Alumni of Influence

Higher education leader and economist Donald Forster studied political science and economics at the University of Toronto, where he later joined the faculty as a lecturer in political economy. He assumed increasingly important administrative roles at the University, starting with his role as a don in UC’s Sir Daniel Wilson Residence and culminating in his service as vice-president and provost of U of T from 1972 to 1975. Thereafter he served as president and vice-provost of the University of Guelph.

In 1983, he was elected president of the University of Toronto, but sadly died of a heart attack just 23 days before he was due to take office. In addition to his contributions to higher education, he was a member of the Economic Council of Canada and served as an advisor to several governments in the developing world.

Ronald Gould is one of the world’s leading experts on the organization and management of elections. He joined the Canadian public service in 1955 and worked in various departments, ultimately becoming assistant chief electoral officer at Elections Canada, a position he held for 20 years.

He has participated in more than 100 elections in over 70 countries, including Cambodia -- where he headed the team for the country’s first general election -- Bosnia, Haiti, Sierra Leone, Yemen, South Africa and Mozambique. In 2007 he conducted an independent inquiry into the Scottish election results for the U.K. Electoral Commission.

He is the author of the books A Guide for Election Observers and Strengthening Democracy: A Parliamentary Perspective, as well as several articles on international elections. For his contributions to democracy, Gould was named a Member of the Order of Canada and received the Medal of Honour from the United Nations Association of Canada, the Queen’s Golden and Diamond Jubilee Medals, the Ten Years of Democracy in South Africa Award, the Canadian Peacekeeping Medal and the Outstanding Service Award from the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws.

Warren Kirkendale is an internationally acclaimed Canadian music historian. Educated at the universities of Toronto, Bonn, Berlin and Vienna, he taught at the University of Southern California from 1963 to 1967 and at Duke University from 1967 to 1982. From 1983, he directed the Institute of Music History at the University of Regensburg, Bavaria. As emeritus he has resided in Rome since 1992.

Kirkendale is a prolific writer and lecturer, having produced more than 4,500 pages of original research, and lectured in more countries, universities and languages than any other musicologist. His work covers Italian music of the 16^th and 17^th centuries and Austrian of the 18^th, and he is especially renowned for his interdisciplinary knowledge of the Italian Renaissance.

 He is the only North American music historian ever to have been appointed to a chair at a university on the European continent (receiving offers from both Germany and Italy), and the only one to hold an honorary doctorate from there -- from the University of Pavia, Italy.

He is the recipient of the prestigious medal of the Collège de France, and he was, with professors from Harvard and Yale universities, one of only three music historians to be made honorary members of the exclusive Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna, whose members included composers such as Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini and Ravel.

Lawyer John McKellar is partner emeritus at WeirFoulds LLP. In the course of a busy commercial law, he is or has been a director or officer of various corporations, including the Giffels and NORR (now “Ingenium”) group of architects and engineers, Fruit of the Loom Canada Ltd., General Mills Canada Ltd., CHUM Ltd., Uniroyal Ltd., Musique Plus Inc., SportsNet Inc. and Netstar Communications Inc.  He has been an advisor to the Law Society of Upper Canada and the Canadian Tax Foundation.

McKellar is known for the many performing artists and arts organizations he has advised, counselled and supported. He is now the chair of the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund and the Young Centre for the Performing Arts; vice-chair of the Ontario Arts Foundation; and director of the Tarragon Theatre, Off-Centre Musica Salon and the Glenn Gould Foundation. He is a past-president of the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto and a former director of the Canada Council for the Arts. He has, alone or with others, produced theatrical shows across Canada and in the United States and has several theatrical projects now in development. 

He became a member of the Order of Canada in 1996, being described as a “lawyer, volunteer, and impresario.” In 2011, he was awarded the Edmund C. Bovey Award, which is presented by Business for the Arts for demonstrating a lifetime of significant support or leadership in arts and culture in Canada. He is also a recipient of the 2002 and 2012 Queen’s Jubilee Medals.

