(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 (also: UQ Hull became UQ Outaouais after a bout of municipal amalgamations eliminated the city of Hull in the early 2000s). But this delay in setting up new regional campuses didn’t mean the UQ system wasn’t expanding. 

First, the existing campuses were building out their programs in some weird and wild ways: UQTR decided to go all-in on two areas: engineering and “group facilitation” (it continues to do one of these, very successfully, to this day).  Chicoutimi, in turn, tried to open a medical school, which seemed a lot crazier an idea then that it would today. This kind of experimentation was the reason why in the early 1970s the central system authorities yanked on the reins and started imposing much stricter criteria for opening programs.

Second, the UQ system wasn’t restricted to expansion via geographically mandated campuses. Instead, expansion occurred in the proliferation of specialist campuses with provincial (in Québec-speak, “national”) mandates, which really have no equivalent in the rest of the country. We have already noted the debut of the École nationale d’dministration publique (ENAP), but now three more institutions popped up.

The first of these was l’Institut National de la recherche scientifique (INRS), which at its outset was thought of as the Graduate School of the whole UQ system, or maybe (depending on who you talked to, agendas varied) the entire francophone system. This latter idea was deeply displeasing to Université de Montréal and Laval, who had their own ambitions in this area, and both fought this idea, hard. The idea of a free-floating graduate school is a little odd in the north American context—the nomenclature, as you can probably tell, is a bit more European in origin—but it wasn’t totally outrageous in the context of the 1960s when graduate schools had a lot more power and autonomy within universities than they do today. Eventually, the more grandiose ambitions for INRS were beaten back. INRS became a small but interesting player on the landscape and the way was open for Laval and Montréal to become the research powerhouses they are today.

The second was the Télé-Université (now Université TELUQ). Remember that originally one of the arguments in favour of the UQ system, as opposed to a set of stand-alone was that a system could re-cycle and re-use course materials across various campuses. So, it made sense to have a unit that was filming classes and either distributing the tapes across campuses or directly to students. But it was never 100% clear whether this was—to oversimplify a bit—an AV department at the disposal of the various physical campuses, or a standalone distance university of its own, which would in some senses make it a competitor to the other campuses. This lack of clarity is why it has gone through a wide variety of institutional forms over time: as a “school” within the UQ system until 1992, a stand-alone institution until 2005, when it was (sub)merged with UQAM, and then a standalone university again since 2011.

The third was the specialist Engineering school, École de technologie supérieure (ETS). But before I get to this one, we have to take a detour through the history of UQAM.

UQAM at the outset was big, brash, and out to break a lot of crockery. Its first President, Léo Dorais, was distinctly unenthusiastic about his university being part of a system (or, alternatively, about personally having a boss in Québec City): for the first year of his tenure, he fought to become an independent institution called Université Louis-Jolliet after an early French explorer of the Mississippi. But more importantly, Dorais was trying to build a large university on the fly. 

Hiring at a new university can be fraught: you’re hiring tons of people all at once, and in the Québec of 1968 you had the added problem that the number of fully-trained-up staff was tiny. Only about one in five academic hires at UQAM had a PhD in 1968 (many anglo-Canadian universities in the 1960s solved the lack-of-locals-with-PhDs problem by hiring a lot of Americans instead, an option UQAM didn’t really have). In addition, the university had decided that it was going to do something radical in the field of academic organization: it was going to split programs from departments. If this sounds a bit cockamamie, that’s because it was. The idea was that in theory the department was a permanent administrative home for professors, but programs could be infinitely malleable, designed and re-designed at the drop of a hat to meet changing faculty and student interests (and, in theory at least, the demands of society and the labour market). It was a disaster, mainly because infinitely malleable programs and job protection are like oil and water. If you keep re-designing programs all the time, chances are at some point some incumbents’ specializations will fall out of favour, and their jobs will go “poof.” This, needless to say, made annual curriculum discussions something like trench warfare.

Now, UQAM had sort of anticipated this drawback and it didn’t offer many people tenure in the first few years, precisely to preserve malleability. But this got them into trouble in another direction: one year they let a few too many people in the philosophy department go at the end of their one-year contracts, and this prompted a massive unionization drive which in turn led to a three week strike in 1971 over the right of anyone on a temporary contract to be automatically re-hired, provided they had a Master’s degree. This was probably not the greatest start an institution has ever had (the only written history of UQAM is, to a unique degree, a history of its various unions).

