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 Québec, specifically (but not quite exclusively) in the province’s francophone university sector. For that reason, I would argue that this is a time and place that deserves a special focus in Canadian higher education history. And so, for the next three days, this is what I am going to do.

But first, some background.

In the beginning, there was McGill. And Bishop’s. Both of which received university charters before any francophone institution got one. And to a significant extent this still affects the way that the Québec  government sees higher education: as an area where historic imbalances between anglophones and francophones still need to be rectified. Bishop’s is only peripherally part of the story: the main piece is that what eventually became one of the world’s great universities arose in Montréal, and for many Québec francophones, this is irritating as all hell and always has been.

So almost as soon as McGill came into existence, there was a push to create a francophone alternative. The problem was that there wasn’t an obvious location for this francophone institution. Would it be located in Québec, or in Montréal? Would it be about general education or professionally focused? There was no question that a new institution would be Catholic in nature, but which faction of the Roman Curia would win out: the ultramontanes (those who believed in papal infallibility) or those with a more modernist take on religion? 

It took the better part of 70 years to work all of this out, in part because with the church taking the leading role, political issues couldn’t get resolved within the province, they had to be taken care of in Rome. The archbishop in Québec City wanted the university to be built around the Grand Séminariedu Québec. The bishop of Montréal—partly for reasons of civic pride, but also for religious reasons (ultramontanism was stronger in Montréal than in Québec)—wanted a university in Montréal. And you know, fair enough: Montréal was in fact the economic centre of the province and was the logical place to train people for professional careers. In 1850, Montréal was 50% larger than Québec. By 1918 it was seven times the size. Giving priority to Québec City was more a reflection of the relative power of the two cities’ Catholic bishoprics rather than a rational economic/ educational decision.

What ended up happening was that Rome issued an approval for one university—Laval—for the entire province. Québec City got the university (meaning HQ plus the Faculty of Arts) and Montréal got all the faculties. All the various “collèges classiques” —essentially, high schools with a little extra Greek and Latin—around the province were “associated” with the university meaning their graduates had guaranteed pathways into the university. Some colleges also provided the equivalent of one year of university education, thus permitting graduates to head to one of the two university campuses with “advanced standing.” These colleges were sometimes private and secular, but more often than not they were Catholic. You will be shocked, reader, to learn that this arrangement did not satisfy the Montréalers one bit and they continued to mount their case to the Roman Curia pretty much constantly for the next few decades.

That said, this system lasted until just after World War I, when the province and the Vatican agreed to split the university in two to create the institutions we now know as Laval and Université de Montréal. At the time, both occupied cramped city centre locations–it wasn’t really until after World War II that each got their present locations: U Montréal was originally located in roughly the area UQAM occupies today, in the eastern end of downtown Montréal (U de M started building its current campus in the 1930s, but the Great Depression put the kibosh on completion for over a decade). But other than location, very little changed over the next forty years or so. Québec had two big, urban francophone universities, both mainly teaching institutions run by clerics. The difference was that post-break up, Laval was relatively centralized, while Université de Montréal was a weak confederation of faculties that had joined up to the new organization at some point in the late 19^th or early 20^th century (it remains the only U15 institution with neither a business school not an engineering school, as both the Hautes Études de Commerce and École Polytechnique have maintained their independence to this day). Only one serious disruption hit the Québec system between the 1920s and the 1950s, and that was the arrival of a third anglophone university: Sir George Williams, a downtown university which focused mainly on part-time learners taking night classes. Eventually, this would become the core of Concordia University, but from our current point of view, that’s still a couple of decades away.

To start the 1950s, then, on the English side, you had the “ancient” universities of McGill and Bishop’s as well as the newish one of Sir George Williams On the French side, you had Laval and Montréal (with the latter somewhat hobbled as a university by the sheer complexity of having to work through its federation of “affiliated” colleges, which included HEC and Polytechnique), both of which were run by the Catholic church, and a plethora of “colleges classiques” which were affiliated with one university or another, including the Montréal west-end English-but-Catholic, and therefore loved by basically nobody, Loyola College. Outside of fascist Spain and Portugal, you would have been hard-pressed to find a more clerically dominated higher education system than Québec’s anywhere in the western world. Or one anywhere in which the obviously “top” university belonged to the minority language group.

However, Québec society was starting to feel the effects of the quiet revolution. An increasingly urban society in an increasingly knowledge-based economy needed more higher education. But neither the Catholic church nor the fiscally conservative Union Nationale government of Maurice Duplessis were particularly interested in paying for it. But in the eastern townships, francophone civic pride began getting seriously annoyed at the fact that the local anglophone community had Bishop’s University as a “local” school, while francophone students either had to leave school at 18 or travel to Montréal to get an education. In 1952, local notables began a push to get their own institutions. Two years later, they got it. But this being Québec in the 1950s, what they got was not a public secular university but one with a strong link to the Catholic church and—as at Laval and U de M—a leadership made up of members of the priesthood.

And so that’s where the province stood on the brink of the 1960s, and the start of the quinze glorieuses. We’ll pick up the story there tomorrow.