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A Brief History of Philanthropy at the University of May 23, 2018

Martin L. Friedland, C.C., Q.C., LL.D., F.R.S.C., University Professor and professor of law emeritus,

I have given dozens of talks over the years on a wide range of subjects related to the history of the University, but have never given one on philanthropy. It is an important subject. If it were not for philanthropy, the University of Toronto would not be in the position it occupies today – one of the leading universities in the world. Its ascent in the rankings over the past few decades has occurred during a period of strong private support by individuals, corporations, and organizations. It has taken place on all three campuses, St. George, Scarborough, and Mississauga. Private donations have enabled the University to improve the quality of education and research to an extent which would not have been possible with regular provincial government support, which tends to be distributed equally according to student numbers across the province. In this talk I will give a brief history of philanthropy at the University of Toronto, primarily drawn from my history of the University and for the most part focusing on the past. Private support was relatively unimportant for the University of Toronto in the nineteenth century. Financing the University was thought to be a provincial responsibility. The University’s predecessor, King’s College, had been established in 1827 by the government of Upper Canada and at the same time was endowed with a generous grant of Crown lands scattered throughout the province that could be sold to finance the University. This endowment was transferred to the University of Toronto when the Anglican King’s College was closed down in 1849 and the secular University of Toronto created. The University was to a great extent controlled by the provincial government and was therefore unlike many of the private universities in North America, such as Harvard, Yale and Stanford in the United States, and McGill and McMaster in Canada – that were the result of philanthropic contributions by major private donors. 2

Montrealer James McGill, for example, a wealthy fur trader who died in 1813, bequeathed £10,000 – the currency in those years – and a 46-acre estate on the side of Mount Royal for McGill College, which was formally opened in 1829. The only major donor named on the Chancellors’ Circle wall for most of the nineteenth century is John Elmsley, who in 1853 donated a large block of land to the Catholic Basilian order to erect a parish church, St. Basil’s, along with a college, St. Michael’s, which were both officially opened in 1856. St. Michael’s affiliated with the University in 1881. There were no philanthropic donations for the purchase by King’s College in 1828 of the original St. George campus. It was purchased from private owners using endowment funds for a total of £3,750, a sum about equal to the cost of Bishop Strachan’s home on Front Street. There were also no philanthropic donations for the magnificent University College, constructed in the 1850s. It was built with money from the endowment. The government permitted £95,000 to be used for the building. The University moved quickly and quietly because there was growing concern that the religious colleges would try to block U of T’s use of the endowment, which the other colleges felt should be shared with them. ‘Every stone that goes up in the building,’ the U of T vice-chancellor at the time stated, ‘every book that is bought is so much more anchorage, and so much less plunder to fight for.’ Apart from Elmsley, the only other entry on the Chancellors’ Circle wall for the nineteenth century is the ‘Benefactors following the Great Fire of 1890.’ More than 40,000 books were received. Donors in Britain sent some 20,000 books, including the works of the Brownings donated by their son, a set of Tennyson’s work in eleven volumes donated by the author, and a book on royal residences donated by Queen Victoria. Donations to the University increased after the turn of the century. An alumni association was founded in 1900 and one of its early actions was to raise funds for the construction of Convocation Hall, which opened in 1906. The government of matched the funds raised by the Alumni Association. Another turning point for the University was the creation by the government of Ontario of a Royal Commission on the University, which reported in 1906 and resulted in the creation of a board of governors and a greater separation of the University from the government. It was composed of public spirited wealthy individuals, who believed in philanthropy and helped set the tone for private giving 3 in the City of Toronto and the University. Nevertheless, financing the University was believed to be the government’s responsibility and the philanthropy was mainly directed at other institutions, not the University itself. The chair of the Commission was Joseph Flavelle, who would become the chair of the board of the Toronto General Hospital and helped raise the funds for the building of the hospital on College Street, which opened in 1913. Many years later, he donated his fine home, now called Flavelle House, to the University. Another wealthy Torontonian on the Royal Commission was Edmund Walker, who later became the chair of the board of the University. He was the head of the Bank of Commerce and throughout his life was heavily involved in various philanthropic enterprises. He was the founder of what is now the Art Gallery of Ontario and was the principal proponent and chair of the board of the Royal Ontario Museum, which opened in 1914 and until the mid-1960s was an integral part of the University. In addition, he helped raise money for social housing in Toronto and various other causes. A further wealthy member of the commission was Goldwin Smith, who had been an academic at Oxford and Cornell and later came to Toronto, where he married Harriette Boulton, the wealthy widow of the former Toronto mayor, William Boulton. They lived in the Grange, an elegant residence which they later