reputation, Pries told him that the college wouldn’t need an affiliation when it reached that point. As a clever but improbable alternative to Waterloo, the business plan proposed an affiliation with Northland Open University, a somewhat shadowy correspondence university which was incorporated in Whitehorse, Yukon, in 1976, but ceased its operations. In lieu of an agreement with an existing university, the College business plan proposed a direct application to the Ontario government.
In view of financial and accreditation concerns, the Brantford development board that had commissioned the College of the Grand Valley business plan decided that it would not release it to the public, but use it as a basis for a revised plan that would include additional details. To keep the initiative going, they hired John McGregor, who had coordinated the Brant Community Strategic Plan, and formed a University Committee to work with him.5 In an attempt to establish some momentum, McGregor personally contacted sixty prominent Brantford citizens. In December 1996, shortly after the College of the Grand Valley business plan was presented to the board, the Ontario Premier’s Advisory Panel on Future Directions for Postsecondary Education raised the hopes of McGregor and the committee when it recommended that the Degree Granting Act of 1983 be amended to allow the province to accredit private universities. McGregor and others travelled to Toronto to discuss Brantford’s plan to establish a private university and were told (by the deputy minister of training and education) that the City College proposal looked “excellent,” but that it could not be supported immediately, and would have to wait until provincial legislation was changed to allow for private universities.
McGregor and the University Committee made some significant attempts to mobilize support for the Grand Valley initiative. With the help of the local member of Parliament, Jane Stewart, McGregor and his committee established the Grand Valley Education Society (GVES) as a charitable organization to raise money for their new initiative. Ontario’s former minister of education, Bette Stevenson, was contacted. She was sympathetic to the project but was already engaged in a similar venture in Newmarket, where she was helping David Strangway, the former University of Toronto and University of British Columbia president, who was attempting to establish a private institution called Wolfe University. Strangway’s experience at two of Canada’s major universities made him a passionate advocate for the kind of education provided by private liberal arts institutions: an interdisciplinary education focused on high quality undergraduate teaching. When the Newmarket project did not succeed, Strangway took his mission to British Columbia, where Quest University became Canada’s first accredited secular private university in 2005.
The Grand Valley Education Society played a central role in bringing the university to Brantford. Key members pose outside the GVES office: (left to right) Susan Vincent, Colleen Miller, Stuart Parkinson, Vyrt Sisson, Bruce Hodgson, and Douglas Brown.
After months of work on their project, the Brant University Committee decided it needed to mobilize public support for the founding of a private university. It announced a public meeting that took place in September 1997, the month originally proposed for the opening of the new university-college. The meeting inaugurated a series of public meetings that discussed all aspects of the project — the need to raise eight hundred thousand dollars in start-up funds; the character of the proposed college (specializing in small classes, emphasizing teaching and student-professor interaction); and possible locations (a number of sites were proposed). The publisher of The Expositor, Michael Pierce, promised to support the committee by sending a reporter to all public meetings.
The Bell Building on Victoria Square was one of the buildings suggested as a home for University College of the Grand Valley. After Laurier arrived, the university had positive discussions with Bell Canada over its use. The discussions came to an end when security restrictions the company introduced in the wake of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York would not permit public access to the building.
A few weeks before the first meeting, the city’s most outspoken councillor, John Starkey, published an Expositor article entitled “Brantford Needs a University.” Comparing the economic woes of Brantford to those of Newfoundland, he singled out Brantford’s lack of a university: “Unlike all of our principal neighbors, we have no university. And so the city looks to a future without the best, the brightest, the most ambitious, the most determined, the most fortunate. Brantford’s youth is taught that the road to success is a one-way route out of town to someplace with a university.”6
Starkey went on to support the University College of the Grand Valley, favouring the vacant Carnegie Library as the right place for its campus: “The opening of Brantford’s ‘University College of the Grand Valley’ is an event of exciting promise. Follow the announcements as they are made. And when the call goes out for volunteers and donations, work hard and dig deep.”7
The Expositor contributed to the momentum with an editorial entitled “School of Hard Knocks.” Observing that “to date the community seems less than inspired by the idea” of a private university, it granted that “It is certainly understandable that there would be a certain amount of healthy skepticism about the plan. For one thing, this is Brantford, where the unofficial motto is “I’ll believe it when they open the doors.”8
The Expositor itself begged to differ: “For decades Brantford has felt inadequate because it lost out during the explosive period of university growth in the 1960s. Subsequent attempts to develop a university presence in Brantford in conjunction with existing universities have largely been unsuccessful. So, if half-measures have failed to work, why not go all the way and dream big — the University College of Grand Valley? There’s little to lose, and the potential rewards are great.”
By the end of 1997, Brantford was abuzz with activity aimed at bringing post-secondary education to the old downtown. While the University Committee worked on the proposal to establish a private university, the Downtown Renewal Group lobbied to move Mohawk College to the vacant Eaton’s mall. The latter had toiled on the details of a proposal for two years. The plan that they proposed was influenced by discussions with Mohawk College, the old YM-YWCA, the mayor, the city, members of the federal and provincial governments, the mall owners, and the public library, which said that it was ready to serve the new location by transforming its undeveloped third floor into a multi-media study space.
Caroline Freibauer, a reporter with an interest in downtown developments, recounted the developments in The Expositor:
…with the downtown economy virtually deflated, yet another group of concerned citizens is crusading for Mohawk’s Elgin Street campus to move into the vacant Eaton Market Square mall.
And despite the many failed attempts at creating a post-secondary presence in the city, this group is just as earnest, committed and unflagging as the crusaders who have gone before.
“If we have a problem, our problem is explaining to the people of Brantford exactly how good a deal this is,” said Frank Matthews, a retired businessman, entrepreneur and member of an informal concerned citizens committee called the Downtown Renewal Group. The group’s long-term objectives are to encourage and bring new initiatives to Brantford’s core. The short-term objective is to make a proposal for a joint Mohawk College and YM-YWCA development work….
Terry Jones, executive director of the YM-YWCA, which is in dire need of a new facility, likes the partnerships a Mohawk plan creates. “It’s a community initiative which addresses
