CCHA, Historical
Studies, 61 (1995), 171-194
St. Michael’s
College at the University of Toronto,
1958-1978:
The Frustrations of Federation
Alexander REFORD
“Possibly no institution has been so
chaotically put together and its chaos so persistently maintained as St.
Michael’s.”1 So wrote the
historian of Catholic higher education in English Canada, Fr. Laurence K.
Shook (1908-1994), about St. Michael’s College in Toronto. Shook knew of what
he wrote. Not only did he make an exacting historical study of Catholic
universities in Canada, but he presided over the challenges facing St.
Michael’s College for six years. And as the superior and president of St.
Michael’s from 1952 to 1958, the beginning of a period of remarkable expansion
and development for the college, Shook attempted to establish some order and to
bring unique solutions to the problems of Catholic higher education in Toronto.
Whether Shook and his successor as president of the University of St. Michael’s
college, Fr. John Kelly, developed an “Ontario solution” remains an open
question.
St. Michael’s College is the senior
English-speaking institution of Catholic higher education in Ontario. Its
beginnings date to 1852 when the Bishop of Toronto, Armand Comte de Charbonnel,
invited his former teachers in France, the Basilian Fathers, to send some of
their members to Toronto to found and staff an educational institution. At the
start and for its first sixty-five years, the mandate of St. Michael’s College
was three-fold: to prepare young men for clerical vocations, to provide an
education for Catholic boys at the secondary level, and to educate Catholic
youth for careers in society through a rigid collège classique program adapted
from that used in Basilian schools in France. From 1855 the college established
itself in a building erected at the centre of several lots in what were fields
in then north Toronto. The lots were acquired, by gift and by sale, from John
Elmsley, a prominent Catholic layman who had converted to Catholicism two
decades earlier. Elmsley created a Catholic precinct on the property adjacent
to his home. Elmsley’s lands eventually became the site of several convents,
colleges, schools and St. Basil’s Church. St. Michael’s property was close to
land Elmsley had previously sold to King's College, the Anglican institution
and Toronto’s first university, established in 1827. By the time St. Michael’s
moved to St. Joseph Street, however, the King’s College property had passed to
the new University of Toronto, the non-sectarian and state-supported
university established in 1849 as the provincial university. St. Michael’s was
thus the first of the University of Toronto’s many educational neighbours,
which came to include the entire university and its many colleges.
The geographic proximity of the college to
the university was immediately recognized as bringing advantages to St.
Michael’s. As early as 1855, the superior of the college requested permission
of the university authorities for affiliation. This request was refused, likely
because affiliation was primarily intended as an avenue by which the College
could receive government grants. But these government grants were made to the
College, and to other denominational colleges, beginning in 1856 and did not
hinge on affiliation. They continued until 1868 when grants to denominational
colleges were suspended by the newly formed Province of Ontario, a policy which
has endured to the present. Like other denominational colleges in Ontario, but
unlike some Catholic institutions in other provinces, such as St. Thomas More
College in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, St. Francis Xavier and other Catholic
universities in the Maritimes, St. Michael’s has never received grants from the
provincial government.
In 1881, St. Michael’s again approached the
university for affiliation. The then Vice-Chancellor of the university, William
Mulock, saw the affiliation as an opening for the university to fulfill its
mandate as the “provincial university.” Because the University of Toronto was
essentially an examining body and a purely degree-granting institution, with
University College as its teaching division, affiliation was thought to be
attractive, even to those colleges with their own charters and degree-granting
powers. The university’s leadership had long expected the principal
denominational colleges in Ontario, Queen’s College in Kingston, Victoria
College in Cobourg, and Trinity College in Toronto, to seek affiliation with
Varsity. Instead of the Presbyterians, the Methodists and the Anglicans, it
established a working relationship with the Catholics, the Low Church Anglicans
and the Toronto Presbyterians when St. Michael’s, Wycliffe and Knox were
affiliated as theological colleges. Affiliation allowed St. Michael’s students
to register at University College, to sit examinations set by the university
and to take university degrees. It also enabled St. Michael’s faculty to teach
history and philosophy to their own students using texts of their own choosing.
This control over curriculum was a pre-condition for affiliation set by Archbishop
Lynch. It was accepted without complaint by the university. Lynch wanted
assurances that St. Michael’s students would be spared the anti-Catholic
sentiments of several of the University's senior scholars. The motives of the
then superior of the college, Fr. John Teefy, for pushing affiliation are
unclear. He was one of the first Catholic graduates of the University of
Toronto in 1871 and perhaps reasonably expected that other Catholic students
would wish to receive degrees from the University. In fact, between 1881 and
1910 only nine St. Michael’s students took advantage of the agreement. In 1887
the university formally invited the province’s denominational colleges to
federate with it and an act was passed by the legislature to facilitate
federation. The Federation Act of 1887 for the first time established a
teaching faculty of the university which up to that time had been only an
examining body.2 The university thus undertook instruction in a
limited number of subjects, paving the way for the creation of professional
faculties and an opening to the students at the colleges who wanted to enroll
in these courses.3 The offer enticed Victoria College to abandon
Cobourg for Toronto and to become federated as an arts college of the
university. St. Michael’s passed from affiliation to federation as a
theological college in 1889. This change in nomenclature aside, St. Michael’s
status and perceived role had changed little. Unlike Victoria, it was not an
arts college of the university. For St. Michael’s students, the university was
of little consequence. Life at the college was strictly regimented and students
had little if any occasion to mix with the students of the university.
