TOLEDO – Universities often have official histories written about themselves, and most of those I’ve seen are mainly good for collecting dust on a coffee table. They are glowingly positive and have nice pictures of buildings, earnest students and sports teams.
But you don’t expect to find much depth, let alone a book you’d really want to curl up with and read. The University of Toledo published its own history this fall, to mark its 150th anniversary, and the first thing I noticed was the very clunky title: An Institution for the Promotion of Knowledge: The University of Toledo at 150.
Then, however, I noticed that the author was Barbara Floyd, and knew this would be a book I needed and wanted to read.
Floyd, who was UT’s archivist for 31 years, wrote a compelling book, The Glass City: Toledo and the Industry That Built It, (University of Michigan Press, 2015) which may be the best book on Toledo history, period.
That book told of the great inventions and larger-than-life figures who made the industry that first made Toledo an industrial powerhouse – but also of the flaws and shortsightedness that helped weaken the industry and doom early efforts to revitalize downtown.
Her University of Toledo book isn’t any less insightful, in spite of being an in-house publication of the institution where she spent her entire career. Reading this book, one is struck by two realizations: First, that UT has, as she notes, “contributed in innumerable ways to making Toledo a great place to live.”
But also, that in many ways this was a university that, especially in recent years, seldom has missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, or as she says in her preface, “there have been many bumps and bruises along the way … most of them self-inflicted.”
Telling that part of the story didn’t come easy for the author. She is almost a biological child of UT, and has been since she walked into her first class as a freshman in September 1976, and stayed to earn three degrees there and become the university archivist and director of its prestigious Ward M. Canaday Center for Special Collections.
The school shaped her, showed her a path to a different future from the one her blue-collar parents had, and she truly loves it.
But she clearly feels the university, those responsible for it and the city it serves need to face reality. Barbara Floyd is a good writer and a rigorously honest one, which is clear from her book’s very beginnings. Yes, Jesup W. Scott did donate 160 acres of land as an endowment to establish what he called “The Toledo University of Arts and Trade, and thought Toledo could become “the future great city of the world,” and wanted to help that process along.
He also, however, thought a major railroad terminal was going to be built near the site, and wanted to protect his land investments.
People are usually a mixed bag. That was the beginning, and she proceeds to tell the story of the university and the city that grew up with it over the next 150 years. If anyone stands out as a hero, it is William Carlson, president from 1958 to 1972; he led UT through perhaps the most turbulent era American campuses have ever faced.
He was also a builder who doubled the size of the place and a true visionary, and helped guide UT to becoming a state, rather than a municipal university in 1967, which was probably key to its economic survival. “I don’t think any president since can compare to Carlson, and some really shouldn’t have been in that job,” she said.
Besides being a rigorous and thorough researcher, the author is also creative; this isn’t a picture book, but the text is well illustrated throughout, and she sensibly includes boxed, eminently readable mini-profiles of some of the interesting, if not necessarily powerful, characters who have helped make the university.
But there were also those who kept it from being all it could, or who had impossibly grandiose dreams. Sometimes, the standards were so mediocre that a senior editor of The Blade back in the 1970s occasionally referred to it as “Bancroft High.”
Far from trying to elide past the worst moments, Floyd takes an honest look at the Vik Kapoor debacle that nearly tore the university apart, and also at the difficult merger of the Medical College of Ohio with the University of Toledo. It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to conclude that Lloyd Jacobs was entirely the wrong person to try to govern the shared entity.
UT has made many miscalculations over the years, but perhaps the biggest problem has been a board of trustees who too often haven’t been willing or able to have a realistic vision for what the school should and could be, and was woefully and perhaps willfully horrible at evaluating top talent.
There are other issues that need to be faced, soon; as she told me, “UT has about 15,000 students in a facility built for 30,000 and there are many infrastructure issues,” she said. The school has to be willing to make some hard and realistic decisions about that.
Still, she knows that she and thousands of Toledoans have had their spirits uplifted and lives transformed by the university. This book would be a good Christmas present for anyone connected to UT.
But more importantly, everyone in leadership at the school or in Toledo ought to be required to read at least the final chapters. There are lessons about governing there that they would do well not to miss.
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