Sir William Mulock was a lawyer, educator, businessman, politician and judge.

In Parliament from 1882 to 1905, he was postmaster general under Sir Wilfred Laurier and organized the federal Department of Labour, becoming its first minister. He negotiated an intergovernmental agreement to establish a telecommunications cable linking Canada, Australia and New Zealand and was instrumental in joining Canada and the United Kingdom through radio. He chaired the parliamentary inquiry into telephones that led to the regulation of Canadian telecommunications, and took part in the negotiations that led to the creation of Alberta and Saskatchewan as provinces.

He was he was chief justice of Ontario from 1923 to 1936. As vice-chancellor of the University of Toronto from 1881 to 1900, he was the primary force in federating denominational and professional colleges into the modern university. He served as chancellor from 1924 to 1944.

Mulock was active in both business and the community and was involved in the founding of the Toronto-Dominion Bank, the Toronto Star, Toronto Wellesley Hospital and Canada's first national peace organization. In later life, he was known as the "Grand Old Man" of Canada.

University College’s Mulock House is named after him, as is a secondary school in Newmarket, Ontario.

Erna Paris is the author of seven acclaimed works of literary non-fiction and the winner of 12 national and international writing awards for her books, feature writing and radio documentaries. Her works have been published in 14 countries and translated into eight languages. Long Shadows: Truth, Lies, and History was chosen as one of “The Hundred Most Important Books Ever Written in Canada” by the Literary Review of Canada Her most recent work, The Sun Climbs Slow: The International Criminal Court and the Struggle for Justice was first on The Globe and Mail's best book of the year list and shortlisted for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.

Paris is a member of the Honorary Council of the Canadian Centre for International Justice; a member of the Canada Committee of Human Rights Watch; a member of the board of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association; and a past chair of the Writers' Union of Canada. In 2012, she was awarded the World Federalist Movement -- Canada World Peace Award.

Bob Rae is a senior partner at Olthuis Kleer Townshend LLP. 

He was elected 11 times to the House of Commons and the Ontario legislature between 1978 and 2013. He was Ontario's twenty-first premier from 1990 to 1995 and served as interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada from 2011 to 2013.

Rae is working now as a negotiator, mediator and arbitrator, with a particular focus on First Nations, Aboriginal and governance issues.  He also teaches at the University of Toronto School of Governance and Public Policy and is a widely respected writer and commentator on public policy issues in Canada and abroad.   

An author of four books and many studies and reports, he is a Privy Councillor, an Officer of the Order of Canada, a member of the Order of Ontario and has numerous awards and honorary degrees from institutions in Canada and around the world.   

Rae attended UC from 1966, was literary director and Students Administrative Council representative, and lived for two years in McCaul House in the Sir Daniel Wilson residence. He studied modern history and was a Rhodes Scholar for Ontario in 1969, completing his MPhil at Balliol College. He is also a graduate of the Faculty of Law at U of T.  

Saul Rae was born in Hamilton, Ontario, of immigrant parents.  He showed a talent for music and theatre at a very young age, and travelled across Canada as part of a family troupe called the Little Raes of Sunshine. 

He came to UC on a scholarship in 1932, and had an active student life, becoming president of the Lit, an active debater at Hart House and producer and director of the UC Follies. He won the Moss Scholarship and became a Massey Fellow, completing his PhD at the London School of Economics in 1938.

After doing pioneering work on public opinion research with George Gallup, he joined the Canadian foreign service in 1940. He served in Algeria, Paris, London, Vietnam, Washington, Geneva, Mexico, New York and the Hague, and served as Canadian ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva and New York, as well as Mexico and the Netherlands.

He retired in 1980 and kept up an active interest in public affairs, as well as music and theatre. On his death in 1999, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien called him "one of the most remarkable men I've ever met. His sense of humour and lively mind drew people to him, and I was proud to know him as a friend."