By the beginning of the century, several
factors pushed St. Michael’s towards fuller integration with the university.
The movement to reform secondary school education in Ontario altered teaching
and courses in St. Michael’s College. Changes to the university entrance
requirements led St. Michael’s to overhaul the high school and collège
classique curriculum initiated and maintained by its French founders. In 1903
the college opened a new wing and separated the high school from the college.
The high school adopted the curriculum of the Ontario Department of Education
and Basilian teachers were sent to get certificates of education in increasing
numbers. At the post-secondary level, it was also becoming apparent that
increasing numbers of Catholic students were choosing to attend the University
of Toronto, the University of Ottawa or other degree-granting institutions
rather than St. Michael’s College, which offered no recognized degree.
One such student was the James Frances Kenney, an historian and founder of the Canadian Catholic Historical Association in 1933. Kenney enrolled at University College but spent much of his time at St. Michael’s where he fraternized with other Catholic students, attended mass, and took courses out of interest. The College had fully satisfied its original mandate of training Catholic youth for clerical vocations but it had yet to fulfill its role in educating Catholics for careers in society. St. Michael’s graduates, as many as eighty percent, were destined for clerical vocations after graduation. But like Kenney, Catholics in increasing numbers were registering at the university to get arts and professional degrees.
By the early 1900s, the
organization of the University of Toronto was again coming under scrutiny. Long
perceived as the privileged son of the government, Toronto nonetheless suffered
from political interference in its academic affairs and fiscal neglect by the
Liberal governments of the 1890s. The new Whitney Conservative government
restored capital grants to the university and in 1905 appointed a Royal
Commission to report on its governance. It entrusted the chairmanship to the
antique but erudite Goldwin Smith and appointed hard-edged businessmen like
Joseph Flavelle and Sir Edmund Walker to bring forth the required result. The
Royal Commission’s report advocated the re-structuring of the university and a
new university act incorporating the suggested changes.4 Shook chronicles
the apparently relaxed attitude St. Michael’s took to this re-organization,
which only included St. Michael’s at the last moment.5 Although not
specifically mentioned as a college of the university, the new act established
provisions whereby St. Michael’s could become, by administrative rather than
legislative action, an arts college federated with the university. After the
University of Toronto Act was passed in 1906, federation was quickly granted to
St. Michael’s, and the first St. Michael’s students graduated with University of
Toronto degrees in 1911. Soon after, the two Catholic women’s colleges in
Toronto, Loretto and St. Joseph’s, were in turn federated with St. Michael’s,
paving the way for Catholic women to receive degrees from the University of
Toronto through St. Michael’s College.6
Federation for St. Michael’s meant that it
had stepped up a rank to become an integral part of the Faculty of Arts.
Students registered at St. Michael’s and were instructed there in the so-called
‘college subjects,” English, French, German, Classics (including Greek, Latin
and Ancient History). St. Michael’s enjoyed the special privilege of teaching
Philosophy. Some of the other colleges offered courses in Ethics and Near
Eastern studies. Each college was responsible for hiring and promoting its own
staff. They had their own undergraduate department in these subjects with its
own chairman. The other subjects, such as History, Political Economy, the
social sciences, physical and biological sciences, were taught by university
departments.
By 1910, the first stage in
the “Toronto Solution” for Catholic higher education had been achieved for St.
Michael’s with little fanfare and less planning. But the arrangement proved to
be remarkably versatile and enduring. Over the following four decades, St.
Michael’s became an important part of the university, never an integral
component perhaps, but a willing and cooperative partner. The college developed
at its own pace and at every stage the university authorities proved helpful
and supportive.
The most ambitious plans for the College
were hatched by Fr. Henry Carr (1880-1963), who took effective control of
planning at the college when he joined the faculty in 1904 while still in his
twenties. As superior and president of St. Michael’s and later as superior
general of the Basilian Fathers, he formulated plans for the institution’s
long-term development.7 He had a vision of the college as a Catholic
university on a level with those rapidly developing in the United States. His
plans to make St. Michael’s an independent Catholic university with its own
charter were only beginning to take shape when the depression brought an end to
his ambitious fund-raising and building programs. Carr did, however, succeed in
putting St. Michael’s on the map as a leading centre for the study of St.
Thomas Aquinas and of the Thomistic revival. He imported well-known Catholic
scholars from Europe, Sir Bertram Windle, past president of University College,
Cork and a well-known Catholic writer, Maurice De Wulf, a pioneering Belgian
historian of Thomism, and the French philosophers Etienne Gilson and Jacques
Maritain. The presence of Gilson and Maritain made the College’s philosophy
department one of the most renowned in the country and inspired the foundation
of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. In this development of what
was essentially a graduate division, the university was fully
supportive. While
it made no contribution to the institute, neither did it stand in the way of
its establishment. In this and other ways, the federation agreement with the
university proved to be adaptable and resilient. The university recognized the
course work done at the institute even though there was no real provision for
any college to establish a graduate division under the terms of federation or
the University Act.
