83 Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus who normally inhabit the campus or how well these learners respond to the techniques of distance education, little evidence is at hand. The nub of the second case study is a summary of the basic principles underlying this Swedish experimentation: as, for example, "to open up new ways for adult students, thereby reducing the generation gap in education"; and "to consider real rather than formal competence" in selecting the student body; "to promote social equality . . . a balanced structure of student groups and different professional groups in society." But so briefly reported as they are, they leave the reader uncertain as to what concrete values are intended to be added to society by these innovatory excursions. * * * Regrettably, this book is flawed by production bungles: typographical errors; duplicate successive section headings; elaborations which fail to materialize where promised. Each of the three articles which comprise the contents of this book is the product of a team of collaborators. Yet in the book's Foreword, the name of Mario Creet who worked with Professor Pike is ignored as are the names of those associated with Professor Mcintosh: Alan Woodley and Moira Griffiths. Quite inexcusable is the misspelling of Robert M. Pike's name on the book's cover. Happily, the lucid and perceptive account of the contributors makes up for the blunders of the publisher. It is a book which deserves to be read — and carefully so — by all engaged in post-secondary education in government or on the campus and particularly by those administrators responsible for shaping their institutions so that they might more effectively serve a changing clientele. Duncan D. Campbell Professor of Higher Education The University of Alberta Charles M. Johnston, McMaster University: Volume 1, The Toronto Years, published for McMaster University by the University of Toronto Press, 1976, xvi and 295 pp., $15.00; Volume 2, The Early Years in Hamilton, 1930-1957, 1981, xvi and 330 pp., $25.00 McMaster University must count itself fortunate that its tale has been told by a historian of the skill and honesty of Charles M. Johnston. Conversely, Dr. Johnston must count himself fortunate that he was given scope to write two solid three-hundred page volumes on the comparatively short life, a mere seventy years, of a university which in 1957 still registered only some one thousand students. Dr. Johnston has taken full advantage of his happy situation. He was able to investigate in depth the abundant materials with which the McMaster records have provided him. He sketches in the preliminary efforts in Montreal and Woodstock, gives more detailed treatment to the founding and fortunes of 84 Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus Toronto Baptist College, but by page forty-five of volume one has reached his main subject, the history of the institution which subsumed these ventures and proclaimed itself McMaster University. It is the story of this institution which Dr. Johnston has told with meticulous care. For the alumnus, or member of the McMaster 'extended family', no doubt each detail has its own appeal. For other readers, the fascination has to be in the unfolding story of a vigorous modern university emerging from the unlikely cocoon of a nineteenth century, largely rural and small town religious denomination, nurtured in sincerely held but narrowly conceived convictions. From the vantage point of the present, one can discern a certain inevitability in this process: the Canada Baptist College in Montreal was concerned whether it should serve a doctrinally 'open' or 'closed' constituency; the Canada Literary Institute in Woodstock wad definitely for all, but should it go further and enlarge its scope to encompass the whole college curriculum; and should it move from the safe confines of Woodstock to the unknown dangers of metropolitan Toronto; McMaster University, once esconced in the big city, would indeed cover the curriculum of a liberal arts college and retain a theological department, but should it go yet further and admit the concerns of biblical criticism and the findings of modern science; and should it move itself to Hamilton and accept some form of liaison with a municipality and a region, which in turn would mean some form of public support; and should the university, once in Hamilton, embark upon the pursuit of scientific research, even if it required the institution of a science college which must receive direct public financing and therefore be removed from denominational control; and should the university as a whole then follow the science college out of the Baptist fold and become a secular institution, overwhelmingly funded with provincial monies? As each of these questions meets with an affirmatory answer, we can sympathize with the honest men and women who agonized over their problems, debating them with tremendous fervour, and reaching conclusions which could only prove painfully divisive; but from which they did not shrink because they believed them to be right. We can sympathize with them, but we cannot help but discern that as each additional step was taken, the next became all the more inevitable. T.T. Shields and V. Evan Taylor, the great opponents of these developments, were not at fault in their reading of the writing on the wall: they were wrong in their premises. Yet those premises were arguably the fundamental convictions they shared with the denomination at large. An aspect of this process which commends our admiration is the way in which each step constituted a remarkable exercise in democracy. William McMaster placed his university under the control of a denomination which fervently believed in the freedom of the individual and of the local congregation, and in the voice of the assembly only as the aggregate of those congregations and indeed of those individuals. Matters of high educational policy had to be taken to the convention floor, and argued convincingly to farmers and small town tradesmen, as well as to college graduates and city lawyers. It speaks volumes for the healthy good sense of the denomination as a whole that when demagogues and obs- 85 Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus curantists mounted a virulent and well-supplied campaign against the course which MaMaster