Carleton Stanley’s Kingdom: Dalhousie 1933-1938

Business, the professions, influence the universities. Stanley’s standards. The Medical Faculty and the Public Health Clinic. Angus L. Macdonald, Dalhousie law professor, premier of Nova Scotia. The 1935 Dalhousie Act. Stanley deposes the registrar. Dalhousie students as middle-class survivors. European affairs impinge on Dalhousie. Death of MacKenzie.

The Commercial Undermining of Liberal Education
By the mid-1950s every college and university, in or out of Nova Scotia, was at grips with a problem that bore in upon them with pressure inexorable: the increasingly commercial test of old and tried intellectual values. Commerce cared little for Coleridge or Kant, and what was irrelevant to commerce and business began, increasingly, to seem to be so elsewhere. Thus the intellectual values of western culture came under attack, and in an insidious form, by being made to seem unimportant to life, living, and progress.

The old core of the university was Arts and Science and the universities had accommodated professional schools with some reluctance. At Dalhousie the Law Faculty was started with a Munro professorship in 1883, and then in 1911 came the duty, as it seemed to Dalhousie, of having to take on Medicine and Dentistry, because there was no one else to do it. Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago from 1928 to 1945, in The Higher Learning in America maintained that the only reason for including professional schools in a university was the influences that Arts and Science might bring to the dreariness of the professional disciplines:

Vocationalism leads, then, to triviality and isolation; it debases the course of study and the staff. It deprives the university of its only excuse for existence, which is to provide a haven where the search for truth may go on unhampered by utility or pressure for “results.”^[1]

Archibald MacMechan would have agreed. He pointed out in the midst of Dalhousie’s Million Dollar campaign of 1920 that the university’s growth was owing to the accretion of professional schools; while these were important even essential acquisitions, there had been “no corresponding growth in the original Arts departments, which gave Dalhousie her standards and her reputation.” A university of seven hundred students in 1920 with one solitary professor of history, one of modern languages, and one in mathematics, was starved.^[2] There was some improvement in the 1920s with modest reinforcement from King’s in 1923, but the point was more relevant in 1930, with Dalhousie’s registration running high (838 in 1928-9) and going higher (902 in 1929-30).

President MacKenzie, scientist that he was, effortlessly made room at Dalhousie for Medicine and Dentistry, and found no intellectual difficulties in doing so. His problems were financial, and institutional, in getting Dalhousie’s research criteria accepted by a conservative medical community. Atlee’s appointment was a good example. Some of MacKenzie’s fellow scientists thought the new sciences in medicine were not very good science, and were being built up at the cost of more worthy research. Humanities professors such as Carleton Stanley would find it still more difficult to appreciate the needs of medicine. Stanley was interested in science, especially biology. One of his more quixotic academic adventures was trying to establish an honours course in Greek and biology; the students would read Aristotle’s science in Greek, and slowly work their way to the present day. The biologists managed to defeat it. A proper science course could not be built around the history of science; it had to be done around modern research, techniques, apparatus, and outlook.^[3] MacKenzie, who had in his time been well out on the cutting edge of physics research, knew that; Carleton Stanley didn’t. Stanley aimed in other directions. His outlook, with a big intellectual range, is set out in his annual report for 1940-1, from his 1941 convocation address:

But I do call university graduates illiterate who have not read, and who show no likelihood of reading later… at least some of the books which on one side or another give a man some inkling of the fabric of European civilisation. On the side of history, politics, law, for example, a man is illiterate who has not read Thucydides’ History, Aristotle’s Politics, Hugo de Groot’s Law of Nations, Guizot’s History of Civilization in Europe, Bryce’s Holy Roman Empire, and at least some of the work of Maitland or Vinogradoff on jurisprudence.^[4]

Carleton Stanley’s own major work was on Matthew Arnold, published by the University of Toronto Press in 1938. In Culture and Anarchy (1869), Arnold described the middle class as Philistines, honest doers but not thinkers, with no real appreciation of arts and letters. Stanley, like Arnold, was trying to re-establish the authority of older disciplines which he now felt were in jeopardy. In some ways Stanley resembled Arnold’s description of Oxford, a university Stanley knew well, “whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the middle Age[s]… Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!”^[5]

Struggling to Raise Standards
Stanley set out to reform some Dalhousie practices that he regarded as pernicious. The first was admitting students with incomplete matriculation, which they would make up during the next years. He discovered that one-quarter of Dalhousie’s undergraduates had not completed matriculation, and many of them had been at Dalhousie three, four, or even five years. At his first meeting with the Arts Faculty in September 1931, he appointed a committee to study Dalhousie’s curriculum. They reported in February 1932, recommending that students take all of Dalhousie’s required classes, including make-up matriculation ones, before being allowed to take any electives. The committee’s second recommendation, with more serious implications, was that the forthcoming 1932-3 calendar carry the prescription that English and five others of the eight matriculation subjects be required for admission to Dalhousie. “It is hoped,” the committee added, “that in the near future complete matriculation required in eight subjects will be adhered to.” But on motion of the registrar, Murray Macneill, that was deleted.^[6]

Here lay a developing quarrel between the president and the registrar. Stanley did not know Nova Scotia; Murray Macneill did. Of the thirty-five members of the Arts Faculty, assistant professor rank and above, twenty-six were from outside Nova Scotia. That had many advantages, in the style, knowledge, and experience of the professors; but it did have some disadvantages. Murray Macneill was a Maritimer, born in Maitland, Nova Scotia, brought up in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and in Saint John, New Brunswick. He recognized what some others did not, that there were good reasons for students to come to Dalhousie with incomplete matriculation. It was not just students finding an easy back door into university, though there were some of those; it was because relatively few high schools in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, or Prince Edward Island could properly prepare students in Grade 11 to pass provincial matriculation examinations. Macneill’s was the position of George Trueman, president of Mount Allison (1923-45), who as a boy had been the victim of just such a school system. Trueman had grown up in Point de Bute, New Brunswick, near the Nova Scotia border, within sight of the Tantramar marshes. Trueman told Stanley in March 1934, “in this sparsely settled country, any system that denies opportunity to those who have not been able to attend good high schools… is wrong.” Outside of Halifax, the Dalhousie Faculty of Arts and Science recognized only a few good high schools in Nova Scotia capable of solid matriculation work.^[7]

