Reinventing Brantford. Leo Groarke

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       Andrew Toos on the evolution of the academic, a parody on the traditional illustration of “the evolution of man.” Like the original, it assumes a male stereotype.

      Most part-time professors toiled in the hope that they would eventually land a full-time position. Many did. Others organized unions to fight for better working conditions for part-time faculty. In Kitchener-Waterloo, Morrell, Pries, and Sawatsky came up with a radically different strategy. Instead of working as perpetual part-timers in an existing university, they decided to launch an initiative to establish an institution of their own. They wanted a model that could compete with existing universities and decided that it would be a small liberal arts institution that would offer a different model of education than the one that characterizes Canadian universities. Like private liberal arts colleges in the United States, the City College they first proposed for Kitchener was designed to emphasize teaching over research, general education, undergraduate rather than graduate programs, student/professor interaction, and, in the spirit of humanism, the development of the whole person. When the Kitchener option did not work out, they partnered with Brantford. The partnership was a marriage of two outsiders: a city and a group of part-time faculty determined to do an end run around existing universities in their attempt to find a way into the Canadian university system.

      Even before it came to Brantford, the City College Project had attracted national media attention. At a time when a Conservative government in Ontario was seriously considering the possibility of private universities, the City College proposal was swept into a heated debate which pitted the City College group and others who wanted private universities against the existing public universities and their faculty associations. The locus of the debate moved to Brantford after two members of the Education Committee of a local development board,¹ Doug Brown and Vyrt Sisson, heard Gordon Morrell interviewed on a national radio broadcast. In a situation in which the Brant strategic plan had already flagged a local need for more post-secondary education, Brown and Sisson were intrigued by the idea of a private university and arranged for Morrell and his two colleagues to speak to their committee. Unable to establish the college they wanted in Kitchener, the City College group was determined to make the most of the Brantford opportunity. When they met with the education committee on September 20, 1996, they requested $291,000 to establish a private college. In return for the funding, which would be used to pay for salaries, a marketing plan, and the development of a curriculum, they promised to open the college in September 1997.

      At a special meeting on October 10, 1996, the local board enthusiastically noted that the proposed college was in keeping with other Brantford initiatives (among them, the plan to move Mohawk College downtown) and encouraged the education committee to pursue the idea further. The board was less enthusiastic about the proposed price tag, which they thought extravagant and not well worked out. One of the key board members, a retired bank manager, told me that the City College professors did not know how to write a business plan. He raised his hands, looked to heaven, smiled, and quipped: “What can you expect from arts professors who haven’t studied business?” (In the wake of the collapse of the North American stock market after questionable business practices in 2008, I poked him in the ribs and asked him: “What can you expect from business leaders who haven’t studied ethics?”)

      The Board offered the City College professors fifteen thousand dollars to prepare a preliminary plan for a private university. They accepted the offer and submitted a University College of the Grand Valley:Business Plan two months later. The “Executive Summary” outlined an ambitious plan to establish a university “in the heart” of downtown Brantford.

      The City College Project Group-Brant, in cooperation with Brant Community Futures Development Corporation, plans to develop an accredited university college, University College of the Grand Valley (UCGV), in the heart of the City of Brantford by September 1, 1997. UCGV will become one of the first private, tuition-driven, liberal arts colleges in Ontario. This model, based on other similar institutions in British Columbia and Alberta, as well as the United States and Great Britain, is a new model for Ontario post-secondary education. UCGV is not intended to supplant the existing public post-secondary education system, but rather to supplement it and to increase the options available to students.²

      In explaining why a private university should be established, the plan emphasized Brant County’s low level of educational attainment, the need to avail local students with access to a university, and the economic and cultural benefits of a university. The mission statement for University College of the Grand Valley was committed to “a high quality undergraduate university degree with a strong emphasis on creative teaching, smaller classes, a high degree of professor-student interaction, and experiential learning.” It promised that UCGV would “be an active participant in the Brantford community, culturally, intellectually and economically.”

      The City College’s forty-three-page business plan attempted to work out, in a more detailed way, how a private university would operate. The plans included a proposed liberal arts curriculum,³ library services provided in partnership with the Brantford Public Library (a plan discussed with Wendy Newman, the Library’s CEO), an agreement with Mohawk College that would allow college students to transfer to degree programs, and suggested linkages with the downtown YMCA (to provide recreational facilities) and the Woodland Cultural Centre, a Brantford institution that houses one of Canada’s largest repositories of aboriginal artifacts. In its discussion of possible locations, the City Group had no doubts about their preference. The empty Carnegie Library had caught their eye, convincing them that an association with the history and heritage of the downtown could be a key component of the new college. “It is the goal of UCGV to locate in the heart of the old City of Brantford. UCGV hopes to contribute to the ongoing process of the revitalizing of the downtown core of Brantford…. To date, the Carnegie Library is the best and most appropriate building which may be available for use.”⁴

      In a rudimentary way, the College of the Grand Valley business plan successfully addressed the issues that a new university would have to face in Brantford. But it faced a major obstacle. To function as a university it would have to be accredited by the government in a province that had no tradition of secular private colleges. In attempting to navigate a way around this problem, one of the City College professors, Edmund Pries, met with administrators from the University of Waterloo, proposing an affiliation. When the university’s president, James СКАЧАТЬ