How has the Ontario Agricultural College contributed to Canadian education? What role has the college played in the development of agriculture since it was founded in 1874?

This history of Canada’s oldest agricultural college revolves around these two questions. It shows that the college’s mandate has changed in its attempt to serve both education and agriculture.

The Ontario Agricultural College was established to enshrine science in farming, but it also became the testing and extension arm of the provincial ministry of agriculture. Direct government control for ninety years provided financial resources not enjoyed by other post-secondary schools, but the results sometimes proved of greater benefit to agriculture than to education or science.

Swept into the University of Guelph when it was created in 1964, the college rethought its role. It emerged as a centre for advanced scientific inquiry, for global agricultural programs, and for understanding rural societies.

The controversies surrounding these changes and the evolving nature of agriculture and science are brought out fully in this account of the past century and a quarter.

Alexander M. Ross grew up on a farm in Ontario and served in the Royal Canadian Artillery in World War II. Now Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph, he has written A Part of Me Is Missing (2002 Borealis) and Slow March to a Regiment (2004). He has co-authored a revision of "The College on the Hill" (1999), a history of the Ontario Agricultural College.

Alexander Ross' profile page

Terry Crowley is professor of history at the University of Guelph, and is editor of the journal Ontario History. Among his books are Clio's Craft: A Primer of Historical Methods; One Voice: A History of the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association (with C.A.V. Baker); Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality, which won the W.C. Good Writing Award of the Rural Learning Association; and Canadian History to 1867: The Birth of a Nation. Dr. Crowley has contributed sections on the French regime to The Concise History of Christianity in Canada and rural labour in Labouring Lives: Work and Workers in Nineteenth-Century Ontario, which won the Ontario Historical Society's J.J. Thalman Award.

Terry Crowley's profile page

This well-written and effectively illustrated book will be useful to scholars of Canadian history ad Canadian higher education.

Canadian Book Review Annual