Nevertheless, in 1933 the faculty agreed that beginning in September 1934 the Dalhousie minimum entrance requirement would be English, Algebra, a foreign language, plus four other matriculation subjects. These new rules would be sent to all Maritime provinces high schools and to Newfoundland schools. In this tightening of rules, Dalhousie wanted to carry the other colleges with her; but although there was talk of doing so, only St. Francis Xavier followed Dalhousie’s lead. Stanley complained bitterly that some colleges, notably Acadia, were pouring graduates out into the school system as teachers without requiring either Latin or mathematics or a foreign language of any kind for a BA. What kind of teachers would such students make?^[8]

Dalhousie’s restrictions on admission had an effect on enrolment, which dropped from 1,015 in 1931-2 to 846 in 1934-5. Mount Allison’s enrolment stayed fairly consistent at about 400 between 1930 and 1935. That was owing, according to Stanley, to blatant recruiting; Mount Allison hired six young women as canvassers, who each had a car and were given five dollars for every student they secured. Acadia was alleged to have matched that with six dollars. The president of the University of New Brunswick, C.C. Jones, grumbled to Stanley in October 1934 about both colleges; one student had telegraphed President Jones, “Am offered $100 by Mt. Allison, and $100 by Acadia. What do you offer?” Jones replied, “If you are fully matriculated, we offer you the best education we can give you.” That was not always good enough, UNB’s registration was down 15 per cent in 1934-5, and according to Jones, there were many at both Acadia and Mount Allison whom UNB would not have admitted. Jones congratulated Dalhousie on doing what it had done, refurbishing standards, risking enrolment.^[9]

Privately Stanley had much fault to find with Dalhousie. The university had no economics professor; Stanley did not consider W.R. Maxwell at King’s, with a Harvard MA, up to standard. Dalhousie had no professor of Greek, nor of German, although both subjects were taught; he thought the staff in mathematics weak (the head of the department was Murray Macneill); J.G. Adshead, with a first-class degree from Cambridge, was appointed in 1927 (King’s), and Charles Walmsley also from Cambridge in 1929. Both were good lecturers, Adshead in particular. But neither were research-minded; distant frontiers had little appeal for them, and they swung easily into teaching routines under Murray Macneill. Stanley thought the Department of English, now that MacMechan was gone, no better.^[10]

However, as the result of submissions made by MacKenzie and Pearson in 1931, the Carnegie Foundation gave $125,000 in 1933 to endow a chair in geology. In 1932 Stanley appointed George Vibert Douglas, aged forty, a big, vibrant bear of a man, noisy, open-hearted and energetic, a Canadian from McGill, who had taught at Harvard, and had been on Shackleton’s last Antarctic expedition in 1921. Douglas had been geologist for the Rio Tinto copper mine when the depression closed it down. “It would be hard to find,” wrote L.C. Graton of Harvard recommending Douglas, “a man more charged with dynamic energy, constructive ideas, absolute loyalty and concentrated sunshine.” Douglas was Stanley’s man from the day of his appointment to Dalhousie. Douglas stirred up the campus. One student recalled his first lecture in Geology 1 in 1932; Douglas could be heard coming, clumping down the hall in his walking boots, starting to lecture as he came through the door. He liked to throw open a window, fall or winter. He smoked a gnarled pipe, loaded with a Canadian tobacco called “Old Chum,” which he lit with long Eddy matches that were carried in a long waterproof cylinder. He was a character, knew it, and revelled in it. He was also a one-man department, giving eight separate courses. He was a good lecturer; if his science was occasionally rusty, the students liked him for his forthrightness and generosity, his ebullient air of imperturbable cheerfulness.

Stanley wanted to appoint new men in whom he could rejoice; with him every new Dalhousie vacancy was a golden opportunity to find the best man available. Stanley saw Dalhousie, and many another Canadian university, cursed with the results of appointments made in a hurry: “the landscape is littered with misfits and experiments that never flowered or even burgeoned.” He was not going to make that mistake. Moreover, he said, “I must get people to reinforce my own plans.” Those included trying to raise Dalhousie’s standards. He was persuaded by his own experience, and perhaps that of his father-in-law, W.J. Alexander, that the Dalhousie graduates of 1885 to 1905 were far above the current crop. “Not only were these men and women well educated,” said Stanley, “but they nearly all had some nobility of soul. At least one could say that they formed a little nucleus of public conscience in the communities in which they lived.”^[11]

Stanley’s most outspoken public criticism was against the Nova Scotian (and Canadian) public schools, against weak teachers and bad textbooks, against the spurious pedagogy that in his view encouraged both. He sent his own son to Rothesay Collegiate, a private school in New Brunswick, in 1934. The printed annual reports of Dalhousie presidents are not noted for their charm or intellectual vigour; some, like President MacKenzie’s, seem almost to have been deliberately pedestrian and low-key, as if the secret of successful development was understatement. Stanley’s annual reports were quite the reverse – vigorous, trenchant, forthright; they called spades spades. He would quote Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, to explain why,

…Medio de fonte leporum
Surgit amari aliquid quod in ipsis floribus angat.

…In the midst of a fountain of delights
Comes up bitterness that chokes their very beauties.