Jeffrey Wong is a distinguished international scientist and Professor Emeritus at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he was the founding head of the Department of Biochemistry.

He is the co-developer of Dextran-Hemoglobin, a blood substitute that is used in transfusions to deliver oxygen to vital organs in cases of severe blood loss. Along with fellow UC alumnus Dr. Jan Blumenstein (BA 1954 UC), Wong first developed and tested the substance at the University of Toronto and Mount Sinai Hospital in the late 1970s, when he was a professor in U of T’s Department of Biochemistry.

His main research contribution is the co-evolution theory of the origin of the genetic code, which posits that the code is mutable, having co-evolved with, and therefore having been shaped by, amino acid biosynthesis.

He has published more than 40 articles in scientific journals and is a member of the Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology and the International Committee on Blood Substitutes.

Frederick H. Zemans is a pioneer in clinical legal education, alternative dispute resolution and the community legal clinic movement in Canada.

He is the founding director of Parkdale Community Legal Services --Ontario’s first community-based legal aid clinic, established in 1971 -- and of Osgoode Hall Law School’s Intensive Program in Poverty Law.  He was the director of clinical education at Osgoode for many years and was one of the original faculty teaching in Osgoode’s programs in Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). His continues to teach in the field of ADR.

His publications have focused primarily on the Canadian legal profession, access to justice, legal services for low-income persons, ADR and quality assurance of state-funded legal services. Active nationally and internationally in the field of legal aid, he is a member of the International Legal Aid Group and was, for many years, the Canadian board member of the Inter-American Legal Services Association. He was a founding member and president of the Canadian Law and Society Association

He has been a Butterworth’s Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London; and visiting professor at the London School of Economics, Kobe University Law Department, UCLA and the National Law University, New Delhi. He served for many years as chair of boards of inquiry for the Ontario Human Rights Commission and, in recent years, as a mediator and facilitator in private and public disputes.

He is married to Professor Joyce Zemans, a fellow UC Alumni of Influence Award recipient.

Pioneers Mary Bell Bald, Catherine Brown, Margaret Brown, Ella Gardiner and Margaret Langley were the first women students to attend lectures at University College, starting on October 6, 1884; they graduated in 1885.

The hard-won battle for admission was initiated more than a decade earlier by trailblazer Henrietta Charles. As a female, she was not permitted to attend classes at UC and resorted to a private tutor, passing exams and graduating in 1870.

While women were permitted to attend lectures by 1884, they continued to face obstructions and inequities. Female students were prohibited from using the reading room and library catalogues and from standing at bulletin boards in the halls; class notices were sent to their private waiting room. Women required the president’s permission to join clubs and did not get their own residence or gymnasium until 1905 and 1959, respectively.

In spite of these obstacles, Bald, Gardiner, Langley and the Brown sisters blazed the trail for generations of female UC students to come.

Entrepreneur and philanthropist Avie Bennett is the founder of First Plazas Inc., his personal, commercial real estate company. He is credited with pioneering the retail plaza concept in Canada, opening the nation’s first strip malls in Toronto in the early 1950s.

Bennett is the former chair of the venerable Canadian publishing house, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.; he donated 75 per cent of the company to the University of Toronto in 2000. That same year, he also donated The Canadian Encyclopedia (electronic version) to the Historica Foundation of Canada and co-chaired the Canadian Democracy and Corporate Accountability Commission.

In addition to his business interests, Bennett is a driving force in the community, education and the arts. He is a past chair of the Historica-Dominion Institute and a former president of the International Readings at Harbourfront. He has served York University as chancellor; the National Ballet of Canada, including its foundation and ballet school; the Governing Council of the University of Toronto; the Schulich Board of Business; the United Way of Greater Toronto; and the Luminato arts festival.

For his distinguished contributions, he was named a Companion of the Order of Canada, as well as a Member of the Order of Ontario, and was awarded the Canada 125 Medal in 1992. He holds three honorary doctorates.