As we have seen, from 1853 to 1890 University College was the sole teaching body of the University of Toronto. French was taught first by the professor of Modern Languages, James Forneri, followed by the newly designated lecturer in French, Émile Pernet, and then by Pernet’s student, John Squair. From 1884 on, Squair received some assistance from a series of “fellows in French and German,” but for administrative purposes, the University College “department” of French was a one-man operation until the appointment of John Home Cameron as lecturer in 1891, and no departmental organization existed. In the 1880s, however, negotiations were completed with Victoria College in Cobourg

general agreement each year on the content of courses of instruction and on the examinations to be set for the undergraduate programme. In practice, this came to mean that the professors or lecturers in French met from time to time to discuss course content and examination questions for a given year. As additional instructors were named, the professor or head of each college department negotiated with his opposite numbers in the other colleges, after which the four departments functioned independently of each other.

Each college made its own appointments in French and named its own head of department, who held office for life. The head convened meetings of his college department as and when he saw fit, assigning teaching duties and allocating other responsibilities, sometimes with a minimum of consultation. The long mandates of

these heads of department, who were usually senior members of the university community, provided continuity in the practices of the four departments and assured a certain minimal co-operation among them. The weakness of the system lay in the divided loyalty imposed upon the teaching members: was their primary obligation to their discipline, French, or to the college that employed them and in which they lived and worked?

Usually the four departments met together only twice a year, once in the fall and once in the spring. These joint meetings were convened by one of the four heads each year and were held in that head’s college building. The particular head responsible was selected in a pseudo-election held in June when examination results were compiled. On 5 June 1959, for example, Hilliard Trethewey

(Victoria) was elected chairman for the following year, with his colleague Edward Rathé as secretary, when only three other persons were present: Eugène Joliat (University College), Alan Ross (Victoria), and William Ruddock (Trinity). The rotation among the four heads of this additional chairmanship of an increasingly large combined department soon became burdensome, and in March 1964 the heads themselves broke the pattern by appointing a chairman and secretary from outside their number. It would be another four years, however, before the system became genuinely democratic.

While the traditional Honour Course pattern was in effect, changes in course material for the Honour courses, and even for the Pass (or General) Course and the special French course provided for students in the first year of social and

philosophical studies, were infrequent. As the number of Honour and Pass courses in French was limited to about twenty, agreement on content (with suitable substitutions in readings as required by St Michael’s College) was arrived at without great difficulty. In any event, modifications were normally considered and recommended by the course instructors and merely approved by the whole department. Apart from examination questions, therefore, there were few matters requiring discussion by the general membership of the departments; routine student petitions were dealt with by the heads and subsequently reported to the teaching members. From time to time, changes in programme, timetable, or subject weighting were proposed by the Honour departments in which French figured (English Language and Literature; Latin, French, or Greek; Modern History and Modern Languages; Modern Languages and Literatures). Combined

departmental meetings then took place, the staff in French becoming for the purpose part of the staff of the Honour department concerned. French was in the process of becoming a graduating department in its own right following the introduction in 1964-65 of the third year of a proposed four-year Honour course in French Language and Literature. But the new course disappeared in 1969, when the departments, in response to the Faculty’s New Programme, abolished Honour courses entirely.

Although the four college departments of French led relatively separate lives and were not free from petty jealousies and rivalries, they did co-operate upon occasion when some general need presented itself. During the 1963-64 session, for example, the combined departments named nine of their members (Alta Lind

Cook, Sister Corinne, Peter Dembowski, David Hayne, William Kennett, Kevin Kirley, Edward Rathé, William Rogers, and John Wood) to a committee charged with preparing a departmental brief to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. The committee met five times during the session and submitted a draft text to the combined departments, which was duly approved. It urged the commission to support the recruitment of more French-speaking teachers in the public and secondary schools, to extend bilingual education in Canada, to arrange cultural exchanges between Ontario and Quebec, and to make French network radio and television available in southern Ontario. All of these proposals have since become realities.

The four college departments also acted as one in their relations with the Ontario

Department of Education. The provincial department had traditionally consulted the combined departments about the prescribed texts set for the Ontario grade 13 French authors examination, had named members of the departments as chief examiners for the province-wide examinations, and had taken advice from the departments in establishing the requirements for the type a (specialist) teaching certificate for Ontario secondary schools. By 1960 this amicable relationship was showing signs of strain. Other Ontario universities were making claims on the Department of Education, and it began modifying the type a requirements to take account of differing practices. Indeed, the subsequent proposal by the combined departments at Toronto to create an Honour course in French Language and Literature (in addition to the dual-language course in Modern Languages) was a response to these changing conditions. When the Department of Education

abolished grade 13 examinations in 1967, the last element of the special relationship with the French departments at the University of Toronto disappeared.

In addition to official links between the four college departments, there was considerable personal contact between individual members as they met in committee to propose reading lists and calendar descriptions for the particular courses they were teaching. Instructors in individual courses from the four colleges might meet several times each year to work out the details of their “teaching agreement” for the year. Most of the time, however, the departments met in plenary session only to approve official course descriptions for the Faculty of Arts calendar and to make examination arrangements.

