The University of Toronto: A History, Second Edition (2013) by Martin L. Friedland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To write a single-volume history of a university is a daunting, difficult, and largely thankless task.The author has only so many pages to cover so much history.What gets put in; what gets left out?The interests and concerns of multiple and competing groups have to be juggled and massaged.Does the author write for historians, the public at large, or alumnae?The author needs to construct a narrative that is both readable and enjoyable but also analytical and critical.How far can one criticize the institution that likely sponsored the work?When writing The University of Toronto: A History, Martin Friedland faced many difficult choices.Some worked; many did not.Friedland chooses a chronological format for his text.The result is a story of the University of Toronto's progressive and triumphant expansion from a small liberal arts college into the billion dollar multiversity of today.For much of the narrative, the author recounts facts focusing on the growth of buildings, programs, and faculty.Three chapters are remarkable exceptions.Chapter 9 on the admission of women to the university, Chapter 15 on the student strike, and Chapter 36 on student activism are excellent works of history.These three chapters are contextualized, provide multiple perspectives, and explore in detail the how and why of events and decision-making.They are welcome diversions to the chronology and provide an alternative example of how Friedland could have structured his text.Other areas that have been arranged chronologically could have been better organized in a thematic manner.For example, the reception and controversy surrounding Darwinian thought is present in the text but is fragmentary, disjointed, and easily missed.Scattered through three different chapters, the force of Charles Darwin's impact on the university dissipates into obscurity.Friedland chooses to focus his text on the elite: administrators, faculty, politicians, and businessmen.The result is a top-down and administrative-political history where students are largely reduced to numbers and most of the professoriate and support staff remain faceless.This decision is out of step with the latest trends in the history of higher education.Over the last few decades, historians of higher education have tended to focus on student and professorial cultures and issues of class and gender.One example that represents the more recent scholarly work is James Pitsula's As One Who Serves: The Making of the University of Regina.Because Freidland focuses so much of his narrative on administrators, the reader is left wondering about questions fundamental to the university experience.What would it be like to be a student at the University of Toronto at the beginning of the 20 th century or before the Second World War?
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.057 | 0.017 |
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".