His annual report for 1933-4 is a case in point, condemning public school education and all its works, and not sparing universities either:

But if so many teachers in the secondary schools are illiterate, and have to be spoonfed by pretentious editors, whose fault is that? Are the universities forever to be permitted to rail at the schools for sending them students who are dunces… ? If the teachers of French in our secondary schools cannot read a sentence of French so that a Frenchman would recognise the words, whose fault is that? Has it to do with the vicious importation [from the United States] of a certain kind of pedagogy which says openly, blatantly and continuously, “it matters not whether teachers know what they teach, so long as they know how to teach it”? This is equivalent to claiming that it does not matter whether you know what to feed a baby so long as you know how to feed it. Get the proper bottle and the proper nipple, and it does not matter whether you fill the bottle with cow’s milk or arsenic, especially if you have taken a course in nutritional psychology.

That was hard-hitting, but he won approval in New York at the Carnegie Foundation. James Bertram congratulated Stanley on his courage and force, and showed the address to one of the Carnegie trustees who said, “This is a fine blast, and I’m sure President Stanley is right.” Stanley sent Bertram’s comment to F.B. McCurdy, chairman of the board’s Finance Committee, to counter criticisms the report had, not surprisingly, earned for Stanley and Dalhousie. McCurdy wrote back, “Am glad to read the above comment, though regretful that his important approval could be purchased only at the cost of so much local good will.” Stanley was confident there was not much ill will. “I don’t believe it exists,” he told McCurdy confidently, “outside the minds of a few. And I have strong evidence that the few grow fewer.” But he was wrong. By 1938 and a few more blasts, Stanley himself admitted that Dalhousie’s only friend among the secondary schools of Nova Scotia was the Halifax Ladies College. There were times when Stanley could usefully have remembered Sir John A. Macdonald’s old saw, that one caught more flies with honey than with vinegar.^[12]

By 1934 Dalhousie’s financial position was better than many colleges, though it was serious enough. The depression had cut dividend and bond income, but Dalhousie’s investments had been so well placed that losses on capital were slight compared to others. That was the good side. The bad side was current debt. The new gymnasium, built in 1931-2, cost $150,000, much of it borrowed, and it added substantially to Dalhousie’s existing debt. As of 30 June 1938 the accumulated deficit was $201,170. How was one to prevent it rising further? McGill University had reduced its academic salaries by 10 per cent. Stanley had opposed that, and neither Pearson nor his successor Hector McInnes had suggested it. Mclnnes thought it could not be done without the consent of the professors. There was talk in 1936 of a campaign, but no real spirit for it. J.L. Hetherington, a member of the board, told R.B. Bennett:

The immediate Dalhousie constituency is somewhat lukewarm and suffering perhaps a bit from divided enthusiasm and an inferiority complex… it may be apparent to yourself that the staff is without personalities such as it had in former days. The Board, as well, unfortunately, is not conspicuous in leadership among its members, many of whom are now elderly men who have served their day.

Hector Mclnnes, chairman since 1932, was seventy-six and there were several other prominent members in their seventies. But to Bennett it was not so much a question of age as impossibility. “I know of no means,” he told Hetherington, “by which you can raise half a million dollars within the next few years.”^[13]

The crunch was at the Medical Faculty. Its 1929-30 income was $90,611, but its expenses were $20,000 more. Of that deficit, $15,000 was incurred by the Public Health Clinic, which had been running annual deficits on almost the same scale for the past few years. The endowment needed to give $20,000 additional annual income was, at 4.5 per cent, $444,444. New money like that was nowhere in sight.^[14]

The head of the Public Health Clinic was the assistant dean of medicine, W.H. Hattie, who really functioned as dean. The dean himself, Dr. John Stewart, CBE, had been in the office since 1912 and had had an honourable career: assistant under Lister in Edinburgh, an able surgeon in Halifax, then head of Canadian Stationary Hospital No. 7 in the Great War. But by the end of the 1920s he was old and tired; Hattie was doing all the work, Stewart just signed the forms. Hattie was loyal, modest, and generous; his specialty was mental illness. He used to tell fourth-year medical students, many interested in surgery, that it might be ten years before they would see a patient needing a gall bladder operation, but they would see a psychiatric patient in their first hour of practice. In December 1931 Hattie died in harness; Stewart resigned six months later.^[15]

Dean H.G. “Pat” Grant and the Medical Faculty
A new and active dean of medicine was now imperative. In November 1931 there was even consideration given to shutting down the Schools of Medicine and Dentistry altogether. President Stanley’s position was straightforward. New as he was to the scene, having acquired as yet little authority with the board, he nevertheless took this position:

You can’t cut limbs off the community like that without taking the community into your counsels. Since 1868, by something like a succession of miracles, you have maintained a Medical School here, and for many years a Dental School. You say the public is indifferent and has never offered you support. Have you let the public know that you need support?

Perhaps, said Stanley, Nova Scotians think that the private endowments of Carnegie and Rockefeller, so talked about in the early 1920s, signified that Dalhousie did not need public money. Stanley concluded that through drift and the absence of any strong dean, the Public Health Clinic had been allowed to go on haemorrhaging the university.^[16]

The board girded itself up and faced the future, carrying its Medicine and its Dentistry burdens as best it could. And they found a new dean – a Nova Scotian, Harry Goudge Grant, forty-three years old, who had taken his MD from Dalhousie in 1912. He and Atlee had done postgraduate work in London together. Grant’s specialty was preventive medicine, and he had become director of county health work in Virginia where he was epidemiologist since 1926. Grant would stay as dean for the next twenty-two years.