From the 1920s to the 1950s, it is no
surprise that the message conveyed by St. Michael’s to Catholics seeking their
own colleges in other provinces was that the federation principle worked. J.J.
Leddy in Saskatoon was one of several laymen and ecclesiastics who looked on
the St. Michael’s – University of Toronto federation as a model for emulation
in their own province. A Catholic college could be a full partner of a secular
university, even a large secular research university of the kind Toronto had
become. Catholic intellectuals, lay and clerical, could find an academic home
where their work would be encouraged and respected and where they could give
graduate instruction. Catholic students could have a milieu where they lived
and studied in a Catholic environment, with other Catholic students, while at
the same time participating in the offerings and facilities of the university,
and working towards a degree which was recognized and respected. By the 1950s,
St. Michael’s was a significant partner in the University of Toronto and a
leader in Catholic higher education. By virtue of its programme in mediaeval
studies, it was an important intellectual centre for the church in North
America.
As in the case of all other
universities in Canada, the 1950s were years of incredible growth for the
college, both in its enrollment and its campus facilities. The college was able
to accommodate increased numbers because in 1951 it received its first
significant government grants since 1868. The federal government of Louis St
Laurent, following the recommendations of the Massey Commission, entered the sphere
of university financing and began to make direct contributions to higher
education in 1951. All recognized universities, including church-related
institutions, received a portion of the grant given to the province, based on
its student enrollment. St. Michael’s share of these grants over their duration
was nearly one million dollars. Since the grants were related to enrollment,
the system not surprisingly encouraged the college to expand its student
population. The College’s enrollment grew to 1,000 students in 1961. By 1970
the enrollment surpassed 2,000. While the St. Michael’s figures were
significant, amounting to a 169% increase between 1957-1958 and 1967-1968, the
growth rate was
common for Catholic and secular universities across Canada.8
To accommodate this growth, the college
embarked on an ambitious building program which from 1953 to 1969 saw the
construction of a residence for men and two for women (undertaken by the
Loretto and St. Joseph’s sisters), an administration building, a student centre
and the largest college library at the university.
The physical expansion and enrollment
increases at the college made the then president, Fr. Laurence Shook, realize
that the administrative structure of St. Michael’s was not adequate to deal
with rapidly emerging realities. He quickly perceived that St. Michael’s was
not taking full advantage of federal funding because it was not claiming the
grant to which it was entitled on behalf of its theological students. In order
to receive such grants, however, St. Michael’s as a prerequisite had to grant
civil degrees in theology. And because St. Michael’s had never been formally
established as a degree-granting institution, it needed to have its original
act of incorporation amended to permit the establishment of a faculty of
theology, a step that was accomplished in 1954. This exercise led Shook to seek
a university act for St. Michael’s. Only occasionally in the past had the
college thought of seeking a legislative act which would replace the act of
incorporation of 1855 and grant St. Michael’s university status. Carr had
flirted with the idea in the 1920s but had not pursued it. Not only would it
have meant a departure from the federation model, but it is unlikely that the
Ontario legislature would have assisted in the creation of a Catholic
university in Toronto. Shook apparently gave no consideration to seeking a
charter to create a stand-alone institution. St. Michael’s lot was fully cast
with the University of Toronto. The University of St. Michael’s College Act,
passed in 1958, established St. Michael’s as a university on a par with its sister
federated colleges, Trinity and Victoria – as an arts college federated with
the University of Toronto, and a university in its own right empowered to
grant civil degrees in theology. The University of St. Michael’s College Act
was Fr. Shook’s final achievement as president.
To Shook’s successor, Fr. John
Kelly (1911-1986), fell the task of dealing with enormous changes facing the
college and the university in the 1960s. Kelly was an Irish-American from
Scranton, Pennsylvania, who was one of the many Americans who had attended St.
Michael’s. After joining the
Basilians, he received a doctorate in philosophy from Toronto. Kelly was a respected professor of philosophy at the time of his appointment to succeed Shook.
His first task was to implement the University
of St. Michael’s College Act and to respond to the ever-increasing reports
produced by the University of Toronto concerning the university’s structure and
future. In 1959 the university examined the relationship between the Faculty of
Arts and Science of the university and the colleges.9 The Woodside Memorandum
tackled the problem of increasing enrollments in university subjects and
declining enrollments in college subjects. The report aired the complaint that
university staff were handling the bulk of the students while the colleges had
the bulk of the staff. This was essentially a problem in the proliferating
social sciences, which were entirely university-based and unrepresented in the
colleges. Woodside wrote,
“There is no doubt
that the four Arts Colleges have had an increasingly small share in the
instruction of their own students. Limited as they are, not to the Humanities,
but to subjects representing only a segment of the Humanities, and excluded
from now populous humanistic disciplines such as history, philosophy and
Spanish, they are in a sense by-passed by increasingly large numbers of
students interested in the social sciences, the physical and natural sciences,
and the humanities offered by non-College departments, while some of the
College departments in Humanities, which in fact are authoritative but for
which there is in fact small demand, are obliged to maintain very large staffs
and to require each member of the staff to devote many hours per week to
teaching an exceedingly small number of students.”10
An oft-cited example was in the teaching of
classics, where the colleges together had thirty-six faculty and only several
times as many students. The solution proposed by Woodside was not a collegiate
solution, involving the appointment of social sciences’ faculty to the arts
colleges, but a departmental solution. Woodside recommended that all college
departments except religion be combined to form university departments. He also
suggested that faculty be allocated to colleges by a system of cross-appointment,
whereby the university hired faculty and “supplied” them to the colleges.
