Fall-Winter 2011

As McGill celebrates its 190th anniversary, we canvassed several history experts and history-makers (individuals who have held senior positions at McGill over the years) about what they believed were the history-making moments that helped shape the University’s identity. Here are some of the moments that were mentioned most often.

by Daniel McCabe, BA’89

1855 – The man who changed everything

Governor General David Johnston, LLD’00, knows a thing or two about leading a university—probably more than anyone else in the country. He served as McGill’s principal between 1979 and 1994, after all, and was president of the University of Waterloo from 1999 to 2010. So his choice for the key moment in McGill’s history carries a lot of weight, especially since it focuses on the impact of another McGill principal.

Johnston says his pick for the University’s most transformative moment would be “the arrival of the young William Dawson as principal.” Johnston isn’t alone in settling on that moment— most of the people consulted for this article did the same.

Dawson might have been destined to become the single most influential figure in McGill history, but when he arrived in 1855 to become McGill’s fifth principal, he viewed the job as something of a consolation prize.

He had been hoping to become the chair of natural history at the University of Edinburgh. In fact, he was all set to sail for Scotland to personally lobby for the position, when he received word that the post had gone to someone else. At roughly the same time, an intriguing offer from Montreal came along.

What Dawson didn’t know was that the people making the offer— McGill’s board of governors—weren’t entirely convinced that Dawson was the right man for the job. When they had consulted Governor General Edmund Head about whom they should hire, they were surprised by the advice they received. Historian Edgar Andrew Collard wrote, “They had expected [Head] to indicate ‘some man of mark in England.’ Instead, [he] urged them to choose… a young colonist in Nova Scotia. Few, if any, of the governors of McGill had heard of him.”

Dawson might not have been on their radar, but the pride of Pictou, Nova Scotia, was already on his way to becoming Canada’s first native-born scientific star. His work with Charles Lyell in Joggins, Nova Scotia, had yielded remarkable fossil finds, including some of the earliest known reptile specimens ever discovered. Dawson’s brief tenure as Nova Scotia’s superintendent of education would soon lead to profound improvements to its educational system.

When the 35-year-old Dawson saw McGill for the first time, he probably lamented the lost opportunity at Edinburgh all over again. The University had a budding young medical school … and not much else.

In his own words, the McGill campus was “two blocks of unfinished and partly ruinous buildings, standing amid a wilderness of… rubbish, overgrown with weeds and bushes.”

Dawson, who would serve as principal for 38 years, got to work. He personally taught up to 16 classes a week and spearheaded his own beautification effort, planting gardens and trees at his own expense. He and his wife Margaret became formidable entertainers, hosting soirees for the city’s elite and weekend teas for McGill students—even personally nursing a sick student back to health, now and then.

Dawson wanted the University to become a leading force in science. He also saw McGill as a potential engine for the city’s development in terms of equipping graduates with practical skills —in agriculture, engineering and mining.

His vision for McGill, along with his charm and his growing stature as one of the leading scientists of his era, proved to be a powerfully persuasive combination for some of Montreal’s wealthiest citizens. The Molson family, Peter Redpath and William Macdonald, among others, would become crucial and generous allies, inspired by what Dawson was trying to accomplish. And, according to Dawson biographer Susan Sheets-Pyenson, the McGill principal could be wily in his dealings with Montreal’s leading families, becoming “adept at exploiting the petty jealousies and competitiveness that both divided and drove this community.”

Under Dawson, McGill attracted other leading scientists to its faculty ranks. It established itself as a top-notch science centre, in large part due to Dawson’s own contributions (he grumbled about how his research was limited by his teaching and administrative responsibilities, yet still managed to produce dozens of scientific papers and several books). He established the McGill Normal School to train badly needed teachers for the English school system (the Normal School would evolve into the Faculty of Education). The McGill campus welcomed the Redpath Library, the Redpath Museum (created, in part, to prevent Dawson from being lured away by a lucrative offer from Princeton), the Macdonald Engineering Building and the Macdonald Physics Building (a first-rate facility that would prove to be instrumental in wooing future Nobel laureate Ernest Rutherford).

Summing up Dawson’s impact on the University, the Times of London declared that McGill now enjoyed “a prestige only excelled in America by that of Harvard.” The paper added, “The scientific side of the University… may be described as Sir William Dawson’s creation.” Stephen Leacock had his own assessment. “More than that of any one man or group of men, McGill is his work.”

 

1884 – Gentlemen, kindly make way

In the spring of 1884, four young women, all recent graduates of the Montreal High School for Girls, journeyed to William Dawson’s McGill office to make a special plea directly to the principal. They wanted to do what no woman had ever done before. They wanted to study at McGill.

“After completing high school, there was nowhere in Montreal for them to go,” explained Margaret Gillett in a 1981 interview with the McGill News. Gillett, an emeritus professor of education, wrote They Walked Very Warily, the definitive account of the early experiences of women at McGill.