Harry Grant (he was always called “Pat”) was very different from Stewart or Hattie. He had little of their paternalism. One of Grant’s younger colleagues, Dr. H.L. Scammell, remembered being in Fredericton with him, interviewing UNB students for Dalhousie Medical School. Scammell was much struck by the obliquity of Grant’s questions. How did they spend their summers? What did they work at? What games did they like to play? Grant was trying to elucidate their character. He was a great ideas man; he rather liked leaping at suggestions. As this was combined with a generous and incurable optimism, Grant would often promise more than he could deliver. But he would try anyway. He persuaded the faculty, rather against its will, to make the fourth year of medicine a clinical year.^[17]

Of the income of the Medical Faculty for 1929-30, 41 per cent came from class fees. The cost of the whole faculty, per student, was $642. Income per Canadian student was about $180, American $320. It was not good arithmetic. Grant’s first major exercise in December 1932 was to cut the 1933-4 budget of $71,000. He managed a 6 per cent cut, pointing out he did not think the faculty should be charged with a share of the cost of Shirreff Hall. He also reminded the board – it was neither the first nor the last time that a dean of medicine would find this threat useful – that “Our Medical School is at present a class A medical school, and drastic economies within our various departments will undoubtedly result in our losing that status.”

Fundamentally, Stanley was angry with the whole medical question. McGill thought it had the best medical school in Canada, but it had been overtaken by Toronto, where politicians understood what Montreal millionaires did not, “that a medical school requires a mint of money.” Dalhousie’s undertakings in medicine were not the “gallant and courageous endeavours” Stanley had heard them called. “They were blunders by ignorant and stupid people who wanted to make a show. On top of that we undertook a Public Health Centre.”^[18]

The clinic was the sore point with Stanley. President MacKenzie had warned the city in 1928 that Dalhousie would have to close it down if help were not forthcoming, but nothing was done about implementing the threat. In 1929 Hattie pointed out to the city what the clinic was and how important were its functions. The city opted for the happy thought that Dalhousie would not carry out its threat, that the clinic was needed for Dalhousie’s own medical students. In part that surmise was correct.

The clinic’s purpose was simple, its functions many. None of the Halifax hospitals had out-patient departments. Rich and middle-class patients could find and pay their own doctors; but the only place the poor could go had been, for nearly a century, the Halifax Visiting Dispensary. In 1924 the dispensary accepted Dalhousie’s invitation to take space in the new Public Health Clinic, with out-patient doctors supplied by Dalhousie. The Public Health Clinic also provided free accommodation to the Halifax Welfare Bureau and a VD clinic for the provincial Department of Health. Opening on 1 November 1924, the clinic handled nearly seven thousand cases in its first year, and by 1930 that had more than doubled.

Great assistance in running the Public Health Clinic had come from the thirteen full-time nurses and one doctor of the Massachusetts-Halifax Health Commission. The commission, chaired by G.F. Pearson, had been an outgrowth of the Halifax explosion, but such outside philanthropy could not go on for ever. The commission announced that its work would end on 31 May 1928. From the thirteen full-time nurses the staff at the Public Health Clinic was reduced by 75 per cent.^[19]

The running of the Public Health Clinic was now wholly in Dalhousie’s lap. President MacKenzie was worried about what responsibilities Dalhousie should retain, and there was uncertainty in the minds of some of the Dalhousie governors. The Public Health Clinic, said Dugald Macgillivray, “was always draped with a good deal of mystery and individual possession by both Pearson and MacKenzie, and what it meant or was to mean in cost to Dalhousie never gripped us.” That suggests some deliberate obfuscation by Pearson, a strong public health man, confident doubtless that in time the City of Halifax would be willing to shoulder its proper responsibilities.^[20]

There was no doubt that the teaching value of the clinic was considerable, with its great variety of out-patient cases. Hattie had devised a follow-up arrangement whereby the medical students would visit out-patients in their homes and thus see the environments that had nurtured TB, infant mortality, and other public health problems. Those visits were a revelation to many students. Nevertheless, Dalhousie was now paying for the clinic from its own money, and Hattie’s efforts to get the city to pay for any of it were unavailing.

Halifax for its part was struggling to get back on its own feet. After the explosion of 6 December 1917 the task of rebuilding the city was taken over by governmental and philanthropic boards. The Halifax Relief Commission was established by the Dominion government early in 1918 to provide permanent care for the injured and crippled, and to rebuild the shattered north end of Halifax and parts of Dartmouth. The city was going to be hard up for some time yet; its tax base had shrunk, some of it permanently, and swaths of property belonging to two governments, the armed services, educational institutions, churches, and cemeteries were wholly exempt from taxes. Thus Dalhousie’s request to have the city fund the Public Health Clinic was put off as long as possible.^[21]

This problem of the Public Health Clinic was the first thing Carleton Stanley encountered in September 1931. The Board of Governors recognized the importance of the clinic’s work, but where could it find the money without adding to Dalhousie’s burgeoning debt? Over the years Dalhousie had already contributed more than $100,000 to the clinic. It had done much to bring medical students face to face with health and preventive medicine as a social question. But as Dean Grant pointed out in a letter to the papers two years later, “It can be said without fear of contradiction that in no other place in the world is it [the medical care of the sick poor] done by a University.” Carleton Stanley claimed that the knowledge so gained from the clinic had not done much public good, for “the slums that send us patients… are allowed to remain.”^[22]

The president and the new dean of medicine went to New York in the autumn of 1932 to make an appeal to the Rockefeller Foundation for funding for a Department of Preventive Medicine. The City of Halifax was approached for $10,000 annually for the clinic; the best it could manage was $2,500. The Nova Scotia government was asked for $5,000 per annum, and it proved more generous. It happened that Dalhousie’s professor of clinical surgery, Dr. G.H. Murphy, was elected in a 1929 by-election for Halifax County, and became minister of health in August 1930 in the Conservative government of Premier G.S. Harrington. That gave Dalhousie an entree. In February 1933, being finally persuaded of the importance to the province of public health, the Nova Scotia government offered $5,000 a year on condition that Dalhousie raise a like amount somewhere else. As Stanley told Dr. Murphy, “the help comes in the very nick of time.” It allowed Dalhousie to show local support to Rockefeller. Dr. Alan Gregg of the Rockefeller Foundation came to Halifax in May 1933, and the upshot was that the Foundation offered a matching grant, up to $8,800 a year, for five years, to support a Department of Preventive Medicine, built around the work of the Public Health Clinic.^[23]