Progressive ideas about curricula plus heavy unionization made UQAM a difficult place to manage.  Dorais did not last past one term, for instance. It gained the reputation—not entirely dissipated to this day—of being the “red sheep” of the UQ family. In one famous incident, when the government asked UQAM to produce an Engineering faculty because the provinces needed more Engineers, UQAM’s Senate basically refused to implement a new Engineering program on the grounds that it would simply be too capitalist (I am simplifying a bit, but honestly not much). The provincial government was so pissed off that in 1974 it set up an entirely separate institution just to make this engineering program happen—that is, the ETS (which, it should be noted, was given the most flat-out capitalist motto of any university in Canada: Le génie pour l’industrie). This is how Québec ended up with not one but two stand-alone engineering schools, which exist not at all elsewhere in the country. It’s interesting to think about an alternate history in which UQAM hadn’t gone all Bolshevik on this subject and ended up with an engineering school of its own: I suspect it would be a much more influential place than it is today.

Now remember that all of this enormous effort was in service of one goal: “rattrapage,” that is, making sure that the francophone population of Québec had the same educational opportunities as did anglophones (in 1959, anglophones were about four times as likely to have had a university education, which is pretty stunning when you think about it). But of course you really can’t make up a gap that big just by teaching 18-21 year-olds: you have to do a lot of adult education, too. Which is why Québec has such an advanced system of lifelong learning—much of the system was designed to cater to older learners, especially UQAM and Sir George Williams—and why for almost twenty years, right up until the end of the 1980s, Québec had more part-time students than full-time ones, the only place in Canada ever to achieve this.

We’re down to one final piece of the puzzle, and that is Loyola College. When the collèges classiques were eliminated, Loyola’s partnership agreements with Université de Montréal went kaput and it had no hope of becoming a university (too English to be given government funding, too weak to go it alone as a private university). With no remaining Catholic institution to turn to, Loyola was left with only one potential dance partner—the protestant Sir George Williams. This was an unlikely pairing for all sorts of reasons because there was an awful lot of overlap and duplication in programming and arguably it took over a quarter of a century to figure out how to make a two-campus university work effectively. But once the deal was done in 1974, the current landscape in Québec higher education was effectively complete. 

What’s interesting is that after 15 years of hyperactivity following the election of Jean Lesage, the system has spent the last fifty years with only minor changes. Sure, a couple of study centres got turned into full universities and the status of TELUQ has fluctuated a bit, but basically the system as it existed in the fall of 1974 is the system we have today. UQAM, for instance, still has arguably the most intransigent faculty union in the country (and holds the record for longest faculty strike in the country’s history,: 100 days in the fall of 1976). The CAQ’s targeted rulemaking on anglophone institutions carries more than a whiff of the McGill Francais days. And we still have the same jealousies between “public” (UQs) and “privates”, too: just this fall, UQAM’s rector publicly called for cutting “private” universities’ budgets so as to better fund the UQs. 

But as mesmerizing as these eternal parallels are, I’d prefer to take a different lesson from this: that Canadians can act quickly, momentously, and decisively when it comes to reforming an areas of public policy. Yes, the Québec higher education file was frantic and not a little bit nuts for much of les quinze glorieuses, particularly from 1968 to 1972. But damn it, big things were achieved. Worthwhile, society-changing things. We should strive for that energy again.

Sources:l’Université en réseau. Les 25 ans de l’Universiteé du Québecby LuciaFeretti; La naissance de l’UQAM: Témoignanges, acteurs et contextesby Denise Bertrand, Robert Comeauand & Pierre-Yves Paradis. Histoire de l’Université de Sherbrooke 1954-2004by Denis Goulet, Histoire de l’Université Laval: les péripéties d’une idée, by Jean Hamelin, Concordia at 50: A Collective History, edited by Monika Kin Gangon and Brandon Webb, and L’université de Montréal: une histoire urbaine et internationale by Daniel Poitras and Micheline Cambron