Dawson listened sympathetically and then politely turned them down. Later that same year, the quartet found themselves at the University anyway, making history as part of the first group of women to enroll as McGill students.

In the 1880s, there was general support for the notion of accepting female students at McGill (though some, like Stephen Leacock, still had reservations). Indeed, McGill ran the risk of lagging behind the times if it didn’t open its doors to women. Vassar College, North America’s first all-women’s college, had begun operations in 1865 and many Canadian universities, including Mount Allison, Queen’s, Acadia and Dalhousie, had all welcomed female students to their campuses.

Though Dawson has been portrayed by some as resistant to change, Stanley Frost, in his two-volume history of the University, argues that the principal wasn’t really opposed to having women pursue their studies at McGill. Dawson had, after all, played an instrumental behind-the-scenes role in establishing the Montreal High School for Girls. But “nothing could be done until money was forthcoming,” wrote Frost. Almost every new initiative, no matter how high-minded or noble, needed a deep-pocketed champion in those days.

Enter Donald Smith. The future Lord Strathcona, Smith was a key figure in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway (his role was so essential, he was given the honour of hammering in the last spike himself) and his marriage was the subject of whispers throughout Montreal high society (his wife had a previous husband and the legality of her subsequent union with Smith was somewhat in question). A few months after Dawson’s meeting with the young women, Smith came forward with an unexpected offer.

He was willing to immediately pay the way for the arrival of women students at McGill, so long as they were educated separately from the men.

Dawson saw the proposal as “providential” and moved swiftly. Within five years, women constituted one-third of all McGill arts students. The students proudly dubbed themselves the Donaldas in recognition of the man who had made their arrival at McGill possible.

Smith’s devotion to the cause would lighten his wallet considerably. In all, he would spend more than $1.5 million to support female students at McGill, an incredible sum at the time, and much of it targeted towards the creation and upkeep of Royal Victoria College, which opened in 1899 and provided the Donaldas with a place of their own.

While the McGill women weren’t subjected to the same level of hostility that the first female students had encountered at some other universities, the first few years for the Donaldas were uneasy nonetheless. Octavia Ritchie, BA1888, recalled being “at first blushingly self-conscious” when male students teased her in the hallways. Another Donalda, interviewed by Gillett, remembered feeling as if “she bore the weight of formulated womanhood upon her shoulders, although men, even then, were not expected to live up to the ideal man.”

When Ritchie, one of the group of four who had originally met with Dawson in his office, graduated in 1888 as one of McGill’s first female graduates, her valedictory address was combative. To cries of “Shame!” and “Never!” from some in the audience, she said, “The doors of the Faculty of Arts were opened four years ago; those of [the Faculty of] Medicine remain closed. When will they be opened?”

Ritchie and her classmate Maude Abbott, BA1891, MDCM1910 (honorary), LLD’36, would both be thwarted in their desire to study medicine at McGill (they went to Bishop’s instead), but the University did begin accepting female students in medicine in 1918. Abbott would go on to become one of McGill’s most illustrious graduates, a pioneering figure in the study of diseased hearts, and the recipient of not one, but two honorary degrees from McGill. Another Donalda, Carrie Derick, BA1890, would go on to teach botany at McGill, becoming the first female university professor in the country.

Today, more than half of McGill’s student population is female and the University’s alumnae include Olympic gold medalists, bestselling authors, award-winning scientists and national leaders. They all owe a debt of thanks to the determined Donaldas who paved the way.

 

1976 – A not so quiet revolution

 

As a weary-looking René Lévesque took to the stage on the evening of November 15, 1976, the victor in one of the most dramatic elections in Canadian history, Quebecers across the province wondered what would happen next. Not only did Lévesque’s Parti Québécois government promise to introduce tough legislation that would restrict access to English schools and ban the use of English on commercial signs, it also pledged to do what it could to push the province right out of confederation.

Quebec nationalists, who had never tasted victory on this scale, were jubilant. Most English-speaking Quebecers had a markedly different reaction. Recalling the mood in his book, My Life at the Bar and Beyond, Alex Paterson, BCL’56, LLD’94, who chaired McGill’s board of governors from 1990 to 1995, wrote, “Needless to say, all of this traumatized our community.”

The uncertainty left McGill reeling as well. As several corporate head offices began to leave the province, rumours circulated that McGill might end up doing the same. Emeritus professor of architecture Derek Drummond, BArch’62, confirms that there was brief, but serious, consideration given to moving the School of Architecture to another province.

Former dean of medicine Richard Cruess muses that institutions facing a particularly unsettling set of circumstances “either fall apart or get stronger. I think [this period] proved that McGill could weather profound changes in Quebec society. In some ways, it brought us closer together. The teaching hospitals and the Faculty of Medicine became much more unified.” Cruess points to the arrival of the relentlessly positive-minded David Johnston in 1979 as a key development. “He gave McGill its self-confidence back.”

