From 'nonsense' to 'no time to waste': How BC's modern university system was born

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It was a preposterous idea. A college located in the Fraser Valley?

“Don’t be silly,” Les Peterson said into the phone the morning of March 1, 1960.

It was the turn of a new decade and this was the sort of poppycock that BC’s minister of education was dealing with.

And yet, within just a couple years, the idea of regional colleges in provincial outposts stopped being ridiculous and started being seen as the thing that would save post-secondary education in British Columbia. As the University of the Fraser Valley prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary, the story of how it and other universities were born is a reminder of how quickly conventional wisdom can change when circumstances—and leaders—change.

The Minister

As the 1950s turned to the 1960s, residents in two rapidly growing British Columbia regions began to talk about the possibility of local junior colleges or vocational schools. In the Okanagan and the Fraser Valley, residents imagined a world in which young people could get a head start on university or start learning a trade while remaining close to home.

But to the province’s education minister, the notion made little sense. That much was clear on that March morning, when Les Peterson answered the phone call of a Chilliwack Progress reporter.

The reporter was asking about the idea, floated by a local group, that the Fraser Valley should have its own post-secondary institution. And Peterson was having nothing of the idea.

“Don’t you think it would be unfair to Lower Mainland students to have to go all the way to Chilliwack to attend college?” Peterson asked.

Peterson was a Vancouver lawyer and MLA. But more than most, he would have known what it meant to have to move away from home to get an education. Peterson grew up on a small-town Alberta farm, but moved at age 14 to attend a private high school in Camrose, 80 kilometres or so away, where he paid for a small room by doing janitorial work. He would graduate and go on to attend university in Montreal, before joining the army for the Second World War.

When he returned to Canada, Peterson went to study law at the University of British Columbia, an institution he would oversee as the province’s minister of education, and later lead as chancellor.

What Price Education?

Today’s UBC is the biggest and most-prestigious university in the province, but the UBC of the 1950s was much more than that. It wasn’t just the biggest college in the province. It was the only one.

Simon Fraser University wouldn’t be created until 1965. And today’s University of Victoria was then just an affiliate campus of UBC. BC’s other public universities didn’t exist. So if you wanted a post-secondary education of basically any sort—if you wanted to be a teacher or an engineer or a scientist or an administrator or a nurse—you went to UBC. That meant debates about the school’s future could spark debate far beyond Point Grey and the borders of Metro Vancouver. And any discussion about post-secondary education in general necessarily involved sketching out UBC’s future.

So in January of 1959, as officials suggested the prospect of hiking enrolment fees at UBC, the editor of the Chilliwack Progress asked a simple question in an opinion editorial: “What Price Education?”

Budgets were tight, and it appeared that UBC would have to increase enrolment fees to make ends meet. And the further you lived from the university, the more you cared whether those fees would rise, the Progress’s editor wrote.

“A boost in student fees could put higher education completely out of the reach of many students,” the paper wrote. “Particularly would such a move hit students from the interior, practically all of whom have to pay board.”

UBC served nearly 3,000 students from outside Vancouver. The paper described that as a “disappointing figure” and warned that if higher fees pushed that figure down, “UBC will become a college for the rich or for the Vancouver metropolitan area alone.”

It also suggested that higher fees could lead to a “renewed demand” for junior colleges in the Interior.

‘Nonsense’

The idea of junior colleges had been starting to slosh around British Columbia in the 50s, with the Kootenays, the Okanagan, and the Fraser Valley all muttering about the need for more local post-secondary education.

Although such colleges had existed in the United States for decades, they were mostly foreign to Canada, which continued to devote its post-secondary energy to funding a handful of large universities in its biggest cities. But with Canada’s workforce increasingly ill-suited to an era of professional jobs and a new generation of young people looking for employment beyond the country’s mines and forests, the model was starting to look ill-suited for a modernizing nation.

In the 1950s, Ontario had considered—and rejected—the prospect of creating its own junior college system. And BC’s school trustees association had expressed interest in a junior college system that could help students transition between high school and university.

Even Peterson, the Education Minister, occasionally batted around the concept. In 1958, a year before declaring a Fraser Valley college “silly,” he had floated the possibility of a junior college in the Kootenays.

But though it seems natural today, when most jobs ask for at least some kind of post-secondary education, the idea of junior colleges was often considered blasphemous—or idiotic.

When Peterson floated that idea of a junior college in the Kootenays, the Vancouver Sun responded by publishing an editorial that ridiculed the idea.

