The story of French at Scarborough is more closely bound to the college’s history than is the case elsewhere, especially since Scarborough’s curricular and administrative separation in 1972 from the Faculty of Arts and Science of the University of Toronto. Since that year the college has functioned as a separate faculty, reporting directly to Governing Council.

in 1964-65, in extension courses at Birchmount Park Collegiate Institute in Scarborough and then in the old Biology building on King’s College Circle, where the Medical Sciences building now stands. In 1964 also came the first appointment in French, that of Peter Moes.

There were many good reasons for the choice. Moes was familiar with the often-arcane and sometimes archaic procedures of the University of Toronto. Born in the Netherlands, he had earned his undergraduate degree from McMaster, followed by a degree in library science, an ma, and a PhD from Toronto, where he had recently been promoted to assistant professor. He had been teaching at Toronto since 1960, had completed his doctoral dissertation on Beaumarchais in 1963, and was, perhaps not coincidentally, a resident of West Hill, close to the new college then under construction. Most importantly, he was

on excellent terms with Dana Rouillard, head of the French Department at University College, under the aegis of which the Scarborough department was established. Moes explained the role of discipline representative at the time.

Because of our common interests in music and 18th-century literature, [Rouillard and I] were able to get along famously with each other, to which one could add that I was not consumed with ambition to “run the French Department” at Scarborough. For one of the qualifications ... was that the candidate was to act strictly as a representative of his or her discipline ... and had no other administrative function than to “advise and consent,” leaving the real work of establishing the new department to the older, wiser, and more experienced Head. It was all relatively simple: Heads were Heads, and others were others. Not that I was ever asked for my opinions ... No, the duties and responsibilities of the first

internal appointee, G. Norman Laidlaw, was an eighteenth-century specialist, with Diderot as his main interest. Although senior in rank and experience, Laidlaw made no lasting mark at Scarborough and left Toronto a few years later.

For its first four years, courses in French at Scarborough College faithfully replicated, in content and designation, those offered elsewhere within the Faculty of Arts and Science in the General (as opposed to Honours) programme, for which demand was perceived to be highest. Thus in 1965-66 two courses were offered: the first, Representative Works of French Literature, comprised two classroom hours devoted to authors, a third to composition and language study, and a further hour of laboratory work; the second was the “one hour option” course French 116, better known elsewhere as the “religious knowledge option.”

In each successive year a further tier of such courses was added, so that by 1967-68 the full General programme was re-created. Staff at Scarborough also regularly taught at least one course at University College or in the Graduate Department. But of course 1967-68 was also the year of the famous Macpherson Report, the most resonant recommendation of which – that “the present distinction between Honour and General degree courses (and courses of instruction) should be removed” – was immediately accepted by the university for implementation in 1969-70. In these new circumstances, the initial raison d’être for Scarborough’s existence had to be re-examined.

In the interval, appointments continued to be made that would determine the basic character of French at Scarborough into the 1990s. In 1966 came two appointees as lecturer, W. Jane Bancroft and Rita A.M. Ubriaco. Bancroft, with

bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Manitoba and soon to complete her doctorate at Harvard, came as a specialist in literature (her thesis was on Gide), but her reputation would be established in the field of language-acquisition theory, particularly in the front lines where contentious new methodologies (e.g., the Lozanov method) interfaced with the reality of the classroom. She would publish scores of articles and maintain an active international correspondence on the topic, remaining at Scarborough for the rest of her career. Ubriaco, with a master’s from Toronto, had primary responsibility for the language laboratory. She returned to Thunder Bay after three years, leaving behind an inventively wallpapered office and memories of her passion for opera.

Two other soon-to-be permanent members were added in 1967, Judith A. (Millington) Curtis and Leonard E. Doucette. Curtis, whose special interest was

seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theatre, had received her degrees (ba, ma, PhilM) from Toronto, while Doucette, a native New Brunswicker, was a graduate of St Thomas, King’s College London, and Brown University. He had recently completed a thesis on seventeenth-century French humanism and arrived from the University of Pennsylvania, where he had been assistant professor. These two would also remain at the core of the French discipline at Scarborough into the 1990s. Curtis, whose thesis was a critical edition of d’Allainval’s L’École des bourgeois, would add stylistics, Renaissance poetry, and eighteenth-century épistolières to her scholarly interests. She would become an active contributor to the Madame de Graffigny project, while providing tactful, but firm administrative leadership at Scarborough in especially turbulent times. Doucette, discovering that seventeenth-century specialists were far too many and French-Canadianists too few at Toronto, soon moved into Quebec studies, with a special interest in

theatre. In this field he has contributed articles to journals and reference works and published a monograph, Theatre in French Canada: Laying the Foundations, 1606-1867, issued by the University of Toronto Press in 1984. He was cross-appointed to the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama and served as associate editor of the University of Toronto Quarterly and co-editor of Theatre History in Canada. Both Curtis and Doucette were deeply involved in the many stages through which Scarborough College and the French discipline would evolve as they strove to define their specific roles within the university.

