FRENCH STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
1 University of Toronto Archives (uta), John Squair, B77-0027/001.
2 Meeting Proust’s Albertina in 1924 “in various lascivious attitudes” elicited Squair’s exclamation: “What an awful book! Pauvre Marcel. It is well that he is dead.” In La Révolte des anges, he found that Anatole France “loves to point out what is nasty and unclean ... It is a horrible book.” So was Mauriac’s Thérèse Desqueyroux, well written but “consisting of sex and murder.” E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View and Arnold Bennett’s Raingo convinced him that “English fiction seems almost as much devoted to lubricity as any other.” And the portraits of Cézanne and Degas at the Art Gallery of Toronto were “quite awful.”
In the light of this Calvinistic bent, it is ironic that Squair’s strong advocacy of the use of art to illuminate the teaching of literature should have involved him in a scandal, best perpetuated (and no doubt embellished) by A.S.P. Woodhouse of the English Department: “The story which De Lury loved to tell, of Squair’s desire to familiarize his students with the glories of French art, of his wholesale import of reproductions, the irate protest of Baker, who demanded their instant eviction as too apt to distract attention from the more austere beauties of Analytical Geometry, of their hasty removal to Squair’s office, there to confront the horrified gaze of Mrs. Jones (from somewhere out in the Province) who had called to inquire how Mary was getting on with her French.” (C.T. Bissell, ed., University College, A Portrait, 1853-1953, [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1953], 53).
3 Andison played the piano “very nicely,” Allen explained the usefulness of Esperanto, and Squair “said something about the history of teaching French in Toronto.”
One wonders whether Ford of Victoria was invited to this dinner. He had played a prominent part in an episode of inter-college friction early in 1922 after the Alliance Française had packed Hart House with a celebration of the tercentenary of Molière’s birth, in the course of which Squair gave a lecture in French and Les Précieuses ridicules was performed by Marion Squair and her classmates from University College. Squair reported the resultant tempest with rather impatient acerbity on 8 February. “Have just seen J. Home Cameron. He told me that Ford of Victoria is making trouble over the Molière celebration. He blames de Champ for putting a slight on Victoria and Trinity in not consulting them. The truth is that the whole affair originated in the Alliance Française and not in University College. What fools we mortals be! It appears that even [Principal] Bowles has taken the matter so seriously that he came to see [President] Falconer about it, and Cameron had seen the President and was trying to see Bowles in order to relieve de Champ of all blame and put it on his own shoulders if any blame is deserved on account of the wording of the invitation card.”
It is obvious that some twenty months later Falconer had not forgotten that embarrassing incident. In November 1924, when the Carnegie Foundation asked him to recommend someone to be chief investigator of the teaching of modern languages in Canada, Falconer, explaining later that he wished not to stir up jealousy, named Buchanan of Italian and Spanish. Squair calls this “a slap in the face to Cameron, Will, de Champ, et al,” and the revelation that Buchanan had chosen as assistant Ford of Victoria elicited the indiscreet declaration “Ford is one of the worst people possible for the work. No wonder Cameron and Will are both angry. We shall see what comes of it. Falconer is a blunderer.”
4 University of Toronto Monthly 46, no.7 (April 1946): 167.
5 Presidents’ reports cited in this chapter are in the University of Toronto Archives.
6 uta, University College Council, a69-0016/002 (002), Minutes, 3 Nov. 1944.
7 Early in its history, the University of Toronto had demonstrated a commitment to part-time students. The commitment took two forms: credit and non-credit programmes. For both forms of instruction for many years, the administrative responsibility lay with the Department of Extension, which counted on the Department of French to offer courses within Extension’s parameters. The credit courses were designed primarily for elementary school teachers wishing to earn a ba through winter evening and summer day classes. The courses were identical to those of the winter day students. The department scheduled the offerings to provide a sequential programme through winters and summers until the equivalent of the Pass/General Course ba programme would be completed. The staffing of these courses was regularly arranged for many years on an overload special stipend.
Non-credit courses served as an outreach function of the university from at least the beginning of the century. In 1901-02, for instance, the university had offered a course of “Saturday Popular Lectures” in January and February. By mid-century, the need to provide a greater variety of more practical or purely cultural courses for adult students became clearer. A demand grew, particularly in the post-1967 period, for French-language beginners and improvement courses.
Eventually, in the early 1970s the Department of Extension, which was administering both the credit and non-credit courses, split in two. The newly named Woodsworth College became the home of part-time degree students, while the School of Continuing Studies mounted non-credit courses. Little by little, the teaching of French in the School of Continuing Studies became severed from the Department of French administration.
With the integration of Woodsworth College students into the full timetable of the Faculty of Arts and Science, it became difficult to identify part-time students from full-time students. The former began taking daytime classes, while the latter often chose evening classes. Administrative policy changed so that Department of French teaching staff were assigned evening classes as part of their regular course load. Woodsworth College from 1975 until 1990 had its own appointed discipline representative in French (see chapter 5). From 1991, counselling of Woodsworth students was handled by the department at its centralized office.
