A Steep Price for a Miracle

By James Christie, Theology

Story is to religion as mathematics is to science: foundational.  Trust me on this. 

The story of The University of Winnipeg is the story of a miracle – and the price that miracles can exact.

Once upon a time, there was a little college that could …

United College was born in 1938, a “church” college, the consequence of the establishment of The United Church of Canada in 1925.  Its alumni register reads like a who’s who of great Canadians: Ted Scott, Lois Wilson and Lloyd Axworthy.  United College was the successor of two great pioneer schools: Manitoba College, Presbyterian, established in 1871 and memorialized in Manitoba Hall; and Wesley College, Methodist, established in 1888. Alumni and graduates were, if possible, even greater, including J.S. Woodsworth and Salem Bland.

By the 1950s the pressure was on United College to abandon the downtown and move south to the suburbs with University of Manitoba.  There was much to recommend the idea:  a growing campus in Fort Garry; a unified locus for post-secondary education, an idyllic retreat from the hurley-burley of downtown life.

But United College, under Principal Lockhart, held firm for a downtown university.  Against all odds, we have one.  That is directly due to the forbearers of today’s Faculty of Theology and The United Church of Canada.  In 1967, every brick that rested one atop another was a gift from The United Church to The University of Winnipeg.  All that was asked in return was the maintenance of a Faculty of Theology and the right of appointment of six Regents by The United Church.

But there were hidden costs.

The first was “the Crowe Affair.”  Far too complex to rehearse here, the Crowe affair concerned the dismissal of History Professor Harry Crowe by Principal Lockhart in 1958 for Crowe’s perceived “disloyalty” to the Church in expressing a desire for United College to become a public, secular university.

The bitter divisions engendered remained unhealed for half a century until the late Dr. Tom Faulkner’s historic 2008 address Head, Hand and Heart:  The Crowe Affair as Tragedy achieved some catharsis and began a process of reconciliation.  The case, settled ultimately by the Fowkes-Laskin report, was a benchmark in defining academic freedom in Canada, gave CAUT new credibility, and paved the way for The United Church to see the wisdom of relinquishing its confessional hold on United College.

The second was incurred by Principal Lockhart when, in promoting to the Province the idea that church schools could be transformed into public universities, funding for the Faculty of Theology would be sacrificed so as to avoid any perception of sectarianism.

The third, and still most pressing, was Dr. Lockhart’s acceptance of a funding formula whereby the new University of Winnipeg would be funded at then-established levels.  Put crudely, our “A” base funding was established in 1967 as the lowest in the province, and so it remains. It was part of the price for our very existence.

As a former Dean of the Faculty of Theology, I can attest to the Herculean efforts of President Axworthy to move the Province to revisit the base funding for the University of Winnipeg, thus far to no avail.

In March we came close to the first strike in our university’s history.  Funding was the key issue.

With two years left in our new collective agreement, surely it is time for UWFA, UWSA and Administration to develop a united front to tackle the Province together.

It would certainly be in the tradition of United College, and it is certainly an idea whose time has come.