It seems fitting that the newest addition to the fast-growing University of Toronto—home base for Canada's baffling communications theorist Marshall McLuhan*—is probably the most television-conscious college in the world. Fully 45% of the instruction at suburban Toronto's Scarborough College is transmitted throughout its single twisting concrete building (see color pages) by television. The college was literally built around its TV facilities.
Scarborough, which opened in 1965, is one of two "satellite" campuses of the University of Toronto created to handle an enrollment expansion from 19,300 fulltime students at present to 35,000 by 1970. The second, Erindale, will open across town next fall. The satellites are undergraduate commuter colleges that do not require students to attend any classes on the hemmed-in downtown campus, although some professors will have to shuttle to and fro.
The Nerve Center. The advantage of television, contends Scarborough Dean W. E. Beckel, is that "we can make a small number of really first-class professors available to the widest group of students." Scarborough's nerve center is a main television-production studio (60 ft. by 50 ft.) and five adjacent smaller studios. The network can handle eleven instructional programs at a time, covering 50 classrooms. Except for educational films, Scarborough produces all of its own TV instructional material, 60% of it on Videotape.
The college employs eleven fulltime television specialists, from producers to electronics repairmen, to man its studios. Most professors give two lectures a week on television. Dean Beckel sees an advantage in the ability to add graphics and photographic illustrations to the lectures of what he calls the "semi-live" professors. Television is not suitable, he concedes, for such subjects as English composition, French recitation, math drills and problem-solving in the sciences. But otherwise, he says, "you at least get no worse results than by face-to-face instruction."
Like Hill Towns. The college is built on 202 acres, most of it in a ravine studded with century-old hemlock, pine, maple and beech trees. Architect John Andrews, an Australian-born professor on the Toronto faculty, likens the setting to that of Italian hill towns, feels he has created in the building a response to the demands of site, climate (no one has to step out of doors in a blizzard to change classrooms) and educational program. Andrews' design emphasizes efficiency. His 30 science labs, which seat 20 students each ("the number that can conveniently look at a reasonably priced TV monitor"), are proving ideal for nonscience classes as well, and are in use 85% of the school day.
* Who last week accepted a New York State-endowed Albert Schweitzer Chair in Humani ties at Fordham University. He and three aides will share $100,000 a year for research in the field of comparative cultures.