It declared the notion that BC should start creating junior colleges to be “nonsense” and “about as half-baked a piece of election promising as can readily be imagined.”

The Sun’s editorial explained that the province’s policy foresaw the University of British Columbia to be the natural parent campus of all other post-secondary institutions in the province. Creating junior campuses, the Sun (and others at the time) argued, would add to the burden facing UBC, which didn’t have the financial or logistical capacity to support branch campuses across BC.

“Junior colleges will eventually become desirable and necessary,” the paper conceded. But only after UBC was a better, more-capable institution. “Mr. Peterson and the Socred government should wait …until they’re prepared to spend the money UBC needs without forcing it to go begging to the public, until they are prepared to match the cost of the junior college with additional funds for UBC to handle the increasing enrolment that will flow from it.”

But UBC continued to struggle, with tuition fees for most students hiked by $100 in 1959. And, as the Progress’s editor predicted, calls to consider junior college picked up. (Or, at least the number of calls recorded in that editor’s own newspaper.)

In June of 1959, the principal of Chilliwack High School speculated about the possibility that the first two years of university could be offered at the site. And the following spring, the “Chilliwack Winter Employment Committee” voted to call on the province to create a junior college in the valley. (Winter employment committees were essentially pro-employment groups concerned with social welfare and the employability of residents—particularly in seasons where temporary resource work slowed down.)

But The Sun’s strong words seem to have won the day, given Peterson’s dismissive tone two years later.

It was the winter employment committee’s vote in 1960 that prompted the Progress’s call to Peterson—and his response that a junior college was a “silly idea.” A month later, UBC president Norman Mackenzie embarked on a speaking tour of the Okanagan, during which he batted away calls for a junior college there. Like Peterson, he pointed to the need for the province to put all its financial might into UBC first.

(In response to Mackenzie’s speeches, The Progress’s editor wrote that the government and UBC have a duty to make a university education available “not to every boob head in the province, but to every country girl and boy with as much intelligence and capacity for work as their city counterparts.”)

John B. MacDonald

It’s incredible the speed that an idea can go from being “nonsense” and “silly” to an absolute necessity. It only takes one report. And also for that report to be 131 pages long, full of statistics, and authored by the new wunderkind president of the University of British Columbia.

In 1962, a young Harvard professor named John B. MacDonald (not to be confused with the long-dead John A. MacDonald) replaced UBC’s outgoing president, Norman Mackenzie. Mackenzie had focused on building a bigger and better university, seeing junior colleges as a potential impediment—one that would drain resources, focus, students and faculty. In Mackenzie’s view, UBC needed one thing above all else to succeed: more money from the provincial government. And every dollar the province spent on other colleges was a dollar that wasn’t going to UBC.

Mackenzie’s replacement was a departure from the norm. MacDonald was a Harvard professor just 43 years old—more than two decades younger than Mackenzie—and a dentist, of all things. But MacDonald was seen as a brilliant innovator and forward-thinking. Years before he was appointed to take over UBC, he was leading calls for provincial education reform and penning a report on dental education that would later be called a “masterpiece.”

And UBC—and all of British Columbia—desperately needed someone with a new plan.

“UBC was facing a virtually impossible proposition,” MacDonald reflected in 2007. The baby boom had boomed, students were flooding out of high schools, jobs were requiring more and more education, and BC’s lone university had neither the faculty nor the buildings needed to educate so many more people.

From the very beginning, MacDonald looked at regional colleges not as parasites that would suck the life out of UBC, but as a solution to the big university’s troubles.

At his first press conference in July of 1962, MacDonald rhetorically asked, “How much more of a load can UBC take?”

In colleges and new universities, MacDonald imagined a network of regional institutions that could assume some of the burden traditionally carried by UBC, while providing education for more young people where they lived. But stating that regional colleges could help solve BC’s post-secondary challenges is very different from actually creating a college system from the ground up.

Faced with the hard task of nailing down just where, when, and how colleges would be built and how they would exist in relation to one another and UBC, some administrators would create task forces to study, deliberate, draft and re-draft a plan. Others would leave the nitty gritty to politicians to hash out in back rooms. And some would delegate the plan-making to a like-minded subordinate.. MacDonald, though, hit the road.

The Sept. 1, 1962, edition of the Vancouver Sun reported that the new president would spend two months crisscrossing British Columbia and flanked by a team of UBC experts.

MacDonald was asked about the possibility of a royal commission. He discounted it immediately, pointing to swelling enrolment figures and demand for post-secondary education that couldn’t be met by UBC.