That was how the Public Health Clinic grew in the 1930s. This noble ambition, as Stanley put it in 1937, was supported by large gifts by Carnegie and Rockefeller, by the public conscience of Dalhousie, and, not least, by the generosity of the city’s doctors, dozens of whom served the clinic for many years without reward. However, the new arrangements merely eased Dalhousie’s financial problems with the clinic; the City of Halifax’s $2,500 was a woeful example of underfunding.^[24]

When Angus L. Macdonald and the Liberals defeated the Harrington government in the provincial election of August 1933, Dean Grant, adroit and assiduous, made sure that the new minister of health, Dr. Frank Davis of Bridgewater, saw something of public health practices. Davis was a country doctor and “had his eyes opened very wide,” Stanley said, to see what other cities like Toronto did.^[25]

Angus L. Macdonald (1890-1954), the new premier, was born in Cape Breton, the gold medallist at St. Francis Xavier in 1914, and joined the Canadian army. After the war he took his LL.B. at Dalhousie in 1921, worked for the attorney general, and came to Dalhousie in 1924 as professor of law, teaching statutes and rules of their interpretation. He found $2,500 a year thin going for a man newly married, and resigned in 1930 to go into private practice, becoming leader of the opposition Liberal party that year. He was elected for Halifax South in the Liberal sweep of August 1933.^[26]

Angus L. was not Nova Scotia’s first Roman Catholic premier, but he was the longest lived politically. With brains, vigour, and not a little fighting skill in the Assembly, he was soon unassailable. He needed it, for he had had a feud with Bishop Morrison of Antigonish over, university federation. Angus L. explained it confidentially to Carleton Stanley in 1937. The Antigonish Casket in 1922 had argued that St. Francis Xavier should not join university federation. It was impossible to get anyone in the Antigonish diocese to answer the Casket articles, so Angus L. wrote a dozen pro-federation articles from his desk at the Dalhousie Law School. The Casket refused to publish them, so Angus L. sent them to the Sydney Post. The bishop did not forgive what he viewed as reckless freedom. Angus L. wanted to get rid of the Maritime degree-granting colleges in favour of one first-class university in Halifax, with a college for Catholics, one for Baptists, and so on. He still did in 1937; a university could have been created, he told Stanley, like a Canadian Princeton, instead of what the Maritimes ended up with in 1937 – thirteen colleges each with their graduates going forth into the world believing they were university-trained. What they had, said Angus L., was “only about equivalent to a first-rate high school.”^[27]

The 1935 Dalhousie Act
The connections between Dalhousie and the government allowed it to seek a new act to bring its charter up to date. Opening up an institutional act is never entirely without risk. If the government is strong, or there is good will on both sides of the House, there is usually no difficulty. It had been discovered that the members of the Board of Governors had not been properly appointed. The reason was the power, given in the 1863 act, to the person or body endowing a chair to nominate a governor and name the professor. The board also nominated governors, and the two principles had become confused. This was briefly patched up in 1934, pursuant to a new act to be passed in 1935. A joint committee of board and Senate began meetings in October 1934. Hector Mclnnes, chairman of the board, decided simply to correct mistakes and bring the 1863 act up to date. The new act was not intended to provide a new constitution for the university, nor to alter the powers of board or president; it would merely regularize existing appointments, and “eliminate the antiquated right of nomination of donors” of either governors or professors. The old right of the Church of Scotland to nominate a governor and appoint a professor lingered, now converted to the right of the United Church to nominate a governor.^[28]

Senate members liked the idea of a wholly new act. Hugh Bell noted that for many years past Senate and board had been drawing apart; now was a good opportunity to pull them together again. Senate on the whole liked Bell’s argument, but Senate did not get its way. The board wanted to end appointments to its board by the provincial cabinet, but it did not get its way either.^[29]

The board constituted by the 1935 act consisted of twenty-two governors appointed by governor-in-council, six Alumni representatives, three Alumnae, two representatives from King’s College, the United Church governor, and the mayor of Halifax, ex officio – thirty-five in all. There were three new departures: an executive committee of the board was formally constituted; full-time professors were excluded from membership on the board; and as quid pro quo for that, a formal attempt was made to bring board and Senate together on major issues of university policy. This last was Senate’s idea. It had in mind the creation of a court, modelled on the University of Edinburgh, that would deal with such matters as annual expenditures, university policy, buildings, and the development of new departments. The board preferred ad hoc joint committees when necessary, but Senate stuck to its guns, and thus the compromise emerged creating what came to be called “The Six and Six.” The wording is interesting:

3.(1) The Board shall from time to time when any new department, building, project or policy arises for consideration, appoint a committee of its members to meet with a like committee of the Senate, which joint committee shall investigate the same and recommend to the Board its findings thereon.

The act required a statutory meeting of the Six and Six every October, at which anything pertaining to the welfare of the university could be discussed, and there could be ad hoc meetings at any time. Stanley claimed that the Six and Six clause was a result of the backstairs influence of G.F. Pearson. Indeed, said Stanley, the whole 1935 revision had been set going by that “arch-imp” downtown. Certainly the 1935 act absorbed a great deal of Stanley’s energies over the winter of 1934-5.^[30]

What did not get into the 1935 act was a clause about the duties of the president. Stanley thought there was need for it. No one would know, he said, from the brief allusion to the president in the 1863 act that the president had what Stanley called “undisputed prerogatives”: to recommend all teaching appointments to the board; to busy himself with university finance; to preside at all faculty meetings if he wished; to represent Dalhousie before the public; and to oversee grounds, buildings, curricula, and discipline. Stanley also wanted a clause on academic tenure. “It is part of the unwritten law about Canadian Universities that anyone who secures a post as high as Associate Professor is appointed for life or on good behaviour.”^[31] Stanley got neither of these clauses. Common law lawyers resist setting down more than they have to. The powers of the president would remain undefined, and the tenure of professors the same. Stanley hated the Dalhousie charter. Five years later, out of temper both with board and Senate, Stanley told the chairman that what Dalhousie needed was “the abolition of the fatuous charter under which we operate.”^[32]

