Someone to Teach Them

From the early 1960s to the 1970s, the province of Ontario witnessed an explosion in university enrolment. So dramatic was the increase that there were neither the institutions nor the faculty in place to meet the demand. In response, a dozen new universities from Trent in the southeast to Lakehead in the northwest were established, and faculty had to be recruited wherever they could be found. It was the events and developments of this decade, many argue, that created the university system that exists in Ontario today.

Someone to Teach Them is an insider's account of this period as told by historian John T. Saywell. As Dean of Arts at York University from 1963 to 1973, Saywell witnessed the expansion of the university from 500 students in 1963 to 7000 by 1970, and the many changes it took to accommodate such a change. York managed to recruit the necessary faculty, he writes, but the large number of American instructors led to a radical attack on the so-called Americanization of the universities. Saywell also elucidates the adverse effect that the reduction of government funding and enrolment had on the administration of the university in the 1970s.

Featuring many of the elements of personal memoir, this is also a thoroughly researched account of a critical decade for the history of education in Ontario.