Knowledge Matters, written in honour of eminent Canadian educator Bernard J. Shapiro, explores the state and prospects of higher education in Canada and beyond. The contributors, a group of distinguished thinkers who participated in a colloquium in honour of Bernard J. Shapiro upon his retirement from the principalship of McGill University, draw from their vast experience and accomplishments in the worlds of scholarship, university administration, and the public and private sectors to demonstrate that knowledge matters. The contributors offer a variety of cautionary notes, neither despairing...

Universities of the 1930s, declared one observer, were "loafing places for rich men's sons." In Making a Middle Class Paul Axelrod challenges this popular perception, arguing that while students who attended university during the Great Depression were relatively privileged, the majority were neither terribly affluent nor completely sheltered from hard economic times. Nor were they all men.

Focusing on the student experience from the last quarter of the nineteenth century through the troubled 1960s, this collection of fourteen essays examines university life as a part of social and intellectual history. It brings to light the work of a new generation of researchers who have moved away from the narrower concern with institutional growth that has typified most historical writing in this field. Contributors include Paul Axelrod, Michael Behiels, Judith Fingard, Chad Gaffield, Yves Gingras, Patricia Jasen, Nancy Kiefer, Susan Laskin, Malcolm MacLeod, Lynne Marks, A.B. McKillop,...