Dismissing Murray Macneill
In 1936 Stanley managed to depose his bête noire, the registrar, Murray Macneill. Macneill would remain only United Church professor of mathematics. Probably no one will get to the bottom of that feud. That Macneill was devoted to Dalhousie and its reputation is patent; that he was difficult at times to get along with is true. There were minor incidents; Angus L. asked Macneill if he would act as Nova Scotia’s civil service commissioner in his spare time. To Macneill’s request for permission Stanley offered two months leave without pay. That was not what Macneill asked for, and Angus L. had to intervene. In 1936, having had no holiday for five years, Macneill asked permission to go to England for a few weeks to see his daughter, Janet Macneill Aitken. She had married Lord Beaverbrook’s son, Peter Aitken, and had a new baby. The baby was fine: the marriage wasn’t. There was an Imperial Universities’ Conference on that summer, and it would save Macneill money if he could be one of Dalhousie’s four delegates. To his request, Stanley replied crisply that Macneill could go but “as to the representation of Dalhousie at the Conference of Imperial Universities, I have made other arrangements.”^[33]

The immediate issue between Stanley and Macneill was Dalhousie’s standards of admission. Stanley had changed from 1931-3 when he wanted to tighten them, to 1936 when he was willing to make them more flexible. One reason was Dalhousie’s declining enrolment, down 24 per cent in Arts and Science between 1931-2 and 1935-6. There were many reasons for it, the depression not least, but one was the notorious competition for students between colleges in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Macneill for his part seems to have gone the other way, finding reasons for tightening Dalhousie’s admission standards. Stanley and Macneill each seem to have been using the issue to get at the other.

Stanley had a list of some fifty-five students from Dalhousie and King’s, the correspondence with whom proved to Stanley that they were being discouraged from coming to Dalhousie. There were complaints from A.H. Moore, president of King’s, of Macneill’s rigidity. King’s was losing students, said Moore, and Macneill should not to be so choosy. Remember, he warned Stanley,

that the majority of these principals and teachers is made up of Acadia graduates, and I would not put it by some of them that they would welcome more active requirements on our part in order that they might say to their students: “To enter Dalhousie or King’s you will have to have all these, but with a smaller list of qualifications it will be possible for you to go to Acadia.”^[34]

In view of “the intensive and persistent campaign that other schools are making for students,” Stanley wrote, Macneill’s attitude was “simply madness… If we paid someone to keep students away, how could the salary be better earned?” Thus he charged Murray Macneill with lack of support and cooperation, and asked the board to dismiss him as registrar.

In mid-May 1936 the executive of the board sat through two meetings and four hours listening to Stanley’s complaints against Macneill. Some were not serious, some were explained, but most charges Macneill thought so ridiculous he would not answer them. What troubled the executive most was the bitter enmity between the two men. Nor would Macneill accept the board’s offer to resign. He was in England when the board relieved him of his duties as registrar, on 30 May, effective the next day, notifying him by cable. His office staff were much upset at what they felt was very shabby treatment. Macneill, bitter and aggrieved, wrote the chairman of the board:

My whole life has been devoted to Dalhousie University. My own feeling is that I have been charged with disloyalty without reason, and with very evident malice. The executive have apparently seen fit to agree to charges which I consider ridiculous and untrue… All I can ask now is to be allowed, for the few years that remain of my active life, to be of what service I can to the college I have always loved.

That meant his work as professor of mathematics, a position which of course he retained until his retirement in 1942. His family believed his dismissal as registrar quite broke his spirit. He was the second person thus broken by Dalhousie’s philosopher-president. Dalhousie had been Macneill’s whole life. Since 1907 the Macneill home at 83 Inglis Street had been a Dalhousie social centre. Every Sunday afternoon in term there would be a tea party, or in winter snowshoe or skating parties.^[35]

An immediate consequence of Macneill’s dethronement was Stanley’s discovery that he would need a dean of arts and science. Hitherto he had not had one, preferring to run his own show in that faculty. Professors Bennet and Johnston would be part-time co-registrars, and a dean would organize the faculty, by which Stanley meant setting agendas for meetings and preventing a waste of time in them. In June 1936 he persuaded Professor C.B. Nickerson of the Chemistry Department to accept the deanship for three years, at $1,000 a year extra pay. Nickerson had been at Dalhousie since 1918, was well connected, being married to Agnes Harrington, sister of the Gordon Harrington, the premier from 1930 to 1933. He was well liked by the staff, popular with students, ever ready with a genial comment or timely anecdote. He and his wife, with no children, were often chaperones at the many Dalhousie dances.

Profile of Dalhousie Students
In 1933 it was said that Dalhousie had “a dance a day.” Stanley explained it to C.E Crandall, president of British United Press, Montreal, who thought his daughter Ruth at Shirreff Hall had too much social life. College life, said Stanley, had changed much since our time. What students called “activities” bulked large. “A dance a day” was a slander on most students, but near the truth if one counted them up. “It’s notorious that it is a small fraction of our students that keep all these dances going.” Stanley asserted that of the nearly one hundred students who failed in three or more subjects in the spring of 1933, most were not the weaker students but those who went to all the dances.