Two more assistant professors were appointed in 1968: the enigmatic John W. Batchelor and the energetic W. John Kirkness, antipodal in several senses. Batchelor, born and educated in England (his PhD was from Hull), came to Scarborough via the University of Queensland in Australia with good

recommendations, although his career there had been troubled and short. An expert on Montherlant’s theatre, he was by turns mercurial and saturnine, charming and alarming colleagues and students for the next few years and qualifying as a pilot in his spare time. On a Saint-Exupérian night flight, solo, to Montreal, his plane crash-landed, leaving him with extensive burns. Characteristically, as soon as doctors allowed, he returned to Toronto by ambulance and within a short time was back in the classroom. But he soon disappeared from the academic scene, and Peter Moes reported that the last time he spoke with Batchelor, he was “constructing a new plane in his garage, especially suitable for stunt flying!” John Kirkness would become one of the Scarborough stalwarts, although his time in the classroom would diminish as his outside interests grew. His research lay primarily in innovative theories underlying

teaching and learning. This route would lead to studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and to various pedagogically strategic posts on the St George campus, notably that of provostial adviser on undergraduate education.

The New Programme in 1969 brought opportunities and demands for curricular diversity that could not be met with existing staff, since these had been appointed with a view to the General Course and with the overall needs of French at the university in mind. (To illustrate: in 1969, of six tenured or tenure-stream faculty members at Scarborough, four were in seventeenth- and/or eighteenth-century studies.) Initially, these needs were met by bridging with the St George campus: Scarborough was fortunate in 1969-70 to welcome David M. Hayne and to be able to offer the first courses in French-Canadian literature. Similar arrangements

would bring other well-known members of the St George departments, such as Daniel Jourlait and Barbara Kwant, to the college for brief periods. As enrolments rose and courses multiplied, sessional appointments were also added: Jacqueline Romney as lecturer and Elizabeth Kirkness and Mireille Walker as instructors, the latter two with primary responsibilities in the language laboratory, where Walker achieved enduring local fame for her meticulous weekly dictées, each one painstakingly corrected by hand.

Having scrambled to adapt to the new system, Scarborough immediately faced another, more radical challenge. In the summer of 1970 President Bissell established a committee to examine the college’s status, with Professor F.K. Hare as its chair. The Hare Report, presented in April 1971, recommended a large

measure of autonomy for Scarborough. The committee’s principal recommendations were accepted by the university, for implementation in 1972-73. There would be complete curricular independence effective immediately. To compensate for unfair procedures in some departments, all new appointments would now be initiated at Scarborough with a view to the perceivedly different needs of the disciplines established there. Furthermore, new faculty would not automatically be appointed to the respective downtown department, while current staff had a choice of continuing their cross-appointments or not. The Hare Report was thus the cause and the basis of the very different relationship some Scarborough faculty have with their colleagues on the other campuses and with the French Department as an entity. Misperceptions have sometimes arisen as to reasons underlying this “différence/ance.” But to quote Peter Moes once more:

Let it be stated unequivocally: members of the French Discipline never felt an urgent need to sever relations with the downtown department. These were ever of the very best. Never was there the slightest hint that the Head used the College as a “parking lot” for staff, so that at a later opportunity a quick transfer might occur to strengthen the downtown department at the expense of Scarborough. Quite simply, French staff had not much choice in the matter. A revolution is a revolution, as anyone will tell you.

Moes has pointed out that the net result of all these radical changes was, inevitably, increased importance for the function of discipline representative at Scarborough, a post that became more clearly defined, with a corresponding reduction in interaction with the heads of the departments and disciplines

elsewhere. Moes had been succeeded by George Trembley as representative and he by Len Doucette, Jane Bancroft, Judy Curtis, and all the others in turn, each generally serving a two-year term.

Studiously avoiding the now politically incorrect designations “General” and “Honours,” Scarborough transcripts henceforth recorded only that the student had completed a three-year or a four-year degree. From an enriched curricular cafeteria, students composed their menu as they saw fit, restricted only by pre- and co-requisites for certain courses, a trend strengthened by the introduction in 1973 of a straightforward credit system. In line with other disciplines, French sought to compete by broadening its coverage (from five language and ten literature courses in 1971-72 to six and seventeen respectively in 1972-73) and by offering, for the first time, half-course credits.

