A Flowering Up North

"I would found first a smoking room; then when I had a little more money in hand I would found a dormitory; then after that, or more probably with it, a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had money over that I couldn't use, I would hire a professor and get some text books." Thus, in the '20s, did Humorist Stephen Leacock define a university, and it may be a blessing that he is not alive to see how bustle has replaced his leisurely academe in Canadian higher education.

The traditional schools--Leacock's own McGill University in Montreal, Nova Scotia's Dalhousie University, the top-rank University of Toronto, and four big western provincial universities --are pouring out more graduates than ever. But the typical Canadian student nowadays is just as likely to be found at an "instant university," sitting in a ground-floor classroom while builders finish the upper stories. For the country has a clear goal: it wants to move from higher-educating a relatively elite 15% of its college-age population to a 1975 level of 271% (currently the U.S. proportion is 42%).

New universities are going up at the rate of two a year; in just seven years, student enrollment has nearly doubled, to 179,000, and in ten years the total should rise to 480,000. Around $350 million worth of construction per year is under way at Canada's 41 degree-granting institutions, and twice that amount is thought to be needed in the coming decade. The landscape will virtually bristle with towers of learning.

Going Public. The old pattern of universities in Canada was Roman Catholic-run colleges in Quebec, private universities modeled on Oxford or Edinburgh in the English-speaking eastern provinces, public universities modeled on U.S. land-grant schools in the West. The big push is shattering the pattern. Because of the need for funds, schools are leaning upon government until there is scarcely a truly private college left in Canada. Provincial governments pick up nearly 40% of the operating costs of the colleges, the federal government about 20%, tuition 27%, and private sources the rest. Typical effect: the French Catholic University of Montreal will get its first layman rector, Rhodes Scholar Roger Gaudry, in June.

In the populous East, Laval University, long a landmark of the Latin Quarter section of Quebec City, has moved most of its facilities to an ultramodern, $45 million suburban complex, decorated with murals in the style of the University of Mexico. Dalhousie, founded with $11,000 seized from Maine customs officials during the War of 1812, is crying for new millions to expand its medical school. In Fredericton, New Brunswick, the provincial university is bursting its serene bounds. The University of Montreal's 14,000 on-campus students will soon ride two new escalators tunneled through granite to reach their campus on Mount Royal, 200 feet above the street, where 23 new buildings are built or planned in a five-year $50 million program. McGill is spending $42 million on new plant in a drive for quality, but hopes to hold its enrollment to 15,000.

More than a third of Canada's university students attend Ontario colleges, which are largely fed by the province's 13-grade public-school system. The University of Toronto is spinning off satellite colleges, including Scarborough, which will open in Toronto next fall with 500 students, and Erindale, which will start in 1966. An earlier Toronto satellite, York University, is moving onto a brand-new campus on the west side of Toronto, leaving its old building to just-founded Glendon College, which is modeled on Swarthmore. Some 16 buildings are under construction or planned at Ontario's much-respected Queen's University in Kingston. The University of Waterloo has opened with a plan of alternate semesters in class and industry. The big 13-sided nuclear reactor at McMaster University in Hamilton is getting lost in a forest of new buildings.

Putting Out Branches. Farther west, on 1,200 acres along the Red River at Winnipeg, the University of Manitoba has put up 40 buildings in ten years. Some of them are for a new University College based on Oxbridge, where each student wears a burgundy-colored robe and is assigned to a tutor. Manitoba's plant scientists are close to producing the first new species of grain developed by man: a combination of wheat and rye.

The 10,000-student University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon studies northern lights and the ionosphere by launching its own rockets at Fort Churchill on Hudson Bay. The university has grown beyond its 2,600-acre campus, with Gothic greystone buildings, to acquire a 1,300-acre branch in Regina. The new school has a campus designed by Architect Minoru Yamasaki; among its teachers is a visiting professor from Moscow University.

The University of Alberta has 9,400 students in tall buildings on its bulldozer-torn Edmonton campus and is building another campus in Calgary with an extra $2,000,000 thrown in for the nearby Banff School of Fine Arts. The University of British Columbia, which with 15,500 students in Vancouver is the biggest and the best in the West, has given birth to the newly independent University of Victoria in the province's garden-filled capital. In Burnaby, near Vancouver, the innovating Simon Fraser University will open next fall on a $15 million, 1,168-acre campus--just 18 months after the architects were commissioned. It will accept bright high-school juniors and seniors at ages as low as 15, teach by TV, give degrees in less than three years on a trimester plan. Junior-college systems similar to those of California and Florida are getting started in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario.

For Canada, such growth presents some tough problems. "We are having to expand before we have had a chance to develop our own true excellence--our Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard," notes Canadian Social Scientist Bernard Ostry. Despite good salaries (the median full professor's pay is $14,163), there are many staff vacancies. Three Canadian college presidents recently toured five U.S. campuses trying to lure graduate students from Canada back home to teach.

At least the stress is on teaching; Canada by and large is not yet afflicted with any acute form of "publish or perish." Research may be what turns good universities into high-rank centers of scholarship, but in a nation intent on pulling itself up by its university bootstraps, the teaching that will create masses of college-educated people must come first.

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