By the time Ruth Crandall graduated in 1935, students had begun to realize something of the sacrifices it was taking to get them to university and keep them there. They were survivors rather than radicals. The typical Dalhousie student of the later 1930s came from a besieged but surviving family. Some parents borrowed money to send a daughter or a son to university because they passionately believed in higher education. There were a few students from wealthy families on Young Avenue, and a few others from blue-collar families, students who had managed to hang on by wits and determination beyond Grade 8. Students in general worked at their studies; law students worked harder at Dalhousie than they did at Toronto according to John Willis, who taught at both. But he also claimed that the law students of the 1930s were not as good as in former years. He attributed it partly to Dalhousie Law School accepting students they should have rejected, needing the fees. Willis also claimed that too many of his law students of the later 1930s were there because well-to-do fathers could afford to send them, there being so few jobs available.^[36]

So far as fathers’ occupations can be traced, of 2,271 fathers of Dalhousie students during the 1930s, 28 per cent were professionals, 31 per cent businessmen. That was perhaps to be expected. But 21 per cent of Dalhousie students had fathers who were artisans, farmers, fishermen, skilled or semi-skilled workmen. The great majority of Dalhousie students were from backgrounds that can be described as middle class, for whom a university education was a major expense, especially where fathers were school teachers or clergymen. As to defining what middle class was, one easy (but treacherous) definition from the 1930s was that it was those families who used napkin rings. Upper-class families had fresh napkins every meal; lower-class families neither knew nor cared about napkins; middle-class families had napkins, cared very much, and washed those symbols of their respectability once a week. Middle-class students, once graduated, tended to move upwards within the middle class. But of the male graduates of Dalhousie between 1931 and 1940, 25 per cent cannot be traced, whereas of the group between 1921 and 1926, 92 per cent can be. That suggests that a group of Dalhousie graduates in the 1930s remained unemployed or worked at jobs they did not care to report on. Or perhaps they were killed in the Second World War.^[37]

Women graduates improved their positions, but it was less through professional work as teachers, librarians, nurses and more by marriage. Tracing Dalhousie alumnae through the Alumni Magazine, as Paul Axelrod has done, suggests that only seventeen of the fifty-nine women who graduated in 1936 found professional work. Thus women who aspired to professional careers in the 1930s probably had a decidedly chancy time of it.

Women were 28 per cent of Dalhousie students in 1930, that figure going to 23.5 per cent in 1939. The reason was simple: as money got tighter, families opted for educating sons who could better anticipate a working career. Sons also found summer work more readily than daughters, and thus were less of a drain on family funds. Nevertheless it is noteworthy that 22 per cent of Dalhousie students in 1935 were women.

For the quarter of Dalhousie students that were women, Lucy Maud Montgomery, writing in a special co-ed issue of the Gazette in February 1939, had some shrewd advice. An old lady once told her, “Don’t marry as long as you can help it because when the right man comes along you can’t help it.” It was, said the author of Anne of Green Gables, the same with writing. And, she added, don’t try to hit the public taste: “The public taste does not really like being hit. It prefers to be allured into some fresh pasture surprised.” Finally, she said, write about what you know: “tragedy is being enacted in the next yard. Comedy is playing across the street.” That was advice the other 75 per cent of Dalhousie students could well profit from too.

Male and female, Dalhousie students of the 1930s, based on averages for 1930-1, 1935-6, and 1939-40, were 67 per cent Nova Scotians. Students from the United States were prominent in medicine and dentistry. Jewish students, especially, found it difficult to crack the unvoiced principles of exclusion at American medical schools, so they came north. Dalhousie’s Medical School, being class A, allowed Jewish students to graduate from Dalhousie and return to the United States and get state licences to practise.

Dalhousie students’ religious affiliations in the 1930s had changed somewhat from the decade before. The new element was Jewish students – now 11 per cent of enrolment, up from almost nothing in the 1920s. Roman Catholic students were up slightly from 13 to 15 per cent. Anglicans increased from 14 to 23 per cent, the result of the addition of King’s. Presbyterian students were the most serious concern. In the early 1920s they were 51 per cent of Dalhousie students. After the creation of the United Church in 1925, one should have expected an increase with former Methodist students added. Instead, the United Church students at Dalhousie were only 34 per cent, plus some students whose old Presbyterian families refused to accept the 1925 union, another 6 per cent.^[38]

The decrease in the number of Pictou County students at Dalhousie worried President MacKenzie, who first made it public in his annual report for 1911-12, when Pictonians in arts and science had fallen from 18 per cent in 1891 to 13 per cent in 1911. By 1931 the figure was 8 per cent. The New Glasgow Eastern Chronicle commented on it, attributing it to parents being happier with the sterner oversight of students at Antigonish, Wolfville, and Sackville. And less metropolitan temptations: F.B. Squire in the Dalhousie Gazette suggested that Senate’s attempts to ban student renting of hotel rooms at the Nova Scotian Hotel’s Saturday night dances was not done for morality but to calm uneasy parents. It was also true, as the Eastern Chronicle noted, that Dalhousie, a little like UNB, had no longer a distinct denominational background. Since “Dalhousie is one of Pictou’s gifts to the welfare of Nova Scotia,” more work was needed to recruit students in Pictou County. This and other pressures caused the chairman of the board, Hector Mclnnes, born and raised in Pictou County, to make three visits to Pictou to stir up relations, friends, and alumni in 1936 and early 1937.^[39]

There were not enough scholarships. The Munro exhibitions and bursaries had gone with Munro’s death in 1896, and nothing quite like their scale had been substituted since. The bursaries and scholarships that did exist were also less rich than before because of a diminution of dividends and bond interest. There was even a suggestion from the president that those who won scholarships and did not need the money return it to the university. By the end of the 1930s 11.6 per cent of Maritime students had entrance or undergraduate scholarships which averaged $113 a year. That was better than in the West but slightly below that in Ontario.^[40]