Kelly and his counterparts at
the other colleges criticized the Woodside Memorandum for not solving the
problems it had identified. The most cogent critique was made by Fr. Shook to
Kelly. Shook’s analysis identified the fundamental problem with the
university’s solution. He pointed out that the “loss of the right of the
Colleges to appoint staff would in effect destroy the Colleges. It would deny
the right of the Colleges to exist independently.”11 It would also
result in the “loss of the relationship of the College with the Basilian
Fathers, and ultimately, the end of the appointment of priests and nuns.”12
The Woodside Memorandum was only one of
several reports produced which was critical of the university’s organization. A
lengthy examination of Toronto’s graduate programs occurred between 1963 and
1965. The final report made repeated mention of the oddities of the
university’s structure. For instance, the graduate school had no formal role in
the appointment or promotion of staff either of the university’s faculty or the
faculty of the colleges even though most faculty anticipated doing some
graduate instruction.13 Another oddity from the university’s
perspective was that the chairman of the graduate department was generally
chosen by the College department chairman from among their members. The report
advocated the separation of the graduate and undergraduate functions of the
university.14 It recognized the federated college’s concern that the university
generally filled gaps in its graduate teaching by hiring additional faculty for
University College, thus ignoring the interests of the colleges in making
their own appointments, often in the same areas.15 It also acknowledged
that the colleges received little or nothing when members of their faculties
engaged in graduate instruction and suggested that this be remedied by greater
compensation to the colleges.16
At the same time that such initiatives were coming out of Simcoe Hall,
the University’s President, Claude Bissell, was affirming the importance of the
collegiate nature of the university. When Claude Bissell assumed office in 1958
he squashed earlier plans for the building of residences outside the college
structure. Instead, he developed and executed plans to deal with expanding
university enrollment by expanding the number of colleges to accommodate them.
There were three aspects to Bissell’s plan: the capping of enrollment of
University College at 2,000 students; increasing registrations at the
federated colleges like St. Michael’s; and the construction of new colleges on
campus. The new colleges were going to resemble the federated colleges in most
respects but without the status, the autonomy, the endowment or the separate
faculty of the federated colleges. They were to be colleges in which students
registered, lived in residence, and received some instruction and counselling.
During Bissell’s tenure, several colleges were added on the downtown campus:
Massey College for graduate students, New College for arts and professional
students, and Innis College for arts students. Suburban colleges were also
erected in Scarborough and Mississauga to deal with the expanding communities
on Toronto’s borders, a step to guarantee the University of Toronto’s status as
Toronto’s main university in enrollment and programs in the face of the new
suburban York University in North York. Another “college,” developed by
students and faculty but operating outside the university’s control, was
Rochdale College, whose infamy eventually led to its closure and transformation
into senior citizens’ apartments. Bissell envisioned the development of additional
colleges, one for engineering students and another for Jewish students, but
plans for both foundered. While Bissell enjoyed the cooperation of the heads
of the federated colleges throughout his tenure, he sensed a reluctant
acceptance for the forming of new arts colleges to handle the expansion of the
university. Their reluctance proved to be misplaced. Never again did the
federated colleges enjoy a university president in Simcoe Hall willing to
expand the collegiate structure of the university. With the appointment in
1972 of the university’s new president, John Evans, and the new fiscal
realities faced by all Ontario universities, the colleges came under even
closer scrutiny and pressure.
The collegiate nature of the
Faculty of Arts and Science was tested even further by changes to the arts and
science curriculum. In 1967 the university again subjected itself to a painful,
and in some minds, destructive examination of its undergraduate curriculum.
The University of Toronto curriculum was then one of the most rigid taught by
any university in North America.
The system had remained
essentially unchanged since the 1930s. Students entering the university were
admitted to either a four-year Honours program or to a three-year General
course. Honours and General students were taught separately, and often by different
faculty members. Honours students progressed by year and not by credit, and
were ranked each year by their department. These final rankings were published
in the local newspapers. For the students enrolled in the Honours courses, the
university offered few course choices, only a regimented program, which
progressed in chronological fashion from the first day of class to the last
examination. The rigour and the internal rationale of the programme prepared
students particularly well for graduate studies. It gave the University of
Toronto and its graduates a high reputation in graduate schools in the
English-speaking world. The advantages of the programme were not only academic.
Students made strong connections with fellow students enrolled in the same honours
courses with whom they shared classes throughout their university careers. They
also developed very strong affiliations with the faculty in their departments.
The core humanities departments (Classics, English, French, German, and
Philosophy (at St. Michael’s only) were college-based.17 History, Political
Economy, the social sciences and the sciences generally were almost entirely
taught by university departments. Even though such departmental offerings were
entirely held outside the colleges, students often developed dual loyalties to
their departments and to their colleges.
In 1967 President Bissell
commissioned the political scientist, C.B. Macpherson, to chair a committee to
examine undergraduate instruction in arts and science. Macpherson was a
well-known political theorist. His work on Hobbes and Locke and his theories of
“possessive individualism” had identified him as a scholar of international
renown with radical views. Macpherson was expected to produce a critical
reevaluation of the university’s undergraduate curriculum. He did not
disappoint. The Macpherson Report sought to reform the division between the
Honours and General students by replacing both courses with a new curriculum.
