Under the President’s Gaze: Sexuality and Morality at a Canadian University during the Second World War

During the course of the Second World War, the Department of Immigration vetted the correspondence between a student at one of Canada’s denominational colleges and his friend in an internment camp. Concerned that the student might have homosexual leanings, the director of the Immigration Branch, F.C. Blair, wrote to the president of the university, and a secretive investigation into the student’s moral character ensued. Although the case was ultimately dismissed and the student’s moral standing within the university community confirmed, the investigation provides an excellent forum for examining the way in which university educators helped construct moral and sexual ideals. Although historians have documented the role of university authorities in upholding moral standards in the nineteenth century, they have had less to say about the same subject in the twentieth century. Social events such as dances have been identified as arenas for heterosexual union, but little is known in the Canadian context of students’ transgressions or how sexual behaviour was regulated. Focusing on how the university helped create and maintain an ideal of heterosexuality, this article explores the ways in which ideas about work and sexuality were combined in an educational process that endeavoured to create not only healthy, well-developed Christian students but the future citizens and leaders of Canada.