form of summer courses in Strasbourg and Nice and, through University Extension, at Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon. The Aix programme was introduced in 1977 and died in 1993, the victim of fiscal restraint.
Behind the facts, of course, lie thirty years of trial and error, as a succession of men and women of goodwill tried to create structures that would enable French majors to spend a substantial amount of academic time in France. The benefits of such a concept appear self-evident, but it has proved surprisingly difficult to put into practice. Like most forms of social history, what came to be known as Study Elsewhere has a substantial prehistory, much of which has been lost. As early as 1950, possibly earlier, the Faculty of Arts calendar had offered dispensation from attendance at lectures and May examinations to third-year students “who agree to spend at least eight months of that year in one or both of the two foreign countries
whose language and literature they have chosen as honour subjects.” In February 1951, in response to a request from the French cultural services in Ottawa, C.D. Rouillard submitted a series of detailed proposals designed to improve the opportunities for study in France. While recognizing the generosity of the French government with regard to graduate study, “it is a pity,” he wrote, “to postpone until then the stimulation as well as the cultural and linguistic enrichment that comes from a year in France, and I should like to see instituted as soon as possible the regular practice of an optional ’Junior Year in France.’ A number of students have since the war as well as before, spent their Junior year abroad with great profit, despite the difficulty of finding a suitable programme of courses among the more highly specialized offerings of French universities.” While nothing came of these proposals, Rouillard’s far-sightedness – in recognizing the advantages of a group of undergraduates working together in France under the supervision of a Toronto
faculty member and the need for governments (both federal and provincial) to implement the principle of reciprocal scholarships and assistantships to offset those already offered to Canadians by the French government – should be a matter of record.
What kind of experience was offered by the junior year in France in those pre-Strasbourg, unstructured days? One veteran of the 1950s, now a senior librarian at the University of Toronto, has recorded her recollections; they offer an excellent summary of the joys and frustrations that successive generations of students would encounter.
We were really pushed in off the end of the dock – just told to find courses as close to the U of T calendar as we could ... We all began by taking courses in the
Cours de Civilisation, some of which were pretty basic, although the faculty was good. We met a lot of foreign students there, but no French ones. I found other courses and some German ones at the Sorbonne, and eventually some great history courses at the Institut des Sciences Politiques, where I was ejected one day for wearing slacks. Food was still rationed then in Britain but not in France, and we all put on weight. The student meals, heavily subsidized, were extraordinarily cheap. We also had to take TB tests ... We learned so much – not just from the courses, but talking to the students, theatre, travelling and sightseeing. It was also a great change from the coddling of residence and home life. Dealing with the French bureaucracy for the permis de séjour and the three days it took to register made us wonder if we’d done the right thing, but I don’t think any of us have any doubts about it now. I still think it was the best year of my life. Hemingway was right to say that being twenty in Paris is a movable feast
... The bureaucracy at U of T was almost as bad on our return. George Brown of the History Department had let me go, but was on sabbatical when I got back and no one wanted to let me into Fourth Year. Professor Rouillard had the measles and the French Department didn’t want to know about me either ... The German Department said they hoped I’d had a good time and were as interested in my travels as my courses. It was two months before I could get an ATL card and take books out of the Library legally.
Character forming as all this was, French majors clearly deserved better, and between 1960 and 1963 Rouillard devoted his considerable energy to getting a programme launched. The initial move came from Gérald Antoine, who immediately following a year in Toronto as visiting professor, was elected rector of the new Université d’Orléans and in that capacity was anxious to develop
exchange programmes with North America. Although these negotiations to set up a junior year abroad in Orléans were quickly squashed at the ministerial level (literary studies were to be developed at Tours rather than Orléans, and Tours already had one North American “programme”), certain details from the Rouillard-Antoine correspondence are worth quoting in the light of later developments. What Rouillard had in mind was something like the existing and well-proven American models, adapted to Canadian conditions and needs. When asked to be more specific about these differences, he wrote: “Nos étudiants étant mieux préparés, grâce à une scolarité plus longue, aux études françaises, le niveau des études poursuivies en France pourrait être plus élevé et le travail plus intensif ... Certains programmes de ’Junior Year’ semblent présenter un côté mondain qu’il nous paraît souhaitable d’éviter. Leur coût élevé favorise les étudiants aisés
au détriment de ceux qui, intellectuellement plus doués, sont moins fortunés.” (In its final year, 1992-93, the Aix programme costs students an average of $16,000, or double what they would have paid for a year at Toronto: plus ça change.)
