University of Calgary: Great War marked end of great dream for Calgary’s first university
Loss is the measure of war — and while human lives are the paramount sacrifice, the residual cost of conflict can run deeply in any society that takes to arms.
For Calgary, one such blow was the demise of the city’s first university, a little-known institution established in the heat of bitter provincial rivalry, and ultimately doomed to fail, in large part due to the financial uncertainty and distraction of the First World War.
“The war certainly did play a role; it was one of a number of things,” says Dr. Norman L. McLeod, PhD, who in 1970 wrote his UCalgary doctoral thesis on the short-lived institution, which closed its doors in 1915.
Battle of Alberta begins
McLeod, a lifelong school teacher who at the age of 92 is enjoying retirement on Vancouver Island, focused his thesis on the little-known history of Calgary’s first university in a paper entitled Calgary College 1912-1915: A Study of an Attempt to Establish a Privately Financed University in Alberta.
The basic narrative of the short-lived institution is rooted in Calgary’s fury over Edmonton being named both the capital of Alberta, and thanks to the partisan meddling of Premier Alexander Cameron Rutherford, also home to the University of Alberta.
“It was one the fights that went on when this province was created,” explains McLeod, reached by phone at his home in B.C.
“There was a tacit understanding when the province was created that one city would be the capital, and the other would get the university. But that didn’t happen.”
Cranky Calgary plots its own university
And so in 1908, when it became clear Calgary would be neither capital of the three-year-old province or its seat of higher education, the mood in Alberta’s largest city was exceedingly bitter.
While some Calgarians wanted to separate from Alberta and start Canada’s 10th province, a number of prominent citizens instead pushed for a privately funded university.
If Alberta’s government was clearly pro-Edmonton, Alberta’s money was in Calgary, and it didn’t take long for that wealth to champion the idea of a private post-secondary, to be named the University of Calgary and constructed in the northwest area of the booming young city of 23,000.
Perhaps the most important endorsement came from the city’s mayor and council, and with promises of financial and political support, Calgary’s first university opened its doors in 1912.