“We have no time for it,” he said.

So MacDonald began to tour BC to figure out where new colleges could be set up. He traveled to Chilliwack, Abbotsford, Victoria, Prince George, Nelson, Vernon, Revelstoke, Salmon Arm, Nanaimo and a rash of other communities. He talked with school trustees and university alumni and teachers and more.

In Chilliwack, he sat for four hours with local educators, who told him that the Fraser Valley could immediately fill classrooms with hundreds of eager post-secondary learners. MacDonald impressed the educators, The Progress reported, and seemed inclined to the start of a new school in the area.

MacDonald and his team also set to work completing studies, looking at statistics, and considering college models in other countries. And when all that was done, the UBC president sat down and got writing.

He had said speed was of the essence and promised to deliver a report in a matter of weeks. But MacDonald wasn’t going to bang out a half-baked set of findings. Instead, by December, just three months after he had started his research, MacDonald delivered—first to his university’s board of governors, then BC’s education ministry—a 131-page report that set the stage for nothing less than a wholescale reorganization of post-secondary education in BC. (By comparison, BC’s Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure has been working on a study of the Fraser Valley’s transportation network for more than two and a half years.)

The report

As the 1960s had approached, BC’s educational elite had talked about the idea of regional colleges like it was a hare-brained plan dreamed up by a bunch of hicks. MacDonald’s report essentially said the hicks had been on to something.

“The numbers of young people qualified for and seeking higher education by 1971 will more than double,” MacDonald wrote. “The task of providing for them requires a ‘new look’ in higher education in this Province, planned for immediately, and followed by prompt action.”

MacDonald wrote that delays would have severe consequences:

“Doubtless some of my recommendations will be debated. However, the urgency of the situation requires that decisions be made promptly. Let us recognize too that delay is in itself a decision for which we will pay deeply.”

MacDonald wrote that improving access to post-secondary education wasn’t just a matter of fairness, or of meeting demand from British Columbians. It was also, he said, an economic necessity if British Columbia was to grow its economy and catch up with other parts of the developed world. With BC long focused on resource extraction, skilled occupations accounted for less than a quarter of the province’s jobs, and that “professional people” amounted to just 6% of the workforce, MacDonald wrote. The US, by contrast, had three times as many professional people, per capita, and twice the number of scientists and engineers.

MacDonald envisioned nearly a dozen new colleges that would be spread across the province, allowing students to study closer to their hometowns at a lower cost than in Vancouver. The colleges would provide, at minimum, the first two years of a university education. MacDonald said the work should start immediately. A demographic wave was about to sweep over BC’s post-secondary institutions, and he said the government needed to act immediately. He envisioned a college in the Surrey-Burnaby area beginning operation in 1965 with one in the upper Fraser Valley—Chilliwack and Abbotsford—starting in 1971.

Becoming reality

The report had an overnight impact, and almost immediately became government policy. It also changed the course of post-secondary education in British Columbia.

The current landscape—in which UBC is an internationally recognized research hub but just one of an array of education options for would-be students in the province—exists because of MacDonald’s urge to decentralize. For decades, MacDonald and his report would shape the futures of BC's universities and colleges, cities and towns, and academics and tradespeople.

He introduced a university system where different communities and colleges could pursue their own goals and ambitions—in his first press conference, MacDonald even declared that he wouldn’t be upset if another BC university ended up with higher admission standards than UBC.

The year after MacDonald made his report, UBC’s Victoria campus became its own institution. The BC Institute of Technology opened in 1964. And in 1965, Simon Fraser University opened on Burnaby Mountain.

But MacDonald didn’t just envisions decentralized institutions. He also saw the need to decentralize the decision-making apparatus of education in BC, emphasizing that the communities that so wanted regional colleges would need to take a key role in getting them off the ground.

Following his report, groups sprung up around the province to attempt to organize such local, regional colleges. In a space of a few years, the idea of what a post-secondary education meant had been turned on its head.

And suddenly, it was the Fraser Valley’s turn to get a college.

But decentralization brought a catch. Because while the Fraser Valley’s educators and residents could agree that they wanted and deserved a college, they were less unanimous in what that would look like and where it would be located. Which threatened to sink the whole plan—especially since the final plan would need to be ratified not just by politicians and academics, but by public referendum.

Click here to read the second part of this story: featuring a referendum, a scramble to create a college in a matter of months, and a bunch of broken typewriters.