The opportunity to create a university has not been presented frequently; when it comes it is bound to offer an exciting and vital challenge to the leaders, to the faculty, to the students who undertake such an important adventure. As the numbers wishing to attend university continue to increase, it becomes clear that there are going to have to be more and more opportunities to create new institutions of higher learning. What should be the guiding principles of these foundations? Should they follow the time-honoured patterns of venerable universities and colleges? Or should they think rather in terms of today and of special needs related to specials problems of contemporary society? What capabilities and interests should they seek to develop in the particular groups of students which will form their constituencies?
Dr. Murray G. Ross, President of York University, which welcomed its first students in the autumn of 1960, has provided in this book a stimulating analysis of the present expansion in university education in Canada, and has outlined against this background the response which York University in particular is attempting to make to the challenge presented to it. He discusses the vexed question of the appropriate size of new institutions and analyses carefully the aims of university training and essential ingredients in administration, in faculty, in the student body which will make a genuine contribution to education possible. The chapters give forceful and convincing expression to the President's belief in the special need today for really vigorous thinking and inquiry at every level of the university community. He calls for the exercise of imagination, of inventiveness, of courage in planning and execution of the new universities. This is the time for a bold, creative thrust in education.