Macpherson favoured giving students the opportunity to take a broad range of
courses in first year without forcing them to choose their specialization at
the time of their admission. General education and student choice became the
abiding principles governing the curriculum. The abolition of the honours
courses reflected the shift away from the mandate of universities to prepare
students primarily for graduate school as well as the demands from students and
faculty for a variety of new courses. The vogue was for inter-disciplinary
approaches, not the tried and true curricular strait jacket.
After a year of agonizing work to redesign
the curriculum, Macpherson’s recommendations were almost entirely adopted and
implemented in 1970. The reformed curriculum brought the University of Toronto
in line with most other universities in North America, ironically, at the same
time that many of the large research universities in the United States were
returning to the core curriculum they had earlier abandoned. The result at
Toronto was a proliferation of course offerings but at the expense of coherence
and unity in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ curriculum. These new courses
changed the nature of undergraduate instruction and the role of the colleges.
With an expanded curriculum and more faculty in non-college departments to
teach the new courses, there was a continuation of the erosion of the position
of the colleges in the teaching of arts subjects. Students enrolled at St.
Michael’s might find that their entire course load was taught elsewhere. The
mandatory religious knowledge course, jettisoned from the curriculum, was not
replaced with another college-based course. The former instructors of religious
knowledge formed the basis of the new university department of religious
studies. The honours course had, in the college subjects, provided the academic
anchor for humanities students at their college, and ensured a central position
to the college departments. With the new curriculum both the students and the
colleges began to drift.
he proliferation of courses following the
abandonment of the honours programs left the colleges in a quandary. Should
they continue their role of offering the basic courses in the traditional arts
disciplines or should they increase their own faculty and attempt to fashion a
new role in the proliferation of course offerings within their recognized disciplines?
The faculty in the colleges began to push
their administrations to seek new ways to play in what seemed to be an
increasingly competitive curricular arrangement. The lay faculty at St.
Michael’s were strongly affected. St. Michael’s lay faculty had undergone
explosive expansion through the 1960s. In the 1940s and early 1950s St.
Michael’s lay faculty consisted of just one member, Marshall McLuhan, the
“civilian Basilian,” as he called himself.18 However, by 1969
lay faculty outnumbered religious. The total had grown to ninety-three, while
the religious consisted of thirty-eight Basilians, fifteen Loretto or St.
Joseph’s sisters, and eighteen non-Basilian priests.19 Lay faculty thus
had considerable weight even though they were largely excluded from the
governing structure of the college. They urged the college to partake in the
multiplication of course offerings enthusiastically endorsed by colleagues in
non-college departments. With the resultant rise in the College’s lay faculty,
the costs of running the institution had also exploded. Whereas priests and
sisters returned as much as fifty per cent of their income to the college as
what were described as “contributed services,” the lay faculty returned little
or nothing of their salaries. Their different responsibilities and their
commitments to support their families meant that they were in no position to
follow the clerical model. By 1972, St. Michael’s salary costs were $1.33
million. Some of the lay faculty also joined their colleagues at other colleges
in demanding wage parity with their counterparts at the University. St.
Michael’s faculty were paid on average fifteen to twenty-five per cent less
than the faculty of the university. While the college kept the tuition revenue
it received from each student, the revenue was not rising at the same rate as
salary and other costs, which in the early 1970s began an inflationary spiral.
In 1970, the forecast budget deficit was $800,000.20
The college had also been caught out by the
withdrawal of the Federal Government from direct grants to universities. For
the most part, the federal grants had funded the college’s expansion from the
early 1950s through to the mid-1960s. But in 1966, the Federal Government
agreed to grant the provinces direct responsibility for funding post-secondary
education. In lieu of per capita grants to the provinces for their respective
universities, secular and church-related, grants were instead made to the
provinces on a costshared basis of 50/50 funded by corporate and personal
income tax. In some provinces, little changed for denominational institutions.
But in Ontario, where church-related institutions had not been eligible for
grants since 1868, the effect was drastic. From 1967 on, there were neither
operating nor capital grants. The only money denominational colleges would
receive was half of the figure, the basic income unit, used to calculate grants
to nondenominational universities, and this for students in theology only.21
This perilous decline in funding was
exacerbated for St. Michael’s by the iniquity within the University of
Toronto’s own granting formula. Even though the college registered a high
proportion of honours students, for which the university received a higher
grant from the province, it did not receive full compensation. As the
Commission of Inquiry into Catholic Colleges and Universities in Canada
reported in 1970 of the St. Michael’s situation, the arrangement between the
college and the university operated to the “serious financial disadvantage of
the College,” and was “a particularly burdensome disadvantage for the College
already disadvantaged in terms of the provincial grants.”22
As president of St. Michael’s, Fr. Kelly
was thus faced with a dilemma partly of the college’s own creation and partly
the result of government policy. The college had expanded enrollment and then
enlarged its physical plant and its faculty. With little endowment, modest
alumni contributions, rising costs and diminishing revenues, Kelly privately
expressed the fear that the college faced bankruptcy within a decade. By 1970,
St. Michael’s was in a dire situation. The reforms to the university’s
curriculum had contributed to the erosion of the centrality of the federated
universities in teaching arts courses to their students. The expansion of the
college overburdened its finances. Its endowment was small. Its ambitious
building programs had exhausted the federal government grants and required the
liquidation of its real estate assets adjacent to the campus. The new library,
the largest college library on the St. George campus, required additional staff
and consumed more electricity than all other college buildings combined. To
make matters worse, the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council saw a
remarkable exodus from both men’s and women’s religious orders. Institutions
founded, staffed and sponsored by religious foundations whether in education or
health care underwent a transformation. The aggiornamento had led to an arrivederci
of damaging proportions. The Basilians lost several qualified members.
