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In the years since its inception in 1919, the McGill News evolved from a review composed largely of information on Graduates' Society activities to a more general interest magazine made up of news and feature articles drawn from the ever-expanding McGill community. By the '90s, this tradition was firmly established. |
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The magazine in this decade featured articles on McGill grads in Hollywood and in the midst of gang wars in Los Angeles; on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its author, McGill graduate John Humphrey; on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the start of the Gulf War; on the 1995 Quebec Referendum and the Great Ice Storm of 1998; on artificial intelligence and on cloned goats at the Macdonald Campus; on the sex life of seahorses and the love life of Canadian novelist Hugh MacLennan. The McGill community is such a diversity of interests that most of the time it was not a question of finding stories but narrowing the story line-up from the multitude of possibilities.
As had been the case with most of the preceding decades for the magazine, activity on the McGill campus itself would provide fascinating fodder for copy in the latest issues. In 1990, the provincial government lifted a tuition freeze that had been in effect since 1969 and fees for Quebec students increased from $660 to approxi-mately $1,500 over the following two years. (Tuition at McGill now stands at $1,670. A second, similar tuition freeze is currently in effect, to the great dismay of University administrators.) Tensions over tuition mounted throughout the '90s in Quebec -- indeed, across Canada -- and in 1997, McGill students protesting fee hikes took a page out of their '60s brethren's playbook, and once again occupied the office of the Principal.
It was not simply students who were prone to vocal disapproval, however. For more unrest, one had only to look to those well-known campus troublemakers: the dentists. In 1991, Principal David Johnston sent shock waves through the Faculty of Dentistry when he announced the University would close the faculty by 1996, eliciting howls of protest from the dentistry community. In a remarkable campaign, lecturers, dentistry graduates and students, and concerned citizens leapt into action to meet the conditions set out by Johnston in order to save the faculty.
"What we tried to impress on alumni was 'Are you ready to let the faculty fall because of $1.6 million?'" said then Director of Development Nicholas Offord.
"The community put its money where its mouth was," said campaigner and dentistry lecturer Norman Miller, DDS'74. "We raised the money in less than six months." By October 1992, Johnston announced that Dentistry had met all conditions and would remain open. In the'90s, McGill appointed its first woman chancellor, the respected journalist Gretta Chambers, and in 1994 McGill graduate Bernard Shapiro was named fifteenth principal of the University. His twin brother Harold, BCom'56, LLD'88, had earlier been named president of Princeton.
Overall, the '90s have once again been years of austerity for McGill, and a 25% reduction in provincial operating grants led to numerous heated debates about the very survival of the University as it exists today. The debates continue. But despite the financial struggles, the '90s also witnessed remarkable developments at McGill, such as the opening of the McGill School of Environment, the new Nahum Gelber Law Library, enormous changes to the curriculum in many faculties, and the initiation of perhaps the University's most ambitious and controversial project ever, the McGill University Health Centre.
