UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO: A BRIEF HISTORY
 
by Chris Redmond
 
(Originally written for IMAGES OF WATERLOO, published 1992 by the
Office of Information and Public Affairs and Office of Alumni Affairs.)
 
 
"Why," a stranger once asked, "would anyone name a university
after a great defeat?"
 
Higher education met its Waterloo on July 3, 1957, while the
farming and insurance town of Waterloo, Ontario, named after the
1815 battle, was celebrating its hundredth birthday. John Diefenbaker
had been prime minister less than a month. Sputnik 1 hadn't yet been
launched. Christopher Plummer was playing Hamlet on the new
Stratford stage. The Milwaukee Braves were leading the National
League. And little Waterloo College, a Lutheran institution founded in
1911, was starting to wonder what had hit it.
 
Monday, July 1, was a sunny day for a Dominion Day parade. On
Tuesday, 75 men who wanted to be engineers wrote admission exams
and bought a term's worth of textbooks. And on Wednesday, July 3,
classes began at the Waterloo College Associate Faculties, later to
become the University of Waterloo. The Associate Faculties had been
created to provide the technical university training that local business
leaders thought Kitchener-Waterloo needed. A co-operative system of
education, with students attending classes for three months and then
working in supervised course-related jobs for three months, was
designed to give practical experience. It was the first co-op program
in Canada, and other universities looked down their noses at the very
idea. But that didn't deter Gerry Hagey, who had moved from the
world of advertising into the role of college president with a passion
for doing things differently.
 
What is now the Waterloo campus was a stretch of farm fields.
The earliest engineering students -- "a strange, strange crew", one of
them would recall for a historian a few years later -- took their classes
in prefabricated "huts" next to the two demure brick buildings of
Waterloo College, on what's now the Wilfrid Laurier University campus.
Under the tin roofs, the air grew so hot that in August they were
listening to lectures in their underwear. Then in October they were off
to work-term jobs, and a second group of students took their place in
the classroom.
 
It was a time of change for Ontario education, with universities
moving from religious affiliation to government support, and preparing
to expand for the post-war baby boom. Hagey had talked with friends
and colleagues from industry, and by December 1955 a pioneering
group had decided that Waterloo College had to go beyond its
traditional work in the arts; they would create a science faculty, soon
redefined to mean an engineering school. Teachers of engineering and
basic science signed on for what seemed a risky venture. The college
built a chemistry lab in its arts building, the provincial government
gave an initial grant of $625,000, and the biggest industry in town,
Seagram's distillery, donated money towards a stadium and
gymnasium, the sort of thing a growing college would be sure to need.
 
Hagey and his colleagues -- Ira G. Needles of B. F. Goodrich in
Kitchener prominent among them -- had even bigger plans. In January
1958, they announced the purchase of 237 acres of farmland to the
northwest, well outside the little city of Waterloo. Later that year
construction began for an academic building on the new site, a
building that the next generation would come to know as Engineering
1. By the end of the year the Associate Faculties had 29 professors
ready to move into their new quarters.
 
The "faculty of science and engineering" was showing signs of
overpowering the college to which it was still attached. Delicate
negotiations turned into bitter hostilities, and eventually a complete
break. In the spring of 1959, the provincial government established
three universities: Waterloo Lutheran University to continue the old
college, the University of Waterloo to continue the Associate Faculties,
and the University of St. Jerome's College to acquire degree-granting
powers for a century-old Roman Catholic college in Kitchener. St.
Jerome's and Waterloo Lutheran were both expected to federate with
the new UW, and St. Jerome's promptly did. But Waterloo Lutheran
chose to remain independent and church-affiliated; UW was on its
own, and had to create a faculty of arts in a hurry in 1960 to hold up
its head as a university. Within weeks, it did just that, and arts
students joined students of science and engineering on the infant
campus.
 
