It was a child of the Sixties, shaped by the baby boom and now staring down its 50th birthday – no wonder York University seems such a hotbed of activists.

As the sprawling campus sits suspended by labour turmoil for the third time in a dozen years, the growing buzz among students and parents is: Why is York so wild?

"It was a brand new university in the 1960s that was hiring like crazy – we even had enough for a professors' soccer team – and this big wave of young, socially concerned newcomers had a greater impact than they would have at a university with more older, established faculty," says historian Michiel Horn, who has just published a history of the university.

"York soon got the image of a bunch of lefties – even I'm not sure it's always justified."

It seems to ring true these days.

A strike by 3,340 teaching assistants, contract faculty and graduate assistants has shut down classes since Nov. 6, throwing 50,000 undergraduates into often heartbreaking personal anguish, which may continue for another week until the provincial government holds a vote for union members to approve or reject York's latest offer.

The university asked for this one-time-only "supervised vote" Friday, after the Canadian Union of Public Employees 3903 refused to put the three-year offer of increased wages and benefits to its members, saying it was a step back, especially with regard to job security.

But it's merely the latest example of activism in an era known more for Facebook than facing off against authority.

Over the past 12 years, York alone among Ontario universities has had its school year lengthened by strikes twice, and this latest stoppage almost surely will do it again.

York grabbed headlines around the world four years ago for expelling a student for protesting with a bullhorn. That student became the first in Canada to sue his university president for defamation. A York professor took his bosses to the Ontario Human Rights Commission in a complaint over cancelling classes on Jewish holidays.

Social criticism seems fixed in its bedrock.

"As president, I used to go out fundraising and CEOs would ask me, `How are you getting on with all those pinkos?'" recalls economist H. Ian Macdonald, who served as president from 1974 to 1984.

"Remember, York began with a focus on the arts and social science and humanities – disciplines whose business is social criticism – and that's exactly what a university is supposed to be concerned with." He cites with pride how York kept contact with Soviet scholars during the Cold War, despite taking heat from other academics.

But Harry Arthurs, who took over from Macdonald in 1985, believes York's strong union tradition was born of something else – a tough new provincial funding formula introduced during the 1970s recession that penalized university growth just as York was starting to boom.

"York was at the epicentre of university growth in Ontario, if not Canada – yet the economy was in trouble and we were shortchanged by a new funding formula that not only hit salaries, but meant we couldn't even buy books for the library or fix the air circulation," recounts Arthurs, a specialist in labour law.

"We couldn't do a damn thing; it was awful – we were working in substandard conditions back then and that's why unionism grew.

"A lot of York's feistiness was attributable to the dire circumstances people faced; they were angry and rightly so – and you can't erase the legacy of these problems.

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"A whole generation of groups can remain bitter."

To Horn, York's official historian, being a young university on a hiring spree during the 1960s led to more open employment practices than normal for the ivory tower, and hiring a more diverse faculty may have helped shape York's upstart campus culture.

"To get the top people in the 1960s necessitated looking beyond the usual candidates, and there wasn't the same prejudice against women and Jews at York as there were at many other established universities," recalls Horn, an expert in academic freedom in Canada.

"Universities were lily-white institutions for a long time – women were tolerated and it was okay to be Jewish if you weren't observant, but that wasn't the case at York; they hired more Jewish faculty. Perhaps, who knows, among Jews of a certain age and their parents, there is a greater awareness of social justice."

But in some ways, Horn says York's activism is partly an optical illusion; it just seems radical when compared to its more staid colleague downtown.

To this day, University of Toronto professors have not unionized, and at Ryerson University, the professors' union has agreed not to strike, but to turn disputes over to binding arbitration.

To philosophy professor Joe Gonda, York's personality can be traced back to the spirit of the times.

"York began in the Sixties, and when you say the Sixties, what do you think of? Sex, drugs, rock and roll – and activism." Those traits are in York's DNA, says the philosopher. "It's how it was born, just as people are born blond or six feet tall."

These Sixties activists may have founded a school that can seem "chaotic" to outsiders, says Gonda, but inside, all this turmoil makes for lively dialogue, or what he says economist Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction."

"We're not the 'Old Boys' Network' at York; we're more like a cranky, fractious family."