Erindale, the youngest and largest unit of the University of Toronto’s extensive college system, began operations in Mississauga in 1967. Situated forty kilometres to the west of the St George campus, it was conceived in the heyday of Ontario-wide university expansion and within the curricular framework of the “Old Programme,” which viewed the study of languages as both basic and obligatory. Planning documents of the day placed heavy emphasis on French, allowing for initial staffing appointments at the highest level in order to build the new department and projecting an eventual faculty complement in French alone of 34 by 1976, at which time the college expected 5,000 students. In 1992-93, with a college enrolment of some 6,600 students, the French group at Erindale would be given a staff complement of 6.3 for the coming term. The history of French at

Erindale since the heady days of its creation has been one of meeting the high expectations set at the start with significantly fewer resources.

Resourcefulness in lieu of resources is perhaps the most accurate formula to describe the activities of the Erindale French group since the mid-sixties. Faced with the ever-changing demands of two masters – the department and the college – French faculty members at Erindale sought unique and frequently collective solutions to differing expectations. This has contributed in no small part to the congeniality for which the group has generally been recognized and which Associate Dean R.W. Van Fossen sought to describe thus in a letter to Vice-Provost Lorna Marsden in March 1984: “We have had a small but thriving operation going on here. Morale has been high. Productivity, in terms of students taught and on-going research, has been increasing. Despite the fact that our

comparatively small staff has been coping with 600 students, there has been a real esprit de corps that has had a marvellous effect on students and has even been a boost to colleagues in other disciplines.”

Appointed initially under the auspices of the University College Department of French, members of the Erindale group were slated to provide instruction in the three-year General programme at the Mississauga campus and to teach four-year Honour courses, as well as graduate courses, at University College, where they all held joint appointments until the establishment of the University Department of French in 1975. With the shift by the Faculty of Arts and Science in 1969 to the New Programme, based on individual course units rather than years and structured programmes, French staff at Erindale reshaped their curriculum into a bare-bones Specialist Programme in French Language and Literature, which

became fully available at the college by 1972-73. Eventually in 1984-85, following course and programme changes in the department, Erindale would add a major in French Language and Linguistics to its offerings. Increased responsibility for course and programme planning (Erindale publishes its own calendar) has led to innovations such as the creation by Joan Le Gall in 1973-74 of Intensive French, a first-year course for students who had not completed Ontario grade 13. This Erindale experiment opened the way the following year for the creation of courses in Beginners’ French and Intermediate French on the St George campus.

G. Norman Laidlaw, appointed professor in University College and Erindale in 1965 and assigned to Scarborough College in his first year, participated in the planning for French at Erindale and was an early advocate of the language

laboratory. He was the author of articles and reviews, principally in his special field, French literature and thought in the Age of Enlightenment; a translation of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws; a major study of Diderot entitled “Diderot’s Teratology”; and a book on Diderot and Gide entitled Elysian Encounter. Since 1953 he had been a member of the editorial board of the journal Symposium, published at Syracuse University. Laidlaw left the University of Toronto in 1968 to take the chair in Romance Languages at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. Peter Findlay, a graduate of Cambridge and the University of Western Ontario, was also present during the initial year of teaching at Erindale. He offered a first-year General course at the college and taught in his area of specialization, seventeenth-century literature, at University College.

Hired initially as a lecturer at University College in 1965, David Trott, a graduate of the University of British Columbia and with a PhD from Toronto, transferred to Erindale in 1969. There he taught courses in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, methodology, modern theatre, computer-assisted text analysis, and language practice. He served variously as discipline representative for French, associate dean of Humanities, and vice-principal academic at Erindale and, on the St George campus, undergraduate secretary of French and graduate co-ordinator at the Drama Centre. As director of the recall (Research at Erindale in Computer-Assisted Language Learning) group at the college, Trott has participated in the creation of an Erindale focus on the use of technology in language teaching and learning. He has shared in the organizing of several conferences dealing with the ancien régime, and with Nicole Boursier edited two volumes of papers, L’Age du théâtre en France (1988) and La Naissance du

roman en France (1990). The fourth staff member appointed in 1969, Henry Weinberg, held degrees from Roosevelt, Northwestern, and Michigan universities. He came to Erindale initially as a specialist in Flaubert and Zola studies but expanded his field of enquiry to the problem of anti-Semitism, publishing a book, The Myth of the Jew in France (1987), and articles on the subject, as well as organizing an international conference in Moscow at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union. During the first of his two terms as discipline representative for French, he lobbied vigorously for the establishment of a French House on the Erindale campus.

The following year, 1970, saw the appointment of Marie-Paule Ducretet, a graduate of Louvain. Devoted to her students and her colleagues, Ducretet has been the mainstay of Erindale’s popular Major Programme in Linguistics and by

far the college’s longest-serving discipline representative (in 1992-93, associate chair) for French. With a background in grammar and linguistic computing, she has been an active member of the recall group, sharing in the creation of the course in Computer Applications in French Studies and in the preparation of a computerized bank of student writing errors. She has also been a member of the Madame de Graffigny editorial team. Hired initially as an instructor in 1970 and noted for her abilities as a language teacher, Joan Le Gall played a major role in the development of language-teaching expertise within the Erindale French group in the thirteen years she spent at the college. She pioneered pre-university French courses at a time when grade 13 French had ceased to be a required course for admission to the university. Le Gall developed and maintained an extensive

collection of language tapes in her capacity as director of the Erindale language laboratory. She was among the first senior tutors in the college when that teaching-oriented position was created in 1976. Jean Rault, with a PhD from Toronto, came three year later. Although a specialist in medieval literature, he carried out a variety of instructional duties at Erindale, including the teaching of a survey course on European drama.

