Ken Luckhurst and Ishveer Malhi walk through CCT

It was 50 years ago today

Cynthia Macdonald

When U of T Mississauga first opened, deer and rabbits easily outnumbered the beautiful woodland campus’s 155 students.

Ken Luckhurst was among the very first to register at Erindale College, as UTM was then known, in the late summer of 1967. When he and friend Rick Robb crossed the threshold of its one and only building, they found a school that was so new, its administration didn’t have registration forms to hand out. “The registrar had to write all of our information down on the back of a Rothmans cigarette carton,” he recalls with a laugh.

Today, with about 14,000 students, UTM has beefed up its operations considerably – and there is no shortage of forms. But as Ishveer Malhi (BCom 2016 UTM) tells it, the school still retains its small-town feel. With the ability to connect to almost anyone through social media, Malhi says she always felt part of an intimate community, even though the school is much bigger than it was in Luckhurst’s day. “In a strange way,” she says, “it was like we all knew each other.”

On a sultry day in late June, Luckhurst (BSc 1970 UTM) and Malhi take a stroll along UTM’s bucolic paths and engage in some comparative reminiscing: Summer of Love vs. the Instagram Era.

Read the full story in the Autumn 2017 issue of U of T Magazine...