Sting Operation

In 1967, the Université de Montréal altered its charter so that graduates of Jesuit-run institutions such as Loyola College and Collège Sainte-Marie would no longer be able to trade their certificates for degrees. In a sign of Quebec’s swing toward secularism, UdeM had recently appointed its first lay rector, Roger Gaudry, who wished to distance his school from the nearby Catholic colleges. Loyola kept petitioning for its own university charter, as it had done since splitting off from Collège Sainte-Marie in 1896. Provincial officials, though, instructed the school to forge ties with an existing English university — a directive that didn’t align with its desire for independence.

The likelihood of Loyola receiving its own charter further dwindled when, in 1972, Quebec’s Conseil des universités presented a report to the education minister, François Cloutier, stating that the government could not permit the creation of another English university “unless it is justified by the needs of the population.” According to the document, if Loyola were added to the network of anglophone institutions — McGill University, Bishop’s University, and Sir George Williams University — their combined resources would outstrip their enrolment numbers. Therefore, the council concluded that Loyola ought to be absorbed and that all operations on its campus in Montreal’s west end should cease by June 1975.

In a last-ditch effort to attain autonomy, Loyola’s dean of arts, Russell Breen, went to speak with Claude Ryan, then the editor and publisher of Le Devoir (he would go on to serve as leader of the Quebec Liberal Party and as minister of education). After Breen told Ryan that a delegation of Loyola representatives would be going to Quebec City to negotiate the school’s fate with Cloutier, the journalist requested all the recent correspondence between Loyola’s administration and the province. Ryan assured the campus leader that there would be an editorial in Le Devoir the day before the critical meeting.

This story is recounted twice in Concordia University at 50: A Collective History — first in an essay by Ronald Rudin, an emeritus professor in Concordia’s Department of History, and again in an interview that was conducted with Breen in the 1980s (included in one of the book’s many oral history sections). As Breen recalled, when he entered Cloutier’s office, a copy of Le Devoir was open to Ryan’s promised piece, the headline of which translated to “Why Should Loyola Be a Scapegoat?” Perhaps persuaded by Ryan’s argument, Cloutier told the delegation that “he had no intention of following the recommendation to end university-level education at Loyola, but at the same time wanted to see progress on merger negotiations.”

Quebec’s government had been encouraging a merger between Loyola and SGWU for years, but the schools seemed unable to reach an arrangement that satisfied both parties. Loyola was concerned about losing its identity, chiefly defined by “small classes and an emphasis on the liberal arts,” while SGWU was still building itself into a comprehensive university, having been a college up until 1948 and, before that, an evening program at the YMCA on Dominion Square that provided “accessible general education and vocational training to working men and women.” Spurred by Cloutier’s insistence, however, the two institutions devised a model for a merger, consisting of both Loyola’s campus in the quiet neighbourhood of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce and SGWU’s in the heart of downtown.

The “final act” of Concordia’s origin story, as Rudin outlines it, entailed the province’s delay in legally establishing the new university. SGWU and Loyola started operating as a fused organization in the fall of 1973, but Robert Bourassa’s Liberals were hesitant about publicly recognizing the union before that year’s provincial election, which would see the Parti Québécois gain considerable support amid the cultural tensions stoked by the Quiet Revolution. Even though the amalgamation would maintain an equal number of French and English universities in Montreal, detractors opposed the idea of SGWU effectively doubling its resources — a situation that could have made Bourassa the target of outrage, given the surge in Quebec nationalism. Only in the summer of 1974, after winning the election and passing Bill 22 — which declared French the province’s sole official language — did Bourassa approve the orders-in-council that finalized the founding of Concordia, which took its name from Montreal’s motto, Concordia salus (well-being through harmony).

Reading this history today, one might be struck by resonances with the current legal battle between English universities and François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec government. In the fall of 2023, the minister of higher education, Pascale Déry, and the minister of the French language, Jean-François Roberge, announced that Concordia, McGill, and Bishop’s would be required to increase tuition for out-of-province and international students as well as comply with a francization plan to have 80 percent of those students attain intermediate proficiency. The reasons cited by Roberge for the policies included a great imbalance of enrolment in the province’s universities and an excess of English being spoken on Montreal’s streets. Although this proposal has been modified numerous times, the fallout for Concordia and McGill has been pronounced. In August 2024, Concordia’s president, Graham Carr, reported that the decline in enrolment of out-of-province students (28 percent) and international students (11 percent) resulted in a loss of approximately $15 million in revenue. A partial win for the English universities came in April 2025, when a Superior Court judge ruled against the ministry’s attempted tuition hikes and “unreasonable” French-language graduation requirements, citing insufficient evidence that these alumni are failing to integrate into Quebec society after their studies.

While this decision, along with the recent student opposition to the CAQ’s demands, occurred too recently to be featured in Concordia University at 50, the collection is filled with other instances of activism that have shaped the institution’s history and identity. In a chapter focused on the 1969 occupation of the Hall Building’s computer centre — catalyzed by the SGWU administration’s failure to address a faculty member’s racism — the communication studies professor Christiana Abraham notes the event’s significance within “Canadian civil rights and Black power movements in the postcolonial context of the 1960s.” A photographic tribute to student media includes the front page of a 1987 issue of The Link, with articles informing readers about a “Day of Action” in response to the underfunding of Concordia. And a contribution by the historians Brandon Webb and Matthew Penney examines the 2002 demonstration to block Benjamin Netanyahu’s campus visit, linking it to the work of the renowned Marxist scholar George Rudé, who taught at SGWU and Concordia from 1970 to 1987.

Elsewhere, Zev Tiefenbach, one of the students who were suspended for protesting Netanyahu’s visit, discusses his role in co-founding the People’s Potato, an ongoing food security initiative organized by the Concordia Student Union. The inclusion of this conversation, which was recorded in 2023, exemplifies how moments of radical action once suppressed by the administration tend to be retrofitted for official institutional history and reframed as points of pride. Concordia University at 50 shows that the school is defined as much by its world-class research as by the faculty and substantial student body who have forcefully challenged it: as of 2024, some 45,000 people were enrolled across more than 200 degree programs.

Fittingly, the final section features Kahérakwas Donna Goodleaf, who has directed the Office of Decolonizing Curriculum and Pedagogy since 2018. While speculating about what might lie ahead for the university, she insists that “Concordia is not ready” for the transformations she’d wish to see, among them the “structural policies and practices that, in my view, need to collapse.” This is a tough note for an anniversary tribute to end on, but the strength of Concordia University at 50 as a retrospective stems from its willingness to look at the institution it’s celebrating from unflattering angles. By spotlighting Concordia’s continued achievements while providing space for deep criticism, this multi-perspective volume captures the vitality of a place that fosters critical thought, holds itself accountable, and keeps pushing for things to be better both within and beyond its walls.