UBC Law: History

Chapter 7: Law’s Content

The University of British Columbia, 1945 to 1950

THE ENORMOUSLY IMPORTANT TASK of training the next generation to carry out law’s crucial mission was entrusted to an institution seemingly ill-equipped for the task.

The University of British Columbia was under-staffed, under-built, and under-resourced. The end of the war brought a flood of new students to an already impoverished institution and the new faculty entered an environment that must have seemed at times to be utterly chaotic. At the end of the Second World War, the university exploded, virtually bursting its seams, and British Columbia’s first faculty of law came into being amid a whirlwind of activity on the Point Grey campus. Professor Harry Logan describes this time as "the most stirring and exhilarating period in the University’s history"—a statement that is both literally true and a cautious euphemism for a period of great difficulty. "The Federal Government’s open-handed assistance in the education of discharged military personnel, the generous policy of admissions adopted by the National Conference of Canadian Universities, and the decision of the President and Board of Governors to reject no candidate who could qualify for entrance, brought an influx of veteran students which taxed to the limit the already overstrained resources of the University."

The university’s new president, Norman MacKenzie, was a former law teacher from eastern Canada. Henry Angus recorded that MacKenzie’s policy of opening "the doors of the university to all qualified candidates, no matter what the strain on resources might be" resulted in unprecedented growth. From a student population of approximately 3,000 in 1944–1945:

[t]he number of students rose rapidly to over 9,000. Accommodation was provided by procuring army huts and moving them in by truck, placing them on cement foundations and equipping them with the necessary facilities. This step was taken boldly even without an assurance that the Government of Canada would meet the cost. Various concessions were made to students who had been in the services and to whom some of the normal university requirement (e.g., an obligatory language) would have been irksome or even prohibitive. But with minor exceptions it was sought to maintain standards in the face of difficulties. The classes were large. . . . In general the graduates were fed into a society eager for manpower—an economic climate very different from that of the 1930s and the First World War.
Looking back, twenty-one years later, I doubt if anyone fully understood the revolution that had begun in Canadian universities. The population explosion was not to affect them for many years but nevertheless they were swamped with students. The teaching staff had heavy administrative duties and there was little time for research and creative writing. The universities were expected to give types of vocational training that had not in earlier years been considered to justify a university degree. Yet this training had to be given somewhere and the universities could give it efficiently and economically.

The law faculty began in the same spirit that motivated the explosive expansion of the university as a whole. By September 1945, the personnel of the new law faculty had been assembled. Dean George Curtis, Professor Frederick Read, and their secretary, Miss Wright, carried on the work of the faculty even though they had no offices, no books, no equipment, and no classrooms. The three began work as "squatters" in the university senate room. The dean, as befits the dignity of office, occupied the chancellor’s chair at one end. Professor Read sat at the other end of the room, while the faculty secretary worked in the middle.

"No sooner had I sat down in the Chancellor’s chair," Curtis recalled, "than the door of the Senate Chamber opened and a veteran came in. He was followed by a steady stream of others." The veterans were home and eager to get on with life. Their presence must have brought terrible moral pressure to bear. Although it was an enormous gamble—hindsight would have judged it reckless in the extreme if the new faculty had failed—Curtis decided to open the law school that term, with absolutely nothing ready and less than a month to get organized.

We had no accommodation, of course. I was placed in the Senate Room. I was up at one end. The university supplied me with a secretary in the middle and then Mr. Read down at the other corner. In came innumerable young men and one or two young ladies, most of them in uniform, because the war had ended so abruptly; those who were of long service got first release and they came in. Some of them had started under articles, others hadn’t and I said to them, "Well, we’ve nothing here as you see . . . Well, you’ve got your D.V.A. benefits, why don’t you go to the established law schools? They are there already. We will try to do the best we can." So many of them said, "Look, I’ve been away four, five, six years, I’ll take a chance. When do we start?"
—Dean George Curtis, 1980

Chapter 7 continued