Since everyone is using war metaphors to describe current efforts against COVID-19, I thought it might be worth taking a trip down memory lane to look at what universities did during the World Wars (colleges, being mostly creatures of the 50s-70s, were not around then, so this is a single-sector survey).  I am not convinced it’s the right metaphor – in Britain, for example, their death-cult instinct makes them treat every crisis like it’s 1940. Because of their refusal to properly contextualize that moment (e.g. “Britain stands alone” when in fact it had a massive empire behind her and three-quarters of her wheat and flour came from Canada), whenever a crisis comes along they think it’s vitally important to go about their daily business as usual and not “give in to the enemy.” This is utterly absurd when the enemy is a goddamn microbe that does not know what an upper lip is, much less care how stiff it is – but you can’t really say no to the zeitgeist.

Anyways, here goes:

During World War I, universities around Europe ground to a halt, due to universal conscription and the fact that the student body at the time was very heavily male.  In Canada, the enthusiasm for war drained the universities more slowly (conscription did not arrive until 1917), but by 1918 the effect was much the same.  World War II was different, though.  In Canada, the front-line army was never really a conscription force but a result of “manpower” planning by the federal government.  Canadian university staff and students were told in no uncertain terms that their services were required on campus and they needed permission from the Wartime Bureau of Technical Personnel to take up jobs elsewhere or join the military (though male students were required to take officer training).  Male enrolments gradually dropped over the course of the war, but they were replaced by women, so total enrolments were not much affected.  This was quite different in the UK and US, where conscription and unbridled war fever (respectively) massively cut enrolments.

Among Allied countries, universities basically played three roles.  First, they were a huge repository of scientific/administrative talent, and governments liberally plucked top people to fill new war-time roles (particularly social scientists).  Many liked the change and the added responsibilities and stayed in government long after the war’s end.  Second, they were a place of training: if there was one thing that disrupted institutions during the  Second World War, it was that they had to give over large chunks of their physical premises to armed forces training (At U of T for instance, Hart House was given over entirely to housing Air Force trainees). 

The third role is what lives on in the popular mind: the universities’ contribution to science.  But a lot of what has entered the public memory about this is wrong.  Scientists played a big role, yes: but in many cases they were yanked out of universities and sent to government labs, either for big things like the Manhattan Project or smaller ones like the Naval Research Establishment in Halifax, which ended up cracking the problem of de-gaussing ships to make them less vulnerable to magnetic mines. 

Research that occurred on-campus – or at least occurred without researchers giving up their university affiliation and paycheque – was more common in the US (through both the Office of Scientific Research and Development and the National Defence Research Committee) than it was in Canada, mainly because few Canadian universities had research equipment and capability worth talking about.  There was some atomic research done at l’Université de Montréal, and a number of physics and engineering departments from Western Canada (particularly the University of Alberta) participated in Project Habakkuk, a scheme to make aircraft carriers out of ice and wood pulp to help hunt submarines in the North Atlantic (and yes, this was a titanically dumb notion, maybe in the top ten of Churchill’s worst-ever ideas, and that’s up against some pretty stiff competition).  But the big stuff – to the extent that there was big stuff – happened at the University of Toronto: work on proximity fuses, anti-gravity suits for pilots (aviation medicine was one of the few areas of science where Canadians were genuinely world-leaders at the time) and, less salubriously, biological weapons research including an attempt to weaponize salmonella (an effort lead until his death in 1941 by Frederick Banting, of all people).

Now this doesn’t mean that life on campus wasn’t affected – it was.  Students spent an awful lot of time doing things like fundraising for various war causes.  With rationing and shortages of various materials, engineering and science courses were affected.  In the long run, the most important academic change was the creation of hitherto-unknown free-standing nursing schools, created by the federal government to deal with shortages.

But maybe the most consequential thing we saw from World War II was not what happened during the conflict but in the aftermath.  This included the huge (if temporary) increase in student numbers, which was mostly funded through federal dollars, but also the very large, and as it turned out permanent, shift in fiscal capacity from provincial to federal governments, because the provinces for the first time let the federal government into the sphere of direct taxation.  Our current system of federal governments taxing and then sending money to provinces via transfers is a part of that legacy.

Obviously, comparing any of this to what might happen in the current crisis is both speculative and fraught.  We have no idea how long this crisis will last, for one thing, and what kind of world it will be afterwards.  There will be some similarities: a few labs here and there may play significant roles in the development of testing or vaccines for instance (my money’s on the InterVac at the University of Saskatchewan), and it’s definitely possible that newly-vacated university residences end up being used for quarantine purposes.  But there are also some differences: there’s not going to be a big bump in enrolments when the unwinding comes, and I don’t see a lot of university social science folks get seconded to run government departments.

The big question, I think, is what happens to provincial and federal fiscal capacity during the crisis.  We are running into not so much an economic recession as much as an economic ice-age, and no one really knows how much money it will take to get out of it and whether that money will come from the feds, the provinces or both.  Borrowing vast sums of money when interest rates are close to zero is a no-brainer, but it still needs to be paid back eventually.  In the 40s and 50s we managed that easily through a burst of inflation (which reduced the value of the bonds in real terms) and a post-war export boom; it’s really unclear how either of those things is going to happen in a post-corona environment.  But we’ve been heading towards a major re-balancing of fiscal federalism for some time now: this crisis may just be the catalyst that accelerates that change into something permanent.  And that would have significant long-term effects for the sector – but for good or ill it is simply too difficult to say.