donated to the Art Gallery. Because of the change in the culture of giving, we find, for example, the Eatons funding the first named chair in medicine at the Toronto General Hospital and the Gooderham family donating 50 acres of land in the north end of the city to be used for the production of vaccines and antitoxins in the new Connaught Laboratories during the First World War. Immediately after the war, the Alumni Association made plans for a memorial tower honouring those who had served and particularly those who had given their lives in the war. The first site chosen was north of the old library, but the Board wanted that for an extension of the library, which was eventually built after the Second World War with the help of a donation by Sigmund Samuel. The Royal Commission of 1906 recommended a number of new initiatives in the University. To pay for them, it had recommended that succession duties or death taxes, which had been introduced in Ontario in 1892, be used to finance the University of Toronto. The government accepted that proposal and enacted legislation, stating that one-half of the amount collected be given to the University 4 of Toronto – the only Provincial University. A few years later, however, this was capped at half a million dollars a year, so it was not the gold mine that some had hoped it would be. In the meantime, Goldwin Smith died, leaving an estate of $700,000. Unfortunately, he did not leave it to the University of Toronto. He was so annoyed at the Ontario succession duty scheme that he left it to . The relationship between the tax system and philanthropy is complex and one that I will not explore in detail here. My tax colleagues at the law school will tell you that the federal government, which had introduced succession duty legislation in 1941, repealed it in the early 1970s after the federal government brought in a capital gains tax, with what is technically referred to as ‘deemed disposition on death.’ In 1997, the federal government wanted to encourage donations to charities and particularly to universities, where, in the words of the 1997 government budget plan, ‘the research facilities at many Canadian universities and research hospitals have not been keeping pace with the demands of world-class research and higher education, and require new investment.’ And so, as the U.S. had done, Canada lowered the capital gains tax rate on donations to charities of securities of public companies traded on an exchange. In 2006, the capital gains tax on such donations was completely eliminated. This encouragement has had a very positive effect on universities across the country. I mentioned Sigmund Samuel. He is an important figure in the history of philanthropy in the city of Toronto and for the University. His father, an industrialist, had been one of the founders of the Holy Blossom Synagogue. Sigmund Samuel attended Upper Canada College and became very friendly with many non-Jewish Torontonians, including Edmund Walker, who involved him in many of the charitable activities in which Walker participated, particularly the Royal Ontario Museum, where Samuel became a member of its board. Walker also brought him into clubs, such as the York Club and other private clubs, where he was their first Jewish member. The University of Toronto has greatly benefited from the generosity of Jewish donors. Sigmund Samuel was the first to be a major contributor to the University. There is a consensus, I believe, that the most important family to have contributed to the University over the years has been the . , after whom Hart House is named, became wealthy through the Massey-Harris company 5 which manufactured farm machinery. He died in 1896. The Massey Foundation was established and in 1910 proposed the creation of a student centre. , later the chancellor of the University and the first Canadian Governor General of Canada, was then an undergraduate at University College and was the driving force behind the donation and the execution of the plan. The land sought had already been set aside for new athletic facilities and so this was incorporated into the new structure, a structure which was meant to cost $500,000, but eventually cost close to $2 million. Construction started in 1911 and was completed in 1919. It is a great institution – at the time unique in North America. It was for ‘common fellowship’ but this, however, did not include women. Even women faculty members – and there were not many in those years – could not use the faculty club, which was in the upper gallery of Hart House. The exclusion of women was – surprisingly – not changed until 1972. There were other major contributions by the Massey Family. Hart Massey donated funds for the first endowed chair in the University when Victoria College opened in 1892. His daughter, Lillian Massey, provided the funds for the Lillian Massey Building at the corner of Bloor and Avenue Road and the establishment of the Lillian Massey School of Household Science and Art.’ The Massey family also contributed to men’s and women’s residences at Victoria College. The final contribution by the Massey Foundation – final only because it used up all the funds of the foundation – was the creation of a graduate college, Massey College, which opened in 1963. As with Hart House, women were not included until 1974. Understandably, there were few major contributions during the depression. One of them was for Engineering’s Wallberg Memorial Building on College Street. Ida Wallberg left a bequest of a million dollars in 1933 to honour her late wealthy brother, Emil Wallberg, who received his engineering education in Illinois, but later practised his profession in Canada, and left his estate to his sister. Neither of the Wallbergs were graduates of the University of Toronto. In 1935 the David Dunlap Observatory officially opened north of Toronto, with funds that Jessie Dunlap donated to honour her late husband David Dunlap, who had been a mining entrepreneur in Northern Ontario. Again, neither was a graduate of U of T. During the interwar years, significant donations were given by some of the large American