Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 773
Such is McGill. A wonderful heritage. Now, as careful as children with a gold watch, let us open the works and look in.
The present organization, scope, and size of McGill may be summarized on paper thus. McGill is a trust, administered under a Royal (British) Charter of 1821, amended and amendable by the Legislature of the Province of Quebec. Its property and money are controlled by a body of governors, acting for the still-existing, imaginary Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning. These governors were, until 1935, a self-perpetuating body, now only partly so since no governor holds for a longer term than five years at a time, and in addition to governors named by the governors themselves, representative governors are elected for terms of three years by the graduates.
For the organization of faculties, schools, courses, and the curriculum, the academic authority (but without control of money) is the senate. The presiding head of the governors and of the senate is the chancellor. Some chancellors accept their office as purely one of honor. Others undertake to give administrative and academic help. Next in dignity is the principal (who is also by title vice-chancellor), standing at the head of all faculties. This was not true of the Medical Faculty until 1905. Until then it retained its own budget, its own control, and was not under the headship of the principal. The idea was that doctors were supposed to be the only people who understood medicine and medical studies. In the day-to-day life of the college the principal is monarch of all he surveys unless he doesn’t care to survey it and leaves to others things of which he knows nothing. Some principals have known everything. Next to the principal there is for each faculty a dean, managing the internal faculty affairs. His boundaries with the principal and with the professors of the departments allow for a good deal of what is called “latitude” or “friction” according to the individuals concerned. But until very recently there was the tradition of each department (meaning what ordinary people call a subject, Classics, History, Physics, etc.) as a kind of little island fortress by itself with the head of the department as a sort of independent native prince.
The existing faculties in order of historic priority are those of Arts (Arts and Science since 1931), Medicine, Law, Engineering, Agriculture, Dentistry, Music, Graduate Studies, and Research.
REGISTRATION OF McGILL STUDENTS, 1941-42
Men
Women
Total
Faculty of Arts and Science
791
495
1286
of these:
In Arts
245
382
627
In Science
381
98
479
In Commerce
165
15
180
Faculty of Engineering
478
6
484
Faculty of Medicine
359
28
387
Faculty of Dentistry
54
2
56
Faculty of Law
54
0
54
Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research
184
54
238
School of Household Science
0
81
81
Faculty of Agriculture
89
2
91
Faculty of Music
5
2
7
Totals (Degree Students)
2015
684
2699
These figures, to those acquainted with the staggering totals of institutions like Columbia, seem very small. But there is an explanation. A state university has to teach everybody. McGill doesn’t have to teach anybody. In medicine, McGill, from the richness of its soil, restricts its crop as they restrict coffee in Brazil and hogs in Missouri. The enrollment is only a fraction of those applying. Particularly notable is the way in which the Medical Faculty attracts students from beyond Montreal and indeed from beyond Canada. In the enrollment above, of its 387 students, only 115 came from Montreal; 32 came from Quebec Province outside of Montreal; 140 from other Canadian provinces, and the rest from the United States. The Law Faculty is small because it represents study for the Bar of Quebec, a theater of French customary law, isolated, along with Louisiana, in a whole continent of English Common Law. McGill, moreover, in its registration only counts students actually attending degree courses, not casual people taking evening classes or afternoon extension lectures.
Among the things long lacking at McGill was a residence for the male students, a need now partly met by the endowment of Douglas Hall. Among those still lacking is a university press with all that goes with it to stimulate the literary impulse — the weak limb of a strong body. McGill, to its shame, has nothing to compare in a literary way with the University of Toronto Quarterly, the Queen’s Quarterly, and the Dalhousie Review.
In its relation to the churches, McGill is a nonsectarian college, chiefly attended by Protestant students but with a large number of Jews, especially in the Faculty of Arts, and a certain number of Roman Catholics. It draws no color line, there being, in Montreal climate, no color line to draw. But it has a certain aspect of Protestantism in that all the chief Protestant sects have Theological Colleges affiliated with McGill and the Jews and Roman Catholics have none. Under its charter and statutes it is entitled to hold College Chapel, and used to do so, praying daily in its days of poverty, but easing off as there was less and less to pray for. McGill has no classes in religion, a contrast with the practice in the University of Toronto where “religious knowledge” is a curriculum study of the first year, with as much “credit” as mathematics. The proposal made at various times to give “lectures on the Bible” as a general subject in the Faculty of Arts, which gives lectures on almost everything else, was never carried. It proved impossible to decide whether the lectures were to be on the Bible as God’s Word or as King James’s English. The Department of English, however, maintains a course — optional and biennial — on the English Bible.
