Mark Kuhlberg. One Hundred Rings and Counting: Forestry Education and Forestry in Toronto and Canada, 1907–2007
Year: 2011
Type: book-review
Abstract: In One Hundred Rings and Counting: Forestry Education and Forestry in Toronto and Canada, 1907-2007 Mark Kuhlberg has presented a lively, well written and sometimes compelling institutional history of the University of Toronto Faculty of Forestry.It breaks new ground in its richly detailed examination of forestry education in Canada and the challenges faced by professional foresters in the first half of the twentieth century.One Hundred Rings and Counting is also a valuable contribution to the history of universities and higher education in Canada for its intense focus on the relationship between middle level management (deans) and upper management (presidents and governing bodies) at the University of Toronto.Both the Faculty of Forestry and Kuhlberg deserve credit for publishing a commissioned history that is less celebratory than analytical.While there are some criticisms to be leveled against the author in terms of insufficient attention to context and static and dismissive views of the provincial state and environmental movement, it is a monograph that deserves praise and a wide readership.Above all else, One Hundred Rings and Counting is a "Dean's eye view" of the evolution of forestry education at the University of Toronto.The chapters are organized, for the most part, around the tenures of individual deans, and the central focus is on how the men holding the office navigated their way through university politics and negotiated relationships between the faculty and government and industry.Despite being the first in Canada, the Faculty of Forestry at the University of Toronto consistently struggled along as a poor cousin of other faculties within the institution.The most compelling part of Kuhlberg's work is his penetrating analysis of the struggles
Author: William Parenteau
Institutions: University of New Brunswick, Historical Studies in Education
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1959163695