Mount Royal University Centennial

A gleam in his eye, a gleam in his pen

Just as Mount Royal University has changed over 100 years, so has the shape of Catch the Gleam since Don Baker first started researching the book ten years ago.

Former Mount Royal President, Don Baker, is set to release Mount Royal's history, Catch the Gleam.

Baker, a historian and former Mount Royal president, (1980 to 1989) says when he started sifting through Mount Royal’s 100-year history for his book Catch the Gleam, From College to University, 1910 to 2000, he intended to call it Calgary’s Community College.

The book, released by University of Calgary Press earlier this month, celebrates the centennial of Calgary's oldest post-secondary institution. Everyone is welcome to join Baker for the official book launch on May 30, 3 p.m. in the Roderick Mah Centre for Continuous Learning.

The evolution

“I intended to focus on Mount Royal’s interactions with the community as well as the effect of those interactions on the college’s internal community,” says Baker from the United Arab Emirates University where he’s currently serving as the Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education.

As he plotted Mount Royal’s major turning points, he began to focus more on the transformations themselves — from the transformation into a “junior college” in 1931 to the final conversion into a university.

Baker’s own career trajectory has been in flux nearly as much, which also impacted the writing of the book.

“When I took on the project, I intended to retire and to devote full time to writing the book. Instead, I wound up being offered fascinating jobs and taking them. As a result, I had to write the book around the edges of my responsibilities — at night, on the weekends, during vacations.”

Director of Mount Royal Archives, Pat Roome, PhD says Baker's work has come to a gratifying conclusion.

"Don Baker's book is important for several reasons: first, as a pioneering work it gives a comprehensive survey of the development of Mount Royal from a small Methodist private college in 1910 to a large undergraduate university in 2009," says Roome.

" Secondly, Baker focuses on the contributions of the people who made Mount Royal, its presidents, board of governors, faculty and students. Lastly he demonstrates the importance that Mount Royal has played in the Calgary community, indeed in the wider context of Alberta and Western Canada."

Adding a real time, real life perspective

Aside from serving as Mount Royal’s president for nearly ten years, Baker’s array of experience working in various circles of education made him a unique candidate for the job.

“As the last chapter indicates, I am aware, as the former director of the Secretariat for the Postsecondary Education Quality Assessment Board in Ontario, of the national dialogue about colleges offering degree programs and becoming universities,” says Baker addressing some of the controversy over Mount Royal’s goal to become a university.

“I was involved in some of the events described in the book, and I discuss this issue in the preface to the book. I hope that I have not skewed the story of those events as a result. My general views are probably affected by my experience in executive positions in higher education in Alberta, Ontario and abroad.”

Baker says Mount Royal was always something of an “outlier” in Alberta’s college system, with its long history as a private institution.

That didn’t always make Mount Royal’s journey an easy one.

“Two examples that stood out for me were in the late 1970s, when the Deputy Minister of the day, receiving Mount Royal’s proposal for an expansion, opposed the request and asked whether the college could meet its needs by using a vacant school,” recalls Baker.

“And in the late 1990s, the cabinet approved an expansion project for Mount Royal but when the Deputy Minister communicated the news, the amount of money was suddenly reduced by about one-third the agreed upon number. On both occasions it took the political influence of people on the board of governors to overcome the resistance of the bureaucrats.”

Baker finally wrapped up his manuscript last autumn and it’s been going through the final editing phases since then.

Getting started

Looking back, Baker says the biggest challenge was just getting started. After sifting through 100 years of documents ranging from student newspapers to Board of Governors meeting minutes, not to mention countless hours of one-on-one interviews, there was an immense amount of detail to work with.

“I spent more time on chapter one than on anything else, cutting it down from what was practically a history of the universe to what it is now. Readers of the book’s 500 pages will be pleased to know that it could have been longer.”

As Baker chiseled his work, refining and perfecting the telling of Mount Royal’s details, he realized his original title was no longer appropriate.

“I decided to use George Kerby’s “catch the gleam” phrase in the title because it seems to me to capture the essential purpose of higher education as it was embraced by Mount Royal during the entire period.”

If you’re interested in getting your own copy of Catch the Gleam, from College to University, 1910 to 2011, it can be purchased online from the U of C Press, Amazon.ca or at the Mount Royal BookStore.

— Steven Noble, May 12, 2011