Cambridge and Toronto: The Twentieth Century Schools of Communication

Abstract

As the foremost twentieth-century schools of communication, Cambridge and Toronto were dissimilar organizationally. the former being a school of English, the latter being chiefly informal and interdisciplinary. At neither school was there unanimity of opinion nor uniformity of outlook, merely creative scholars whose collective insights about the processes of human communication far surpass those of all other universities in the Western world. The principal figures at Cambridge were I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis and at Toronto, H. A. Innis and H. M. McLuhan. Cambridge was ascendant from about 1912 to the Second World War; Toronto, pre-eminent afterwards to 1980. At both schools the approach to human communication was linguistic, embracing the classical, medieval, and Renaissance periods and the languages of contemporary media such as advertising, film, radic, and the press. At Toronto H. M. McLuhan, the intermediary between the two institutions, gave the humanistic study of communication unequaled scope, depth, complexity and relevance.