McGill, though in no sense a provincial university, is fortunate enough to receive a considerable financial support, without any academic control, from the provincial government. This arises from the peculiar situation of education in Quebec. It is impossible to find sufficient common ground as between English-speaking Protestants and French-speaking Roman Catholics to allow for a unified department. Education is left on the clerical basis and the so-called Council of Public Instruction operates through two separate branches, the Protestant Committee and the Roman Catholic Committee. Education under the Catholic Committee is clerical both in name and in fact, inseparably connected with the Roman Catholic religion and its clergy. Under the Protestant Committee, education is much the same as secular education under any state or provincial government. The proceeds of local school taxes are divided according to the declared religious faith of the taxpayers. These, however, fall hopelessly short of maintaining education in all its branches. Hence the provincial treasury, in default of any other method, makes large, direct grants to a long list of schools, colleges, organizations, and objects not administratively controlled by the provincial government. The allocation is made on a rough-and-ready basis of population classified according to declared religious belief. About $8,000,000 a year is the present total of all these sums. McGill University gets a general grant and special grants for such things as its Neurological Institute, Teachers Training, etc. The University of Montreal receives more than three times as much with special capital grants for construction. Bishop’s College, at Lennoxville, the Classical Colleges of the province, and a lot of institutions gather round to get their share. There seems no particular system. It is what is called, in other than clerical circles, a “pork barrel.”
It seems to work reasonably well. To outside eyes the only amazing feature is that there is in Quebec no compulsory education. It won’t fit into this dual control.
In the matters of terms and sessions McGill follows what is called the Scottish model. This was commended to James McGill in the Rev. John Strachan’s first letter of advice. It remains still as the basis of McGill’s studies, though much broken into of late years and almost shattered in wartime. The Scottish system was especially suited, in Scotland and in Canada, for a population strong in industry and effort, but little blessed with inherited family wealth. The young men were to work on the land in summer and study in the winter. Hence the single short session, which as late as 1900 had lectures only from September 22 to March 22, with exams all over in mid-April. It was hardly broken by holidays, a continuous unflagging effort, the “vacation” being in its own way harder still. Thus did generations of Canadians pitch wheat in July and pitch medicine in January. What sort of men the system produced it is not for those of us left over from it to say. The present session, with lectures from October 1 to May 1 and examinations in May, is extended more or less all summer by special schools. But it is broken with many holidays, breaks, gaps, and stops, and is throughout so punctuated with “student activities” that it is hard to say where activity ends and study begins.
The Faculty of Arts of McGill shares with those of all other great colleges the perplexities of the expanding curriculum. The distressed Alma Mater is like the Old Woman in the Shoe. The children clamor round her, asking for all sorts of new things, commerce and social science, music and housekeeping, and some of the little ones crying for salesmanship and beekeeping. She does what she can, gives out Greek for little clergymen, English to make boys gentlemen, Economics for those who don’t want to be, and compulsory Latin in a medicine spoon, marked B.A., “a spoonful before and after matriculation.” Commerce students don’t take this spoonful.
Old-fashioned professors think that more than half of the present Arts Course is just tinsel and frills and fun. Old-fashioned men in colleges think that Commerce can only be learned in a counting house. But if old-fashioned men in counting houses endow a course in Commerce in a college, what are you to do? “Commerce” disrupts modern arts courses like a bombshell. Students flock to it, by preference, not for what they learn, but for what they don’t. At McGill Latin is compulsory for entrance to Arts, not for Commerce. Many professors, old- or new-fashioned, think Latin a great training, even for business purposes. Businessmen don’t. Businessmen want their sons to learn business English. There isn’t any, except bad English. Businessmen want their sons to learn business psychology; there is none, or none inside the law. Businessmen want their sons to learn accountancy because they never learned it themselves . . ..
But all of this is common ground to McGill and all similar places. McGill has here no particular success or solution to offer for study.
The case is different with endowment. The experience of McGill, as a great endowed university, may be of a certain interest at the present time. A controversy, and indeed something like a national problem, has arisen in both England and America over the question of endowed versus state institutions. In England the question concerns the so-called “public schools” (that is, endowed secondary schools such as Eton and Rugby), as against schools conducted by the government. In America the problem turns on the rival merits of state universities and endowed universities. The controversy gathers urgency in proportion as the increasing scope and cost of education and the decreasing funds available from endowment begin to threaten the future of endowed universities.
The latter, however, have found voices raised in their defense. One of the most prominent among the presidents of endowed universities argues that without their competition the curriculum of the state university would deteriorate. Legislatures elected by the people would clamor for a sort of free-for-all, pleasant and easy higher education, with degrees for everybody. At present they are held back from this by the stern example of the private, endowed colleges, still teaching Greek and trigonometry.