8 Varsity Graduate 4, no. 4 (Oct. 1956): 169.
9 Torontonensis 39 (1937): 254.
10 Acta Victoriana 15, no. 6 (April-May 1935): 30. A glowing account of the traditional faculty dinner for the graduating class in Arts highlights the toast proposed so fittingly by Mary Rowell, who “really belongs to 3T5 as she, in a sense, is graduating this year too. After many happy years spent in the shadow of Vic, she, too, is leaving the college halls, halls that will miss her gentle smile and her charming personality.”
11 Acta Victoriana 69, no.2 (Xmas 1944): 8,10.
12 Victoria University Archives, Senate, 92.113v, 2-3, Minutes, 4 Oct. 1963, resolution re Professor Hare.
13 A History of the University of Trinity College, Toronto, 1852-1952, ed. T.A. Reed (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952), 164.
14 Trinity College Archives, Records of Corporation, 986-001/032(29).
15 uta, Senate, A68-0012(014), Minutes, 10 April 1964.
16 Felix Walter, “Modern Language Teaching in Canadian Universities,” Fifteenth National Conference of Canadian Universities ... May 30-31, 1932 (n.p., n.d.), 44-9.
17 Unesco Chronicle 6, no.10 (Oct. 1960): 360.
18 From an interview with Father Bondy taped by C.D. Rouillard on 24 Feb. 1976.
19 St Michael’s College Archives, Kevin Kirley, “French at the U. of T.: Recollections” (manuscript), 2. Subsequent quotations from Kevin Kirley are from this source.
20 Letter from Deborah Webster Rogers, 6T4, to Mariel O’Neill-Karch, 2 Sept. 1992.
21 Archives of the Sisters of St Joseph, Toronto, Sister St Bernard, “Sister Mary Agnes Murphy” (typescript).
22 The same year the Loretto College French Club met weekly in what was called “the Chambre Bleue of the Hôtel de Rambouillet,” where such luminaries as Mme de Maintenon, Mme Récamier, Mlle de Montpensier, and other bas bleus gathered to discuss literature or to interpret scenes from various plays. See “L.A.C. Dramatic Club,” Saint Michael’s College Yearbook, 1921, 61.
23 R.M. Agnew, “The French Club,” Saint Michael’s College Yearbook, 1922, 46-7. On page 46, there is a photograph of Elizabeth O’Driscoll surrounded by members of the club.
24 Mother Mary Aloysius Kerr, Dictionary of Biography of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in North America (Toronto: Mission Press, 1984), 130. Information about other sisters of Loretto is from this source.
25 B.L., “Le Club français,” Saint Michael’s College Yearbook, 1924, 71.
26 G.Q.H.K., “Le Club français,” Saint Michael’s College Yearbook, 1925, 69.
27 Letter from James R. O’Brien, 5t0, to Mariel O’Neill-Karch, 20 Aug. 1992.
28 ”At St. Joseph’s,” Saint Michael’s College Yearbook, 1923, 37.
29 Robert J. Scollard, Dictionary of Basilian Biography, 1822-1968 (Toronto: Basilian Press, 1969), 57-8.
30 Interview with Father Bondy, 4 Feb. 1977.
31 Scollard, Dictionary of Basilian Biography, 41-2.
32 Letter from A.M. Baldwin, 3T7, to C.D. Rouillard, 9 April 1981.
33 Étienne Gilson came to St Michael’s regularly until 1972 to give courses, and eventually lectures, which always attracted large audiences. Jacques Maritain died in 1973.
34 Interview with Father Bondy, 4 Feb. 1977.
35 O’Brien to O’Neill-Karch, 20 Aug. 1992.
36 See, among others, E.J. Lajeunesse, The Windsor Border Region, Canada’s Southernmost Frontier: A Collection of Documents Sponsored by the Champlain Society for the Government of Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960).
37 O’Brien to O’Neill-Karch, 20 Aug. 1992.
38 Rogers to O’Neill-Karch, 2 Sept. 1992.
39 St Michael’s College, Alumni Newsletter 24, no.1 (Spring 1986): 2.
40 Mother Mary Aloysius Kerr, Dictionary of Biography, 115.
41 Laurence K. Shook, Catholic Post-Secondary Education in English-Speaking Canada: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 173. Subsequent quotations in this section are from this source.
42 This letter can be found in the Rouillard files at the Department of French, University of Toronto; see dossier on “Teaching 1920-1960, Undergraduate.”
43 In Honour Classics in the University of Toronto (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1929), 17-26. Italics in the quoted passage from pages 19 and 20 have been added.
44 Since 1891 the matriculation examinations for admission to the various universities in Ontario had been conducted on two levels by the provincial Department of Education. The Pass Matriculation, usually taken at the end of four years of secondary school, provided admission to the Pass Course. The Honour Matriculation involved five further examinations, usually taken at the end of the fifth year of secondary school.
45 Pass Greek, compulsory for the first three years, was not a part of the fourth-year curriculum. With the Greek course went its two final examinations. Fourth-year students were left with only five examinations in French, five in Latin and Greek and Roman History, and one in Religious Knowledge or an option. Hence the total of eleven.
46 From written reminiscences by Laure Rièse presented to the Department of French in the winter of 1992-93.
47 Ibid.
48 This section has been written with the help of C.D. Rouillard’s research notes.
49 Figures supplied by the University of Toronto Office of Statistics, Records, and Convocation.