\Of Mud and Dreams\ was the title James Scott gave to his history
of the new university's first ten years. The dreams belonged to Hagey
and his colleagues, and to the early faculty and staff who came to
Waterloo: Ted Batke (chemical engineer and vice-president), Doug
Wright (first dean of engineering, to return in the 1980's as
president), Bruce Kelley (first dean of science), George Dufault
(pioneer administrator of co-op programs), Rev. C. L. "Corky"
Siegfried (who brought St. Jerome's into the university), Ralph
Stanton (mathematician, wearer of pink ties and first dean of graduate
studies) and others like them. The mud was on every side as
contractors turned flat farmland into a rolling campus, placing brick
buildings around quadrangles in an echo of the British academic style,
and planning a "ring road" to keep traffic away from the pedestrian
sanctuary the campus would some day be. Bricks were delivered by the
ton, but the builders managed to spare the old Schweitzer farmhouse,
one day to be the Graduate Club. An original plan to put up one
building a year accelerated: in 1966, seven buildings opened. The Dana
Porter Library, named after the politician and jurist who became UW's
first chancellor, had three storeys, then was built up to seven floors,
then ten. Business leaders on the board of governors bought a square
mile of cornfield and lake on the north side of Columbia Street, against
the day when the university might have an enrolment of 30,000 or
more.
 
Three more church colleges joined the university (Renison from
the Anglican tradition, Conrad Grebel with Mennonite affiliations, and
St. Paul's United). The world's first mathematics faculty was created.
The first co-op programs outside engineering were introduced -- in
physics, then other sciences, eventually the arts as well. The co-op
system was rescheduled to involve four-month terms, producing less
disruption and more teaching weeks. In 1967 the College of
Optometry of Ontario, long an independent institution in Toronto,
moved to Waterloo and affiliated with the university; it spent seven
years in rented downtown space before a building designed for its
needs was opened facing Columbia Street. A physical education
program was established, grew, changed, and eventually became a
faculty of applied health sciences. A faculty of environmental studies
was created two decades before the general public was mounting the
environmentalist bandwagon.
 
Student activities turned into student politics. The innocent
enthusiasms of the early years (engineers who painted "Beer" on the
city water-tower got national publicity for Waterloo) gave way to social
consciousness, "radicalism", all the excitements of the late sixties.
Sit-ins took place at the bookstore, the library, and the president's
office; the Federation of Students held marathon meetings, and a
student newspaper called \The Chevron\ rallied support for a greater
student role in university affairs. A new provincial Act in 1972,
reorganizing the university's governance, gave students a voice on the
board of governors and the senate, a recognition unprecedented in
Canada. As things settled down in the early 1970's, a core of
enthusiastic Marxists remained to keep life stirred up, even after their
\Chevron\ was ousted from campus in 1975.
 
Also in 1975, students celebrated the first and only time the
Warriors have won a national championship in Waterloo's chosen
sport, basketball. Other championships came to a fair number of
Athena and Warrior teams, except of course the football Warriors, who
finally ran up a winless streak so long that it became a source of
perverse pride, until a coach with a long-time winning reputation was
brought in and turned things around dramatically. Undefeated or winless,
Waterloo teams had faithful followers in the raucous Warriors Band.
UW's real achievement in athletics was the intramural, or "campus
recreation", program, which gave thousands of students a chance to
forget their cares and clear their lungs with softball, late-night
broomball, or squash. Social life, centred on off-campus pubs in the
early days, moved back to campus with the opening of the
Bombshelter and then Federation Hall, biggest student-run pub in the
country. Still there were grumbles that coming to Waterloo meant
putting your life on hold, commuting to Toronto on weekends,
packing for a work term the moment you'd settled into the school
routine. Being a student at Waterloo wasn't relaxing. Wasn't meant to
be.
 
Howard Petch was president pro tem for a year, and then in
1970 came Burt Matthews. Growth was slowing. In an era of high
inflation there was a keen interest in pay increases and budgets each
year. Waterloo professors were among the most highly paid in Canada,
but inevitably that meant heavy workloads and big classes. "Integrated
studies" as an experiment with a flaky image became "independent
studies", a place to get serious about an idea. Interdisciplinary
programs grew up: Canadian studies, peace and conflict studies,
women's studies, gerontology. Waterloo resolutely didn't open a
business school, but students could register for business courses down
the street at Wilfrid Laurier University, the name Waterloo Lutheran
adopted in 1973. Correspondence courses, first delivered on reel-to-reel
tape for a few high school teachers who wanted more knowledge
of physics, mushroomed in the cassette era, eventually reaching more
than five thousand students each term with single courses or complete
degree packages.
 
