University of Saskatchewan

• 1. Introduction

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  The University of Saskatchewan opened its doors on the 28th of September, 1909, with seventy students walking into classrooms on the east bank of the South Saskatchewan River. Three years later, the first class graduated. Of the three students who earned honours, two were women. That detail, embedded in a university barely five years old, tells you something about what the founders intended when they wrote into the founding act that no woman should be deprived of any advantage accorded to male students.

  The university was born out of a provincial rivalry. Five cities fought to claim it. Battleford, Moose Jaw, Prince Albert, Regina, and Saskatoon all lobbied hard. The first president, Walter Murray, favoured the provincial capital, Regina. A politically influenced vote settled the matter on the 7th of April, 1909, and Saskatoon won.

  What grew from that contested beginning is a place that built Canada's first betatron facility, constructed the world's first non-commercial cobalt-60 cancer therapy unit, and now houses a synchrotron the size of a football field. The questions that follow are about how a prairie agricultural college became one of Canada's fifteen most research-intensive universities, and what it cost, built, and discovered along the way.

• 2. The Founding Vision

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  Walter Charles Murray became the university's first president, and the document he inherited shaped everything. The founding act, passed by the Legislative Assembly of Saskatchewan on the 19th of March 1907, declared the university would provide facilities for higher education in all its branches, enabling all persons without regard to race, creed, or religion to take the fullest advantage. That language was not incidental; it was the institution's declared reason for existing.

  The model chosen was the American state university, emphasizing extension work and applied research to serve an agrarian province. But the governance structure came from closer to home. The university's bicameral arrangement of senate and board of governors was drawn from the provincial University of Toronto Act of 1906. The senate handled academic policy; the board of governors controlled finance. The president, appointed by the board, was to bridge the two and provide institutional leadership.

  The original plan set an ambitious scope: colleges of arts and science, agriculture with forestry, domestic science, education, engineering, law, medicine, pharmacy, veterinary science, and dentistry. The university was to be publicly funded but independent. Seventy students walked in that first September, and by 1912, the first class had collected their degrees. The first convocation elected Chief Justice Edward L. Wetmore as the first chancellor, and Duncan P. McColl became the first registrar. The fight song, written by Russell Hopkins in 1939, was still three decades away; Hopkins himself had won a Rhodes Scholarship in 1932, and would go on to cement his place in the university community.

• 3. Stone, Structure, and the Bowl

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  On the 29th of July, 1910, Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier laid the cornerstone of the College Building, the first structure on the new campus. The architect was David Robertson Brown of the firm Brown and Vallance, who designed the buildings in Collegiate Gothic style using native limestone quarried just north of campus. That greystone, as it was called, became one of the most recognizable features of the university over the years.

  Brown and Vallance were extraordinarily productive in the university's early decades. They designed the Administration Building, Saskatchewan Hall, the Engineering Building, the Barn and Stock Pavilion, Emmanuel College, the Faculty Club, the President's Residence, Qu'Appelle Hall, the Physics Building, the Chemistry Building, and the Memorial Gates, among others. When the Faculty Club burned in 1964, they rebuilt it. When the Engineering Building burned in 1925, they rebuilt that too.

  The original campus plan organized buildings around a green space called The Bowl. When the local limestone supply ran out, the university turned to Tyndall stone, quarried in Manitoba. The College Building was officially opened on the 1st of May, 1913, by the Honourable Walter Scott, and in 2001 it was declared a National Historic Site of Canada by Sheila Copps, Minister of Canadian Heritage, on the 27th of February of that year. Over time, the original buildings were connected by skywalks and tunnels, and the campus expanded to its current 2,425 acres, with another 500 acres allocated to Innovation Place Research Park.

• 4. Nuclear Physics and the Synchrotron

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  In 1948, the University of Saskatchewan built the first betatron facility in Canada. Three years later, scientists there constructed the world's first non-commercial cobalt-60 therapy unit. The first female chancellor of the university, Sylvia Fedoruk, was a member of that cobalt-60 research team. She later served as Saskatchewan's lieutenant-governor from 1988 to 1994.

  The cobalt-60 work helped establish USask as a serious force in nuclear physics. A linear accelerator followed as part of the Saskatchewan Accelerator Laboratory in 1964. The Plasma Physics Laboratory operates a tokamak on campus. In 1949, the university used the SCR-270 radar to image the Aurora Borealis for the first time.

  Decades of research and collaboration with global scientists eventually led to the university being selected as the home of Canada's national facility for synchrotron light research. The Canadian Light Source opened on the 22nd of October, 2004. It is the size of a football field, and the source text describes it as one of the largest and most innovative investments in Canadian science. Discoveries made at USask also include sulfate-resistant cement, a material with durable construction applications well beyond the campus itself. The Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, known as VIDO, opened a facility in 2003 to develop DNA-enhanced immunization vaccines for both humans and animals.

