Canada: QUEBEC: The New Laval

For nearly 300 years, Laval University had been almost as grim and ascetic as its founder, François de Montmorency-Laval de Montigny, first bishop of Quebec. The bishop wore a hair shirt, watered his soup, slept on wood. The university, which De Laval started as a seminary in 1663, was cramped into narrow, grey stone buildings in Quebec City’s huddled Quartier Latin. Its curriculum concentrated on theology, law and medicine. For diversion, students were expected to turn to religious reading or take meditative walks in the walled courtyard of the university.

Last week. Laval University made plans for a big change. A rally in Quebec’s Coliseum launched a $10 million public subscription campaign to bring Laval up-to-date. The university would spread over an area of one square mile in the spacious St. Foye district. There would be white stone buildings, a swimming pool and broad reaches of campus. It would cost $100 million and the whole job would take 50 years. Premier Maurice Duplessis made the first move: a check for $2,000,000 from the province of Quebec.*

No Overpayment. Two million dollars was no overpayment for the university’s contribution to Quebec. Ever since Bishop de Laval started his seminary to train French and Indian priests, the history of the school and of French Canada have been interwoven. Laval was the center of learning in New France. After the British conquest, it continued to educate French-speaking leaders. Money from Bishop de Laval’s lands (granted to him by Louis XIV) kept the school going. Laval turned out scholars who kept alive the French culture in the English-governed land.

In the 20th Century, Laval’s faculty discovered belatedly that all this was not enough; French Canada needed more. New mines (copper, gold, iron and aluminum) had been established in Quebec’s north; vast power developments were being built to serve them. The giant pulp & paper industry depended on scientific forestry. The sons of the habitants wanted to know about engineering and business.

No Room. Younger clerics on Laval’s faculty were all for meeting the need. But older heads stood against them: there was no room for business and industry in the place which Bishop de Laval himself had ordained as “a perpetual school of virtue.” Not until 1937 did the opposition yield enough to approve a faculty of science. Not until February, 1947, did Laval have a school of commerce.

The new faculties taxed Laval’s space. Enrollment (1,294 in 1936) jumped last year to more than 3,000 full-time students. But there was no room for expansion in the tight little blocks below Quebec’s Citadel. Quebec’s Archbishop Maurice Roy, World War II army chaplain, agreed that Laval would have to be remade. Said he: “The university . . . must addpt itself to the continual progress of science and technology.”

*For news of another Catholic school, see RELIGION.