Waterloo had been a computer university since the early 1960's,
when Wes Graham and a few colleagues decided that even
undergraduates should have access to the room-sized machines that were
coming on the market. Faculty and their students wrote user-friendly versions
of the early programming languages, and WATFOR and WATFIV took the
Waterloo name around the world. When the faculty of mathematics was
created it included a department of computer science; soon
computers were Waterloo's best-known activity. There was a Volker-Craig
terminal on everybody's desk; before long, it was replaced by a
micro or a workstation. In 1988 came the glass-and-steel William G.
Davis Centre for Computer Research. Students in arts wrote their
essays using computers, while engineering students stayed up half the
night doing their work on the Watstar network.
 
Research became something that could be seen to make money
and benefit society, not just something professors mysteriously did
after lectures. Millions of dollars came from governments, from
non-profit granting agencies, from industry, to support laboratories
and thinkers. Spinoff companies founded by recent graduates, or
moonlighting professors, began selling software and modifying
hardware. The phrase "technology transfer" was heard in the land. A
powerful spokesman for such activity was Doug Wright, returning in
1981 as the university's president, and incessantly travelling to tell
governments, corporate leaders, Korean and Japanese industrialists
that what the world needed was more highly trained workers, as
many of them as possible to come from Waterloo.
 
Other voices responded: don't forget Waterloo's work in the
traditional pure sciences, in clinical psychology, in "public history".
Don't forget a dance program formally linked to the National Ballet
School, don't forget a PhD program in philosophy, don't forget pure
mathematics. New fields of practical study were opened as well: a
school of accountancy blossomed, actuarial science was taught, the
English department decided to emphasize "rhetoric and professional
writing", the kinesiology department sent a growing number of its
graduates off to chiropractic college. The school of architecture,
marrying professional skill with liberal arts understanding, flourished.
As enrolment growth levelled off, the university found itself with about
16,000 full-time and 9,000 part-time students, including those
studying through correspondence, and talk of much physical growth
was no longer heard. The suggestion of a "research park" on the still
largely empty north campus became a detailed plan for development of
neighbourhoods there, including plenty of research and commercial
space, over five decades or longer.
 
In the 1980's Waterloo responded to government demands and
social changes with new safety programs, new day care services, and
much attention to the status of women on campus. Sexual harassment,
grievance policies, natural justice, equal rights and the balance of the
sexes among professors were constantly in the news. Women,
unknown in Waterloo's earliest years, have always been
under-represented on the campus, with its dominance by technical,
traditionally male fields of study. But now came pay equity,
employment equity, "goals" for the hiring of women professors, and
special programs to entice high school girls into the study of math,
science and engineering.
 
In the 1980's, too, came a new interest in links with alumni --
now there were forty thousand, fifty thousand, sixty thousand of them --
and with corporate friends who might provide academic guidance,
jobs for graduates, and, frankly, money. A development campaign in
the early 1980's, the Watfund, brought the campus computers and
other equipment donated by well-wishers in industry. A second
campaign, launched in 1992, was intended to bring funds for more
equipment and books, for more people (the faculty and staff felt
stretched ever thinner), and for buildings to house some of those new
activities. A priority, now that the whole country was recognizing the
importance of environmental research, was a building to house
"environmental science" and "environmental engineering" programs.
Students began studying the university's own energy consumption and
waste disposal, under the label "WatGreen".
 
In the early 1990's, the University of Waterloo faces financial
hard times, but it doesn't face them alone. This is a university with
friends, and a university that (having never tried to do all things) may
just be able to do some things really well. Doug Wright likes to say that
of all the universities founded in the English-speaking world during
the baby boom years, only one has become an internationally-known
success, and that one is Waterloo. A university named after a defeat?
Oh, maybe; but a university that's triumphed in its 35-year life, ready
for the next battle, and the one after that.