In the bowels of U of T’s rare books library are many leather-bound, Atlas-sized volumes of media clippings on Nobel Prize winner Frederick Banting, the co-discoverer of insulin. Banting made his secretary locate these media reports – which document such banal topics as his transatlantic voyages, speeches, social engagements, and honorary degrees – and paste them into the weighty tomes every morning. The egotism of the great? Or a sad account of Banting’s lazy post-Nobel laurel-resting?

The ever-diplomatic Martin Friedland wouldn’t put it either way. One of the University of Toronto’s great remaining humanists, Friedland has a tolerance for different mixtures of frailties that makes him the perfect choice to write an official history to mark that contentious institution’s 175th anniversary. But, fair-minded as he is, Friedland loves a good story too much not to provide (albeit sotto voce) all the raw material one needs to create one’s own, perhaps racier, reconstruction of the same personalities and events.

It’s an official history, the first in 75 years, but it’s one with the secret history imbedded in the same pages – one can almost hear Robertson Davies archly delivering certain lines to expose the parallel tale under the respectable veneer. This mixture of astute judgment with unrefined grist makes the book a remarkable, indeed an indispensable, text for those interested in the university and in the intellectual history of Canada.

Friedland adeptly depicts the carnival of 19th-century education before the U of T’s founding, where squabbling religious factions duked it out among themselves and with the trade schools for scarce public funds and students. Eventually the moderate advocates for impractical, predominantly secular education won out. The government sponsored the founding of a non-sectarian university and provided it with enough ballast to draw the best of the other institutions (Victoria, Trinity, St. Mike’s) into its own orbit. They built it, and eventually everyone came.

Friedland’s tale of the university’s early years is enriched by his sympathy for a roguish scholar, Daniel Wilson, the school’s second president. A painting archeologist and polyglot, Wilson was the first to use the term “prehistory” and found time to keep a pungent diary of which Friedland makes liberal but judicious use. Like one of those inveterate plotters with whom Davies populated The Rebel Angels, Wilson filled his journal with observations about his colleagues, including vice-chancellor William Mulock: “The Mule was devoid of the instincts of a gentleman.”

During Wilson’s tenure, women pushed for admission, but he would only allow them to audit lectures from just outside the classroom door. While women did eventually breach the gates in the 19th century, it would take considerably longer for various minority group members to establish a presence on campus. Friedland’s depiction of the long and storied relationship between the university and the Jewish community is particularly interesting. He unearths many examples of polite and not-so-polite antiSemitism, from York club blackballings to Banting’s alleged comment that he wouldn’t have worked so hard to find a treatment for diabetes if he’d known so many Jews suffered from the disease.

The text sometimes flags when it recounts the internecine squabbles that often filled otherwise peaceable times. Friedland dutifully marches through these long forgotten melees, barely suppressing a yawn. When he reaches the actual wars to which the university sent so many students, Friedland deftly contrasts the collective sense of waste that was palpable on dedicating the memorial at Hart House after the First World War with the bellicose eloquence the school’s hawkish president exhibited when sending so many of the university’s young men marching toward the Somme.

Later Friedland tracks the progress of a recent graduate, a fresh-faced Rhodes scholar named J.K. MacAlister, as he enlists for the Second World War, becomes a spy, is captured, sent to Buchenwald, is tortured, and dies. MacAlister’s poignant mug shot where his mouse-small eyes peer brightly out, is one of many well-selected archival photos that illustrate the text.