(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 Lévesque, after all, was in that cabinet), and one of their big preoccupations was the educational gap between anglophones and francophones. And so, it was no surprise that one of the new government’s early initiatives was to create a commission on education, one which is known to history at the Parent Commission because of its chair, Alphonse-Marie Parent, who was rector of Laval University (and, of necessity, a Catholic priest).

The Parent commission was more about K-12 education than it was about postsecondary education. But it had one major effect which was recommend the abolition of the colleges classiques, to be replaced in 1967 by some new-fangled things called “Collèges d’enseignement général et professionnel” or CEGEPs. The institutions would replace the old colleges as waystations to universities (and anyone who finished CEGEP had not just the opportunity to attend university but also a right to do so) but would also include professional education in the manner of vocational provinces in other provinces. For the most part, the old collèges simply became CEGEPs, but in two specific cases the end of the college system would have effects on the university system.

The first case was College Ste Marie, located in downtown Montreal. This was a college that was arguably a level and a half above the others, and had been involved in university-level education for a long-time, as an affiliate of the Université de Montréal. It was (to put it mildly) not very interested in being relegated to a second-class institution. The second was a few kilometers west: Catholic Loyola College—also a U de M affiliate despite teaching in English (at the time, religious affiliation was more important than language, and since all three English universities were strictly Protestant, Loyola didn’t have much choice)—had to make a similar choice. 

When it came to universities, Parent was more cautious. He did not argue for new universities as the existing six institutions, including his own, were firmly opposed to an expansion of the number of higher education institutions. This was a pretty universal pattern in Canada in the 1950s & 60s…Toronto opposed the creation of York, UBC of Simon Fraser, U Alberta of Calgary, etc., all on the grounds of “spreading money too thinly” long past the point where it should have been obvious that their own institutions were incapable of meeting surging student demand. Parent did, however, argue for “university centres” in a whole bunch of spots around the province, like Chicoutimi, Trois-Rivieres, Rimouski, etc. The idea seems to have been a little bit like the regional colleges in Saskatchewan—places spread widely around the province where students could take university courses provided by one of the existing six. But as demand for higher education continued to grow, this idea of fobbing off these regional centres with something less than actual universities ceased to be tenable. After all, if Sherbrooke deserved a university, why not them too?

This debate about how to provide the regions with expanding higher education in the regions soon ran into another debate about how to increase the amount of francophone education in Montreal. As noted earlier, the government was already faced with what to do about College Ste Marie and Loyola. Eventually, the idea emerged that there should be another downtown university, roughly where U de M used to be, with College Ste Marie at its heart, but merged with a teachers’ college (école normale) and a Fine Arts school. 

In other words, by the time the Union Nationale came back to power in 1967, there had been a lot of promises made to create a lot of new universities, or university-like entities. How to make it all work, though? Well, around about this time, Assistant Deputy Minister for higher education at the time, Yves Martin (later rector of Sherbrooke) got on a plane with then-Ontario Education Minister (and later Premier) Bill Davis to California to go and study the then-much-vaunted California system of Universities (UCs), State Universities (CSUs) and Community Colleges CCCs. They seem to have come away with quite different views: Davis decided to create a community college system with no organic links to universities, while Martin came back convinced that a full-on university system on the California model was exactly what the doctor ordered. Mainly, as far as I can tell, because the government was under the impression that a system model would be a lot cheaper than opening a bunch of institutions. This wasn’t just about lower admin costs: many believed that most of the courses could be taught in Montreal and beamed to the regional campuses, an idea that was also being put into practice at the same time at the University of Toronto, where the Scarborough campus in particular was built to accommodate television learning.

The next big question was: who would be included in this new system? For a time, it seemed like the provincial government might try to force the existing trio of “private” francophone institutions into it (asking the anglophone universities to join was clearly a non-starter). Obviously, this never came to pass, but for some years the door was left open in case anyone wanted to join voluntarily. The fact that it never did spoke to a very serious rivalry (never especially well understood in the anglophone sector) between the “public” UQs and the thee “privates.” One forum where this was especially obvious was in the Conseil des recteurs et principaux des universités du Québec (CREPUQ), a body which theoretically regrouped all Québec universities until it died very precisely due to a split between “publics” and “privates” in 2013.

Four universities formed the core of the UQ system that emerged in 1968-69: Trois-Rivieres, Chicoutimi, the École Nationale d’Administration Publique (ENAP, a specialized school of public administration which has no obvious counterpart in the rest of the country)…and Montreal. This last one was contentious. Basically, the Montreal group wanted its own university, not to be subsumed as part of a larger entity, to be a cash cow for the rest of the system, to have its freedom limited by a head office in Québec City (it was, in some respects , a re-run of the old Laval/U de M fight of the previous century). They didn’t win that fight, though over the course of the subsequent 25 years or so, UQAM did gain a measure of “special status” within the system that achieved a bit more financial and operational independence.

Meanwhile, the three “private” francophone universities were adopting institutional forms which were much more legible to the rest of North America and were able to do so in part because so many of their professors were now emerging from American graduate schools. Graduate and professional instruction expanded apace, and in Université de Montréal’s case, this period saw the beginning of a real research enterprise as well as welcoming a surprisingly large number of international students. And, slowly, these universities shed their Catholic skins. In 1965, Université de Montréal said goodbye to its last clerical rector, Msgr Lussier, and welcomed chemist Roger Gaudry to the post instead. Laval would take until 1972 to get a lay rector—intriguingly, an anglophone, Larkin Kerwin—and Sherbrooke not until 1975.

And on the anglophone side? Not much changed in this period at sleepy Bishop’s, but George Williams became world famous for a confrontation between black students and white administrators in January 1969, and McGill gradually came to terms with the fact that the new, nationalist politics of Québec were distinctly unfriendly to an elite anglophone university, most notably in the McGill Français protest of March 1969 when over 10,000 people showed up at the Roddick Gates to demand that McGill switch its language of instruction to French.

And yet, the real period of radicalization was in some respects just getting started.

Tomorrow: the 1970s and on.