approach seriously annoying.  But then again, if what you want is a sense of a complex organization in under 200 pages, then it works well.  A lot more campus histories could probably benefit from this approach.  

 Have a great weekend (read a good book).