The Idea of a University
; "Athabasca, Assiniboia, and Pembina Halls")
The modern state university has sprung from a demand on the part of the people themselves for intellectual recognition, a recognition which only a century ago was denied them. The result is that such institutions must be conducted in such a way as to relate them as closely as possible to the life of the people. The people demand that knowledge shall not alone be the concern of scholars. The uplifting of the whole people shall be its final goal.
Dr Henry Marshall Tory,Convocation Address, University of Alberta, Oct. 6, 1908.
Before legislation was passed, its first halls were built, and its first students began their studies, the University of Alberta was, from its very start, looking toward the future. The model for Alberta’s university was that of a non-denominational, co-educational, publicly-funded, teaching institution. It was a modern institution that would see the University of Alberta as an integral part of the evolution of post-secondary education in Canada.
It took two graduates from Montreal’s McGill University to lay the intellectual foundations of the University of Alberta. Alexander Cameron Rutherford, Strathcona businessman and politician, and Dr Henry Marshall Tory, mathematics and physics professor at McGill, met on May 26, 1905 at a gathering of the McGill Graduates Society of Strathcona and Edmonton in Strathcona, Northwest Territories (it would not become Strathcona, Alberta until September of that year). The two men saw in each other a kindred spirit, someone who believed in the importance of university education and was interested in delivering it to the people of Alberta. Thus began the correspondence between Rutherford and Tory that would further refine the blueprint for Alberta’s provincial university.
Both Rutherford and Tory subscribed to the idea of a university that was developing in the West at the time. Neither of them was enamoured with the idea of creating an educational elite in Alberta; rather they saw the university as a publicly-funded institution that would be accessible to all. With this in mind, Rutherford and Tory conceptualized a secular university, one that gave women full and equal access to all programs and services, and that had as its primary focus, teaching and research.
The ongoing fellowship and correspondence shared by Alexander Rutherford and Henry Marshall Tory inspired Rutherford to pursue the creation of a university in Alberta in the very first sitting of the Alberta Legislature in 1906, when he introduced An Act to Establish and Incorporate a University for the Province of Alberta. This legislation articulated many of the ideas Rutherford and Tory had discussed in their months of correspondence, and when passed, would provide the political support that would set the building of the university in motion.