Student tuition costs in 1930 were about $112 a year in arts, rising to $125 in 1932 over President Stanley’s objections. Arts classes were $25 each, sciences classes $40. A student needed about $300 for room and board in Halifax. Thus a year at Dalhousie, including books and personal expenses, would come to about $600. Henry Hicks was given a $500 prize when he graduated from Mount Allison in 1936, and used it to come to Dalhousie in 1936-7. It just about covered his expenses, which were “five hundred and forty-six dollars to attend Dalhousie then, and pay for my residence at Pine Hill Divinity Hall where I lived and even to take a girl to the supper dances at the Nova Scotian Hotel every other week or so.” The sum of $546 may seem modest, but it has to be set against salaries then current. In 1937 a beginning bank clerk was paid $400 a year, an experienced typist $700.^[41]

Henry Hicks lived at Pine Hill; so had Larry MacKenzie, fifteen years before, as there were no men’s residences. Male students were not expected to make their own way completely in the untender world of Halifax boarding houses; Dalhousie kept an avuncular eye on boarding and rooming houses used by its students. The dean of medicine reported in February 1935 on 214 houses for male students: ninety-one offered room and board, sixty-eight were rooms only, thirty-nine offered room with breakfast. For sleeping accommodation the dean reported that half provided double beds. There was nothing strange in the 1930s about men sleeping together; indeed, that was the way many of them had grown up. Three-quarters of the houses had what Dalhousie designated as good washing and toilet facilities – that is, bath, washbasin, and toilet for every six students. Stanley was not satisfied and kept hoping for $750,000 that would enable Dalhousie to build a men’s residence; but it did not come.^[42]

For that reason a few modest branches of American fraternities appeared at Dalhousie in the 1930s. President MacKenzie had seen them coming and wondered how best to deal with them. Robert Falconer’s advice from the University of Toronto was to ward them off, if possible, “but unless you can get residences for men, or keep the college small, they’ll come.” Sidney Smith told Stanley much the same in 1932, but Smith was positive, seeing fraternities’ useful function as residences for men. They were self-governing largely, communal boarding houses run by the occupants, and usually owned by a small clutch of benevolent alumni. At first Stanley did not like them, but within a couple of years he had begun to find them useful. Dalhousie never recognized them, but neither did it ban them. By the end of the 1930s there were seven fraternities and two sororities. They tended to be anti-Jewish, the law fraternity specifically so; but there is no evidence that in Nova Scotia they were what they sometimes were in the United States, anti-Catholic. The Gazette, in October 1934, gave an opinion that while fraternities raised hell now and then, and tended to play student power politics, on the other hand they were pleasant houses for men of like interests. President Stanley preferred them kept under control.^[43]

The president ran afoul of student opinion in the great badminton crisis of 1934. Mixed badminton Stanley himself suggested as a useful antidote to the erotic temptations of dancing, but he wanted the game taken seriously, with proper clothes, which meant white flannels for men and white skirts for women. One day he found a young woman playing badminton in shorts, and a ban on mixed badminton issued forthwith from the president’s office. To the Gazette it was irresistible:

The boys and girls must play alone,
They cannot play together –
Your father wouldn’t sanction it,
And neither would your mother.

he Halifax Citizen, a leftish local weekly, chimed in with an editorial; Hitler decreed what the German woman should wear, but “President Stanley’s dictatorial rule” says what Dalhousie girls shouldn’t wear. The Citizen wondered what would happen about bathing suits should Dalhousie ever have a summer session! But Dalhousie students never liked downtown interference; they told the Citizen to leave well alone, that it understood nothing of campus conditions.

However, Dalhousie could not be kept out of the Halifax papers. During the League of Nations crisis of October 1935 over the issue of sanctions against Italy for its invasion of Abyssinia, the students conducted a poll, the results of which were illuminating. Of 850 students, 464 voted as follows:

	Yes	No
For economic sanctions against Italy	444	16
For military sanctions against Italy	205	235
Support of military measures for League	175	277
For participation in war	157	289

That made headlines in local papers, which concluded, rightly, that Dalhousie students wanted to punish Italy but did not want to have any part in the punishing. This was reinforced a few months later when the Gazette insisted that Dalhousie students be neutral in any European conflict. “We have close sentimental ties binding us to Great Britain,” said the Gazette, “but that is no reason why we should fight the battles of British Capitalism and Imperialism in all parts of the world.”^[44]

That was something President Stanley approved of: students being students should be outspoken, revolutionary if need be. His concern, he told the students in October 1935, was if they were not revolutionary:

My young friends, you should be. There is no other hope for the world. There are many things always to revolt and rebel against. Somewhere or other stupidity is always enthroned. Somewhere or other there are always wrongs to right. Sooner or later there is going to be a wholesale revolt on the part of the youth in North America against what is offered them, by selfish, commercial interests, in the name of amusement and entertainment. Suppose that you began a revolt here and now against the so-called music that I have been listening to for the last four years at Dalhousie, and against what I have for four years heard called in the name of dancing.

But Stanley would not be able to call out the students on that issue. Perhaps not on any issue. He found them ill informed and not well read. He interviewed personally all new students; many of the new men, for law, medicine and dentistry, from other colleges, had never read a book in their lives but the textbooks they had been obliged to read, or “detective stories and trashy novels.” But Stanley’s utterances on such an issue were not always to be trusted. A year later he was saying how solid Dalhousie students were, how they read books and debated serious questions. The difference was not, probably, that between the students of December 1937 and those of October 1938; it was, rather, the correspondent he was writing to. But it is true the world had become a more serious place after Munich.^[45]

But in the wicked world outside there were increasingly few hopes for that. The war that came in 1939 would test Dalhousie more sternly even than the 1914 war, and its classicist president. One can imagine Carleton Stanley, tall, slim, curly haired, coming out of his office in the Macdonald Library with bowler hat and umbrella, his black Newfoundland dog Pontus waiting for him on the steps, ready for a walk. At such times he would survey his campus a little absently, as if he could not quite have said whence he had come or whither he was going.^[50] That was an illusion: for Stanley was strong, stubborn, and determined. He would demonstrate those qualities over the next six years.