Sub-series consists of records relating to the activities of the Office of the Vice-President, Academic, including personal correspondence, business correspondence not filed under more specific file categories, and (after 1992) memoranda sent by the VP Academic for wide distribution on a variety of subjects. Activities and topics documented include the search for a Vice-President, Academic (1968-1970) and the appointment of the Associate Vice-President (1975); correspondence with external individuals and organizations; purely personal correspondence of the Vice-President with colleagues, students and professional bodies; the organization and administration of the VP Academic's office, and staff relations; university policy development and university reorganization; strategic planning, and budget planning and allocation; legal advice; and meetings with Vice-Presidents, Academic from other universities. Records include correspondence, policies, reports, job descriptions, invitations, contracts and agreements, legal services invoices and legal advice, wide-distribution memoranda, and personal papers and essays.
Note that sub-sub-series 4 ("Chronological correspondence") consists of copies ("flimsies") of all outgoing correspondence, arranged chronologically. The records are duplicates of "file copies" that were organized by subject using the classification plan (both flimsies and file copies are annotated with the same classification code). The VP Academic's Office maintained such "chrono files" throughout the entire time span of this sub-series (1968-1999), but the Archives has only retained the records for the period prior to the appointment of Brian Wilson as VP (i.e. September 1970); the sub-sub-series therefore represents the chrono files of the first two Acting VPs Academic, R.R. Haering and Lalit Srivastava. With Wilson's appointment, the Office was formally established and the file classification system clearly in place. Prior to it, it is not always possible to establish that records in the chrono files are in fact duplicated in the subject files, and therefore they have been retained in their entirety.
Note that sub-sub-series 5 ("File indices") is an artificial series established by the archivist for the annual file index created by the VP Academic's Office. The file index shows classification codes and category titles; the indices were created by Office but not integrated into the classification system.
