up on the downtown.
The end result was a proposal that did not recommend a university campus, but a new campus of Mohawk College. As a concession to the idea of a university, Mohawk agreed that it would make arrangements with already existing universities, allowing them to offer programming in Brantford. When the idea of a Brantford university resurfaced a decade later, Caroline Freibauer recounted the discussions:
Back in the 1980s … Mohawk had its satellite campus downtown in the Beckett Building on Colborne Street where adult upgrading and retraining classes were held in six classrooms and a conference room. Other job readiness and retraining courses for women were offered at the YM-YWCA. The Brant-Elgin campus, then called Braneida, was gaining a reputation for industrial training. Nursing programs were run out of the Brantford General Hospital. The next logical step was to unite all these campuses.
Thus a campaign began — the first of several — to bring a full-fledged post-secondary school into Brant, a community with half as many university graduates as the provincial average. In 1987, a $24-million facility was proposed.… By 1988 the price tag for the dream campus had grown to $35 million. At that time, Mohawk’s president Keith McIntyre began negotiating with universities to offer degree completion programs in Brantford.… In 1989, the effort switched to an expansion of the existing campus and the price tag went up again, to $38.9 million.7
In the end, the effect of the Nixon initiative was limited. The provincial government rejected the plan for a new Mohawk campus, which it deemed too ambitious and expensive. As a kind of consolation prize, it provided a grant (of $6.2 million) to expand the college’s operations on its Brantford campus, which was located in a warehouse district away from the downtown.
A number of prominent Brantford figures continued to push for a university. John Starkey was a colourful city councillor in love with Brantford history. He had gained a reputation for speaking his mind, not hesitating to criticize his fellow councillors, the mayor, or the city government. One avid reader of the commentaries Starkey had written for The Expositor told me that he had used Starkey as his “crap detector,” counting on him to illuminate civic issues by playing devil’s advocate.
Starkey was deeply committed to all things Brantfordian and believed in radical reform. In 1994, he ran for mayor on a platform that included a commitment to a university. In his speeches he argued that the money spent on attempts to reinvigorate Brantford’s economy had been wasted, and that tax dollars should be put to a different end: “Brantford needs a university.”8 This position was emphasized in his campaign:
As a community, we should make a commitment to begin raising funds and accumulating assets to enable Brantford to eventually attract or establish a local university. This will make our city more competitive as an attractive place to live, locate, and invest, and provide the option of a higher education to those who cannot afford to go away to school. The importance of leadership is essential to the success of such a crucial project, and so from the Mayor’s 1995 income, I pledge the first $40,000 to establish the “University for Brantford Foundation.”9
Others began thinking of post-secondary education as a solution to the downtown’s problems. One of the problems was the empty downtown mall, a nondescript brick fortress that sprawled over more than two downtown blocks, protecting its interior space from the deteriorating downtown beyond its walls. One city manager I talked to complained that the mall was not “porous” enough to create an integrated downtown. “It functions,” he said, “like a constipated brick in the middle of downtown.” The mall’s fortress-like walls might not matter if it had successfully created a vibrant retail market, but it quickly failed. By the 1990s, it was eminently usable downtown space bereft of stores and customers. In an effort to promote downtown revitalization, a group associated with Mohawk College proposed that the college move into the empty space. Skip Stanbridge, the vice-president in charge of Mohawk’s Brantford campus, said that administrators were willing to discuss all possibilities. “There are people in the city of Brantford and at all three levels of Brantford,” he said, “who feel there’s a natural link between the revitalization of the downtown and the development of post-secondary education in Brantford.10
The success of any of the plans for Brantford post-secondary initiatives required popular support. A long and involved attempt to establish a broad community consensus on Brantford’s future began with a mayor’s task force on the future of the city. It proposed a county-wide strategic plan that was undertaken by a not-for-profit group (a local Community Futures Development Corporation), which hired a planning company and a local coordinator who played a key role in subsequent developments. John McGregor came to Brantford after working on development issues in the Kalahari Desert and the Northwest Territories and on projects with Six Nations. He was staggered by Brant County’s profound pessimism when he arrived, which struck him as more negative than the attitudes he had experienced in his work in the Kalahari and the North. He saw an underlying defeatism as the principal barrier to change, and welcomed a strategic plan that might get the city talking and thinking in a more positive way. In an effort to push in this direction, the discussion material he and the planning committee produced presented the city and the county as a community driven by “a fierce independence and unshakeable pride” and a “continuing tradition of genius” rooted in a proud history.11
The strategic planning exercise was an ambitious endeavour that began with a detailed survey of seven hundred residents and fifty community leaders, and twenty workshops attended by three hundred people. The final strategic plan, released in April 1997, noted that the county’s levels of post-secondary education were lower than the provincial average and listed “brain drain” as one of its major problems. In its positive recommendations it encouraged the establishment of a university in Brantford as a way to “provide an opportunity for young people to get an education locally,” and to “raise overall education levels in the County.”12 Other recommendations supported the proposal that Mohawk College move into the empty Eaton’s mall, promoted lifelong learning and formal education (in particular, the use of new technology and distance education), and advocated programs focused on business training.
The details of the Brant Community Strategic Plan were not realized. The proposed Coordinating Committee which was supposed to oversee the achievement of its various components never materialized. It is difficult to see how such a committee could have managed the sweeping scope and the myriad details of the plan’s proposals. But at the same time, the creation of the plan did what good strategic planning does — it made Brantford and Brant County rethink what they could be. In the aftermath, BOBB — the Big on Brantford/Brant Committee — organized a series of local forums on key strategic issues. In May 1997, one discussed the idea that Mohawk College should move to the downtown core. In September, another discussed the need for a Brantford university. The notion that Brantford needed post-secondary downtown had by this time taken root.
Even in the tough times, Brantford has enjoyed a strong identity. In the campaign to establish a university, this expressed itself in a desire to have a university of its own. Everyone in Brantford nods knowingly when I tell them that there are those in Brantford who did not want a satellite campus of Laurier or some other existing university but a new “UBC”— a University of Brant County.
In the quest for a university, the local desire to have a Brantford institution was manifest in a proposal to establish a private university. This was a radical idea in a country which defines university education in terms of public institutions. In this respect, Canadian education has developed in a different way than its American counterpart, where some of the nation’s best known universities — Harvard, Yale, Stanford — are privately funded institutions. The idea that Brantford should have a private university proposed a new educational paradigm for Canada, but this was not what motivated the city. From its point of view, the plan