The approval of examination papers was an important matter, because final examinations under the pre-1969 Honour Course system had accounted for a major part of the student’s final mark. The university examinations were thus the principal means of ensuring uniformity in the instruction provided by the colleges. The machinery for approving final examination papers became increasingly complex. The four heads of department first met among themselves to name examiners for each course on a loosely rotational basis, although examiners’ names (and, by implication, their college affiliation) were not usually revealed; latterly, examination papers were ascribed only to “the Staff in French.” Each examiner, sometimes in uneasy collaboration with an assistant examiner, then drafted his or her paper, perhaps consulting one or two colleagues in other colleges, and submitted it to the annual “examination meeting” of the entire

membership of the four departments.

The examination meeting took place in late January or February; it consisted of a roomful of colleagues waving draft examination papers for approval and attempting at the same time to scrutinize the papers being put forward by other examiners. There was frequently heated discussion and intensive bargaining about the wording – or even about the inclusion – of various questions before agreement was reached. Each paper had finally to be initialled by at least one representative of each of the four college departments before it could be sent to the printer. As the teaching staffs of the four departments became more numerous after the Second World War, the annual examination meeting spread over two afternoons, one for first- and second-year papers and the other for third- and fourth-year

examinations. Departments continued to grow, and these meetings would become increasingly unwieldy. Eventually, a more orderly method of conducting the department’s business would be sought.

Graduate studies at the University of Toronto had originally been dealt with by a standing committee of the Senate. It would appear, however, that the individual departments played the principal role since they approved the candidates’ thesis subjects and recommended acceptance of the finished work and awarding of the degree to the standing committee. With the institution of the PhD degree in 1897, an advisory board, which included members from the Council of University College and the Senate of Victoria, was established to examine applications to proceed to graduate degrees. This body, which reported to the Senate, was

replaced in 1903 by a Board of Postgraduate Studies responsible for all matters relating to graduate studies in the Faculty of Arts; it consisted of the president and six elected members of the Senate. It in turn became the Board of Graduate Studies, which was finally replaced by the School of Graduate Studies in 1922. Through a system of committees and subcommittees, the School of Graduate Studies administered graduate courses and degrees, but the autonomy of departments was firmly maintained and they could appeal decisions of the school to the Senate.

Under the original statute of the School of Graduate Studies, the heads of undergraduate “university” departments were tacitly understood to be the heads of the graduate departments. No similar arrangement existed, however, for the

“college” departments or for the Graduate Department of Romance Languages, which included French, a “college” subject, along with two “university” subjects, Italian and Spanish. The relatively small numbers of graduate students in Romance Languages up to 1947 probably presented no serious administrative problem. It is likely that the informal arrangement of rotating the headship among the various departments that made up Modern Languages and Literatures (similar to that which prevailed in French among the four colleges at the undergraduate level) existed in the Graduate Department of Romance Languages. In 1947 a recommendation of the President’s Committee on Graduate Studies, chaired by Harold Innis, was adopted; it prescribed appointment of the heads of graduate departments in “college” subjects by the president after consultation with the dean of Arts and Science and the heads of the four arts colleges.

The first head of the Graduate Department of Romance Languages and Literatures was Emilio Goggio, of the Department of Italian and Spanish. He was succeeded upon his retirement in 1956 by Dana Rouillard. Both were assisted up until 1965 by J.H. Parker of Spanish, who served as secretary. Because of the burden of heading both the Graduate Department and the undergraduate Department of French of University College, Rouillard was also aided from 1963 to 1965 by a secretary in French, Victor Graham. Upon the disappearance of the Graduate Department of Romance Languages and Literatures in 1965, Graham became the first head of the Graduate Department of French Language and Literature. He was succeeded in 1967 by Eugène Joliat, who was appointed chairman for a five-year term of office and was followed in turn by Henry Schogt. After the unification of the undergraduate departments of French in 1975, Schogt

completed his term of office as associate chairman for graduate studies.

During this period, the department was served by a series of secretaries: Robert Harden (1965-66), John Walker (1966-69), and John Flinn (1969-75). Regular administration was dealt with by the two appointed officers. General meetings of all members of the department were held as required to approve course requirements, new course proposals, thesis subjects, and originally even applications for admission to the degree programmes. In 1965 the department approved the creation of an Academic Advisory Committee (later the Graduate Academic Advisory Committee, known familiarly as gaac), whose role was to “consider separately the academic and the administrative aspects” of the department, including the admission of new members. Decisions of the committee

were submitted to general meetings for approval. The committee was originally composed of five members elected for two years. Some years later, the division between the executive and the committee being deemed undesirable, the chairman of the department became an ex-officio member and chairman of the committee. This system of administration, the culmination of 125 years of change and evolution, obtained in 1975, when undergraduate and graduate departments were incorporated into the new University Department of French.