Laymen began to replace Basilians in administrative and teaching positions. Not
only were the “contributed services” of these priests (and some sisters) lost
to the institution but additional expenses were incurred for salaried lay
replacements.
To some, the interest in the colleges
expressed by the new president of the University, John Evans, was thus seen as
their salvation. A graduate of Toronto and Oxford, Evans had come to the
presidency of Toronto after being the Dean of Medicine at McMaster, where he
had introduced new approaches to the teaching of medicine, later widely
emulated across Canada. Evans was an active administrator and rapidly tackled
some of the University’s lingering problems. In his installation address in
1972, he signalled his intent to resolve the perceived difficulties with the
relationship between the Faculty of Arts and Science and the colleges. Evans
was responding in part to recent murmurings of the Minister of Education,
William Davis, to rationalize their operations in light of the decline in the
province’s generous support for university expansion.23 Evans was particularly
concerned about the vesting of the hiring of faculty in humanities disciplines
in the colleges. University College had led the policy of the proliferation of
faculty in the “college subjects.” But none of the colleges could claim
immunity from the charge of the duplication of faculty. The heads of the
federated colleges welcomed the overture from the university. It held some
promise of alleviating their growing financial burdens. St. Michael’s financial
position was by far the worst of the three.
Evans initiated discussions with the federated universities soon after his installation. The heads of the three federated institutions were Fr. John Kelly at St. Michael’s, George Ignatieff at Trinity and Goldwin French at Victoria. They were all accomplished men with broad experience and enjoyed solid reputations within their colleges and outside of them. For many reasons, it could be claimed, the federated colleges had never had a more able and respected group of leaders. Kelly had been president of St. Michael’s since 1958 and enjoyed a high reputation within the university and in Toronto’s Catholic community. His Basilian confrères found his charismatic style often masked what were highly autocratic methods of administration. Some felt that his allegiances were more strongly for the college than his community. However, any dissent was well-contained within the local Basilian community at St. Michael’s. Ignatieff was a Trinity graduate, a Rhodes Scholar, an experienced diplomat and former ambassador. He was wellconnected with the federal mandarinate and Canada’s political and social elites. Goldwin French was an academic who had long been associated with Victoria College, but only recently had become president of Victoria after years of teaching history at McMaster University in Hamilton. They negotiated with Evans forcefully, mindful of the varying demands and beliefs of their constituencies of faculty and alumni. Nonetheless, they expressed few doubts about the necessity of the new arrangement formulated and pressed upon them by the university. In the end, it became a question of securing the best possible solution at a time when the federated colleges were unable to negotiate from a position of strength.
The protracted negotiations and
consultations took place over a period of more than two years. In contrast to
the simple agreements for the affiliation and the federation of these
colleges, the new administrative arrangements were sophisticated and complex.
The final form was expressed in the Memorandum of Agreement, a short
document of four pages which nonetheless completely re-organized the
administrative relationship between the university and its historic colleges.
There were four objectives in the final
memorandum: (1) to teach most arts and science courses, particularly in the
early years, in the student’s home college; (2) to foster distinctive academic
programs in the colleges; (3) to broaden the teaching in the colleges to
include social, physical and life sciences; (4) and to expand the role of the
colleges in student counselling, in hosting university classes, and in
developing new programs to be offered by the university.24 These goals were
to be implemented by a number of organizational changes. The academic
departments in the college subjects in each college were integrated into the
new university departments of Classics, English, French, German, Near Eastern
Studies, Philosophy, and Religious Studies. The university recognized the
status and tenure of the college faculties. The salaries of college and
university faculty were to be equalized over a period of two years (which had
to be extended to three because of the large cost to the university). Colleges
could make faculty appointments by using their own resources but subject to the
approval of the university. The colleges were to surrender all tuition revenue
from their students. In return, all of the college’s arts faculty were to be
paid at parity with other university faculty.25 The colleges would
receive an instructional grant from the university to pay for the provision of
classrooms, teaching materials and administrative personnel assisting the
academic staff and counselling students. The colleges would continue to be
ineligible for all provincial grants except for the per student grant support
accorded students enrolled in graduate programs in theology.
Ignatieff was the most eloquent spokesman
and forceful apologist for the arrangement. He publicly characterized the Memorandum
of Agreement as moving the signatory institutions from “a static relationship
between the colleges and the university to a dynamic relation.”26 Trinity appeared
content with the arrangement to strengthen their fledging program in International
Studies by cross-appointments from History, Political Science and other
departments. Thus, Trinity acquiesced without rancour. However, the Memorandum
did not pass easily through the consultative process at Victoria and St.