Drummond also gives credit to Lévesque. “He made a point of talking about the important role that McGill played” and the premier’s words helped soothe frazzled nerves. In a 1977 interview with the McGill News, PQ education minister Jacques-Yvan Morin, BCL’52, insisted that his government was not at odds with McGill. “We are indeed on good terms. There is no reason not to be.”

With a referendum on Quebec’s status within Canada in the works, many anglophones decided that their futures lay elsewhere. “For sale” signs became a familiar sight on the front lawns of many Montreal neighbourhoods. More than 130,000 anglophones left the province between the years 1976 and 1981. By some estimates, more than 300,000 English-speaking Quebecers moved away in the 20 years that followed the 1970 October Crisis.

For a university that was so tightly bonded to Quebec’s anglophone community, that kind of population shift couldn’t help but have repercussions. “For years it was understood that the sons and daughters of Westmount and Montreal West and the Town of Mount Royal, when it was time for university, there was no question about where most of them would be going,” notes Drummond. Suddenly, many of those students, along with their families, were heading out of town with no plans to return.  In the late seventies, one worrisome estimate predicted that McGill’s student population could plummet to a paltry 12,000 by 1991.

“In a strange sort of way, the election of the PQ and the first referendum, followed by the exodus of the anglophone community, set McGill on the road of having to become a national university,” says Alan Shaver, a former McGill dean of science who now heads Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC.

McGill had always prided itself on its ability to attract students from other provinces and other countries. Now it realized it needed even more of those students if it wanted to prevent its enrolment numbers from becoming dangerously low.

The University was also busy re-evaluating its role in Quebec, a process that began in earnest years earlier in the wake of the McGill Français protests in 1969. “The history of McGill is the history of the Anglo-Saxon elite of Montreal,” observed Pierre Anctil in a 1989 Montreal Gazette piece. Then the director of McGill’s French Canada Studies program, Anctil added, “But now McGill is living something else. In the past 20 years, there has ceased to be a feeling of fear here—there’s a feeling of openness. McGill has adapted.”

One persuasive piece of evidence relates to the number of francophone students who choose to study at McGill. In the mid-sixties, French-speaking students made up less than five percent of the University’s student population. Since 1980, francophones have generally comprised at least 17 percent of McGill’s student body.

 

Other moments that mattered

 Osler returns

In terms of McGill becoming internationally known, William Osler, MDCM1872, “is every bit as important as Dawson was” in Richard Cruess’s estimation. Cruess, who co-authored a two volume history of the Faculty of Medicine, believes that the faculty’s rise to international prominence coincided with the return of Osler to McGill in 1875 as the first full-time member of its teaching staff. He credits Osler with “transforming medical education here” by stressing the need for practical experience and for advanced training in anatomy and pathology. Osler didn’t do it alone—he was part of a remarkable group of young medical faculty that also included Francis Shepherd and Thomas Roddick.

And even after Osler left for good (he went on to co-found the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, among other things), his influence continued to be felt at McGill.  Osler, who became the best-known physician in the English-speaking world, championed Maude Abbott’s pioneering work in chronicling heart ailments and helped secure instrumental funding from the Rockefeller Foundation that reshaped the Faculty of Medicine along lines he had recommended—by creating stronger links between clinical and basic science research, for instance. “That changed the face of teaching and research in the [Faculty of Medicine],” says former Montreal Neurological Institute director William Feindel, MDCM’45, DSc’84.

An unfortunate land deal

When it comes to matters of real estate, Derek Drummond, the former director of the School of Architecture, laments that McGill, too often, has a habit of “selling at the worst time and buying at the worst time.” The University’s biggest blunder, in his view, dates back to the 1850s, when the governors of a cash-strapped McGill decided to sell a big chunk of the University’s property— property that now encompasses “some of the highest valued land in the city.” A bustling stretch of St. Catherine Street shops, Central Station, the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, the Peel and McGill metro stations and Place Ville Marie all occupy land that once belonged to the University. McGill had failed in its attempts to lease the land during a period when the city was just beginning to emerge from a blistering recession. Drummond says the governors should have tried harder to lease. “Can you imagine what that land would be worth today?”

 

 

Lots and lots of new profs

In the late nineties, McGill embarked on an unprecedented hiring spree. With many of the University’s most accomplished professors inching closer to retirement, Luc Vinet, then the provost, declared that “academic renewal is the single most significant challenge that McGill faces over the next few years.” Principal Bernard Shapiro, BA’56, LLD’88, and Vinet devised an ambitious plan to recruit 1,000 new professors over a 10-year period. Former dean of science Alan Shaver characterized it as “the biggest renewal of the professoriate McGill has ever seen.”

So, how’s it going? It looks like the new kids are working out just fine. Maclean’s just named McGill the top medical-doctoral university in Canada for the seventh straight year, while the QS World University Rankings recently ranked McGill as the 17th best university in the world. The new hires “really transformed McGill,” says former dean of agricultural and environmental sciences Deborah Buszard.

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