New appointments helped diversify the discipline’s offerings. Louis B. Mignault had been added in 1971, a Quebec native with degrees from the universities of Toledo and Colorado. His thesis was on Malraux, but literary studies would not be the primary area in which he would deploy his impressive enthusiasm and energy. He soon played a central role in reshaping language teaching, not only in French but in

the other language disciplines as well, best exemplified in his founding of Scarborough’s Summer Language Institute (the project, after a vigorously successful decade, was terminated for “urgent budgetary reasons” in 1983). In 1972 came the first staff hired by a Scarborough-based search committee: Chantal Bertrand-Jennings and Sylvia Mittler. Bertrand-Jennings, born in France,

had a licence ès lettres from Paris and a PhD from Wayne State, with a dissertation on “Les Romanciers naturalistes et la question de l’émancipation féminine.” She had been assistant professor at the State University of New York in Buffalo and was appointed at that rank to Scarborough. Immediately active in the Graduate Department, her progress would be rapid, leading to her promotion to professor in 1981, the first such since George Trembley’s in 1971. Her contributions to French and to the Division of Humanities have been immeasurable: she has urged and aided the discipline to respond to its many challenges as they arose and has been influential in establishing the very successful Women’s Studies Programme at Scarborough. Mittler had degrees from Toronto and Strasbourg, where her doctoral dissertation had traced “Les Débuts littéraires d’Henri Pourrat.” A woman of diverse talents, she soon shared them with the

Italian and later the Humanities and Greek disciplines at Scarborough, teaching one-third to half-time in French and meshing separate careers as vocalist in Greek nightclubs and court interpreter. By 1978 all Scarborough’s tenure-stream appointees (except John Batchelor) had received permanent status and been promoted.

But the supporting cast must be given its due as well. A significant development of the 1970s was the institution of new, semi-permanent ranks of tutor and senior tutor, the security of which – alas! – remains moot at time of writing. The first of these new appointees was French-born Françoise Mugnier-Manfredi, who had come to Scarborough in 1974 with an ma from Lyon and solid language-teaching experience at St Michael’s. Initially appointed as instructor to replace Geneviève Nemeth, who had served two years at that rank, Mugnier-Manfredi became tutor

by 1977 and senior tutor four years later, while earning her doctorate from Grenoble. Then came Claude Evans, also born in France, with a master’s from Rochester and a PhD from Toronto. She came on a sessional appointment as assistant professor in 1979 but opted to return as tutor the following year. Trained in medieval French, she would make an important contribution to Celtic Studies at the college and was promoted to senior tutor in 1980. Characteristic of their rank has been that tutors teach four, instead of the “normal” three courses, often all four in the area of language practice. With high competence and good grace, this is what Mugnier-Manfredi and Evans have continued to do, while class sizes increased and logistical assistance diminished. They have become, literally, irreplaceable in the French discipline at Scarborough.

Two more recent appointments must be mentioned in this context, both of whom

came to Scarborough as replacements for John Kirkness during his frequent commitments elsewhere. Christine Besnard had first been hired for the Summer Language Institute, then as tutor, senior tutor, and finally (after she had received her doctorate from Nancy), assistant professor on a contractually limited term appointment. Her remarkable classroom skills and her dedication to language teaching have been sorely missed since her move to York in 1990. Her (and thus Kirkness’s) capable replacement, on a thrice-renewed contract, has been Shodja E. Ziaian, of Iranian origin with degrees from the National University of Iran, Dijon, and Brussels. Here also tribute should be paid to the many sessional appointees whose time at Scarborough was often brief but whose contributions were vital. Not all the names are now retrievable, but in their time they were better known to first-year students than those of the permanent faculty. The

French discipline at Scarborough owes much to Guy Gornouvel, Alain Thomas, Danièle Issa-Sayegh, Charles Elkabas, Karen Laughlin, Christine von Aesch, Pauline Simpson, and perhaps a dozen others, who taught demanding courses with little recognition.

With the relative stability of curriculum and staff in the eighties and nineties, French at Scarborough has continued to offer a rich, well-rounded variety of courses and programmes. In 1980 a Specialist Programme in French (twelve designated courses) was introduced, along with a major (seven-course) in French Language and another in French Language and Literature. In 1993 came another important initiative, the Specialist Programme for Education of Teachers in French, offered jointly by the Division of Humanities and the Faculty of Education and similar to

other co-operative programmes resident at Scarborough. Other, sadder signs of maturity have come as well: the early retirement in 1988 of George Trembley and his move with his wife, Nicole, to southern France, leaving a void the discipline has not managed to fill. His untimely death in 1992 came as a shock to all. Peter Moes was next to take early retirement, in 1991. With his cheerful tolerance and what one colleague has described as his “irrepressible faith in the perfectibility of his colleagues,” he left with many friends and few regrets. It is apparent that there will be many such departures over the next few years and that the French discipline which greets the next decade at Scarborough will, at least as regards personnel, bear little resemblance to that which entered the last.