Michael’s. There the debate was more heated. Groups of faculty members at both
colleges opposed the new arrangement and suggested innumerable amendments, both
hostile and friendly. Already, faculty members wondered aloud about the
sincerity of the university and especially of the key administrators in the
Faculty of Arts and Science and at University College responsible for the
interpretation and implementation of the terms of the Memorandum. Remarks
made about the validity and purpose of the colleges by the principal of
University College led some to suspect that the new departments would be
nothing more than an extension of University College and of the university.
Some academics focused on their own status within the university, seeking
assurances on tenure and promotion. It was apparent that the transfer of
decisions over tenure and promotion from the colleges to the new consolidated
university departments was a significant transfer of responsibility. In
retrospect, the concern proved to be valid. However, the proposed generous
salary equalization mollified many of the potential protesters. The
philosophers at St. Michael’s, the largest college department, and arguably its
most distinguished, dropped their opposition to the agreement when they finally
secured the right for their courses to carry their own designation in the
course calendar (PHI rather than the PHL designation of the University’s
courses) and to exercise greater control over their course offerings.
The Memorandum of Agreement was
signed by the heads of the three federated universities, on April 15, 1974.
Ignatieff, French and Kelly agreed on the selling points of the arrangement. It
equalized the salaries of college faculty with those of the university, it
allowed the colleges to expand their teaching to new areas in the arts and
science calendar and diminished the University’s encroachment on the academic
functions of the federated colleges.27 With few
modifications, this Memorandum has governed the relationship of the
colleges and the university ever since.
Ironically, while the new agreement was
intended to provide greater flexibility, it instead placed the colleges in an institutional
strait jacket from which they have not yet wrested themselves free. The
presidents of the three federated colleges had apparently not counted on
several factors in the interpretation of the document. The Memorandum effectively
created university departments where none had previously existed. English,
French and the other “college subjects” were no longer simply the amalgam of
the college faculties but were administrative units in their own right. As
Winston Churchill remarked about the distribution of honours, “Feed a bee on
royal jelly and it becomes a queen.” Such was the case with the new
departments. Following the anointment of the chairmen of the university
departments, they quickly moved to establish a kingdom. While the agreement
made no provision to house the new university departments in their own
facilities, often the first act of each new department was to seek its own
building or office space and adequate administrative support. The chairman of
the new department assumed significant powers within the university and
directly over the colleges’ teaching. Increasingly the departments functioned
for themselves and not for the colleges. Instead of achieving John Evans’ goal
of streamlining the operations in the teaching of arts, the Memorandum aided
their expansion, but this time outside the colleges.
The other unanticipated result was the
failure of the system of cross-appointments. The colleges expected the
cross-appointment of existing and new faculty to one or other of the colleges.
The objective was to invigorate the federated colleges with the appointment of
new faculty, both in college subjects and in departments like sociology,
political science, history and psychology; subjects previously unrepresented in
the colleges. But the agreement did not take into consideration the sharp
decline of faculty hirings from the early 1970s onwards. Fewer faculty were
hired. The new hires largely shunned cross-appointments and chose to remain in
the department, closer to the perceived perks and preferments and to their
academic colleagues. More often than not the chairmen of the new departments
also wanted to maintain their departmental and personal importance by keeping
faculty members nearby. These chairmen were in the early years of the arrangement
almost never from the federated colleges and rarely seemed friendly towards
them. Faculty members in the former non-college subjects who sought
cross-appointments by happy coincidence often turned out to be those whom the
chairman was quite content to be rid of for personal reasons. Far from
resulting in the decentralization of the faculty to the colleges, the new Memorandum
allowed for the increasing centralization of power and faculty outside the
colleges. While the colleges had a say in the cross-appointments, faculty
members ended up in the colleges for a variety of reasons, religious membership
and commitment being one of the least important.
One of the selling points of the new
arrangement was that it allowed and even encouraged the colleges to develop new
inter-disciplinary programs in order to provide college students with courses
ideally suited to their interests and needs. However, it soon became apparent
that while the university would permit the development of such new programs, it
would not pay for them. Most often, these programs were cobbled together out of
existing courses already taught by faculty members. The hiring of faculty to
teach in new programs would fall entirely on the college developing the
courses. St. Michael’s was the most adventurous in developing these programs.
It offered college programs in Catholic Studies, Celtic Studies, Christianity
and Culture, Mediaeval Studies, Biomedical Ethics and several other areas of
philosophical interest. The first of these programs were not simply curricular
groupings of standard courses taught by existing university faculty. They
involved new appointments in new areas funded by the College’s already
hard-pressed treasury. These programs and those offered by the other federated
colleges did not acquire the central status in the college curriculum. The
enthusiasm for inter-disciplinary approaches also proved to be limited. As the
university curriculum began a slow return to the formality and structure it had
lost, it gradually became apparent that the new programs had limited appeal to
the students and lukewarm support from the Faculty of Arts and Science.
Even after two decades of attempts to
return coherence to refocus the curriculum after the radical deconstruction
wrought by the Macpherson reforms, there is still no particular college core to
the undergraduate program at the university of Toronto. Even though all arts
and science students at the University must register at a college and can
receive important student services through their colleges, the academic
connection between college and student can in fact be negligible.