Equally perceptive was the response of Dean Vincent Bladen of the Faculty of Arts on 18 January 1962. “I am delighted by the proposal and hope that the proposed centre will be established. But should there not be some special provision at Toronto for French students of English (or possibly of other subjects)? I would like some thought given to this.” Thirty years on, with the advantage of hindsight, it is fair to say that while plenty of thought was given to the idea of reciprocity – it was, for example, built into the formal agreements with Aix drawn up in 1977 – little was done about it in practice. The success of the
Erasmus programme in Europe, as well as the more recent exchanges set up between the government of Ontario and certain European regional governments, make it clear that real reciprocity, in terms of shared costs and transfer credits, will be at the heart of the study elsewhere programmes of the future. It was the starting-point of discussions in the 1990s between the department chair and the Université de Montpellier, with a view to setting up a genuine exchange programme.
Touraine – where the best French is spoken, or so we used to be told – having proved impossible, the focus turned to Strasbourg. In addition to its overall academic reputation and strength in linguistics, it had the advantage for students in Modern Languages and Literatures (mll) of proximity to Germany. Once more, personal contact with a former visiting professor, M.-F. Guyard, was crucial to
the negotiations, and in the fall of 1962, a detailed plan for a junior year programme was drawn up by Eugène Joliat, after consultation with Professor Guyard as to local conditions, student housing, and overall costs. In January 1963, President Bissell informed the department that the cost of the programme would be met by the Varsity Fund. At this juncture, less than three months before application deadlines, a new stumbling-block emerged rather closer to home. Writing directly to Bissell, the heads of German, Russian, and Italian and Hispanic Studies voiced their strong opposition to the French Department’s proposal. The actual terms of their objection are a matter for conjecture, since the document in question has been excised from the Rouillard archives. But from the minutes of various mll meetings and reading between the lines of Rouillard’s diplomatic responses, it is clear that in a system in which students were obliged to study two
modern languages, a year in France devoted mainly to French was felt to be disadvantageous to the other languages.
Whatever view one takes of this filibuster, it must be said that professors Rouillard and Joliat weathered the crisis with remarkable tact and deftness of footwork. A revised plan, offering a half-year in Strasbourg, the balance of the year normally to be spent in the country of the student’s other foreign language, was quickly brought to the Moderns committee and approved at their meeting of 6 March. In the fall of 1963, with eleven students, a budget of approximately $3,000 underwritten by the Varsity Fund (half of which went to pay the Strasbourg teachers for twelve weeks’ instruction), transfer credit assured, and Eugène Joliat at the helm, the programme got under way. Not unnaturally (Strasbourg was, and
is, a real university – they even have libraries), it flourished. In subsequent years, directed in turn by Pierre Robert, David Hayne, Robert Harden, and Hilliard Trethewey, the numbers grew to a healthy twenty-four. Had the Honours degree structure remained in place, there is no reason to suppose that this junior half-year abroad would not have continued to thrive. However, with the introduction of the New Programme in 1969, the role of the term in Strasbourg, specifically designed for Honours students, was no longer clear. Given the freedom to choose courses from a much greater range of subjects, towards a degree built to individual specifications, the profile, the linguistic competence, and therefore the needs of the new-style modern linguist became much harder to determine; and until such needs were clear, the expense of the Strasbourg programme could not be justified. Varsity Fund support was withdrawn and the programme cancelled.
