LEFT: Colleen Miller, who has served as president and director of the Grand Valley Educational Society, has been one of the key community supporters of a Laurier campus in Brantford. RIGHT: Kate Carter was one of the campus’s first professors and later served as associate dean and dean. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Alberta and then taught at Duke. As a girl growing up in Paris, Ontario, she never imagined that it would be possible to teach at a university in Brant County.
A week later, seven months after the University College of the Grand Valley had been scheduled to welcome its first class, the University Committee released a one-hundred-page Revised Business Plan for a private university now called “Brant University.” The proposal was an expanded version of the City College plan. The mission statement and curriculum remained the same; similar partnerships were proposed (the library partnership was now backed with a detailed prospectus compiled by Anne Church, a professional consultant hired by the library); and similar buildings were suggested as a home for the university (among them, the Icomm — which was already optioned to the casino company and no longer available — the Carnegie Library, and the old Boys’ and Girls’ Club). The plan was well-intentioned, but some of its details show that it was thrown together in haste, in an attempt to respond to all the developments in the drive for a university. Some aspects of the plan were simply impossible — further revisions were to be made by January/February 1998, one month before the plan was released, and two million dollars in fundraising would have had to be organized and initiated as soon as the plan was released. The details of the plan included an ambitious timetable for the development of Ontario’s first private university: a detailed curriculum and governance structures by June, an application for a provincial charter in one year, the appointment of a president by June 1999, the hiring of full-time professors by March 2000, and an opening in September 2000 or, if necessary, September 2001.
Like the plan for a University College of the Grand Valley, the Brant University Plan did not provide a convincing business plan for the building and operation of a university. But this did not prevent it from underscoring, yet again, the reasons to bring a university to Brantford. By now, anyone who followed local news and events knew and understood some of the sixteen reasons given for establishing a university downtown. These included Brant County’s low participation rate in post-secondary education, the access to university education it would provide for local families, and the role that a university and its graduates could play in the economic and cultural development of the region. The economic benefits were calculated at twenty-four million dollars a year. In a city that had not recovered from the collapse of its industrial economy, with a downtown still mired in urban decay, these were compelling reasons to support a Brant University.
Like the proposal to establish University College of the Grand Valley, the Brant University Plan was innovative. There was much that could be said for it but there was no way to change the fact that a private university in Brantford would have been an anomaly that would face many challenges. It was not easy to see how any university could attract students to Brantford’s crumbling downtown, but much more difficult to imagine a successful private university managing it. In a university system in which the existing institutions were locked in a perpetual competition for interested students, how would a (secular) private institution lure them with no reputation, higher tuition costs, and a foreign view of education? The answer to this question remains a central issue in the Canadian university system, but it was quickly moot in Brantford, where the city’s civic officials and the public advocates for a university turned their attention to the Laurier initiative. The two plans for a private university are now forgotten, though one aspect of their trajectory intersected with the Laurier initiative when one of the original City College professors, Edmund Pries, took up a position at Laurier Brantford.
Within the Laurier community, the Brantford cause was pushed by a determined Professor Copp, who returned to visit Brantford after city council voted to sell the Icomm Building to RPC Gaming. In the course of his private campaign to push the university in a Brantford direction, he met with city officials, took eye-catching photos of the Carnegie Building and the square, and did his best to create some enthusiasm for an elegant “campus around the Square.” In Waterloo, the university’s chief academic, Rowland Smith, warmed to the idea that Brantford could be an innovative campus with the potential to allow Laurier to develop a university education that would distinguish it from other Canadian universities. Laurier’s longest-serving dean, Art Read, was looking for a new challenge and began to discuss the Brantford possibility with Copp, Smith, and President Rosehart.
As the Laurier community discussed what the university might do at Brantford, the fate of the Icomm Building hovered as an unsettled detail in the background. City council had granted RPC Gaming an option to buy the building, but this did not end the debate. Financially, the construction of the building had been supported by many Brantfordians who believed that downtown revival should include a new home for the Bell archives. They had a personal stake in what happened to the Icomm, which seemed to be headed in a very different direction than the one that they envisaged. A member of the Grand Valley Education Society who had contributed to the project told me he felt “betrayed” by the city’s actions. With emotions running high, the disposal of the building became a matter of controversy and debate. The proposal that it become the site of a Laurier campus only added fuel to the fire. Council had voted to give RPC Gaming an option to purchase the building but it had not been ratified and now they were being inundated with objections. The mayor, some council members, and a host of critics began to argue that the city should withdraw its commitment to the option.
Some of those objecting to the sale of the Icomm opposed the proposed price — four million dollars for a building that had cost twenty-four million to construct. A city-wide referendum had voted in favour of a casino, but many more commentators objected to the sale on moral grounds. Letters to the editor of the Brantford Expositor argued back and forth. Dale Fisher, president of District 5 of the Ontario Secondary School Teacher’s Federation, wrote that teachers were concerned that a casino would wield a negative influence on their students. He did not convince another letter-writer who argued that casino jobs were the most important part of the equation. Someone else wrote that a university would, in the long run, be more valuable than a casino.
Max Sherman, a former city councillor, proposed a compromise between the two sides, suggesting that the Icomm be sold to the casino, but that some of the proceeds be used to support a university. When it was argued that the university had expressed its interest in the Icomm too late — after the RPC option was finalized — Councillor Starkey obtained and circulated an internal Laurier memo that proved otherwise. At a heated council session held to discuss the Icomm sale, the vast majority of the delegations loudly opposed the sale. President Rosehart followed the debate from Waterloo, refusing to be drawn into it. He was still interested in the Icomm, but his experience as a university president had taught him to keep his head low in the midst of public controversy.
Despite all objections, which included Mayor Friel’s arguments in favour of the university option, the pro-casino forces prevailed on April 15, 1998, when city council ratified RPC’s option to purchase the Icomm. The decision required the company to purchase the building before January 1, 1999. For some, including President Rosehart, this kept alive a glimmer of hope that the sale would not be consummated. In the meantime, a resolute mayor and University Committee continued to court Laurier. After a meeting with Professor Copp on April 20, Friel and the city’s chief administrative officer, Geoff Wilson, began to work earnestly on a plan that would give the university the Carnegie Building.
The agreement had to be worded in a way that managed some sensitive concerns on both sides. In a city full of doubts about itself, some worried that Laurier had ulterior motives in pursuing Brantford land and funding. Some argued that the university could sell any building it acquired, and use the proceeds to fund operations back in Waterloo. There was some illogicality in this line of reasoning — it is difficult to see how the university could have made a profit selling a building that no one had been willing to purchase for almost a decade — but it was an emotionally charged suspicion deeply rooted in the Brantford psyche. As fate would have it, this was not a barrier to an agreement because of the