In York University: The Way Must Be Tried, Michiel Horn weaves archival research and interviews into a compelling narrative, documenting the development of an institution committed to helping professors and studies reach across disciplinary boundaries. He covers the challenges York has faced through the years - from the 1963 faculty "revolt," to the troubled search for a successor to founding president Murray Ross, to the budgetary problems that led to the resignation of President David Slater - as well as its many innovations and triumphs - including bilingualism at Glendon College, Osgoode Hall Law School's Parkdale legal clinic, and Canada's first concurrent Bachelor of Education program. The philosophies that guide the faculties of administrative studies, fine arts, and environmental studies, and the ground-breaking research done in science and engineering are explored in detail. Archival and current photographs complement Horn's narrative throughout. Prose and pictures chart the creation of an important Canadian institution whose commitment to solving real-world problems has led to important innovations in education and beyond.

York University: The Way Must Be Tried

History

Horn, Michiel

Americas

McGill-Queen's University Press

Although currently under attack from several directions, academic freedom is as important as it has ever been in enabling academics to teach, to carry out research, and to offer disinterested criticism and advice.
Michiel Horn's new book accentuates the changing nature of academic freedom in English Canada and provides essential background to today's discussions. Based on extensive archival research in more than twenty universities across Canada and in six public archives, the book locates the idea of academic freedom in its institutional and social contexts and traces its conflict-ridden evolution from 1860 to the present. 
Providing detailed coverage and analysis, Academic Freedom in Canada exposes previously unpublished information on why selected academics were dismissed or forced to resign, and on how pressure was used, often successfully, to silence others. As well as focusing on individuals such as Frank Underhill (University of Toronto), George Hunter (University of Alberta), and Harry Crowe (United College, Winnipeg), the book covers issues including the resistance in universities to Darwinist thought; the influences of modern Biblical criticism, capitalism, and war on academic freedom; the experience of women and ethnic minorities; and the question of whether or not academics should be allowed to run for public office. One chapter addresses the contentious issue of tenure.
Michiel Horn also identifies and analyses the challenges that have faced academic freedom in more recent years, most notably those of the economy and of 'political correctness'. He shows how the seeds of today's changing demands on universities can be found in the vicissitudes of the past, and contends that Canadian academics owe it to their fellow citizens to use their freedom for the common good.

Academic Freedom in Canada: A History

University of Toronto Press

Thousands of Western European immigrants streamed into Canada after the Second World War, seeking refuge from the economic devastation of their homelands. Many sought to assimilate as quickly as possible into the Canadian mainstream. Michiel Horn, in Becoming Canadian: Memoirs of an Invisible Immigrant, shares his reflections on the process of social integration. As a Dutch immigrant to British Columbia in 1952, Horn had to make sense of the cultural demands of two worlds. Over forty years later, a professor of Canadian history, he recounts his own personal history, relating it to broader issues. 'I have tried.' he writes, 'to describe the process of assimilation as I experienced it, and to make sense of the ambivalence immigrants feel towards their adopted country and their country of origin, the sense that they belong to both yet fully to neither.'Horn's autobiography explores the story of his Dutch middle-class family and seeks to answer what it means to replace one nationality with another. He begins with his years in Holland during the Second World War, discusses his family's immigration to Canada, and explains how the family built a life for itself in Victoria. Several of the themes that run throughout the narrative relate to the often uneasy transfer of Dutch values to a Canadian context, the influence that Holland still has on Horn's life, and his own thoughts on multiculturalism as public policy in Canada. Becoming Canadian is a timely memoir, and Horn's consideration of the process of assimilation, and of his own position as an 'invisible immigrant,' is topical and revealing.

Becoming Canadian: Memoirs of an Invisible Immigrant

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Univ of Toronto Pr

The Great Depression of the 1930s in Canada (Historical booklet / Canadian Historical Association)

Canadian Historical Association

In 1931-2 the first organization of Canadian left-wing intellectuals was founded. Led by historian Frank Undergill of the University of Toronto and law professor and poet Frank Scott of McGill University, the League for Social Reconstruction was critical of industrial capitalism and called for basic social and economic change through educational activity and parliamentary and constitutional channels. In the first history of this unique organization Michiel Horn outlines the League's aims and accomplishments and its ideological influence on the CCF and the NDP. Initially, the LSR avoided the term 'socialism' and remained uncommitted to any political part, although its choice of J.S. Woodsworth as honorary president made its sympathies clear. When, not long after the LSR's establishment, the CCF was founded, many League members joined it. An attempt to link the LSR openly with the CCF failed, but the League soon became known as the CCF's 'brain trust, ' and the manifesto and programme adopted by the party in 1933 clearly reflected the influence of the LSR members. The League's own democratic socialist ideas were most fully stated in Social Planning for Canada (1935), Democracy Needs Socialism (1938), and in the pages of the Canadian Forum, acquired by the LSR in 1936. With the disillusionment of the later 1930s, the distraction of the war, and, most of all, the increased support enjoyed by the CCF after 1940, the LSR disappeared as a formal organization, but its ideas shaped a political tradition which found expression in the CCF and later the NDP.

The League for Social Reconstruction: Intellectual Origins of the Democratic Left in Canada, 1930-1942 (Heritage)

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

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Books by Horn, Michiel