He explores the motives, goals, and social and religious ideas that were behind the creation of this important institution of higher education, explaining the reasons Trinity was founded, the role it played in Canadian society, and the way its founding doctrines were transformed into a functioning college. He also challenges the social and educational views of the founders, giving voice to those who did not share the founders' vision and criticized the course the college was determined to pursue. These dissenting voices help us understand the problems the new college faced and the steps a new generation of leadership would take to point the college in a new direction, and define a very different relationship with the modern world.

William Westfall is an Associate Professor at York University in both the Department of History, Atkinson College, and the Division of the Humanities, Faculty of Arts.

William Westfall's profile page

"Trinity is but the laboratory where Westfall plies his imagination in recreating an intellectual and social world we have almost entirely lost and mostly forgotten ever existed. The quality and range of his scholarship is on full display - both his command of the Canadian and international literature, and his well-established ability to exploit sources." R.D. Gidney, emertius, Faculty of Education, University of Western Ontario "A vital and significant contribution to Canadian history." Elizabeth Smyth, Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, OISE, University of Toronto