Bissell's "Great Good Place" and the History of HigherEducation in Canada: Reflections on the Symposium
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A.B. McKillopOver the all too many years it took to research and to write Matters of Mind: The University in Ontario, 1791-1951 (1994), one of my greatest regrets was the fact that no general history of the University of Toronto had appeared since the 1920s.Appointed University Historian by his good friend Claude Bissell, former professor of English Robin S. Harris had been mandated to produce a comprehensive history of the University of Toronto.But by the 1980s Harris had reached the conclusion-or so rumour had it-that no adequate history of any university of over 6,000 students could be written.The University of Toronto had reached this point by the early twentieth century.Harris threw up his hands in surrender.And so the University of Toronto history project faltered, and continued to falter, as I began to reach those chapters of my own book that dealt with higher education in Ontario after the Great War.The increasing attention I gave to the University of Toronto for the period after 1918 reflected of course its growing importance and influence in Canadian higher education.I had direct experience of this.My undergraduate education at the University of Manitoba was peppered with professors sent by people like A.S.P. Woodhouse or Donald Creighton to the regional "colonies" of the nation.The manner of these men reflected, at times, a wistful yearn to return to the imperial heartland, and this did not escape even the naïve undergraduate.But the amount of historical detail Matters of Mind afforded to the University of Toronto also reflected my decision that if a comprehensive history of the University of Toronto was not going to be written in my lifetime (as I then thought), much less before the deadline for submission of my manuscript, I would damn well provide for others as much of what I had come to know about the institution-even if this risked distorting the overall cast of the book.If only one graduate student published some serious research on an aspect of the University of Toronto's history my book helped reveal, I thought the gamble would have paid off.I did not remotely expect that the U of T Historical Studies in Education/Revue d'histoire de l'éducation 1
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.057 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".