• 5. Colleges, Expansion, and Regina

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  Arts and Science opened in 1909, Agriculture and Engineering in 1912, Law in 1913, Pharmacy in 1914, Commerce in 1917, Medicine in 1926, Education in 1927, Home Economics in 1928, Nursing in 1938, Graduate Studies and Research in 1946, Kinesiology in 1958, Veterinary Medicine in 1964, Dentistry in 1965, and Physical Therapy in 1976. The list charts a century of expansion from a single agrarian college into a comprehensive research institution.

  Correspondence courses were established in 1929, extending the university's reach beyond Saskatoon. Theological colleges were also affiliated from early on: Emmanuel College joined in 1909, St. Andrew's College in 1913, the Lutheran Theological Seminary in 1920, St. Thomas More College in 1936, and Central Pentecostal College in 1983.

  The most consequential branch was Regina College, which the university rescued from bankruptcy in 1934. It was granted degree-giving privileges in 1959, making it a second USask campus. By 1974, a separate act of the provincial legislature made Regina College an independent institution, the University of Regina. The university also established the first Canadian university-based department of extension in 1910, reflecting the founding emphasis on serving the province's citizens directly, and by 2007 the alumni association counted more than 132,200 members who had graduated since 1907.

• 6. The People Behind the Degrees

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  Gerhard Herzberg arrived at the university in 1935, offered a position as a way to flee Nazi Germany. He stayed for ten years. In 1970, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Henry Taube, another alumnus, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1983.

  John Diefenbaker, the 13th prime minister of Canada, is also an alumnus and served as the university's chancellor. He and his wife were buried near the Diefenbaker Canada Centre on campus, which houses his paper collection and legacy. Emmett Matthew Hall, who graduated from USask, became a Supreme Court judge and one of the founders of Canada's Medicare system. Ray Hnatyshyn, the 24th governor general of Canada, also studied here. Among premiers alone, the university's alumni list includes Grant Devine, Woodrow Lloyd, Roy Romanow, Brad Wall, Scott Moe, and Alison Redford of Alberta.

  On the faculty side, Thorbergur Thorvaldson, the chemist for whom the Thorvaldson Building is named, was the university's first dean of graduate studies. The hymn for convocation ceremonies, known simply as the University Hymn, was written by Neil Harris in 1949 and has been performed at convocations since. Among more recent alumni, Tracy A. Robinson became CEO of Canadian National Railway, and Noraini Ahmad became the 16th Minister of Plantation and Commodities of Malaysia. In all, 78 USask graduates have received the Rhodes Scholarship.

• 7. War, Memory, and the Gates

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  Three hundred and forty-two students, faculty, and staff of the University of Saskatchewan enlisted for the First World War. Of those, 67 were killed, 100 were wounded, and 33 were awarded medals of valour. Their names were carved into a stone wall at the Memorial Gates, which architect David Robertson Brown designed and which were erected in 1927 at the corner of College Drive and Hospital Drive.

  The inscription on the gates reads: "These are they who went forth from this University to the Great War and gave their lives that we might live in freedom." When a new access road called Hospital Drive was built in the 1990s, the gates were preserved in their original location. The hallways of the Old Administrative Building are lined with memorial scrolls honouring alumni who served in both World Wars.

  The campus also holds the grave of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, near the centre that bears his name. The Victoria School House, built in 1888 as the first school in the Temperance Colony and originally located in Nutana, was moved onto campus and declared a historic site on the 1st of June, 1967. The Rugby Chapel, built in 1912 as a gift from the students of Rugby School, was declared a City of Saskatoon Municipal Heritage Property; it traces its origins to a building first constructed in 1883 in Prince Albert.

• 8. Campus Life and Athletics

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  The Sheaf, the student publication, first appeared in 1912. By 1920 it was publishing weekly, and it has continued to publish since. The campus pub Louis and Place Riel Theatre both opened in 1975. Place Riel, the student centre, opened in 1980 and underwent renovation completed around 2012-13. These facilities were named after Louis Riel.

  The student radio station CJUS-FM began broadcasting in 1965 on a non-commercial basis. It became a limited commercial station in 1983, lost funding by 1985, and was revived in internet radio form in early 2005. Graduate students have been represented by the Graduate Student's Association since 1992, located since 2007 in the Emmanuel and St. Chad Chapel.

  Athletic teams compete under the name Saskatchewan Huskies. The Huskies Track and Field team has won the national championships on 12 occasions. The men's football team has won the Vanier Cup three times, in 1990, 1996, and 1998. The Athletic Wall of Fame was launched in 1984 at the university's 75th anniversary, with 75 inaugural honours awarded. Since 2001, the annual Huskie Salute ceremony has inducted new candidates each year. The university's student residences carry names drawn from explorers associated with Saskatchewan's history, including Samuel Hearne, Henry Kelsey, Peter Pond, Anthony Henday, and John Palliser. One residence, Seager Wheeler Hall, is named for a Saskatchewan pioneer who bred wheat.