Education at McMaster: A review: History

Kacper Niburski

Assistant News Editor

While McMaster has devoted copious funds to maintaining its education model, it has remained relatively unchanged for a hundred years. McMaster was founded in 1881 as Toronto Baptist College by William McMaster, the first president of the Canadian Bank of Commerce, who bequeathed a substantial amount of capital to finance the university. Limiting the first programs to specializations in arts and theology, the first degrees were founded in 1894. In the dream of McMaster, the University was endowed as “a Christian school of learning.”

For the most part, this remained the character of McMaster. The early 19th century saw an expanding Baptist culture, and McMaster became a Christian mecca in the heart of Toronto. With its notoriety increasing, classes doubled, in-class education became more centralized upon a lecturing style developed at Harvard, and McMaster outgrew its physical boundaries.

As McMaster blossomed as an institute of higher learning, it began to lose its faith in more ways than one.

That is to say, much of the early theology and Baptist dogma that characterized McMaster’s nascent beginning was subjected to the scrutiny of a changing world, one that focused largely on the growth and progress of science. While by no means an existential crisis of grand proportion, McMaster saw the construction of the first Science Building in 1906, which spearheaded both a newfound appreciation of the field of science as well as a list of degrees not previously offered in the academic year.

Yet despite the influx of novel studies, McMaster’s education model remained stagnant. As it does now, professors taught, students learned and the cycle of so-called higher education continued without end or sign of mitigating, even after McMaster relocated to Hamilton in 1930.

Much of this can be attributed to the Province’s mandate on higher education. Considering that under the British North American Act responsibilities for universities rest in the government of the province it is located in, McMaster was incorporated under the Legislative Assembly of Ontario. To that end, McMaster has always been subjected to the wishes and machinations of the Province.

This, of course, is not a bad thing. Funding for research primarily comes from the University. Yet as a result, McMaster has continued along the same education current even after 1957, when McMaster became a publicly funded nondenominational society.

Some efforts have been made, though. Flagship interdisciplinary programs like Arts and Science, Integrated Science and Health Sciences function contrary to the general university experience: there are small classes, close relationships with professors and a focus on independent learning.

With the much of the education renewal discussions looking at these pioneering programs, only time will tell whether or not education will move forward with integrity, as Deane wishes to, or instead just move forward, only to realize it has been walking backwards the whole time.