The Crowe Case: A Student's Perspective

By: Joe Martin, Class of 1959

It is difficult to write about this episode even after half a century. It was a brutal, angry affair that changed my life from academia to business. NOTHING in subsequent years in business, in politics or in sport touched the intensity of the Crowe Case.

In the 1950s Harry Crowe was not only a lecturer of History at United College, he was also one of the most popular, as good a teacher of undergrads as any in Canada. He was part of a small, but distinguished History department, which also included Stewart Reid, Ken McNaught and G. K. Brown, and which had close relationships with the History department at Fort Garry headed by W. L. Morton.

As we returned to campus after the 1958 summer break, rumours were swirling that Harry had done something awful. As events unfolded we learned that what he had done was write a letter to a colleague, which somehow never reached the colleague but was received by the administration. On the basis of that intercepted letter, Harry was fired.

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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.

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