@nformer

Fighting the Grey Auth

The following is an excerpt from a work in progress by English faculty member,
Bill Schermbrucker. Bill, who retires from full-time work at the College this
year, will be giving a special presentation at the October 23 employee
recognition event. See page 3 for more details.

Chapter 6

“Ladies and gentlemen...
congratulations!” dean Bull greeted the
fifty odd college faculty.

We were assembled in the portable
wooden building which had been
dumped onto a parking lot of the old
North Vancouver High School, off
Lonsdale Avenue. This was the college
headquarters. Additional classrooms
were all over the place, in high schools
at night, and in church basements. It
was Monday, 18th of August 1968, and
classes were due to begin in three
weeks time.

“Congratulations! You are in on the
birth of a completely new kind of
institution for this area. With your help,
Canyon Community College will be a
campus for the 1970s, a people place,
flexible, dynamic, and responsive to the
unmet educational needs of the
community. Not a top-down institution,
but as far as possible a bottom-up, non-
hierarchical college. Now, I’ve got good
news and bad news for you.”

“Let’s hear the bad news first,” I
said.

“The bad news is that we’ve been
planning for 350 students, and so far no
fewer than 629 have applied for
admission to the college, and they’re
still coming!”

“Holy shit!” said Andrea Halvorson,
which drew a quick glancing check
from the dean.

“What’s the good news?” I called
out.

He smiled, his face round as a
ball topped with white hair. ““The
good news,” he said, “is that we
operate under a funding formula
from Victoria. The more students
we enrol, the more money we get
to run the college.”

“What about class size?” I
said. “Surely we’re going to have
to hire some more faculty?”

“You bet! The ads are in the
paper tomorrow. Coordinators
can expect to give their time over
to job interviews beginning next
Monday. This Friday’s the
closing date.”

By week’s end, 765 students had
applied and been processed and 551
actually admitted to the college. I was
phoning all kinds of people I knew, and
by the following week’s end we had
hired an additional seven faculty in
English alone. Most were graduate
students, teaching just one or two
classes.

Every day, for lunch, a group of us
would walk down Lonsdale to Ripp’s
Diner and talk excitedly about the
college. The core of the group was in
English, Barnet Nolan, Ada Smith, Max
Odegaard, Andrea Halvorson — all part-
timers with four/fifth teaching loads. The
college administration had been so
nervous about commitment that they had
appointed only two full-time faculty in
the entire college, myself and the
coordinator of the Early Childhood
Education program. At Ripp’s we talked
about the future.

An ‘early’ Bill Schermbrucker

“When we get our own campus,”
Ada Smith said, “do you think we
should demand a faculty club?”

“Hell no!” said Max Odegaard. He
wasn’t a draft dodger, but had left the
States for similar reasons: his father
and mother had been persecuted by the
McCarthy Commission in the ’50s and
hounded out of Hollywood as pinkos.
“T wouldn’t want any of that special
privilege: no faculty club, no faculty
parking, no faculty washrooms. I
would prefer to acknowledge our
common humanity with the students
and support staff and administration.”

@ @= Capilano
@€em College

Vol. XX No. 7
August 14/98