After 150 years: the decline of Toronto's St. Michael's College.

The decline of Catholic higher eduation in Canada has been an unobserved fact. In the early sixties Father Lawrence Shook of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies published a thick volume on the history of Catholic colleges and universities in Canada. When, some two decades later, Fr. Peter Swan began a survey for a possible update of the Shook volume, he discovered that many of those universities and colleges had disappeared, while others remained Catholic in name only.

In more recent days, Fr. Swan has brought out a private printing of his Memoirs of his years at Assumption College, Windsor; as Principal of St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan, in Saskatoon; and as President of the University of St. Michael's College in the University of Toronto. That last tenure coincided with the death rattle of St. Michael's as an undergraduate teaching institution. Yet, of the Catholic public, no one seems to have noticed.

While USMC registers over 4,000 students of the University of Toronto it has ceased to teach them, with the exception of 400 students who take a course or courses in the Christianity and Culture programs, a much smaller number in Celtic Studies, and some 40 students in a medieval program. The other students are not taught by SMC professors for the simple reason that there are none. The once independent departments of Classics, English, French, German, Religious Knowledge (Theology), and Philosophy have been merged with the respective university departments, ending Catholic education by Catholic professors. In brief the President of SMC is little more than a landlord who rents out student residences and offices on the College's downtown property to several university departments.

St. Michael's as an undergraduate college, which has always been its bread and butter, ...is no more. Yet strangely, the current President seems to think of his institution as the foremost Catholic university in Canada.

Editor

The following article contains the reflections by a foremost St. Michael's professor and department head on the issues raised by Father Swan's Memoirs.

When Michael Power, first Bishop of Toronto died in 1850, his successor was a French aristocrat, Armand, Comte de Charbonnel. He asked his former teachers, the Basilian Fathers of Annonay, France, to help him in the British colony. In September 1852, they took over St. Michael's College from the Christian Brothers of de La Salle, who had started it some six months earlier. They began with eight students in the Bishop's parish house. The year 2002 therefore is the 150th anniversary of the College. In time it became affiliated, and then federated, with the University of Toronto, so that it is from this University that students of the College receive their degrees. It is one of four original colleges, the others being University, Trinity and Victoria. Since World War I this Catholic College on the University of Toronto campus has offered instruction in six departments--Classics, English, French, German, Philosophy, and Religious studies. For courses in other subjects, students have gone to classes in university departments.

In 1974, St. Michael's College had faculty members who taught students as part of an agreement signed that year, which brought financial advantages to the Colleges. Their separate departments ceased to exist; John Evans, then President of the University, was convinced that if they were amalgamated considerable savings could be realized, partly through a reduction in the number of their faculty members in the disciplines affected. When the agreement came up for review in five years time, Father Peter Swan was President of St. Michael's College. His recent memoir gives us the inside story of decisions taken during his presidency (from 1978 to 1984); in this very valuable account, he documents the disasters which both he and I predicted and both of us lived through.

Catholic tradition

It is possible for the Catholic intellectual tradition to be transmitted to future generations by a Catholic college in a secular university, Father Swan argues, but only if the college has the right to appoint its own staff and to determine course content in sensitive areas such as philosophy and religion. The 1974 agreement between the University and the Federated Colleges did give the latter some financial stability, and did allow for distinctive programmes within them, but, Swan writes, "unfortunately, the Memorandum of Understanding contained a provision highly detrimental to St. Michael's College, namely that all future academic appointments be by U of T (In practice, by its Arts departments.)"

He first heard of this proviso in 1974, when he was Principal of St. Thomas More College in Saskatoon. Immediately he remembered what had happened to St. Paul's, the Jesuit college in Winnipeg, in 1968. When it was faced with bankruptcy, the University of Manitoba agreed to pay the salaries of its staff, if it ceased to exercise the right to appoint new staff members; after that, it lost its identity and its academic function. "So in spite of the distance from Toronto," Father Swan writes, "I could hear the death knell of federation; it is impossible for an academic institution to retain its own identify if it cannot select and appoint its staff."

"Patently," Father Swan writes, "the vision of federation which had inspired such academic statesmen as Sir Robert Falconer, Sydney Smith and many others and which had fostered co-operation between St. Michael's and U. of T. for almost a century had grown dim. It is ironic that the university which pioneered the concept of academic federation should now in effect propose its rejection." Furthermore, the colleges, "for the sake of temporary benefits, had lost the vision of federation and accepted absorption into a monolithic university."

This was not fully realized at the time. U of T officials maintained that the federated universities should have appropriate staff complements related to their student enrolments. In fact, the Memorandum stated, "It is not proposed that...College staff be reduced; in fact, college councils should consider how membership could be offered to a greater number of teaching staff of the University than at present." The University thought that college complements could be kept up by cross-appointment of professors with University contracts. St. Michael's made good use of this avenue, but "unfortunately," as Father Swan wrote, "few academics hired by a secular university are interested in cross-appointment to a church-related institution." As he predicted, the College complement continues to shrink: "As I foresaw that fateful day when I first read the Memorandum, year by year St. Michael's is becoming less and less a teaching institution, and more and more a set of buildings in which U of T staff teach and have thei r offices."