At first sight the outstanding success of McGill would seem a strong case in point. But it is not so simple. McGill owes much, not only to its peculiar basis as endowed, but to the peculiar atmosphere in which it grew up, the traditions brought from Scotland, the scholarship from England, the class of people from whose sons it drew its students, and the attitude toward learning current in their homes. McGill did not make these things. It found them. We realize this when we remember that McGill is not the only great Canadian college. One other, the University of Toronto, rivals it and in many things exceeds it. Yet Toronto is a provincial university, born by act of Parliament, cradled in legislation, and suckled and fed on taxes.
Toronto is dependent on the provincial legislature. McGill is not, except in the inapplicable sense of constitutional law whereby a province is supreme in education, so that the legislature at Quebec could legally abolish McGill tomorrow. It could also, if it liked, make it legally a Roman Catholic institution open only to Negroes. Such things have no bearing on the case. Indeed, it has been argued, no doubt incorrectly, that McGill, having been created by Royal Charter before Confederation, is not fully amenable to the province.
But the point is that the legislature controls Toronto, at one remove, through a board of governors and the legislature does not control McGill. But is this good or bad? It all depends on how the legislature acts, as compared with how the self-perpetuating Board of Governors acts. Either body may be wise or foolish, sagacious or inept.
At the same time colleges of both types, private or state, seem to meet the same troubles and fall into the same sins. State institutions run the obvious danger of political favoritism; private institutions to danger of control by money. Endowment, after all, is just the sister of capitalism. Both kinds of colleges suffer from the intrusion of business ideas belonging to another sphere; suffer from the peculiar dry rot of “efficiency,” the attempt to make all educational values provable, measurable, divisible into credits and units, to make professors work on time, “produce” by the cubic yard, and be “hired and fired” according as to whether they “show results.”
In any case, the days of endowment are measured. No such funds will again exist under arbitrary personal control. We cannot, of course, see far into the veiled future of the hour. But the sweeping tax power called forth in war will carry forward for the aims of peace. A myriad voices call for it. Failing hands are lifted up for it. Never again; never again the rich and poor as they were. Never again will any individual, however philanthropic, have the chance to give $80,000,000, even to education.
In the main McGill was made, not by its system, but by its circumstances, by the models from which it drew, the generous and unconditioned help of those who paid its cost, and above all by the men who served it. Men, not mortar, make a college. Trustees and governors at times get a glimpse of this in their sleep and then wake up and buy more mortar . . . And not only the great and outstanding men — the Dawsons and the Oslers — but all the men, all who are given the peculiar and proper tenure of a university chair, as abiding as marriage, no hire and fire, no time clock, room for individuality to shape and grow, for scholarship to walk its own queer path, as odd as Isaac Newton, as freakish as Edward Gibbon.
A university is hard to recast. We should watch that we do not break the mold.
It is important to notice that benefactions given to McGill in its great formative period from 1860 to 1914 were given from pure public spirit, without self-interest, and carried with them no conditions, no “strings,” no intrusion on the conduct of the university. On these terms alone is a benefaction worth accepting. Anything else is just a handful of poisoned thorns hidden in a bouquet of flowers. After all, the benefactor gets much, gets in the long run the best of the bargain. That tablet of Latin, high on the corner of a McGill building, To Commemorate the Notable Bounty of —— —— —— , what a legacy to leave to one’s descendants. The “Macdonald” Physics Building, known to the world as the cradle of modern atomic physics, rocked by Ernest Rutherford, how much better than if the name had ended with the “Macdonald’s ten-cent plug.”
So there were no strings. Sir William Macdonald of the “plug” had made his vast fortune out of tobacco. But he never insisted that professors must smoke or even chew. The Chair of Economics was endowed by members of a family whose name was associated with their proprietary interest in a great brewery. But they made no conditions that the occupant of the chair must drink beer. If any strings there were, they arose by general consent out of the ideas of the moment as apart from the personal interest or advantage of the donor. Thus Sir Donald Smith (Lord Strathcona), in his foundation, some fifty years ago, of the Royal Victoria College (the more feminine part of McGill), laid down certain restrictions. Sharing the fear of women common to his time, he insisted that the college girls must not come near the men for two years. The Royal Victoria opened thus, as safe-guarded and secluded as an Indian purdah, a harem in Hyderabad. Its very doors and its curtained windows looked mystery. Its entertainments were open only to professors over sixty and governors over seventy. Old graduates of McGill, quite old now, will remember the glorious incident when two college boys, dressed up all in flounces and fans and feathers, entered a Royal Victoria entertainment with bogus cards of admission and were shown into their seats by an eager and competitive group of elderly governors and professors.