Although they were appointed after the period covered by this chapter, it seems appropriate to mention briefly several other individuals who have contributed to the French discipline at Erindale: Noreen Swallow, originally appointed to Victoria College, who transferred to Erindale in 1976; Josette Feral, who taught at the college from 1978 to 1981; Georges Bérubé, a replacement for colleagues

on leave in 1980-82; Janet M. Paterson, who joined the staff in 1981 and served the department in a variety of capacities, from course convenor of Practical French i, which she totally reformed, to associate chair for graduate studies and in 1993-94 acting chair of French; Charles Elkabas, hired in 1982, and Peter Leslie, two years later; and Krystyna Piechura, who after teaching French at Erindale in 1988-90, transferred to the Department of History.

Over the more than twenty-five years that French has been taught at Erindale, some nineteen faculty members have made up the French group. Only sixteen of them have had what could be considered ongoing and full-time appointments. In addition, at least seventy-five other individuals – some involved in teaching at Erindale for many years – have supported the efforts of the small core of faculty in

French at the college. Mary-Jane Geddes taught for some fourteen years as a part-time instructor; Sylvie Rosienski served a year as a lectrice, then as teaching or research assistant over a five-year period, and finally as a lecturer in 1991-92; Jean Bowman, Don Bruce, Astrid Berrier, Winfried Siemerling, and Françoise Couture all served repeated terms or in a variety of capacities within the French group. It can be said that one of the unique features of French at Erindale has been the high level of involvement and integration of many of its non-permanent colleagues.

Erindale French staff are members of the Department of French, but with a difference. With the advent of the single university department in 1975, they ceased to be cross-appointed to University College, which had continued through

the early 1970s to pay part of their salaries in recognition of courses taught on the St George campus. At the same time, unlike members of St George colleges, they remained outside the budgetary jurisdiction of the new university chair of French. In addition, the mere fact of distance placed them outside the geographical range of some St George faculty members, as the following item from a Senior Committee meeting shows: “The Chairman received some firm refusals to attend a general department meeting at Erindale and only one or two unqualified commitments to attend such a meeting. He scheduled the meeting downtown in order to assure a quorum” (Minutes of the Senior Committee meeting, 13 Jan. 1982). The resulting relationship between Erindale and the department has been a matter of ongoing discussion. Differences arose in December 1977 between the college and the department over the conducting of searches for new

appointments. The granting of release time for departmental duties was questioned by Erindale associate deans in June 1979. Eligibility for positions in the Strasbourg and Aix-en-Provence programmes occasionally became an issue. However, goodwill and accommodation have invariably won the day.

Original plans for French at Erindale had included senior appointments to build and give direction to what was originally projected as a very large group. As budgetary resources were curtailed, the college found it increasingly difficult to staff its French programme with experienced leaders and full-time teachers. The archives are full of letters and memos detailing struggles and disappointments over staffing. These included the downgrading by the college of an associate to an assistant professorship in 1967, the difficulties experienced by the department in

transferring St George colleagues to Erindale after 1975, and the reluctance by the provost to authorize replacement positions in lieu of transfers from the larger St George department throughout the 1980s. At more than one point, the proportion of non-permanent instructors to ongoing staff became a matter of concern. In 1986, for example, discipline representative Marie-Paule Ducretet warned the college that without an additional instructorship “out of 9 first-year and a total of 15.5 language sections, 50% would be taught by [teaching assistants] in the next three years” (letter to R. Beck, 28 Nov. 1986). The smallness of the core group in French at Erindale and its distance from the St George department has contributed to a heightened spirit of co-operation among its members, as well as with the part-time and off-campus colleagues who have temporarily joined them. Erindale staff established in 1976, and continue to fund, an annual Erindale French

Prize now valued at several hundred dollars. Liaison efforts with teachers and students in the Peel Region have included tailored, one-day programmes to introduce high school students to university French studies, meetings of secondary school language teachers hosted by Erindale, and throughout the 1980s, the preparation, administration, and marking of the annual Peel French Contest, which drew contestants from most of the twenty-six high schools in the region.

Perhaps the most important collaborative project of the Erindale French group has been its drive to enhance teaching effectiveness through the use of technological aids. The lengthy campaigns of laboratory directors Joan Le Gall and Charles Elkabas have left the college with a well-equipped, multi-purpose facility that has drawn interest and visitors from other campuses and universities.

Since 1985 successive projects mounted by the recall team have attracted over $140,000 in research funding from the province, the university, the department, and the college. This in turn has led to the incorporation of computers into many French courses at Erindale, the training of graduate students in call applications, the development of computerized materials for self-instruction, and the presentation of findings in the form of lectures, demonstrations, and shared articles.

The hardships of difference and distance notwithstanding, members of the Erindale French group have been full and vigorous participants in the life of the Department of French. They have been actively involved in graduate instruction and supervision. They have organized or helped organize many events, from

annual meetings of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies to symposia on such themes as “Théâtralité: écriture et mise en scène,” “L’Université de demain: courants actuels and apports de la didactique des langues à l’enseignement du français langue seconde,” and “L’Age du théâtre en France.” Erindale French staff authored the report that led to the establishment of the department’s Language Programme Committee; they provided members and chairs to that committee; they have regularly participated in most other departmental committees; and they have provided the Department of French with a director for the programme in Aix-en-Provence, an undergraduate secretary, a graduate associate chair, and an acting chair.