When the Memorandum was reviewed in 1983, and Father Swan was right in the middle of the negotiations, President James Ham seemed sympathetic to the concerns of the colleges and actually asked them to determine what their complements ought to be. But the breakthrough they hoped for was not to be, as father Swan points out:

"After we were well into our deliberations, President Ham announced that the heads of the University of Toronto's arts departments, alarmed by a rumour that the federated universities might regain the right to appoint Arts staff under certain conditions with funds flowing through the U of T budget, had voiced strong objections. They argued that in order to maintain the prestige of U of T as a world-class university, departments should have the exclusive right to appoint academic staffs, and further that only 'academic' considerations should play any part in such appointments. It was the prerogative of departments to determine the best candidates."

Ignorance and bigotry 

It is worth pointing out how small-minded were these administrators so concerned about the University's prestige. A stronger President would have been able to remind them that Trinity, Victoria, and St. Michael's all had excellent academic reputations. In English studies, Toronto had few superiors on the continent; when he came to our city to deliver the Alexander Lectures in 1964, Herschel Baker, head of the English Department at Harvard, said that Toronto graduates were the best prepared students in their graduate school. Religious considerations, not merely academic ones, probably influenced Northrop Frye's coming to Victoria; he was, after all, a clergyman. They certainly influenced Marshall McLuhan's coming to St. Michael's. James Cameron, who had been Professor of Philosophy at Leeds and first Master of Rutherford College in the University of Kent at Canterbury, England, brought the benefit of his wide knowledge of both English and philosophy to St. Michael's in 1972 precisely because he wanted to end his academic career in a Catholic college.

St. Michael's as well had had the benefit of having a "world class" centre on its campus, the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies. It had been founded in the later 1920s by two eminent French philosophers, Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain, and throughout succeeding decades its faculty had included many other distinguished scholars as well. With their aid, St. Michael's had turned out more PhD's in philosophy than the university department did.

The very condescending comments made by the "prestigious" heads of the Arts departments were the products of ignorance and bigotry.

A self-contradictory report

As Father Swan shows, the 1983 deliberations resulted in a document which contradicted itself. On the one hand the Preamble, recognizing that the university derived its strength from diverse sources, and reaffirming the academic role of all the Colleges on the St. George campus, concluded that the federal character of the university should continue to be a source of enrichment and diversity. On the other hand, it declared that the responsibility for academic management in all disciplines should reside in the Faculty of Arts and Science. What it gave with one hand, it took away with the other. Yet in its statement of principles it produced strong arguments for the Colleges:

"Colleges are communities of scholars which share with the rest of the University a responsibility for the advancement of learning. They should seek to promote this end by bringing scholars together from different disciplines and by functioning as catalysts for intellectual interaction.

"Colleges have a specific responsibility for the education of undergraduates. In a large metropolitan university they provide a humane environment for students who might otherwise be lost or alienated by the sheer size and complexity of the University."

The University departments were forgetting these worthwhile objectives. They were also forgetting the traditions of their own university, not quite the same as those of British and American universities. Like the British, we enrolled the student in a college, providing him with the humane environment referred to in the list of principles, rather than leaving him as an isolated individual in an undifferentiated mass of thirty, forty, or fifty thousand students as he might be in an American state university. On the other hand, we had not imitated the British tutorial system, but like the Americans gave instruction by means of lectures. As Father Swan says, we were forgetting about the advantages of the federated system which had worked so well for us in the past.

Out of consideration for the College staff and their families, Father Swan says he signed the new memorandum on June 30, 1983. But he did so with extreme reluctance: "Here we were pretending to reaffirm and revitalize the academic role of the Federated Colleges, while in fact we were agreeing to measures whereby that role would be reduced and, in the end, terminated. We were asserting that the federal character of the historical university has been and should continue to be a source of continuing enrichment and diversity...while at the same time taking steps to weaken that federal character and eventually change the U of T into a monolithic institution." Failing a major change in University policy, he anticipated that "our Arts division is doomed. In 1974 it began a wake which will last some 35 years. Early in the Third Millennium, St. Michael's will cease to be an Arts College. It will cease to be an academic institution engaged in teaching and research." So he raised the question whether continued associat ion with the University was even desirable. In order to be faithful to its mission of transmitting the Catholic intellectual tradition, should the College extricate itself from this unsatisfactory arrangement and become an independent university?

