75 Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus nomes et quasi-indépendants. Le rapport est très peu loquace sur ce sujet de même que sur le rôle que jouent les centres de recherche présentement en opération au Canada. Certes, on ne peut être en désaccord avec l'augmentation des fonds de recherche, la couverture de tous les frais afférents y compris le temps des chercheurs, et les objectifs de développement des infrastructures. Ceci étant dit, l'auteur n'a résolu en rien les problèmes d'allocation de ressources entre les institutions et surtout les problèmes d'orientation de la recherche en fonction d'objectifs de développement qui sont à la fois provinciaux et fédéraux. L'auteur suggère une participation fédérale prépondérante dans l'établissement des politiques d'ensemble de la recherche au Canada. Une politique basée sur la concertation avec les provinces est essentielle au développement intégré de ce secteur d'activité universitaire. De même ne faudra-t-il pas laisser les politiques de financement de la recherche remplacer les processus formels et concertés de planification pour opérer les changements structurels attendus des universités. Lise Tremblay Bureau de recherche institutionnelle Université de Montréal J.A. Corry. My Life and Work: a Happy Partnership. Kingston: Queen's University, 1981. XV and 239 p. $18.50. It was my practice for many years to give to those of my students in English who were going on to graduate school and an academic career a copy of Donald Creigh ton's Harold Adams Innis: Portrait of a Scholar. The subtitle was the key. Both Creighton and Innis were dedicated as well as first-rate scholars and this relatively slim volume was in essence a study of the nature of scholarship. It was also a dramatic revelation of the joys and the tribulations of the academic life. The memoirs of Alex Corry constitute a companion volume, less emphatic on the research or scholarship function of the professor's role but more illuminating on the complementary function, teaching. The focus here is on the classroom rather than the library, the concern with the dissemination of knowledge rather than with its advancement. Both books demonstrate that the functions are complementary. Innis' belief in and his active defence of liberal education are legendary, the basis for his conception of the idea of the university and the point of departure for his attitude towards graduate study and scholarship in general. Corry specifically disclaims any pretensions to serious scholarship and notes that his principal publication was an undergraduate textbook. Democratic Government and Politics was, however, a pioneer work which proved to be the staple of Canadian courses in political science for a quarter of a century. It is at least conceivable that the germ of as many doctoral dissertations emerged during the reading of Corry's text as of Innis' The Fur Trade or The Cod Fisheries. It is also conceivable that Corry might have produced a work in the field of political 76 Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus science or public administration comparable to either of these had he not been increasingly diverted into university administration from 1951 on. To most readers of this review, J.A. Corry will be chiefly known as the principal of Queen's from 1961 to 1969 and the co-author (with Louis-Philippe Bonneau) of Quest for the Optimum: Research Policy in the Universities of Canada, a 1972 study sponsored by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada. As vice-principal of Queen's from 1951 to 1961 and later as principal 1961 to 1969, Corry was heavily involved in that university's expansion in the 1950s and 1960s and, through the major roles he played during his principalship in the Committee of Presidents of Ontario Universities (later the Council of Ontario Universities) and the A.U.C.C., in the development of the Ontario postsecondary educational system and of Canadian higher education as a whole. But while his activities in these connections are the subject matter of three of the last four chapters of My Life and Work, they are commented on rather than systematically described. It has not been Corry's intention in these pages to lay the groundwork for a history of Queen's during his years on its staff or for a study of the post-secondary expansion phase in Ontario and Canada which began with the Sheffield Report of 1955. At first glance this is a disappointment. One regrets, for example, that less than a paragraph (p. 203) is devoted to the A.U.C.C. annual meeting in 1966 when without advance warning the universities learned that the federal government was withdrawing the direct support of universities which it had been providing since 1951, an occasion which was memorable for many reasons but not least for the remarkable address which Corry on short notice had to deliver at the banquet owing to the non-appearance of the scheduled speaker, the Secretary of State, Miss Judy Lamarsh. This is not, in short, a self-portrait of a university president, and it is not likely to spawn many footnotes in future histories of Canadian higher education including volumes devoted to Queen's or the University of Saskatchewan which Corry attended as an undergraduate from 1920 to 1923 and where he taught in the law school from 1927 to 1937 before transferring to Queen's and to political science. But it will surely be listed in the bibliography of all future studies of Canadian higher education which deal with the period 1920 to 1970 as a work which graphically illustrates what it was like to be a university student, professor and president during this half century. There is much gloom in our universities today about the prospects of higher education in the light of financial restraint, an aging professoriate and a virtual moratorium on the appointment of young men and women to tenured positions, and the decline of collegiality in the face of unionization and the sheer size of the institutions. One hears rumours of institutions being closed down, of faculties of medicine being established as independent institutions, of declining standards, of the threat of the cancellation — or the introduction — of degree programmes by government fiat. In this context Corry's is an extraordinarily timely and welcome book because, for at least two reasons, it serves to dispel this gloom. In the first place, it reminds us that the sun also rises. There have been many 77 Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus periods of gloom in the 600-odd year history of the university and, more to the point, in the history of the Canadian universities during the twentieth century. As Corry shows, there was good reason for gloom in the 1920s, in the Depression Years (when salaries were actually reduced), during World War II (when the cancellation of liberal arts programmes for the duration was seriously considered), and in the early 1950s. There were serious problems, too, during the so-called golden years of the expansionist 1960s — have we forgotten the sit-ins and the Sir Geroge Williams computer? Yet the institutions survived. The sun sets but it also rises. The second reason is implicit in the subtitle: My Life and Work: a happy partnership. In his brief introduction, in which he explains why a very modest and private person has decided to set down on paper his reflections on his life and times ("Canadians do not write enough memoirs. We complain that we really do not know who we are or how we came to be what we are. How can we unless we know where we have been or what we have been doing for several generations?") Corry identifies himself as a sceptic and a pragmatist. No dewy-eyed romantic he. And this stance is frequently reiterated in all ten chapters, including the brief conclusion entitled The Perils of Democracy. Yet in retrospect he finds that his life and his work have been continually exciting and productive and in combination have made him a happy man. Perhaps this would have been his conclusion at aged 80 had he stayed on the Ontario farm where he was raised or pursued the legal career he envisioned when he set out at age 20 to attend the University of Saskatchewan. What is certain is that he found this satisfaction as a university teacher. My Life and Work is an examination of the potentialities of the academic life and it finds them good. Robin S. Harris University of Toronto Higher Eduation in American Society. Edited by Philip G. Altbach and Robert 0 . Berdahl. 1981 Prometheas Books, 326 pgs. While many considered the 1960's to be a difficult period for higher education because of the student activist movement, the 1980's promise to be an even more stressful time for higher education because of such changes in American society as the decline in the college age population, fiscal stringency, and a major intrusion of government involvement in all aspects of higher education. These changes and their impact on higher education are the subject of this collection of an excellent series of original essays (only three have been published previously). Through these essays the editors of this book present a multifaceted yet unified perspective regarding the complex and highly important relationship between higher education and society with special emphasis upon the concepts of autonomy, accountability, and academic freedom.