The Changing Canadian Pse Landscape
CHAPTER TWO THE CHANGING CANADIAN PSE LANDSCAPE BY Ken Steele ACCELERATING EVOLUTION OF PSE—THE LONG VIEW In the world today there are universities that have endured, largely unchanged, for almost a millennium: the Università di Bologna traces its origins to 1088 AD, the Université de Paris to 1150 AD, and the University of Oxford to 1167 AD. Canada’s oldest academic institutions are Université Laval (founded as the Seminaire de Quebec in 1663), the University of New Bruns- wick (1785), and the University of King’s College in Halifax (1789). Although six hundred years had passed, the structure, governance, and mechanics of higher education had changed very little by the time it took root in this country. Academic institutions were still primarily commit- ted to preserving knowledge, from antiquity to the present day, in massive libraries impervi- ous to the incidental shocks of plague, warfare, religious schism, or political upheaval. Young would-be scholars went to “read” in university libraries, tutored by professors and enlightened by lectures. For centuries, timelessness was a key virtue of the academic enterprise, and there was nothing particularly denigrating about being labeled an “ivory tower.” In the mid-twentieth century, however, the global environment surrounding higher edu- cation began to evolve, and North American institutions have faced a climate of exponen- tially accelerating change over the past sixty years. Religious foundations gradually gave way to secular funding, and government interest in academic research has steadily grown since the 1940s for military, and now economic, ends. In the 1950s, the post-war GI Bill sparked an unprecedented expansion and democratization of higher education in the U.S., and ultimately in Canada.
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