Father Swan was not being unduly pessimistic. Until my retirement in 1987, I had been saying over and over again that we needed new faculty members. When we ceased to have our own English department in 1974, we had a complement of 24 staff members (not all of them full-time but all fully employed). This year, 2001/02, the College English section has one professor teaching, and one on leave. That is all. If the proportion of students enrolled in English courses has kept up, there will be approximately a thousand of them in English classes, virtually all being taught by instructors who are not members of the St. Michael faculty. Since similar attrition has occurred in other subjects, St. Michael's cannot be said to be providing students with a Catholic education. It does have a healthy enrolment in a widely respected Christianity and Culture programme (400 students), for which it can choose its own professors since they are funded by the college itself, but the programme by itself is not a substitute for a ful l range of art courses.

The fall in the number of professors of English has another consequence. For the first time since the Second World War, no one in English at St. Michael's has a graduate appointment. This means that there is no one qualified to direct an M.A. or a Ph.D thesis in English--and it also means that St. Michael's has no say in the direction of the Graduate Department of English.

In a recently published alumni newsletter, the College looks forward to its sesquicentennial celebrations in 2002, for which many important events have been planned. In his lengthy President's report, Richard Alway justifiably takes credit for a new men's s residence, the first addition to the campus in over thirty years. He regards this as "symbolic of the renewal and new initiatives that are so apparent on our campus as we approach the 150th anniversary of our founding." But in some sense this is just glossing over the fact that with the exception of "Christianity and Culture" the University of St. Michael's College has ceased to teach undergraduate students.

Education out of focus

Dr. Alway's perspective on college education, however, is very different from that of his predecessor, Father Swan. "When most of us think back on our days at St. Michael's" he writes, "we probably have in our minds the undergraduate arts and science program that has been the central focus of the College since its federation with the University of Toronto early in the twentieth century. Undergraduate teaching remains our raison d'etre, but increasingly we are also taking on new responsibilities as part of our broader mission to serve the Church and society in addressing issues of contemporary interest and concern."

Richard Alway is a very distinguished man and every inch a College president, but he does not seem to realize that here he has confessed that the College has lost its focus. It should not want to address issues of contemporary concern; its sole purpose is to introduce students to the liberal arts, and it has no time for anything else. Questions of social concern are of paramount importance in our city, our province, and our country, but there are other agencies which can address them. The College has to stick to its own work, and try to do it well. It should not seek to justify its existence on the basis of activities which are not part of its mandate.

St. Michael's is now home to the French, German, and Italian departments--to professors who have their offices at the College, but no formal affiliation with it, and no commitment to the Catholic intellectual tradition. The fact that the College has room for them testifies to its own lack of faculty members; these people are using offices which in more normal times would have been occupied by St. Michael's professors. The number of staff members in the traditional College subjects has fallen to about twenty and is continuing to fall (whereas in 1974, as I have pointed out, there were 24 in English alone). Meanwhile, the English Department is rejoicing in the fact that it is being given a building which, when remodelled, will provide a roof over the whole department--meaning of course that it has no thought of cross-appointing professors to the various colleges. President Alway is no longer the head of an academic institution, but a landlord.

So the Colleges have lost, and the Departments have won; their victory is complete. Symbolically, the new head office of the English Department will be on Spadina Avenue, at the farthest possible remove from St. Michael's College.

The achievements of a federated structure

In his book English Studies at Toronto: A History (University of Toronto Press, 1988), Robin S. Harris made it clear that he regarded the college system as a source of strength, not weakness, for this discipline. Near the end of his book he wrote:

"A fundamental characteristic of English Studies at Toronto in the twentieth century has been its collegiate structure. This was already the case in 1900--the University College and Victoria departments of English--and emphatically so by 1916, when undergraduate departments at Trinity and St. Michael's were also operational and the graduate program was involving members of all four undergraduate departments. Since 1975, there have been no undergraduate departments of English, but in functional terms the college departments continue to exist. For most of the 125 full-time members of the present Department, their college affiliation is of day-to-day importance."

Under the terms of the Memorandum which Father Swan described and deplored, a system which had worked very well in the past was thoughtlessly discarded. As Harris points out, when the University marked its 150th anniversary in 1977 with a special convocation honouring nine active members of its teaching staff, three of the nine were from the Department of English: Northtrop Frye, Marshall McLuhan, and Father Lawrence Shook. "English was the only department represented by more than one. All three had been members of the federated college departments prior to the unification of the Department of English in 1975. That three of the scholars whom the University saw fit to honour on this unique occasion were members of the Department of English is a testament to the continuing strength of English studies at Toronto. That all three should have been associated with a federated college is evidence of the importance of the college tradition in the pursuit of those studies."

We are left with two questions which Father Swan's memoir has brought into the foreground:

1) Can the University of Toronto restore the college system which was one of its distinguishing features, or is it going to continue to pursue the model of the large American universities?

2) Or must we seek some other solution to the problem of not having a Catholic liberal arts college in a city the size of Toronto? Should St. Michael's perhaps go independent and start anew from the bottom up?

David Dooley is Professor Emeritus of St. Michael's College, University of Toronto and associate editor of Catholic Insight. Fr. Peter Swan's Memoirs, 1919-2001, are privately published by the author, who lives at SMC in Toronto.