FEATURES

AT 6:50 A.M., the busiest intersection in Toronto is still asleep, and the Ryerson campus is mostly empty. Walk along Gould Street and you might see a couple of residents from Pitman Hall looking for a bagel, or some early-bird students trying to get a head start on the Library printers.

When Balzac’s opens at 7, there’s one person waiting to get a coffee. By 7:10 there are two, by 7:20 there are five, and by 8 the café is almost full. By then, the daily mix of business people, tourists, street preachers, and colourful characters have congregated around Yonge and Dundas. Ryerson wakes when Toronto wakes. Over the next few pages, spend a day on campus—find out what’s happening, and how it became possible. Few universities in Canada are as densely and seamlessly woven into a downtown core as Ryerson. As Toronto has grown and evolved, so has the university.

IN 1852, when the Normal School opened to train Ontario teachers, downtown Toronto was still mostly rural. In 1948, when the vacated buildings were re-opened as the Ryerson Institute of Technology, not much had changed. One of Ryerson’s first student societies was an equestrian club, which required only a quick trip to Sunnybrook for practice. “In those days, you didn’t have to go very far to get to the country,” says Ronald Stagg, Ryerson History professor.

Ryerson’s mascot was always a ram, but back then it was a real animal. “They had, I think, four live rams,” says Stagg. “It was quite a thing, because other schools liked to steal the ram. There was quite a competition: they would take it and decorate it. But it became… not acceptable.” Today, our foam-and-felt friend Eggy handles mascot duties; the skulls of those original rams are filed away in Ryerson’s Archives & Special Collections.

Emerging after the Second World War and with many veterans amongst its students, Ryerson offered a practical education in the new industries that had appeared during the war, from aircraft and automotive manufacture to electronics repair. The school was the brainchild of Howard Kerr, the first principal, who dreamed of an “MIT of the north” but whose idea was resented by more established universities.

Kerr was sensitive enough to this skepticism to introduce a dress code in 1954 (shirt, tie and jacket for men; dress and blouse for women). “He was very worried that Ryerson would not be wellreceived, so he wanted to show that these were really the kind of students you would want to hire for your business,” says Stagg. As a principal, Kerr was regarded with a mix of respect, fear and appreciation. “Probably more of the ‘respect’ and ‘fear’ than the ‘appreciation,’” says Stagg. “He was very good at supporting students … on the other hand, he would not tolerate any hijinks of any kind.”

The dress code would be phased out, and much more would change over the next 70 years. Courses devoted to jewelry repair, barbering and cooking disappeared; Ryerson would become a polytechnical institute, then a university granting degrees. One thing that hasn’t changed is Kerr’s vision of a school that would be adaptable to the times.

THE ADAPTABILITY is crucial to the Ryerson School of Journalism. Founded in 1950, Ryerson’s journalism program is one of the school’s oldest, and one of the most respected in the country. But in a constantly changing industry, it can never become static. Professor Asmaa Malik, who teaches digital skills to graduate students says, “The tools themselves are not really worth anything unless you’re doing something with them.”

The next generation of journalists will have to tell the stories that the media has traditionally neglected. 2015’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission report asked journalism schools to educate students on Indigenous culture and history. Malik’s digital journalism class partnered with Journalists for Human Rights to create a response: Indigenous Land, Urban Stories, a multimedia project that profiled Indigenous artists, artisans, educators, parents, chefs and activists in Canadian cities.

“It was challenging,” says Malik. “The students had a lot of hesitation. I think there was a lot of concern about telling Indigenous stories when you’re not Indigenous. ‘Will I understand? Will I unintentionally offend? How will I find sources?’ It was a great project in the end, but there was some anxiety.”

Modern journalism means a nuanced understanding of the role of the media itself. 2017 grad Kyle Edwards is now a staff reporter at Maclean’s, where he regularly reports on Indigenous affairs. He is Anishinaabe from Lake Manitoba First Nation. “I knew there were very important issues that weren’t being covered well,” says Edwards. “Even growing up, I remembered hearing about all these negative things in the news. I didn’t appreciate the coverage, and neither did many of my family. I always knew that was an issue in Canadian journalism.”

A TRIP THROUGH TIME

1850
A parcel of semi-rural land known as St. James Square is purchased by Egerton Ryerson for the site of the Normal School, the first school for teachers in Canada

1941
The Normal School building is used as a training facility for the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War