The other profound effect of the Memorandum
on St. Michael’s centred on appointment of religious to teach in the
College. In 1974, St. Michael’s had fifty-six priests and other religious on
its faculty. In the following decade two unanticipated trends developed. First,
priests in the Basilian order left or retired in significant numbers without
replacements by new vocations. As a result, the Basilian component of the
academic staff became progressively weaker. A parallel development occurred
within the Loretto and St. Joseph’s sisters. This phenomenon was seen in
virtually every Catholic institution of higher learning in North America and
was certainly not unique to St. Michael’s.
What was unique at St. Michael’s was the
second factor; the university’s control over the appointment of new faculty
members. If the college intended to hire on its own it could do so with
university approval but the college had to fund appointments exclusively. Given
the financial situation at St. Michael’s, the practical result of the Memorandum
in this area was to discourage to the point of elimination any new Basilian
appointments to Arts and Science, despite the application of academically
qualified Basilians. The Memorandum required approval of all faculty
appointments by the appropriate department and the university’s academic
planners. The selection process for new faculty naturally became politicized
and subject to all manner of changing university criteria. In such departments
as Religious Studies, for instance, the department refused to appoint qualified
Basilians to tenure track positions. Few reasons were given, but it was widely
speculated that among the reasons was the disinclination of department and
university officials to add Catholic and particularly clerical members to a
department which already had significant representation in both categories.
This interpretation of the Memorandum required St. Michael’s, whenever it
wanted to hire religious for the faculty, to do so out of its own funds.
Maintaining the Catholic and Basilian
identity of the college thus became a significant challenge to the institution,
and not surprisingly, a serious point of discontent among the Basilian
community. Ironically, St. Thomas More College at the University of
Saskatchewan, modelled on St. Michael’s College at its inception in 1936,
remained more faithful in the 1970s to the maintenance of autonomous control of
college faculty and Basilian input than St. Michael’s. There, the system for
university grants allowed the administration to reach an agreement with the
provincial government and the university which allowed for appointments to be
made by the college funded by the university. At St. Michael’s, the Basilian
Fathers found themselves in a position where they governed an institution and
contributed significantly to its financial well-being but were essentially
prohibited from placing members of their own community at the college for anything
other than administrative positions. Qualified Basilian academics thus turned
to other Basilian institutions, notably in Houston, Rochester, Saskatoon and
Edmonton, where full appointments were available. The community of religious at
St. Michael’s was also essentially static because transfers into St. Michael’s
were impossible. The “special relationship” of St. Michael’s with the
university in this case contributed to a kind of isolation from its founding
community. Indeed, the last Basilian faculty member teaching in the
undergraduate college is expected to retire in 1996. This will end a presence
on the faculty which has spanned more than 140 years. Sadly, all the
predictions Shook made in 1960 have effectively come to pass.
Was the St. Michael’s solution a solution
at all? This question is still very relevant and perhaps cannot be answered for
several more years. Compared to the solutions arrived at by many other Catholic
institutions in the same period, St. Michael’s did arrive at a policy which at
least assured its continuation. In contrast to St. Patrick’s College in Ottawa,
St. Dunstan’s on Prince Edward Island, and Loyola College in Montreal, it did
not disappear. Unlike the stand-alone Catholic universities, the University of
Ottawa and all Catholic universities in Quebec, St. Michael’s has continued as
a Catholic institution teaching at the undergraduate level. Indeed, one can
speculate that had St. Michael’s adopted the stand-alone model it too would
have ceased to be a Catholic institution in anything other than an historical
sense. For Catholic universities in Canada, it seems that university status
leads inevitably to secularization. St. Francis Xavier and Mount St. Vincent
come to mind as exceptions, but perhaps only in Nova Scotia could a Catholic
university also be considered a public university. The independence and
Catholic identity of St. Michael’s once nourished by its relationship with the
University of Toronto are now hindered by it. The college now finds itself in a
precarious financial situation which threatens its future existence. At the
same time, its two graduate divisions, the Pontifical Institute and the Faculty
of Theology, are under pressure, the former by financial woes and the latter by
declining enrollments. Most importantly, St. Michael’s has yet to find a way in
which it can maintain its role as the centre for Catholic academics at the
University of Toronto.
Can the St. Michael’s solution be
considered a failure? The college registers increasing numbers of Catholic
students and is home to two graduate academic divisions of international
importance. It provides a home base to more than 3,500 students, at least some
of whom increase their knowledge and practice of Catholicism while at
university. St. Michael’s has remained independent and it has remained
Catholic. It is more than simply a Catholic chaplaincy and a residence. Within
the University of Toronto context, St. Michael’s College is widely recognized
as the only college at the University which remains faithful to its founding
principles and religious identity. And though limited by financial constraints,
the college has appointed new faculty in recent years, such as Joseph Boyle in
philosophy, and Mark McGowan, a Canadian historian.
There are thus varying standards of assessment. I would argue that the federation principle remains a dynamic and compelling arrangement for Catholic institutions and public universities. I would also argue that the large research university of the kind the University of Toronto has become is a hostile environment for any such arrangement. The St. Michael’s solution is not a solution to be emulated without greater study of its origins and results. But an examination of its elements reveals a history which is important to our understanding of the history of Catholic higher education in Canada and provides signposts for institutions who may wish to follow St. Michael’s path.