I do not recall many rules surrounding my life in university residence during the early 1980s. We were all aware that a Dean of Women existed, and a House Don, but these institutional figures seemed to play a social rather than a supervisory role. Our house had become co-educational, we were told, after many years as a men’s residence; we accepted with only mild surprise that men and women shared even the shower and toilet areas. University life was not always like this, of course. Canadian universities in the early twentieth century bristled with regulations, and university officials were particularly concerned to monitor the conduct of female students and limit their contact with men outside of class. The Protestant churches had a significant presence on every campus, and the positions of University President and Dean of Women carried serious moral weight, as these figures, many assumed, were to act on the principle of in loco parentis when watching over undergraduates. At some point in the last century, then, the universities experienced a fundamental shift toward modernization, the ascendancy of the Protestant establishment waned, and mixed-sex bathrooms in residence became not only thinkable, but practical. This transformation has long been acknowledged, yet the actual process and timing of secularization in Canadian universities, as in society as a whole, has formed a central debate among historians. Much of this debate has focused on the years spanning World War I, when clergymen and educators struggled to reconcile Protestant orthodoxy to the demands of modern culture, particularly to the challenges of Darwinian thought and the new higher criticism of the Bible. While most scholars agree that the place of religion within Canadian society was changing by the turn of the twentieth century, they have contested the degree to which religious values and beliefs became privatized.
In A Long Eclipse, Catherine Gidney confronts this debate over secularization, maintaining that the decline of Protestantism on Canadian campus actually took place much later than the conventional interpretation suggests. Rather than locating the demise of Protestant hegemony in the early twentieth century, Gidney argues convincingly that liberal Protestantism continued to play a central role in undergraduate life well into the 1960s. She explains in her introduction: “I take issue not with the changes these authors identify but with the speed at which they are assumed to have spread. The ideas of the vanguard do herald change, but that change is often slow” (p. xxiii). Carefully written and meticulously researched, A Long Eclipse focuses on the relatively understudied period between the 1920s and the 1960s. Gidney asserts that the universities provide an ideal subject through which to explore the public voice of religion, and she challenges the assumption that there is an inevitable link between modernity and religious privatization. The book examines six of Canada’s older universities, representing regional and religious diversity: Dalhousie University and the University of King’s College in Halifax, McMaster University in Hamilton, Victoria and University Colleges at the University of Toronto, and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
A Long Eclipse is not an intellectual history in the traditional sense, as Gidney resolutely positions her study outside of the classroom, and avoids any discussion of the academic curriculum or of the ideas presented in the writings of the professors who taught and researched during this period. Yet Gidney does follow other recent intellectual historians by attempting to form connections between popular ideology – in this case liberal Protestant culture – and the lived experience of distinct groups of people. In what ways, more specifically, were the public pronouncements of university administrators and educators translated into a pervasive religious climate on campus, a climate that affected the daily lives of students in their residences, clubs and extra-curricular activities?
Well into the post-World War II era, Gidney reveals, university officials and their professoriate shared common convictions about the importance of liberal Protestant values in moral development, and all of these men (and a few women) had the power to shape their comparatively small institutions to their own vision of a moral community. The success of University Christian Missions, organized by officials and students, are clear examples of widespread consensus on the centrality of religion within the universities. The moral regulation of students is shown most vividly in the ability of administrators to control what they interpreted as improper behaviour on campus. While there was some concern about drinking and late hours among male students, it was women undergraduates who experienced the full restrictive force of university regulations. In the 1920s at Victoria College women living in residence had to obey strict curfews, and they needed chaperons for off-campus activities such as eating in restaurants, or for co-educational social functions. These rules were relaxed only for women whose brothers were willing to act as escorts. In terms of extra-curricular activity, the Student Christian Movement (SCM) provided the leading religious voice, and was a consistently successful student organization on campus until the mid- 1960s. Much of this success, Gidney suggests, came from the orientation of the SCM toward a social Christianity that accommodated students’ growing interest in social activism and liberal theology. The fact that the Christian atmosphere on campus was pervasive is shown most clearly in the marginalized position of the growing numbers of non-Christian students throughout these decades.
Although Gidney emphasizes the importance of religious continuity into the 1960s, she argues that as early as the 1940s administrators and clergymen became uneasy about the place of liberal Protestantism in the life of the university, and tensions began to appear that challenged the strength of the religious establishment. Even as the universities celebrated their Christian spirit in organized activities such as the missions and the SCM lectures, they experienced currents of change that would eventually undermine religious hegemony. The second half of A Long Eclipse documents the changing nature of Canadian universities in the post-war period: the rapid expansion of programs and faculties, the fundamental alteration in the size and composition of the student population, and the rise of religious pluralism and political radicalism. All these forces reduced the authority of liberal Protestantism and pushed the universities toward a more secular environment. Gidney writes: “A single moral vision – or at least the vision of a singular moral community informed by the values of liberal Protestantism – would become less and less pervasive and increasingly less relevant” (p. 96). As the title of the book indicates, however, the process of secularization was gradual. It was only in the late 1960s that the diverse, fragmented university emerged, and administrators, responding to growing student radicalization, finally abandoned the principle of in loco parentis. Gidney’s study is tightly focused on this central argument. Change came to Canadian universities, the liberal Protestant establishment lost its power to dominate student culture, but this transformation came much more slowly than we have previously recognized. A Long Eclipse is a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate over the process and timing of secularization in Canada, and will be of equal interest to historians of religion and higher education.
Sara Z. Burke
Laurentian University