The great expansion of the university during the 1960s had brought into the four college departments numerous new staff members, many of them from American universities and colleges. The new “faculty members,” as it now became fashionable to call them, had been accustomed to more structured and more

democratic organizations, and they joined in the movement to create new departmental structures at Toronto. By 1966 the combined departments of the four colleges numbered nearly one hundred persons, and there was discussion of the need to create an executive committee composed of a chairman, the four heads or chairmen of the college departments (under the “Haist rules” retiring heads had been succeeded by chairmen with limited terms of office), and the chairs of standing committees. In January 1968 William Rogers, in his capacity as chairman of the combined departments of French for that year, appointed an ad hoc committee of four members representing the colleges “to consider the institution and ways of improving communication among the various branches of the Department.” The committee produced draft “By-laws of the Combined Departments of French of the University of Toronto (1968),” which proposed the

creation of an executive committee of a dozen members, with a chairman elected for two years. The minutes of the executive committee were to be circulated to all full-time teaching members of the four French departments.

These apparently innocuous proposals were, in terms of the Toronto tradition, quite radical: for the first time, the combined university department would be chaired by an elected officer who was not a head or chair of one of the college departments of French and who would preside over an executive committee on which at least two junior colleagues would sit as equals of the college-appointed chairmen. There was still, however, no provision for student representation, in a year when cries of “student power” were being heard elsewhere on the campus. An ad hoc Committee on Student Representation reported to the combined

departments in February 1969 in favour of student membership on the executive and on all committees, although rejecting the principle of student parity. These recommendations necessitated changes in the departmental by-laws, which a second ad hoc committee prepared. The revisions were adopted in April 1969, not without some clashes between the “old guard” and the “young Turks” of the four departments. Eventually, a more widely elected committee structure, which included students selected by the French Course Union and part-time instructors, as well as alternative members, was adopted in February 1970 and would be progressively amended over the next two or three years.

Simultaneously, and in response to the same changing circumstances, the individual college French departments were setting up their own organizational

structures. The University College department had established an elective committee pattern during the late 1960s. Trinity and St Michael’s had created staff-student committees to discuss improvements to French courses as early as 1967. The Victoria College department passed by-laws governing its operations in December 1970 and revised them in February 1971 and November 1972. During the same period, the governance of the whole university had been fundamentally altered by the University of Toronto Act of 1971. The traditional format of the Faculty of Arts and Science, based since 1877-78 upon four-year sequences of rigidly constructed Honour courses, had been replaced by the New Programme of 1969, built around multiple electives with or without prerequisites.

The New Programme produced revolutionary changes in the teaching of French

and in the relations between the four French departments. The number of French courses increased rapidly to suit the special interests of instructors and the demands of students. Colleges developed particular approaches to literary and linguistic study, and course work was no longer uniform in the four colleges. A greater emphasis was placed on term work done in the colleges by giving it a larger proportion of the final mark and ultimately by suppressing final university examinations in a number of courses.

The creation of four new arts colleges during the 1960s – New and Innis colleges on the St George campus and Scarborough and Erindale in the suburbs of Toronto – raised the question of the desirability of multiplying indefinitely the number of college teaching departments. It had been decided to staff from the

University College departments the new foundations, which were designated “constituent colleges” to distinguish them from the older federated institutions. The result for the University College Department of French was an unprecedented increase in its teaching staff, now dispersed over five colleges, two of them many miles away. In addition, it remained, as in the past, responsible for the teaching of French in the professional faculties of the university and in the Division of University Extension (evening and summer courses). The Department of English at University College was similarly extended and fragmented. Furthermore, these two departments were now greatly disproportionate in size when compared with the federated college departments, with which they were combined for administrative purposes.

An additional motivation for centralization lay in the financial pressures felt by the university as a whole and by the federated colleges in particular. The Ontario government had been increasingly underfunding the three church-affiliated colleges, which as a result had become unable to keep apace with the constituent colleges in salary levels and even in some basic operational services. The problems of the fragmented college language departments were made more evident as new university language departments, such as Slavic Studies, were created with no college ties. It became evident that a major restructuring of the college system was needed. The promise of equalized salaries from a centralized university budget was a tempting carrot held out to the colleagues of the federated colleges in exchange for the loss of autonomy in the administration of their departments.

As accommodation in the central offices was limited, it was understood that at the end of their mandate, officers would probably return to their former offices in the colleges. The lack of a central location capable of housing all members of the newly united department weakened the proposed structure, but there was no alternative to continuing the dispersal of colleagues throughout the college buildings. In an attempt to minimize the influence of the colleges, the former college departments of French were renamed “teaching centres,” each of which would be represented on the undergraduate Executive Committee by an elected “discipline representative.” Five other members (three elected students, the Course Committee chairman, and the Third Year Elsewhere Committee chairman) would sit on the Executive Committee. Provision was also made for an advisory group to be called the Senior Committee; its four elected members

would meet with the three departmental chairmen to deal with appointments, promotions, salaries, and other confidential or budgetary questions.