Category: Canada

Les Quinze Glorieuses: Understanding the History of Québec Universities (Part 3)

(There is no point in you reading today’s piece if you missed Monday’s and Tuesday’s installments on the history of Québec Universities. Catch up on Part 1 and Part 2.) After the original four campuses of the UQ network—Montreal, Trois-Rivieres, Chicoutimi and ENAP e system—opened in 1968, the UQ system continued to grow at a healthy clip. The Rimouski campus opened in 1969. Abitibi-Témiscamingue and Hull got “centres d’études universitaires,” which didn’t end up becoming universities until the early 1980s

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Les Quinze Glorieuses: Understanding the History of Québec Universities (Part 2)

(If you didn’t read yesterday’s piece, you’re going to be lost. Catch up with Part 1.) It’s 1960. Québec has six universities—three English and three French—all of them private, and the French trio explicitly clerical (all the Presidents were priests). But the Union National regime has fallen, replaced with a technocratic Liberal government with a mandate to move Québec in a modernist direction. And although it wasn’t an explicitly nationalist government, it certainly had national concerns on its mind (René

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Les Quinze Glorieuses: Understanding the History of Québec Universities (Part 1)

Over the past few months I have been reading quite a lot of history about Québec universities. And I am pretty blown away by the way that the entire system transmogrified itself in a very short space of time between (roughly) 1960 and 1975. Though expansion in that period was obviously substantial in other parts of Canada, I would argue that nowhere else was there anything like the degree of systemic change in the nature of universities that took place in

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Re-capturing the early 80s

Most of the time when I talk about the history of university financing, I show a chart that looks like this, showing that since 1980 government funding to the sector is up by a factor of about 2.3 after inflation over the last 40-odd years, while total funding is up by a factor of 3.6. Figure 1: Canadian University Income by source, 1979-80 to 2022-23, in billions of constant $2022 That’s just a straight up expression of how universities get

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The Trudeau Legacy

I don’t know about you, but I find all the writing about the Trudeau legacy pretty goddamn annoying. Weeks and weeks of columnists yelling “resign!” followed by weeks and weeks of the same columnists yelling “he didn’t do it fast enough!” All true; all deeply boring. But since this is basically the blog of record for the sector, it would be weird to let the man leave without an assessment of his effect. So here goes: The early years A

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