Salem Bland & Academic Freedom at Wesley College

By Tom Faulkner (Theology and Global College)

Image Citation: Lawren Harris, Dr. Salem Bland, 1925 (AGO ID 3545). © The Family of Lawren S. Harris.  From the Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario  http://www.ago.net/

In 1917 the leading Canadian thinker of the Social Gospel movement was dismissed from his post in the Faculty of Theology at Wesley College. Salem Bland was convinced that his academic freedom had been violated.

Henry Steele Commager reminds us that we are always searching for a “usable past,” and I should like nothing better than to offer Bland’s dismissal as a straightforwardly cautionary tale for those committed to academic freedom at The University of Winnipeg today. But the lesson to be learned is wickedly complex.

The Bland case has been studied closely by some of Canada’s best historians—Richard Allen, Ramsay Cook and Michiel Horn, all strong supporters of academic freedom. It is true that Salem Bland was renowned in his day as an articulate and fearless public critic of politics in Western Canada—much as Carl Ridd was in more recent times. And it is true that some members of the Board of Wesley College had no great love for Bland.

But in 1917 the issue was at bottom a budget crisis. During the war years the expenses of Wesley College mushroomed—in part because of a bold new commitment to the Arts program that later became the basis of UW’s good reputation—and enrolments fell. The Board considered asking everyone on staff to accept a 10% reduction in salary but then abandoned the thought. (Sound familiar?) Instead the Board decided to ask two professors in the Faculty of Theology to resign voluntarily: they were thought to be able to find alternative employment within the Methodist Church. Salem Bland, who had taught at Wesley for 14 years, flatly refused to go, and so the Board dismissed him and one other from their posts.

The dismissal came too late for Bland to be given alternative employment in a congregation, and his complaint led the courts to grant him a severance package of one year’s salary. But the grounds were violations of due process committed by the Board as employer, not violation of Bland’s academic freedom.

It was a murky set of events but it seems doubtful that Bland was dismissed by the Board because of his political or religious views. Business owner and donor J.H. Ashdown [“Ashdown Hall”] had defended Bland against public attacks in the past, even though Bland’s opinions were at odds with his own. And the President of the Manitoba Conference of the Methodist Church, A.E. Smith, served on the Board and defended its decision in public.

Two years later Smith would be one of the key leaders of the Winnipeg General Strike and the radical founder of the Labor Church that it spawned. It is implausible that he would have accepted Bland’s dismissal on any grounds but financial exigency.

Today Salem Bland is probably best remembered as the subject of the most famous portrait in Canadian art—the powerful painting from 1925 by Lawren Harris that can be viewed at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The portrait arguably illustrates the mysterium fascinans et tremendum that Rudolph Otto identified as lying at the core of religion—the “otherness” that both attracts and terrifies. Contemplating this portrait, and contemplating the complexities of Bland’s dismissal from Wesley College in 1917, reminds us how difficult it is to disentangle religious, political and academic motivations in the nitty-gritty of human affairs.