charitable foundations, such as Rockefeller and Carnegie. Such 6 foundations were enormously important in the development of the research capacity of the University and continued their support after the war. Rockefeller, for example, gave a million dollars in the 1920s for a chair of surgery in the faculty of medicine and another large grant to help establish the School of Hygiene. In the 1930s it donated additional funds for the new School of Nursing and a program in Chinese Studies. After the war, it helped establish the department of Slavic Studies. The Carnegie Foundation supported libraries, also contributed to Chinese Studies, helped establish the first professor of fine art, and provided benefits for retired academics. In more recent years, there were large contributions from the Ford Foundation as well as from Canadian foundations, such as the Donner Canadian Foundation and the McLaughlin Foundation. In 1953 – in its first grant to a Canadian university – Ford gave early support to Marshall McLuhan and anthropologist Edmund Carpenter and supported scholarly publishing by the University of Toronto Press. In 1963, it gave over $2 million to help build up the research capacity of the Faculty of Engineering and later gave support to the new Centre of Criminology. Donner supported individual research projects and McLaughlin gave $50 million – all its remaining funds – for cellular and genetic research. A successful organized fundraising campaign did not take place at U of T until Claude Bissell became president in 1958. There had been a campaign by President Henry Cody in 1944, but it was abandoned, as was a similar campaign by President Sidney Smith in 1948. The goal of Bissell’s ‘National Fund’ campaign, launched in 1959, was $12.6 million and the University did not think it would reach it. Within a year, they had $15 million. This included half a million contributed by the board and another half million by the staff. In 1976 President John Evans launched what was called the ‘Update’ campaign. The goal was $25 million. At the end of Evans’ tenure, $21 million had been pledged. And at the end of President Jim Ham’s tenure in 1983, the combined total was $36 million. It was considered a success, although relatively modest by today’s campaign targets. During George Connell’s presidency the ‘Breakthrough’ campaign for $100 million was launched in 1987 and raised $135 million. Pride in John Polanyi’s contemporaneous award of the Nobel Prize for chemistry helped. President Rob Prichard’s fundraising campaign for $300 million was launched in 1994 and by the time he left office in 2000 over $700 million had been raised. The campaign concentrated on endowed professorships. The University matched 7 donations. Deans and chairs became more involved in fundraising activities. When Prichard left there were 160 such chairs. The campaign continued under Robert Birgeneau and eventually reached $1 billion. Impressive fundraising activity continued under President , who took office in 2005, and his successor, , who became president in 2013. A new campaign, entitled “Boundless” was launched in 2011 and raised its goal of $2 billion six months ahead of schedule. The campaign continues with a higher goal. The numbers on the Chancellors’ Circle wall show the dramatic increase in major donations: 2 entries in the 1980s; 13 in the 1990s; 25 in the first decade of the 2000s; and so far 40 in the second decade. I will not single out recent donors. I will not even mention Hal Jackman’s major donations to the Law School and to the humanities, although if I did mention him I would make a point about multigenerational families of major donors, such as the Jackmans, the Masseys, the Goldrings, the Dans, and others. Each gift has made the University stronger and has allowed the University to do things it otherwise would not have been able to do in constructing new building, starting new programs, contributing to research, providing student assistance (matched by the province), and improving the physical beauty of the University – to name only some of the uses of the funding. There is a story behind each donation. I will close with one story from an earlier period – a story that I recently discovered while researching the life of W.P.M. Kennedy, the first dean of the U of T law school. During the Second World War, Kennedy’s undergraduate Honour Law program became a multicultural institution. There were a number of students from the Caribbean, who could not go to England to study law during the war and came to the University of Toronto. There were also a number of so-called ‘enemy aliens,’ who had left Germany before the war, had later been interned as ‘enemy aliens’ in England, and were then transferred to Canada. A number of them entered the U of T law school after their release from custody. One of them, Peter Fuld, whose Jewish family had owned a major factory in Frankfort that had been confiscated by the Nazis, fell in love with a classmate, Ivy Lawrence, a black student from Trinidad. They planned to get married. After the war, Peter and Ivy went to England to meet Peter’s mother, who said she would kill herself if Peter married Ivy. They each married other people, but would see each other from time to time. 8

Peter was able to regain his family business in Frankfort, became very wealthy, but died of brain cancer in 1962 at the age of 41, leaving an estate of £6 million – worth over £100 million today. About ten per cent of the estate was given to Ivy, the bulk of which was to be used by her to start a law school in the West Indies. The will was contested in a 91-day trial – at the time the longest and costliest such trial in British history – and was upheld. Ivy then created the Norman Manley Law School in Jamaica. There is, however, more to the story. When Ivy died in 1999, Ivy – now Ivy Maynier – left $600,000 to the University of Toronto Law School, which was matched by the University to create a $1,200,000 bursary fund to be ‘awarded to law students from underrepresented minority groups who demonstrate financial need.’ There is a story behind each donation. Thank you.