felt constrained to follow, the majority vote in the assemblies was solidly for the university and its leadership. Dr. Johnston has the space to recount some of these debates very fully, and in particular the furore which arose in the 1920's over the 'liberal-modernism' of some of the theological teachers is told with excellent attention to detail. Similarly, when the university had moved to Hamilton and was in the process of moving away from its Baptist origins, he can devote many pages to an informative analysis of student attitudes to the issues of the nineteen-thirties naziism and communism, war and peace, king and empire. There was no great enthusiasm for Canadian participation in any coming war, and to judge from the following chapter the degree of commitment to the national effort, once war had broken out, was not as strongly felt as in some other universities. The tradition of dissent and nonconformity had not wholly evaporated. Even so, in the fall of 1939 three hundred volunteers made up two full companies for the newly formed Canadian Officers' Training Corps. What the war did accomplish for McMaster was to give Henry Thode his opportunity to concentrate on isotope research which led directly to the university's postwar emphasis on nuclear physics and to the thrust into the physical sciences, which carried not only the science departments into 'Hamilton College' and out of Baptist control, but a bare ten years later drew the rest of the university after it, leaving only Divinity behind to the answerable to the Ontario and Quebec Baptist Convention. The account of how that decision was taken by one last democratic vote in the full assembly is told in subdued scholarly tones, but the drama of the moment nevertheless makes itself felt with considerable force. This then is the story which Dr. Johnston has told, and it gives an interest and value to his work far beyond that of the average college history. On the other hand, it has to be said that he has time to recount the succession of one valued — or not so valued: his judgments are not always favourable — teacher after another, many of them of only temporary interest, to the point where we wonder why some of them were mentioned at all. We could have wished that some of the amplitude allowed to the author in these volumes could have been spent in portraying more fully some of the major personalities involved. John Castle, H.P. Whidden, Charles Burke could all have been introduced with a substantial paragraph or two, and the remarkable Gilmour story, father, son, and grandson, surely deserved some collective discussion, rather than strictly chronological references as the different generations move in and out of the main narrative. What kind of a man was George Gilmour, when he was not being a university president? He began as a lowly lecturer in Church history, and was, one gathers, a Baptist preacher all his life, yet he resolutely and most capably steered McMaster from being a liberal arts Baptist college into becoming a vigorous young secular university with a strong bias to the sciences and a penchant for nuclear physics. Did he never reveal how he reconciled his loyalties and his policies? Dr. Johnston's work is at all times conscientious and balanced. He has told 86 Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus an important story extremely well. He has broken it off in 1957, a natural place to pause, just when McMaster was becoming a provincial university. But it is also just the period when Canadian universities were beginning to heat up, intellectually and sociologically, and when stormy years were ahead for everyone. It is to be hoped that he will continue the good work and give us a third volume which will deal with the 'knowledge explosion' of the later fifties, sixties, and seventies, and which will tell us how McMaster fared in the days of 'the student revolt'. He may even tell us whether there was yet some lingering odour of sanctity, or whether it all disintegrated in Henry Thode's reactor. It is also to be hoped that for a third volume McMaster will be rather more generous in the way of publishing subsides. The physical production of the two volumes, particularly with regard to the illustrations, leaves much to be desired. Dr. Johnston's work deserves a much better presentation. Stanley B. Frost History of McGill Project McGill University Peter Aucoin, ed., The Politics and Management of Restraint in Government. Montreal: The Institute for Research on Public Policy, 1981, 268 pp. $17.95. Universities in many Canadian provinces have become a prime target of government fiscal restraint in recent years. As well, there has been wide discussion of the federal government's suspected intentions to reduce its contribution to post-secondary education as a means of attacking its budgetary problems. While The Politics and Management of Restraint in Government refers only in passing to universities and post-secondary education, it offers to readers who are concerned about the future of the university some useful insights about the nature, causes and incidence of and possible reactions to government fiscal restraint. The Politics and Management of Restraint in Government records the proceedings of a conference sponsored by the Institute for Research on Public Policy in Toronto in the fall of 1979. It features presentations by thirteen contributors and also contains brief commentaries by other invited participants and short summaries of the open discussions which concluded several of the Conference's sessions. The presentations, all in English, range from Martin Goldfarb's fascinating analysis of public attitudes towards government spending to a dull piece by William Teron on some of his experiences at CMHC to Fred Cleverly's fulsome commentary on Donald Craik's description of recent government practices in Manitoba. Besides Goldfarb, W.T. Stanbury on deregulation, Michael Krashinsky on user charges and E.S. Savas on contracting out of government services are worth reading. For those interested in political aspects, pieces by Darcy McKeough and John Sewell may be rewarding. The highlight of the book is Peter Aucoin's masterful overview. Provided in both English and French, this 24-page introductory chapter conveys on its own almost everything of significance discussed at the Conference. As well as sum-