To ensure some kind of continuity, it was replaced by a more flexible scheme, reflecting both the “do-it-yourself” spirit of the times and a return to the private enterprise of the fifties. Students were authorized to set up their own programme in a French university of their choice, their progress being monitored by a Paris-based co-ordinator in 1968-70 and thereafter directly from Toronto. Given the inherent difficulties of matching French university courses to existing Toronto ones (the bugbear of any year-abroad programme), numbers, not unnaturally, dwindled to five by 1976. In contrast to, and perhaps as a consequence of, this slow decline, the summer programmes prospered in the 1970s, for the most part thanks to the efforts of those who were committed to making them work: Roland Le Huenen and John Gilbert in Strasbourg, Pierre Robert and Michel Sanouillet in Nice, Clarence Parsons and Jack Yashinski in Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon.
However, even the best summer courses have their limitations, and unless independently funded in the style of Middlebury College in Vermont, they are vulnerable to fluctuations in enrolment and shifts in university priorities. The Nice initiative – which had its zanier moments, with University of Toronto Shakespeare specialists teaching Toronto English majors in English in an ant-infested classroom just off the Promenade des Anglais – was discontinued in 1975. And then there was Aix. Conceived by David Smith and launched in 1977-78 by Daniel Jourlait, the scheme was designed to achieve the best of both worlds. Students, who were required to have at least b standing in French and overall, took three or four University of Toronto courses taught by a resident director and a member of the Aix staff, the remainder of their programme being made up by Aix courses at the deug or licence level, usually in French literature, linguistics, English, or another modern language. Although theoretically and administratively awkward,
particularly with regard to transfer credit in subjects other than French, the system worked. Travel bursaries, at least in the early years, ensured that the cost was kept within the range of a year in Toronto. Students got the marks they had earned, as opposed to the “pass-fail” results imposed by Faculty regulations for courses done “elsewhere,” and the best prepared and most highly motivated among them were able to get inside the French university system and discover some of its strengths (above all, the quality of the teaching), as well as its more obvious weaknesses. The group was formally limited to thirty and was frequently oversubscribed. Naturally, there were plenty of difficulties and disappointments: the Aixois are not the most welcoming of hosts, and getting a carte de séjour is still a nightmare. Several members of the final contingent did not get their appointment to apply for the carte until mid-January, until which time they were
not allowed to leave the country. And costs continued to spiral. But the students learned to cope; by passing on essential information from one group to the next, they became adept at finding the best teachers, the best addresses, and the best food. Almost without exception, they came back to Canada with a better sense of their own identity and their place in the world; the women learned a dozen new ways to say no; a minority, perhaps one in four or five, were close to becoming functionally bilingual by the end of the year. Why then did the programme in Aix fail? Primarily, of course, it was a matter of money, or more exactly of rentabilité. Of the final group of seventeen students, only twelve were from the University of Toronto, and only half of those could be described as “Honours students of a or high b standing.” The Faculty of Arts and Sciences position on équivalences, unique among major universities, has also been a real deterrent, in an age when marks count more than they used to; one of the 1992-93 students ended up top
of her licence-level class, with 18 out of 20, but this outstanding performance would not be reflected in her grade point average. Above all, we must recognize that the programme, with its emphasis on language and literature, no longer corresponded to the needs and interests of many outstanding students of French. At the final organizational meeting in October 1991, attended by sixty students, questions such as “Can I take two third-year courses in Political Science?” or “What kind of courses does Aix offer in Third World Economics?” spoke volumes about the gap between what the department had to offer and the interests of its potential clients.
At a more general level, however, those who were involved in this and other programmes have often had occasion to wonder – as Eugène Joliat did in 1963 – whether the university as a whole has ever been committed to the idea of study elsewhere. The entire contingent from Toronto choosing to spend their third year
abroad, including the Aix group, often amounted to between fifty and a hundred students; in other words, approximately the same number as those who set off annually from Smith College, an institution of roughly three thousand students. Seen in that context, we should perhaps be grateful for what we have had.
