"Best of Both Worlds"

To U.S. Roman Catholics who find Catholic colleges too weak in scholarship and secular colleges too shy of religion, a lively campus in Canada beckons with a rare formula for the "best of both worlds." St. Michael's College, which has 1,260 Catholic students, 15% of them American, is run by the Basilian Fathers. Yet it is integrated with the tax-supported University of Toronto (17,000 students), a federation of five Oxford-style colleges. As a result, coed "St. Mike's" offers the intellectual stimulus and ample curriculum of a major secular university plus the religious spirit of a Catholic college.

What forged this friendly setup was a 19th century custody battle over the infant University of Toronto, which both secular and religious educators wanted to run. As a compromise, the Ontario legislature put in a nonsectarian administration to control degrees and the teaching of "university" subjects, mostly science. Sectarian colleges were then invited to join and teach "college" subjects, mostly humanities. St. Michael's in 1887 became the first to join.*

In practice, St. Mike's and the other arts colleges have their own dormitories, faculties and particularly strong courses, which are open to students of any other college. All schools get indirect provincial and federal help in the form of grants based on enrollment. Otherwise, St. Michael's is financed from tuition, a Basilian Fathers subsidy, and the bonus of having many unpaid priests as teachers.

High Standards. A breezy place, with more Americans than the other colleges, St. Mike's is a block-square complex of old red brick and new limestone buildings, set off from the bulk of the university by spacious Queen's Park. Canadians sometimes charge it with Catholic clannishness. Nonetheless, it is far more worldly than the average U.S. Catholic college. Some of its students even take all their courses outside St. Mike's, mixing with agnostics and perhaps bracing their faith in the process. "I believe in confrontation with other than Catholic ideas," says U.S.-born Father John Kelly, who arrived as a student 25 years ago, stayed on to teach philosophy, and in 1958 became president.

The price of a year at St. Mike's is as low as $1,200. "It costs me about as much to go here as it would to go to Fordham, commuting," says one boy from a New York City suburb. Admission standards are high. Americans must not only have top school grades, but must also take St. Mike's "13th year" of high school (more English, math, science, languages) before becoming full-fledged collegians. They are then so well prepared, says one American professor of English, that he gives freshmen the same Chaucer course that he used to give seniors and graduate students at Cornell. Many Americans still get through in four years because Canadian universities require only three years for a degree (honors students take an extra year).

Unlike some U.S. Catholic colleges where priests get all the privileges, St. Mike's lay teachers (one-third of the faculty) swing their weight. "Lay faculty have more to say here than at any other Catholic institution I know about," says one American professor, who deserted Notre Dame for St. Mike's. In philosophy, its strong point, St. Mike's outshines all other Toronto colleges with 22 courses, almost all taught by laymen. "We approach philosophy from the scholarly, not the apologetic point of view," says Professor Lawrence Lynch, head of the department. "We have a course called Contemporary Systematic Philosophy that doesn't even touch on a Catholic philosopher." Similarly, a compulsory "religious knowledge" course stresses such wide-ranging sources as the novels of J. D. Salinger.

Broadening Vistas. Aiding such breadth is St. Mike's proudest claim to intellectual distinction: its Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, launched by French Medievalist Etienne Gilson, who now commutes between Paris and Toronto. Generally recognized as tops of its kind in North America, the institute has produced at least 100 graduates now adding scholarly luster to U.S. Catholic philosophy departments. In addition, the university itself has set up new institutes--Slavic, Islamic, East Asian--sharply broadening St. Mike's vistas.

All this makes St. Mike's sure that its two-world formula is a first-rate cure for provincialism in Catholic education. Is there any good reason, many college administrators wonder, why in an age of ecumenicism similar Catholic colleges could not be set up at private U.S. universities?

* Toronto's other sectarian arts colleges are the Anglican Church's Trinity and the United Church of Canada's Victoria; the nonsectarian members of the federation are University College and professional students' New College.

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