The success of any of the plans for Brantford post-secondary initiatives required popular support. A long and involved attempt to establish a broad community consensus on Brantford’s future began with a mayor’s task force on the future of the city. It proposed a county-wide strategic plan that was undertaken by a not-for-profit group (a local Community Futures Development Corporation), which hired a planning company and a local coordinator who played a key role in subsequent developments. John McGregor came to Brantford after working on development issues in the Kalahari Desert and the Northwest Territories and on projects with Six Nations. He was staggered by Brant County’s profound pessimism when he arrived, which struck him as more negative than the attitudes he had experienced in his work in the Kalahari and the North. He saw an underlying defeatism as the principal barrier to change, and welcomed a strategic plan that might get the city talking and thinking in a more positive way. In an effort to push in this direction, the discussion material he and the planning committee produced presented the city and the county as a community driven by “a fierce independence and unshakeable pride” and a “continuing tradition of genius” rooted in a proud history.11
The strategic planning exercise was an ambitious endeavour that began with a detailed survey of seven hundred residents and fifty community leaders, and twenty workshops attended by three hundred people. The final strategic plan, released in April 1997, noted that the county’s levels of post-secondary education were lower than the provincial average and listed “brain drain” as one of its major problems. In its positive recommendations it encouraged the establishment of a university in Brantford as a way to “provide an opportunity for young people to get an education locally,” and to “raise overall education levels in the County.”12 Other recommendations supported the proposal that Mohawk College move into the empty Eaton’s mall, promoted lifelong learning and formal education (in particular, the use of new technology and distance education), and advocated programs focused on business training.
The details of the Brant Community Strategic Plan were not realized. The proposed Coordinating Committee which was supposed to oversee the achievement of its various components never materialized. It is difficult to see how such a committee could have managed the sweeping scope and the myriad details of the plan’s proposals. But at the same time, the creation of the plan did what good strategic planning does — it made Brantford and Brant County rethink what they could be. In the aftermath, BOBB — the Big on Brantford/Brant Committee — organized a series of local forums on key strategic issues. In May 1997, one discussed the idea that Mohawk College should move to the downtown core. In September, another discussed the need for a Brantford university. The notion that Brantford needed post-secondary downtown had by this time taken root.
Even in the tough times, Brantford has enjoyed a strong identity. In the campaign to establish a university, this expressed itself in a desire to have a university of its own. Everyone in Brantford nods knowingly when I tell them that there are those in Brantford who did not want a satellite campus of Laurier or some other existing university but a new “UBC”— a University of Brant County.
In the quest for a university, the local desire to have a Brantford institution was manifest in a proposal to establish a private university. This was a radical idea in a country which defines university education in terms of public institutions. In this respect, Canadian education has developed in a different way than its American counterpart, where some of the nation’s best known universities — Harvard, Yale, Stanford — are privately funded institutions. The idea that Brantford should have a private university proposed a new educational paradigm for Canada, but this was not what motivated the city. From its point of view, the plan to found a private university was not an attempt at educational reform, so much as an attempt to circumvent a system of publicly funded institutions which excluded Brantford. One way or another, those who wanted a local university were bound and determined to secure one. If this meant breaking the mould that defined university education in Canada, this was fine with them. To some of those involved, this made the proposal more attractive.
But the proposal for a private university did not begin as a Brantford initiative. It was an idea forwarded by three renegade arts professors who were inspired by a desire for educational reform. Gordon Morrell, Edmund Pries, and Ronald Sawatsky were part-time professors at the University of Waterloo. Morrell and Pries were members of an ever-expanding army of part-time faculty who worked at Canadian universities. Squeezed between limited provincial funding and the demands of full-time faculty, universities increasingly relied on part-timers, who were paid a fraction of the salary of full-time professors, taught larger classes, and did not enjoy the security and the benefits that accrue to tenured faculty (benefits that included sabbaticals and research opportunities). This was a difficult lot for part-timers who had successfully survived the rigours of a Ph.D. in the hopes of full-time employment. In a situation where some of them engaged in the research associated with a job as a professor more than their full-time counterparts, it was difficult, even unjust, to have to endure working conditions so inferior to those of their full-time colleagues. The more radical decried “tenure as injustice” and described themselves as the “lumpenproletariat” of the academic workforce, a term that Marx used to described the rabble that makes up the bottom layer of the working class.
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